University of Virginia Library

Oxford, English Verse, and the Lyell Lectures

Foxon's teaching time in Oxford was divided between giving general lectures and classes to postgraduate students and supervising research. The informal role of general bibliographical adviser to the University— and, of course, to interested visitors—which had been filled by Herbert Davis, and would have suited Foxon, was not available to him because he was not given space in the Bodleian. There were probably several reasons for this decision. Davis (Reader in Textual Criticism 1949-60) had been succeeded by Alice Walker (1961-68), who had worked to a

different pattern. Foxon was not a printer as Davis had been, and he did not, therefore, teach printing classes, as Davis had done (Michael Turner had already taken over that role), and the Bibliography Room, which had been Davis's headquarters, had passed back fully into the control of the Library. Unlike Davis, Foxon was elected to a college fellowship, at Wadham, but Wadham did not give him a room. His teaching room was behind the English Faculty Library, next to the Territorial Army headquarters. As I recollect, he used it very little, preferring to see his students at home or take them to the pub. Whatever the reasons for not encouraging Foxon to make his headquarters in the Bodleian, I have little doubt that the decision played a significant part in his growing isolation in Oxford. From the start, he was semi-detached from the University.

Foxon struck students and faculty alike, I think, as a touch sophisticated and cosmopolitan for Oxford. He dressed smartly while others were dedicated to ancient tweed and leather patches; he liked French food and wine; and his cigarette holder, though eminently practical, smacked of London clubland in an earlier age. The sophisticated exterior was sometimes disrupted by extraordinary bursts of energy; if there were stairs available, Foxon would run up and down them. David Fleeman remembered a first meeting at the British Museum Library during which Foxon leapt up and ran across a table, disrupting its pile of papers, in order to collect a relevant curiosity. Foxon was a lively lecturer and an enthusiastic supervisor. At times I could have wished him less enthusiastic, because he would happily rewrite paragraph after paragraph of my prose; but mine may have been an especially dire case. Isobel Grundy remembers an endearing habit of trying to lift his head from his shoulders by the hair and exclaiming, `Boy, have you got problems!', something we both found reassuring. He was passionately interested in music, and, like Fredson Bowers, created a sophisticated audio system. Always determined to get warm and musical results, he endlessly tweaked his equipment and experimented with new units. To the distress of his advisers, however, he refused to part with his elderly Quod electrostatic speakers, which were fastened to the wall to reduce vibration, and took up enough space to make his sitting room look more like a radio station or cricket nets than a place for relaxation.

In 1975 Foxon finally published English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions. He had succeeded in his aim, prompted by Bowers, of consulting multiple copies and discriminating variant printings. Although he decided to restrict his listings for each item in the printed catalogue to five locations in Britain and five in the States, he made it

clear that further information would be available to enquiring scholars.[23] (The provision of shelfmarks for British Library copies has led to his name being blessed by at least one perplexed user of its catalogues.) Other important bibliographical information is provided: titles and summaries of imprints, collations (an important advance over other short catalogues), notes of watermarks, dates of publication, information from printers' records, and, of course, discrimination of editions, impressions, and states. Foxon suggests in his preface that users might become impatient of notes such as `apparently a reimpression' or `sheet B is apparently reset' and acknowledges that they come from the method of recording the position of signature letters rather than using facsimiles (vii). But he regarded the method as appropriate to his time and resources. With his interest in developing technology, and particularly in the Hinman collator, he recognized that modern techniques of reproduction and collation would have permitted him to be more decisive in his judgements, but I think most readers would concur with his verdict that the method served him well. The quality of the discrimination in cases such as the bibliography of Pope's Dunciad or Essay on Man is astonishingly high. His results may be developed or refined by bibliographers of single poets or poems, but it is difficult to imagine more being encompassed by a single scholar in the time he had available.

Foxon's opposition to quasi-facsimile transcriptions of title pages, defended in his Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (1970), has proved controversial. His doubts about traditional practices had two sources. One was the development of technology, which made it possible to xerox title pages and then compare them mechanically. As he notes in his catalogue, only this comparison could reveal whether the type pages have been removed from the forme between impressions. In other words, the bibliographer can now carry out and summarize analyses that cannot be made available for the reader's replication by possession of the bibliography. The second reason for challenging the usefulness of title-page transcription was that it was very rarely successful in discriminating editions. Reviewing, and praising, Philip Gaskell's Bibliography of the Foulis Press in 1965, Foxon remarks on how large the title page transcriptions loom and notes the danger that a false emphasis on the title page can lead to variants being distinguished by a comma there, rather than by the fact that a preface occupies two pages rather than one. By providing a history of some of the practices of bibliographical description, Foxon was drawing attention to a ritual observance of received practice, and his challenge has

not, I believe, been fully answered. A characteristically thoughtful response from G. Thomas Tanselle, however, defended quasi-facsimile transcription as an essential part of the historical account of the book, and I share his sense that title pages have an importance that goes beyond their ability to discriminate editions.[24]

English Verse, 1701-1750 shows a characteristic respect for its material and concern for its users. His thoroughly humane approach was singled out for praise by G. S. Rousseau in a review that captures the quality of Foxon's work:

Foxon certainly attended to those small decisions that might benefit his users. In 1965, he published `Defoe: A Specimen of a Catalogue of English Verse, 1701-1750' in The Library, `to provide an opportunity for criticism at a stage when it can be constructively used' (277). If there were no major modifications resulting from this exercise, Foxon had already shown himself open to advice about his catalogue and willing to change his mind. As noted above, he had not originally intended to include first lines, but gladly did so when the suggestion was put to him, and the introduction to the specimen in The Library points to another change: `I originally intended to say nothing about the subject-matter of the poems, but it became clear that when I did know the person or event concerned it was silly to exclude it, even if I could not undertake the work of identification in every case' (277). For all its lightness of touch, I suspect this sentence is Foxon's way of conveying one of his profoundest insights: that his was essentially a humanist activity and that helpfulness to critics and historians was more important than consistency. Careful consideration of the user is also apparent in the preface and introduction, and in the six indexes of the second volume (first lines, chronological, imprints, bibliographical notabilia, descriptive epithets,

subject). The preface and introduction are object lessons in the art of combining scholarly information with personal intimacy. Foxon's account of his work is Johnsonian. He is amusingly self-critical, but he puts before us standards of excellence we know cannot be attained. As a result, the reader not only feels in touch with the compiler but comes away with a proper understanding of what the catalogue can and cannot do.

Foxon's catalogue has had the anticipated success with librarians, booksellers, and collectors—`not in Foxon' is a rare but important description—but it has also had less easily anticipated literary consequences. Roger Lonsdale's heroic labours in reading eighteenth-century verse for his ground-breaking New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Oxford, 1984) began by treating English Verse, 1701-1750 as a reading list, and Andrew Carpenter has confessed a similar debt in compiling his Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Cork, 1998). In this respect the catalogue has helped to revolutionize our understanding of eighteenth-century poetry.[26]

The long period of preparing the catalogue for publication tired and debilitated Foxon. In his preface he explains that the actual compilation of his slips was much the easier part of his task. Organizing and polishing the material took eight years, and occupied most of the period of his Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967-68. I saw Foxon often in 197172, when the catalogue had started to go through the press (I checked the proofs of the index of imprints for him), and know that he found the stress of the work overwhelming. The indexes were difficult to order, and proof correction was a complex and laborious task. He was also at this time taking various medicines that seemed to complicate or aggravate his condition. He himself dated a decline in his health from this period, dividing his life into before and after the publication of English Verse, 1701-1750.

Preparation of the catalogue completed, Foxon launched immediately, and perhaps unwisely, on another important project. In 1974-75 he took up a fellowship at the Clark Library in California to prepare the Lyell lectures on Pope, which he was to deliver in Oxford in March 1976. The Clark proved an excellent place to work—Foxon always said that the lectures were completed only because he was looked after so well—and he worked under intense pressure, with extraordinary bursts of energy. When they were delivered, the lectures were an immediate

success. Nicolas Barker gave a good account of them in the TLS, 3 September 1976, 1085, pointing out that much of their impact came from their illustrations. Foxon combined direct illustrations of imprints and advertisements with ingenious parallel texts constructed of Pope's drafts and editions. The final lecture, which has not been published, used some astonishing pictures of typographical innovations practised by authors. I have no wish to criticize the yeoman efforts of the editor who brought the lectures to publication in 1991, but there can be little doubt that some of the original force of the lectures is lost in their transition into print.[27] Foxon had himself considered revising and printing the lectures as a landscape book, with pictures to the left and text to the right, but such a project would have involved significant rewriting.

In the lectures Foxon is the first to tell the full story of Pope's relation with printers and publishers, and to consider the consequences for editing. As Brean Hammond has recently pointed out, Pope's stance was usually that of an opponent of professional writing, but the Lyell lectures showed the full extent of his own professionalism as a writer.[28] If Pope was not a fraud like Wise, he was certainly an ingenious manipulator of booksellers and readers. Foxon is pleasantly ruthless in exposing him, while, as usual, avoiding a censorious tone. The skilled uses of anonymity, the wily business deals, and the taste for equivocation are all detailed, and the detective work is characteristically accurate. The chapter on the Homer translations, with its analysis of Pope's aesthetic choices and debts, and its reconstruction of the unfortunate Lintot's business problems, is a tour de force unequalled in discursive bibliography. Pope knew how books were printed and how they were marketed: he ruled the printer down to fixing the size of an initial letter, and he did his best to block out the publishing middle men and take a larger share of the profits. He was also the opposite of the author conceived by simplified versions of the Greg rationale of copy-text—one who wrote his text and then abandoned it to the printer. He intervened at every stage and shaped his text himself.

Although Foxon was exhausted by this outburst of activity, he carried on working. In 1977-78 he was Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge and lectured on the Stamp Act and its consequences. In writing the lectures he drew on generous assistance from Richard

Goulden, then in the Public Record Office but later to move to the British Library to help with the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. These lectures remain unpublished, but copies were deposited in the Cambridge University and British libraries. In 1978 Foxon was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of his eminence in refining the methodology of enumerative and descriptive bibliography, and in 1980-81 he was president of the Bibliographical Society. His presidential address to the Society, `Proofs as Evidence of Change in the Seventeenth-Century Printing House', provided an excellent introduction to the whole topic of proof-correction and used Plantin's ordinances of 1564 as a basis for discussing the timetable likely to be used in the printing house. Although he was encouraged, by Don McKenzie among others, to publish this paper, he declined to do so. In 1982 he retired from his Readership on grounds of ill health.