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ABSTRACT This essay argues for an expansion of the work of book history at the interface between the magazine and the personal verse miscellany. The manuscript verse miscellany was a widely practiced genre in the eighteenth century but has remained largely invisible to scholars. The genre forms an archive of interest for, among other things, how it adapts to, and exploits, the newly developed eighteenth-century print form of the periodical, especially the magazine. Existing at the intersection of new print forms and established strategies of literary production and networking through manuscript exchange, the verse miscellany reveals how readers, many of them women, "hacked" printed poetry that offered private, transferable affect that they could then repurpose to their own ends. One product of this dynamic exchange is a countercanon of manuscript-based poetry that varies significantly from the established print canon. KEYWORDS: manuscript verse miscellanies; manuscript networks in eighteenth-century England; strategies for manuscript compilation; George Lyttelton; eighteenth-century periodicals
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE ASSERTS that a wider conception of women's relation to books is necessary in order to extend the recovery work begun over half a century ago and to enable us to have a full understanding of the intellectual, economic, and social networks in which women participated during the long eighteenth century. In this spirit, I will argue for an expansion of the work of book history at the interface between the printed magazine and the manuscript verse miscellany, a contact zone I am exploring as part of a general study of such miscellanies. I adopt the term manuscript verse miscellany from studies of early modern manuscripts. Scholars have developed valuable models for the study of these earlier manuscripts, which tend to feature mixtures of poetry, religious and literary prose, lists of historical or scientific information, popular subgenres such as the epitaph, and remedies or recipes.1 It is my argument that, as generic distinctions between poetry and other forms of writing took on greater importance over the first few decades of the eighteenth century, amateurs increasingly produced carefully curated, handwritten compilations of copied and original verse. The manuscript verse miscellany overlapped chronologically with the early modern commonplace book and later with the nineteenth-century album and scrapbook, but hundreds of surviving exemplars suggest that it was a form practiced...