Crossing Stage and Page

Chapter five demonstrated the ways in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace” gestures toward a “narrativization” of satire—a process that Montagu models, but which also seems to have occurred on a larger scale in literary history: thus scholars posit satire as eventually having “merged” into elements of free-indirect discourse, character, and plot. Satire was not the only cultural artifact that was finding its way into the reaches of prose fiction, however: as William Warner notes, the novel was soon perceived as having taken over print itself. Thus he writes that “Although they represented only a small part of print culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century, by the 1720s novels comprised one of the most high-profile, fashionable, and dynamic segments of the market.” ¹ But if print was increasingly taking the form of the novel, the novel was transforming how print was used: as Janine Barchas has shown, although many early- to mid-century volumes of prose fiction utilized typography innovatively, extravagantly, even mockingly, the aim of these innovations was not—as was the case in the Augustans satirists’ use of page-design—to incite readerly skepticism or adjudication, but rather to sponsor an (often consensual) illusion. Thus the gaps and dashes produced by an epistle-writer in the heights of her passion, for example, are meant not to direct our attention to the act of looking and reading per se, but rather to pull us further into the story’s imaginative world, to see “through” the typeface and into the world for which the typeface serves as a kind of emissary or representative. As Montagu’s “Verses” suggested, the narrativization of satire may imply a concomitant de-emphasis on visuality and objectivity, encouraging instead a mode of reading based on interiority and sympathy. Likewise, the colonization of print by narrative by the early 1720s seems to suggest a redeployment of typography in the service not of the eye, but rather of emotion—using page-design to train the reader not in circumspection but in sentiment. Of course, the kind of “unself-conscious” beholding of the text that such typographical strategies invite is precisely what the Augustans were fighting against. Thus, over time, their recurring deployments of typography to counteract rapt or credulous modes of reading also becomes—I will argue—a campaign to counteract the influence of such modes of reading on the use of typography itself.