 | |  |
Notes
Shaftesbury's concern with establishing the identity of the Letter as a true epistle may also be reflected in his insertion of additional indications of direct address ("My Lord") in the 1711 version. The September date is consistent with the work's reference to a Bartholomew Fair puppet show staged "at this very time" (I, 21). In Shaftesbury's day the fair generally began on August 24 (St. Bartholomew's Day) and lasted about two weeks. Another possible confirmation of the date is provided by a one-sentence Latin note of September 6, 1707, which Shaftesbury's protégé Paul Crelle sent his patron from Oxford (Public Record Office, Shaftesbury Papers, PRO 30/24/45, pt. 3). Crelle wrote that he had located a copy of Polyaenus' Strategematum in one of the Oxford libraries and had decided to transcribe the passage he and Shaftesbury had discussed concerning the origin of the word "panic" (the note's inconclusiveness suggests that it accompanied this transcription). Had Shaftesbury asked Crelle to check the source of the etymological anecdote he wished to employ in the Letter (I, 12-13)?
Whitaker writes: "It is true that the Letter concerning Enthusiasm had been first communicated in manuscript; and it seems that an indiscretion on the part of Shaftesbury's patron nearly led to the publication by certain of his enemies of a clandestine edition with the author's name revealed. The provocation was, in particular, a satirical remark about Bishop Fowler's belief in fairies—a remark which Shaftesbury later modified. However, the Letter duly came to be printed at the author's own instigation, in the form that has become well known as the first treatise of the Characteristics" (The Library, 5th Ser., 7 [1952], 235). Although Whitaker cites the two letters upon which I base the present account, I can find no grounds in either for his inferences that the near-publication of the Letter was the work of enemies of Shaftesbury and was provoked by the allusion to Fowler.
Four of Fowler's accounts had been published after More's death in Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus (London, 1681), II, 230-231, 238-250. Fowler's identity as the prelate in the Letter was first recorded in the anonymous French translation Lettre sur l'enthousiasme (Hague, 1709), p. 9.
PRO 30/24/22, no. 4, pp. 86-87. Hereafter cited in the text. Benjamin Rand's transcription of this letter on pp. 386-387 of his Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (1900) is slightly inaccurate.
For the letters (to Ambrose Philips, Charles Ford, and Robert Hunter), see Harold Williams, ed., The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift (1963-65), I, 100, 110, 122. Swift's playful attribution of the Letter concerning Enthusiasm to Hunter in his letter to that friend apparently misled the dean's early nineteenth-century editor John Nichols, who cited Hunter as the work's author in his Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century ([1812-16; rpt. 1966], I, 339 n., VI, 89 n.). The error was perpetuated (although secondary attributions to Swift and Shaftesbury were recorded) in Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, which is probably responsible for the author cards bearing Hunter's name that appear in some library card catalogues today. For Swift's denial of authorship in his Apology, see A Tale of a Tub, To which is added the Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (2d. ed., 1958), p. 6.
This ordering of editions suggests that the other substantive variant in the Letter, which necessitated the overrunning of a line on a reset page, may also be a correction: the omission of the unidiomatic "in" from the phrase "excluded in a Being" (p. 60, lines 7-8). The original infelicity was noted by the author of the first full-length reply to the work (probably Bishop Fowler), who offered his own correction: "I would rather have said out of" (Remarks upon the Letter to a Lord concerning Enthusiasm [1708], p. 37).
| | |