Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 193

pbsa 107:2 (2013): 193–240

Leah Orr (P.O. Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College. She has published on eighteenth-century literature, book history, and the classical tradition, and is currently completing a book project on fiction and the book trade in early eighteenth-century England.

The History, Uses, and Dangers of Halkett and Laing

Leah Orr

For many scholars and librarians, the nine-volume Dictionary of Anony-mous and Pseudonymous English Literature (1926–1962) remains a stan-dard reference for the attribution of anonymous texts, since the abortive attempt to revise it begun in the 1970s resulted in only one published volume.1 The work of two great nineteenth-century librarians, Samuel Halkett and John Laing, and revised in the early twentieth century by James Kennedy, it is the culmination of decades of study based on a huge range of sources. In the words of Murray C. T. Simpson, the Dictionary has long been “relied upon for its accuracy and admired for the concise

1. Samuel Halkett and John Laing, rev. James Kennedy, W. A. Smith, and A. F. Johnson, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1926–1932); vol. 7, Index and Second Supplement (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934); Dennis E. Rhodes and Anna E. C. Simoni, vol. 8, 1900–1950 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956); and vol. 9, Addenda (Edin-burgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962); Samuel Halkett and John Laing, rev. John Horden and others, A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language, 1475–1640, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 1980). Since only one volume of the third edition was published, subsequent citations in this article will be by volume and page number to the second edition unless otherwise noted. See also the first edition, A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1882–88).

Bibliographical Society of America194way in which it cited the sources for its attributions.”2 It is indeed a remarkable achievement for its time, and no other dictionary of anony-mous literature has approached its broad scope. Few people have ques-tioned its trustworthiness, and to date no one has critically scrutinized its origins, methods, and sources used. Since the Dictionary is still in use, fifty years after its final volume ap-peared, how dependable is it for modern scholars? As I will demonstrate, it is sadly unreliable for the purposes to which it has been put to use. In many cases, the evidence cited in the Dictionary is vague, mistaken, or simply not acceptable by the standards of twenty-first century scholar-ship. Such evidence is found particularly in entries for pre-1800 items, where Halkett and Laing often did not have access to the primary texts on which the attribution was supposedly based and were therefore rely-ing on what other scholars reported. This is especially problematic be-cause many of the attributions made in Halkett and Laing are repeated in current standard scholarly resources, including the post-1640 entries in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), citing only the Dictionary as a source with no indication of the evidence behind the attribution. Here I will assess the sources and methods for pre-1800 attributions in the Dictionary and examine several types of problematic cases to argue that we must be far more wary about trusting the evidence for attribution in the Dictionary and the variety of more recent sources that rely on it. Given the recent upheaval in the canons of eighteenth-century authors like Defoe, Manley, and Haywood, we ought to be particularly cautious about the nature of the evidence used to attribute a text to an author.3

Unfortunately, Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary is a shaky foundation on which much modern scholarship has been built, and we need to recog-nize both the extent of its problems and its influence on other sources. 2. James Kennedy, rev. Murray C. T. Simpson, “Laing, John (1809–1880), bibliog-rapher,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15889. This source is subsequently cited as “ODNB.” 3. For the latest discussion of Defoe attributions, see Ashley Marshall, “Did De-foe Write Moll Flanders and Roxana?,” P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, “On the Attribution of Novels to Daniel Defoe,” and Robert J. Griffin, “Did Defoe Write Roxana? Does it Matter?,” all three in Philological Quarterly 89 (2010): 209–41, 243–53, and 255–62; and also Marshall, “Beyond Furbank and Owens: A New Consider-ation of the Evidence for the ‘Defoe’ Canon,” Studies in Bibliography (forthcoming). On Manley, see J. A. Downie, “What if Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah?,” The Library 7th ser., 5 (2004): 247–64. On Haywood, see Leah Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library 7th ser., 12 (2011): 335–75.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 195I. Halkett, Laing, and the Evolution of the DICTIONARY

The Dictionary has an interesting history stretching back into the mid-nineteenth century. First conceived in the 1850s by Samuel Halkett, and continued after his death in 1871 by John Laing, it was a monumental undertaking involving the cooperation of dozens of librarians and draw-ing on hundreds of sources. The Dictionary finally began appearing in print in 1882, after both Halkett and Laing were dead. A revision was eventually carried out in 1926 by James Kennedy. This version, reprint-ed with supplements and various additions, has become standard. John Horden, the general editor of the third edition, traces the origins of the first two editions of the Dictionary but does not analyze the aims of his predecessors or question their methods.4 Here, I will briefly relate the history of the Dictionary to explain its purposes and uses, and to show how it has changed between its original conception and the nine-volume second edition still in use. Much of the compilation of the first edition of the Dictionary can be traced through references to it in Notes and Queries. According to Simp-son’s entry on Halkett in the Dictionary of National Biography, Halkett was a draper whose mostly self-taught linguistic skills earned him the position of keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. Simpson explains that Halkett was involved in editing a massive catalogue of the works in the library, and that the Dictionary was “an offshoot of his cata-logue work.”5 In February 1856, Halkett published a letter in Notes and Queries proposing that he produce a reference book gathering informa-tion about known authors of anonymous works, explaining that “I have, myself, felt the want of it greatly, and for my own purposes I have long been in the habit of noting down every piece of information that came in my way. . . . should no one better qualified than myself undertake the task, I feel strongly disposed to continue the researches in which I have been engaged, and to arrange the results with a view to publication.”6 Evidently there were no objections, and in 1861 Halkett wrote again to report optimistically that “I have now a collection of about eight thou-

4. John Horden, “The Revision of Halkett and Laing,” Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 12 (1978): 71–84. 5. Murray C. T. Simpson, “Halkett, Samuel (1814–1871), librarian,” ODNB, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11938. 6. Samuel Halkett, “Dictionary of Anonymous Writers,” Notes and Queries 2nd ser., 1 (1856): 129–30.

Bibliographical Society of America196sand titles” and that “I have begun lately to arrange and revise these titles for the press; being of opinion that even an imperfect attempt is better than none.”7 He also adds that he has had help from prominent bibliographers, including J. D. Haig, James Darling, and Frederick Star-tridge Ellis.8 In 1866, he wrote once more to Notes and Queries, asking for help in verifying titles from those readers “having any access to the public libraries of London, Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin,” since he had reached the end of his resources in Edinburgh.9

By 1868 the size of the undertaking was impeding its execution. Halkett wrote the following in a private letter to Ralph Thomas: I have now resolved to send to the press, with as little delay as possible, my Dic-tionary of Anonyms and Pseudonyms [sic]. I begin to feel convinced that I have been aiming at something too perfect, and therefore unattainable. My intention was to give a complete copy of every title-page, including motto, imprint, &c.; but, having lately put a few entries into type, by way of specimen, I find that the work would extend far beyond all reasonable limits. I have, therefore, resolved to abridge the titles, leaving in all cases enough to secure perfect identification; and I may probably use some of the space so gained to increase the number of bibliographical and illustrative notes, for which I have extensive materials.10

The difficulties in assembling the material and resulting delays in publication meant that the Dictionary was still unfinished at the time of Halkett’s death in 1871. A note appeared in 1872 announcing that the Dictionary would be continued by Thomas Hill Jamieson (Halkett’s suc-cessor at the Advocates’ Library) and Reverend John Laing.11 Ralph Thomas, author of the Handbook of Fictitious Names (1868), endorsed the enterprise with a plea for subscribers to finance a planned two-vol-ume edition.12 Jamieson, however, died in 1876, before the project was near completion, and Thomas remarks in his obituary that “The task of editing the MS. proved far greater than had been anticipated, and, in spite of the most arduous work which Jamieson’s co-editor, Mr. Laing, 7. Notes and Queries 2nd ser., 11 (1861): 480. 8. Haig worked for the King’s Inns Library, Dublin; Darling was the editor of Cyclopaedia Bibliographica: A Library Manual of Theological and General Literature, 2 vols. (London: Darling, 1854–1856); Ellis was a bookseller who purchased for the British Museum and collaborated with William Carew Hazlitt to compile The Huth Library, 5 vols. (London: Ellis and White, 1880). 9. Notes and Queries 3rd ser., 9 (1866): 38. 10. Notes and Queries 5th ser., 6 (1876): 448, dated October 1, 1868. 11. Notes and Queries 4th ser., 9 (1872): 271. 12. Notes and Queries 4th ser., 9 (1872): 403.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 197has devoted to it, no further announcement as to its progress has been made during the last three years.”13 James T. Clark, of the Advocates’ Library, commented that in fact Jamieson never got around to working on the project, and that “no one since Mr. Halkett’s death but Mr. Laing has done anything towards the progress of the work.”14 From Halkett’s death in 1871 until Laing’s in 1880, Laing was the sole editor of the Dic-tionary. Laing, a friend of Halkett, was the librarian of the New College of the Free Church in Edinburgh—and so, like Halkett, he worked on the Dictionary as a side project, without being able to see it through to publication. Upon Laing’s death in 1880, his daughter Catherine, with the assis-tance of Henry Benjamin Wheatley, took up the task of seeing the Dic-tionary through press. By the time the first volume was announced as being in print in 1882, it was said to contain approximately 11,000 entries for the letters A through E—a huge increase on the 8,000 entries for the whole project that Halkett had gathered back in 1861.15 The preface to the first volume acknowledges Wheatley, “who abandoned his own intention of preparing a work of the kind, and confided to Mr Halkett’s care a large mass of materials, the result of several years’ labour.” Impor-tantly for my purposes here, the preface also explains that “when cases of doubtful spelling or punctuation occurred, the MS. has been compared with the printed title when possible. Occasionally, however, access to the book could not be obtained, in which case no alteration has been made in the editors’ MSS., both gentlemen being remarkable for their minute accuracy.”16 Catherine Laing’s preface to volume four (1888) is clearer about the problems, explaining:At the time of my father’s death, eight years ago, there came into my hands an enormous mass of materials, comprising, in addition to his own collections, those of Mr Halkett and Mr H. B. Wheatley. No attempt had been made to arrange these materials. In the process of reducing the slips to some rough al-phabetical order, I discovered that a large number consisted of merely a word or two of the title, with a reference to one or more authorities. Consequently, those titles had to be completed, references verified, and not infrequently, in the case of duplicate slips drawn from different sources, rival claims of authorship examined.17

13. Notes and Queries 5th ser., 5 (1876): 64. 14. Notes and Queries 5th ser., 7 (1877): 74. 15. Notes and Queries 6th ser., 5 (1882): 239. 16. Dictionary, 1st ed., 1:2–3. 17. Ibid., 4:5.

Bibliographical Society of America198One can only imagine the monumental task of turning those disorga-nized slips of paper recording the notes of Halkett, Wheatley, and Laing into a useful reference tool. If Catherine Laing’s depiction of the state of the project in 1880 is to be believed, then Halkett’s assertion that the Dictionary was nearly ready for the press in 1861 and Laing’s call for sub-scriptions in 1872 both seem wildly optimistic—and Catherine Laing deserves far more credit for her role as editor than she has so far received. I would like to make two general points about the production history of the first edition of the Dictionary. First, it was from the start both enormously collaborative but also dependent on a single person (first Halkett, then Laing), and subject to problems of accuracy on both ac-counts. In his 1872 plea for subscriptions, Thomas remarks that “We have all helped from time to time, and added our brick to the edifice: though one in twenty thousand does not seem much, yet it was the help that was valuable.”18 The readers of Notes and Queries who sent in their attribu-tions to Halkett and Laing, the librarians who corresponded with the editors, and the other bibliographers who shared their own research, all made the Dictionary possible. Given the huge number of people contrib-uting to the project, Halkett and Laing could not have personally veri-fied all the evidence they received but instead had to trust the research skills of their many individual contributors. Since the Dictionary was conceived, organized, and edited single-handedly, it was also subject to individual idiosyncrasies and relatively little oversight. Second, the most important insight into Halkett and Laing’s meth-odology from the compilation of the first edition is that all of the effort in corroborating facts concentrated on checking titles, not attributions. This is seen in Halkett’s plea for help from researchers and librarians in London, Dublin, and Oxford, in his statement of his original intent being to print the full titles of each work, and in the two prefaces to volumes of the first edition. Catherine Laing explains in her preface that the fact-checking for the final printed volumes involved verifying titles and determining whether a book was indeed truly anonymous. The sig-nificance of this to understanding the Dictionary cannot be overstated: at no point does anyone express any concern with the criteria used for attributing texts to authors. Two reasons might account for the lack of attention to attribution and the focus on repeating titles and ensuring texts are anonymous.

18. Notes and Queries 4th ser., 9 (1872): 403.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 199First, Halkett, Laing, and Wheatley were chiefly librarians and cata-loguers, not historians. They do not appear to have been very critical of the evidence presented to them for particular attributions, and they were inclined to trust the word of other librarians, including the earlier librarians who compiled catalogues of larger collections like the British Museum and the Bodleian Library. Second, the project was modeled on Antoine-Alexandre Barbier’s Dictionnaire des Ouvrages Anonymes (Paris, 1872), which similarly focused on listing titles and determining which works were really anonymous as opposed to those works that listed the author’s name inside or on another edition. Throughout the entire pro-duction of the first edition, nationalism played a key role in the enthusi-asm for the project. Haig cited foreign dictionaries of pseudonyms and argued that “it is full time that English literature should be similarly rep-resented,” and the bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee bemoaned the fact that the French had better bibliographies than the English.19 The preface to the first edition comments that “The admirable works of this class, of which France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, and even Bel-gium, are able to boast, have been continually held up as examples, and pointed to as models of what should be done for English Literature.”20 Such eagerness to compile a vast bibliography of English anonymous literature to rival foreign bibliographies likely led to the impulse to add information rather than question it. As the first edition was slowly coming into print, Laing’s assistant and successor at the New College Library, James Kennedy, began to prepare a second edition. Kennedy had begun gathering materials in 1882 while helping Catherine Laing, and by the time he secured funding for a sec-ond edition in 1917, his “additional MS. was estimated to number 35,000 to 40,000 titles.”21 He died in 1925, with only two volumes completed, and the final three along with the index were finished by W. A. Smith and A. F. Johnson, librarians at the British Museum. This edition, in six volumes with three supplementary volumes published later, is the ver-sion generally known today as “Halkett and Laing.” Reviews were posi-tive: the librarian and bibliographer Wilfred Bonser commented that it will “remain the standard work on the subject, now that it has been 19. J. D. Haig, Notes and Queries 2nd ser., 11 (1861): 65; Henry Spencer Ashbee, Notes and Queries 5th ser., 9 (1878): 224. Ashbee is the author of An Iconography of Don Quixote 1605–1895 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1895). 20. Dictionary, 1st ed., 1:1. 21. Dictionary, 1:ix.

Bibliographical Society of America200enlarged and brought up to date. Errors in a work of this size there must be, but one may rest assured that they are the minimum possible.”22 Bon-ser does not comment on what the errors might be, but corrections and objections from other scholars related to specific entries rather than the Dictionary as a whole. The preface to the second edition makes an important point about the purpose and limitations of the Dictionary: “To trace back the his-tory of an attribution to its source may be, for an individual book, a fascinating occupation; for a dictionary, it is a sheer impossibility. The authorities cited must therefore be regarded generally as an indication that the reader is not faced with an ex cathedra verdict by the editors, and as a jumping-off ground for further inquiry to those who care to make it.”23 The intended use of the Dictionary, therefore, was as a guide for readers and researchers, a compilation of other secondary sources, not as an authority in its own right. This is a different sort of proposition from the assumption either that the Dictionary should be trusted as a source for attribution, or that it points the readers at the source for an attribution. The editors of the Dictionary, as I will demonstrate below, relied on almost any source for an attribution, which might appear ir-responsible—yet as they state in the preface, they do not intend to be making judgments at all, but simply recording the information available. The supplementary volumes continued the practices and methods of the second edition of the Dictionary, relying chiefly on library catalogues and other intermediary sources. The inadequacies of the second edition of the Dictionary led John Horden to propose in 1968 that the publishers commission a revision of the work rather than reprinting it.24 Horden outlines the details of this monumental task in the preface to the third edition, including his reasons for reorganizing the Dictionary into chronological rather than alphabetical volumes. He took some practical approaches to the project similar to his predecessors: he wrote to librarians and academic jour-

22. Wilfred Bonser, review of volumes 1 and 2, The Library 4th ser., 8 (1927): 143. For a similarly positive review of the supplementary eighth volume, see L. Bonnerot, who declares that “Pareille entreprise mérite des félicitations des bibliothécaires sans doute, et aussi des collectionneurs et des chercheurs” [The unrivaled enterprise doubtless merits the congratulations of librarians, and also of collectors and researchers.], Études anglaises 11, no. 3 (1958): 277–78. 23. Dictionary, 1:ix–x. 24. See Dictionary 3rd ed., xi.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 201nals asking for information on attributions, and he organized the in-formation on slips of paper that could be sorted easily. In other ways he adapted their methods to increase accuracy and accountability. He did not work alone, but instead assembled a five-person editorial board, who worked with nine full-time “research editors” to compile, sort, and check the work of the sixty-four academics who helped on the volume and the 174 named individuals (mostly librarians) who sent information. One reason for this large number of people working on the project was to al-low every fact to be verified by more than one person. Horden explains that four members of the editorial group read the entire volume and dis-cussed differences in opinion about particular entries until they reached a consensus. This approach means that the Dictionary is somewhat more regulated than the previous editions, which were largely the work of in-dividuals working without oversight. In contrast to his predecessors, Horden does state the criteria used for attribution and indicates that accuracy and reliability are primary goals of the Dictionary—not just recording titles of anonymous works, as had been the purpose of the first two editions, but creating a new authority in its own right. His two main principles for recording and determining attribution are “that contemporary evidence should be cited wherever possible” and “that some indication of the history of an attribution is often useful.” He concludes that “for more than half the entries an at-tribution has been recovered that was made within twenty years of the work’s publication,” and names several sources for this such as subse-quent editions, letters or manuscripts, and records such as the Stationers’ Registers. These methods are highly commendable: Horden wants to make the basis for each attribution clear, so that readers can make their own judgments as to whether a particular manuscript or other source is trustworthy. For the rest of the entries, where contemporary evidence is not available, the third edition of the Dictionary cites the relevant sources, trying to explain the origins of the attribution. Horden admits that “It is recognized that many of the sources necessarily relied upon in the documenting of H&L3 are not authoritative and that others are of widely unequal validity,” explaining that in cases where the earliest source for an attribution comes from the nineteenth century, we have no way of knowing whether the claim can be trusted or not.25 Horden’s edi-tion lays out in scrupulous detail the basis for each attribution, including alternative possible authors and contrary opinions. 25. Dictionary, 3rd ed., xl.

Bibliographical Society of America202 The main problem with the attributional criteria of the third edi-tion of the Dictionary is that they are sometimes inconsistently applied. Horden explains that “There is only one direct form of evaluation which has been offered: a question-mark is prefixed to the writer’s name at the beginning of the Annotation in instances of uncertain attribution.”26 Yet the editors are obviously making other choices about what information warrants inclusion and what is unreliable: on numerous occasions they disagree with the attribution made in the second edition of the Diction-ary on the grounds that it is based on mistaken or insufficient evidence.27 The absence of a question mark implies that the reader should trust the attribution provided, when in fact it means simply that no dissenting opinions had appeared in print. For the majority of entries, the editors provide one attribution that is preferred over others, even where the evi-dence for several possibilities is similar.28 Horden also admits in passing that he trusts manuscript attributions on single copies of a work, and worries that such evidence will vanish: “An inscription pencilled in a privately-owned book not considered to be of any value, and yet being the only known evidence of authorship, provides an example of the kind of material that I would wish to have photographed for such archives.”29

26. Ibid., xli. 27. For an example of the third edition disagreeing with the second, see the entry for A Dialogue betwixt a Secular Priest and a Lay Gentleman (1601), which the second edition of the Dictionary attributes to William Watson based on an argument made by Thomas Graves Law in 1889. The third edition of the Dictionary cites a 1602 at-tribution to John Mush, which they say Law rejected “on insufficient evidence” (55). For an example of the third edition disagreeing with the second without providing an alternative attribution, see the entry for A Most Pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus (1598), in which the editors of the third edition cite J. Churton Collins, The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene (1905), 60–61, for the de-attribution and explain that other possibilities (Shakespeare, Thomas Lodge, or George Peele) are similarly un-substantiated (131). 28. For an example of the third edition preferring one possible author over anoth-er, see the entry for Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), attributed to Nicholas Breton but with the caveat that “It is probable that, as with The arbor of amorous devises, the work was compiled and edited by the printer, Richard Jones” (26). For an example of the third edition adjudicating between authors without a decisive conclusion, see the entry for An Epitome of all the Lives of the Kings of France (1639), in which they list either Robert Basset or Richard Brathwait at the top of the entry as translators, but state in the succeeding paragraph that “The attr. to Brathwait (e.g. by Hazlitt, Handbook, 53, and STC1) is apparently without authority” (67). 29. Dictionary, 3rd ed., xii.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 203While photographing every manuscript scribble would indeed preserve it for posterity, the more important question is whether or not we should trust attributions made on the basis of an anonymous, undated claim written on a single copy of a work. The third edition of the Dictionary is infinitely more helpful than the second edition since the editors explain the basis for their attributions, but they still make judgments based on criteria that may not always hold up under scrutiny. Indeed, in many cases there is no reliable information available, and the question of at-tribution will remain unanswered—frustrating the goal of tracing back each attribution to its source. Perhaps one reason no subsequent volumes were published is that the editors realized that they were trying to com-plete an impossible task. The three editions of the Dictionary demonstrate the changing pur-pose of the work, from: 1) a listing of anonymous literature for national pride; to 2) a resource for librarians gathering information from available sources into a single work; to 3) an authoritative source for attribution in its own right. Unfortunately, as I shall demonstrate in the final section of this essay, the second edition of the Dictionary—the compendium of sources—is often used as a source in itself, rather than a finding aid. This shift is similar to the change that Peter W. M. Blayney identi-fies with users of the Pollard and Redgrave Short-Title Catalogue, where “most readers since 1926 have treated STC itself as an end rather than a means.”30 Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary was not meant to be used as an authoritative source, but it is now relied upon by scholars as the first and often final word on attributions. The long production history of the Dictionary includes such a variety of editors with different purposes, methods, and criteria, often unstated, that errors and inconsistencies are practically inevitable—and we need to be aware of their purposes and biases in assessing their reliability.

II. Sources for Attributions in the DICTIONARY

Considering the long history of the Dictionary and the number of people involved in producing it, the sources used are highly various and represent a range of attributional methods. The 222 “Authorities” listed in volume one of the second edition give a misleading impression that a wide variety of trustworthy sources were used for attributions. What 30. Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Numbers Game: Appraising the Revised STC,” PBSA 88, no. 3 (1994): 406.

Bibliographical Society of America204exactly are the types of sources employed, and how reliable are they? I have categorized the entries for pre-1800 texts in the Dictionary based on the type of source used for attribution in order to map the attribu-tional practice of the Dictionary as a whole. I limited this quantitative analysis to pre-1800 texts because Halkett, Laing, and Kennedy could conceivably have had first-hand knowledge of authors of recent texts (and such information is unknowable if they did not explain their con-nection), but they would have had to rely on intermediary information about authors of texts before their own lifetimes. I am using the second edition of the Dictionary here rather than the first or the third because it is the most complete edition and the version most people know as “Halkett and Laing.” Rather than a long list of specialists and contem-porary sources, a surprising number of the pre-1800 entries rely on a few library catalogues, major nineteenth-century bibliographical sources, or no traceable evidence at all. This picture of attributional practice reflects the original intentions of the Dictionary as a compendium of authorities rather than an authority in itself. Here I will describe the types of evi-dence used to attribute the pre-1800 entries in the Dictionary, and then discuss the trustworthiness of these sources from most to least trustwor-thy in order to argue that the majority of entries in the Dictionary use evidence that most modern scholars would not consider satisfactory. As Table 1 demonstrates, most of the attributions come from either later secondary sources or library catalogues (which are a special type of later secondary source). Out of the 18,358 entries in the Dictionary with a publication date before 1800, seventy-eight percent (14,305 entries) cite a secondary source or library catalogue as the basis for attribution. Anoth-er sixteen percent (2,930 entries) have no citation for the attribution at all. Just three percent (560 entries) cite a source contemporary with the anonymous text. Almost no entries cite what we might consider a pri-mary source using first-hand knowledge about the attribution, though a number of entries point out that the author’s name appears on a separate issue or in the body of the text and so the work is not in fact anonymous. These statistics demonstrate that regardless of how scholars might use the Dictionary, its primary method of attribution is to cull nineteenth-century sources, not to figure out the historical basis for an attribution. Viewed chronologically by original publication date, the number of entries for each source type increases over time, but the relative pro-portion in each category stays approximately the same. The increase in

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Bibliographical Society of America206entries for each time period is easily explained by the higher number of works printed each year as well as the greater survival rate of later books, while the share each category contains remains steady due to relatively consistent methods of citing sources across the whole of the Dictionary (though not necessarily consistent treatment of sources as reliable for at-tribution). The same sources are used across the different volumes, since Kennedy had compiled his notes for all the volumes before the first went to press. The one exception to this is the Advocates’ Library catalogue, which is only cited in the first two volumes of the Dictionary since it was largely superseded by the National Library of Scotland in 1925. Although the number of entries (18,358) might seem quite high, by comparison with the number of anonymous works that do not appear, the Dictionary represents a very small portion of the literary output of Britain before 1800. More than half of the pre-1800 entries are from the eighteenth century: 11,251 have imprints between 1700 and 1799. Mi-chael F. Suarez provides statistics on publishing that demonstrate that each year in the eighteenth century at least 2,000 separate titles were produced. This would imply that at least 200,000 different works were printed in the eighteenth century (a highly conservative estimate, con-sidering the great increase in print output in the last three decades of the century).31 The number listed in the Dictionary, therefore, is something like five percent of the total number of titles produced. This is far less, however, than the percentage of works that were anonymous in the same period. While some genres of writing, like sermons, were frequently printed with authors’ names, other types of printed material were more often anonymous. James Raven has estimated that in the later part of the eighteenth century, eighty percent of the works of fiction were published anonymously, and I have calculated elsewhere that fully seventy percent of the fiction across the entire century did not identify an author.32 Ju-

31. Michael F. Suarez, S. J., “Towards a Bibliometric Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1701–1800,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695–1800, ed. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 43. I derive my estimate from his calculations of ten evenly spaced years, which range from from 1,744 to 6,801 different titles apiece. 32. James Raven, “The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830,” in The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert J. Griffin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 143; and Orr, “Genre Labels on the Title Pages of English Fiction, 1660–1800,” Phil-ological Quarterly 90 (2011): 80.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 207lian Hoppit, in his study of economic writing in the eighteenth century, concludes that during the period 1660–1760, “a very clear majority, some sixty-one per cent, were anonymous.”33 Given such statistics, we must assume that the Dictionary contains only a small portion of the anony-mous literature that has been printed, and that Halkett and Laing delib-erately concentrated on works for which an identifiable author could be traced. Not only were the editors of the Dictionary selective in the works they included, they systematically preferred more recent sources over contemporary evidence for attribution. Just three percent of the total en-tries cite a contemporary source. These statistics are even more startling considering the wide definition of “contemporary source” that I em-ployed, including John Nichols’ Literary Anecdotes and the Monthly Re-view when cited for works published in the latter half of the eighteenth century.34 Many of the works attributed on contemporary evidence are either not in fact anonymous at all—that is, an earlier edition had the author’s name—or were subsequently published with the author’s name or in a collected works edition. Horden comments in the third edition of the Dictionary that “well over five hundred entries” from the period 1475–1640 were mistakenly included in the second edition, nearly all of which are not in fact anonymous.35

Moreover, the reader should remember that even contemporary sourc-es might be untrustworthy. For example, Germaine Greer argues that the bookseller Samuel Briscoe added works to posthumous collections of fiction supposedly by Aphra Behn that she probably did not write.36 33. Julian Hoppit, “The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–1760,” The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 89. 34. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London: Printed for the author, 1812–15). For examples of the Dictionary citing the Monthly Review as a source, see the entries for The Modern Fine Lady (4:99) and Thoughts on National Insanity (6:37). 35.Dictionary, 3rd ed., xxxii. Some of the mistaken entries were from incorrect titles or the listing of parts of a longer work as individual publications. For example, see the entries in the third edition for A Defence of the Right of Kings (1624), which actually lists the author (Edward Forset) on the title page and so is not anonymous; or A Brefe and Compendious Register or Table of the Pryncypal Histories (1550), which is the half-title page of a different work listed separately with the author’s name (Walter Lynne) on the full title page (Dictionary, 3rd ed., 52, 21). 36. Germaine Greer, “Honest Sam. Briscoe,” in A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the 16th to the 20th Century, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995), 33–47.

Bibliographical Society of America208A contemporary source that has some known connection with the pur-ported author is more reliable than a source that may be acting on mis-information, supposition, or guesswork. Consider the case of The Pres-byterian Lash (1661), where the Dictionary quotes a “MS. note by Malone in the Bodleian copy” that says “In a copy of this piece which was in the collection of Mr. Lutterel, made in 1678, it is said by that gentleman to have been written by Francis Kirkman. The initials K. F. subscribed to the dedication countenance the supposition.”37 Edmond Malone was a well-respected eighteenth-century Shakespearean scholar, so he might be trusted to be accurate in his own knowledge (though he could be rely-ing on an inaccurate source). Narcissus Luttrell was a frequent customer of a variety of booksellers, and he collected pamphlets of the sort that Kirkman sold, so he might plausibly have genuine inside knowledge of the authorship of the work.38 Malone would likely not have repeated the note had he not thought it were true. Still, even though this ex-ample of contemporary evidence is plausible, perhaps even likely, it is not provable; we have no solid information as to why Luttrell attributed the work to Kirkman, and we have to trust that Malone repeated the note without error, that Halkett and Laing repeated Malone’s note ac-curately, and that they correctly identified the handwriting as Malone’s. Unscrupulous booksellers hoping to cash in on a well-known author combined with the lack of rights for authors, particularly deceased ones, undoubtedly contributed to false attributions, even among contempo-rary sources. One source used in the Dictionary that deserves separate consideration is Edward Arber’s transcription of the Term Catalogues. In the Preface to the work, Arber explained that the Catalogues were a trade journal put out quarterly for the Stationers’ Company in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries announcing new publications, reprints, and reissues with bookseller names and prices.39 Published 1903–1906, the Term Catalogues were not available to Halkett and Laing while they prepared the first edition of the Dictionary, but they are frequently cited in the second edition. Most of the entries in the Dictionary that cite the 37. Dictionary, 4:415. 38. On Luttrell’s books and his collecting, see Stephen Parks and Earle Havens, The Luttrell File: Narcissus Luttrell’s Dates on Contemporary Pamphlets 1678–1730 (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Library, 1999). 39. Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709 A. D., with a Number for Easter Term, 1711 A. D., 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed, 1903–6), 1:vii–viii.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 209Term Catalogues, however, cite the index, not the actual transcripts of the catalogues. For example, the Dictionary cites the Term Catalogues as the source for the attribution of Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–7) to Aphra Behn.40 The page number cited is in the index, and any entries for Love-Letters in the catalogues themselves that supply the name enclose it in brackets, indicating that it was provided by Arber but was not in the original catalogue.41 In the table above, I have counted the Term Catalogues as a contemporary source only when the entry in the body of the work is cited, not the modern index. Even when the page cited refers to the transcription rather than the index, however, this does not mean that the attribution is actually in the original catalogues rather than a later addition by the editors. In the case of Seven Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1693), the sequel to Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678), Halkett and Laing cite the entry in the Term Cata-logues rather than the index, implying that the source for the attribution is contemporary to the publication of the work.42 The entry, however, attributes the work to Marianna d’Alcoforado in brackets, indicating that Arber inserted the author’s name and that d’Alcoforado does not in fact appear in the original catalogue entry.43 More recent scholars have demonstrated that in fact the attribution to d’Alcoforado is false, and the Love-Letters were written by Gabriel de Guilleragues—but since the Dictionary appears to cite a contemporary source, most readers would not think to question the attribution to d’Alcoforado.44 The modern transcription of the Stationers’ Registers is not cited in the second edition of the Dictionary, though it was in print, since it rarely gives attribution information not available elsewhere.45

The two major secondary sources used in the second edition of the Dictionary are the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and Robert 40. Dictionary, 3:403. 41. Term Catalogues, 3:688 (index), 2:49 (no name), 2:529 (name with “?”), 3:576 (name in brackets). 42. Dictionary, 5:236. 43. Term Catalogues, 2:441. 44. On Guilleragues’ authorship, see Gabriel de Guilleragues, Chansons et Bons Mots, Valentins, Lettres Portugaises, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Rougeot (Ge-neva: Librairie Droz, 1972), 95. 45. G. E. B. Eyre and G. R. Rivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers; from 1640–1708 A. D., 3 vols. (London: Privately Printed, 1913). One notable exception is the attribution of The English Rogue (1665) to Richard Head, though the Dictionary does not cite this (Stationers’ Registers, 2:372, and Dictionary, 2:167).

Bibliographical Society of America210Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica. Together these account for 2,402 of the at-tributions of pre-1800 works in Halkett and Laing, or thirteen percent, and so are worth investigation into their own fact-gathering methods. Both are similar to Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary in that they are the culmination of many years of scholarship. The DNB, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, first began appearing in print in 1885, the same year as volume three of the first edition of Halkett and Laing’s Diction-ary.46 Each volume is prefaced with a list of writers of individual entries, identified by initials after each entry: volume one alone lists eighty-sev-en different writers as contributing to the 505 entries. The “Statistical Account” in the final volume claims that “The total number of contribu-tors to the Dictionary is 653 . . . Of these, 224 have contributed one article apiece, and 329 from two to twenty articles apiece,” and that seventy-five percent of the DNB was the work of the remaining 100 individuals.47 This was a collaborative project on a scale far more vast than Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary, and one can assume the methodological inconsisten-cies seen in Halkett and Laing’s project are magnified in a work the size of the DNB. As subsequent scholars and editors have pointed out, there are many idiosyncrasies in the DNB that reflect the preferences of writers of individual entries.48 One particularly egregious error is G. A. Aitkin’s spurious addition of “Mary” to Delariviere Manley’s name, which was repeated by scholars throughout the twentieth century.49 There seems to have been little vetting or fact-checking beyond whatever the author of

46. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885–1900). Hereafter cited as “DNB.” 47. DNB, 63:xv. 48. On the idiosyncrasies of the DNB, see Pat Rogers, “Diversions of the DNB,” Essays and Studies 37 (1984): 75–86; Brian Harrison, “Comparative Biography and the DNB,” Comparative Criticism 25 (2004): 3–26; and David Amigoni, “Distinc-tively Queer Little Morsels: Imagining Distinction, Groups, and Difference in the DNB and the ODNB,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10 (2005): 279–288. 49. DNB vol. 36, 35. On Delariviere Manley’s name, see Patricia Köster, “De-lariviere Manley and the DNB: A Cautionary Tale about Following Black Sheep, with a Challenge to Cataloguers,” Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1977): 106–111. For examples of scholars calling her “Mary de la Riviere Manley,” see Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 409n1; William Harlin McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fic-tion, 1700–1739 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960), 8, 18, and 26; and The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2, 1660–1800, ed. George Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971), 767.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 211each entry might have done. After each entry there is an abbreviated list of sources, mostly newspapers and obituary notices, nineteenth-century histories, and sometimes manuscript or primary sources. The attempt to trace back the source of a particular fact in an entry, such as the attribu-tion of a publication to a particular person, is likely to be foiled: there is no link between facts and sources, and many entries cite “personal infor-mation” as a source. This could mean anything, and we have no way of determining its reliability in particular cases. The Bibliotheca Britannica is different from the DNB in that it is largely the work of a single person. Watt, a Scottish doctor, compiled his bibliography of British authors and works in the early nineteenth cen-tury. It was published posthumously in four volumes in 1819–24.50 The Bibliotheca Britannica is simply a bibliographical listing of authors, titles, and printers, and individual entries do not cite any sources, so we have no way of knowing where Watt got his information. Since it was unique in its scope and detail when it was published, many nineteenth-century scholars relied on it: Watt’s biographer James Finlayson claims with-out much exaggeration that “Watt’s ‘Bibliotheca Britannica’ is known wherever English bibliography is cultivated, whether in this country or abroad.”51 Although scholars pointed out errors in the Bibliotheca, and John E. B. Mayor suggested in the 1870s that a new edition be prepared, no revisions were ever made, and it continued to be trusted as an author-itative source for bibliographical information on English publications.52

Among the minor authorities not listed separately in Table 1, most are either bibliographies other than the Bibliotheca Britannica or nineteenth-century bookseller catalogues. Though Halkett and Laing do not distin-guish among their “authorities,” they are certainly not all of equal valid-ity. Some are more trustworthy than others, and some can be considered more reliable in some cases than they are in others. William Cushing’s dictionary of pseudonyms, for example, is cited fairly frequently as the

50. Bibliotheca Britannica: Or, A General Index to British and Foreign Literature, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1819–24). On Watt’s death, see 1:v, where bizarrely the writer of the preface blames the strain of writing the Bibliotheca for his early death at age 40. For a biographical account of Watt, see Archibald L. Goodall and Thomas Gibson, “Robert Watt: Physician and Bibliographer,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 18 (1963): 36–50. 51. James Finlayson, An Account of the Life and Works of Dr. Robert Watt (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1897), 1. 52. John E. B. Mayor, Notes and Queries 5th ser., 6. (1876): 342.

Bibliographical Society of America212source for an attribution—yet Cushing was a contemporary of Halkett and Laing and cites no sources for his own attributions, only rarely even giving an explanation for how certain initials or pseudonyms relate to the author he ascribes to them.53 The second volume of his dictionary contains 184 pseudonyms supposedly used by Defoe, derived from Wil-liam Lee’s biography, such as Anti-Bubbler, Abigail, Sir Timothy Cau-tion, Jeremiah Dry-Boots, Miranda Meanwell, and Jeffrey Sing-Song.54 Almost all of these pseudonyms are now considered inauthentic.55

Cushing’s dictionary is only one example of the many bibliographies cited in the Dictionary, but most of them do not cite any sources of their own and so are dead ends for scholars seeking the origin of an attribu-tion. Many of the American entries in the second edition of the Diction-ary derive from Charles Evans’ American Bibliography (1903–34), but Ev-ans is intensely invested in naming authors of anonymous texts wherever possible: he states that a primary mission of his bibliography is “keeping alive the high ideals these Fathers of the Republic strove to impress upon the National character.”56 With such interest in the people who wrote the books listed, he is not overly critical about the criteria used for at-tribution. He explains that “the authorship of anonymous or pseudony-mous works [has been] carefully sought out, until there remain but few works the identity of whose authorship has not been ascertained.”57 Ev-ans, however, is not an entirely trustworthy source: as his modern biog-rapher Edward G. Holley notes, Evans did not cite his sources, did not personally inspect most of the titles of the books he listed, and “had im-

53. William Cushing, Initials and Pseudonyms: A Dictionary of Literary Disguises, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1885 and 1888). 54. Cushing, Initials and Pseudonyms, 2:306–11. William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings, 3 vols. (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869). 55. Most of the pseudonyms Cushing lists for Defoe are found in articles either in Mist’s Weekly Journal or Applebee’s Journal. Furbank and Owens do not attribute the vast majority of these short pieces to Defoe, and of Lee’s assumption that Defoe worked for Applebee’s Journal, they comment “We are inclined to think this whole construction may have been a fantasy on Lee’s part” (P. N. Furbank and W. R. Ow-ens, A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998], xxi–xxiii). 56. Charles Evans, American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 Down to and Including the Year 1820, 14 vols. (Chicago, IL: The Blakely Press, 1903–34), 1:viii. 57. Dictionary, 1:xi.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 213mense, but mistaken, confidence in his ability not to make mistakes.”58 Halkett and Laing also used a variety of specialist bibliographies, such as David Erskine Baker’s Biographia Dramatica for drama, William Up-cott’s Bibliographical Account for works on topography, Obadiah Rich’s Bibliotheca Americana Nova for books about the Americas, and Joseph Smith’s Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books for works by nonconform-ists.59 These bibliographies do not cite sources or explain their criteria for attribution, so there is no way to verify the evidence used. Not all bibliographies are scholarly, and a number of citations in the Dictionary come from bookseller catalogues—which are often biased in favor of attributing texts to well-known authors to help sell otherwise anonymous books. William Thomas Lowndes states that the purpose of his Bibliographer’s Manual is to provide “the Collector, the Author, and the Bookseller with a notice, in alphabetical order, under the names of their respective authors, of the principal works” in different subject areas, and he provides the most recent price at which the book was sold.60 The fact that he organizes his catalogue by author’s name demonstrates his bias in favor of identifying authors of texts. He praises Watt’s Biblio-theca and presumably used it as a source for attributions and other facts. Lowndes occasionally provides information about sources for attribution, but usually not.61 Bernard Quaritch’s Catalogue, also used as a source by Halkett and Laing, has a similar purpose as Lowndes’s catalogue and

58. Edward G. Holley, Charles Evans: American Bibliographer (Urbana, IL: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 1963), 213. 59. David Erskine Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket and others, 1764); William Upcott, A Bibliographical Account of the Principal Works Relating to English Topography, 3 vols. (London: Richard and Arthur Taylor, 1818); Obadiah Rich, Bibliotheca Americana Nova, or, A Catalogue of Books in Various Languages, Relating to America, 2 vols. (London: O. Rich, 1835); Joseph Smith, A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books, 2 vols. (London: Joseph Smith, 1867). 60. William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, 4 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1834), 1:vii; the 1865 edition (edited by Henry G. Bohn and published after Lowndes’s death in 1843) was expanded to six vol-umes. For an explanation of Bohn’s involvement, see George Watson Cole, “Do You Know Your Lowndes? A Bibliographical Essay on William Thomas Lowndes and Incidentally on Robert Watt and Henry G. Bohn,” PBSA 33 (1939): 1–22. 61. For example, see his entry for Halifax and its Gibbet Law Placed in a True Light (London, 1708), of which he says “The real author of this book was Dr. Samuel Midgley, after whose death James Bentley, clerk of Halifax Church, claimed the honour of it.—Halifax (1761),” (1:856).

Bibliographical Society of America214does not provide information about the sources for attributions.62 A number of entries in the Dictionary cite Book Prices Current, published annually from 1887 and listing books and auction prices, though it was never intended as a bibliographical reference.63 Halkett and Laing also made use of the catalogues of private libraries, such as those of Alexan-der Dyce and David Laing, but the compilers of these library catalogues do not explain the reasons behind their attributions.64

The very frequent use of library catalogues as sources is not surpris-ing considering Halkett and Laing’s positions as prominent and well-connected librarians—and such catalogues were also some of the most complete listings of titles, authors, and publication information available in the late nineteenth century. They account for 6,010 attributions in the Dictionary, or thirty-three percent of the pre-1800 entries. They are, in many cases, however, far from trustworthy in matters of attribution. The extensive use of such catalogues explains why the Dictionary often cites editions other than the first, and why the Dictionary so often cites mark-ings found only on a single copy of the work. The catalogues did not cite sources and gathered all types of information rather indiscriminately, frequently repeating suppositions, mistakes, and wishful thinking along-side genuine information about anonymous texts. The two major catalogues, the Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library catalogue, were massive collaborative projects like the DNB that came out in many volumes over a long period of time. Anthony Panizzi explains that the British Museum Catalogue was initially assembled quickly as the original plan was for each volume to be published as soon as it was complete: “consequently the early vol-umes must present omissions and inaccuracies, which, it is hoped, will diminish in number as the work proceeds.”65 The “rules” for cataloguing contain several important points about how attributions can be made

62. Bernard Quaritch, A General Catalogue of Books, Arranged in Classes (London, 1868). For an example of Quaritch cited as a source for attribution see the entry for The Present State of Russia (4:419). 63. For examples of this source used for pre-1800 texts see the entries for Here Be-gynneth a Devout Treatyse in Englysshe (3:29) and The Prophecy of the Andrée (4:443). 64. A Catalogue of the Printed Books and Manuscripts Bequeathed by the Reverend Alexander Dyce (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1875); Cata-logue of the Extensive and Valuable Library of the Late David Laing (London: So-theby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, 1879). 65. Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Museum, vol. 1 (London: J. B. Nichols, 1841), a1r.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 215and how they are marked in the catalogue: II. If the name be supplied in MS. the work must nevertheless be considered anonymous or pseudonymous, as the case may be, and the MS. addition deemed merely a suggestion to which the librarian will attach such importance as he may think proper, on his own responsibility, in supplying the author’s name between brackets.

XVI. In the case of doubt on this or any other point, when the librarian is direct-ed to supply any information in cataloguing, a note of interrogation to follow in such a position as to indicate clearly the point on which any doubt is entertained.

XXXII. Works published under initials, to be entered under the last of them; and should the librarian be able to fill up the blanks left, or complete the words which such initials are intended to represent, this to be done in the body of the title, and all the supplied parts to be included between brackets.

XXXIX. Whenever the name of the author of an anonymous publication is known to, or conjectured by, the librarian, the same to be inserted at the end of the title, between brackets.66

According to these rules, attributions can be made at the discretion of the librarian—trusting to manuscript notes in the library’s copy of the work, prior knowledge, or personal conjecture—but must be marked in the catalogue by being set off in brackets. This seems to have been done with regularity in the catalogue: for example, the catalogue lists “D. F. A.” as an author of a printed letter, and the entry indicates how the at-tribution is supplied by marking it “D[octor] F[rancis] A[tterbury?].”67 The question mark notably emphasizes that the attribution is a sugges-tion derived from the initials and perhaps the content of the work, not an assured fact. This marking distinguishes conjectural attributions from solid cases, as when the first name of a known author is supplied where only the last name appears on the printed text. At times the supplied name is placed in parentheses, not brackets, which may indicate that the attribution came from an external source or was widely acknowledged to be true. Regrettably, the librarians compiling the British Museum Catalogue did not continue to be scrupulous about attribution, and Halkett and Laing did not follow (or at least did not repeat) such markings of doubt

66. Catalogue of Printed Books, v–vii. 67. D. F. A.’s Vindication of the Bp. of Sarum, from being the Author of a Late Printed Speech (London: John Nutt, 1704). Catalogue of Printed Books, 1.

Bibliographical Society of America216as there are in the catalogue. Only this first volume of the initial cata-logue, containing the letter “A,” was printed in 1841, and then the enter-prise stopped. The librarian Richard Garnett explained that the problem was the continual need to insert more titles amongst those that had been recorded, and so the first real catalogue of the British Museum, complet-ed in 1851, was a compilation of 150 volumes of slips of paper that could be moved and reorganized. By the 1870s, Garnett reports, the librarians realized that at the present rate of addition, by the time they finished go-ing through the alphabet “there would be 9000 volumes of manuscript catalogue, three times as many as the Reading Room could contain, or the public conveniently consult.”68 When the catalogue finally went to press in 1881, as Garnett relates, “we are content with a single revise, and deliberately prefer systematic energy to minute accuracy.”69 Minor mistakes were apparently acceptable so long as the whole project stayed on schedule. They relied almost entirely on the handwritten catalogue, compiled over thirty years by many different librarians, did not check specific facts, and almost never indicated doubt in authorship or ex-plained the basis for an attribution. Other library catalogues were similarly problematic. The Bodleian catalogue was the first to be compiled, starting in 1605, and it is notori-ously inaccurate.70 According to Carolyn O. Frost, the 1620 Bodleian Catalogue was the first to be organized by author rather than subject, so “All too frequently, the question arises as to whether a work is actually ‘by’ an author or has been falsely ascribed to him,” though “The catalog, however, is not always consistent in choice of entry for such cases.”71 Later versions, in 1738 and 1843, repeated mistakes from the earlier cata-logues. Maximillian E. Novak, in writing of the problems in verifying Defoe attributions, comments that “The old Bodleian catalogue was more like something out of the fiction of Borges than a modern library

68. Richard Garnett, Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London: George Allen, 1899), 72. 69. Ibid., 80. On Garnett’s efforts to get the catalogue printed, see Barbara Mc-Crimmon, Richard Garnett: The Scholar as Librarian (Chicago, IL: American Li-brary Association, 1989), 82–91. 70. Reprinted as The First Printed Catalogue of the Bodleian Library, 1605: A Fac-simile (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 71. Carolyn O. Frost, “The Bodleian Catalogs of 1674 and 1738: An Examina-tion in the Light of Modern Cataloging Theory,” The Library Quarterly 46 (1976): 257–58.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 217catalogue.”72 This version of the Bodleian is precisely what had to have been employed by the compilers of the second edition of the Dictionary. Other library catalogues cited as sources in the Dictionary are similarly unverifiable: the catalogues of Advocates’ Library and the University of Edinburgh both adopt the policy of the British Museum Catalogue of placing supplied names in brackets, and they likewise do not provide any sources or reasons behind attributions for anonymous texts.73

The main problem with attributions based on library catalogues is that there is no way of verifying the evidence used to make a particular attribution. Attributions in the catalogue might be perfectly legitimate or they might be the result of misinformed or mistaken cataloguing, and there is often no way to tell. Halkett and Laing, and their successors editing the second edition of the Dictionary, unfortunately did not dis-tinguish between works that are assuredly attributed based on credible contemporary evidence and works that are attributed on the authority of an unknown librarian. If they derived an author’s name from a library catalogue, the library is listed as the source, whether it has parentheses, brackets, question marks, or no markings at all. They do not appear to have followed up on the origins for attributions derived from library catalogues. Along with library catalogues, Halkett and Laing also relied on their predecessors who added authors’ names to library copies of anonymous works (categorized as “MS” in Table 1). They trusted many annotated copies with no indication as to who wrote the name in or how reliable the source might be—often only commenting that it is “in a contemporary hand,” or simply trusting it at face value.74 Interestingly, they regularly

72. Maximillian E. Novak, review essay, “The Defoe Canon: Attribution and De-Attribution,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1996): 91. 73. Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1867–78); Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Li-brary of the University of Edinburgh, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1918–1923). Halkett and Laing also cite the catalogues of smaller libraries including the Aberdeen Public Library, the Manchester Free Library, and the Imperial Li-brary of Calcutta. On the parallel development of library catalogues in the United States and the problems with various forms of organizing such a catalogue, see Jim Ranz, The Printed Book Catalogue in American Libraries: 1723–1900 (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1964). 74. For an example of attribution based on “Attestation by a contemporary hand,” see The Present Interest of the People of Great Britain (1758?), attributed to Hugh Hume, the Earl of Marchmont (4:417).

Bibliographical Society of America218deduce from the handwriting which scholar wrote in the attribution, which in some cases may lend more credence to the claim. One of these who appears frequently is Anthony Wood, author of the Athenae Oxoni-ensis (1691), a biographical history of Oxford that is frequently cited by Halkett and Laing as a source for attributions.75 Wood’s contemporaries criticized the Athenae, both for its sometimes unflattering representa-tion of living people and its supposed Catholic leanings.76 However, Wood did have genuine inside knowledge about printed works of his day: Nicholas K. Kiessling explains that Wood had “personal acquain-tance with an extraordinary number of Oxford writers and thinkers” and “was on familiar terms with printers and publishers in Oxford.”77 Given this, we might trust his word on the authorship of publications of his own time, particularly political writings, more than we might trust a manuscript attribution from an unknown source. Other sources ear-lier than the nineteenth century who might be trusted as contemporary witnesses include Thomas Barlow, the late seventeenth-century librar-ian of the Bodleian, and his contemporary the antiquary Thomas Hyde, as well as the eighteenth-century antiquaries Richard Gough, Thomas Hearne, and the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, all of whom appear as “authorities” whose handwritten attributions on library copies are repeated by Halkett and Laing.78 Not all older authorities are equally trustworthy, however: the Dictionary also cites the writer Samuel Ireland as a trustworthy source, though he is now best known for having pub- 75. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols. (London, 1691). For an example of the Dictionary using it, see A Political Catechism (4:389). 76. Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself, ed. Andrew Clark, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891–1900), 3:365–95. 77. Nicholas K. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 2002), xii and xviii. 78. For examples of Halkett and Laing using the marginalia of these scholars as a source for attribution, see the entries for Observations upon the Ordinance of the Lords and Commons (5:228), Parliament’s Power in Lawes of Religion (4:302), Obedience and Submission to the Present Government (4:211), Phoenix Paulina: A Poem (4:286), and Ovid’s Banquet of Sence (4:286). On Gough, see Rosemary Sweet, “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2001): 181–206; on Hearne, see Theodorus Harmsen, Antiquarianism in the Augustan Age: Thomas Hearne, 1678–1735 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2000), and also Hearne’s autobiography, The Life of Mr. Thomas Hearne, of St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772); on Malone, see Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 219lished new works by “Shakespeare” that were in fact written by his own son.79

Attributions made by nineteenth-century scholars without explana-tion are even more suspect since they are that much further from the writers they are naming as authors of anonymous texts. Halkett and La-ing cite Alexander Dyce, David Laing (apparently unrelated to John Laing), and especially Henry Wheatley as sources for attributions of pre-1800 texts, with no indication as to why these scholars made a par-ticular attribution or any distinction between them and the earlier schol-ars like Wood, who did have more direct connection with the writers named.80 Dyce was a scholar and book collector who edited the works of several famous authors, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Pope, and David Laing was a book collector and head of the Signet Library in Edinburgh.81 Wheatley, the Librarian of the Royal Society, also edited the first full edition of Samuel Pepys’ diary, albeit bowdlerized.82 The at-tributions from Dyce and David Laing are mainly deduced from hand-written notes on library copies of anonymous works, while Wheatley’s attributions are from notes he made on slips of paper and then passed on to Halkett. All three were learned scholars who had access to a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, and they could conceivably have had very good reasons for the attributions they make. Without more information about the basis of an attribution, however, we should 79. On Ireland, see Bernard Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgery: The Auda-cious Career of William Henry Ireland (New York: Norton, 1965). See, for example, Shakespeare’s Manuscripts, in the Possession of Mr. Ireland (1796), attributed to Colo-nel F. Webb on the strength of “Author’s name in the handwriting of Samuel Ire-land” (5:242). 80. An attribution made on the basis of “The author’s name is in the handwriting of Dyce” is Rosina: A Comic Opera in Two Acts (1783), attributed to Frances Moore (5:141). The entry for Observations on the Bill for Sale of the Forfeited Estates (1718) cites “the author’s name in the hand-writing of Dr David Laing” as its source (4:218), and Wheatley is cited as the source for the attribution of The Observations of Newton Concerning the Inflections of Light (4:214). 81. The Poems of Shakespeare, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: William Pickering, 1832); The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols. (London: Wil-liam Pickering, 1850); The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1831). On David Laing, see Gilbert Goudie, Da-vid Laing, LL.D.: A Memoir of His Life and Literary Work (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1913). 82. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, transcribed by the Rev. Mynors Bright, with Lord Braybrooke’s Notes, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 9 vols. (London: George Bell, 1893–99).

Bibliographical Society of America220be very cautious about blindly accepting the word of a scholar working more than a century after the death of the putative author. The variety of sources used, and the apparent lack of discrimina-tion among them in trusting their attributions, means that any user of Halkett and Laing needs to investigate the evidence for particular cases. The Dictionary can be a valuable finding aid, guiding readers to earlier sources for attributions, but it should not be considered an authority for attribution in itself. In a surprising number of cases, the evidence is ei-ther not cited at all or simply so indeterminate as to be misleading. Some of the sources are legitimate primary or contemporary indications of au-thorship, but the vast majority of them, some ninety-seven percent, rely on evidence that modern scholars would not accept. The fact that these attributions have been repeated in scholarship, criticism, and other bib-liographies causes one to pause, but without tracing back the origins of these attributions we will not know which are really trustworthy, which are probable or likely, which are possible but should be treated with cau-tion, and which are unsubstantiated.

III. Four Types of Problematic Cases

The preface to the second edition of the Dictionary explains that it should be taken as “a jumping-off ground for further inquiry” rather than as a final source in itself.83 Here, I will take the editors up on their suggestion, and by tracing back the origins of attributions in the Diction-ary, examine four types of problems in order to show where the Dic-tionary can be helpful—and where its judgments mislead the reader. The first two types of problems (trusting initials or pseudonyms) stem from the assumption that an author of an anonymous text is identi-fied elsewhere as a writer and that he or she consistently uses the same pseudonym or set of initials. The third problem, the reliance on late attributions, is found throughout the Dictionary where Halkett and La-ing systematically prefer more modern “authorities” over older sources. The fourth problem, the lack of citation for famous works, is the main reason that spurious attributions are so often repeated without question. For each case, I will focus on a principal example that demonstrates the strengths and limitations of the Dictionary. I want to make very clear that I am not trying to argue for or against the attribution of any of the

83. Dictionary, 1:x.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 221texts mentioned below to the authors generally associated with them; I have chosen them because they clearly demonstrate the ways in which the attribution methods of Halkett and Laing may not hold up under scrutiny.

1. Initials leading to false dichotomies: “T. D.” as Dekker or Deloney Halkett and Laing frequently use initials as evidence that a certain author wrote a work, or cite the initials in support of an attribution made on a later authority. In some cases, a string of initials might be unique enough to a particular individual that they may be taken to indicate that person as the author. For example, Halkett and Laing cite the initials “T. R. D. J. S. D. O. P. I. I.” as meaning “The Reverend Doctor Jona-than Swift, Dean Of Patrick’s In Ireland.”84 This long string of letters is unlikely to stand in equally well for a phrase pointing to someone else, so we could trust that it is meant to indicate Swift if we see it on oth-er works. Most of the time, however, there are many possibilities, even among known authors, and when only the initials are given they might also refer to a writer not known from other works or be entirely pseud-onymous and not relate to the author’s real name. I have demonstrated elsewhere that the initials “A. B.” cannot be trusted to indicate Aphra Behn, as some scholars have claimed, for they along with “N. N.” are frequently used to indicate anonymity or to stand in for an author’s name that in fact has different initials.85 In the Dictionary, “T. D.” provides an interesting example of the problems that initials can cause for attribu-tion. The Dictionary lists seventeen different people employing the initials “T. D.” to stand for their name, and a further seven people who use “T. D.” with another initial for a middle name.86 Together, there are thirty-six works in the Dictionary attributed to at least one of these people on the strength of the initials “T. D.” How is one to know which person the initials indicate in any one instance? Some of the possible authors lived in different time periods, so the publication date of a work can narrow

84. Ibid., 4:88. 85. See Leah Orr, “Attribution Problems in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” Modern Language Review 108 (2013): 30–51. On these initials as unreliable, see Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 69; and Franklin B. Williams, Jr., “An Initiation into Initials,” Studies in Bibliography 9 (1957): 163–78. 86. For a list of authors using these initials, see the Dictionary, 7:404.

Bibliographical Society of America222down the possibilities: Thomas Durfey was active a century after Thom-as Dekker, so they are not easily confused. But among authors who are contemporaneous with each other, the difference between them is less certain. Dekker and Deloney, for example, are similar in many ways. They both wrote a variety of works in different genres and modes, have uncertain canons, did not authorize particular editions of their work, and wrote for publishers who produced cheap, short works for the lower economic tranches of the market. The criteria used to distinguish when “T. D.” could be Dekker and when it might be Deloney, therefore, are worth some investigation. The “T. D.” titles attributed either to Dekker or Deloney indicate that the primary criterion for the editors in determining which writer was meant is the genre of the work. Dekker is thought to have written primarily plays and pamphlets. The works attributed to Deloney are all poems or short fictions: The Garland of Good Will, The Royal Garland of Love and Delight, Jack of Newbery, Thomas of Reading, and fictional ac-counts of the “gentle craft” (shoemaking). This fits well with the assess-ment in Lowndes’ Bibliographer’s Manual, cited by Halkett and Laing in an entry for The Royal Garland, that Deloney is “mentioned by Kempe in his ‘Nine Days Wonder’ (1600) as ‘the great ballade-maker T. D. or Thomas Deloney, chronicler of the memorable lives of The six yeomen of the west, Jack of Newbery, The gentle craft, and such like honest men.’”87 William Kemp is a contemporary source, so he conceivably had some knowledge of Deloney and his writings.88 Confusingly, some of the Deloney fictions cited in the Dictionary have publication dates long after Deloney’s death in 1600—as much as a century afterwards—but these are not the first editions of the works. As Paul Salzman points out in his account of Deloney’s life, the early editions have often been “read out of existence” so that only the later editions survive.89 Thus, even works published more than thirty years after Deloney’s death, which have often been attributed to Dekker since he was still alive, could have been written by Deloney. Dekker, however, presents a different sort of problem from Deloney, in that much of his work is collaborative. The Virgin Martir (1622), for 87. Lowndes, Bibliographer’s Manual, 1:568. 88. See William Kemp, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (London: E. A. for Nicholas Ling, 1600), D3v. 89. Paul Salzman, “Thomas Deloney (d. in or before 1600),” ODNB, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/7463.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 223example, lists Philip Massinger along with Dekker on the title page, and The Roaring Girle (1611) names Thomas Middleton as well as Dekker. He chiefly wrote plays and pamphlets, so far as we know, but these ranged widely, and the content and purpose of the pamphlets is very diverse, meaning that we cannot dismiss possible authorship on the con-tent alone. One of the works, Jests to Make You Merie (1607) that Halkett and Laing attribute to Dekker on the strength of the initials “T. D.” is collaborative, between “T. D.” and George Wilkins.90 In the case of The Bloodie Banquet: A Tragedy (1639), Halkett and Laing comment that it is either by Dekker or Thomas Drue, and that “The authorship is a much vexed question, not likely to be definitely settled; it has been ascribed also to Robert Davenport, but on grounds insufficient to determine the point.”91 In addition to the complexity of Dekker’s known collaborative authorship, he often used existing stories as the basis for his plays, as with Old Fortunatus (1600) and Patient Grissel (1603). As an example of the confusion this can cause for attribution, his most famous play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), is also called The Gentle Craft—the same title that Deloney used for his account of several famous Tudor shoe-makers. The various possibilities for the initials “T. D.” listed in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) demonstrate how widespread the confu-sion can become if one trusts initials for attributions. Where “T. D.” is found in an imprint, the ESTC considers the initials as indicating the printer Thomas Dawson in at least three cases, as the bookseller T[homas] Downes in one case, and as the printer Thomas Daniel in another. In other instances, the initials are taken to mean Thomas Dewe, an editor; Thomas Drue, a supposed playwright; or Thomas Davidson, a music instructor. Two uses of the initials are supposed to stand for Thomas Davenport, three titles for Thomas Deloney, two for Thomas Dekker, and one for either Dekker or Deloney. Six other titles with the initials “T. D.” have no author listed in the ESTC. These possibilities are just among entries in the period 1580–1680. Clearly, the ESTC has no consistent method for determining who a particular “T. D.” might be, but they do seem to be following Halkett and Laing for the entries found also in the Dictionary. With such confusion, the suggestions for who might be the author behind the initials seem more distracting than

90. Dictionary, 3:187. 91. Ibid., 1:211.

Bibliographical Society of America224helpful—and without any information as to why sometimes “T. D.” is Dekker, sometimes Deloney, and sometimes Davenport, the reader can-not see why a particular author was chosen in each instance. Simply repeating the attributions of Halkett and Laing is not good enough, for few readers would check to see that the use of initials for attribution in the ESTC is so inconsistently applied. The example of Deloney and Dekker is indicative of three broader problems with the methodology of attribution in Halkett and Laing. First, initials can be misleading, and they are often assumed to relate to a person whose real name begins with those letters. Second, they lead to false dichotomies—the argument that a work like Canaan’s Calamitie is by either Deloney or Dekker, without any indication that it could be by one of the other people, known or otherwise unknown, writing under those initials. Finally, trusting initials exposes the problems with apply-ing a single-minded view of authorship to writers of the past, without recognizing the variety of collaborations and borrowings that occurred. Particularly for writers of cheap print products, like Dekker and De-loney, there was very little sense of obligation to originality or singularity of creative work. By assuming that the initials will stand for a single per-son who created the work from scratch, Halkett and Laing often mislead their readers.

2. Trusting pseudonyms indiscriminately: The case of “Robert Burton” Pseudonyms can be helpful in suggesting a possible author of a work, and if they are used consistently, they can be considered fairly reliable in determining authorship—though there is nothing to stop another writer from publishing under a famous pseudonym. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to deciphering pseudonyms and explaining the rea-sons authors would employ them: in addition to people who compiled dictionaries, like Cushing and Ralph Thomas, scholars such as William Prideaux Courtney, Archer Taylor and Fredric J. Mosher, and more re-cently John Mullan, have devoted book-length studies to the complexi-ties of pseudonyms.92 Taylor and Mosher comment that much of the 92. William Prideaux Courtney, The Secrets of Our National Literature: Chapters in the History of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Writings of Our Countrymen (Lon-don: Archibald Constable & Co., 1908); Archer Taylor and Frederic J. Mosher, The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma (Chicago, IL: Chicago Univer-sity Press for the Newbery Library, 1951); John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 2007).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 225bibliographical research is devoted either to enumerating anonymous works or known pseudonyms, or “the listing of unsolved secrets,” rather than attempting to trace back the real people behind pseudonyms—in other words, that it is collective rather than investigative.93 The second edition of the Dictionary, in fact, takes this collective approach towards the Letters of Junius, listing every author who has been suggested, no matter how improbable, and leaving judgment up to the reader as to which of the forty-six chief possibilities is the real writer.94 Mullan is interested mainly in the reasons behind pseudonyms, rather than par-ticular cases. Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary gives many real names for pseudonyms without any explanation, and the editors tend not to ques-tion the attributions made by their predecessors. The case of “Robert Burton” provides a good cautionary example of Halkett and Laing trusting that a pseudonym is used consistently and uniquely. In the entry to Admirable Curiosities, Rarities, and Wonders in England, Scotland, and Ireland (1682), Halkett and Laing explain that “The material in the many small books issued by Crouch was largely derived from works already in print; his productions, however, proved very popular and instructive. After his death, the pseudonym on some volumes is ‘Robert Burton’; his real name is given only at the end of the preface to his History of the Kingdom of Scotland (1813, 4to).” They cite the Bodleian Library catalogue, the Bibliotheca, and the DNB.95 The Bibliotheca explains that “Burton, Robert, or Richard, a name placed in the title pages of a number of books, published about the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, and sold by a Mr. Nath. Crouch, a bookseller, who is supposed to have written them himself; however, in the Bodleian catalogue, they are marked Burton, alias Crouch.” He lists thirty-five titles published under the pseudonym of Burton.96 Watt is therefore unwilling to say that Crouch is certainly Burton, and instead merely presents the information available from the title pages and the Bodleian catalogue. Halkett and Laing’s influence can be seen in the confidence with which subsequent bibliographers refer to the attribution. The DNB en-try on Burton says that his “real name was Nathaniel Crouch,” conclu-

93. Taylor and Mosher, Bibliographical History, 183. 94. Dictionary, 3:327–31. 95. Ibid., 1:35. 96. Watt, Bibliotheca Britannica, 1:176.

Bibliographical Society of America226sively naming Crouch as the real author of the books attributed to “Bur-ton” and even attributing two additional titles to him published under the initials “T. B.” and “S. B.”97 One problem with trusting “R. B.” or “R. Burton” as Crouch, of course, is that Robert Burton was the name of another writer, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The more recent ODNB even provides an explanation for why Crouch might choose the name of an Oxford scholar and erudite wit for his pseud-onym, saying that “The Anatomy became a best-seller partly because it translated hundreds of quotations from Greek and Latin into English, thereby giving many humbly educated men a passing knowledge of the classics. In similar fashion Crouch’s history books presented shortened and simplified versions of serious works to audiences that might other-wise never have read them.”98 This seems something of a stretch: while some of the works signed “R. B.” are digested from larger histories, many, like The Apprentice’s Companion (1681) and Delightful Fables in Prose and Verse (1691), are not summarized versions of more serious works. In Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary, there are many instances in which the editors explain the reason an author used a pseudonym or give details unrelated to attribution, rather than how they know that the pseudonym at hand was used by a particular author.99 In other cases, they explain how a pseudonym relates to the author, such as an anagram of the au-thor’s real name or other sort of code.100 As the prefatory “Notes on An-onymity and Pseudonymity” show, the editors of the Dictionary are very 97. William Edward Armytage Axon, “Burton, Robert or Richard, (1632?–1725?),” DNB, 8:14–5. The two additional works are Travels of Fourteen Englishmen (1672) and Relation of the Great Council of the Jews in Hungaria (1683). 98. Jason McElligot, “Crouch, Nathaniel [pseud. Robert Burton] (c.1640–1725?),” ODNB, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/52645. 99. For an example of an explanation for the reason for anonymity, see the entry for An Authentic History of the Professors of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1796), which explains that the supposed author “brought an action in the law-courts against William Gifford, who, in the ‘Baviad,’ had severely censured his writings” (1:163). For an example of details unrelated to attribution, see the entry for Hudibras Redivivus (1705), which explains only that “each volume contains 12 parts” and cites the Bodle-ian catalogue (3:113). 100. For an example of this, see the entry for The Pretie and Wittie Historie of Arnalt and Lucenda (1575), which is by “Claudius Hollyband”—a pseudonym that Halkett and Laing explain as a rough English translation of the writer Claude Desainliens, where “saint lien” is read as “holy band” (4:422). Another example is A Word or Two of Advice to William Warburton (1746), signed “A. E.,” which Halkett and Laing explain “are the vowels in Zachery Grey,” who they consider the real author (6:254).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 227concerned with “the motive which led to the suppression of the author’s name,” not in determining how we know that a particular pseudonym stands for the writer generally associated with it.101 While a unique false name probably stands for just one writer consistently, there are other pseudonyms that are far more common, and so are unhelpful in deter-mining even a group of texts written by the same writer: pseudonyms like “a young lady” are so general and widely used that they might as well be totally anonymous. Halkett and Laing identify 196 different people writing under the name “A Gentleman,” in which case the label seems to be completely useless in determining attribution. The whole idea of a dictionary listing pseudonyms and the real people behind them—as is found in the seventh volume of Halkett and Laing—presumes that pseudonyms are consistently used and have a one-to-one correspon-dence with known people. This is simply untrue, and leads us to assume that we can decode the use of pseudonyms, when in fact there is much about pseudonymous authorship that remains unknown and unknow-able.

3. Late attributions versus contemporary evidence: The Isle of Pines Halkett and Laing do not seem to have worried about when an attri-bution was first made. Horden emphasizes the primacy of contemporary evidence in his preface to the third edition, but Halkett and Laing ap-pear to consider late and contemporaneous attributions equally trust-worthy. By late attribution I mean here one that was made at least a half century after the author’s death, but before the present day—in the case of Halkett and Laing, those that are made after the supposed author’s death but before the early nineteenth century. If someone attributes a sixteenth-century text in the eighteenth century, we have no reason to believe that the person making the attribution had any direct connection with the putative author unless he or she cites documentary evidence or other reasons for the attribution (such as a letter from the author). With-out a direct connection of some sort, they can be considered no more trustworthy than a nineteenth- or twentieth-century scholar making the same claim. The Isle of Pines (1668), a work of narrative fiction, provides an ex-ample of late attributions in the Dictionary. The first edition of The Isle of Pines states ambiguously on the title page that it is “A late Discovery

101. Dictionary, 1:xi.

Bibliographical Society of America228of a fourth Island Near Terra Australis, Incognita, By Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten,” implying that Van Sloetten might either be the discoverer of the island or the author of the narrative.102 The subtitle confuses the issue of authorship further by claiming that it relates to a shipwreck of four women and a man, and was “written, and left by the Man himself a little before his death.” By way of preface, The Isle of Pines includes two letters about the arrival of the Dutch ship in England, signed by Abraham Keck, and the end of the narrative is signed by Van Sloetten.103 The Stationers’ Registers names only Allen Bankes and Charles Harper, the booksellers listed on the imprint.104 The second edition of The Isle of Pines, printed in 1768—a full century after the first edition—states on the title page that it is “By Henry Neville,” enclosing the attribution in square brackets.105 Neville’s name is not connected with The Isle of Pines in any earlier references to the narrative by title.106 Given the political nature of the work, the author would have reason for concealment, but this late attribution does not give any explanation for its source. The first and second editions of the Dictionary attribute the work to Henry Neville, citing an 1861 Notes and Queries article as evidence.107 This article, signed “W. S.,” cites the title and asks whether it is fact or fiction. An anonymous reply mentions the sequel and explains that “The author of the first (if not of the second) was Henry Neville, the second son of Sir Henry Neville of Billingbeare, co. Berks, and an active agent for republicanism.”108 The reply also cites Wood, who identifies Neville as the author without citing a source. This is not an implausible assumption: the republican ideas in The Isle of Pines are similar to those in Neville’s Plato Redivivus (1681). Still, Wood gives no indication of his reasons for attributing the work to Neville. Both were well-connected in political and literary circles, and Neville was an Oxford graduate, though

102. The Isle of Pines (London, 1668). 103. Ibid., A2v, E1v. 104. Stationers’ Registers, 2:388. 105. The Isle of Pines (London, 1768). 106. For references to The Isle of Pines, see John Dryden, The Kind Keeper; Or, Mr. Limberham (London, 1701), 24; Sir Thomas Craig, The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England (London, 1703), g1r; John Quick, A Serious Inquiry into that Weighty Case of Conscience (London, 1703), 17; and The Lord Bishop of Exeter’s Answer to Mr. Hoadly’s Letter (London, 1709), 18. 107. Dictionary, 1st ed., 2:1255; Dictionary, 3:177. 108. Notes and Queries, 2nd ser., 11 (1861): 212–13.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 229Wood does not mention in his diaries interacting with Neville in per-son.109 From this we can conclude that Halkett and Laing trusted the anonymous Notes and Queries entry, which in turn trusted the word of Wood, but no contemporaries other than Wood associated Neville with the work, and the edition bearing his name was published a hundred years after the first edition with no indication as to its source for the attribution. Since Halkett and Laing do not mention Wood, their at-tribution is based solely on the Notes and Queries entry and is not distin-guished from other late attributions. Given that nearly half of the works listed in the Dictionary contain attributions based on a later source, we must be cautious about accepting them without investigating the evi-dence and logic behind the attribution.

4. Trusting to received wisdom: Evidence for Smollett attributions Halkett and Laing demonstrate an alarming tendency to trust long-standard attributions, without investigating their origins or the solidity of the evidence. A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, Absalom and Achi-tophel, the Dunciad, and Lyrical Ballads are all attributed without citation in the Dictionary.110 As with these cases, there is often perfectly good evidence available, and Halkett and Laing apparently did not cite it ei-ther because they were not aware of it or because they considered the attribution beyond doubt. Sometimes, however, their reasons for decid-ing not to cite evidence are mysterious. In the case of the Robinson Cru-soe narratives, for example, the first two volumes, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), are attributed to Defoe without comment, though both are anonymous.111 By contrast, the Dictionary considers the third volume, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1722), to be “Wrongly attributed to Daniel Defoe,” citing Charles Knight’s Shadows of the Old Booksellers.112 In fact, Knight does not deny that Defoe wrote Serious Reflections, but instead simply comments that “In 1722 there was a third volume published” and that Thomas Gent was responsible for the “abridgment of three volumes of 109. Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Henry Neville (1620–1694),” ODNB, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19941. See note 76 above. 110. Attributed to John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Word-sworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, respectively. Dictionary, 4:31, 1:6, 2:125, and 3:411. 111. Dictionary, 3:353 and 2:268. 112. Ibid., 5:228.

Bibliographical Society of America230Crusoe into one.”113 Knight’s concern with attribution here is to argue that Gent created the abridgement, not that he wrote Serious Reflec-tions. Since Knight’s comment refers to all three Crusoe books, and the basis for attribution of both Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections is the same, some indication of why Halkett and Laing consider Farther Adventures to be safely attributed when Serious Reflections is not would be helpful. While scholars are well aware of the problems with Defoe attributions, Halkett and Laing’s similar treatment of Tobias Smollett demonstrates the difficulty with trusting to received wisdom even in more solid cases. In the Dictionary, Smollett is named as the author of sixteen dif-ferent works. Five of these, including Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), and Humphry Clinker (1771), are attributed based on the title page claim that they are “By the author of Roderick Random.”114 Yet the evidence cited for Smollett’s authorship of Roderick Random is the British Museum Catalogue.115 Roderick Random, as with the other fictions attributed to Smollett, was published anonymously and went through several editions without his name on it. In fact, the first edition to name an author is the French translation published by John Nourse in 1762, which says that it is “Traduites de l’Anglois de Fielding”—not Smollett.116 Since the French preposition “de” can mean both “by” and “of,” this might mean either “translated from the English of Fielding” or “translated from the English by Fielding,” but as Field-ing had died eight years before, the phrase is more likely meant to imply that he is the author of the original English work. Smollett’s name only appears on the title page of his fiction in 1767, when the fourth edition of Sir Launcelot Greaves, printed in Cork, says that it is “By Tobias Smol-lett, M. D., Author of Roderick Random, &c. &c.”117 Subsequent editions continued to be printed anonymously until they were included in The

113. Charles Knight, Shadows of the Old Booksellers (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865), 92. 114. Dictionary, 1:41, 1:42, and 2:238. The other two are a translation of Gil Blas (1:41) and The Regicide: Or, James the First of Scotland, a Tragedy (1749, 5:53). The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle also says on its title page that it is “By the author of Roderick Ran-dom,” but the Dictionary does not repeat this (1:42). 115. Dictionary, 1:42. 116. Aventures de Roderik Random, 2 vols. (London, 1762). 117. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (Cork, 1767).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 231Selected Works of T. Smollett in 1776—five years after his death.118 The fiction was successful enough to be reprinted regularly, but Smollett ap-parently did not put his name on the title page in his lifetime. Other attributions to Smollett in the Dictionary either cite later sec-ondary sources or have no source citation at all. The entry for A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Arts that were Lately Practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding (1752), attributed on the title page to “Draw-cansir Alexander,” cites the DNB as the source for attributing the work to Smollett.119 Baker names Smollett as the author of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, as well as the translator of Gil Blas (1748) and Don Quixote (1755), but Halkett and Laing cite Baker only as the source for The Reprisal, Or, The Tars of Old England (1757).120 Thus, even though they were clearly aware of Baker’s entry on Smollett, which identified him as the author of several anonymous works within his lifetime, they prefer either to cite no source or to cite a later source like the DNB as the basis for attribution. Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica is the source for the attribution of two satiric poems, Advice (1746) and Reproof (1747).121 Only one work, A Journal of the Expedition to Cartha-gena (1744), is marked in the Dictionary as being tentatively attributed to Smollett, with a question mark after his name, and a reference to the British Museum Catalogue.122 This probably derives from a comment in the short “account” of his life that prefaces the 1790 collection of his works, which says that “He is supposed to have been the editor of ‘A Compendium of authentic Voyages, digested in a chronological series,’ 7 vo. 12mo. published in 1756; amongst which is inserted a short narra-tive of the expedition to Carthagena, 1745.”123 An explanation as to why this item is doubtfully attributed while others citing the same source are solidly attributed would be helpful. With the Smollett entries, and in the Dictionary more broadly, eighteenth-century sources for attribution are only cited when there is no later source available—the opposite of the practice of more modern bibliographies, including the third edition of Halkett and Laing. In many cases of works that have a long association with a particular famous or canonical author, the Dictionary, madden-ingly, does not give any information about the basis for the attribution. 118. The Selected Works of T. Smollett, 8 vols. (Dublin, 1776). 119. Dictionary, 2:256; Thomas Seccombe, “Tobias Smollett,” DNB, 53:176. 120. Baker, Companion 2, 2F6r. Dictionary, 5:99. 121. Watt, Bibliotheca Britannica, 2:866. Dictionary, 1:43 and 5:99. 122. Dictionary, 3:200. 123. The Miscellaneous Works of Tobias Smollett, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1790), 1:i, note a.

Bibliographical Society of America232IV. The DICTIONARY in the ESTC and Other Sources

By now I hope the reader is persuaded that Halkett and Laing are not altogether trustworthy, and that their methods for attributing texts and system of documenting sources would not be acceptable by modern scholarly standards. Yet my purpose here is not simply an investigation of the practices of our predecessors: the implications of this analysis are wide-reaching, both in the direct influence of Halkett and Laing on current bibliographies and in what this analysis has to say about more modern attribution methods. An alarming number of currently stan-dard reference works either cite the Dictionary or cite other sources for attributions that rely on it, often without any sense of the basis for the attribution or its reliability. Attributions from Halkett and Laing can be found in criticism, bibliographies, and electronic databases, and few users of these resources would likely go back to the Dictionary to trace an attribution to its origins. Here, I will survey different places and ways that Halkett and Laing is used in order to show how widespread its in-fluence is on scholarship that does not deal specifically with attribution. While some scholars consult the Dictionary directly, others rely on its conclusions indirectly by using resources that trust it. The ESTC cites it as evidence for attribution for 353 different titles (not counting reprints or revised editions) and likely uses it or sources that rely on it for many other attributions without citation. In many of these entries the ESTC does not repeat the sources Halkett and Laing cite (if any), nor does it distinguish between those made on contemporary evidence and those relying on nineteenth-century sources alone.124 For example, in the case of The Red Sea (1666), attributed to Richard Head by the ESTC on the basis of the Dictionary, Halkett and Laing are relying on the mid-nine-teenth-century catalogue of Philip Bliss’s library.125 The catalogue does not cite any source for the attribution, and since the object of printing the list of books in Bliss’s collection was to sell them, the compilers of the catalogue may have been biased in favor of attributing anonymous works to known authors in order to increase their value. Without more

124. For example, see An Invention of Engines of Motion Lately brought to Perfection (1651), attributed to Cressy Dymock by the ESTC though Halkett and Laing does not cite any source at all (3:169). 125. Dictionary 5:40. Catalogue of the First Portion of the Extensive, Interesting, and Valuable Library, formed by the Late Rev. Philip Bliss (London: J. Davy and Sons, 1858), 149.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 233information, we really cannot trust this attribution fully—yet there is no indication of doubt in the ESTC entry, nor information about the source cited by Halkett and Laing. The multifarious nature of the ESTC, much like the Dictionary, is worth noting as its assemblage over many decades, with information drawn from a variety of sources, contributes to some of the issues I have found in its attributions. The ESTC is an enormous undertaking, and at present (2013) it contains some 460,000 works.126 It was begun in the 1970s and has adapted to changing technologies including microfilm and microfiche, computerized catalogues (OPACs), CD-ROM publi-cation, and most recently the explosion of material available on the In-ternet. The bulk of entries in the ESTC is compiled from three previous publications: the Pollard and Redgrave Short-Title Catalogue (pre-1640), the Wing Short-Title Catalogue (1641–1700), and the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (1701–1800).127 These resources, much like Halkett and Laing, were formatted to accomodate space restrictions inherent in print (and thus often abbreviated sources or eliminated citations alto-gether), and also drew heavily on prior sources like the British Museum Catalogue. Complicating matters, each of the three had different policies and methods for citing sources and determining attribution. Given such a varied history, it is not surprising that the ESTC is not completely transparent as to when it relies on Halkett and Laing to at-tribute the primary author of the work, or when it employs another re-source to identify a different author. Here is an example of the confusion caused by inconsistencies in the ESTC ’s use of Halkett and Laing. The ESTC lists Richard Duckworth as the author of the second edition of Tintinnalogia: Or, The Art of Ringing (1671), citing Halkett and Laing, and commenting that the work “Has also been attributed to Thomas White and to Fabian Stedman,” without explaining the basis for these

126. From the ESTC homepage, accessed 8 July 2013. <www.estc.bl.uk> 127. Alfred W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, with W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91); Donald Goddard Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged, 4 vols. (New York: Index Committee of the Mod-ern Language Association of America, 1972–98). The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (London: The British Library, 1990).

Bibliographical Society of America234attributions. Halkett and Laing actually attribute Tintinnalogia to “T. W[hite],” and in turn cite H. T. Ellacombe, who makes the White at-tribution and also says that Fabian Stedman wrote Campanalogia, or the Art of Ringing Improved (1677).128 The ESTC entry for the first edition of Tintinnalogia (1668) lists Stedman as the author but says that Halkett and Laing attribute it to Thomas White. To clarify, Halkett and Laing attribute Tintinnalogia to White, and the evidence they cite attributes it to White and names Stedman as the author Campanalogia. The ESTC, however, cites Halkett and Laing as the source for the Duckworth attri-bution in the entry for one edition of Tintinnalogia, and in another entry for the same title cite Halkett and Laing as the source but actually name Stedman—whom Ellacombe names as the author of Campanalogia. In this example, the ESTC is not only inconsistent in entries for different editions of the same work, but it also does not accurately represent the information in the Dictionary even when citing it as the source for the attribution. Tracing back the sources of the attributions does not explain who wrote Tintinnalogia or where these possibilities came from: neither the ESTC, Halkett and Laing, nor Ellacombe name any evidence to support Duckworth, Stedman, or White as the author of Tintinnalogia. The problems with the ESTC are well known—Blayney has argued convincingly that the print STC cannot be completely relied on even for bibliographical information found on title pages—but the extent of the problems of authorship attribution has not been investigated.129 As Rob-in C. Alston points out, assembling the ESTC was such a monumental task that no one will re-do it in the foreseeable future.130 Knowing that many entries in the ESTC rely on the Dictionary means that scholars need to investigate the origins of every attribution they use from the ESTC, not just those that cite Halkett and Laing specifically. A search of Early English Books Online (EEBO) pulls up more than seven hundred

128. Dictionary 6:54. H. T. Ellacombe, Notes and Queries, 1st ser., 9 (1854): 240–41. 129. Peter W. M. Blayney, “STC Publication Statistics: Some Caveats,” The Li-brary 7th ser., 8 (2007): 387–97 and “The Numbers Game,” 353–407. David McKit-terick explains the connection between the print STC and the electronic ESTC in “‘Not in STC’: Opportunities and Challenges in the ESTC,” The Library 7th ser., 6 (2005): 178–94. 130. Robin C. Alston, “The History of ESTC,” Age of Johnson 15 (2004): 269–329. For a more optimistic take on the ESTC’s history and uses, see The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future, ed. Henry Leonard Snyder and Michael S. Smith (New York: AMS Press, 2003).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 235entries that cite the Dictionary, nearly all derived from the ESTC (on which EEBO based its bibliographical information). Eighteenth-Centu-ry Collections Online (ECCO) does not cite sources for attributions, but since it is also based on the ESTC it too must ultimately derive attribu-tions from Halkett and Laing. Stephen Tabor has demonstrated that EEBO and ECCO not only repeat citation information from the ESTC, but also often introduce new errors.131 Without further investigation into the origins of attributions in these databases, the problems of the Dictionary will continue to be repeated—and scholars need to be aware of the problems in the sources on which they rely. Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary is not only employed by the ESTC, it is also trusted for attributions in many scholarly and critical works—even those that do not cite it specifically. For the most part, scholars who cite the Dictionary directly recognize its problems and accordingly treat it as an unreliable source for attributions. Yet many scholars who subsequently cite research based on the Dictionary do not realize that the information actually comes from Halkett and Laing and may or may not have sufficient factual evidence to warrant confidence. Just as Halkett and Laing did not reproduce many of the question marks on entries they encountered in the British Museum Catalogue, scholars are less likely to repeat indications of doubt if they believe the attribution is sound, and subsequent researchers may not realize that there was ever doubt at-tached to the case. Among scholars who cite Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary, most seem to trust the single volume of the third edition as being fairly secure in its attributions but refer to the second edition when pointing out problems. Michael J. Marcuse gives the cursory assessment in his reference guide that the Dictionary’s second edition “is still regarded as the best source for identifying authors of anonymous and pseudonymous English litera-ture” and that “Sources of attributions are often given.”132 Scholars mak-ing attribution arguments, such as Daniel Eilon on Swift or Frederick G. Ribble on Fielding, cite it to mention that a work was not included in Halkett and Laing—implying that the attribution of the Dictionary would have some weight if the work were included.133 Some scholars do 131. Stephen Tabor, “ESTC and the Bibliographical Community,” The Library 7th ser., 8 (2007): 367–86. 132. Michael J. Marcuse, A Reference Guide for English Studies (Berkeley, CA: Cali-fornia UP, 1990), 76. 133. Daniel Eilon, “Did Swift Write A Discourse on Hereditary Right?” Modern Philology 82 (1985): 375. Frederick G. Ribble, “New Light on Henry Fielding from the Malmesbury Papers,” Modern Philology 103 (2005): 75n83.

Bibliographical Society of America236cite the second edition of the Dictionary in order to point out problems with it. Timothy Whelan comments that “Halkett and Laing confuse the two” different authors named William Fox that he analyzes, and Jo-hanna Devereaux explains that a false attribution to Mary Astell is per-petuated because “the 1926 edition of Samuel Halkett and John Laing’s Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature includes both Astell and Drake’s names in the entries for the Essay,” which was then repeated by EEBO and the ESTC.134 Geoffrey M. Sill cites an ex-ample of the DNB mistakenly attributing a work to Benjamin Hodges, and comments that “Upon this statement seem to rest all subsequent at-tributions of the Impartial History to Hodges, including the key ones in Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary” and Gough’s sale catalogue.135 Here, Sill considers Halkett and Laing a significant enough source that the mis-taken attribution it repeats from the DNB would be disseminated wide-ly. Scholars who cite the second edition of the Dictionary are generally not doing so when using it as an authoritative source for an attribution. There are other print resources besides scholarly studies on individual topics that either use the Dictionary as a source for attributions or em-ploy similar attribution practices. The single published volume of the third edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature uses it as a source.136 Many bibliographies of individual authors, surprisingly, do not discuss attribution in much detail, but are chiefly concerned with reporting the exact titles and numbers of editions of each work without investigating how it first became attached to the author. Even when they have a strict attributional policy, it is often not employed consistently in practice: John Robert Moore declares in the preface of his bibliography of Defoe that “A considerable number are included here in a borderland of partial uncertainty, and I have marked each of these with a star”—but only thirteen items out of 566 are in fact starred.137 Some bibliographies 134. Timothy Whelan, “William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2009): 407. Johanna Devereaux, “‘Affect-ing the Shade’: Attribution, Authorship, and Anonymity in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27 (2008): 23. 135. Geoffrey M. Sill, “The Authorship of An Impartial History of Michael Serve-tus,” PBSA 87, no. 3 (1993): 313. 136. Joanne Shattock, The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 4, 1800–1900, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), xiii. 137. John Robert Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe, 2nd ed. (Ham-den, CT: Archon, 1971), ix. The problems with Moore’s attribution policies were explored in P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London: Hambledon Press, 1994).

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 237avoid the problem of attribution by not discussing it, even when the reader might like more information. Such is the case with M. L. Pearl’s bibliography of William Cobbett (Pearl does cite later collected edi-tions of works originally published anonymously), and Geoffrey Keynes’ bibliography of John Donne, though many of the poems he names were first attributed posthumously.138 Scholars studying writers like Cobbett (who frequently published in periodicals and was inconsistent about at-tribution), or Donne (whose work circulated in manuscript form as well as print), need to acknowledge the basis for attributing each text before making critical arguments that depend on correct attributions. Today there is little doubt as to the Donne canon, but the circumstances for publication alone do not give reliable evidence for all attributions. In all these cases, the bibliographies largely coincide with the entries for the relevant authors in Halkett and Laing, including works later de-attrib-uted on the basis of insufficient evidence. If these scholars were not us-ing the Dictionary, they were using the same sources (library catalogues, later secondary sources, marginalia on individual copies) to determine authorship. One example of a modern bibliography that succeeds in looking be-yond Halkett and Laing to uncover the original basis for attribution is Thomas James Holmes’ bibliography of Cotton Mather.139 Holmes does not cite Halkett and Laing but is careful instead to document the reason behind each attribution. For example, for the pamphlet called The Angel of Bethesda (1722), Halkett and Laing cite Cushing’s Initials and Pseud-onyms (1885) as the source for the Mather attribution.140 Rather than cite Cushing, Holmes explains that the attribution comes from Samuel Mather’s list of his father’s works and notes a letter from Mather to John Winthrop that mentions the pamphlet and discusses the printing of it.141 Mather presents a particularly difficult attribution case because he published many anonymous books and pamphlets over the course of nearly five decades, in both England and America, worked with a variety

138. M. L. Pearl, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of His Life and Times (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953); Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). The first collected edition of Donne’s poetry was published in 1633, two years after his death. 139. Thomas James Holmes, Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1940). 140. Dictionary, 1:80. 141. Holmes, Bibliography, 40.

Bibliographical Society of America238of publishers and booksellers, and employed a style widley imitated by other contemporary writers. In addition to scholarly books citing Halkett and Laing as the source for attribution, there are a number of electronic sources besides the ESTC that employ it. The electronic Oxford Dictionary of National Bi-ography, like its predecessor, is a complex and collaborative enterprise in which entries are written by individual scholars. At least twenty-one entries cite the first or second edition of the Dictionary as a source for attributions. In one entry, on Ebenezer Rhodes, the author points out the discrepancy between the attributed work and Rhodes’ known works: “Halkett and Laing attribute, in the Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseud-onymous English Literature, to Rhodes Alfred (1789), a tragedy about King Alfred, to which was added some poems, but Rhodes is chiefly remem-bered as a topographer.”142 Despite these doubts, the work is included in the ODNB as being by Rhodes. A number of library catalogues in addition to the British Library In-tegrated Catalogue also use Halkett and Laing. The electronic Bodleian Library catalogue, for example, for example, has 247 entries that contain the search phrase “Halkett and Laing.” Nearly all of these cite the Dic-tionary as a source for the attribution used in cataloguing. These include well-known works such as The Adventures of David Simple (1744), attrib-uted to Sarah Fielding. The relevant entry in the Dictionary cites a “note in the hand-writing of Dyce” claiming that “This work was written by Sarah Fielding, sister of the great novelist,” and citing “Mrs Piozzi’s Autobiography.”143 This in turn refers in passing to “‘David Simple,’ an old novel composed by Dr. Collier’s sister, who was dead before I knew him, in conjunction with Sally Fielding, whose brother was the author of ‘Tom Jones.’”144 Thus in this example, there really is a contemporary claim (or nearly so) to Sarah Fielding’s authorship, but there is no indi-cation of the basis for the attribution in the Bodleian catalogue. The problem with relying on the Bodleian catalogue to report at-tributions that have basis in fact is that there is no indication even as to which entries citing Halkett and Laing can be traced to some earlier source and which cannot. In most cases the reason for the attribution 142. Charlotte Fell-Smith, rev. Elizabeth Baigent, “Ebenezer Rhodes (1762–1839), topographer,” ODNB, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23450. 143. Dictionary, 1:40. 144. Hester Thrale Piozzi, Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains, ed. A. Hayward, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1861), 2:29.

Halkett and Laing: History, Uses, and Dangers 239is not apparent at all from the catalogue entry: for Letters on the State of Education in Ireland (1825), for example, the catalogue says that the Dictionary identifies James Warren Doyle as the author though the title page says it is “By J. K. L.” The entry for this work in the Dictionary cites the Bodleian Library catalogue, making any effort to trace the source of this attribution nearly impossible.145 The most famous work of Anthony Richard Blake, Thoughts upon the Catholic Question (1828)—a work that was influential in passing the Catholic Relief Act of 1829—is likewise attributed in the Bodleian catalogue on the basis of Halkett and Laing, with no explanation. The entry in the Dictionary cites the British Mu-seum Catalogue, also with no information about any earlier basis for the attribution.146 When library catalogues and Halkett and Laing cite each other as the source for the same attribution, there is no way for scholars to trace back the origins of the attribution or judge its reliability. Fully a third of the entries in the Dictionary rely on library catalogues as their source, so we should be particularly cautious given this dangerous prac-tice of reflexive cross-referencing that obscures the original reasons for making an attribution.

* * * Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary remains an important if treacherous source for the attribution of works of English literature from the origins of print to the twentieth century. Although few scholars now consult it directly, its influence persists in widely-used sources like ESTC and the databases that rely on it. Investigation into the long history of the nine-volume second edition reveals that it was conceived essentially as a list of anonymous and pseudonymous literature. The compilers tried where possible to cite later authorities rather than explaining the origins of par-ticular attributions since their primary aim was not to judge attributions but to report the information available. Halkett and Laing never intend-ed the Dictionary to be a stand-alone source for attributions but rather a finding aid that would point to other reference works. Unfortunately, the Dictionary seems almost from the start to have been used by librarians and scholars alike as the standard resource for attributions of anonymous works—a purpose for which it was not designed. As early as the original DNB, the first edition of the Dictionary was treated as authoritative in its own right, not just as a compendium of a wide variety of unchecked sources. 145. Dictionary, 3:338. 146. Ibid., 6:42.

Bibliographical Society of America240 Where does this leave us? This is not a completely hopeless situation. Present-day scholars must be aware of whether a work was originally published anonymously, and if so, the basis for the attributions made by the ESTC and other sources. Many attributions provided by Halkett and Laing may be perfectly trustworthy, but in other cases the evidence might be suggestive rather than definitive, or altogether unreliable. At-tributions made in the nineteenth century using evidence that would not be considered acceptable today should not be trusted without further investigation. As I have tried to demonstrate in this article, the evidence for even some very famous works does not hold up under scrutiny. If we insist on accuracy and proof in literary scholarship, we need to be pre-pared to challenge longstanding tradition and received wisdom. Halkett and Laing’s Dictionary was never meant to be an authoritative source of attributions in its own right, and it should never have been treated that way.147

147. I am grateful to Robert D. Hume, Jonathan Pritchard, David Wallace Spiel-man, Patricia Gael, and Julian Fung for helpful comments on drafts of this essay.