Why Be Anonymous?

An interesting article on anonymity in fiction in The Guardian.

To see how much anonymity has mattered to writers you only have to browse in the nine large volumes of Halkett and Laing's 1882 Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain. This lists in double columns over thousands of pages works in English that were first published without their authors' names, but that have since been attributed to particular writers. Why was it so important to so many authors to remain unnamed? The perplexed compilers of the dictionary guessed that the usual motive was "some kind of timidity, such as (a) diffidence, (b) fear of consequences, and (c) shame". Yet this does scant justice to the ambitions of some of the authors who used anonymity. Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" and Byron's "Don Juan", both originally anonymous, were hardly works by timid writers. Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, authorless in their first editions, were not published diffidently or fearfully. Indeed, in these cases as in many others, the authors did not really expect to remain hidden. If you follow in any detail the use of anonymity by literary writers - satirists, poets, dramatists and novelists - you will find that only rarely was final concealment the aim. Provoking curiosity and conjecture - highlighting the very question of authorship - was more often the calculated effect.

Anonymity was sometimes elaborately achieved. Jonathan Swift arranged for a sample part of Gulliver's Travels, transcribed in another man's handwriting, to be dropped in secret by an intermediary at the house of publisher Benjamin Motte. It was accompanied by a letter from one "Richard Sympson", supposedly Lemuel Gulliver's cousin, offering the whole of the Travels for publication in return for £200. Motte was told that, within three days, he should either return the "Papers" or give the money "to the Hand from whence you receive this, who will come in the same manner exactly at 9 a clock [sic] at night on Thursday". Motte bravely accepted the mysterious offer and a few nights later he duly got the rest of the book. Soon afterwards, Swift's friend and probable co-conspirator Alexander Pope discussed the business with the puzzled publisher, pretending to be equally mystified. He reported the conversation in a letter to Swift: "Motte receiv'd the copy (he tells me) he knew not from whence, nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark, from a hackney coach." The author himself had returned quietly to Dublin to resume his duties as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral.

All Swift's satirical writings first appeared anonymously or pseudonymously, and it is possible to detect in the manoeuvres over Gulliver's Travels a playful, even childish, delight in surreptitiousness.