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IV
Conclusion
While Bell succeeded in one of his primary objectives, that of acquainting the reader "at once with the poet and the man," it is less clear how far he progressed towards a "connected system of biography." In his prefaces there is neither a uniform biographical approach nor a consistent critical voice. As a lot they are altogether too miscellaneous.
No matter what their peculiarities and varied degrees of competence, however, these reprints and compilations gave readers a considerable body of English literary biography. If little new in the way of fact or criticism was to be discovered, Bell could not be faulted for scrimping on them. Where sources were meager, the lives were necessarily brief; otherwise the compilers sought the fullest accounts available and often supplemented these with other materials. At their worst Bell's lives were equal to the kind of "advertisement" Johnson was asked to write; at their best they approximated the most informative biographies extant of their respective subjects. Yet the question of how they stack up against Johnson's Prefaces or other authoritative sources, though crucial, gives way to another when the focus shifts from the compiler to the bookseller: what sort of book was Bell trying to place in his readers' hands?
Prefixing lives to cheap octavo and duodecimo volumes of poetry had been a fairly casual matter, as the editions of Philips and Gray demonstrate. Bell's model was the life-and-works formula, not of the cheap reprint, but of the complete and authoritative edition. Into his small and relatively inexpensive books Bell transplanted lives which had made their debut in folio (Cowley, Donne) and quarto (Thomson, Swift). This stately ideal exemplifies the standard attempted by Bell's series; each author was to be accorded a substantial biographical account. It was an unprecedented enterprise.
If "system," finally, is taken to mean "any complexure or combination of many things acting together," as Johnson defined the term, then the lives in Bell's edition fit the bill. Cast in the same prefatory role, together they provided the purchaser with a broad glimpse of "this particular class of writers," and by so doing contextualized the works of the British poets.
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