University of Virginia Library

Lyrical Ballads

Foxon's first essay was `Some Notes on Agenda Format', a technical essay that established his bibliographical credentials, but this was followed very shortly by the essay that was to be the foundation of his reputation. `The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798' was read to the Bibliographical Society on 17 November 1953 and published in the December issue of The Library the following year. This is his first published encounter with T. J. Wise and to that extent represents a meeting between the old bibliography and the new. Lyrical Ballads was a trophy for collectors and Wise had given an account of it in his Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of William Wordsworth (London, 1916) and Two Lake Poets (London, 1927). Foxon addresses librarians, collectors, and literary scholars, presenting his own conception of bibliography in distinction to Wise's. The paper is written with very close attention to physical evidence—point-holes, a Foxon speciality, but also watermarks in wove paper—and after consultation of as many copies as possible.[15] None of the resulting evidence, Foxon makes it clear, however inconvenient, is to be overlooked, and conclusiveness should not be claimed where it cannot be achieved. The physical evidence

is used to reconstruct the history of the production of Lyrical Ballads, but that reconstruction depends on knowledge of the practices of the trade, and especially of printing practices. Foxon is quite explicit about his programme in the first paragraph: `I have tried to approach the whole subject afresh from the point of view of the printer, and the results suggest some modifications in the traditional story' (221).

The paper is concerned with four late changes to Lyrical Ballads: the cancellation of `Lewti', because it would have identified Coleridge as author, and its replacement by `The Nightingale'; the consequential change of the Contents page; the addition of a short preface by Wordsworth; and the replacement of a Bristol title page by a London one. Foxon's account depends on accurate description of the surviving copies and an explanation of the relation between leaves on the basis of the watermarks and surviving point-holes. He first shows that the Contents page is not a cancel, as Wise had claimed (it is conjugate with the first leaf of its gathering) but a proper member of a half-sheet also containing the preface. He then uses point-hole evidence to show that the halfsheet of preliminaries (including the Contents) was printed with the half-sheet used to replace Lewti with `The Nightingale'. The new Contents, therefore, belongs to the same stage of printing as the substitution, and the preface is contemporary with this change. Foxon then turns from the preliminaries to the end of the book, and quotes Wise's account: `O (1 leaf), followed by an unsigned quarter-sheet of two leaves, the first of which has upon its recto the List of Errata, the reverse blank, whilst the second is occupied by the list of Books published . . .' From the printer's point of view this would have been an uneconomical arrangement, and Foxon uses point-hole evidence to show that O1 and O2 were conjugate. The presence of only one point-hole suggests these final leaves (O4) were printed by half-sheet imposition, and that O4 was removed for some other purpose. Foxon speculates that it might have been the original title page. `If . . . we add the title-leaf (which is a singleton) to the three leaves at the end, we have a respectable half-sheet, and I think a modern bibliographer would almost automatically assume that the four leaves were printed together' (225).

The title page of Lyrical Ballads is found in two states: one with `Bristol: printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman, PaternosterRow, London, 1798.' and the other with a `London' imprint for `J. & A. Arch'. Foxon suggests that the London title page is indeed a cancel (it has the wrong part of the watermark), but he is perplexed by the Bristol title page, because none of the eight copies traced has the watermark needed to link it to O4. Foxon is willing to speculate on a solution— `merely one attempt at stringing together the facts and some of the

hypotheses into a consistent whole' (241). He suggests that there may have been three title pages: a `Cottle only' title page, O4, which was abandoned when Cottle realized he needed financial help with the edition; the Bristol title page, which was some form of proof, run off when Cottle thought he had an agreement with Longman; and the London, Arch, title page, which was run off on the correct paper. The abandoned Contents page was also without watermarks, and would belong to the same proofing stage as the Bristol title page. As became his habit, Foxon presents a summary:

The final element in Foxon's discussion, the association of O4 with a `Cottle only' title page has recently been challenged successfully in a fine essay by Mark L. Reed.[16] Reed is generous in his assessment of Foxon's essay, calling it `indispensable' and outlining much of its analysis in defining his own position. A copy Foxon had not seen (at the Alexander Turnbull Library) shows that the Bristol title page does sometimes display the same watermark as the rest of the volume and undermines the contention that it was some sort of stop-gap measure. And a fascinating examination of a volume in the McGregor Library of the Special Collections Department of Alderman Library, University of Virginia, reveals a stub, likely to be of the first Contents page, with one of the letters of the watermark in the right place. Reed's conclusion, highly persuasive, is that the original Contents was O4 and that the Bristol title page was printed at the same time. Reed's analysis shows

the basic soundness of Foxon's approach, and, in correcting Foxon's conclusions, it confirms the value of examining multiple copies of a book.

Foxon's essay brings together more elements than my brief summary has indicated—evidence of provenance, publication history, acquittal of Wise from one forgery charge—but the concern for easy communication of technically complex information is thoroughgoing. Foxon presents the essay as the fruit of collaboration (he thanks John Hayward, Howard Nixon, Basil Cottle, and American librarians), and suggests that his audience may be able to take the investigation further. A key group of sentences points to Foxon's method of codebreaking. Having given the collation of the volume, he says,

The method is to identify irregularities as the key to the whole, treat them as individual puzzles, set about solving them, and then try to collate the results. In this case, Foxon is able to use the evidence of the point-holes to establish the concurrent printing of the cancel section and preliminaries, and then sets about examining the watermark evidence in O4. But, though he attends to individual puzzles, Foxon always has a general aim in mind, which is to uncover the story of the printing and publication of Lyrical Ballads to the interested parties.

The success of the Lyrical Ballads paper introduced Foxon to two figures who were to be influential in his development: John Hayward and William A. Jackson. Hayward, who had given a different account of Lyrical Ballads in the Rothschild catalogue (II, 703-704), had come to the Library in his wheelchair to check Foxon's account. Hayward was editor of the Book Collector and he encouraged Foxon to publish a series of bibliographical notes, often short but always of high analytical quality, over the next fifteen years. Jackson was then rare books librarian at Harvard and had been responsible for compiling and designing the three-volume Pforzheimer Catalogue.[17] He was in England every summer, working on the revision of the STC. For Foxon he provided an important connection with a major project in enumerative bibliography and also a link with the world of American libraries. When

Foxon went to the States on a Harkness Fellowship in 1959-61, it was letters of introduction from Jackson that opened the doors—and even stacks—of American libraries to him.

The articles in The Library and Book Collector established Foxon as an authority in analytical bibliography. In 1955 he produced a lucid and well-referenced little pamphlet for the National Book League on The Technique of Bibliography. The approach is informal, but the initial recommendation of McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography and John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors is supplemented by praise of articles by Bowers and Stevenson.