I will be honest: when I first saw the title of John Dussinger’s latest book-length publication on Samuel Richardson, I expected something very different from the slim volume I received in the mail a few weeks later. Instead of the bibliographical, book-historical investigation of Richardson’s early activities as a printer that I had anticipated, I found a collection of excerpts from two early eighteenth-century British periodicals, framed by two short introductions and a conclusion. Arguably, though, what I received will be of more value for a greater range of scholars than even the most intricate and inventive scholarly argument.

The bulk of Dussinger’s Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer: Recycling Texts for the Book Market consists of carefully curated and edited selections from two important early periodicals, The True Briton and The Weekly Miscellany. Of these pieces, seven are drawn from the True Briton while sixteen appeared in the Weekly Miscellany. All of the selections take the shape of pseudonymous letters to the editor (together with the editorial framing that often accompanied these letters in the Weekly Miscellany); all of them purport to have been written by women; and all of them, Dussinger argues, were penned—and, in the case of the letters published in the True Briton, also printed—by Samuel Richardson. 

Dussinger prefaces each selection of pseudonymous letters from the two publications with a historical and critical introduction. These introductions describe the crucial events surrounding the publication of the periodical numbers from which the letters were selected and situate the letters’ publication within the context of Richardson’s activities as printer, editor, and enterprising writer. Pseudonymous publication and the assumption of fictional identities were a common feature of eighteenth-century periodical culture: Mr. Spectator and the Tatler served Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as vehicles for social commentary while standing in for (and partially disguising) the eponymous periodicals’ editors. Within the same pages, readers encountered a riot of characters who, though they claimed to be actual readers of and contributors to the periodicals, were usually (and transparently) written by the editors or crowdsourced from among the broader community of fellow writers. Against this background, Dussinger argues that the selections reveal Richardson’s early experimentation with fictional women’s epistolary voices (which would eventually feed into his monumental exercises in ventriloquizing femininity in Pamela and Clarissa) and thus establish the future novelist’s fundamental investments in supporting women’s access to public print spheres in early eighteenth-century Britain. The selections from the True Briton are particularly salient in this regard as they engage with thorny political debates of the day and thus give a platform to (fictional) women’s voices within public debates. The selections from the Weekly Miscellany offer wide-ranging social commentary, cultural critique, and witty, bantering exchanges with the periodical’s equally fictional editor from which the supposed letter writer, “Belinda,” begins to emerge as a fictional character akin to those that would populate Richardson’s later novels.

The two introductions are strangely uneven in length, taking up just over five and just over sixteen pages, respectively. The second introduction lays out in great depth and detail the textual and bibliographical evidence for an early connection between Richardson and feminist theorist and pamphleteer Sarah Chapone, fomented by their publication within the pages of the Weekly Miscellany with the support of William Webster, the periodical’s entrepreneurial editor (himself operating under the pseudonym “Richard Hooker”). The first introduction, while equally dense with historical and bibliographical detail, by contrast deals surprisingly briefly with the evidence that Richardson may have been responsible for letters published under feminine pseudonyms in the True Briton. Another brief conclusion of four pages closes the two collections of periodical excerpts and their introductions by making a case for Richardson’s crucial role in helping women emerge as public voices through print publication in the periodicals he helped usher into the world. 

The volume’s greatest value, to my mind, lies in the selection and careful editing of excerpts from two periodicals that might otherwise resist discovery in the stacks of special collections’ print periodical holdings or lie buried in historical periodical databases. Thanks to Dussinger’s editorial and critical efforts, we find instead materials that show great promise in supporting a specific inquiry—Richardson’s early activities as printer-editor-writer of periodical matter and the germination of Richardsonian attitudes towards women’s self-determination and self-representation—while also inviting future investigation. Dussinger’s book is an extremely valuable extension of his editorial and interpretive work on the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (CECSR), for which he edited a volume of Richardson’s exchanges with three young women: Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger, and Laetitia Pilkington. In Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer, Dussinger opts for consistency and familiarity of textual presentation by using editorial and formatting conventions similar to those in the Cambridge volumes, thus potentially easing access to the new texts. (In fact, while reading this work I kept wondering why it was not published by Cambridge; it would have made a wonderful supplementary volume for CECSR.)

Unfortunately, for this reviewer at least, Dussinger’s analytical sections lose somewhat in their effectiveness due to a propensity, common to all three of them regardless of length, of combining dense historical and bibliographical description with minimal argument. This is no doubt partially driven by the relative paucity of conclusive evidence and the difficulty it poses for arguments in favor of connections or influences between Richardson’s early work as editor and printer of periodicals and his later emergence as eminent novelist. To be clear, this is not to dismiss Dussinger’s arguments; they are persuasive and, for all their brevity, cogently made. Yet even taking into consideration the archival challenges that bedevil most investigations into early eighteenth-century printing and editing ventures, it would have been useful to lay out the book’s intriguing suggestions and insights more explicitly and at greater length. Instead, Dussinger sets a number of data points side by side and leaves it to readers to infer intended conclusions, a strategy particularly evident in the short first introduction to the selections from the True Briton. Notwithstanding such quibbles, Dussinger’s arguments are always convincing and his material is either fresh or presented in contexts that make it fresh again. 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.

Sören Hammerschmidt, GateWay Community College