Anonymity is an under-researched topic in eighteenth-century literature, not least because it is much less visible to us now than it was to readers at the time. We read texts such as Evelina (1778) or Roxana (1724) as part of “the works of Frances Burney” or “the works of Daniel Defoe,” and it now requires an effort of imagination to remember that their original readers encountered these books as anonymous texts, to be attributed to specific authors only by rumor and guesswork. Over the course of this admirable study, however, Mark Vareschi demonstrates that there were whole genres of eighteenth-century literature for which anonymous publication was not the exception, but the norm: the majority of eighteenth-century novels were published anonymously, and most eighteenth-century theatergoers would have had no idea who wrote the entertainments and pantomimes that appeared on the London stage. Indeed, Vareschi's careful bibliometric analyses demonstrate that of all the surviving works published in eighteenth-century Britain and America, at least one-fifth—and probably more—were published anonymously.

Based on this data, Vareschi argues that anonymity cannot be understood as a minor or marginal part of eighteenth-century literary culture. As he notes, there is a strong tendency in modern literary criticism to understand literary works in relation to the careers of their authors, and within this paradigm, anonymity becomes a puzzle to be solved (“Who wrote this book?”) or an anomaly to be explained (“Why didn't they put their name on it?”). But eighteenth-century readers often did not know who wrote the books they read or the plays they watched, and they often did not much seem to care, either. Roxana circulated successfully as an anonymous novel for more than fifty years before having Defoe's name attached to it, and in one fascinating passage, Vareschi demonstrates that the great theater manager John Rich frequently seems not to have known who wrote the plays that were being performed at his own theater. Intriguingly, Vareschi goes on to suggest that such anonymity should lead us to shift our attention away from what authors might intend texts to do and toward what those texts do by themselves. The meaning and purpose of an anonymous text cannot be deduced by referring to the stated or assumed intentions of its (unknown) author, and must thus be communicated purely through the text itself—a construct that, for Vareschi, includes the physical, formal, and generic qualities of books as well as the specific words that they contain.

Vareschi organizes Everywhere and Nowhere around four subtopics. The first is the difference between leaving the author of a work unspecified and actually declaring it to be anonymous: a subtle distinction, but a potentially significant one, as Vareschi demonstrates with his analysis of the various attributions assigned to eighteenth-century poems. The second topic is eighteenth-century drama, within which Vareschi notes that author names were much more likely to be assigned to plays when they were published than when they were performed, and that serious, high-status plays such as tragedies were much more likely to be assigned to named authors than “low” genres such as pantomimes or farces. The third topics is the works of Defoe, whose anonymous publications were so extensive that exactly which books he did or did not write remains a matter of great scholarly debate even today. Finally, the fourth topic uses the context of eighteenth-century anonymous publication to reexamine the explanations and excuses offered by Frances Burney and Walter Scott for their respective decisions to publish their novels anonymously.

Vareschi's intelligent and well-argued book opens up intriguing questions about the relationships between authors, texts, and readers, and he makes excellent use of bibliometric data to support his claims. It serves as a valuable reminder that eighteenth-century conceptions of authorship were often very different from our own and provides a wealth of data that should help to recontextualize the decisions of so many canonical eighteenth-century authors to publish at least some of their works anonymously. My one criticism is that Vareschi's distrust of arguments relating to authorial intentionality—or “supposed interior life” (145), as he refers to it at one point, as though authors’ having interior lives was something that he regarded as an extremely dubious proposition—frequently leads him to consider eighteenth-century literary culture from a rather abstract and zoomed-out perspective, remote from the messy and chaotic world of book production within which actual writers and actual printers had to make decisions about which actual names to print or not print on actual books. The real stars of Everywhere and Nowhere are books, networks, forms, and genres: actual human beings are reduced to a rather inglorious role, usually appearing only to get things wrong, confess their ignorance, or make unreliable statements about their own motivations. Overall, however, this is an impressive and insightful book, and one that richly deserves the attention of anyone interested in authorship or publishing in eighteenth-century Britain.