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Notes
All line references are to the original version as reconstructed in my edition of a Prospect of Society, Water Lane Press, Cambridge, 1954. In this lines l-80 correspond to those in The Traveller, lines 81-370 to 83-372, 371-374 to 375-378, 375-392 to 383-400. Traveller lines 81-82, 373-374, 379-382 and, presumably, 40l-416 were added in revision. Readers using Dobell's facsimile edition of the two texts should correct the following misprints.
| [Dobell line, reading] | [text line, original copy] |
| 306 honour | 86 honor |
| 265 ascends | 101 ascends, |
| 232 querry | 134 quarry |
| 235 late, | 137 late |
| 205 Cheerful | 181 Chearful |
| 224 breast, | 200 breast; |
| 173 coarsely | 221 coarsly |
| 85 skies: | 233 skies, |
| 125 days, | 245 days |
| 99 profession | 289 profusion |
| 106 brings. | 296 brings, |
| 45 wing | 311 wing, |
| 66 annoy. | 332 annoy: |
| 14 home, | 364 home; |
| 17 tyrant | 367 coward |
| 42 mine, | 392 mine. |
| [Traveller readings] | |
| 61 rest | rest, |
| 82 patriotic | patrioric |
| 157 And | As |
| 223 flow; | flow: |
| 224 low, | low. |
| 354 unhonour'd | unhonor'd |
Daily News, March 31, 1902, as cited in appendix of later issues of Dobell's edition. The same quotation, with supporting testimony, is offered by George England in The Library, n.s., III (1902), 327-332.
Dobell, op. cit., appendix; I. A. Williams, Seven XVIIIth Century Bibliographies (1924), pp. 133-134.
For manuscripts of any length (Goldsmith ordinarily wrote on foolscap paper in a hand averaging (with spacing) 8mm. to a line. One contemporaneous with the Prospect (CSmH, Preface and Introduction to the History of the Seven Years' War c.1761) is a folio in twos, written throughout on both sides of the leaf, and containing about 37 lines to the page. Another of the same period (NNP, The Captivity, c.1764) is in quarto half-sheets, written throughout on one side only, and averaging 25 lines to the page. For his correspondence, on the other hand (as judged by 1 letter at NNP, 4 at MH), Goldsmith consistently used post quarto half-sheets.
McKerrow (p. 66) cites as the earliest reference Savage's Dictionary of Printing, l841; but earlier reports, in this century, appear in (1) Johnson's Typographia, 1824, II, 193, 587; (2) the Inventory of the Glasgow University Printing Office, 1826 (reproduced by the Water Lane Press, Cambridge, 1953), which accounts for "51 Mahogany Galleys-32 Fir Galleys"; the 1832 report of the Union Society of Compositors (Ellic Howe, The London Compositor [1947], p. 195), which refers to the pulling and correcting of "slips and galleys".
The First Editions of William Mason, Cambridge, 195l, p. 18. Even earlier than this-but possibly of little significance for English printers-is a reference to galley proof for the 12 "Neaulme, Amsterdam" [Duchesne, Paris] edition of Rousseau's Emile, 1762. See P. H. Muir's account in The Book Collector, I (1952), 68-69.
"Slips", as defined by Savage (cited in Howe, op. cit., p. 177), are of "the length and half the breadth of a demy leaf of paper," i.e., of half-sheets divided lengthwise in strips measuring 451 x 279 mm. These presumably are the "folios" to which Mason refers, a series of proofs necessarily longer than those required for the Goldsmith quarto (since Mason's work remained unleaded), and struck from long, thick wooden galleys (cf. fn. 6) on a press especially reserved for this purpose. As Mr. Gaskell reminds me, the use of such galleys in a press set for ordinary printing would be a great nuisance, requiring first a considerable adjustment of the platen cheek mortices and headbolts, and then a readjustment of all these before normal work could proceed.
Brackets enclose readings unprinted in the Prospect but evident in The Traveller. To simplify this account I enter only the stem of the word, ignoring prefixes and the like.
For other probable reversals, not of galleys but of formes, see my account in Studies in Bibliography, III (1950), 184-191. In these examples, of course, the text remains unaffected, whatever the order of printing.
If as Dr. Walker has shown (Studies in Bibliography, VI [1953], 58), a corrector was occasionally concerned only that letters should make a word and not that words should make sense, we may excuse (indeed, applaud!) the example of this corrector in leaving to the author the meaning of his lines and drawing to himself only the responsibility of pointing the text. Even in this distorted form the lines make sense, of a kind-as much certainly as the Shakespearian motley constructed by Harvey Breit or the modern mess compounded by Lord Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany. See NYTBR, January 24, 1954, p. 8.
Unfortunately press figures and skeletons, the two most obvious signs of successive impression, are not used either in this printing or in the first published edition.
In a copy of the poem which Boswell tendered him in 1783 (a pirated '1770' edition: see my note under 'C', Studies in Bibliography, VI [1953], 41), Johnson marked nine lines as all that he could recollect as being his. These, in the first edition, are 398, 407-l2, 415-116. Nonetheless, Johnson told Reynolds on an earlier occasion (Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill-Powell, II, 6, n.3) that he might have revised as many as eighteen; and from the collation given in my edition of the Prospect it would seem that even this number may be an underestimate.
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