Publication and publicity are virtually synonymous nowadays. John Mullan’s book is a fascinating reminder that this hasn’t always been the case. Crammed with cameos of self-effacing scribblers, reclusive dons, surreptitious satirists, pamphleteers menaced by the rack and gallows, ladies with virile noms de plume and an Anglican vicar who passed himself off as an Asian housewife, it casts an informed eye over 500 years or so of title pages offering blank spaces, pseudonyms and enigmatic initials instead of authors’ names. The roll-call of works that first appeared anonymously is distinguished, Mullan displays: Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, Robinson Crusoe, Walter Scott’s Waverley books, all of Jane Austen’s novels published during her lifetime, Byron’s Don Juan and numerous other masterpieces. At times, the phenomenon could be on an extraordinary scale: 70% of English novels published in the last three decades of the 18th century were anonymous; in the first three decades of the 19th century, almost 50% were. Ever since title pages became common in the 16th century, many authors have found reasons to be wary of making a name for themselves.

Self-preservation was the prime cause for concealment. In periods when religious or political antagonisms seethed, putting your name to a controversial text could be tantamount to signing your death warrant or, at the very least, cost you a limb. In 1579, John Stubbs had his right hand lopped off when found to be the author of a work admonishing Elizabeth I (gamely, as the offending extremity was severed, he demonstrated his loyalty by removing his hat with his other hand and shouting “God save the Queen”). Grisly accounts of sentencings to Newgate or the pillory, slit noses, sliced-off ears and branded faces might give pause to authors touchy about hatchet reviews today.

Satire’s venomous heyday in the 18th century gave rise to a new authorial hazard: being called out to a duel by some nettled crook or booby, if your cover was blown. There were innocent casualties, too. Dryden was badly beaten outside a Covent Garden coffee house for a lampoon it’s now known he didn’t write. Maltreatment because of misattribution wasn’t the only injustice anonymity allowed. When authors ducked below the firing-line by staying nameless, others got it in the neck: printers whose heads ended up on spikes, horse-whipped editors of magazines that published provoking attacks.

Besides self-protection, anonymity can, Mullan shows, be used for self-promotion. Writers such as Swift or Pope turned self-concealment as titillation into a fine art, performing a kind of authorial fan-dance – a glimpse here, a hint there – that profitably whetted readers’ appetites. Other purposes that anonymity has served are illuminated. There is anonymity as deference. In Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, not the author’s but his patron’s name is emblazoned on the title page. This occurs, too, with George Puttenham’s pioneering critical book, The Arte of English Poesie – which, ironically, argues against the upper-class practice of authorial anonymity. Witholding your name could signal lofty status: courtly and gentlemanly writers eager to elude the taint of ostentation or trade. It could also signal modest decorum, especially among the legions of female authors who, when not sporting elegantly classical-sounding pseudonyms – Ardelia, Ephelia, Orinthia – sheltered behind the genteel formulation, “by a lady”. Differing motives for women’s adoption of male pen names, from George Eliot to George Egerton, are engrossingly explored. Men writing under female aliases are rarer, it’s observed by Mullan (who misses one of the most piquant instances of this: Arnold Bennett, who graced the pages of Victorian periodicals as Gwendolen, Barbara, Ada, Cecile and Sal Volatile). A highlight of Mullan’s survey is a detour into the world of unsigned reviewing, which lays bare a sometimes hilariously disgraceful state of affairs: Boswell anonymously hailing one of his own books as “true genius”, William Godwin’s daughter rhapsodising about “the wonders” of her father’s latest novel.

Ploys undertaken to shield anonymity – manuscripts in camouflaged handwriting, disguised go-betweens, equivocations and outright denials of authorship – are chronicled with lively acumen. Hazards (and rather sneaky satisfactions) of secret authorship get interestingly documented: Scott sitting silent as a guest decried “the culprit of Waverley, and the rest of that there rubbish”; Fanny Burney smirking as associates not in the know chatter about her incognito novel Evelina; George Eliot aghast to learn that a man called Liggins was claiming authorship of (and payment for) Adam Bede. Another kind of discomfiture caused by anonymity might have been added to Mullan’s tally: In Memoriam, Tennyson’s great elegy for his dead friend Arthur Hallam, won praise in one review as having “evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man”.

Omissions are inevitable in the encompassing of so vast a field, as are occasional glitches (rather takingly, given his book’s concern with names, Mullan has a propensity for tiny errors in this line: Byron’s wife was called Annabella, not Arabella; the satirised civil servant in Little Dorrit is Tite Barnacle, not Barnacle Tite; Trollope’s Prague-based novel isn’t Nina Baltka, as twice here, but Nina Balatka). These are the slightest of speckles, though, on a splendidly wide-ranging, entertaining and instructive work. Scholarly without a whiff of pedantry, witty and eye-opening, Anonymity is a book to which John Mullan can be proud to have put his name.

ANONYMITY: A Secret History of English Literature by John Mullan
Faber £17.99 pp374

Available at the Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy