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Notes
The peculiar order of composition of the History was seized upon by Hume's critics, for instance Richard Hurd: "having undertaken to conjure up the spirit of absolute power, [Hume] judged it necessary to the charm, to reverse the order of things, and to evoke this frightful spectre (as witches use to say their prayers) backwards" (Moral and Political Dialogues [London, 1761], "Postscript", quoted by Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. [1980] 302).
The editions of the History that I cite in this study are as follows: The History of Great Britain under the House of Stuart. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1754; London, 1757. The History of Great Britain under the House of Stuart. Revised ed. 2 vols. London, 1759. The History of England under the House of Tudor. 2 vols. London, 1759. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII. 2 vols. London, 1762. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1668. 6 vols. London, 1762. The History of England. 8 vols. London, 1763. The History of England. 8 vols. London, 1767. The History of England. 8 vols. London, 1770. The History of England. 8 vols. London, 1773. The History of England. 8 vols. London, 1778. When comparing editions I cite the date of the "original" edition (for example, 1762 in the case of the medieval volumes), and the date of the edition in which the relevant revision first appeared. Although the second volume of the History of Great Britain appeared at the end of 1756 I have referred to it throughout, in accordance with its title page, as the 1757 edition. Similarly, the medieval volumes were actually published in late 1761, but I cite them as the edition of 1762.
For an account of British editions of the History published in Hume's lifetime and posthumously see T. E. Jessop, A Bibliography of David Hume (1938) 28-32. No American edition of the History appeared in the eighteenth century; however, I have managed to trace thirty-one separate American editions published in the nineteenth century.
Hitherto the only study devoted to the revisions has been that of Ernest Campbell Mossner, "Was Hume a Tory Historian? Facts and Reconsiderations", JHI 2 (1941): 225-236. Mossner rejects the idea that Hume's revisions manifest Tory bias, and sees them as indicative of scepticism rather than dogmatism (233). Mossner's study, however, has several flaws. He draws his conclusions from a fairly small sample of revisions (148 variants), and his tabular analysis of the revisions is based on the rather simplistic categories of "Whig", "Tory" and "Neutral" (230). Mossner's terms suffer from an exclusive concentration upon the "politics", narrowly interpreted, of the History. Moreover, Mossner's bibliographical principles are themselves suspect, as the editions which are used for the purposes of collation are not in fact those cited in the "Table of Revisions" (230 n). Constant Noble Stockton, although employing a limited sample of the revisions, casts doubt on Mossner's findings in "Hume's Constitutional History," (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1968) 244. Victor Wexler is aware of the significance of the revisions, and discusses aspects of them at various points in "David Hume: Historian" (Ph.D dissertation, Columbia Univ., 1971); he also deals briefly with examples of the process of revision in David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979) 15-17, and "David Hume's Discovery of a New scene of Historical Thought" (Eighteenth Century Studies 10 (1976-77): 192-194. Duncan Forbes' discussion of the revisions in Hume's Philosophical Politics (1975) 324-326 is brief but thoughtful. Forbes also confines himself to a consideration of the political import of Hume's recastings, and decides that "in the last resort Hume does not radically alter his main thesis in spite of all the changes" (325).
I was assisted in this laborious task by the eighteenth century annotator—apparently the Rev. Charles Godwyn, Fellow of Balliol (see G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of David Hume to William Strahan [London, 1888] 6)—who noted many of the revisions made by Hume in the 1754 and 1757 editions held by the Bodleian. However, Godwyn seems to have compared only the 1759 edition with the two earlier volumes—thus not taking account of later revisions—and even in this comparison is not fully comprehensive. Certain of Hume's contemporaries were as fascinated as the author himself by the process of revision; there are also interlinear and marginal annotations in a Dublin edition of 1755 held by the British Library (annotations which are not by Hume himself, pace Victor Wexler, "David Hume: Historian" 145 n), and the Analytical Review 1 (1788) notes the existence of a similar "critical edition", "a most curious collation of the last octavo edition of the History of England with the first in quarto" owned by a Mr. Herbert Croft (297 n.).
T. C. Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel enter a similar caveat on the limitations of statistics in the study of revisions in "Richardson's Revisions of Pamela", Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 62.
The implications of Hume's attitudes to revision and print have received comparatively little attention; but Elizabeth Eisenstein has remarked that Hume's attitudes exemplify the process by which, through print, "the transmission of written records no longer reinforced the sense that corruption was an inevitable consequence of any sequence over time" (The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe [1979] 2.112).
John Hill Burton noted that Hume's "most brilliant passages are those which bear the least appearance of being amended" (The Life and Correspondence of David Hume, 2 vols. [Edinburgh, 1846] 2.80-81).
The origins of the anecdote of Hume's reluctance to walk across his study to check a reference are obscure, but see for example Ernest Campbell Mossner, "An Apology for David Hume, Historian", PMLA 56 (1941): 682, and Victor G. Wexler, David Hume and the "History of England" 37.
Pace Forbes, 324, and Mossner, "Was Hume a Tory Historian", 230 n, the editions of 1763 and 1767 are not identical.
For the difficulties encountered by the first volume of the History in the London publishing world, see Ernest Campbell Mossner and Harry Ransom, "Hume and the Conspiracy of the Booksellers", Univ. of Texas Studies in English 29 (1950), 162-182. For an account of the fate of the first volume in the context of the Scottish book trade see Warren Macdougall, "Copyright Legislation in the Court of Session, 1738-1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade" (Edinburgh Bibliographical Transactions V. Part 5:2-31) 27-29.
John Brown, An Estimate of the manners and Principles of the Times (London 1757, 1758) 1:57-58.
Mossner and Ransom, however, claim that the possibility that the sale of the first volume had been affected by its treatment of religion was "never taken seriously by Hume" (167).
Negative reviews and the initially poor sales of the History may not have been the only factors involved in Hume's recisions. See Mossner, Life, 341-354, for the moves against Hume in the General Assembly and the Committee of Overtures of the Church of Scotland in 1755 and 1756.
See Letters 2.216, and New Letters of David Hume, ed. R. Klibansky, E. C. Mossner (1954) 69-70.
A more immediate explanation for Hume's excision of his extravagant tributes to the Dutch republic might be the crisis of 1758, during which friction between England and the republic over the latter's status as neutral trading power nearly resulted in war.
Burton, 2.79-81, gives a list of some of the more common alterations made by Hume in his quest for correctness, and notes the contradiction between Hume's declared independence of interpretation and his obvious susceptibility to linguistic and stylistic criticisms (2.78-79). See also Thomas Ritchie, An Account of the Life and Writings of David Hume Esq. (London 1807) 351-368.
Ironically, Joseph Priestley used the History as a mine of linguistic error, citing dozens of Humean solecisms. Priestley apologised for having devoted such attention to Hume with reference to the historian's "great reputation" and refused to believe that "exactness in the punctillios of grammar was an object capable of giving [a man such as Hume] the least disturbance" (The Rudiments of English Grammar [London, 1768] xiii). For Hume and "Scots", "Scotch" and "Scottish", see Priestley, 79.
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