Annotator as Ordinary Reader: Accuracy, Relevance, and Editorial Method

Article Sidebar

cover image
PDF
Published: Jun 11, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14434/textual.v11i1-2.22098

Main Article Content

Michael Edson
University of Wyoming

Abstract

As the first annotated edition of Churchill’s poetry, William Tooke’s 1804 Poetical Works of Charles Churchill offers insight into the reading practices specific to eighteenth-century verse satire and beyond. Drawing information from widely-circulated periodical sources rather than the author-proximate documents favored by most annotators today, Tooke reveals the suspect modern assumption that satires held the same meanings for early readers as authors intended. Building on the reader-centered approach behind Tooke’s apparatus, this essay argues that the lingering intentionalist bent of modern explicatory editing distorts the information available to past readers, the identities ascribed to allusions, and the uses assigned to past texts. In Churchill’s case, such annotation obscures his links to the print-driven scandal culture of the 1760s, a culture in which identifying allusion displays one’s mastery of gossip. Ultimately, Tooke raises questions about the continued editorial allegiance to intentionalist ideas of accuracy and relevancy, questions that can be extended to the editing of texts from many genres and times. He implies that, while early scholarly apparatuses may not meet today’s standards, they nonetheless offer information about reading habits, insights often more historically accurate than what is gleaned from modern editions.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 11 No. 1-2 (2017)
Section
Articles

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (see:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors warrant that their submission is their own original work, and that they have the right to grant the rights contained in this license. Authors also warrant that their submission does not, to the best of your knowledge, infringe upon anyone's copyright. If the submission contains material for which an author does not hold the copyright, authors warrant that they have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner to grant Indiana University the rights required by this license, and that such third-party owned material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text or content of their submission.
  3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.

References

Abrams, M. H. 1993. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

“Account of New Performers”. 1763. Theatrical Review; or the Annals of the Drama(Ja nu a r y): 36 – 40.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso.

Battestin, Martin C. 1981. “A Rationale of Literary Annotation: The Example of Fielding’s Novels”. Studies in Bibliography 34: 1–22.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Les-kov”. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, 83–109. New York: Schocken.

Bertelsen, Lance. 1986. The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture 1749–176 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bricker, Andrew Benjamin. 2014. “Libel and Satire: The Problem of Naming”. ELH81 (3): 889–921.

Butler, Samuel. 1967. Hudibras. Ed. John Wilders. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Churchill, Charles. 1804. The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, with Explanatory Notes; and An Authentic Account of his Life. [Ed. William Tooke.] 2 vols. London: C. and R. Baldwin.

——— . 1 8 4 4 . The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. With Copious Notes, and a Life of the Author. Ed. W. Tooke. 3 vols. London: William Pickering.

Thomas Evans, the annotator of Matthew Prior’s Wo rk s (1779), had little formal training in editing. See “Evans, Thomas (1742–1784)”, ODNB. The translator and annotator of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1805), John Mason Good was a surgeon and did not attend University. See “Good, John Mason (1764–1827)”, ODNB.

———. 1891. The Rosciad and The Apology. Ed. Robert W. Lowe. London: Lawrence and Bullen.

——— . 1 9 3 3 . Poems of Charles Churchill. Ed. James Laver. 2 vols. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

——— . 1 9 5 6 . The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. Ed. Douglas Grant. Oxford: Clar-endon Press.

——— . 1 9 9 7. Selected Poems of Thomas Gray, Charles Churchill, and William Cowper. Ed. Katherine Turner. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

——— . 2 0 0 3 . Charles Churchill: Selected Poetry.Ed. Adam Rounce. Nottingham, UK: Tr e nt .

Clark, Anna. 2004. Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cowper, William. 1995. The Poems of William Cowper. Ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

de Grazia, Margreta. 1991. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dryden, John. 1995. The Poems of John Dryden. Ed. Paul Hammond. Vol. 1. The Long-man Annotated English Poets. London: Longman.

Dyer, Gary. 1997. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Erskine-Hill, Howard. 1995. “On Historical Commentary: The Example of Milton and Dryden”. In Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception: Essays in Honour of Ian Jack,edited by Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe, 52–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fielding, Henry. 1975. The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings. Ed. W. B. Coley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fish, Sta nley.1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Com-munities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[Forster, John]. 1845. Review of The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. With Copi-ous Notes, and a Life of the Author.Edinburgh Review 81 (163): 46–88.

“For the Benefit of Miss Nossiter”. 1757. Public Advertiser 6976 (March 5): page 1, col-umn 2.

Gilman, Todd. 2013. The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Gosse, Edmund. 1918. “Gray’s Notes on Churchill”. Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom 36: 161–79.

Groom, Nick. 1999. The Making of Percy’s Reliques. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hammond, Brean. 2006. “Verse Satire”. In A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. Christine Gerrard. 369–85. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Harris, Michael. 2009. “London Newspapers”. In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695–1830, edited by Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner. 413–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Howard-Hill, T. H. 1998. “The Dangers of Editing, or, the Death of the Editor”. In The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts, edited by Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey, 51–66. London: Routledge.

Impartial Strictures on the Poem Called “The Pursuits of Literature”. 1798. London: Printed for J. Bell.

Kaufer, David S. and Kathleen M. Carley. 1993. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocultural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Knight, Charles A. 2004. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lockwood, Thomas. 1979. Post-Augustan Satire: Charles Churchill and Satirical Poetry, 1750 –18 0 0. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle. 1761. 550 (January 21–23): page 77, column 2.

Marcus, Leah S. 1996. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. Lon-don: Routledge.

Maynard, John. 2009. Literary Intention, Literary Interpretation, and Readers. Peter-borough, ON: Broadview.

McGann, Jerome J. 1983. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McKenzie, D. F. 1986. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library.

McLane, Maureen N. 2010. “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830: The Invention of Oral Tradition; or, Close Reading before Coleridge”. In This is Enlight-enment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, 247–64. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press.

Nichol, Donald W. 2000. “Slander, Scandal, & Satire”. Times Literary Supplement 28 (January), 14–15.

Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Pope, Alexander. 1951. Epistle to Several Persons. Ed. F. W. Bateson. Vol. 3b of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al. London: Methuen.

Prior, Matthew. 1971. The Literary Works of Matthew Prior. Ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Review of The Duellist. A Poem in Three Books. 1763. Monthly Review 29 (December): 531– 38.Review of The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. 1805. British Critic 25 (February): 171–75.

Rounce, Adam. 2005. “‘A Clamour Too Loud to be Distinct’: William Warburton’s Literary Squabbles”, Age of Johnson 16 : 19 9 – 217.

Rowland, William G. 1996. Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Seary, Peter. 1990. Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Shillingsburg, Peter L. 1986. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

——— . 2 0 17. Textuality and Knowledge: Essays. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Small, Ian and March Wa l s h, ed. 1991. The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essay in Honour of James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Snead, Jennifer. 2010. “Epic for an Information Age: Pope’s 1743 Dunciadin Four Books and the Theater Licensing Act”. ELH 77 (1): 195–216.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1985. Gossip. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stone, George Winchester, ed. 1962. The London Stage: 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces. Part 4: 1747–1776. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Ti l lya r d, Stella. 2005. “Celebrity in 18th-Century London”. History Today 55 (6): 20 –27.

Tu i t e, Clara. 2007. “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity”. ELH 74 (1): 59– 88.

Tw o m b l y, David J. 2005. “The Revenant Charles Churchill: A Haunting of Literary History”. Studies in Philology 102 (1): 83 –109.

Walpole. Horace. 1960. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Ed. W. S. Lewis. Vol. 21. New Haven: CT: Yale University Press.

Wa l s h, Marcus. 1997. Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weatherly, Edward H., ed. 1954. The Correspondence of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wilkinson, Andrew M. 1952. “The Decline of English Verse Satire in the Middle Years of the Eighteenth Century”. RES, ns 3, 11: 222–33.

Zwick er, Steven N. 2014. “Why Are They Saying These Terrible Things about John Dryden? The Uses of Gossip and Scandal”. Essays in Criticism 64 (2): 158–79.