 | |  |
The birth of Johnson's Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets was difficult, at once premature and overdue. An anxious set of midwives, the booksellers for whom Johnson wrote, were alarmed by John Bell, whose series of British poets from Chaucer to Churchill was projected to reach one hundred volumes. Viewing Bell's scheme as an invasion of their literary property, they had plotted to undermine it with a collection of their own, banking on Johnson's name to give them an advantage.
Timeliness was all. To facilitate dispatch, the publishers had minimized their request of Johnson, as the biographer readily confessed: "My purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character."[1] The greater hurdle, it seemed, was the printing of fifty-six volumes of poetry; to expedite this task, ten printshops were put to work.[2] The proprietors had done their best to speed things along. To their undoubted chagrin, however, Johnson ignored their scant recipe for the lives, led beyond their intention by an "honest desire of giving useful pleasure"—a process that stretched from months into years. Meanwhile, Bell enjoyed an uncontested market, his Poets of Great Britain steadily progressing from its commencement in 1777.[3]
Johnson's delay left the proprietors with five options, none of them appealing:
(1) To publish nothing until Johnson had finished his task. This was unacceptable because it ignored the pressing commercial problem: Bell had a product, while they still had none.
(2) To publish the complete poetry, but withhold the prefaces until Johnson had finished. This move would have defeated their marketing scheme, reliant as it was on Johnson's name.
(3) To publish what Johnson had completed to date, binding up his prefaces with the poems they introduced, while reserving the rest of the poems for similar publication either serially as Johnson progressed or collectively when he had ended his labors. Given Johnson's uneven rate of progress, the proprietors understandably would have been reluctant to proceed dilatorily and commit themselves to an indeterminate promotional plan.
(4) To publish whatever prefaces were ready, affixing them to their respective poets (as in option 3), but also to release the rest of the poems (without prefaces), promising to sell the balance of the lives in a batch when they were ready. This course would have yielded a half-baked set of books, with some prefaces joined to the works and others detached.
(5) To publish the complete poems, along with separate volumes containing whatever prefaces Johnson had finished, with the rest of the lives to be sold in additional volumes when they were finished. This option was evidently the least objectionable. In March 1779, with only twenty-two of the fifty-two slated lives ready, the proprietors published an inchoate collection. The Prefaces formed four separate volumes, to which six more were added in 1781 to finish the collection. Owing to these accidents Johnson's Prefaces were not prefaces at all, but rather "Appendices, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets."
This anomaly elicited a jibe from Bell. In 1783, upon the completion of his series, he published a triumphal letter in which he sniffed at the irregular bond between Johnson's Prefaces and the proprietors' collection of poems. Johnson, Bell observed, had had no real concern in the edition called "Johnson's Poets" "otherwise than in writing and compiling the four volumes of the lives, which have no reference or allusion whatever to that Edition of the Poets, more than to mine.—Nay, I will even dare him so say, that he saw even a single sheet of manuscript, or printed copy, of what is called his Edition of the Poets, before it came finished from the press."[4] It was true: the four-volume Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (the 1781 reprint of the Prefaces) bore no clear affiliation to the Works of the English Poets. Nor had the original Prefaces—this was Bell's point. Because Johnson had paid little explicit attention to the proprietors' edition in drafting his lives, and because the lives as a result did not "own" that collection, they could with equal propriety have been attached to Bell's series as well.
The insinuation was deliberately ironic. Some of Johnson's work had, in fact, been incorporated into The Poets of Great Britain: the famous writer's words and ideas were appropriated by Bell's compilers in several of his prefaces, running the gamut from outright piracy, which cost Bell a legal scrape, to the promiscuous little borrowings that were routine in eighteenth-century hackwork. To sort this out I have tried to chart the tangle of sources
| | |