University of Virginia Library

I gratefully acknowledge Prof. Allen Reddick, whose perspicacious comments on an earlier version of this essay led to numerous improvements both large and small; residual errors are of course entirely my own.

The first edition had been published in 1755, eight years after Johnson announced his intention in The Plan of a Dictionary. The Dictionary went through two additional editions in 1755-56 and 1765 before the major revision of 1773. Since I refer repeatedly to various editions of the Dictionary, I will employ the following abbreviations: the folio editions, first through fifth and seventh will be designated F1 (1755), F2 (1755-56), F3 (1765), F4 (1773), F5 (1784) and F7 (1785); the sixth edition is a quarto, designated Q6 (1785).

In a letter to Lord Hardwicke of 12 October 1765, Thomas Birch credited Steevens— "without whose Assistance that Work would probably not have appeared these twelve Months"—with propelling the Shakespeare edition towards completion. What contribution Steevens might have made beyond the forty-nine notes is unknown, although it is possible that he saw the final volumes through the press and advised Johnson on the "Preface." Hardwicke also refers to the imminent appearance of Steevens's edition of the Shakespeare quartos, saying that he did "not see the Use of such an Edition" (BL Add. MS 35400 fol. 350r, quoted in Arthur Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare. With an essay on "The Adventurer" [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1956], 10)

Johnson himself added a paragraph to the "Preface" of the 1773 Shakespeare edition praising Steeven's "diligence and sagacity." For a discussion of Steevens's contributions to the 1773 edition see Sherbo, Samuel Johnson, Editor of Shakespeare, 102-113. For the relationship, both personal and working, between Johnson and Steevens see John H. Middendorf, "Steevens and Johnson" in Johnson and His Age, ed. James Engell (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 125-135.

Arthur Sherbo, "1773: The Year of Revision" Eighteenth-Century Studies 7.1 (1973), 18-39.

See the DNB entry for Steevens. See also Arthur Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 4, 6-7, 29, 44, 56-57, and Middendorf, "Steevens and Johnson," 128-130.

These materials were first discussed by James H. Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: Essays in the Biography of a Book (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955), 116126, and "The History of the Sneyd-Gimbel and Pigott-British Museum Copies of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary," PBSA, 54 (1960), 286-289. A more recent consideration is Allen Reddick, The Making of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, 1746-1773 (1990; rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). Much of this valuable book, which reconstructs Johnson's methodology in creating and then revising the Dictionary, is based on an insightful analysis of the Sneyd-Gimbel copy, which is thoroughly described in Appendix A, 179-189. The British Library copy is described in Appendix B, 190-191 and the provenance of both copies in Appendix C, 192-194.

See especially Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5.

Formerly known as the Pigott-British Museum copy. For convenience I will follow Reddick in referring to it simply as the BL copy.

The hand was identified by Sledd and Kolb, tentatively in 1955, and more firmly in 1960.

A number of notes correct small errors that had crept into F3, which in F1 had read correctly.

Sledd and Kolb, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, 122.

In one of his notebooks Boswell quotes Johnson as having asserted that "it was remarkable that when he revised & improved the last edition of his Dict[iona]ry the Printer was never kept waiting." Quoted in Reddick, 91.

Reddick, 96. Only three entries in the word list for "B" are substantially revised: Blow, where the four senses distinguished in F1 are expanded to seven in F4; Bosom, where six senses become ten; and Bright, where four senses are expanded to ten, illustrated with thirteen new quotations.

They occur in the entries for: To Abut, Addition 4, Affection 9, Affliction 2, Allowance 2 and 6, Almond Tree, Argosy, Aroynt, Caisson, To Canary, Canary bird, Cannibal, Chamber 1, Chargeful, To Clamour, Clump, Coigne [French], Comart, Commere, To Confess v.a. 1, Crescent adj., To Croak 2, To Defeat, To Derogate v.n., Desideratum, Despicable, Despiteous, Devious 2, Dexterous, Diuretick, Downhil' adj., Eisel, To Embale 2, Emblazonry, Endamagement, Equipage 4, Fight 3, Fit n.s., Forgetive, Formal, Galleass, To Give v.a. 14, Hail n.s.

Reddick's count of authors whose works supplied ten or more new quotations to Vol. II of the revised Dictionary shows Shakespeare in 29th place out of 30, with only 21 new illustrations, as compared with Milton, the most frequent source of new quotations, with 200 (121-122).

Johnson similarly rejected a substantial amount of material prepared by one of his amanuenses, William Macbean, whose "relatively frequent observations on Scottish or other regional usage of English words which were written on the Sneyd-Gimbel slips . . . were always ignored" (Reddick, 99).

The copy marked by Johnson, missing vol. 8, is held by the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8:343.

They are: Coigne n.s., Crescent adj., To Defeat v.a, Despicable adj., Despiteous, Devious adj. 2, Dexterous, Diuretick adj., Downhil n.s., Eisel n.s., Fight n.s., 3.

The 1693 text of The Old Batchelour reads: "And the first Stage a Down-hill Greensword yields" (5.1.473); -sword for -sward was an acceptable contemporary spelling variant. The source of the variant "steps" for "stage" is again obscure.

Johnson soon found that limitations of spaces precluded his "scheme of including all that was pleasing or useful in English literature" and that as a result his authorities were sometimes truncated "to clusters of words in which scarcely any meaning is retained" ("Preface," B2v).

A rare misattribution from Steevens; the passage comes from Sonnet 111.

In Here is conteyned the lyfe of Johan Picus erle of Mirandula (London: de Worde, c. 1525; STC 1998) the passage appears as: "Cast in thy mynde as oft with good deuocyon / How thou resemblest chryst / as with sowre pocyon, / If thou payne thy tast; remembre therwithall / How chryst for the tasted eysell and gall" (F1v).

For a detailed review of the textual issues involved in this reading, see the note by Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, Second series (London: Routledge, 1990), 555-557.

Johnson was clearly aware of the parallel passage since, in Appendix II of the 1773 Shakespeare edition, he adds the very direct remark "You forgot our author's 111th sonnet" (Note to 321 n. 5). In the revised Johnson/Steevens edition of 1778 the note stands much as it had in the 1773, but Steevens has added several supporting passages from Stowe and Drayton which refer to a river "Issell" or "Isell." Johnson appends a version of the note from the 1773 Appendix: "Mr. Steevens appears to have forgot our author's 111th sonnet."

As is typical of Johnson's method the quotation is shortened and adapted; in the 1773 Johnson/Steevens edition the full phrase reads ". . . there were no sallets in the lines, to make the matter savoury; nor no matter in the phrase, that might indict the author of affection . . ." (10:224). Steevens has added a note explaining Shakespeare's use of "affection" to mean "affectation," and adducing parallels from Twelfth Night and Love's Labour's Lost. Again the cross-fertilization between the two projects is evident.

In Q6 printed the year after Johnson's death in 1784, the punctuation is corrected: ". . . to signify treaty; article; from. . . ."

The passage occurs in Act 1 Scene 1, where Horatio is describing the defeat of Old Fortinbras by Old Hamlet. In Q2 the passage reads: "Against the which a moitie competent / Was gaged by our King, which had returne / To the inheritance of Fortinbrasse, / Had he bin vanquisher; as by the same comart, / And carriage of the article desseigne, / His fell to Hamlet." In the First Folio the reading is: "Against the which, a Moity competent / Was gaged by our King: which had return'd / To the Inheritance of Fortinbras, / Had he bin Vanquisher, as by the same Cou'nant / And carriage of the Article designe, His fell to Hamlet."

Most, though not all, of these occurrences had appeared in the 1773 edition, which is the source for the examples in the following paragraph.

Under: Addition, Allowance 2 and 6, Aroynt, Canary bird, Chamber 1, Commere, To Embale 2, Equipage 4, Galleass, To Give v.a. 14, Hail n.s.

Sherbo, "1773," 21.

Steevens would later assist Johnson in compiling materials for The Lives of the Poets and was the only individual whose aid Johnson acknowledged in the Advertisement to the third edition of 1783. See John Middendorf, "Johnson and Steevens," 130-131.

Considering the sheer volume of typesetting and proofreading involved, it is not surprising to find instances where F1/F3 readings agree against F4, or where F1/F4 agree against F3. For example, in the entry for Bacon 2, F1 and F3 read "To save the bacon, is a phrase for preserving one's self from being unhurt," which F4 corrects to "hurt." Conversely, in a Milton quotation illustrating Barber, F1/F3 agree in reading the correct "locks" which in F4 is corrupted to "looks." And under Babble, the Shakespeare quotation is punctuated with a question mark in F3, where F1/F4 agree in correctly punctuating with an exclamation point. These examples in no way undermine the case that the letter "B" was set from third edition sheets, since variation that arises either from the correction of error or the introduction of new error cannot be used as evidence in assessing the setting copy for F4. (I am grateful to Prof. Reddick for pointing out these examples.)

Reddick, 121-122. In the Steevensian portion of the BL copy some 310 new Shakespeare quotations are suggested, followed by Jonson with 18, Pope with 17, Rowe with 13, Dryden with 8, Milton and the Bible with 7 each, and Beaumont and Fletcher with 5. Another twenty-three authors are cited, most with only a single quotation.

In these thirty pages at least fifteen changes appear to have been initiated by Steevens; by way of comparison there are forty-four instances in the more than nine hundred pages from "A" and "C-I/J" where Johnson followed Steevens's suggestions.

Edited by Anne McDermott (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).

The OED, 2nd ed., rejects Steevens's argument about beefeater: "The conjecture that sense 2 may have had some different origin, e.g. from buffet `sideboard,' is historically baseless. No such form of the word as *buffetier exists; and beaufet, which has been cited as a phonetic link between buffet and beefeater, is merely an 18th c. bad spelling, not so old as beef-eater." Steevens is however ultimately correct about the etymology of bumbast.

Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens, 24-26.

Quoted in Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens, 199.

Because the first edition had been published in 1755, the copyright ought to have reverted to Johnson twenty-eight years later in 1783 (a fourteen-year initial term plus a fourteen-year renewal; see John Feather, "The Publishers and the Pirates: British Copyright Law in Theory and Practice," Publishing History 22 [1987], 5-31). I have found no evidence that indicates the way in which copyright may have affected the fifth edition of 1784. Whether Johnson was paid again for the right to republish, or had by some particular arrangement given up all right to copy from the beginning, is uncertain. But the Dictionary certainly went into the public domain after Johnson's death, since there was at this time no right of survivorship tied to copyright, although Johnson himself had advocated a change to this provision. See Reddick, 171-172.

See Sledd and Kolb, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, 127-133. The Dictionary had not been available in parts since the second edition of 1755-56; in 1775 Thomas Ewing had published an unauthorized quarto in Dublin.

The Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, 24 October 1785, quoted in Sledd and Kolb, 130.

Sledd and Kolb, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, 132.

Quoted in Arthur Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens, 29.

Under Aim 5, Air 5, Anatomy 5, To Case, To Cast 2, To Deck 3, Defiance 1, Direful, and Jack 4.

I am grateful to David L. Vander Meulen for information on the variant readings.

On the interleaf opposite 9X2r in the BL copy Steevens had teasingly suggested adding the abbreviation "F.S.A." to the word list, for "Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries."

William B. Todd, "Bibliography and the Editorial Problem in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951-52): 42-43.

J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1:440.

As most readers will know, in bibliographical parlance, edition refers to "all copies printed from a given setting of type," and impression to "those copies of an edition printed at any one time." See G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Bibliographical Concepts of Issue and State," PBSA 69 (1975), 18. Fleeman himself concedes that "The ESTC discrimination between the vol. and part publication is reasonable, but difficult in practice" (1:440).

The proprietors could now compete fully and directly with Fielding who on 29 May 1786 had advertised both the thirty-second number of his quarto edition and "The First Volume of the Work complete, bound or unbound." On 4 October he announced the issue of the forty-eighth and last part and stated that he could now "lay the whole of it at once before the publick," indicating that his edition was also available complete (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser). Similarly, Longman advertised Chambers's Cyclopaedia on 9 January 1787: "The work being finished, purchasers may be supplied with complete sets, in four hundred and eighteen numbers, making four large volumes in folio; or with as many numbers weekly, as suits the inclination or convenience" (MC and LA).

Two are the current author's copies, one is privately held by David Vander Meulen, and the others are held by the British Library, Trinity College Cambridge, and Lehigh University. In Vol. I, these six copies exhibit variant settings in nearly all gatherings through sig. 5E, with the DVM and BL copies most often agreeing against RCH1, RCH2, Trinity, and Lehigh, though in some gatherings Trinity varies from the other five. In Vol. II on the other hand, only three of 137 gatherings show variant settings in these copies.

At X1v the DVM copy is figured "01"; in the BL copy this has been corrected to "10."

BL Add. MS 48815, fol. 118. Presumably Strahan printed "The History of the English Laguage" because he possessed the necessary Anglo-Saxon font.

BL Add. MS 48817, fol. 39; payments for the three jobs were made in January 1792, March 1794, and March 1796 respectively.

There are two varieties of the "1794" paper, one with the date in all four corners of the sheet, the other with the date in two corners. A copy in my possession (RCH3) may come from the same typesetting since its press-figures match those of the ViU copy, but it is printed on paper without watermarks.

H.R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland From 1726 to 1775 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1932).

That this sort of puffery was common in the eighteenth century is evidenced in Thomas Percy's sardonic comment that "The booksellers of those days [i.e. the sixteenth century] did not ostentatiously affect to multiply editions." Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. (London: Dodsley, 1765), 2:262.

Todd, 42.

There is no evidence in the Strahan ledgers that F7, published simultaneously with Q6 in 1785, was ever reprinted as was Q6. New quarto editions, beginning with Q8 in 1799, appeared well into the 19th century, but F7 was the last folio edition of the Dictionary published.

At Kalendar, where in the quotation "Let this pernicious hour stand as accursed in the Kalendar," "as" is corrected to "ay," and, under the 2nd sense of the verb To Keep, where in the quotation "What! keep a week away? seven days and nights? / Eightscore hours? And lovers absent hours!" the time period becomes a bit longer: "Eightscore eight hours".