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III
Earlier efforts to establish the order of the impressions have often depended on attempting to trace textual changes through the various printings. The argument which follows also depends on evidence generated by the juxtaposition of varieties of the text, but now it is primarily evidence of resettings and of the recurrence of running titles. For ease in reference I have used the edition designations indicated on the title pages of the various impressions. The term edition is not strictly accurate, for although each impression has some material reset, the new portion is never enough to qualify the book as a new "edition" by customary standards. Despite that slow change, however, most of the poetic text has been reset once or more by the end of the five impressions.
The core of the argument for establishing the priority of one of the impressions of the "first edition" is quite simple. Two features of these impressions are basic: that the settings of their headlines and type pages are the same, and that a basic set of running titles which appears in these impressions is reused elsewhere in them as well as in the other printings of 1728. The identity of the text and of the sequence and positions of the running titles throughout the 12° and 8° indicates that individual sections of the two impressions were printed without any intervening dismantlement other than that required for imposing the pages in a new format. But because some of the headlines eventually were removed so that the running titles could be
The argument proceeds with the establishment of the temporal relationship between the printing of the sections of the first edition which use the same set of running titles. For the moment the distinction between the two formats is not important, for we know that, whatever the order of the formats with respect to each other, the corresponding sections in the two were printed consecutively. In the two impressions of the first edition, the group of running titles used for pages 1-16 is also used for pages 37-48. In the second edition, pages 1-16 have been reset and their running titles changed from those in the first, but pages 37-48 are identical both in their text and in the order and position of the running titles. Variant press figures confirm that pages 37-48 are in fact from a separate impression rather than from an overprinting of the first edition. It is virtually certain that of the two parts of the first edition in which the same set of running titles appears, the part which corresponds precisely with the parallel section of the second edition was printed closer in time to the second edition than the part which is not identical. Thus, pages 37-48 were printed later than pages 1-16. If the opposite had been true, that is, if pages 37-48 were printed first and then their running titles transferred to pages 1-16, where they appear in a different sequence, then only a mind-boggling coincidence could explain how the running titles were rearranged in exactly the same order and position with respect to the text when they were transferred to pages 37-48 of the second edition.
Pages 1 through 36 of the first edition contain the original appearances of the running titles which are used throughout the 1728 Dunciads. Some of these—the ones in the first sixteen pages—are, as we have just seen, reused later in the first edition, but the rest are not. In normal printing house practice, the compositor set running titles for each page as he went along when existing ones were not available.[9] Because the running titles as well as the other parts of the skeleton were subsequently reused by being transferred to other formes, it was logical to stop the series of new running titles at the end of a gathering. In the first Dunciad, the break between new and reused running titles occurs after page 36—midway through gathering F in the 8°, but at the end of D in the 12°. If the compositor had prepared the gathering which includes page 36 for initial imposition in 8°, he would have set new running titles for the first four pages and then used four from earlier gatherings to complete the forme. A simpler explanation, and one which fits better the ordinary pattern of compositorial work, is that he composed the running titles for a 12° imposition, preparing sufficient new ones to complete the gatherings he was working on. By that reasoning, pages 25-36 would have first been imposed and printed as gathering D of the 12°. Likewise, because
Gathering E of the 12° employs running titles first used on pages 1-16— that is, B and part of C in the 12°, or all of B and C in the 8°. The running titles in 12° E would have been collected from the later of the two impressions of those early pages. Because they correspond exactly with an integral division in the 8° volume, they seem to have been drawn from the 8°. In contrast, those running titles of 12° E match all of B but only the first four pages of C in the 12°. It would have been another amazing coincidence for those particular running titles from 12° C to be selected for use in 12° E. It is apparent, therefore, that because the running titles of 8° B and C were transferred to 12° E, all gatherings of the 12° of which 8° B and C form a part must have been printed before the 8° ones; in other words, both 12° B and C preceded 8° B and C. Because pages 1-24 (12° B and C) were thus first imposed for 12°, gathering 12° C was almost certainly printed before 8° D (pp. 17-24) as well. Furthermore, it is likely that the running titles reused for pages 37-48 were the first ones that became available. If so, then 8° B and C were run off before 8° D.
The running titles in the closing pages of the book, 12° F or 8° H (pp. 49 ff.), remain the same throughout the 1728 impressions and offer no clues for determining priority. The imposition order for those final pages is conclusive from earlier investigations, however. Foxon observes that in the 12° the direction line on page 49 lies immediately below the footnote, while in the 8° and in the second edition a lead has been inserted between them. Because these pages of the second edition were not reset, page 49 apparently is closer in time to the 8° than the 12° ("Two Cruces," p. 52). Chandler made two useful discoveries about the same gathering ("First Edition," pp. 68-69). On page 51, line 273 in the 12° and in most copies of the 8° has the phrase
Traditional printing house procedures as well as patterns within this particular work provide some basis for speculating that gatherings b2 and H2 of the 8° were printed as a single half-sheet. It obviously would have been easiest for the printer to combine them and end up with a whole number of half-sheets for the book. The other gatherings of the poetic text were printed in alphabetical sequence; that pattern, coupled with the usual practice of preliminaries being printed last, would support a chronological link between the two quarter-sheets as well as suggest that they were printed after the section that ends with page 48 had been completed. The fact that new running titles were produced for pages 49-51 does not weaken the theory; it would have been logical to compose these three separately rather than to plunder the set of a full gathering which could otherwise be transferred as a unit to another forme. Paper evidence also suggests some connection between the beginning and end of the book. Of the four varieties of "BF"-marked paper here, two occur almost exclusively in gatherings B-E, and two in F-H and a-b. Finally, the evidence of point holes, deckle edges, tranchefiles, and watermarks reveals that the quarter-sheets were machined as they would be for joint imposition in a half-sheet: the first leaf of one gathering (H) always falls at the outer edge of the full sheet, and the first leaf of the other (b) on the inside.
The priority of the imposition of the rest of the preliminaries remains problematical. The running titles for this section, "The Publisher to the Reader," are invariant throughout the five 1728 impressions, and no typographical variations appear in the text. Certain speculations in light of what is known about the rest of the book are nonetheless possible. The pattern in the other gatherings immediately suggests that here too the 12° preceded the 8°. It is true, as McKerrow points out, that "an edition in which the signatures are all of one alphabet, beginning with A and proceeding regularly, is likely to be later than an edition in which the preliminary leaves have a separate signature." That would argue for the priority of the 8°. But he also says that "A" was often saved for the preliminaries and that a preliminary sheet signed A when the text begins on B tells us "nothing at all."[10] According to the signature pattern, then, the 12° could have been the first impression, and the preliminaries could have been composed and printed at the customary time, after the rest of the book. If the pages that were distributed first were the ones that had been printed first, we have another hint that the preliminaries were not worked at the start of the press run; they remained intact, for use in the second edition, while the equivalent of 8° B, C, and some of D were distributed and then reset.
With the actual sequence of these impressions now in mind, it is interesting to take another look at earlier arguments about the priority of editions. The spirited debate to a large extent turned on the question of whether a clearly corrupt or a correct form of the text came first. An important group of variations consisted of those that either could have been caused by type movement when the format was changed or else might have been corrected at that point. All but one of the variations, it turns out, were from good to bad. The extensive type movement on the opening pages of the text, along with the dropping of the 'S' of 'BOOKS'; the two raised letters in the footnote on page 5; the removal of the exclamation point after the catchword on page 8; and the dropping of the final letter in the catchwood 'As' on page 9 all resulted when the poem was reimposed for octavo. Only one error of this kind, the omission of the final letter in the catchword 'This' on page 29, seems to have resulted from a mistake in composition (or from the dislodging of the letter early in the press run) and to have been corrected for the second impression. Yet while the octavo text is inferior at these points, it contains seven corrections of material whose states are independent of type movement caused by the opening of the formes. The pattern of changes thus suggests that sheets of the 12° impression served as the proof sheets for the text of the 8°, with the appropriate revisions made between impressions. The 8° seems to have received no separate proofing; that omission allowed the errors caused by type movement to enter.
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