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The "Garbage Heap" of Memory: At Play in Pope's Archives of Dulness

Harold Weber *

I

In the last decade, scholarship concerned with the cultural and literary significance of Alexander Pope's life and work has increasingly portrayed him as a reluctant modern. ¹ Temperamentally conservative, his face set rigidly against many of the cultural changes overtaking his society, Pope nonetheless reveals not only his fascination with what he ostensibly disdained, but his participation, however reluctant and sometimes unwitting, in a host of modern practices that he publicly reviled. Brean Hammond's recent book on the growth of writing as a profession argues that for all of his complaints against the corruption wrought by modern notions of progress, "in some respects, Pope embodied the direction being taken by progress," a work like The Dunciad--the subject of this essay--ideologically "rooted in the value systems that it ostensibly opposes, and much of its energy...borrowed from the lowbrow and demotic forms that it affects to despise." ²

Nowhere has the emphasis on Pope's divided loyalties been more persuasive and revealing than on the issue of his involvement in the early-eighteenth-century print trade, a complex relationship in which a consummate professional writer invests tremendous energy and resources to deny his professional identity and traduce [End Page 1] the emergence of a literary professionalism that brought him fame and wealth. Contemporary academic scholarship presents Alexander Pope not simply as the foremost poetic genius of his age, but as an innovative businessman of formidable cunning, energy, and vision who publicly derided the skills and energies that brought him success. ³

For all of his business acumen and economic prosperity, however, the unprecedented transformations in the print trade that Pope had to negotiate, as well as the profound ironies that undermined his stance as a simple, unambitious amateur, generated profound anxieties in the poet. However secure he may have been in his poetic abilities, and however much he may have dominated his commercial rivals, Pope reveals a genuine concern for how literary history would be written in the new age of the book, and memorials constructed that might succeed in representing a poet to posterity. In November of 1708, while anticipating the appearance of his first publication--the Pastorals, which appeared in May 1709 in the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellaneous Poems--the virgin poet explains to Henry Cromwell, "That Poet were a happy Man who cou'd but obtain a Grant to preserve His [Fame] for Ninety nine Years; for those Names very rarely last so many Days, which are planted either in Jacob Tonson's, or the Ordinary of Newgate's, Miscellanies." ⁴ For all of his posturing before an older friend, Pope nonetheless reveals, in his association between collections of contemporary poets and sensational biographies of condemned criminals--publishing ventures both made profitable by the expanding book trade--a shrewd and cynical understanding of the relationship among modern poetry, financial profit, and enduring fame. The almost four decades that Pope spent planting and working that particular field only darkened his suspicions about modernity and literary history. As he expressed it to Warburton near the end of his career, "I hope Your Friendship to me will be then as well known, as my being an Author, & go down together to Posterity; I mean to as much of posterity as poor Moderns can reach to" (Correspondence, 4:362).

Committed from his earliest years to a very classical conception of fame and the poetic vocation, Pope nonetheless recognized both that a new age had rendered these inherited models problematic and that his identity as a "poor Modern" compromised his ability to achieve them. In this essay I will examine how Pope specifically fashioned The Dunciad as a response to his anxieties concerning modernity and the unprecedented challenges it presented to a poet ambitious for "the second Life, he receives, from his Memory" (Correspondence, 3:174). To do so, I will draw on current scholarship concerned with the way in which the printed book, according to Jacques Le Goff, "transformed the content and mechanisms of collective memory." A number of these "mechanisms," particularly those that Paul Connerton has described as "the store-room of collective memory: museums, libraries, and academies," are central to the narrative of cultural destruction portrayed in The Dunciad. ⁵

In focusing particularly on the book and the library, I want to historicize the poem, situating it more precisely in its specific intellectual milieu, while, at the same time, to locate it within a much larger project involving the formation and evolution of a particularly modern conception of memory. David McKitterick establishes the dimensions of the former when he argues that the "essentials of modern [End Page 2] book collecting" were established in England during the years 1660 and 1753, between the foundation of the Royal Society and the passage of the British Museum Act. ⁶ Composed during the last quarter of this century-long process, The Dunciad reveals Pope's powerful ambivalence to the "storehouse" and "archive" as the sites of a new collective memory. The poem represents an anguished protest against the breakdown in traditional structures of memory, and a sustained critique of the new (or newly redesigned) institutions--library, museum, and academy--that print culture helped to erect in their place. At the same time, Pope's successive revisions of the poem transform it into the very type of textual archive that he despises, for it memorializes and preserves the print industry that Pope both vilifies and exploits.

The monumental aspirations of Pope's poem, which seeks to immortalize the poet even as it portrays the apocalyptic extermination of literate civilization, reveal the complex and problematic nature of our modern memory, its paradoxical richness and poverty suggested by Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes the Memorious," which I invoke in the title of this essay. In that short story, Borges writes of a Uruguayan peasant who, after a horseback riding accident that leaves him "hopelessly paralyzed," finds that he lives in a present "almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories." In speaking of his new "gift," Funes explains that "'I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world.' And again: 'My dreams are like you people's waking hours.' And again, toward dawn: 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.'" ⁷ Like Funes, The Dunciad moves from the triumph of memory to its defeat, from the promise of a richness that can frustrate the encroachments of modernity to a recapitulation of modernity's most deplorable excesses. In The Dunciad, Pope both contemplates and duplicates the effects of the first two and a half centuries of a print revolution whose alterations in the storage and transmission of knowledge fundamentally altered the nature of collective memory. The cultural memories so obsessively hoarded by the poem and its elaborate critical apparatus represent Funes's "garbage heap," the "paralyzing" modern condition in which the creation and preservation of a collective memory signals but a new bondage to a past from which we can never escape.

II

It may seem perverse to talk of the "triumph of memory" in a poem that celebrates the power of Dulness, for "Wits have short Memories, and Dunces none." ⁸ The cultural and historical oblivion to which The Dunciad, in Four Books inexorably moves depends on Dulness's successful appropriation of the resources and potential of the modern library, museum, and academy. The fourth book in particular contains a powerful and sustained critique of the eighteenth-century academy, in which the schoolmaster's ability to "hang one jingling padlock on the mind" (IV. 162) relies to some extent on the trivialization of memory. When Busby boasts that "We ply the Memory, we load the brain" (IV. 157), the note scoffs that "By obliging them [students] to get the classic poets by heart, [a teacher] furnishes them with endless matter for Conversation, and Verbal amusement for their whole lives." Here a bankrupt educational system reduces memory to a mere parlor trick, and, according to the note [End Page 3] to lines 581-82, "fits and prepares [Youth] for the observance of [Dulness's] Laws, and the exertion of those Virtues she recommends." ⁹

In the figures of Annius and Mummius, and the collectors of flowers and butterflies, Book IV also savages the private collections that led to the establishment throughout Europe of the great public museums during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Pope, however, such miscellaneous and promiscuous objects reveal themselves not as treasure but as excrement, a random collection of nasty, trivial, and meaningless oddities: "Each with some wond'rous gift approach'd the Pow'r, / A Nest, a Toad, a Fungus, or a Flow'r" (IV. 399-400). ¹⁰ In Book I, Pope even portrays collections of books in such a light, the library of first Tibbald, in the 1728 Dunciad, and then Cibber, in the 1743 version, as mere conglomerations of "learned Lumber," "The Classicks of an Age that heard of none." Collectors of books, Pope's note to line 120 in the 1729 Dunciad insists, base their libraries not on rational principles of selection and evaluation, but on "one of these three reasons...that they fitted the shelves, or were gilded for shew, or adorned with pictures."

Historians of the book generally agree that in Britain the rise of modern book collecting and the establishment of the "new age of libraries" took place during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The first proposal for a national library was put forth in 1697; the first union catalog of manuscripts in Britain was published in 1697-98; the first book clubs were organized in 1725; the first circulating library in 1726. Numerous private collections of books were established during these years--Pepys's among them--and many scholarly working libraries as well. ¹¹

In both the 1728 Dunciad and the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, the library emerges as one of the most powerful symbols of Dulness's triumph, its corruption, and eventual destruction by her minions as a measure of her approaching cultural hegemony. In Book I, Pope introduces Tibbald "with all his books around, / Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound." Here, within this "Gothic Vatican," the hero of the poem assembles his altar, prays for inspiration, and receives his first visit from Dulness. The note to line 120 in the 1729 edition describes a "library divided into two parts," containing both "polite learning," from which Tibbald steals his poetry, and what "our author calls solid Learning, old bodies of Philosophy, old Commentators, old English Printers, or old English Translations; all very voluminous, and fit to erect Altars to Dulness." Age does not automatically confer cultural value, however, and the "old" books housed in the hero's library efface cultural memory rather than sustain it.

When Pope determined to replace Tibbald with Cibber in the 1743 version of the poem, he revised extensively in order to provide his new hero with a library suitable for a dramatist rather than a scholar. Indeed, critics have complained that a library is hardly appropriate to the poem's new hero, but Pope was loath to abandon a cultural institution that since antiquity had represented the progress of learning. The library, in fact, figures prominently in the parodic progress of Dulness contained in Book III, where the institution merely corrupted by the laureate in Book I is now utterly destroyed: [End Page 4]

Heav'ns! what a pyle? whole ages perish there:
And one bright blaze turns Learning into air.
     Thence to the South extend thy gladden'd eyes;
There rival flames with equal glory rise,"
From shelves to shelves see greedy Vulcan roll,
And lick up all their Physick of the Soul. (69-74)

As the notes to the 1729 Dunciad Variorum reveal, Pope refers to two different book burnings here, the first committed by Chi Ho-am-ti, the Emperor of China who both built the Great Wall and "destroyed all the books and learned men of that empire," and the second by Caliph Omar I, who "caus'd his General to burn the Ptolomaean library, on the gates of which was this inscription, Medicina Animae, The Physick of the Soul." When the laureate burns an altar of books in Book I as a pious sacrifice to Dulness, Pope does not ask the reader to lament the loss; these are volumes, "Redeem'd from tapers and defrauded pyes," that deserve their fate. But the burning of books and whole libraries in Book III possesses a whole other meaning, the destruction of a society's cultural heritage instrumental in Dulness's ability to preserve only "the dulness of the past," to create "A Lumberhouse of Books in ev'ry head, / For ever reading, never to be read" (III. 186, 189-90). As the note to these lines suggests, Dulness's servants represent in miniature the perversion of the cultural value of the library, for their "heads were Libraries out of order."

Paradoxically, the library in The Dunciad thus exemplifies both the virtue of a civilized society, and the triumphant progress of Dulness. The metamorphosis of the library into the "Lumberhouse," the ease with which an institution that since antiquity had preserved literary history could be used to destroy that history, reveals Pope's intense anxiety about the ability of cultural memory to sustain itself in the modern world. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the transformation of the academy, the evolution of the museum, and the formation of new types of libraries to house and circulate the printed book represent significant challenges to the traditional institutions and structures that English society employed to preserve and remember its past. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, according to Frances Yates, "the printed book is destroying age-old memory habits," the classical "art of memory" undermined by the modern book and its mechanical reproduction. ¹² For Pope, the new forms taken by the academy, museum, and library embody the uncontrollable and perverse growth of modern culture, and the inability of genuine culture to sustain itself in the face of modern methods of reproduction and preservation. Laura Brown has described the "primary poetic effect" of The Dunciad as "pure numerousness, an inexhaustible and indistinguishable accumulation," the material manifestations of these poetic effects exemplified by the rote learning of the academy, the assiduous collection and preservation of trivial artifacts, and, especially, the proliferation of bad books. ¹³ When Dulness's "Anointed" visits the underworld at the opening of Book III, he observes "poetic souls...Demand new bodies, and in Calf's array / Rush to the world, impatient for the day" (21-22). Pope's note to these lines insists that it glosses the obvious: "The Allegory of the souls of the Dull coming forth in the form of Books, and being let abroad in vast numbers by Booksellers, is sufficiently intelligible." [End Page 5]

In regard to the book and the library, in fact, Pope's slighting references to William Caxton demonstrate his unwitting insight into the evolution of the modernity he so despised. Today, of course, scholars celebrate Caxton as a seminal figure in the English print revolution. In the early eighteenth century, however, Caxton's importance remained generally unregarded, and Pope places him in both Tibbald's and Cibber's libraries--"There Caxton slept, with Wynkin at his side, / One clasp'd in wood, and one in strong cow-hide"--only as an example of the antiquated rubbish that an indiscriminate culture has kept, "like mummies," uselessly intact.

Yet in the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, Pope himself preserves Caxton's remains by including "A Copy of Caxton's Preface to his Translation of Virgil" among the many appendices that he added to the original poetic text. In doing so, he not only extends his satiric attack on Caxton, providing what he thought a compelling example of useless, fusty knowledge, but transforms the poem itself into an exemplar of the modern excesses he so deplores. Pope's emphasis on sheer numbers and endless accumulation, the nightmarish propagation of "nameless Somethings" and "momentary monsters," finds its perfect realization not only in the triumph of Dulness chronicled in the poem, but in the poem itself, whose successive transformations from 1728 to 1743 generate a textual artifact that faultlessly mimics the cultural depravity of a modernity unable to escape from the narcissistic and self-referential contemplation of its own unruly and promiscuous growth.

Although The Dunciad casts a very jaundiced eye on the archival dimensions of modern culture, other contexts--as well as the poem's own archival gestures--reveal that Pope was himself interested in utilizing the potential of the library to preserve his own works and poetic memory. Indeed, Pope's letters disclose a conviction that for "poor Moderns" the library constitutes a necessary resource for determining the meaning and even the content of literary history and artistic memory. In 1728, Pope donated his published works to the public library established by the New England Historical Society. During this same period, Pope's friend the earl of Oxford was completing the construction of his library, and the publication of the posthumous works of William Wycherley provided an occasion for Pope to request Oxford's help in "responding" to the way in which these poems brought discredit to the reputation of himself and his friend: "you would suffer some Original papers & Letters, both of my own and some of my Friends, to lye in your Library at London....Something will be necessary to be done, to Clear both his & my reputation, which the Letters under hand will abundantly do." Someone has played Pope and Wycherley "some dirty Trick," and "certain it is, that no other way can Justice be renderd to the Memory of a Man" (Correspondence, 3:54-56). Here "reputation" and "Memory" depend on textual archives where, Pope insists, the truth about the present can be made available to the future.

A year after this exchange, Pope again avails himself of Oxford's help, anxious now to present him with some poems from Swift, who "has promisd me some Verses, not to be printed, which however may increase the Collection in the Harley Library, where I look upon all good papers to have a sure retreat, safe from all Present & future Curlls. I rejoice at the finishing of your New Room, the Palace of [End Page 6] Learning" (Correspondence, 3:136). In these letters, Pope implies that the library represents a powerful corrective to the transitory productions of the commercial world of publication. Controlled by cultural vandals like Curll, the print trade cannot secure the reputation or memory of authors who depend on the productions of their pen. The act of publication is no longer sufficient to establish the just measure of a writer's stature. The cultural deprecations of publishers like Curll can be corrected only by the archive, which represents the true "Palace of Learning." Pope even uses Oxford's library as part of a joke when he published separately the fourth book of The Dunciad in 1742: in the "Advertisement to the First Edition, Separate, of the Fourth Book of the Dunciad," Pope pretends that the new book "was found merely by accident, in taking a survey of the Library of a late eminent nobleman." Harley had died in June 1741, his library here used as the alleged preserver of Pope's manuscript.

Yet even the archive cannot necessarily protect a writer's memory and present his true preeminence to future generations. In a 1729 letter to Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift admits that "I hate a crowd where I have not an easy place to see and be seen. A great Library always makes me melancholy, where the best Author is as much squeezed, and as obscure, as a Porter at a Coronation" (Correspondence, 3:29). A crowd of books, like a crowd of people, inevitably produces a leveling effect, reducing its individual members to a common and melancholy anonymity. A library may save the past and present for the future, but those preserved in the archive remain powerless to assert their unique status.

One of the curses of modernity, for both Pope and Swift, lies in the difficulty of separating oneself from the promiscuous rout who clamor for the attention and rewards of posterity. The urban landscapes of both Pope's Dunciad and Swift's Tale of a Tub represent nightmarish visions of enforced anonymity, where crowds, stink, and the claustrophobic press of humanity make genuine distinction almost impossible to achieve: "Whoever hath an Ambition to be heard in a Crowd, must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable Pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain Degree of Altitude above them."

This opening to A Tale of a Tub points to the desire to distinguish oneself from the rabble, and the hack narrator continues by describing the three mechanical aids, the "wooden Machines," that generations have erected to achieve preeminence: "the Pulpit, the Ladder, and the Stage-Itinerant." ¹⁴ In the versions of The Dunciad after 1728, Pope adds a fourth machine to this list, the book itself, attaining the hack's hard-won "Altitude" by claiming the authority in his textual monument to construct cultural memory and literary history. As Leo Braudy argues, "By the end of the seventeenth century the book was defining itself as a prime new place of fame, not (like the stage) tied to the world of political and military action, but somehow hovering above it, judging it, and finding it deficient." ¹⁵ After 1728, Pope's obsessive concern for The Dunciad's textual apparatus, his conscription of friends and colleagues in the task of writing, collecting, and providing references for the notes, suggests his intuitive understanding of the new status of the book. [End Page 7]

III

As my last remarks suggest, I draw a fundamental distinction between The Dunciad of 1728 and the many versions of the poem that followed its original publication. For this reason, I want to proceed by briefly examining facsimiles of both The Dunciad of 1728 and The Dunciad Variorum of 1729. Although James Sutherland's decision to organize his authoritative Twickenham edition of The Dunciad around the 1729 Variorum and the 1743 Dunciad, in Four Books cannot be faulted, it has nonetheless obscured the crucial differences that separate Pope's original version of the poem from what it was eventually to become. Even a brief examination of the two facsimiles can tell us much about the expansion and complication of Pope's ambitions for the work he appointed, in a letter to Swift, his "Chef d'oeuvre" (Correspondence, 2:468).

When studied together, these facsimiles suggest that Pope's first version presents itself as a relatively simple and clearly defined literary text in ways that the second does not. Indeed, the title page of the 1728 version explicitly and fully identifies the object before us: The Dunciad. An Heroic Poem. In Three Books. The 1729 version, on the other hand, reveals its more ambiguous status not simply in the title--The Dunciad, Variorum. With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus--but in its now distended and unwieldy length. Though the number of verses remains about the same--918 in the first, 1,016 in the second--the fifty-one pages of verse and six pages of prefatory matter in the 1728 edition have multiplied prodigiously, becoming in the 1729 Variorum seventy-nine pages of verse--swollen by the addition of copious "Remarks" and "Imitations" at the foot of each page--framed by almost ninety pages of new textual apparatus. Although the poem has changed little, Pope's archival ambitions have transformed the work itself, the unity and coherence of his original design compromised by what a newly added "Advertisement" refers to as the poem's now more problematic status as "too much a Cento" (4). A "patchwork" or composition formed by joining scraps from other authors, The Dunciad of 1729 announces itself as new not primarily by virtue of revisions to the poem, but because a series of archival gestures has linked the verse to a host of other works, a preface from Caxton, for instance, "Testimonies of Authors, Concerning our Poet and his Works," and "A Parallel of the Characters of Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope, as Drawn by Certain of Their Contemporaries." Earlier in his career, Pope had capitalized on the success of The Rape of the Lock by extending a brief two-canto poem into a more serious and weighty five-canto mock epic; he transforms the The Dunciad, however, by embedding the verse within a massive repository of contemporary documents and scholarly commentary.

This material survey of these two facsimiles raises important questions about what we mean when we refer to the work conventionally designated as Pope's Dunciad. Such a comparison suggests that, after 1728, Pope's Dunciad cannot simply be considered a poem, and that the poetic text cannot be understood apart from its relationship to the extensive and varied critical apparatus that came to surround it. When Emrys Jones, for instance, in his important essay "Pope and Dulness," insists that "the poet at once succumbs to and defies the power of Dulness; and what destroys the world completes the poem," he forgets that what destroys the world may [End Page 8] indeed complete the poem, but after 1728 it does not complete the work. ¹⁶ In the 1728 version of The Dunciad, the "FINIS" that follows the last verse marks the conclusion of the poem, the work, and the volume. In the 1729 version, however, that "FINIS" marks merely the end of the verse, for the work itself continues, completing itself only in a bewildering array of appendices, indices, and addenda. After 1728, the poetic text loses its primacy, and attempts to understand its significance must take into account its status as part of a much larger work.

Embedding his initial publication over a thirteen year period in an increasingly complex, extensive, and self-referential architecture of contemporary documents, gossip, and (mis)information, Pope converts a relatively simple mock-epic poem into a repository devoted to the reconstruction and preservation of the early-eighteenth-century print industry. In 1728 and 1729, Pope's decision to do so would have been daring but certainly not novel, since the archival ambitions that underlay The Dunciad's transformation define an important dimension of contemporary attempts to organize the republic of letters and to engage the increasingly diverse productions of its citizens. A concern for the archive, repository, and storehouse marks the era, and I want to examine briefly two works published at about the same time as The Dunciad, in order to explore further the archival impulse in early-eighteenth-century Britain and its implications for our modern articulations of memory and literary history.

The first, Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, was published in the same year as The Dunciad in 1728. Issued by subscription, its two handsome and expensive folio volumes (four guineas) occupied the high-end of the literary marketplace, the "List of the Subscribers" that follows a dedication "To the King" and extended "Preface" as glittering as that affixed to Pope's Iliad thirteen years before. The dedication embodies Chambers's belief that his undertaking participates in modernity's heady and inevitable eclipse of the past: "Indeed, the Time seems at hand, when we are no longer to envy Rome her AUGUSTUS and AUGUSTAN Age, but Rome in her turn shall envy ours." ¹⁷

Hanovarian England can surpass Augustan Rome because Chambers sees himself as "Heir to a large Patrimony, gradually rais'd by the Industry, and Endeavours of a long Race" of academicians, dictionarists, and lexicographers. Moderns can elevate themselves above the ancients because their forebears have made Chambers "rich enough not only to afford Plenty, but even Profusion" (i). His own work, he assures us, is "what it ought to be, a Collection; not the Produce of a single Brain, for that would go but a little way; but of a whole Commonwealth" (xxix). Chambers prides himself, therefore, not on his knowledge of particulars, but on his ability to organize and structure the diversity of knowledge and information that he has inherited; Chambers has organized "a confused Heap of incongruous Parts" into "one consistent Whole," proud that his work is "as different from theirs, as a System from a Cento" (i). The spectre of the "Cento" bothers Chambers as well as Pope, both men aware, in spite of the very different nature of their undertakings, that the archival dimensions of their projects threaten to undermine their authorial integrity. [End Page 9]

Chambers's belief in his "System," however, protects him from doubt. So grand is his conception for the Cyclopaedia that he can assure us "that half the Men of Letters of an Age might be employ'd in it to advantage" (ii), for his volumes represent no less than a distillation of all knowledge, both past and present: "a Work accomplish'd as it ought to be, on the Footing of this, would answer all the Purposes of a Library, except Parade and Incumbrance; and contribute more to the propagating of useful Knowledge thro' the Body of a People, than any, I had almost said all, the Books extant" (ii). In his two volumes, Chambers imagines an entire library, a quintessence of knowledge--purified from the physical inconveniences of a real library and its multitudinous volumes, the dross of "Parade and Incumbrance"--that can reveal the essential truth contained in "almost" all books.

The first issue of The Gentleman's Magazine, or Trader's Monthly Intelligencer, dated January 1731 (and appearing early in February), announces no such grand ambitions, its price of sixpence and monthly publication placing it at a very different stall from Chambers's in the literary marketplace. Although the periodical publication does not aspire to replace entire libraries, its title page nonetheless asserts its own archival virtues by claiming that it contains "More in Quantity, and greater Variety than any Book of the Kind and Price." ¹⁸ Designed to evade both the 1710 copyright law and stamp taxes imposed in 1712 and 1725--because it primarily reprinted news and extracts from daily and weekly papers--The Gentleman's Magazine presented itself, in the "Advertisement" that introduced the first edition, as a way for the educated individual to confront the impossible demands of the periodical press: "This may serve to illustrate the Reasonableness of our present Undertaking, which in the first Place is to give Monthly a View of all the Pieces of Wit, Humour, or Intelligence, daily offer'd to the Publick in the News-Papers, (which of late are so multiply'd, as to render it impossible, unless a Man makes it a Business, to consult them all)." ¹⁹

Capitalizing on the class-coding of print, the stigma of writing as a "business" that so marks a poet like Pope, Edward Cave, founder and editor of The Gentleman's Magazine, provided a decorous way for his audience to sample and enjoy the chaotic outpouring of the contemporary print trade. For a modern reader this "Advertisement" can almost suggest the pen of Pope or Swift, for it communicates a powerful sense of the overwhelming numbers produced by the trade, of the sheer mass of material "thrown from the Press," of the many "loose Papers, uncertainly scatter'd about." But its accents remain earnest, not satirical, and its energies devoted not to a critique of the periodical press but to its celebration: "many Things deserving Attention . . . are only seen by Accident, and others not sufficiently publish'd or preserved for universal Benefit and Information. This Consideration has induced several GENTLEMEN to promote a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces on the Subjects abovemention'd."

Throughout the seventeenth century, the chief meanings of the term "magazine" had referred to a storehouse or repository for goods or merchandise, a victualling ship, or a military building protecting particularly gunpowder, ammunition or explosives. Late in the century, however, examples of its figurative use in titles are provided by The Mariners Magazine (1669) and The Penman's Magazine (1705). Cave, however, deserves credit for the establishment of the modern meaning of the [End Page 10] term, the enormous success of his publication transforming "magazine" into a generic term for a periodical publication intended for a general readership.

That readership may have differed profoundly from the worthies contained in the impressive "List of the Subscribers" that accompanied Chambers's Cyclopaedia, but both publications are nonetheless marked by the insistence that only as archives can they bring order to and make sense of the contemporary world of letters and print. Chambers complains that because of the multiplication of dictionarists and lexicographers "all the Confusion of Babel is brought upon us" (xxi), while Cave figures this Babel in the illustration that highlights his title page: in the center a stone structure titled "St JOHN's GATE"--the location of Cave's press--is flanked on both sides by a difficult-to-read jumble of small print representing, on the left, the titles of a host of London publications, on the right those of the provinces (beginning with York and Dublin and ending with Jamaica and the Barbados). Out of this confused heap of publications, The Gentleman's Magazine will "preserve those Things that are curious," its single voice a way to "treasure up" and "preserve" the best of an otherwise promiscuous and chaotic literary culture.

Pope certainly would have regarded the efforts of Chambers and Cave to organize and preserve contemporary culture with some contempt. The former's insistence on elevating the moderns above the ancients placed him on the other side of that quarrel from Pope, although Chambers finds a place in neither Pope's letters nor his poetry. In 1735, however, Pope wrote to Cave declining to become a judge in a poetry contest organized by The Gentleman's Magazine, though Pope does extend an opinion as long as Cave promises "never naming me in this affair" (Correspondence, 3: 499). While the 1731 establishment of Cave's magazine protected it from the 1728 and 1729 versions of the poem, his efforts did not escape Pope's censure in the 1743 Dunciad, where in the first book Pope replaces "Hence the soft sing-song on Cecilia's day" (40) with "Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc'ries, Magazines" (42). A note to the line only emphasizes Pope's contempt for Cave's extraordinarily popular formula for success: "These [Miscellanies in prose and verse] were thrown out weekly and monthly by every miserable scribler; or picked up piece-meal and stolen from any body . . . equally the disgrace of human Wit, Morality, and Decency." That by 1743 The Dunciad itself had become a collection of extracts from a host of other works seems to have escaped Pope's notice.

IV

Pope's blindness in regard to the ways in which The Dunciad as an archive participates in cultural imperatives that he ridicules elsewhere undoubtedly stems from the complex acts of satiric negation that define his project. Pope can only locate his work and reputation in the "ancient" or (in his mind) "timeless" context of enduring literary value by simultaneously asserting its preeminence in the "modern" context of a Grubstreet that he affected to despise. To conceive of The Dunciad as an archive is to recognize that Pope's own survival as a poet is inextricably bound up with those he mocks. In her recent book on Pope, Helen Deutsch asserts that "If this poet lives forever he will do so by himself and by negation," and while The Dunciad [End Page 11] certainly attests to the validity of her latter proposition, it belies the former. ²⁰ The Dunciad immortalizes its poet by firmly grounding him within the mundane and transitory reality of his time, surrounding him, indeed overwhelming him with the writers, booksellers, printers, and publishers who populated the early-eighteenth-century book trade.

The Dunciad asserts Pope's own preeminence by providing the dense cultural context within which to judge what he confidently assumed to be the insignificance of his contemporaries; their unworthiness to achieve enduring fame provides a measure of Pope's own triumph over time. Such a project, which seeks to memorialize Pope's own antimodern literary genius, is obviously profoundly contradictory, because it both utilizes an ideology of archival comprehensiveness that Pope scorned and depends on individuals whom Pope deemed unworthy of literary immortality. The 1728 version of the work registers the problem of the insignificance of the dunces in "The Publisher to the Reader"--the only textual apparatus to accompany the poem--in which the "publisher" claims that he would have done the author a wrong "had I detain'd this publication: since those Names which are its chief ornaments, die off daily so fast, as must render it too soon unintelligible" (v). The joke here, to be sure, remains something of a scriblerian commonplace, utilized as early as 1704 by Swift in A Tale of a Tub, when his hack narrator, in "The Epistle Dedicatory, To His Royal Highness Prince Posterity," laments that contemporary writers, "altho' their Numbers be vast, and their Productions numerous in proportion, yet are they hurryed so hastily off the Scene, that they escape our Memory, and delude our Sight." ²¹

Even the modern library, with its ambitions toward archival inclusiveness, cannot preserve the memory of writers so insignificant and transitory. In "A Letter to the Publisher"--signed by William Cleland although almost certainly written by Pope himself--affixed to the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, the obscurity of the dunces and their literary efforts again emerges as a significant concern: "as for their writings, I have sought them (on this one occasion) in vain, in the closets and libraries of all my acquaintance....[these writings] themselves will be so soon and so irrecoverably lost. You may in some measure prevent it, by preserving at least their *Titles" (8-9). Without the help of Pope's poem, his enemies cannot hope to survive, and the note here assures us that at least their titles have been saved "in a List in the Appendix, No. 2." This "List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was Abused, Printed Before the Publication of the Dunciad: With the True Names of the Authors" was constructed from the bound volumes of attacks on himself and his poetry that Pope had busily and compulsively collected over the years. Its inclusion in the poem reveals not simply Pope's thin-skinned bitterness, his inability to forget or forgive an insult, but his recognition that his own literary memory depends on the preservation of those he despises. Their obscurity cannot be allowed to undermine his immortality. As "A Letter to the Publisher" puts it when comparing Pope to Boileau, they were "equally abus'd by the ignorant pretenders to Poetry of their times; of which not the least memory will remain but in their own writings, and in the notes made upon them" (13).

The transitory nature of modern authorial fame is not simply noted in The Dunciad Variorum, but becomes the primary rational for the enlargement of [End Page 12] the work's critical apparatus. "The Publisher's Advertisement," which replaces the earlier "Publisher to the Reader," explains: "Of the Persons it was judg'd proper to give some account: for since it is only in this monument that they must expect to survive,...it seem'd but humanity to bestow a word or two upon each, just to tell what he was, what he writ, when he liv'd, or when he dy'd" (3). The term "monument" possesses great resonance in such a context, its meaning for a poet like Pope always inflected by Horace's bold assertion that "I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids' royal pile,...I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time." ²² Emphasizing the tremendous disparity between the materials of fame available to emperor, conqueror, and poet, Horace's ode impresses itself on the literary imagination precisely because it insists that insubstantial texts may outlive the adamantine memorials erected by the rulers of this world. The Dunciad represents Pope's attempt to memorialize himself at the expense of his contemporaries, to present an archive that would distinguish between their dross and his precious metal. The Dunciad, as Brean Hammond reminds us, "was an act of canon formation." ²³

The calm certainty of Horace's vision of poetic immortality, however much it served as a powerful classical model that grounded Pope's own dreams of lasting fame, must also have rebuked his attempts to achieve the monumental in the age of the printed book. While the 1729 Dunciad Variorum begins with an explicit avowal of its monumental ambitions, it also recognizes the modern condition that undermines such aspirations: "We shall next declare the occasion and the cause which moved our Poet to this particular work. He lived in those days, when (after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as a scourge for the Sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover'd the land" ("Martinus Scriblerus, of the Poem," 23). This "deluge" of authors threatens to recapitulate Noah's flood, the history and memory of civilization erased not this time by the waters of God's ire, but by the promiscuous productions of the press. The Dunciad Variorum is marked from the start--even before the poem itself begins--by the poles of memory and oblivion, its monumental status mocked by the extinction toward which modernity rushes. For Pope the waters have not receded, but continue to rise, literary and cultural survival a matter of building his own ark.

Pope populates that ark not with the many creatures of God's creation, but with the miscellaneous hordes of Dulness, that "vast involuntary throng, / Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less, / Roll in her Vortex, and her pow'r confess" (IV. 82-84). The Dunciad contains many such scenes, in which Dulness manifests her power over the numberless, anonymous mobs that populate her kingdom. At the same time, however, the poem insists on individualizing those who pay tribute to Dulness, juxtaposing mass and anonymity against particular individuals and the specific name.

The power and significance of The Dunciad, in particular, depends on its willingness to hazard and even court its unintelligibility to posterity through its insistence on the importance of names that do not deserve to endure. By "naming [End Page 13] names," of course, Pope asserts his own power, for as Deutsch insists, the "power to name is also his power to judge." ²⁴ In this guise, Pope assumes the status not simply of a Noah who will preserve what might otherwise be lost, but of Adam, who demonstrates his unique and superior place in the creation by his ability to name the rest of God's creation.

The power that Pope claims here depends on his instinctive recognition that print, the book, and the library would transform the nature of modern memory. According to Pierre Nora, that memory "is, above all, archival....Memory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution. Its new vocation is to record....What we call memory is in fact the gigantic and breathtaking storehouse of a material stock of what it would be impossible for us to remember." ²⁵ From such a perspective, the insignificance of the dunces is precisely the point, the "virtue" that gives them their value. Doomed to extinction without Pope, their very anonymity demonstrates his triumph.

The modern library and archive accelerate the movement toward what James Fentress and Chris Wickham refer to as the "'textual model' of memory": "In Western society, the history of memory is one of its steady devaluation as a source of knowledge--a devaluation which proceeds in step with the evolution, and increasing dominance, of the textual paradigm of knowledge." In asserting The Dunciad's status as "monument," and transforming the initial poem into a textual archive devoted to "the Grubstreet race," Pope not only participates in this process but also attempts to master it. Fentress and Wickham have noted that "the reconstitution of memory through texts....sets into relief the issue of who controls commemoration in any given society," ²⁶ and Jacques Le Goff has identified the eighteenth century not only as the period when print decisively revolutionized western memory and transformed the "content and the mechanisms of collective memory," but when the question of who was to achieve power over such processes became crucial: "to make themselves the master of memory and forgetfulness is one of the great preoccupations of the classes, groups, and individuals who have dominated and continue to dominate historical societies. The things forgotten or not mentioned by history reveal these mechanisms for the manipulation of collective memory." ²⁷

In such formulations, control over the mechanisms and content of collective memory becomes an ideological program, an instrument of power as well as a form of conquest. Pope's off-hand remark to Thomas Sheridan in a letter of 1728, in which he refers to the care he takes in The Dunciad of "branding none but our own Cattle" (Correspondence, 2:523), suggests precisely this sense of power and conquest in its assertion of property rights and ownership. ²⁸ The issue of ownership is obviously crucial here, for Pope must elevate himself not simply over rival writers, but over the booksellers and printers who control the print trade. The "high, heroic Games" of Book II begin with the race between Lintot and Curll, "persons, whose names being more known and famous in the learned world than those of the authors in this Poem, do therefore need less explanation" (note to line 49). The latter's economic power makes him an irresistible target to Pope, for as the note to line 54 explains, "he possest himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caus'd them to write what he pleas'd; they could not call their very names their own." This is precisely the [End Page 14] power that Pope's Dunciad attempts to wrest from those who dominated the trade: Pope makes the dunces his own, and in doing so he claims the power to determine their place in literary history and memory. In The Dunciad, Pope employs the names of others to forge his own memorial, commemorating his memory through their "Monumental Brass."

In emphasizing The Dunciad's status as archive, I don't mean to suggest that Pope hasn't distorted the "history" that he records in order to present himself in the most favorable light possible. William Kinsley has noted that "the Dunciad as book has useful real notes, and as mock-book it has ludicrously inept and overgrown mock-notes." But he also reminds us that "recent critics who quite rightly emphasize the fictional role of the notes sometimes tend to ignore their quite straightforward complementary role of elucidating a poem that was obscure even to Swift." ²⁹ In a letter to Swift after the poem's 1728 publication, but before its revised appearance in 1729, Pope asks that his friend "read over the Text, and make a few [Notes Variorum] in any way you like best, whether dry raillery, upon the stile and way of commenting of trivial Critics; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory, or collecting the parallel passages of the Ancients" (Correspondence, 2:503). Pope delineates here five different classes of notes, and while the first and second clearly possess a satirical purpose, numbers three, four, and five fulfill an historical and explanatory function.

The work's intrusive textual apparatus, which physically dominates the poem and on the page can at times reduce the verse to the status of a mere footnote, exists as an immense and unwieldy hodgepodge of miscellaneous information, some of it true, some false, some faithfully reporting current gossip--which may have been accurate or not--some creating that gossip. In his recent book on individual memory, John Kotre suggests that "the remembering self...has the temperament of a librarian, a keeper of memory's most important archives. It can be fastidious in that role, guarding its original records and trying to keep them pristine....But memory's archivist by day has a secret passion by night: to fashion a story about itself...a personal myth...a different kind of reality than a librarian knows." ³⁰ The Dunciad's textual apparatus functions in a similar fashion, both preserving an historical record and distorting that record in order to generate a personal narrative that consolidates Pope's own position as literary and moral exemplar.

Though Pope's passion for distorting the "pristine" truth can hardly be considered a "secret"--either from himself or generations of readers--we should remember that part of the success of Pope's Dunciad has manifested itself in its ability over the last two and a half centuries to govern how history has in fact judged those consigned to the "Grubstreet race." Very few of those dunces "branded" by Pope have escaped the stigma of his literary judgment. As Fentress and Wickham remind us, "the social meaning of memory, like its internal structure and its mode of transmission, is little affected by its truth; all that matters is that it be believed"; "social memory is not stable as information; it is stable, rather, at the level of shared meanings and remembered images." ³¹ Pope's misshapen, eccentric, and unique masterpiece has, like few other literary works of the eighteenth century, shaped those "shared meanings" and provided the "remembered images" that have constructed our literary past. [End Page 15]

V

In his short story "The Encyclopedia of the Dead"--subtitled "(A Whole Life)"--the Serbo-Croatian author Danilo Kis writes about a woman who, in trying to come to terms with the recent death of her father, visits the Royal Library in Sweden and there discovers "the celebrated Encyclopedia of the Dead." ³² This encyclopedia is unique, according to the narrator, not only because there exists only one copy, but "because it records everything. Everything" (42), and her progress through the entry on her father gradually teaches us just what such a claim means. At first the narrator explains it by noting that "the reference (for example) to my father's place of birth is not only complete and accurate ('Kraljevcani, Glina township, Sisak district, Banija province') but is accompanied by both geographical and historical details" (42).

As she continues reading, the proliferation of detail becomes even more overwhelming. When her father goes to Ruma, for example, to receive his secondary-school education, we find "a brief history of Ruma, a meteorological map, a description of the railway junction; the name of the printer and everything printed at the time--every newspaper, every book; the plays put on by itinerant companies and the attractions of touring circuses; a description of a brickyard...where a young man, leaning against a locust tree, is whispering a mixture of romantic and rather ribald words into a girl's ear (we have the complete text)" (46-47). Eventually, the narrator comes to understand that "for The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings" (56), although, as in the passage above, the "human" and "ephemeral" communicate themselves most fully and powerfully in "text" and "print."

Libraries have always possessed a special status and significance for the civilizations whose texts they have protected, whose memories they have preserved. In the classical world they were associated with temples and shrines; the library at Alexandria was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Yet the encyclopedia in Kis's story represents a specifically modern fantasy of inclusion, created by moveable type, the printed book, and the specific effects generated by the print revolution, which presented an unprecedented opportunity to standardize, codify, systematize, accumulate, periodicize, preserve, and catalog the diverse productions of the human mind. The possibility of what Roger Chartier has called "libraries without walls" represented for early modern Europe a fantastic vision in which "the closed world of individual libraries could be transformed into an infinite universe of books noted, reviewed, visited, consulted and, eventually, borrowed."

Yet such a vision could never be realized: "a universal library...could not be other than fictive,...The irreducible gap between ideally exhaustive inventories and necessarily incomplete collections was experienced with intense frustration." ³³ The library without walls, the universal library, the one or, in Chambers's case, two volumes that represent the key to all knowledge remains a hopeless dream that rebukes and mocks our aspiration to the perfect and exhaustive knowledge that the print revolution seems to promise. Kis's narrator completes the entry on her father's life and "let[s] out a scream. I awoke drenched in sweat. I immediately wrote down all [End Page 16] of the dream I remembered. And this is what remains of it..." (65). That dream, in short, is also a nightmare, the library in which the Encyclopedia rests "like a dungeon" (40), the volumes that compose it both unread "in a long time" and "fettered to one another like galley slaves" (41). The infinite accumulation of books and memories does not provide liberation but entrapment, not freedom but a specifically modern experience of paralysis and bondage, not the realization of a dream of total knowledge but the experience of a frightening nightmare of an uncontrollable and cancerous growth.

The Dunciad represents Pope's attempt to realize that dream, to create a self-contained literary artifact that could present his greatness to the future. But the oblivion toward which Dulness hurries her minions is not, finally, defeated or even arrested by a textual apparatus that attempts to preserve memory and literary history within its labyrinthine mazes of notes, appendices, and addenda. Anyone who has attempted to teach The Dunciad recognizes that its obsessive self-referentiality does not help to understand it better, but positively hinders students, who become lost and frustrated within the bewildering landscape of early-eighteenth-century London.

Michael Rosenblum has written that while "the poem itself celebrates the triumph of Dulness...the outside frame which is contributed by the notes and fictional situation which they imply, suggests the forces of wit which are to contain Dulness." ³⁴ Although the poem's textual apparatus attempts to function in this fashion, finally it recapitulates the effects of Dulness rather than counteracting them. In preserving the bewildering and miscellaneous details of contemporary literary history, the poem's notes present not an alternative vision to the forces that in the fourth book silence a narrator who asks for "yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light / Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night" (1-2), but another version of the oblivion that overwhelms the created world.

Harold Weber teaches English at the University of Alabama. He has written The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (1986) and Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship Under Charles II (1996). This essay is part of a book-length project tentatively entitled "Literary Monuments: Memory, Gender, and Print in England, 1640-1743."

Notes

*I would like to thank Elizabeth Meese and Ellen Rosenman for their help with this essay, as well as the Research Grants Committee of the University of Alabama for a 1996 summer fellowship that made its writing possible.

1.The figure of Pope as the "reluctant modern" can be found to different degrees in Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996); Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996); Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670-1740: "Hackney for Bread" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); J. Paul Hunter, "From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in Eighteenth-Century English Texts," in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keefe (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), 41-69; Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustine Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1985).

2.Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 2 and 209.

3.David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), shows how Pope exploited the Copyright Act of 1710 much more successfully than his contemporaries, for while this act was "supposed to have brought a new alliance of author and bookseller,...from the 1720s Pope was using it to strengthen his own position and lessen his dependence on the book trade" (237). James A. Winn, "On Pope, Printers, and Publishers," Eighteenth-Century Life 6 (1980-81): 93-102, argues that "Pope's success in his dealings with the 'trade' is the more remarkable for having occurred in a period when most writers were at a disadvantage....Pope effectively defeated this monopoly by understanding it perfectly and shifting his methods when necessary" (94).

4.The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1:52. All quotations from the correspondence are from this edition.

5.Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), 81; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Themes in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 62.

6.David McKitterick, "Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge," in The Foundations of Scholarship: Libraries and Collecting, 1650-1750, Papers Presented at a Clark Library Seminar 9 March 1985 by David Vaisey and David McKitterick (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1992), 31.

7.Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 63-64.

8.James Sutherland, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope. Volume V. The Dunciad (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), IV. 620. All quotations from the 1743 Dunciad, in Four Books are from this edition. For reasons that will become clear later, all quotations from the 1728 Dunciad are from David L. Vander Meulen, ed., Pope's Dunciad of 1728: A History and Facsimile, Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1991), while quotations from the 1729 Dunciad Variorum are from Geoffrey Day, ed., Alexander Pope: Poems in Facsimile (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988).

9.For an extended discussion of Pope's survey of the eighteenth-century academy, see G. S. Rousseau, "Pope and the Tradition in Modern Humanistic Education: '...in the pale of Words till death,'" in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 199-239. Rousseau concludes that "if the satire on education was a literary achievement, it was something else as well: a moment in the history of Western education" (227).

10. In her recent book, Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), looks at these lines in order to explicate the "fetishization of objects" (57) that accompanied both the new science and the burgeoning retail trade.

11. For the history of the library in England I have depended on Raymond Irwin, The English Library: Sources and History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966) and Irwin, The Origins of the English Library (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958); McKitterick, "Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge"; and Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright, eds., The English Library Before 1700 (London: Athlone Press, 1958).

12. Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), 127. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) for a study of medieval memory, particularly for an exploration of how the glossed book provided a functional model for the relationship between authorship and textual authority during the Middle Ages.

13. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 132.

14. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 55 and 56.

15. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 361.

16. Emrys Jones, "Pope and Dulness," in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980), 647.

17. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; Containing the Definitions of the Terms, and Accounts of the Things Signify'd Thereby, In the Several Arts, Both Liberal and Mechanical, and the Several Sciences, Human and Divine: The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses, of Things Natural and Artificial; The Rise, Progress, and State of Things Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military, and Commercial: With the Several Systems, Sects, Opinions, &c. Among Philosophers, Divines, Mathematicians, Physicians, Antiquaries, Criticks, &c. The Whole Intended as a Course of Antient and Modern LEARNING, Compiled from the Best Authors, Dictionaries, Journals, Memoirs, Transactions, Ephemerides, &c, in Several Languages, 2 vols. (London, 1728). All quotations are from the first volume of this edition.

18. Edward Cave, The Gentleman's Magazine, or Trader's Monthly Intelligencer (London, January 1731). All quotations are from this edition.

19. For discussions of periodical literature in eighteenth-century Britain, see Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron, Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity, and the Woman's Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991); E. A. Reitan, introduction to The Best of the Gentleman's Magazine 1731-1754, ed. E. A. Reitan, Studies in British History 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1987); Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972); Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989); and C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). Both J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990) and Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, also consider periodical printing.

20. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 170.

21. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 34.

22. Horace, Ode 3.30, in Horace: The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 279.

23. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 195.

24. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 182.

25. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," Representations 26 (1989): 13.

26. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 8 and 106.

27. LeGoff, History and Memory, 81 and 54.

28. Susan Staves, "Pope's Refinement," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 (1988): 145-63, provides an exciting discussion of how Pope would have considered himself "the proprietor of his poems" and the ways in which "the Copyright Act imagines the author as an individual owner of property" (158). She argues that the appearance of the revised version of The Dunciad in 1743 depended on the reversion to Pope of the original copyright.

29. William Kinsley, "The Dunciad as Mock-Book," in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Mack and Winn, 717 and n.39, 866-67.

30. John Kotre, White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory (New York: Free Press, 1995), 116.

31. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, xi and 59.

32. Danilo Kis, "The Encyclopedia of the Dead," in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin, 1991), 37-65. All quotations are from this edition.

33. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 70 and 88.

34. Michael Rosenblum, "Pope's Illustrative Temple of Infamy," in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Mack and Winn, 675.