Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer

A fascinating and informatively detailed study that rescues a once influential printer/publisher from an undeserved obscurity, "Samuel Richardson as Anonymous Editor and Printer: Recycling Texts for the Book Market" will be of special interest to students, academicians, and bibliophiles concerned with the history of publishing in 18th Century Britain. -- Midwest

“Building on his valuable explorations of Richardson’s early and anonymous journal publication, Dussinger offers carefully annotated texts of 7 contributions to the True Briton (1723–4) and 16 to the Weekly Miscellany (1733–8), all significantly signed with the names of women. Drawing on a half-century of critical engagement with Richardson novels, he is able to establish convincingly the importance of these early texts to our understanding of the great fictions that follow.” — Melvyn New, Professor Emeritus, University of Florida

“Building on his important articles on Richardson’s press and editions of his correspondence, John Dussinger presents periodical essays in which Richardson impersonated women letter-writers to support the sex’s autonomy and to criticize mandated oaths of allegiance. The texts—prefiguring his epistolary novels—reveal Richardson’s religious and political values and his support for the periodicals.” — James E. May, Professor Emeritus, Penn State University

“This is an important scholarly addition to what we know about Samuel Richardson. William Sale’s bibliographical study of Richardson’s press has long cried out for someone able and willing to make sense of Richardson’s full activities as a writer and printer. Dussinger persuades us that these works he attributes to Richardson are by him. He sheds light on the deeper and literal sources of Clarissa, the real people who might have gone into the composite array of characteristics that make up the novel’s two major characters. He also brings out the convoluted attitudes that make up Richardson’s form of feminism. Richardson was fighting the increase of secularism in the era and a transformation of social norms, which, among other things, insisted on more respect for women and closer containment of their sexual and familial lives.” — Ellen Moody, Instructor at Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning at American University

I would recommend John Dussinger’s book to any university library supporting eighteenth-century courses. He is a major Richardson scholar. The argument that before Richardson embarked on Pamela, he took the woman’s point of view in letters to the journals he himself printed, provides new insights into his much-debated feminism. — Jocelyn Harris, Professor Emerita, University of Otago, New Zealand.

Dussinger provides convincing linguistic, contextual, and historical evidence in support of his attributions. He does terrific detective work throughout his introduction, headnotes, and footnotes, piecing tantalizing hints and references together into persuasive vignettes. He brings a refreshing sense of excitement and joy to solving the various puzzles Richardson seems never to tire of leaving us. - Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies