Naming Names: Steele and Swift

In the early eighteenth century authors did not like to reveal their identities. Most texts, whether for polite or popular audiences, appeared anonymously, and a glance at the original title-pages of the works of, say, Addison, Defoe and Pope well illustrates this general reticence. Readers of all ranks were therefore often faced with the fundamental problem of attribution as they sought to make sense of the words in front of them. Moreover, as authors were aware that, as one wit put it, ‘the man is certainly mad, and fit only for the College in Moorfields [Bedlam], who when he commences Writer, expects not to be enquired after’,1 so naturally they adopted many counter-strategies that both excited curiosity and compounded the readers’ difficulties. Not least among these subterfuges was the widespread use of false identities. As authors invented and adopted names, titles, pseudonyms and voices (counterfeiting the identities of friend and foe, alive or dead, with irony and parody), it was seldom ever clear to anyone which hand, if one alone, had penned a composition. Nor did the activities of pure plagiarists, interfering editors and pirate publishers advance the chances of detection.