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The First Edition of Essays by Mr.
Goldsmith,
1765
Arthur Friedman
It is well known that there are two editions of Oliver Goldsmith's Essays dated 1765, both said in the imprint to be "for W. Griffin": one with an engraved titlepage (1765A);[1] the other a cheaper edition with a title-page printed from type (1765B).[2] No careful attempt has been made to determine which of these editions is the first. In his bibliography of first editions of Goldsmith's writings Iolo A. Williams describes 1765A and does not mention the other edition.[3] Temple Scott, on the other hand, describes both editions and argues for the priority of 1765B:
A direct comparison of the texts of 1765A and 1765B leads to no demonstrable conclusion for one or the other as the first edition. Fortunately, however, the problem of priority is readily solvable by comparing the two editions with an earlier state of the text. As is suggested by the motto "Collecta revirescunt" on the title-page of the Essays, Goldsmith was republishing essays and poems which he had previously contributed to newspapers and periodicals, and the original texts are available for all but the last of the twenty-seven pieces. For the collected Essays Goldsmith made very extensive revisions, which appear in both 1765A and 1765B; the two editions are clearly not independent reprintings of the periodical texts. One of the editions, consequently, was printed from the revised periodical texts, whereas the other was derived from this first edition;[5] and the order of the editions can be determined by
| Page and line (from 1765A) | Bee | 1765A | 1765B |
| 1.16 | at a loss | at a loss | at loss |
| 4.20 | extraordinary pages | extraordinary pages | pages extraordinary |
| 6.22 | am | am | I am |
| 37.17 | [No paragraph division] | [No paragraph division] | [Paragraph division] |
| 72.18 | possible a | possible a | possible that a |
| 75.17 | for Sundays | for Sundays | for Sunday |
| 121.16 | on a string | on a string | in a string |
| 123.18 | and and | and, and | and, |
| Lloyd's Evening Post | |||
| 29.7 | vainly | vainly | in vain |
| Citizen of the World [6] | |||
| 91.22 | the joke sake | the joke sake | the joke's sake |
| 95.12 | an hundred | an hundred | a hundred |
| 112.6 | greater efforts | greater efforts | great efforts |
| Royal Magazine | |||
| 131.7 | habitation | habitation | inhabitation |
| 131.14 | ingratitude | ingratitude | gratitude |
| 132.9 | over our heads | over our heads | above our heads |
| 135.6 | we have no | we have no | we no |
| 137.3 | put it into | put it into | put into |
| Public Ledger [7] | |||
| 149.5 | They have all | They have all | They all have |
| British Magazine | |||
| 166.4 | came upon them | came upon them | came in upon them |
| 167.24 | one of his legs were | one of his legs were | one of his legs was |
| 168.10 | made a bishop | made a bishop | made bishop |
| 170.2 | heard | heard | had heard |
| 187.17 | fondlings | foundlings | fondlings |
| 192.6 | those two months | those two months | those months |
| 197.5 | [No paragraph division] | [No paragraph division] | [Paragraph division] |
| 199.11 | of Europe | of Europe | in Europe |
| 215.10 | sailors and soldiers | sailors and soldiers | soldiers and sailors |
| Weekly Magazine | |||
| 227.23 | where | were | where |
From this collation 1765A is seen to be very much closer to the periodical texts than is 1765B. 1765B agrees with the earlier texts against 1765A in only two cases: in one instance (227.23) the reading of 1765A is a simple misprint, and in the other (187.17) it appears on critical grounds to be inferior to the reading of the British Magazine and 1765B. 1765A, on the other hand, agrees with the periodical texts twenty-six times when 1765B differs from them. Of these distinctive readings in 1765B three (121.16, 131.14, and 135.6) are obvious errors, and three others (112.6, 131.7, and 137.3) seem on critical grounds to be inferior readings. The other twenty instances, however, are all indifferent readings not clearly inferior to 1765A; indeed a number of them—the correction of grammar at 167.24, for example—appear to be attempts at obvious improvement. In these twenty cases it is highly improbable that either Goldsmith or a printer would have returned in 1765A from the readings of 1765B to those of the periodical texts; it is very much more probable that 1765A is the first ediiton and that 1765B represents a stage of the text still further removed from the periodical version.[8]
When 1765A is recognized as the first edition, 1765B is seen to contain a number of features that call for explanation. (1) It is not described as the second edition; rather the edition of 1766 is called on the title-page "The SECOND EDITION, corrected." (2) No new edition, as far as I have been able to discover, was advertised in the newspapers during 1765.[9] (3) The printer of 1765B did not employ the
It is apparent that 1765A and 1766 display a sequence in the practices of Griffin and that the supposedly intermediate 1765B departs from this sequence. The only thing associating Griffin with 1765B is his name on the title-page, and the five features listed above taken in combination strongly suggest that he was not responsible for its publication. If 1765B is in fact a piracy, then (1) there would have been no reason for calling it the second edition, whereas Griffin would naturally have given that designation to 1766; (2) the only result of advertising 1765B as a new edition would have been to call the piracy to Griffin's attention; (3) the engraved title-page plate for 1765A or the picture cut from that plate and used as a vignette for 1766 would not have been available to the printer of 1765B; (4) 1765B does not resemble 1765A in physical make-up because the printer wished, not to deceive people who had seen the first edition, but to produce the volume as cheaply as possible; (5) the printer would have had no interest in advertising Griffin's stock.
Since 1765B can with some confidence be labelled a piracy, none of its distinctive readings—even those which are corrections or have the superficial air of improvements—can be authoritative, and therefore an editor should give no weight to its variants. Even if a less extreme view is taken, and the case for piracy is considered speculative only, an editor will find that there is no distinctive reading in 1765B which could not be a printing variant. In light of this fact, it would appear to be of considerable significance that when the authorized 1766 edition was ordered, the printer was furnished a copy of 1765A, an unlikely occurrence if the readings in 1765B resulted from the author's further revisions. Of even greater importance, Goldsmith, if he were responsible for the distinctive readings of 1765B, might be expected to repeat some of them in his fairly extensive revision of 1765A for this edition of 1766; but for the twenty-eight instances listed above where 1765A and 1765B differ, 1766 invariably agrees with 1765A. Even if the very strong evidence that 1765B is a piracy is ignored, the edition can still be granted no textual authority.[10]
Notes
Oliver Goldsmith Bibliographically and Biographically Considered (1928), p. 157. Scott's statement that "most of the editions which followed it [1765B] have the engraved title" is inaccurate. For the edition of 1766 the complete title-page plate engraved for 1765A was discarded, probably because to have used it as a whole would have necessitated not only the addition of "The SECOND EDITION, corrected" and of a Roman numeral to the date but also a change of the address of Griffin's shop from Fetter Lane to Catharine Street. The engraved picture above the imprint in the plate, however, was cut out and used alone as a vignette for the title-page of 1766; the rest of the 1766 title-page was printed from type. This correction of Scott is not intended to weaken his argument; 1765B, if it is the later edition, might be expected to have the engraved title, since the wording of the two 1765 title-pages is identical.
The later of the editions dated 1765 was almost certainly printed from the first edition, because there is no known edition that could have served as an intermediary; the only other recorded editions published during Goldsmith's lifetime are the edition of 1766, which contains corrections and additions that do not appear in the 1765 texts, and Dublin editions of 1767 and 1772.
The essays in which the variants listed below occur had originally appeared in the Public Ledger of 1760, but the 1765 text of these essays was derived from the revised version in The Citizen of the World (1762).
The 1765 text of Essay XVIII, in which the following variant occurs, was derived from the Public Ledger rather than from the revised version in The Citizen of the World.
I have listed only the substantive variants because the evidence from accidentals is less conclusive. (For an example from an earlier period of the treacherous nature of accidentals in determining priority see A. H. Carter, Studies in Philology, XLIV [1947], 497-503.) Here I give a summary of the variants in accidentals for four essays (Nos. III, XVI, XXI, XXVI) from four different periodicals, from which 1765A is again seen to be much closer to the periodical texts than is 1765B. In the presence or absence of a comma there is no significant difference between the two editions; 1765A agrees with the periodical texts seventeen times against 1765B, and 1765B agrees thirteen times against 1765A. In more important variations in punctuation—an exclamation mark for a period or semicolon, a question mark for a comma, and so on—1765A agrees with the earlier texts against 1765B in thirteen cases; 1765B agrees against 1765A in only two cases. In capitalization alone 1765B is closer to the periodical texts than is 1765A; it agrees with them in four cases against 1765A, whereas 1765A agrees in only two cases against 1765B. In all other differences —five in the use or absence of a hyphen and two in spelling—the agreement is uniformly on the side of 1765A. For all variants in accidentals in the four essays, then, 1765A agrees with the periodical texts thirty-nine times against 1765B; 1765B agrees with them nineteen times against 1765A.
In Lloyd's Evening Post the Essays was first advertised in the number for 3-5 June 1765, and a brief account of the work appeared in the same journal for 5-7 June. In the London Chronicle and St. James's Chronicle it was first advertised in the number for 11-13 June; in the Critical Review it was promptly noticed in the June number. 1765B, if the statement in the imprint that it was "Printed for W. Griffin, in Fetter-Lane" is to be believed, must have been published before the first of December 1765, for sometime between the middle of October and the end of November Griffin moved his shop from Fetter Lane to Catharine Street. In the advertisement of Daphne and Amintor in the London Chronicle for 12-15 October 1765 Griffin's address still appears as Fetter Lane, but in the advertisement of R. Boote's An Historical Treatise of an Action or Suit at Law in the same paper for 26-28 November—and in all later advertisements of Griffin's publications that I have seen—his address is given as Catharine Street. H. R. Plomer is in error in his statement that "In 1767 Griffin moved to Catherine Street in the Strand" (Dictionary, p. 111).
If 1765B is a piracy, it might appear that authority could be given to its readings on the hypothesis that it was printed—possibly later than 1765—from a lost revised edition subsequent to 1765A; but nothing would really be gained by such a hypothesis. This lost edition, if it were authoritative, would have to be prior to the edition of 1766, since as copy for 1765B it could not contain the revisions and additions of 1766; its distinctive readings, consequently, would seem not to be revisions by Goldsmith for the same reasons that those of 1765B appear to lack authority; and—unless its title-page were printed from the 1756A engraved plate or had the 1766 vignette—it would be suspected of being a piracy because it was not advertised in the newspapers or called the second edition. The hypothetical edition would thus have the same status as 1765B. I am greatly indebted to Professor Fredson Bowers for assistance in the preparation of this paper.
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