Abstract
Historians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development contemporaneous with the novel’s rise: the relatively sudden supersession of the busy, cluttered page that typifies seventeenth-century book production by the clean, modernised layout that prevails in the eighteenth century. Yet if a primary concern of the realist novel is to give a transparent window on a fictional world, uncomplicated by overt mediating factors, the illusion depends as much on typographic convention as on narrative technique. The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw what one book historian has called a ‘revolution … in the appearance of the printed page’: a revolution that swept away conventions of presentation, including heavy use of rules, decorative borders and marginal apparatus, often with enclosure of text in boxed-rule borders, some of which derive originally from the manuscript codex.2 By reducing or eliminating obtrusive features of this kind, the streamlined page that took hold after 1700, alongside the elegant Franco-Dutch founts introduced by refugee Huguenot printers and made fashionable under William III, visually de-emphasised the materiality of print in ways promoting immediacy of access to literary content. In a poem to celebrate the modernity of Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (1712), John Gay commented on the clarity not only of the poetic voices assembled by Lintot (Addison, Congreve, Pope, Prior) but also of his typographic style, which rejected the native crudeness of Grubstreet for sleeker continental models.
This chapter draws on material from two public lectures, the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, University of London, 2009, and the David Nicholls Memorial Lecture, Thomas Fisher Library, Toronto, 2010. My gratitude to the colleagues and institutions involved, and to my then research assistant Darryl Domingo.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes and references
N. Barker (2009) ‘The Morphology of the Page’ in M. F. Suarez and M. L. Turner (eds) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 254.
J. Gay (1974) Poetry and Prose, ed. V. A. Dearing, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, 40;
see also commentary on these lines in J. McLaverty (2001), Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 16.
R. Kinross (2011) ‘Typography’ in P. M. Logan (ed.) The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell), p. 828.
J. Swift (2012) Gulliver’s Travels, ed. D. Womersley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 197.
J. Swift (1714) Preface to the Bishop of Sarum’s Introduction, p. 12.
On the rich afterlife of the wastepaper trope, see L. Price (2012) How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 219–57.
J. J. McGann (1991) The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 13–14, 48–68.
J. Swift (2010) A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. M. Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 141; the 1710 frontispiece is on p. 138.
On the games of later authors with stars in this sense, see C. Flint (2011) The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 140–51.
For approaches to the typographic pyrotechnics of Tristram Shandy via The Dunciad and A Tale of a Tub respectively, see J. P. Hunter (1994) ‘From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in Eighteenth-Century English Texts’ in M. J. M. Ezell and K. O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds) Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Michigan: University of Michigan Press), pp. 41–69;
C. Fanning (2003) ‘Small Particles of Eloquence: Sterne and the Scriblerian Text’, Modern Philology, C, 360–92.
J. Barchas (2003) Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Flint, The Appearance of Print, p. 8.
G. Bornstein (2001) Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 31.
G. White (2005) Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 59.
W. St Clair (2004) The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 175; on typewriters see Kinross, ‘Typography’, p. 831.
M. Cyr (2006) Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery behind a Seventeenth-Century Forbidden Love (New York: Hyperion).
H. Love (2008) ‘L’Estrange, Joyce and the Dictates of Typography’ in A. Dunan-Page and B. Lynch (eds) Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 168, 179.
Observator (17 May 1683), quoted by T. A. Birrell (2002) ‘Sir Roger L’Estrange and the Journalism of Orality’ in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds) The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 659.
Anon. A (1713) Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, Done into Verse, p. 5.
Anon. (1713) Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, Done into Verse, p. 5.
See J. Lennard (1991) But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 15–36.
D. F. McKenzie (2002) Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), p. 198.
W. Congreve (2011) Works, ed. D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press), III, 5.
M. B. Parkes (1993) Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press), Plate 38 (Incognita, p. 90).
Dunton’s joke antedates the earliest OED instance (1699) of conger in the book-trade sense; on typographical play in Dunton, see G. Sherbert (1996) Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang).
M. E. Novak (2001) Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 689.
D. Defoe (1990) A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. L. Landa, intr. D. Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 80.
K. R. King (2005) ‘New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood’ in P. R. Backscheider and C. Ingrassia (eds) A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 266.
E. Haywood (1732) Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, 3rd edn, 4 vols, I, 47; I, 51.
S. Richardson (1751) Clarissa, 3rd edn, 8 vols, I, 237; V, 358; see K. Maslen (2001) Samuel Richardson of London, Printer (Dunedin: University of Otago), pp. 49, 310.
See K. Maslen (2012) ‘Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: Further Extending the Canon’, Script & Print XXXVI, 144; also Maslen, Samuel Richardson, p. 90.
J. Dussinger and D. Shuttleton (eds) (2013) The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 62.
W. C. Slattery (ed.) (1969) The Richardson-Stinstra Correspondence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), pp. 98–9, 100.
A. von Haller (1749), in Gentleman’s Magazine, XIX, 349.
On the survival of Grover’s scriptorial and other cursive founts in Richardson’s day, see S. Morison (1981) Selected Essays on the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), I, 47–80.
C. Lupton (2011) ‘Giving Power to the Medium: Recovering the 1750s’, The Eighteenth Century, LII, 289–302 (289).
W. H. Bond (1990) Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn: A Whig and His Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 34–77;
J. Hanway (1756) A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth, p. 3, partly quoted by Lupton, 299.
B. Redford (ed.) (1992) The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), I, 178;
see also J. D. Fleeman (2000) A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, 780–1 and 785–8.
T. Keymer (2002) Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 61–2 (quoting Sterne to Robert Dodsley, 5 October 1759); see also, on format jokes and typographical play in general, pp. 63–82.
L. Sterne (1759–67) Tristram Shandy, 9 vols, V, 42; I, 71; III, 168–70; VI, 147; V, 1; IV, 146–56.
M. Portela (2000) ‘Typographic Translation: The Portuguese Edition of Tristram Shandy (1997–98)’, in J. Bray, M. Handley and A. Henry (eds) Ma(r) king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 296.
M. New (1991) ‘A Manuscript of the Le Fever Episode in Tristram Shandy’, Scriblerian, XXIII, 165–74.
L. Sterne (1759) A Political Romance, p. 49.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Thomas Keymer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keymer, T. (2014). Novel Designs: Manipulating the Page in English Fiction, 1660–1780. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43946-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02698-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)