 | |  |
The False Alarm and Taxation No
Tyranny: Some Further Observations
by
D. J. Greene
This note is an addition to William B. Todd's article "Concealed Editions of Samuel Johnson" (The Book Collector, Spring, 1953, pp. 59-65). Todd's differentiation of the various issues of Johnson's two pamphlets by means of the press numbers is most useful, and my own recent examination of a dozen or so copies of them produced nothing to add to his findings on this point. There are a few other matters, however, mostly arising out of a closer study of the variant readings, that may be worth reporting.
Of The False Alarm, Todd says, "The four impressions comprise the initial issue, generally recognized as the first edition, and three reimpressions of the type originally composed for the first edition, all labelled THE SECOND EDITION and therefore regarded, until now, as a single publication . . . the order of the four impressions may be determined by the progressive deterioration of the type and by certain other peculiarities common only to variants immediately related." The variants he mentions are the disappearance, in his issue 2, of a line that reads in issue 1 "felony, is not eligible in Parliament. They," and its restoration in issues 3 and 4, with "parliament" substituted for "Parliament"; and differences in the make-up of the title-pages.
This account might leave the reader with the belief that the words "THE SECOND EDITION" appearing on the title-pages of issues 2, 3, and
| Issue I ("first edition") | Issues 2,3,4 ("second edition") | ||
| P.8, | 1.12 | controul | control |
| P.9 | 1.23 | co-ordinate they | co-ordinate, they |
| P.47, | 1.9 | retain | reclaim |
| P.53, | 1.14 | to, reflexion | to reflexion |
The mythical third edition of The False Alarm was apparently John Wright's mistaken deduction from the advertisement of issue 4, in the London Chronicle for March 13 and 15, 1770, as "a new edition," 2 and 3 having been previously advertised as "the second edition." It is worth noting that in the Public Advertiser for March 12, 13, and 14 Cadell's advertisement reads, as before, "the second edition."
The usual date given for the first publication of The False Alarm, January 16, 1770, seems to be one day too early. The first occurrence of "This day was published" in the London Chronicle is, to be sure, in the number for January 16-18; but it appears there in the section of the newspaper headed "January 17." This date is confirmed by the series of advertisements in the Public Advertiser, where we are told, in the January 16 number, "Tomorrow at Noon will be published" The False Alarm, and on January 17, "This day is publish'd."
The textual history of Taxation No Tyranny is puzzling. I append a fairly full list of the variant readings found in the first four editions, all published during March, 1775. Todd discusses at length the two most striking sets of variants (numbers 38 and 47 in my listing). In the first edition, the phrase "and as a seditious conventicle, punishable by law" is used of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia; in the second edition, it is eliminated; in the third, it reappears, with "conventicle" changed to "meeting"; in the fourth, it disappears agains. And the paragraph "It is difficult to judge with what intention such airy bursts of malevolence are vented: if such writers hope to deceive, let us rather repel them with scorn, than refute them by disputation" appears in the first, second, and fourth editions, but is missing from the third. If Johnson was responsible for this changing
To take, first, the variations of the second from the first edition. Many of them (1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 35, 36, 59, 60, 64) are unimportant changes in capitalization and punctuation, that no doubt represent merely the different practices of different compositors. Some presumably represent attempts of a printing-house editor to improve the text—one (18) is the correction of an obvious misprint, others (4, 13, 61) substitute a preferred spelling for an older and less preferred one. But in other places the text deteriorates: the compositor, setting up new type, manages to introduce new misprints that were not in the first edition (31, 39); a slip in punctuation (63) is made; one mistake (57), perpetuated in subsequent editions, was probably the work of an officious but ill-informed printing-house reader. One variant (2), "has never been" in place of "never has been," could conceivably be interpreted as the effort of a conscientious author to make a subtle improvement in the rhythm of his prose; but in view of the triviality of the change, and in the absence of any other specifically stylistic changes in this edition, it seems more reasonable to consider it merely the result of compositorial inattention. In sum, the changes in the second edition, apart from the major one under consideration (38), do not seem to me to make it necessary to postulate Johnson's correcting hand. They can be fully accounted for by the behavior of compositors and proofreaders.
The third edition, however, gives a different picture. There are, to be sure, many changes of a similar nature to those encountered in the second edition. Some (1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 35, 36) represent a return to the practice of the first edition in the use of capitals and punctuation marks. Others (14, 24, 41, 49, 50) represent improvements of less preferred spellings found in both the first and second editions. Some misprints introduced in the second edition (31, 39, 63) are corrected and the readings of the first edition restored. Do these facts indicate that the first rather than the second edition was used as the copy-text for the parts of third edition newly set up in type? It is true that some readings of the third edition (4, 13, 57, 60, 61, 64) agree in preference for spelling or punctuation with the second rather than the first edition. But the last four of these occur in signatures L and N, which Todd tells us were printed from standing type of the second edition; and the first two, 4 and 13, could be explained as independent corrections of the text of the first edition—the spellings "desart" and "controll" were, I imagine, very seldom used in 1775.
The changes so far noted in the third edition are all capable of being attributed to compositors and proofreaders. But the third edition also contains,
How then are we to account for the discrepant readings at these two places in the second edition? The history of variant 47 is easily enough explained. The paragraph "It is difficult . . . by disputation," which occurs in the first and second editions, is a tasteless little piece of bad temper, which certainly does not forward Johnson's argument, and indeed contains a position—that the appeal to reason may on some occasions be justifiably abandoned—which in his soberer moments would have been repugnant to him. So he though better of it and, when he came to revise the piece for the third edition, struck it out.
The history of variant 38 in the first three editions, it seems to me, is probably this. The deletion in the second edition of the passage about the seditious conventicle was not ordered or authorized by Johnson at all, but by a representative of the Government for whom he had written the pamphlet—perhaps Sir Grey Cooper, one of the Treasury secretaries, who had drastically edited the original copy for the pamphlet, or Wedderburn, the canny Solicitor-General, or even Strahan himself, who was an M.P., a supporter of the Administration, and eager for Government patronage. Johnson, who prided himself on his knowledge of law, was probably very pleased with his discovery that the Continental Congress could be proceeded against under the obsolescent legislation against Dissenters. Even if this were good law—and it sounds too neat to be true—Wedderburn and Cooper would hardly care to have the fact insisted upon in a piece of Government propaganda: they themselves would have been responsible for the prosecution of any such ridiculous action, and no doubt they did not relish being taught their professional duty by the enthusiastic amateur Johnson. So the edict went out to Strahan (Johnson may still have been in Oxford when the second edition was printed off) and the offending passage was expunged. When, however, Johnson came to revise the copy for the third edition, he could not bring himself to part with his darling child, and insisted on bringing it to life again, though with the substitution of the milder word "meeting" for the offending "conventicle." One can imagine Johnson arguing with the reluctant Wedderburn that seditious meetings were at any rate properly actionable, whether or not conventicles were.
If this seems an odd proceeding, or if seems shocking to modern notions that Strahan and the Government should take such a liberty with Johnson's text as I suggest, it should be remembered that virtually the same thing had happened four years earlier with Johnson's Thoughts on . . . Falkland's Islands. After a number of copies of the first issue had been publicly sold, the sale was stopped and a revised text issued, without Johnson's knowledge or consent, in which a politically offensive reference to George Grenville was eliminated. In a later edition (1776), Johnson doctored the emended passage so as to restore a little at least of the original pungency.
So far, then, I have postulated a first edition of Taxation No Tyranny printed from copy supplied by Johnson, though heavily revised, in proof, by Government direction; a second edition corrected in the printing house, with one major deletion ordered by higher authority; a third edition revised by Johnson, with some stylistic changes, and the deleted passage restored in a softened form. What, finally, of the fourth edition? The type for it, Todd tells us, was completely reset—Strahan must have underestimated the sale of the pamphlet and ordered the type distributed after the third edition was printed off. Todd suggests that the second edition was used as the compositor's copy text for the fourth. In much of the pamphlet the nature of the variants supports this theory: Johnson's careful stylistic corrections to signature K of the third edition are lost; so is his restoration, in signature H, of his remark about the seditious nature of the Philadelphia Congress. But in other signatures, substantial corrections made in the third edition are retained in the fourth—22 and 29 in signature F and 55 and 56 in signature L. The last two were certainly Johnson's, and the first two were very possibly his. The conclusion to be drawn appears to be that the fourth edition was composed from a mixed copy in which signatures F and L were from the third edition and at least signatures H and K from the second. There seems no reason to assume that Johnson himself had any hand in preparing the fourth edition.
Johnson did, however, thoroughly revise the text of Taxation No Tyranny for its reprinting in his collected Political Tracts, 1776. For this he obviously used the fourth edition of 1775 as his copy text, with the result that his third-edition corrections of variants 38 and 47 continued to be abandoned. By this time Johnson had probably forgotten all about them. Taxation No Tyranny, as revised by the Government, was not one of his favorite compositions: "The changes [made by Sir Grey Cooper in the proofs of the first edition] are not for the better, except where the facts were mistaken," he wrote Strahan; but "why should I in defense of the ministry provoke those whom in their own defense they dare not provoke?" It is not likely that he would waste much energy on a work that was botched, in his opinion, even before it had been published at all. True, on the two occasions when he had an opportunity to revise the text, for the
[Tables follow on page 229]
| No. | Sig. | Page & line | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 1. | 2-19 | parliament | Parliament | parliament | Parliament | |
| 2. | B | 3-22 | never has been | has never been | never has been | has never been |
| 3. | 4-14 | happens | happens | happen | happens | |
| 4. | 4-19 | desarts | deserts | deserts | deserts | |
| 5. | 11-6 | Congress | congress | Congress | congress | |
| 6. | 11-20 | wild, | wild, | wild, | wild; | |
| 7. | 12-8 | set, | set, | set, | set | |
| 8. | C | 13-2 | colonies | Colonies | colonies | Colonies |
| 9. | 14-19 | occasional | occasional | occasional | occasional, | |
| 10. | 16-8, 9 | Mother Country | Mother country | Mother Country | Mother-country | |
| 11. | 16-17 | before | before, | before | before, | |
| 12. | D | 19-3 | counsels | counsels | counsels | councils |
| 13. | 25-21 | controll | control | control | control | |
| 14. | 26-3 | entrusted | entrusted | intrusted | intrusted | |
| 15. | 28 catchword | both, | both, | both; | both, | |
| 16. | E | 29-7 | hitherto | hitherto | hitherto | hitherto, |
| 17. | 29-10 | intitled | intitled | intitled | entitled | |
| 18. | 29-18 | taxtion | taxation | taxation | taxation | |
| 19. | 32-4 | argument | argument, | argument, | argument | |
| 20. | 32-11 | Montesquieu | Montesquieu | Montesquieu | Mentesquieu | |
| 21. | 33-9 | sound; | sound; | sound: | sound: | |
| 22. | 34-1 | nor | nor | not | not | |
| 23. | 35-10 | truth. | truth. | truth. | truth: | |
| 24. | 35-22 | witheld | witheld | withheld | withheld | |
| 25. | F | 36-10 | ancestors, | ancestors, | ancestors, | ancestors |
| 26. | 37-10 | Parliament | Parliament | Parliament | Parliament | |
| 27. | 39-8 | chuse | chuse | chuse | choose | |
| 28. | 39-13 | cannot | cannot | cannot | cannot | |
| 29. | 40-20 | professed | professed | possessed | possessed |
| No. | Sig. | Page & line | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| G | None | |||||
| 30. | 50-12 | granted, | granted, | granted, | granted | |
| 31. | 51-7 | now their | now in their | now their | now their | |
| 32. | 52-10 | others | others | others | others, | |
| 33. | 53-3 | admitted. | admitted. | admitted. | admitted? | |
| 34. | 53-3 | parliament | parliament | parliament | Parliament | |
| 35. | H | 54-8 | new model | new-model | new model | new-model |
| 36. | 55-4 | Congress | congress | Congress | congress | |
| 37. | 55-8 | South-Carolina | South-Carolina | South-Carolina | South Carolina | |
| 38. | 55-19, 20 | and as a seditious conventicle punishable by law, | om. | and as a seditious meeting punishable by law, | om. | |
| 39. | 56-11[10] | perverseness | perveresness | perverseness | perverseness | |
| 40. | 57-3 | subjects | subjects | subjects | subjects | |
| 41. | I | 58-23 | guarrantied | guarrantied | guarantied | guarrantied |
| 42. | 59-9 | Mauduit, | Mauduit, | Mauduit | Mauduit, | |
| 43. | 64-23 | continent | continent | continent | continent, | |
| 44. | 65-4[5] | These are dreadful menaces; | These are dreadful menaces; | Thus formidable are their menaces; | These are dreadful menaces; | |
| 45. | 65-20[21] | streams | streams | floods | streams | |
| 46. | 66-1 (edd.1,2); 66-2 (ed.3); K 65-23 (ed.4) | stream | stream | stream | stream | |
| 47. | 66-8 to 12 (7 to 11, ed.4) | It is difficult . . by disputation. | It is difficult . . by disputation. | om. | It is difficult . . by disputation. | |
| 48. | 66-14 [10, 13] | positions | positions | positions, | positions | |
| 49. | 70-13 | Cornwal | Cornwal | Cornwall | Cornwall | |
| 50. | 71-3 | Cornwal | Cornwal | Cornwall | Cornwall |
| No. | Sig. | Page & line | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 51. | 73-4 | unauthorised | unauthorised | unauthorised | unauthorized | |
| 52. | 75-13,14 | consent: | consent: | consent: | consent: | |
| 53. | 75-16 | burthen | burthen | burthen | burthen | |
| 54. | 76-3 | withhold | with-hold | with-hold | with-hold | |
| 55. | 76-3 | our | our | a proper | a proper | |
| 56. | L | 76-6,7 | we shall pay | we shall pay | is proper | is proper |
| 57. | 76-9 | council | counsel | counsel | counsel | |
| 58. | 78-9 | Parliament | Parliament | Parliament | parliament | |
| 59. | 78-13 | us: | us; | us; | us: | |
| 60. | 80-19 | mother country | mother-country | mother-country | mother-country | |
| 61. | 80-22 | withold | withhold | withhold | withhold | |
| 62. | M | 85-20 | fire arms | fire arms | fire arms | fire-arms |
| 63. | 86-17 | detestable. | detestable, | detestable. | detestable. | |
| 64. | N | 87-11 | society | society, | society, | society, |
| | |