University of Virginia Library

John Nichols on a Johnson Letter
by
James L. Battersby

During the period when the Prefaces to the English poets were being written and published, Samuel Johnson had occasion to send many letters to his printer and friend, John Nichols. Among these letters, there is one which, according to R. W. Chapman, may have precipitated a "last-minute addition" to the "Life of Addison." The letter, without a date, reads:

Chapman's interesting speculation was provoked by the cryptic markings on the verso of the letter. In a long note to Johnson's letter, Chapman writes:[2]

Before discussing Chapman's note, it would perhaps be useful to review a few relevant details concerning the publication of the first edition of the Lives of the Poets, appearing originally in ten volumes as Prefaces to the poetry of fifty-two English writers. The Prefaces were published in two installments, the first, containing twenty-two lives in four volumes, coming out in 1779 and the second, containing thirty lives in six volumes, in 1781. The account of Addison was the first of three lives in volume five, i.e., the first volume of the second installment. The relatively short lives of Blackmore and Sheffield were included in the Addison volume. Finally, the "Life of Addison" in the first edition (1779-81) is collated as follows: A-B8 C8 (± C8) D-K8 L1.

Without further inquiry, it would appear that Chapman's evidence has little to commend it and that he has too readily associated the content of the letter with the enigmatic markings on the reverse side, succumbing to the natural tendency to assume an integral relationship between two events enjoying the companionship of proximity. On the face of matters, the events would appear to be discrete and the relationship accidental.

In the first place, it should be noted that Johnson asks for the original preface, which appeared in the 1715 edition of The Drummer, not for the "Dedication," which appeared as an epistle to Congreve prefatory to the 1722 edition of the play and from which Chapman quotes in his note. Secondly, if we disregard the letter for a moment and examine the puzzling note, we notice that it contains little to tempt us to look at the "Life of Addison," since, as Chapman says, neither "Sheet Ii of Vol. 5" nor the "last Sheet" of that volume has anything to do with Addison at all. There

is, in fact, no signature Ii in the fifth volume of the Prefaces, and, if we assume that Nichols is referring to the Prefaces, the "last Sheet" would relate to the "Life of Sheffield." Thus, although the account of Addison is in volume five of the 1779-81 edition, the note has no immediate or ostensible relevance to "Addison."

These initial problems notwithstanding, Chapman introduces additional difficulties in his own explanatory comments. For example, in spite of G. B. Hill's index, there are actually two references to The Drummer in Hill's edition of the "Life of Addison" (Lives, 1905, ii. 79-158). The first reference appears on page 106 (in paragraph 75), and here Johnson is concerned chiefly with the appropriateness of including the play in the canon of Addison's writings, citing the omission of it from Thomas Tickell's edition of the Works (1721) and Steele's attribution of the work to Addison in the "Dedication" (1722):

The second reference (the one to which Chapman directs us) is on page 148, where the title appears, not in Johnson's text, but in Hill's note (and only indirectly in Hill's note). When Johnson says that "His [i.e., Addison's] humour . . . as Steele observes, is peculiar to himself," Hill, locating what he assumes is Johnson's source, directs us to the following statement in Steele's "Dedication": "He was above all men in that talent we call humour." (Although the reference is to Steele's "Dedication" to The Drummer, Hill cites as his authority "Addison's Works, v. 151," by which he means The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. Henry G. Bohn, 1893, v. 151; nowhere on page 148 of Hill's edition do the words "Dedication" or The Drummer appear.) It is important to note that we have it only on Hill's authority that Johnson is referring to Steele's "Dedication." Furthermore, in addition to confusing matters by talking about Johnson's "quotation from Steele," Chapman tells us that the comment is in the "last sheet of the Life of Addison," which is, as we can determine from the collation above, simply not the case. The comment does occur on "K6 recto p. 155," as Chapman says, but "K" is only the last complete sheet of the life of Addison, the last gathering being, in fact, "L". The evidence advanced by Chapman clearly will not support the hypothesis that Nichol's note is related to Johnson's letter.

Nevertheless, if we begin by trying to make sense of the letter itself, we may be able to establish its relevance to the passage on "K6 recto p. 155," at least its probable relevance. Initially, let us assume that Johnson did in fact want Nichols to send him Steele's original preface, not the "Dedication" to the second edition of The Drummer. The validity of this assumption is confirmed not only by Johnson's specific request in the letter, but also, I think, by the contents of one of his primary sources for the "Life of Addison," namely, the Biographia Britannica, which is conspicuously, though silently, present throughout the first and third sections of the account of Addison. On page thirty-seven of the 1747 edition of the Biographica and on page fifty-two of the 1778 edition, there is appended to the reference to The Drummer a long note, which consists of a paraphrase of Steele's original preface and an extended quotation from the "Dedication," including the statement "he was above all men in that talent called Humour." Since the original preface is presented only in a paraphrastic summary, Johnson might reasonably wish to examine directly the original, whereas he had no need to see the "Dedication" passage, since the clause that Hill assumes that Johnson was referring to in the "Life of Addison" and that Chapman uses in his note is reproduced in the Biographia.[5]

Consequently, when in the account of Addison Johnson says that "His humour . . . as Steele observes, is peculiar to himself," he may have had in mind the following passage from the original preface, in which, speaking of the kind of humor in the play (although the word "humor" is not used), Steele writes:

This passage corresponds at least more exactly to the meaning of Johnson's statement than the one which Hill cites, for, like Johnson's, it insists that Addison's humor was different in kind, not simply in degree, as the passage from the "Dedication" suggests. Johnson, of course, may have had neither of these passages immediately in mind, but if he were in fact alluding to the original preface, then it would seem that the letter to Nichols (the fulfilling of the request being assumed) culminated in a passage in the "Life of Addison."

However, even if all the above were true, we have absolutely no basis for the assumption that Johnson made a "last-minute addition" to the account of Addison. The letter, we recall, is undated, but considered as a document isolated from a ruling hypothesis and on the basis of content alone, it would appear to belong to some period prior to the completion of the biography of Addison (perhaps to the summer of 1779, when we know that Johnson was collecting material on Addison and other poets, or to early 1780, when he was apparently writing the life), not to a later period. As far as Nichols's note, also undated, is concerned, it is highly probable that in the hurry of business Nichols jotted a note to himself on the most immediately available sheet of paper, a note relevant to a task at hand but totally unrelated to his work on Johnson's Prefaces, conceivably at a time long after the Prefaces had been published.

The paucity of our knowledge must dictate modest claims. Thus, although we cannot be certain that Johnson introduced a remark in his account of Addison as a result of reading Steele's original preface, we do know that the relationship between Nichols's enigmatic markings and Johnson's letter is one of propinquity, not consanguinity; the relationship spatial, not causal.

Notes