University of Virginia Library

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.