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Notes
I wish to thank David Fleeman for bringing to my notice the manuscript in the Hyde Collection to which I refer; for this and other kindnesses I am deeply grateful.
Samuel Johnson, "Advertisement," Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, vols. 1-4 (London, 1779), vols. 5-10 (London, 1781), 1:v. This "Advertisement," dated 15 March 1779, supplies my next quotation, too (vi).
The printers of these volumes were Henry Hughs (1-8, 21, 35-36), Edward Cox (9-12, 25, 29), Richard Hett (13-16, 43, 46), J. D. Cornish (17-18), John Rivington (19, 44, 53-56), John Nichols (20, 24, 30-31, 39-42), Henry Goldney (22, 45), Henry Baldwin (23, 26-28, 37-38, 50-52), William and Andrew Strahan (32-34), and George Bigg (47-49).
For a record of Bell's publication, with an account of its genesis and design, see Thomas F. Bonnell, "John Bell's Poets of Great Britain: The 'Little Trifling Edition' Revisited," Modern Philology 85 (1987): 128-152.
Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1721), 2:423; Biographia Britannica, 6 vols. (London, 1747-66), 3:1646; Prefaces, Denham 10; "The Life of Sir John Denham," The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Edinburgh, 1779), vii. I use the text of the Prefaces; for ease of reference, however, I cite not the original page numbers but the paragraph numbers assigned in Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905).
"MS Agreement of the Booksellers, 27 March 1780," in the Hyde-Adam extra-illustrated Life of Johnson, 3.2:111, from the Hyde Collection; quoted with the kind permission of Lady Eccles.
George T. Kenyon, The Life of Lloyd, the First Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice of England (London, 1873), p. 173. This book was written to answer Lord Campbell, whose portrait of the Chief Justice was most unflattering. Nonetheless, Lord Campbell grudgingly admired Kenyon's "intuitive quickness in seeing all the bearings of the most complicated case, and his faculty of at once availing himself of all his legal resources." Campbell also was struck by the great demand for Kenyon's advice; by around 1781 he was taking in above 3000l. a year by answering cases. See The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, 3 vols. (London, 1749-57), 3:44 and 12.
Edward Foss, Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England (London, 1870), p. 384; and The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. (Oxford, 1921-22), 11:30-32. Leman Thomas Rede wrote that Kenyon's "manner was ungraceful—his language uncouth, awkward, unharmonized. . . . He is in the habit of hurrying his words so disagreeably together, that his articulation is not only indistinct, but sometimes totally unintelligible. He lisps, hesitates, and occasionally stammers. . . . Yet, under all these defects (insuperable as they might be imagined) . . . he was not only heard with patience, but with attention and respect" (Strictures on the Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Lawyers of the Present Day [London, 1790], pp. 98-99).
Arthur Sherbo, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum, ELS Monograph Series No. 45 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1989), chapters 3 and 4. Reed's anonymity was broken when the editors of Biographia Britannica expressed their gratitude, naming him twice in the "Preface to the Second Edition of the Second Volume" (1780), p. viii.
Had he lost in court, Bell could have been forced to pay a fine of one penny for every sheet in his custody, "either printed or printing, published, or exposed to sale," and to forfeit all sheets to the copyright holders, who "forthwith [would] damask, and make waste paper of them" (8 Anne, c. 19, § I).
Closest to number 2754 in Edward Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hilversum, 1950). As Martin imposed his pages, with three gatherings per sheet, the watermark and countermark wound up centered on the fifth leaves of each first and third gathering, with portions of the "J" sometimes visible on the second leaf in the gutter, and a fraction of the "R" appearing at the fore-edge of the second or fifth leaf of the second gathering.
The choice of terms between "state" and "re-issue" in the following paragraphs is no easy matter. Here are some considerations: (a) the completion of the initial print run without alterations, leading to (b) publication; (c) the interruption of sales to cancel the life, followed by (d) the renewal of sales without the life; (e) the printing of a revised life, paving the way for (f) a second resumption of sales, with the new life; and (g) the republication of the volume with the first sheet re-set, incorporating not only the revised life but also (h) an updated title-page, with (i) concomitant external evidence in the form of an advertisement to corroborate the public nature of the event. If time and the publisher's intention mattered most, a case could be made, once (a) and (b) had occurred, to call each new release of the book in altered form a new issue: sales of the book were halted, changes were made, and sales were then resumed. And it must be said, (c) and (d) resulted in a dramatically different book, the causes of which are known and can be documented. It might be especially tempting to call (f) a re-issue, since much "conscious planning" was required to publish the book in this form, and since the change was expressly designed to be noticed by the audience that counted most at this juncture, the lawyers. On balance, however, I defer to one of Bowers' definitions of re-issue: a book issued "again" in different form, the purpose of which alteration is "the stimulation of lagging sales, or a complete revival of the sale of sheets which have lost their currency." Although Bell's Denham, having truly lost its currency, was partly revived by steps (c) through (f), complete revival awaited the coordinated plan of (g), (h) and (i); the book at this stage may certainly be called a re-issue. The edition at stages (d) and (f), then, may be referred to as its second and third states. See Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (Princeton, 1949), p. 66 and passim; and G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Bibliographical Concepts of 'Issue' and 'State,'" Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 69 (1975): 17-66, esp. 46-47.
Had copies in this state been altered in no other way, the stubs of the five can-cellanda would be visible between the second title-page and the dedication (p. [xix]). (Five, not seven, because A3 and its conjugate A4 could be removed entirely.) None that I have examined, however, fits this description. Three stubs only are present in a copy at the University of Virginia: those of B1, B2 and B3. The leaves conjugate with the title-pages (A5 and A6) were cancelled at the fold, requiring the title-pages to be pasted onto the stub of B1. Copies at Wellesley and Notre Dame betray an effort either to conceal the loss of text or to strengthen the attachment of the remaining leaves of $A and $B to the rest of the volume: the five stubs crop up, not in front of the dedication, but between pp. 24 and 25, just before the C gathering. What remains of $B was lifted up; the stubs of B1, B2 and B3 were folded back in the opposite direction; and the gathering was nestled into the middle of the A gathering. Its collation: A1-2, B4-6 [stubs B1-3 A5-6] C-P6.
Having seen only one copy of Denham's poems in this third state, and hence only one half sheet, I do not know what watermark stood opposite the countermark.
The term is found in Caleb Stower: The Printer's Grammar 1808, English Bibliographical Sources, ed. D. F. Foxon, ser. 3, no. 4 (London, 1965), p. 182. In this case a seven-leaf or fourteen-page version of 18mo would have been more convenient, which, had it been workable, Bell presumably would have requested. I have seen nothing of the sort in the printers' manuals.
Technically this would have made pp. [iii] and iv redundant, but since the second title-page and its blank verso were not numbered, the glitch in pagination would have been less noticeable.
Still closest to Heawood 2754, the 1780 watermark is smaller than its 1779 look-alike, 10.0 cm from the top of the crown to the bottom of the "GR," as opposed to 11.7 cm.
To identify the type sizes I have relied on John Richardson, Jr., "Correlated Type Sizes and Names for the Fifteenth through Twentieth Century," Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 251-272.
The third state, curiously, happened to serve as the Morisons' copytext for The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Perth, 1780), as evidenced by the compositor's fidelity to the sixteen-page life. The Apollo Press printing of the revised preface differs in scores of accidentals. I wish to thank several people for lending me copies of the 1779 Denham or patiently examining the book as I questioned them over the phone: Nancy Birkrem, James Green, Samuel Huang, Gwin Kolb, Eric Nye, Richard Oram, Ruth Rogers, Eleanore Stewart, and Michael Suarez.
See The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, 1992-94), 3:226; and Boswell's Life of Johnson, 4:35n.
In what follows I cite Bell's pirated text as "1779" and the revision of it as "1780." For the revision I have used The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Edinburgh, 1780), printed by the Apollo Press, rather than the earlier setting of the text by the unidentified press.
This was one view of Johnson's prose in the early 1750s, attributed by Charlotte Lennox to readers who could not appreciate Johnson's "Language, because it reaches to Perfection," and who were therefore deaf to its "inimitable Beauties" (The Female Quixote [Oxford: World Classics, 1989], p. 253).
The two phrases designated solely by SJ paragraph numbers do not occur in Bell's 1779 life. Taken up for the first time in 1780, their handling is in line with the stylistic transformation of the earlier piracy.
I believe it is Bagster's edition to which William Prideaux Courtney and David Nichol Smith refer when they claim that "Johnson's Lives were incorporated in John Bell's The Poets of Great Britain, 109 vols." (A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson [Oxford, 1925], p. 147). Had they known of any lives adopted by Bell (other than that of Savage, noted on p. 17), they would have listed them on pp. 150-152, where they trace the reappearance of individual lives in subsequent imprints, even where the lives are altered, excerpted, or present merely "in substance." Thus they seem, pace their statement, to have been unaware of the borrowing that is my focus.
The Poetical Works of John Philips (Edinburgh, 1781), p. [v]. All subsequent citations of Bell's edition will be parenthetical: no title is needed, since all begin with The Poetical Works of; the poet in question will be clear from the context; and the imprint year of the volume corresponds with the colophon date listed for each poet in Table 1. For poets whose works took up several volumes, only the first (with the life) is of concern.
For the dates of publication, see two articles by J. D. Fleeman, "Some Proofs of Johnson's Prefaces to the Poets," The Library, 5th ser., 17 (1962): 213n, and "The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson's Literary Earnings." Studies in the Book Trade, in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford, 1975), p. 217.
As Table 1 shows, Bell's borrowing from Johnson was executed in fairly short order. A four month turn-around is noteworthy, given that the process was more involved than placing a book to be pirated into a compositor's hands. Once Johnson's text reached Edinburgh, the compiler had to gather whatever other sources were wanted, and printing could go forward only after the other coordinates of the series (establishing a schedule of successive poets and collecting the pertinent editions of their poems) had been plotted. In the light of these contingencies, the attention paid to Johnson's Prefaces seems to have been quite prompt.
Bell reprinted Johnson's Life of Savage in 1780, more than a year before the biography was incorporated into the Prefaces. Copyright protection of the work, first published in 1744, had long since expired. Strictly speaking, it falls outside the pattern of Bell's borrowings from the Prefaces.
Robert and Andrew Foulis's series of English poets in pot 12mo (48 vols.; Glasgow, 1765-76), William Creech's British Poets (44 vols.; Edinburgh, 1773-76) and John Boyle's English Poets (20 vols.; Aberdeen, 1776-78).
Pat Rogers, "Johnson's Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries," Review of English Studies N.S. 31 (1980): 149-171, esp. p. 150. An expanded definition of "single lives" is warranted for Table 2, for I include in this category non-biographical features that perform the office of introducing the author's works. Bell's prefaces, like Johnson's, were meant to be critical as well as biographical; and because a critical notice attached to the works plays a parallel role to the single life thus situated, it makes sense to grant it the same status. This definition applies to sources connected with Armstrong, Broome, Butler, Chaucer, Dyer, Hammond, Parnell and Waller.
For sifting through the authorship of this work see SJ Hammond 1; Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1910), pp. 120-125; and William R. Keast, "Johnson and 'Cibber's' Lives of the Poets, 1753," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago, 1963), pp. 89-101.
Whether for the later borrowings the compiler might have had in hand not the Prefaces but The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols. (London, 1781) is a question I have not decided.
The footnotes in BB are granted special attention: given their length and digressive tendency, the compiler had to deliberate—whether to adopt or ignore, abbreviate or copy in full, interweave with the narrative or leave as a note. With the occasional footnotes in other sources, it is assumed they have been brought along into Bell and rest at the bottom of the page.
First published with the edition of 1704, it is tentatively ascribed to Sir James Astrey (New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, ed. George Watson, 5 vols. [Cambridge, 1969-77], 2:437).
In Mason's edition there are two sequences of page numbers: a bracketed series for the Memoirs and an unbracketed series for the poems. Here Bell's compiler inserts the text of Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West," and on p. xviii interpolates some information from Mason's footnote. All other numerals in this collation refer to the bracketed series.
Besides, it is difficult to imagine that the writer who tracked down so many sources for Waller's life was the same one who resorted to phony footnotes in Gay's life; the two were printed one after the other (see Table 1). And the many pedestrian transcriptions are hard to square with the liquid paraphrasing in Gray's life, although there were good legal reasons for the compiler to keep his distance from Mason's prose.
Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (Edinburgh, 1787), p. 87. This work dates from the late 1770s, when Beattie circulated it privately amongst his students. The phrase "in the 1713" is from the preface to Hughes (xvi); other examples occur in the lives of Butler (15), Lyttelton (vi, vii), Ambrose Philips ([v], vi, xvii), John Philips (vii, xxi), Pitt (vi), Pomfret ([v]), Rowe (vi, xiv, xv, xvi), Swift (xxxv), Waller (ix, xii, xxxvi), and Young ([v]); this is not an exhaustive list.
John Hawkesworth, "An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin," The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 12 vols. (London, 1755), 1:8; and William Duncombe, "An Account of the Life and Writings of John Hughes, Esq.," Poems on Several Occasions. With Some Select Essays in Prose, 2 vols. (London, 1735), 1:viii. The affected passages in Bell's lives of Swift and Hughes fall on pp. xvi and vii respectively.
Again, it was Johnson's candor that required censorship, for TC was quoting his life of Roscommon from the Gentleman's Magazine.
In any event, the confession was obviated by the compiler's footnote on p. [v], which advertised that the defects in Sewell would be repaired by additions from other accounts.
Typically enough, the writer of Young's life in 1773 was to blame only in part. His glowing endorsement was copied from The Annual Register (1765), p. 34, which had copied and elaborated the sentiment from CP 1:sig. S4r (s.v. The Revenge).
Beauties of Biography: Containing the Lives of the Most Illustrious Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain, France, Italy, and Other Parts of Europe. . . . Extracted from the Biographia Britannica, Baile's Dictionary, and Other Valuable Works, for the Instruction of Youth of Both Sexes, 2 vols. (London, 1777), 1:iii. "Circumstantial" was a key evaluative term in gauging the worth of a biography; see above, where Bell promises an "account of the Author, equally circumstantial" to the pirated Denham preface he was forced to paraphrase.
"The Life of Mr. John Philips," Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton. By Mr. John Philips. With a New Account of His Life and Writings (London: Printed for R. and J. Tonson, and T. Lownds, 1762), pp. [3]-23; and "The Life of Mr. John Philips," Poems on Several Occasions. . . . To which is added, His Life, by Mr. George Sewell (Glasgow: Printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1763), pp. [3]-28. By calling attention to their biographies on their title pages, the publishers used this feature as a selling point. Tonson's "New Account" following the publication of Philips's life in BB by only two years (vol. 5, 1760).
As promised, readers of Philips's life in The Beauties of Biography (1:178-183) were assessed the lightest tax: around 1175 words.
The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writings by W. Mason, M.A. (York, 1775). In a later octavo edition (4 vols.; York, 1778) Mason reversed the order, giving this explanation: "The Editor, when he compiled those Memoirs, and made them the vehicle of communicating . . . so many of the Author's unpublished compositions, both in latin and english, thought, that, on account of their novelty, they ought then to take the lead. This reason ceasing, it seemed proper that such posthumous pieces should give place to what was published in his life time" (1:sig. π1v).
"The Life of Mr Gray," Poems by Mr. Gray. To which is prefixed, An Account of His Life (London: Sold by A. Millar, 1774?), pp. [iii]-xv; "A Short Account of the Life of Mr. Gray," Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (Edinburgh: Printed for Alexander Donald-son, 1775), pp. [iii]-ix; "A Short Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Gray," Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (London: Printed for J. Murray, 1776), pp. [v]-xviii; "The Life of Mr. Gray," Poems by Mr. Gray. With a Biographical and Critical Account of the Author (London: Sold by R. Tomlins, J. Chandler, D. Watson, and H. Middleton, 1779), pp. [iii]-xv. The same life appears in the Millar and Tomlin editions. The life in Murray's edition was written by Gilbert Stuart, who received three guineas for the piece (William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743-1786 [Edinburgh, 1992], p. 57).
Bell took Gray's will and Taite's poem from Murray's 1778 edition, to which they were newly added (pp. [xxv]-xxxii and [xxxiii]-xxxix). Wakefield copied the life and Gray's will from Bell, but not the poem; The Poems of Mr. Gray. With Notes by Gilbert Wakefield, B.A. (London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1786), pp. [v]-xxii, and [xxiii]-xxvi. Wakefield viewed his edition as an "antidote" to the criticisms of Johnson, whose strictures against Gray, "under the sanction of his respectable character, might operate with malignant influence upon the public taste, and become ultimately injurious to the cause of polite literature" ("Advertisement," p. [iii]). One review of Wakefield called his edition "a classical performance" (Gentleman's Magazine 56 [1786]: 592); another began with the dictate, "A Classical Poet . . . ought to have a classical Commentator," and granted that Gray and Wakefield had earned these respective epithets (Monthly Review 76 [1787]: 505). Neither reviewer commented on the prefatory life.
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