“An Undisputed Right to this Offering”: About this Edition
A Critical Edition of Eliza Haywood’s Dedicatory Epistle of The Female Spectator to Juliana Colyear, Duchess of Leeds
About this Edition
First issued by Gardner as a monthly periodical for two years, April 1744 to May 1746, The Female Spectator’s popularity spurred Gardner (and his successor, H. Gardner) to reissue it in four volumes two years later, from 1748 to 1771, resulting in seven (official) editions over 27 years. Haywood’s periodical was popular enough that in 1746, pirated editions began to surface out of Dublin. To compete with the piracies, Gardner began reprinting in the cheaper duodecimo format in 1748, 1750, 1755, 1776, and 1771. In 1775, the (non-numbered) edition issued in London and Glasgow with different title pages was the last edition to be printed for 226 years (Fair Philosopher, p. 194).
The highly acclaimed critical edition of The Female Spectator (1744-1746) published as part of the six-volume Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Eliza Haywood in 2001-2002 marked the first release of Haywood’s 960-page, 24-book periodical in its entirety since the 18th century. The editors sought to incorporate Haywood into the canon as “more than” an amatory novelist. King writes that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, Haywood and her publisher aimed for The Female Spectator to earn a genteel readership during its time and in “futurity” (King, “Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator”). The Pickering & Chatto Selected Works is also likewise available for an upscale readership (with a $200+ price tag). This free edition is part of my project to make portions of Haywood’s periodical glossed and edited, and available to a wider audience that includes scholars, graduate and undergraduate students.
Because scholars agree that The Female Spectator was never revised, by Haywood or anyone else, and, as Newman points out, “informal sight collation suggests that bona fide later editions were merely reset and, as the century wore on, shorn of long s’s, capitalized nouns, and so forth” (p. 52), this edition is based on the first edition published by Gardner, dated 1745, from the Harvard University Houghton Library that was scanned for Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Textual Note
The following emendations are included to improve the text’s readability: the long s (ſ) is replaced by the short s throughout; the 18th-century convention of capitalizing and italicizing non-proper nouns is not retained; line spacing and indentation is updated to reflect modern letter/dedicatory format; and inadvertent printing errors are silently corrected.