The matter of attribution has to do with identifying the author (or even the most likely candidates) for a text whose authorship is doubtful, collaborative, or unknown. Such work has been practiced down the centuries, most often for the rectification of literary history but also in political and theological disputation where the authenticity of a document is at issue. Its apparent value in legal inquiry is limited by the fact that few criminals offer a substantial corpus of their writings. The notorious US Unabomber, who might well have written himself into gaol without benefit of other evidence, was a striking exception.

To begin with the obvious: the terms “literary” and “authorship” are bound to their histories – at some points of their history bound to each other – and a survey of literary authorship in rhetorics and poetics cannot work from overly granular definitions given the shifts in the signification of these concepts. Material changes (e.g., the shift from manuscript culture to the printed book and from printed book to electronic transmission), social conditions of literary production (e.g., the concentration of textual transmission in monastic settings during the Middle Ages and the emergence of authorial copyright in the eighteenth century), and conceptual shifts (e.g., the development of a notion of authorial subjectivity) all complicate the creation of definitions, and the temptation to construct definitions teleologically is powerful. I will therefore work from the broadest possible starting place: authorship exists where there is acknowledged enunciative responsibility, where the writer is taken to “back” his or her words and their promulgation, and where the writer’s name “marks off the edges” of the work, to use Michel Foucault’s formulation.1

Why do texts and readers need authors? Why is “authorship talk” so prevalent in literary conversations – whether at book fairs, book clubs, or readers’ groups, in literary magazines, newspapers, university seminars, or social media? These questions may seem absurd, at least to those who are blissfully unaware of, or have happily moved on from, twentieth-century debates about “the intentional fallacy,” “the death of the author,” or indeed his or her “return.”1 But, as we hope to show in this handbook, these questions have a relevance for literary studies that transcends the theory wars of the past or the narrow confines of the discipline itself. They are – or should be – central to the field if only because questions of authorship are of great popular interest, given the media attention devoted to, for instance, celebrity authors and the size of their advances, accusations of plagiarism, the gender of an anonymous author, or the Shakespeare authorship cottage industry.2

The ancient Mesopotamian written culture in cuneiform script on clay tablets, beginning about 3000 BCE and disappearing in the early Christian era, offers abundant evidence for authorship, including individual strategies for remembering the names of people who composed specific literary works and statements about how, why, and when they did so.1 These stand out because the authorship of most Mesopotamian literary and scholarly achievements was unknown in antiquity and remains so today; amidst such general anonymity some authors clearly made special efforts to ensure that their claims and experiences continued to be associated with their handiwork. A contrasting artifice, use of a pseudonym, was intended to associate a text with some notable figure of the past who had no role in its composition, even if it seems unlikely in most cases that ancient readers took such an attribution seriously. Cases of authors’ anonymous self-reference and evident presence in the text may also be suggested, as well as apostrophe, or direct address of the author to the reader.

The extensive influence of scott's fiction on art in the nineteenth century has long been a subject of commentary, while a parallel, if less developed, line of enquiry has examined the symbiosis between text and illustrative material in the production of collected sets of the Waverley novels. Until recently, however, general analysis has largely concentrated on exhibition painting, quantifiable as it is from sources such as the catalogues of the Royal Academy and British Institution. Catherine Gordon thus points to the exhibition by over three hundred painters and sculptors of more than a thousand Scott-related works between 1805 and 1870, with an increasing choice of the novels rather than poetry for subject-matter. Likewise, Richard Altick locates an equivalent heyday for Scott illustration: ‘The great age of Scott painting was the period 1830–50. During those two decades, well over 400 examples were exhibited, an average of more than twenty a year.’ Though never openly stated, in both critics one senses an underlying feeling that print illustrations were for the most part an offshoot of this ‘primary’ field of activity. However, there are a number of reasons for believing the opposite to have been the case, with the print market providing the chief motor force for the production of Scott imagery. In many instances paintings and drawings were commissioned for engraving first, and only exhibited subsequently.

The Early Nineteenth-Century Almanac

The presence of the almanac in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century households from right across the social scale has long been noted by historians of print culture. Characterised as publications within the important category of ‘pocket usefulness’ by James Raven, almanacs were a vital source of information within an agricultural society. If the almanac was not always to be found in the pocket, then it may have moved no further than the table – ‘Of all books the Almanack is the most indispensable. So constant is the need for it that, unlike other books, it is not deposited on the shelf, but lies ready to hand on the table.’ As William St. Clair elaborates:

Question: how did a nineteenth-century dinosaur publication like the Athenaeum (1828–1921) prepare for the twentieth century? Answer: it appointed a new editor. This essay aims to look at the print legacy of this new editor, Vernon Horace Rendali (1869–1960), who in spite of the enormity of the task loaded onto his shoulders, has remained an unknown entity in print-culture history. As was often the case it was through the columns of the Athenaeum that the change of captain was announced:

This sudden resignation of Norman Maccoll (1843–1904) as editorin-chief of the weekly was to signal a new but unexciting path for this major Victorian periodical. His assistant editor, Vernon Rendall, had already carried out the editorial duties for several years before being entrusted with the sole management of the prestigious publication. The result of his reign as an editor was not really something he could boast about but he did try hard to make sure the Athenaeum continued to be the cultural flagship it had been up to then. In short, Rendall continued the publication policy he and Maccoll had followed in the previous years.