University of Virginia Library

Postlude

Foxon told me late in life that he had never anticipated so long a retirement, and in retrospect his abandonment of his research seems premature. In particular, he decided not to continue work on an edition of the Stationers' Register, 1710-1746, a project he had conceived before going to Canada and to which he was uniquely suited. His proposal had been accepted by the Bibliographical Society and some preliminary work had been done on copying the entries onto slips, but the prospect of undertaking another complex work of annotation and indexing was too daunting. By the time of his retirement Foxon thought of himself as a sick man, and, having largely given up conventional medicine, he sought relief in osteopathy and acupuncture. There can be little doubt that by this point he seriously underestimated his own powers, both intellectual and physical. He believed that treatment of his hypertension with beta-blockers on his return from America in 1975 had resulted in severe memory loss, but, although he may have suffered some impairment, my many scholarly conversations with him over the years convinced me that his memory was still strong—certainly usually better than my own. He played a very large role as a consultant in the preparation of his Lyell lectures for the press from 1987 to 1991, recalling in detail some of his original intentions, and in the late 1990s he still had the capacity to conjure up events, characters, and ideas from his early life.[29]

For a time Foxon attended various committees of which he was a member, including the British Academy's, and he would regularly attend the Lyell lectures. He took pleasure in the honours he was given. He was awarded the Bibliographical Society's gold medal in 1985 and was delighted to be elected as Honorary Member of the Bibliographical Society of America the following year. He continued to offer assistance to scholars: Roger Lonsdale testifies to his helpfulness with particular queries in relation to the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, and Steven Shankman thanks him for answering detailed questions for the Penguin edition of the Iliad (1996). But though he would be happy to correspond with Lonsdale, a scholar he much admired, and to chat with him if he met him in the street, he was always unwilling to set up longer meetings. He regularly declined my suggestions that he should meet interested Popeians, through a false sense of his declining powers.

Inevitably Foxon's life narrowed in these circumstances. As Isabel Fleeman remarked, `Someone who has to be in bed by eight o'clock is not a promising dinner guest'. He was on good terms with his neighbours, enjoyed visits to his daughter and her family, tinkered with his stereo, read The Times every day, and was still capable of a short private correspondence if something caught his interest in the TLS. He looked back on his life with pleasure tinged by perplexity. He became ill early in 2001 and died in a nursing home in London on 5 June.

Foxon's life, in spite of persistent ill health and the valetudinarian impulses that overtook it, displays high ambition, independent intelligence, and courage to triumph over persistent difficulties. His achievement must be seen against the background of a British academic establishment that valued scholarly research (Foxon always enjoyed the respect of his superiors and his colleagues) but did little actively to support it. The major awards that enabled him to complete his work (the Harkness and Guggenheim Fellowships) were both American; he worked without a research assistant; he usually paid for his research travel and materials; and some of his most important work was carried out during his lunch breaks. He succeeded because bibliography was for him an exciting vocation, demanding a commitment not dissimilar to his father's devotion to his ministry. Bibliography required that the intellectual powers he had developed at Bletchley be dedicated to serving a wide community of critics, historians, librarians and collectors.

That dedication lies behind Foxon's catalogue English Verse, 17011750, but it also marked his work at the British Museum and at Oxford. He was always willing to approach the problems of other scholars with the same enthusiasm he brought to his own. To him answering queries was both a pleasure and a duty, an activity central to his scholarly role. And he never ceased to find the work exciting, perhaps too exciting. His curiosity was unresting, always seeking out patterns and anomalies, and trying to reconstruct the narratives behind them.[30] Foxon's legacy lies not only in the great resource of his catalogue and in the stories he uncovered of Pope and Wise and their machinations, but also in the possibility of future discoveries by the application of the same humane curiosity and technical know-how. He modestly took the epigraph for English Verse, 1701-1750 from Pope's Essay on Criticism:

But his achievement is perhaps better reflected in the account of the ideal critic later in the same poem, which evokes a man like Foxon: