University of Virginia Library

David Foxon, Humanist Bibliographer

by
JAMES McLAVERTY

Introduction

David Foxon was perhaps the most distinguished British
bibliographer of the second half of the twentieth century.
His general contribution to bibliography has been widely
admired and honoured, and his catalogue English Verse,
1701-1750 (1975) has given his name to half a century of separately
published poems.[1] But, while his work has been influential, particularly
on the study of the book trade, on the history of pornography, and on
eighteenth-century editing, it has been little discussed. This neglect is
at least partly due to the fact that Foxon founded no school of bibliography,
formulated no theory of bibliographical enquiry, and initiated no
general programme of research. Yet the body of his work as a whole displays
an impressive consistency of approach and an awareness of the
values, motivations, and intentions directing it. My aim in this essay is
to provide a record of his life and work in the context of some of the
social and intellectual currents of his time. More broadly, I hope to
draw attention to the combination of humanist and technical virtues
that often informs bibliography but is less frequently identified in discussion
of it.

A fruitful approach to Foxon's work, I believe, is through an analogy
with the `ordinary language philosophy' that formed such an important
part of the intellectual atmosphere of post-War Oxford. Foxon
breathed this same atmosphere, and, like J. L. Austin, the movement's
leading figure, he came to Oxford after serving in war-time intelligence.[2]

Foxon was not a philosopher and he was not an adherent of the `ordinary
language' school—its members were comparatively few—but he
shared some of the school's approaches and assumptions. Three elements
stand out. First there is the concern with ordinary language and
meaning. There can be no direct parallel with the philosophers' notorious
examination of what was ordinarily said and the search of it for
implicit truth—the fruits of enquiring into the meaning of `tympan'
are limited—but we do find in Foxon's work a sustained attention to
the languages of the book trade and to the codes of the book. Whereas
the philosophers to some degree estranged themselves from ordinary
language, looking on it as a code to which they already held the analysable
key, Foxon looks on the books of the past as codes to which the
original practitioners held a key that can be recaptured partly by examining
their writings and partly by examining patterns of evidence.
Foxon is interested in past institutional facts and the way they are constructed
and sustained.[3] The beginning of his Lyell lectures on Pope
and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (delivered in 1976 but
not published until 1991) is the most striking example. The first section
of the lectures is devoted to `The meaning of the imprint', and as the
lectures proceed Foxon explores the meanings of format (for example,
an `elzevier edition'), of illustration, of capitals and italics. He is, of
course, engaged in code-breaking, but many of the codes are those of
the ordinary members of the book trade, who took their language for
granted.

The second link with Oxford's ordinary language school lies in the
way Foxon uses language. In their writing the philosophers aimed at
an easy style, consciously engaging with the readership as a social group,
but capable of the strictest technical demonstration. Philosophers like
J. L. Austin or H. P. Grice move easily from discussing what might be
said by this sort of person in this sort of social situation to a technical expression

of their conclusions in logical symbols. Foxon shows a similar
facility, moving from lucid expository writing (he is a particularly fine
narrator) to technical bibliographical description. In this he shows a
respect both for what in his early career he regarded as the `gentlemanly'
English tradition of bibliography and for the professional American
approach.[4] A good example from Foxon's early work is his sensational
identification of T. J. Wise's thefts from the British Museum Library,
which was presented to the general public in The Times and the TLS
in October 1956, and then to the bibliographical community with a
clear analysis of the bibliographical requirements for the identification
of the theft.

Thirdly, ordinary language philosophy was so constituted that it
had a ready reply to scepticism, rebutting sceptical challenge by asking,
`Why raise that question here and now? What in the situation calls for
it?' Foxon always knows what in the immediate social or academic situation
gives rise to a question and who might be interested in the answer.
Abstract issues have no application. In adopting this approach he contrasts
with that drive for definitiveness of research, system, and even
sometimes scientific methodology, which has been such an important
strand in bibliographical discourse since the War.[5] These claims to
foundations and demonstration left bibliography and textual criticism
vulnerable to sceptical challenge in the 1990s.[6] Foxon belongs to the
alternative broad tradition sketched by Keith Graham: `Deeply rooted
in the English intellectual tradition is a feeling for concreteness and
particularity, a mistrust of abstract, high-flown generalizations and an
insistence that even speculative thought should be anchored in the concreteness
of tangible, everyday experience.'[7] Graham reports that a colleague
responded to this claim by saying, `Well, could you give me an

example?' That was also Foxon's characteristic response. He considered
quoting Blake's `To Generalise is to be an Idiot' in his presidential
address to the Bibliographical Society in 1981, but worried that it was a
generalization.

Family and School

The trajectory of David Foxon's life was from a family background
of provincial nonconformity, through public school, war-time intelligence,
and Magdalen College, Oxford, to the British Museum Library,
and finally to university teaching at Queen's Ontario and Oxford. The
Foxon family had been stocking weavers; Foxon's grandfather kept a
couple of weaving-frames in his cottage. He had eleven children, of
whom Walter, Foxon's father, was the youngest. After leaving school at
twelve, Walter went to work in a stocking factory, but his intelligence
and gift for preaching were recognized at Chapel and he was encouraged
to go in for the Methodist ministry. He trained at Didsbury College in
Manchester, and married Susan Fairweather, the daughter of a well-todo
circuit steward in Clitheroe, Lancashire, whom he met when visiting
the town to take services. Walter Foxon enjoyed a high reputation as a
preacher (`a good preacher, slightly old-fashioned' was his son's verdict),
and at one point in his career he turned down the prestigious post at
Spurgeon's Tabernacle in South London. Susan Foxon, a firm advocate
of women's rights and of total abstinence, was an active pamphleteer
and campaigner. Walter Foxon's ability to attract and hold crowds led
to his appointment to ministries at a series of seaside towns. David was
born at Paignton on 9 January 1923 (he was an only child), and his
parents' subsequent homes were at Bournemouth, St Anne's on Sea,
Finchley, Blackpool, and Newquay, where, after a spell as President of
the District, Walter Foxon retired.

David Foxon did not share his father's religious beliefs, but he profoundly
admired his father's compassion and sense of social responsibility.
Looking back over his life, he believed that some attitudes from
his early years—perhaps more recognizably Quaker than Methodist—had
stayed with him: a liking for simple and direct truth-telling, with a
corresponding anxiety to avoid equivocation and economy with the
truth; a distaste for the hypocrisy (particularly over sexual matters)
that for much of the century oiled the machinery of daily living; and
a dislike of violence and conflict. The first two of these attitudes can
be seen directly in his career as a scholar in his lucid, if mild-mannered,

exposure of the frauds of T. J. Wise and in his investigation of the
history of pornography while the subject was largely taboo. The third
attitude might possibly have led to his being a conscientious objector
during the Second World War, a potential crisis from which a sympathetic
headmaster rescued him by recommending him for intelligence
work at Bletchley Park. Foxon also profited from his Methodist background
by being brought up in a culture of improvised preaching. He
took public speaking as a matter of course, enjoyed it, and throughout
his academic career he was able to speak without notes and hold an
audience.

School, Kingswood near Bath, was a Methodist foundation, one of
whose aims was to provide for the education of the sons of itinerant
preachers.[8] Foxon spoke of it with affection as a civilized society, tolerant
and humane, with a strong record of academic achievement. E. P.
Thompson, the historian (`a bit of an exotic'), and A. N. Flew, the
philosopher, were Foxon's contemporaries there. The school had resources
that particularly appealed to Foxon, including a fine and wellstocked
new library. It also had an outstanding headmaster in A. B.
Sackett.[9] Foxon was sixteen when World War II broke out, and it was
clear that if the war continued he would be called up for active service
when he was eighteen. Sackett, knowing and understanding Foxon's
scruples, recommended him to the Government Code and Cypher
School, which at the outbreak of war had moved from London to Bletchley
Park, where it was known as War Station X, or Room 47 Foreign
Office, or Government Communications Headquarters.[10] But before
going to Bletchley in 1942 Foxon had secured his place at Magdalen
College, Oxford. The choice of course was difficult for him. He had performed
at a high level in the School Certificate in all subjects and he
might have specialized in science or mathematics, but it was traditional
for the brightest boys at Kingswood to take classics and Foxon sat the
Oxford scholarship exam for Literae Humaniores (Greats). It was C. S.
Lewis, a member of the interviewing panel, who suggested that on the
basis of his general essay he would be better suited to English, and he sat
for an English scholarship successfully the following year. He had to wait
until 1946 before he could take up his place.

War-Time Intelligence

Bletchley Park was a crucial experience for Foxon, socially and intellectually.
It allowed him to mix freely with a variety of gifted, if
eccentric, academics, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, at an early age
(he was only nineteen when he went); it gave him training in codebreaking;
and it introduced him to his future wife, June (`Jane') Jarratt.
After five weeks in Aberdeen with the Gordon Highlanders (in theory
the Bletchley workers were seconded from their units), Foxon was sent
to Bletchley, where, after training, he eventually took over from Sydney
Easton in charge of a small section deciphering Italian submarine codes;
his future wife was a member of the unit. Intercepted messages were
translated and then passed on to naval intelligence, who plotted the
movements. The work was not exciting but the training was significant
for Foxon's later career. A relish for puzzles (and for setting up puzzles),
the ability to recognize and interpret patterns, the habit of working
from established knowledge (a code book captured on a commando raid)
to gain new knowledge, and the sense of intellectual activity as a cooperative
venture, all stayed with Foxon and influenced his subsequent
work. It can hardly be a coincidence that across the Atlantic, Fredson
Bowers, Charlton Hinman, and William H. Bond were members of a
naval communications group engaged, as Foxon was shortly to be, in
cracking Japanese ciphers.[11]

Foxon's transfer to Japanese intelligence came after the fall of Italy.
The major tasks in this operation fell to the Americans, with the British
in a supplementary role, but one of the British responsibilities was an
intercept station in Ceylon and Foxon was sent out there in the summer
of 1944, just before D-Day. His was essentially a desk job as co-ordinator
of cryptographic intelligence, largely from the Americans. During his
time in Colombo, problems with Foxon's health that had plagued him
at school resurfaced. He was capable of working very intensely for short
periods, but he rapidly became exhausted; it was as though he had difficulty
in sustaining the high levels of energy and activity that demanding
work generated in him. Although various specialists had been consulted,
there was no diagnosis, and Foxon had to learn to manage his energies
and ration their output. This was a matter of serious sympathetic concern
to Hugh Alexander, later director of GCHQ at Cheltenham, when
he came out to Ceylon on a visit in 1944, but there was no solution to
the problem, and these periods of exhaustion continued throughout

Foxon's working life, resisting treatment through drugs or psychoanalysis.
Only in the mid-eighties, after Foxon's retirement in 1982, did a
research programme incidentally reveal that he had an adrenalin abnormality,
exceptionally high levels of adrenalin accounting for both
the periods of high-level activity and the subsequent exhaustion.

Colombo allowed Foxon to develop his interest in music. Though
never a star performer, and untrained in musical theory, Foxon had
developed his enthusiasm for music at Kingswood School and played
the piano as a relaxation. When the War made the piano inaccessible,
he bought a Dolmetsch treble recorder and took it with him to Ceylon.
In Colombo, Ronald Johnson, later head of the Scottish Office, had become
the focus of musical activity among local musicians and service
personnel, and, through his friendship with Johnson, Foxon became
involved in chamber music, lieder singing, and choral music. In particular,
he was able to develop his interest in music of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries (especially Purcell and Handel)
which was particularly suited to his new recorder. Music became a lifelong
love, and record-collecting Foxon's major hobby.

Oxford

Foxon returned from Ceylon at the end of the War, and in 1946
began a shortened degree course at Oxford, where Jane Jarratt was
already part of the Bletchley diaspora, the friendships made during the
War continuing to exert an influence for the next ten years or so. An
important link was through Theo Chaundy, Reader in Mathematics
and Student of Christ Church, who had been part of Bletchley's reserve
force and now offered something like a second home to Jane Jarratt and
to Foxon. With Chaundy's son, Christopher, Foxon experimented with
electronics and built his first loudspeaker in the Chaundys' workshop,
establishing an interest in hi-fi that was to last until his death. Undergraduate
study with Jack Bennett and C. S. Lewis was a success. Foxon
joined in a discussion society, the Lyly club, with other Magdalen men,
and took Lewis's advice to sample Oxford lectures outside his subject.
Egon Wellesz, composer and pupil of Hindemith (whose small audiences
were particularly in need of Foxon's support), and Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, diplomat and author of Eastern Religions and Western
Thought, made a particularly strong impression, as did Kenneth Clarke,
who showed that a lecture could be constructed round illustrations.
Clark's example was something Foxon remembered in preparing his
Lyell lectures in Oxford in 1976.

In 1947 David Foxon and Jane Jarratt married. Her background was

very different from his. Her father Sir Arthur Jarratt had progressed
from being a cinema pianist to assuming a public role as the manager
of a national chain of cinemas, a friend of Lord Mountbatten's, and a
film producer in alliance with Alexander Korda, Herbert Wilcox, and
Michael Balcon. Jane Jarratt had come to Bletchley from the Central
School for Speech and Drama, and through his marriage Foxon became
tangentially connected to a more glamorous social world, though Jane
Foxon herself had little time for film society, refused to be presented at
court, and much preferred the comradeship of Bletchley. I gained the
impression that Foxon relished the contact with the entertainment industry
more than she did. The couple shared an interest in the arts,
particularly music, and, as Jane brought with her a small private income
of £200 a year, they were able to live a modest, cultured life, with a
wide circle of friends. A daughter, Deborah, was born in 1952. Although
the Foxons were divorced in 1963, they remained friends, sharing holidays
and family concerns, until Jane's death in 1988.

After graduating with first-class honours Foxon started research for
a BLitt on the relationship between words and music in the seventeenth
century. Although he was given a supervisor from the Music Faculty,
Jack Westrup, he was left very much to his own devices. He set himself
to read every Restoration play for what it had to say about music and
even settled on Purcell's ceremonial odes as a specific topic, but he felt
little confidence in his progress with what was potentially a very large
project. At this point, late 1948, a circular appeared offering a final
opportunity to apply for the civil service. Many of Foxon's Bletchley
friends had taken that route and he now decided to follow them. He
took the exam successfully (passing out second in mathematics) and
survived the country house weekend and the interview with the selection
board. (Some flavour of the exercise is conveyed by C. P. Snow's
asking Foxon whether he considered it was more important to be than
to do.) Foxon was sent to Town and Country Planning, but a casual
meeting over lunch changed his career. Angus Wilson, a friend from
Bletchley, was now back at the British Museum Library (his piercing
tenor soon to become famous during his superintendency of the reading
room), and Bentley Bridgewater, who had also been at Bletchley, was
now secretary of the Library. These two persuaded Foxon that work at
the Library would be more congenial to his temperament and talents,
and he successfully applied for transfer to the Museum.

British Museum Library

Foxon joined the British Museum Library staff in 1950. After a few
months training, he became involved in the Library's major project, the

revision of the general catalogue. This work had begun in the 1930s
and Foxon came in at the beginning of the letter D. Much of his time
was spent on Defoe, where the experience with first editions, chapbooks,
and cheap reprints proved invaluable. Subsequently he became involved
with Dickens before the revision was brought to a halt. His attention
then turned to the Ashley Library, T. J. Wise's collection of English
literature. The Ashley Library had been bought en bloc by the Museum
in 1937, and its printed books were being added to the catalogue as it
was revised. With the major project abandoned, the Ashley books had
to be incorporated into the current catalogue, and Foxon was given that
responsibility. In 1957 he was put in charge of antiquarian purchasing,
and Julian Roberts, who became his colleague a year later, has praised
the energy and enthusiasm Foxon brought to this side of the Library's
work after the financial difficulties and fierce competition from American
libraries of the inter-war years. Roberts has also paid tribute to
Foxon's general influence on the Library in the late fifties and early
sixties, quoting a comment from the Principal Keeper of Printed Books
on Foxon's leaving, `We are all Foxonians now.'[12]

The Library brought Foxon into contact with the Bibliographical
Society. Frank Francis, then Deputy Keeper of Printed Books but later
to become Director of the Museum, was Secretary of the Bibliographical
Society and editor of The Library.[13] He encouraged Foxon to become
involved in the Bibliographical Society, and he soon became its librarian,
spending lunch-hours and Saturday afternoons in the library at the top
of a spiral staircase over the British Academy offices, then at the back
of the Royal Academy. Foxon served ex officio on the Society's Council,
and started to write for The Library and the Book Collector on points
he came across in his cataloguing. Francis also made a helpful suggestion.
He pointed out to Foxon that a post at the Library opened up the possibility
of undertaking some major research project—a seed that was
later to bear fruit in the catalogue English Verse, 1701-1750.

Foxon saw his early years at the Library as marking an important
change in British bibliography, with many of the important influences
coming from America. He looked on the Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature (1940) and John Hayward's catalogue of the Rothschild
library as the last gasps of a dying world.[14] The CBEL had great
value as a handbook for literary scholars, but it worked by listing books

rather than by identifying and describing them. It was a fine example
of enumerative bibliography, but it was bibliographical only in a thin
sense. Hayward's folio two volumes were more sophisticated in analysis,
but their chief aim was to promote the trophies of a rich collector and
the number of copies examined was consequently restricted. The catalogue
was useful to scholars but it addressed their interests, literary or
historical, indirectly. Foxon felt a sympathy for both these forms of
bibliography—the scholarly handbook and the detailed record of copies—
but he thought the future of bibliography lay in the fusion of the two.
He was excited by the new bibliography, mainly centred in the United
States. In conversation he singled out the founding of Studies in Bibliography
by Fredson Bowers in 1948 as a central event; he was conscious
that Bowers's emphasis on physical evidence and on the wide consultation
of copies was a continuing influence on him. Other work that greatly
impressed Foxon in this period was Allan Stevenson's essay on paper in
the first number of Studies in Bibliography and his `Watermarks are
Twins' in volume four, and Bill Todd's work on press figures in his
thesis. The Americans exposed weaknesses in the gentleman collectors,
and these Foxon was determined to avoid.

Lyrical Ballads

Foxon's first essay was `Some Notes on Agenda Format', a technical
essay that established his bibliographical credentials, but this was followed
very shortly by the essay that was to be the foundation of his
reputation. `The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798' was read to the
Bibliographical Society on 17 November 1953 and published in the
December issue of The Library the following year. This is his first
published encounter with T. J. Wise and to that extent represents a
meeting between the old bibliography and the new. Lyrical Ballads was
a trophy for collectors and Wise had given an account of it in his Bibliography
of the Writings in Prose and Verse of William Wordsworth
(London, 1916) and Two Lake Poets (London, 1927). Foxon addresses
librarians, collectors, and literary scholars, presenting his own conception
of bibliography in distinction to Wise's. The paper is written with
very close attention to physical evidence—point-holes, a Foxon speciality,
but also watermarks in wove paper—and after consultation of as
many copies as possible.[15] None of the resulting evidence, Foxon makes
it clear, however inconvenient, is to be overlooked, and conclusiveness
should not be claimed where it cannot be achieved. The physical evidence

is used to reconstruct the history of the production of Lyrical
Ballads, but that reconstruction depends on knowledge of the practices
of the trade, and especially of printing practices. Foxon is quite explicit
about his programme in the first paragraph: `I have tried to approach
the whole subject afresh from the point of view of the printer, and the
results suggest some modifications in the traditional story' (221).

The paper is concerned with four late changes to Lyrical Ballads:
the cancellation of `Lewti', because it would have identified Coleridge
as author, and its replacement by `The Nightingale'; the consequential
change of the Contents page; the addition of a short preface by Wordsworth;
and the replacement of a Bristol title page by a London one.
Foxon's account depends on accurate description of the surviving copies
and an explanation of the relation between leaves on the basis of the
watermarks and surviving point-holes. He first shows that the Contents
page is not a cancel, as Wise had claimed (it is conjugate with the first
leaf of its gathering) but a proper member of a half-sheet also containing
the preface. He then uses point-hole evidence to show that the halfsheet
of preliminaries (including the Contents) was printed with the
half-sheet used to replace Lewti with `The Nightingale'. The new
Contents, therefore, belongs to the same stage of printing as the substitution,
and the preface is contemporary with this change. Foxon then
turns from the preliminaries to the end of the book, and quotes Wise's
account: `O (1 leaf), followed by an unsigned quarter-sheet of two
leaves, the first of which has upon its recto the List of Errata, the reverse
blank, whilst the second is occupied by the list of Books published
. . .' From the printer's point of view this would have been an
uneconomical arrangement, and Foxon uses point-hole evidence to show
that O1 and O2 were conjugate. The presence of only one point-hole
suggests these final leaves (O4) were printed by half-sheet imposition,
and that O4 was removed for some other purpose. Foxon speculates that
it might have been the original title page. `If . . . we add the title-leaf
(which is a singleton) to the three leaves at the end, we have a respectable
half-sheet, and I think a modern bibliographer would almost automatically
assume that the four leaves were printed together' (225).

The title page of Lyrical Ballads is found in two states: one with
`Bristol: printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, PaternosterRow,
London, 1798.' and the other with a `London' imprint for `J. & A.
Arch'. Foxon suggests that the London title page is indeed a cancel (it
has the wrong part of the watermark), but he is perplexed by the Bristol
title page, because none of the eight copies traced has the watermark
needed to link it to O4. Foxon is willing to speculate on a solution—
`merely one attempt at stringing together the facts and some of the

hypotheses into a consistent whole' (241). He suggests that there may
have been three title pages: a `Cottle only' title page, O4, which was
abandoned when Cottle realized he needed financial help with the edition;
the Bristol title page, which was some form of proof, run off when
Cottle thought he had an agreement with Longman; and the London,
Arch, title page, which was run off on the correct paper. The abandoned
Contents page was also without watermarks, and would belong to the
same proofing stage as the Bristol title page. As became his habit, Foxon
presents a summary:

The final element in Foxon's discussion, the association of O4 with
a `Cottle only' title page has recently been challenged successfully in a
fine essay by Mark L. Reed.[16] Reed is generous in his assessment of
Foxon's essay, calling it `indispensable' and outlining much of its analysis
in defining his own position. A copy Foxon had not seen (at the
Alexander Turnbull Library) shows that the Bristol title page does
sometimes display the same watermark as the rest of the volume and
undermines the contention that it was some sort of stop-gap measure.
And a fascinating examination of a volume in the McGregor Library
of the Special Collections Department of Alderman Library, University
of Virginia, reveals a stub, likely to be of the first Contents page, with
one of the letters of the watermark in the right place. Reed's conclusion,
highly persuasive, is that the original Contents was O4 and that the
Bristol title page was printed at the same time. Reed's analysis shows

the basic soundness of Foxon's approach, and, in correcting Foxon's
conclusions, it confirms the value of examining multiple copies of a
book.

Foxon's essay brings together more elements than my brief summary
has indicated—evidence of provenance, publication history, acquittal of
Wise from one forgery charge—but the concern for easy communication
of technically complex information is thoroughgoing. Foxon presents
the essay as the fruit of collaboration (he thanks John Hayward, Howard
Nixon, Basil Cottle, and American librarians), and suggests that his
audience may be able to take the investigation further. A key group of
sentences points to Foxon's method of codebreaking. Having given the
collation of the volume, he says,

The method is to identify irregularities as the key to the whole, treat
them as individual puzzles, set about solving them, and then try to collate
the results. In this case, Foxon is able to use the evidence of the
point-holes to establish the concurrent printing of the cancel section
and preliminaries, and then sets about examining the watermark evidence
in O4. But, though he attends to individual puzzles, Foxon always
has a general aim in mind, which is to uncover the story of the printing
and publication of Lyrical Ballads to the interested parties.

The success of the Lyrical Ballads paper introduced Foxon to two
figures who were to be influential in his development: John Hayward
and William A. Jackson. Hayward, who had given a different account
of Lyrical Ballads in the Rothschild catalogue (II, 703-704), had come
to the Library in his wheelchair to check Foxon's account. Hayward
was editor of the Book Collector and he encouraged Foxon to publish a
series of bibliographical notes, often short but always of high analytical
quality, over the next fifteen years. Jackson was then rare books librarian
at Harvard and had been responsible for compiling and designing
the three-volume Pforzheimer Catalogue.[17] He was in England every
summer, working on the revision of the STC. For Foxon he provided
an important connection with a major project in enumerative bibliography
and also a link with the world of American libraries. When

Foxon went to the States on a Harkness Fellowship in 1959-61, it was
letters of introduction from Jackson that opened the doors—and even
stacks—of American libraries to him.

The articles in The Library and Book Collector established Foxon
as an authority in analytical bibliography. In 1955 he produced a lucid
and well-referenced little pamphlet for the National Book League on
The Technique of Bibliography. The approach is informal, but the
initial recommendation of McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography
and John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors is supplemented by praise
of articles by Bowers and Stevenson.

Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama

Later in the fifties Foxon increased his public profile through a
further and more dramatic encounter with T. J. Wise. In a letter to The
Times of 18 October 1956 he revealed that Wise had been sophisticating
his own books with leaves stolen from copies in the British Museum
Library. The extraordinary bibliographical authority Wise had assumed
in the early years of the century had already been severely dented by
John Carter and Graham Pollard in An Enquiry into the Nature of
Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (London, 1934), but Foxon's
researches revealed a different order of villainy.[18]

Foxon's discovery came from his cataloguing the Ashley Library,
and began with a typical small puzzle. Ben Jonson's The Case is Alter'd
turned out to have four leaves at the end inlaid, with missing elements
at the head and tail of each leaf restored in pen-and-ink facsimile. When
Foxon checked the Museum's copies, one turned out to lack just those
leaves, and to be cropped at head and tail. This set Foxon in search of
stolen Museum leaves, first in the Ashley Library and then in the library
Wise had helped assemble for John Henry Wrenn in Texas. After preliminary
announcements in The Times and the TLS, the whole business
was thoroughly examined in a short monograph, published as a supplement
to the Bibliographical Society's publications in 1959. The results
of the investigation were striking. In all, 206 leaves were stolen
from the Museum's copies; 89 of them were found in Ashley copies and
60 in Wrenn copies; 15 more were suspected but the copies had not been
examined. Of the 47 plays with missing leaves, 41 have had at least some
of their leaves traced.

Foxon's account is remarkably free from censoriousness. Wise's behaviour
is studied with the same dispassionate interest that Foxon might
have granted the practices of an eighteenth-century printer, and, significantly,
with the same sense of historical perspective. The second
section of the essay describes the turn-of-the-century patterns of behaviour
that made Wise's frauds comparatively easy. There was a general
willingness among collectors to make up plays with loose leaves
that they might have lying around. Wise makes no secret of it; Gosse
and Aitken accepted the practice without question; Wrenn makes no
objection. Wise, however, took the practice to new lengths by developing
a regular habit of exchanging leaves in his own copies for those in
copies he was selling to Wrenn. Of course this confused the bibliographical
evidence, and Foxon gives two nice examples of Wise discarding
bibliographically valuable leaves because of their inferior appearance:

The first section of the essay demonstrates that Wise had taken this
practice further by stealing leaves from the copies in the Museum. It
sketches the conditions under which Wise would have had access to the
books, and the lack of supervision so distinguished a figure would
have enjoyed. Wise probably took the books home at night, removed
the leaves, and returned them in the morning. Foxon calculates that
the financial gains Wise would have made by the thefts bore no relation
to the risk of discovery and disgrace: `clearly there are irrational motives
at work which are beyond the scope of this enquiry' (5).

The final section of the discussion turns to technical matters and the
evidence for Wise's thefts. Wise made no attempt to match up watermarks
or chain lines, and most of his made-up copies can be detected
through absence of conjugacy. Evidence to identify a leaf with its source
may come from a number of indicators: stab-holes (with a discussion of
problems from refolding and binding); worm-holes and patterns of
worm-holes; stains; and flaws (`foreign bodies', `ill-digested lumps',
`wrinkles') which the binder presses into adjacent leaves. These forms
of evidence then become the basis for the fascinating discussions that
follow in the list of `Plays with Stolen Leaves'. Each entry gives the Greg
reference number, the details of the missing leaves in the Museum
copies, and the description of the Ashley and/or Wrenn copy. The information
is presented economically, but the typical final line, `Conclusion:

The stolen leaf is in the Ashley copy', is thoroughly earned.

This study is another venture involving collaborators—Fannie E.
Ratchford, Emeritus Curator of the Wrenn Library, who travelled with
the Wrenn books from Texas, is thanked with eleven other individuals—
but the skill lay in the initial identification of the theft, the recognition
of what further needed doing to advance the enquiry, and the martialling
of the evidence in a particularly accessible and attractive form. Foxon
himself says,

Given the importance of the British Museum Library as a source for
texts of early drama, the first of these aims is an important one, but
Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama is also successful in
giving readers a set of clear techniques for investigating sophisticated
copies.

Compiling English Verse, 1701-1750

By the time the Wise discoveries were in print, Foxon was launched
on his catalogue of English verse. In the early fifties, after the publication
of Donald Wing's short-title catalogue, 1641-1700 (New York,
1945-51), the Bibliographical Society had been considering the possibility
of preparing a similar catalogue for the eighteenth century. A
working-party was set up, under Harold Williams, to see whether the
project should be taken further and Foxon took on the responsibility
of estimating how many entries there might be. When it was decided
not to go ahead with the proposed project, Foxon decided to embark
on his own verse catalogue for the first half of the century. What he
decided to aim at was `a short-title catalogue with frills' (English Verse,
1701-1750, xi): something that offered more bibliographical information
than STC and Wing, but less than Greg's Bibliography of the English
Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59). The project
would give him more scope for bibliographical sophistication than his
cataloguing at the Museum, and allow him to pursue his long-standing
interest in the poetry of the period.

As Foxon records in the preface to his catalogue, a stimulus for his
work was Fredson Bowers's paper on his proposed bibliography of the

Restoration drama, read to the Bibliographical Society on 18 November
1952.[19] `This lecture was my inspiration', he declared nearly twenty
years later.[20] Foxon decided that, like Bowers, he would consult multiple
copies, but that, whereas Bowers intended to use microfilms, he would
use the position of signatures as a means of identification:

Although Foxon recognized the limited precision Madan's method gave
him, he continued to value its economy and utility.

Foxon's first task was to make a skeleton catalogue with pencil entries
(including shelfmarks where available) in preparation for detailed
information in ink when he had seen the copies. He used forms on
pressure-sensitive pads of six slips each, ordered from the Stationery
Office. The slips (8″ x 5″) consisted of eight central boxes (4 full-length
and 4 half-length), with the borders forming larger boxes (1″ deep at
the top, 1½″ wide at the side). In the centre top went the title; to the
left the date; to the right the location. In the central division were recorded:
imprint; collation; pagination; half-title, errata, frontispiece,
advertisement, watermark, press-figures; ornaments; miscellaneous. The
recording of first lines began later, proposed by someone during Foxon's
stay at Harvard—he always regretted that he could not acknowledge his
debt by naming the proposer. The top slip would be used to create the
main entry in the catalogue, the five subsidiary slips to create the indexes.

Foxon began his work by reading the Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature, before moving on to author-bibliographies and
Dobell's poetry catalogues from before the War. He read in the BM
Catalogue and visited the Bodleian at weekends to consult the catalogues
there. An interest from the beginning was printer's ornaments,
which in this period provide opportunities for printer identification.

Foxon established a file of printer's ornaments, even though he found it
difficult to get the quality of pictures he wanted, but it was soon clear
that a photographic record of all printer's ornaments would be too expensive
and cumbersome. During his period at Harvard in 1959, however,
he had access to a Polaroid camera with close-up lens, which helped
him to identify Edinburgh piracies in the period, piracies that had, for
example, perplexed the bibliography of Pope. The files of these ornaments
have been given to the National Library of Scotland.

Serious work on examining books for the catalogue began only on a
visit to North America from 1959 to 1961. For this Foxon applied for a
Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund. These annual
awards enabled about thirty British men and women in their late twenties
or early thirties (Foxon was a little old at thirty-six) to go to America
for a year or more. The scheme was administered with personal and
financial generosity. It provided around $300 a month, a rented car for
six months (Foxon had a special arrangement for a year), and appropriate
introductions. Foxon went for eighteen months, carrying his catalogue
slips in a single large suitcase inherited from his father-in-law.
Nominally he was at Harvard and Yale, but he managed to fit in many
of America's scholarly libraries in his nine months of travel between the
two. It was an exciting time to be in the States, coinciding with John
Kennedy's nomination for the presidency, and Jane and Deborah came
out to join Foxon for a three-month holiday. They met in Quebec and
drove across America to California and back.

Libertine Literature

The return to the British Museum brought a sense of anti-climax.
There was talk of Foxon's being given time to complete his catalogue,
but it never materialized. Indeed, the next serious step towards completion
was delayed until Foxon left the Museum in 1965. Nevertheless,
this period saw the publication of four important articles in the Book
Collector in 1963 as a result of the accidental discovery of an advertisement
for The School of Venus, or the Lady's Delight in the Daily Advertiser
for 25 August 1744. Foxon recognized this as a reference to
L'École des Filles, a French pornographic work referred to in English
literature but with no known English translation. The discovery that
there had been a translation set off an enquiry into early English pornographic
publications, their continental antecedents, and finally, in an article
requested by John Hayward, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
and Fanny Hill. The essays were subsequently issued together as Libertine
Literature in England, 1660-1745, and then published, with an

introduction by Foxon, in the United States in 1965. This was a pioneering
exercise in the scholarly history and bibliography of pornography,
and one still referred to today.[21] Using legal records, advertisements,
and bibliographical and literary analysis, Foxon was able to show the
patterns of diffusion of the texts and estimate their potential importance
as historical sources. Publication of articles on such a subject, even ones
as scholarly as Foxon's, was still regarded as daring, and one distinguished
bibliographer warned Foxon that it would ruin his career. But
Foxon's period in psychoanalysis, and a short research visit to the Kinsey
Institute during his time in the States, gave him confidence to pursue
these intellectual puzzles like any others encountered in his work, and
Hayward, who was the editor of Rochester, encouraged him. Publication
was timely, for it coincided with the new freedom in sexuality recorded
wistfully by Philip Larkin in his `Annus Mirabilis':

Although Foxon had no programme of liberation in mind, he was bibliography's
representative in this historical shift, and the measured tone
of his writing goes alongside a conviction that old hypocrisies must be
blown away and new moral judgements made.

In Libertine Literature Foxon interprets the advertisement for The
School of Venus as a clue to a hidden vein of English culture. It had
been assumed there had been no pornography in the seventeenth century,
except for Rochester, and that the first legal proceedings had been
against Curll in 1727. Foxon argues that, on the contrary, there had
been rapid importation of French pornography and a willingness to
risk prosecution. The first chapter is informed by his visits to the Public
Record Office during his lunch hours and lists government actions
against pornography from 1660 to 1745. He paints a lively picture of
the trade in pornography by printers, publishers, and hawkers, with a
particularly telling glimpse of the Brett family, who sent out their
children to buy `The Complete Set of the Charts of Merryland' and
The School of Venus for selling on to customers, and of George Spavan,
who made a guinea a week from sales of The School of Venus alone. The

account of gentleman purchasers includes Pepys, Wycherley, Learnerd,
and Ravenscroft, but perhaps the most amusing episode is the attempt
of the gentlemen of All Souls to print Aretine's Postures at the University
Press. Sadly for the young gentlemen, Dean Fell turned up unexpectedly
and confiscated the prints and plates; about sixty prints had
already been distributed `but Mr. Dean hath made them call them in
again and commit them to the fire' (1964 edn., 7).

from Aretine onwards, while the third, on Satyra Sotadica and Vénus
dans le cloitre, examines a series of translations of the former, including
a `sucker-trap' from that most respectable of booksellers, Jacob Tonson.
In the final chapter, on Fanny Hill, Foxon tells the story of its prosecution,
printing a letter from its author Cleland for the first time, and
then, partly on the basis of ornament evidence, clarifies the bibliography
of the early editions. He shows that the version with the sodomitical
episode is the first, and it was on this understanding of the textual history
that Peter Sabor was later to base his edition for Oxford University
Press in 1985. The proposal in the late sixties that Foxon should himself
edit the text for the Oxford Novels series was turned down on the
grounds that the time was not yet ripe.

English Bibliographical Resources and Canada

In 1965 Foxon left the British Museum to take up a post as professor
of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. The Museum was
not proving an encouraging environment for his work, and two Canadians,
Kathleen Coburn and George Whalley, who had met him through
their work on the Bollingen Coleridge edition, persuaded him to think
of a move to Canada. Foxon's divorce had been finalized in 1963, and a
new job in a new country had a self-evident appeal. He accepted a post
in Whalley's department at Queen's, but before going to Canada he
made a tour of British libraries in an attempt to draw his catalogue
towards a conclusion by inspecting as many further copies as he could.

Foxon could afford his British trip only because he had become involved
in a facsimile-publishing enterprise. When he returned from the
States in 1961, Foxon had brought back microfilm of a large number of
broadsides, and his first thought was that it would be a good idea to
publish them in facsimile. But attempts to get good quality photographic
enlargements failed through lack of adequate equipment.
Nevertheless, Foxon had become persuaded of the value of xerox reproduction
during his time in America, and the arrival of the Museum's
first proper machine in 1963 confirmed his view that a book could be
reproduced well enough to provide publishable copy. He found that

this view was shared by his Hampstead neighbour, Peter Elstob. Elstob
was a man with an unusual and varied career: novelist, balloonist, recorder
of the Spanish Civil War (in which he had fought), manager of
the Arts Theatre Club, and secretary of International PEN. Elstob had
been in touch with Gregg International of America about photolitho
publishing, and, with Foxon's advice, the project emerged of publishing
English Bibliographical Resources. There were three series: 1. Periodical
lists of new publications; 2. Catalogues of books in circulation;
3. Printers' manuals. Foxon had discovered many of the facts about the
editing and publishing of early book lists through his work on dating
for his catalogue, and he had published some of the information in an
article in The Library in 1963. These catalogues were now made available
in facsimile and formed the basis of the first series. Foxon's role
was that of editor; he found the materials and wrote the introductions.
Gregg were responsible for production, and Elstob for sales. The series
was offered for subscription, with considerable success, and Foxon's
share of the subscription financed his tour of British and Irish libraries
from March to August 1965. He worked through the Bodleian and Cambridge
University libraries, the major Irish and Scottish libraries, and as
many provincial libraries as he could, especially hoping to find locally
printed materials.

Though he left for Canada with no thought of returning, Foxon's
stay there was short. He relished the informality of Canada—returning
to Oxford, he found it formal and stuffy by contrast—and he enjoyed
both his teaching and the social life of the department at Queen's. The
post in North America made him eligible to apply for a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and he was successful in being given an award for 1967-68,
spending the time in Oxford preparing English Verse for publication.
During this period the Readership in Textual Criticism became vacant
(it was perhaps the only post that would have tempted Foxon to return
to Britain); he applied and was appointed.

Oxford, English Verse, and the Lyell Lectures

Foxon's teaching time in Oxford was divided between giving general
lectures and classes to postgraduate students and supervising research.
The informal role of general bibliographical adviser to the University—
and, of course, to interested visitors—which had been filled by Herbert
Davis, and would have suited Foxon, was not available to him because
he was not given space in the Bodleian. There were probably several
reasons for this decision. Davis (Reader in Textual Criticism 1949-60)
had been succeeded by Alice Walker (1961-68), who had worked to a

different pattern. Foxon was not a printer as Davis had been, and he
did not, therefore, teach printing classes, as Davis had done (Michael
Turner had already taken over that role), and the Bibliography Room,
which had been Davis's headquarters, had passed back fully into the
control of the Library. Unlike Davis, Foxon was elected to a college
fellowship, at Wadham, but Wadham did not give him a room. His
teaching room was behind the English Faculty Library, next to the Territorial
Army headquarters. As I recollect, he used it very little, preferring
to see his students at home or take them to the pub. Whatever
the reasons for not encouraging Foxon to make his headquarters in the
Bodleian, I have little doubt that the decision played a significant part
in his growing isolation in Oxford. From the start, he was semi-detached
from the University.

Foxon struck students and faculty alike, I think, as a touch sophisticated
and cosmopolitan for Oxford. He dressed smartly while others were
dedicated to ancient tweed and leather patches; he liked French food
and wine; and his cigarette holder, though eminently practical, smacked
of London clubland in an earlier age. The sophisticated exterior was
sometimes disrupted by extraordinary bursts of energy; if there were
stairs available, Foxon would run up and down them. David Fleeman
remembered a first meeting at the British Museum Library during
which Foxon leapt up and ran across a table, disrupting its pile of
papers, in order to collect a relevant curiosity. Foxon was a lively lecturer
and an enthusiastic supervisor. At times I could have wished him
less enthusiastic, because he would happily rewrite paragraph after paragraph
of my prose; but mine may have been an especially dire case.
Isobel Grundy remembers an endearing habit of trying to lift his head
from his shoulders by the hair and exclaiming, `Boy, have you got problems!',
something we both found reassuring. He was passionately interested
in music, and, like Fredson Bowers, created a sophisticated audio
system. Always determined to get warm and musical results, he endlessly
tweaked his equipment and experimented with new units. To the distress
of his advisers, however, he refused to part with his elderly Quod
electrostatic speakers, which were fastened to the wall to reduce vibration,
and took up enough space to make his sitting room look more like
a radio station or cricket nets than a place for relaxation.

In 1975 Foxon finally published English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue
of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected
Editions. He had succeeded in his aim, prompted by Bowers, of
consulting multiple copies and discriminating variant printings. Although
he decided to restrict his listings for each item in the printed
catalogue to five locations in Britain and five in the States, he made it

clear that further information would be available to enquiring scholars.[23]
(The provision of shelfmarks for British Library copies has led to
his name being blessed by at least one perplexed user of its catalogues.)
Other important bibliographical information is provided: titles and
summaries of imprints, collations (an important advance over other
short catalogues), notes of watermarks, dates of publication, information
from printers' records, and, of course, discrimination of editions, impressions,
and states. Foxon suggests in his preface that users might become
impatient of notes such as `apparently a reimpression' or `sheet B
is apparently reset' and acknowledges that they come from the method
of recording the position of signature letters rather than using facsimiles
(vii). But he regarded the method as appropriate to his time and resources.
With his interest in developing technology, and particularly in
the Hinman collator, he recognized that modern techniques of reproduction
and collation would have permitted him to be more decisive in
his judgements, but I think most readers would concur with his verdict
that the method served him well. The quality of the discrimination in
cases such as the bibliography of Pope's Dunciad or Essay on Man is
astonishingly high. His results may be developed or refined by bibliographers
of single poets or poems, but it is difficult to imagine more being
encompassed by a single scholar in the time he had available.

Foxon's opposition to quasi-facsimile transcriptions of title pages,
defended in his Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical
Description (1970), has proved controversial. His doubts about traditional
practices had two sources. One was the development of technology,
which made it possible to xerox title pages and then compare them
mechanically. As he notes in his catalogue, only this comparison could
reveal whether the type pages have been removed from the forme between
impressions. In other words, the bibliographer can now carry out
and summarize analyses that cannot be made available for the reader's
replication by possession of the bibliography. The second reason for
challenging the usefulness of title-page transcription was that it was
very rarely successful in discriminating editions. Reviewing, and praising,
Philip Gaskell's Bibliography of the Foulis Press in 1965, Foxon
remarks on how large the title page transcriptions loom and notes the
danger that a false emphasis on the title page can lead to variants being
distinguished by a comma there, rather than by the fact that a preface
occupies two pages rather than one. By providing a history of some of
the practices of bibliographical description, Foxon was drawing attention
to a ritual observance of received practice, and his challenge has

not, I believe, been fully answered. A characteristically thoughtful response
from G. Thomas Tanselle, however, defended quasi-facsimile
transcription as an essential part of the historical account of the book,
and I share his sense that title pages have an importance that goes beyond
their ability to discriminate editions.[24]

English Verse, 1701-1750 shows a characteristic respect for its material
and concern for its users. His thoroughly humane approach was
singled out for praise by G. S. Rousseau in a review that captures the
quality of Foxon's work:

Foxon certainly attended to those small decisions that might benefit his
users. In 1965, he published `Defoe: A Specimen of a Catalogue of English
Verse, 1701-1750' in The Library, `to provide an opportunity for
criticism at a stage when it can be constructively used' (277). If there
were no major modifications resulting from this exercise, Foxon had
already shown himself open to advice about his catalogue and willing
to change his mind. As noted above, he had not originally intended to
include first lines, but gladly did so when the suggestion was put to him,
and the introduction to the specimen in The Library points to another
change: `I originally intended to say nothing about the subject-matter
of the poems, but it became clear that when I did know the person or
event concerned it was silly to exclude it, even if I could not undertake
the work of identification in every case' (277). For all its lightness of
touch, I suspect this sentence is Foxon's way of conveying one of his
profoundest insights: that his was essentially a humanist activity and
that helpfulness to critics and historians was more important than consistency.
Careful consideration of the user is also apparent in the preface
and introduction, and in the six indexes of the second volume (first lines,
chronological, imprints, bibliographical notabilia, descriptive epithets,

subject). The preface and introduction are object lessons in the art of
combining scholarly information with personal intimacy. Foxon's account
of his work is Johnsonian. He is amusingly self-critical, but he
puts before us standards of excellence we know cannot be attained. As
a result, the reader not only feels in touch with the compiler but comes
away with a proper understanding of what the catalogue can and cannot
do.

Foxon's catalogue has had the anticipated success with librarians,
booksellers, and collectors—`not in Foxon' is a rare but important description—but
it has also had less easily anticipated literary consequences.
Roger Lonsdale's heroic labours in reading eighteenth-century
verse for his ground-breaking New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century
Verse (Oxford, 1984) began by treating English Verse, 1701-1750 as a
reading list, and Andrew Carpenter has confessed a similar debt in compiling
his Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork,
1998). In this respect the catalogue has helped to revolutionize our understanding
of eighteenth-century poetry.[26]

The long period of preparing the catalogue for publication tired
and debilitated Foxon. In his preface he explains that the actual compilation
of his slips was much the easier part of his task. Organizing and
polishing the material took eight years, and occupied most of the period
of his Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967-68. I saw Foxon often in 197172,
when the catalogue had started to go through the press (I checked
the proofs of the index of imprints for him), and know that he found
the stress of the work overwhelming. The indexes were difficult to order,
and proof correction was a complex and laborious task. He was also at
this time taking various medicines that seemed to complicate or aggravate
his condition. He himself dated a decline in his health from this
period, dividing his life into before and after the publication of English
Verse, 1701-1750.

Preparation of the catalogue completed, Foxon launched immediately,
and perhaps unwisely, on another important project. In 1974-75
he took up a fellowship at the Clark Library in California to prepare
the Lyell lectures on Pope, which he was to deliver in Oxford in March
1976. The Clark proved an excellent place to work—Foxon always said
that the lectures were completed only because he was looked after so
well—and he worked under intense pressure, with extraordinary bursts
of energy. When they were delivered, the lectures were an immediate

success. Nicolas Barker gave a good account of them in the TLS, 3 September
1976, 1085, pointing out that much of their impact came from
their illustrations. Foxon combined direct illustrations of imprints and
advertisements with ingenious parallel texts constructed of Pope's drafts
and editions. The final lecture, which has not been published, used some
astonishing pictures of typographical innovations practised by authors.
I have no wish to criticize the yeoman efforts of the editor who brought
the lectures to publication in 1991, but there can be little doubt that
some of the original force of the lectures is lost in their transition into
print.[27] Foxon had himself considered revising and printing the lectures
as a landscape book, with pictures to the left and text to the right, but
such a project would have involved significant rewriting.

In the lectures Foxon is the first to tell the full story of Pope's relation
with printers and publishers, and to consider the consequences for
editing. As Brean Hammond has recently pointed out, Pope's stance
was usually that of an opponent of professional writing, but the Lyell
lectures showed the full extent of his own professionalism as a writer.[28]
If Pope was not a fraud like Wise, he was certainly an ingenious manipulator
of booksellers and readers. Foxon is pleasantly ruthless in exposing
him, while, as usual, avoiding a censorious tone. The skilled uses
of anonymity, the wily business deals, and the taste for equivocation are
all detailed, and the detective work is characteristically accurate. The
chapter on the Homer translations, with its analysis of Pope's aesthetic
choices and debts, and its reconstruction of the unfortunate Lintot's
business problems, is a tour de force unequalled in discursive bibliography.
Pope knew how books were printed and how they were marketed:
he ruled the printer down to fixing the size of an initial letter,
and he did his best to block out the publishing middle men and take a
larger share of the profits. He was also the opposite of the author conceived
by simplified versions of the Greg rationale of copy-text—one
who wrote his text and then abandoned it to the printer. He intervened
at every stage and shaped his text himself.

Although Foxon was exhausted by this outburst of activity, he carried
on working. In 1977-78 he was Sandars Reader in Bibliography at
Cambridge and lectured on the Stamp Act and its consequences. In
writing the lectures he drew on generous assistance from Richard

Goulden, then in the Public Record Office but later to move to the
British Library to help with the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue.
These lectures remain unpublished, but copies were deposited
in the Cambridge University and British libraries. In 1978 Foxon was
elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of his eminence
in refining the methodology of enumerative and descriptive bibliography,
and in 1980-81 he was president of the Bibliographical Society.
His presidential address to the Society, `Proofs as Evidence of Change
in the Seventeenth-Century Printing House', provided an excellent introduction
to the whole topic of proof-correction and used Plantin's
ordinances of 1564 as a basis for discussing the timetable likely to be
used in the printing house. Although he was encouraged, by Don McKenzie
among others, to publish this paper, he declined to do so. In
1982 he retired from his Readership on grounds of ill health.

Postlude

Foxon told me late in life that he had never anticipated so long a
retirement, and in retrospect his abandonment of his research seems
premature. In particular, he decided not to continue work on an edition
of the Stationers' Register, 1710-1746, a project he had conceived before
going to Canada and to which he was uniquely suited. His proposal had
been accepted by the Bibliographical Society and some preliminary work
had been done on copying the entries onto slips, but the prospect of undertaking
another complex work of annotation and indexing was too
daunting. By the time of his retirement Foxon thought of himself as a
sick man, and, having largely given up conventional medicine, he
sought relief in osteopathy and acupuncture. There can be little doubt
that by this point he seriously underestimated his own powers, both
intellectual and physical. He believed that treatment of his hypertension
with beta-blockers on his return from America in 1975 had resulted
in severe memory loss, but, although he may have suffered some impairment,
my many scholarly conversations with him over the years convinced
me that his memory was still strong—certainly usually better
than my own. He played a very large role as a consultant in the preparation
of his Lyell lectures for the press from 1987 to 1991, recalling
in detail some of his original intentions, and in the late 1990s he still
had the capacity to conjure up events, characters, and ideas from his
early life.[29]

For a time Foxon attended various committees of which he was a
member, including the British Academy's, and he would regularly attend
the Lyell lectures. He took pleasure in the honours he was given.
He was awarded the Bibliographical Society's gold medal in 1985 and
was delighted to be elected as Honorary Member of the Bibliographical
Society of America the following year. He continued to offer assistance
to scholars: Roger Lonsdale testifies to his helpfulness with particular
queries in relation to the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century
Verse, and Steven Shankman thanks him for answering detailed questions
for the Penguin edition of the Iliad (1996). But though he would
be happy to correspond with Lonsdale, a scholar he much admired, and
to chat with him if he met him in the street, he was always unwilling to
set up longer meetings. He regularly declined my suggestions that he
should meet interested Popeians, through a false sense of his declining
powers.

Inevitably Foxon's life narrowed in these circumstances. As Isabel
Fleeman remarked, `Someone who has to be in bed by eight o'clock is
not a promising dinner guest'. He was on good terms with his neighbours,
enjoyed visits to his daughter and her family, tinkered with his
stereo, read The Times every day, and was still capable of a short private
correspondence if something caught his interest in the TLS. He looked
back on his life with pleasure tinged by perplexity. He became ill early
in 2001 and died in a nursing home in London on 5 June.

Foxon's life, in spite of persistent ill health and the valetudinarian
impulses that overtook it, displays high ambition, independent intelligence,
and courage to triumph over persistent difficulties. His
achievement must be seen against the background of a British academic
establishment that valued scholarly research (Foxon always enjoyed the
respect of his superiors and his colleagues) but did little actively to
support it. The major awards that enabled him to complete his work
(the Harkness and Guggenheim Fellowships) were both American; he
worked without a research assistant; he usually paid for his research
travel and materials; and some of his most important work was carried
out during his lunch breaks. He succeeded because bibliography was
for him an exciting vocation, demanding a commitment not dissimilar
to his father's devotion to his ministry. Bibliography required that the
intellectual powers he had developed at Bletchley be dedicated to serving
a wide community of critics, historians, librarians and collectors.

That dedication lies behind Foxon's catalogue English Verse, 17011750,
but it also marked his work at the British Museum and at Oxford.
He was always willing to approach the problems of other scholars with
the same enthusiasm he brought to his own. To him answering queries
was both a pleasure and a duty, an activity central to his scholarly role.
And he never ceased to find the work exciting, perhaps too exciting.
His curiosity was unresting, always seeking out patterns and anomalies,
and trying to reconstruct the narratives behind them.[30] Foxon's legacy
lies not only in the great resource of his catalogue and in the stories he
uncovered of Pope and Wise and their machinations, but also in the
possibility of future discoveries by the application of the same humane
curiosity and technical know-how. He modestly took the epigraph for
English Verse, 1701-1750 from Pope's Essay on Criticism:

But his achievement is perhaps better reflected in the account of the
ideal critic later in the same poem, which evokes a man like Foxon:

Publications by David Foxon

1953

`Binding Variants in the Brontës' Poems', Book Collector, 2 (1953), 219-221.

`Some Notes on Agenda Format', The Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 163-173.

Review of S. Roscoe, Thomas Bewick: A Bibliography, The Library, 5th ser.,
8 (1953), 206-209 [see also `The Bibliography of Bewick' (1954) below].

1954

`The Bibliography of Bewick', The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 209 [reply to
S. Roscoe's response to 1953 review].

`The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798', The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 221241.

1955

`The Golden Treasury, 1861', Book Collector, 4 (1955), 252-253 [see also `The
Golden Treasury, 1861' (1956) below].

`A Piracy of Steele's The Lying Lover', The Library, 5th ser., 10 (1955), 127129.

The Technique of Bibliography, The Book, No. 6 (Cambridge: National
Book League, 1955).

`E Typis Palgravianis', Book Collector, 4 (1955), 252.

1956

`Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 77-78.

`Another Skeleton in T. J. Wise's Cupboard', TLS, 19 October 1956, 624.

`Concealed Pope Editions', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 277-279.

`Fielding's The Modern Husband, 1732', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 76-77.

`Forger and Thief. A New Chapter in Cautionary Tale of Thomas J. Wise',
The Times, 18 October 1956, p. 11.

`The Golden Treasury, 1861', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 75 [see `The Golden
Treasury, 1861' (1955) above].

`On Printing "At One Pull", and Distinguishing Impressions by Point-Holes',
The Library, 5th ser., 11 (1956), 284-285.

1957

`The Chapbook Editions of the Lambs' Tales from Shakespear', Book Collector,
6 (1957), 41-53.

1958

`Two Cruces in Pope Bibliography', TLS, 24 January 1958, 52.

Review of Edwin Elliott Willoughby, The Uses of Bibliography to the Students
of Literature and History, Journal of Documentation, 14 (1958),
214-215.

1959

`Modern Aids to Bibliographical Research', Library Trends (April, 1959),
574-581.

`Oh! Sophonisba! Sophonisba! Oh!', Studies in Bibliography, 12 (1959), 204213.

`Prior's A New Collection of Poems, 1724 &c.', Book Collector, 8 (1959),
69-70.

Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama, Supplement to the Bibliographical
Society's Publications, No. 19 (London: Bibliographical
Society, 1959).

1961

`Re-shuffle or Declare?', TLS, 17 February 1961, 105 [letter].

[With W. B. Todd] `Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama: A
Supplement', The Library, 5th ser., 16 (1961), 287-293 [250 offprints
were available at special price].

1962

Review of Thomas J. Wise: Centenary Studies, ed. William B. Todd, The
Library, 5th ser., 17 (1962), 263-264.

1963

`John Cleland and the Publication of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure',
Book Collector, 12 (1963), 476-487 [reprinted in Libertine Literature
(London, 1964) and Libertine Literature (New Hyde Park, NY, 1965)].

`Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745', Book Collector, 12 (1963), 2136,
159-177, 294-307 [reprinted in Libertine Literature (London, 1964)
and Libertine Literature (New Hyde Park, NY, 1965)].

`Monthly Catalogues of Books Published', The Library, 5th ser., 18 (1963),
223-228.

[With Frank H. Ellis] `Prior's Simile', Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America, 57 (1963), 337-339.

1964

Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (London: Book Collector, 1964)
[revised reprint of Book Collector, 12 (1963), 21-36, 159-177, 294-307,
476-487].

[Ed.] English Bibliographical Sources (London: Gregg Press; Archive Press,
1964-68). Three series:

• Series 1: Periodical lists of new publications

  • 1. The Monthly Catalogue, 1714-1717

  • 2. The Monthly Catalogue, 1723-1730

  • 3. A Register of Books, 1728-1732

  • 4. Bibliotheca Annua, 1699-1703

  • 5. The Annual Catalogue, 1736-1737

  • 6. The Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1751

  • 7. The London Magazine, 1732-1766

  • 8. The British Magazine, 1746-50

• Series 2: Catalogues of books in circulation

  ---

  112

  
  
  

  • 1. Andrew Maunsell, The Catalogue of English Printed Books (1595)

  • 2. William London, A Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England
    (1657, 1658, 1660)

  • 3. Robert Clavel, A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England since
    the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the End of Michaelmas
    Term 1672 (1673)

  • 4. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England
    since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the End of Trinity
    Term 1674 (1675)

  • 5. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England
    since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the end of Trinity
    Term 1680 (1680)

  • 6. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England
    since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the end of Michaelmas
    Term 1695 (1696)

• Series 3: Printers' manuals

  • 1. James Watson, The History of the Art of Printing (1713)

  • 2. John Smith, The Printer's Grammar (1755)

  • 3. Philip Luckombe, The History and Art of Printing (1771)

  • 4. Caleb Stower, The Printer's Grammar (1808)

  • 5. John Johnson, Typographia (1824)

  • 6. Thomas C. Hansard, Typographia (1825)

  • 7. Charles H. Timperley, The Printer's Manual (1838)

  • 8. William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841)

Review of Norma Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper, Book Collector,
13 (1964), 91-95.

Review of Herman Teerink, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan
Swift, Book Collector, 13 (1964), 379-380.

1965

`Defoe: A Specimen of a Catalogue of English Verse, 1701-1750', The Library,
5th ser., 20 (1965), 277-297.

Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, NY: University
Books, 1965) [revised reprint, with an introduction, of Book Collector, 12 (1963), 21-36, 159-177, 294-307, 476-487].

`The Reappearance of Two Lost Black Sheep', Book Collector, 14 (1965),
75-76.

Review of Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press, The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 251-252.

Review of Terence J. Deakin, Catalogi Librorum Eroticorum, The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 253-254.

1969

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969).

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 1714 (Menston: Scolar Press,

1969).

Review of The Houghton Library, 1942-67, The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969),
255-256.

1970

`More on Robinson Crusoe, 1719', The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 57-58.

Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (Los
Angeles: School of Library Service, Berkeley: School of Librarianship,
Univ. of California, 1970).

`The Varieties of Early Proof: Cartwright's Royal Slave, 1639, 1640', The
Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 151-154.

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr Pope to Dr Arbuthnot, 1734,
Epistle VII, To Dr Arbuthnot from Works, Volume II, 1735 (Menston:
Scolar Press, 1970).

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711 (Menston: Scolar Press,
1970).

[Ed.] James Thomson, The Seasons, 1730 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

Review of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. by O M Brack, Jr., and
Warner Barnes, The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 266-268.

Review of A Ledger of Charles Ackers, ed. D. F. McKenzie and J. C. Ross,
The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 65-73.

Review of Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning, The Library, 5th ser., 25
(1970), 174-175.

1975

English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with
Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1975).

`Stitched Books', Book Collector, 24 (1975), 111-124.

1978

`Greg's "Rationale" and the Editing of Pope', The Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978),
119-124.

1979

Letter to the Editor, Publishing History, 6 (1979), 113-115 [on trade discounts].

Review of Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader, Review of English Studies,
n.s. 30 (1979), 237-239.

1980

`Poems Autographed by the Author', Factotum, 8 (1980), 21-23.

1991

Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).