John McTague

Censorship, Reissues, and the Popularity of Political Miscellanies

This article begins with a literary and material analysis of two instances of post-and intra-publication censorship in Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 4 (1707), and The Foundling Hospital for Wit (1743, 1744). As well as illuminating the climate in which political materials were read and circulated, these interventions both turn one bibliographical item into something that looks like two, presenting problems for the way they are represented in the Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI) and other bibliographical databases. For, by certain blunt measures of “popularity,” in such databases it may appear that these works are twice as “popular” as they actually were. But the story is more complicated than that, as a closer attention to print-shop practice and the culture of bookselling reveals. The evidence gathered regarding these miscellanies and the methods used to censor them enables a wider critique of some dominant methodologies employed in assessing popularity in bibliographical study. Reissues are often discounted by bibliographers taking quantitative approaches to popularity, because they are not taken to be signs of expected demand, as new editions are. This article argues that, on the contrary, reissues can tell richer, more various, and more detailed stories about demand, making the history of certain bibliographical items more legible.

Anti-Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity in the Warming-Pan Scandal of 1688-9

Exploring the conspiratorial fictions surrounding the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, prince of Wales, in 1688, this article argues for the centrality of confessional language and feeling in the representation of the revolution of 1688-9. The warming-pan scandal and related fictions, I argue, use obscurity and a (perceived) lack of evidence as the starting-point for a kind of propaganda that relies heavily on the suspension of disbelief, ironically demanding readerly faith in a sceptical, satirical, iconoclastic and pseudo-scientific deconstruction of an invented plot which ridicules Catholics for their implicit faith.