Endnotes

1 The fourth edition contains two women authors, Anne Finch and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that the 2nd edition of 1968 did not; it also contains scientific prose, including John Locke, whereas the 2nd edition contained only Bacon.

2 It seems to me that Patey avoids his own insight when he says that “The aestheticization of literature [in the Romantic era] revis[ed] the canon” (27): he should have said, transformed a list into a canon, given his earlier arguments (18).

3 The version of it printed in 1824 was not mass-printed, not produced for sale, until after its table of contents page had been altered. The living authors were removed from the 1824 version, the proverbial dead white males alone appearing in the 1825 edition that was finally produced and disseminated.

4 I define both types shortly.

5 The rise of the discipline of English is, of course, historically overdetermined. Other accounts, be they complimentary or competing, might make more sense in other interpretive contexts. For those accounts, see Court, Crawford, Engel, Moran, Scholes, Soffer, and Wellek (Rise).

6 The Works of the English Poets, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical (1779).

7 Boswell 3.137, qtd. in Bonnell 128 n. 2.

8 Bell’s list is much closer to the canon than Johnson’s.

9 Bell, Cowley 1:[lviii], qtd. in Bonnell 133.

10 I am grateful to Jerome McGann for this insight.

11 At first, each issue of the 109 volumes was assigned a number based on the order of its printing; that number appeared on paper labels affixed to wrappers. After the whole set was completely printed and assembled, in May of 1783, the volume numbers were assigned that transformed the collection into a chronological list of poets (Bonnell 133, Note to Table 1). The difference between volume numbers based on chronology and order-printed numbers differentiates poetry as field from its specific productions, its material performances.

12 See Alan Cameron (The Greek Anthology, 1993) and James Hutton (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, v. 23 and 28).

13 In the elided portion of this quotation, St. Clair claims that manuscript collections of poetry did indeed perform anthologizing functions. I disagree with him about that, and will argue against it below.

14 Morning Post 16 May 1777, qtd. in Bonnell 136.

15 Bell, Prior 1:[xlvii], qtd. in Bonnell 134.

16 This in some ways resembles the state of HTML-generated web pages at our moment – only one head per body; yet, when the separate HTML pages are generated by one TEI document, multiple heads are possible. Unfortunately, TEI garbles the metaphor a bit, since multiple heads occur WITHIN and not before bodies.

17 John Aikin’s 1820 Select Works of the British Poets. With Biographical and Critical Prefaces (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820) is another contender for the first disciplinary anthology, as much of what is said here about Hazlitt’s collection is similarly true of Aikin’s. However, Aikin is concerned with educating young schoolboys, including, he says, no poems “unsuited to the perusal of youth. The Work, within these bounds, may be termed a ‘Library of Classical Poetry,’ and may safely be recommended to the heads of Schools in general, and to the libraries of Young Persons” (Preface).

18 The 4th edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry was edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. Those editors chose to reflect the historical recovery efforts by feminists and included women writers. Hence, its table of contents is very unlike Hazlitt’s.

19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (36); see also Deborah White.

20 The advent of a mass reading public during the Romantic era has been debated (cf. Klancher to Cressy, e.g.). However, St. Clair documents a huge rise in the number of volumes printed after 1774, as well as a huge increase in bookseller’s businesses, that seem only possible given a growing market (114-120). But whether in the fantasy about readership maintained by writers or in actuality, a new, bigger reading public, extending beyond coterie or club, needed rules for reading and laws laid down for arbitrating issues of taste (Ferris 22-23).

21 Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 4 vols. (London, 1774-1781), 3.490, quoted in Wellek 482; Wellek also mentions Hurd’s “On the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth” (1759).

22 Wellek differentiates the notion of “age” from “period,” but Robert Griffin productively intermingles the two.

23 I get this idea from reading Blix, Chandler, and Lowenthal.

Links

Page 3

"body metaphor" http://bodyimagery.pdf/

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"multivolume collections" http://mid-centurymisc.pdf/

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"a whole body" http://bodyimagery.pdf/

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"see Table 1" http://table1.pdf/

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"Beauties" http://commonplacetobeauty.pdf/

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"collections that directly contrast with the disciplinary anthology" http://curiosities.pdf/