Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore 9780367416171, 9781003090960

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Of Little Consequence: Pseudonym, Paratext, and Authorship in Moore's Early Poetry
2 If England Doesn’t Read Us, Who the Devil Will?: Reprinting Moore in the United States
3 Cream of the Copyrights: Authorship in the Publication History of Lalla Rookh
4 Orientalising the Angels: Blasphemy, Copyright, and Revision
5 These Quick-Reading Times: Distant Reading Moore’s Poetic Style
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Write My Name

Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore is the first monograph devoted to Moore’s poetry. The focus of the book is on Moore’s poetry and differing formulations of authorship therein. Its scope comprises poetic publications from Moore’s early career, from his Romantic Orientalist writings, and from selected musical works, and political and satirical verse. It shares the strong historicist awareness of much previous scholarship on Moore but combines this with a range of new and interdisciplinary contexts that are of increasing interest to scholarship in the twenty-first century, and which are rarely adopted as frameworks for viewing Moore’s work: digital humanities, book history, legal history, and textual theory. Ultimately, the book argues for the value of attending to neglected aspects of Moore’s work through analysis of his shifting modes of authorship and their various motivations. Justin Tonra is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland Galway. His research interests are in the fields of digital humanities, book history, textual studies and bibliography, and at the intersections of literature and technology. He has previously held positions at University College London and the University of Virginia.

Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution

Series Editors: Michael Brown, University of Aberdeen, UK Kath Campbell, University of Edinburgh, UK John M. Kirk, Dresden University of Technology, Germany Andrew Noble, Strathclyde University, UK

1 United Islands? The Languages of Resistance John Kirk 2 Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song Julie Henigan 3 Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland John Kirk 4 The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1723–1795 Kate Horgan 5 James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical Carol Baraniuk 6 Reading Robert Burns: Texts, Contexts, Transformations Carol McGuirk 7 Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration: Poetry, Music, and Politics Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher 8 The Reputations of Thomas Moore Poetry, Music, and Politics Edited by Sarah McCleave and Tríona O’Hanlon 9 Write My Name Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore Justin Tonra

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Write My Name Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore

Justin Tonra

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Justin Tonra to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of the National University of Ireland Galway/Rinneadh maoiniú ar an bhfoilseachán seo trí Chiste Foilseachán Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tonra, Justin, 1979– author. Title: Write my name : authorship in the poetry of Thomas Moore / Justin Tonra. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Poetry and song in the age of revolution | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Write My Name: Authorship in the Poetry of Thomas Moore is the first monograph devoted to Moore’s poetry. The focus of the book is on Moore’s poetry and differing formulations of authorship therein”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023779 | ISBN 9780367416171 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003090960 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Moore, Thomas, 1779–1852—Authorship. | Moore, Thomas, 1779–1852—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR5058.A9 T66 2020 | DDC 821/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023779 ISBN: 978-0-367-41617-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09096-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To Julie, Clara, and Martha, with love.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

ix xiii

1

Of Little Consequence: Pseudonym, Paratext, and Authorship in Moore’s Early Poetry 11

2

If England Doesn’t Read Us, Who the Devil Will?: Reprinting Moore in the United States 38

3

Cream of the Copyrights: Authorship in the Publication History of Lalla Rookh

71

4

Orientalising the Angels: Blasphemy, Copyright, and Revision 99

5

These Quick-Reading Times: Distant Reading Moore’s Poetic Style 127

Bibliography Index

171 187

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Acknowledgements

In the pages that follow I argue that authorship is a phenomenon not solely constructed by an individual author but by the interactions of a diverse range of agents within dynamic circuits of communication. To practice what I preach, I would like to acknowledge the many people and groups who have encouraged, enabled, and influenced my work in a range of ways. I am very grateful to the Irish Research Council and the European Commission, whose co-funded CARA scheme allowed me to complete research for this book during a postdoctoral fellowship divided between the University of Virginia and the National University of Ireland Galway. A Bibliographical Society of America Fellowship enabled me to spend a month studying the manuscripts of Lalla Rookh at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, and a William T. Buice III Scholarship from Rare Book School allowed me to complete crucial training in bibliographical methods. I am deeply indebted to my mentor at the University of Virginia, Jerome McGann, for his support and encouragement during my period in Charlottesville and in the subsequent years. I could not have wished for a finer mentor, inspiration, and friend. Thanks to all those in the Department of English, the Scholars’ Lab, and further afield who made my time at the University of Virginia so fulfilling: Laura All, Alison Booth, Tim Duffy, Andrew Ferguson, Mandy Gagel, Alex Gil, Gabriel Hankins, Walt Hunter, Victor Luftig, Bethany Nowviskie, Elizabeth Ott, Jahan Ramazani, Eric Rettberg, Andy Stauffer, Robert Stilling, Annie Swafford, David Vander Meulen, Cynthia Wall, June Webb, Dana Wheeles. My research was enabled and augmented by many happy weeks at Rare Book School in Charlottesville; I am grateful for the friends and colleagues I made there, as well as for the expertise of the staff and faculty: Megan Gildea, Barbara Heritage, Amanda Nelsen, Ben Pauley, Carl Stahmer, Michael Suarez, Stephen Tabor, David Whitesell, Nick Wilding. My thanks to colleagues in English at NUI Galway, and in particular to Sean Ryder, who was an enthusiastic mentor during my postdoctoral studies. I have been fortunate to work alongside many valued colleagues in the department in recent years: Victoria Brownlee, Dermot

x Acknowledgements Burns, Clíodhna Carney, Marie-Louise Coolahan, John Kenny, Padraic Killeen, Frances McCormack, Mike McCormack, Dearbhla Mooney, Andrew Ó Baoill, Irene O’Malley, Richard Pearson, Lionel Pilkington, Lindsay Reid, Ira Ruppo, Elizabeth Tilley. Thanks to the staff of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, who have provided essential support in countless ways over the course of many years: Dan Carey, David Kelly, Martha Shaughnessy. I am grateful to colleagues in the Distant Reading for European Literary History project (COST Action CA16204), whose knowledge and advice helped to enrich the final chapter of this book. Thanks to Rosario Arias, Joanna Byszuk, Maciej Eder, Mike Kestemont, Katja Mihurko Poniž, Roxana Patras, Antonija Primorac, Jan Rybicki, Christof Schöch. To the staff of the many libraries that I visited during the course of my research, I am very thankful for your expertise, assistance, and patience: James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, especially Geraldine Curtin and Margo Donohue. Thanks to Brendan Duffy and Aisling Keane for digitising the image of “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Commonplace Book.” Special Collections, University of Reading, especially Verity Andrews and Adam Lines; the Morgan Library & Museum, New York City, especially Clara Drummond, Inge Dupont, Declan Kiely, Sylvie Merian, and Maria Isabel Molestina; McClay Library and Special Collections, Queen’s University Belfast, especially Diarmuid Kennedy, Brenda Robinson, and Deirdre Wildy; Alderman Library and Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; Trinity College Library, Dublin; National Library of Ireland, Dublin; Royal Irish Academy Library, Dublin; British Library, London. Portions of the research for this book were presented at a host of conferences, and I am grateful to the organisers and audiences of those events for the opportunities to discuss my work-in-progress: British Association for Romantic Studies “Romantic Identities” Conference, Institute of English Studies, London; American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting, San Antonio; Digital Humanities Congress, University of Sheffield; Reconfiguring Authorship Conference, Ghent University; New Directions in Moore Research Conference, Queen’s University Belfast; New Voices Conference, Maynooth University; British Association for Romantic Studies International Conference, Cardiff University; Lalla Rookh Bicentenary Symposium, Marsh’s Library, Dublin. It has been a pleasure to enjoy the company and conversation, on these occasions, of many scholars of Moore and his era whose work I admire. My thanks to Francesca Benatti, Matt Campbell, Brian Caraher, Claire Connolly, Moyra Haslett, Una Hunt, Margaret Kelleher, Ronan Kelly, Ed Larrissy, Jane Moore, Tríona O’Hanlon, Sarah McCleave, Daniel Roberts, Sheila Rooney, Harry White, Jeffery Vail. Chapters 1 and 4 are derived in part from articles published in European Romantic Review in 2014 (vol. 25, no. 5) and 2017 (vol. 28, no. 6),

Acknowledgements  xi copyright Taylor & Francis. Full publication details appear in the bibliography at the end of the book. Thanks to Jennifer Abbott and Mitchell Manners at Routledge, and to Nazrine Azeez at codemantra, who have made the publication process for this book mercifully smooth. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Routledge and to other readers of parts of the manuscript. Each of you has helped to make important improvements to this book: Francesca Benatti, Molly Hardy, Jerry McGann, Sean Ryder. The faults that remain are my own. Thanks to other colleagues that I have the great fortune to call friends: you have supported and encouraged my work on many occasions and buoyed my spirits in many ways: Rebecca Barr, Molly Hardy, Anne Karhio, Charlotte McIvor, Muireann O’Cinneide, Kevin O’Sullivan, Brad Pasanek, Adrian Paterson, Bryan Radley, Deborah Russell, Valerie Wallace. My highest thanks and appreciation are for my family, who are a constant source of support and inspiration. Thanks, and love, to Julie, Clara, and Martha.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in this book: BLJ JTM LJB LTM MTM PW UTM

Byron’s Letters and Journals The Journal of Thomas Moore Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life The Letters of Thomas Moore Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore

Figure 0.1 I mage from copy of second edition of The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. held by Discipline of English, National University of Ireland Galway.

Introduction

The breadth and diversity of Thomas Moore’s published oeuvre is a challenge to behold. Comprising poetry, biography, fictional and nonfictional prose, and musical and dramatic works, his body of work attests to the prodigious and relentless productivity of a writing career that spanned from his translation of the Odes of Anacreon (1800) to the fourth and final volume of the History of Ireland (1846). His journal, begun comparatively late in his career, in 1818, runs to six printed volumes, and four volumes of his correspondence have been published to date.1 At the end of the 1830s, Moore revised his poetry and composed new prefaces for a collected Poetical Works edition, published by Longmans in 1840 and 1841 in ten volumes. Sometimes, for the critic, the task posed by Thomas Moore is figuring out where to begin. For many, the Irish Melodies have served as a fruitful gateway and a representative work. Published simultaneously in London and Dublin in ten numbers between 1808 and 1834, they were the crowning popular achievement of his career and the focus of many critical assessments of his work throughout the twentieth century and to the present day. Moore wrote the lyrics for these works, to accompany modern musical settings of Irish tunes by John Stevenson and Henry Rowley Bishop: their generic hybridity and complex dual mode of linguistic and musical signification a fitting token of Moore’s authorial elusiveness, his “aesthetic delight in the dappled, ambiguous nature of things” (144), as Terry Eagleton describes it. The Irish Melodies’ wide popular success and significant influence on musical and poetic works of Romantic Nationalism throughout Europe and further afield in the nineteenth century ensured their canonical critical status. For a long time, to write about Moore without discussing the Irish Melodies was unthinkable. Towards the close of the twentieth century, a reassessment of Moore and his works was begun. A revisionary impulse saw critics seek the rich interpretive potential of the Irish Melodies elsewhere in his body of work. The continuation and consolidation of this energy into the scholarship of this century is testimony to the successes of that search, and, perhaps, to a prior lack of curiosity and inquiry into the less familiar corners of his oeuvre. For, once you begin to look for Moore, especially

2 Introduction in the literary culture of the first half of the nineteenth century, you find him everywhere. James Chandler’s recognition of Moore’s “extraordinary status and fame in the literary culture of his time” (267) informs his decision to situate Moore as a centrally important pivot in his study of literary culture and Romantic historicism, England in 1819. Suddenly, critical perspectives on Moore began to encompass a range of themes and topics that better reflected the scale and variety of his legacy. Scholarship on his musical works grew, as did treatments of his satirical writings, his Romantic Orientalism, and his prominent works of biography. Beyond a focus on individual works, critics considered his status as a cultural cipher: his literary relationships with major Romantic figures, and his characteristic figurations of history and culture, especially in an Irish context. Moreover, this work was abetted by the publication of new biographies (with Ronan Kelly’s Bard of Erin now the standard) and new editions of his works. Yet, in many respects, this reassessment of Moore has continued to grapple with the dizzying scope of his output. Biographies and editions aside, the field of Moore scholarship has tended to articulate its findings in articles, chapters, and essay collections: Una Hunt’s recent book Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies (2017) is a notable exception. My book is the first monograph devoted to Moore’s poetry, and it provides readings of a range of his poetic works and the different formulations of authorship therein. In seeking to forge a more sustained understanding of Moore’s body of poetic work, the theme of authorship gradually emerged as a fruitful unifying force in the course of my research. As a cursory knowledge of the Irish Melodies reveals, its authorial situation is complex and convoluted. A fundamentally collaborative endeavour between writer and musician, its relationship to older tunes and verse underscores a multifaceted historical and intertextual debt. Similarly, Moore’s frequent declarations about the fundamentally entwined connection of the music and verse present an interdisciplinary interpretive challenge to both literary and musical criticism. Fitting poetic verse to an existing music air, as was Moore’s conventional method, represents a quite unique constraint upon authorship, different from working within orthodox poetic forms. In negotiating the different obstacles and restrictions presented by the Irish Melodies project, Moore demonstrates his adept and flexible manoeuvring within unconventional modes of authorship. Similar evidence of Moore’s deliberate and strategic engagements with authorship is also apparent in other parts of his poetic career, and one of my tasks in the following chapters is to describe and analyse some important examples. Another related objective is to identify and examine the array of nonauthorial forces that exert pressures and influences on Moore and his efforts to establish and cultivate an authorial persona. In the example of the Irish Melodies, collaboration is one such force. In the following chapters, different nonauthorial forces manifest in the mechanics

Introduction  3 of reprinting, critical and public reception, and legal regulation of expression and intellectual property. Moore’s negotiation of these diverse forces and their accompanying constraints is further testament to his authorial malleability, as well as a model of opposition to conventional understandings of Romantic authorship. While I endeavour to write a broad account of authorship in the poetry of Thomas Moore in this book, I have also been constrained by the scale of his work. The works I have chosen to discuss were dictated by their consonance with the topic of authorship, primarily, but also by my recognition that parts of Moore poetic corpus have received extensive critical attention in the past. I bring particular focus to two groups of publications: his early publications in the first two chapters (The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. and Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems) and two major works of Romantic Orientalism in the subsequent two chapters (Lalla Rookh and The Loves of the Angels). My critical purview is broader in the final chapter, encompassing nineteen of Moore’s poetic works via a combination of close and distant reading.2 Thus, I probe different aspects of authorship in Moore’s poetry at different scales: from a forensic, microscopic analysis of individual, historically specific poems and volumes to broader, macroscopic examinations of publication history and stylistic consistency across a period of decades. The formulations of authorship that I excavate from different portions of Moore’s corpus are evident in other parts, too, as, doubtless, are additional formulations to those articulated in the following chapters. In the conclusion to this book, I gesture inwards towards other areas for potentially profitable discovery within Moore’s works and outwards to indicate how these cases in Moore’s work add to our understanding of larger issues within writing of the Romantic period. Authorship is the organising principle of my book, and I understand it in the broad sense in which we must consider the term today. Moore writes at the heart of the Romantic period, when the concept of the solitary genius elevated the status of authorship and sanctified the author’s independence, autonomy, and authority. He is an outsider to contemporaneous and subsequent constructions of high Romanticism; however, his practices present a productive foil to canonical accounts of Romantic authorship. The methods I pursue in my book follow the critical inquiry and revision of Romantic authorship, which have been underway in literary studies for some time, while seeking to position original research on Moore’s poetry within appropriate critical methodologies and frameworks. While I hew to some aspects of the standard theory of Romantic authorship by considering Moore’s active agency in the construction of his authorial persona, I consider it crucial to examine the nonauthorial forces which assist, impede, and modify that process of construction. For authorship is not a simple case of a writer’s authoritative self-fashioning: it is a complex, interdependent phenomenon encompassing textual and paratextual dynamics; critical and public reception; authorised and unauthorised

4 Introduction publication; legal and moral regulation; and stylistic and generic categorisation, among a range of additional considerations. All authors engage a range of these systems, whether consciously or not. I examine Moore’s engagement with different modes and formulations of authorship for two main reasons: because Moore studies has not addressed this meaningful topic in a systematic fashion, and as it aids literary studies’ continuing task of understanding the multifaceted discourse of authorship and its specific instantiation in the Romantic period. From the very beginning of Moore’s career, we find a complex mediation at play in his construction of an authorial identity. His first book is a translation of the Odes of Anacreon; though in the process of rendering the ancient Greek poet for a contemporary audience, he succeeds in merging identities: for years to come, he is known as Anacreon Moore.3 In his second book, and first volume of original poems, The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. (1801), Moore adopts the pseudonymous identity of Thomas Little, which once again fuses with his authorial persona in the critical and public consciousness.4 Despite this mask, Moore undertakes a deliberate and strategic process of establishing himself as an author within this work, through a dynamic interplay of irony and sincerity which I discuss in detail in Chapter 1. In one of the poems from that volume, we find a particularly striking example where Moore enacts his authorial methods and ambitions in a tentative, though symbolically sophisticated fashion. A short lyric poem, like the majority of works in the volume, “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Common-place Book” engages the coterie dynamics of the volume that Moore establishes in its preface. Thomas Little is Moore’s pseudonym and alter-ego, and the preface artfully frames the volume as a posthumous collection of the tragic young poet’s works. The system of coterie circulation is immediately established in the preface, which declares that the poems “were never intended by the Author to pass beyond the circle of his friends” (iii). In this context, “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Common-place Book” neatly fits the attested mode and documentary origins of Little’s works. As I discuss in Chapter 1, Moore’s particular staging of the poems’ origins is a strategic formulation designed to heighten the reader’s sense of encounter with a private, illicit collection of verses. The presentation of a body of private manuscript literature within the public mode of print is one of the paradoxes employed by Moore to cautiously establish a provisional authorial self in this work. Within a space that skirts the perimeters of revelation and concealment, the novice poet is emboldened to trial and test different modes of authorship, and in this poem, the very process of becoming an author is dramatised in the act of inscribing one’s name: Here is one leaf reserv’d for me, From all thy sweet5 memorials free;

Introduction  5 And here my simple song might tell The feelings thou must guess so well. But could I thus, within thy mind, One little vacant corner find, Where no impression yet is seen, Where no memorial yet has been, Oh! it should be my sweetest care, To write my name for ever there! (38) Whether or not the owner of the commonplace book invited the contribution to her volume is unclear, so a measure of ambiguity is present in the opening line of the poem. The speaker may well be responding to the lady’s request to compose some verse, as was conventional in the circuits of coterie literature.6 However, an alternative reading might view the poem as uninvited, giving a darker edge to its imagery and framing the reserved leaf as a conquest and not the site of a consensual literary exchange. Judging between these possible readings is difficult, and the more sinister is not obviously sustained by ominous imagery elsewhere in the poem. But doing so is a matter of divining the motivations of the speaker, thus assessing the full force of his authorial convictions. Thomas Little is a collection notable for the amorous content of the majority of its poems: as I describe in Chapters 1 and 2, it was largely responsible for the lascivious reputation which followed Moore for much of his career. Viewed from this perspective, the opening four lines of this poem may position the speaker as acting on romantic motives, seeking to describe in verse for his addressee “[t]he feelings thou must guess so well.” In a volume comprised of many poems of direct address to a female lover, the romantic exposition of these lines is easily sustainable. However, if we attribute to the speaker the same kind of authorial motivations and designs that Moore strategically employs throughout this book, this portion of the poem may be read in a different fashion: the speaker’s “simple song” is testimony to his desire to become a poet, and this address to the lady makes her witness to his authorial desires. That she is already conscious of these wishes is implied in the fourth line, though one might easily imagine the lady to be in two minds about the ambiguous nature—romantic or professional?—of the speaker’s feelings. As we proceed to the fifth line, the image of the mind comes into sharper relief as Moore juxtaposes the authorial benefits of physical and mental inscription. Having written—and continuing to write—on a blank leaf of the lady’s commonplace book, the speaker moves to a conclusion that it would be far preferable—“my sweetest care”—to make an enduring impression on her mind. The trajectory here follows that of the Lockean mental metaphor, where white paper stands for the mind before it has received the impressions of experience and sensation. To leave a mark upon the tabula rasa of the commonplace book is a means to recognition by

6 Introduction its owner, and to communicating certain feelings. However, the speaker considers that scenario inferior to making an impression on the lady’s mind: to insinuate himself onto a portion of blank slate, to commit himself to her memory. To secure such an effect is a more durable and promising outcome for the prospective lover, and for the prospective author, too. The word “memorial” is used in the two contexts of page and mind, and assumes poignancy in the context of the posthumous writings of Thomas Little. Moore seeks the same memory and monument, and implies that he might achieve it through writing. The commonplace book is a means of organising knowledge, a technology for managing and organising information about the world collected by the senses. Viewed in these technological terms as an external analogue of memory, contemporary metaphors abound: the commonplace book is a database, a hard drive, a Tumblr.7 In the Enlightenment period and thereafter, commonplacing was described in terms similar to metaphors of mind: as an external aidemémoire, ready to be impressed with knowledge yielded by the world. John Locke, who compared the mind to white paper, also recommended a system for arranging and categorising information upon the blank page in A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books.8 The implicit idea, which Moore leaves unsaid, is that by writing in the lady’s commonplace book, his speaker writes himself into her mind. Though the second part of the poem presents the route to the lady’s attention as an alternative to inscription in her book, the symbolic connection of page and mind implies the speaker’s understanding that the desired memorialisation is achieved by that very process of inscription. “To write my name for ever there” is the aspiration of the speaker to be remembered. The ultimate wish is figurative: to write himself into her consciousness. The use of the writing metaphor is a signal of the speaker’s knowledge that the route to this desire is first realised in the literal marking of page with pen. At the same time, Moore, present behind layers of pseudonymous authorship and simulated coterie circulation, also indicates the authorial craft and design he has adopted. In Moore’s early quest to become an author, the Thomas Little volume is the literal impression which contains this calculatedly artificial manuscript poem.9 That printed book’s strategic mix of print and manuscript, and of irony and sincerity is captured in “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Common-place Book,” and in so doing, Moore demonstrates the deliberation with which he will construct his authorial persona: how he intends to write his name. Using the recognisable tropes of occasional writing an romantic address, Moore creates a poem which simultaneously addresses the process of constructing authorship. Further couched within an artificial coterie and a layer of pseudonymous concealment, the poem engages a number of authorial issues and strategies that are evident in Moore’s early verse, and elsewhere throughout his poetic works. My discussion of these features in this book will interest scholars of authorship, but the new

Introduction  7 research I present is also addressed to those with an interest in a range of different fields, including British and Irish Romantic literature, Irish Studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, literary history, legal and copyright history, and digital humanities. With scholarly interest in Moore steadily growing since the turn of the century, I aim to add new perspectives to an increasingly rich and distinguished body of scholarly work. Aside from those works already mentioned above, the last decade has seen the publication of three collections of essays on Moore. First, Thomas Moore: Text, Contexts, Hypertexts (2013), which I edited alongside Francesca Benatti and Sean Ryder, addressed topics of media and travel, along with sections devoted to criticism on the Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824) and the Irish Melodies. Edited by Brian Caraher and Sarah McCleave, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration (2018) analyses musical, literary, and political contexts as inspirations for Moore, as well as performative contexts for his musical works. Arising from a European Union-funded project entitled “ERIN: Thomas Moore in Europe,” The Reputations of Thomas Moore (2020), edited by McCleave and Tríona O’Hanlon, establishes the construction of Moore’s reputation in poetic, musical, and political contexts. In the context of these collections and the many new and recent essays I cite throughout the following chapters, Write My Name is a timely addition to the wave of scholarly interest in Moore and builds upon that strong foundation. Its inclusion of scholarship yielded from research in neglected archival collections on both sides of the Atlantic (Morgan Library; Longman Archive, University of Reading; Gibson-Massie Collection, Queen’s University Belfast) and perspectives from new and recent primary (UTM) and secondary sources makes it an up-to-date contribution to critical literature on Moore. It shares the strong historicist awareness of much previous scholarship but is novel in combining this with a range of new and interdisciplinary contexts that are of increasing interest to scholarship in the twenty-first century, and which are rarely adopted as frameworks for viewing Moore’s work: digital humanities, book history, legal history, and textual theory. The five chapters of the book deploy these methods at different times, in diverse combinations, to examine distinct works: they are united by a persistent focus on the authorial and nonauthorial forces which influence the different formulations of authorship that manifest in Moore’s poetic works. Chapter 1 examines Moore’s early forays into the construction of authorship with a focus on the volume that contains “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Common-place Book”: The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. Here, Moore adopted the pseudonymous persona of Thomas Little in order to place his early amorous poetry within distinct literary, historical, and generic contexts. The plan that he adopted was a response to two specific factors: a desire to provoke a favourable response from his readers by alluding to his literary precursors and

8 Introduction influences but also by a keen awareness that crude biographical inferences were likely to be made on the basis of the poems’ morality. These aesthetic and functional objectives are evident in the overlapping irony and sincerity of the volume’s paratexts, and in their relationship to the verse. These strategies consistently tread a nebulous line between playfully activating readerly expectations and protecting Moore’s identity, while also revealing the author’s responsiveness to the principles and consequences of Romantic authorship. The hostile critical reception for this amorous poetry prompted textual revisions which affirm Moore’s conception of authorship as a pliable construction, and which reveal the roles of multiple agents within the literary marketplace in shaping the formulation and function of the Romantic author. By examining the reprinting of Moore’s early works in the United States, Chapter 2 begins to consider the influence of nonauthorial agents on the construction of his authorial persona. In his first two volumes, Odes of Anacreon and Thomas Little, Moore adopted intermediary personae which strategically obscured his authorial identity. At the same time, the growth of his reputation in the United States equalled that in Britain. In the United States, a system of unauthorised reprinting which was structured to occlude the rights of international authors provided a systemic mirror for Moore’s tactical authorial poses. Ironically, as he appeared in the British marketplace with his first orthonymous publication, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), the reprinting of its contents in the United States began to reflect the strategic manipulations and disavowals that enriched the authorial status of his first two books. As Moore moved towards a more conventional model of orthonymous authorship at home, international agents acted beyond his control to preserve the complex authorial significations of his work. This chapter investigates the unauthorised reprinting of Moore’s writings in the United States to illustrate how that system enhances our understandings of the complex authorship evident in his early works. Continuing the previous chapter’s attention to the influence of nonauthorial agency, Chapter 3 examines different modes of authorship evident across the publication history of Moore’s Lalla Rookh. It describes the details of the work’s publication by Longmans from its first edition in 1817 to its final edition in 1880. The chapter examines case studies within the sequence of changing formats, print runs, illustrations, and piracies of Lalla Rookh over this period, illustrating how these changes were precipitated by the general procedures of publishing, as well as by external forces, such as changes to the market, copyright law, and the circumstances of readership and authorship. In so doing, it presents a model for describing the publication history of a literary work by showing the reciprocal influences of publisher, author, reader, and market in shaping the material and textual form of a single literary work over the course of more than sixty years. The chapter examines the material, textual, and paratextual forms of Lalla Rookh’s authorised and

Introduction  9 unauthorised publication to expose the shifting presentation and formulation of its author during the course of the work’s publication. Literary production rarely reflects dominant models of Romantic authorship and their promotion of the primacy of authorial instinct, spontaneity, and autonomy. Closer examination of individual works reveals different ways in which these models are subverted by the material conditions and varying motivations of multiple agents involved in the production of literature. In revising The Loves of the Angels, Moore’s substitution of Islam for Christianity at the poem’s religious foundation represents a flexible mode of authorship where its broad social and cultural formulation is apparent. This revision was inspired by critical accusations of impiety and blasphemy against the poem and a concurrent awareness of the unprotected copyright status of blasphemous literature. Comparing Moore’s and Lord Byron’s differing responses to critical, public, and legal threats to authorial autonomy illustrates the contingency of Romantic authorship and helps to expose the limitations of Romanticism’s self-representations. Thus, Chapter 4 preserves and extends the methodological focuses of the previous chapters in its analysis of the intersections of authorship, copyright, and textual fluidity. Approaching Moore’s poetic oeuvre through the lens of computational stylistic analysis, Chapter 5 poses two related questions. First, what effect does the generic diversity of Moore’s poetic corpus have on his stylistic consistency? Second, what practical and conceptual changes occur in the notion of authorship when we approach it through the methods of computational analysis? The arguments of the preceding chapters have emphasised the value of considering different sources of agency in the construction of an authorial persona, and the book’s conclusion examines some logical consequences of that trajectory. A basic assumption of stylometry—the statistical analysis of literary style—insists that a quantifiable and (often) distinctive aspect of an author’s style is unconscious. As stylistic consistency is often posited as a key characteristic of authorship, is this criterion evident in an author, like Moore, whose verse encompasses lyric, satiric, epic, song and ballad, and epistolary modes, and a wide range of poetic forms? In other words, do genre effects and features supersede an author’s stylistic consistency? This chapter reflects on the implications of digital humanities methods for literary analysis, comparing the nature of the evidence, assumptions, and conclusions of stylometry with those of the methods employed in previous chapters. Ultimately, the book’s final chapter concludes with an argument for the necessity of a broad methodological approach to the study of authorship. Finally, Write My Name concludes by addressing the lessons that Moore’s understanding of authorship can impart and how these might aid our comprehension of wider issues within literature of the Romantic period, and within the study of authorship. Having begun this introduction by lamenting the question of where to begin with Moore, I conclude the book by making some suggestions for how to continue.

10 Introduction

Notes

1

Of Little Consequence Pseudonym, Paratext, and Authorship in Moore’s Early Poetry

In scholarly accounts of the career and works of Thomas Moore, his early poetic works suffer from relative neglect. The success and significance of the Irish Melodies (1810–34), the Romantic Orientalist grandeur of Lalla Rookh (1817), the historical import of biographies of Lord Byron (1830) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1825), and the force of several other works all overshadow his first three volumes of poetry. With the frequent perception of Moore as a spokesperson for Irish issues, their comparative absence from these works is an impediment to their claims for attention. Likewise, the manner of the poet’s own later disavowals of some of the contents of these volumes might be viewed as a licence for critical inattention. In contemporary scholarship, Moore has apparently escaped the Streisand effect, where an attempt to disavow or censor a piece of information has the paradoxical and unintended consequence of drawing greater public attention to that information.1 Though the reason for Moore’s disavowal was a mature regret of salacious content, this was not what drew my attention to these early volumes of poetry. Instead, these works, and The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. in particular, provide a means for understanding Moore’s differing formulations of authorship in his early poetry and the ways in which they were influenced by the Romantic conception of the author. Little (1801) was a volume primarily composed of amorous verses, many of which were composed during his teenage years and bear the unmistakeable mark of hormonal surplus. Though published under a pseudonym, it was Moore’s first volume of original poetry, following his translation of the Odes of Anacreon (1800). The final volume comprising his trilogy of early works was another original work, the first to bear his name, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). What emerges from an examination of these volumes is a set of shifting authorial methods and strategies which expose Moore’s perception of authorship as a pliable construct for yielding favourable aesthetic and professional outcomes. This phase of Moore’s career deserves greater attention because it reveals the origins of his complex relationship with authorship, the subject I trace throughout this book. In the next chapter, I pay greater attention to Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, while my focus here is on Little:

12 Of Little Consequence not only is its strategic engagement with onymity an effective window on Moore’s understanding of authorship, 2 it also exposes the source of the persistent reputation for licentiousness, which pursued him throughout his career.3 Moore’s understanding of Romantic authorship is animated by a dynamic dialectic of irony and sincerity. Evidence of this is found in the creation of the pseudonymous persona of Thomas Little: Moore’s alter-ego and the purported author of the volume of verse that bears his name. The self-conscious strategies of the Little volume represent an ironic engagement with the model of the Romantic author and a sincere desire for literary achievement. In addition, they signal Moore’s consciousness of the literary marketplace, of traditions of pseudonymous authorship, and of his own place in both of these domains. While these strategies betray closely related self-promotional and self-protective instincts, Moore’s desire to shape his authorial persona is interrupted by functions of the literary marketplace and significations of Romantic authorship that are beyond his control. This varying scale of authorial agency in controlling the construction of the authorial person is a consistent feature of the studies I undertake in each chapter of this book: on certain occasions I examine Moore’s active efforts to shape his authorial persona in his poetry, while on others, I analyse the construction of that persona by forces and agents outside of his influence. For the present, this chapter takes three approaches to assessing the authorial situation emerging from Little. First, I examine the volume’s paratextual strategies and pseudonymous persona, using theoretical perspectives on paratexts and onymity to argue that aspects of their creation elide the distinction between their aesthetic and functional effects. The complex interaction of these pseudonymous features and the difficulty of categorising the instincts and motivations that contributed to their adoption are evidence of Moore’s anxious relation to an age that amplified the needs and consequences of presenting a distinct authorial identity. In this respect, his formulation of Romantic authorship contributes to a more complex and nuanced picture of the phenomenon than is yielded by a narrow focus on the major Romantic poets. Second, I trace the critical reception of Little to reveal how accusations of immorality made against Moore arose from a characteristic Romantic equivalence of authorial and personal identities. Both this situation and the later revisions to the Little persona and poems, which I examine in the third section, are evidence of Moore’s flexible understanding of authorship and of its status as a broadly mediated cultural phenomenon. The case surrounding Little reveals an important point about considerations of anonymous and pseudonymous publication: accounts of authorship cannot be solely subject-centred, since authorship is the outcome of a convergence of individuals and institutions in a circuit that includes a variety of social, cultural, legal, economic, and technological forces.4 The Romantic “age

Of Little Consequence  13 of personality”5 and its legacy obscures this situation with its traditional locus of authorial meaning in a linear causal relationship between author and text.6 By examining Thomas Moore within this broader communication circuit, however, we can uncover the various motivations, means, and consequences of his early pseudonymous works.7 While Moore is conventionally pseudonymous in Little, some evidence of his particular formulation of authorship is apparent in his translation of Anacreon and the orthonymous Epistles. By the time of Little’s publication, Moore had already established his name, if not yet his poetic reputation, thanks to the achievement of Anacreon. The volume’s dedication to the Prince of Wales brought it commercial success and attention in London society, though some commentators saw a disparity between the verse’s qualities and the instantaneous celebrity conferred on its author.8 Little, a collection comprised of amorous and gently erotic verses, was a very different publication. Selling for seven shillings in octavo format, it was one-third of the cost of the luxurious Anacreon quarto. Its smaller format allowed for larger print runs, wider distribution, and a broader audience. Not only did these aspects of the volume declare different bibliographical codes to the stately Anacreon, but the smaller format was a notable factor in adopting pseudonymous authorship.9 In practice, an author who wished to publish anonymously or pseudonymously was constrained to some degree by the market, since readers who paid a high price for a book expected to be able to identify its author.10 James Carpenter, who would also publish Epistles in quarto five years later, recognised that Little would appeal to a different reader, but that no reader would pay a high price to read the work of an unknown poet. Thus, the determinants of bibliography and the literary marketplace were in agreement with Moore’s intentions on this occasion, facilitating the desired authorial situation of the Little poems. As later chapters demonstrate, this balance was not always so harmonious. Why did Moore adopt the pseudonym of Thomas Little? If we opt for an instinctive explanation that he wished to avoid being associated with amorous poetry of dubious morality, then we must also conclude, on the basis of his enduring licentious reputation, that the pseudonym failed its purpose. However, this account fails to explain the complexity involved in the choice of pseudonym, the way in which it functioned, and the relationship between author and reader that it effected.11 Instead of capitalising upon the success associated with his name after his translation of Anacreon, Moore’s pseudonymous publication of Little appears more of a reaction against the model of the sincere and authentic Romantic author. But a closer reading of Little suggests that Moore’s is a more subtle engagement with Romantic ideology. This reading rejects the notion that the Thomas Little pseudonym was a genuine attempt to conceal the true identity of the author and depends instead on viewing it as a deliberate and ironic staging of a Romantic persona.12 The prematurely dead

14 Of Little Consequence Thomas Little is a Romantic type which readers might be expected to recognise as a fiction, establishing a contract where their disbelief is willingly suspended.13 His origin and presence in the paratextual elements of the volume serve to activate and amplify a set of readerly expectations instead of disguising a reticent author.14 In assessing the shifting authorial formulations across Moore’s early works, treating the use of the legal name as a calculated and deliberate stance equal to adopting a pseudonym can illustrate the mutability of what Michel Foucault calls the “author function.”15 By identifying the translator of Anacreon as “Thomas Moore, Esq. of the Middle Temple” and dedicating the volume to the Prince of Wales, Moore engaged in a transparent petition for preferment, as I discuss further in the next chapter. The hedonism of the subject matter of some of Anacreon’s odes is not dissimilar to that which prevails in Little, though some critics accused Moore of gratuitously amplifying the amorous context of Anacreon’s verse (Eyre 462–3). However, his status as a translator (not an original author) and the classical idiom of the work meant that the book posed little threat to the respectability of his name and reputation. Little’s erotic poetry offered no such personal or historic buffer, so Moore’s awareness of the age’s gossiping tendencies which read authors’ works in terms of their personal lives was one of a number of motivations for the initial absence of his name from the volume.16 Thus, we see a dual imperative in the pseudonymous attribution of Little. The paratextual construction of Thomas Little reveals, in part, Moore’s understanding and application of ideas of Romantic authorship. Instead of publishing his amorous verse anonymously, he elected to construct a persona that embodied the biographical instincts and expectations of the period, and titillated the reader by signalling an apparent need to hide. A further part of the pseudonymous strategy was addressed explicitly to critics and aimed at generating a favourable reception for the volume. Mature reflections on the wisdom of the volume prompted a later revision and erasure of some of these carefully constructed artifices. None of these three stages of Little’s life is straightforward, however, and the ironic and sincere formulations of authorship further complicate the picture. Closer examination of each of these stages brings the motivations, means, and consequences of Thomas Little’s creation into sharper focus.

Paratextual Strategies On many occasions throughout this book I examine the role of paratexts in various formulations of authorship across Moore’s works. These features of a volume—titles, prefaces, notes, dedications—often have a more mutable existence than the main text and are an important means by which authorship can be established, framed, and presented. Their relationship to a text is key: according to Gérard Genette, my principal

Of Little Consequence  15 theoretical guide on this phenomenon, paratexts “surround it and extend it” (1), “enable [it] to become a book” (1), and function as a crucial “threshold” (2) of interpretation. The pseudonymous strategies of Little are found in the volume’s paratexts.17 Their form is recognisable and conventional, but the strategic means by which Moore presents them within a dynamic interplay of irony and sincerity is striking. To do so, he employs a range of devices and contexts: a fictional editor, classical intertextuality, coterie circulation, authorial modesty, and autocriticism. The full title of the volume establishes it as the posthumous publication of a poet’s verses, and a preface by an unnamed editor gives the reader some context about the purported author’s life and influences, and the provenance of the works. If a function of the paratext (and particularly the preface) is to gain and hold the reader’s attention with “a typically rhetorical apparatus of persuasion” (Genette 198), Moore achieves this by presenting an author who “died in his one-and-twentieth year” (iv). This tragic young bard is a familiar Romantic type, and Moore embraces the ludic potential of the paratext to create his deceased alter-ego. In one respect, Moore is engaging in Romantic poetics by providing a biographical context for the originator of the verse, but he is also communicating to the reader his own distance from the work and his role as artificer. The tragic Romantic type is a cue for readers to question the veracity of the preface, and it invites the possibility of an ironic reading of the volume’s authorship. The reader’s awareness of their participation in this game is in proportion to their knowledge of the identity of the author hidden behind the pseudonym, and, more generally, to their readerly docility about paratextual functions and conventions (Genette 3). That initial readers of Little were ignorant of the true author’s identity is certainly conceivable—though a discussion of its critical reception below questions its probability—but a small measure of awareness would have alerted readers to the presence of a calculated artifice. For instance, aside from alluding to the significance of the occasional verse, “Little” is also a playful reference to the author’s well-known diminutive stature.18 Early in the preface, the volume’s purported editor writes: “[t]he particular situation in which [the poems] were written, the character of the author and of his associates, all these peculiarities must be known and felt before we can enter into the spirit of such compositions” (iii–iv), before proceeding to an analysis of the author’s classical influences. Thomas Little makes a brief and belated return at the end of the preface, only for the editor to contradict his opening statement: “[w]here Mr. Little was born, or what is the genealogy of his parents, are points in which very few readers can be interested” (xii).19 This elliptical picture of Little activates the reader’s Romantic expectations of a tragic Chattertonian figure before swiftly disappointing them. It exposes the fallacy of positing a credulous reader and a protective function for the Little pseudonym, while simultaneously revealing Moore’s ironic formulation

16 Of Little Consequence of Romanticism’s biographical interpretation. A regular formal characteristic of the pseudo-editorial preface involves explaining or recounting the circumstances in which the pseudo-editor acquired the text, 20 but the Little pseudo-editor does not provide this, nor does he explain his relationship to Little, thus failing to fulfil the official fiction. Though the pseudo-editorial narrative continues throughout the text, with editorial notes and commentary provided for individual poems, its fictional credibility is weakened by the biographical gap in the preface. In the context of the appeal that the theatricality of pseudonymity held for Moore, we can read the incompleteness of the authorial fiction as deliberate and ironic, rather than careless or lackadaisical. For in thus masking himself, Moore does not disavow his writings. Rather, in ironically concealing his authorship, Moore presents himself as an author, not merely a translator, for the first time. The authorial preface functions to allow the author to assume a different persona that is distinct from the author of the text (Genette 261): such liberties were unavailable to Moore in his role as Anacreon’s translator. The first edition of Little presents an unnamed pseudo- editor who writes the preface and annotates Little’s poems. Given Moore’s career-long habit of exhaustively annotating his own works, the pseudo-editor’s annotative practice is noteworthy. While Moore’s authorial notes to a poem like Lalla Rookh (1817) serve a similar argument-from-authority function as the classical digression of the Little preface (discussed below), the pseudo-editor of the latter volume interrupts the close narrational-authorial discourse (Genette 340) through his fictionality. Instead, to preserve the fictional authorial situation constructed in Little, the footnotes resort to an awkward and contrived syntax—“I believe Mr. Little alluded to a famous question among the early schoolmen…” (40)—or to ironic knowingness—“[t]here are many spurious copies of this song in circulation, and it is universally attributed to a gentleman [Moore] who has no more right than the Editor of these Poems to any share whatever in the composition” (108). 21 This pseudo-editor, who creates a further layer of distance between the text and Moore’s authorship and ultimately excludes the Romantic “I,” may be read in two ways. The pseudonymous fiction demands this logical necessity: the imagined author is deceased and requires an agent to publish his work. The absence of any identifiable biography for the editor has the dual effect of distancing Moore from the text but also offering the possibility to the enlightened reader that he is the unidentified author. The pseudo-editor’s anonymity contributes to the vertiginous and artificial authorial situation: this partial and performative gesture signals to the convention of the fictive preface-writer. 22 Later occasions on which Moore adopts a pseudo-editor in his writing help to clarify the particular function of the Little editor. Intercepted Letters; or, the Twopenny Post-Bag (1813) is presented under the editorship of the fictional Thomas Brown, the Younger for legal reasons.

Of Little Consequence  17 This political satire was published in the same year Leigh and John Hunt were imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent in The Examiner, and the threat of prosecution occasioned the fictional editor, Brown, and led Carpenter to obscure his role as publisher by attributing its publication to “J. Carr.”23 The politically sensitive prose narrative of Captain Rock (1823) has a fictional editor (“S. E.”) who claims to have been presented with the manuscript that forms the basis of the narrative by the titular Captain. This strategy may also be read as a reflection of the secrecy and assumed identities of the agrarian insurgency movement which forms the subject of the narrative. 24 The initially uncertain signification of the Little pseudo-editor changes with its second edition (1802), where the preface is signed “T. M.” Without explicitly revealing himself, Moore is satisfied to disclose a connection to the work in the form of his apparent editorship. The paratext remains the same, though a new dedication to Joseph Atkinson (also signed “T. M.”) preserves the pseudonymous fiction with an ironic reference to “our friend Little’s Poems” (xvii). 25 Now more transparent, the official fiction of Thomas Little is more theatrical in proportion. Under these conditions, to fully disclose Moore’s authorship would benefit neither author nor reader, and so the pseudonym, never sincerely intended to conceal the author, retains its crucial role in articulating the work’s ironic formulation of authorship. After the brief biographical remarks on Little in the volume’s preface, the pseudo-editor embarks on a detailed examination of the respective merits of Ovid, Catullus, and other poets of antiquity that the pseudonymous poet “selected for imitation” (xi). The legacy of Moore’s association with authorship in Anacreon is evident here, and comparing the two prefaces illustrates a further paratextual strategy of Little. In the case of Anacreon, the poet’s classical stature absolves Moore of the obligation to attribute high value to the work in his prefatory comments. But Thomas Little has no such canonical status, and so the reader might expect to find in the preface the biographical information and editorial advocacy that would justify the canonical-sounding title, Poetical Works. That Moore provides so little of the former and reaches back to antiquity for the latter illustrates the twin imperatives of irony and sincerity that inform Moore’s paratextual strategies in the volume. Moore shows both classical and neoclassical influences in these strategies. The attribution of the title Poetical Works to a twenty-year-old poet is another ironic gesture recalling Alexander Pope’s publication of his Works at the age of twenty-nine. The addition of the honorific “Esq.” to Thomas Little is also a common Augustan authorial convention. 26 In Moore’s own neoclassical signals, we can see the sincere side of his dual strategy. The Little preface’s apparently tangential excursion into a discussion of ancient poetic models has in fact a very definite object. In this argument from ancientness, Moore insists on the classical nature of his themes and subjects, in anticipation of their perceived triviality.

18 Of Little Consequence Through this approach, Moore positions his work within a respectable tradition and provides the reader with the authoritative context that stands opposed to the humility implicit in the coterie writer who never sought a public audience. 27 Thus, he aims at fulfilling the dual function of the paratext: generating a better reception and a more pertinent reading of the text (Genette 2). The opening lines of the preface describe a private literary coterie in which Little’s poems circulated, while setting an apologetic tone for the verse. The poems which I take the liberty of publishing were never intended by the Author to pass beyond the circle of his friends. He thought, with some justice, that what are called Occasional Poems must be always insipid and uninteresting to the greater part of their readers. (iii) In one sense, the preface functions here to support the authorial fiction by describing the means by which the verses have come to be published. 28 In addition, it offers a hedge against critics who find the verse “insipid and uninteresting,” in an instance of the autocriticism discussed more fully below. The reference to coterie circulation is particularly significant, as Moore is providing another key to reading the work by alluding to the means of textual circulation of amorous precursors of the Restoration, such as Rochester and Sedley, and the recent (and calculatedly artificial) coterie of the Della Cruscans.29 In making the allusion, Moore highlights a crucial difference between textual transmission in coteries and in the literary marketplace: the printed book. In so doing, he enables his paratextual strategising and evokes a different set of literary standards and conventions for the verse. First, the paratextual means by which Moore constructs his pseudonym is intrinsic to the printed book and not to manuscript transmission.30 Second, he implies, the standards to which the verse should be held (in terms of its quality or morality) are different because of the originally private context of their composition and circulation. In effect, Moore is creating a fictional context of moral relativism for the verses in Little: their amorous and licentious content is acceptable within a consensual literary network, but the move from manuscript to print, and from private to public effects a change in their moral status for which the reader should be prepared. The convention of adopting pseudonyms in literary coteries also draws further attention to Little’s imagined author. The fact that assuming a name in a literary network was less a cloaking device than a means of signalling one’s membership of a network points again to the performative nature of the Thomas Little persona.31 Margaret Ezell has shown the convention of coterie pseudonyms emerging in the English Commonwealth period and moving through the Restoration, before being adopted by commercial literature in the early eighteenth century

Of Little Consequence  19 (“Reading” 18). Her work also argues that the connection between coteries and pseudonyms as a participatory (rather than antagonistic) literary model extends its influence from the seventeenth century into the Romantic era.32 Though Ezell analyses the coterie to discredit assumptions about pseudonyms serving a protective and defensive role in female authorship, the literary network that Moore evokes is static and masculine. The subjects of the amorous poems in Little remain subjects, not active participants in the exchange of verse that is characteristic of the Della Cruscan circle. The various Celias, Chlorises, and Phyllises of Little explicitly recall the subjects of Rochester’s verse and the monologic male speaker of Astrophil and Stella. While Moore’s poetic and prosodic style is closer to his classical and Restoration precursors, the artifice and performativity of the literary persona and the transfer of coterie circulation to the printed book are his inheritance from the Della Cruscans. Just as the original periodical ephemerality of Della Cruscan verse and the tortuous love story of the two protagonists, Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, was granted literary immortality by the publication of the Poetry of the World (1788) volume, 33 so Moore created a fictional coterie to whose private and ephemeral verse the publication of the Little book gave public life. While Ezell rejects the view of pseudonyms as antagonistic, Lee Erickson argues that aside from those writing political satire or panegyric, most poets in the Romantic period hid their identity because of “fearful modesty” (“‘Unboastful’” 247). While Intercepted Letters and Captain Rock engage onymous traditions of satirical and political writing in different ways, Moore’s use of imagined personae triggers the irony and performativity that is not possible in anonymous publication. Compared to those volumes, Little has no generic or thematic justification for pseudonymity, 34 so does the charge of fearful modesty apply? The autocritical strategy described below can be interpreted to some degree as an active response to Moore’s fears about his critical reception, but he was also following an established onymous tradition for poets of the Romantic period. Volumes of poetry that were initially published anonymously commonly saw the poet later revealing his or her identity if the work gained sufficient popularity to remain in print.35 This evidence counters interpretations that equate withheld orthonyms with a desire for concealment. It suggests that poetic anonymity was occasioned by both the internal regulation of the literary marketplace and the modest desire of poets not to have their names associated with bad or unpopular poetry. Analysis by Erickson and Paula Feldman suggests that poetic anonymity was relatively uncommon in the Romantic period, that it was usually a case of testing the waters upon initial publication, and that, where successful, a work would usually receive orthonymous attribution by the third edition. Both scholars make important points about respectability, readership, and the market for poetry as factors in acknowledging authorship.36 Along with the recognition that “in the early years of

20 Of Little Consequence the nineteenth century, it was not all that easy to remain anonymous” (Feldman 283), this is further evidence of the strategic and performative nature of the Thomas Little pseudonym. If the addition of “T. M.” to the second edition of Little signals both a conventional path from anonymity towards orthonymity and the enduring fictiveness of the Little persona, what is the purpose of the autocritical strategies that appear in the volume? These largely comprise comments by the pseudo-editor on the verses in the volume and in this fictive spirit represent an apparently objective report that balances the circumstances of their composition with their quality and morality.37 From the perspective of Moore’s authorship, however, the paratextual situation of the pseudo-editor’s preface offers him the indulgence of writing what he, as the author, cannot write.38 References to the youth of Thomas Little abound: “most of these Poems were written at so early a period, that their errors may claim some indulgence from the critic” (iv). These are designed to increase the appeal of the work on the basis of its youthful unselfconsciousness, while displaying an acute awareness of the consequences for one’s reputation of the reception of one’s first publications. Though Pope confronted this situation head-on, 39 Moore’s pseudonymity effects a circuitous appeal for critical clemency, tempering its potential pathos with layers of irony. The prefatory comments aim at eliciting a contextual reading and a sympathetic reading, in a further instance of the volume’s fusion of irony and sincerity. Moore deploys this autocritical strategy in his writings on a number of occasions. The eunuch chamberlain of Lalla Rookh, Fadladeen, uses the interludes between poetic sections to offer invariably negative criticism on the preceding verse. With overblown and hypocritical rhetoric, Moore satirises pedantic critical practices and undercuts criticisms of this kind by anticipation. Thus, disentangling the playfulness of Moore’s ironic autocriticism from genuine anxiety about his own critical reception is a subtle and tricky negotiation: indeed, further effects of anxiety on authorship in the case of Lalla Rookh are discussed in Chapter 3. Arguably, Little presents a more acute situation since it represented the twenty-one-year-old Moore’s submission of “these trifles of the moment to the eye of dispassionate criticism” (iv), and other evidence confirms his heightened awareness of the relationship between authorship, reputation, and criticism. In the discussion of Little’s classical precursors, the pseudo-editor refers to an inherent hypocrisy in the criticism of contemporary amatory verse. It is astonishing that so many critics have preferred [Propertius] to the pathetic Tibullus; but I believe the defects which a common reader condemns have been looked upon rather as beauties by those erudite men, the commentators, who find a field for their ingenuity and research in his Grecian learning and quaint obscurities. (vi)

Of Little Consequence  21 The accusation suggests that bacchanalianism is tolerated, even critically venerated, when safely beneath the dust of antiquity but is censured when it appears in the contemporary poetic idiom.40 The comment also articulates an implied preference for the judgement of the “common reader” which Moore uses in the opening poem of the volume (and the shift to Little’s voice) to express in more explicit terms: Oh! let my song, my memory find A shrine within the tender mind; And I will scorn the critic’s chide, And I will scorn the fume of pride, Which mantles o’er the pedant fool, Like vapour on a stagnant pool! (2) This appeal to the good sense of the reader is as common a strategy as the argument from ancientness. It placates the reader’s self-regard and critical awareness while emphasising the conscious decision that Little has made to avoid the critical glare of the literary marketplace. Moore’s use of the volume’s paratexts for autocritical purposes is most directly relevant to the assessment of the work’s reception which follows. However, in his construction of a fictional editor and coterie, and his appeals to classical precursors and authorial modesty, we see further evidence of Moore’s deliberate use of paratexts’ potential for signifying authorship, combined with a sophisticated balance of irony and sincerity.

Little’s Reception Little’s publication came a year before a shift in the gravity and importance of periodical reviewing of literature represented by the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. That journal would play a significant part in the critical assessment of Moore in due course, but in the meantime, reviews of Little that appeared throughout 1801 and 1802 give some interesting indications about the reception of the volume and its strategies.41 Reviews were mixed, in general, with an apparent consensus about the author’s technical abilities tempered by complaints about the immorality of the verses. The British Critic judged the volume’s autocritical strategy as: “adopted … with the view, no doubt, of screening the poetry from severe criticism: for who would treat with asperity the defects or errors of a youthful writer after his decease?” (540). The reviewer thus identifies a purely sympathetic motivation behind the strategy without registering its contextual purpose of generating a correct reading of the volume. Such an assessment betrays a solipsistic view of the reviewer’s role, interprets the relationship between author and reviewer as antagonistic, and repositions the pseudonymous stance as necessarily hostile or evasive.42 The reviewer’s estimation of Moore’s intent to generate a

22 Of Little Consequence sympathetic reading contains a degree of accuracy, of course. By making this allusion, the reviewer highlights the self-fulfilling function of the pseudonymous strategy, which Genette identifies as a “perverse effect” (410) of the paratext: that its strategic use highlights the motives for its adoption.43 But Moore may also claim a measure of success for this function of the strategy here: by simply agreeing with the reservations of the Little editor, reviewers criticised the volume on the terms that he dictated.44 Some reviews inevitably took issue with the morality of the volume. After a generally positive assessment, the Monthly Review writer closes with a proviso that would echo in criticisms of Moore for decades to come: “it is allowable to express our regret that a writer who possesses such talents for pleasing should publish any thing which delicacy and morality forbid us entirely to approve” (179).45 Writing for the Critical Review, Robert Southey takes a similar approach. After admitting that some of the Little poems demonstrate technical accomplishment and “abundantly prove the genius of the author,” the reviewer laments that “he degrade[s] himself by thus miserably misapplying it” (205). The reviewer for the Monthly Mirror accedes to Moore’s argument from ancientness, suggesting that those who object to Little’s verses must also “find fault with all the Latin poets, Horace and Ovid in particular” (317). This reviewer also feels justified in identifying the author behind the persona, illustrating a notable correspondence between the reviewer’s judgement on the merit and morality of the poems and their assessment of the function of the pseudonym: “Mr. Little, we understand, is a name of fiction. The real author is Thomas Moore, Esq. of the Middle Temple, whose splendid translation of the Odes of Anacreon we shall consider at some length hereafter” (316–7). In addressing the identity of the pseudonymous author, the Monthly Review is less explicit, stating that it “is said to be a Gentleman who lately favoured the world with a translation of Anacreon” (174), while Southey gravely frames his objections to the verses with the comment: “[i]t is not the business of a reviewer to publish a writer’s name, if the writer himself have chosen to withhold it” (200). This correspondence between judgement and pseudonymous function is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it reveals a common critical knowledge of the true identity behind Thomas Little, further illustrating the transparency of the authorial fiction. Second, it is additional evidence of the period’s apparent critical understanding of pseudonymity in antagonistic terms. The more positive reviews stage a meritorious revelation of the poet, while articles like Southey’s implicitly suggest that the author has good reasons for hiding his identity. A third interesting aspect is the etiquette that constrained Southey from making a direct identification of the true author. In these divergent positions in the reviews of Little, we can trace critical estimations of Romantic authorship and the breadth of that

Of Little Consequence  23 ideology’s reach. Southey’s claim that the reviewer’s business does not include identifying a pseudonymous author may be true in practice, but it does not accurately reflect the broader critical trend of Romantic reviewers commenting on authors’ personal lives and reading their work on those biographical terms.46 The disjunction is a curious one and appears to be predicated on the functioning of the literary communication circuit described above. Moore is generally acknowledged as the author of Little, though that authorship appears only between the lines of most of the critical reviews. On initial publication, etiquette grants pseudonymity a free pass, anticipating that future success will see the circuit reveal the true identity of the author and satisfy Romantic curiosity. If the publication does not succeed and sinks without trace, the pseudonymous author fails (according to the principles of the marketplace) but preserves their personal identity and integrity. Thus, the system understands that the pseudonymous author stakes their personal name in the self-regulating system of literary fame and authorial success. Understood in these terms, the pseudonymous strategies of Little simply postponed a reckoning which finally arrived in 1806. Francis Jeffrey’s review of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems in the July 1806 issue of the Edinburgh Review is a delayed articulation of the role that Little played in establishing Moore’s early reputation. The volume’s “Epistles” and “Odes” were inspired by Moore’s experiences and encounters in North America,47 while the “Other Poems” were verses which closely matched the amorous style of Little.48 The first reason for the significance of Jeffrey’s review is that it represented the earliest opportunity for the increasingly influential Edinburgh to comment on an original publication by Moore, although a review of the third edition of Anacreon in 1803 had announced the journal’s antipathy to the author’s pseudonymous habits and literary licentiousness.49 Jeffrey’s review soon declares itself as not only an assessment of Epistles but of the career and reputation of Moore to that point.50 The reviewer’s allusion to the “Other Poems” enables an engagement with the type of verse that formed the basis for his renown. Jeffrey’s criticism is entirely without mercy: the ten-page article was the most public and significant distillation of all of the stray references to the author’s immorality which had appeared in the previous six years. The review begins by noting Moore’s technical accomplishments, 51 before hastily moving to the crux of Jeffrey’s objections: that the author’s fame is founded not upon these qualities but on those that make him “the most licentious of modern versifiers” (456). Jeffrey echoes Southey’s rhetorical antithesis in order to underline the nature of the poetic crimes but also avails of the volume’s orthonymity to make a more devastating accusation: that Moore possessed a deliberately malicious and corrupting intent: “It seems to be his aim to impose corruption upon his readers, by concealing it under a mask of refinement” (457). The

24 Of Little Consequence charge is founded upon the apparently insidious and exploitative union of an amorous message with a talent for versification and is pursued forcefully throughout the review.52 Though some of the terms of Jeffrey’s argument are exaggerated, the article’s damaging potential lay in the Edinburgh Review’s secure command of influence and respect in the literary establishment of the time. Moore’s awareness of the reach of the journal, and consequent anxiety about his reception therein, was evident in advance of the review: “I wait but for the arrival of the Edinburgh Review, and then ‘a long farewell to my greatness’ … I shall vanish and be forgotten” (LTM 1: 101). The decisive difference between the harm of this review and those which made similar claims is the orthonymity of Epistles, which licensed Jeffrey to level his accusations directly at Moore.53 By confining the substance of his remarks to Epistles and only briefly alluding to “former publications,” Jeffrey demonstrates his appreciation of the categorical distinction between that volume and Little. By doing this he preserves the etiquette of not exposing pseudonymous authorship but supports his argument with reference to the open secret of Moore’s authorship. Jeffrey’s review adopts the characteristic Romantic equivalence of authorial and personal identities, and his accusation of predetermined malice evokes legal rather than literary discourse. But he is a critic, and questions of interpretation are more important for him than theories of authorship. For Jeffrey, identifying Moore as the source of the immorality that he locates in the verse is a critical and cultural imperative of the age and of his profession. His accusations collapse the distinction between the orthonym and the “ethical person” (Saunders and Hunter 509), though such a distinction is maintained in legal cases of libel, sedition, or copyright. The law is agnostic about authorial intention in these latter instances and is more concerned with its material instantiation: that is, in most cases, publication. 54 In Little, Moore exploits this crucial legal distinction between private and public circulation to conjure a certain illicitness and intimacy for the reader who reads in the publicity of print what was only ever intended for private transmission. 55 Here, again, the pseudonym is revealed as less of a practical necessity than an aesthetic and authorial strategy. Moore’s verses, as Jeffrey rightly observes, have none of the vulgarity and obscenity of Rochester, so he has no urgent need to disguise his authorship. But Rochester’s poetry circulated in a private coterie, with the majority published in a bowdlerised posthumous form. Moore’s fictional coterie is published and public, so the private imperative is transferred from textual circulation to onymity. In adopting a pseudonym, Moore gives the impression of having something to hide and increases the illicit connotations of the publication.56 The critical trajectory of Little confirms that the pseudonym is only a temporary indemnity against Romantic authorship and its equivalence of author and legal name. If anything, its perversity is evident in the vigour with which Jeffrey exploited Moore’s unmasking. But what is

Of Little Consequence  25 also clear is that the conditions under which a pseudonym is adopted or exposed are historically circumstantial and obey no single logic.57 Since Jeffrey’s argument is enabled by Epistles’ orthonymity, the motivations for that manner of publication are important. To capitalise on the success of Anacreon and Little, Moore and James Carpenter planned a new volume of poetry that was postponed by Moore’s departure for Bermuda in September 1803. The nucleus of Epistles comprised poems inspired by the North American travels, 58 so had the planned volume been published by Carpenter, the style and content of the poems completed before the transatlantic trip might have warranted another pseudonymous publication. However, the epistles and odes of 1806 represent a significant departure from the juvenilia of Little: the epistles, in particular, present the poet as a mature and thoughtful international correspondent: an alternative persona, and one with more favourable associations for Moore.59 From this perspective, the inclusion of the “Other Poems” was a crucial misjudgement which permitted Jeffrey’s assault. Epistles, an expensive quarto with another noble dedicatee, provided no bibliographical, pseudonymous, or paratextual imprimatur to justify the inclusion of the “Other Poems” or their licentious content. Anacreon and Little addressed themselves to distinct markets and audiences, and like those volumes, aspects of bibliography and market played a role in determining the appropriate authorial situation. However, Epistles’ miscellaneous content and its failure to harmonise its textual and paratextual signals reaped its consequences in the Jeffrey review. Moore’s initial response on reading that review is recorded in a letter of 6 August: “I was agreeably disappointed by the article on my Volume of Poems—there is all the malignity which I expected, but not half the sting, and I hope I shall always be lucky enough to have such dull, prosing antagonists” (LTM 1: 102). In the days that followed, however, the apparent coolness of Moore’s response gave way to anger, and he decided to challenge Jeffrey to a duel.60 In issuing the challenge, the reviewer’s accusation of intent to corrupt was the charge for which Moore sought restitution: after adverting to some assertion contained in the article, accusing me, if I recollect right, of a deliberate intention to corrupt the minds of my readers, I thus proceeded: “To this I beg leave to answer, You are a liar; yes, sir, a liar: and I choose to adopt this harsh and vulgar mode of defiance, in order to prevent at once all equivocation between us, and to compel you to adopt for your own satisfaction, that alternative which you might otherwise have hesitated in affording to mine”. (MTM 1: 201–2) Moore had anticipated the Edinburgh doing some damage to his reputation, but the specific allegations about his personal character were an unexpected and unacceptable outcome. Given the potentially grave

26 Of Little Consequence outcome of a duel, we cannot suggest that Moore proposed it to redeem his literary reputation, but the close association between this and one’s good name is apparent in the fallout from the encounter. The story has become the stuff of legend: as the duellists faced off, several policemen sprang forth, arrested them, and took them to Bow Street station, where their enmity began its resolution into friendship. However, the story of the aborted duel soon became the subject of mockery in the press, and, now out of mortal danger, Moore showed great eagerness to protect his name and reputation and to “stem, if possible, the tide of ridicule” (MTM 1: 209). The story could not be reined in, however, and true and false details of the encounter contributed to the growing ignominy surrounding the episode.

Revisions to Little Throughout his career, revision played an important role in Moore’s active fashioning of his authorship. On a number of occasions, Moore seized the opportunity to revise the texts and paratexts of this works to effect notable changes in the manner of their signification, and often for the purposes of shifting perceptions about his own authorial persona and status. In Chapter 4, I examine Moore’s revision of the religious foundation of The Loves of the Angels (1823) in response to critical accusations of impiety and blasphemy against the poem and a concurrent awareness of the unprotected copyright status of blasphemous literature. Nonauthorial revision is also present as a factor that influences authorial formulations in Moore’s career. The next chapter demonstrates how revisions in American reprints of Epistles began to reflect the strategic manipulations and disavowals that enriched the authorial status of his first two books. In the case of Little, too, Moore responded to the adversity of its negative receptions with textual and paratextual revisions which reversed many of the volume’s deliberate and strategic authorial representations. Romantic ideas about spontaneous creativity and authorship are complicated by the revision of literary texts (Leader 1), but revisions to paratexts are considered less problematic despite enacting important changes in the meaning of texts that they frame. Their availability for revision, repositioning, and removal by the author or another agent serves to equate their liminality with disposability.61 But in a work like Little, where paratextual strategies play such a pivotal role in constructing authorship and reception, paratextual revisions are of significant interest. Coupled with substantive revisions to the texts of the Little poems, the motives for Moore’s conscientious revisions for Longmans’ ten-volume edition of his Poetical Works (1840–1) demand conscientious analysis. Each of the volumes contains a new authorial preface that combines a desire for canonical respectability with a pre-posthumous inflection. These prefaces are primarily autobiographical and contain reflections on

Of Little Consequence  27 the composition of the works, but the cloak of respectability appears to have prevented Moore from undertaking a mature consideration of his early licentious reputation, or of the role of Little in its creation.62 That Thomas Little is an undesirable part of his canon is clear from further paratextual revisions. Volume one of the Poetical Works reprints Anacreon in its entirety and original arrangement, and the preface recounts the circumstances of Moore’s translation. However, the Little poems are dispersed throughout a miscellaneous “Juvenile Poems” section, which spans the first and second volumes. The focus of the second volume’s preface moves to Epistles’ Bermudian and American poems, revealing Moore’s plan to remove Thomas Little as an identifiable entity from the account of his early career. By printing the Little poems under the heading of “Juvenile Poems” and interrupting their original arrangement, Moore undermines the integrity of the original volume and its central pseudonymous persona.63 This is the first occasion on which the Little poems are published under Moore’s name, and in finally asserting his authorship, he renders the strategic construction of the pseudonymous fiction redundant. Preserving the original architecture of the volume would have presented an exhibit of Moore’s publication history and his pseudonymous strategies, but its dispersal takes a more utilitarian view of the volume, prioritising the textual contents above the fictional paratextual frame. The effect announces Moore’s authorship, but shorn of the bibliographic and contextual unity provided by Little and his coterie, the poems suffer a relegation of significance to mere juvenilia. The inclusion of the original Little preface (signed “T. M.”) at the head of the “Juvenile Poems” section both preserves and distorts the fiction.64 The effective marginalisation of Thomas Little gives the impression that Moore is writing in propria persona, and the preface appears to function as an authentic commentary on the Little poems, on the “Other Poems” of Epistles, and on assorted juvenilia. The destruction of the original volume’s continuity also effects a change in the editorial paratext: a footnote to the 1801 “Song (Mary, I believ’d thee true)” reads: “I believe these words were adapted by Mr. Little to the pathetic Scotch air ‘Galla Water.’ E[ditor]” (164), whereas the Poetical Works simply records: “These words were written to the pathetic Scotch air ‘Galla Water’” (2: 101). Thus, the original pseudo-editor and his curatorial function are destabilised. Just as the original volume’s fictional persona and bibliographical unity enabled the functioning of these paratextual elements, so the weakening of the persona and the breaking of the book demanded their adjustment. The revisions are not undertaken to address a new public in different or reflective terms, but the subtle changes to the paratexts are significant because they reorient their original strategic functions. But the manner of these changes is uneasy: the discontinuity of the Little poems and the juxtaposition of fictional and autobiographical prefaces in the Poetical Works create a curious dissonance. The dispassionate but

28 Of Little Consequence selective 1840 preface and the reframed Little preface evoke a mixture of assertion and denial of Moore’s early work. Ironically, having originally used a pseudonym for the strategic purpose of directing an appropriate reading, Moore now disavows the Little poems with orthonymity: both fictional and legal names have functional roles in the construction of authorship. The paratext also betrays Moore’s self-conscious reflection on the revision process and the critical consequences of Little. To the claim for the poems in the original preface that “their author…wrote as he pleased, careless whether he pleased as he wrote” (iv–v), he now adds the qualifying phrase “in general” (254).65 The Poetical Works represented Moore’s presentation of a canonical version for his verse and an opportunity to shape a reputation that would endure posthumously.66 Victorian ideas of respectability that succeeded Romanticism’s concerns with authenticity influenced Moore’s textual revisions, and his prepublication correspondence with Thomas Longman about those revisions underlines further motivations: I have completed the correction of the Anacreon (which cost some trouble) and the castration of the young Mr Little which was done in no time. My intention is (as this portion of the Volume will be headed “Juvenile Poems”) to fill up the vacancies made by the aforesaid operation with other juvenilities from the Odes & Epistles—but I shall want your help, when I send up the Vellutified Little, to calculate how many more lines that portion of the volume will admit of—I should like to get in as much under that head as is practicable. (LTM 2: 842) The claim that the “vellutification” of the Little poems involved negligible effort compared to the revision of Anacreon is dubious. The degree of attention and the frequency of correction in the Little poems that are included in the Poetical Works does not testify to a minor intervention. Likewise, Moore’s expressed desire to include as much juvenilia as possible does not tally with the removal of thirty-six complete poems from Little. This exclusion was conceivably dictated by practical bibliographic constraints to which Moore alludes, but the poems that failed to make the cut are conspicuously united by a preponderance of the type of amorous content that attracted most critical attention. To add a respectable velvet trim to Little, Moore makes frequent and substantive revisions to the amatory content of the poems. The description of the poems’ revision as “castration” captures both the extent and the severity of the excision and its carnal subject: the number of instances where the sexual charge of a “pout” is changed to the modesty of a “smile” are too frequent to recount, but a few examples will illustrate the nature and extent of Moore’s demure adjustments (Table 1.1). Any hint of excessively amorous language or imagery is bowdlerised, as in “Rondeau”.

Of Little Consequence  29 Table 1.1 “Rondeau”  And I will stay, and every minute Shall have an age of rapture in it! We’ll kiss and kiss in quick delight, And murmur, while we kiss, “Good night!” (1801, 43).

And I will stay, and every minute Shall have an age of transport in it; Till Time himself shall stay his flight, To listen to our sweet “Good night.” (1840, 2: 12).

In the original version of “The Kiss,” where a lover is invited to “Come panting to this fever’d breast” (97), Moore’s revision invokes a more coy couple: “Come blushing to this ardent breast” (2: 84). Elsewhere, rapture becomes gladness, warmth becomes fondness, and bliss turns to joy. More substantial excisions are made to other poems, as the ten-stanza “To ——” (98–100) retains only four stanzas in the Poetical Works. In its revised form, the poem is an earnest reflection on the end of a romantic dalliance. Originally, however, the speaker imagines his former lover’s future companion, and concludes: I think I should be sweetly blest, If, in a soft, imperfect sigh, You’d say, while to his bosom prest, He loves not half so well as I! (100) Moore’s objective in revising the poems was to oversee Little’s castration: but what were his motivations? Leaving behind a respectably chaste and moral body of work was a priority, but the pseudonym’s role in forming his early reputation was also a significant factor. In removing the persona of Thomas Little, Moore also removes the fictional context which gave coherence to an otherwise disparate collection of occasional juvenile verses. Such was Moore’s dissatisfaction with the consequences of his Little’s publication that almost forty years later he completed this quiet but substantial disavowal.67

Conclusion After 1806, Moore changed the course of his writing career, beginning the Irish Melodies in 1808, and establishing himself as a satirist. His determination to move away from the reputation earned by the amatory verse of his early publications is evident in his defiant statement of April 1807: “I am not writing love-verses…I am writing politics” (LTM 1: 120–1).68 The decision was partly motivated by the rich satiric potential of Regency politics and by Moore’s sincere desire to distance himself from Little and the critical controversy that it provoked. Samuel Rogers later recalled the extent of Moore’s regrets about his juvenile volume: “[s]o heartily has Moore repented of having published Little’s Poems, that I have seen him

30 Of Little Consequence shed tears—tears of deep contrition—when we were talking of them” (280). Moore’s political satires did succeed in effecting a change in his reputation, but rather than achieving a break from his licentious character, he now found opponents referring to this already established type to add weight to new charges of sedition.69 Reflecting Pope’s warning that one’s reputation is based upon “the first steps he makes in the world,” the durability of Thomas Little was increased by his theatricality and memorability.70 Moore’s use of fictional personae in his political and satirical writings indicates that the Little experience had not soured him on the principal of pseudonymity. Instead, he judiciously operated within the recognised onymous conventions of satire, mostly reserving his name for the musical publications of the decade that followed Little. Moore is rarely depicted as an archetypal Romantic, but the formulations of authorship evident in his early works and in their subsequent revision may be read as a conscious engagement with Romantic ideology. His thinly concealed authorship and the construction of the performative Thomas Little persona activate the readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, Biographia 2: 6): if they are willing to play along with the masquerade, so is he. Jerome McGann argues that Byron exposed the hypocrisies of Romantic authorship in a figurative anonymity where his orthonym is effectively moulded into a theatrical persona, and “[t]he work is engulfed in that dissolving, disillusioning ambiguity” (“Anonymous” 43) between the self and the text. Moore treads a similar path by complicating and critiquing the Romantic equivalence of author and legal person but adopts an active pseudonymity instead. In constructing an occasional provenance for Little’s verses, Moore presents them as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The creation of the Little artifice itself and the movement of the fictional coterie to the bibliographic sphere represent the complementary portion of Wordsworth’s Romantic programme: the reflective, self-conscious, and internalised act, or “emotion recollected in tranquillity” (1: xxxiii). Moore, so seldom associated with the Romantic aesthetic outlined in Lyrical Ballads, effectively internalises it in his construction of Thomas Little.71 In his creation of the Little persona, and its effacement in the Poetical Works, we see Moore’s initial engagements with differing formulations of Romantic authorship: one that sees the authorial self as mutable— created and articulated through the revision and refinement of the texts that reveal that identity72 —and another where revision creates the authorial self afresh and extinguishes all previous authorial incarnations and intentions.73 Both perspectives on authorial identity are closer to the Byronic conception of authorship which saw the revision of The Giaour, that “snake of a poem” (BLJ 3: 100), over the course of fourteen editions than to Shelley’s Socratic prioritisation of inspiration above the inherent corruption of composition.74 The shifting configurations of the communication circuit, which help to articulate changing formulations of authorship across Moore’s career and in later chapters of this book, are

Of Little Consequence  31 also evident in the case of Little’s revision. The Moore of 1801 is a blank leaf upon which personae can be constructed and tested. The Moore of 1840 is a palimpsest where the canonical identity of the author is inscribed over the traces of earlier personae. With a view to posthumous respectability, he attempts to bring final order and stability to the polyonymous commotion of the previous forty years. Moore adopted the pseudonymous persona of Thomas Little in order to place his amorous poetry within distinct literary, historical, and generic contexts. He was motivated by a desire to provoke an appropriate response from his readers by alluding to his literary precursors but also by a keen awareness that crude biographical inferences were likely to be made on the basis of perceptions about the poems’ morality. These aesthetic and functional objectives are evident in the overlapping irony and sincerity of the volume’s paratextual strategies. The popular and commercial success of Little attests to the success of Moore’s fiction, but that same achievement precipitated the revelation of his authorship and the consequent accusations about his personality in the periodical press. Though Moore successfully exercised control over the aesthetic effects of authorship through the pseudonymous strategies in Little, the broader functional aspects of authorship lay beyond his control and at the mercy of the several agents in the literary marketplace—reviewers, in this instance—that participate in the communication circuit and help to shape the authorial function. At length, Moore’s “tears of deep contrition” were a response to the unanticipated personal consequences of Little and the lessons that it imparted about the inevitability of the Romantic conception of authorship. That this conception endured beyond the boundaries of the Romantic period is evident in Moore’s late revisions to Little for his Poetical Works. With one eye on Victorian respectability and the other on his posthumous reputation, Moore contrived a legacy without Thomas Little.

Notes

32 Of Little Consequence







Of Little Consequence  33

17

18

19

20 21

22

23

24

this as a factor in the original anonymity of poetry from this period (“‘Unboastful’” 257). In the Foucauldian assessment of the author-function (211–6), the author’s name (regardless of its onymous status) is equally paratextual to a title or preface, since its function is entirely separate from the legal name of the author. See also Griffin (“Anonymity” 890). However, the other paratextual elements that contribute to the creation of Thomas Little are the main subjects of my focus here. As I discuss below, Moore’s authorship was soon revealed through official and unofficial channels, so his authorial identity did not remain secret for long. More broadly, both reader and author anticipate, in almost all circumstances, the unmasking of the pseudonym: “[c]onsequently, no pseudonymous writer can dream of glory without foreseeing this disclosure … but, reciprocally, no reader who is more or less interested in the pseudonymous author can avoid being exposed to that particular bit of information” (Genette 50). This echoes Moore’s treatment of Anacreon’s biography in the preface to his debut volume: “[t]he name of his father is doubtful, and therefore cannot be very interesting” (6). But in those “Remarks on Anacreon,” Moore remains wary of readers’ identification of authorial character in literary works: “[t]o infer the moral dispositions of a poet from the tone of sentiment which pervades his works, is sometimes a very fallacious analogy: but the soul of Anacreon speaks so unequivocally through his odes, that we may consult them as the faithful mirrors of his heart” (10). For example: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Scott’s Rob Roy, and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The uncertainty produced by this effect is reminiscent of the gradually increasing suspicions provoked by the paratextual apparatus of Charles Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Like the Little editor, Kinbote introduces and annotates the poetry of the deceased John Shade, and, like the Little volume, the numerous doubts about the identity and motivations of Kinbote are generated by the paratext and its apparent dissonance from the text of Shade’s poem. “If an author is going to take the trouble to make up an allographic preface writer, he generally prefers to grant him the solid identity that a name confers” (Genette 188–9). For contrast, consider the biographical detail conferred on Jedediah Cleishbotham by Scott. From Moore’s perspective, this choice of pseudonymity was probably motivated by a mixture of satirical convention and performativity rather than a genuine fear of imprisonment. Carpenter’s dissemblance is more significant, since it was printers and publishers that were held legally culpable for libel. Though Leigh Hunt had written the libellous piece, he and his brother were charged, as proprietors of The Examiner, with “[p]ublication of a libel tending to traduce and vilify the Prince of Wales, Regent of these Realms, and to bring him into contempt and disgrace” (Holden 62). The onymous status of Moore’s satirical and political writings warrants separate study, since they engage with a long tradition of pseudonymous satire and function as covert protection from the threat of sedition. Evidence of the latter may be traced to Moore’s college days, when his revolutionary idealism was manifested in an allegorical poem (“Extract from a Poem: In Imitation of Ossian”) and a vigorous letter (“To the Students of Trinity College”) which were published in the Press newspaper. The poem first appeared under the persona of “Pity” in Belfast’s Northern Star newspaper but was anonymous in the Press, while the letter to his classmates was signed “A Sophister” (Kelly 55–9; Jane Moore, Satires xv).

34 Of Little Consequence 25 Or, “J. AT—NS—N, Esq.” (xvii) as it appears in print. In this dedication, Moore also makes reference to pseudonymity and its effects on reputation while maintaining the fiction of Little: “you know the pious Beza was not the less revered for those sportive juvenilia which he published under a fictitious name” (xviii). 26 “English neoclassical authors readily styled themselves, for lack of anything better, ‘Esquire’” (Genette 54). Neoclassical resonance is consistently evident in the formally generic choice of titles for Moore’s first three books: Odes, Works, Epistles, Poems. 27 Genette describes Borges’ prefaces as displaying a similar “coquettish rhetoric of modesty” (205). 28 “[T]he fictional preface [is] inseparable from the staging of the fictional exercise itself” (Genette 293). 29 Both Rochester and Sedley are mentioned in the preface to Little (xi). Daniel Robinson (“Della Crusca”) describes the ludic, burlesque, and selfdeprecating Della Cruscan milieu, and the functioning of pseudonyms within that circle, while McGann (“Literal”) analyses the role of self-conscious artifice within that network. Harold Love provides a summary of the functions and significations of scribal transmission in early modern England. 30 Genette consistently argues for the paratext’s intrinsic relation to the printed book and its role in mediating the text for the reader (1, 163, passim). However, I do not mean to suggest that paratexts are entirely absent from scribal transmission: the tradition of marginal glosses and annotation could arguably be described as manuscript paratexts. But these are related more closely to the manuscript book than to the diverse formats of manuscript circulation in literary coteries. At any rate, Genette and I refer to the paratextual conventions originating from the printed book (title pages, prefaces, dedications), which have few equivalent conventions in the manuscript tradition. 31 See Ezell (“Reading” 21), and further context on onymous conventions in early-modern literary networks in Love and Marotti. 32 The tendency to posit defensiveness or fraud as central to pseudonymous publication is a consequence of reading backwards into literary history from the perspective of commercial print production: Ezell writes of a misplaced critical presumption of antagonism in the relationship between pseudonymous author and reader (“Reading” 15). Robinson and McGann make similar points about the Della Cruscans, while Lisa Wilson assesses the influence of the Della Cruscans on Charlotte King’s conceptions of Romantic authorship and pseudonymity. 33 Della Cruscan poetry was also published in The Arno Miscellany (1784) and The Florence Miscellany (1785). 34 Authors were similarly protected from answering legal charges of obscenity, and Carpenter’s willingness (along with his printer, Gosnell) to attach his name to the publication indicates the unlikeliness of it attracting such charges. 35 Erickson’s analysis presents the unveiling of authors after three years of sustained interest in their work as a “signal feature” of anonymous poetry publication (“‘Unboastful’” 249). Little satisfies this criterion for merit: fifteen editions of the work were published by 1822. 36 This contrasts sharply with evidence from the novel publication market in a similar period. James Raven has shown that over 80% of all British- and Irish-published novels between 1750 and 1790 were anonymous (143). 37 “It may likewise be remembered, that they were all the productions of an age when the passions very often give a colouring too warm to the imagination; and this may palliate, if it cannot excuse, that air of levity which pervades so many of them” (v).

Of Little Consequence  35

















36 Of Little Consequence

50 51 52

53

54 55 56

57 58 59

60

61 62 63

Anacreon’s poetry, Moore has produced a translation “calculated for the bagnio” (476). The admission is articulated thus: “[w]e have been induced to enter this strong protest, and to express ourselves thus warmly against this and the former publications of this author” (459; emphasis added). “[A] singular sweetness of melody and versification … brilliancy of fancy … classical erudition” (456). Elsewhere, Moore is characterised as “the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality” (456); as making “a cold-blooded attempt to corrupt the purity of an innocent heart” (456); and “insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers” (456). Rochester and Dryden are described as poets whose vulgarity and “undisguised profligacy” (457) rendered them unappealing to the delicate and impressionable reader, but Moore, by contrast, had not the honesty to thus advertise his impropriety, instead mixing it with “exalted feeling and tender emotion” (457). Without recourse to Little or Anacreon, or to the critical propriety which prevented naming names, Moore found the amorous details of the verses explicitly identified with him: “Mr Moore … is at pains to let the world know that he is still fonder of roving, than of loving; and that all the Caras and the Fannys, with whom he holds dalliance in these pages, have had each a long series of preceding lovers” (458). Notably, these collisions of law, morality, and authorship resurface in the case of Moore’s Loves of the Angels, which I discuss in Chapter 4. Little’s private literary network alludes to what Love characterises as the scribal text’s “aura of forbidden knowledge” (107) and “air of privileged secrecy” (111). Byron evokes these illicit associations when reporting to Moore: “I believe all the mischief I have ever done, or sung, has been owing to that confounded book of yours” (BLJ 7: 117). However, as I have stated, the law did not pursue the author of obscene material, but rather the printer and publisher. So, the impression that the obscene author (masked or unmasked) was under any legal threat is itself a Romantic fallacy. See Saunders and Hunter (483). Moore describes these in his preface as the “principal poems” (vii). These poems gave a report from the period of government appointment that earlier appeals for preferment (such as the dedication of Anacreon) had earned Moore (see Kelly 89–90, 93). The situation is an ironic reversal of the onymous consequences of public office that were a factor in Brian O’Nolan’s decision to publish under a range of pseudonyms including Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen (Taaffe 30). The invitation to duel may not be a reliable gauge of Moore’s rational feelings. He subsequently issued a similar challenge to Lord Byron after reading a reference to “Little’s leadless pistol” (25) in a comic account of the aborted duel with Jeffrey in English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. Moore’s account of the duel is in MTM (1: 199–207) and the episode is described by Kelly (138–51) and Jordan (1: 128–37). Genette writes of paratexts’ “intermittent duration” (6–7) which exposes their ephemerality, in one sense, but also reveals their dynamic hermeneutic potential compared to the (relatively) static text that they frame. Associated events of significance such as Jeffrey’s review and the subsequent duel are also conspicuous by their absence. Moore also revises the distribution of the poems from Epistles in the second volume of the Poetical Works, but he had a more legitimate reason for

Of Little Consequence  37

64

65 66 67

68

69

doing so. Epistles’ original arrangement was miscellaneous, with American, Bermudian, and Little-style verses indiscriminately mixed together. The creation of a “Poems Relating to America” section, his preface claims, resolves this “awkward jumble” (PW 2: v). A brief footnote explains its provenance: “[a] portion of the Poems included in this and the succeeding volume were published originally as the works of ‘the late Thomas Little,’ with the Preface here given prefixed to them” (1: 253). Genette identifies this compensatory attitude as characteristic of the revised preface (240). Moore’s arrangement was also canonical and was preserved in the 1910 OUP edition of his Poetical Works. Parallels are evident between Moore’s quest for respectability and the posthumous appearance in print of Rochester’s poems. As well as reordering the poems to fit print conventions, indecent material was suppressed in order to package Rochester as an occasional writer suitable for public consumption (Love 117). This marked the beginning of a period of contributing regular squibs to the periodical press, as well as the publication of Intercepted Letters and The Fudge Family in Paris. Moore’s satirical writings have been collected in Jane Moore’s edition, The Satires of Thomas Moore. Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston took this approach in his 1819 parody of the Fudge Family, entitled The Fudger Fudged; or, The Devil and T***y M***e: A ballad-singer, who had long Strumm’d many a vile lascivious song, Such as unwary youth entice, To follow in the paths of vice, Worn out and impotent become, Beats, as he can, sedition’s drum. (1)

70 The endurance of James Hogg’s “Ettrick Shepherd” persona provides a more pronounced example of this associative tendency, where “the brand came, in time, almost to swallow up its creator” (MacLachlan 6). 71 However, Jane Moore has traced the influence of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lyrical Ballads in the Canadian poems of Epistles, linking them to the later Romantic nationalism of the Irish Melodies (“‘Transatlantic’” 83–6). Elsewhere, she sees the Anacreon volume sharing with the authors of Lyrical Ballads a revolutionary instinct that “marks its modernity by making a self-conscious return to earlier genres” (39), while also arguing that the passage of his Anacreontic influence from Hunt to Keats makes Moore “an unacknowledged governor of the Cockney School” (“Anacreon” 43). 72 Where, “revision is as much an attempt to establish personal identity as to reveal it” (Leader 5). 73 Leader identifies this effacing tendency in the final lines of Whitman’s “O Living Always—Always Dying”: “O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast them!/To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!” (7). 74 In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley writes: “but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet” (697).

2

If England Doesn’t Read Us, Who the Devil Will? Reprinting Moore in the United States

The mode of authorship evident in Moore’s first two publications is one in which his identity as an author is obscured, to a greater or lesser extent, by an intermediary persona. His strategic engagement with authorial personae is most evident in the interplay of pseudonym and paratext in The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq., while the reception of Odes of Anacreon saw Moore framed as a creative conduit for Anacreontic values, rather than a mere translator. The persistence with which the “Anacreon Moore” and “Thomas Little” nicknames were applied to Moore testifies to the success of these personae and their inseparable associations with his name. Despite the deliberate artifice of these volumes’ authorial poses, the copyright system in the British market, where they were published, allowed Moore to realise the financial benefits of their success.1 However, in the United States, where the growth of his reputation equalled that in Britain, a system of unauthorised reprinting was structured to occlude the rights of international authors and returned him no direct financial reward. Ironically, as Moore appeared in the British marketplace with his first orthonymous publication, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, in 1806, the manner of its reprinting in the United States began to reflect the strategic manipulations and disavowals that enriched the authorial status of his first two books. As Moore moved towards a more conventional model of orthonymous authorship at home, international agents acted beyond his reach to preserve the complex authorial significations of his work. After the United States’ declaration of independence, the country maintained no copyright agreement with Britain. Its first federal copyright law was passed in 1790, 2 and it granted to authors resident in the country a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable for a further fourteen, along the same terms as Britain’s Statute of Anne, its first statutory copyright provision of 1710.3 While the act granted copyright to domestic authors, it simultaneously denied it to international authors.4 In practical terms, this meant that any international publication—such as Moore’s Epistles—could be acquired by an American printer, reprinted, and sold without seeking permission, or without facing legal penalty. This chapter examines how the unauthorised reprinting of Moore’s

If England Doesn’t Read Us  39 writings in the United States enhances our understandings of the complex authorship evident in his early works.5 I continue the methods of the previous chapter by examining how Moore actively orchestrates the relationship between text and paratext to forge specific representations of authorship and to address specific audiences for his work. However, my analysis of Moore’s works within the American culture of unauthorised reprinting demonstrates the shifting meanings and significations that take place beyond his active control. These include acts of prosthetic authorship where editorial agents manipulate his works and personae for ideological ends, instances of reception which become entangled in partisan debates about the young republic and its self-representations, and revealing moments within the charged development of relations between intellectual property and conceptions of authorship. Moore moves in and out of focus in this chapter for practical and methodological reasons: in order to expose how other agents within the authorial circuit stake a claim in his works’ meanings, and to illustrate the importance of examining the role of these and other social and cultural agents in gaining a fuller historical understanding than is enabled by author-focused inquiries that have often hindered a broad grasp of literary history.6 The system of unauthorised reprinting which developed in the early decades of the American republic provides a suitable model for this task because its explicit disavowal of the intentions of authors and their publishers makes publication “distinctly legible as an independently signifying act” (McGill 5).7 By considering some of the ways in which Moore’s works were subjected to nonauthorial manipulations, this chapter invokes the authorship theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and other twentiethcentury theorists who query the author’s position of supremacy. Core features of these theories manifest in the varying texts and significations of these works as they circulate in a reprinting system which explicitly marginalised the role of the (international) author. What results is a variation on Barthes’ provocation that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142), where American reprinters manipulate works to increase their appeal to an anticipated readership and a national ideology. Barthes’ ideas help us to navigate this “multidimensional space” (146) where texts “blend and clash” (146), and where meaning proliferates and departs, sometimes radically, from its point of authorial origin. But by invoking a “point of authorial origin” from which these meanings depart, my historicist understanding departs from Barthes. However, maintaining a view of Moore while examining the diverse significations in a work’s “processive life” (McGann, Beauty 24)8 is consistent with Foucault’s understanding of the “author function” (211): that it provides a focal point for explaining and neutralising the work’s diversity—its transformations, distortions, modifications, and contradictions (214–5). My purpose in articulating Moore’s modes of

40  If England Doesn’t Read Us authorship is not dependent on a necessary relationship between author and text. Other discursive properties and relationships are possible— those between texts and editors, readers, booksellers, and so on—each of which has its own mode of existence and expressive value (Foucault 220). These nonauthorial agents, whom Lisa Maruca calls “protagonists of print” (67), have had their creative contributions to the production and signification of books obscured by a cult of the author whose prominence in the period in which Moore wrote has persisted throughout the last two centuries.9 Considering these agents and their modes and values alongside those which originate with the author enables us to “reexamine the privileges of the subject” (Foucault 220) which constrain our understanding of an author and their work as discourses permeating broader circuits of communication. The purpose is not to “reestablish the theme of an originating [authorial] subject” (Foucault 221) but to comprehend its “points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies” (Foucault 221). As I argue here, Moore and his Epistles poems function differently at diverse points of reception, and those functions reflect differently upon his authorship according to conflicting significations which arise from discrepancies between the author’s original intentions and those points of reception.

Background to Epistles As the previous chapter indicated, Moore’s dramatic duel with Francis Jeffrey at Chalk Farm concludes the period surrounding the composition and publication of Epistles. It also marks the end of his early poetic career, representing an important pivot in Moore’s move from his early writings to the satires and Irish Melodies, which more decisively sealed his reputation.10 Before Epistles’ publication Moore found himself in a somewhat precarious financial position, despite the popular and commercial successes of Anacreon and Little. Continuing a strategy begun by his dedication of Anacreon to the Prince of Wales, Moore redoubled his efforts to obtain professional preferment through his writing. In 1803, Lord Moira helped to secure agreement for establishing a Poet Laureateship of Ireland, with Moore intended as first occupant of the post.11 Moore declined the offer, however, fearing it would hinder his hopes of “advancement under government” (LTM 1: 42) and render him “a poet for ever” (LTM 1: 42). Undeterred, Moira secured for Moore the position of Registrar of the Naval Prize Court in Bermuda, for which he would later be rewarded with the dedication of Epistles. While this strategy reveals a practicality in financial matters, it also emphasises Moore’s view, at that time, of writing and its dedicatory blandishments as a means to a more stable professional career. The realities of work may have convinced him otherwise, as his time in Bermuda was relatively brief: bookended by visits to North America,

If England Doesn’t Read Us  41 it lasted little more than a year.12 Finding his Bermudian post tedious, he appointed a deputy to fulfil his duties and returned to England in October 1804. While in Bermuda, Moore was offered £400 by James Carpenter for a new collection of poetry (LTM 1: 40), and he set about compiling the volume after his return to England. His travels accounted for a large proportion of its contents, with the Bermudian suite of poems, “Odes to Nea,” and the American-inspired epistles forming two of the central attractions in an otherwise miscellaneous collection of poems. He revisited the greatest hits of his earlier works by including a number of Anacreontics and several Littlesque amorous verses. Epistles was eventually published by Carpenter in May 1806, in the bibliographic fashion of Anacreon: an expensive quarto volume. Its lavish bibliographical signification indicated its intended audience in Britain: alongside the volume’s dedication to Moira, many of the epistles were addressed to members of the same noble and influential class who were the recipients of Moore’s appeals for professional preferment. Within the reprinting culture of the United States, the material status of Moore’s works signified very differently: published in smaller, cheaper volumes and periodicals, their wide circulation represented the civic republicanism and encouragement of learning enshrined in the nation’s 1790 Copyright Act.

Periodical Reprinting Moore’s early success and high esteem in the United States was achieved largely through the reprinting of his poems in periodicals. Reprinting individual poems in periodicals was part of a “horizon of the ordinary” (McGill 4) that normalised the widespread reprinting of international authors and texts. Though some periodicals in this culture were effectively compilations of texts reprinted from British and Irish journals,13 the practice was not subject to the same quarrels about intellectual property that accompanied the reprinting of books. Periodical reprinting often begot further reprinting, as publications lifted a poem from a competing journal for publication in their own, setting in motion a chain of transmission of the kind which dispersed Moore’s early poems throughout the republic.14 A consequence of such a chain was that each additional link brought the text a little further away from authorial control, often introducing conscious or unconscious textual change. Another was that this authorial vacuum emboldened periodical publishers to modify a poem to suit the periodical’s particular ideology or agenda or that of its readers. These revised works provoked responses which reflected back on Moore, illustrating the significance of nonauthorial contributions to a fluid and dynamic understanding of authorship. On the one hand, while periodical publication generated publicity and renown for an author by publicising their work, the cost was a ceding of textual

42  If England Doesn’t Read Us and contextual stability to the circuit of transmission through which the works travelled.15 To examine the shifting formulations of a work across the period of its transmission is to see the motivations of the various agents—authorial and editorial—responsible for variation in text and context and to evaluate the various meanings of the work as constituted by readers in different times and places. Ultimately, it enables us to understand how certain interpretive tendencies came to prominence and to argue for the restoration of others which may help us to see the work anew and with greater clarity. Indeed, one aspect of this period that often escapes notice is the frequency and fervour with which Moore and his work advocate for “the excellencies … of Old England” (LTM 1: 66). This version of Moore is difficult to reconcile with the figure of the moderate Irish liberal that emerges in his later writings, but its origin is important for understanding the context of his work in the United States. On his initial transatlantic voyage before reaching Bermuda, Moore was joined by Anthony Merry, the new ambassador to the United States. By all accounts, the conservatism of Merry was matched by many of Moore’s fellow travellers, and owing to their influence, and to a sense of duty to his position of a government official, the opinions Moore expressed in his American epistles were those of a staunch defender of old-world British values. In America, he preferred to spend his time in the company of Federalists, whose political outlook favoured friendly relations with Britain and staunch opposition to revolutionary France. His tour guide in Philadelphia was Joseph Dennie, publisher and founding editor of the Port Folio, the leading Federalist periodical in the nation.16 From the beginning, however, the journal was destined to chart Federalism’s demise: reneging on his threats to leave the country should Thomas Jefferson assume power, Dennie channelled his frustrations into attacking the third president and the republican and commercial pillars of his programme. By the Federalists’ estimation, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party encouraged an anarchic or covetous demos in the Gallic mould. The result was an erosion of their old-world sense of order and decency, which favoured centralisation of political power with a passive polity ruled by elected elites.17 Dennie sought to ameliorate these conditions in the Port Folio, shaping Thomas Moore into an ideological ally in its pages. When Moore passed through Philadelphia in 1804, he and Dennie found in one another kindred spirits. Dennie was an intense admirer of Moore’s work: even prior to the poet’s first arrival in the United States, Dennie had been reprinting poems from Anacreon and Little in the Port Folio, with around a hundred Moore works appearing in the periodical before the publication of Epistles in 1806. The form and content of the Anacreon poems, in particular, held a special appeal. Neatly matching the neoclassical Federalist aesthetic, the poems suggested a course of action to dispel the fatalism and disenchantment its supporters felt in

If England Doesn’t Read Us  43 a strange new democratic world. On the surface, Anacreon’s bacchanalianism might have jarred with the Port Folio reader’s conservatism, but his philosophy had a serious resonance for Dennie. Elucidating the poems’ relevance for his readers, Dennie referred to two central Federalist objections to Jeffersonian democracy: an equivalence of wealth and happiness, and a loosening of morality and virtue: [t]he heart of Anacreon, devoted to indolence, seems to think that there is wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness enough in wealth. … His disposition was amiable; his morality was relaxed, but not abandoned; and virtue, with her zone unloosed, is an emblem of his character. (3 Mar. 1804: 72)18 The commitment of the Port Folio to the Anacreontic philosophy is evident in John E. Hall’s “Memoirs of Anacreon,” which appeared in serial format in the periodical. Hall’s commentary posited the poetry as a reaction to a “world on which that poetry has resolutely turned its back, an Athenian democracy that had degenerated from mob rule into the tyranny of Pisistratus” (Dowling 61), a despot who surrounded himself, Hall writes, with “the base and the profligate, the needy and the designing, the restless and the ambitious, the ignorant and the credulous”—the constituents of the demos or “the vilest rank of his country” (20 Sept. 1806: 163), in other words. Without drawing explicit links between Anacreon’s Athens and the United States, or Pisistratus and Jefferson, the Port Folio’s literary pages presented a subtle Augustan juxtaposition of old and new, to complement the direct assaults on the Republican agenda that appeared elsewhere in the magazine. Reading Moore’s versions of Anacreon’s odes to wine, women, and song in a volume dedicated to a prince whose fondness for this trio was well known, the British reader might be tempted to assess the collection as a simple paean to merriment. Dennie and his colleagues, however, framed Moore’s translations to elucidate the significance of the Greek poet’s philosophy to Federalist thought. While the Port Folio indirectly shaped Moore’s translations into its own ideological form in this example, another reprinted poem demonstrated a more active intervention by Dennie, providing evidence of the broad interpretive malleability of Moore’s works in this period, and how a single work’s meaning shifts considerably in the hands of different agents and in different publication contexts. The Port Folio of 17 November 1804 announced a poem by Moore, reprinted from the British Gentleman’s Magazine of that July, and entitled “Ode for his Majesty’s Birth-day, June 4, 1803.” Composed at a time when Moore was contemplating Moira’s offer of a Poet Laureateship of Ireland, the poem can be read as the kind of occasional work that is the customary duty of such a post.19 An ode is an appropriately formal and ceremonial form for

44  If England Doesn’t Read Us a king’s birthday, but rather than addressing the royal, Moore’s poem begins by considering the prospects of warriors and their lovers at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. The opening stanzas contemplate the transience of successive symbols of peace: smile, hopes, olive wreaths, sunny weather, and hours of dalliance. The ode shifts from these symbols to the scene of a warrior and his lover, who are now faced with a return to the “warrior’s sanguine way.” Despite the advancing prospect of conflict, the warrior will be sustained in battle by the memory of his lover: Long the smile his heart will cherish, To his absent idol true; While around him myriads perish, Glory still will sigh for you. 20 The opening eight stanzas of the poem are notable for their timeless, historical dislocation, evoking a recurrent trope rather than a scene specific to 1803. Moore makes no reference to “Gallia’s upstart Emperor,” for instance, as the next poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine does, but relies instead on the classical diction of warrior and lover, images of ceremonial wreaths, and personifications of values such as peace and glory, hope and honour. From this neoclassical scene, however, the poem turns to an explicit address of Britain, and, belatedly, the monarch, in its final three quatrains. Sacred chain, from heaven descended, Chain, that Britain calls her own, Which, by fetters, pure and splendid, Bind’st a people to the throne. Blest, we hail the morn, that shining, Fair and welcome from above, To the ties so softly winning, Adds another link of love. Brightly may the chain be lengthen’d, Through the lapse of future hours, When the links, by glory strengthen’d, Peace again shall deck with flowers! This is the Port Folio text, and the capitalisation used in two lines of verse is the periodical’s deliberate intervention. 21 Emphasising the ties that bind a king and his subjects, Dennie appeals to the monarchical sympathies of his Federalist readers, typographically stressing the allegiance felt by many of their numbers to the societal order represented by the British crown. Thus modified, the poem signified an understanding by the poet of the Federalist reader’s political perspective. After all, it

If England Doesn’t Read Us  45 was composed in anticipation of war with Napoleon, whom they viewed as the despotic terminus of the French Revolution and an avatar of their ideological adversary, Jeffersonian republicanism. How different is this meaning for Port Folio readers from Moore’s intent in composing it? Many of Moore’s opinions during his visit to the United States chimed with those of the Federalists, but in the context of Moore’s appeals for preferment during the early years of his career, the poem must also be read as professionally motivated: a trial for the authorial responsibilities of a laureate. His subsequent treatment of the poem confirms an understanding of the poem originating in these specific professional circumstances and testifies to Moore’s later desire to wrest the poem away from its initial signification. Published in Epistles, the poem was reframed as a contemplative piece on the Napoleonic Wars entitled “Peace and Glory: Written at the Commencement of the Present War.” In order to complete the royal breach indicated in the revised title, Moore removed the final three stanzas which attracted Dennie’s editorial attention. The absence of the sacred chain linking the British throne and its subjects makes the poem read as a nonpartisan reflection on the prelude to war, even if its inclusion alongside other anglocentric works in the Epistles volume forecloses that neutrality. 22 If the context of Epistles confirms the speaker’s British allegiances, Moore’s paratextual revisions to the poem for his Poetical Works (1840–1) effect a final break from the poem’s original professional motivations, achieving the desired ambiguity for what Moore viewed as its final, canonical form. Nestled in the “Juvenile Poems” section alongside Little’s works and other miscellanea, “Peace and Glory,” now subtitled “Written on the approach of war,” bears an archetypal transhistorical vacancy, awaiting the associative inscription of whomever its reader might be. The precise occasional origins of the poem have been obscured, with specific signifiers (George III, Napoleonic Wars) smoothed into ambiguity to universalise its message, in the manner in which specific Irish events and issues are disguised beneath a polysemic patina in the Irish Melodies. 23 As in the previous chapter, Moore once again uses the canonical venue of his Poetical Works to enshrine a definitive version of the poem, shorn of the specific significations and interpretations accumulated during its earlier processive life. The reprinting of Moore works in the Port Folio demonstrates how an author’s intentions can be obscured by the direct and indirect intervention of editorial agents during the works’ circulation through the periodical press. During the longer transmission of “Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-day, June 4, 1803,” however, we also see how Moore’s intentions change as his original motivations lose their relevance and how his revision of the poem is an attempt to reassert his authorship by the paradoxical method of increasing its ambiguity and signifying potential. The sequence of the poem’s transmission and varying significations

46  If England Doesn’t Read Us underlines the value of a historical method: abstracting a text of the poem from any or all of its changing contexts precludes a comprehensive understanding of the different, yet reciprocally evocative meanings of the poem which descend to us today. Considering the interplay of Dennie’s manipulations and Moore’s revisions enables us to broaden our purview of Moore’s authorship and to recover obscured significations of his work. While he may not have authored the Port Folio changes in a conventional sense, the meanings they yield are attributed at the point of reception to his authorial persona. Readers, whether consciously or not, follow Foucault’s dictum that “[t]he author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (221). By establishing some ways in which Moore’s authorship is invoked, excluded, and manipulated, these poems set the scene for examining the further consequences of unauthorised reprinting of Moore volumes in the United States.

Book Reprinting Dennie and the Port Folio employed different means of aligning Moore’s works with their particular ideological cause: through commentary and textual manipulation, as well as by virtue of the works’ situation within a dedicated Federalist periodical. These strategies testify to the independent signification of the act of publication within a culture of reprinting. Moreover, they signal ways in which an increasing radius away from the point of authorial origin in a poem’s processive life enables us to view meanings not readily apparent within the ambit of Moore’s active authorship. Nonetheless, these nonauthorial contexts impinge upon readers’ understanding of Moore and his work, especially when that work continued to circulate, in its shifting guises, under his legal name. This periodical reprinting culture made Moore “by far the most extensively reprinted contemporary English poet” (Eldridge, “Anacreon” 54) in the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century, but at the cost of severing his claims to continue determining the precise significations of his work. Where Moore strategically crafted layers of personae and voices to enrich the authorial status of his first two publications, that process now took place not only beyond his reach but in the hands of agents with vested ideological interests. The ideological resonances of reprinting, and their consequences for authorship, become more pronounced when we consider the unauthorised reprinting of Moore’s books in the United States. In this section, I examine the unauthorised reprinting of Epistles to balance Moore’s intentions for his poems against differing significations at their early points of reception. The context this provides is a statutory correlate for the strategic authorial disavowals that Moore crafted in Little, as well as a frame for understanding the consequences for authorship of a culture where a writer’s proprietorial right over their work

If England Doesn’t Read Us  47 was discounted. In the present and next two chapters, I discuss different manifestations of the relationship between copyright and authorship. Within the legal functioning of the copyright system of this period, an author possessed an intellectual property which they were empowered to sell or to retain, according to their wishes. An author who sold a copyright to a publisher activated a legal relationship where they authorised the publisher to exercise the proprietary rights to own and disseminate that property by printing and selling books, thus contributing to the construction of the author with a communication circuit. However, the important aspect of the relationship between copyright and authorship in focus in this chapter is how that legal system was breached by unauthorised reprinting and what consequences for the construction of authorship resulted. The idea that ownership of a literary work was vested in its author had been legally recognised for a relatively short time before the American Copyright Act of 1790: if the fact seems surprising, it serves to illustrate the subsequent dominance of the figure of the author in our understanding of literature. To the founding fathers of the United States, however, it was a short step from “vested rights” to hereditary privilege, monarchy, and tyranny. This language and associated metaphors can be found in the historical forerunners of copyright, from Venetian printing “privileges” to English printing licences granted by royal prerogative. 24 While the royally sanctioned system gave way to legal property rights in eighteenth-century England, echoes of monarchical succession anathema to the American republic prevailed: “the paternity metaphor [of copyright] is consonant with the emergence of the individuated author in the patriarchal patronage system concerned with blood, lineage, and the dynastic principle that like engenders like” (Rose, Authors 39). The perception of an individuated author’s natural rights to their intellectual property was one which the Copyright Act of 1790 sought to sever in cases of international authorship. The rhetoric and practice of the American reprinting system was inspired by the Irish and Scottish printers who responded to the centralising effects of statutory copyright by testing the legalities of the Statute of Anne with instances of unauthorised reprinting throughout the eighteenth century. 25 These measures closely matched the discourse of post-independence America, where debates about the centralisation of power were the hallmark of the early republic. Two central ideas justified the American reprinting system, even if indeterminacy often characterised debates about its finer points: that the system prevented the concentration of economic and political power, and that print was a common public property. 26 The durability of these principles had profound consequences for conceptions of authorship in the United States for the majority of the nineteenth century. 27 The occasion of Epistles’ reprinting in Philadelphia in 1806 represents a prominent moment in the developing American reprint culture, and one which reveals additional examples of the nonauthorial signification

48  If England Doesn’t Read Us inherent in a work’s transmission. As we shall see below, many transatlantic debates about the institutionalisation of international copyright featured appeals made from the perspective of the author, whose legal and rhetorical status had recently been strengthened in Britain. The nature of this category error, which failed to recognise the American system’s deliberate suspension of international authors’ rights in the service of a greater public good, is also inscribed in the case of the Epistles reprint, where the authorial vacuum is crucial to the terms of the debate. The reprinting of Moore’s Epistles exposed professional tensions regarding courtesy of the early American reprint trade and highlighted the marginalisation of the author within the system. 28 Moore enjoyed a prominent reputation in the United States in 1806: not only had his poems been circulating widely in the periodical press for almost five years but his Anacreon and Little volumes had also been reprinted in New York and Philadelphia. 29 On 2 August 1806, Dennie announced in the “Literary Intelligence” section of the Port Folio that he had “been favoured with the first copy of Mr. Moore’s work, which has been received in America” (57) and that he had partnered with printer John Watts to prepare an imminent Epistles reprint.30 Elsewhere in the same issue, he composed a piece called “Mr. Moore’s New Work,” characteristically lending support to Moore’s critiques of republicanism, which would soon provoke a hostile reception for the volume: In some of his longer and more elaborate effusions, Mr. Moore has exercised the liberty both of a traveller and a satirist, and has described, we are confident, not with more harshness than truth, many of the deformities of a republican region, in which, perhaps, from the form of government, and most certainly from its administration; from the shameful imperfection of education in some places, and the total want of it in others, and from the ignorance, levity, boorishness, and ingratitude of the commonwealth character, there must spout so much Folly, and so much Vice, as not only to task the gay and sportive powers of such a writer as Mr. Moore, but all the severity of Juvenal himself. (56) Before the volume appeared in print, it could be characterised by Dennie as an unqualified critique of the present administration, and he was predictably explicit in his support for the poems’ anti-republican sentiments. However, the apparent unanimity of public opinion about Moore’s assessment of America’s “voluntary degradation” would later force Dennie to reassess his vindication of the verses. In the meantime, Dennie printed poems from Epistles in the Port Folio throughout August in anticipation of the Watts edition, which duly appeared at the end of the month. Such was Watts’ keenness to maintain a monopoly on selling this popular work that he transported copies for

If England Doesn’t Read Us  49 sale to New York (Eldridge, “‘Game’” 203). This unusual decision indicated the lucrative commercial prospects of Epistles and arguably contradicted the system’s principled avoidance of monopoly.31 Such was its popularity that Watts issued a second edition on 16 September. By that time, however, the courtesy of the reprint trade had been broken, as a competing reprint of Epistles had appeared. To add insult to injury, it had been published in the same city, Philadelphia, by Bartholomew Graves and was being sold by Hugh Maxwell, among others.32 The 1790 Copyright Act prevented a publisher who produced an unauthorised reprint from claiming a legal copyright on the work, but the system developed an informal courtesy of the trade which amounted to a de facto copyright and a recognition of a publisher’s sole right to publish a reprinted work.33 The notable difference from statutory versions of copyright was its total occlusion of the author: their perspective is entirely absent from this and other disputes. In effect, the courtesy protected the right—or, whisper it, the privilege—of the enterprising publisher who arrived first at the marketplace.34 In response to the Graves edition, Watts and the Port Folio quickly issued a stinging rebuke to those responsible for “this flagrant act of hostility” (20 Sept. 1806: 174).35 Though the Watts edition employed monopolistic practices, Dennie’s defence employed the republican rhetoric of reprinting. Taking aim at Graves’ “dwarfish imitation, in the puny shape of a lank duodecimo” (173), Dennie placed a prominent emphasis on format and its signification. Watts’ octavo editions democratised the “very ostentatious and expensive style” (172) of the London quarto, fulfilling the reprint system’s avowed objective of enabling the reading public to access useful knowledge and information: though it may be a “poetical luxury,” it deserved to be affordable.36 In reality, this rhetoric was possible largely because of the absence of the author: since the publisher made no payment to the author to secure copyright, book prices could be low without damaging profit margins. The irony here is that Dennie invokes the republican rhetoric of the Copyright Act to defend a quasi-monopolistic trade practice: a “protectionist policy that sailed under the flag of free trade” (McGill 85). By doing so, he illustrates the indeterminacy of the issue and its resistance to neat partisan associations. The additional importance of the Epistles episode is its foreshadowing of the cutthroat competition between booksellers that would arrive with the success and lucrative potential of the Waverley novels in 1814.37 The later flourishing of this antagonism highlights one of the central paradoxes of the reprint system: its republican rhetoric encouraged the displacement of authority from the author to the publisher as a hedge against the monopoly that copyright and intellectual property were understood to represent. The conditions which followed fulfilled the republican desire for decentralisation and deregulation but shifted the locus of market control away from the author and

50  If England Doesn’t Read Us towards the publisher. This resulted in tactics adopted by publishers to ensure their very survival, the successful pursuit of which led to a consolidation of strength and power by an ever-decreasing number of large publishers who prospered at the expense of smaller publishers.38 Just as Foucault notes that the problematic notion of the work rushes to fill the vacuum created by the author’s absence (208), publishers fought to secure the profitable gap created by the author’s occlusion from the reprint system. Or, to put it bluntly, the conditions created to prevent monopoly eventually resulted in monopoly: democratic republicanism went hand in invisible-hand with capitalism. Perhaps the greatest irony of all confirms McGill’s assertion about reprinting that “the politics of culture is played out at the level of form and format as well as in the explicit themes of literary texts” (15): namely, the clash of established old-world values of privilege and property with republican ideals of democracy and commonwealth highlighted by the episode was precisely that which animated Epistles’ most controversial poems. After the publication of the volume, American readers were primarily drawn to the epistles that commented on their country, rather than the odes, or the “Other Poems,” which attracted Francis Jeffrey’s attention. In these works we find evidence of Moore’s modular approach to critiquing the country through a strategic command of text and paratext. The consequences of this approach ultimately provoked the furious response of American readers and critics, but not before American reprinters of the volume attempted to shape it for their particular ideological purposes by masking and manipulating its controversial paratexts. As critical responses rapidly gathered into a consensus, though, Moore and his Federalist champions were forced to recant their support for the volume’s most controversial insinuations and implications. Affording footnotes a high level of significance in this chapter might be viewed as paradoxical. Owing to their contingent connection to particular details of texts, Genette argues that they have “no autonomous significance” (319) and whatever strategic importance they bear is balanced by this curiously conditional existence. Nonetheless, the mutable role we have already seen them play in Moore’s works tallies with their most notable formal feature, as described by Genette: “[t]he always partial character of the text being referred to, and therefore the always local character of the statement conveyed in the note” (319). Their value for Moore, and for others who would manipulate them, lies in this temporary and occasional essence. As the locus of intention moves from author to reader via editor in these epistles (as they also do in the periodical poems discussed above), changes occur in the conditions of the relationship between the text and note, and, consequently, in its meaning. I pursue this method here, as in the previous chapter, fully cognisant of this paradox. Indeed, this varying relationship provides a theoretical correlate for the shifting authorial formulations and inconsistent

If England Doesn’t Read Us  51 personae observable in early period of Moore’s career. Moreover, this method, in closely following the appearance and disappearance of the footnotes in the course of the poems’ processive life, and at the hands of different agents, follows the socio-historical model of inquiry that I employ throughout this book. In this section, I discuss Moore’s assessment of America in his epistles and examine his strategic command of their texts and paratexts. The first encounter with America comes in the second of the eight poetic epistles, addressed from Norfolk, Virginia, to Moore’s sister in Dublin.39 Its opening portion depicts the speaker anticipating his arrival in the United States, and hoping it will prove a panacea for the homesickness that he has felt. The prospects of this are good, as Moore arrived in the country as “a friend to liberty, predisposed to be favourably impressed” (Jarvis 162): At length I touch the happy sphere To liberty and virtue dear, Where man looks up, and proud to claim His rank within the social frame, Sees a grand system round him roll, Himself its centre, sun and soul! (18)40 The lengthy opening portion reveals a parallel significance for America: the sense of welcome it extends reinforces the country’s status as a haven from the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars and the “shocks of Europe” (18). Just as the epistle reaches the peak of its positive depiction of America: And he, who came, of all bereft, To whom malignant fate had left Nor home nor friends nor country dear, Finds home and friends and country here! (19) the initial momentum of the poem pivots to reveal the preceding utopian description as a fallacy whose falsehood the speaker had observed since arriving. The previous scenes are recast as republican propaganda absorbed by the speaker in his earlier years, whose fraudulence was exposed by a close examination of the realities of the American republic. That exposure comes as a shock and shakes the foundations of his youthful beliefs in the causes of liberty, independence, and republicanism. … I have felt, indignant felt, To think the glorious dreams should melt, Which oft, in boyhood’s witching time, Have rapt me to this wond’rous clime! (20–1)

52  If England Doesn’t Read Us Yet, if the reader seeks a specific cause for the speaker’s sudden reversal, they seek in vain among the poem’s verses. For here, Moore deploys suggestion and ambiguity to obliquely address the reasons for the speaker’s disappointment. Having posed himself a question about whether he had yet seen evidence of the utopia of his youthful imagination, the speaker responds in the negative, counselling, “But courage! yet, my wavering heart, / Blame not the temple’s meanest part” (21). Here, as at other significant moments in the epistles, Moore glosses his poetic obscurity with a specific and unambiguous footnote, thus charging the relationship between text and paratext by means of different voices and expressive registers. Indeed, I use the critical convention of “speaker” to refer to the poetic voice with heightened self-consciousness here and do not suggest that this speaker is Moore’s alter-ego, while the paratextual voice represents the authentic expression of the “real” Moore. Both voices have similar modes of expressive existence, and “the author function is carried out and operates in … this division and this distance” (Foucault 215) between the two. The “temple’s meanest part,” and later “the porch to freedom’s fane” (21), is Norfolk, “an unfavourable specimen of America” (21). “It is,” the footnote continues, “in truth a most disagreeable place, and the best the journalist or geographer can say of it is, that it abounds in dogs, in negroes, and in democrats” (21). Concluding with references to travel writers, the footnote highlights Moore’s modular approach to showing and telling in his epistles.41 The verse preserves the decorum of epistolary poetry’s form and content, while the paratext is the location for evidence, and for unfettering poetic propriety. The type of clarifying footnote that Moore uses in this epistle is located by Genette in discursive texts, where the annotation provides “details about an event that in the text is evoked more vaguely or cavalierly” (326). The relationship is also characteristic of the fictional or poetic text, argues Genette, where the paratext relies on the “impure” (332) fictionality of the text and corroborates its nonfictional correlates.42 Here, the distinction between the voices and the objectives in the text and footnote are clear: the poetic text suggests and implies, but the prosaic footnote employs a “restrictive nuance” (Genette 326) that limits the meaningful potential of the textual ambiguity, and the reader’s understanding thereof. It obeys the explanatory instinct of the footnote: not in the manner of glossing but rather in a negative sense. In identifying the source for the speaker’s artfully ambiguous disappointment, it closes off meaning instead of opening it up. A further footnote in the same mode is appended to the innocuous “No—yet, alas! no gleaming trace.” It argued that America had “shared in the wildest excesses of jacobinism” (20) of the French Revolution, leading to its characteristic vulgarity, vice, and “hostility to all the graces of life” (20). Beyond the manners which failed to meet the speaker’s approval were “those fraudulent violations of neutrality to which

If England Doesn’t Read Us  53 they are indebted for the most lucrative part of their commerce, and by which they have so long infringed and counteracted the maritime rights and advantages of this country” (20). This note refers to Britain’s dissatisfaction with the United States’ trade with France during the Napoleonic Wars, but it more significantly reveals Moore’s allegiances. He was an Admiralty official, ostensibly concerned with naval issues, but was more importantly a British opponent of American republicanism and Gallicism. The status of the footnote as an optional paratext which could be addressed to a particular audience fulfilled Moore’s objectives of acknowledging his benefactors and maintaining his prospects for future advancement.43 What complicates the situation is the book’s characteristic mobility. In the expensive London quarto imprint of Epistles, these footnotes were less conspicuous for their circulation within the milieu to which they were addressed. But within an American reprint, they instantly assumed explosive potential. As we shall see, however, the very fact of their paratextual existence offered a solution to this dilemma. After the interlude of three Bermudian epistles (III–V), Moore trained his focus on the third member of the trio he found so distasteful in Norfolk: democrats. In “Epistle VII,” Moore addressed the preferred target of the Federalists: the third president. In this poem, addressed from Washington, the speaker repeats the familiar rumour about Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ relationship:44 The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of councils to his negro’s shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace! (209–10) Later in the poem, a footnote locates the dual consciousness of a city that would rename a tributary of the Potomac—“What was GooseCreek once is Tiber now!” (210)—in the combined squalor and grandeur of Jefferson’s White House: The President’s House, a very noble structure, is by no means suited to the philosophical humility of its present possessor, who inhabits but a corner of the mansion himself and abandons the rest to a state of uncleanly desolation, which those who are not philosophers cannot look at without regret. (211) Once again, while the verses maintain a largely dispassionate, if sarcastic tone, relishing the ironic antithesis of classical ideals and modern realities, the footnotes provide the specific details for comprehending the subject of the poem’s mockery. “Epistle VI,” dedicated to Lord Viscount Forbes from Washington, sees Moore adopt the same ironic juxtaposition of the dream and reality

54  If England Doesn’t Read Us of the United States that he first used in “Epistle II.”45 Here, the idealistic vision placed in the mouths of American sages is quickly halted by the speaker’s perception of reality which turns on the query, “But, is it thus?” (175): Already has the child of Gallia’s school, The foul Philosophy that sins by rule, With all her train of reasoning, damning arts, Begot by brilliant heads of worthless hearts. (176) A catalogue of customary complaints follows: first, that American customs and manners are coarse: “Already blighted, with her blackening trace, / The opening blooms of every social grace” (177). Second, the frequent complaint levelled by Federalists at Jefferson: that the nation’s burgeoning commercial greed is a threat to its liberty: Long has the love of gold, that meanest rage, And latest folly of man’s sinking age, … Long has it palsied every grasping hand And greedy spirit through this bartering land. (177–8) While his Federalist allies might have expected Moore to make an example of Jefferson and his republican confreres, the poet’s paratextual attack on George Washington came as an unexpected and unwelcome surprise. The verses’ general distaste for commercial skulduggery are underlined by a footnote which targeted Washington’s perceived breach of the constitution’s restrictions on emoluments.46 To the distinctly Popean lines, “Even here already patriots learn to steal / Their private perquisites from public weal” (178),47 Moore appended a footnote which accused the first president of speculating with public finances: “it is by no means pleasant to know, that Washington not only received his salary, but was in the habit of anticipating the regular periods of payment, and had constantly, during the space of five years, several thousand dollars of the public money in his hands” (178). This mode of attack, which likely originated in the pages of the anti-Federalist Aurora journal (Eldridge, “Anacreon” 56), would prove pivotal for the reception of Epistles in the United States. Because footnotes occupy a space which is “inherently marginal” and “innately referential” (Benstock 204), they represent for Moore a staging ground for his continued experiments with and explorations of the plural authorial self. Several essential features of the footnote enable Moore to adopt a different authorial persona and discourse to those present in the verse. Their paratextual status—not part of the poem but certainly related to it—allows Moore to adopt a different

If England Doesn’t Read Us  55 authorial voice. Their referentiality admits a range of possible purposes for the footnote, but these generally fall within the realm of performing a critical or interpretive act on the verse. Thus, we find a rhetorical shift between text and note. These features cohere to create a different relationship between the author and the reader. While the main text is presumably addressed to all readers, the footnote’s marginal status implies that it is optional. This endows it with added communicative potential: to address certain readers, to exclude others, or to conduct a reflexive dialogue between textual and paratextual voices. However, the fluid relationship between text and footnote invites a reading of the latter as mutable. Often, the author exploits this aspect of the relationship for revisionary purposes, but as we shall see, others may also do so without the author’s assent. For the socio-historical critic who negotiates the tensions between a work’s points of origin and reception, its initial responses and reception are crucial moments which can “modify the author’s purposes and intensions, sometimes drastically” (McGann, Beauty 24). The textual modifications that attempt to shape and respond to reception take place beyond and within the compass of Moore’s authorial control, all comprising the “system of dependencies” (Foucault 221) in which a view of Moore’s authorship is formed. While initial responses to a text are often interpretive, establishing the initial public significations of the work’s processive life, the American reprint industry’s disregard for the author meant modifications could be more literal and active interventions in the text. Having previously championed Moore as a kindred spirit, the Port Folio and Dennie were presented with a problem by the antipathies of Epistles. With his assault on George Washington, Moore was no longer a reliably steadfast ally for Federalist values. In response, the Watts edition exploited the nation’s reprint culture and the paratextual locus of the Federalist critiques, to remove unsavoury rebukes while preserving those aimed at Jefferson’s Republicans. When Watts’ first edition left the press, the offending Washington footnote had disappeared (159) while all others appended to the American epistles remained. Was Dennie responsible, once again? We cannot be certain, but the evidence points squarely in his direction.48 Just as changes to Moore’s poetry in the Port Folio had been made to satisfy the ideological purposes of the journal, so was the redaction of the Washington footnote designed to preserve for the volume’s readership the established impression of Moore as a Federalist ally. If Dennie is the editorial agent in the Watts editions, his relationship to the Epistles notes is allographic, according to Genette’s formulation, “for it consists of an external commentary … that in no way involves the responsibility of the author” (337). What complicates his involvement is that it is reductive rather than accumulative: the more common intervention in Genette’s theory. The theory also ascribes the allographic

56  If England Doesn’t Read Us note to a usually benign agent: a scholarly editor often dealing with a posthumous text. Dennie’s removal of the Washington note must, however, be considered as an action in the same ideologically motivated interpretive category as the formal shaping of Moore’s poems in the Port Folio, and critical and biographical introduction he (likely) composed for the second Watts edition.49 What licenced Dennie to do this? Was his removal of the footnote any more egregious than Moore’s later removal of the same footnotes? Was it precisely the paratextual nature of the footnote—its perceived marginality and contingency—which emboldened Dennie to remove it? We have seen in his reprint of “Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-day, June 4, 1803” that his excursions into the text remained formal, rather than textual, and the Watts edition similarly refrains from revising the poetic text. By turns adventurous and restrained, the interventions implicitly recognise the authorial divisions and distinct audiences activated by Moore’s use of paratexts. The Watts edition and its agents recognise that the implied audience of the London edition’s footnotes is English and stake an authoritative claim equal to that of the paratextual voice in modifying them. The ideological divergence of that paratextual voice from those of the Watts agents accounts for the removal of Washington footnote. If this change was undertaken in an attempt to direct the American response to Epistles towards the Port Folio’s favourable view of Moore, it failed. The short period between Watts’ first and second edition yielded the controversy of Graves’ “surreptitious edition” but also the first dissenting voices in the American press. The Norfolk Herald reviewer took issue with “this little cock-sparrow of a songster [who] came hopping across the Atlantic” (qtd. in Brown 220) and impugned his native city, while Charles Brockden Brown commented that he “never heard of any merit he possessed beyond that of a writer of drinking songs and love ditties” (220). If the introductory essay to the second Watts edition was authored by Dennie, he had evidently decided by the time of its composition that the growing force of critical and public opinion about Epistles meant that he could no longer safely insulate Moore from reproach or support the volume merely on the basis of its anti-republicanism. Before discussing the American poems, the author followed the amenable precedent of critical voices in building a discreditable foundation for Moore around his amorous verse. The terms are practically identical to those of Jeffrey: “[b]ut, if there be literary blemishes in the amatory verses of Mr. Moore, there are others of a more serious character. Mr. Moore, with a want of moral feeling, such as is rarely seen by the side of eminent genius, is the deliberate partisan of vice” (xxxiv).50 The force of the argument is stronger for its apparent disinterestedness: the author praises the volume, in the main, but argues that the errant critiques of the epistles originate in the disappointment of Moore’s “wildest notions of American perfection” (lx). If Dennie was the essay’s author, then some of the

If England Doesn’t Read Us  57 comments that followed must have required a certain suspension of his own beliefs, for he proceeds to defend the same demos that soured his Anacreontic vision of the republic: The rabble, it must be understood, is a term of faction, to signify that the body of fathers of families, worthy husbands, faithful wives, dutiful children, affectionate lovers, adventurous seamen, valiant soldiers, laborious cultivators and industrious artizans, which makes up the bulk of the people … What then are the people of the United States? What, but such as compose the multitude of every other country! (lxv–lxvii) If this populist rhetoric is hypocritical in an opponent of what was perceived as Jeffersonian populism, it merely echoed the partisan trend already established by the Port Folio’s editorial manipulations. Eventually, the Washington footnote entered circulation in America, at the behest—ironically—of another Federalist friend of Moore: the New York Evening Post editor William Coleman. His six-part essay titled “English Tourists”51 reprinted the footnote during its assessment of Moore’s volume, circulating this important addendum to Epistles to the reading public. By this time, however, the poet’s critical fate had already been sealed, with the controversy reflected in an immediate and tangible effect on Moore’s authorial status in America. Reprints of his poems disappeared from the Port Folio, only to eventually reappear a decade later. 52 This trend was generally observable in American periodicals after 1806, though the success of the Irish Melodies saw his work reprinted in certain periodicals during the early years of the second decade. New reprint editions of his books were scarce until Mathew Carey published an edition of the Irish Melodies in 1815: this saw the beginning of an American reawakening of interest in the poet. 53 Two years later, his rehabilitation was sealed by the immense popularity of Lalla Rookh, which had three competing reprints in 1817 in New York alone: evidence, also, of how far courtesy of the American reprint trade had deteriorated in the intervening years. The sense of regret that prompted Moore’s revisions to Little is also evident in the case of Epistles. He soon came to regret the severity of his assessment of the United States, seeing it as an uncharacteristic error of judgement. Even before the publication of the volume, he evidently experienced moments of doubt, which are recorded in its preface: “though prudence might have dictated gentler language, truth might have justified severer” (viii). The passage of time and the terms of his American critical reception strengthened these nascent misgivings, and a comparison of the original Epistles preface with the one that preceded the poems from that collection in the 1840–1 Poetical Works clearly illustrates the extent of his remorse. In the latter, he recognised his youthful credulity,

58  If England Doesn’t Read Us declaring, apropos of his Philadelphian Federalist friends, “my mind was left open too much to the influence of the feelings and prejudices of those I chiefly consorted with” (xii).54 Youth is again proposed in mitigation of his more rash pronouncements, which were formed in “the only period of my past life during which I have found myself at all sceptical as to the soundness of that Liberal creed of politics, in the profession and advocacy of which I may be almost literally said to have begun life, and shall most probably end it” (xii–xiii). This theme was also evident in a much earlier recanting of his Epistles views, in two letters to John E. Hall of the Port Folio Federalist circle. Writing first in June 1816, Moore declared that “there are few of my errors I regret more sincerely than the rashness I was guilty of in publishing those crude and boyish tirades against the Americans” (LTM 1: 397). Hall’s reply does not survive, but it apparently provoked some confusion in the Philadelphian to find his old friend and idol professing an admiration of America’s “good republicans” (LTM 1: 397). In July 1818, Moore clarified: “You are mistaken in thinking that my present views of politics are a change from those I formerly entertained—they are but a return to those of my school and college days” (LTM 1: 458), 55 suggesting that his disgust at democracy in the United States arose from his focus on the abuse of its principles, rather than the principles themselves. The previous chapter demonstrated how Moore used the occasion of his Poetical Works to redress the regrets and controversies of his youthful verse with both textual and paratextual changes. As in the examples of the Little revisions, Moore’s regrets about the controversial aspects of Epistles are assuaged through a revisionary approach to establishing a set of canonical texts. In this context, once again, he exhibits an aggressive assertion of the author function by attempting to instantiate a definitive, legatary version of his works. In so doing, his objective is to redress “the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition” (Foucault 221) occasioned upon his work in the course of its processive life. Many revisions are made to the three American epistles, varying in purpose between polishing poetic language and prosody and more substantive revisions to content. In “Epistle II” the severity of the speaker’s reactions to the United States is generally softened. Where the speaker’s youthful impressions of the country were initially made to “[r]ecoil with more regret of heart” (20), they now more modestly “[s]hrink back with more of sad surprise” (2: 220). Reflecting on the apparent betrayal of his young dreams, the speaker now states: “I have felt, in sorrow felt” (2: 220), where the original version read, “I have felt, indignant felt” (20). Notably, the troubling pejorative reference to the surfeit of “dogs, … negroes, and … democrats” (21) has been deleted from the revised footnote (2: 220). A similar strategy of moderation is evident in “Epistle VI,” where the utopian visions of the American republic are now characterised as “fancies” (2: 287), rather than “delusion” (176).

If England Doesn’t Read Us  59 As Moore reported to Hall, the controversial footnote about George Washington is notable by its absence, though a new footnote serves the dual purpose of implying what was once explicit and distancing the author from too close an association with his former employers in the  British government. To the lines “Those vaunted demagogues, who nobly rose / From England’s debtors to be England’s foes,” the following footnote is appended: “I trust I shall not be suspected of a wish to justify those arbitrary steps of the English government which the colonies found it so necessary to resist; my only object here is to expose the selfish motives of some of the leading American demagogues” (2: 290). Just as he revises his intemperate views on America, he redacts the nowredundant portions once motivated by professional concerns. Yet far from an indiscriminate whitewash of youthful error, his revisions were also used to strengthen the force of prevailing convictions. In “Epistle VI,” Moore’s critique of the unresolved American vice of slavery is more pronounced than in 1806: Who poor of heart and prodigal of words, Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords, But pant for licence, while they spurn control, And shout for rights, with rapine in their soul! (1806: 180) Who, poor of heart and prodigal of words, Form’d to be slaves, yet struggling to be lords, Strut forth, as patriots, from their negro-marts, And shout for rights, with rapine in their hearts. (1840–1, 2: 291) The hypocrisy characterised as “false liberty” (214, 2: 300) is more consciously exposed in revisions to “Epistle VII.” While the original footnote remains unchanged, the verse implication of Jefferson’s liaison with Hemings is generalised to a violent tendency of the American patriot:56 The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of council to his negro’s shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace! (1806: 209) The patriot, fresh from Freedom’s councils come, Now pleas’d retires to lash his slaves at home; Or woo, perhaps, some black Aspasia’s charms, And dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms. (1840–1, 2: 295) Finally, a new group of lines is added to assuage any lingering guilt about Moore’s previous impugning of George Washington. A verse section is largely unchanged and preserves much of its critical character: the first president, it claims, “[c]limb’d o’er prostrate loyalty to fame” (2: 299).

60  If England Doesn’t Read Us However, in answer to the question, “How shall we rank thee upon glory’s page?” (2: 299), the section now concludes with the addition of four complimentary lines: Nor yet the patriot of one land alone,— For, thine’s a name all nations claim their own; And every shore, where breath’d the good and brave, Echo’d the plaudits thy own country gave. (2: 300) The extent of Moore’s regret at his youthful characterisation of America is clearly evident in his later revisions to Epistles. As in the case of Little, as the last chapter showed, Moore privately and publicly sought to excuse his errors with reference to his early immaturity and impressionability. The evidence of Epistles, and its later authorial revisions, reveals an author who was adept at balancing the distinct registers of text and paratext and addressing discrete audiences in different voices. This chapter differs from the last in considering the crucial responses and interventions of the American audiences who were not explicitly addressed by the modulated voices of the original volume. Examining the volume’s reception through the lens of transatlantic reprint culture and paratextual theory exposes the nature and extent of those responses and the different distortions to authorship that a work can undergo beyond the control of its author.

Copyright and Authorship This chapter has broadened the scope of enquiry into modes of authorship in Moore’s career by considering instances of nonauthorial intervention in the texts and contexts of his work. As Moore subjected Epistles to the same type of revision as Little, we find further evidence of his understanding of the mutability of the authorial voice and persona. Alongside this view, our conception of Moore’s authorship is enhanced by the perspective of American reprinters who seized upon the suppression of the author within their print culture to manipulate his texts and shape their significations into specific ideological moulds. Moving further along the radius away from the point of authorial origin increases the breadth of potential significations for his work, yet they accumulate as additional facets of his authorship, according to the Foucauldian view of the author function as the principle of significatory thrift. Continuing along this radius, the conclusion of this chapter considers the shifting landscapes of copyright as the nineteenth century progresses and how these conceptualise the role of the author in different ways. Finally, does Moore’s active participation in debates about copyright and intellectual property clarify his views on authorship as these broader developments hasten changes in its legal status?

If England Doesn’t Read Us  61 A legal analogy for the Romantic cult of the author can be found in the conclusions of the landmark British copyright case of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774.57 That House of Lords ruling decisively outlawed perpetual copyright, implicitly recognising the production of books as a cooperative endeavour of several agents and bearing witness to “the radical instability of the concept of the autonomous author” (Rose, Authors 8). Yet, the judgement contained a paradox: it affirmed the author’s common-law right to their literary property but limited it by term. 58 In interpreting the judgement, the Romantic age and the authors that it produced and reified seized on the former affirmation rather than the latter constraint: authors had a natural right to their works, but parliament chose to restrict it. Emboldened by Romanticism’s promotion of individual creative genius, authors of the period began to assert claims to their intellectual property rights and to petition for lengthier terms of copyright. One consequence was the period of intense activity aimed at copyright reform in Great Britain, where, in each of the five years between 1837 and 1841, Thomas Noon Talfourd brought his proposal (“Talfourd’s Bill”) to extend copyright to a period of the author’s life plus sixty years before parliament.59 Talfourd’s motivations were based on a conservative understanding of copyright and a belief in the author’s natural rights to their intellectual property. The development he represented marked a notable shift from booksellers’ status as the primary proponents of perpetual copyright in the eighteenth century and captured the author-focused spirit of the age.60 While British Romanticism had succeeded in instantiating in the person of the author a solution to many of the thorny legal questions about creativity and intellectual labour on which copyright rested, international authors were refused that status in American law. However, as the American printing industry matured, a gulf opened between the rhetoric of civic republicanism and the practices of the trade. While the Copyright Act of 1790 “associated the depersonalization of print with a kind of selfless publicity, the exercise of civic virtue” (McGill 48), printers gradually adopted de facto copyright payments to international authors in order to claim the kind of lucrative competitive advantage evident in the case of the Epistles reprint discussed above.61 As a bankable author, Moore was no exception, earning a de facto copyright payment of £333 ($1500) for the rights to the first American imprint of his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron in 1830.62 Thomas Kirby describes Washington Irving’s role as an intermediary between his American-based brother and Moore “in furthering his friend’s financial rewards in America” (254) for this commercially attractive book. The casual and open tone of the correspondence testifies to the conventional nature of the transaction, as does the blessing granted by Moore’s publisher: “[John Murray] allowed me to avail myself of whatever I could get from France and America” (JTM 4: 1400).63 Moore was evidently familiar with transatlantic reprinting

62  If England Doesn’t Read Us conventions in this period, and both he and his publisher exhibit an acquiescence wholly at odds with the rhetoric of outrage which propelled appeals for domestic and international copyright reform that began in Britain in the late 1830s. However, the case shares with those appeals evidence of the increasing power to be wielded by the celebrity author, or their copyright holder, even in cases beyond the reach of the law. Despite the increasing prominence of the author implied by the payment of transatlantic de facto copyrights, the American legal code and cultural rhetoric still hewed closely to the republican principles of reprinting and its marginal position for the author. The ultimate failure of the 1837 “Petition of Thomas Moore, and other Authors of Great Britain, Praying Congress to grant them the Exclusive Benefit of their Writings in the United States” testifies to the enduring power of these principles. Instigated by Saunders & Otley, a British publishing firm which opened a New York office in 1836, the petition was led by Moore because of his status as the best-known signatory to the American reading public.64 By making the literary author the central focus of the document, however, the petitioners failed to recognise the occlusion of the author that was an essential tenet of the American reprint system. The petition’s emphasis of damages done to individuals’ rights was an implicit strategy to address Congress on terms—the rights of the individual—which were constitutionally important to the republic (McGill 87), but which ultimately fell on deaf ears.65 Congress was unmoved by the petition, but one significant point in its argument resonates with the type of nonauthorial manipulations precipitated by the system. The petition identified the tendency of reprinted works “to be mutilated and altered at the pleasure of the said booksellers, or of any other persons who may have an interest in … conciliating the supposed principles or prejudices of purchasers in the respective sections of your Union” (1). Coupled with the retention of the authors’ names, this situation resulted in works which those authors “no longer recognise as their own” (1). In this sense, the petition recognised the effects of the reprinting system in fragmenting authorship. In doing so, it alluded to the kinds of nonauthorial shifts in meaning and intended audience that are evident in the cases discussed above. The instinct behind this specific objection located the petitioners in a proprietary space, eager to maintain a slender radius of signification for their works and unwilling to accept the proliferation of meaning inherent in a work’s transmission. The contradictions of the American system—a steadfast legal occlusion of authorship coupled with a practical acknowledgement of its growing importance—are also evident in Moore’s ambivalence towards the topic. Satisfied to accept the financial spoils of the American reprint system, he nonetheless led the petition condemning its practices. Moore fails to mention the petition to Congress in his journal or correspondence but does comment on domestic copyright reform in Britain. Here, once

If England Doesn’t Read Us  63 again, his views on the emerging developments in the relationship between authorship and intellectual property are contrary. On 3 May 1838, his “Grand Dinner of Type & Co. A Poor Poet’s Dream” appeared in the Morning Chronicle, satirising the avarice of publishers whose commercial prospects were threatened by Talfourd’s author-friendly bill.66 Two days later, the poem was reprinted in the Athenaeum between two letters that strenuously advocated copyright reform: the first from Southey to Brougham, from 1831, and the second, written a fortnight before, from Wordsworth to Talfourd. Both poets agreed that Talfourd’s proposals were not vigorous enough in protecting the property rights of the author and provide a neat contrast to the rhetoric of American reprinters.67 However, Moore did not fully support Talfourd’s ministrations on behalf of authors. He rejected as unfair a retrospective clause in the proposed bill which would extend copyright to sixty years after the author’s death: “an author who had already sold his copyright to a publisher for the maximum twenty-eight years currently allowed could recover his copyright after the twenty-eight years and pass it on to his heirs or sell it in accordance with the revised provision” (Barnes 120). This refusal contradicted Moore’s own financial interests: his consistent commercial success made him an ideal beneficiary of a professional system which was entrepreneurial, merit-based, and market-oriented. Evidently, however, matters of commercial fairness and honour superseded any prospective boon to be yielded by a new legal formulation of authorship.68 As proposals for reform sought to consolidate the increasing dominance of the author, Moore recognised the attendant benefits yet rejected the apparent injustice, citing his reluctance to change any agreements already established with his publishers. His uncertainty was exploited by Longman, who solicited his signature on two further copyright petitions in 1840 and 1842. Moore had by that point realised the increasing zeal with which publishers now pursued a change in the legislation: after Lord Mahon adopted Talfourd’s cause, the proposed reform tipped towards a greater share of benefit for publishers.69 Moore’s indecisive perspectives on copyright heighten the paradox that its rhetoric can be deployed to suit opposing ideologies. In the United States, the cause of republicanism could be invoked by appealing on behalf of an author’s individual right to property or on behalf of the civic need for the free circulation of ideas. Though arguably contradictory, both ideologies—possessive individualism and civic humanism (Rose, Authors 85)—were recognisable facets of republican thought. The ambiguity of Moore’s attitude towards the arguments and campaigns being waged in favour of author’s rights towards the end of his career can be viewed as a correlate for the contingent role of the author as a meaningmaking agent in the broader circuit of transmission and reception in which his works moved. If unreserved support for the immutable rights of authors to possess their intellectual property is the surest indicator of

64  If England Doesn’t Read Us subscription to the Romantic notion of the author (Wordsworth passes this test with ease), then Moore’s disavowal of the retrospective clause of Talfourd’s bill marks him as an author who questioned the status, legality, and fairness of that conception of authorship. Yet, as in this final case, our broader view of Epistles in this chapter reveals an ever-shifting picture of authorship as Moore’s work moves inwards and outwards from the point of authorial origin. While Moore maintained his strategic command of text and paratext to address different audiences in different voices, the reprinting of those works within a culture of deliberate authorial effacement contributes further layers of complexity and signification not evident within a narrow focus on authorial intervention. Even as Moore attempts to reinforce the dominance of the authorial point of origin with his revisions of Epistles for the Poetical Works, our understanding of those works is enriched by a fuller understanding of their processive life and the vital significations which the Poetical Works versions, in their attempted definitiveness and canonicity, seek to suppress. The two imperatives that conclude this chapter—a focus on the value of nonauthorial signification, and the mutual developments of copyright and authorship—continue to inform the arguments of the two chapters that follow.

Notes

If England Doesn’t Read Us  65

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19

work from a contemporary point of view: “one that derives from the author’s expressed decisions and purposes, and the other that derives from the critical reactions of the [work’s] various readers” (Beauty 24). Maruca also argues that complaints about textual alterations occasioned by “protagonists of print” are legitimised when they are presented as problematic by the voices of canonised authors. My purpose in this book is not to elevate Moore’s voice to join that chorus of complaint: indeed, his explicit critiques of these practices are so rare as to mark him as an author whose “silence is not written into our histories” (Maruca 67). Instead, I wish to consider how meaningful contributions to the formulation of authorship are made by agents at different scales of proximity to the author. The pre-1806 period of Moore’s career has received comparatively little attention, though a number of scholars have argued persuasively for its importance. Jeffery Vail (“Growth”) and Jane Moore (“‘Transatlantic’”) are united in identifying this time as the locus of more commonly observed attributes of his mature work. Vail argues that Moore’s understanding of the American, French, and Irish revolutions, and their consequences, was a major factor in his maturing as an artist after his return to England from America in 1804, locating evidence of this maturity in his political poetry after 1808. Jane Moore sees in the satirical works of this time the germ of his later, more successful satires, and evidence of his turn towards a more conventionally Romantic style and imagination in the Canadian verses in Epistles. Both view the period as remarkable in the different and unfamiliar aspects of Moore’s works and persona that it presents, and both assert (as I do in this chapter) the value of the transatlantic nature of their inquiry. Older articles by Herbert G. Eldridge account for the American reception of Epistles and for the unique position the volume holds in the early history of American reprinting. Soon after moving to London, Moore had met the Irish-born Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Lord Moira, former soldier in the American War of Independence and trusted advisor of the Prince of Wales. For a fuller account of this period, see Kelly (91–127) and Jordan (1: 90–121). See McGill (24–7) for a particularly egregious example. For an effective illustration of this phenomenon, see The Viral Texts Project, which maps networks of reprinting in nineteenth-century American periodicals and newspapers (Cordell and Smith). While McGill argues that “[c]irculation outstripped authorial and editorial control” (2) within this culture, I contend that, in the following case, editorial intervention increased in order to capitalise on the absent author. A footnote to “Epistle XIII” mentions Dennie by name and credits his Philadelphian company with “the few agreeable moments which my tour of the United States afforded me” and “that love of good literature and sound politics … which is so very rarely the characteristic of his countrymen” (268). A particularly virulent Port Folio critique saw Dennie face trial in 1803 on charges of sedition: “[a] democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history. Its omens are always sinister, and its powers are unpropitious. … It was tried in France, and has terminated in despotism. It was tried in England, and rejected with the utmost loathing and abhorrence. It is on trial here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy” (23 Apr. 1803: 135). Dennie’s commentary introduced a reprint of Moore’s translation of Ode XVIII. When published the following year, both the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Port Folio introduced the poem as written by Moore, “Poet Laureat [sic] of Ireland, pro tempore”.

66  If England Doesn’t Read Us 20 The quotation is taken from the Port Folio text. The only difference in the original Gentleman’s Magazine version is an exclamation mark which concludes the stanza. 21 Aside from this, the Port Folio changes the punctuation of the Gentleman’s Magazine by modifying several exclamation marks and, more curiously, replaces the original’s “twining” with “winning,” breaking the rhyme in the process. 22 The other substantive variants are a change from quatrains to octaves and the substitution of “blessed isle” for “fairy isle,” which corrects a rather rare and unusual characterisation for Britain. 23 The nameless elegy for Robert Emmet, “Oh! Breathe Not His Name,” is the exemplary model of this strategy. 24 “Privileges” were exclusive rights initially granted to Venetian printers, the first “a monopoly on printing itself granted in 1469 for a term of five years to John of Speyer, the man who probably introduced printing to Venice” (Rose, Authors 10). Later, authors as well as printers availed of the right, with Ludovico Ariosto granted lifetime rights for his Orlando Furioso in 1515 (Rose, Authors 10). Features of the Venetian system are evident in England after 1518, with the Stationers’ Company “deriv[ing] its authority ultimately from the crown through a royal charter of 1557 which granted the guild a monopoly on printing” (Rose, Authors 12). 25 A concise introduction to Irish reprinting is provided by Johns (145–78), with more detailed accounts in Pollard (especially 66–109), Phillips (especially 103–50), and Cole. Sher provides ample perspective on Scottish literature and reprinting in the eighteenth century. 26 While these general principles were upheld, their interpretation was inconsistent and paradoxical: “[p]rinted texts and authorial labour were idealized both by those who called on the government to regulate and nationalize the trade in books, and by those who argued forcefully for the book market’s decentralization” (McGill 11). Neither did debates divide neatly along ideological or part-political lines, though some loose affiliations began to emerge. As the issue of international copyright gathered pace in the 1830s, the Whig Party’s inheritors of certain Federalist principles—including national unity through centralisation and protectionism—proposed the first five supporting bills to the Senate. Their opponents in the Jacksonian Democratic Party traced a closer lineage to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and generally opposed international copyright because of its perceived threat to their core value of decentralised power (see McGill 85). 27 Conditions began to change with the Chase Act of 1891, which granted non-resident authors the same copyright protections available to residents. See Feather (166–9) for details of further petitions and debates preceding this legislation. 28 Eldridge gives a detailed examination of this episode in “‘Game.’” I cover some of the same ground here in order to provide essential context for the following sections. The incident is also notable insofar as it forces Dennie to make a decision between personal, political, and national allegiance: this is discussed in further detail below. David Longworth of New York published Little in 1804 and Anacreon in 29 1805, while Hugh Maxwell published Philadelphia imprints of both books in 1804. 30 Eldridge also notes that on 1 August, a similar notice announcing the volume and praising both Moore and Watts appeared in the Federalist New York Evening Post (201).

If England Doesn’t Read Us  67

















68  If England Doesn’t Read Us

















If England Doesn’t Read Us  69 by Lord Mahon after Talfourd failed in his bid for re-election to parliament in 1841. More conciliatory than Talfourd, Mahon successfully oversaw the passage of the Copyright Act of 1842, which extended copyright, normally, to the author’s lifetime plus seven years, or forty-two years from publication. 60 Let us note a striking reversal. In the eighteenth century the proponents of perpetual copyright were the booksellers. By the early nineteenth century, however, the trade had adjusted to the limited copyright term, and many had a vested interest in it; it was authors such as Southey and Wordsworth who were now claiming that their rights should be perpetual (Rose, Authors 111–2). 61 Eldridge dates the true beginnings of this practice to the appearance of Scott’s Waverley novels after 1814, leading to a “rapacious market” (“‘Game’” 205) where “[t]he struggle was intense and the competitors were not overly scrupulous” (“‘Game’” 200). 62 The profit to be gained by American reprinters for making these payments lay in the brief period of monopoly before their edition was reprinted, in turn, by other American competitors. Mathew Carey reveals the narrowness of these competitive margins in 1822 correspondence related to his payments to secure advance rights for an edition of Scott’s Peveril of the Peak: [T]he only advantage we derive from the purchase is the sale of 3 or 4 days until another Edit. can be printed in New York, Boston and here. This takes place in about 3 days from the time of publishing our Edition … All the advantage consists in having the whole copy a few days before others, in order that we may send our Edition off in every direction and receive the first sales. (qtd. in Bradsher 130)

63

64

65

66

The implications of Carey’s transatlantic publication arrangement are also discussed by Rezek (40–61). Letters and Journals of Lord Byron was published by J. and J. Harper of New York (1830), and by A. and W. Galignani of Paris (1831). Murray also allowed Moore to accept a £100 payment for the French de facto copyright (JTM 4: 1400). The fifty-six signatories included Thomas Campbell, Maria Edgeworth, T. N. Talfourd, Edmund & Henry Lytton Bulwer, S. C. & Anna Maria Hall, Joanna Baillie, Charles Babbage, Gerald Griffin, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Rogers, and Robert Southey. Wordsworth is a notable absentee, given his involvement in copyright debates of this period; Dickens is too, especially since he claimed to have signed the petition. His absence from the list of signatories was probably due to a clerical error (Barnes 272, n.20). “That authors of Great Britain have long been exposed to injury in their reputation and property from the want of a law by which the exclusive right to their respective writings may be secured to them in the United States of America” (1). The poem, reprinted in Jane Moore’s Satire (391–4), describes a poet’s dream after having fallen asleep, “[t]hinking of Sergeant Talfourd’s Bill.” A nightmarish vision follows, of a dinner spent in the company of a group of people “[a]ll in the printing and publishing line.” The poet is conspicuous in his poverty, wearing a shabby coat “just gone into its second edition,” among the publishers, “sipping, like lords, their rosy wine.” The poet’s shock is heightened on realising that the dinner upon which the publishers are feasting is composed of books: “‘And here, my friends, is a treat indeed, / The immortal Wordsworth fricassee’d!’”

70  If England Doesn’t Read Us 67 Southey: “[o]ne thing alone I ask from the Legislature, and in the name of justice, that the injurious law of copyright be repealed, and that the family of an Author should not be deprived of their just and natural rights in his works when his permanent reputation is established” (324). Wordsworth: “… what in equity I consider to be the right of a class, and for a much longer period than that defined in your bill—for ever” (324). 68 “I took care to impress upon [Longmans] that it was solely from what I thought due to myself and my own feeling of what was right that I had come to the determination of not availing myself of any such law to change or unsettle my agreement with them” (JTM 5: 1973). In this decision, he was influenced by his wife, Bessy, who proclaimed “with the directness of aim at the true and the just which, in her, is innate, ‘Why that’s not honest’” (JTM 5: 1966). 69 In 1842, Longman brazenly alluded to the interests it would serve for publishers; Moore countered, “‘is there any good to come to me from it?’ ‘Oh yes, there is,’ he eagerly replied. After a few more words between us I subscribed my signature to the List, when having gained his object, he with much composure said ‘The good is very remote’” (JTM 5: 2235–6).

3

Cream of the Copyrights Authorship in the Publication History of Lalla Rookh

When publisher Thomas Longman referred to Lalla Rookh (1817) as the “cream of the copyrights” (LTM 2: 821) in 1837, its author, Thomas Moore, responded with a distinction between commercial appeal and the prospect of longevity. It may have succeeded, Moore responded to his publisher, “in a property sense; but I am strongly inclined to think that, in a race into future times (if any thing of mine could pretend to such a run), those little ponies, the ‘Melodies,’ will beat the mare, Lalla, hollow” (LTM 2: 821). The poet was correct insofar as posterity has granted greater fame to his Irish Melodies, but while Lalla Rookh received limited scholarly or popular attention for much of the twentieth century, Longman’s description suggests why it should be the subject of closer study. In an age when Walter Scott and Lord Byron had captured the public imagination with their long verse narratives, Moore sold the copyright of Lalla Rookh to Longmans, sight unseen, for the high sum of £3,000. Indeed, such was the eagerness of the firm for Lalla Rookh to emulate the success of its generic predecessors that Walter Scott’s work was explicitly invoked in the terms of the copyright contract: “upon your giving into our hands a poem of the length of Rokeby, you shall receive from us the sum of 3000£” (MTM 2: 58).1 If it seems curious that the commercial value and utility of poetry should be calculated in terms of length, format, and exemplars, the formula is salutary in its attention to authorial celebrity and market success. Recently usurped by journalism in terms of professional appeal, poetry’s artistic pre-eminence and its commercial renown were resoundingly resurrected by Scott and Byron in the 1810s. For around twenty years afterwards, the commercial and professional markets for poetry were in the ascendant, with Byron’s publisher, John Murray, rejecting as many as 700 poems during the year of 1817, when Lalla Rookh made its début (Collins 235). If Scott and Byron were the principal authors of the new romantic spirit in poetry, their protagonists’ daring was matched by the unprecedented munificence of publishers in this period. The boldness of their publication ventures was established by Edinburgh publisher, Archibald Constable, who “led the way in unheard-of prices” (Collins 158) for copyrights, with other major publishers like Longmans and Murray following suit. 2 These prices,

72  Cream of the Copyrights wrote Scott, “made men’s hair stand on end” (qtd. in Collins 133) and created significant new commercial conditions for the profession of authorship.3 For the elect band of authors, at least, the prospect of living by the proceeds of one’s pen became a distinct reality. The payment received by Moore for Lalla Rookh placed him within this category of authorship but, as we shall see, not without presenting challenges to his prowess in a new poetic form and to his authorial self-confidence. For its part, Lalla Rookh is worthy of further attention for a number of reasons. Subtitled “An Oriental Romance,” it comprises four long narrative poems linked by a framing prose narrative which describes the journey of the titular Indian princess and her retinue to meet the king of Bucharia,4 to whom she is betrothed. Along the way, she is entertained by a travelling poet, Feramorz, who relates the four verse narratives, and eventually she falls in love with him. Upon arriving in Bucharia, Lalla Rookh discovers that Feramorz is none other than the king to whom she is engaged.5 Two of the verse narratives, “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” and “The Fire-Worshippers,” are firmly in the established Byronic mode of Romantic Orientalism, with “Paradise and the Peri” and “The Light of the Haram” more recognisably characteristic of Moore’s style in their metre, themes, and ornamental imagery. The work represents a perfect exemplar of the genre of Romantic Orientalism, which was arguably at its pinnacle when the work was published in 1817.6 Despite more recent scholarly attention, it remains a relatively neglected work within the world of Anglo-Irish literature, not conforming easily to its established histories and tropes.7 Its translation, adaptation, and reception history demonstrate a remarkably wide reach and popularity for a work that was largely forgotten for much of the twentieth century.8 While recent scholarship has recognised the importance of Lalla Rookh, and more broadly of Moore, as significant subjects for a historicist understanding of early-nineteenth-century literature, this chapter’s close examination of its publication history augments that knowledge by revealing the broader social and cultural forces influencing the circulation of the work and their effects on our understanding of its author. Following the trajectory of focus away from Moore as the sole agent of signification in his published works, this chapter examines the different modes of authorship evident across the publication history of Lalla Rookh. It describes selected details of the work’s publication by Longmans from its first edition in 1817 to its last in 1880. Tracing the sequences of changing formats, print runs, illustrations, and prices of Lalla Rookh over this period, it illustrates how these changes were precipitated by general practices of publishing, as well as by external forces, such as changes to the market and to copyright law. In so doing, it presents a model for describing the publication history of a single literary work by showing the reciprocal influences of publisher, author, and market in shaping the material and textual form of a literary

Cream of the Copyrights  73 work over the course of more than sixty years. The chapter continues the methods of the previous two by examining the material, textual, and paratextual forms of Lalla Rookh’s authorised and unauthorised publication to expose the shifting presentation and formulation of its author during the course of the work’s transmission. Next, I discuss the modes of authorship evident in publication histories, before examining theoretical and practical contexts for such histories and proceeding to significant aspects of Lalla Rookh’s prepublication history. Here, and in my subsequent examination of large- and small-scale bibliographical aspects of the work’s publication history, I analyse the emerging consequences for our understanding of Moore’s authorship.

Authorship and Publication History Previous scholars have described and analysed the pre-publication contexts of Lalla Rookh, to different ends. Jeffery Vail’s attention to the work places it within the specific perspective of the relationship of Moore and Byron, and their concurrent works of Romantic Orientalism (Literary 103–39). Ronan Kelly (277–306) and other biographers unearth useful detail about Lalla Rookh in the context of his developing career.9 I retrace some of these details in this chapter, but my greater focus is on the bibliographical evidence yielded by the post-publication history of the work. Both periods—before and after the publication of the first edition in May 1817—present varying signals for understanding different facets of Moore’s authorial persona and status. As in the broader manner of this book, these signals differ in their proximity to Moore as an active determinant of that authorial image. Before publication, for example, the uncanny sequence of thematic coincidences between his and Byron’s writings in this period has a significant and injurious effect on Moore’s confidence and creativity. For a writer ordinarily so productive and prolific, the sterilising consequences of such a direct and imposing competitor on Moore’s authorship are remarkable. Even without the Byronic rivalry, however, Moore experienced some notable difficulties in adjusting to the unfamiliar form of the long poetic narrative. On the other hand, the assurance represented by the generous copyright payment for Lalla Rookh precipitated an image of an author who was strong and poised in correspondence with his publisher but privately plagued with doubts and anxieties about his formal poetic prowess and about the structure of his work. These aspects of Lalla Rookh’s pre-publication life all present us with fruitful ways of conceiving of Moore’s active authorship. After the work’s publication, however, different kinds of evidence can be synthesised to present another authorial aspect: one arising from the actions of agents at various removes from the poet’s sphere of influence. As publishers, pirates, and legal mechanisms are engaged and intersect, the material forms

74  Cream of the Copyrights in which Lalla Rookh appears change, and the work signifies in diverse ways. The bibliographical record—and, in this particular case, its connection to publishers’ archives—instantiates and preserves evidence of these engagements and intersections and illustrates how these nonauthorial agents participate in the construction of the authorial persona. Thus, the differences in the methods of gathering and interpreting evidence of authorship in this chapter arise from the central importance of studying books as physical objects and viewing their materiality as a source of legibility separate from, and signifying differently to, the texts that they bear. Alongside contextual information that details how these material objects were produced, the physical book emerges as a powerful source of knowledge and understanding, revealing how its production and reception are recursive and mutually signifying. Such knowledge of the book’s fluctuating presence within commercial and social worlds is a lens through which our understanding of authorial formulation is refracted. Following this logic, this chapter examines physical imprints and records of the publishers who created those imprints, to illustrate the differing authorial perspectives that emerge from specific pieces of bibliographical evidence within the publication history of a literary work. The view of authorship presented here follows that of previous chapters and anticipates the view of chapters to come: the evidence of authorship’s construction in the detail of publication history derives from the author and from other agents involved in the production and dissemination of the books that instantiate his work. This dispersed, socialised perspective on authorship and its construction views the author as a necessary, but not central, influence on an authorial persona that is mutable, and often formulated in circumstances and by agents beyond his control. The commercial relationship between a publisher and an author implies some understanding of this situation by both parties: in selling a copyright, an author sells their right to exclusively control how their authorial persona is formed by the production and dissemination of their work by the publisher. Whether this transaction is viewed as an artistic compromise, a fact of the profession, or an active opportunity for authorial publicity is a belief according to which different authors might be categorised. Those who actively resist publication, like Emily Dickinson, or who seek to control their works’ means of publication, such as William Blake, are models that productively complicate our assumptions about how literary personae are formed. As a professional author, Moore must understand that in exchange for the copyright payment for Lalla Rookh, he activates an expansive collaborative process of authorial formulation. That formulation inheres and persists covertly within our understandings of Moore’s authorship. Tracing and identifying its sources reveals the degree to which the author is an active agent in the forging of his authorial persona and to what extent authorship is a broader social and cultural construct.

Cream of the Copyrights  75

Theory and Practice of Publication History Writing in the same historical and theoretical milieu as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Pierre Macherey sought to demystify authorship and reframe it in terms of literary production, rather than creation. One of his aims in so doing, like Barthes, was to promote the role of the reader in the production of literary meaning, but in his statement of the central problem with authorship, as he saw it, he gestures towards the value of a broad account of literary production which considers the meaningful influence of agents beyond the author and, indeed, the reader. The type of “making” whose absence from theoretical accounts of authorship Macherey laments is the kind recovered in this chapter.10 By describing and examining the various actions and reciprocal influences of publisher, author, and market in shaping the material and textual form of Lalla Rookh over the course of more than sixty years, my purpose is to account more fully for the various types of evidence in the material objects—the books—first encountered by their initial readers, and forever instantiating moments of the work’s historical record. These books are evidence of “a coalescence of human intentions,” says Michael Suarez (Schuessler, “Peering”): traces of which are present and legible in the book’s textual and material components. The shape of the work that results is one whose meanings are made within the circuits of communication and production described by Bordieu, Darnton, Adams and Barker, and others, and where the author is intrinsic, but not dominant. That said, the operations of those circuits are often determined by conditions of the law, market, and book trade which manifest in the printed book and, in turn, influence the authorial persona through the dynamic circulation of those models. The socialtext theories of the literary work which are present throughout this book are sharply focused in this chapter, where the sociological aspects of book history are deployed “to open and extend the very concept of literary culture together with the understanding of who produces it” (English viii). In his theorisation and illustration of the “Communications Circuit,” Robert Darnton claims that the value of book history is in its purpose “to understand how ideas were transmitted through print” (65). That authorship is a social phenomenon transmitted and continually constructed through print is evident from his application of the model to Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie and its illustration of the necessary and consistently meaningful entanglements of its various agents: “how each phase is related to … other persons at other points in the same circuit” (67). D. F. McKenzie holds a similar perspective on the potential of the actions and intentions of these diverse agents, also arguing for their specific role in the creation of authorial identity and meaning. In examining the case of printing William Congreve’s works, McKenzie considers the interpretive roles played by his printer

76  Cream of the Copyrights John Watts11 and publisher Jacob Tonson, and their consequent instantiations in the printed book, ultimately posing the question, “[w]ho, in short, ‘authored’ Congreve?” (26). Addressing that question reveals the extent to which “an author disperses into his collaborators” (26), and the bibliographical evidence by which it can be addressed possesses “an unrivalled power to resurrect authors in their own time” (29). Jerome McGann presents similar perspectives on the dispersed and collaborative nature of the literary work in arguing for the essential interconnectedness of its “double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on the one hand, and the bibliographical codes on the other” (Textual 77). While the material form of a literary work instantiates “many kinds of creative intentionalities” (Textual 75) from different agents involved in its creation, the author is not their necessary polestar. In the literary universe that McGann describes, the author is not possessed of a singular identity but is rather “a plural identity … a multiverse” (Textual 75). As the arguments of this book’s different chapters illustrate, the further we track away from the gravitational pull of the author, the more we can see how different agents beyond their control exert decisive influence on the constitution of their authorial persona. Certain types of publication history operate under the influence of a degressive principle, tending to characterise later editions or impressions of a work only insofar as they differ from the early, and implicitly superior, instantiations. The utility of the principle is evident, particularly when describing a lengthy bibliographical record such as Lalla Rookh’s, but, as Suarez argues, to employ it is to depart from the central tenets of social-text theorists who insist that “every iteration of a work in its published texts is important because it instantiates an historically valuable theory of that work, its author and its most likely market (or reading public)” (211). In describing in detail certain notable moments from the publication history of Lalla Rookh and their significance for Moore’s authorship, this chapter is necessarily selective, but anti-degressive in its emphasis on the potential value to be gleaned from the later years of a work’s life-cycle.12 Publication histories have appeared in different forms and with different emphases, but many notable exemplars rely on astute combinations of material and archival evidence to uncover moments of concord and discord between what books say and what records reveal. Jane Millgate’s study of Walter Scott’s “magnum opus” edition of the Waverley Novels is noteworthy for its sustained focus both on Scott’s revisionary textual acts and on the publication and promotional innovations of his publisher, Cadell. Susan Bauman analyses how Smith, Elder and Company managed to bring the Brontës’ poetry within their canonical oeuvre despite a weak market for poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century. The study’s particular relevance to Moore and Lalla Rookh lies in its evidence of a publisher extracting the value of their copyright investment with shrewd publication practices. R. Peter

Cream of the Copyrights  77 Stoicheff’s examination of the composition and publication history of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments is notable in the present context for its discussion of hasty and impromptu publication decisions occasioned by the appearance of a piracy of a copyrighted work. The final instalment of Cantos and its text must thus be seen, it argues, within this more broadly competitive publication context. John Barnard studies the publishing history of a work contemporaneous with Lalla Rookh, Keats’ Poems of 1817, to argue for the importance of the volume’s publication costs, and Keats’ investment therein, as a key factor in understanding the poet’s subsequent development. The conclusions of other publication histories, including those on Wallace Stevens (Beyers) and Archibald MacLeish (Lane), bear a closer resemblance to my analyses of Moore’s revisionary practices in other chapters of this book. While their conclusions and emphases are often differently focused, all of these publication histories tend to emphasise “‘external’ conditions” (Stoicheff 78) which influence the particular case under discussion, suggesting that the integrity of the author or the work is of central concern. To characterise these conditions— revision, piracy, economic motives—as “external” is an error, however, as they are ever-present features of publication histories which often bear significant consequences for the interpretation of the works and authors in question. Referring to Stoicheff’s analysis of Pound’s Drafts & Fragments, McGann observes its “extreme instance of something one discovers repeatedly in literary studies” (Textual 75). Ultimately, however, a tension exists in arguing for greater equilibrium amongst the different agents involved in making a book while focusing on the effects and consequences of external conditions on a work, an author, or both. Just as Darnton relies on Voltaire to illustrate the practical operations of his “Communications Circuit,” my demonstration of bibliography’s manifestations of authorship are revealed through Lalla Rookh’s publication history. In pursuit of this objective, my focus shifts between broad and narrow views of the work, between physical and archival evidence, and between the macroscopic and the microscopic. My reason for adopting this method is to articulate the different formulations of authorship that are legible within these varied perspectives. As I discuss below, the clash between publishers’ nomenclature and bibliographical classification is broadly evident throughout the publication history of the work and has demonstrable consequences for its reception and perception within the marketplace. More specific case studies focus on particular moments within that history—publication of piracies, changes in copyright status—which represent meaningful pivots in the presentation of work and author. In presenting evidence from both scales of perception, I am guided by McKenzie’s insistence that the ultimate concern of the bibliographer should be “to show that forms effect meaning” (13). Before proceeding to those analyses, however, I will first present important context on the composition and publication of Lalla Rookh.

78  Cream of the Copyrights

Pre-publication History The story of Lalla Rookh’s composition and its pre-publication life is long, and several of its parts reveal differing formulations of authorship: how Moore conceived of himself as an author, and how the actions of publishers and literary agents disclose a broader public and social understanding of Moore as an author. Lalla Rookh is first mentioned by Moore in correspondence with his mother in early 1812: “[a]s soon as I have leisure to finish a long poem I have in hand, I shall get a good sum for it, which will, I hope, enable me not only to pay my debts, but to assist my dearest father with something towards his establishment” (LTM 1: 186–7).13 Writing a new preface for Lalla Rookh for the Poetical Works of 1840–1, he expands upon his early labour on the work: [i]t was about the year 1812 that, far more through the encouraging suggestions of friends than from any confident promptings of my own ambition, I conceived the design of writing a Poem upon some Oriental subject, and of those quarto dimensions which Scott’s successful publications in that form had then rendered the regular poetical standard. (6: v–vi) The terms of the recollection are notable, with Moore presenting himself as a receptive conduit for the literary inclinations of others. Lalla Rookh was a departure for Moore at the time: a work of long narrative poetry extending to 405 quarto pages in its first edition. By this point, his reputation had been built on lyric poems, epistolary satires, and the songs of the Irish Melodies. The growing public taste for longer verse narratives and a vogue for literary Orientalism were the likely sources for Moore’s influential interlocutors. Sensing a commercial opportunity within the zeitgeist, Moore decided to set himself a new poetic challenge. Despite the formal change represented by the long verse narrative, Moore identified a way to preserve thematic continuities with the recent works which had elevated his authorial reputation. If the Melodies were a subtle means of expressing the concerns and desires of Irish nationalism to the audiences of English drawing rooms, a similarly subversive tactic can be found in Lalla Rookh.14 While the burgeoning fashion for Orientalism in Britain has been read as a means of rationalising the project of imperialism,15 Moore’s portrayal of characters like the Iranian Gheber, Hafed, represented the colonial subject as heroic, courageous, and romantic. Moore seized the opportunity to apply the allegorical basis of the Melodies to a different, commercially successful form: “the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East” (PW 6: xvi). By following strategies such as modelling Hafed after Robert Emmet, Moore appropriated the conventions of

Cream of the Copyrights  79 Orientalism for Irish subjects, with the eventual success of Lalla Rookh strengthening “the link between the geniuses of the Celt and the Oriental while subverting British Orientalism” (Lennon 157). Even though Moore required some initial prompting, his absorption of his authorial brand into a popular poetic form attests to an author who was precisely attuned to the literary marketplace. However canny the concept of Lalla Rookh, its execution was a much more tortuous matter. Moore began a first draft of the work in late 1811.16 He wrote to Thomas Longman about six months later to say that he “had hoped to be near giving you my Poem now” (LTM 1: 190). Evidently, he had made some progress on the work, but the confidence implicit in his hopes belied the reality that Lalla Rookh was more than five years away from publication. What was the cause of this lengthy delay? Part of the reason was rooted in the apparent creative difficulties Moore experienced with the form of the long narrative poem. His correspondence with Samuel Rogers over the succeeding years betrays a persistent crisis of confidence about the structure of the work. Its eventual published form comprised four discrete verse sections connected by a framing prose narrative: a distinct deviation from the model of the long narrative poem with which Scott had captured the public imagination in the early years of the decade. Moore worried that knowledge of this variant structure would damage the work’s prospects with publishers and public alike. A letter of August 1814 cautioned Rogers that “no one but yourself and Bessy knows the truth” (LTM 1: 327) about Lalla Rookh’s structural compromises. Here was an author plagued by anxieties about what he perceived as his creative shortcomings in an unfamiliar formal mode and deeply concerned about the consequences for his authorial appeal and persona. Another significant factor in Lalla Rookh’s protracted composition was the sudden appearance of a competitor: Lord Byron’s Oriental poem The Giaour was published on 5 June 1813. The two poets were friends and regular correspondents, but neither was aware of the other’s Oriental-themed poetic pursuits. Thus, the publication of The Giaour was a shock to Moore, and its immediate success a mixed blessing. While it indicated a receptive potential audience for Lalla Rookh, Moore was anxious that its success would mean his work would be lost in an oversubscribed marketplace: “the success he has met with will produce a whole swarm of imitators in the same Eastern style, who will completely fly-blow all the novelty of my subject” (LTM 1: 271–2). Byron, for his part, was sympathetic, advising Moore to “Stick to the East” and encouraging him that “[t]he little I have done in that way is merely ‘a voice in the wilderness’ for you; and if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalising, and pave the path for you” (LJB 1: 424). Moore was unconvinced and then further unnerved to learn that Byron was contemplating a poem about “the amours of a

80  Cream of the Copyrights Peri and a mortal” (LJB 1: 424): his own draft of Lalla Rookh had begun with “Paradise and the Peri.” He wrote, distressed, to his friend and commercial rival: All I ask of your friendship is—not that you will abstain from Peris on my account, for that is too much to ask of human (or, at least, author’s) nature—but that, whenever you mean to pay your addresses to any of these aërial ladies, you will, at once, tell me so, frankly and instantly, and let me, at least, have my choice whether I shall be desperate enough to go on, with such a rival, or at once surrender the whole race into your hands. (LJB 1: 424) The nature of the developing coincidence between Moore and Byron’s work is striking, and illustrates the broader social and cultural determinants of authorship, as the spirit of the age found remarkably similar expression in the two poets’ works.17 To Moore’s dismay, Byron’s “invasion of the region” (LTM 1: 275) continued with The Bride of Abydos in December 1813, a poem which contained “such singular coincidences … not only in locality and costume, but in plot and characters” (LJB 1: 433) with a section of Lalla Rookh, that Moore chose to abandon it.18 The “deep wound” of the Bride was soon reopened by Byron’s The Corsair in February 1814, though its publication further underlined the growing commercial success of Romantic Orientalist verse. The poem, which sold out its initial print run of 10,000 copies on the day of its publication (MacCarthy 215), was dedicated to Moore. Byron puffed in anticipation of Lalla Rookh, declaring that no poet was better suited to writing Orientalist verse, because “[t]he wrongs of your country, the magnificent and fiery spirit of her sons, the beauty and feeling of her daughters may there be found” (vi).19 Not only was the dedication Byron’s attempt to redress the hurt felt by Moore about their unexpectedly coincidental undertakings, but it also served the helpful purpose of publicising the work as negotiations for its sale began. Despite his personal anxieties for Lalla Rookh, Moore’s authorial star was on the rise in the summer of 1814. The previous year, his satirical verse had reached a peak of success with Intercepted Letters; or, the Two-Penny Post-Bag and the fifth number of his popular phenomenon, Irish Melodies, had been published. To publishers, Moore represented a bankable commodity: combining his authorial appeal with the fashionable long verse narrative made for a potentially lucrative copyright. Moore’s friends, surer of his prospects than the poet himself, laid the ground for Lalla Rookh’s sale. Byron’s dedication of The Corsair had the auxiliary benefit of recommending the poem to his publisher, John Murray, who offered Moore 2,000 guineas for the poem in May (LTM 1: 312). A July letter to Murray reveals a poet emboldened by the offer: “I confess my vanity is not a little gratified by the very liberal offers

Cream of the Copyrights  81 that have voluntarily been made to me, and to you, in particular, I feel highly grateful for being the first to pay so solid a tribute to my literary character—” (LTM 1: 322).20 While Moore was basking in the glow of his prized authorial persona, his friend James Perry, editor of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, was acting as his agent by shopping the poem around to other publishers. Four days after the letter to Murray, Perry brought news of an improved offer from Longmans, as Moore wrote to his Irish Melodies publisher James Power: “Longman has communicated to me through Perry his readiness to treat on the basis of the three thousand guineas” (LTM 1: 323). Moore’s authorial profile at this time was so great that he could afford to be unreasonably hard-headed about the terms of the proposed sale. When Longmans requested a perusal of the work-in-progress, Moore’s anxieties about its structure manifested in an affronted response: “I shall have no ifs. Murray’s two thousand without this distrustful stipulation is better than three with it” (LTM 1: 323). Whatever the exact source of Moore’s objection to Longmans’ request, the terms of his response are evidence of his confidence in the present value of his authorial status and its ability to underwrite his dictation of terms to publishers. 21 In his preface for the Lalla Rookh volume of the Poetical Works—a forum often richly infused with the advantages of hindsight—Moore emphasised Perry’s influence in establishing this attitude: “the romantic view which my friend, Perry, took of the matter, was, that this price should be given as a tribute to reputation already acquired, without any condition for a previous perusal of the new work” (6: vii). 22 While Longmans’ request to see the work-in-progress seems to make commercial sense after their high investment, these two aspects of the proposed copyright agreement convey very different signals for authorship. Longmans are willing to pay a high price to secure Moore’s copyright, activating the collaborative process of authorial formulation in their printing and circulation of his work. This gesture signifies an intrinsic belief in the established value of Moore’s brand and a boost to his authorial ego. The request to see the drafts of Lalla Rookh immediately undermines this trust with an apparent insult that strikes at the heart of Moore’s fragile self-confidence. In a perverse sense, with the staggering copyright price earned by a “reputation already acquired,” the actual quality of Lalla Rookh should be beside the point. Before the terms of the sale to Longmans were settled, Moore’s correspondence with his previous publisher, James Carpenter, further attests to his sense of having achieved an elevation of authorial status. Carpenter had published the majority of Moore’s non-musical works from Little in 1801 to Intercepted Letters in 1813, but he was a relatively small bookseller and publisher, whose resources could not match those of Murray or Longmans. Cognisant that Carpenter’s limited means meant their association must end, Moore’s correspondence conveys his giddiness at moving upwards in the publishing world: “[t]here is nothing in

82  Cream of the Copyrights the competition for my Poem which is not highly honourable & flattering to me, and you are the last person that ought to feel hurt at such tributes to my reputation” (LTM 1: 331). Undeterred by what he perceived as a patronising request from Longmans, Moore strikes a condescending note by imagining his old publisher finding satisfaction in reflected glory and not frustration at the commercial constraints highlighted by his former author’s success. To Moore’s relief, Longmans relented on their request to examine the Lalla Rookh manuscript, paving the way for a contract resolution, which eventually arrived in December 1814. With a slight reduction in the sum involved from 3,000 guineas to £3,000, the official terms of the sale, as communicated to Moore, stipulated a poem equivalent in length to Rokeby (MTM 2: 58). 23 As news of the extravagant sale reached London society, the reputations of author and work grew immeasurably: “the poem was anticipated on an unprecedented scale” (Kelly 259). For all the evidence of how authorial standing influenced the terms of the sale, the blunt utility of the contract is striking in its calculation of the commercial value of poetry in terms of its length and format. Moore had previously disparaged Scott’s long poem, 24 and Francis Jeffrey wrote to express his hope that Lalla Rookh “will resemble Rokeby in nothing but length” (LTM 1: 361). However, Rokeby’s relevance is clearly apparent in the commercial success that a 5,000-line poem could command: within three months of its January 1813 publication, the initial print run of 3,000 quarto volumes (at the price of forty-two shillings) had been sold, prompting a second edition in octavo of 6,000 copies (St Clair 635).25 Having secured the author that they desired, Longmans, in their terms, merely specified the second part of their commercial equation: the precise length and format of the work. Though that format would continue to cause anxieties for Moore, the closure of the sale of Lalla Rookh was a relief and a generous testimony to his high status in the realm of authorial celebrity in the period.

Publication History We already have a good sense of the popularity of Lalla Rookh in the nineteenth century, but many of the sources of this knowledge are isolated and anecdotal: the relationship, described above, to Bryon and his Romantic Orientalism; the afterlife of songs like “Bendemeer’s Stream”; the adaptations to music, drama, and painting; and the grand performance at the Royal Prussian Court in 1821.26 In describing its bibliographical aspects, one of my aims is to provide some more empirical evidence to augment our existing sense of the work’s importance. Attention to the publishing history of Lalla Rookh allows us to examine the shifting dynamics of a bestselling nineteenth-century work and how those, in turn, reflected on Moore’s authorial status. What emerges is a

Cream of the Copyrights  83 portrait of a work which experiences peaks and troughs of popularity, each a potential occasion for interpreting the reasons behind the fluctuations. These causes are revealed by the combined examination of physical books and archival evidence that attests to their production: here, we find signs of the influence of customs and regulations of the book trade, as well as broader social and cultural forces. With their broadly influential place within communication circuits theorised by Darnton and others, they effect legible traces within individual books across the publication history of Lalla Rookh. That work’s repeated reappearances in the market in shifting guises signal subtly different perceptions about its author and his authorial status. For example, the later Victorian publications of Lalla Rookh complicate the narrative of a precipitous decline in Moore’s post-mortem reputation. More generally, the publication history enables a greater understanding of the processes, conventions, and distortions of the print trade where Moore’s work circulated and of the influence of its various nonauthorial agents of meaning on both the work and its author. Publication figures are only one measure of a work’s significance, but in the case of Lalla Rookh, they are striking: Longmans printed almost 100,000 copies between 1817 and 1880 in around sixty impressions of various kinds. This is but a fraction of the actual publication figures for the work in this period, however: it fails to account for fugitive evidence of the work’s proliferation in piracies, international reprints, translations, its increased distribution after it entered the public domain in 1859, adaptations, excerptings, anthologisations, and so on. All of these instantiations of the work are more difficult to quantify, but we can accurately account for Longmans’ figures thanks to the survival of the firm’s archive and to the details recorded in their Impression Books.27 What emerges from these archives are narratives of both large and small scales that add nuance and complexity to our understanding of Moore and Lalla Rookh, and to the manner in which a publisher can mould and influence authorial status in this period. These are narratives that are often submerged, or subsumed into the accounts that are evident in the surviving printed record of a work like Lalla Rookh. As we will see, however, that printed record can deceive. Bibliographical methods can help to uncover a true account of a work’s transmission from its printed witnesses, but when combined with the amplifying and corroborating evidence of publishers’ accounts and Impression Books, the force and conviction of the narrative is strengthened, revealing valuable hidden detail in the process. Below, I describe some of these details, apparent at both large and small scales within the publication history of Lalla Rookh. Issuing a new edition of a work is one of the simplest means for a publisher to signal its success and popularity to the public and to the market for books. For a contemporary reader, a book in its tenth edition within its first year of publication announces itself as a bestseller. 28

84  Cream of the Copyrights From a historical perspective, the sequence of reprinting offers a cursory measure of its success. As Adams and Barker write, [t]he number of reprintings, or lack of reprintings, immediately after publication are factors that enable us to determine the extent to which the author and publisher succeeded in achieving their immediate goals. Later reprintings and revivals, subsequent changes in the form of the book or the style of author or imprint, tell us something about the long-range impact of the text. (27) By those estimates, Lalla Rookh performs rather well: the twentieth numbered edition was published in 1842, twenty-five years after its initial publication. 29 Above, I referred to Longmans publishing around sixty impressions of various kinds up to 1880. Neither enumeration is accurate, however, nor does the evidence of title pages provide reliable evidence of the true transmission of the work, owing to a fundamental disjuncture between publishers’ nomenclature and bibliographical classification. In this context, the motto of the Monthly Review is worth recalling once more: “Fronti nulla fides / No trusting to Title-pages.” If a new edition is a flexible means of signalling popularity for the publisher, an edition’s status is more strictly defined by the bibliographer: “all copies printed at any time or times from one setting-up of type without substantial change” (Carter & Barker 87). The criterion of “substantial change” admits a degree of ambiguity to the definition, but the element of time is what distinguishes an edition from an impression in bibliographical classification. The latter comprises “the whole number of copies of that edition printed at one time, i.e. without the type or plates being removed from the press” (Carter & Barker 87). Somewhat abstract in these conceptual terms, the distinction is nonetheless crucial for an accurate assessment of the publication history of Lalla Rookh, and, consequently, for revealing the commercially motivated manipulation testified to by the work’s title pages. If we examine the first and second “editions” of Lalla Rookh through the combined lens of bibliographical and archival evidence, we find some immediate discrepancies. The first edition was published in quarto format on Tuesday 27 May 1817 in a print run of 1,000 copies, costing two guineas or forty-two shillings (MS 1393 1/H9: 103).30 Four days later, the Times advertised that “the second edition of Mr. Moore’s Poem of Lalla Rookh is published this day,” also in quarto, in a run of 500 copies at the same retail price.31 This conjures an image of a work selling like hot cakes. But it also illustrates a commercial tactic of the book trade: keeping the size of the initial print run small hedged against failure32 and allowed the rapid appearance of a second edition to signify popularity and success and to generate further publicity and demand for the book. Collating copies of the first and second “editions” of Lalla Rookh reveals that

Cream of the Copyrights  85 they are identical in all respects save their title pages, with the latter explicitly announcing itself as a “Second Edition.”33 This, combined with the contextual evidence of the newspaper advertisement four days after the publication of the first edition, suggests that the second “edition” is not a true edition but a second impression of the first edition. So far, the situation correlates with the commercial logic of the trade: the rapid appearance of a second edition signals the work’s success. The Longmans’ Impression Books complicate the matter even further, however, by suggesting the concurrent, not consecutive, printing of the first and second “editions.” The recorded printing costs are calculated on the basis of 1,500 copies, combining the 1,000 copies of the first edition and the 500 of the “second” edition.34 If accurate, this indicates that the second “edition” is not even a second impression of the first edition, but that a single edition of 1,500 was printed at the same time with a separate title page, reading “Second Edition,” for 500 of its copies.35 Adams and Barker identify this type of imposture as an example of the publisher’s desire to signal success: “all the sheets of a single press-run deceptively issued with different edition statements attempting to suggest popularity” (28). Bending reality to their commercial will, the publishers simulate success in order to stimulate success. The misleading bibliographical classification of the first two “editions” of Lalla Rookh is evident throughout its publication history at Longmans. The twenty numbered “editions” published by the firm up to 1842 actually encompass only ten true editions comprising a new or substantial resetting of type.36 After the publication of the first octavo edition in July 1817 (numbered the third “edition” by Longmans), a further six numbered “editions” emerge from the press in the following nine months, comprising 9,500 copies. However, these seven “editions” are actually one true edition consisting of five separate impressions from the standing type set for the “third” edition.37 Lalla Rookh was still in its first year of publication, and Longmans were eager to capitalise on its early momentum. While copies continued to sell, the successive appearance of multiple “new” numbered editions corroborated the work’s early popularity.38 What is the significance of this discrepancy? The practice is not unique: while bibliographers and publishers deploy the term edition differently, are there consequences to the latter’s more promiscuous use of the word? Beyond obscuring bibliographical clarity, this widespread practice conceals differences in the amount of labour and the financial costs involved in publishing a new edition (which demands a new setting of type) versus a new impression: these differences are illustrated in my comparison of unit costs below. In addition, it poses issues for understanding the stability of texts, with each new setting of type introducing new authorial or compositorial variants. For a scholar seeking to edit the text or to understand Moore’s influence on the changes it undergoes, the knowledge that the first ten “editions” comprise only three true editions

86  Cream of the Copyrights is crucial, and—on the evidence of the printed record and its misleading title pages alone—easy to miss. Thanks to Moore’s correspondence, we know that he did revise the text ahead of the “third” edition in July 1817: “I am most unluckily for myself obliged to return to Hornsey tomorrow evening, in consequence of the Third Edition of Lalla Rookh being about to go to Press, and I am anxious to correct a few of its many errors while it is printing” (LTM 1: 421). A later journal entry confirms that he did not revise the text again until the “fourteenth” edition of 1827 (JTM 3: 1063), so a combination of evidence from bibliographical and archival analysis and authorial testimony assures us that the text of the first nine “editions” of Lalla Rookh experienced some oversight from their author. With new settings of type for each of the “tenth” (1820) to the “thirteenth” (1826) editions, we necessarily have a higher degree of nonauthorial variation entering the text, as printers, in their human fallibility, introduce variants in the course of resetting type.39 While textual scholarship has long queried the notion of textual “corruption” and the desirability and practicability of establishing an author’s “intentions,” the bibliographical obfuscation of capricious title pages is a definite obstacle to those pursuits of this particular vision of authorship.40 Those seeking the clarity of an authorial signal within a textual stemma must be conscious of its probable misalignment with bibliographical classification: though the “tenth” edition of Lalla Rookh proceeds in an apparently orderly continuum from the “ninth,” its printing from reset type renders it an important pivot point away from prior authorial involvement in the text and a significant impediment to the hypothetical editor’s task of recovering the author’s “intentions.”41 The discrepancies between publishers’ nomenclature and bibliographical classification are large-scale, global phenomena whose presence is submerged in the correspondences between the publishers’ archive and the bibliographical record. Elsewhere in the interactions of the public commodities of books and the commercial logic of their producers are more small-scale cases which afford us the means of understanding fluctuations in the status of Lalla Rookh as varying material artefacts and in the corresponding status of its author. Decisions by a publisher to create a new edition, to leave type standing, or to mint stereotype plates all signify status and importance in more subtle, but more meaningful ways than the mere numerical record of editions, impressions, or copies printed.42 On a number of occasions in its publication history, the format in which Lalla Rookh is published changes. A regular feature in the publication history of a successful work, such change usually occurs as an initial period of expensive pricing gives way to successively smaller formats and lower prices. Examining the moments at which these changes arise can reveal varied motivations and causes, with publishers prompted by different factors and conditions in the market and in the status of the

Cream of the Copyrights  87 author or the work. Such moments emphasise the influential potential of different agents within the communication circuit and its cycles, as variations in the commercial availability of the work in turn impinge upon the authorial status and significance of the writer. From the appearance of what Longmans designated the “third” edition in July 1817, the book was published in octavo format, selling for a third of the price of the expensive quarto: fourteen shillings (St Clair 619). It remained in this format for a decade in ten further numbered “editions” until a further tranching down to duodecimo format in the fourteenth edition.43 What influenced the decision to move to duodecimo format in 1827? A possible motivation can be found in the Impression Book entry for the “thirteenth” edition which records the firm’s purchase of “2 pirated editions” on 2 December 1826 (MS 1393 1/H11: 117). At this time, ten years after its initial publication, Lalla Rookh was still in copyright. That copyright and the high price Longmans have paid to Moore for it were potentially undermined by the presence of cheap pirated editions circulating within the market. These were also likely to be true piracies, printed in London, as opposed to international reprints of the work which had previously surfaced in France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere.44 In this case, one of the likely pirates whose book was acquired by Longmans was William Dugdale, who is known to have published an undated pirated edition of Lalla Rookh which survives in one known copy.45 Though undated, the piracy was published between 1824 and 1834, the dates at which Dugdale operated from the address listed on the cover and title page of the edition: 23 Russel[l] Court, Drury Lane.46 On the evidence of Dugdale’s publication patterns, the edition was likely to have been published with the narrower window of 1824 and 1826. In the period from his establishment as a printer in 1822 until 1826, Dugdale published a number of piracies of both Moore’s and Byron’s works, including editions of The Loves of the Angels in 1823 and 1826. After this period, however, Dugdale rapidly moved from the dubious pursuit of publishing piracies to another: almost exclusively printing bawdy and pornographic works. He excelled in this later role, variously characterised as “one of the most prolific publishers of filthy books” (Ashbee 1: 127) and “the doyen” (Mendes 3) of London’s pornographic printers in the period. In this context, we may also find an alternative candidate for the piracies acquired by Longmans: John Sudbury, another pornographic printer in this decade, printed a pirated edition of Lalla Rookh in 1823.47 Though no direct personal link between Sudbury and Dugdale is evident, as is the case with the latter and many other printers in the London pornographic milieu, both their editions were duodecimos of 188 pages, suggesting that Dugdale may have set his edition from Sudbury’s earlier exemplar. With Sudbury’s edition further removed in time, Dugdale’s, priced at five shillings and sixpence, is perhaps the likelier of the two to have been recorded in the Longmans’ Impression

88  Cream of the Copyrights Books in 1826, though it is possible that Sudbury’s also remained in circulation at this time. I have found no evidence of another Lalla Rookh piracy in the market in this period, though piracies are notable for their material ephemerality: published on inferior paper with a cheap price in mind, they have low survival rates and are not extensively preserved in library collections. As the next chapter demonstrates in more detail, the appeal that Moore and Byron held for underground printers such as Dugdale lay in their licentious and immoral authorial reputations. With immoral writings refused the protection of copyright, enterprising printers successfully blurred the definitions of immorality to give legal justification to their apparent piracies. For Sudbury, and for Dugdale and his mentor William Benbow, a straight commercial road led from Moore and Byron to pornography. For all of Moore’s protests about the critical endurance of his early licentious reputation, here—and in the next chapter—are examples of how that persistent authorial identity threatened the commercial appeal and integrity of his authorship. In this particular instance, however, Longmans stood to suffer commercial loss on their copyright investment from the circulation of cheaper pirated editions. The discovery of these editions in December 1826 is likely to have prompted Longmans’ decision to move Lalla Rookh to the smaller duodecimo format in 1827. By thus meeting the piracies on their own material terms, the publisher sought to neutralise their appeal to the book-buying public. The inclusion of four engraved illustration plates was an additional feature which signalled the volume’s superiority to the piracies and accounted for its higher price: fourteen shillings in boards.48 Further evidence to support this reading can be found in the Impression Books: having spent £50 on advertising the “thirteenth” edition when it was published in January 1826, Longmans invested almost double that amount again in December in order to publicly affirm their ownership of the lucrative property.49 In addition, the firm recorded an expenditure of £30/9/6 on unspecified legal costs related to the piracies (MS 1393 1/H11: 119). It seems likely that Longmans weighed the possibility of taking legal action against one or other of the pirates but, given the successful precedent set by Dugdale and some of his contemporaries in defending their piracies in court, ultimately decided that a commercial response would be more fruitful.50 In another economical move by Longmans, the duodecimo saw the publication of Lalla Rookh by stereotype plates for the first time.51 The process, which involves creating a durable metal plate of one or more pages of type, removes the need for new settings of type for new impressions in the same or similar format: creating stereotype plates for a work signifies the publisher’s confidence in its long-term prospects and an investment in its future. After the initial expense involved in creating the plates (£44), this move resulted in much cheaper printing costs for future duodecimo impressions of the

Cream of the Copyrights  89 work, further increasing their profit-margin: for example, the unit cost for printing a copy of the “thirteenth” edition was 2/6¾d., and for the “fifteenth” edition, it was 1/4d.52 The publication of pirated editions of Lalla Rookh was most likely the main motivation for Longmans to move their publication of the work to a more cost-efficient model with a smaller format, resulting in lower paper costs and higher print runs, and to adopt the use of stereotype printing. This threat of commercial competition had the collateral effect of making the once luxurious work widely available in a modest, pocketsized format, ten years after its initial quarto publication.53 Another decade later we see a similar situation, with different effects. Longmans’ purchase of “three spurious editions” (MS 1393 1/H12: 240) in December 1836 was followed by the production of a grand new edition illustrated by “Eminent Artists.”54 Once again, advertising costs spiked on the occasion of the new edition (£150), as Longmans vigorously asserted their copyright. The effect on Moore and his authorial status on these occasions is that he and his work received unexpected promotion and advertisement, elevating his status in the consciousness of the public and in the market for books. Throughout the 1820s, the market for Lalla Rookh was steady, with a new print run of 1,500 copies occurring at roughly twoyear intervals.55 In 1826, the fifth number of the National Airs had been published, along with the first of Evenings in Greece. The revival of promotion for Lalla Rookh at the end of this year is serendipitous, as it anticipates Longmans’ publication of another Romantic Orientalist work, The Epicurean, the following summer.56 This unforeseen spike in publicity for Moore is explicable only from the perspective of book trade commerce and by an understanding of the remedial actions taken in a competition between authorised and unauthorised publishers of Lalla Rookh. However, these actions are apparently not matched by a corresponding increase in the sale and production of the work: stereotype impressions are printed in 1827, 1829, 1832, and 1835, before a reconfiguration of the plates from duodecimo to sextodecimo for the “eighteenth” numbered edition in 1836.57 The decreasing print runs for these impressions and the increasing intervals between their publication signify a gradual weakening of the market for the work, just as the move to sextodecimo stereotyping indicates a lower retail price (five shillings) and production cost for a less lucrative title.58 As the market for Lalla Rookh began to weaken in this period, Longmans were faced with a dilemma: they held exclusive ownership of a property which would remain in copyright until 1859. After that date, their monopoly on printing and selling the work would end, so they needed to revive interest in the work and secure yields on their copyright investment while the commercial advantage was theirs. The question of how to extract a financial return from a flagging or exhausted copyright

90  Cream of the Copyrights is addressed by the examples of two prominent illustrated editions of Lalla Rookh. The “Eminent Artists” edition is first published in 1839, during the period of the work’s publication in cheap sextodecimo impressions. However, it was first proposed by Longmans in 1836, the same year in which the acquisition of three “Spurious editions” is recorded in the Impression Books (MS 1393 1/H12: 240). Thomas Longman suggested a new edition of Lalla Rookh, “with some very good engravings in the shape of the best of Heath’s annuals” (qtd. in Briggs 194), referring to Charles Heath and his production of illustrated annuals such as the Keepsake and the Literary Souvenir (Heath). Thus, Heath and his staff were engaged to produce and engrave thirteen new illustrations for the work, making it by far the most expensively produced edition of Lalla Rookh to that point. In terms of unit costs for its text, this edition was comparable to other octavos at just under 2/11d., but the £436 spent on letterpress printing and paper is dwarfed by the outlay of more than £1,400 on illustration expenses (MS 1393 1/H13: 62). Three thousand copies comprised the first “Eminent Artists” edition, with one hundred copies of the illustrations printed on fine paper and sold at a higher price.59 The edition was robustly promoted by Longmans, with an advertising budget of £150 representing the highest for any individual impression of Lalla Rookh. The “Eminent Artists” edition was regularly reprinted in the following twenty years, providing the market with the option of a more expensive edition alongside the successive tranchings-down of price and format that would occur during the period.60 Once again, the motivations for publishing this luxurious edition of Lalla Rookh might be discerned in a number of factors issuing from diverse points in the bibliographical communication circuit: the reappearance of “spurious editions” likely prompted Longmans to reassert their copyright in the work, but the commercial success of illustrated literary annuals also suggested a particular format for its revival.61 Moreover, it anticipated Longmans’ publication of Moore’s canonical Poetical Works the following year. With the availability of the work in a number of different affordable formats, the publication of the “Eminent Artists” edition represented an echo of the prestige and luxury that were associated with the work and its author on its initial publication more than two decades previously. These factors were also evident in the publication in 1861 of a quarto edition illustrated by John Tenniel, but for a significantly different reason. Longmans were eager to maintain their association with Lalla Rookh in the form of another luxuriously illustrated edition because the copyright of the work had just expired. Between 1814 and 1842, copyright protection for a work extended to twenty-eight years after publication, or the life of the author, if longer. The Copyright Act of 1842, briefly discussed in the previous chapter, extended the period of copyright to the author’s lifetime plus seven years, or forty-two years from publication: by either criterion, Longmans’ copyright of Lalla Rookh expired in

Cream of the Copyrights  91 1859. With the text of the work now in the public domain, the publisher would immediately face competition from new cheap editions: a signal to the market that Moore’s work was now a “classic.”62 This situation prompted Longmans to focus on publishing a grand new illustrated edition, once again providing an alternative to the glut of inexpensive editions which would soon flood the marketplace.63 Anticipating the expiration of their copyright, Longmans engaged Tenniel to illustrate a new edition in February 1858, sending him copies of the “Eminent Artists” edition and the recent 32mo edition illustrated by Daniel Maclise (MS 1393 1/H15: 149; MS 1393 1/H15: 264).64 Though the main source of Tenniel’s enduring reputation—his illustrations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—was published in 1865, his fame and status before the Lalla Rookh commission were secured by his weekly caricatures and political cartoons for Punch (Curtis). For the new edition, he completed sixty-nine illustrations, earning the sum of £400 from Longmans. These illustrations, engraved on woodblocks by the prominent Dalziel Brothers firm, enabled a closer integration of text and image than previous illustrated editions, which incorporated intaglio illustrations on separate leaves (sometimes sold separately to the text). In addition, Thomas Sulman was commissioned to produce Persian-themed illustrations for the title page and for each of the work’s four parts. Consequently, this edition of 3,000 copies succeeded ‘Eminent Artists’ as the most expensively produced edition of Lalla Rookh, costing just under £2,000 (MS 1393 1/H16: 147). Compared to the first edition, this quarto edition of 1861 signifies a number of wide gulfs between the Regency and Victorian periods. A luxurious commodity in its time, the first edition looks austere in comparison to the lavishness of the Tenniel edition, with the evidence of advanced bookmaking technologies everywhere present in the latter. From more durable toned paper, to Sulman’s coloured title illustration, to the elaborately gilded and embossed bindings of many surviving copies, the characteristic ornamentation of Moore’s verse had finally found its extravagant material correlative.65 Moore did not survive to see this vision of his work, having died in 1852. Longmans’ revival of his work in this fashion testifies to the twin markets for an established classic: available as both a cheap reprint and an expensive illustrated edition. Two further quarto editions with Tenniel’s illustrations were published by Longmans in the 1860s, before it was reformatted as an octavo in 1879, the centenary of Moore’s birth. The Impression Book entry for this edition (MS 1393 1/H24: 28) offers a poignant perspective on the fate of Moore and Lalla Rookh as the century progressed. Though the edition comprised 2,500 copies, a note dated 27 May 1885, exactly sixty-eight years after the publication of the first edition, records what would have been unthinkable at the peak of the poet and the poem’s fame: “1149 [copies] reduced to sell to trade.” A year later, in May 1886, a further 830 copies were remaindered.

92  Cream of the Copyrights

Conclusion These three examples from the publication history of Lalla Rookh—the effects of publishers’ nomenclature, of pirated editions, and of changes in copyright status—each testify to occasions in which the material nature of the work changes, each with consequences for Moore and his authorial status. Further opportunities for investigation are still available: these might include a forensic examination and description of the true nature of editions and impressions across the eight decades in which the work was published by Longmans. Another might focus more closely on the nature of the work’s illustration by different artists and on patterns of textual influence on the imagery depicted. Broader, more diffuse sources of influence on the work’s publication history might be sought in tracing the popular and commercial fortunes of the long verse narrative, of the Romantic Orientalist genre, or of the popular taste for Orientalism. As I indicate above, accounting for textual variation across the entire course of its transmission at Longmans is a monumental task for a work of such popularity and possessed of such a complex history of publication. It would require extensive manual and mechanical collation of extant copies: and even if such a task were completed, the textual consequences could not be fully elaborated without a synthesis of the classificatory discrepancies described above. These investigations are beyond the scope of the present study but represent additional opportunities for knowledge that would further expand our understanding of how formulations of authorship may vary in accordance with changes in an author’s work. Thus, the core basis of this chapter is bibliographical, and though it shares theories and methods with other chapters in this book, its particular approach to authorship is its fundamental focus on the empirical evidence of bibliographical study and the complementary evidence of publishers’ archives. The functioning of the booktrade and its agents of nonauthorial meaning is legible within the surviving printed record of Lalla Rookh’s publication. However, the Impression Books of the Longmans firm are a valuable alibi for the conjectures arising from bibliographical study of Lalla Rookh’s material history, strengthening what is merely speculative, clarifying what is ambiguous, and correcting what is wrong. This unique set of data is what has made this particular publication history possible and what has enabled its use to illustrate different formulations of authorship at different scales and at different degrees of association with Thomas Moore. The bibliographical investigations of this chapter are central to understanding Longman and Moore’s exchange about the “cream of the copyrights.” Moore’s instinctive understanding of the situation is canny, with a view of the spoils of longevity as well as those more immediate rewards. While the sale of the Lalla Rookh copyright brought Moore

Cream of the Copyrights  93 immediate and ample wealth, he wagered on the more fertile future prospects of the Irish Melodies. In a sense, the race was unfair from the outset: with the Melodies capturing the literary and musical imaginations at once, its hopes for a lengthy afterlife were aimed at two cultural spheres. Thus, Lalla Rookh only partially achieved that criterion of longevity identified by McGann: “[t]he vaunted immortality sought after by the poetic impulse will be achieved, if it is achieved at all, in the continuous socialization of texts” (Textual 83). Despite a lengthy and varied afterlife, Lalla Rookh could not match that of the Melodies, but Longman’s positive characterisation of the work is notable, as it sharpens our focus on the publisher’s intense efforts to secure an appropriate return on his significant copyright investment. And here we find evidence, if not of immortality, then of the commercial imperative which also acts as a strong socialising force, its legacy a catalogue of material effects and bibliographic codes, shifting, in its progress, the shapes of the author and his work.

Notes

94  Cream of the Copyrights

9 10 11 12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

Ireland (28 October 2019), while the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed Robert Schumann’s oratorio, Das Paradies und die Peri (6 December 2019). See also Jordan’s account of the period (1: 259–81). “The various ‘theories’ of creation all ignore the process of making; they omit any account of production” (68). The eighteenth-century London printer (d. 1763), not the same John Watts who printed Moore’s Epistles in Philadelphia in 1806. Indeed, my method in this chapter shares some methodological similarities to the “life course” theory in the social sciences: a multidisciplinary paradigm that analyses (people’s) lives within a range of influential structural, historical, social, and cultural contexts (see, for example, Elder). Wilfred S. Dowden dates the letter to either March or April of 1812. Pearsall narrows the range to 22 March, “give or take a day” (107). John Moore had recently lost his position as barracks-master in Islandbridge, Dublin: a position which his son had acquired for him in 1806 by petitioning Lord Moira (Kelly 136, 280). Moore’s prefatory remarks to the third number of Irish Melodies are explicit about this audience, even if the veracity and sincerity of the claim is debatable: “a work of this nature … looks much higher for its audience and readers—it is found on the piano-fortes of the rich, and the educated—of those, who can afford to have their national zeal a little stimulated” (PW 4: 130). Saglia writes that, in this period, when “the West began to take over increasingly larger portions of Asia, the desire for knowledge became inextricably bound up with practices of control, colonization, and more or less direct exploitation” (“Orientalism” 467). I am conscious that the use of the term “Orientalism” is problematic because of its origins and endurance as a Western imperial construct. I use the term advisedly, following contemporaneous use and its acceptance in subsequent scholarship, but aware of Edward Said’s melancholic assertion that “Orientalism is after all a system for citing works and authors” (23). The notebook containing the first draft, now held in the Morgan Library (MA 947), has a note in the poet’s hand on the inner cover which reads: “Began this book Saturday evening, Nov. 23, 1811.” Both abstained from the topic of human-angelic love for the moment but returned to it for Manfred (1817) and The Loves of the Angels (1823). “But to aim at vigour and strong feeling after you is hopeless; — that region ‘was made for Caesar’” (UTM 1: 72). These terms, and Moore’s reference to Byron’s “invasion of the region,” are suffused with imagery of conquest that testifies to the Imperial undertones of the rivalry. Beneath the two poets’ correspondence is a perspective which views these Asian countries and their culture as territories to be plundered for literary gain. The dual significations of Byron’s statement, which might be read as an encouragement of his friend or as evidence of a pejorative association of Celtic and Oriental savagery, are described by Lennon: “[f]or nineteenth-century Anglocentric intellectuals, the Celtic-Oriental link could confirm the barbarity of the Irish; for Irish cultural nationalists, the Orient was a strategy to help obviate Empire” (xxxi). Previously, Moore had related to his music publisher, James Power, “I have told [Murray] that when it is finished, the highest bidder shall have it” (UTM 1: 65). On this occasion, however, he informed Murray “that if the appreciation of its value was left to myself, my conscience would direct me to the lowest bidder that offered” (LTM 1: 322).

Cream of the Copyrights  95





























96  Cream of the Copyrights









Cream of the Copyrights  97 4 4 I take some pleasure in the contradictory designation “true piracy,” which is intended to distinguish such illegal works from legal, though unauthorised, international reprints. The previous chapter discussed in detail the legal status of the unauthorised international reprint, while the next chapter deals with returns to similar legal territory to consider the intersections of blasphemy, copyright, and piracy in the case of The Loves of the Angels. 45 This copy is held at Loyola Marymount University Special Collections, and I am very grateful to Cynthia Becht for her insights on the acquisition, dating, and cataloguing of the book. 46 This address is confirmed by Todd (61) and Brown (59). Todd also records Dugdale’s relocation to 30 Russell Court in 1834. 47 The only extant copy of Sudbury’s edition that I have found is held by the British Library. Sudbury is listed in Todd (187) and Brown (193) and described by Ashbee: “John Sudbury carried on business from about 1820 to 1830, chiefly at No. 252, High Holborn, and did not hesitate to attach his name to the erotic books he published” (3: 126). 48 The “fourteenth” edition was advertised at this price in the Times on 19 July 1828, and the “fifteenth” edition on 2 September 1829. For this edition, Longmans commissioned new engravings of four of Westall’s illustrations of Lalla Rookh, first produced to be sold as a separate accompaniment to the initial quarto in 1817 (MS 1393 1/H11: 192). The cost of producing new engravings, £94/10/0, further affirms the scale of investment dedicated to counteracting the effects of the pirated editions. 49 MS 1393 1/H11: 119 records an expenditure of £99/1/10 on “[a]dvertising further.” 50 The next chapter examines some of these successful defences of piracy. 51 Briggs misses this significant moment in Longmans’ use of technology, claiming that the firm first “employed new technology in an 1851 octavo edition of Lalla Rookh printed on stereotype plates” (195). For further detail on the history and practice of stereotyping, see Kubler. 52 These figures are calculated from the costs for each impression of printing, paper, and coldpressing (but not including illustration costs). The reduction largely arises from the saving yielded by not having to pay for a new setting of type. With more than a year between impressions at this point, the option of leaving type standing was uneconomical. 53 This duodecimo edition presents some initial challenges to interpretation, however. Advertised in the Times as a foolscap octavo (“fcp. 8vo”), the Impression Book entries for the “fourteenth” (MS 1393 1/H11: 192) and “fifteenth” (MS 1393 1/H12: 23) editions also use this designation. However, on examination of copies from the “fourteenth” to “sixteenth” editions (held at Queen’s University Belfast) alongside their Impression Book costs, their duodecimo format is quickly apparent. For instance, all have fifteen signatures of twelve leaves plus a sixteenth, divided between the preliminary and final gathering (12°: A4 B-Q12 R8; 192 leaves): this matches the line items for printing sixteen sheets in each of the three relevant Impression Book entries. Moreover, the consistency of stereotype impression is evident in a cursory collation of the text and spacing of the three “editions.” Finally, the “sixteenth” edition, whose print run and printing costs are identical to the “fifteenth,” is correctly designated by the Impression Books as a duodecimo (MS 1393 1/H12: 120). The discrepancy may be explained by the fact that “foolscap octavo” was a commonly use industry term for a book measuring 6¾ in. × 4¼ in., the rough dimensions of these Lalla Rookh impressions. Here is another example of variance between publishers’ nomenclature and bibliographical classification. For an account of the bibliographical analysis

98  Cream of the Copyrights

54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63

64 65

and the rhetorical force of the foolscap octavo in the case of Lyrical Ballads, see Foxon and Boehm. One further sextodecimo impression was published before the new “Eminent Artists” edition, however. The exception is the 2,000 copies of the “thirteenth” edition in January 1826 (MS 1393 1/H11: 119). Lalla Rookh is advertised alongside The Epicurean in the Times in July, August, and September 1827. Curiously, the “seventeenth” edition is published in octavo with a new setting of type during this period, in 1832 (MS 1393 1/H12: 127). The London Catalogue of Books lists the price of Longmans’ Lalla Rookh sextodecimo at five shillings. The unit costs for duodecimo and sextodecimo impressions vary, with the latter roughly three shillings cheaper. Prices for the second “Eminent Artists” editions of 1842 are recorded in the advertising pages included in the copy of the 1844 edition of Lalla Rookh held at Queen’s University Belfast: “Twentieth edition (1842), 1 vol. medium 8vo. beautifully illustrated with 13 Engravings, finished in the highest style of art, 21s. handsomely bound in cloth and ornamented; morocco, 36s.; or 42s. with India Proof Plates, cloth.” The final “Eminent Artists” edition was printed in December 1857, at which time a 32mo version of Lalla Rookh was available for 2/6d. (St Clair 620). For a detailed study of the literary annual in this period, see Harris. For context on the practice, motivations, and consequences of publishing “classic” works, compare the period of c.1780–1808 in England, when the public domain was expanded to include all works first printed in England or Scotland before 1746 (St Clair 122–39). Routledge published an edition of Lalla Rookh in 1859 costing 1/6d. (St Clair 620). Further editions published in the same year included those by T. J. Allman (London), Galls & Inglis (Edinburgh), and Milner & Sowerby (Halifax). Better known for other associations with Thomas Moore’s work (see Campbell), Maclise provided only a title-page illustration for this editions, depicting Feramorz performing a song for Lalla Rookh and her retinue. However, its comparatively low price illustrates how the mechanisation of printing in the later nineteenth century had reduced the costs of the book trade. The Times carried an advertisement for the Tenniel edition on 18 October 1860, with prices set at twenty-one shillings in ornamental covers, or thirty-six shillings bound in morocco leather (13).

4

Orientalising the Angels Blasphemy, Copyright, and Revision

On 9 January 1823, Thomas Moore opened a copy of the new issue of John Bull to find a denunciation of his latest work, The Loves of the Angels. The review, Moore concluded, “grossly abuse[d]” his long narrative poem and made strong efforts “(which I rather fear may be but too successful in some quarters) to brand it with a character of impiety and blasphemy” (JTM 2: 614). Subsequent reviews confirmed the author’s fears, many condemning the impiety of the work’s titular focus: romantic relations between angels and mortals. Fearing a critical tide of moral outrage against the poem, Moore wrote to John Murray, publisher of the Quarterly Review, to plead for gentle treatment: “I only hope & trust that there will be no giving in to the cry of ‘impiety’ ‘blasphemy’ &c.” (LTM 2: 511). To Moore’s relief, Murray’s influential periodical did not publish a review of the poem, but many other members of the critical establishment followed John Bull’s lead in accusing the poem and its author of an “abominable mixture of the most sacred subjects with mundane matters and earthly passions” (6). Despite these unpromising reviews, initial sales of the poem were encouraging, with 6,000 copies sold within a month (UTM 1: 259). However, the gathering critical outcry convinced Moore and his publishers, Longmans, of the urgent need to take measures to protect the work’s future prospects against controversy. Thus, midway through the sale of the fourth edition, less than one month after its initial publication, Moore announced his “idea of orientalising the ‘Angels’” (JTM 2: 617) by changing their religion from Christianity to Islam. From the fifth edition onwards, the angels duly appeared in their revised religious guise. Although a romantic poem, The Loves of the Angels differs notably in form and content from the amatory verse of Moore’s early career. A restrained, vaguely Miltonic disquisition on mortal and immortal love, its central inspiration was found in an “erroneous translation” (1: viii)1 of the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis and in the obscure apocrypha of the Book of Enoch. In both, “the Sons of God,” apparently intended to refer to the descendants of Seth, third son of Adam and Eve (1: 126–7), are mistakenly called “the Angels of God.” As these individuals “took wives for themselves of all that they chose” (Gen. 6.2), a heavenly

100  Orientalising the Angels origin would present some practical and doctrinal challenges to their actions. Having found his subject, Moore followed the episodic structure of his earlier success in narrative poetry, Lalla Rookh: within a framing verse narrative, this work presented three discrete tales in which a male angel relates his romantic encounter with an earthly woman.2 Despite the striking and unusual nature of its revision and evolution, the poem remains a relatively neglected work within Moore’s oeuvre. Critics have addressed its associations with works by Lord Byron, as I do below, as well as the influence of the Book of Enoch on its conception and composition.3 The social and cultural forces which viewed the poem’s conversion to Islam as adequate recompense for its apparent impiety are ripe for Romantic Orientalist and postcolonial readings, which are beyond the scope of this chapter. Lord Byron, whose productive and antagonistic presence during the composition of Lalla Rookh was discussed in the last chapter, returns here as a central interlocutor. The two poets correspond about their respective religious-themed works from this period, but, more importantly, Byron provides a model for Moore of the potential consequences of being branded with the mark of blasphemy. In this chapter, I compare the two poets, analysing their separate engagements with critical, public, and legal perceptions of their religious-themed works. What results in each case is a set of constraints on their status and practice as authors, though the two are conspicuously distinguished by their responses. Accusations of blasphemy threatened the legal and commercial integrity of works such as Cain (1821) and The Loves of the Angels, and the contrasting reactions of the two poets provide a lens through which to examine their differing perspectives on authorship and revision. The first part of this chapter examines the influence of a legal system which refused copyright in works found to be obscene or blasphemous. Legal findings against Cain provoked a dual response from Byron, who insisted on his authorial autonomy and identity but also acknowledged the growing power and influence of a mass reading public. The same findings were interpreted by Moore as a prompt to adopt a more flexible mode of authorship where its broad social and cultural formulation was reflected in a recognition of textual contingency. The second part traces the effects of that recognition in Moore’s substantive revisions to the fifth edition of The Loves of the Angels, while also analysing the degree to which the poet also responded to thematic and stylistic criticisms voiced in the reviews of critical periodicals. As previous chapters have illustrated, this reactive instinct was an authorial measure developed by Moore in response to critical hostility suffered early in his career and explains, in part, his decision to revise the poem. The final part of the chapter examines paradoxes in the interactions between legal regulations of intellectual property and obscenity, which shaped the two authors’ responses in different ways. This chapter preserves and extends

Orientalising the Angels  101 the methodological focuses of the previous chapters in its analysis of the intersections of authorship, copyright, and textual fluidity. It differs in its greater emphasis on legal (as opposed to solely critical) forces which represented commercial and criminal threats to The Loves of the Angels, exerting pressures which prompted Moore to intervene decisively in revising the text of his poem.

The Mark of Cain A month before the publication of The Loves of the Angels, on 27 November 1822, Longmans received an anonymous letter at their offices warning them to “[b]eware of the fate of Murray and of Cain!” (JTM 2: 593).4 The message referred to the publication a year previously of Lord Byron’s verse drama, Cain: a rendering of the biblical story of Cain and Abel which prompted critical accusations of blasphemy and provided legal complications for its publisher, John Murray.5 In drawing a connection between Cain and The Loves of the Angels, Longmans’ anonymous correspondent astutely recognised a link between two works whose treatment of religious materials threatened to undermine their legal status and drew attention to a case whose precedent and consequences would influence Moore’s subsequent decision to make fundamental revisions to his poem. Byron’s verse drama was published on 19 December 1821 in a volume also containing Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari. The work carries an epigraph from the Book of Genesis (3.1) on its title page, and the preface explicitly records Byron’s relationship to scriptural writings. Here, the author remarked that on the rare occasions when he adopted language from “actual Scripture” (335), he made only minimal adjustments to fit the language to his prosodic requirements. This explicit acknowledgement of adopting and adapting authentic scriptural materials is a factor which makes Cain a less morally defensible work than The Loves of the Angels, according to the rhetoric and strictures of the period. A more conceptual adaptation of biblical material sees Cain in the role of the rebellious Byronic hero, refusing to praise God after having been cast out of Eden and receiving from Lucifer a vision of natural destruction and human mortality. Inevitably and immediately, its content and connection to scripture earned Cain a hostile critical reception, with several prominent journals alluding to the work’s blasphemous intent.6 Echoing the terms of Francis Jeffrey’s pivotal 1806 critique of Moore, Henry Crabb Robinson thought the work “calculated to spread infidelity … [and] do nothing but harm” (1: 281), while Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse commented that “[s]ome will call it blasphemous, and I think the whole world will finally agree in thinking it unworthy” (2: 172). Curiously enough, even Murray’s own periodical, the Quarterly Review, joined the chorus of denunciation,

102  Orientalising the Angels with the kind of article that prompted Moore to write to Murray with his appeal for mercy. In that journal, clergyman Reginald Heber wrote an unsigned review of Byron’s “monstrous creed” (516) and cited the unauthorised publication of Cain as one of his motivations for writing the review: “those speculations which [Byron] designed for the educated ranks alone, are thrown open to the gaze of the persons most likely to be influenced by them, and disseminated, with remorseless activity, among the young, the ignorant, and the poor” (478). In so doing, Heber referred to the widespread dissemination occasioned by the unauthorised publication of Cain and to a legal case whose authorial ramifications would provide an object lesson for Moore and The Loves of the Angels.7 On 12 February 1822, Lord Chancellor Eldon presided over the case of Murray v. Benbow in the civil Court of Chancery in London. In the case, Murray had filed for an injunction against William Benbow, who had printed an unauthorised edition of Cain. The distinctions between England’s criminal and civil courts are important for understanding the complexities and consequences of this particular case: in criminal or common law, obscene or immoral publications were viewed as a threat to society at large, and the responsible subjects were charged with a criminal offence by the crown. In civil or equity courts, proceedings were brought by private individuals against one another, and judgements were made against a publication if it was found to be obscene or immoral. Published a year after this case, Richard Godson’s A Practical Treatise on the Law of Patents for Inventions and of Copyright summarises the position thus: “[t]he courts of common law, and of equity, strive to protect the morals of the public. It is a principle on which this part of the law rests, that there cannot be copyright in any work, the tendency of which is obscene or immoral” (212). Questions of morality or obscenity were not factors in Murray’s decision to seek an injunction: he was solely motivated to arrest the breach of his copyright represented by the publication of Benbow’s unauthorised edition. However, in presenting his judgement on Murray v. Benbow, Eldon outlined the jurisdiction of the civil court with respect to matters of literary property: “[n]ow if the object of the present publication be to vilify and bring into discredit that portion of the Scripture history on which it is founded, it is a publication for the piracy of which the party could not recover any damages at law” (“Law” 3). Thus, Eldon handed the burden of proof to Murray, challenging him to demonstrate the work’s moral probity and to “show me that you can maintain an action upon it” (“Law” 3) in a court of law. Until such a time, Eldon ruled that he could not grant an injunction against Benbow because he “entertain[ed] a reasonable doubt on the character of the book” (“Law” 3). Suddenly, Murray was presented with an unanticipated dilemma: prove Cain’s morality or lose its copyright. Eldon’s judgement was consistent with the precedent which he established in the landmark case of Southey v. Sherwood in 1817. On that

Orientalising the Angels  103 occasion, he ruled that an injunction could not be granted against Sherwood, Neely, and Jones’ unauthorised publication of Robert Southey’s “mischievous” (qtd. in Richardson) and anti-monarchical drama Wat Tyler, written in 1794.8 The absence of legal protection for obscene or immoral publications had productive consequences for opportunistic and unauthorised reprinting: morally dubious publications, which held an inherent subversive appeal, were effectively part of the public domain and hence available for publication without the need to pay a copyright fee or royalties. As the brief focus on pirate printers in Benbow’s milieu in the last chapter illustrated, pornographic publications were attractive commercial propositions, in part, because their content was free and unprotected by copyright. For publishers who held the now redundant copyright in unprotected works like Wat Tyler, the consequences were proportionately grave: the market for the work was undermined by the lower prices at which the unauthorised publishers sold their editions,9 and their ability to achieve a return on the investment represented by the copyright payment was greatly diminished. For publishers of commercially successful authors like Byron and Moore, who often commanded high prices for the sale of their copyrights, the consequences were greater still.10 This fear of piracy was implicitly encoded in Longmans’ suggestions to Moore that he revise The Loves of the Angels for its fifth edition and echoed in their explicit concern that the poem’s connection to scripture would damage its popular appeal. The low threshold for judging a work’s obscenity or immorality in the civil courts posed a particular challenge to publishers. As the case of Murray v. Benbow attests, all that was required for the judge to refuse an injunction was a reasonable doubt about the moral character of the work. Unlike the courts of law, which assessed a work’s threat to the general morals of society or a particular portion thereof, the civil law “never developed its own test or definition for obscenity” (Saunders 434). Thus, while we can read clearly between the lines to ascertain Eldon’s views on whether Cain’s intent was “to bring discredit upon Scripture history and doctrines” (“Law” 3), he ultimately reserved judgement on that point, stating that “[t]his question I have no right to determine” (“Law” 3). Arising from this distinction between the jurisdictions of the civil and criminal courts is a situation which apparently contradicted the stated aim of both courts: “to protect the morals of the public” (Godson 212). By refusing to offer copyright protection to a work which was potentially injurious to public morality, the civil courts paved the way for that work’s increased circulation in society at the hands of unauthorised publishers. Eldon explicitly recognised this paradox in his judgements on the Wat Tyler and Cain cases,11 and unauthorised publishers began to exploit the court’s low threshold of evidence for immorality to argue that injunctions against their publications be denied or dissolved.

104  Orientalising the Angels On 9 August 1823, in the same period in which he pirated Lalla Rookh,12 William Dugdale appeared at the Vice-Chancellor’s civil court to argue for the dissolution of an ex-parte injunction that had been granted against him for his unauthorised edition of Cantos VI–VIII of Don Juan. Dugdale’s absence from the case at which the injunction was initially granted is notable: on that occasion, the case was perceived as a simple and clear instance of piracy. Had Dugdale been present, he would likely have brought the issue of morality to bear on the case, as he did at his subsequent appeal. The essence of Dugdale’s plea was that the work’s “tendency was immoral in the highest sense of the word, most calculated to taint the minds of the public, licentious, in every way dangerous, and most destructive of the morals of the community at large” (“Law” 2). As evidence to support this claim, he cited the absence of the publisher’s name from the title page of Don Juan, and Murray’s publication of the work in three separate editions, the cheapest of which (selling at one shilling), was publicly advertised as a measure to counteract piracy. Not only did these actions point to an implicit acknowledgement of the work’s immorality,13 Dugdale argued, the poem was rife with dubious content: “the hero (Don Juan) was conducted through the most licentious scenes, and their immorality became still more calculated to injure the morals of the public, for their being written in such a warm poetic style” (“Law” 2). Representing Byron, Daniel Wakefield responded with an argument that the work itself contained nothing immoral and that “corrupt meaning could only be implied by those who were themselves corrupt” (“Law” 2). He cited the cases of both Cain and Wat Tyler as examples where establishing the total corruption of a work (as opposed to the presence of corrupt portions) was a necessary factor in making a judgement about the proposed injunction. With both sides of the case making arguments grounded in ambiguous and nebulous aspects of the literary work, reasonable doubt about the moral character of Don Juan inevitably followed. On 11 August, Vice-Chancellor Sir John Leach dissolved the injunction against Dugdale and, as in the case of Cain, decided that the judgement of a court of law was needed to affirm the appropriateness of an injunction.14 Dugdale represented himself in court, suggesting a high degree of self-confidence in his own argumentative abilities: the precarious nature of his profession demanded such levels of boldness and bravura. Similarly, the knowledge that he could exploit ambiguities in the law and in the interpretation of literary morality rendered any qualms about the legality of his actions moot. His success in overturning the Don Juan injunction came in the same year that he published an unauthorised edition of The Loves of the Angels: in doing so, Dugdale demonstrated an implicit confidence in his ability to argue for that work’s blasphemous or immoral nature. That action, combined with Dugdale’s demonstrated success in muddying the legal waters for prominent authors and their

Orientalising the Angels  105 publishers, gave Moore and Longmans occasion to fear for the prospects of The Loves of the Angels. The year 1823 was the second year of Dugdale’s work as an independent publisher (Todd 61; Brown 59). In these early years, his literary publications were dominated by poets of the socalled Satanic School (Byron and Shelley, as well as Moore), alongside the range of obscene and pornographic titles in his catalogue.15 The 1823 edition of The Loves of the Angels was not the only unauthorised version of the poem to appear: the following year saw the publication of an edition by William Chubb, an associate of Dugdale, and the latter reprinted the poem in a smaller format in 1826.16 The appeal of the poem to this close-knit network of unauthorised and pornographic publishers was evident within days of the first authorised edition’s appearance, as Benbow printed a portion of the poem under the title of “The Witchery of Woman” in the 1 January 1823 issue of his soft-core Rambler’s Magazine (45–6).17 Dugdale’s 1823 edition reproduced the Christian text of the first edition of The Loves of the Angels, as did his 1826 edition, and Chubb’s. The likely practical reason for this related to the rapid responsiveness of unauthorised publishers: getting their reprints to market as soon as possible after the original work’s appearance was a crucial commercial imperative.18 Though the precise date of Dugdale’s edition is unknown,19 it is highly probable that it appeared early in 1823, before the publication of the revised fifth edition. But a more strategic reason for reprinting the text of the first edition was its established public and critical perception as a blasphemous work. For this specific reason, Dugdale’s edition was likely to have been a source of great alarm for Moore and Longmans.

Immoral Quandary What emerges from the situation represented by Cain—and that faced by Moore and Longmans with The Loves of the Angels—is a complex matrix of legal and commercial perspectives that bear very directly on questions of authorship and notions of authorial identity, autonomy, and stability. The publisher who possesses the copyright of a potentially obscene or immoral work is placed in a difficult double-bind, and the dilemma faced by Murray and contemplated by Longmans may be summarised thus: once a copyright is violated by the publication of an unauthorised reprint, its owner may seek an injunction against its publication in civil court. Having an injunction granted is the simplest and most positive outcome for the authorised publisher, but, as Dugdale’s testimony illustrates, creating a reasonable doubt about the moral character of the work is a relatively simple task and is central to the unauthorised publisher’s initial decision to reprint a work in the first place. If the injunction is refused or successfully dissolved, as in the example of Dugdale, the copyright holder fails

106  Orientalising the Angels to stop the black market for the work. In addition, the consequent doubt about the work’s morality increases the likelihood of criminal proceedings being brought against the work by the attorney general, the Constitutional Association, or the Society for the Suppression of Vice. 20 Similarly, the route proposed by the magistrate in the cases that rejected injunctions for Cain and Don Juan was also fraught. The process to clear any doubt about the work’s moral character in criminal court carried a far greater risk for defeat—imprisonment— than the punitive measures of civil court. 21 Moreover, refusing to seek an injunction against the printer of an unauthorised publication was also viewed as an implicit admission of guilt by the publisher and was likely to attract the attention of the self-proclaimed “moral guardians” who initiated criminal cases against works of apparently dubious morality. 22 In such trying circumstances, it is easy to understand why some publishers and authors adopted an aversion to these judicial risks and took alternative measures to ameliorate the dangers, even if they amounted to the kinds of self-censorship represented by Moore’s revisions to The Loves of the Angels. The presence of many organisations like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, coupled with the introduction of a series of repressive legislative measures, saw the Romantic period coincide with the British state’s “last sustained attempt in the country’s history to control the minds of citizens by controlling their access to print” (St Clair 309). Notwithstanding the irony that many of these regulatory measures brought about an unintended ecology of cheap and plentiful reprints, their force and threat can be traced in the relationships between authors and their legitimate publishers. In the correspondence of Byron and Moore with their publishers, we see both authors evaluating the risk of moral ambiguities in publications and querying such nebulous features as “tendencies” and “intentions.”23 Writing of Murray’s concerns about Cain and requests for revisions to the text a month before its publication, Byron complained: “[t]o me he talks of the power—of ‘Cain’ … but he cants about it’s [sic] tendency also.—There never was such cant” (BLJ 9: 60). In this instance, Byron stated his principled objection to revision as injurious to the potentially powerful effects of spontaneous composition: “[t]here is no occasion for a revise—it is only losing time. … I told you before that I can never recast anything.—I am like the Tiger—if I miss the first spring—I go growling back to my jungle again—but if I do hit—it is crushing” (BLJ 9: 45). 24 In each case, Byron objected to the constraints which Murray’s concerns placed upon his essential status as an autonomous author. In legal terms too, Byron’s status as an author who could assert his ownership of a copyright was destabilised by the potentially immoral character of his work. Under such conditions, only an arbitrary tribunal of public opinion (or, practically, the judgement of a criminal jury) could confirm his status as an author on the condition

Orientalising the Angels  107 that his work was judged to be free from obscenity or immorality. In these circumstances, as Saunders observes, “the legal personality of the author … has no essential unity” (435): to be an obscene or immoral author is incompatible with being a professional author in the literary marketplace. The practical source of this disunity was the situation which held an author responsible and answerable to an external arbiter of their work’s morality. In legal terms, this arbiter is the public, though in reality, organisations such as the critical reviewing establishment and the Society for the Suppression of Vice acted on behalf of the public (in however circumscribed a form) when they encountered a work which they perceived to represent a threat to its morality. 25 The discourse of critical journals in this period about Byron, Moore, and their immoral confreres echoes the terms used by Dugdale and Wakefield in the case relating to the Don Juan injunction—intention and calculation to corrupt are identified and held among the most heinous and threatening poetic crimes. Francis Jeffrey’s identification of a deliberate intent to corrupt in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems was the specific charge for which Moore sought satisfaction in challenging the reviewer to a duel in 1806. 26 In this sense, critical reviewers wielded a powerful tool in their ability to provoke a reasonable doubt about the morality of an author’s work, and the act of assessing an author’s intentions in these terms bore dramatic legal and commercial consequences. While the principle of copyright was afforded to authors without reference to any qualifying conditions for their work, the practice of refusing copyright for immoral or obscene publications placed authors in a deliberate and strategic relationship with works of this nature. As Moore and Byron demonstrate, authors responded to this de facto restriction on creative freedom in notably different ways.

Revising The Loves of the Angels The precise timescale of Moore’s revisions for the fifth edition of The Loves of the Angels is unclear, but evidence suggests that the task was completed in roughly two months following 18 January 1823. On that date, Moore recorded in his journal that Longmans “have apprised me that I must revise for a fifth edition” and that “if they thought it would not be too late, I could make the ‘Angels’ completely eastern, and thus get rid of that connection with the Scriptures, which they fear will, in the long run, be a drag on the popularity of the poem” (JTM 2: 617). 27 The poet’s diligence in completing this task is evident in the journal entry for the following day: “Turned over my ‘D’Herbelot,’ &c. for the project of turning the poor ‘Angels’ into ‘Turks’” (JTM 2: 617). In early February, Moore wrote to Owen Rees of the Longmans firm to promise a forthcoming “continual supply of [revised] sheets” (UTM 1: 262). In a letter

108  Orientalising the Angels dated before 14 February, Moore sent some revised sheets to his friend John Wilson Croker accompanied by commentary on his progress:28 My present inclosures contain the transmogrification of my angels into Mussulmans, which I rather think will amuse you, as showing what convenient things religions are sometimes, and how easily they slide into one another.—I have put in four additional lines, and altered as many words, and the whole thing might now have been written by a Mufti. (UTM 1: 263) Whether Moore’s inclosures represented his complete revisions for the poem is uncertain, but at this point, he underestimated the scale of revision present in the fifth edition.29 That process was evidently completed by 23 March, as on that date, he wrote to Croker that “[y]ou have had a respite from my Longman packets lately, as my corrected Edition is finished” (LTM 2: 515). Moore’s correspondence with Croker casually suggests that the revisions made for the fifth edition were trivial, amounting to the substitution of one religion for another. However, his description of the extent of revision as “four additional lines, and… as many words” is inaccurate. The scale of revision was far greater and involved revisions to thirtyseven individual lines, as well as to three separate four-line groups. The first substantive revision occurs at the beginning of the poem, where Moore added four new lines to the fifth edition to explicitly identify the Islamic faith of the three angels: Spirits, who once, in brotherhood Of faith and bliss, near Alla stood, And o’er whose cheeks full oft had blown That blessed wind, which wafts his throne—.(5: 3) This change is representative of one of Moore’s strategies for Orientalising the poem: an amendment in the text moves its religious associations from Christianity to Islam, while a paratextual revision appeals to a relevant authority to underline and support the legitimacy of the new context. Moore’s strategy here is familiar, as poetic and prosaic voices modulate between text and paratext to convey different categories of information to the reader.30 In this instance, Moore appended a footnote to “That blessed wind” to direct the reader to the “Preliminary Discourse” of George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an. Sale describes “the sound of the bells hanging on the trees, which will be put in motion by the wind proceeding from the throne of God, so often as the blessed wish for music” (1: 132). Sale and D’Herbelot are regularly invoked in the notes to this poem and to Lalla Rookh, often for the purposes of providing Orientalist authority for imagery that seems characteristic of

Orientalising the Angels  109 Moore. The motivations for doing so are evidence of Moore’s wish to demonstrate his scrupulous research on Eastern culture and customs but also of the apparent seamlessness with which the Orientalist mode accommodated his distinctive poetic style. In the “Third Angel’s Story,” Moore omitted four lines with specific Christian connotations in the fifth edition. The lines referred to a “hymeneal chaplet” as a symbol of marriage which is prohibited in remarriage in the Catholic tradition. Then first did woman’s virgin brow That hymeneal chaplet wear, Which when it dies, no second vow Can bid a new one bloom out there—. (1: 113) This innocuous, apparently secular image represented the purity of the angel Zaraph and the mortal Nama’s love. However, Moore glossed these lines in the first edition, clarifying the precise religious significance of the image: “In the Catholic church, when a widow is married, she is not, I believe, allowed to wear flowers on her head” (1: 147). An endnote anchored at the point of omission in the fifth edition attests to the incompatibility of the lines with his “Mahometan Poem.” In the same note, Moore characterised the sentiment of the original lines as the only obstacle in his revision of the entire poem: “[it] has occasioned the only hesitation or difficulty, which I have experienced in converting the poem to Islamism” (1: 145). While Moore provided transparent testimony about his revision of the poem on this occasion, most of the changes in the fifth edition are silent. The most prevalent category comprises minor revisions to words, phrases, or lines which remove or modify Christian vocabulary and imagery. Here, Moore’s claim of altering four words once again underestimated the extent of revision. The word “God” is changed nine times, providing further evidence of Moore’s particular approach to Orientalising the poem. The most obvious change—“Alla” for “God”—occurs on only three occasions, with the additional syllable in “Alla” precluding a straightforward substitution of one word for the other. The least intrusive of these deific changes replaces “Where God’s sublimest secrets lie?—” (1: 29) with “Where Alla’s grandest secrets lie?—” (5: 29). The other substitutions have a knock-on effect on the adjacent metre and sense and are less easily assimilated. The first edition’s “Not only what God loves to show, / But all that He hath seal’d below” (1: 65) becomes, in the fifth, “Not only all that, full reveal’d, / The’ eternal Alla loves to show, / But all that He hath wisely seal’d” (5: 66). The effect of this revision in the fifth edition is an increased redundancy in narrative terms and the substitution of a rhyming triplet (characteristically favoured by Moore) for an abab rhyme.31 While the “hymeneal chaplet” was the image that created

110  Orientalising the Angels narrative inconsistency in the Orientalised poem, Moore also made prosodic compromises to accommodate its revised context. However, his compromises were fewer than they might have been. The casual attitude Moore adopted in his comments to Croker is most accurately reflected in an inconsistent approach to expunging the poem’s Christian content. The nine instances in which “God” is excised are united by the use of the word as a proper noun in the first edition: stood on God’s own ground (1: 19) | trod celestial ground (5: 19); By God’s command (1: 35) | On high behests (5: 35); Which God made (1: 43) | Which sprung there. (5: 43) On numerous occasions, the use of “God” as a common noun in the first edition goes unrevised in the fifth. In addition, the capitalisation of the word is not a reliable means of distinguishing common and proper nouns in the poem: “her God” (5: 24); “Demon or God” (5: 59); “their God” (5: 117). A consistently different treatment of the proper and common noun forms would be acceptable and understandable, but Moore also left many uses of the proper noun unchanged in the fifth edition: “all God’s works” (5: 42); “of God she sung” (5: 110); “God’s most disturbing mystery” (5: 36); “Merciful God!” (5: 95). Perhaps regretting this inconsistent approach, Moore revised almost half of these in preparing the poem for his Poetical Works in 1840–1, including the latter two, which became “Creation’s strangest mystery” (8: 38) and “Merciful Alla!” (8: 82).32 The uneven nature of the revisions may be explained by the particular attention Moore devoted to emphasising the Islamic theme at key establishing points of the poem. Just as the addition of four lines near the beginning of the poem places the angels unambiguously beside Alla, the second and third of the angels’ stories reaffirm the religious context at the outset. The third and fourth lines of “The Second Angel’s Story” are revised from “He, whom all living things obey / Summon’d his chief angelic powers” (1: 33) to “Alla convok’d the bright array / Of his supreme angelic powers” (5: 33). Similarly, the beginning of “The Third Angel’s Story” sees four separate revisions in its opening two pages, removing the Christian connotations of “Almighty” and “God”: As if particularly God’s own (1: 104) | Of Alla, as if most his own (5: 105); Often, when from the’ Almighty brow (1: 105) | Oft, when from Alla’s lifted brow. (5: 107) In order to satisfy the critical outcry about the perceived impiety of the poem, Moore’s general strategy dedicated particular attention to the beginnings of the frame and internal narratives, while taking a less consistent approach to revision within the bodies of the texts.

Orientalising the Angels  111 The revisions in the fifth edition of The Loves of the Angels are not exclusively religious, however. Moore seized the opportunity provided by the spiritual adjustments to make further changes in response to particular stylistic criticisms raised in critical reviews of the poem. Some minor changes add little to a verse: “bright creature!” (1: 65) | “fair creature!” (5: 65), while others revise awkward diction in the original: “how I sung / Exulting out” (1: 40) | “how I sung / Exultingly” (5: 40). More substantial revisions address prosodic issues, including a change from an unstressed to a stressed line-ending rhyme (Table 4.1).33 And a further revision of awkward diction and syllabic excess to the customary tetrameter of the poem (Table 4.2). Much of the labour required in Orientalising the poem may be found in its footnotes and endnotes. These paratexts bear the weight of Moore’s scholarly tendencies, which are deployed in the task of replacing the Christian apparatus and commentary. Moore glossed some of his textual revisions, but just as often, he appended an Islamic or Oriental footnote to a phrase that remained unchanged from the first edition. His purpose in doing so was to further emphasise the new contextual frame of the poem and to legitimise his choices of certain vocabulary within the verse. Should any doubts remain for the reader about the morality of the poem and its author, the paratexts’ appeals to reality attest that this work is no mere blasphemous or amorous artifice. For example, the simile that describes stars—“That watch, like winking sentinels” (1: 39; 5: 39)—in both editions has an accompanying footnote and endnote in the fifth edition explaining the relationship of the image to “the cosmogony of the antient Persians.”34 On other occasions, paratexts are revised to fit the new Islamic context: the “Spirits of Knowledge” glossed as “The Cherubim” (1: 30) in the first edition are described as “The Kerubiin, as the Mussulmans call them” (5: 30) in the fifth. In the expediency of Moore’s revisions, we see evidence of his claim about the ease with which religions “slide into one another” but also of his characteristically strategic balance of differently signifying textual and paratextual registers. Table 4.1 Revising rhyme At length, as slowly I descended To view more near a sight so splendid (1: 7)

At length, as from that airy height I gently lower’d my breathless flight (5: 7)

Table 4.2 Revising metre Were such, when glittering out all o’er, As mortal eye-lids wink’d before (1: 30)

Were such as, when effus’d all o’er, The eyes of mortals wink’d before (5: 30)

112  Orientalising the Angels

Reviews and Revisions The sequence of Moore’s revisions for the fifth edition is difficult to deduce because of the lack of precise detail about their progress in his letter and journals and the absence of confirmed dates for some of the letters (including that to Croker quoted above). 35 Having begun the process of revision on 19 January, he apparently recorded some completed corrections in journal entries from early February: “[s]ent up two sheets of the corrected ‘Angels’” (5 Feb, 2: 619) and “[s]ent up more sheets of the ‘Angels’” (7–9 Feb, 2: 619). The destination of these sheets is not recorded, but the likely recipients are Croker or Longmans. The sentence following the latter report mentions Longmans but is inconclusive on the question of the sheets’ destination: “[h]ave heard nothing of the Longmans for a long time, and fear my faithful correspondent, Rees, must be very ill” (2: 619). At any rate, this sequence does little to confirm the nature and extent of revisions completed by Moore by this date. Determining the sequence of revision is desirable as it would help to reveal the precise degree to which Moore actively responded to criticisms in the reviews that he read during this period. For example, a journal entry dated 12–15 March records Moore receiving “several more reviews of the ‘Angels’” (2: 619), including the “long-expected broadside from ‘Blackwood’ … which is a tolerably murderous discharge, and (I must say for it) very ably served” (2: 619–20). The Blackwood’s assessment of The Loves of the Angels is negative, though the review is contradictory in its varying declarations of admiration for and disgust at Moore. It combines outrage at the poet’s perceived impiety with criticisms of the characterisation of the angels and the nature of their passions. As evidence of Moore’s immorality, the Blackwood’s reviewer provided a catalogue of twenty-six quotations from the poem to illustrate “how the mind may acquire unconsciously a habit of speaking more irreverently of divine things” (67). Notably, thirteen of these impious passages are revised for the fifth edition (and a further four for the Poetical Works in 1840–1). Moore may have independently identified these offensive passages for revision, but an equally plausible scenario is that he noted the fervour of the Blackwood’s review and actively responded to its convenient catalogue in the course of his revisions. In that case, the Blackwood’s reviewer may be vindicated in their confident assertion that “should Mr Moore himself chance to look over our pages, we do not fear … that he will wholly dissent from our judgment” (68). The conclusion of “The Third Angel’s Story”—and of the poem itself—provides a further instance of Moore’s active engagement with the critical establishment. The story concerns the angel Zaraph and his mortal love Nama, who are punished for their transgressive love by

Orientalising the Angels  113 being condemned to remain on earth until the end of time. The closing line describes how the couple might be identified: Should we e’er meet with aught so pure, So perfect here, we may be sure, There is but one such pair below, And, as we bless them on their way, Through the world’s wilderness, may say, “There Zaraph and his Nama go.” (1: 122) The Monthly Review, whose article on The Loves of the Angels Moore described on 1 February as “very twaddling” (JTM 2: 618), takes specific issue with these lines. After quoting at length from the poem, the reviewer paused to describe the conclusion of the poem as “generally beautiful in expression and melody” (90). The praise of Moore’s musical verse is swiftly qualified, however, as “so obviously capable of a ludicrous application” (90). The reviewer criticised the exposition of the final line (“Ostendi digitis, et dicier, hic est!”) and noted that “we shrink from quoting it, and earnestly recommend its alteration in another edition” (90). Despite the twaddling nature of the review, Moore noted that it “will do the poem mischief, as it takes up the Puritan tone about it” (JTM 2: 618) and dutifully revised the final four lines for the fifth edition: ’Tis Zaraph and his bride we see— And call young lovers round, to view The pilgrim pair, as they pursue Their pathway tow’rds eternity. (5: 123) The general tone and substance of the critical reviews and their anticipated effects on the reading public are an additional factor in explaining the revisions to the fifth edition of The Loves of the Angels. Moore was alert to the manner in which critical reviews of his early amatory verse had contributed to a persistent critical and public image which presented him as immoral and lascivious.36 That these religiously oriented public criticisms were the primary motivation for revising the poem is less probable. That decision was more likely motivated by a number of factors which certainly included Moore’s sensitivity to critical rebuke and its potential for reputational damage, but also by his and his publisher’s awareness of the legal status of blasphemous literature. The threat of losing the protection of copyright, of being reprinted by unauthorised publishers, and of suffering commercial losses are arguably more compelling and wide-reaching effects than the risks of an individual author stoking the ire of the critical establishment.37 As Moore knew very well, Byron’s Cain had been the subject of a legal challenge of this nature in 1822,

114  Orientalising the Angels and revising The Loves of the Angels may be seen as a measure taken to avoid similar sanction. While Moore agreed with his publishers that a revised fifth edition “would materially serve me and my future works with the public” (JTM 2: 618), his combined revisionary measures— reactive to public criticism and proactively amending his work’s dubious legal status—reveal a deeply pragmatic approach to revision and to the legal intricacies of authorship.

Laws and Loves Moore and Byron’s responses to the threats to their authorship by blasphemy legislation were very different: in contrast to Moore’s pragmatism, Byron was indignant. Whether or not he made an explicit connection between public morality and the copyright status of his work, Byron identified the public as a threat to his creative and authorial integrity in the aftermath of the Cain trial: “they hate me—and I detest them—I mean your present Public—but they shall not interrupt the march of my mind—nor prevent me from telling the tyrants who are attempting to trample upon all thought—that their thrones will yet be rocked to their foundation” (BLJ 9: 152). Moore closely observed the proceedings of the trial, corresponding with Byron about its fallout and the resultant consequences for writing about religious topics. While the first recorded reference to The Loves of the Angels appeared in a Moore letter of June 1822, 38 his correspondence with Byron the following spring indicated differences in his conception of the authorial responsibilities associated with religious writing. As much as he admired Cain, Moore shrank from its inclusion of atheistic elements: “Cain, to be sure, has made a sensation; and grand as it is, I regret, for many reasons, you ever wrote it. * * For myself, I would never give up the poetry of religion for all the widest results that philosophy will ever arrive at” (LTM 2: 503). Moore did not associate Byron with “the blasphemies of Cain” (LTM 2: 504) but perceived Percy Shelley’s influence on his friend: a claim which the latter denied (LJB 2: 585). Moore cautioned Byron on the force of such expressions in his work and articulated his views on the moral responsibilities of the poet: “all I wish is that you, who are such a powerful manufacturer of these thunderbolts, would not choose subjects that make it necessary to launch them” (LTM 2: 504). In suggesting that Byron had failed “the young, the simple,—all those whose hearts one would like to keep unwithered” (LTM 2: 504), Moore began to echo the rhetoric of moral panic invoked to promote public morality as a cause requiring protection from immoral and obscene publications. Whether consciously or not, Moore had absorbed the language and logic of moral prohibition that had been periodically aimed at his work ever since Little,39 and Byron hinted as much in his exiled opinion that

Orientalising the Angels  115 “[t]he truth is, my dear Moore, you live near the stove of society, where you are unavoidably influenced by its heat and its vapours. … I think it, as now constituted, fatal to all great original undertakings of every kind” (BLJ 9: 119). Sensing Byron’s implications, Moore responded that “your friend Tom Moore—whatever else he may be,—is no Canter” (LTM 2: 505). Byron’s claim would prove to be accurate, with Moore yielding to the unavoidable influences of both law and criticism. At the outset, however, Moore believed that The Loves of the Angels’ apocryphal source, despite its relationship to the Book of Genesis (6.1–4), would insulate it from the accusations of blasphemy which had undermined Cain. His preface to the first edition provided an explicit rejoinder to any doubt that the poem’s motive was to discredit scripture: “[a]s objections may be made, by persons whose opinions I respect, to the selection of a subject of this nature from the Scripture, I think it right to remark, that, in point of fact, the subject is not scriptural” (viii). Additional prefatory material and an extensively referenced endnote identified the origin of the poem’s central notion in Genesis.40 However, in order to disavow the scriptural legitimacy of the passage which related the love of “Angels, the sons of heaven” for mortal women, and to characterise the Book of Enoch as a discredited “rhapsodical” fiction (125), Moore carefully demonstrated the origin of this phrase in an “erroneous translation” (viii) of Genesis which ought to have been rendered “the sons of nobles or great men” (125). If Moore hoped to satisfy any legal doubts about the poem’s relationship to scripture with this disclaimer, he had some—but by no means unqualified—success. Some of the major reviews commented on Moore’s deliberate reference to the poem’s noncanonical inspiration,41 perceiving the author “cautiously and sufficiently guard[ing] himself, in this point, from the imputation of irreverent meddling with the sacred text” (Monthly Review 83). However, this point alone was not sufficient to absolve Moore of accusations of irreverence and immorality from reviewers who took particular exception to the poem’s union of fictional and divine elements. One of these, in John Bull, concluded with a condemnation of the variance between Moore’s “sickening blasphemy [and] the professions of propriety contained in his preface” (14). Here is a further example of the double-binds surrounding morally dubious publications and of the shifting and contradictory criteria for their identification. Having attempted to satisfy Eldon’s legal qualm about discrediting scripture, Moore found that allusions to a nonscriptural source were equally subject to accusations of blasphemy, precisely because of their fictional employment of scriptural scenes and characters. But another notable curiosity is how many reviews specifically absolve Moore of blasphemous intent, as if dramatising a legal dialectic with the rhetoric of both defence and prosecution.42 One might imagine such instances of absolution being cited in a legal defence of the work against an accusation of blasphemy, but as we have seen in the cases of Byron, reasonable

116  Orientalising the Angels doubt about the moral character of a work was created with ease, and the nebulous concept of authorial intention was not a firm ground for decisive moral judgements. Beyond their initial recommendations about revising The Loves of the Angels, no evidence from Moore’s journals or correspondence suggests that Longmans coerced the poet into making the revisions. He was seemingly cooperative and willing to take action against an apparent threat to his work and perceived no affront to his authorial freedom and integrity in the suggestion, as Byron did. On this occasion, as on others discussed in previous chapters, Moore seems satisfied to countenance the influence of nonauthorial forces upon the shape and meaning of his work. Nonetheless, once can imagine a fraught atmosphere behind the scenes at Longmans, or contingency plans being drawn for the event of legal action.43 The Longmans firm was advised by the same attorney who was employed by Murray during the Cain trial: Sharon Turner, a recognised authority on copyright in this period (Loyn). In the case of Byron, Turner advised Murray to cite likely refusals of injunctions to exhort the poet to “write less objectionably,” speculating that the resultant commercial imperative would “affect his mind & purify his pen” (qtd. in Dyer 123–4). This advice presented a credible course of action for avoiding the entanglements of blasphemy, but its rhetoric of authorial self-censorship enabled and legitimised the practices of printers like Dugdale and Benbow. The creative circumscription it recommended was unthinkable to Byron but was readily adopted by Moore. In the role of advising his clients about publications which were likely to attract legal proceedings, Turner had a documented encounter with Moore in 1823, advising Longmans that Fables for the Holy Alliance “tend[ed] to bring monarchy into contempt” (JTM 2: 629). Moore met with his publisher and Turner on 18 April, just weeks after finishing revisions for The Loves of the Angels, and rejected Longmans’ appeal to make alterations to Fables: “[t]he Longmans expected I should make alterations, but told them that was impossible” (JTM 2: 629). In addition, he dismissed Turner’s promise of indictment by the Constitutional Association, remarking, “I was perfectly ready to meet the consequences myself in every way; though of there being any such consequences from the publication I had not the slightest apprehension” (JTM 2: 629). Moore’s refusal to revise Fables led Longmans to seek a second opinion from Whig attorney Thomas Denman, who was confident that the work represented no legal threat, “though he could not guarantee against the folly of people in prosecuting” (JTM 2: 631). No evidence can be found to indicate that Turner advised Longmans to seek revisions to The Loves of the Angels when its critical controversy surfaced a few months earlier, but given his active advisory role to Murray and his heightened aversion to legal risk, the possibility is quite plausible. If Moore’s bullishness in refusing to revise Fables seems out of character when compared to his acquiescence

Orientalising the Angels  117 in revising The Loves of the Angels, at least two factors can explain this stance. First, Fables was published under one of Moore’s satirical pseudonyms: Thomas Brown, the Younger. Though the identity of the legal person behind this satirist was well known, the pseudonym offered a degree of mitigation against indictment. Second, Moore was much more comfortable satirising George IV and his European regal counterparts than having his work categorised in the same atheistic company of Byron, Shelley, and their Satanic School.44 The situation adds nuance to Moore’s willing self-censorship of The Loves of the Angels, illustrating his ability to compartmentalise diverse modes of authorship and to recognise the authorial imperatives of different genres. In the preface to the fifth edition of The Loves of the Angels, Moore struck a repentant tone: “in deference to some opinions which have reached me, a considerable change has been made in the character of this Poem” (v). By thus advertising his unwillingness to offend the religious sentiments of his readers, did Moore attempt to engage a possible legal defence? In summarising the laws relating to copyright and immorality, Godson notes a potential loophole in the event of repentance, stemming from Eldon’s remarks in the case of Southey v. Sherwood: “[b]ut there seems to be an exception to the general rule, that equity will not interfere to protect a book of bad tendency, when the author repents of his work, and wishes to suppress it” (214). Does the imposition of Islamic “machinery and allusions” amount to adequate repentance and a wish to suppress the work? Here, we are in the ambiguous territory of not only legal language and interpretation but also bibliographical classification. Moore’s apparent repentance was instantiated in a new edition of the same work.45 Along with its text, the subtitle was changed from “A Poem” to “An Eastern Romance,” but this was unambiguously another edition of a work previously perceived to cause offence. Presenting a work with a new title in a first edition may have represented a more active and plausible gesture of repentance and suppression of The Loves of the Angels, but it would have created additional classificatory problems, not least for the question of whether it would qualify for a separate copyright. While Moore’s revisions were unlikely to be considered a suppression of the work, might they be viewed as a sufficient act of repentance for the granting of an injunction? This logic was apparently not the primary motivation: had Moore and Longmans viewed revision as adequate repentance, they might have sought an injunction against Dugdale, but no evidence suggests that they did. In any event, the absence of a precedent for the loophole to which Eldon alludes would have made such an appeal a risky case for the plaintiffs. Eldon firmly disagreed that Southey had repented about Wat Tyler (Richardson) and appeared to base his remarks on a scenario in which repentance occurs prior to publication, while the work is still in manuscript.46 If Moore’s revision was intended as a show of repentance to forestall further unauthorised

118  Orientalising the Angels reprinting, it did not succeed, as Chubb’s and Dugdale’s later editions testify. Since Dugdale based his edition’s text on the pre-revision Christian version of Moore’s poem, his defence in the event of a legal challenge would presumably be based in bibliographical classification as well: he had reprinted a blasphemous, publicly injurious version of the poem, not the sanitised, Orientalised version.

Authorship, Copyright, and Blasphemy By the end of March, the fifth edition—thoroughly Orientalised—was ready for the market. In its initial form, the poem was apparently a genuine expression of Moore’s piety and his personal understanding of spirituality as necessarily including the carnal.47 His revisions marked a retreat from these initial motivations, cognisant that they would likely damage his reputation and marketability. Once again, Moore’s revisionary practices reveal his perspective on authorship as a malleable construct, subject to amendment in the service of decorum. The revised preface for the fifth edition was conciliatory, with Moore writing “[f]or the satisfaction of future readers” (vi) and professing that he is “always most unwilling to offend” (v). This unwillingness to offend is central to understanding Moore’s readiness to revise his work to satisfy the demands and desires of his audience and critics, to avoid legal censure, and to preserve his and his work’s commercial potential.48 In this view, he departs most obviously from Byron’s response to the Cain episode but remains consistent with the practices of authorial revision from earlier in his career that I discuss in previous chapters. On those occasions—the castration of Thomas Little, the gentrification of the American epistles—the revisionary impetus is provided by the reactions and responses of critics and readers. The different motivating factor on this occasion was that the decision to revise the poem was a reaction to a complex combination of formal and informal systems of regulation that manifested in reply to both his and Byron’s religious publications. These systems hinged on the interaction between formal structures of state and law and the more capricious responses of the public and critics. Their increasing influence on authors reflected the development of a “more perilously competitive” literary culture which arose in the second decade of the eighteenth century, where the “relatively secure systems of recognition gave way to a dependency on unknown readers, whose numerical power and anonymity were felt to be threatening” (Newlyn 8). Both poets reaped the considerable rewards of popular success with their works of the previous decade, but the impending reversal of fortune signified a greater challenge to Moore, whose livelihood relied on the success of his work, than to the independently wealthy Byron. Moore owed a debt of £1,000 to Longmans at the time of The Loves of the Angels’ publication, so the commercial viability of the poem was vital.49 His appeal to Murray for

Orientalising the Angels  119 gentle treatment in the Quarterly can be seen as “the letter of a man desperately concerned for his reputation, which was fairly indistinguishable from his livelihood” (Kelly 377). Writing to Byron in July of “[t]his cursed Public” which had given Rhymes on the Road a tepid reception, Moore wondered aloud at his moneyed friend’s motivations: “[h]ow you, who are not obliged, can go on writing for it, has long, you know, been my astonishment” (UTM 1: 273). The respective professional status of each author, thus, is a significant factor in assessing their responses to the legal constraints on their authorship and their readiness to make reactive amendments to their work: the commercial imperative that was persuasive to Moore was much less important to Byron. The origins of Byron’s and Moore’s differing responses to blasphemous writing and its threat to copyright and authorial autonomy can be traced to the beginning of the eighteenth century and to separate legal actions which granted writers ownership of copyright and held them criminally responsible for their work’s blasphemous or obscene content. The first was the Statute of Anne (1710), which enshrined the writer’s work as a commodity to be owned, reproduced, and sold: in ascribing rights and value to a writer’s compositions, it marked a crucial foundational moment in the development of Romantic authorship and its ideas of individual genius.50 If the Statute of Anne paved the way for the unfettered authorial autonomy which Byron invokes, Dominus Rex v. Curl [sic] (1727) represented a qualification of this freedom and a new legal connection of authorship and public. The case, heard in criminal court, indicted Edmund Curll for obscenity on the basis of his pornographic publication, a translation of Abbé Du Prat’s Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in her Smock (1724). 51 The significance of this judgement was its adjudication of a matter of morality under criminal rather than canon law: as Saunders observes, for the publication “to be a crime and not a sin, there had to be a public offence, not merely a private immoral act” (437). Thus, the crime of obscene publication was established, making the legality of an author’s work contingent on it not possessing a threat to public morality. However, the judgement was not a deliberate check on the new freedom of authors, or a “repression of [their] subjectivity” (Saunders 437). Rather, its focus was on regulating print and its increasing dominance as a medium for public discourse. The Statute of Anne can be viewed in similar terms: it was not intended as an explicit instrument for the promotion of authorial autonomy but as another regulatory intervention in a print trade dominated by the Stationers’ Company’s monopoly. Both authorial copyright and obscene publication emerge from intersecting developments in law, commerce, and technology, but Romanticism absorbs the former as a correlate of its ideological selfrepresentation, which is ultimately undermined by the latter.52 Just as Moore’s creative powers are rewarded by his ability to sell the copyright to his work, that privilege is accompanied by an obligation to write in a

120  Orientalising the Angels morally tolerable fashion. The private Romantic imagination demands to be unfettered, but once its expression circulates in the publicity of print, the law requires that the boundaries of propriety are not breached. The resulting legal responsibility of authors to the public is implicitly acknowledged in Moore’s revisions to The Loves of the Angels, marking his mode of authorship as more compliant than Byron’s. If Byron’s promotion of authorial autonomy was stated as a matter of principle in the case of Cain, his understanding of authorship was also pragmatic in deed: the solution to the problem which his indictable writing posed was to sever his ties with Murray and to begin publishing with John Hunt. As well as a symbolic move from a conservative establishment publisher to one with close associations with radicalism, Byron’s decision had two significant outcomes: it represented an embrace of the cheap printing and prices favoured by unauthorised publishers, and it enabled him to work with a publisher who was less risk-averse, and less likely to demand prophylactic revisions to his writing. 53 This decision also qualifies Byron’s claim to “detest” the public: by embracing the medium of cheap print in which the majority of his readers encountered his work, Byron located the source of his ire not in a broadly conceived public but in the chastening and constraining effects that more abstract aspects of the communication circuit—public morality and public interest— could exercise over his authorship. While Moore, ever unwilling to offend, was loath to abandon the relative comfort and security of an established publisher like Longmans, Byron’s calculated descent into the radical publishing world of Hunt neatly matched his dangerous and anti-authoritarian persona. Freed from commercial imperatives which weighed on Moore, Byron’s motives originated more conspicuously in authorial self-consciousness and self-fashioning. Literary criticism and literary history have acknowledged the interpretive value of the kind of social contract which Moore’s revisions represent. Throughout this book I have placed Moore’s active formulations of authorship within a broader field of meaning-generating agents. These perspectives of book historians, textual critics, and authorship theorists help to delineate the contradictions that emerge when a blasphemous publication activates systems of regulation which destabilise the boundaries of authorship, public, and copyright. Assigning credit to nonauthorial agents via theories of multiple authorship and the social construction of texts fits uneasily with copyright law, which has gradually strengthened a proprietary model of individual authorship in the three centuries since the Statute of Anne. Martha Woodmansee (28) and Lior Zemer (2) identify an increased legal insistence on this model in proportion to growths in collective and collaborative creative production which are perceived to threaten the autonomy of the individual creator. However, Zemer argues against this trend and for a social constructivist view of copyright that sees authors and copyrighted works as social constructs

Orientalising the Angels  121 (in a similar manner to Foucault) and understands authors’ claims for copyright as limited “by their reliance on the contribution of the public to the realisation of authorial abilities and actual copyrighted materials” (8). I argued a similar point about Lalla Rookh in the last chapter, but it applies equally for all of Moore’s, or any other published author’s, works: by accepting a copyright payment for their work, the author necessarily activates a dispersed collaborative process of authorial formulation. The apparent radicalism of Zemer’s proposal is a consequence of views of authorship and copyright that insist on individual creative agency and autonomy, but a logical line can also be drawn to his view of copyright from the judgement on Curll in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, placing Moore’s revisions in the light of Zemer’s proposal highlights additional paradoxes of copyright law. Leaving aside the contradiction noted by Eldon that an obscene publication is more widely available to the public because of its obscenity, the commercial threat to the potentially blasphemous first edition of The Loves of the Angels is the loss of its copyright status. For Moore’s authorial persona, it would amount to a tacit acceptance of critical accusations of immorality: while this was a welcome enhancement of Byron’s celebrated madness and badness, Moore resisted such a characterisation. His legal compliance in the fifth edition depended, in part, on his active response to public critique described above. But instead of recognising the reciprocal creative process involving author and public, copyright law granted Moore’s revised poem a more stable and certain status as a private intellectual property. A social constructivist model of copyright would place this explicitly socialised text within the public domain, but under the presiding understanding of copyright, the public was less a creative collaborator than a regulatory censor. For the nonauthorial agents of meaning and social forces on authorship whose influence I have discussed throughout this book, this model of copyright is the closest they will come to formal recognition of their productive roles. From perceiving them as censors, however, comes the rhetoric of constraint articulated in Byron’s description of the public as an obstacle to “the march of my mind.” The first periodical to review Moore’s poem, John Bull, explicitly noted “the proximity of the Mahometan doctrine to that adopted by the lively bard” (5). The review, whose force struck Moore “too hard” (JTM 2: 614), may well have planted the specific idea for how to approach the poem’s revision, but in seeking to revive his commercial appeal, Moore instinctively turned to the Oriental mode of his previous success in long narrative poetry, Lalla Rookh. This decision represents a pragmatism that is everywhere evident in the process of revising The Loves of the Angels, with Moore actively responding to the prohibitions of the courts, the critics, and the public. Byron, by contrast, resisted the opportunity to beat a textual retreat from the outcry occasioned by his blasphemous publication. While this resistance placed him at odds with

122  Orientalising the Angels Moore’s methods, his defection to Hunt and to cheap printing was an implicit recognition of the importance and influence of his public readership, whose control he elsewhere rejected. Thus, both authors managed to engineer a route around the moral and legal oppositions to blasphemous publication by adopting perspectives from opposite ends of the revisionary spectrum. Byron insisted on preserving the spontaneous and autonomous nature of his writing, but in adjusting his authorial persona, he hewed to the Yeatsian revisionary dictum: “It is myself that I remake” (2: [ii]). Moore, the assiduous reader and scholar, assumed a provisional relationship with his sources and his writings, acknowledging their necessary amenity to reconstruction. As in previous instances, the spectre of negative critical reviews was a catalyst for his revisions: what differed on this occasion was the pre-emptive nature of changes adopted to assuage the threatening consequences of blasphemy. Both Moore and Byron present examples of the specific effects of legal and moral discourse on blasphemous publication, and in so doing, they illustrate differing ways in which the abstraction of the public and its morality influenced authorial unity and identity in this period.

Notes

Orientalising the Angels  123







124  Orientalising the Angels





























Orientalising the Angels  125





















126  Orientalising the Angels

47 48 49

50 51 52

53

composed a work, of which he afterwards repents, wishes to withhold it from the public. I will not say that a principle might not be found which would apply to a case such as that; but then it is necessary to take all the circumstances of the case into consideration” (qtd. in Merivale 2: 438). “I am pious myself—warmly so … and would not give up one of my frequent outbursts of adoration & gratitude towards the Deity for all that those everyday religionists ever felt or imagined in their whole lives” (UTM 1: 263). A similar sentiment is identified in the Edinburgh Review’s article on The Loves of the Angels, which attributes to his style “the charm which arises from the continual desire to please” (30). See UTM (1: 256, 259) and JTM (2: 639) for further details of this debt and its clearance through sales of the poem. For details of Longmans’ broader assistance in the clearance of debts related to Moore’s Admiralty post in Bermuda, see Kelly (328–31, 363–7). This law is discussed in the context of Anglo-American copyright discrepancies in Chapter 2. See Rose (Authors) for an extensive development of the connections between copyright and authorship. Abbé Du Prat was the pseudonym of Jean Barrin, vicar-general of the Diocese of Nantes. Carla Hesse’s description of the drive to “dethrone the absolute author” (130) in post-revolutionary France and recast the previously private role of authorship as that of a public servant gives added nuance to understanding the repressive environment for print in England during the Romantic period. As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, John Hunt and his brother, Leigh, were imprisoned for two years in 1813 for their libelling of the Prince Regent in their radical newspaper, The Examiner. See Manning (231) for further discussion of Byron’s abandonment of “elegant editions … for cheap printings.”

5

These Quick-Reading Times Distant Reading Moore’s Poetic Style

Approaching Moore’s poetic oeuvre through the lens of computational stylistic analysis, this chapter poses two related questions. First, how consistent is Moore’s authorial style as he writes across different poetic genres? Second, what practical and conceptual changes occur in the notion of authorship when we approach it through the methods of computational analysis? The arguments of the preceding chapters have emphasised the value of considering different sources of agency in the construction of authorship: how authorised and unauthorised printers, copyright and legal conventions, as well as a work’s author can effect textual and contextual changes which impinge on the stability of the authorial persona. This final chapter examines some logical consequences of that trajectory, by assessing the evidence of textual features of Moore’s poetry which are unique and characteristic of his writing, but arguably the product of unconscious processes. This apparently paradoxical premise is a basic assumption of stylometry: the statistical analysis of literary style. A principle that unites the different methods which comprise the stylometric field suggests that a quantifiable and often distinctive aspect of an author’s style is unconscious. Instead of defining an author by their use of unusual words which occur infrequently, many stylometric studies have argued that an author’s characteristic stylistic fingerprint is more reliably evident in their use of function words and the most frequently used words in the language.1 In this isolated context, the computational analysis of this chapter represents a different approach to studying the issue of Moore’s authorship, but combined with the diverse methods of previous chapters, it provokes a range of fruitful questions about the nature of his authorial formulations and about the relationship between style and genre: does an author’s style change when they write in a different genre; is individual style more distinct than generic conventions; do genres have recognisable styles? When we think of Moore’s characteristic style, what adjectives come to mind? “Sentimental,” “ornate,” “feminine”? “Amorous,” “immoral,” “blasphemous”? “Righteous,” “intemperate,” “seditious”? Certainly, these reflect some of the discourses present in reviews and commentary on Moore’s poetry, but his is an oeuvre which encompasses lyric, satiric,

128  These Quick-Reading Times epic, song and ballad, and epistolary modes, as well as a wide range of poetic forms. Given two different volumes from different parts of the poet’s career, the resulting stylistic impressions may be quite different. How, then, asks Foucault, “can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author?” (214). In response, he lists four criteria proposed by Saint Jerome, one of which conceives the author as a stylistic unity.2 If stylistic consistency is posited as a key characteristic of authorship, does Moore’s diverse oeuvre exhibit this standard? Or, do the effects and features of the many genres he deploys supersede stylistic unity? To what extent can the evidence of computational analysis address these concerns? And, finally, what are the consequences for our view of Moore’s authorship, of the answers to these queries? Below, I assess the stylistic similarities and differences of nineteen volumes of Moore’s poetry using a combination of stylometric and close reading analysis. In the course of preparing the texts for analysis, I examine the ways that computerassisted analysis necessitates a different conceptual understanding of the relationship between author and text than those expressed in earlier chapters. Before proceeding to that analysis, I first consider some issues about the use of computation in literary studies.

Digital Humanities and Literary Studies The nature of some of the evidence and methods I use in this chapter is computational and, in its apparent distinctness from earlier evidence and methods used in this book, invites some comment. Just as Moore parodied the effects of the industrialisation of the printing press on literature, the use of computational and quantitative evidence and methods often sits uneasily with literary scholars for a number of reasons. In “Announcement of a New Grand Acceleration Company for the Promotion of the Speed of Literature” (1838), Moore laments how demand dilutes the quality of literary supply in “these quick-reading times.” He alludes to the Birmingham entrepreneur Matthew Boulton as a symbol of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the quality of metal goods, implying that similarly malign consequences would be felt in literature: Beg to add, as our literature soon may compare, In its quick make and vent, with our Birmingham ware, And it doesn’t at all matter in either of these lines, How sham is the article, so it but shines;— (Jane Moore, Satires 390) Similar concerns have been expressed about the compatibility of critical standards in literary studies with the methods, logic, and rhetoric of big data. First, literary scholars understand that quantitative methods are deployed in other disciplines in order to bring the aura of objectivity to

These Quick-Reading Times  129 an argument, while claims to objectivity are largely alien to the study of literature. However, rigorous quantitative research in the sciences and social sciences qualifies the nature of the claims it makes with respect to the data and methods used. The basis of knowledge in those fields is derived from results that are verifiable and reproducible, not a belief that those results are inherently objective and true. The subjectivity of the solitary reader’s encounter with a text is so central to the very premise of literary scholarship that to invoke a set of empirical facts about that text must be intellectually suspect, or so obvious as to be self-evident.3 Other categories of objection emerge from this prevailing concern. One perspective argues that the literary text functions via a dual subjectivity that is manifested at the points of origin and reception. The literary scholar exercises their own subjectivity in the act of analysing a text which bears the traces of an author’s subjectivity.4 As a consequence, some have argued, literary texts are not reducible to data, or, at least, to data that is meaningful in a computational context.5 The provocative opening of Stephen Marche’s argument—“Big data is coming for your books”—is developed in a critique by Stanley Fish, which raises the spectre of creeping scientistic methodology in literary studies. Following an elegant example of close reading, Fish contrasts his method—“first the interpretive hypothesis and then the formal pattern”—with those he perceives within the digital humanities. There, he argues, pattern recognition precedes hypothesis, interpretive cart before horse, wholly at the mercy of computational power and algorithmic opacity. For each critique of the digital humanities, a response can be found from within that community: indeed, debate is a characteristic feature of digital humanities, as evidenced by the many publications and conference contributions in the field which prominently feature this mode of discourse. As a proponent of computational methods in this chapter, I acknowledge my bias in arguing for the success of these rebuttals. Nonetheless, my aim is to address the terms of the foregoing critiques and to highlight certain aspects which misapprehend or misrepresent the rigorous and conscientious work within the field of computational literary studies. In doing so, I discuss a mere fraction of the literature on this topic, but one which I believe is representative of the most prominent discourse in the field.6 For some, digital humanities was born in 2009, when William Pannapacker, reporting from the MLA Convention, hailed it as “the next big thing,” or, more accurately, “the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Against the threat of the new that it represented, others have traced the long history of the field back to the collaboration between Fr Roberto Busa and IBM in producing the Index Thomisticus.7 Though the 2010s began with digital humanities advocating a “big tent” disciplinary approach, it quickly became associated in many minds with literary studies, and with English departments, in particular.8 Assessing that association in an article entitled “What Is Digital

130  These Quick-Reading Times Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Matthew Kirschenbaum proposed a number of reasons why English is a “hospitable” disciplinary setting for digital humanities (59–60). In addition to the convergence of editorial theory and digital media, the discipline’s amenability to cultural studies, and the large-scale digitisation of literature, the most notable factor is arguably that aside from numbers, “text has been by far the most tractable data type for computers to manipulate” (60). Literary studies exhibited a wide variety of methodological approaches that fell under the rubric of digital humanities,9 but those which aimed to “read” literary texts at scale soon became the most notable, and publically noticed, within the field.10 The term used for this collection of related methods, “distant reading,” is widely attributed to Franco Moretti and his article of the year 2000, “Conjectures on World Literature,”11 though Ted Underwood has traced the origins of this critical tradition to the middle of the twentieth century (“Genealogy”).12 Moretti captured the broader interest of literary studies with his analysis of how distant reading enabled a mode of reading beyond the canon to incorporate “the great unread” (208) and with his metaphor for this 99.5% (207): “[t]he Slaughterhouse of Literature.” The provocation of that name extended to the proposed method, which encompassed samples, statistics, and paratexts—but not always texts: But of course, there is a problem here. Knowing two hundred novels is already difficult. Twenty thousand? How can we do it, what does “knowledge” mean, in this new scenario? One thing for sure: it cannot mean the very close reading of very few texts—secularized theology, really (“canon”!)—that has radiated from the cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary studies. A larger literary history requires other skills: sampling; statistics; work with series, titles, concordances, incipits…. (208–9) Other Moretti articles, such as “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850),” explicitly avoided the texts of the novels under analysis, arguing a literary historical point about the contraction of novel titles from an initial diachronic analysis of the lengths of the sampled titles across the span of more than a century. As distant reading has developed, it has begun to admit a wider range of statistical and computational methods, to focus on a broader palette of cultural materials than literature, and to go by different names.13 In addition, many scholars have argued forcefully for distant reading as a method whose effectiveness is increased when combined with established methods of literary analysis such as close reading.14 The title of Matthew Jockers’ book, Macroanalysis, emphasises the centrality of large-scale data in his methodology, but other scholars such as Martin Paul Eve have demonstrated the telescopic and microscopic potential of

These Quick-Reading Times  131 distant reading, as well as its applicability to individual texts.15 The term “distant reading” has thus been used to refer to the computational analysis of everything from individual texts to collections of thousands of texts: I use the term, in this context, to describe my analysis of nineteen Moore volumes, below. This brief survey of the development of computational literary studies within the digital humanities necessarily omits a large number of trends, methods, and excellent scholarship. Rather, my purpose has been to trace a particular lineage of computational textual analysis within the field to illustrate that its growth has happened in close proximity to literary studies and has been cognisant of addressing the major critiques that literary scholars have made. Respect for the values and subjectivity of the reading experience is evident in many distant readers’ combination of the method with the more familiar practice of close reading.16 We should also note, however, that insisting on the presence of subjective reading as the foundation of critique ignores a broad range of methodological approaches in literary studies—book history, publishing history, and bibliography, to name just three used in the previous chapters of this book—where close reading is not considered to be an essential method. The objection that literature is not data is a simple one to assert: many of literature’s effects on the reading subject are mysterious and ineffable, and examples of how these effects are irreducible abound. Marche cites an example of the paradox and semantic obscurity of a line from Macbeth—“Light thickens, and the crows make wing to the rooky wood”—which he argues are meaningless in terms of data, but which nonetheless “illuminate their moment radiantly.” No thoughtful digital humanist would dispute this point, I believe: the type of meaning that Marche describes is not (currently) computable, but many other valuable types of information that are potentially meaningful to a literary scholar are present and computable in a text. The effects that Marche describes are a notable aspect of—perhaps even essential to—literature, but not to the exclusion of other sources of meaning. Literary interpretation is not a zero-sum game. Similarly, the accusation that digital humanities inverts the desired trajectory from interpretive hypothesis to formal pattern may be upheld in certain isolated cases where the emergence of tools and datasets engendered a degree of fetishism.17 However, the development of distant reading has been accompanied by a high degree of self-consciousness about, and assiduous attention to, open and transparent accounts of methodological process.

Stylometry and Literary Studies If the image of Roberto Busa collaborating with IBM and using punch cards to compute aspects of his Index Thomisticus is surprising, the dating of stylometry’s origins to 1851 may shock. In this year, English

132  These Quick-Reading Times logician Augustus de Morgan wrote that issues of authorship might be settled by comparing the word lengths of candidate authors of a disputed text. Once his hypothesis was tested three decades later, however, it was ruled out as a suitable discriminator of authorship (Holmes 112). Nevertheless, his proposition established the idea that quantifiable and largely unconscious features of an author’s writing might comprise demonstrable evidence of their unique style. More than a century after de Morgan’s insight, stylometry had its breakthrough moment when two statisticians used probabilistic methods to attribute the authorship of a number of disputed Federalist Papers (Mosteller & Wallace). Their findings’ consonance with the attributions of historical scholarship was an important validation for the statistical analysis of style and laid the foundations for modern stylometry. More recently, the method attracted public interest with the case of Patrick Juola, stylometrist and forensic document analyst, who unmasked J. K. Rowling as the pseudonymous author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first in the series of Cormoran Strike detective novels (“Rowling”). Stylometry is the quantitative study of literary style. Its fundamental premise, writes Holmes, is that “authors have an unconscious aspect to their style, an aspect which cannot consciously be manipulated but which possesses features which are quantifiable and which may be distinctive” (111). It may be instinctive to think that certain authors use individual words that are highly characteristic of their personal style and whose presence in a text might be a reliable indicator of their authorship. However, stylometry demonstrates that the opposite is true: an author’s individual stylistic fingerprint is much more reliably present in their use of the most common and frequent words in the language, in patterns which are not readily apparent in close reading. In fact, if a reader can easily associate a characteristic individual word with an author, then that author’s style can be imitated by using it.18 If we examine the textual features used in the three cases above, we can see some important similarities between stylometry and distant reading. De Morgan proposed word length as a discriminating feature (Holmes 112); Mosteller and Wallace used function words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and articles (17); Juola used a multivariate analysis encompassing word length and function words, as well as recurring word-pairings and character 4-grams (“Rowling”).19 None of these is a feature that is ordinarily the focus of close reading, and quantifying the full extent of any such feature over the scale of a text or a corpus of texts is an arduous manual task for the individual critic. However, these features appear in all texts and so represent a stable and consistent measure for comparison. Moreover, the unconscious use of these features by authors establishes a more level field for comparison by identifying and eliminating fakes and imitations. So, stylometry conforms to Moretti’s description of distant reading: it cannot be achieved through

These Quick-Reading Times  133 close reading and relies on statistical measures of texts. The question about what “knowledge” means in this scenario is also relevant: stylometry is probabilistic, asserting not “Shakespeare, not Marlowe, wrote this unattributed play,” but, “this unattributed play is less unlike Shakespeare than Marlowe.” In our stylometric investigation of Moore’s possible role in the anonymous Edinburgh Review critique of Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Francesca Benatti and I were unable to decisively attribute the article to Moore (“English”). However, we did succeed in presenting evidence that ran counter to recent conclusions about the article’s authorship, and which suggested Moore was a more likely author than the previously favoured candidate, William Hazlitt. This qualified rhetoric is the obverse of that used in media reports about stylometric successes and bears a strong resemblance to the conventions of a field, like literary studies, that rarely trades in certainties. The use of stylometry for authorship attribution has an aura of detective glamour that occasionally elicits wider public attention. However, the same methods used to attribute authorship can also be used to study stylistic change (Juola, “Becoming” 145): that which can distinguish between age, gender, genre, and period, or that which takes place within the span of an individual author’s career. 20 In each case, a comparative method is used to assess stylistic similarity and dissimilarity between the authors’ works and to arrange them according to patterns of stylistic proximity. This general method is shared by these studies, though the underlying motivations may be different: to question existing periodisations, to reveal stylistic development, or to date undated works. In my use of stylometric methods on Moore’s poetry, my principal purpose is to examine the effects on his authorial style of the generic diversity of his poetic corpus. Arising from this analysis, I discuss the practical and conceptual changes that occur in the notion of authorship when we approach it through the methods of computational analysis.

What Is Style? Why Do We Care? What do we mean when we talk about style, and how does style relate to authorship? Those are two of the principal inquiries of this chapter, and their answers—spoiler—are uncertain, because we mean different things at different times when we talk about style. When we are talking about literature, style usually has something to do with writing, sometimes in a fundamental way. Style (or stile) can refer to the writing instrument, which incised characters in wax with one end and erased them with the other: the stylus. That object’s meaning morphed from the literal to the symbolic as style came to refer to a manner of writing (and also, leaving its material origins, of speaking). On the one hand, a writer’s style became a measure of their success with regard to aspects of their expression: its clarity, beauty, persuasiveness, and so on. On the other,

134  These Quick-Reading Times however, it could be seen as evidence of artifice or superficiality, with the form and expression of style a potential mask for a deficit of substance. Depending on the context, calling someone a stylish writer could be a compliment or an insult. Style became something that an author could possess and by which they could be identified. Not only could authors have a characteristic style, but the same could be said of literary groups, periods, and genres: different discourses that are used to collect and arrange literary works. Style is a mobile concept, with varying modes of theoretical and semantic relation to writing and to language. All of these examples indicate potential intersections with the equally moveable concept of authorship, but the last two—style’s characteristic connection to authors and genres—are of particular concern in this chapter. One of my enduring impressions of reading Moore and reading about Moore is that he is a stylish writer. Reading Moore alone, I would have found myself reaching for this term, but criticism of his writing employs it with liberal frequency, so it is difficult to precisely identify the origin of this impression. And once the association is made, it is difficult to shake. The majority of critics who invoke Moore’s style do so for derogatory purposes: to assert or imply that his writing has an appealing surface but little depth. His early work coincided with the birth of professional criticism and in a period vigorously alert to divining and critiquing the depths and truths of an individual author’s expression.21 While the writing of the prized Romantic was the lamp which exposed the illumination of their inner being, Moore’s work still bore traces of the unfashionable neoclassical mirror: a surface, however polished, that merely reflected the world. 22 The images and metaphors of surface and ornament proliferate in contemporaneous commentary on Moore’s work, and those implications and accusations of superficiality persisted with remarkable tenacity in assessments of Moore’s legacy for more than a century after his death. This consensus implied his status as a minor author, and these two conclusions entered into a long cycle of mutual reinforcement. Part of the motivation of this inquiry is to move beyond this entrenched tendency to see Moore’s writing as a symptom of an underlying conceptual or intellectual deficit, to pursue an interpretive focus on those surfaces, and to consider the nature of their evidence and complexity which have been obscured by a history of symptomatic reading. 23 A further motivation for this inquiry is my interest in operationalising authorship. I concur with Moretti about the ugliness of the word (“‘Operationalizing’” 103), but I am interested by the possibilities for literary studies that are afforded by the concept. And concepts play a role in the definition of operationalising: “the process whereby concepts are transformed into a series of operations—which, in their turn, allow us to measure all sort of objects. Operationalizing means building a bridge from concepts to measurements, and then to the world” (“‘Operationalizing’” 103–4). For example, temperature is a physical property

These Quick-Reading Times  135 that is often operationally defined by the expansion of mercury inside a calibrated tube called a thermometer. The largely qualitative nature of literary study means that operational definitions are generally not used for concepts in that field.24 While operationalising a concept increases its precision, it also excludes the kind of ambiguity which is common in literary studies. For example, if an operational definition of authorship was “the name of the individual person which appears on a book’s title page,” it would exclude all instances of collaborative and anonymous authorship and consider writing for newspapers, periodicals, and other media as beyond its scope.25 Despite the obviously unsatisfactory nature of this example, its implementation arguably enriches the meaning of the concept through an enumeration and careful consideration of counterexamples. 26 If not a successful operational definition, it serves a valuable function by affirming the essential ambiguity of a concept. As in the best practice of digital humanities, the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods can, here, contribute to the advancement of knowledge about a topic—such as authorship—in literary studies. A similar desire to assess the relationship between differing conceptions of style in literary and computational fields motivated a recent study which provides a model for the value of operational thought (Herrmann, et al.). 27 With the growing interest in stylistic analysis in digital humanities, the authors were struck by the absence of consensus about the meaning of style in different disciplinary traditions. Arguing that this situation constituted a threat to the type of interdisciplinary collaboration and research intrinsic to digital humanities (27), the authors conclude their paper by offering an operational definition of style that “incorporates a minimal common ground for interdisciplinary empirical research and the application of new, digital methods” (28): Style is a property of texts constituted by an ensemble of formal features which can be observed quantitatively or qualitatively. (44) The definition is striking in its broadness and abstraction: a point noted by the authors (45), whose methods in arriving at the definition included a synthesis of existing definitions of style: as a higher-order artistic value, a holistic gestalt of texts, an expression of authorial individuality, a choice among stylistic alternatives, a deviation from a norm, or any textual property that can be measured computationally (42). The benefit of the capacious new definition is evident from even a cursory assessment of the tensions between some of these six views of style. The character 4-grams central to Juola’s analysis of The Cuckoo’s Calling are computationally measurable, but can they be considered an expression of their author’s individuality? The computational scholar may view the propositions as tautologous—if a textual property can be measured, it is an expression of its author—but the literary scholar might demand

136  These Quick-Reading Times that an expression of individuality be conscious to qualify as a genuine expression. The intersubjectivity of the operational definition admits the premises of both views of style, while articulating a clear framework for devising verifiable and reproducible methods of stylistic analysis. In practical terms, it urges the computational linguist to recognise the literary scholar’s theoretical concerns and provides the literary scholar with the means of devising a computational method to test and interrogate their hypotheses.

Computers and Authorship Is an operational definition of authorship desirable, or even possible? In arguing that the criteria used to assess authorship are ideological constructs, Foucault seems to suggest that such a definition is not possible and is fundamentally wrongheaded. “What difference does it make who is speaking?” is the conclusion of his essay and the starting point for John Burrows’ computationally oriented critique. In framing the tools and methods of authorship studies as ideological constructs, Burrows argues, Foucault’s “gambit” (“Computers” 175) distrusts the validity of any factual or logical explication of authorship. Foucault presents the four authorial criteria proposed by Saint Jerome (214) as evidence of how modern conceptions of authorship have persisted in maintaining dubious ideological and author-centred frameworks. In this case: literary value, thematic coherence, stylistic unity, and chronological viability (214). Foucault, surely, cannot present the last as an ideological construct, since it is the most clearly operational criterion: a text written in 1853 cannot be attributed to Thomas Moore because he was dead on that date. The third—stylistic unity—is the criterion upon which Burrows’ argument against Foucault rests. Since computational methods have demonstrable success in authorial stylistic analysis, he insists, stylistic unity can no longer be considered a purely ideological construct: “[n]ow that we can demonstrate that stylistic consistency makes it possible to differentiate, with a high degree of confidence, between most pairs of authors, the burden of proof falls back upon those who claim it is a mere construct” (“Computers” 176). Indeed, Burrows continues to argue that resolving a question of stylistic unity can influence the second criterion of thematic coherence. For example, let us imagine that an anonymous science-fiction story was attributed to Moore after the observation of some impressionistic stylistic similarities. We can anticipate immediate arguments against his authorship of the story on the grounds of thematic coherence: “Moore did not write science fiction” closes off the argument in an unconstructive fashion. If a computational stylistic analysis were to attribute the story with a very high degree of probability to Moore, the question of thematic coherence is then available for reassessment in the context of new evidence: here, it does matter who is speaking.28

These Quick-Reading Times  137 In the years since Burrows’ initial attempts to argue for the possibility of an operational model of authorship, further work in computational literary studies has demonstrated the plausibility of operational examinations of thematic coherence and literary value.29 The concept of authorship is arguably more capacious than style, but the prospect of an operational definition seems ever more plausible since the turn of the century. In this book, the approaches I have taken to studying Moore’s authorship have been similarly broad. From a close focus on the author and his manipulations of text and paratext in the first chapter, I have expanded the locus of agency into formulations of his authorship by examining the influences of authorised and unauthorised reprinting, and legal regulation of literature. In a certain sense, the analysis of this chapter returns focus firmly to Moore and his poetic works. But in switching the telescope for the microscope, the analysis is based on elements of style that have consistently been presented as unconscious to its author by the field of computational stylistic analysis.30 In that sense, this chapter’s analysis might equally be seen to rely on material that is beyond the active control of the author. Indeed, the conclusions one draws about the authorial nature of function words and character n-grams are a useful token of one’s authorial instincts and inclinations.31 This uncertainty is one of the appealing aspects of using a computational method in this chapter. On its own, it represents a different approach to studying the issue of Moore’s authorship, but in concert with the other approaches of previous chapters, it provokes productive questions about the general nature of the concept of authorship. In attempting to devise an operational method for the computational analysis of the tensions between generic diversity and stylistic consistency in Moore’s poetic oeuvre, what conceptual changes occur to the formulations of authorship I have articulated to this point? What must those formulations of authorship surrender in order for this computational formulation to be expressed? What claims about Moore’s authorship are valid on the basis of stylistic analysis alone?

Expectations about Moore’s Style Before proceeding to analysing Moore’s poetic works, I wish to advance some general and particular hypotheses. Part of my interest in pursuing this analysis lies in the diversity of Moore’s oeuvre. Even leaving aside the prose works which include fictional, historical, biographical, and travel narratives, his poetic output encompasses a wide range of modes, genres, and subjects. The tension between Moore’s attested modes of writing and the terms of his critical reception has always interested me. His body of work is one which seems to invite neat generic divisions and categorisations. Earlier, I invoked a line drawn underneath Moore’s early poetry after his 1806 duel with Francis Jeffrey at Chalk Farm. His determination to change his writing is evident in the declaration of the

138  These Quick-Reading Times following April: “I am not writing love-verses … I am writing politics” (LTM 1: 120–1). However, critics repeatedly return to particular themes and vocabulary from his early writings to characterise works across the span of his career. For example, the first two chapters of this book focus on his early works, whose amorous nature earned Moore a reputation as a lascivious and immoral writer which was remarkably persistent in critical accounts throughout his career.32 Similar critical patterns focus on his apparent commitment to ornamental and sentimental language and to his occasionally overwhelming accumulations of sensory imagery. 33 A tension is evident here between Moore’s intentions to write in different modes, genres, and registers and his critics’ perceptions of consistent authorial characteristics, regardless of those differences. My computational analysis of Moore’s style is an attempt to bring a different kind of evidence to bear upon this apparently intractable problem, to develop my own impressions gleaned from years of reading Moore’s poetry with the additional empirical perspectives yielded by stylometric analysis. How clear a division is possible between individual style and generic style? Does the decision to write in a different genre change one’s characteristic stylistic identity? By contrast, does an author’s stylistic fingerprint supersede the stylistic modifications required to write in a different genre? Can we even speak of style of a characteristic feature of genre? Additionally, I wish to consider how to account for tensions which arise from style which is identified and analysed, respectively, through close and distant reading. To that end, I want to outline some hypotheses before proceeding to the analysis. Here, again, I recognise that these ideas are influenced by my prior familiarity with the methods and outcomes of stylometric analysis.34 While a scholar unfamiliar with stylometry might predict a similar stylistic clustering of Moore’s poetic works, my knowledge of stylometric methods manifests most clearly in the qualifications that I add to my predictions.35 Visualisations of stylometric analysis often use Cluster Analysis, which groups texts that are more stylistically similar to each other than to those which appear in different groups or clusters. For example, the results of a successful stylometric analysis of a corpus of texts from a given century would likely cluster texts written by the same author, while a positive stylochronometric analysis would group texts written in the same time period.36 Thus, given the nineteen poetic works by Moore listed in Table 5.1, what stylistic clusters would one expect to emerge?37 Would it be reasonable to expect the clusters to arrange according to distinct chronological periods—the trajectory of juvenility, maturity, late style—or to match the generic contents of the works?38 Given the thematic threads uniting aspects of the first three volumes, we might expect the works of 1801–6 to cluster together. However, some distinct features present a challenge for this outcome: Odes of Anacreon is a

These Quick-Reading Times  139 Table 5.1 Moore poetry corpus. For each work, I have provided its date(s), title, abbreviated title used in stylometric graphs, and word count of texts in the main Moore corpus. The total word count for the corpus is 407,219. Date

Title

Graph title

1800 1801

Odes of Anacreon Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems Corruption and Intolerance Irish Melodies The Sceptic: a Philosophical Satire Intercepted Letters, or, the Twopenny Post-Bag Sacred Songs Lalla Rookh The Fudge Family in Paris National Airs Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress The Loves of the Angels, a Poem Fables for the Holy Alliance, etc. Evenings in Greece Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters The Summer Fete The Fudges in England Alciphron, a Poem

anacreon little

35,298 17,219

epistles corruption melodies sceptic intercepted

50,806 13,718 33,768 4,212 14,505

sacred lalla fudges_paris national tom_crib loves_angels fables evenings cash_corn

6,557 70,206 21,931 9,063 15,322 17,820 20,199 5,612 20,792

summerfete fudges_england alciphron

6,349 32,429 11,413

1806 1808 1808–34 1809 1813 1816–24 1817 1818 1818–27 1819 1823 1823 1826–32 1828 1831 1835 1839

Words

translation, however loose or characteristic of Moore’s individual style; and Epistles is notable for the miscellaneous styles, genres, and modes it contains. Little has Anacreon’s stylistic consistency, but the original poetry is likely to reveal a clearer authorial fingerprint. Epistles, to my mind, seems like the most challenging volume in Moore’s early oeuvre to categorise: it contains songs, amorous poems in the Little style, Anacreontics and other classically inflected poems, and epistolary poems like the later Intercepted Letters and Fudge Family volumes. Predicting the volumes it might cluster with is a roll of the dice.39 Even within the apparently coherent early period of Moore’s career, echoes of the generic and stylistic variety that characterises his career are present. Burrows, whose Delta method is a component of the Stylo package, argues that the top forty or so most frequent words (MFWs) of a text are “powerful markers of genre” (“Questions” 28).40 If this is the case, we might expect a stylometric process that analyses MFWs to discriminate between different genres deployed by Moore: between his amorous and satirical volumes, and between his songs and Romantic Orientalism. A cursory knowledge of Moore’s work will present evidence to the contrary: the Romantic Orientalism (Lalla Rookh and The Loves of the

140  These Quick-Reading Times Angels) contains songs and amorous episodes; some satires are written in song form (“A Pastoral Ballad, by John Bull”) or the ardent mode (“An Amatory Colloquy Between Bank and Government”).41 That initial expectation implies that genres in general, and as evident in Moore’s work, are consistent and clearly delineated categories with stylistic features that are measureable and productively tractable by stylometric analysis. Beyond that empirical respect, a pertinent literary consideration is the degree to which these genres manifest, and manifest differently, in the eyes of the author and the critic. Genres are not distinct, hermetic things but often inconsistent labels for conveniently categorising texts.42 Satire, for example, can be defined thematically (humorous critique of human folly), by disposition (Horatian, Juvenalian, Menippean), or by its use of particular poetic form. The formal, social, and chronological understandings of the genre labels we use are, as Underwood acknowledges, “entities of very different kinds” (“One Way”). What would a categorisation of Moore’s poetic works according to genre look like? Leaving aside the reservations just expressed, here is my impression of the kind of clustering that might emerge (Figure 5.1). Providing genre labels for these categories is an impressionistic and uncertain task, as is evident from the different criteria underpinning my categorisations. Some are firmly generic, as in the category of “Romantic Orientalism,” but I have also distinguished between “Epistolary satire” and “satire” more broadly. This subdivision recognises a formal similarity uniting the works of the epistolary category which is absent from the works in the broader satirical grouping. “Musical works” implies the presence of a stylistic similarity between works with different themes, while “Miscellanies” predicts an affinity amongst volumes containing a diverse range of poetic modes and forms. Finally, “Early works” expects a consonance between the first two, amorous volumes of Moore’s career,

Figure 5.1 Predicted categories.

These Quick-Reading Times  141 though Anacreon is a translated work. Another possible textual outlier is Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress, which is a sustained work of political satire that matches the tenor of other satirical works but is written in a pugilistic argot called “flash.”43 Even here, in this brief labelling exercise, is evidence of the different ways of defining and populating genres. An immediate disconnect is evident between my impressionistic groupings and the methods of stylometry, which relies on lexical measurements as an indicator of stylistic similarity. However, if the evidence of stylometric analysis reproduces this categorisation informed by textual familiarity and literary knowledge, what conclusions can we draw? Can we assert that Moore adopted a different poetic style when writing in these genres? Or have we merely confirmed that these are different genres with relatively different stylistic markers? The first assertion implies authorial agency, but to what degree can we attribute agency in the arguably unconscious patterning of function words? Conversely, what would a more “random” (compared to the literary logic followed above) clustering of works suggest? We might deduce that Moore’s personal authorial signal is stronger than those of the genres in which he wrote, or that the genres hypothesised above are inadequate. Ultimately, of course, the stylometric analysis is merely part of a developing investigation: a means and not an end. The method, against what Fish argues, is not dictated by the tool. The method is already well advanced before the tool is deployed to provide results for further analysis.

Corpus Preparation For the analysis that follows, I have used Stylo, a package for stylometric analysis explicitly designed to “help bridge the methodological gap” (Eder et al., “Stylometry” 107) between computer science and the humanities. Practically, this means that Stylo uses R, the standard programming language for statistical computing, in combination with a graphical user interface that enables non-programmers to exploit R’s affordances. The operational procedures of preparing texts for analysis with Stylo have a range of interesting implications for the literary scholar and for the concept of authorship: certain interesting conceptual and practical shifts must occur. Notwithstanding Jerome McGann’s insistence that there is no such thing as “plain text” (“Marking” 198) and Denis Tenen’s more recent analysis of the associations of the term, Stylo requires that texts are prepared for analysis in plain text format.44 A consequence is that any typographic formatting which appears in the original Moore publications—font size and weight, italics, small capitals, and indentation, among other features—is removed. In the third chapter, I argued for specific kinds of authorial agency and effects that arise from the use of small capitals in a reprint of “Ode for his Majesty’s Birth-day, June 4, 1803.” The operational requirements of this method of stylistic analysis are incompatible with this conception of authorship.

142  These Quick-Reading Times In practical terms, the typographic formalism of literature is not currently computable using Stylo: the spatial and graphic features of a text are not characteristic markers of authorship according to this method. This may come as a surprise to a scholar of E. E. Cummings, George Herbert, or of concrete poetry. My prompt is intentionally provocative, but its underlying importance is to register our attention to the textual features we use to argue for authorship, to their contingency, and to their fruitful collision with other features. Paratexts have played a central role in some of my earlier formulations of authorship in this book, but to what degree are they relevant in stylometry? Since the purpose of the method is to isolate and distinguish the particular characteristics of an author, it seems important that the sample texts should be attributable to the author under consideration. This imperative differs from my earlier arguments, which illustrate how extra-authorial manipulations of both text and paratext can contribute to shifts in authorial formulation, largely due to the manner of their reception. Stylo’s operational methods depend on isolating measurable components of authorship, and, as previous chapters have demonstrated, texts are often subject to varying degrees of nonauthorial influence. In preparing the texts, one might remove instances of clearly quoted material, as an example of text which could obscure the characteristic authorial fingerprint. But embarking on this path soon raises contentious issues in literary formulations of authorship. To clarify the authorial signal, should allusions and unquoted borrowings also be removed (even leaving aside the intolerable question of how to identify them)? Can the selection and arrangement of quotations not be considered a form of authorship? The appropriative mode of Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project and more recent works by Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place make conceptual arguments for the authorial integrity of work entirely composed of appropriated text.45 In stylometric experiments where the sample texts are small and limited in number, different results may be evident when nonauthorial quotations are removed, but in a larger study such as this (encompassing nineteen Moore works and more than 400,000 words), I have opted to proceed with analysis which includes nonauthorial quotation: at this level of scale, the very small proportion of quoted material is likely to have negligible impact on the results.46 I have also retained substantive paratexts such as prefaces and introductions,47 though it is worthy of note that Stylo does not discriminate between text and paratext: aspects of paratexts which I have presented as meaningful and influential in earlier chapters—their location, voice, register, and interactions with the text—are thus redundant in this computational method. The issue of authorial revision of texts is also relevant, given the importance I have placed on the phenomenon in previous chapters. I have consistently aimed to use the text from the earliest available edition of each Moore work included in the analysis. This method reproduces a

These Quick-Reading Times  143 tendency in textual studies to equate earlier editions of works with closer proximity to an “author’s intentions.”48 This theory is not unproblematic but is consistent and largely defensible. However, as in the cases above, the objections to this operational step help to clarify and enrich the other approaches to authorship in previous chapters, where extraauthorial influences are considered central to certain formulations of authorship. Where digitised copies of Moore works are available, I chose the first authorised edition.49 Where this is not available, I chose the earliest authorised edition. Next, I selected the earliest available edition by a different publisher.50 For multi-volume or multi-number works, I have used the collected text from the Poetical Works (1840–1).51 This method treats these works singly and may obscure the stylistic development evident in parts of a work created over a long period of time. That aside, the issue of analysing the lyrics of these works in isolation from their accompanying music is also problematic. Beyond the textual sacrifices described above, this method implies that Moore’s style inheres in the text of (for instance) the Irish Melodies, and not in its music, or in the synthesis of the two.52 While computational analysis of music is technologically feasible, its application to Moore will have to await a scholar of suitable expertise.53 Once I had collected digital copies for each work, I followed best practice by running optical character recognition (OCR) with an industry-standard software program to extract the text from the document images, saving it in plain-text format with UTF-8 encoding.54

Stylometric Analysis In order to address the question of whether the generic diversity of Moore’s poetic corpus has any demonstrable effects on his stylistic consistency, I assessed the range of different stylometric functions offered by Stylo, including unsupervised multivariate analysis, supervised machine learning classification, contrastive analysis, and collaborative authorship analysis. In the analysis below, I primarily use unsupervised multivariate analysis, which deploys the stylo() function, the main tool of the Stylo package. The principal difference between “supervised” and “unsupervised” methods relates to machine learning, and the former is more common in the use of stylometry for the specific purpose of authorship attribution.55 Since my purpose in analysing the Moore corpus is not to attribute authorship, I use unsupervised methods which do not include machine learning or “training” but instead use multivariate statistics to assess and visualise stylistic similarities between Moore’s works. Multivariate statistics involves analysis of more than one statistical variable at a time to arrive at an outcome which represents the analysis of multiple dimensions of the texts under consideration. For example, Cluster Analysis arranges Moore’s works into groups according to different measures of similarity, while the Bootstrap Consensus Tree method runs a number of different cluster analyses before statistically aggregating the results

144  These Quick-Reading Times into a consensus tree visualisation. This measure of consensus functions as though several hundred readers had been asked to arrange Moore works into stylistically similar clusters, as I have done above, with the results combined and normalised to represent a single compromise analysis for the group.56 Stylo is a package with a variety of features for stylometric analyses, but the stylo() function that I use follows a number of specific steps to process and analyse the most frequent words (MFWs) in the corpus of texts under consideration: stylo() will typically be used to produce a most-frequent-word (MFW) list for the entire corpus. Next, it will acquire the frequencies of the MFWs in the individual texts to create a matrix of words (rows) by individual texts (columns): each cell will contain a single word’s frequency in a single text. Subsequently, it will normalize the frequencies: it selects words from the desired frequency ranges for an analysis … and it will perform additional processing procedures (automatic deletion of personal pronouns and culling…) to produce a final wordlist for the actual analysis… It then compares the results for individual texts, performing e.g. distance calculations and various procedures (cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, or principal component analysis). Finally, the function will produce graphical representations of distances between texts. (Eder, et al. “‘Stylo’” 7, emphasis added to terms discussed below) Cluster Analysis groups individual texts according to those which have low measures of distance between each other: these clusters, according to the principles of stylometry, comprise texts that are the most stylistically similar to one another within the corpus. To test the accuracy of my stylistic expectations discussed above, I began with Cluster Analysis based on different measures of the MFWs, using the Cosine Delta measurement method.57 Examining a writer’s use of the most frequent words in a language may strike the literary scholar as counter-intuitive, but such analysis has proven to be strikingly robust for distinguishing between genres and comparable to the judgements of human readers.58 After the wordlist of MFWs for the entire corpus was produced, I made some manual corrections to remove errors.59 Once satisfied with the stability of the Stylo parameters,60 I proceeded to run tests at different levels of MFWs: this initial iterative method emphasises that stylometry deals in probabilities and not certainties, and that MFW analysis should be guided by the understanding that only findings that are stable across different parameter settings are worthy of report. Since Burrows argued for the power of the top forty MFWs in delineating genres (“Questions” 28), I began my cluster analysis at that point, analysing distances between texts calculated from their use of the top forty words in the corpus (Figure 5.2).61

These Quick-Reading Times  145 The analysis of the top forty words produced some notable results, while raising a number of questions.62 First, the clusters are divided into two distinct branches. With some exceptions, a number of notable patterns emerge. The lower branch comprises a grouping which might be loosely categorised as “Romantic Orientalism”: it contains works such as Lalla Rookh, The Loves of the Angels, and Alciphron, which I predicted together above. Evenings in Greece and The Summer Fete are musical works that contain some Eastern motifs, while Fables for the Holy Alliance might be viewed as an instinctive outlier in such a category.63 Three multi-volume musical works—National Airs, Irish Melodies, and Sacred Songs—are grouped together at the top of the upper branch, along with

Figure 5.2 Cluster Analysis, 40 MFW.

146  These Quick-Reading Times the outlying Little: the three musical volumes correspond to a section of the musical grouping that I predicted. Another notable cluster in the upper branch contains four satirical works: the two Fudge Family works closely related, along with another epistolary satire, Intercepted Letters, and the satirical Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters. Again, this cluster closely matches the “Epistolary satire” category I predicted above. Though Odes Upon Cash does not use the epistolary form, its presence within a satirical cluster is not unexpected. The other portion of the upper branch also contains the satirical works I grouped in the broader “Satire” category above—Corruption and Intolerance, The Sceptic, and Tom Crib—but in a more diffuse cluster which also contains two pre-1806 volumes, Odes of Anacreon and Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. As an assessment of Burrows’ claim that the first forty MFWs are “powerful markers of genre” (“Questions” 28), this test has a degree of success, but hardly enough to corroborate that argument. The corpus is resolved into two clusters that veer towards the categories of “Romantic Orientalism” and “satire and music” but those are rather loose groups that contain evident exceptions. Some coherent patterns are evident, though they are obscured by exceptions and outliers: the epistolary satire and musical categories in the top branch of the graph are the strongest evidence in support of Burrows’ argument, but only further tests would reveal whether this generic coherence would extend throughout the corpus. Analyses at increased numbers of MFWs present results that do move in this more coherent direction.64 Clustering of texts at 140 MFWs presents a resolution and refinement of some of the categories, but with some exceptions still present. Moving to 240 MFWs, however, reveals a greater degree of generic coherence (Figure 5.3). Some texts from the previous miscellaneous grouping have migrated into more established clusters. The “satire” cluster has moved to the bottom branch and is joined by the satirical volumes, Fables and Tom Crib. While the epistolary signal of the resulting cluster is weakened, its status as a broader satirical grouping is arguably strengthened. With Fables joining other satirical volumes, the “Romantic Orientalism” cluster is increasingly coherent: the location of musical works The Summer Fete and Evenings in Greece on a separate sub-branch confirms their instinctive difference from the three more established works of the genre. The two early volumes, Little and Epistles, are brought into close proximity, with the former vacating the increasingly coherent musical sub-grouping of National Airs, Irish Melodies, and Sacred Songs. The contemporaneous philosophical satires, Corruption and The Sceptic, are clustered closely together, while the logic of their proximity to Anacreon is less obvious. At 340 MFWs, this situation is granted an instinctive periodic resolution, as Anacreon is grouped with the two pre-1806 volumes, Little and Epistles. Otherwise, the clustering is identical to that found at 240 MFWs.

These Quick-Reading Times  147

Figure 5.3 Cluster Analysis, 240 MFW.

At 440 MFWs, one apparently minor but significant change occurs in the established pattern: the grouping of philosophical satires, Corruption and The Sceptic, moves from the upper branch of the graph to join the other cluster of satirical volumes on the lower branch. This creates a more coherent and logical division in the graph, with two satirical clusters occupying one branch, and the other comprised of a more diverse collection of musical, early, and Romantic Orientalist clusters (Figure 5.4).65

148  These Quick-Reading Times

Figure 5.4  Cluster Analysis, 440 MFW.

Thus, the emergent generic divisions present in the forty MFW test cohere and refine as the test is repeated at higher word frequencies. This suggests that there are genre signals which manifest in lexical choices that this stylometric method reliably distinguishes. To further confirm the stability of the patterns observed across these initial tests, I conducted two additional tests based on a more iterative method of analysis. The first, a Bootstrap Consensus Tree (BCT), produces a “statistically justified ‘compromise’” (Eder, et al., ‘“Stylo”’ 15) between a number of tests carried out at different word frequencies between 40 and 440.66

These Quick-Reading Times  149

Figure 5.5 Bootstrap Consensus Tree, 40–440 MFW.

Instead of a rooted dendrogram visualisation, the BCT produced an unrooted tree where texts cluster together if they cluster in at least 50% of the iterated analyses (Figure 5.5).67 After averaging the iterated tests, the four major stylistic clusters remain intact: (clockwise) early works, music, satire, and Romantic orientalism. Alongside the final “philosophical satire” cluster of Corruption and The Sceptic are three outlying works—Anacreon, Fables, and Tom Crib—which fail to achieve a consistent clustering in half of the tests. Finally, I conducted a range of analyses based on the frequency of character 4-grams, rather than words. The method is identical to that used in the MFW analyses but focuses on an even less conscious authorial level (Figure 5.6). Character n-grams have also proved valuable in authorship attribution (Kolowich) and are robust when the corpus has a high level of error resulting from inaccurate OCR (Eder, et al., ‘“Stylo”’ 12).68 Following the principle of consistency across varying parameters, this method confirms the strength of the main generic clusters, even if there are some instances of textual slippage between them. The musical category is clustered on the same branch as the early works, Little and Epistles, both volumes comprising a majority of short lyric poems. The Romantic Orientalism grouping remains as consistently formed as it has

150  These Quick-Reading Times

Figure 5.6 Bootstrap Consensus Tree, 40–440 MFC 4-grams.

throughout all tests. The satire category reveals itself to be less coherent, with greater distances between volumes, and with the departure of Tom Crib to a more miscellaneous grouping containing Anacreon and the two philosophical satires. Across the range of different tests, the clusters which appear most frequently and consistently across different parameter settings are those to which the method attributes the highest degree of confidence in its identification of stylistic similarity.

Discussion and Close Reading The generic patterns that I predicted prior to the stylometric analysis are evident, to a certain degree, in the patterning arising from the analysis (Figure 5.1).69

These Quick-Reading Times  151

Figure 5.1 Predicted categories.

Figure 5.7 Analysis categories.

What is apparent is how some of the stylometric clusters are almost perfect, according to our imperfect literary conceptions of genre and its limits (Figure 5.7). Without Evenings in Greece and The Summer Fete, the “Romantic Orientalism” category is a perfect reproduction of my prediction. With them, the category is less precise and satisfactory: even though both musical works contain some Orientalist elements and imagery, they are not a consistent presence throughout either. Similarly, these two volumes were present in my predicted cluster of “Musical works”: does their absence from the stylometric category of “Musical works” weaken its integrity?

152  These Quick-Reading Times As we assess the apparent conflict of competing modes—the musical and the Romantic Orientalist—the language of categorisation reveals its permeability. Lalla Rookh is a poetic work that contains songs, while Irish Melodies contains poetic lyrics divorced from their music. For Evenings in Greece, the Romantic Orientalist signal generated by its text apparently supersedes its musical signal. We can reasonably pose similar questions of the predicted and stylometric satirical clusters. Does the analysis successfully capture a broad satirical signal, or does it imperfectly identify an epistolary constellation? While I anticipated that Anacreon and Little might be united because of their amorous themes, analysis clustered the latter with Epistles. While that shared perception of the two volumes vindicates the critical view of Francis Jeffrey, Epistles’ formal and thematic miscellany makes it an instinctively odd bedfellow for Little. Does their proximity indicate a lexical connection to corroborate other categorisations of the pre-1806 period of Moore’s career? Some of the stylistic outliers are also explicable, to a degree: Moore is the translator of Anacreon, so it makes sense that his authorial style is obscured. He adopts an uncharacteristic slang in Tom Crib, even if none of its specific vocabulary appears in the top 440 MFWs. If Burrows is correct in his suggestion that the top forty MFWs are powerful markers of genre, the underlying assumption must be that genre is a consistent and clearly delineated category. These examples present evidence to the contrary on both counts. The clustering model works with a high degree of success in identifying categories which make sense in a literary perspective, but the literary critic’s desire for consistency at ever more granular levels of pattern recognition and generic coherence—not satire: epistolary satire!—is frustrated. Such microgenres represent a human desire, or more particularly a critical desire, for ever deeper layers of cultural classification. While they can offer rich hermeneutic potential, the fine detail with which microgenres are drawn can make them transitory categories.70 Where does the problem lie, then? With Burrows and stylometry, or with genre and literary criticism? It should not be a question of which is wrong, so much as a recognition of the poverty of the notion that a unified model for understanding Moore’s style can be found.71 While Richard Jean So’s basis for examining the claim that “all models are wrong” originates in the suspicion of quantitative methods in the humanities, it is worth remembering how genres are also categorical models which aim to represent the complex world of literature (and other cultural forms) in a simplified manner. However, we can acknowledge the simplification of models and query the efficacy of their relationships to the world, while also recognising the productive and exploratory insights they can yield (So 669).72 Stylometric analysis clusters Moore’s volumes according to their stylistic similarity and uses multivariate analysis of the works’ most frequent words to do so. As we have seen, however, many of the features

These Quick-Reading Times  153 that literary critics use to judge and compare poems cannot be analysed with this method. Metre, rhyme, rhythm, line length, and a host of other poetic features—while quantifiable—are not meaningful in the primarily lexical method of stylometric analysis.73 While this method has demonstrable success in confirming literary expectations about genre and style, what aspects of close reading does it disregard? To address this, I have examined poems from volumes with close and distant measures of stylistic difference, to assess whether the stylistic similarities and differences evident at scale are apparent at the level of the individual poem, or portion thereof. In calculating the relative frequencies of the 440 MFWs in each Moore volume, National Airs contains the highest proportion, while The Sceptic contains the lowest.74 Highlighting the occurrence of these 440 words within individual poems enables a complementary level of close reading, to examine the findings of stylometry within the context of literary criticism. All nineteen Moore volumes contain each of the forty MFWs, but further down the list appear words which are absent from one or more volumes.75 To distinguish, italicised words below appear in the first forty MFWs, while those in bold are placed from 41 to 440 in the same list and discriminate between volumes by their varying presence. The prevalence of the 440 MFWs in National Airs is evident in a poem such as “Fear Not That, While Around Thee,” a title whose constituent words all appear in the list. Fear not that, while around thee Life’s varied blessings pour, One sigh of hers shall wound thee, Whose smile thou seek’st no more. No, dead and cold for ever Let our past love remain; Once gone, its spirit never Shall haunt thy rest again. (PW 4: 240) With only eight words (18%) of the first stanza absent from the MFW wordlist, this is a statistically characteristic piece of Moore poetry. Thematically, it might also be considered typical, with the intrusion of a romantic memory threatening to upset the subject’s emotional equilibrium. The precarious emotional balance registers in the use of words of opposing sentiment: “blessings,” “smile,” “love,” versus “fear,” “wound,” “dead,” “cold,” “haunt.” The abstract nature of the stanza is also notable. The concrete nouns, “sigh” and “smile,” are the specific memories of the past lover which portend an emotional hazard. Otherwise, abstraction dominates: the subject’s present “blessings” and “rest” hint at an ambiguous state of positive repose, a recovery from the “spirit”

154  These Quick-Reading Times of the lost “love,” whose turmoil is not explicit but suggested between the lines. Another notable feature of the stanza is the shifting modes of address, including “our past love” (emphasis added), which unexpectedly implicates the speaker in the lost relationship. Having established the lovers by the use of second- and third-person “thee” and “hers,” the shift to the first-person plural is jarring. The second stanza resolves this apparent discrepancy, however, revealing the female speaker whose initial “hers” was a reference to the self in the third person. This delayed revelation intensifies the mood of emotional uncertainty of the first stanza. The abstract quality of a stanza predominantly composed of the most frequent words of the language has an instinctive logic: that the words we use most often have capacious utility and signification.76 The linguistic consequences of fitting words to music, as Moore does in National Airs, are another important factor: the constraints of composing words to match an existing melody are resolved by the use of ambiguous or abstract words, where precise signification might clash with its accompanying musical sense. By contrast to the abstraction of “Fear Not That, While Around Thee,” the satiric mode of The Sceptic manifests in a proliferation of concrete and specific detail, as Moore identifies and describes the objects of his satire. The following passage teems with detail of the Napoleonic Wars: the opposing parties, their generals, and the battle fought: Then, rights are wrongs, and victories are defeats, As French or English pride the tale repeats; And, when they tell Corunna’s story o’er, They’ll disagree in all, but honouring Moore! Nay, future pens, to flatter future courts, May cite perhaps the Park-guns’ gay reports, To prove that England triumph’d on the morn, Which found her Junot’s jest and Europe’s scorn! (21–2) Though the forty MFWs are still liberally present, the proportion of words from outside the top 440 MFWs rises to 55%, representing a significant stylistic difference from the previous poem. As a Napoleonic War poem, this passage bears comparison with “Ode for his Majesty’s Birth-day, June 4, 1803,” discussed in Chapter 2. In order to increase the ambiguity and signification of that previously occasional ode, Moore’s later revisions removed the final three quatrains specifically addressed to the king, while preserving the earlier transhistorical scene of warrior and lover. Fitting the occasional nature of satire, however, The Sceptic’s meaning is tied to its specificity and to its concrete historical references. Notably, of the eight volumes with the lowest proportions of the top 440 MFWs, seven are satirical.77 The same trend is evident in Corruption and Intolerance, where the satiric fury of “Intolerance” again comprises

These Quick-Reading Times  155 specific and concrete language from beyond the list of Moore’s most frequently used words: Enough for me, whose heart has learn’d to scorn Bigots alike in Rome or England born, Who lothe the venom, whencesoe’er it springs, From Popes or Lawyers, Pastry-cooks or Kings, Enough for me to laugh and weep by turns, As mirth provokes, or indignation burns, As C-nn--g vapours, or as France succeeds, As H-wk-sb’ry proses, or as Ireland bleeds! (42)78 This volume, and the satirical poetry more broadly, does contain interludes where Moore’s most frequent words cluster significantly. In “Corruption,” one such example distinguishes itself from the concrete tendencies of satire by critiquing the rhetoric of freedom in more abstract and universal terms: The people!—ah! that Freedom’s form should stay Where Freedom’s spirit long hath pass’d away! That a false smile should play around the dead, And flush the features when the soul hath fled! (24) The reverse situation can also be found in musical works which predominantly tend towards high frequencies of Moore’s most frequent words. Sacred Songs clusters consistently with National Airs in stylometric analysis and features the second highest proportion of the 440 MFWs by volume. Nonetheless, some of its more narrative poems share a specificity of detail and reference which place them on a similar footing to the satiric poems above. Describing the use of language as uncharacteristic for Moore is not adequate, however. They are only uncharacteristic within their immediate statistical context, whether that is the volume in which they appear or within the cluster to which stylometric analysis has assigned them. But the literary critic sees in this statistical deficiency familiar evidence of the permeability of genre and the habits of authorship. An author versed in the conventions of both satire and song lyric may choose to inflect each mode with traces of the other, using narrative detail in song and lyric language in satire. “Sound the Loud Timbrel” from Sacred Songs demonstrates the narrative tendency of some of Moore’s musical lyrics and the relatively low frequency of MFWs that accompany the mode: Sound the loud Timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea! Jehovah has triumph’d—his people are free. Sing—for the pride of the Tyrant is broken,

156  These Quick-Reading Times His chariots, his horsemen, all splendid and brave— How vain was their boast, for the Lord hath but spoken, And chariots and horsemen are sunk in the wave. Sound the loud Timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea; Jehovah has triumphed—his people are free. (PW 4: 269) The empirical MFW evidence yielded by stylometric analysis implies a stylistic gulf between volumes like National Airs and Sacred Songs, on the one hand, and The Sceptic and Corruption and Intolerance, on the other. The instinctive response of the Moore scholar must be agreement: the works within each of the two groupings are contemporaneous and are united by unambiguous generic conventions. In this sense, computational analysis confirms literary hypothesis. But using the statistical evidence of MFWs to compare their patterns of presence and absence, their specific functions, and their correlative interactions with the broader categories of style and genre brings a degree of clarity to the sometimes opaque functioning of computational evidence at the familiar scale of the individual poem. How a poet employs detail, the different types of language he uses to evoke ambiguity and precision, how a poem’s metric or phonetic frames influences the words the poet uses—none of these is an unfamiliar topic in studies of poetry. However, the combination of distant and close reading, and of empirical evidence apparent both at and beyond the observation of the individual reader, represents a novel and potentially fruitful approach to literary criticism enabled by computational methods. Nonetheless, I equally acknowledge the limitations of my arguments, and specifically from the perspective of literary criticism. The stylometric grounds for assertions of similarity and difference are primarily lexical, though close reading compensates by employing the full range of possibilities from the critic’s toolbox. But the concern remains that, stylometric success notwithstanding, the exclusive reliance on words is an unsatisfactory measure of poetry. If we want to use computers to study poetry according to criteria other than style, genre, and authorship, computational models should account for additional features of poetry.79 In studying what he calls an author’s “vulnerability” (147–77), or evidence of “change, novelty, or difference” (147) in their writings, Piper’s model measures similarity according to a matrix of the “lexical, semantic, syntactic, and phonetic aspects of a poem” (154). In selecting these features as components of an operational definition of poetic similarity, Piper highlights the potential shortcomings of isolated lexical analysis and illustrates some future possibilities for the study of Moore’s and other poets’ work.80

Conclusion Given the degrees of similarity and difference between the perspectives on Moore’s style informed by literary knowledge and stylometric analysis,

These Quick-Reading Times  157 what conclusions can be drawn? One of the primary questions I posed at the outset of this chapter was about the effects of the generic diversity on Moore’s stylistic consistency. The results of stylometric analysis present evidence to support an assertion that Moore adopted different writing styles when writing in different genres. To predict that stylistic analysis will find affinities in works that correlate with the genres they occupy is to posit the presence of identifiable genre markers in an author’s writing. That stylometry should endorse my expectations is not surprising, nor disappointing: as Underwood notes, “even when a model basically confirms a well-established hunch, we are likely to learn something along the way” (Distant 104). What precisely, have we learned? Further querying of the stylometric results with a combination of distant and close reading perspectives enabled me to address the question of how actively or deliberately Moore adopted these different styles. The resulting analysis of patterns of linguistic abstraction and concretion, and of lyric and narrative modes is a means of understanding how generic and stylistic difference manifests at the level of the poems and their words. Formulating this argument on the basis of closer reading alone is, of course, possible, but with the support of evidence gleaned from a large corpus of Moore’s poetry, the claim is arguably more compelling. However, it does not resolve the question of how deliberately authorial these generic and stylistic shifts might be. The further down the MFW list we travel, the more we recognise the instinctive markers of genre and style in words we readily associate with Moore and his writing: “weep,” “bosom,” “burning.”81 As Burrows argued and my initial analysis demonstrated, however, a recognisable germ of Moore’s generic clustering is already evident in the first forty MFWs, whose use is arguably unconscious. This represents another type of characteristic Moore vocabulary, albeit one that is more challenging for the human reader to perceive. From an authorial perspective, Moore may deliberately reach for what he views as characteristic vocabularies of the genres in which he writes as he moves from one to another, but he has already signalled those genres in his unconscious use of the most common words of the language. Does that mean those deeper MFWs, whose generic associations the critic will more easily intuit, are redundant? Perhaps, in the very narrow sense of distinguishing genre. But reading these words in context can yield closer textual evidence to bolster the argument and also reveal the slippages of this simplified model of Moore’s generic style. Close reading reveals consistent patterns of language use in distinct genres, but also where those patterns mingle, leaving shadowy traces of one genre in another. On these occasions we catch a glimpse of Moore’s distinctive authorial signal, whose strength transcends those of the genres in which he writes. The relatively distinct satirical categories testify to the success of his confident assertion that “I am not writing love-verses … I am writing politics” (LTM 1: 120–1), but the blurry boundaries of genre are evident on close and distant inspection. Lyric abstraction is

158  These Quick-Reading Times present in the satire of Corruption and Intolerance, while stylometric analysis places Fables for the Holy Alliance in close association with Romantic Orientalism works at lower counts of MFWs. On reflection, where my predicted clusterings went wrong was in their excessive faith in the stability of genres: in discretely gathering the musical works, the epistolary satires, and the Romantic Orientalism, I took no account of the generic and stylistic hybridity that the subsequent combination of distant and close reading revealed. Ironically, the miscellaneous volumes for whose fate I had no instinctive feel were those whose fusion of genres and styles provided a model for how stylometry would assess and arrange the corpus. This analysis has managed to address some of the additional questions I also posed. Divisions between individual style and generic style are evident, but the boundaries are indistinct and permeable. Adopting different genres changes Moore’s style in a measurable way, but the level of authorial agency and conscious deliberation driving that change is less clear. We can say, broadly and reservedly, that the genres in which Moore writes have stylistic correlates, but neither the genres nor styles have the consistency implied by the categorical use of those terms. The tensions between stylistic evidence gleaned by close and distant reading are methodological and ontological. The methods by which they are reached are vastly different, but I have endeavoured to show that belief in the validity and utility of both categories is compatible and productive for literary criticism. The question of the relationship between Moore’s authorial style and his work’s generic diversity threads its way through all these points and arguments. Discussion of an author’s stylistic evolution is commonplace in literary studies, but the methods and terms we use are diffuse. We can read all of an author’s poetic output with relative ease (compared to reading a corpus of 30,000 novels), but the broad stylistic patterns of a writing career are still difficult to isolate and articulate. The outlines that this chapter reveal do not describe the clear pattern of chronological development or periodisation by which we instinctively organise or understand a writing career: in 1817 and 1818, for instance, Moore traverses genres with Lalla Rookh, The Fudge Family in Paris, and the first volume of National Airs. Just as his engagement with genre defies neat classification, so too does the chronological progress of his career. What this chapter shares with previous chapters is a conviction about the value of combining distinct methodological approaches to the question of authorship: how they expose a fruitful balance between Moore’s active and passive roles in the shaping of his authorial personae. As a measure of stylistic unity, the generic hybridity of his works suggests that Moore’s authorial stylistic signal has a varying amplitude that occasionally supersedes that of the genre signal. Another means of testing for his stylistic unity would be to investigate whether all of

These Quick-Reading Times  159 his works cluster with a much larger corpus composed of many poets, especially those writing in similar genres. Would such unity tell us anything about authorship, however? An irony of stylometry that Foucault and Barthes would surely have appreciated is that the authorial signal manifests most clearly in the most frequent words of the language, the words common to us all that comprise a significant proportion of a text’s “tissue of quotations” (Barthes 146). Here, assuredly, in the dominion of the function word is proof for the poststructuralist of the “author function,” evidence of its ideological construction, its categorical utility. But in challenging Foucault, Burrows argues for the opposite conclusion: far from the notion that the author function involves mere curation of a common linguistic palette, function words bear demonstrable evidence for affirming authorial identity and property, and, in the competitive discourse of attribution and deattribution, for upholding the cult of the individual author.82 By demonstrating an effective empirical way of identifying who is speaking in a text, stylometry’s intervention might seem to require taking an ideological stance on the use of quantification in literary studies and on a particular theory of authorship. However, in both its operational procedures and in its attentive union with close reading, computational analysis has much to offer in enhancing our understanding of literary authorship.

Notes

160  These Quick-Reading Times







These Quick-Reading Times  161 powers of amplification, the question becomes: what can the computer see, in its repetitive and unwavering attention to minute detail, that is less (or even in-) visible to human readers? (76–7) 16 For a good example, see the third chapter of Enumerations, where, having used a topic modelling algorithm to extract topics from a corpus of 150 German novels, Piper uses close reading to analyse the distribution and proximity of words from a single notable topic in passages from four of the novels in the collection (75–83). 17 See Allington et al. for a wide-ranging critique of digital humanities which makes this specific point. 18 A recent example of another crossover stylometry moment relates to the anonymous New York Times Opinion article, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Some attempted to attribute the article to Vice President Mike Pence on the basis of its use of the word “lodestar,” which Pence was recorded using on several occasions (Moye). But this is precisely the kind of tactic that an anonymous author seeking to create a false attribution would pursue. Interestingly, WikiLeaks deployed pertinent language (if not methods) by referring to “adverserial [sic] stylometry” and “forensic author profiling” in attributing the article to an “older, … conservative … male.” However, as Benjamin Schmidt pointed out, their announcement was accompanied by an irrelevant image lifted from an article on stylometric visualisation by Maciej Eder. In the midst of such a dizzying array of mis- and disinformation, even the probabilistic attribution methods of stylometry emerge as a beacon of relative truth. 19 An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given text. The items may be letters, words, syllables, or other distinct textual or linguistic units. For example, successive character 4-grams from the beginning of the previous sentence are “thei,” “heit,” “eite,” “item,” “tems,” etc. 20 Authors whose works have been subjected to the latter mode of analysis (sometimes called stylochronometry) include Samuel Beckett (Hulle & Kestemont), W. B. Yeats (Forsyth), Charles Dickens (Tabata), Henry James (Hoover, “Conversation”), and Jack London (Juola, “Becoming”). For a critique of computational (including distant reading) analyses of gender categories, see Mandell. 21 See the early chapters of Gross for an account of reviewing’s ascent in the early years of the nineteenth century. 22 The symbols are those employed in M. H. Abrams’ study of romantic theory. 23 See Best & Marcus for an introduction to the concept of “surface reading.” 24 Some empirical areas that fall under the large umbrella of literary studies do proceed in operational fashion: descriptive bibliography, for instance. 25 The (hypothetical) bridge to the world and its practicalities is obvious in this example, too: who may claim the money accrued by the sale of a book, if it has no author? 26 VerSteeg attempts to provide an operational definition of authorship, but for the specific legal purposes of assigning copyright. What results invites a range of counterexamples from the literary scholar (which do not necessarily challenge its legal soundness): [t]o ascertain whether someone is an author, we must ask whether he has communicated original expression, either directly (through personal fixation) or indirectly (through authorizing another to fix it). This is what makes someone a copyright author. Without communication, a person cannot be an author. (1,365)

162  These Quick-Reading Times





















These Quick-Reading Times  163

40

41 42 43

44

45

46

47

48

It suggests how the artifact of the book continues to play a very strong role in how poets evolve in their writing” (166). More recent studies have argued for increased success in authorship attribution at higher word vectors, with Smith & Aldridge suggesting that a “word frequency vector of between 200 and 300 words give[s] the most accurate results.” In my analysis, I examine and evaluate shifts in clusters at a range of different word vectors. “When you call’d me the fondest, the truest of Banks, / And enjoy’d the endearing advances I made!” (Odes Upon 1). Here, a comparison with Foucault on the author is salutary: “he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses” (221). See xxv–xxx of Moore’s preface to the volume for context on “Flash or St. Giles’s Greek.” Again, the instinctive literary concern may be redundant here, since none of the unique vocabulary described by Moore (“prig,” “fib,” “lour,” “duds,” “prancers,” “cove,” “mill,” “rum,” etc.) appears in the list of the top 440 MFWs for Tom Crib, suggesting that the genre effect is not exclusively determined by their presence. In actual fact, TEI XML and HTML are also permissible formats, but Stylo removes those languages’ formatting in the preprocessing stage prior to performing its analysis (Eder, et al., “Stylometry” 109–10). I have consistently used UTF-8 character encoding in my plain text files, though ANSI encoding is also permitted by Stylo. Goldsmith’s Capital is a twentieth-century reconfiguration of The Arcades Project, and it closely follows its citationist methods. Many of Goldsmith’s works fit this description, as do those of Vanessa Place, whose work is based on the verbatim reproduction of court reports and testimony. My own conceptual work, Eververse, is a pertinent poetic example, using natural language generation technology to generate new verse from corpora of existing poetry. Burrows describes different results in a stylometric test to attribute early modern poems before and after removing additions made subsequent to the poet’s death (“Questions” 25), but his sample sizes—those of individual poems— are very small. My article with Francesca Benatti on attributing an anonymous review of Coleridge’s Christabel describes the scrupulous removal of quoted material which would obscure the authorial signal in small text samples (“English”). By contrast, Ted Underwood, whose work admittedly involves much larger sample sizes than mine, warns about the diminishing returns to be yielded by overcorrection and cleaning of sample data (Distant 153–4). I am conscious that preserving prose paratexts, depending on their length, has the potential to interrupt the genre signal of the verse in that volume. However, following my arguments in earlier chapters, I contend that the construction and inclusion of paratexts can be viewed as deliberate contributions to establishing a work’s genre. That said, I have removed more structural paratexts such as title and contents pages, running titles, page numbers, and signature marks. Different ways of divining an author’s intentions exist, but Greg summarises a dominant methodology up to the mid-twentieth century, which persists in different guises today: “[i]t is therefore the modern editorial practice to choose whatever extant text may be supposed to represent most nearly what the author wrote and to follow it with the least possible alteration” (“Rationale” 21).

164  These Quick-Reading Times









These Quick-Reading Times  165

60

61

62 63 64

65

66 67 68

69 70

71

72

Having run some tests before and after the removal of these errors, I observed some notable differences in the results of analyses of lower MFW counts (40–140) which became negligible at higher counts. In running a series of initial tests, I experimented with removing personal pronouns, culling (analysing only words that appear in a given percentage of texts within the corpus), and sampling (analysis of equal-sized consecutive sections of each text). Finding the effects of these variable tests negligible, I preserved pronouns and refrained from culling and sampling. This chapter does not allow me to present evidence of all tests performed. In the interests of verifiability and reproducibility, however, I have deposited tabular and graphical results for all tests, along with the corpora used for analysis, on GitHub: https://github.com/jtonra/moore. The top forty MFWs in the corpus are: the, of, and, to, in, a, that, I, as, with, is, his, for, all, it, but, which, from, by, this, he, on, my, her, was, be, at, when, so, their, not, they, who, or, like, we, have, one, are, me. Containing sections of satires, travel works, and miscellanea, its full title is Fables for the Holy Alliance, Rhymes on the Road, &c. &c. In practical terms, admitting additional MFWs to the analysis means that less frequently occurring words are included. The resulting effect is a refining of the results yielded by the analysis at forty MFWs and not a wholesale methodological change. From a literary perspective, this refinement of categories at higher MFWs makes instinctive sense, as words at this range of frequency seem more characteristic of Moore: the 400th to 403rd MFWs are “cannot,” “weep,” “bosom,” “burning.” Smith & Aldridge’s argument for greater accuracy in authorship attribution at higher word vectors offers a stylometric correlative. The process runs through multiple iterations, rather than a single iteration as in the tests conducted at specific MFW counts. The test I ran synthesised the results of 400 iterated analyses between 40 and 440 MFWs. This is a variable, with 0.5 used as the default Stylo setting. Conscious of the presence of OCR error within the corpus, I also assembled a second corpus of Moore works deriving from texts on Project Gutenberg, upon which I ran an identical set of tests. While this corpus has a lower error rate, the provenance and reliability of the texts is lower than in the main corpus (this Gutenberg corpus and full test documentation are available on GitHub). Some variations in the tests are evident, but similar generic signals to those arising from the main corpus are present. In the “Analysis” section, I have arranged the clusters with the most statistically reliable first, and then in descending order of reliability (both in the overall list, and within clusters). As O’Donnell and Stevens write, “[m]icrogenres offer unique frameworks for thinking about classification and historical organization in formally, historically, and theoretically nuanced ways” (2), and “that humanity’s desire to classify is often only matched by the unsustainability of the obscure and hyper-specific” (6). For instance, when using Classic Delta distance measurements, the resulting Cluster Analysis is similar, but with notable failures to associate Irish Melodies with other musical works, and Lalla Rookh with Romantic Orientalism. Should such apparent failures be attributed to that particular stylometric model, or to the generic or stylistic integrity of those particular works? So’s conclusion echoes the emergent rehabilitation of error in computational literary studies and digital humanities, more broadly:

166  These Quick-Reading Times error is a constitutive part of science and … quantitative literary criticism would benefit from viewing error as less something to be tolerated or avoided and more something to be formally integrated into our research (Wimsatt). Accepting that all models are wrong might prove liberating. (672) In claiming “all models are wrong,” So quotes George Box. 73 While the dominant data points in stylometry are lexical, some experiments in alternative methods have been published. See, for example, Feng, et al. on syntactic stylometry. 74 Stylo normalises the frequency of each of these words so the measure of their frequency is relative to the length of the work in which they appear, resolving discrepancies in length between different works. I determined the frequency of the 440 MFWs by calculating the sum of the relative frequencies for each word in each volume. 75 The most frequent word which does not appear in The Sceptic is “heart” (83rd) and, in National Airs, “man” (144th). 76 Interestingly, Heuser and Le-Khac have argued for the decreasing abstraction of literary language across the nineteenth century, as a symptom of the shift from “telling to showing” that characterised the transition from realism to modernism. The crucial difference is that their corpus was composed of British novels. A similar study of poetic language in the same period would make for an interesting comparison. 77 The exception is Odes of Anacreon. 78 The expletives mask “[George] Canning” and “[Robert Jenkinson, Baron] Hawkesbury,” but neither, unmasked, would appear in the 440 MFWs. 79 For examples of stylometric approaches to studying poetry, see articles which focus on characteristics such as authorship (Smith), syntax (Chaudhuri, et al.), and metre (Plecháč, et al.; Nagy). 80 As Piper also recognises, these features are pertinent for his specific analysis of poetic similarity and that virtually anything can be conceptualised as a feature of a poem (31). 81 I recognise the projection in this statement. I instinctively associate “weep,” “bosom,” and “burning” with Moore because I have written primarily about his early and Romantic orientalist verse. A scholar of the Irish Melodies might instinctively recognise “bright,” “sweet,” and “music,” or a researcher of the satires, “letter,” “king,” and “friend” as characteristic Moore vocabulary. 82 For example, see the contentious sequence of attribution, deattribution, and reattribution in the Daniel Defoe canon (J. R. Moore; Furbank & Owens; Novak).

Conclusion

From an explicit aim to “write my name” in Little to an empirical environment in which Moore writes his name through the characteristic, yet unconscious arrangement of function words, this book has sought to examine a range of scenarios in which Moore’s authorship is constructed. The trajectory evident between those two distinct instances illustrates at once a core methodological principle and an organising theme for my study. On the one hand, Moore is examined as an active, deliberate, and strategic agent in the formulation of his authorial identity in Little, while on the other, stylometric analysis reveals the degree to which his distinctive authorial style unconsciously persists in his writing, even as he moves between different poetic modes and genres. Throughout the other chapters of this book, I examine different sources and forces of agency in the construction of authorship at varying levels of remove from Moore’s activity. The methodological principle I assert in taking this approach views authorship, necessarily, as a broadly mediated phenomenon, constructed within a host of complex interactions between different forces of authorial and nonauthorial agency. I argue that the study of authorship must attend to the pressure and influence of multiple agencies within circuits of literary communication. Reprinting, reception, and regulation are three prominent factors in the middle three chapters of this book, but a study of such interlocking forces can potentially be brought to bear on cases of individual literary works. I have proceeded to vary my focus and attention on different agents and forces in different chapters in order to ascribe increased attention to a number of distinct approaches to studying authorship. Ultimately, however, my aim is to illustrate the complementarity and reciprocal productivity of such methods, and the value in attending to broad formulations and understandings of book history—those articulated by scholars such as Bordieu, Darnton, McKenzie, and McGann—in the task of studying authorship. At the outset, I stated that authorship is not a simple case of a writer’s authoritative self-fashioning but rather a phenomenon arising from the intricate interdependence of a range of textual features and cultural factors. In my analysis of Moore’s poetic corpus in the final chapter via

168 Conclusion a combination of distant and close reading, I model this type of interdependence. At that large scale of distant reading, we can detect patterns of the nebulous cultural categories that we call style and genre. In switching the macroscopic approach for a more forensic engagement with individual texts in that corpus, we begin to see the dynamics of those patterns at small scale and in arrangements not apparent in the course of close reading alone: how linguistic abstraction and concretion appears to correlate to notable degrees with, respectively, Moore’s lyric and satiric poetry. In such discoveries, as I indicated in that chapter, we see how the methods of this book might aid our comprehension of wider issues within literature of the Romantic period and within the study of authorship. In a larger corpus of poetry from the Romantic period, or indeed, any other literary period, would these same apparent correlations be sustained? Do Romantic authors generally write in concrete terms when they write satire and use more abstract language in lyric poetry? Similarly, the discoveries of the final chapter might fruitfully be extended by assessing the stability of Moore’s authorial signal within a poetic corpus of a greater size, comprising works by multiple authors. How, too, are these patterns sustained or changed in an analysis of Moore’s entire output, including both poetry and prose? Thus, we see how the distant reading methods employed here might profitably address a range of questions about authorship in the case of individual authors and across periods of literary history. Similarly, the authorial analysis arising from specific methodological approaches in each chapter might be supplemented and advanced by the application of focus to different agents of authorial force. While Chapter 1 concentrates on Moore’s strategic employment of the dual effects of authorial revelation and concealment, one might pursue this topic further by considering the precise ways that the Little preface alludes to the established history of authors’ prefatory self-representation and to the characteristically apologetic and deferential modes of other poetic débuts. The paratextual emphasis of Chapter 1’s analysis can potentially augment the formulations of authorship articulated in the chapters that focus on Lalla Rookh (Chapter 3) and The Loves of the Angels (Chapter 4). In the latter, I briefly examine Moore’s habits of scholarly annotation which are designed, in this instance, to add factual authority to the work’s Orientalist imagery. A more focused study on the paratextual apparatus of these two works would help to give added nuance to Moore’s authorial practices in the Romantic Orientalist mode, while revealing, at the same time, the dominant factual sources about the East employed by literary authors in this period and how their works absorb or challenge those sources’ specific ideologies. Moore’s paratextual practices within his broader body of work is another topic that would further elucidate his varying authorial customs in different genres and contexts: I address significant paratextual moments during the circulation of Epistles, in

Conclusion  169 Chapter 2, and the different purposes which they serve is evident from this brief comparison. Chapter 2’s focus on periodical and book reprinting of Moore’s works in the United States is designed to elaborate the changing authorial significations that arose beyond Moore’s direct control in that country, but another useful means of exploring authorship in this context is to consider in more detail the clandestine transatlantic publishing partnerships exemplified by Irving’s intermediary role in negotiating the terms for the American imprint of Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. This covert trade provides an alternative conception of authorship to that represented by the “official” narrative of the “Petition of Thomas Moore” to the US Congress. In my introduction, I described my recognition that parts of Moore poetic corpus have received extensive critical attention in the past and that my own focus on early and Romantic Orientalist work was to some extent dictated by this consideration. That said, some of these more often-tread avenues could be illuminated by further examination through some of this book’s methodological lenses. For instance, the central importance afforded to onymity in Chapter 1 is relevant to a whole host of additional works across Moore’s career. What masks Moore adopted, what prompted their adoption, how sincere they were, and how they impacted the works’ texts are all revealing questions to be posed of the authorial situations in works such as Corruption and Intolerance (“An Irishman”); Intercepted Letters, Fables for the Holy Alliance, and the two Fudge Family volumes (“Thomas Brown, the Younger”); Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters (anonymous); Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress (“One of the Fancy”); Memoirs of Captain Rock (“By Himself”); and Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion (“Editor of ‘Captain Rock’s Memoirs’”). Such a sustained feature of Moore’s writing deserves dedicated attention. In chapters on the authorised and unauthorised publication of Moore’s works in Britain and the United States, I focused on certain volumes because of their particularly appropriate contextual characteristics: the anti-Americanism of Epistles, and the bestselling nature of Lalla Rookh. Revealing detail could be gleaned from such bibliographical and book-historical studies of other Moore works, especially when combined with unexplored evidence such as that yielded by publication archives and the underground history of book piracy. An extensive publication history of the Irish Melodies awaits completion: it would be a near-inexhaustibly rich trove of bibliographical details and contexts. It would also be an enormous undertaking but a potentially momentous contribution to our understanding of that work. Though the legal restraint on blasphemous literary works, discussed in Chapter 4, does not readily apply to other writings in Moore’s corpus, legal regulations about seditious publication served as a comparably influential factor on the textual and authorial situations of many of Moore’s satirical writings. In a similar fashion,

170 Conclusion tracing the effects of early critical denunciations of his amorous poetry across the course of his career could prove to be a stimulating exercising in identifying further instances of self-censorship and moral reticence. The examples that I have discussed in this book are those which spoke most directly and coherently to my desire to probe the authorial formulations evident across Moore’s work and proved the most amenable fit for the methodologies I wished to apply. From this brief census of possible future directions for research on discourses of authorship in Moore’s works, however, the potential richness of the topic is clear. The case of Moore, as Chandler’s England in 1819 attests, is one with great potential to aid our understanding of broader currents within the literature of the Romantic period. Centrally involved in literary culture at the time, but largely peripheral in canonical accounts of the period in its aftermath, Moore—true to his ambiguous aesthetic—is both of and not of Romantic literature. Simultaneously inside and outside some of the normative features of the period and its literature, Moore acts as a useful foil for querying dominant models of Romantic authorship. The most obvious way in which this book exploits the opposition he represented is in its accounts of textual revision and how they conflict with ideals of authorial autonomy that are central to Romantic authorship. However, my reliance on examinations of the wider forces which exert pressure on the integrity of these characteristically Romantic inheritances— spontaneity, independence, autonomy—represents a further means of interrogating the ideologies of Romantic authorship. This is an aspect of scholarship which has been underway for a long time, of course, but my work aims to model the manner in which the study of a “minor” author can meaningfully contribute to problematising the persistence of Romantically inflected theories of authorship. The poem from which this book takes its name, “Written in the Blank Leaf of a Lady’s Common-Place Book,” sees its speaker stake a claim for a place in “One little vacant corner” of the reader’s consciousness. This book, Write My Name, argues in a similar fashion for a new space for Moore in scholarship: that from greater attention to his understanding of authorship arises a greater understanding for the scholar of Moore’s works and their place in literary history.

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Norton, 1958. Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker. “A New Model for the Study of the Book.” A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, edited by Nicolas Barker, British Library, 1993, pp. 5–43. Allington, Daniel, et al. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016. The Arno Miscellany: Being a Collection of Fugitive Pieces Written by the Members of a Society Called the Oziosi at Florence. Stamperia Bonducciana, 1784, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Ashbee, Henry Spencer. Index Librorum Prohibitoru[m]: Being Notes BioBiblio- Icono-Graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. C. Skilton, 1960. 2 vols. Barnard, John. “First Fruits or ‘First Blights’: A New Account of the Publishing History of Keats’s Poems (1817).” Romanticism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2006, pp. 71–101. doi:10.1353/rom.2006.0000. Barnes, James J. Authors, Publishers, and Politicians, The Quest for an AngloAmerican Copyright Agreement 1815–1854. Ohio State UP, 1974. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana P, 1977, pp. 142–8. Bauman, Susan R. “In the Market for Fame: The Victorian Publication History of the Brontë Poems.” Victorian Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, pp. 44–71. Beare, Geraldine. “Dugdale, William (1799/1800–1868).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 23 Sept. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/65592. Benatti, Francesca, et al., editors. Thomas Moore: Texts, Contexts, Hypertext. Peter Lang, 2013. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap P, 2003. Benstock, Shari. “At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text.” PMLA, vol. 98, no. 2, 1983, pp. 204–25. doi:10.2307/462046. Bentley, G. E., Jr. “A Jewel in an Ethiop’s Ear: The Book of Enoch as Inspiration for William Blake, John Flaxman, Thomas Moore, and Richard Westall.” Blake in His Time, edited by Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce, Indiana UP, 1978, pp. 213–40. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. doi:10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1.

172 Bibliography Beyers, Chris. “Adventures in the Book Trade: The Publication History of Stevens’ Harmonium and Ideas of Order.” Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 79–97. doi:10.1353/wsj.2011.0003. Bode, Katherine. “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77–106. doi:10.1215/00267929-3699787. Boehm, Alan D. “The ‘1798 Lyrical Ballads’ and the Poetics of Late EighteenthCentury Book Production.” ELH, vol. 63, no. 2, 1996, pp. 453–87. Bonakdarian, Mansour. “Locating Ireland in Iran of Thomas Moore’s ‘The Veiled Prophet’: Allegory, History, and Unsettled Interpretive Trajectories.” European Romantic Review, vol. 30, no. 5–6, 2019, pp. 519–40. doi:10.108 0/10509585.2019.1672546. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson. Polity P, 1993. Bradsher, Earl L. Mathew Carey: Editor, Author and Publisher. A Study in American Literary Development. Columbia UP, 1912. Briggs, Asa. A History of Longmans and Their Books, 1724–1990: Longevity in Publishing. British Library, 2008. Brougham, Henry. Review of Hours of Idleness, by George Gordon Byron. Edinburgh Review, vol. 11, 1808, pp. 285–9. Brown, Charles Brockden. “Anacreon Moore versus America.” The Literary Magazine and American Register, vol. VI, 1806, pp. 219–22. Brown, Philip A. H. London Publishers and Printers: C.1800–1870. British Library, 1982. Burrows, John. “Computers and the Idea of Authorship.” Rückkehr Des Autors: Zur Erneuerung Eines Umstrittenen Begriffs, edited by Fotis Jannidis et al., Niemeyer, 1999, pp. 167–81. ———. “‘Delta’: A Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 17, no. 3, 2002, pp. 267– 87. doi:10.1093/llc/17.3.267. ———. “Questions of Authorship: Attribution and Beyond. A Lecture Delivered on the Occasion of the Roberto Busa Award ACH-ALLC 2001, New York.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 37, no. 1, 2003, pp.  5–32. doi:10.1023/A:1021814530952. Byron, George Gordon. Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand. John Murray, 1973–82. 12 vols. ———. Cain; A Mystery. W. Benbow, 1822. ———. Complete Poetical Works, edited by Jerome McGann. Oxford UP, 1980–93. 7 vols. ———. The Corsair: A Tale. John Murray, 1814, HathiTrust. ———. Don Juan. Cantos VI., VII., VIII. W. Dugdale, 1823. ———. English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. James Cawthorn [1809]; 2nd ed., James Cawthorn, 1809, HathiTrust. ———. The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale. John Murray, 1813, HathiTrust. ———. Heaven and Earth. The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South. 1 Jan. 1823, pp. 165–206. ———. Hours of Idleness. S. and J. Ridge, 1807, HathiTrust. ———. Sardanapalus, A Tragedy. The Two Foscari, A Tragedy. Cain, A Mystery. John Murray, 1821.

Bibliography  173 C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. ProQuest, 2005–20. Campbell, Matthew. “Thomas Moore, Daniel Maclise and the New Mythology: The Origin of the Harp.” The Voice of the People: Writing the European Folk Revival, 1760–1914, edited by Michael Perraudin and Matthew Campbell, Anthem P, 2012, pp. 65–86. Carter, John, and Nicolas Barker. ABC for Book Collectors. Oak Knoll P; British Library, 2004. The Cases of the Appellants and Respondents in the Cause of Literary Property, Before the House of Lords. J. Bew, W. Clarke, P. Brett, and C. Wilkin, 1774. Chandler, James. England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. U Chicago P, 1998. Chaudhuri, Pramit, et al. “A Small Set of Stylometric Features Differentiates Latin Prose and Verse.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 34, no. 4, 2019, pp. 716–29. doi:10.1093/llc/fqy070. Clement, Tanya, and Stephen McLaughlin. “Measured Applause: Toward a Cultural Analysis of Audio Collections.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2016. doi:10.22148/16.002. Cobb, Matthew. The Idea of the Brain: A History. Basic Books, 2020. Cole, Richard Cargill. Irish Booksellers and English Writers 1740–1800. Mansell, 1986. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 7. Princeton UP, 1984. ———. “On the Errors of Party Spirit: Or Extremes Meet.” The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 4, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 134–45. Collins, Arthur Simons. The Profession of Letters: A Study of the Relation of Author to Patron, Publisher and Public, 1780–1832. Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1973. “Computational Literary Studies: A Critical Inquiry Online Forum.” In the Moment: the Critical Inquiry Blog, 31 Mar. 2019. “Copyright Act of 1790: 1 Statutes at Large, 124.” U. S. Copyright Office, 2020, copyright.gov. “Copyright Act, London (1842).” Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), edited by L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, 2008–20, copyrighthistory.org. Cordell, Ryan, and David Smith, Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines, 2017, viraltexts.org. Cranenburgh, Andreas van, and Corina Koolen. “Identifying Literary Texts with Bigrams.” Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 2015, pp. 58–67. Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. “Tenniel, Sir John (1820–1914).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 23 Sept. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36458. Da, Nan Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 3, 2019, pp. 601–39. doi:10.1086/702594. Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” MLN, vol. 94, no. 5, 1979, pp. 919–30. doi:10.2307/2906560. Dowling, William C. Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801–1812. U of South Carolina P, 1999.

174 Bibliography Du Prat, Abbé. Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in her Smock. [Edmund Curll], 1725. Dyer, Gary. “Publishers and Lawyers.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 44, no. 2–3, 2013, pp. 121–6. doi:10.1086/TWC24044234. Eagleton, Terry. “The Masochism of Thomas Moore.” Crazy John and the Bishop: and Other Essays on Irish Culture, Cork UP, 1998, pp. 140–58. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver, Picador, 1984. Eder, Maciej. “Does Size Matter? Authorship Attribution, Small Samples, Big Problem.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 30, no. 2, 2015, pp. 167–82. doi:10.1093/llc/fqt066. Eder, Maciej, et al. “‘Stylo’: A Package for Stylometric Analyses.” Computational Stylistics Group, 2013. ———. “Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Text Analysis.” R Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 107–21. doi:10.32614/RJ-2016-007. Elder, Glen H. “The Life Course as Developmental Theory.” Child Development, vol. 69, no. 1, 1998, pp.  1–12. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998. tb06128.x. Eldridge, Herbert G. “The American Republication of Thomas Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems: An Early Version of the Reprinting ‘Game.’” PBSA, vol. 62, 1968, pp. 199–205. ———. “Anacreon Moore and America.” PMLA, vol. 83, 1968, pp.  54–62. doi:10.2307/1261233. English, James F. “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature after ‘the Sociology of Literature.’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. v–xxiii. doi:10.1353/nlh.2010.0005. Erickson, Lee. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. ———. “‘Unboastful Bard’: Originally Anonymous English Romantic Poetry Book Publication, 1770–1835.” New Literary History, vol. 33, no. 2, 2002, pp. 247–78. Escobar Varela, Miguel, and Luis Hernández-Barraza. “Digital Dance Scholarship: Biomechanics and Culturally Situated Dance Analysis.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 35, no. 1, 2020, pp. 160–75. doi:10.1093/llc/fqy083. Eve, Martin Paul. “Close Reading with Computers: Genre Signals, Parts of Speech, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.” SubStance, vol. 46, no. 3, 2017, pp. 76–104. Evert, Stefan, et al. “Understanding and Explaining Delta Measures for Authorship Attribution.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 32, no. suppl_2, 2017, pp. ii4–16. doi:10.1093/llc/fqx023. Eyre, John. Review of Odes of Anacreon, by Thomas Moore. Edinburgh Review, vol. 2, 1803, pp. 462–76. Ezell, Margaret J. M. “‘By a Lady’: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture.” The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert J. Griffin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 63–79. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-11109-8_4. ———. “Reading Pseudonyms in Seventeenth-Century English Coterie Literature.” Essays in Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1994, pp. 14–25.

Bibliography  175 Feather, John. Publishing, Piracy, and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain. Mansell, 1994. Feldman, Paula R. “Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era.” Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850, edited by E. J. Clery et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp.  44–53. doi:10.1057/9780230375482_3. Fish, Stanley. “Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation.” The New York Times Opinionator Blog, 23 Jan. 2012. The Florence Miscellany. Gaetano Cambiagi, 1785, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Forsyth, R. S. “Stylochronometry with Substrings, or: A Poet Young and Old.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 14, no. 4, 1999, pp. 467–78. doi:10.1093/llc/14.4.467. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, Penguin, 2000, pp. 205–22. Foxon, D. F. “The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798.” The Library, vol. s5–IX, no. 4, 1954, pp. 221–41. doi:10.1093/library/s5-IX.4.221. Furbank, Philip Nicholas, and William Robert Owens. Defoe De-Attributions: Critique of JR Moore’s Checklist. A&C Black, 1994. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford UP, 1972. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge UP, 1997. Godson, Richard. A Practical Treatise on the Law of Patents for Inventions and of Copyright. Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1823. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Capital. Verso, 2016. Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Pages from the Goncourt Journal. Translated by Robert Baldick, New York Review Books, 2007. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. W.W. Norton, 2008. Green, James N. “The Rise of Book Publishing.” History of the Book in America Volume 2. An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, U of North Carolina P, 2010, pp. 75–127. Greg, W. W. The Calculus of Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism. Clarendon P, 1927, Internet Archive. ———. “The Rationale of Copy-Text.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 3, 1950, pp. 19–36. Griffin, Robert J. “Anonymity and Authorship.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 4, 1999, pp. 877–95. ———, editor. The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Gross, John. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. Guldi, Jo. “Critical Search: A Procedure for Guided Reading in Large-Scale Textual Corpora.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018. doi:10.22148/ 16.030. Harper, George Mills. “‘Unbelievers in the House’: Yeats’s Automatic Script’. Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 14, no. 1, 1981, pp. 1–15.

176 Bibliography Harris, Katherine D. Forget Me Not. The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835. Ohio UP, 2015. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, 2013, pp. 226–31. doi:10.1632/pmla.2013.128.1.226. Heath, John. “Heath Family (per. c. 1775–1898), Engravers and Etchers Engraver Artist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 3 Jan. 2008. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/65036. Hensel, Wilhelm. Die lebenden Bilder und pantomimischen Darstellungen bei dem Festspiel: Lalla Rukh. L. W. Wittich, 1823. Herrmann, J. Berenike, et al. “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015, pp. 25–52. doi:10.1515/ jlt-2015-0003. Hesse, Carla. “Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793.” Representations, no. 30, 1990, pp. 109– 37. doi:10.2307/2928448. Heuser, Ryan, and Long Le-Khac. “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method.” Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 4, 2012. Hewitt, David. “Constable, Archibald (1774–1827), Publisher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 4 Jan. 2007. doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/6101. Hobhouse, John Cam. Recollections of a Long Life, edited by Lady Dorchester. John Murray, 1909–11. 2 vols. Holden, Anthony. The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt. Little, Brown, 2005. Holmes, David I. “The Evolution of Stylometry in Humanities Scholarship.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 13, no. 3, 1998, pp. 111–7. doi:10.1093/ llc/13.3.111. Hoover, David L. “A Conversation among Himselves: Change and the Styles of Henry James.” Digital Literary Studies, edited by Kieran O’Halloran et al., Routledge, 2014, pp. 104–33. Hulle, Dirk van, and Mike Kestemont. “Periodizing Samuel Beckett’s Works: A Stylochronometric Approach.” Style, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, pp.  172–202. doi:10.5325/style.50.2.0172. Hunt, Una. Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies. Routledge, 2017. doi:10.4324/9781315443003. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The New York Times, 6 Sep. 2018, p. A.23. Jacobs, Alan. “‘Commonplace Books’: The Tumblrs of an Earlier Era.” The Atlantic, 23 Jan. 2012. Jänicke, Stefan, et al. “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges.” Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis)-STARs. The Eurographics Association, vol. 2, 2015, p. 6. Jannidis, Fotis, et al. “Improving Burrows’ Delta—An Empirical Evaluation of Text Distance Measures.” Digital Humanities 2015: Conference Abstracts, 2015, p. 11. http://dh2015.org/abstracts. Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–1840. Ashgate, 2012.

Bibliography  177 Jautze, Kim, et al. “From High Heels to Weed Attics: A Syntactic Investigation of Chick Lit and Literature.” Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 2013, pp. 72–81. Jeffrey, Francis. Review of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems by Thomas Moore. Edinburgh Review, vol. 8, 1806, pp. 456–65. Jockers, Matthew L. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. U of Illinois P, 2013. Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. U of Chicago P, 2009. Jones, Steven E. Roberto Busa, SJ, and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards. Routledge, 2016. Jordan, Hoover H. Bolt Upright: The Life of Thomas Moore. Institut für Englische Sprache and Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975. 2 vols. Juola, Patrick. “Becoming Jack London.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 14, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 145–7. doi:10.1080/09296170701378957. ———. “The Rowling Case: A Proposed Standard Analytic Protocol for Authorship Questions.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 30, no. suppl_1, 2015, pp. i100–13. doi:10.1093/llc/fqv040. Jurafsky, Dan, et al. “Linguistic Markers of Status in Food Culture: Bourdieu’s Distinction in a Menu Corpus.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2016. doi:10.22148/16.007. The Keepsake. Hurst, Chance, & Co., and Robert Jennings, 1828; Hurst, Chance, & Co., and Robert Jennings, 1829. Kelly, Ronan. Bard of Erin: The Life of Thomas Moore. Penguin Ireland, 2008. Kirby, Thomas A. “Irving and Moore: A Note on Anglo-American Literary Relations.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 62, no. 4, 1947, pp.  251–5. doi:10.2307/2908840. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments.” ADE Bulletin, vol. 150, 2010, pp. 55–61. Klancher, Jon P. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Klein, Lauren F. “Distant Reading after Moretti.” Lauren F. Klein [blog], 10 Jan. 2018. Kolkey, Jason. “Mischievous Effects: Byron and Illegitimate Publication.” The Byron Journal, vol. 42, no. 1, 2014, p. 21. ———. “Venal Interchanges: Shelley’s Queen Mab and Literary Property.” European Romantic Review, vol. 25, no. 5, 2014, pp. 533–50. doi:10.1080/ 10509585.2014.938229. Kubler, George A. A Short History of Stereotyping. Brooklyn Eagle Commercial Printing Department, 1927. Lane, Lauriat. “The Publication History of MacLeish’s Longer Poems.” American Literature, vol. 61, no. 2, 1989, pp. 273–8. doi:10.2307/2926699. “Law Report [Lord Byron v. Dugdale].” Times, 13 Feb. 1822, p. 2. Times Digital Archive. “Law Report [Murray v. Benbow].” Times, 9 Aug. 1823, p. 3. Times Digital Archive. Leader, Zachary. Revision and Romantic Authorship. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.

178 Bibliography Lennon, Joseph. Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse UP, 2008. Locke, John. A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. J. Greenwood, 1706. Internet Archive. The London Catalogue of Books, Published in Great Britain. With Their Sizes, Prices, and Publishers’ Names. Thomas Hodgson, 1855. Love, Harold. “Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England.” Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, edited by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, vol. 4, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 97–121. Loyn, H. R. “Turner, Sharon (1768–1847).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 23 Sept. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/27866. MacArthur, Marit, et al. “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets.” Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018. doi:10.22148/16.022. MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. Faber and Faber, 2003. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. T. Cadell, 1771. MacLachlan, Robin W. “Hogg and the Art of Brand Management.” Studies in Hogg and His World, vol. 14, 2003, pp. 5–15. Mandell, Laura. “Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota P, 2019. Manning, Peter J. Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts. Oxford UP, 1990. Marchand, Leslie Alexis. Byron. A Biography. John Murray, 1957. 3 vols. Marche, Stephen. “Literature Is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 Oct. 2012. Marotti, Arthur F. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Cornell UP, 1995. Martin, Philip W. “The Angels of Byron and Moore: Close Encounters of Another Kind.” Romanticism and Millenarianism, edited by Tim Fulford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 153–65. doi:10.1057/9780230107205_10. Maruca, Lisa. The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–1760. U of Washington P, 2007. McCalman, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840. Clarendon P, 1988. McCleave, Sarah Yuill, and Brian Caraher, editors. Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration: Poetry, Music, and Politics. Routledge, 2018. McCleave, Sarah Yuill, and Tríona O’Hanlon, editors. The Reputations of Thomas Moore: Poetry, Music, and Politics. Routledge, 2020. McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Clarendon P, 1988. ———. “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric.” Byron Journal, vol. 20, 1992, pp. 27–45. doi:10.3828/BJ.1992.2. ———. “The Literal World of the English Della Cruscans.” The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style, Oxford UP, 1998, pp. 74–93. ———. “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions.” A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Ray Siemens et al., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 198–217.

Bibliography  179 ———. The Textual Condition. Princeton UP, 1991. McGill, Meredith L. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–53. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. British Library, 1986. Meagher, Shelley E. “Nineteenth-Century Ireland and the Orient: Tom Moore’s Lalla Rookh.” New Voices in Irish Criticism, vol. 5, 2005, pp. 145–53. Mendes, Peter. Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800–1930: A Bibliographical Study. Routledge, 2016. Merivale, J. H. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery: Commencing in Michaelmas Term, 1815 [to the End of the Sittings After Michaelmas Term, 1817]. A Strahan, 1818. 3 vols. Millgate, Jane. Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History. Edinburgh UP, 1987. ———. “Scott the Cunning Tailor: Refurbishing the Poetical Works.” The Library, vol. s6–11, no. 4, 1989, pp. 336–51. doi:10.1093/library/s6-11.4.336. Moody, Jane. “Thomas Brown [Alias Thomas Moore], Censorship and Regency Cryptography.” European Romantic Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 2007, pp. 187–94. doi:10.1080/10509580701297919. Moore, Jane. “Nineteenth-Century Irish Anacreontics: The Literary Relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore.” Irish Studies Review, vol. 21, no. 4, 2013, pp. 387–405. doi:10.1080/09670882.2013.844940. ———. “Thomas Moore, Anacreon and the Romantic Tradition.” Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, vol. 21, 2013, pp. 30–52. ———, “‘Transatlantic Tom’: Thomas Moore in North America.” Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production, edited by Jim Kelly, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 77–93. ———, editor. The Satires of Thomas Moore. British Satire, 1785–1840, vol. 5, Pickering & Chatto, 2003. Moore, John Robert. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. Archon Books, 1971. Moore, Thomas. Alciphron: A Poem. Macrone, 1839. ———. Corruption and Intolerance: Two Poems. J. Carpenter, 1808. ———. The Epicurean, a Tale. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827. ———. Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. James Carpenter, 1806; John Watts, 1806; 2nd ed., John Watts, 1806; Hugh Maxwell, Bartholomew Graves, and William F. M’Laughlin, 1806. ———. Evenings in Greece. J. Power, 1826–32. 2 vols. ———. Fables for the Holy Alliance, Rhymes on the Road, &c &c. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823. ———. The Fudge Family in Paris. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818. ———. The Fudges in England. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1838. ———. History of Ireland. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1835–46. 4 vols. ———. Intercepted Letters; or, The Twopenny Post-Bag. J. Carr (James Carpenter), 1813; E. J. Coale, 1813; Moses Thomas, 1813. ———. Irish Melodies. J. Power; W. Power, 1808–34; Mathew Carey, 1815.

180 Bibliography ———. The Journal of Thomas Moore, edited by Wilfred S. Dowden. U Delaware P, 1983–91. 6 vols. ———. Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817; John Sudbury, 1823; [William Dugdale?, 182-?]; T. J. Allman, 1859; Galls & Inglis, 1859; Milner & Sowerby, 1859. ———. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life. John Murray, 1830. 2 vols. ———. The Letters of Thomas Moore, edited by Wilfred S. Dowden. Clarendon P, 1964. 2 vols. ———. The Loves of the Angels, a Poem. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823; 5th ed., Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823; Dugdale, 1823; W. Chubb, 1824; Dugdale, 1826. ———. M. P. or, The Blue-Stocking. David Longworth, 1812. ———. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, edited by John Russell. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853–6. 8 vols. ———. Memoirs of Captain Rock, the Celebrated Irish Chieftain, With Some Account of His Ancestors. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824. ———. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825. 2 vols. ———. National Airs. J. Power; W. Power, 1818–27. 6 vols. ———. Notes from the Letters of Thomas Moore to His Music Publisher, James Power, edited by Thomas Crofton Croker. Redfield, 1854. ———. Odes of Anacreon. John Stockdale, 1800; Hugh Maxwell, 1804; David Longworth, 1805. ———. Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1828. ———. Poetical Works. Oxford UP, 1910. ———. The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. J. and T. Carpenter, 1801; 2nd ed., J. and T. Carpenter, 1802; David Longworth, 1804; Hugh Maxwell, 1804. ———. The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1840–1. 10 vols. ———. Sacred Songs. J. Power; W. Power, 1816–24. 2 vols. ———. The Sceptic: a Philosophical Satire. J. Carpenter, 1809. ———. The Summer Fete. J. Power, 1831. ———. Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819. ———. The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore, edited by Jeffery W. Vail. Pickering & Chatto, 2013. 2 vols. “More Responses to ‘The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies.’” In the Moment: the Critical Inquiry Blog, 12 Apr. 2019. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, vol. 1, 2000, pp. 54–68. ———. “‘Operationalizing’: Or, the Function of Measurement in Literary Theory.” New Left Review, no. 84, 2013, pp. 103–19. ———. “The Slaughterhouse of Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1, 2000, pp. 207–27.

Bibliography  181 ———. “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740– 1850).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 1, 2009, pp. 134–58. doi:10.1086/605619. Mortenson, Robert. “The Copyright of Byron’s ‘Cain.’” PBSA, vol. 63, no. 1, 1969, pp. 5–13. doi:10.1086/pbsa.63.1.24301780. Mosteller, Frederick, and David L. Wallace. Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference: The Case of the Federalist Papers. Addison-Wesley, 1964. Moye, David. “One Word Has People Convinced Mike Pence Wrote Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed.” HuffPost, 5 Sept. 2018. Murray, Chris. “‘Freedom on the Green-Sea Brink’: The Two Orientalist Voices of Thomas Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh.’” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 18, 2018, pp. 96–115. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Putnam, 1962. Nagy, Benjamin. “Metre as a Stylometric Feature in Latin Hexameter Poetry.” ArXiv, 2019. http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12478. Newlyn, Lucy. Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Oxford UP, 2000. Nolan, J. C. M. “In Search of an Ireland in the Orient: Tom Moore’s Lalla Rookh.” New Hibernia Review, vol. 12, no. 3, 2008, pp. 80–98. doi:10.1353/ nhr.0.0020. Novak, Maximillian E. “‘A Narrative of the Proceedings in France’: Reattributing a De-Attributed Work by Defoe.” PBSA, vol. 97, no. 1, 2003, pp. 69–80. doi:10.1086/pbsa.97.1.24295804. Nyhan, Julianne, and Andrew Flinn. Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities. Springer International Publishing, 2016. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2. O’Donnell, Molly C., and Anne H. Stevens, editors. The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture. Bloomsbury, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5040/ 9781501345845. Pannapacker, William. “The MLA and the Digital Humanities.” The Brainstorm Blog: The Chronicle of Higher Education Online, 28 Dec. 2009. Pasanek, Brad. Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary. Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. Pearsall, Robert Brainard. “Chronological Annotations to 250 Letters of Thomas Moore.” PBSA, vol. 63, no. 2, 1969, pp.  105–7. doi:10.1086/ pbsa.63.2.24301812. “Petition of Thomas Moore, and other Authors of Great Britain, Praying Congress to grant them the Exclusive Benefit of their Writings Within the United States.” 24th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Documents No. 134, 1, 2 Feb. 1837. Phillips, James W. Printing and Bookselling in Dublin, 1670–1800: A Bibliographical Enquiry. Irish Academic P, 1998. Phillips, Jeremy. “Copyright in Obscene Works: Some British and American Problems.” Anglo-American Law Review, vol. 6, 1977, pp.  138–71. doi:10.1177/147377957700600302. Piper, Andrew. Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. U of Chicago P, 2018. Plecháč, Petr, et al. “Versification and Authorship Attribution. A Pilot Study on Czech, German, Spanish, and English Poetry.” Studia Metrica et Poetica, vol. 5, no. 2, 2018, pp. 29–54. doi:10.12697/smp.2018.5.2.02.

182 Bibliography The Poetry of the World. John Bell, Eighteenth Century Collections Online. 1788. 2 vols. Pollard, M. Dublin’s Trade in Books, 1550–1800. Clarendon P, 1989. Pope, Alexander. The Major Works, edited by Pat Rogers. Oxford UP, 2008. ———. The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope. Bernard Lintot, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 1717. The Port Folio [Philadelphia]. 1801–27. Rambler’s Magazine: or, Man of Fashion’s Companion, 1 Jan. 1823. Raven, James. “The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830.” The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert J. Griffin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 141–66. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-11109-8_7. Reeve, Jonathan Pearce. “Does ‘Late Style’ Exist? New Stylometric Approaches to Variation in Single-Author Corpora.” Digital Humanities 2018: Book of Abstracts/Libro de Resúmenes, 2018, pp. 478–81. https://dh2018.adho.org/ abstracts/. Reiman, Donald H. “‘Versioning’: The Presentation of Multiple Texts.” Romantic Texts and Contexts, U of Missouri P, 1987, pp. 167–80. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore and Heaven and Earth, by Lord Byron. Edinburgh Review, vol. 38, 1823, pp. 27–48. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 13, 1823, pp. 63–71. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. Eclectic Review, vol. 19, 1823, pp. 210–7. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. Imperial Magazine, vol. 5, 1823, pp. 182–6. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. John Bull, 5 Jan. 1823, pp. 5–6; 12 Jan. 1823, pp. 13–4. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. Literary Gazette, vol. 310, 1822, pp. 815–7; vol. 311, 1822, pp. 9–11. Review of The Loves of the Angels, by Thomas Moore. Monthly Review, s2, vol. 100, 1823, pp. 79–95. Review of Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain, by Lord Byron. Quarterly Review, vol. 27, 1822, pp. 476–524. Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq, by Thomas Moore. British Critic, vol. 18, 1801, pp. 540–1. Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq, by Thomas Moore. Critical Review, vol. 34, 1802, pp. 200–5. Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq, by Thomas Moore. Monthly Mirror, vol. 12, 1801, pp. 316–7. Review of The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq, by Thomas Moore. Monthly Review, vol. 39, 1802, pp. 174–9. Rezek, Joseph. London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Richardson, Megan. “Authors and Their ‘Mischievous’ Books: The Salutary Experience of Southey v Sherwood.” Authorship, vol. 4, no. 1, 2015. doi:10.21825/aj.v4i1.1105. Robinson, Daniel. “Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, and Ludic Sensibility.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp.  170–4. doi:10.1086/ TWC24045854.

Bibliography  183 ———. “Mary Robinson and the Trouble with Tabitha Bramble.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp.  142–6. doi:10.1086/TWC 24043703. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, edited by Edith J. Morley. J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938. 3 vols. Rogers, Samuel. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, edited by Alexander Dyce, D. Appleton and Company. HathiTrust, 1856. Rose, Mark. “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship.” Representations, vol. 23, 1988, pp.  51–85. doi:10.2307/2928566. ———. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Harvard UP, 1993. Rutherford, Andrew, editor. Lord Byron: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1970. Saglia, Diego. “Harem Power: Narrative Structure and Sexual Politics in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh.” Questione Romantica: Rivista Interdisciplinare Di Studi Romantici, vol. 12–13, 2002, pp. 77–88. ———. “Orientalism.” A Companion to European Romanticism, edited by Michael Ferber, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp.  467–85. doi:10. 1002/9780470996607.ch28 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978. Saunders, David. “Copyright, Obscenity and Literary History.” ELH, vol. 57, no. 2, 1990, pp. 431–44. doi:10.2307/2873078. Saunders, David, and Ian Hunter. “Lessons from the ‘Literatory’: How to Historicise Authorship.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991, pp.  479–509. doi:10.1086/448594. Schmidt, Benjamin. “DH People: This Wikileaks Tweet Implies They Did Analysis, but Lifts What Appears to Be an Image from a DH Paper: The Nodes Are Richardson Clarissa, Austen, Trollope, Etc. Looks like Stylo Package, Maybe? Anyone Know the Article? @MaciejEder @Jan_Rybicki pic.Twitter.Com/Au9dhVrdtd.” @benmschmidt, 7 Sept. 2018, https://twitter.com/ benmschmidt/status/1037889687027949569. Schreibman, Susan, et al. A New Companion to Digital Humanities. John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Schuessler, Jennifer. “Number-Crunching the Novel.” The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2017, p. C.1. ———. “Peering Into the Exquisite Life of Rare Books.” The New York Times, 24 July 2012, p. C.1. Schulz, Kathryn. “Distant Reading.” The New York Times, 26 June 2011, p. 14. Scott, Walter. Rob Roy. Archibald Constable; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817, HathiTrust. 3 vols. Siemens, Ray, and Susan Schreibman, editors. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Siemens, Ray, et al., editors. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill. Oxford UP, 2009. ———. Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. P. B. Shelley, 1813; Clark, 1821. Sher, Richard B. The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America. U of Chicago P, 2006.

184 Bibliography Sidak, J. Gregory. “The President’s Power of the Purse.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1989, no. 5, 1989, pp. 1162–253. doi:10.2307/1372517. Sidney, Philip. The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford UP, 2008. Smith, M. W. A. “The Authorship of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: An Application of Statistical Stylometry to Poetry.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 18, no. 1, 1984, pp. 23–37. Smith, Peter W. H., and W. Aldridge. “Improving Authorship Attribution: Optimizing Burrows’ Delta Method.” Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 18, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–88. doi:10.1080/09296174.2011.533591. So, Richard Jean. “‘All Models Are Wrong.’” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, 2017, pp. 668–73. doi:10.1632/pmla.2017.132.3.668. Southey, Robert. Wat Tyler. A Dramatic Poem. Sherwood, Neeley [sic], and Jones, 1817. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2004. Stoicheff, R. Peter. “The Composition and Publication History of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 1986, pp. 78–94. doi:10.2307/441307. Suarez, Michael F. “Book History from Descriptive Bibliographies.” The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Leslie Howsam, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 199–219. Taaffe, Carol. Ireland Through the Looking-Glass: Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and the Irish Cultural Debate. Cork UP, 2008. Tabata, Tomoji. “Narrative Style and the Frequencies of Very Common Words: A Corpus-Based Approach to Dickens’s First Person and Third Person Narratives.” English Corpus Studies, vol. 2, 1995, pp. 91–109. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Textual Criticism and Deconstruction.” Studies in Bibliography, vol. 43, 1990, pp. 1–33. Taylor, Susan B. “Irish Odalisques and Other Seductive Figures: Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh.” The Containment and Re-Deployment of English India, edited by Daniel J. O’Quinn, Romantic Circles, 2000. Temple, Henry John. The Fudger Fudged; or, The Devil and T***y M***e. William Wright, 1819, HathiTrust. Temple, Kathryn. “Printing like a Post-Colonialist: The Irish Piracy of ‘Sir Charles Grandison.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 33, no. 2, 2000, pp. 157–74. doi:10.2307/1346077. Tenen, Dennis. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford UP, 2017. Todd, William Burton. A Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades, London and Vicinity 1800–1840. Printing Historical Society, 1972. Tonra, Justin. “Masks of Refinement: Pseudonym, Paratext, and Authorship in the Early Poetry of Thomas Moore.” European Romantic Review, vol. 25, no. 5, 2014, pp. 551–73. doi:10.1080/10509585.2014.938231. ———. “Pagan Angels and a Moral Law: Byron and Moore’s Blasphemous Publications.” European Romantic Review, vol. 28, no. 6, 2017, pp. 789–811. doi:10.1080/10509585.2017.1388797. Tonra, Justin, et al. Eververse. 2019–20. http://eververse.nuigalway.ie/. Tonra, Justin, and Francesca Benatti. “English Bards and Unknown Reviewers: A Stylometric Analysis of Thomas Moore and the Christabel Review.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies, no. 3, 2015. https://breac.nd.edu/

Bibliography  185 Tsur, Reuven. “Masculine and Feminine Rhymes: Their Structural Effect.” Style, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–24. Underwood, Ted. Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. U of Chicago P, 2019. ———. “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017. https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/ ———. “One Way Numbers Can after All Make Us Dumber.” The Stone and the Shell, 18 Aug. 2013. Vail, Jeffery W. The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron & Thomas Moore. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. ———. “‘My Bright Twin Sisters of the Sky’: Manfred, Moore’s Loves of the Angels, and the Shadow of Augusta Leigh.” Byron Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 1998, pp. 29–38. doi:10.3828/BJ.1998.3. ———. “‘The Standard of Revolt’: Revolution and National Independence in Moore’s Lalla Rookh’. Romanticism on the Net, no. 40, 2005. doi:10.7202/012459ar. ———. “Thomas Moore in Ireland and America: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” Romanticism, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004, pp.  41–62. doi:10.3366/ rom.2004.10.1.41. VerSteeg, Russ. “Defining Author for Purposes of Copyright.” American University Law Review, vol. 45, 1995, pp. 1323–66. “Vice-Chancellor’s Court [Lord Byron v. Dugdale].” Times, 11 Aug. 1823, p. 2. Times Digital Archive. Walters, Gwyn. “The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: The Battle for Literary Property.” The Library, vol. 29, 1974, pp.  287–311. doi:10.1093/library/ s5-XXIX.3.287. Wilson, Lisa M. “Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic ‘Age of Personality’: The Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre.” European Romantic Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1998, pp. 393–420. doi:10.1080/10509589808570060. Wimsatt Jr., W. K., and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 54, no. 3, 1946, pp. 468–88. Winship, Michael. “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century.” Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, edited by Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams, Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 98–122. Woodmansee, Martha. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, edited by Peter Jaszi and Martha Woodmansee, Duke UP, 1994, pp. 15–28. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2nd ed. T. N. Longman and O. Rees. HathiTrust, 1800. 2 vols. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Works in Verse & Prose of William Butler Yeats. Shakespeare’s Head P, 1908. 8 vols. Zall, Paul M. “Lord Eldon’s Censorship.” PMLA, vol. 68, no. 3, 1953, pp. 436–43. doi:10.2307/459864. Zemer, Lior. The Idea of Authorship in Copyright. Ashgate, 2007.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Adams, Thomas R. 32n7, 64n6, 75, 84, 85, 96n42 agrarian insurgency movement 17 Alciphron (Moore) 145 Anacreon 13, 14, 16, 17, 43; Odes of Anacreon (see Odes of Anacreon) anti-republicanism 56 The Arcades Project (Benjamin) 142, 163 Atkinson, Joseph 17 “author function” 14, 33n17, 39, 52, 60, 159 authorial formulation 14, 26, 50, 74, 81, 121, 127, 142, 170 authorial identity 4, 8, 30, 75, 88; affirming 159; authorship and notions of 105; distinct 12; formulation of 167 authorial preface functions 16 authorial revision 3, 8, 9, 26–9, 45, 46, 57–60, 107–14, 118, 121, 122, 142 authorial self-censorship 116 authorial style 127, 133, 152, 158 authorship 143, 167, 168; attribution 133; Byronic conception of 30; computers and 136–7; concept of 141; construction of 127; copyright and 47, 60–4; formulations of 14; functional aspects of 31; literary 159; mode of 38; modes of 4; and notions of authorial identity 105; orthonymous 8; prosthetic 39; pseudonymous 12, 13, 24; and publication history (see publication history); Romantic 3, 9, 22, 119, 170; scholars of 6; see also individual entries autocriticism, 18, 20

bacchanalianism 21, 43 Barker, Nicolas 32n7, 64n6, 75, 84, 85, 96n42 Barnard, John 77 Barthes, Roland 35n38, 39, 75, 159 Bauman, Susan 76 BCT see Bootstrap Consensus Tree (BCT) Beardsley, M. C. 96n40 Benatti, Francesca 7, 133, 162n34, 163n46, 164n55 Benbow, William 88, 102, 103, 105, 116, 123n9, 123n17 Benjamin, Walter: The Arcades Project 142, 163 Bentley, G. E. 122n2 bibliographical methods 83 bibliography: demonstration of 77; determinants of 13; and market 25 “big tent” disciplinary approach 129 Bishop, Henry Rowley 1 Blake, William 32n9, 74 blasphemy 9, 118–22; accusations of 100, 101, 115; entanglements of 116; impiety and 26, 99; legislation 114 book reprinting 46–60, 169 Bootstrap Consensus Tree (BCT) 143, 148, 149,150 Boulton, Matthew 128 The Bride of Abydos (Byron) 80 Briggs, Asa 95n21, 97n51 British Romanticism 61 Brougham, Henry 35n46, 63 Brown, Charles Brockden 56 Brown, Thomas, the Younger, 16, 17, 117, 169

188 Index Burrows, John 136, 137, 139, 144, 146, 152, 157, 159, 162n28, 163n46, 164n57 Busa, Roberto 129, 131 Byron, George Gordon 9, 36n56, 71, 121, 124n24; biographies of 11; The Bride of Abydos 80; Cain 100, 101–6, 113–16, 118, 120; The Corsair 80; The Giaour 30, 79; Hebrew Melodies 123n15; Letters and Journals of Lord Byron 61, 168, 169; Moore and 73, 87, 88, 119, 122; The Prisoner of Chillon 123n15; Sardanapalus 101; The Two Foscari 101 Byronic conception of authorship 30 Cain (Byron) 100, 101–6, 113–16, 118, 120 Capital (Goldsmith) 163n45 Caraher, Brian 7; Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration 7 Carey, Mathew 57, 67n38, 69n62 Carpenter, James 13, 17, 25, 33n23, 34n34, 41, 64n1, 81 Chandler, James: England in 1819 2, 170 Chase Act of 1891 66n27 Christabel (Coleridge) 163n46 Chubb, William 105, 118, 123n16 civic humanism 63 Clark, George 124n20 Classic Delta distance measurements 164n57, 165n71 Cloud Atlas (Mitchell) 160n15 Cluster Analysis 138, 143, 144, 145,147,148 Coleman, William 57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 32n5, 37n71, 133; Christabel 163n46 commercial imperatives 93, 105, 116, 119, 120, 123n17 computational evidence 127–31, 133, 135, 138, 141, 143, 156, 159; authorship 136–137 computational literary studies 129, 131, 137; see also computational evidence computational stylistic analysis 9, 127, 136, 137 computers and authorship 136–7; see also computational evidence Congreve, William 75 consensual literary network 18

copyright 118–22; and authorship 47, 60–4; and immorality 117; international 48; legal 49; and legal conventions 127; perpetual 61, 69; principle of 107; protection of 113; system 38; unprotected 9, 26, 103 corpus preparation 141–3 Corruption and Intolerance: Two Poems (Moore) 146, 154, 156, 158 The Corsair (Byron) 80 Croker, John Wilson 108, 110, 112, 124n28 The Cuckoo’s Calling (Rowling) 132, 135 Curll, Edmund 119, 121 Da, Nan Z. 159n3, 160n6, 160n13 Darnton, Robert 32n7, 64n6, 75, 77, 83, 167 de facto copyrights 49, 61; transatlantic 62; see also copyright de Man, Paul 32n13 democratic republicanism 50 de Morgan, Augustus 132 Denman, Thomas 116 Dennie, Joseph 42–6, 48, 49, 55, 56, 65n16–18, 66n28, 67n34–6, 68n48, 68n49 D’Herbelot, Barthélemy 108 Dickinson, Emily 74 digital humanities 7, 135, 165n72; and literary studies 128–31; methods 9 distant reading 3, 10n2, 130–2, 138, 158, 168 Donaldson v. Becket 61 Don Juan injunction 104, 107 Dowden, Wilfred S. 94n13, 95n21, 125n35 Drafts & Fragments (Pound) 77 Dryden, John 36n52 Dugdale, William 87, 88, 97n46, 104, 105, 107, 116–18, 123n15, 123n16, 124n19 Du Prat, Abbé 126n51; Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in her Smock 119 Eagleton, Terry 1 Eder, Maciej 161n18, 162n37 Eldon, 1st Earl (John Scott) 102, 103, 115, 117, 121, 123n8 Eldridge, Herbert G. 65n10, 66n28, 66n30, 67n37, 68n48–50, 69n61

Index  189 “Eminent Artists” edition, Lalla Rookh 89–91, 98n59 Emmet, Robert 66n23, 78 “Emoluments Clause” (US Constitution) 68n46 England in 1819 (Chandler) 2, 170 The Epicurean (Moore) 89 Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Moore) 8, 11, 13, 23–7, 36n63, 38, 40–2, 45–50, 53–8, 60–1, 64, 65n10, 107, 139, 146, 149, 152, 168, 169 Erickson, Lee 19, 32n10, 32n16, 34n35 “erroneous translation” 99, 115 Eve, Martin Paul 130, 160n15 Evenings in Greece (Moore) 89, 145, 146, 151, 152 Ezell, Margaret 18, 19, 32n11, 32n12, 34n32 Fables for the Holy Alliance (Moore) 116, 145, 158 Feldman, Paula 19 Foucault, Michel 14, 32n15, 39, 46, 50, 75, 121, 128, 136, 159, 159n2, 163n42 The Fudge Family in Paris (Moore) 139, 146, 158, 169 Genette, Gérard 14, 22, 31n2, 32n14, 34n27, 34n30, 35n43, 36n61, 37n65, 50, 52, 55 The Giaour (Byron) 30, 79 Godson, Richard: A Practical Treatise on the Law of Patents for Inventions and of Copyright 102 Goldsmith, Kenneth 142: Capital 163n45 Greg, W. W. 96n39, 163n48 Hall, John E. 43, 58, 59 Hazlitt, William 133 Heath, Charles 90 Heber, Reginald 102 Hebrew Melodies (Byron) 123n15 Hesse, Carla 126n52 Heuser, Ryan 166n76 History of Ireland (Moore) 1 Hobhouse, John Cam 101 Hogg, James 37n70 Holmes, David I 132 Hunt, John 17, 120, 122, 126n53

Hunt, Leigh 17, 33n23, 37n71, 126n53 Hunt, Una 164n53; Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies 2 “hymeneal chaplet” 109–10 individual stylistic fingerprint 132 intellectual property 3, 39, 41, 47, 49, 60, 61, 63, 100 “intentional fallacy” 96n40 Intercepted Letters; or, The Twopenny Post-Bag (Moore) 19, 80, 81, 139, 146 Irish Melodies (Moore) 1, 2, 7, 11, 29, 31n3, 40, 45, 57, 71, 78, 80, 81, 93, 94n14, 123n15, 143, 145, 146, 152, 164n51, 165n71, 169 Jacksonian Democratic Party 66n26 Jeffersonian populism 57 Jefferson, Thomas 42, 43, 53, 54, 55, 59, 66n26, 67n42, 68n54 Jeffrey, Francis 23–5, 36n60, 36n62, 40, 50, 56, 68n50, 82, 101, 107, 137, 152 Jerome, Saint 128, 136, 159n2 Jockers, Matthew L.: Macroanalysis 130 Juola, Patrick 132, 135 Kelly, Ronan 2, 73, 95n21 Kirby, Thomas 61 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 130 Lalla Rookh (Moore) 8, 10n8, 11, 16, 20, 57, 71, 72, 92, 93, 96n38, 97n53, 100, 104, 108, 121, 145, 152, 158, 165n71, 168; authorship and publication history 73–4; pre-publication history 78–82; publication history 82–91 Leach, Sir John 104 Lejeune, Philippe 32n13 Le-Khac, Long 166n76 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (Byron) 61, 168, 169 literary criticism 120, 152, 153, 156, 158 literary history 39, 120, 168, 170 literary interpretation 131 Literary Souvenir 90 Locke, John 10n7; A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books 6

190 Index Longman, Thomas 28, 63, 70n69, 71, 79, 81, 90, 92, 93, 95n22, 108 Longmans (publishing firm), 1, 8, 26, 70n68, 71, 72, 81–5, 87–92, 93n2, 95n21, 95n22, 95n25, 96n38, 97n48, 97n51, 98n58, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 112, 116–18, 120, 122n7, 123n10, 125n43, 126n49 Lord Byron see Byron, George Gordon The Loves of the Angels (Moore) 9, 26, 87, 162n32, 168; authorship, copyright, and blasphemy 118–22; Cain 100, 101–5; “erroneous translation” 99; immoral quandary 105–7; laws and 114–18; reviews and revisions 112–14; revising 107–11 lyric abstraction 157–8 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) 30, 37n71, 98n53 Macherey, Pierre 75 Macroanalysis (Jockers) 130 Marche, Stephen 129, 131, 160n5 Marotti, Arthur F. 10n5 Martin, Philip 122n3 Maruca, Lisa 40, 65n9 Maxwell, Hugh 49, 66n29, 67n32, 67n35 McCleave, Sarah Yuill: Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration 7 McGann, Jerome 30, 32n9, 34n29, 34n32, 64n8, 76, 77, 93, 96n40, 124n21, 141, 167 McGill, Meredith 50, 64n7, 65n15 McKenzie, D. F. 75–7, 167 Memoirs of Captain Rock (Moore) 7, 17, 19 Merry, Anthony 42 MFWs see most frequent words (MFWs) Millgate, Jane 76 Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas 160n15 Moore, Jane 31n3, 37n71, 65n10; Satire 37n68, 69n66 Moore, Thomas: Alciphron 145; Corruption and Intolerance: Two Poems 146, 154, 156, 158; The Epicurean 89; Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems 8, 11, 13, 23–7, 36n63, 38, 40–2, 45–50, 53–8, 60–1, 64, 65n10, 107, 139, 146, 149, 152, 168, 169; Evenings in Greece 89, 145, 146, 151, 152;

Fables for the Holy Alliance 116, 145, 158; The Fudge Family in Paris 139, 146, 158, 169; History of Ireland 1; Intercepted Letters; or, The Twopenny Post-Bag 19, 80, 81, 139, 146; Irish Melodies 1, 2, 7, 11, 29, 31n3, 40, 45, 57, 71, 78, 80, 81, 93, 94n14, 123n15, 143, 145, 146, 152, 164n51, 165n71, 169; Lalla Rookh (see Lalla Rookh); Little (see The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (Moore)); The Loves of the Angels (see The Loves of the Angels (Moore)); Memoirs of Captain Rock 7, 17, 19; National Airs 145, 153–6, 158; Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters 146; Poetical Works 1; The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (see The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (Moore)); poetry corpus 139; reprinting (see reprinting); Sacred Songs 145, 155, 156; The Sceptic: a Philosophical Satire 146, 147, 149, 153–4, 156; stylistic consistency 157; The Summer Fete 145, 146, 151; Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress 141; translation of Odes of Anacreon 1, 4, 8, 11, 14, 22, 138–9 “moral guardians” 106 Moretti, Franco 130, 132, 134, 160n10, 160n12 Mortenson, Robert 124n21, 124n22 Mosteller, Frederick 132 most frequent words (MFWs) 139, 144, 146–9, 152–9, 159n1, 165n64 Murray, John 61, 69n63, 71, 80, 81, 93n1, 94n20, 99, 101, 102, 104–6, 116, 118–20, 123n9, 124n21–3 Murray v. Benbow 102, 103 National Airs (Moore) 145, 153–6, 158 nebulous cultural categories 168 A New Method of Making CommonPlace-Books (Locke) 6 nonauthorial revision 26, 43–6 occasional writing 6; see also writings Odes of Anacreon (Anacreon) 8, 23, 25, 27, 38, 40, 42, 48, 139, 141, 146, 150, 152; authorship in 17; bibliographic fashion of 41; revision of 28; translation of 1, 4, 11, 14, 22

Index  191 Odes Upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and Other Matters (Moore) 146 O’Donnell, Molly C. 165n70 O’Hanlon, Tríona 7 “Operationalizing” 134 operational model of authorship 137; see also authorship optical character recognition (OCR) 143 orthonymous authorship, conventional model of 8, 38 Pannapacker, William 129 paratext 28; characterisation of 32n14; dual function of 18; function of 15; optional 53; “perverse effect” of 22; pseudonym and 38; text and 39, 50, 52, 60, 64, 108, 137, 142 paratextual revisions 26, 27, 45, 108; see also textual revision paratextual strategies 14–21 Pasanek, Brad 10n8 patriarchal patronage system 47 periodical reprinting 41–6; see also reprinting perpetual copyright 61, 69; see also copyright Perry, James 81, 95n21, 95n22 Peveril of the Peak (Scott) 69n62 “philosophical satire” 146, 147, 149, 150 Piper, Andrew 156, 160n14, 161n16, 166n80; Enumerations 162n29, 162n39 piracy 64n5, 87, 88, 95n21, 97n44, 97n50, 102–4, 123n9; book 169; of copyrighted work 77; Lalla Rookh 78 The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (Moore) 1, 4, 7, 11, 38, 57, 64, 78, 81, 90, 110, 124n32, 139, 143; “age of personality” 12–13; paratextual strategies 14–21; reception 21–6; revisions to 26–9 poetic style 134–5; competing mode 152; computers and authorship 136–7; corpus preparation 141–3; digital humanities and literary studies 128–31; expectations about 137–41; MFWs 153–6; “Romantic Orientalism” category 151; stylometric analysis 143–50;

stylometry and literary studies 131–3 poetry: Brontës 76; commercial value and utility of 71; commercial value of 82; of dubious morality 13; epistolary 52; erotic 14; market for 19; narrative 78, 100, 121; of religion 114; Rochester 24; satiric 168; satirical 155; unsatisfactory measure of 156 poetry corpus, Moore 138, 139 Poetry of the World (Bell) 19 Port Folio 43–6, 48–9, 55–8, 67n35 possessive individualism 63 Pound, Ezra: Drafts & Fragments 77 A Practical Treatise on the Law of Patents for Inventions and of Copyright (Godson) 102 preface functions 18; authorial 16 pre-publication history (Lalla Rookh) 78–82 The Prisoner of Chillon (Byron) 123n15 private intellectual property 121; see also intellectual property prosthetic authorship 39; see also authorship pseudo-editorial narrative 16 pseudonym 4, 11, 24, 28, 117; adopting 14, 24, 25; function of 22; and paratext 38; role 29; of Thomas Little 13 pseudonymous authorship 6, 12, 13, 24; see also authorship pseudonymous fiction 16, 17, 27 publication history 3, 8, 27; augments 72; authorship and 73–4; of Irish Melodies 169; of Lalla Rookh 83–6, 92; pre- 78–82; theory and practice of 75–7 public interest 120, 132 public morality 103, 114, 119–20 Queen Mab (Shelley) 124n20 Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Voltaire) 75 Raven, James 34n36 reprinting: book 46–60, 169; copyright and authorship 60–4; Epistles 40–1; mechanics of 3; periodical 41–6; sequence of 84; strategic reason for 105; unauthorised 8, 38, 39, 103, 117–18, 137

192 Index The Reputations of Thomas Moore 7 revisions 9; authorial 60, 118, 142; authorship and 100; to Little 26–9; nonauthorial 26; and refinement 30; reviews and 112–14; of Romantic authorship 3; substantive 108; textual 170 Rezek, Joseph 64n7, 69n62 Richardson, Samuel: Sir Charles Grandison 124n18 Robinson, Daniel 34n29, 34n32 Robinson, Henry Crabb 101 Rochester, 2nd Earl (John Wilmot) 18, 19, 24, 34n29, 36n52, 37n67 Rogers, Samuel 29, 69n64, 79 Romantic “age of personality” 12–13 Romantic authorship 3, 8–9, 12, 14, 22, 24, 30, 119, 170; see also authorship Romantic inheritances 170 Romantic Orientalism 2, 3, 72, 73, 82, 93n7, 139, 140, 145, 146, 149, 151, 158 Romantic Orientalist 80, 152, 169; clusters 147; genre 92; grandeur 11; mode 168; and postcolonial readings 100 Rowling, J. K.: The Cuckoo’s Calling 132, 135 Ryder, Sean 7 Sacred Songs (Moore) 145, 155, 156 Saglia, Diego 93n6, 94n15 Sale, George 108 Sardanapalus (Byron) 101 Saunders, David 32n6, 62, 107, 119 The Sceptic: a Philosophical Satire (Moore) 146, 147, 149, 153–4, 156 Schmidt, Benjamin 161n18 scholarship 72, 170; contemporary 11; historical 132; literary 129; Moore 2; textual 86, 96n40 Scott, Walter 32n16, 33n22, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 82, 93n1–3, 95n25; Waverley novels 49, 69n61, 76; Peveril of the Peak 69n62 scriptural writings 101, 115; see also writings self-censorship 106, 116, 117, 170 Shelley, Percy Bysshe30, 114, 117, 123n13: “A Defence of Poetry,” 37n74 Queen Mab 124n20 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 11

Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson) 124n18 Smiles, Samuel 124n21 social constructivist model of copyright 120, 121 Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies (Hunt) 2 Southey, Robert 22, 23, 63, 69n60, 69n64, 70n67; Wat Tyler 103, 104, 117 Southey v. Sherwood 102, 117 “Spurious editions” 90 Stanford, Charles Villiers: The Veiled Prophet 93n8 Statute of Anne (1710) 38, 47, 64, 119, 120 Stevens, Anne H. 77, 165n70 Stevenson, John 1 Stoicheff, R. Peter 76–7 Streisand effect 11, 31n1 style 127, 133–4, 136; authorial 127, 133, 152; definitions of 135; distinctive authorial 167; distinctive poetic 109; expectations about Moore 137–41; individual and generic 158; literary 9, 127; prosodic 19; unique 132 stylometry 138, 157; analysis 143–50; basic assumption of 9, 127; clusters 152; and literary studies 131–3; principles of 144 Suarez, Michael 75, 76 substantive revision 26, 28, 58, 100, 108; see also authorial revision Sudbury, John 87, 88, 97n47 The Summer Fete (Moore) 145, 146, 151 “system of dependencies” 55 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 61, 63, 64, 69n59, 69n64 Tanselle, G. Thomas 125n45 Tenniel, John 90, 91, 98n65 textual contingency 100 textual revision 26, 28, 76, 111, 170; see also paratextual revisions textual scholarship 86, 96n40; see also scholarship Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration (McCleave & Caraher) 7 Thomas Moore: Text, Contexts, Hypertexts (2013) 7 Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress (Moore) 141

Index  193 Tonson, Jacob 76 Turner, Sharon 116 The Two Foscari (Byron) 101 typographic formalism of literature 142 UK Copyright Act of 1842, 69n59, 90 unauthorised reprinting 8, 38, 39, 46, 103, 117–18, 123, 137; see also reprinting US Copyright Act of 1790 41, 47, 49, 61 US reprinting system 38–9, 47, 62; see also reprinting Vail, Jeffery 31n3, 65n10, 68n55, 73, 95n21, 122n3 The Veiled Prophet (Stanford) 93n8 Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in her Smock (Du Prat) 119 VerSteeg, Russ 161n26 “voluntary degradation” 48

Wakefield, Daniel 104, 107 Wallace, David L. 132 Washington, George 53–7, 59, 61, 68n46 Watts, John 48, 49, 55, 56, 66n30, 67n35, 67n36, 68n48, 76, 94n11 Wat Tyler (Southey) 103, 104, 117 Waverley novels 49, 69n61, 76 Wimsatt, W. K. Jr. 96n40, 166n72 Woodmansee, Martha 120 Wordsworth, William 63, 64, 69n60, 69n64, 69n66, 70n67: Lyrical Ballads 30, 37n71 writings: immoral 88; metaphor 6; occasional 6; political and satirical 30, 33n24; posthumous 6; satirical 2, 169; scriptural 101, 115 Yeats, W. B. 122, 161n20, 162n31 Zemer, Lior 120, 121