Production Values: Gender, Authorship, and the Print Trade in England, 1660-1760

This dissertation is an attempt to recover the material contributions of print workers to the production of texts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Through close readings of narratives by these workers about their trade, I argue that print products were once understood to be the result of the collaboration of many hands, of which the writer was merely one among many. I then trace the struggle for textual agency that ensued as the discourse of the author-as-owner slowly gained currency around the mid-eighteenth century, evacuating print workers from the imagined scene of textual creation. Central to my analysis is an examination of the ways in which the print trade, in formulating a counter-discourse to proprietary authorship, deployed ideologies of gender and sexuality in their representations of their rights and responsibilities. My chapters include readings of Joseph Moxon's and John Smith's printer's manuals; bookseller John Dunton's autobiography; Samuel Richardson's Pamela, his continuation, and its unauthorized sequels; tracts on censorship, legal documents from seditious libel trials, and descriptions of the role of women workers in the print trade.