The Gentleman's Magazine,
Concealed Printign, and the Texts of Samuel Johnson's Lives of
Admiral Robert Blake and Sir Francis Drake
by
O M Brack, Jr.
Until the publication of William B. Todd's "A Bibliographical
Account of The Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1754" in
Studies in Bibliography (18 [1965], 81-109), the
bibliographical
history of the first magazine was "entirely conjectural, with all editions
undefined, early printings unlocated, piracies and counterfeits undetected
and—excepting . . . the work of a few Johnsonians—all
textual
revision completely unnoticed" (p. 81). In the course of his investigations
Todd examined, or had examined for him, 175 sets of 24 annual volumes,
which, including various supplements, total 312 separate
numbers, some printed as many as nine times, with differing textual states
occurring in every set. The bibliographical evidence, as might be expected,
is extensive and complex. Although Todd was aware that a number of the
Gentleman's Magazine might be only "partially revised and
reset" (p. 85), in a project of this scope it would be difficult to collate
every gathering.
[1] In order to
differentiate the printings Todd relied on the order of the eight woodcuts of
St. John's Gate used on the title pages of the original editions from
September 1731 through June 1790 and the order of the imprints,
supplemented by a record of the last entry to the left and right of the
woodcut, the type of ornamental block heading the first page of text, and
the signature position on the first signed page.
[2]
Since many of Samuel Johnson's early prose writings, including the
"Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia" or Parliamentary
Debates, appear in the Gentleman's Magazine, it is
important that the scholar be able to distinguish printings. In the process of
preparing an edition of Johnson's shorter prose writings I have had
numerous occasions to consult Todd's essay and have found it a reliable
guide. When editing the text of the life of Sir Francis Drake which
appeared in the August, September, October, December 1740, and January
1741 numbers of the Gentleman's Magazine, I was alerted to
the reprinting of the January 1741 number in May or June 1742 by Todd's
essay (p. 100). A collation of the two printings indicates that there are
forty-five variant readings. Since these changes were made when Johnson
was closely involved in the editorship of the Gentleman's
Magazine, it is tempting to attribute them to him, although many
seem unnecessary and a number
of errors are introduced.
One almost inexplicable revision is the change of "the Coast of
America" to "this Coast" in "they . . . took a Ship laden with
Silk and Linen, which was the last that they met with on the Coast of
America" (38.b.56-60).[3]
Perhaps it was felt that since Drake had been on the coast of America for
the last two installments, the reader need not be reminded. When Drake
lands on the coast of California he takes "Possession of it in the name of
Queen Elizabeth, not without ardent Wishes that this
Acquisition
might have been of Use to his native Country, and that so mild and
innocent a People might have been united to the Church of Christ"
(40.a.58-40.b.2). The second printing improves both occurrences of "have
been" to "be." In another instance a long sentence held together by "and"s
is broken into two sentences (40.a.2). The most important correction,
however, is the addition of a footnote: "An Account which we have seen
since the
first Impression for this Month, says, most of these Spanish Ships were
unmann'd." At the beginning of this final installment
of the
Life of Drake, Johnson has described Drake's arrival
in
Lima where he "entered the Harbour without Resistance, though thirty
Ships were stationed there, of which seventeen were equipp'd for their
Voyage, and many of them are represented in the Narrative as Vessels of
considerable force" (38.a.2-7). The phrase "in the Narrative" immediately
suggests that Johnson is sceptical and wants to shift the authority for this
statement to his source,
The World Encompassed by Sir Francis
Drake, edited by Drake's nephew and namesake, Sir Francis Drake
Bart., to glorify himself and his family.
[4] As might be expected, Johnson
inserts a
commentary:
their Security seems to have consisted not in their Strength, but in
their Reputation, which had so intimidated the Spaniards, that
the Sight of their own Superiority could not rouse them to Opposition.
Instances of such panic Terrours are to be met with in other Relations, but
as they are, for the most Part, quickly dissipated by Reason and Reflection,
a wise Commander will rarely found his Hopes of Success on them; and,
perhaps, on this Occasion, the Spaniards scarcely deserve a
severer Censure for their Cowardice, than Drake for his
Temerity (38.a.8-38.b.1-7).
That Drake, with only one ship, could enter a harbor with thirty ships,
seventeen "full ready," as the source describes them, was not to be
believed, although it must be said in the narrator's favor that Johnson omits
this was done at night. The "Instances of such panic Terrours" he
apparently remembered from earlier reading as he did not examine other
relations to find if they gave a different version of the taking of Lima
harbor. This episode must have continued to bother him since in the spring
of 1742 he added the footnote at "Temerity." Johnson may have had an
occasion to consult some edition of either Richard Hakluyt's
The
Principal Navigations or William Camden's
Annals,
sources he had drawn upon for Drake's early life, where he would have
discovered that the number of the ships was twelve, that the tacking and
arms had been taken ashore, that not so much as a boy had been left
aboard, because the Spanish had no reason to expect an attack on the
Pacific shore.
[5] Perhaps he saw an account based
on one or both of these sources in an unidentified periodical or pamphlet.
The point is that this valuable insight into the working of Johnson's mind
might have been lost without the skills of an analytical bibliographer. In
fact, until the appearance of my edition of the collected shorter prose
writings, the only text of the
Life of Drake where the
footnote
can be found is in this second printing of the
Gentleman's
Magazine.
The Life of Drake was reprinted in 1767, in a volume
published by "Henry and Cave" which also contains reprints of the
Life of Savage and the Life of Blake. In the
portion
of the Life of Drake containing the Gentleman's
Magazine January 1741 installment, the 1767 edition follows the
second
rather than the first printing, but omits the footnote.
[6] In 1773, however, Thomas
Davies,
reprinting the
Life of Drake without authorization in his
Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces, reverted to the
Gentleman's Magazine, with the first printing of the final
installment. As a result, the work of the 1767 editor, who did more than
any of his successors to try to rectify the mistakes and puzzles of the
original text, was lost, along with the footnote, since Davies's text of the
Life (and of a good deal else in the Johnson prose canon)
seems
to have been the basis for that in the 1787
Works and later
eighteenth-and nineteenth-century collections.
The examination of only the title page and the place of the signature
on the first signed page of each number of the Gentleman's
Magazine is certain to leave some anomalies undetected. The
Life of Drake began appearing in the August 1740 number
of
the Gentleman's Magazine and this opening installment fills
all
but the last column of a separate gathering, numbered '4.' Curiously, this
gathering breaks into the text of an article reprinted from Common
Sense, interrupting it at the end of the last page (388) of the
previous
gathering; the essay continues on the first page (397) of the next. At the
foot of page 397 is the notice, "N. B. This Page is to read
[sic]
next to P. 388." The first installment of the Life of Drake
thus
appears to be a last-minute addition to this number. Perhaps Johnson's
habitual dilatoriness had made Edward Cave despair of keeping the promise
made to his readers in the July number, and he was able to fulfill it only
by doing violence to the make-up of the magazine. This clue to Johnson's
work habits can be discovered only by a bibliographical examination of the
earliest printing of the Life of Drake.
The Life of Blake first appeared in the June 1740
number
of the Gentleman's Magazine and fills all but one page of an
eight-page gathering, but the evidence presented by Todd provides no clue
that this gathering exists in two typesettings with thirty-three variant
readings. The immediate occasion of the publication of the life of Robert
Blake (1598-1657), Oliver Cromwell's victorious admiral, was the failure
of Robert Walpole's administration to pursue the War of Jenkins's Ear, thus
allowing the Spanish to continue to prey on English shipping. As the
introductory paragraph makes clear, Johnson intended to gain public support
for the war by a comparison of the glorious past of the English navy with
its present state. The strategy appears to have been successful, for in the
following month Johnson announced that "Having the Satisfaction to find
that the Account of Admiral Blake in our last Magazine was
not
disagreeable to the Publick, we propose in our next to
entertain our Readers with the Life and Actions of Sir Francis
Drake."[7]
In fact the
Life of Blake was successful enough that Cave
issued
it as a separate pamphlet sometime later in the year. The pamphlet, set
from the first printing of the
Gentleman's Magazine, corrects
a few typographical errors but introduces more than a dozen textual
corruptions. When at some undisclosed time it became necessary to reset
the gathering containing the
Life of Blake for the
Gentleman's Magazine the first
GM printing
again
served as printer's copy.
The first printing of the Life of Blake appears in most
sets
of the Gentleman's Magazine; the reset gathering,
undoubtedly
a smaller press run, I have discovered only in the Huntington Library
copy.[8] Since all copies of the June
1740 number, no matter which printing of the life they contain, correspond
to the first edition described by Todd (p. 105), only a careful examination
of this gathering in multiple copies will discover the second printing. The
Life of Blake fills seven of the eight pages of the fifth full
gathering of the number. It is numbered '5' and signed 'Pp'. The signature
positions are as follows: (1) River, sent (2)
River,∧ sent. The different placements of the signature on
the first, and only, signed leaf of the gathering alert the bibliographer that
there are two impressions, if not two editions. The compositor, of course,
was resetting the text line for line so that at first glance the
two printings appear similar. But a typographical peculiarity makes it
readily clear that these are two separate typesettings. The first printing uses
abbreviations such as 'y' to represent the Old English thorn with an 'e' over
it for 'the' and a 't' over it for 'that,' a 'w' with 'th' over it for 'with' and
'ch' over it for 'which.' These abbreviations appear seven times in the first
printing but disappear in the second. As early as 1683-84 Joseph Moxon
stated that these abbreviations "have been used by Printers in Old Times,
to Shorten or Get in Matter; but now are
wholly left
off as obsolete."[9] Yet they were still
in use in the Gentleman's Magazine throughout 1740,
gradually
dwindling in number after that until August 1741 when they seem to
disappear altogether.[10] Priority must
be given, then, to the printing with abbreviations since it shares common
typographical features with the rest of the
June 1740 number—there are at least fifteen similar abbreviations in
other
articles—and other numbers in the 1740 volume.
Additional evidence for establishing the priority of the printings is
provided by the textual variants. As might be expected from such a
reprinting, many of the changes are in punctuation and spelling, with a
sprinkling of new
typographical errors. But there are two revisions and one correction which
indicate editorial intervention, almost certainly by Johnson since it is hard
to imagine who else would take such an interest in the life. That Johnson
should make so few revisions will come as no surprise to those familiar
with his method. Given time and interest Johnson could make substantial
revisions, usually in the direction of clarity in expression, as he does, for
example, in the
Rambler and
Rasselas. But he
was
also capable of a kind of desultory carefulness, as when he inserts only one
word in the pamphlet version of his
An Account of the Life of John
Philip Barretier (1744)
[11] or
corrects the final installment of the
Life of Drake with a few
stylistic improvements and the addition of one footnote.
The first printing of the Life of Blake states that "In
March, 1666, having forced Algiers to
Submission,
he entered the Harbour of Tunis" (305.b.61). This is clearly
a
mistake since Blake died in 1657. The problem begins with a typographical
error in Johnson's source. Although Johnson refers to many sources, he is
in fact drawing all of his information from the double-structured text and
notes of Thomas Birch's article on Blake in volume three of the
General Dictionary (1735). Johnson's source erroneously
gives
the date as March "1665" instead of "1655." Johnson either copied out
"1666" for "1665" or the compositor introduced the error. When going
back over the text Johnson saw that the chronology was wrong and changed
the date to "1656" for the second printing. Since in the preceding paragraph
Johnson gives "November, 1654" as the date Cromwell sent
Blake into the Mediterranean, a more careful reading would have told him
the March date
should be the year following—1655. Johnson, who had used only one
source for the life in the first instance, was not moved in the second to
corroborate a date by consulting other sources.[12]
The second revision is a stylistic improvement. The earliest printing
read, "the bravest Man is not always in the most Danger"
(303.a.35); "most" has been changed in the later printing to
"greatest" to make it parallel with "bravest"
and to
give it a more epigrammatic quality. The third revision clears up a
confusion in the text. Johnson opens a paragraph by describing the English
taking "the Rear Admiral and another Vessel" before turning to the Dutch
Admirals, de Ruyter and de Witt's, reaction to this loss. With "Admiral"
referring to both ships and men in the first sentence, the clause "that two
were taken" in the next sentence gives rise to some confusion as to whether
"two" refers to ships or to men. This is clarified by the addition of "Ships":
"that two Ships were taken" (303.b.26).
Unlike Johnson's revisions for the Life of Drake, those
for the Life of Blake were incorporated into later editions,
probably because Thomas Davies unaccountably omitted it from his
Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces which served as a basis for
the 1787 Works.[13] The
pamphlet version set from the first printing in the Gentleman's
Magazine proved to be a textual deadend since reprintings in the
London Chronicle, 13-20 August 1757, and in the 1767
volume
containing the Life of Savage and the Life of
Drake
return to the earliest printing in the Gentleman's Magazine.
Unable to find the Life of Blake in the Davies volume, the
editor of the 1787 Works turned to the Gentleman's
Magazine and reproduced the second GM printing.
Subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions used this text. No
need for congratulations here, since they also incorporate many of the
errors, and later reprintings have added to this number.
Before December 1740 Johnson contributed little to the
Gentleman's Magazine other than the lives of Blake and
Drake,
but beginning with this final number of the year his activity is intense until
mid-1742, after which time he mostly contributed the debates.[14] I see no reason to doubt that it was
Johnson who did the editorial tinkering for the reprinting of the Life
of Drake in May or June 1742. Although the reprinting of the
Life of Blake cannot be precisely dated, it is highly probable
that Johnson revised it during the same period of editorial activity. Why this
single sheet was reprinted is a mystery. Perhaps copies of this sheet were
damaged or printed in an insufficient number and were reprinted to meet
the demand for back numbers.[15]
"Whatever its extent, no list of points will encompass every contingency,"
Todd reminds us. Users of the Gentleman's Magazine are
warned that while Todd's
essay provides a good point of departure, it is necessary to examine
multiple copies of the gathering in which their text appears.
Notes