This essay looks at satires of the literary marketplace written by three non-elite female poets: Mary Barber (1685–1755), Mary Jones (1707–78), and Elizabeth Hands (1746–1815). Writing outside the urban marketplace and living with heightened financial precarity, these women did not market their volumes directly in a London commercial space. Rather, these poets sold their collections by subscription, cultivating potential patrons, subscribers, and readers through personal connections across provincial, non-London networks. Their rich satires draw on the keenly felt challenges of attracting a sufficient number of subscribers, a process that essentially moves the public literary marketplace into more private, often domestic, space shaped by individual relationships and social networks. A distinctly different kind of literary satire results, one focused on private interactions, particular utterances, and domestic gatherings. This essay examines satiric poems by Barber, Jones, and Hands, and suggests that the female poet’s perspective gained from their proximity produces effective satire both of the specific individuals the women encounter and of the cultural attitudes those individuals represent. Within the very material object marking these women’s success – the published volume in the reader’s hands – these four verse satires document the precarity of their situation and their perilous path to publication by subscription.

In the first season of Outlander, Starz's 2014 series based on Diana Gabaldon's time-travel novel of the same title, the Scottish Highlander hero Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) in the 1743 narrative is flogged by the British army offi- cer Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall (Tobias Menzies). Within the context of the series, the graphic brutalization of the improbably buff and hairless body of Jamie is told in flashback, prompted when the time-traveling nurse Claire (Caitriona Balfe) asks about the scars on his back. The flogging, a scene showrunner Ronald Moore describes as “truthful and awful, without being gratuitous,” powerfully presents the physical effects of that violence, the English attitude toward the Scots, and the relative impunity with which British military officers could act. (The flogging is by no means the only vio- lence enacted by the British military on Scots in the series.) The scene vividly reminds viewers that during the long eighteenth century, institutionalized military brutality was public, common, and widely known.

This episode first ran while I was teaching a senior seminar on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) titled The Persistence of Pride and Prejudice. The course looked at Austen's originating text and a series of twen- tieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations and remediations that followed. We were discussing the moment from chapter 12 in Austen's novel when Kitty and Lydia return to Longbourn and report the “information” from the militia stationed in the town of Meryton: “Much had been done, and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.” It is easy for the inattentive reader to miss the reference to flogging in that line, situated as it is between dining and a prospective marriage. (Indeed, that is precisely Austen's point.) When brought to their attention, twenty- first-century college students have, at best, an abstract understanding of what flogging would actually entail. The three-minute scene from Outlander not only illustrates the physical punishment, but also makes students consider that the violent act committed by a British officer upon a Scotsman he sus- pects of treasonous activity in Outlander is, in Jane Austen's text, committed by a British officer upon one of his own men.

When Alexander Pope recounts the onslaught of impecunious writers who seek him out at Twickenham, he describes their typical “modest wish” for “My Friendship, and a Prologue, and ten Pound” (TE, iv, p. 99). That triad of desires captures the basic types of currency in which Pope regularly traded: professional friendship, literary commodities or words, and, of course, money. Pope dwells on these currencies in Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) because they define the symbolic system of investment and exchange that shapes his personal and professional relationships, his poetic career, and his financial activities. These three currencies are deeply imbricated and mutually reinforcing: as Pope's professional success increased, aided in part by an ad hoc system of patronage and his savvy determination to control the publication of his texts, his financial gains outstripped those of most of his poetic contemporaries. From the earliest stages of his career, Pope realized the value of ongoing relationships (sometimes collaborative, sometime adversarial) with his colleagues in the print trade: “A mutual commerce makes Poetry flourish” (Corr, i, p. 20). By skillfully deploying printed rejoinders, financial assistance, or well-placed advice, he contributed to his consistent “fame” in the marketplace and enhanced his ability to control the production and distribution of his own texts (and the attendant socio-poetic image). That control - which ranged from holding the copyrights to his poems to determining the quality of ink and paper and the appearance of the text on the page - simultaneously enriched Pope's poetic persona and his financial accounts.