University of Virginia Library

"THIS INSTANCE WILL NOT DO": GEORGE STEEVENS,
SHAKESPEARE, AND THE REVISION(S) OF
JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY

by
R. Carter Hailey[1]

In 1773 Samuel Johnson published revised editions of his monumental Dictionary
of the English Language (4th ed., folio),[2] and, with George Steevens,
of The Plays of William Shakespeare. The working relationship of the two
men dated from at least 1765 when Johnson had published his first Shakespeare
edition, a project to which Steevens contributed forty-nine textual
and usage notes.[3] Johnson in turn encouraged and praised Steevens's 1766
edition of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, Being the whole Number
printed in Quarto During his Lifetime, or before the Restoration. While the
1773 Shakespeare was an ostensible collaboration, both the impetus for the
edition and the bulk of the work were provided by Steevens. Johnson contributed
some eighty new notes to the commentary, while Steevens established
the text, wrote General Observations for The Comedy of Errors and
Much Ado About Nothing (which had been lacking in the 1765 edition), and
added hundreds of explanatory notes, many citing parallel passages from
other Renaissance dramatists.[4] Conversely, although Steevens is nowhere

identified as a contributor to the revised Dictionary, Arthur Sherbo has
discerned an element of cross-fertilization between the two projects by identifying
a number of instances in which Steevens's notes to the Shakespeare
edition resulted in Johnsonian revisions in the Dictionary.[5]

Steevens's scholarly abilities were eminently suited to both textual criticism
and lexicography, and contemporary praises for his intelligence, industry,
and wide acquaintance with antiquarian literature—especially that of
English Renaissance drama—are plentiful.[6] Steevens's scholarly interests coincided
with the aims of both the Dictionary and the Shakespeare editions,
and his rationale for reprinting the Shakespeare quartos recognizes the affinity
between the two projects:

The last sentence might serve as a concise statement of Johnson's methodology
in compiling the Dictionary, and appears to have been designed both to flatter
Johnson and to demonstrate Steevens's own grasp of the project's nature and
scope. If the reference was not sufficiently transparent, Steevens continued:

This better understanding is implicitly the product of Johnson's efforts in
producing the laborious catalogue and judicious glossary that is the Dictionary
of the English Language. By reprinting the Shakespearean quartos
Steevens contributes to the larger cultural project: he not only offers the
public "the poet's first thoughts" (14) but also helps to preserve the literary
heritage by providing the raw materials from which dictionaries can be made.
Steevens has thus in a few lines insinuated himself into a productive scholarly

association with Dr. Johnson, William Shakespeare, and the art of
lexicography.

John Middendorf has speculated that "from time to time evidence may
still emerge to add to our knowledge of the possible extent of Steevens's
anonymous assistance" to the 1773 Shakespeare edition (129). It is now possible
to expand this statement to include Steeven's activity in assisting Johnson
with the Dictionary during "The Year of Revision" (Sherbo, "1773," 18).
I will argue that George Steevens, dubbed the "Puck of Commentators" by a
contemporary for his literary quarrels and hoaxes, played a much more
active role in the revision of the Dictionary than has hitherto been suspected,
a role that, without acknowledgment, continued long past Johnson's death.

I

Two sets of materials offer a fascinating glimpse into Johnson's working
method in preparing the revisions for the fourth edition of the Dictionary.[7]
The first is the Sneyd-Gimbel copy—so called for its previous owners—now
held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University (shelfmark MS Vault Johnson).
This copy contains first edition (1755) sheets from the letter A through
the entry for Pumpion (with several gaps), corrected and annotated in the
hands of Johnson and an amanuensis and interleaved with more than 1,800
slips containing additional illustrative quotations. In The Making of Johnson's
Dictionary, Allen Reddick mounts a persuasive argument that the
Sneyd-Gimbel materials represent a preliminary stage in Johnson's preparations
for the revised fourth edition.[8] A heretofore perplexing set of materials
is a second partial and annotated copy of the dictionary, British Library
C.45.k3,[9] which consists of mixed first and third edition sheets from "A""Jailer,"
interleaved, with manuscript notes for revisions to the text. The
sheets for letter "B" are from the first edition (1755) and are annotated by
Johnson and an amanuensis; the remaining letters, "A" and "C"-"I/J," are
third edition sheets (1765) annotated by George Steevens,[10] whose work is

markedly different from Johnson's. Johnson reorders entries, adds new lemmas
and new senses of words, and deletes some quotations while adding
others. (The fourth edition would eventually include some 3000 new illustrative
quotations.) Steevens on the other hand, although he offers numerous
suggestions for additional illustrative quotations, concentrates on usage notes
and textual corrections to Shakespeare quotations.[11] How these apparently
disparate materials might have come together has been an enduring mystery.
Prior to their identification of Steevens's hand, Sledd and Kolb described the
problem:

While some of the mystery must remain, a reconsideration of the evidence
will show that Steevens almost certainly annotated the BL copy in order to
assist Johnson in revising for the fourth edition of the Dictionary, that at
least some of these annotations resulted in printed revisions in the fourth
edition, and that the missing third edition sheets of the letter B—whose place
is taken by the first edition sheets annotated by Johnson—served as the printer's
copy for that letter in F4.

Reddick argues convincingly that the first edition sheets in the BL copy—
those annotated by Johnson—represent a second stage in the revision process
and were intended as printer's copy for the revised edition, but were for some
reason never used. How they might have been mislaid or made otherwise
unavailable is unknown and, absent new documentary evidence, probably
unknowable. But, in the event, Johnson was forced hastily to reedit the letter
"B,"[13] with the result that the printed revisions in "B" are of a very different
order and magnitude from those found in the rest of the Dictionary. There
are for example fewer than half the number of new quotations that on average
appear in other letters of the revised Dictionary, and authors like Bacon,
Spenser, and Browne whose works frequently supply new illustrations in
adjacent portions of the revision do not appear at all in the new illustrations
in "B." Additionally, "B" is the only letter in the revision which is shorter
(by four pages) than in previous editions, "because very little new material
was added, while long quotations and references (as in other sections of the
text) were deleted or abridged."[14]

Reddick also asserts that "the corrections and additions" from the portion
of the BL copy annotated by Steevens "were never incorporated into the
Dictionary," indicating that "Johnson probably did not have access to them"
(193). And, after offering several possible scenarios to explain the odd juxtaposition
of Johnson's and Steevens's work in the BL copy, including one that
implies some chicanery on Steevens's part, Reddick concludes that Steevens
annotated the third edition sheets only after Johnson's death, at the request
of Charles Marsh, a fellow member of the Society of Antiquaries who had
purchased the materials when Johnson's library was dispersed in 1785 (193194).
But my own collation of Steevens's annotations in the BL copy against
the printed text of the revised fourth edition of the Dictionary (1773) indicates
that a number of Steevens's suggestions were in fact adopted by Johnson.
While he made no systematic use of the annotations—only a small
proportion of the more than 760 changes Steevens proposed appear to have
influenced the text of F4—in some forty-four instances Johnson either accepts
Steevens's suggestion outright, or alters an entry in a way which suggests that
Steevens's note was the probable source of the revision.[15] Why Johnson admitted
only a small number of Steevens's suggestions and what procedure he
used to incorporate those that were accepted remain obscure. But a substantial
number of Steevens's proposed revisions—around 310 of the 760—
are Shakespeare quotations which offer supplementary examples for words
and senses which were already illustrated in F1. While one of Johnson's purposes
for the revision was to provide additional illustrations, Shakespeare was
already heavily represented in the word list and only one of the printed
Steevensian revisions adds a Shakespeare quotation to an existing sense of
a word.[16] (For additional authorities in F4 Johnson relied heavily on the
Bible and Milton, at least in part because concordances were available.) Additionally,
Steevens for some reason annotated a copy of the third edition
(1765), while Johnson had prepared his revisions (rightly) from a copy of
the first edition (1755). Dozens of corrections suggested by Steevens in the BL
copy are to corruptions that had crept into the text in the transmission from
first to third editions, and were thus unnecessary to an edition set from annotated
first edition sheets. (They amply attest, however, to Steevens's perspicacity

as a proofreader.) Thus if the unnecessary corrections and Shakespeare
quotations are excepted from the total, Johnson adopted in some form
roughly 10% of Steevens's suggestions.[17] I say "in some form" because, as will
be seen below, some of the printed revisions vary to a greater or lesser degree
from Steevens manuscript notes. This is not altogether surprising considering
that, whatever Johnson's method for selecting instances to incorporate in F4,
Steevens's notes, corrections, and quotations would need first to be transcribed
on the interleaves of the printer's copy, probably by an amanuensis, and then
set in type by compositors. Variation could have crept in at each stage. The
Steevensian revisions that Johnson did choose to print take a variety of forms:
some correct textual errors, others rectify problems with usage and etymology,
provide additional illustrative quotations, or introduce new senses of
words. A few cases add new lemmata to the word list.

Several of the revisions correct small textual errors in Shakespeare quotations
and thereby attest to Steevens's meticulous attention to detail and
prodigious memory, for no Shakespeare concordance was available until
1787. Under To Abut, for example, F1's reading "Perilous the narrow" from
Henry V is corrected in F4 to "The narrow perilous," and under To Croak 2,
F4 corrects F1's "The raven himself not hoarse" to "is hoarse" in the first line
of the Macbeth quotation. Steevens's expertise is not limited to the works of
Shakespeare; in the F1 entry for Almond Tree, the first line of a Fairy
Queen quotation reads: "Like to an almond tree, you're mounted high."
Steevens, thoroughly familiar with Spenser's characteristic archaizing, noted
that "you're mounted" should properly read "ymounted." In F4 the reading
is simply "mounted high," with "you're" deleted. The original error had
probably arisen from a compositor's failure to recognize Spencer's use of the
archaic past tense "ymounted" and thus mistaking the "y" for the abbreviation
"yr."

A more complex example occurs in the entry for Cannibal, where
Steevens alters the F3 reading of an Othello quotation from "It was my hent
to speak" to "hint" (my emphasis). In F1 the word had read "bent," an apparent
transcriber's or compositor's error that had been corrected to "hent"
in F3; since F4 was set from a copy of F1, without Steevens's suggestion the
reading might well have remained "bent" in the later editions. This series of
readings effectively illustrates the interconnection between the Dictionary
and the Shakespeare edition. The Shakespeare First Folio (1623) and Second
Quarto (1630) both read "hint," while the First Quarto (1622) reads "hent."
William Warburton, whose 1747 edition was Johnson's source for Shakespeare
quotations,[18] had accepted "hent," appending a note defining it as
"use, custom." In collecting "authorities" for the first edition of the Dictionary

(1755) Johnson had uncritically accepted Warburton's reading, but when he
came to edit Shakespeare ten years later, he rejected the Second Quarto reading,
adopting instead the First Folio's "hint." Johnson prints Warburton's
note on the reading, followed by one of his own: "Hent is not use [sic] in
Shakespeare, nor, I believe in any other author. . . ."[19] The 1773 Johnson/
Steevens edition also prints both, followed by an additional note from
Steevens which indicates that he was fully aware of the conflicting readings
which had given rise to his suggestion in the BL copy. (The same quotation
had been used to illustrate Antre, and again Steevens questioned the reading
"hent," but the correction was never made.)

Among the corrections suggested by Steevens and accepted by Johnson,
roughly a quarter involve the addition of new illustrative quotations.[20] In
several instances Steevens provides a quotation for a word not otherwise
illustrated. Finding that Coigne "1. A corner." lacked an example in F1,
Steevens suggests a quotation from Macbeth: "—no jutting frieze, / Buttress
or coigne of vantage, but this bird / Hath made his pendant bed or procreant
cradle." Reading further, Steevens found that Johnson had used this very
quotation (and another from Shakespeare) to illustrate the same sense, but
under the spelling Coin. There Steevens notes: "Coigne is not spelt coin in
the ancient Editions or in Dr. Johnson's." In F4 both quotations are moved
from Coin to Coigne, and the anglicized lemma, though retained, is not illustrated.
For Dexterous, not illustrated in F1, Steevens offers "For both his
dextrous hands the lance could wield. Pope's Homer." Johnson duly adds the
quotation in F4 as "For both their dext'rous hands their lance could wield.
Pope."; the source of the error "their" for "his" is unclear. Similarly, for
Downhil adj., Steevens proposes "and the first stage a downhill green-sword
yields. Congreve." In F4, Johnson prints "And the first steps a downhil greensward
yields. Congreve."[21] This instance meets only the minimum requirement
for illustrations: as Johnson acknowledged in the "Preface" to the
Dictionary, "Many quotations serve no other purpose than that of proving
the bare existence of words." But ideally quotations would be "useful to
some other end than the illustration of the word" by the additional performance
of an aesthetic or didactic function. "It is not sufficient that a word is
found unless it be so combined as that its meaning is apparently determined
by the tract and tenor of the sentence . . ." (F1, B2v-C1r).[22] That is, quotations
should preferably not only illustrate the existence of a particular
word or sense, but additionally, through contextual clues, assist in defining

it. Steevens was throughly familiar with the aims and methods of compiling
"authorities" as Johnson repeatedly calls them. Under To Defeat, for
example, Steevens argues that: "To defeat. Perhaps in the following instance
means to alter, to change. Defeat thy favour with an usurped beard.
Shakespeare." In F4 Johnson, satisfied that the conjunction of "defeat" and
"usurp" fulfilled the "tenor and tract" test, adopts Steevens's suggestion by
adding "to undo" to the definition and illustrating it: "Defeat thy favour
with usurped beard. Shakespeare."

The revision of the lemma Eisel again attests to the complex interactions
between Steevens's editorial activities and his work on the Dictionary. In F1
Johnson had defied eisel as "Vinegar; verjuice; any acid" and illustrated it
with a quotation from Hamlet: "Woo't drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? / I'll
do it." In the BL copy, Steevens crosses through the quotation, adds a note
which insists that "The passage from Hamlet is controverted," and offers
several alternatives: "Whilst like a willing patient, I will drink / Potions of
Eisel 'gainst my strong infection. The Complaint a Poem attributed to Shakespeare";[23]
"—Remember therewithal / how Christ for the fasted with Eisel
& gall. Sir Thomas More"; "Kned in with Eisel strong and egre; / And there
to she was lene and megre. Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose." In F4 the Hamlet
passage is dropped, replaced by the More quotation which comes from his
translation of Pico della Mirandola's life of Johan Picus. Atypically, Johnson
expanded the passage Steevens had suggested: "Cast in thy mind / How thou
resemblest Christ, as with sower poison, / If thou paine thy taste; remember
therewithall / How Christ for thee tasted eisel and gall. Sir. Thomas More."
Johnson corrects Steevens "fasted with" to "tasted," while introducing the
reading "poison" for "potion," an easy transcription or compositorial error
through metathesis and a mistaking of long s- for t- (if indeed "potion" had
been the spelling of his source[24] ).

It had been Steevens himself who had controverted the reading eisel in
the 1773 Johnson/Steevens edition (10:321-322 n. 5), where the line is given
as "Woo't drink up Esil? Eat a crocodile?" Steevens appended a long note on
the reading "Esil," quoting Theobald's edition of 1733 in which "Eisel"—a
reading accepted by nearly all modern editors—was first conjectured as the
original of Q2's Esill and F1's Esile (Q1 had read "vessels"). Theobald rejects
earlier commentators' notion that Esill/Esile is the name of a river in
Denmark, contending that "there is none there so called."[25] Steevens, however,
argues otherwise, citing an unnamed "old Latin account of Denmark"
which includes "the names of several rivers little differing from Esil, or Elsill,

in spelling or pronunciation." Steevens goes on to allege that "no" authours
later than Chaucer or Skelton make use of eysel for vinegar: nor has Shakespeare
employed it in any other of his plays." His comments are curious in
light of the passages he had suggested in the BL copy which, as I have shown,
must have been annotated prior to the publication of the revised 1773
editions of both the Dictionary and the Plays of William Shakespeare. The
More quotation is roughly contemporary with Skelton, but, although "Eisel"
does not in fact appear elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays, it is found in Sonnet
111: "Whilst like a willing pacient I will drinke, / Potions of Eysell gainst my
strong infection."[26] This is of course the very passage Steevens had cited in
the BL copy, where its source is wrongly identified as "The Complaint a Poem
attributed to Shakespeare." How Steevens could have known the line when
annotating the BL copy, but not when writing the textual note for the Shakespeare
edition, is curious. But Steevens clearly uses the Dictionary to substantiate
his own reading of the passage, suppressing counter-evidence by advising
Johnson to delete the Hamlet quotation. And Steevens's note seems almost
certainly to have prompted Johnson's revision of the entry, although the
means by which a longer version of the More quotation was used is unclear.

In several instances Steevens suggests that an additional sense of a word
be defined and illustrated. For Affection, Steevens's note on the interleaf is
keyed by an "x" to follow the eighth sense of affection and offers: "affection.
Affectatation [sic] / x No sallets in the lines &c this [sic] / might indite the
Author of Affection. Shak. Hamlet" and "—witty without affection Shak.
Love's L.L." And in the 4th edition Johnson adds a 9th sense: "9. It is used
by Shakespeare sometimes for affectation. / There was nothing in it that could
indict the authour of affection.[27] Shakespeare." At To Clamour, Steevens
observes of the second Shakespeare quotation—"Clamour your tongues, and
not a word more"—that "This instance proves just the contrary to what was
intended by it. To clamour bells is to silence them by raising them upright."
In F4 Johnson adds a second sense of the word: "2. In Shakespeare it seems to
mean actively, to stop from noise" and illustrates it with the suggested quotation.
(It is worth noting in passing that "clamour" is thus one of the rare
words like "sanction," "cleave," and "let" that can mean the opposite of
itself.)

When Johnson accepts a suggestion, the revised text is generally straightforward

enough. For example under Caisson Steevens notes: "Likewise the
floating frame in which the Piers of Bridges are built," and in F4 Johnson
adds a second sense of the word: "2. A wooden case in which the piers of
bridges are built within the water." In several instances, however, a suggestion
is accepted, but with a bit of editorial commentary which indicates
that Johnson remains unconvinced by Steevens's argument. In F1 Johnson,
citing Pope, derives Argosy from the name of Jason's ship Argo. Steevens's
note reads: "Argosy is as probably derived from Ragusa formerly famous for
Pirates (hence Shakespeare's Argosine) but now tributary to the Porte." In
F4 the etymology is altered to read: "Derived by Pope from Argo, the name
of Jason's shop; supposed by others to be a vessel of Ragusa or Ragosa, a
Ragozine, corrupted." Here one may detect a hint of disapprobation in Johnson's
"supposed by others." In F1 the word Comart n.s. is not defined, although
it is illustrated by a quotation from Hamlet. Steevens crosses through the
quotation and on the interleaf writes: "The word was inserted by Warburton,
but no Dict. that I have seen gives any example of it." Johnson nevertheless
retains both lemma and quotation in F4, but modifies the definition: "This
word, which I have only met with in one place, seems to signify; treaty;
article from con and mart, or market."[28] That one place had been in the
Second Quarto of Hamlet (1604-5).[29] Warburton's Shakespeare (1747)—the
edition Johnson used for collecting quotations for the Dictionary—had accepted
the reading "comart" instead of the First Folio's "cou'nant." Johnson's
edition of 1765 follows the First Folio in reading "cov'nant," although
Warburton's note defending Q2's "comart" is included; the 1773 Johnson/
Steevens edition reads "covenant." Warburton's note is appended, but is now
followed by Steevens's rebuttal which echoes his note in the BL copy: "I can
find no such word as comart in any dictionary" (10:151). Again the intersection
of the two projects is manifest.

In several instances Johnson adds a lemma to F4 that had been suggested
by Steevens in the BL copy. On an interleaf Steevens proposes "Chargeful a
word employed by Shakespeare," although, uncharacteristically, he does not
cite a specific passage. (It is in fact used only once, in Comedy of Errors 4.1.29.)
Johnson adds the lemma in F4, defining it as "Expensive, costly. Not in use."
Here Johnson accepts Steevens's suggestion almost grudgingly, as if to say,
"Well yes, it may well be found in Shakespeare, but I didn't include it because
it's not current." Johnson's tone may be in part a reaction to the brusqueness
of some of Steevens's notes. Under To Chance, for example, Steevens crossed

through the first Shakespeare quotation, adding a note that "This instance
will not do," and under Commiseration, where again a quotation is marked
through, the note reads simply, "This is a bad instance." Steevens tone should
not, however, be taken as evidence that his annotations were not intended
for Johnson's eyes. Reddick, for example, argues that the annotations were
probably made after Johnson's death since in several of the annotations
"Steevens seems to speak of Johnson as a third party (i.e. `Compliments in
this passage is the same as compliments, and is so explained by Dr. Johnson
in his Shakespeare'), rather than to address the lexicographer directly, [which]
seems to suggest that they were not executed for Johnson's use" (193-194).
But Steevens's use of the third person results from the habitual manner in
which both Johnson and Steevens referred to each other in their notes to the
Shakespeare edition. A search of the Chadwyck-Healey electronic text of the
second Johnson/Steevens edition (1778) reveals that, in the textual notes,
Johnson refers to "Mr. Steevens" twenty-five times and that Steevens refers to
"Dr. Johnson" on one hundred and forty occasions.[30] While the great majority
of Johnson's notes cite "Mr. Steevens" with approbation, on at least one occasion
(cited above), Johnson observes that "Mr. Steevens appears to have
forgot our author's 111th sonnet."

Steevens is much more apt to contradict Johnson and his tone is reminiscent
of that in the BL annotations:

In exchange for Steevens's invaluable assistance, Johnson was apparently
willing to tolerate a bit of brusqueness.

In addition to the previous examples of corrections and additions inspired
by Steevens's notes in the BL copy, there are also a number of instances
where Johnson apparently responds to Steevens's suggestions not by
revising but by deleting the passage in question.[31] One major stage of the
Dictionary revision had, in fact, been the deletion of superfluities and the
truncation or compression of entries to allow space for new material to be
included. The extent of Johnson's editorial excisions is apparent when considering
that although some 3,000 new quotations were added, the fourth

edition is only eighteen pages longer than the first.[32] In one or two instances
it could be argued that the deletion would have been made independent of
Steevens's suggestion. Under Aroynt, for example, Steevens proposes an alteration
to the quotation which was not accepted, but also notes that it had
been wrongly attributed to Shak. King Lear, rather than to Macbeth. In F4 it
is attributed simply to Shakespeare. Since Johnson frequently truncates attributions
in F4, this particular instance may not have been a response to
Steevens's note, but no space is saved by the shortening. In other cases, however,
the deletion was apparently prompted by Steevens's notes. In the first
Shakespeare quotation illustrating Addition 4, the third line in F1 reads "The
sway, revenue, execution of th'last." Steevens indicates that the last words
should read "the rest." In the fourth edition "of th'last" is simply excised,
although no space is saved. (This is a rare instance where the attribution is
expanded in F4, to Shakes. King Lear from F1's Shakespeare.) The primary
sense of Chamber 1 is defined as "An apartment in a house; generally used
for those appropriated to lodging." Steevens crosses through the first Shakespeare
quotation, from Richard III: "Welcome, sweet prince, to London,
to your chamber." His note states: "Chamber, in this instance, signifies
London anciently called Camera regea." In F4 the quotation is deleted.
In F1 Johnson defines Commere as "A common mother" and illustrates it
with a quotation from Hamlet: "As peace should still her wheaten garland
wear, / And stand a commere 'tween their amities." Steevens crosses through
the entry, and notes on the interleaf: "There is no such word in Shakespeare.
Commere was instead of comma by Warburton." Johnson drops the entry
entirely in F4.

One final example again indicates the cross-fertilization between the
Dictionary and the Shakespeare edition. For the word Hail n.s. Steevens
marked for deletion the illustration "As thick as hail / Came post on post.
Shakespeare's Macbeth." This had been the reading, first proposed by Rowe,
of Warburton's edition (1747) from which Johnson had chosen his Shakespeare
illustrations. And Johnson had printed the line thus in his 1765
Shakespeare edition, but appended a note reading:

In the 1773 edition Johnson, perhaps prompted by Steevens's corroborative
note in the BL copy, adopts his own suggestion and prints "As thick as tale /
Came post with post."

As the preceding series of examples demonstrate, Steevens's sedulous
labors in annotating the BL copy were utilized by Johnson, although not
systematically so. The strong suggestion is that Steevens worked closely with
Johnson over a period of many years on both the Shakespeare editions and
the Dictionary.[33] And while Allen Reddick has brilliantly reconstructed the
several stages in Johnson's lexicographic development, this new awareness of
Steeven's deep involvement provides fresh clues about the nature and provenance
of the British Library copy. The first edition sheets were certainly, as
Reddick suggests, prepared by Johnson as printer's copy for the letter "B."
But why were they never used for that purpose, and how did they come to be
inserted between the third edition sheets annotated by Steevens? How Johnson
or the printer might have mislaid the material must remain mysterious,
but it is possible to say with some assurance what was used in its stead. It is
evident that where the Johnsonian material for the letter "B" is inserted in
the BL copy, Steevens's annotated third edition sheets for the same letter are
absent; it would be difficult to imagine a situation in which Steevens would
have annotated only the letters "A" and "C-I/J." I consequently suspected
that when the printer's copy for the letter "B" was mislaid, Johnson, rather
than beginning from scratch, took what was nearest to hand—Steevens's annotated
third edition sheets—hastily augmented them with a few additional
revisions, and sent the copy off to the printers. This scenario would account
for the different nature and magnitude of revisions in the printed text of the
letter "B" as compared to the rest of the fourth edition of the Dictionary.

To confirm my suspicions I collated the first thirty pages of the letter "B"
in the first, third, and fourth editions and through recension determined
that, unlike the rest of the fourth edition, "B" was set from third rather than
first edition sheets. The following is a sample of the more than sixty instances
of shared F3-F4 readings in the collated pages:

                     

Location	F1 reading	Shared F3/F4 reading
To Baa (Sidney)	treble baas⁁ for	treble baas, for
Babble (Milton)	mere	meer
Baby 1 (1st Locke)	plumbs	plums
Baccivorous (definition)	A devourer of berries	Devouring berries
Balance (Sir John Davies)	burden'd	burden
Ballad-singer (definition)	employment it is	employment is
Bank n.s. 4 (South)	Their	There
Barbarian n.s. (etymology)	only foreign	only a foreign
Barm (Shakespeare)	drink to bear	drink bear
Base n 7 (Dryden)	trebles squeak	trebles queak

The first three are among the many examples where the readings of (relatively)
indifferent accidentals in F3/F4 agree against F1. In serving to determine
the copy from which F4 was set, they are valuable only in their sheer

frequency, for in individual instances it is always possible that the compositors
of separate editions coincidentally produced the same divergence from
copy. More suggestive is the entry for Baccivorous, because it represents a
rare instance in which a substantive change had been made in the third edition.
Since the word is an adjective, Johnson had properly altered the first
edition reading "A devourer of berries" to "Devouring berries" for the third
edition. Had the letter "B" in the fourth edition been set from first rather
than third-edition sheets, this change would in all likelihood have been lost.
Most conclusive, however, are instances where F3/F4 agree in manifest error,
where the F1 reading had been correct; it is highly improbable that the compositors
and proofreaders of separate editions would repeatedly and coincidently
commit and allow to stand identical variance from copy.[34] In order to
assure myself that the letter "B" had been set throughout from third edition
sheets, I additionally collated six pages near the end, from 3R1r through 3S2r,
and found a dozen instances where again the text of F3/F4 agreed against F1.
Since shared error is more conclusive than shared correction, the most telling
example occurs under Bunch 4, where a line from Fairy Queen appears correctly
in F1 as "A bunch of hairs discoloured"; in both F3 and F4, "discoloured"
becomes the nonsensical (in context) "discover'd." Additional
support is found in the shared misspellings of several headwords: F1's "Bivalvular"
appears in both F3 and F4 as "Bivalvula," and F1 "Bobbin" as
F3/F4 "Bobin." The letter "B" in F4 was thus demonstrably set not from F1,
as is the rest of the Dictionary, but from F3.

As noted above, the new illustrative quotations found in the letter "B"
are both fewer in number and different in source from those found in adjacent
letters. It is thus useful to compare the new illustrations which appear in the
printed text of the letter "B" with the suggestion for new quotations Steevens
had made in the BL copy. In "B," as with most of Vol. I, the largest number
of new illustrations in F4 come from the Bible (there are 25), due largely to
the availability of Cruden's concordance. But second to the Bible are Shakespeare
and Pope with 16 new quotations each: this compares with 21 new
Shakespeare quotations and 80 new Pope quotations in the whole of Volume
II.[35] The over-representation of Shakespeare is particularly striking, and provides

an additional indication that Steevens's annotated F3 sheets for "B"
must have served as printer's copy for the revised edition.

Additionally, I have collated approximately the first quarter of the letter
"B" in F1 and F4 and found a comparatively large proportion of the sorts of
changes Steevens had proposed in the BL copy (and that, on the basis of the
BL copy for "B," Johnson himself rarely made).[36] There are, for example,
small corrections to Shakespeare quotations under To Bait v.a. l, To Bait v.n.,
Bank 1, and To Beguile; a longish usage note following the Shakespeare
quotations which illustrates Bankrupt adj.; new "authorities" (Shakespeare
of course) for Baa and Beggarly; and the new lemmas To Bass and Beef-witted
and a third sense of Bastard, all illustrated with Shakespeare quotations.
Remarkably, there are two instances in the letter "B" of F4 where Johnson
cites Steevens by name. The first, discovered during collation, occurs in the
etymology for Beef-Eater n.s.: "from beef and eat, because the commons is
beef when on waiting. Mr. Steevens derives it thus: Beefeater may come from
beaufetier, one who attends the sideboard, which was anciently placed in a
beaufet. The business of the beef-eaters was, and perhaps is still, to attend the
king at meals." A search of both F1 and F4 of A Dictionary of the English
Language on CD-ROM[37] revealed a second example in F4 under Bumbast:
"falsely written for bombast; bombast and bombasine being mentioned, with
great probability, by Junius, as coming from boom, a tree, and sein, silk; the
silk or cotton of a tree. Mr. Steevens, with much more probability, deduces
them all from bombycinus."[38] Nowhere else in either F1 or F4 does Johnson
mention Steevens. The confluence of circumstantial evidence supports my
original conjecture that Steevens's annotated third edition sheets for the
letter "B" served as the basis, and ultimately as printer's copy, for Johnson's
revision of this letter in F4. At some point after the letter "B" was printed
off, the missing sheets Johnson originally had prepared must have been located
and were inserted in their proper alphabetical order in Steevens's annotated
3rd edition copy, replacing what had now become copy for that
letter. That explains why the BL copy is made up of mixed third and first
edition sheets, annotated by Steevens and Johnson respectively.

II

Following Johnson's death in 1784, Steevens continued his work on
Shakespeare. In 1785 a new edition of the Johnson/Steevens Shakespeare

appeared, and although much of the editorial work had been entrusted to
Isaac Reed, Steevens contributed new notes to all of the plays.[39] Steevens
would later resume direct editorial control and in 1793 published another
edition, in large part as a response to Malone's edition of 1790. In 1800
Steevens died while working on still another edition, which Reed published
in 1803 as containing "the last improvements and corrections of Mr.
Steevens."[40] What may be surprising is that Steevens's involvement with the
Dictionary also continued long after Johnson's death.

The copyright held by the original proprietors of the Dictionary (Longman,
et al.) had expired[41] and, while their fifth edition folio—essentially a
reprint of the fourth—was still selling at £4.10.0, two substantially cheaper
competing editions began to appear in the fall of 1785. James Harrison offered
a folio reprint of the first edition supplemented by a life of the author
in one hundred weekly numbers at six pence each, while John Fielding published
the first English quarto edition in forty-eight weekly numbers at a
shilling apiece.[42] Longman quickly responded:

Before the end of the year the proprietors published new and competitively
priced quarto (Q6) and folio (F7) editions of the Dictionary, both in weekly
numbers, which incorporated Johnson's "last improvements." That the
changes were mostly minor and numbered only about two hundred and fifty
went understandably unremarked. But such was the cachet of these "final
revisions" that Harrison began to advertise, falsely, that his edition was also
based on the Reynolds copy. (Since Harrison's was actually a reprint of the

first edition of 1755, it failed in fact to include even those revisions Johnson
had made for the fourth edition of 1773.) If the number of surviving copies is
any indication, Longman and the other proprietors, with their concurrently
published sixth edition quarto and seventh edition folio, easily prevailed
over the competition.

Equally unremarked was that the proprietors had procured "a corrector
for the press [who took] some independent and fairly intelligent care that
the sixth and seventh editions should be accurately printed."[44] It is highly
probable that this corrector was George Steevens whose diligence in this regard
was renowned, Malone having called him "one of the most accurate
correctors of the press . . . in the world."[45] The evidence consists of changes
which had long before been suggested by Steevens in the BL copy but which
appear for the first time in the 6th edition.[46] Several are relatively minor
corrections in punctuation and spelling. At Aim 5 in the last line of the
quotation from Henry IV Part II "intreasur'd" is emended to "intreasured,"
restoring a metrically necessary syllable. At Air 5 (which had been sense 4 in
F1), in the first line of the Lear quotation "vengencies" is altered to "vengences."
At Anatomy 5, in the quotation from Comedy of Errors "a needy
hollow-ey'd" gains a needed comma. And at To Deck 3, in the second line
of a quotation from Spenser, "Fit to adorn the head, and deck the dreary
tomb," "head" is corrected to "dead." Such seemingly insignificant variants
might easily be laid to the vagaries of compositorial practice if we did not
have Steevens annotations in the BL copy to indicate that they were in fact
deliberate corrections.

A more substantive example is found at To Case 2 "To cover as a case"
which Johnson illustrates with a quotation from Steevens's favorite play:
"Then comes my fit again, I had else been perfect; / As broad, and gen'ral, as
the casing air, / To saucy doubts and fears. Shakesp. Macbeth." Johnson had,
as he so often did, abridged the quotation. In the BL copy Steevens marked
the third line for deletion—not to save space, but to preserve sense—but the
line is retained in F4. In the 1773 Johnson/Steevens the passage reads in full:
"Macb. Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect; / Whole as the
marble, founded as the rock: / As broad, and general, as the casing air: / But
now, I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.
But Banquo's safe." Steevens certainly understood Johnson's method of compressing
quotations; but in the "Preface" to the Dictionary Johnson himself
acknowledged that "The examples are too often injudiciously truncated,"
and this is just such an example. The excision of the second line creates no
difficulty, but without the fourth line the final phrase is rendered nonsensical.
In Q6 the quotation, although further truncated, for the first time makes
passable sense. The range of Steevens's literary expertise is further illustrated
by his handling of Direful. In F1-F4 an illustration from Pope read: "The

wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring / Of all the Grecian woes, O goddess,
sing." In the BL copy Steevens crosses through the quotation, and offers a
different version: "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes
unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess sing." As it happens, both versions are authorial.
The former had been the original opening of Pope's translation of
the Iliad, and the lines were printed thus in the quartos and folio editions of
1715 and the first and second octavo editions of 1720. The latter version
represents a revision which first appeared in the third octavo edition of
1732.[47] While Steevens may have been unaware of the earlier version and
believed Johnson's rendering to be erroneous, I find it more likely that he
preferred the revised lines as representing Pop's final thoughts. Whatever the
case, in Q6 the lines read: "Achilles' wrath, to Greeks the direful spring / Of
woes unnumber'd, heavenly Goddess! sing."

The evidence of Steevens's hand is apparent in Q6, but by 1785 the BL
materials were in the possession of Charles Marsh, who procured them when
Johnson's library was sold. Since Steevens and Marsh were both Fellows of
the Society of Antiquaries, however, they must have been well acquainted,
and it seems plausible that March would have allowed Steevens direct access
to the materials he had annotated.[48] It is also possible that, with his prodigious
memory, Steevens simply recalled some of the infelicities that had drawn
his editorial attention in the BL copy but had remained uncorrected in the
fourth edition. Whatever the case, it appears certain that Steevens himself
saw the new editions through the press. And the Puck does not stop here.

Over fifty years ago William Todd characterized "the proper discrimination
and ordering of multiple editions" as "perhaps the most vexing" problem
facing the bibliographer of eighteenth-century literature, asserting that
"undenominated reprints are to be suspected everywhere," and that one may
suspect "the presence of two or three concealed editions in practically every
major production in the eighteenth century. . . ."[49] Such is the case with the
sixth edition of A Dictionary of the English Language. In his magisterial A
Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, J.D. Fleeman notes that this
edition

Fleeman's explanation that variant press figures signal reimpression or reimposition
depends on the unspoken assumption that the printing of the sixth
edition took place exclusively from 1785-87, with the further implication
that large quantities of type were kept standing. But in fact both physical
and archival evidence shows that while the title-page date of 1785 is maintained,
the sixth "edition" was reprinted from new settings of type several
times over the next ten years. A full account of the complex printing history
of this edition is beyond the scope of this essay, but several preliminary observations
may be made.

The evidence that type was reimposed from one format to another comes
directly from the Strahan ledger, where there are notations indicating savings
from what Strahan calls "overrunning," both from quarto to folio and vice
versa (fol. 97v). But, within the quarto itself, I have found no evidence that
suggests copies issued in parts were from impressions separate from those
issued complete.[51] Publication in weekly numbers began 19 November 1785
and ran through 30 June 1787. But on 17 February 1787 the Morning Chronicle
and London Advertiser ran the following advertisement:

With printing now completed, the sixth edition was available in several
forms. While distribution of the printing-in-parts proceeded, the proprietors
issued the edition as completed volumes as well, following the general practice
with serial publication.[52] Later gatherings—those of the latter parts of
Vol. I, most of Vol. II, and perhaps the title page and preliminaries as well—
would then have been printed in sufficient quantities to satisfy both forms of
publication, while Vol. I gatherings which had previously been sold out in
parts would have been reset and printed off as necessary to make up complete
sets. (Type for the earlier gatherings is unlikely to have been left standing

for sixteen months.) Six of the nine Q6 copies I have examined exhibit a pattern
that supports this hypothesis: they are essentially invariant in the latter
portions of Volume I and the whole of Volume II, while in the first two-thirds
of Volume I most gatherings are found in two different type settings and a
few in three.[53]

Q6 provides a tremendous quantity of press-figure data since there are
141 gatherings in Vol. I, 137 in Vol. II, with the majority figured in both
formes. One feature that may have contributed to Fleeman's puzzlement is
that some sheets from a single typesetting are differently figured, most often
with identical figures in one forme, and variant figures in the other. In comparing
the BL and DVM copies I noted ten such occurrences in Vol. I; perhaps
significantly, all but one occur between 5Q and 6T and the other is
found in gathering `a' of the preliminaries, which would have been printed
shortly after the completion of 6X, the final sheet of Vol. I. (In Vol. II there
are only four examples, more randomly assorted.) I have also found examples
where, coincidentally, formes from different settings of type have the same
figure in roughly the same location on the page. And on at least one occasion
a press figure actually undergoes a stop-press correction.[54] But in most cases
in the sixth edition, different press figures imply different settings of type,
and individual copies may be composed of a dizzying variety of reset and
identical gatherings, depending on the number of copies of particular earlier
gatherings that were still on hand when the decision was made to issue the
edition in complete volumes. This possibility is further complicated by an
advertisement that appeared on 21 December 1787: "GENUINE EDITIONS,
. . . On Saturday, January 5, 1788, will be published,/Number I. of the Folio,
and Number I. of the Quarto/Edition of/A Dictionary of the English/Language
. . ." (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser). The advertised
"Conditions" are that the parts, consisting alternately of three and four
sheets, will be issued weekly until completion, the folio to be composed of
eighty sixpenny numbers, the quarto of seventy-eight. The process of serial
publication appears to have begun again, while complete editions are still
being offered at two guineas. Whether this new issue represents an actual reprinting
of the parts or a new offering of parts left from the earlier printing
has yet to be established, but entries in the Strahan ledgers which are not
cited by Fleeman support the former interpretation. Under the heading
"Johnson's Dictionary 4to" is an entry dated January 1789 which records
charges for printing a run of 2000 copies of signatures c-k—the preliminary
gatherings of Vol. I which cover "The History of the English Language"—

and signatures "B-3Z" of Vol. II.[55] These are the same signatures Strahan
had printed in 1786 when the run had been between 3000-3500 copies. In a
second ledger, again under the heading "Johnson's Dictionary 4to," are
additional entries which record the printing of these same signatures yet
again, with the prelims printed in January 1791 (2000 copies), sigs. "B" and
"C" in July of 1793 (2000 and 1500 copies, respectively), and "D-Z" in December
of 1795 (1275 to 1325 copies).[56] The copy of the sixth edition held by
the University of Virginia must come from this last printing, since much of
it is printed on paper whose watermark is the date "1794".[57] This edition
(for it comes from a separate setting of type) is apparently intended to be
indistinguishable from the earlier printings. The title-page date remains
1785 and the list of proprietors is identical to that in Vol. II of the earlier
printing, even though at least four—L. Davis, W. Owen, W. Richardson, and
J. Murray—were dead by 1794.[58] The collation also duplicates that of the
earlier issues:

Even the anomalous parenthetical signings which intrude in the alphabetical
sequence of the preliminaries and the curious signature "4F-M" which appears
on 4F1 are repeated. This puzzling state of affairs may be explained in
part by a comment made by Andrew Millar—bookseller, publisher, and one
of the original proprietors of the Dictionary—concerning Hume's essays:
that he regarded them as classics and never numbered editions when there
was little need to "puff" them.[59] Todd concludes that "A close facsimile was,
then, what [the booksellers] oftentimes attempted to produce.[60] The Dictionary
would certainly have been considered a classic—and, particularly in
the unabridged quarto format, it continued to be quite a profitable venture
for its proprietors.[61] With the cachet of containing the "last improvements"

from Dr. Johnson's hand, the sixth edition would have required no additional
puffing. But the proprietors apparently saw the Dictionary as something more
than a cash cow, for as they reprinted it they continued to have it improved—
almost certainly by George Steevens. In the 1795 printing of the sixth edition
several corrections which had been proposed by Steevens over twenty years
previously appear in a printed edition of the Dictionary for the first time.
All are textual corrections to Shakespeare quotations: Under Censer 2, in a
quotation from Taming of the Shrew, "Here's snip, and nip, and cut, and
slish, and slush," "slush" is corrected to "slash." Under Chamberlain 3, in the
quotation, from Macbeth, "We will with wine and wassail convince," the
word "so" is inserted after "wassail." In the Macbeth quotation under Farrow,
"Pour in sow's blood that hath litter'd / Her nine farrow," "litter'd" is
altered to "eaten." Under To Fast, in the Cymbeline quotation "Last night
the very god shew'd me a vision," "god" is corrected to "gods." And under
Green adj. 4, in a quotation from Romeo and Juliet, "Lies festering in his
blood," "blood" is corrected to "shroud."

Since the annotated British Library materials end with the letter "I/J"
they do not include even all of Volume I of the folio Dictionary, which ends
with the letter "K", and Vol. II is not represented at all. It is possible that
Steevens annotated a complete copy, and that the end of the first and all of
the second volume have been lost. I have as yet made no attempt to collate
Vol. II, either between F4 and Q6, or between the early and late printings of
Q6. But I have done so for the letter "K," which runs only to a dozen pages
in the quarto edition. I was not surprised to find that between the early and
late printings of Q6, there are two substantive corrections, both to quotations
from Macbeth.[62]

Most if not all of the changes Steevens introduced in seeing the successive
editions through the press would have gone unremarked by readers. As Johnson
had reassured the public in the "Advertisement" to the revised fourth
edition of the Dictionary, the owner of a previous edition "needs not repent;
he will not, without nice collation, perceive how they differ. . . ." Yet the
regard in which the proprietors held Johnson's Dictionary as a cultural icon
apparently dictated that if they were to reprint it, they should also improve
it. And George Steevens, through his anonymous ministrations carried out
over a period of nearly twenty-five years, sought "not merely to obtain justice
to Shakespeare," but justice to Johnson as well.