It is now several months since I have written a post under the 'Experiencing Political Texts' heading. For that reason alone I wanted to return to it this month, but there is a further incentive for doing so. We learnt in May that our application for an AHRC Networking Grant on this topic has been successful. So, from January 2022 we will be organising a series of workshops exploring the themes: 'Genre and Form in Early Modern Political Texts', 'The Materiality of Early Modern Political Texts', and 'Experiencing Early Modern Political Texts in a Digital Age'. We will also be running a monthly reading group at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society and working with colleagues at the Robinson Library, Newcastle University and at the National Library of Scotland to put on exhibitions exploring the relative merits of print versus digital editions and the forms in which political arguments were articulated in the past and the present.
Screenshot from the Early Modern Ballot resource designed in conjunction with Animating Texts at Newcastle University (ATNU) as a pilot for the ‘Experiencing Political Texts’ project. It provides an animated version of James Harrington’s broadsheet The Manner and Life of the Ballot following the instructions set out in that publication.
In previous posts in this series I have written about the important role played by genre in early modern political texts and about the significance of the material dimensions of those texts. In this post I want to extend the discussion to think about how works were connected with each other: the issue of intertextuality. I should acknowledge here that my thinking on this was greatly influenced by supervising Thomas Whitfield's PhD thesis and, in particular, his work on the 'multi-media strategy' adopted by the radical printer and bookseller Thomas Spence. For those who are interested, you can find out more about Tom's work here.
Joseph Wilton, ‘Thomas Hollis’, marble bust, c.1762. National Portrait Gallery NPG 6946. Reproduced under a creative commons licence.
Thomas Hollis, who has featured previously in this blog, edited and financed the publication of a number of works on politics and government in the mid-eighteenth century, especially works of the republican canon, producing lavish copies with special bindings, illustrations and coded stamps. Hollis disseminated large numbers of works to city and university libraries across Britain, Europe, and North America. The most extensive collection of these books was sent to Harvard University. This donation, which was added to over many years, was so vast that the electronic library catalogue used at Harvard today is named after Hollis (and his forebears who also made donations to the College). Sending a huge collection of books allowed Hollis to seek to influence how readers read not just a single volume but the collection as a whole.
Hollis added handwritten annotations into a considerable number of the books he sent to Harvard that were designed to direct the reader to other works in the collection. In some cases the aim was to provide more detail on the author. On the flyleaf of Anthony Ascham's Of the confusions and revolutions of governments, for example, he directed readers wanting to know more about Ascham to Antony Wood's Athenae Oxoniensis, volume 2, p. 385, which he had also donated (William H. Bond, “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”: Thomas Hollis’s Gifts to the Harvard College Library. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press for the Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library, 2010, p. 39). Elsewhere, however, annotation was intended to provide further reading on the same topic. In William Atwood's Jani anglorum facies nova he directs the reader to 'See "Plato Redivivus", by the ingenuous Harry Neville" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 40). Similarly, on the flyleaf of John Bridges's work, A brief account of many of the prosecutions of the people call'd Quakers, Hollis added the following annotation: 'In "The Pillars of Priestcraft" shaken is preserved a master tract in behalf of the Quakers & of Liberty; which was written by the late Lord Hervey, in answer to an artful tract of the late Dr Sherlock's, then B. of Salisbury, intitled "The Country Parson's Plea'" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 55). Two copies of The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, which was by Hollis's close friend Richard Baron, were also among the works sent to Harvard.
Giovanni Battista Cipriani, ‘Thomas Hollis’, etching, 1767. National Portrait Gallery NPG D46107. Reproduced under a creative commons licence. This portrait of Hollis by Cipriani was produced to appear in his Memoirs. It includes several of the emblems or tools used in the works Hollis commissioned., including the owl and the pileus or liberty cap between two Roman short swords. That combination of symbols appeared on coins issued by Brutus to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar.
In both of these cases the works to which the reader was directed expressed similar sentiments to the one in which the annotation appeared, but this was not always the case. On the half-title page of the first volume of The history of the rebellion, Hollis added a rather unflattering description of the author: "Edward Hyde, at length Earl of Clarendon, in the opinion of the writer, so far as he can judge, a hack Lawyer ... of working, but not first-rate abilities; a wordy, partial Historian." He went on to recommend that readers of Clarendon's volume should also read the works of one of his contemporaries: 'See the Prose-works of his opposite, the man, who in no respect, would subscribe slave, the matchless John Milton. T-H aug. 7. 1767" (Bond, Thomas Hollis’s Gifts, p. 67).
The printer and radical bookseller Thomas Spence did not have the resources that were at Hollis's disposal, but he too saw value in encouraging readers to read one text in the light of another, and found a much more direct way of encouraging them to do so. His weekly periodical One Pennyworth of Pig's Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude comprised an eclectic mix of short extracts from works by authors as diverse as the Anglo-Irish cleric and satirist Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century reformer William Frend, the political theorist John Locke, and the French philosopher, writer and politician the comte de Volney. The extracts are carefully chosen and important in themselves, but additional messages are conveyed through their juxtaposition. For example, in an early issue Spence included two extracts from Frend's Peace and Union, one dealing with the recent regicide in France, drawing a parallel between it and the events of 1688, and another highlighting the negative impact of war on the poor. They are followed by Lord Chesterfield's letter to his son from April 1752 in which he predicts a decline in the power of kings and priests by the end of the century, on the basis of the 'symptoms of reason and good sense' breaking out in France, which he also links to 'Revolution principles' at home. Together these extracts are designed to encourage readers to view the French Revolution in a positive light and to oppose Britain's involvement in the war against France.
Token produced on Spence’s behalf to advertise his Pig’s Meat publication. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.
One of Spence's particular aims in the work is to demonstrate that his arguments for equality, and in particular the fair division of land, are endorsed not just by many of the great political thinkers of the past, but also by the Bible. In another issue he includes two extracts taken respectively from Leviticus and Isaiah followed by a passage from Samuel Pufendorf's Whole Duty of Man. The labels Spence gives to these extracts hints at the connections between them. The Biblical passages are headed 'Lessons for the Monopolizers of Land', while the passage from Pufendorf is entitled 'On Equality'. The extract from Leviticus describes the idea of jubilee whereby every fifty years land that had been bought or sold in the intervening half century would be returned to its original owner. The passage from Isaiah also warned against the accumulation of land. The Pufendorf extract included the following claim: 'That no man, who has not a peculiar right, ought to arrogate more to himself than he is ready to allow to his fellows, but that he permit other men to enjoy equal privileges with himself.' (One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. London, 1793, p. 91).
In fact both Hollis and Spence also went beyond intertextuality, making connections not just between one text and another, but also between texts and objects, and between text and place. Both men commissioned the production of images and tokens depicting individuals and emblems that embodied the causes for which they stood. The portrait of Hollis by Giovanni Battista Cipriani and the Spence token advertising his Pig's Meat periodical, both of which are depicted above, are good examples of this. Hollis also became obsessed with John Milton's bed, while Spence experimented with speakeasies and even embarked on a graffiti campaign chalking the words 'The Rights of Man' around the streets of London. Historians of political ideas must, therefore, venture beyond the words on the pages of individual texts if they are to make sense of the politics of the past. I hope that through the 'Experiencing Political Texts' project we will be able to identify fruitful ways of doing this.