Contracting Readers: ‘Margaret Newcastle’ and the Rhetoric of Conjugality 1

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes – Great Nature’s Stereotypes – we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be ‘eteme’. But where a book is at once both good and rare – where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes […] such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess – no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel. (Charles Lamb) ¹