University of Virginia Library

Two Notes on Goldsmith by Arthur Friedman

1. The First Edition of Goldsmith's Life of Bolingbroke

There is a curious lack of agreement among Goldsmith's biographers, editors, and bibliographers concerning the form in which his Life of Bolingbroke first appeared. In the Percy Memoir we are told that Goldsmith wrote "the Life of Lord Bolingbroke, which he prefixed to the Dissertation on Parties, which was printed by T. Davies in 1771."[1] Cunningham in his edition of Goldsmith says that the work "was prefixed to an edition of the . . . Dissertation on Parties published by Davies in 1770. It also appeared the same year as a separate publication . . ."; and this account is followed by later nineteenth-century writers.[2] Goldsmith's twentieth-century bibliographers say, however, that although the Life was intended to be prefixed to an edition of Bolingbroke's Dissertation upon Parties, it was first published as a separate pamphlet on 19 December 1770 and did not appear with the Dissertation until 1775. The only edition described by Williams and by Scott in their bibliographies is the separate Life of 1770.[3]

The history of the publication of the Life is easily traced in the newspapers. In the General Evening Post for 8-10 November 1770 Davies advertises: "The 22d inst. will be published, A NEW EDITION (being the TENTH) of A DISSERTATION upon PARTIES . . . . To this edition is added the Life of the Author." The next advertisement I have seen, in the Gazetteer for Thursday, 29 November 1770, shows that the publication had been delayed and the designation of the edition altered and also that the Life was to appear separately: "Saturday next will be published, . . . A New Edition, being the Ninth, of A DISSERTATION upon PARTIES . . . . To which is prefixed, The Life of the Author. Printed for T. Davies . . . . Where may be had The Life of Lord Bolingbroke, price 1s. 6d." This advertisement is repeated in the Gazetteer for 30 November with "Tomorrow will be published"; and the Dissertation is advertised (without mention

of the separate Life) as published "This day" in the London Evening Post for 29 November-1 December. The separate Life is advertised as published "This day" in the London Evening Post for 1-4 December.

Since apparently no recent student of Goldsmith has seen a copy of the ninth edition of A Dissertation upon Parties, I give a description of it.

With this description may be compared that of the separate Life.

As is suggested by the descriptions and confirmed by examination, sheets B-H in the two publications were printed from the same setting of type; and since the press figures are the same and there is the same cancel, these sheets were no doubt continuously impressed. Leaf I1 is of different impressions for the two publications: I1r has a catch-word in the Dissertation and

FINIS in the separate Life; and I1v is blank in the Dissertation, while in the Life it has the advertisement which in the Dissertation appears as A1v. Only the title of the separate Life is from a new setting.

From this study the following conclusions may be drawn: (1) the Life was apparently first published on 1 December 1770 in the ninth edition of A Dissertation upon Parties, dated 1771; (2) the separate Life probably was published a few days later, on 4 December;[4] (3) the two publications of the Life may best be described as different issues not only of the same edition but also—for almost all the work—of the same impression.

2. The 1772 Edition of Goldsmith's Traveller

In the Daily Advertiser for Thursday, 27 February 1772 appears the following advertisement: "On Saturday next will be published, . . . With a Copper-Plate Title Page, . . . the Eighth Edition of THE TRAVELLER . . ."; and the poem is duly announced as published "This Day" on 29 February. The difficulty is that no edition of the work between 1770 and 1774 is known.

To make up for this lack there is (in addition to a duodecimo piracy called the fifth edition) one superfluous edition dated 1770. The sixth edition, with a title printed from type as in all earlier editions, was published 29 June 1770. The seventh edition, "With a Copper-Plate Title Page," was advertised as published on 8 December;[1] and certainly no further edition was needed in 1770, since the seventh edition was still being advertised on 26 February 1771. There are, however, two unnumbered editions with titles printed from the same engraved plate dated 1770. The probable explanation is that one of these is the missing eighth edition of 1772, for which the title-page plate was left unaltered. The plate appears to have been changed by the addition of two roman numerals to the date only for the edition (called on the half-title the ninth) of 1774.

Although the two unnumbered editions with the engraved title dated 1770 have the same collation and are without press figures, they can be

readily distinguished, perhaps most easily by the line-endings in the prose dedication. The following are the endings for page i, lines 4-8:            

70b	70c
But as a	But
from Switzer-	from
only inscribed to	only in-
it, when	it
man, who,	man,

Although 70b and 70c both derive from 70a (the sixth edition), since they follow the new readings of that edition, they are not independent reprints of 70a, for they agree against 70a in two substantive readings and in a large number of variants in accidentals; consequently one of the two must have used the other as copy. That 70b is the earlier is established by the fact that it agrees with 70a against 70c in a number of readings in accidentals and more conclusively by the fact that the prose dedication of 70b is a line-for-line reprint of 70a while that of 70c is not. 70b can thus be identified as the seventh edition published 8 December 1770 and 70c as the eighth edition published 29 February 1772.

Copies examined. 70b: Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum; University of Chicago; University of London; Friedman (2 copies). 70c: British Museum (2 copies); Forster Collection; R. S. Crane (2 copies).

Notes