Miscellanies do not pretend to present us with “British literary history,” offering instead recently written, often previously unpublished poems. Early in the eighteenth century, miscellanies continue to look like the coterie epistle, imitating manuscripts circulated by aristocrats. Richard Steele's dedication to Congreve in his Poetical Miscellanies (London: Tonson, 1714) thus attests to their social interactions and engages in that rivalry through compliments typical of manuscript collections:

This miscellany is as much a performance or showing of friendships and alliances as it is a collection containing "performances," as poems are called throughout the prefaces of eighteenth-century collections.

    Miscellanies equate individual poems with persons, with bodies, as one can see in the spate of multivolume collections published mid-eighteenth century (the Dodsley group). Miscellanies, including the Dodsley group, organize their poems neither by poet, nor by theme or tone, nor by any historical overview – most if not all the poets are living. Given the hodgepodge appearance of poems throughout the volume, the table of contents listing their order of appearance resembles a scrambled index. In fact, some such collections I have seen have no table of contents, putting instead the index on the first few pages (Pearch). At one point, Welish calls the table of contents “an index ‘which seems to me to / beckon’” (266), but in fact, indices can be generated automatically because the words comprising them appear in the text. In contrast, the table of contents requires creating names for major sections of a book. These titles can only be established as such through layout, by being set off from the rest of the text in a particular way, with numbers and large type, as evinced by Welish’s headline for the making of a table of contents: “Epitome Stunned Immortal Source Text!” (267).@I am grateful to Jerome McGann for this insight.

    Bell’s multivolume collection more drastically replaces the ad hoc with the systematic than does any disciplinary anthology. Bell’s volumes place all an author’s poems together either in one volume or in sequentially numbered volumes, all uniform in appearance. Sequential volume numbering of each author’s works – conceived of as a whole body – constitutes “THE” history of British literature. The numbering works in chronological order, creating a list that admits of no insertions or deletions.@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.
This fixed list, Tricia Lootens argues, “evokes a violent siege mentality” in which “human interactions with great art” are limited to “disruption and descration” (8). Bell’s volumes constitute authorial bodies clothed in the uniform appropriate for soldiers manning their can(n)on.

    Had the miscellanies prevailed, and Bell never collected, our canon would be a canon of particular poems. But had Bell’s list become our canon, it would be a canon of the complete works written by particular authors. Unlike Bell’s collection, the table of contents in the disciplinary anthology properly speaking distributes these soldiers evenly across a disciplinary field, laid out strategically by period to cover all of literary history, all poets having approximately equal amounts of cannon fodder – or poems – to defend their position in the canon.