No names, please -- we’re British

Author interviews and signing tours have become a chief element in bookselling. If not by their covers, today’s books are known by their jacket photos. So it’s odd that, for much of publishing history, anonymity was a vastly common practice.

In “Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature,” John Mullan cites a whole pantheon of illustrious names. Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Meredith concealed their identities, sometimes with a pseudonym. So did Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Alexander Pope. Granted, these last wrote with a satirical edge, and formal concealment might have seemed prudent.

But so did such properly bland romancers as Sir Walter Scott. So did Thomas Gray, composer of that mildest of poems “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” And Alfred Lord Tennyson, revered reinsurer of Victorian pieties, withheld his name when he published his manual for high sentimental grieving, “In Memoriam.” (Victoria, widowed, wept as she read.)

In the harsher times of the Tudors and Stuarts, to be sure, anonymity was a matter of mortal safety. England was riven by insurrections and religious battles. Those who wrote doctrinal controversy or questioned royal legitimacy kept their names secret, and for good reason. Failing to find the writers, the authorities executed the printers, sometimes by chopping them up and displaying their bits and pieces around London.

By the 18th century, matters were less severe. There could be fines, lawsuits and occasionally a jail stint, but what had been lethal pursuit and concealment became more of an enjoyable dance.

The identities of some, such as Pope and Swift, were fairly well known in literary circles. So Pope, ever the master of one-downmanship, took perverse pleasure in veiling his very anonymity. He wrote a tract that was not just anonymous, but secret as well -- thus aiming to trap the praises of those who, having managed to penetrate “The Dunciad’s” easily penetrated disguise, denounced it. Swift, the respectable dean of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s, found greater freedom to scour by using Gulliver as the author of the wickedly satiric “Travels” -- the wink hardly had to be tipped. At the same time that Ireland’s lord lieutenant jailed the printer of “Drapier’s Letters” (Swift’s bitter attack on British rule), Swift was treating the lord lieutenant’s wife to a picnic. It was “Don’t let me catch you writing bad stuff.” Nobody, least of all the lord lieutenant, wanted to catch him.

The subtitle of Mullan’s book is “A Secret History of English Literature.” The “English” is especially pertinent to what is perhaps the most piquant theme in a work that, after a lively start, can suffer from an excess of academic list-making and reiterating.

In effect: In the 18th and early 19th centuries, anonymity was a form of publicity. Guessing the identity of the writer instigated a pleasurable wriggle among the cognoscenti, as well as a three-way magnetic force field among those in the know, in the guess or quite out of it all.

Technically anonymous, few writers wanted to be truly unknown. Fanny Burney was tediously persistent in showing her “anonymous” novel “Evelina” to everyone she met and hitting them up for compliments. Newspapers and journals fanned public interest in a book when the reviewers played guessing games about its authorship.

There was another factor, perhaps even more English: a sense of reserve, of privacy. Burney herself, when her name was eventually published, deplored the loss of her “snugship.” And there was a class element: one thing to have those of your circle wink at you; quite another to have the masses come and rub you up with their opinions.

There was sheer playfulness as well. Sir Walter Scott went 30 years before letting his name be printed as the creator of the Waverley novels. A literary scholar did a textual analysis and concluded (partly from the recurrence of dogs) that the Waverley author was the author of “Marmion,” which had appeared under Scott’s name. His analysis, of course, was printed anonymously. Scott invited him to dinner, where each sedulously avoided talking attribution.

And the novelist derived great satisfaction from writing an anonymous attack upon his own anonymous “Old Mortality.” The characters lacked proper definition, Scott complained (something critics have gone on noticing ever since).

The wink-wink was by no means universal. Trollope and Wilkie Collins insisted on using their names. As for reviewing, as far back as 1833, Edward Bulwer-Lytton assailed the common practice of anonymity as swindling readers by the opportunity it gave the critic to do favors: “Nearly all criticism at this day is the public effect of private acquaintance.”

Halfway into the 20th century, the revered Times Literary Supplement still maintained the practice, almost alone and incurring much the same criticism. It was not until 1947, when it began to attach names to the voices, that the insiders’ happy few gave way to the unprivileged many.