A just and graceful elocution: Miscellanies and sociable reading

The essays collected in this journal issue illustrate some of the various ways in which scholars can draw on miscellanies as an important, and relatively neglected, form of transmission for eighteenth-century verse. The Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI) will enable scholars to establish with more evidence, and more precision, than ever before, exactly what happened to individual works and authorial reputations, and to create for the frst time a data-driven reception history of verse in this period. Yet miscellanies are, of course, more than a vehicle for their contents—they are works in their own right, which repackage literature for a range of needs and interests. Such compilations can be an index not only of textual transmission, but also, more broadly, of the popular educative and social uses of literature. Miscellanies could be educational, ribald, pious, gender-specifc, topographically located, high, low, intended for social performance or for private perusal. This essay will consider the uses and reading experiences that miscellanies enabled by focusing on a subgenre —collections designed for reading aloud