Introduction
David Foxon was perhaps the most distinguished British bibliographer of the second half of the twentieth century. His general contribution to bibliography has been widely admired and honoured, and his catalogue English Verse, 1701-1750 (1975) has given his name to half a century of separately published poems.[1] But, while his work has been influential, particularly on the study of the book trade, on the history of pornography, and on eighteenth-century editing, it has been little discussed. This neglect is at least partly due to the fact that Foxon founded no school of bibliography, formulated no theory of bibliographical enquiry, and initiated no general programme of research. Yet the body of his work as a whole displays an impressive consistency of approach and an awareness of the values, motivations, and intentions directing it. My aim in this essay is to provide a record of his life and work in the context of some of the social and intellectual currents of his time. More broadly, I hope to draw attention to the combination of humanist and technical virtues that often informs bibliography but is less frequently identified in discussion of it.
A fruitful approach to Foxon's work, I believe, is through an analogy with the `ordinary language philosophy' that formed such an important part of the intellectual atmosphere of post-War Oxford. Foxon breathed this same atmosphere, and, like J. L. Austin, the movement's leading figure, he came to Oxford after serving in war-time intelligence.[2]
Foxon was not a philosopher and he was not an adherent of the `ordinary language' school—its members were comparatively few—but he shared some of the school's approaches and assumptions. Three elements stand out. First there is the concern with ordinary language and meaning. There can be no direct parallel with the philosophers' notorious examination of what was ordinarily said and the search of it for implicit truth—the fruits of enquiring into the meaning of `tympan' are limited—but we do find in Foxon's work a sustained attention to the languages of the book trade and to the codes of the book. Whereas the philosophers to some degree estranged themselves from ordinary language, looking on it as a code to which they already held the analysable key, Foxon looks on the books of the past as codes to which the original practitioners held a key that can be recaptured partly by examining their writings and partly by examining patterns of evidence. Foxon is interested in past institutional facts and the way they are constructed and sustained.
[3] The beginning of his Lyell lectures on
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (delivered in 1976 but not published until 1991) is the most striking example. The first section of the lectures is devoted to `The meaning of the imprint', and as the lectures proceed Foxon explores the meanings of format (for example, an `elzevier edition'), of illustration, of capitals and italics. He is, of course, engaged in code-breaking, but many of the codes are those of the ordinary members of the book trade, who took their language for granted.
The second link with Oxford's ordinary language school lies in the way Foxon uses language. In their writing the philosophers aimed at an easy style, consciously engaging with the readership as a social group, but capable of the strictest technical demonstration. Philosophers like J. L. Austin or H. P. Grice move easily from discussing what might be said by this sort of person in this sort of social situation to a technical expression
of their conclusions in logical symbols. Foxon shows a similar facility, moving from lucid expository writing (he is a particularly fine narrator) to technical bibliographical description. In this he shows a respect both for what in his early career he regarded as the `gentlemanly' English tradition of bibliography and for the professional American approach.
[4] A good example from Foxon's early work is his sensational identification of T. J. Wise's thefts from the British Museum Library, which was presented to the general public in
The Times and the
TLS in October 1956, and then to the bibliographical community with a clear analysis of the bibliographical requirements for the identification of the theft.
Thirdly, ordinary language philosophy was so constituted that it had a ready reply to scepticism, rebutting sceptical challenge by asking, `Why raise that question here and now? What in the situation calls for it?' Foxon always knows what in the immediate social or academic situation gives rise to a question and who might be interested in the answer. Abstract issues have no application. In adopting this approach he contrasts with that drive for definitiveness of research, system, and even sometimes scientific methodology, which has been such an important strand in bibliographical discourse since the War.[5] These claims to foundations and demonstration left bibliography and textual criticism vulnerable to sceptical challenge in the 1990s.[6] Foxon belongs to the alternative broad tradition sketched by Keith Graham: `Deeply rooted in the English intellectual tradition is a feeling for concreteness and particularity, a mistrust of abstract, high-flown generalizations and an insistence that even speculative thought should be anchored in the concreteness of tangible, everyday experience.'[7] Graham reports that a colleague responded to this claim by saying, `Well, could you give me an
example?' That was also Foxon's characteristic response. He considered quoting Blake's `To Generalise is to be an Idiot' in his presidential address to the Bibliographical Society in 1981, but worried that it was a generalization.
