Hazlitt’s 1825 edition contains a list of authors more closely resembling the table of contents of Norton’s 4th edition – perhaps our last canonical anthology – than anything before it (see Table 1). Many of the differences are accounted for by the larger number of pages in the Norton and by the fact that it includes prose and drama, not just poetry.@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. Johnson may have been omitted from Hazlitt for reasons of copyright. The relative balance – Hazlitt contains more eighteenth-century poets, Norton more sixteenth- and seventeenth-century – has to do somewhat with his more limited historical knowledge, as is probably the case with the imbalance found in Bell. Also, Hazlitt’s collection is light on early and middle-English verse because that area is so well-covered by Henry Headley’s 1787 Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry and George Ellis’s 1790 Specimens of the Early English Poets, not to mention Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1775 [3rd ed.], 1794 [4th ed.]).

    But it is not simply the content, the list, found in the table of contents that makes Hazlitt’s Specimens the first disciplinary anthology. The way the table of contents looks creates the most profound feature of our canon: its gendering. Hazlitt’s collection is marked by selectivity on aesthetic grounds, as he says in the introduction: "To possess a work of this kind ought to be like holding the contents of a library in one's hand without any of the refuse or `baser matter'" (ii). Hazlitt says also that his collection is built upon the same plan as Vicessimus Knox's Elegant Extracts but that it "has been compressed by means of a more severe selection of matter" (i). The "`baser matter'" excluded from a view of Britain's "natural preeminence" (ii) in the field of Poetry is women's writing: Knox's volume of poetry contains women writers while Hazlitt's does not. Thomas Campbell’s 1819 Specimens had included every “worm” who ever wrote between the time of Chaucer and Cowper, just like Johnson’s multivolume collection, but in the space of a short anthology. But though its table of contents includes 246 entries, only 3 are women – they are outnumbered even by “anonymous.” This is extraordinary given how popular women writers were at the time, and throughout the eighteenth-century – they were being published not only in single-author editions but in numerous literary annuals (Katherine D. Harris) and miscellanies.

Many, many of the men appearing in Campbell’s table of contents were less popular and less productive, not to mention less aesthetically valuable. Campbell’s Specimens defensively presents us with a male body of English poetry. In Hazlitt’s Specimens, each author’s name appears in the table of contents in bold, last name only – the only exception being an “A” distinguishing Ambrose Philips from John Philips, author of “A Splendid Shilling.” For Hazlitt, the work of gendering the canon has been done; he doesn’t need to be defensive. One can list authors by last name if gender is not an issue: this is a male canon.