Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer: Recycling Texts for the Book Market

Offers a comprehensive account of Samuel Richardson's numerous editorial interventions in producing books and pamphlets from his press. From the beginning of his career as printer, Samuel Richardson consistently worked as an anonymous editor and compiler while manufacturing books from his press. While setting type for his many newspapers and journals, this major London printer was mainly concerned about generating a readership and thus invoked all the tricks of his trade to arouse interest in his readers. Without ever asserting himself as the author, Richardson produced many letters to the editor as a means of invoking a collective response without risking the responsibility of answering for the opinions expressed in his letters. It was a rhetorical strategy that worked very well for a printer who by profession had to publish many works that expressed opinions wholly in conflict with his own. His long experience as anonymous editor prepared him in launching fictional 'histories' told through multiple voices that conceal or underplay a central author's authority.

Table of Contents:
1.  Introduction to The True Briton: Oaths of Allegiance and Women's Empowerment; 2. Selected Texts of The True Briton; 3. Introduction to The Weekly Miscellany: Sarah Chapone, Women's "Championess."; 4. Selected Texts of The Weekly Miscellany; 5. Conclusion:  Richardson's Press and Women's Entry into Public Life; 6.  Bibliography.

About the Author :
John A. Dussinger, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has written widely about eighteenth-century authors from Astell to Austen.

Review :
SHARP News A fascinating and informatively detailed study that rescues a once influential printer/publisher from an undeserved obscurity, "Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer: Recycling Texts for the Book Market" will be of special interest to students, academicians, and bibliophiles concerned with the history of publishing in 18th Century Britain. —Midwest Readers can be grateful to have been given something genuinely new to think about a long-familiar author. —CHOICE “Building on his valuable explorations of Richardson’s early and anonymous journal publication, Dussinger offers carefully annotated texts of 7 contributions to the True Briton (1723–4) and 16 to the Weekly Miscellany (1733–8), all significantly signed with the names of women. Drawing on a half-century of critical engagement with Richardson novels, he is able to establish convincingly the importance of these early texts to our understanding of the great fictions that follow.” — Melvyn New, Professor Emeritus, University of Florida “Building on his important articles on Richardson’s press and editions of his correspondence, John Dussinger presents periodical essays in which Richardson impersonated women letter-writers to support the sex’s autonomy and to criticize mandated oaths of allegiance. The texts—prefiguring his epistolary novels—reveal Richardson’s religious and political values and his support for the periodicals.” — James E. May, Professor Emeritus, Penn State University “This is an important scholarly addition to what we know about Samuel Richardson. William Sale’s bibliographical study of Richardson’s press has long cried out for someone able and willing to make sense of Richardson’s full activities as a writer and printer. Dussinger persuades us that these works he attributes to Richardson are by him. He sheds light on the deeper and literal sources of Clarissa, the real people who might have gone into the composite array of characteristics that make up the novel’s two major characters. He also brings out the convoluted attitudes that make up Richardson’s form of feminism. Richardson was fighting the increase of secularism in the era and a transformation of social norms, which, among other things, insisted on more respect for women and closer containment of their sexual and familial lives.” — Ellen Moody, Instructor at Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning at American University I would recommend John Dussinger’s book to any university library supporting eighteenth-century courses. He is a major Richardson scholar. The argument that before Richardson embarked on Pamela, he took the woman’s point of view in letters to the journals he himself printed, provides new insights into his much-debated feminism. — Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago, New Zealand. Dussinger provides convincing linguistic, contextual, and historical evidence in support of his attributions. He does terrific detective work throughout his introduction, headnotes, and footnotes, piecing tantalizing hints and references together into persuasive vignettes. He brings a refreshing sense of excitement and joy to solving the various puzzles Richardson seems never to tire of leaving us. - —Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies   Richardson the novelist and Richardson the printer have been highlighted in scholarship from the middle of the previous century, but Richardson the periodical writer / contributor is a relatively recent addition: in the past three decades Dussinger has been one of the leaders in this “recovery” and this volume is a convenient way for the rest of us to catch up on this development. —The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats Dussinger has done students of Richardson, of the mid-eighteenth-century novel, of women’s activities and agency in mid-century British society and its print markets, and of British periodical culture, especially as it pertains to the soliciting and publication of pseudonymous letters, a great service in finding, editing, and framing these selections of texts in such a careful and evocative manner. —SHARP New This book makes a real, if modest, contribution to Richardson studies and to periodical studies in general. - The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America