Abstract
In the early eighteenth century authors did not like to reveal their identities. Most texts, whether for polite or popular audiences, appeared anonymously, and a glance at the original title-pages of the works of, say, Addison, Defoe and Pope well illustrates this general reticence. Readers of all ranks were therefore often faced with the fundamental problem of attribution as they sought to make sense of the words in front of them. Moreover, as authors were aware that, as one wit put it, ‘the man is certainly mad, and fit only for the College in Moorfields [Bedlam], who when he commences Writer, expects not to be enquired after’,1 so naturally they adopted many counter-strategies that both excited curiosity and compounded the readers’ difficulties. Not least among these subterfuges was the widespread use of false identities. As authors invented and adopted names, titles, pseudonyms and voices (counterfeiting the identities of friend and foe, alive or dead, with irony and parody), it was seldom ever clear to anyone which hand, if one alone, had penned a composition. Nor did the activities of pure plagiarists, interfering editors and pirate publishers advance the chances of detection.
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Notes
Thomas Burnet (ed.), The Grumbler no. 1 (24 Feb 1715).
See C. T. Probyn, ’“Haranguing upon Texts”: Swift and the Idea of the Book’, in H. J. Real and H. J. Vienken (eds), Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985) pp. 187–97.
R. Steele, Tatler, no. 271 (2 Jan 1711).
R. Steele, Spectator, no. 555 (6 Dec 1712).
R. Steele, Tatler, no. 242 (10 Oct 1710).
R. Steele, Englishman, no. 16 (10 Nov 1713).
J. Addison, Spectator, no. 451 (7 Aug 1712).
B. A. Goldgar, The Curse of Party: Swift’s Relations with Addison and Steele (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961) P. 99.
Swift to Addison, 13 May 1713, in The Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. R. Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) pp. 70–1.
John Gay, The Present State of Wit (1711), pp. 2–3.
R. Steele, Englishman, no. 16 (10 Nov 1713), written in response to the claim that ‘I wrote Spectators and Tatlers, when he [Steele] only publish’d them’ — Examiner, iv, no. 45 (9 Nov 1713).
See J. Swift, Journal to Stella ed. H. Williams (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948) II, 430 and passim.
A. Pope et al., The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. C. Kerby-Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950) p. 169.
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© 1991 The Editorial Board, Lumiere (Co-operative) Press Ltd
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Hyland, P. (1991). Naming Names: Steele and Swift. In: Hyland, P., Sammells, N. (eds) Irish Writing. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21755-7_2
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