AI is not eating antique books

It seems that the latest injection of disinformation, or "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), into discussions about AI is that AI companies are "eating" physical copies of rare and antique books in the same way that data-centres are believed to be "drinking" water. (I asked Nano Banana to generate an appropriate image of this imagnined process—using the same starting prompt I used previously—to help my readers visualise this action. Please enjoy the result!)

This, somewhat alarmist, 25 July article by Frank Landymore, for instance, suggests that AI companies are purchasing antique books in large volumes (this is in the article title: "AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books…") to use as high-quality training data, as these texts are free from modern digital AI content. Because it is cheaper, destructive, high-speed automated scanning processes are being used to digitize the books (i.e., book spines are guillotined off, the covers removed, page-stacks are fed into scanner hoppers, then thrown away). The practice is facilitated by book database services that keep the tech company buyers anonymous. Rare booksellers have ethical concerns about selling books to these services, warning that it permanently destroys some of the last surviving copies of historic literature.

The FUD here is the "antique books" and "historic literature" claim. Once you read through the parent and grandparent linked articles (3 April essay by Val Giordano, promoting the practice, here; 25 June [anonymous] essay on the NL Times, reporting concerns of European book dealers, here; a 26 June article by Benj Edwards here; a solid, 21 July essay by Emanuel Maiberg here) it becomes clear that the books being hoovered up by Anthropic (and possibly others) all post-date 1969 (when ISBNs were introduced) and most, it seems likely, post-date 2006 (when ISBN barcodes became ubiquitous)—about the same time, coincidently, that the arrival of modern smart-phones ended civilisation as we knew it.

That the AI-company proxies are exclusively interested in books with an ISBN is made very clear from the following anecdote reported by Maiberg:

The seller told me that … Bulk purchases … usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. (emphasis added)

That the bulk-purchase companies are likely to prefer later, bar-coded books, seems probable from the scale they are working on—it is simply easier and cheaper to scan the bar codes of hundreds of thousands of books, than it is to key in the ISBN (and then check for errors) on the same number.

From the articles I mention above, it seems that second-hand book dealers are getting what I take to be in-fill requests, for any ISBN that has not shown up in the literal truck-loads of books donated to charities, that are sold off to bulk-book dealers / waste-paper merchants (on this, see my post here concerning Mubin and Raza Ahmed's "Wrap Ltd."—a "printed matter," "waste and scrap paper" import/export business with an annual turnover of £6.5M "or more.")

It simply wouldn’t be economical to buy a book via ABE, Alibris etc. if you could buy the same book at a fraction of the price from parasites, excuse me, erm … paper-dealers like Mubin and Raza Ahmed. I.e., you'd start with whatever your local large-scale charity can wring from a well-meaning public, checked-off against a master-list of ISBNs via bar-code scanning, and then back-fill the gaps in that master-list via ABE, Alibris etc.

For me, this is where it gets interesting. Anthropic et al. have more money than they know what to do with, and have just been stung to the tune of USD3K per book, for all the digital books they stole, and then got sued for stealing. That being the case, the following observation should come as no surprise:

there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.

* * * * *

Since I was born before ISBNs were a thing, it is hard for me to think of books after 1970 as "antique" or "historic" ("rare," especially, "rare on market" is another matter completely). Perhaps, this is easier for Frank Landymore—who seems to be in his early 30s. In any event, I asked one of the water-guzzling, book-eating monsters (ChatGPT) to estimate how many books have been published since 1970 (and 2006) and the answer should be reassuring.

It seems likely that something like 80 million English-language ISBN editions have been released, or which approximately 60 million editions were printed with a barcode. The number of unique works (i.e., with Pride and Prejudice counting once) is obviously much smaller—perhaps 10–20 million, but the number of physical copies printed is much larger, likely "well over 100 billion copies since the 1980s."

So, it seems Anthropic is attempting to gobble up millions of recent books (emphatically-not antique you baby-faced ageists!), mostly comprised of unwanted donations, fenced by the likes of Messers Ahmed, and otherwise unsold obscuriana, laying heavily on the hands of dealers who once supplied libraries, out of a pool of something like 100 billion copies printed.

If it were possible to pile this 100-billion copies one atop the other, it seems that the pile would likely extend 2.5 million kilometres, or about 6.5 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Indeed, only 14.5 billion books would be need to reach the moon, or 14.5% of all books printed with an ISBN.

I would wager as many books as I could carry, that far, far more than this 14.5%—perhaps 80% of these 100 billion books—have already been pulped, without once raising the interest of Landymore et al., making this story a pretty good parallel to widely-disseminated concerns about the water consumption of data centres. (Which is mostly FUD too, since most new data centres consume no water—they use closed-loop cooling—and the water usage of older AI data centres that do use evaporative cooling etc., is dwarfed by the water consumption of golf-course and intensive cattle farms. I.e., this is a gnat on the arse of a flee in the grand scheme of things.)

And while most AI tokens will doubless go to things like generating fake security footage of President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe in flagrante delicto, or self-insert versions of Terminator or Twilight, it is already clear that AI can, and probably soon will, cure every disease known to man and put a complete stop to the death and mutilation caused by badly-driven cars on the road—to name but two of life’s miseries. If they need to guillotine a copy of each my books to do this (**), they are welcome to do so.

(**) if AI can also restore my use of AdobeCaslonExpert in the later versions of Word, they can have all my essays too.

OCR Redux

In my 2011 essay on the difficulties of searching OCR text-bases like ECCO ("'The New Machine': Discovering the Limits of ECCO; here), I gave, as an example, the opening sentence of Haywood's Female Spectator as rendered by Google Books and the Internet Archive. The two OCR-captured texts averaged over 150 typos per 2000 characters, a high enough error rate to render parts of the text completely unintelligible.

(I actually first did this test in 2004, at which point I encountered 33 errors in a passage 432 characters in length in a passage from Ab.60.7 The Female Spectator, 5th ed. (1755). I.e., OCR messed up 1 in 13 characters, nixing twenty words. The result didn't change between my first attempt at this and when I sat down to write my article, so this is the result I reported in 2011.)

While the Google Books passage had 33 errors among 432 characters, the Internet Archive had 35 in 430, allowing for differences in punctuation of the originals. The total of 68 errors among 862 characters equates to 157 typos per 2,000 characters. Here is the Google Books:

T is very much, by the choice we make of fubjects for our entertainment, that theiefined tall*' diftiuguifhes itfelt" from the vulgar and more grofs
: reading it univerfaily allowed to be one of the mofr. improving, as well at agreeable amufemerits; but then to render it fo,. one fhould, among the number of books which ar« perpetually ifluing from the prefs, endeavour to lingle out fuch as promife to be moft conducive to tho(e ends.

Since 2011, I have occasionally revisited this crude OCR test, to see how much OCR has improved. In January 2020, the same Google Books passage had only ten errors, or approximately 1 in every 43 characters—a significant improvement over 2011. Not only had the error rate for individual characters reduced by two-thirds, only three words contained errors compared to the total of twenty in 2011. Here is the 2011 text:

T is very much, by the choic* we make of subjects for our entertainment, that the icrlned tail*' distinguishes itself from the vulgar and more gross : reading it universally allowed to be one of the most improving, as well as agreeable amusements ; but then to render it so,, one should, among the number of books which art perpetually issuing from the press, endeavour to single out such as promise to be most conducive to those ends.

The error rate in May 2026 is, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, even lower. The same passage in two different editions (there are more editions of The Female Spectator online now than there were in 2011 or 2020) is only seven errors, six of which are long esses. Here is Ab.60.5 The Female Spectator, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (1748) here

T is very much, by the choice we make of fubjects for our entertainment, that the refined taste distinguishes itself from the vulgar and more gross: Reading is universally allowed to be one of the most improving, as well as agreeable amusements; but then to render it so, one should, among the number of Books which are perpetually iffuing from the prefs, endeavour to fingle out such as promife to be moft conducive to those ends.

Ab.60.7 The Female Spectator, 5th ed., vol. 1 (1755) here has exactly the same error rate, but the set of long esses misrendedred differs slightly. Intriguingly, a later edition, with what I took to be generally clearer type, has a lower error rate but more nixed words. Ab.60.9 The Female Spectator, 7th ed., vol. 1 (1771) being:

XCXX59XT is very much by the choice we make of subjects for our entertainI ment, that the refined taste diftin#guishes itself from the vulgar and more gross. Reading is universally allowed to be one of the most improving as well as agreeable ametements; but then to render it so, one should, among the number of books which are perpetually ifluing from the press, endeavour to fingle out such as promise to be most conducive to those ends.

The worst of the bunch is a copy of the 1775 pirate edition on the Internet Archive, having 33 errors—almost unchanged since 2011—only some being long esses: Ab.60.10b The Female Spectator, vol. 1 (Glasgow, 1775) here

IT is very much- by the choice we make of." fubjr&s for our entertainment, that the refined t:ut: uifimguilhes itfclf from the vulgar and more'grofs. Reading is univerfally allowed" to be one of the molt improving as well as agreeable amutements; but. then to render it fo, one fhould, among the number of books which are perpetually iffuing from the prefs, endeavour to finglc out fuch as promife to be moll conducive to thofe ends.

My conclusion from the above is that the Internet Archive has some work to do and that the Captcha / Turing test should probably be based on the ability to "diftinguish," or "fingle" out "fuch" words as distinguish, single out and such.

Chapbook Illustration and the History of Dr. Faustus

Thanks to Giles Bergel et al., bibliographers of the (very) long eighteenth-century have a valuable new widget for image-matching woodblocks. The widget was developed by Bergel et al. to search of woodblock illustrations in Scottish chapbooks held in the National Library of Scotland.

Importantly, said widget—"NLS Chapbooks"—has an external search function, allowing you to "Search using your own image" (see here) in much the same way you can conduct image searches using Google Images (here) etc.

As I have said recently (here), that the lack of a "Search using your own image" function, is the largest (remaining) limit on the utility of Hazel Wilkinson's otherwise outstanding "Compositor" (aka Fleuron 2.0).

Knowing this—and my interest in this subject generally—David Levy kindly sent me the details of the "NLS Chapbooks" search engine and a link to a very informative video of Bergel's NLS talk "Exploring Chapbooks Printed in Scotland with Machine Vision" (here).

* * * * *

Conveniently, I had the perfect candidate to test the "NLS Chapbooks" search function: the image above that appears on a chapbook History of Dr. Faustus, which I blogged about in 2010 (here). The result of my search was extremely gratifying. As you can see, it matched the image to seven items (listed below)—one of them from my copy of the History of Dr. Faustus—before the algorithm failed.

Something that should be immediately obvious, even in the small images above, is that the block has been intentionally altered—or "diminished" as Bergel explains in his talk (starting at 35.00). A halberd, a late eighteenth century version of the pole-axe-spear-weapon, is present in five of the seven images, but is missing from the two issues of the History of Dr. Faustus.

A closer examination of the seven images reveals two much more subtle changes: a very small chip in the hat (which seems to be some sort of French military bicorn hat), that becomes progressively less small, and a very small crack adjacent to that chip, which becomes progressively larger.

Above, we see the four distinct states or forms of this block represented by the NLS images, with the changes mentioned: [1] undamaged; and [2] tiny chip to hat (1st image below); [3] small chip and second tiny crack; and [4] large chip and small crack (2nd image below). The last of these corresponds with the block's de-halberdising.

Looking just at the just the top of the hat, this progression is a bit clearer—despite the pixilation at the magnification necessary.

* * * * *

The pixilation is a clear indication of the path to further progress. The excellent work by Bergel and his team may not be reproducible by Wilkinson (using images from ECCO), because the images she is working with are at a lower resolution that the NLS images. (NLS Chapbooks download at approximately 350dpi, ECCO images at 72dpi.)

Like decent OCR, matching user-supplied images requires more detailed images to reduce the number of false positives. This suggests the utility of ECCO upgrading at least a proportion of their scans with fresh photography, to improve OCR (which they now supply) as well as this sort of image-searching functionality.

But even when working with better images, such as those in the NLS Chapbooks series, resolution sets limits in identifying the sort of progressive damage to blocks seen above. This, in turn, suggests that the optimal image resolution is probably 600dpi—which has long been the digital archive standard.

* * * * *

One final point to make about the items listed below, with NLS cataloguing links, is that the suggested date of publication for these items at NLS will have to be re-considered. Judging from the ornament damage, the earliest item (Three Scotch songs) cannot be "1850–1860?" if the History of Dr. Faustus is "1840–1850?" etc.

Also, if the History of Dr. Faustus is the final form of this block, then it should also be clear that the person depicted in this block is neither Faustus not Mephistopheles—nor anyone else from the History of Dr. Faustus for that matter. As Edward J. Cowan and Mike Paterson explain:

"It was often felt necessary to ornament the front cover with a picture , and a woodcut usually served this purpose—even if it had been used several times before, was fairly crudely executed and made only an indirect allusion (if any at all) to the content." (Folk in Print: Scotland's Chapbook Heritage, 1750-1850 (2007), 13).

* * * * *

State 1: spear; no chip
Three Scotch songs: Donald Caird. Bundle and go. The Haughs of Crumdel (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]) [L.C.2845(30)] NLA catalogue entry.

State 2: spear; tiny chip
John Falkirk's cariches: to which is added Tam Merrilees; a capital story (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1840-1850?]), E [L.C.2852.C(10)] ¶ issue with number NLA catalogue entry; E [L.C.2848(1)]. ¶ issue without number NLA catalogue entry.

State 3: spear; small chip, 2nd tiny chip
Four popular songs: viz. Glasgow fair; Oh what a parish. A beauty I did grow; and The adventures of a shilling (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]), E [L.C.2845(32)] NLA catalogue entry.

The Haughs of Crumdel: to which is added, It fell upon the Martinmas time. Wilt thou go my bonny lassie? (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1850–1860?]), E [L.C.2845(5)] NLA catalogue entry.

State 4: no spear; large chip, 2nd small chip
History of Dr. Faustus: shewing his wicked life and horrid death, and how he sold himself to the devil, to have power for 24 years, to do what he pleased, also many strange things done by him with the assistance of Mephostophiles. With an account how the devil came for him at the end of 24 years, and tore him to pieces (Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, [1840–1850?]), [L.C.2852.E(24)] NLA catalogue entry; L.C.2847(6)] ¶ issue without number NLA catalogue entry.

[UPDATED 2021.07.19]

Compositor: Fleuron 2.0

In March of 2017, I mentioned Fleuron: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Printers' Ornaments as a “new and enticing method for identifying” items printed by Thomas Gardner. (I also mentioned my three articles on the Gardner printing business, and have since used the post to aggregate newly-identified Gardner items.)

The woman behind Fleuron, Hazel Wilkinson, has continued "developing methods of identifying unknown printers using digital imaging" (i.e., using image-recognition software to identify and match printer’s ornaments). The upshot is Compositor, a site that went live in the middle of 2020—according to its blog and Twitter accounts—unbeknown to me. (Thankfully, David Levy got wind of the new site and recently let me in on the secret.††)

What Compositor enables is a lot closer to what I had hoped might be possible with an image-searching approach, than that provided by Fleuron. Fleuron was very good; Compositor is better. Although there is a lot of unnecessary, mouse-operated, busy work which makes any extensive search a grind, it is now possible to cross-match images of cast-metal Fleurons and carved wooden printers ornaments—Headpieces, Tailpieces, Initials, and Factotums—quickly compare the Compositor-identified image matches (to weed out the more obvious false-positives), and to trace the matches back to the works in which they appear.

So, for instance, I can [1] search Compositor for an item that I know was printed by Gardner, get [2] a full list of his ornaments that appear in that item, and then [3] search Compositor for other instances of each individual ornament, leading me to [4] items that I did not previously know were printed by Gardner—something I am keen to do.**

Likewise, I can [1] search Compositor for an edition of a work written by Eliza Haywood, follow steps [2] and [3], to [4] lead me to other items printed by the same printer as the printer of the Haywood edition. And since I do not know who the printer was of many editions of the works by Haywood, this should help me identify them—something I am keen to do.

Apart from the grind of unnecessary mouse-operated, busy work, which discourages anyone from undertaking the sort of extensive searches I am keen to have the results of, there are some other limitations worth mentioning.

Compositor appears to contain ornament images only from a sub-set of items filmed for The Eighteenth Century microfilm series, and subsequently scanned for ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). Also, the easiest way of locating an item on Compositor, is via an ESTC number. So, with a list of eighteenth century books in hand, you will be stymied if your candidate for a search

[1] the book isn’t on ESTC
[2] it is on ESTC, but not filmed for ECCO
[3] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, but not on Compositor (!? I am not sure why this is the case)
[4] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, and on Compositor, but the images captured by ECCOare so awful, that no match was possible
(*[5] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, and on Compositor, but it has no ornaments! — obviously this is not the fault of Compositor, but it is easy to forget the basic, limiting, starting point for searches.)

It is a shame that Compositor does not allow you to upload your own images: even if you had to provide black-and-white images, of a certain number pixel density or size, include physical dimensions and so on, it would still be a huge improvement.

Even if Compositor only allowed you to source images from, say, the Internet Archive or Google Books, that would be an improvement, but I want to upload ornaments I have from other sources too, so I can identify the printer of such things as Sodom, or the Gentleman Instructed. A Comedy. By the E. of R. (Hague, Printed in the Year 1000000)—which is not on ESTC or ECCO or the Internet Archive or Google Books. The only known copy sold at Sotheby’s on 16 December 2004 and is now in private ownership.

Still, what Compositor does allow you to do is very impressive, and is a lot closer to what I imagined might be possible with an image-searching approach, when I explored getting such a project off the ground in 2004. If the search interface were to be improved (I might do a separate post on this) and if it were possible to search Compositor for user-sourced images, it would achieve all that I imagined in 2004.

Of course, it both changes were to be made, I would be unlikely to eat, drink or sleep until I had identified the printer of every item that survives from the first half of the eighteenth century. As things stand today, my main risk will be RSI. So, "Careful what you wish for"?

* * * * *

†† David has since done a post about Compositor here, giving an over-view of its use in his search for printers of works by or relating to Edmond Hoyle.

** Soon after writing the above I went ahead and did this search. I am not sure whether this blog is the best place to publish the full list of Gardner publications I have now identified—and my indecision is largely responsible for delaying the publication of the present post (which I wrote in January, about the same time as David was writing his post!).
[UPDATED 9 March 2021]

Eliza Haywood Criticism Online

I previously maintained the list below of free, online Eliza Haywood criticism on the same page as my list of 18C and 19C editions of the works by Eliza Haywood (here). Since both lists have grown considerably since 2009, when I started the lists, I have decided to move this list of articles, chapters, theses etc. here.

I have not yet updated the list, but will do so as I get a chance. If readers of this blog find any dead links, please let me know. And if readers (or authors) know of any thesis, chapter or article not listed here, which ought to be, please let me know about this also.

(BTW: For contemporary and early reviews of works by Haywood, see here; for contemporary and early criticism and commentary on Haywood, see here. For an extensive online Haywood bibliography (up to 5 July 2005), see here.])

Chelo de Andrés Martinez, "[Review of] Juliette Merritt, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators. University of Toronto Press, 2004," on Academia.com. [also Medieval Feminist Forum, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 16. 2008.]

Scott Black, "Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood's Love in Excess," on Academia.com. [also Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15, no. 2 (2003): 207–26.]

Emily Kathryn Booth, "Eliza Haywood's Feigning Femmes Fatale: Desirous and Deceptive Women in Fantomina, Love in Excess, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless." (MA thesis, East Tennessee State University, 2001).

Claire Boulard-Jouslin, Augustus Caesar to Livia Drusilla’: théorie(s) de l’Histoire dans le Female Spectator Études Épistémè 17 (2010): 87–104.

Amy Thomas Campion, "Scandalous Figures: Authorial Self in Eliza Haywood, Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Smith, and Lord Byron." (PhD thesis, University of California, 2010). ¶ NB Ch.2. "Scandal: Eliza Haywood’s Chameleon Self" (ibid. 18–58).

Rachel K. Carnell, "It's not easy being green: Gender and friendship in Eliza Haywood's political periodicals," on Academia.com. [also in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 32, no. 2 (1998): 199–214.]

Rachel K. Carnell, "Eliza Haywood and the Narratological Tropes of Secret History," on Academia.com. [also in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (2014): 101–21.]

Claudia Chibici-Revneanu, "Genius and the Construction of 'the inferior female creator': The Case of Eliza Haywood," Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 7, no. 3 (2015).

Sarah R. Creell, "[Review of] Carol Stewart (ed.), The Rash Resolve and Life's Progress," on Academia.com. [also ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, vol. 4, no. 1 (2014).]

Anna Davison, "Bridging the Gap: Defining and Deciphering the Female Heroine in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless," Courtship and Catastrophe: Negotiating the Classical and Contemporary Marriage Plot (2009): 41–57.

Emily Joan Dowd, "Evoking The Salon: Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator [and] The Conversation of Protofeminist Space" (PhD Theses; Florida State University, 2010).

Joseph Drury, "Haywood's thinking machines," on Academia.com. [also in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 21, no. 2 (2008): 201–28.]

Paula Kay Fitzgerald, "'A Scribbling Dame' Eliza Haywood's literary reputation and the Female Spectator." (MA thesis, California State University, 2006).

Joanna Elizabeth Fowler, "Theorizing voice and perspective in the narratives of Eliza Haywood and her contemporaries" (PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2010).

Patsy S. Fowler, "Rhetorical Strategy and the 'Dangerous Woman-Poet': Eliza Haywood and the Politics of Self-Promotion" in Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers, and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage, edited by Daniel James Ennis and Judith Bailey Slagle (University of Delaware Press, 2007), 179–97.

Amrita Ghosh, "Masquerade as a Strategy: Eliza Haywood’s The Masqueraders or The Fatal Curiosity: Being the Secret History of a Late Amour," The Criterion 4.3 (June 2013).

Suzanne B. Gibson, "The Eighteenth-Century Oriental Tales of Eliza Haywood, Frances Sheridan and Ellis Cornelia Knight" (PhD Theses; McMaster University, 1996). Paper 2316.

Andrea K. Gill, Objectifying Men: Gulliver’s Travels, Fantomina, and the Dildo in Eighteenth-Century Literature Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 2:1 (2011).

Kristin M. Girten, "[review of] A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, by Kathryn R. King" ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 3:1 (2013), Article 10.

Jennifer L. Hargrave, "'To the Glory of the Chinese:' Sinocentric Political Reform in Eliza Haywood's The Adventures of Eovaai, on Academia.com. [also Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 1 (2015): 31–50.]

Eileen A. Horansky, "Sexualizing Politics: The Rhetorics of Sexuality and Political Satire in the Works of Eliza Haywood" (Conference Presentation, October 2014), on Academia.com.

Genevieve Howard, "Equal Performances: An Exploration of Eliza Haywood's Depiction of Hillarian Ideals in Fantomina," (MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2015).

Aleksondra Hultquist, "Haywood's Re-Appropriation of the Amatory Heroine in Betsy Thoughtless," on Academia.com. [also Philological Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 1/2 (2006): 141–65.]

Marisa C. Iglesias, "Secret servants: Household domestics and courtship in Eliza Haywood's fiction" (MA thesis, University of South Florida, 2008).

Catherine Ingrassia, Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century (1995)

Catherine Ingrassia, "'Queering' Eliza Haywood", on Academia.com. [also Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 4 (2014): 9–24.]

Kathryn R. King, "New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725" in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider, Catherine Ingrassia (2009), 261–75.

Marta Kvande, "The Outsider Narrator in Eliza Haywood's Political Novels", on Academia.com. [also SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 43, no. 3 (2003): 625–43.]

Joy LaFrance, "Whenever we would truly conquer, we must seem to yield: Eliza Haywood's Fantomina and subversive fiction for women" (MA Theses; Lehigh University, 2003).

Tesi di Laurea, "A Present for a Servant-Maid: Eliza Haywood and the Conduct Book Tradition" (Bachelor's thesis, Università Ca'Foscari Venezia, 2013).

Kate Levin, "'The Only Beguiled Person'?: Accessing Fantomina in the Feminist Classroom," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 2:1 (March 2012).

Kathleen Lubey, "Eliza haywood's amatory aesthetic," on Academia.com. [also Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 309–22.]

Holly Rae Luhning, "'Manacles of Madness: Haywood's The Distress'd Orphan; Or Love in A Madhouse," eSharp 8 (Autumn 2006).

Holly Rae Luhning, "A Crafted Debut: Haywood’s Love in Excess and the Literary Marketplace." Lumen, vol. 28 (2009): 97–110.

Holly Rae Luhning, "Entertainment and Didacticism: Eliza Haywood’s The Unequal Conflict and Fatal Fondness." Lumen, vol. 29 (2010): 161–174.

L. Lutsenko, "Eliza Haywood's Intrusive Practices from the Perspective of Feminist Narratology." Advancedscience.org, 2014, no. 5 (2014): 80–83.

Cameron McFarlane, "Equal Ardour: Gender and the Ideal Relationship in Eliza Haywood's Amatory Fiction." (PhD thesis, McMaster University, 1991.

Kelly McGuire, "Mourning and Material Culture in Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless," on Academia.com. [also Eighteenth Century Fiction, vol. 18, no. 3 (2006): 281–304.]

Juliette Merritt, "Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators" (PhD Theses; McMaster University, 1998). Paper 2140.

Juliette Merritt, "'That Devil Curiosity Which Too Much Haunts the Minds of Women': Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators," on Academia.com. [also Lumen Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 16 (1997).]

María Jesús Lorenzo Modía, "The Female Spectator: an experiment in women's press in the eighteenth century," on Academia.com. [also in The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies, no. 5 (1998).]

Susan Vida Muse, "Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood," (PhD thesis, Marquette University, 2012).

Douglas A. Northrop, "Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood," Proceedings of the 14th Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature, April 7–8, 2006, edited by Bruce E. Brandt and Michael S. Nagy (Brookings, SD: South Dakota State University, 2006), 87–93.

Leah Orr, "The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood," on Academia.com. [also The Library, vol. 12, no. 4 (2011): 335–75.]

John Richetti, "Histories by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding: Imitation and Adaptation," on Academia.com. [also in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, edited by Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (2000), 240–58.]

Laura J. Rosenthal, "Eliza Haywood: Discrepant Cosmopolitanism and the Persistence of Romance," NineteenthCentury Gender Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

Jonathan Sadow, "The Puppet Show Conundrum: Haywood and the 'Fittest Entertainment for the Present Age'," Digital Defoe, vol. 5, no. 1 (2013): 121–20.

Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio, eds., The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on her Life and Work (2000).

Orla Smyth, ""Fashioning Fictional Selves from French Sources: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess," on Academia.com. [also in The ‘self’: theories and representations in “Great Britain in the long eighteenth century, ed. Marion Leclair and Allan Ingram (Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2017)].

Patrick Spedding, "Eliza Haywood’s last ('lost') work: The History of Miss Leonora Meadowson (1788)," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, vol. 23, no.3 (1999): 131–47. PDF (poor quality) online on BSANZ website.

Patrick Spedding, "Shameless Scribbler or Votary of Virtue? Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742," in Women Writing: 1550–1750, edited by Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (2001), 237–51. PDF on Monash Explore.

Patrick Spedding, "Measuring the Success of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46)," in Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator, edited by Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman (2006), 193–211. PDF on Monash Explore; and on Academia.com.

Patrick Spedding, "Eliza Haywood at the Sign of Fame," 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 18 (2011): 29–55. Copy on Monash Repository.

Patrick Spedding, "Eliza Haywood’s Eighteenth-Century Readers in Pennsylvania and New York," Australian Humanities Review, vol. 56 (May 2014): 69–120. Copy on publisher’s site; and on Academia.com.

Patrick Spedding, "Twice-Told Tales in Eliza Haywood's Leonora Meadowson," Notes and Queries, vol. 63, no. 4 (8 October 2016): 619–22. Available here.

LaShea Simmons Stuart, "The Arbitress of Passion and of Contract: Eliza Haywood and the Legality of Love" (PhD Thesis, Auburn University, 2006).

Shea Stuart, "Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless," on Academia.com. [also in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 42, no. 3 (2002): 559–75.]

Rivka Swenson, "Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela," on Academia.com. [also in The Eighteenth Century, vol. 51, no. 1 (2010): 27–43.]

Camelia Teglaş, "The Complexity of the Self in Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai," on Academia.com. [also in Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Philologia, vol. 2 (2015): 157–67.]

Marina Estevão Tiago, "Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess–figuring women, subverting conventions, in Studies in Identity (2009): 17–29.

Martin Wells, "The Hypocrisy of Moral Outrage in The Dunciad: Eliza Haywood’s Persecuted Virtue and Alexander Pope the Persecutor," Alfred: An undergraduate student journal 3 (2011): 19–24.

Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman, eds., Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator (2006).

Lynn Scarnati Zvara, "Eliza Haywood and Her Rebellious Pen in Early Modern England." (PhD thesis, Youngstown State University, 1999).

[last updated 6 November 2019]

Works by Eliza Haywood online

Regular visitors to this page (my list of original editions of works by Eliza Haywood available for free online) will have noticed that the pace of additions has slowed. This is not because I am neglecting the page or failing to search for new scans. Rather, fewer and fewer scans of original editions of Haywood's works are appearing online, on Google Books, The Internet Archive, and elsewhere.

Often now, when I am able to make an addition to my list of links to Haywood's works, it is because I have found something that was so abominably catalogued that it has been invisible online for years. And, usually, I am able to locate these otherwise-invisible texts only because I discover a new search engine, or a new way to do a search.

When I made my last update to my list of "Facsimile Texts and Downloadable pdfs" I discovered just such a new way of searching the Internet Archive. When you search the Internet Archive catalogue for editions of works authored ("Created") by Eliza Haywood (presently 7 items as "Eliza Haywood" [here]—mostly LibriVox recordings—and 25 items as [Haywood, Eliza] here), it is possible to sort the results according to "Date Archived"—a proxy for when the item was first uploaded to the internet.

If you combine the information from the two screen-caps above (ignoring the LibriVox recordings) you will see that the total number of volumes per year are: 2006 (2), 2007 (3), 2008 (2), 2009 (9), 2010 (7), 2011 (1), 2012 (1), 2013 (0), 2014 (1), 2015 (0), 2016 (0), 2017 (0), 2018 (1). That is, after a steady climb from 2006 to 2010, there has been a collapse in the number of new scans of works by Haywood on the Internet Archive. Below is a graph of the data.

I am not sure why fewer scans are appearing on the Internet Archive. It is probably because, as more of her works were scanned, fewer remained to be scanned—a possibility based on the assumption that those doing the scanning are reluctant to "double-up" by scanning a second or third copy of the same edition. It is also likely that those doing the scanning simply do not have access to either works which are yet to be scanned or even second or third copies of editions which have already been scanned.

The first item on my list of scans, for instance, is the Boston Public Library copy of Ab.1.4b Love in Excess, 4th ed. (1722)—which is the only copy known, so no other copy can be scanned. The second item is the British Library copy of Ab.4.1b The British Recluse, 2nd. ed. (1722). There are only two other copies of this edition, at Glasgow University and Reading University. These universities are unlikely to prioritise the scanning and uploading of another copy of The British Recluse until they have scanned and uploaded all the works they hold which are not already online.

Although I don't have easy access to similar data for Google Books, my impression is that there is a similar pattern there. Which means that, with only a few new scans made available in the last six years, it could be a very long time before there is a significant increase to the number of Haywood's works available online.

Translations of Les Journées Amusantes

As Séverine Genieys-Kirk explained in 2007, "in addition to the multiple Paris, Amsterdam and London" editions—in French—of Madeleine Angélique Poisson de Gomez’s Les Journées Amusantes (Paris: G. Saugrain, Charles le Clerc, Ándre Morin, 1722–31), there were eight editions of Eliza Haywood's translation of this work, under the title La Belle Assemblee (detailed in my Bibliography).

However, Les Journées Amusantes (v.2 frontispiece, above) was also translated into Italian (the first six days only) by Pietro Chiari, as Li Giorni di Divertimento (1758?; 1777), German, under the title Angenehme und lehrreiche Erzählungen in vergnügten Tagen (1761), into and into Spanish, of which there are a faithful and free versions Jornadas Divertidas, Politicas sentencias y hechos memorables by Baltasar Driguet (1792–97) and Dias alegres (1792-1798) by Gaspar Zavala y Zamora.

At various times, and for various reasons, I have gone hunting for information about these other translations, and then forgotten, buried or lost that information. So, I thought I would start a page where I could aggregate information about, and links to, editions of these translations—for myself, and anyone else interested in Les Journées Amusantes.

* * * * *

Editions of Les Journées Amusantes (1724; 1728; 1730; 1736; 1744; 1754; 1761; 1770; 1777; 1776)

[1st ed.] (Paris: G. Saugrain, 1724): v.3 is here; v.4 is here.

2nd edition (Paris: Charles le Clerc, 1724): v.2 is here.

3rd edition (Paris: G. Saugrain, 1728; Charles le Clerc, 1728): v.1 is here; v.2 is here.

[Suite des Journées Amusantes (Paris: Charles le Clerc, 1730; Ándre Morin, 1730)]: v.3 is here; v.4 is here.

3rd edition (Amsterdam: Aux Depens de la Compagnie, 1736): v.1 is here; v.2 is here; v.3 is here; v.4 is here; v.5 is here; v.6 is here; v.7 is here; v.8 is here.

7th edition, revised and corrected (Amsterdam: Par la Compagnie, 1744): v.1–2 is here; v.3–4 is here; v.5–6 is here; v.7–8 is here.

New edition (London: Guil. Meyers, 1754): v.1 is here; v.2 is here; v.3–4 is here; v.5–6 is here; v.7–8 is here.

New edition (Amsterdam: Aux Depens de la Compagnie, 1761): v.1 is here; v.2 is here; v.3 is here; v.4 is here; v.5 is here; v.6 is here; v.7 is here; v.8 is here.

8th edition (Amsterdam: Par la Compagnie, 1770): v.1–2 is here; v.3–4 is here; v.5–6 is here; v.7-8 is here.

8th edition (Amsterdam: Par la Compagnie, 1777): v.1–2 is here; v.3–4 is here; v.5–6 is here; v.7–8 is here.

9th edition (Amsterdam: Par la Compagnie, 1776): v.1–4 is here; v.5–8 is here. Also v.1 is here; v.2 is here; v.3 is here; v.4 is here; v.5 is here; v.6 is here; v.7 is here; v.8 is here.

Translation into Italian (the first six days only) by Pietro Chiari (1758?; 1777) [not found online]: the first volume of a 1758 edition is reviewed in Annales typographiques, 2 (July 1760): 249–50 (no. 181)—and a two-volume set is recorded in 1774 in this catalogue. Genieys-Kirk only mentions the 1777 edition, and this is the only one I have seen images of [above].

Translation into German (1761) [not found online]

Translation into Spanish by Baltasar Driguet: Jornadas Divertidas (1792-1797) [above]: v.1 is here; v.2 is here; v.3 is here; v.4 is here; v.5 is here; v.6 is here; v.7 is here; v.8 is here.

Translation into Spanish by Gaspar Zavala y Zamora: Dias alegres (1792-1798): v.2 is here; v.3 is here; v.4 is here; v.5 is here; v.8 is here.

[UPDATED 2018.08.02]

Eliza Haywood Unpopular in the UK

It pains me to say this, but Eliza Haywood appears to be unpopular in the UK.

Early one Saturday morning, shortly after I did my most recent update of this page (which lists Haywood scholarship online), it occurred to me that most of the major Haywood critics seem to be based in the US. Since it was cold, and daylight was still hours away, I started flicking through my mental card file to identify anyone from the UK who has made a name for themselves in the last century or so, by writing about Haywood, or editing her works.

George Frisbie Whicher? No.
Mary Anne Schofield? No.
Christine Blouch? No.
Toni Bowers? No.
Patricia Meyer Spacks? No.
Kirsten T. Saxton? No.
Juliette Merritt? No.
Jerry C. Beasley? No.
Deborah Nestor? No.
Alexander Pettit? No.
Kathryn R. King? No.
Margaret Case Croskery? No.
Tiffany Potter? No.
Me! No.

The only Haywood scholar from the UK that I could think of, off the top of my head, was Kim Simpson. I wish Kim enormous success, but I am sure she would agree that she is still establishing herself in the field. Which got me thinking: how would you quantify, empirically, the extent to which other UK (or British) scholars have contributed to the field. As soon as I had worked something out, I jumped up and set to work.

It took all day—from dark to dark—but I managed to establish to my own satisfaction that British scholars have made no significant impact on recent Haywood studies. I set out my reasoning and results below, and the limit I set myself concerning how to define "recent" and "impact", but the searches that I conducted which go beyond the limits I set reinforce the impression of those results. That is, British scholars have not made a significant impact on Haywood studies generally.

Another impression I have is that many (perhaps "most") of the scholars, who have made an impact on Haywood studies, are not from top-ranked universities. University rankings are an unhealthy obsession of administrators, but the fact that I had not heard of a very large number of the institutions in question cannot be dismissed solely on the basis that I am an antipodean. I visited every library in the States with more than ten Haywood items in their collection: west-coast, mid-west, north-east and east coast. If I find myself with another day on my hands I might correlate scholars with original editions of her works. I suspect the relation is an inverse proportion.

It is quite likely that my revelation is no revelation to US-based scholars, who regularly attend conferences, and see few outlanders. If any such are reading this, I hope you enjoy finding that the evidence below supports your general impression, that Haywood studies are unpopular in the UK. If you have any theories concerning why that may be the case, I'd love to hear them.

* * * * *

I decided to use citation statistics to establish which essays are most frequently cited. I also decided to omit monograph books because there are very few of them, and none that I could think of had UK authors (Whicher, Schofield, Merritt, me, King). The best citation-indexing of literary Studies is by Google scholar (GS), so I used it, and compared Google to its competitors, focusing on citations from 2000 onwards.

Since I was primarly interested in literary studies scholars who had contributed to the study of Haywood's works as literature, I excluded biographical essays like Blouch's “Eliza Haywood and the romance of obscurity" [48 citations on GS], Backscheider's “The shadow of an author: Eliza Haywood” [27] and King's “Eliza Haywood, Savage Love, and Biographical Uncertainty” [13]. I also excluded comparative essays like H. Thompson, “Plotting materialism: W. Charleton's The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood's Fantomina, and feminine consistency” [15] and M. N. Powell, “Parroting and the Periodical: Women's Speech, Haywood's Parrot, and Its Antecedents” [14].

The citation-indexing by MLA is less complete than GS, but the coverage is very good: all of the top eleven GS articles are indexed by MLA, but the total citations are 80 versus 161 citations on GS (i.e., it records around half the citations).

The citation-indexing by Web of Science [WoS] is, in general, pitiful: no article about Haywood has more than eight citations on WoS, and none of the six essays with more than five citations are among the eleven with the highest citations on GS. Likewise, only six of the top eleven Google-listed articles appear on WoS, and these listings capture less than fifteen percent of the total citations for the same articles, as recorded by GS (18 versus 125 citations).

The citation-indexing of by Scopus is only slightly better than WoS: no article has more than eight citations on Scopus, and only three of the essays with more than five citations are among the dozen with the highest citations on GS. Likewise, while nine of the top eleven Google-listed articles appear on Scopus, these listings capture only about one quarter of the total citations for the same articles, as recorded by GS (44 versus 161 citations).

With these limits in mind, I was able to establish a list of the top eleven essays—eleven, because there was a tie for tenth place! These essays, with their citation statistics, are:

Lubey, K., “Eliza Haywood’s amatory aesthetic” (2006) [30; 13 on MLA; 8 on Scopus; 3 on WoS] ¶ focus on Lasselia
Anderson, E. H., “Performing the Passions in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Miss Betsy Thoughtless” (2005) [24; 12 on MLA; 6 on Scopus; 2 of WoS]
Kvande, M., “The Outsider Narrator in Eliza Haywood’s Political Novels” (2003) [22; 12 on MLA; 5 on Scopus] ¶ focus on Memoirs of Utopia
Stuart, S., “Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless” (2002) [19; 7 on MLA; 5 on Scopus; 4 on WoS]
Drury, J., “Haywood’s thinking machines” (2008) [14; 4 on MLA; 4 on Scopus; 0 on WoS] ¶ focus on Love in Excess
Girten, K. M., “Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator” (2009) [14; 6 on MLA; 3 on Scopus; 2 on WoS]
Mowry, M. M., “Eliza Haywood’s Defense of London’s Body Politic” (2003) [14; 7 on MLA; 4 on Scopus; 0 on WoS] ¶ focus on Fantomina (1725) and The City Jilt (1726)
Pettit, A., “Adventures in pornographic places: Eliza Haywood’s Tea-Table and the decentering of moral argument” (2002) [13; 1 on MLA; 7 on Scopus; 5 on WoS]
Black, S., “Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood’s Love in Excess” (2003) [12; 6 on MLA; 0 on Scopus; 0 on WoS]
Potter, T., “The language of feminised sexuality: gendered voice in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Fantomina” (2003) [11; 6 on MLA; 0 on Scopus; 0 on WoS]
Hultquist, A., “Haywood’s Re-Appropriation of the Amatory Heroine in Betsy Thoughtless” (2006) [11; 6 on MLA; 2 on Scopus; 2 on WoS]

The affiliations of these scholars are:

Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, NY
Emily Hodgson Anderson, University of Southern California's Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, CA
Marta Kvande, Texas Tech University, TX
Shea Stuart, Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs NC
Joseph Drury, Villanova University, English Department, Villanova, PA
Kristin M. Girten, University of Nebraska, NE
Melissa M. Mowry, St. John's University, Staten Island NY
Alex Pettit, University of North Texas, TX
Scott Black, University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT
Tiffany Potter, University of British Columbia, Canada
Aleksondra Hultquist, Stockton University, Galloway, NJ

So, there you have it: ten American-based scholars, and one Canadian-based scholar. So, why is Eliza Haywood Unpopular in the UK?

[UPDATED 2 July 2017]

Eliza Haywood in the Early Novels Database (END)

The Early Novels Database (END) is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library (PU), and under development by staff and students at the library, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. The project has a stated aim of restoring metadata lost in digitisation projects. If this were actually the case then the six-year old project would have to be considered a failure, even in its "Under Construction" form. It is clear, however, that the actual aim of END is to involve undergraduate students in the collection of detailed paratextual information, annotation, marginalia etc. from the "extensive collection of fiction in English published between 1660 and 1830" available at PU. (A 2011 overview of the project is here.)

I am not sure how I have managed to not hear about the project, given that I am interested in annotation, marginalia etc., particularly that in works by Haywood. But once I did hear about it I realised that it was very likely that END included information about works by Haywood, since PU has a large number of books by Haywood. (With 45 items, it has the fifth largest Haywood collection in the States: larger than that at Yale, Princeton, the Clark.) Unfortunately, it is presently impossible to search END for works by Haywood. On the splash page, a visitor is given the choice of sorting results by title or year (not author), or to "narrow results" by browsing "Narrative form," "Author claim type," "Author gender claim" (by which they seem to mean "Author sex claim"), "Person" etc. Since there was no way to narrow results by author, I did what I have had to do so many times, I simply searched through every single title to identify those by Haywood. It is a tedious way of searching, and would have been largely unnecessary if the metadata in the PU library catalogue had been carried over, but it is effective. Below is the list of titles, arranged chronologically.

The busy-body (1742) *
Memoirs of an unfortunate young nobleman (1743) *
Secret histories, novels, and poems (1745)
The fortunate foundlings (Dublin, 1745)
The adventures of Natura (1748)
Dalinda: or, the double mariage [sic] (1749) *
The busy body (Dublin 1770)
The distressed orphan (1770) *
The female spectator (1771) *
The invisibe [sic] spy (1773) †
The female spectator (1775)
Epistles for ladies (1776) †
The Sopha (1781) †
The history of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1783)

There appear to be many cases where there are multiple entries for the one work, and there are three records that are empty—links that lead to a blank page (marked † above). Also, only five of the fourteen entries record marginalia or inscriptions (marked * above) of any kind, and most of these provide few useful details. In almost all cases Haywood listed as a “Person” in the primary record, but no linking is provided to her as a Person. The only case where you can navigate from one Haywood work to another is Secret histories, novels, and poems (1745) which links to The female spectator (1771).

Since I examined all of these books late in July 1997, I am not relying on END for my knowledge of the PU colection. But there are a lot of smaller libraries that I did not visit and it would be helpful if projects like this were more common. Involving undergraduates in cataloguing weird and interesting copy-specific information is a great idea. It is a shame that the basic database structure is not better adapted to searching by author since the vast majority of interest in marginalia is focussed on the annotator (as author) or on the annotations (as a response to an author): i.e., it is ultimately a biographical interest.

The only blog entry (on the END blog) concerning marginalia is this one from 2013. In her reflections on Marginalia, Christina Aruffo explains why "marginalia cataloguing can be sporadic"—even in a project such as this—because cataloguing it can be time consuming, cataloguers have their own "accepted and internalized definition of what marginalia actually is"—meaning doodles and library markings ("library marginalia") get less attention than text, as does anything else that cannot be easily related to the text as text.

For student projects based on END data and texts, see here; for papers, see this (including one by Andrew Piper and Ehsan Arabnejad which "draws on a taxonomy of eighteenth-century novels’ footnotes to advance a simple but consequential argument: despite the claims of almost all scholarship on the subject, footnotes in novels were common and referential rather than exceptional and self-referential, meta-fictional, or “postmodern” avant la letter." Nice.)

Informal Haywood criticism, blogs etc

[I have moved this on section of my Eliza Haywood Links here, since my 2009 post was becoming unweildy. I hadn't updated it for years (since 2012?), and I don't plan on updating it again any time soon. Now that so much formal criticism is readily available online, there is less need for it. And since this type of ephemeral and informal discussion is very prone to dissapearing from online, it is a constant battle maintain the links—time better spent keeping up with the primary and secondary texts.]

For a defunct blog titled A Blog to be Let, see here.

November 2005: Janet posted her thoughts on Eliza Haywood "Fantomina"

February 2007: The Literate Kitten posted her thoughts on Love in Excess by Eliza Haywood

November 2007: P. Brigitte posted her thoughts on The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

July 2009: Stephen J. Gertz posted his thoughts on The Secret History of … the Court of Caramania in a post titled Sex! Scandal! Political Intrigue! (What Else Is New?)

December 2009: The students of St. Christopher’s and St. Catherine’s posted their thoughts on Fantomina in a series of posts here

January 2010: J. Y. posted her/his thoughts on The Great Debate in Love in Excess

February 2010: Kate Wallis posted her thoughts on Love “Barter’d” in The City Jilt

February 2010: Stephanie Jarnold posted her thoughts on Fire and Seduction in Eliza Haywood’s “The City Jilt”

March 2010: Kristen Eggen posted her thoughts on The City Jilt – Fall from Hopes

June 2010: Meminsanebrane posted her/his thoughts on Fantomina is a creeper

October 2010: Liz posted her thoughts on Haywood's appearance in Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance in Sisters under the dust-jacket.

December 2010: Jill Domschot posted her thoughts on Eliza Haywood: from The Female Spectator, Vol. 1, No. 1

January 2011: Students at the University of Illinois doing Engl 206/CWL 257: Enlightenment Literature and Culture posted their thoughts on Fantomina in a series of posts, mostly here and here.

May 2011: Kat Aubrey posted her thoughts on Eliza Haywood, Remarkable 18th Century Author

August 2011: Students at The University of Illinois doing Engl 429: The Eighteenth Century Novel posted their thoughts on Fantomina in a series of posts, mostly here and here.

February–April 2012: Students at The University of Colorado at Boulder doing ENGL 1260-002: Intro to Women's Lit: Adventures in Form posted their thoughts on Fantomina in a series of posts, mostly here and here.

Not The Only Copy

The Wellcome Library has acquired copies of the 1787 and 1788 editions of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. Which is great, and certainly to be celebrated. It is also, apparently, big news, since quite a few people have read Hallie Rubenhold's sensational, well-promoted and insubstantial books on the subject (which, for reasons that will become clear, I will neither name nor link to).

According to The Guardian (here) and The Independent (here) the Wellcome Library bought "the book" or "a copy" (NB singular) from a London dealer for "a low five-figure sum"—which I take to mean about twenty to thirty thousand pounds for the two editions.

Another thing that The Guardian and The Independent agree on is that the 1787 edition is unique, claiming: it is "the only surviving 1787 guide" and is "a unique surviving … copy"—a claim that is repeated in every newspaper to reprint the story, such as The Sunshine Coast Daily (here), The Mackay Daily Mercury (here) and The Toowoomba Chronicle (here).

Dr Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship at the Wellcome Library, is more cautious than The Guardian and The Independent: stating in his blog entry about the purchase (here) that the 1787 edition "appears to be the only one in existence."

Unfortunately for Aspin (and the reporters at The Guardian and The Independent), the Wellcome copy of Harris's 1787 List is not unique. A simple Google search for "Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies" and "1787" locates the Bavarian State Library copy immediately. It has been available online since 14 December 2011 and has appeared in my list of Eighteenth-Century Erotic Texts Online since 14 July 2013.

Although the Bavarian State Library has had their copy since the eighteenth century, have published it online, and it has appeared in major bibliographies of erotica since 1889, it is not surprising that it was overlooked. Rubenhold appears only to known of eight editions/years of Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies: 1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789 and 1793. She gives the impression that these are the only survivors. Obviously, she is wrong.

During my research into eighteenth century erotica, I located seventeen editions/years of Harris's List. Some were easier to locate than others, appearing in major bibliographies and collections, and some are easier to locate now, than they were a decade ago. However, the fact that Rubenhold located only seven of at least seventeen copies, while preparing a series of books on the subject, suggests that her research was pretty shallow. Woeful, in fact.

I can't help wondering if the Wellcome Library paid a premium for the 1787 edition on the basis that it was "unknown to Rubenhold". (Since the claim that the 1787 edition is "unique," crops up in every article I can only assume that this claim is important to the Library because the did pay a premium.) If so, they probably won't be pleased to discover that they are wrong.

Early Criticism on Eliza Haywood

Thanks to Google Books, the Internet Archive and the scanning projects of various libraries, a lot of early (i.e., out-of-copyright) critical material—apart from reviews—is now available online. In the case of Eliza Haywood this is a mixed blessing, because a good deal of this material is "critical" only in the sense that it is censorious, not analytical.

However, whether adverse and positive, I think it might be useful to have such links to such criticism and comment, however brief, in one place. Unlike some of my other lists (links below), it is likely to be quite some time before this list is even close to representative or complete, but I'll start small, and add items as I find them.

[For editions of works by Eliza Haywood and recent criticism of the same, see here; for contemporary and early reviews of works by Haywood, see here; for contemporary biographical sources for Haywood, see here. For William Hatchett links see here.]

* * * * *

1832. John Genet, Some Account of the English Stage from 1660 to 1830 (Bath: H. E. Carrington for Thomas Rodd, 1832), 10 vols. ¶ Wikipedia entry here ("accurate and well-researched"); one of the more important and detailed nineteenth-century accounts of the plays by Haywood and Hatchett, frequently cited. (O = Oxford University; CaOTU = University of Toronto; * = miscataloged and not viewable outside the US.)
vol.1: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.2: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.3: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.4: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.5: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.6: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.7: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.8: O copy here* and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.9: O copy here and here; CaOTU copy here.
vol.10: O copy here and here CaOTU copy here.

Items Published or Sold by Haywood at the Sign of Fame

Below are links to the small number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of works published or sold by Eliza Haywood that are on Google Books, The Internet Archive, etc. (The item numbers are from my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), updated in my "Eliza Haywood at the Sign of Fame" (2011).) This list is not complete, but I'll add items as I find them—which is quite infequently.

Da.4 [=De.3] The Ghost of Eustace Budgel Esqr. to the Man in Blue(1742) [British Museum]

Da.5.1 [=De.6.1] The Right Honourable, Sir Robert Walpole, (Now Earl of Orford) Vindicated (1742) [Bodleian Library] NEW

Da.9 [=Ab.66.1a] A Letter from H— G—g(1750) [Bodleian Library]
Da.9 [=Ab.66.1a] A Letter from H— G—g (1750) [Queen's University Library]

Db.2.1 The Humours of Whist. A Dramatic Satire, as acted every day at White’s and other Coffee-Houses and Assemblies (1743) [New York Public Library copy]

Db.3.1 or 2 A Voyage to Lethe by Capt. Samuel Cock, Sometime Commander of the Good Ship the Charming Sally (1741) [a fragment (pp.[39]–62); Bodleian Library]

Db.3.1 or 2 A Voyage to Lethe by Capt. Samuel Cock, Sometime Commander of the Good Ship the Charming Sally (1741; late 19C type facsimile) [Ohio State University copy; University of Michigan copy]

[last updated 2 October 2020]

Identifying Eliza Haywood's Sources

I have just read Douglas Duhaime’s essay on “Digital Approaches to Intertextuality: The Case of Eliza Haywood,” which was published on his blog on 3 January this year (see here; for a profile of Duhaime, see here and here). I am in danger of developing a tick if I say the essay was “thought provoking,” but it was. Very.

Duhaime is interested in “the ways in which writers borrow language and ideas from other writers.” He has used his considerable computer skills to write a plagiarism-detection script, which he has used/tested/developed on Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless. As a result of his analysis, Duhaime is now able to suggest a source for almost all of Haywood’s quotations and paraphrases not previously identified by editors.

Like all editor of Haywood’s works, Christine Blouch was frequently forced to admit defeat with the statement "Source unidentified." And like all editors of Haywood’s works, I am sure she wished she had had access to Duhaime’s skills and his plagiarism-detection script before having to make such an admission in her Broadview edition of Betsy Thoughtless. Having edited a number of eighteenth-century texts myself, I know how much work is represented by these two words—"Source unidentified"—often much more work than is represented by a neat and succinct reference to the Bible, a Classical author, or a Canonical writer.

Having "set out to uncover the materials that informed Haywood's work," Duhaime used an API to search Literature Online's text-base. (An API is an Application Programming Interface. Duhaime used Python's Selenium package to create a script to “programatically investigate” the text-base. See here and here for details.) It emerged that “in many cases,” Haywood's unidentified literary borrowings were fairly easy to identify—though the source was occasionally mis-identified by Haywood. In this way Duhaime identifies quotations from Nathaniel Lee, Alexander the Great (1677), John Dryden, The Spanish Friar (1681), William Congreve, Love for Love (1695) and The Mourning Bride (1697).

Of course, since these works are easy to find on EEBO, ECCO, Google Books and the Internet Archive, there really is no difficulty doing this sort of search online without an API, although it is obviously more time-consuming. No matter how dodgy the OCR of each individual copy digitised, the multitude of copies and editions available online means that just about any short search string (any short sequence of words) is likely to lead you to the source of a quotation. I have done this myself, many times, with interesting results.

(In June of 2012 I did a post on a quotation repeatedly used and mis-identified by Haywood (see here), which I concluded with the words “in the Pickering & Chatto edition of Ab.64 Epistle for the Ladies, edited by Alexander Pettit and Christine Blouch, the verse is not identified … [this] edition was published in 2000, back in the before time, the long-long-ago. When the internet was young and you had to read whole books to find a quote, or miss one, as the case may be. Oh how far we have come in only a decade …)

So the really interesting part of Duhaime’s essay is not so much the “many cases” in which the source was easy to locate, but the discovery of many other “instances of intertextuality in Haywood's writing” where a given quotation—usually multiple lines of verse—“seems to derive from multiple sources.” This is where the API appears to really come into its own. By quickly chopping up any given Haywood quotation into segments, searching for those segments, and presenting the findings in a convenient spreadsheet, Duhaime’s API makes it possible to establish that Haywood “often combined lines from disparate literary works in order to forge her own ideas” (italics mine).

Duhaime argues that three of the following five lines, for example, are cobbled together from three sources:

  Pleas'd with destruction, proud to be undone,
  With open arms I to my ruin run,
  And sought the mischiefs I was bid to shun;
  Tempted that shame a virgin ought to dread,
  And had not the excuse of being betray.

[1] Richard Blackmore, “Advice to the Poets” (1718): “Let them this gen'rous Resolution own, / That they are pleas'd and proud to be undone”; [2] Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Basset Table” (1716): “I know the bite, yet to my ruin run, / And see the folly which I cannot shun”; [3] Aaron Hill, “The Excursion of Fancy: A Pindaric Ode” (1753): “Let us throw down this load of doubt, with which no race is won: / And, swift, to easier conquests, lighter, run, / The way, which reason is not bid to shun! ”

Although this is not—contrary to Duhaime’s claim—a clear case of Haywood “combin[ing] lines from disparate literary works,” like Lego blocks stacked one upon another, it is a particularly intriguing selection of works which Haywood appears to echo in her poetry. The third echo, from Hill, is perhaps the most interesting of all because it seems far less likely to me to be a source text than the Montagu text (which is much closer to Haywood's actual lines). Since Hill's influence on Haywood is well-established a critic who found the Hill echo first/alone could be forgiven for looking no further and use the echo to suppport the existing interpretation of Haywood as being heavily-influenced by Hill. Having multiple echo-texts simultaneously presented as possibilities, it is less likely that a critic will be side-tracked by a single, convenient partial-match, like that from Hill.

Duhaime’s second example is slightly more convincing:

  When puzzling doubts the anxious bosom seize,
  To know the worst is some degree of ease.

[1] Joseph Mitchell, “Poems on Several Grave and Important Subjects”: “When puzling Doubts invade my Breast, / And I am cloath'd in Shades of Night . . . "; [2] Davild Mallet, Eurydice (1731): “When others too / are miserable, not to know the worst / is some degree of bliss.”

Here, “invade my Breast” becomes “the anxious bosom seize,” and “degree of bliss” becomes “degree of ease”—the sole changes made being necessary to make the couplet rhyme.

* * * * *

Although I think the really interesting part of Duhaime’s essay is not the “many cases” in which the source was easy to locate, the fact is one could feed every snippet of verse quoted by Haywood into Duhaime’s API and produce a spreadsheet of Hawood’s sources, ranked by author, title and number of quotations, total number lines etc. Such a list would offer an intriguing insight into Haywood’s own “reading” and the major influences on her writing.

(I put “reading” in inverted commas because it is already clear that Haywood frequently quotes plays and often seems to do so from memory, suggesting that she spent a lot of time at the theatre—a suggestion supported by her own plays, acting, and her two volumes of drama criticism—The Dramatic Historiographer (1735) and A Companion to the Theatre (1747).)

If a spreadsheet of Hawood’s confirmed sources were used in conjunction with a spreadsheet of the works Haywood appears to echo, it may be possible that something like a reasonable or defensible judgement could be made between competing texts (in cases where there are two equally-possible origin-texts of similar constructions). That is, if a corpus-wide analysis of Haywood's sources shows a multitude of quotations from author A and none from author B, then it is more likely that Haywood is paraphrasing the former than the latter. (Though the example above with Montagu and Hill suggest that, even here, each case must be judged on its merits.)

I hope Duhaime decides to expand his work on Haywood and to publish his findings: I, for one, would love to have them on hand when editing her works.