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I
Preface: Alterations in Second and Fourth
Editions
Keast initially collated the first four London folio editions of the Preface, all published during Johnson's lifetime (1755; 1755 again, set from the first edition and revised by Johnson; 1765, set from the second edition and unrevised; and 1773, set from the first edition and revised by Johnson). In his essay, he records, with his individual assessments, virtually all the variants, substantive and accidental, in the second and fourth editions. At the end, making clear his concurrence, which we share, with the Greg-Bowers theory of copy-text, he sums up: "Future editors must . . . adopt the text of the first edition as their copy-text and introduce into it the two sets of Johnsonian revisions from the second and fourth editions, together with such changes in
Examining anew editions one through four as well as the "proprietors'" fifth (1784), sixth (1785), and seventh (1785), the latter for possible rectification of errors, we have arrived at the same general conclusion, although our estimate of variants has differed from Keast's in two instances. Specifically, we have accepted sixty-three of Keast's suggested readings, including his emendation of fall for full in paragraph 45; but we have rejected his choice of betwixt rather than between in paragraph 15 (we have found betwixt neither elsewhere in the Preface nor in the Plan of a Dictionary, the History, the Grammar, and Johnson's letters) and his emendation of semi for fair in paragraph 38 (we have adopted far, proposed by the reviewer of the Dictionary in the Monthly Review, 12 [1755], 300, n. 14). Moreover, we have (1) made decisions on three variants about which Keast was undecided (pp. 130, 131); (2) selected the replacement in paragraph 26 of a semi-colon for a comma (after "language") which appears in the second, third, and fourth editions and which Keast overlooked; and (3) recorded twelve accidental variants which appear only in the third edition, unrevised, to repeat, by Johnson.
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