Circulation

Abstract

In his satire A Tale of a Tub, Swift’s hack persona celebrates ‘so blessed an Age for the mutual Felicity of Booksellers and Authors’. This chapter asks: was this indeed such an age? Unambiguous production data are hard to establish, and the jagged uptrend seen in annual totals of surviving books must be interpreted with care. The commercialized print culture for which Swift’s hack speaks was in the ascendant, but scribal publication also flourished, alongside a manuscript culture of amateur authorship and coterie transmission. Legislative landmarks such as the abolition of Star Chamber (1641) and the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695) suggest that official censorship was in slow retreat. Yet press control was ferociously enforced by Roger L’Estrange during the Restoration era, and Defoe’s 1703 pillorying for seditious libel brought home to him that the end of pre-publication censorship made authorship no less hazardous now than before.