University of Virginia Library

David Fairweather Foxon, born 9 January 1923, died 5 June 2001. I am grateful to him for discussing his life and work with me in meetings we arranged in 1997 and 1998, though I first met him in 1970 and saw him regularly thereafter. Isabel Fleeman, the late David Fleeman, Isobel Grundy, Roger Lonsdale, Julian Roberts, Kathryn Sutherland, Michael Turner, and David Vander Meulen have generously shared their recollections of him with me at various times.

Austin was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Intelligence Corps and was awarded the Croix de Guerre at the end of the War; Foxon was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. Austin was appointed White's Professor in 1952. His major publications are Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1970), How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Oxford, 1962), and Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1962). An entertaining account of a movement their opponents called `the Futilitarians' is given by Paul Grice in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, ed. Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner (Oxford, 1986), 49-59. The most important continuer of this tradition is Stanley Cavell; see Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford, 1994).

See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London, 1995) for accounts of how physical objects acquire institutional status, a series of essays with considerable potential interest for bibliographers. For interesting play with meanings of `tympan', see Derrida's first essay to use columns of text in Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), translated in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 146-168. I am grateful to the late D. F. McKenzie for drawing my attention to this essay.

In Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (1970), Foxon says, `My fourth point you may consider somewhat emotional, but it is a concern that bibliography has cut itself off not only from educated men but also from many scholars . . . bibliographical writing would be better if the lay reader were more considered' (22-23). Full references to Foxon's publications are given in the list at the end of this essay; they are not repeated in the text or notes.

Fredson Bowers is sometimes representative of this tendency, though I would consider his general approach richly humanist. For Bowers's interest in scientific enquiry, see `Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems', Studies in Bibliography, 3 (195051), 37-62, esp. 58; `Bibliography, Pure Bibliography, and Literary Studies', PBSA, 46 (1952), 186-208, esp. 208; and Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford, 1964). For an impressive consideration of some of the issues, see G. Thomas Tanselle's `Bibliography and Science', Studies in Bibliography, 27 (1974), 55-89.

See G. Thomas Tanselle, `Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism', Studies in Bibliography, 49 (1996), 1-60.

Keith Graham, J. L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), 4.

See Gary Martin Best, Continuity and Change: A History of Kingswood School, 1748-1998 (n.p., ?1998).

See A. B. Sackett: A Memoir, ed. John Walsh (London, 1979).

Work at Bletchley, of course, had military consequences; it would have been incompatible with pacifism. I never fully explored Foxon's position with him. For a general account of Bletchley, see Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, ed. F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (Oxford, 1993).

See G. Thomas Tanselle, The Life and Work of Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, 1993), 33.

Julian Roberts, `David Fairweather Foxon, FBA—Demy 1946-48', Magdalen College Record 2001 (Oxford, 2001), 177-178 (177). See also the same writer's `David Foxon 19232001', The Library, 7th ser., 2 (2001), 395-397.

See R. J. Roberts's obituary notice, The Library, 6th ser., 11 (1989), 150-154.

The Rothschild Library: A Catalogue of Eighteenth-Century Printed Books and Manuscripts Found by Lord Rothschild, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1954).

For further discussion of point-holes, see Foxon's `On Printing "At One Pull", and Distinguishing Impressions by Point-Holes', The Library (1956), 284-285.

`The First Title Page of Lyrical Ballads, 1798', Studies in Bibliography, 51 (1998), 230-240. I have only one disagreement with Reed. He says, `Having shown that neither the known Bristol-Longman title nor London-Arch title was printed as O4, he concludes—his conclusion is stated both with qualification (in various places) and absolutely (once)—that O4 contained an earlier title page' (235). But (a) the sentence Reed quotes as absolute in his supporting note appears before Foxon shows Bristol-Longman was not O4, and (b) six lines after that sentence Foxon says, `I have followed the traditional view that the Bristol title-page was first, and assuming that Lyrical Ballads was printed in isolation have argued as if it had been printed as O4' (227). That explains the status of Reed's quotation. Foxon always regards the `Cottle only' title page as a matter of speculation.

The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library: English Literature, 1475-1700 (New York, 1940).

Foxon liked Wilfred Partington's Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth: The Life and Record of the Forger of the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets (London, 1946), which tells the story as it was known before Foxon's own discoveries. For subsequent reflections, see note 23.

`Purposes of Descriptive Bibliography, with Some Remarks on Methods', The Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 1-22.

In Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (1970), 26.

See, for example, Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Homosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998) and Robert Purks Maccubbin, 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985).

High Windows (London, 1974), 34.

Foxon emphasized the importance of identifying the whereabouts of copies in his review of Thomas J. Wise: Centenary Studies in The Library (1962), 263-264.

Tanselle summarizes his view in `Issues in Bibliographical Studies since 1942', in The Book Encompassed, ed. Peter Davidson (Cambridge, 1992), 24-36 (28). Further issues are explored in his `Title-Page Transcription and Signature Collation Reconsidered', Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 45-81, which also discusses Foxon's Thoughts (50-52).

G. S. Rousseau, Review in The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, n.s. 1 (for 1975), 7-9 (7).

English Verse, 1701-1750 had two excellent reviews which listed further items and copies: L. J. Harris, The Library, 5th ser., 31 (1976), 158-164, and James Woolley, Modern Philology, 75 (1977-78), 59-73. Woolley confirms Foxon's own suspicions that he missed items by going straight for the shelves and ignoring the catalogue when he visited a library—a strange choice for a cataloguer by profession.

I have no wish, either, to criticize Oxford University Press, where Frances Whistler did wonders in realizing the editor's intentions. Nicolas Barker had doubts about whether the lectures were publishable, and any conventional form of publication would have involved some compromise. Copies of the lectures were deposited in the Bodleian, British, Beinecke, and Clark libraries.

Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: Hackney for Bread (Oxford, 1997), 291-302.

Foxon was unable to read fiction in later life and complained to me of a decline in his capacity for feeling. In surveying his life, he also remarked that, although he had enjoyed his time at Kingswood School, he felt cut off from the life there, as though he had never really understood it. It has sometimes occurred to me that Foxon displayed in mild form some of the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, but, whatever the nature of his problems, his wonderful intelligence enabled him to combat them successfully, if at the cost of a final social exhaustion.

In a letter to David L. Vander Meulen of 29 May 1980 he described himself as `a pattern-seeking animal', adding that `it often pays off.'