University of Virginia Library

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.