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Notes
William B. Todd, "Concealed Editions of Samuel Johnson," Book Collector 2 (1953), 59-65. The notes mentioned there, forty years ago, were in the edition now identified in this report as Wright 1835 (W).
J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (1837), ii.316. Immediately before and after this comment Lockhart quotes in full, as prime examples, the entries numbered below as 65, 71, 75, 76. The entire passage is repeated, unaltered, in his revised second edition (1839), iii.280-282.
This odd notion may not have originated with Croker. On 19 January 1829 Lockhart suggested to Murray, the editor's publisher: "Pray ask Croker whether Boswell's account of the Hebridean Tour ought not to be melted into the book. Sir Walter has many MS. annotations in his 'Boswell,' both 'Life' and 'Tour,' and will, I am sure give them with hearty good will . . ." (Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends [1891], ii.288).
The correspondence still extant is given in Herbert Grierson (ed.), The Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1937), xi.110-120, 151-155, 166, 196-197; xii.461-466, 468-471, 478-479. Throughout Grierson helpfully identifies in the 1831 edition (S) whatever Scott first proposed in his letters.
Since the date has not been ascertained previously (Scott thought the book was "nearly out" on 17 February [Letters, xi.473], but Pottle's Boswell bibliography [p. 180] cites no reference before August), it should be reported that The Athenaeum 18 June 1831 announced issue "on Wednesday next" (or the 22d), a date confirmed on the 23d in the Edinburgh Evening Courant.
Evidently the reviewer hastily read first the beginning and the end of the Tour, quoting initially in the 2 July number seventeen Scott entries (4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 24, 29, 33, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 83) then on 9 July seven other entries in the middle of the text (36, 37, 42, 44, 55 with 62, 58). Two of these (42, 55) represent postscripts to previous remarks by Croker.
Later editions often cite note 74 simply as a vivid portrayal and then regularly subtend a contrary argument. At the very outset, however, the Edinburgh Literary Journal 16 July 1831, though properly observing that Smith's letter about Hume in 1776 could not have occasioned a dispute in 1773, cogently argues for a single encounter between Smith and Johnson, not in Glasgow, but in London between November 1776 and May 1778. Scott's anecdote, then, may be right as to the subject represented to him on good authority, but wrong as to the time and place where it occurred.
These are entered in Carruthers' [1852] edition, pages 10, 20, 24, 27, 28, 43, 77-78, 123, 162, 167, 174, 213, 229 (2), 276, 311.
Pottle 96 does not make it clear that Napier's edition of the Tour is first printed (after the Life of Johnson) as volume 5 in the second 1884 edition, with Johnsoniana then following in an unnumbered sixth volume. In the first edition, as he observes, Johnsoniana follows as an unnumbered fifth volume.
Smiles, ii.289, on the evidence of publisher Murray's files, reports that up to 1891 some 50,000 copies of Croker's editions of the Life (including the Tour) had been sold, this despite Macaulay's "smash." Even though this reckoning apparently excludes later sales of the 1835 Croker-Wright edition, continually reissued from stereotype by Bohn and others 1848-1880, Richard D. Altick accepts the partial record as sufficient for entry in his bestseller list: The English Common Reader (1963), p. 388. (It may be noted further that while the first Croker five-volume edition 1831, selling at £3, was not reprinted, the third single-volume edition 1848, available at one-fourth the earlier price [15 shillings], was apparently reprinted at least nine times.)
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