Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Verse Miscellanies and the Print-Manuscript Interface

This essay argues for an expansion of the work of book history at the interface between the magazine and the personal verse miscellany. The manuscript verse miscellany was a widely practiced genre in the eighteenth century but has remained largely invisible to scholars. The genre forms an archive of interest for, among other things, how it adapts to, and exploits, the newly developed eighteenth-century print form of the periodical, especially the magazine. Existing at the intersection of new print forms and established strategies of literary production and networking through manuscript exchange, the verse miscellany reveals how readers, many of them women, "hacked" printed poetry that offered private, transferable affect that they could then repurpose to their own ends. One product of this dynamic exchange is a countercanon of manuscript-based poetry that varies significantly from the established print canon.