University of Virginia Library

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.