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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
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
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
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:
English Verse 1701-1750, whatever else it may be, is certainly a work in the great tradition of English humanism. Foxon gives every evidence of familiarity with each of the approximately ten thousand poems catalogued here . . . Then [there are] the abundant signs of fine taste and common sense that are manifest, and, finally, the less sublime but nonetheless necessary `humanism' that must have gone into the dozens of small decisions—maybe hundreds— regarding this detail or that aspect of layout, this or that solution when faced with difficult choices, to say nothing of the perseverance that is the superlative sign of individual effort.[25]
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,
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
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
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