Karian’s Chapter 2: Manuscript circulation through 1714

Eschewing a colon and subtitle so common in the naming of academic works, Karian’s title Jonathan Swift in Print and Manuscript captures both his book’s subject and its logic. While habit of mind suggests an inverse order in presenting the two forms of media—“manuscript” and “print”—the transposition serves Karian’s purposes well. From the outset the titular ordering subtly disrupts traditional thinking about relationships between manuscript and print. Rather than connoting a stage of production that precedes print, manuscript here participates in an integral, complex relationship with print. As Karian explains, “For Swift, manuscript both competes with and complements print” (46).

The book’s organization enacts its title’s word order by devoting the first chapter to Swift’s print publication and ensuing chapters to his use of manuscript. Chapter two charts the role manuscript circulation played in Swift’s early career as a writer through 1714. Yet, it also supplies the rationale and methodology for such study. Noting that he is the first to undertake a study of Swift’s career-long involvement with manuscript, Karian establishes the need and merits for reconstructing this history. Swift’s career as an author is so intricately intertwined with manuscript that attending to print publication alone yields an inevitably incomplete understanding of his textual production. Besides affording a more comprehensive picture of Swift’s corpus, attending to the manuscript component also offers insights about readers’ responses to his works and his shifting status as an author during the period (44).

As Karian describes his methods for studying manuscripts, the challenges and labor involved suggest cogent reasons for the scholarly neglect of Swift’s manuscript circulation that extend beyond the privileging of print. Problems tied to the loss or destruction of manuscripts, uncertainty about the manuscript’s origins (is the handwritten text derived from manuscript transmission or from a printed text?), inability to identify the producer if the hand is unknown, issues related to dating, and the like underscore the amount of ingenuity and work such a task necessitates. Karian is a scholar up to the task, possessing intimate knowledge of bibliography, Swift, book-history matters, and textual criticism. He is also a careful scholar as illustrated by the pains he takes with presenting and assessing evidence, employing appropriate qualifiers in making claims, and recognizing freely that future discoveries may alter his conjectures and conclusions.

Because he is interested in only manuscript circulation that is independent of print, Karian employs textual collation and other tools to identify and eliminate those manuscripts whose roots are printed texts. His scope is also confined to “the initial stages of manuscript circulation (i.e., stages contemporaneous with the initial reception of a work),” noting that a late manuscript may nonetheless be relevant if its base text is an earlier but now-lost manuscript (47).

Beginning with the early 1690s and ending with the year 1714, chapter two presents several early phases in Swift’s use and views of manuscript production and his authorial development. Swift’s involvement with manuscript circulation dates from the start of his authorial career and coincides with his pursuit of print. Yet within this expanse of roughly two and half decades, only the years 1708 to 1710, a period book-ended by “his emergence as a known author” and the appearance of “his first authoritative collection,” record the circulation of his manuscript work to any large degree (70).

Although Swift partook in coterie manuscript circulation during the 1690s, his main involvement with manuscript circulation “may have been primarily for the service of others” (48). During his time in Lord Berkeley’s household (1699-1701 and intermittent visits through 1709) Swift gravitated toward social verse suited to the easy rapport he enjoyed with the family and their circle—a rapport that the manuscript works often capture. This period cultivated a conversational tone in his compositions that endured over the course of his career; these social verses also displayed his talents at impersonation. In discussing these works Karian offers some perceptive comparisons between the different effects rendered by the original scribal medium and the later printed form (52-53). This same perceptiveness found in his comparisons of the two media and his use of print as evidence carries over into his discussion of readers.

Remarking that the circulation of these verses was probably confined to the Berkeley circle until 1708, Karian plausibly suggests that the interest in Swift’s works generated by publication of the Bickerstaff papers and, particularly, A Tale of a Tub spurred, in turn, the wide circulation of Swift’s unpublished works between 1708 and 1710 (52-59). Among these manuscript works were ones Swift had composed and shared while residing with the Berkeley household. Although Swift no doubt had a large hand in this wider dissemination of his unpublished works, their circulation was not entirely within his control. Karian attributes the waning of Swift’s manuscript circulation after this period to several factors. For one, Swift’s experience with fame and Curll’s subsequent unauthorized printed editions of his works made Swift highly wary of losing control of his unpublished writings, resulting in his exercising a far tighter rein over them. Another factor was the 1711 publication of Swift’s authorized Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; its appearance satisfied the demand for his work that manuscript copies had formerly exclusively filled (67). From 1711 through 1714 Swift was employed writing propaganda for Queen Anne’s ministry. This role resulted in yet another form of ‘publication’: the private distribution of print. By distributing printed works gratis to a select few, the practice merged “the typographic element of print with the coterie climate associated with manuscript” (67). That Karian situates this practice within the context of manuscript and print enhances his discussion and enables him to offer broader points. Not only does the private distribution of print destabilize, as Karian asserts, “the public-private binary so often applied to print and manuscript” (70), but it also illustrates an aspect of the symbiotic relationship between the two media.

While this chapter provoked a number of thoughts and queries, I will pose just a few here and perhaps offer others in later discussions.

Swift’s counterfeiting his hand for social raillery (51) and his employing transcriptions for both “politically controversial works” (66) and pranks “because [Swift’s] hand was known” (66-7) seem worthy of pause. As Steve has rightly pointed out, “The typography of print standardizes the special features of a counterfeit hand or manuscript with two hands” (52). Yet I also find it quite interesting that the discussion of Swift’s being more angered by “Curll’s naming him” than by Curll’s “publishing works without Swift’s permission” (65) prefaces a return to discussing counterfeit hands and transcriptions. Perhaps this sequence is coincidental, but the issues of naming and hand seem not unrelated. One might argue that these incidents reveal deeper cultural attitudes about agency, identity, hands, and names as rendered and negotiated by manuscript and print. In terms of manuscript handwriting could act literally to “name” or identify a person. Although manuscript had come to acquire new meanings by Swift’s time, the practices associated with the word manuscriptum in the sense of its original meaning that I noted in commenting on Dave’s post (“documents which derived evidential value from being written by a particular person”) were still in play. The second “witness” called in Algernon Sidney’s 1683 trial was his handwritten draft of his “Discourses upon Government.” This sense of document as witness lingers today as a specific term used in textual criticism. That Swift, in an effort to protect unauthorized connecting of his name to unauthorized publications of his works in print, draws his manuscripts closer to him and becomes far more wary of their circulation, seems a conflation of name and hand.

Steve’s examination of Swift in print and manuscript demonstrates the crucial importance of considering not just print but manuscript circulation as well in ways that seem quite different from those presented in Margaret Ezell’s significant study, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Yet I was struck not only by the challenges Steve tackled in studying Swift’s manuscript production but also by the relative wealth of material available. As Steve notes, Lindsay has compiled over 500 manuscripts related to Swift, and that’s just one source. Swift’s canonical status today and his celebrity at the time have contributed to the preservation of such a large number of manuscripts, notwithstanding the number that has been lost to us. So I wonder the extent to which such a study could be undertaken for other eighteenth-century authors who exist on the margins of the canon? Perhaps the extreme paucity of manuscript materials I have been unable to uncover for my project is driving my query, for in comparison there seems to be an abundant wealth of materials.

I was quite struck by the type of detective work that provided the evidence for many of this chapter’s (indeed the entire work’s) arguments and by the case reconstructions that assembled this evidence. Part of the method employed reflects a willingness to search beyond traditional routes for evidence as well as to assemble sources in fairly fresh ways. While this type of work has always been with us (and indeed seems characteristic of eighteenth-century scholarship as well as bibliography), our digital environment appears to be fostering new areas of evidence-gathering across disciplinary boundaries that is invigorating painstakingly detailed investigations. Perhaps this roaming brought to mind other possible sources of evidence. Though perhaps outside the scope of or not even useful to Karian’s project, I was wondering about the use of paper as evidence in such a study of manuscript circulation. It seems as if investigating this aspect of materiality might result in unusual findings. I was also wondering about economic issues. For example, today one might prefer a photocopy or PDF of a selected portion of a work rather than purchasing an entire work. Would one prefer to write the verses one desired from a friend’s copy of Swift’s work rather than buy his or her own? While the publication of Swift’s Miscellanies did seem to offer one of several plausible explanations for the diminishing circulation of Swift’s manuscript works in 1711, I nonetheless found myself weighing just how strong a manuscript market might remain among some segments of potential purchasers if costs were considered.

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