Antiquarian authorship: D'Israeli's miscellany of literary curiosity and the question of secondary genres.(Benjamin D'Israeli)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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BENJAMIN DISRAELI'S MEMOIR OF HIS FATHER, PREFACED TO THE POSTHUMOUS fourteenth edition of Isaac D'Israeli's remarkably successful antiquarian miscellany Curiosities of Literature (originally published in 1791), underlines his parent's intense bookishness, calling him "a complete literary character, a man who really passed his life in his library." (1) The elder D'Israeli indeed spent many if not all his days poring over printed books and manuscripts both in his own collection and, more importantly, in the library and archives of the British Museum, producing a stream of collections of curiosities, miscellanies, anecdotes, essays, and secret histories in a literary career spanning more than fifty years. A hybrid mix of extracts from and reflections on old books, these volumes are rooted in a deep commitment to a culture of reading and re-reading, and Isaac D'Israeli stands as perhaps the epitome in the period of the kind of literary figure defined by Leigh Hunt as those who "write books about books, or upon authors, or out of them, or are made up of scholarship and anecdote, who in any way ... would not have been authors, but for authors before them." (2) Such genres and their authors have generally fared poorly in critical discourse, both then and now, typically seen as parasitical, secondary, dim of mind and vision, as in the proverbial book-worm scorned by William Hazlitt in one of his more platonic moments as someone who sees "only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others." (3) For someone like D'Israeli, however, reflections from the minds of others were precisely the point. "We learn to think, by being conversant with the thoughts of others," he asserts rather testily in a critique of the idea of inborn natural genius. (4) D'Israeli by no means denied the existence of such genius. His An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (1795), revised as The Literary Character (1818), celebrates as much as it interrogates the term, and throughout his career, he strenuously defended authorial rights, proposed the establishment of literary prizes and academies, and in general supported institutions linked to an authorial model of textual production. (5) But at the same time--and herein lies the specificity of his contribution to a history of the literary field in the Romantic era--D'Israeli actively sought to expand the category of "the literary character" by including auxiliary forms of publication and secondary genres of reflection typically cast in the penumbra of the literary sphere.

Genres of collection, compilation, and republication, they were typically gathered under the suspect sign of "book-making," regarded less as literary forms than as adjuncts of the book trade. Frequently initiated by booksellers rather than authors, they were understood as contingent and ramshackle collections rather than compositions, modes of lazy and opportunistic publication that exploited the technological power of the press to transfer and reproduce text rather than the mental powers proper to authorship and literary genres. (6) As an intervention in public culture, they threatened to strip the book of both its traditional learned aura and its newer authorial identity not just by turning it into a commodity but by eliding the distinction between reading and writing whose centrality to generic hierarchy in the Romantic literary field Lucy Newlyn has recently traced. (7) D'Israeli's own literary pragmatics is symptomatic. So long as a book is useful and agreeable, he argues in defense of the hybrid essay-extracts initiated in the Curiosities of Literature, "I believe the Public care little whether the Author has written every sentence himself, or like me, stands deeply indebted to the works of other Writers." (8) But wherein lay "the useful" to justify this casual dismissal of the original in out-of-the-way productions like the antiquarian miscellany? Other genres of collection such as the pedagogically-minded poetical anthologies directed at schoolboys or middle-class ladies might serve social utility by training inexperienced readers to develop aesthetic taste and literary knowledge, for they were made up of texts "publicly known and universally celebrated" (to cite the emphatic phrase of Vicesimus Knox). (9) When it came to a collection of heterogeneous "curiosities," however--by definition attached to the odd, obscure and irregular--utility even in the symbolic form of cultural capital for upwardly mobile readers was more elusive. An active figure in the critical debate such publications occasioned, D'Israeli argued for the obscure site of the antiquary's archive as central to the formation of middle-class public culture. Developing a model of the literary field foregrounding generally overlooked literary energies--energies ill accommodated by concepts of singular authors or singular volumes--he adumbrated a theory of the secondary through which he carved out a properly literary space for the ever-thickening band of intermediary genres appearing in his time.

Although miscellaneity has been attracting a good deal of attention, especially as notions from print culture studies and book history have sifted into literary history and criticism, genres like "Curiosities of Literature" continue to sit uneasily in critical discourse, relegated as Jerome McGann has quipped to "the imagination's rust belt." (10) Explicitly middle-brow genres, they lack the kind of gravitas we tend to attach (albeit in different ways) to those of either high and low culture, "middling" publications of vaguely embarrassing import except as source material for larger projects of literary and cultural analysis. But it was to the author of the Curiosities of Literature that Bulwer Lytton dedicated "View of the Intellectual Spirit of the Time" in England and the English (1833), where he posed a key question in relation to the broad literary culture of the early nineteenth century: "It is a great literary age--we have great literary men--but where are their works?" A moment's reflection, Bulwer says, gives us the answer: "we must seek them [i.e. their works] not in detached and avowed standard publications, but in periodical miscellanies." (11) Anticipating an argument to be reiterated throughout the century and beyond, he suggests that intellectual energies have gravitated to the heterogeneity of the serial, abandoning the wholeness of the "work." Herein lies the key to his dedication, for while D'Israeli was not himself deeply involved in periodical culture (despite his connection to the Quarterly Review), his entire career was defined by an allegiance to forms of literary activity that did not issue in what he called "the continuity of a text." The "multiplied means" of modern knowledge, he explains, have "raised up the most diversified objects. These ... can never melt together in the continuity of a text." (12) If D'Israeli's commitment to literary culture makes him part of the wider movement in the late eighteenth century to valorize literature as the new repository of public and national virtue--he repeatedly surfaces in Paul Keen's chapter on "Men of Letters" in the 1790s, for example (13)--his antiquarian bias in favor of partial and specific views makes the alliance more tenuous than it may initially seem. Where, as critics like Keen have argued, the new cultural authority of literature derived in part from its appropriation of the aristocratic political claim to a whole or general view, the antiquarian model of literature promulgated by D'Israeli rewrote the literary in terms of the piecemeal. Miscellany lay at its heart, articulating reading, writing and publication in ways that challenged even as they converged with the operations of a periodical literary sphere equally shaped by what Leah Price has dubbed "a culture of the excerpt" (Anthology and the Rise of the Novel 5).

1. The Antiquary-miscellanist and the "Subterraneous" Realm of Letters

Miscellanists by definition present a problem of categorization. Where to locate someone like D'Israeli in the literary field? What kind of writer or author might he be? For Allan Cunningham, pondering the question in the Athenaeum in 1833 (the same year that Bulwer published England and the English), the answer was far from clear. After deciding to place him among the historians, Cunningham immediately added a qualification: "In placing Isaac D'Israeli among historians, I know not that I am right; he is, however, a great writer of some kind, and all his productions are of a historic character." (14) His tentativeness underlines the difficulty presented by a career built on volumes featuring titles such as Curiosities of ..., Miscellanies ..., Inquiry into ..., Amenities OF ..., Commentaries on ..., and so forth. Such designations point to a literary activity that understands itself as plural and provisional, outside the denomination of a particular name. As D'Israeli observed late in his career, "the diversified literature in which I have so long indulged ... has never obtained a name" (Amenities vii-viii)....

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