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II
For some people books themselves are invisible, and the power of literature resides in the ideas and images which transcend the material that contains them. For Fleeman the bibliographer, however, books embody physically the effort to get things right, to see ideas through to the point at which they communicate, and from the chain lines and the press marks, to the imprint or the cancels, they tell a human story. Fleeman's uneasiness with "pure" literary criticism is partly a distaste for things that float free (like the yearnings of Lamartine), and a conviction that, as Pope said, "when we are confined to truth, we soon find the shortness of our tether." This Johnsonian belief that what is right and true is not mysterious, ideal, or distant, but is embedded in the present and tangible, means that its recovery is both a practical and ethical challenge.
Before gaining his Oxford fellowship Fleeman had already published four papers on Johnson, and the earliest of these exemplifies his concern for the processes of Johnson's thought. "Some Proofs of Johnson's Prefaces to the Poets" (The Library, 1962) demonstrates the great man's solicitude and attention to minutiae at the proof stage, and also his consideration for his printer. Fleeman reveals how "the restrictions of time and space . . . stimulated his critical faculties to acute and incisive activity" as Johnson reworked ideas sometimes through the smallest stylistic emendations. In an appendix, along with a checklist of the surviving proofs of the Prefaces, Fleeman offers a full tabular analysis of the many kinds of proof-changes under various headings, a fascinating record of Johnson's sustained commitment to stylistic accuracy, to getting things right. This detailed work on Johnson's proofs convinced him that beneath the public image of the confident critical dictator was the scrupulous craftsman and conscientious refiner of language, and the article set him off on a lifelong exploration of the dynamics of the Johnsonian text, its creation, revisal, printing, and distribution.
The most enjoyable of the early papers on Johnson is "The Making of Johnson's Life of Savage, 1744" (The Library, 1967), a highly satisfying blend of detection and reasoned conjecture which exemplifies bibliography's forensic role in tackling a literary mystery. After demonstrating bibliographically that the Life was printed in two parts, he relates the final part (of forty-eight pages) to those "forty-eight printed pages" that Johnson told Boswell had been written "at a sitting." An examination of Johnson's marginalia in the Glasgow University Library copy suggests that the hurried rewriting may have been the result of new material from a Popean source, but "whether he obliged Johnson to
In his R.E.S. note (1968) on Johnson's Prayers and Meditations he gives the results of a close re-examination of the Pembroke College manuscripts. From beneath George Strahan's heavy obliterations he is able to recover a considerable number of new readings, and although the censored details are unremarkable, the very anti-climax of the conclusion has a vindicatory ring to it: "References to doubts, scruples, uncertainties, and perplexities of mind and to melancholy (μχ) are the targets of Strahan's Indian Ink; those who seek sensational disclosures need not look for them in Johnson's papers." Reminiscent of Johnson striding into the cave to dispel Boswell's delicious mystery, Fleeman relishes making conjecture face up to the empirical evidence, wittily substituting for the abstract word "disapproval" the all-too-tangible "Indian Ink."
In fact, a subtext of much of Fleeman's scholarship is his distinction between the practical bibliographer and the over-sensitive "litterateur." This term appeared in his 1969 review of Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, in which he responded to Edmund Wilson's slight on Fredson Bowers as a "monomaniac bibliographer." In making that comment, says Fleeman, Wilson reveals himself as someone "for whom 'literature' is a self-evident phenomenon, whose sensibilities are sufficient to define it." Bibliographers are needed, he continues, to remind such people that "the translation from inspiration to publication is a far from simple matter. . . . A text is not a stable entity but rather needs interpretation through an understanding of the ways in which it came into existence and that those ways are less than finely metaphysical and too often grossly physical." A critic who disowns bibliography is placing literature on a Platonic plane, cutting it free of its incarnation as a series of human processes. For Fleeman "literature" is inseparable from the act of giving physical form to an idea: "It is too easy" he concludes, "for the litterateur to dismiss the bibliographer because he occasionally wants to spell 'literature' as 'books.'"
It was an exciting moment for Fleeman the booklover when, in the Spring of 1963, he discovered William Bowyer's ledgers in the Grolier Club of New York. While searching with Gabriel Austin for general information on eighteenth-century printing practices, he came across the seven volumes which had lain forgotten since their purchase in 1929 and immediately saw their significance. Having reported his findings
Fleeman's tireless efforts to track down every surviving item of Johnsoniana have led to a number of very useful reference volumes that should be on any self-respecting Johnsonian's shelf. The earliest of these was partly the result of his travels around American libraries and especially of his work on the Hyde Collection; modestly entitled A Preliminary Handlist of Documents & Manuscripts of Samuel Johnson (1967), it consists of 265 items and includes documents bearing Johnson's autograph annotations or endorsements. A companion volume listing 285 copies of "books associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson" appeared in 1984. His substantial C.B.E.L. entry for "Samuel Johnson" (1971) is a significant contribution to Johnsonian bibliography and offers some further helpful lists, including works dedicated to Johnson, his contributions to others' books, his periodical writings, and his many "proposals." In 1975 Fleeman published a facsimile edition of the sale catalogue of Johnson's library (reproduced from the annotated Harvard copy), adding an introduction, and providing an index of authors, titles and purchasers, along with a census of all known copies, some not identified in the catalogue. In the same year his article "The Revenue of a Writer" brought together all the available information on Johnson's literary earnings during his career, and made good use of William Strahan's bank account to present a striking picture of the financial realities behind the man of letters. In 1985 he published a detailed list of thirty-one prospectuses and proposals in which Johnson was concerned, and in the 1993 volume of Studies in Bibliography he and Donald Eddy offered a further "preliminary handlist" of the many books to which Johnson subscribed. Taken together, these bibliographic publications provide a wealth of Johnsonian knowledge that eighteenth-century scholars can be grateful for.
For Fleeman all bibliographies are in a sense "preliminary," all knowledge finally tentative. In his 1984 "Valediction" he offered the sobering remark that, thanks to the increasing refinement of analytical techniques, "every modern critical edition is obsolescent on the day of publication:"
One of Fleeman's strengths as an editor is his keen awareness that a literary text is a flux upon which any printed edition is bound to impose an artificial fixity. In a review of Cornford's edition of Young's Night Thoughts (Notes & Queries, 1991), he echoes the 1969 review quoted earlier, but develops his point in terms of the compromised role of the editor: "Language is undoubtedly a slippery and elusive agency," he writes, "and despite the apparent certainty of the written or printed form, it cannot be wholly settled in an unequivocal state. Editors nevertheless undertake to do exactly that." This healthy awareness of textual pragmatics causes him to be suspicious of tidy impositions of consistency upon a text that may reflect its author's uncertainties or oversights. Although editors have to make choices, these should not be decided through a desire to impose a comforting predictability that will not trouble a reader. It is as though Fleeman even wants that reader to notice inconsistencies or quirks in a text, as reflecting more truly its conception in the fallible human brain. A regularized text is therefore anathema to him. In his reviews he criticizes editions that invoke a publisher's "house style" as an excuse for regularizing, or, under the cloak of a comment that "such matters as punctuation and capitalization were left to the compositors," tidy up a text so that the idiosyncrasies are wiped out.
As an editor Fleeman is prepared to be equivocal, even inconsistent, when he deems it appropriate, and he will weigh the balance of probabilities at those points where certainty is impossible. He feels that an editor must show his hand and reveal exactly why a particular reading is being emended or retained. In fact a stubborn retention of readings is a marked feature of his work, which is only conservative in the most literal sense. His "conservatism" can be bold and daring when a safer course might have been to emend something awkward, inconsistent or strange. He insists, however, that editions should preserve a degree of unfamiliarity, so that the reader is reminded that the text is not a modern one, just as the mind that produced it was not a modern mind. In welcoming Fleeman's 1985 edition of the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland ("a model of its kind"), Mervyn Jannetta commented: "it is heartening to encounter such straightforward statements of editorial policy, which are the more reassuring for the openness with which they
A characteristic of Fleeman the editor is his capacity to keep an open mind and think each specific problem through. Rather than apply a textual theory and work to produce a neat, consistent answer, he is an intelligent realist who works with the grain of the material, however knotty, and develops a method appropriate to each instance; furthermore, his knowledge of Johnson is profound enough to appreciate the writer's own inconsistencies.
There is a note of comprehending sympathy in this, and it is no surprise that the introduction to his edition of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland tells a story worthy of his author. Setting out on an idealistic mission to reconstruct the lost manuscript from which the text had been set, he had hoped to identify individual compositors and work back to the holograph they had in front of them (this early optimism is evident in his 1981 lecture to the Johnson Society of London, summarized in The New Rambler). But in the end the fact had to be faced that typesetting conventions and variations in spelling and punctuation did not form a consistent pattern, and so his task changed to a humbler but far more Johnsonian one:
In his introduction to the Journey he remarks that "a text, and certainly not this one, is not a single entity but is rather a process. Its witnesses are merely markers on the continuum of that process," and it is this awareness of process which justifies some of his decisions. Inconsistency is embraced as an authentic mark of human fallibility which it is not the editor's job to override, and the reader of this edition is brought intriguingly close to Johnson's thought processes and seems to be leaning over Johnson's shoulders as he writes. Some of Fleeman's more daring decisions are to resist emendation. Perhaps the most outrageous is his retention of the printed "Frith of Forth" in the third paragraph, even though later in the text the word appears as "Firth" (as in "Firth of
Perhaps Fleeman's most triumphant emendation (all the more convincing because of the many carefully argued refusals to emend) concerns Johnson's description of the Armadale otter. The published texts read: "I expected the otter to have a foot particularly formed for the art of swimming; but upon examination, I did not find it differing much from that of a spaniel." Fleeman's brilliant emendation of "art" to "act" is the result not merely of close acquaintance with Johnson's handwriting, but of a sure sense of Johnson's mind: "Though swimming may be an 'art' for men," he comments, "it is not so for otters. Johnson defined art as 'the power of doing something not taught by nature and instinct'." Johnson's sureness and clarity of mind have been absorbed by his editor. The majority of its readers will value the edition for the almost two hundred pages of commentary and appendices, which reveal a range of erudition and eye for detail worthy of his mentor Powell (in his Notes & Queries review, A. F. T. Lurcock commented that "it could be reviewed properly only by a committee"); but it will not surprise some to know that he himself is proudest of the thirteen pages of textual notes. Indeed, as the above examples show, it is there that we come closest to Johnson's mind and art.
The text of Johnson's poems may have offered less scope for annotation and emendation, but here too Fleeman took a firm stand. His Penguin edition of 1971 (subsequently revised) remains for many the standard edition (in a 1975 review O M Brack concluded that it contained the best texts of the poems). The policy of the Penguin series required a modernized text, but after a sustained struggle Fleeman persuaded the publishers that in Johnson's case the updating of his spelling and reduction of his capitalizations would prevent the full meaning from coming through. His two-page discussion of this point in the introduction makes
Consistent with his interest in the workings of Johnson's mind, he chose in this edition to supply a critical text: "one advantage of the construction of a critical text is that the recorded variants will illustrate the progress of a composition by which a rough draft develops into a finished work." This dynamic principle extends to the contents of Fleeman's edition: two texts of the same translation of Horace Odes I.22 are placed side by side. As he says in the introduction, "the changes are slight, but the two together illustrate the kind of polishing to which Johnson often subjected his compositions." In his selections from Irene he gives extracts from Johnson's draft notes so as to "give some idea of the development of his thoughts and expression." It is clear throughout Fleeman's scholarly work that it is the movement of Johnson's mind that fascinates him: his Johnson is never the self-confident dictator occupying a firm position on every subject, but a writer who is always thinking things through, reworking ideas and developing his responses in a context of human uncertainty and fallibility. The crucial poem for Fleeman is, not surprisingly, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and he ends the Penguin volume with the text of the original manuscript in the Hyde Collection "so that the curious reader may see for himself the progress of Johnson's mind and art." This point was developed in his 1985 R.E.S. review of The Unknown Samuel Johnson: "It is clear from the manuscript of the Vanity of Human Wishes that the act of composition was a dynamic process in which Johnson was both maker and audience interacting to generate words and ideas sometimes in conflict, sometimes
Fleeman's well known dissatisfaction with the editorial principles of the Yale Edition of Johnson's works is best seen in terms of this concern for the dynamics of the Johnsonian text. His objections are clearly presented in his 1971 R.E.S. review of the three-volume Rambler. In reprinting a modernized version of a "best" text, the "straitjacket of editorial policy" allows no consideration of Johnson's "processes of thought;" the reduction of initial capitals and elimination of italics sacrifices subtleties of meaning; and the editor's defensive appeal to the house style of the original publisher gets short shrift: "'House style'," says Fleeman, "is assumed to exist in the eighteenth century even though there are no surviving manuals of it, no analyses of it, and no definitions of it: it has become a kind of magic handkerchief into which editorial problems may be persuaded to disappear." Furthermore, in rejecting the layout of the original folio Ramblers, the edition ignores Johnson's care for the appearance of his texts (witness the displayed compliments in his letters), and so the "spaciousness, dignity, and public statement" of the Folio is replaced by the crowded page "of a mere commercial venture." Another Yale principle of which Fleeman disapproves is the separation of the textual editing from the writing of the critical introduction. The assumption behind this division of labour contradicts his belief that the textual editor has the true critical warrant: "One of the best ways to approximate to an understanding of an author's work is to try to edit him. However carefully Mr. Bate may have read the Rambler there will remain tracts of Johnson's mind which only Mr. Strauss has traversed, and it is regrettable that we have not been given the results of that journey." (In that single word "tracts" we gain a sense of Fleeman's conviction that bibliography is the reverse of a narrow pursuit.)
Fleeman was given the chance to enter the arena of criticism when he was invited to deliver the British Academy's prestigious Warton Lecture on 3 November 1983. Rather than map out "Johnson's ideas" or "Johnson's style" (those static concepts beloved of so many undergraduate essays) Fleeman took the dynamic principle as his key, finding the clue to Johnson's art in his revisions, and the Vanity of Human Wishes manuscript played its role in this. For Fleeman, Johnson's mind and art were always in progress together—his words were not idea-led. To demonstrate this he follows the poem's third line, "Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife," through its earlier stages (from "Explore each restless . . ."):
What drives Fleeman's lecture, as well as his scrupulous editing, is a conviction of the immanence of meaning, contained and expressed in the words themselves. There is no fashionable interplay of multiple meanings, it is not imported by the reader's own independent experience or transformed by a modern perspective. All is contained in the "now" of Johnson's words to which our minds should be addressed. But that "now" is itself in process and leads outwards. Fleeman concludes: "It is this feature of Johnson's poetry which projects its interest beyond the words which make it. It is projected into a dimension which is not backward from or anterior to those words, but which looks forward to something which is yet to arise from the words. The interest of his words is not so much in where they start but in where they lead."
The "life sentence" that L. F. Powell promised him in 1960 is still being served. For over thirty years Fleeman has been working towards a complete account of every published piece by Johnson, and of every known fragment of manuscript material which can be traced. Not resting content with describing the editions published in Johnson's lifetime, he has set himself the task of listing all later printings including translations, abridgments, chap-books and school text books, a detailed examination of which can give valuable information on the dissemination of Johnson's writings during the nineteenth century when it has often been supposed that his reputation was in eclipse. The fact that
Some shifts in approach have been necessary as the work entered areas of study not envisaged at the outset, and the bibliographer has even had to become reconciled to the sociologist. For example, nineteenth-century school editions of Rasselas or the Dictionary (see his 1993 essay, "Johnson in the Schoolroom") needed to be placed in the context of the educational curriculum on both sides of the Atlantic. In his 1994 Oxford Bibliographical Society paper Fleeman recognised that the project has widened his view of the nature and possibilities of bibliography:
Throughout his scholarly life Fleeman has struggled to come as close as possible to Johnson's mind and art. The energy of his researches, the integrity of his principles, and the generosity of his commanding knowledge deserve our gratitude. But for all his unrivalled expertise he has never forgotten that the work of the scholar must never supersede or blur the direct message of the great man himself. As he reminds himself and us in a 1985 R.E.S. review: "[Johnson] did not write to set arcane puzzles for professors in academies, but in order to say something, despite
It would be appropriate to conclude this memoir with the full text of "A FRAGMENT of the late Dr. JOHNSON, ON THE CHARACTER AND DUTY OF AN ACADEMICK," printed as an appendix (pp. 42-43) to Hospitality. A Discourse Occasioned by Reading His Majesty's Letter in Behalf of the Emigrant French Clergy, in St. Dionis Back Church, May 26, 1793 . . . By John Moir, A. M. It is introduced by Moir as follows: "The affinity of the subject has induced me to present the reader with the following STRICTURES, by one of the most illustrious moralists in modern times, presented to me, in the Author's own handwriting, by a friend whose confidence is one of my best comforts, and whose communications are all valuable, and merit the highest gratitude. The utility of the order is implicated in the functions thus forcibly described and inculcated."
David Fleeman agreed that the word originally printed as "national" in the second paragraph was probably a misreading of Johnson's handwritten "rational" ("his initial ragged 'r' is very like an 'n' to those unfamiliar with his hand"), and he also cited in favour of the emendation Johnson's sense of the internationalism of learning and knowledge.
In the month before his death David Fleeman had managed to do some preliminary research into Moir's background. He apparently was born in Scotland of English parents, and brought up a "Seceder," i.e. a schismatic of the Kirk (1733), but he was bright enough to do well in various Scottish schools, and studied divinity at Edinburgh (though did not graduate), before coming to England and joining the Church of England. He published a number of books and sermons, and a collection called Gleanings (2 vols., 1785), which includes a whiggish essay on Johnson, and an even more whiggish one on "Majesty," but which is published by the Author, from his house "8 Bolt Court, Fleet Street," viz. the house in which Johnson died in December of the year before. Nowhere in Gleanings does Moir indicate that he had this "Fragment," nor does he at that time show much respect for his predecessor in the house, so it may be assumed he acquired the paper some time later. In 1788 he was living in Southwark, and held a curacy and a lectureship in London. His most successful work was called Female Tuition, which ran into several editions.
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