Kevin Murphy - Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print

Henry Walton, A Girl Buying a Ballad , ca 1778. (oil on canvas 921 717 mm). Courtesy of Tate, London.

Acknowledgments

T he editors have accumulated a number of debts of gratitude, which we would like to acknowledge here. This volume represents work begun in the seminar on broadside ballads at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2005 taught by Ruth Perry, who inspired our ongoing collaboration. In 2009, we taught a seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center on ephemera in the long eighteenth century, the funding for which was kindly provided by William P. Kelly, president of the Graduate Center. Two of the research projects developed in that seminar are presented here. Most of the essays in this volume began as presentations in an international symposium we organized at the CUNY Graduate Center with the support of the John Rewald Endowment of the PhD Program in Art History, which also provided a subvention for this publication. Paula McDowells contribution to this volume was previously published in Book History and is reproduced here with the kind permission of that journal.

The editors greatly appreciate the efforts of Greg Clingham at Bucknell University Press and Brooke Bascietto at Rowman & Littlefield to bring this book to publication.

Kevin D. Murphy and Sally ODriscoll

Introduction: Fugitive Pieces and Gaudy Books: Textual, Historical, and Visual Interpretations of Ephemera in the Long Eighteenth Century

Kevin D. Murphy and Sally ODriscoll

There is, perhaps, no Nation, in which it is so necessary, as in our own to assemble, from Time to Time, the small Tracts and fugitive Pieces, which are occasionally published: For, besides the general Subjects of Enquiry, which are cultivated by us: in common with every other learned Nation, our Constitution in Church and State naturally gives Birth to a Multitude of Performances, which would either not have been written, or could not have been made publick in any other Place.

Samuel Johnson

A ny modern scholar of eighteenth-century ephemera is familiar with the gut-wrenching arbitrariness that determines which of the fugitive pieces mentioned by Samuel Johnson in his introduction to The Harleian Miscellany survived and whichhow many we will never knowblew away in the litter of a London gutter or faced some even more ignominious end. Even eighteenth-century collectors were fully aware of the fragility of the material they saved: Bishop Percy told the story of how he snatched a manuscript from the hands of a maid in his friends house in Shropshireshe was using it to light fires, but for him it became the basis of his extraordinarily popular Reliques of Ancient Poetry ; Samuel Pepys left careful instructions in his will for the disposition of his collection, worrying about its survival. Modern commentators describe the fate of much cheap print: it ended up lining pie plates or finding a use in the privy. This is the material reality of ephemeral texts: they were produced in vast quantities, they mattered very much at the moment they were distributed, and then they became rubbish. Every time a modern scholar pores over a particularly significant example, the question of whether it is representative or anomalous looms, and is necessarily relegated to the realms of the unanswerable.

The problems associated with the study of ephemera are dauntingand thus this book, a collection of essays that acknowledge the realities: the ubiquity of ephemeral texts, the special qualities of their materiality, their visual and linguistic content, and the extraordinary influence they exerted in the political, religious, and social world. Together, these essays take a step toward a truly interdisciplinary account of eighteenth-century ephemera, by focusing first on the logic of categorization that constructs the very concept of ephemera itself, then on the unique interplay of text and image that marks so much of the material. The broadside ballad, the popular format in which visual and literary signification most crucially intertwine, is thus a focus of much of the work in this volume.