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Manuscript in the House of Print

In his classic account of seventeenth-century scribal publication, Harold Love points briefly to three authors—Swift, Richardson, Sterne—whose careers indicate the ongoing vitality of manuscript culture in later generations. Taking a cue from Love, this chapter explores Richardson’s self-consciousness as a novelist about manuscript production and transmission, his real-world cultivation of epistolary sociability, and the ways in which his published output was shaped by practices arising from scribal tradition. For all his centrality in the history of print, Richardson was also at the centre of a thriving culture of manuscript exchange that bypassed or transcended print and also informed its products at every stage from creation to reception. There emerges a story of enduring interaction between coexisting media systems, not simple supersession of one by another, with creative consequences as much for the novel as for the lyric, epistolary, and other forms most often associated with manuscript exchange.