Novel Designs: Manipulating the Page in English Fiction, 1660–1780

Abstract

Historians of the novel and theoreticians of narrative rarely comment on a publishing development contemporaneous with the novel’s rise: the relatively sudden supersession of the busy, cluttered page that typifies seventeenth-century book production by the clean, modernised layout that prevails in the eighteenth century. Yet if a primary concern of the realist novel is to give a transparent window on a fictional world, uncomplicated by overt mediating factors, the illusion depends as much on typographic convention as on narrative technique. The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw what one book historian has called a ‘revolution … in the appearance of the printed page’: a revolution that swept away conventions of presentation, including heavy use of rules, decorative borders and marginal apparatus, often with enclosure of text in boxed-rule borders, some of which derive originally from the manuscript codex.² By reducing or eliminating obtrusive features of this kind, the streamlined page that took hold after 1700, alongside the elegant Franco-Dutch founts introduced by refugee Huguenot printers and made fashionable under William III, visually de-emphasised the materiality of print in ways promoting immediacy of access to literary content. In a poem to celebrate the modernity of Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (1712), John Gay commented on the clarity not only of the poetic voices assembled by Lintot (Addison, Congreve, Pope, Prior) but also of his typographic style, which rejected the native crudeness of Grubstreet for sleeker continental models.

This chapter draws on material from two public lectures, the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, University of London, 2009, and the David Nicholls Memorial Lecture, Thomas Fisher Library, Toronto, 2010. My gratitude to the colleagues and institutions involved, and to my then research assistant Darryl Domingo.