University of Virginia Library

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: 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