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II
"Additional Materials . . . Interwove"
An image for Bell's handling of sources is provided in a footnote to "The Life of John Philips": "This life is principally copied from Dr. Sewell's Life of Philips: where that was found defective the additional materials will be found either interwove in the text or thrown into marginal readings."[30] The
Johnson's Prefaces afforded a ready supply of these materials, too good to pass up despite the trouble over Denham. As accident and delay would have it, there were two phases of borrowing. Had Bell kept to his projected timetable of publishing one volume per week, he would have had no chance to pilfer from Johnson, for his series would have been completed by the time Johnson appeared in print. A fire, however, having burnt the Apollo Press to the ground in 1778, Martin was unable to resume printing until mid-1779, by which time the first four volumes of the Prefaces had been published (31 March 1779). After ten months of printing, another delay postponed the series until the last six volumes of the Prefaces had appeared (15 May 1781).[31] Table 1, which charts the printing of Bell's Poets against the staggered publication of the Prefaces, shows which of Johnson's lives were used as compared with those that were "available" when Bell's compiler presumably was hunting for sources. The question was moot for Johnson's lives of Milton, Dryden, Butler, Waller and Cowley, since Bell's editions of these poets were published before Johnson's volumes containing these lives went on sale. Several of the lives in Johnson's fourth volume, however, were eligible targets. Why Pomfret and Garth failed to attract is unclear; but Denham, Hughes, and Roscommon drew the attention of Bell's compiler.
What caused a seventeen-month hiatus between April 1780 and September 1781 is a mystery. Yet the dates raise an intriguing possibility. Printing of the series faltered just when Bell would have been apprised of the lawsuit, assuming the proprietors notified him soon after their resolution of March 27. By the time Bell had sent word to Martin, the first of the two Somerville volumes would have been in the press; and with these volumes, their colophons dated April 15 and 22, the series abruptly ceased. It is not surprising that the Poets would be suspended while legal action was pending and until Bell could re-issue the Denham in altered form. But after July 1780, why the further delay? Was he low on capital? If so, it did not hamper Bell's British Theatre, which Martin went on printing during this period at a healthy pace.[32] It is just conceivable that Bell, occupying himself meanwhile with other projects, waited to resume the Poets until Johnson's second installment of Prefaces had appeared. Could an urge to nettle his rivals have gotten the better of his acumen, or could he simply have wanted to provide his compiler with a broader choice of sources? Whatever the case, the series and Bell's borrowing from Johnson resumed simultaneously with the Collins/Hammond volume, printed within four months of the release of Prefaces, vols.
Leaving aside the life of Savage, a separate case,[34] twenty of Johnson's lives presented Bell's compiler with an opportunity for borrowing. Fifteen were used. When not appropriated for the main narrative, they were treated as a source of threads for interweaving or snippets to be "thrown into marginal readings." If the Denham preface had not been challenged, piracy might well have been the preferred mode. Bell's life of Roscommon, printed before the legal issue had been raised, was nearly as flagrant a theft as the other, its second half taken en bloc from Johnson. (Even so, Bell was not forced to retract this preface, and the text was never changed.) The Denham crisis ensured that subsequent loans would consist of shorter passages, usually in lazy paraphrases which, far from disguising their origin, preserved much of Johnson's syntax and word choice. Apart from Denham and Roscommon, three other Johnsonian lives served as Bell's primary source: those of Broome, Lyttelton, and West. Strands from the accounts of Hughes, Rowe, Tickell, Ambrose Phillips, Pitt, and Akenside were interwoven into other narratives. And material for footnotes was lifted from the lives of Collins, Hammond, John Philips and Smith.
Any grain in specificity was worthwhile. At the most rudimentary level, Bell's compiler gathered key minutiae from Johnson—a missing date, birthplace, or name. In the life of Hughes, for instance, drawn mainly from William Duncombe's account of the poet, the compiler embellishes a reference to "Mr. Montague" with Johnson's epithet, "the general patron of the followers of the Muses" (vi; SJ 4). To the end of a lengthy paragraph in the same life the compiler tacks on this sentence: "The same year 1699 our Author produced a song on the Duke of Gloucester's birth-day" (vii; SJ 4). The need for this addition is symptomatic of the shortage of dates and titles that often confronted the compiler. What many earlier literary biographies lacked, ironic though it seems, is what the Prefaces usually provided: a firmer chronology. To this obvious task Johnson brought his fascination with the course of life, especially a writer's life, and marked with empathy the stages of his subjects' poetic careers. For example, he characteristically notes the first attempt by Ambrose Philips, with verses on the death of Queen Mary, to "solicit the notice of the world"; Bell's compiler interrupts Cibber's Lives
In addition to the biographical data so easily inserted into the prefaces, Bell's compiler made little grafts of the "characters" which were a feature even in some of Johnson's shorter prefaces. Examples of this borrowing are the thumbnail sketches of Tickell (xii; SJ 17) and Ambrose Philips (vii; SJ 34).
Of highest value on the biographical side of the ledger were the anecdotes. As a companion of Collins, for instance, Johnson had seen "the guineas safe in his hand" from an advance he accepted for translating Aristotle's Poetics; he knew also that, the bargain never fulfilled, Collins had returned the sum. In abbreviated form (and minus the occular testimony), this anecdote becomes a footnote in Bell (ix; SJ 5). Johnson related a story told by Dodsley, who had sought Pope's opinion of The Pleasures of Imagination in manuscript: "this [is] no every-day writer," Pope advised him, a comment that finds its way via the Prefaces into Bell's life of Akenside (ix; SJ 4). In his life of Smith, Johnson tells how the unlucky poet died from taking a self-prescribed medicine against his apothecary's warning; how Addison asked Smith to write a history of the revolution; and how the poet had no part in corrupting the text of Clarendon's history. All this Johnson had on the authority of his friend Gilbert Walmsley, who had known Smith, and it winds up in Bell (vi-vii, x; SJ 43, 57-59, 71, 56). Firsthand knowledge of Collins, Dodsley's report of what Pope had said, conversations with an acquaintance of Smith— by these means Johnson preserved the kind of biographical detail he prized most, the volatile and evanescent impressions which are lost forever if not set down in print. In seizing upon them Bell's compiler attests to their currency and appeal.
Relative to the supply of such anecdotes, however, the Prefaces offered a greater fund of critical opinions. From this storehouse dozens of Johnsonian renderings were pilfered. Bell's compiler interrupts TC's discussion of Rowe's The Fair Penitent to distill (rather awkwardly) Johnson's appraisal of the drama, "one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage, of which it still keeps, and probably will long keep, possession, the story being of a domestick nature, the fable interesting, and the language delightful" (xiii; SJ 7). Johnson's critical estimate of The Royal Convert is also introduced: "The fable of this play is taken from dark and barbarous times, and the scene is native, being laid among our ancestors. Rhodogune is a character highly tragical, vicious with a mind that must have been truly heroick if formed to virtue" (xiv-xv; SJ 11). Where stronger praise is offered, Johnson's words are often quoted directly and attributed to him, as when he praises Rowe's Lucan as "one of the greatest productions of English poetry" (xviii; SJ 35). The approach is similar in the life of Ambrose Philips. Johnson lurks anonymously in paraphrase where the poet's "epitome of Hacket's Life of Williams has been thought destitute of spirit"; on the other hand, his epithet for The Freethinker, which "Dr. Johnson styles his happiest undertaking," is openly acknowledged (xvi, xvii; SJ 5, 28).
Some of Johnson's less favorable assessments were mitigated. The frankness in his appraisal of Tickell, for instance, was carefully excised.
- SJ: Of the poems yet unmentioned the longest is Kensington Gardens, of which the versification is smooth and elegant, but the fiction unskilfully compounded of Grecian Deities and Gothick Fairies. Neither species of those exploded Beings could have done much, and when they are brought together, they only make each other contemptible. (17)
- JB: Kensington Garden is the longest of our Author's poems. The fiction is compounded partly of Grecian deities and partly of Gothick Fairies. The versification is harmonious, and the language elegant. (viii)
In more accomplished hands the interweaving and footnoting of Johnson might have been a seamless process. But, no doubt for reasons of haste and uncertainty, ragged edges are sometimes obvious. Where Johnson and Langhorne record different years for an event in Collins's life, Bell's text gives both (viii). More glaringly, text and footnote in the life of Smith are at war over the question of his student days at Oxford. The main narrative, copied from TC, lauds Smith for his talents and fails to mention his expulsion from the university. This unflattering episode, condensed out of SJ (30, 35-36, 40), is added in a footnote. The compiler tries lamely to mute the dissonance: "We must observe in this note, notwithstanding of what is said in the text, that the indecency of Smith's behavior" caused him to be expelled (v). Incoherently, the matter is left at that.
Confronted with a similar discrepancy, Johnson would have ruminated over the credibility of his sources. This example underscores the quality that could not be transferred to Bell's lives: a strong voice, an idiosyncratic authorial presence. In the life of John Philips, for example, Johnson corrects a mistaken attribution: "The inscription at Westminster was written, as I have heard, by Dr. Atterbury, though commonly given to Dr. Freind" (8). Bell's compiler follows the sentence word for word, but deletes the incidental "as I have heard" (xxxviii). Johnson's colloquial presence is masked in other cases with anonymous phrases like "it is said" or "we are told," substitutions which preserve the cadences of oral history but efface its authority.
More analysis is needed on this topic, but what I have done presently is enough to call attention to the compiler's unique perspective on Johnson's Prefaces. His assignment was to organize various sources as efficiently as possible into more or less coherent prefaces. Because this was the task faced by
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