University of Virginia Library

I

William Thoms, the editor of Notes and Queries, made future discussion possible when he compiled the first checklist of versions of The Dunciad.[1] He cited three variants of the 1728 "first edition": A, a 12° with the first line reading "Book and the man . . ."; B, an 8° with that same first line; and C, a 12° beginning "Books and the man. . . ." He decided that, because of the size of the type page, A (a 12°) probably preceded B (the 8°), and that because of various "corrections" C (the second 12°) was the latest of the three.

Thoms's assessment of the order of those early printings remained authoritative for over half a century. Then, in 1915, Reginald H. Griffith presented the initial results of his consideration of the problem. He challenged the existence of Thoms's A, an objection which subsequently has not been overturned, and he hesitantly suggested that variant C, the 12°, may have been printed before the 8°, item B. [2] By the time the first volume of his Alexander Pope: A Bibliography appeared in 1922, he had considered the matter more thoroughly. He admitted there that the evidence remained ambiguous, but after a lengthy examination of the variations between the two impressions he decided that the 12° probably came first and that the 8° was intended as a large-paper issue.

Griffith's opinions were soon challenged by one of the most respected bibliographers of the day, Thomas J. Wise, who also had been studying the 1728 Dunciads. In the fourth volume (1923) of The Ashley Library he reinterpreted the ambiguous evidence that Griffith had cited and argued that the 8° came first and that it appeared in both large- and small-paper issues.[3]

Griffith responded in an appendix to the second part of his bibliography (1927); while remaining tentative about his own hypotheses, he was unequivocal in rejecting Wise's conclusions. In 1931 Wise published the Pope section of his Ashley catalog as A Pope Library. Most of the material was reprinted verbatim, though Wise made numerous minor changes, especially where Griffith had challenged him, and he expanded his defense of the existence of a small-paper 8°—an argument based, ironically, on a copy which by then had passed to the Wrenn Library under the curatorship of Griffith in Austin, Texas.[4] But overall Wise merely reiterated his earlier arguments and ignored Griffith's specific objections. Griffith had the last word: drawing on some points raised in an article by W. K. Chandler,[5] he provided his definitive statement on the problem in 1938, the year after Wise's death. His tentativeness now disappeared: "the princeps of the Dunciad was the duodecimo."[6]

The controversy then lay dormant for another twenty years until David Foxon revivified it. In a 1958 TLS essay[7] he examined several of the variations between the issues and decided that, for the parts of the book where they were found, the 12° had come first. Foxon's analysis has been influential as the persuasive argument of one of the foremost modern bibliographers of Pope, though Foxon himself noted that his insights did not yet solve all of the problems. The most valuable contribution of his study has proven to be not his conclusions but two features of his methodology. He was the first to use the Hinman Collator to examine copies of the book, and he was the first to acknowledge that priority for one part of a copy does not entail priority for all parts of that copy.