Giving Power to the Medium
Flat Reflections
In 1766, Evan Lloyd published at his own cost “The Powers of the Pen,” a poem satirizing the mid-century market in literature. Lloyd presents readers mindlessly clamouring after sentimental tales, life histories, novels, and religious writing, and authors egged on by poverty and mercenary booksellers to produce these forms as efficiently as possible. In this energetic world of superfluous literary production, Lloyd describes pens rather than minds generating different kinds of text, imagining as the ultimate piece of hack writer’s equipment a pen so indifferent to content that it can write everything:
Can by the Foot sob, whine and sigh,
Tho’ too polite to make you cry.
Sometimes, so various is this Pen,
’Twill deign to write of common Men;
Will tell the Feats of Tommy Thumb,
As well as those of Fee-fa-fum—
Histories, Novels, Odes, or Tales,
As the fantastic whim prevails.1
Parodying literature as quantitative output, Lloyd damns the mechanical production of writing. Yet what his catalogue of popular forms leaves out is the most typical kind of mid-century writing of all: writing that, like his own poem, reflects critically on the economic and material production of literature. As a participant in the flood of reading matter it describes, Lloyd’s poem belongs to a moment where such reflexivity was so deeply embedded in popular culture that it can be described as a fashionable and technological impulse rather than one of real human outrage.2
There is, of course, nothing particularly new about the claim that eighteenth-century literature commented wryly on the overproduction and mindless consumption of literature. It is well known that Cervantes was enthusiastically read and imitated in England throughout the 1700s, that Swift specialized in ridiculing the efforts of the writers aspiring to popularity and economic success, and that Fielding rose to popularity as a novelist by challenging the new thirst for credible narratives. The success of these writers underscores the now widely accepted view that the eighteenth century’s best-known literary invention, the realist novel, evolved as writers sought ways to trump and belittle older genres and habits of belief and not, as critics once supposed, as an ideal of its own. Michael McKeon describes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers exposed to successive versions of truth-telling, each of which dialectically overturns the one that had come before it.3 And J. Paul Hunter documents a market early in the century for ever more innovative examples of sermons, didacticism, and travel literature, arguing that the genesis of the novel at this time can best be understood as a response to the demand for works capturing readers’ imagination through visible kinds of experimentation.4
These studies have laid the basis for understanding the eighteenth century as a period in which fiction was produced through, and productive of, participant awareness—of genre, of epistemology, and even of print. Most literary historians now agree that the period’s newest kinds of novels, magazines, and anthologies announced themselves as novelties through their reflexivity about older kinds of reading and writing.5 Far from being swept up only in ever more convincing imaginative alternative realities, eighteenth-century readers were entertained by the feeling of knowing more than the generations before them about the production of language and the representation of truth. There is, however, a certain slant to this narrative that assumes, if not a teleological development of literature, then at least a process of innovation required to satisfy the demands of savvy readers. Studies emphasizing the constitution of literary genres tend to document the production of new forms through the usurping of older ones.
This perspective applies well to the first four decades of the century, when self-consciousness and formal innovation run closely together. It even works to describe why a certain kind of generic, literary innovation dries up in the middle years of the century. With the exception of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which can itself be understood as a reflective reiteration of the process of which it announces the end, relatively few mid-century works advance the history of the novel—or of literary novelty. As an engine of change, literary self-consciousness seems to run more slowly once the institution of the modern novel is in place. The market in ephemeral literature, well-established by the 1750s, produced instead a range of predictable products that were greeted for the large part as old hat by their public. All this is true. And yet, this version of literary history does not describe how and why certain kinds of self-consciousness should have exploded in this otherwise imitative literary climate. What has a writer like Lloyd to gain by critiquing the commercial incentives and mechanisms his own poems follow? It is difficult to explain why a writer like Edward Long should caricature the vanity of minor authors like himself in this way: “Having concluded this History to the destined period, I threw down my Pen; and looking steadyfastly at the manuscript before me, began to entertain myself with those self-Applauses, and flattering conceits, which most Authors are sensible of, whilst they survey their new fangled performances.”6 Equally perplexing are the ways that minor novelists in this period represent their frustrated readers, and that pious texts written for profit encourage their readers to scrutinize the practice of penmanship. A special account is needed of why these kinds of writing, produced largely for profit, reflect so closely on their status as paper products, on the marketplace for which they written, and on the misbehaviour and appetites of their authors and readers.
In this respect, mid-eighteenth-century British literature complicates the ways literary critics have previously understood the relation between self-consciousness and literary innovation. While literature did become less exciting on many fronts once the novel was established as a genre, the self-consciousness of texts did not decline as commercially driven and sub-canonical texts took over the mid-century market. On the contrary, if there is one thing characterizing the writing of this period, it is the vivid interest that writers like Lloyd show in representing the phenomena of bad writing, mindless reading, and ruthlessly profit-driven publishing. Clifford Siskin describes eighteenth-century authors “making writing as much an object of inquiry as a means: writing about writing produced more writing in a self-reflexive proliferation.”7 In the mid-century such self-reflexivity is striking and widespread. It is not, however, proof of an author’s originality, literary merit, or class aspiration. The mid-century culture of self-consciousness about literary production and consumption cannot be explained as a laboratory in which norms were challenged or new forms made. Rather, it must be understood as culture in which critical awareness becomes compatible with the production and consumption of fairly predictable and widely berated literature.
Thus Columella, or, the Distressed Anchoret (1779) begins:
The Public is overwhelmed already with books of every kind, but especially with tales and novels; and I begin to think that in time the world, in a literal sense, will not be able to contain the books that shall be written. Nay, a droll friend of mine imagines, that one reason why this terrestrial globe will be destroyed by fire, is, that a general conflagration will more effectively consume the infinite heaps of learned lumber (with which it was foreseen our libraries would be stored after the invention of printing) than any inundation, earthquake or partial volcano whatsoever, could possibly do.8
At first glance, Richard Graves’s humor seems Swiftian in its emphasis on the disturbing, material proliferation of texts. It is tempting to imagine the author of Columella trying to distinguish his own work from the mass of novels on the market, and to produce in Columella’s reader a feeling of conscious distinction. Yet Graves’s satire occurs in a text that seeks no exemption for itself from the conditions of print popularity it describes. Written by a second-rate novelist, this description of literary superfluity illustrates the way that the professional writers, publishers, and booksellers who had been the target of ridicule in Augustan satire became involved in managing the prejudices of the public against the their own profession. In making the posture of critical knowledge collective and compatible with ordinary forms of reading, their style differs from the wit that drives those seeking distinction for their own work. Unlike the Augustan satirists, the authors of most novels, poems, magazine columns, and philosophy