University of Virginia Library

David Foxon, Humanist Bibliographer
by
JAMES McLAVERTY

Introduction

David Foxon was perhaps the most distinguished British bibliographer of the second half of the twentieth century. His general contribution to bibliography has been widely admired and honoured, and his catalogue English Verse, 1701-1750 (1975) has given his name to half a century of separately published poems.[1] But, while his work has been influential, particularly on the study of the book trade, on the history of pornography, and on eighteenth-century editing, it has been little discussed. This neglect is at least partly due to the fact that Foxon founded no school of bibliography, formulated no theory of bibliographical enquiry, and initiated no general programme of research. Yet the body of his work as a whole displays an impressive consistency of approach and an awareness of the values, motivations, and intentions directing it. My aim in this essay is to provide a record of his life and work in the context of some of the social and intellectual currents of his time. More broadly, I hope to draw attention to the combination of humanist and technical virtues that often informs bibliography but is less frequently identified in discussion of it.

A fruitful approach to Foxon's work, I believe, is through an analogy with the `ordinary language philosophy' that formed such an important part of the intellectual atmosphere of post-War Oxford. Foxon breathed this same atmosphere, and, like J. L. Austin, the movement's leading figure, he came to Oxford after serving in war-time intelligence.[2]

Foxon was not a philosopher and he was not an adherent of the `ordinary language' school—its members were comparatively few—but he shared some of the school's approaches and assumptions. Three elements stand out. First there is the concern with ordinary language and meaning. There can be no direct parallel with the philosophers' notorious examination of what was ordinarily said and the search of it for implicit truth—the fruits of enquiring into the meaning of `tympan' are limited—but we do find in Foxon's work a sustained attention to the languages of the book trade and to the codes of the book. Whereas the philosophers to some degree estranged themselves from ordinary language, looking on it as a code to which they already held the analysable key, Foxon looks on the books of the past as codes to which the original practitioners held a key that can be recaptured partly by examining their writings and partly by examining patterns of evidence. Foxon is interested in past institutional facts and the way they are constructed and sustained.[3] The beginning of his Lyell lectures on Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (delivered in 1976 but not published until 1991) is the most striking example. The first section of the lectures is devoted to `The meaning of the imprint', and as the lectures proceed Foxon explores the meanings of format (for example, an `elzevier edition'), of illustration, of capitals and italics. He is, of course, engaged in code-breaking, but many of the codes are those of the ordinary members of the book trade, who took their language for granted.

The second link with Oxford's ordinary language school lies in the way Foxon uses language. In their writing the philosophers aimed at an easy style, consciously engaging with the readership as a social group, but capable of the strictest technical demonstration. Philosophers like J. L. Austin or H. P. Grice move easily from discussing what might be said by this sort of person in this sort of social situation to a technical expression

of their conclusions in logical symbols. Foxon shows a similar facility, moving from lucid expository writing (he is a particularly fine narrator) to technical bibliographical description. In this he shows a respect both for what in his early career he regarded as the `gentlemanly' English tradition of bibliography and for the professional American approach.[4] A good example from Foxon's early work is his sensational identification of T. J. Wise's thefts from the British Museum Library, which was presented to the general public in The Times and the TLS in October 1956, and then to the bibliographical community with a clear analysis of the bibliographical requirements for the identification of the theft.

Thirdly, ordinary language philosophy was so constituted that it had a ready reply to scepticism, rebutting sceptical challenge by asking, `Why raise that question here and now? What in the situation calls for it?' Foxon always knows what in the immediate social or academic situation gives rise to a question and who might be interested in the answer. Abstract issues have no application. In adopting this approach he contrasts with that drive for definitiveness of research, system, and even sometimes scientific methodology, which has been such an important strand in bibliographical discourse since the War.[5] These claims to foundations and demonstration left bibliography and textual criticism vulnerable to sceptical challenge in the 1990s.[6] Foxon belongs to the alternative broad tradition sketched by Keith Graham: `Deeply rooted in the English intellectual tradition is a feeling for concreteness and particularity, a mistrust of abstract, high-flown generalizations and an insistence that even speculative thought should be anchored in the concreteness of tangible, everyday experience.'[7] Graham reports that a colleague responded to this claim by saying, `Well, could you give me an

example?' That was also Foxon's characteristic response. He considered quoting Blake's `To Generalise is to be an Idiot' in his presidential address to the Bibliographical Society in 1981, but worried that it was a generalization.

Family and School

The trajectory of David Foxon's life was from a family background of provincial nonconformity, through public school, war-time intelligence, and Magdalen College, Oxford, to the British Museum Library, and finally to university teaching at Queen's Ontario and Oxford. The Foxon family had been stocking weavers; Foxon's grandfather kept a couple of weaving-frames in his cottage. He had eleven children, of whom Walter, Foxon's father, was the youngest. After leaving school at twelve, Walter went to work in a stocking factory, but his intelligence and gift for preaching were recognized at Chapel and he was encouraged to go in for the Methodist ministry. He trained at Didsbury College in Manchester, and married Susan Fairweather, the daughter of a well-todo circuit steward in Clitheroe, Lancashire, whom he met when visiting the town to take services. Walter Foxon enjoyed a high reputation as a preacher (`a good preacher, slightly old-fashioned' was his son's verdict), and at one point in his career he turned down the prestigious post at Spurgeon's Tabernacle in South London. Susan Foxon, a firm advocate of women's rights and of total abstinence, was an active pamphleteer and campaigner. Walter Foxon's ability to attract and hold crowds led to his appointment to ministries at a series of seaside towns. David was born at Paignton on 9 January 1923 (he was an only child), and his parents' subsequent homes were at Bournemouth, St Anne's on Sea, Finchley, Blackpool, and Newquay, where, after a spell as President of the District, Walter Foxon retired.

David Foxon did not share his father's religious beliefs, but he profoundly admired his father's compassion and sense of social responsibility. Looking back over his life, he believed that some attitudes from his early years—perhaps more recognizably Quaker than Methodist—had stayed with him: a liking for simple and direct truth-telling, with a corresponding anxiety to avoid equivocation and economy with the truth; a distaste for the hypocrisy (particularly over sexual matters) that for much of the century oiled the machinery of daily living; and a dislike of violence and conflict. The first two of these attitudes can be seen directly in his career as a scholar in his lucid, if mild-mannered,

exposure of the frauds of T. J. Wise and in his investigation of the history of pornography while the subject was largely taboo. The third attitude might possibly have led to his being a conscientious objector during the Second World War, a potential crisis from which a sympathetic headmaster rescued him by recommending him for intelligence work at Bletchley Park. Foxon also profited from his Methodist background by being brought up in a culture of improvised preaching. He took public speaking as a matter of course, enjoyed it, and throughout his academic career he was able to speak without notes and hold an audience.

School, Kingswood near Bath, was a Methodist foundation, one of whose aims was to provide for the education of the sons of itinerant preachers.[8] Foxon spoke of it with affection as a civilized society, tolerant and humane, with a strong record of academic achievement. E. P. Thompson, the historian (`a bit of an exotic'), and A. N. Flew, the philosopher, were Foxon's contemporaries there. The school had resources that particularly appealed to Foxon, including a fine and wellstocked new library. It also had an outstanding headmaster in A. B. Sackett.[9] Foxon was sixteen when World War II broke out, and it was clear that if the war continued he would be called up for active service when he was eighteen. Sackett, knowing and understanding Foxon's scruples, recommended him to the Government Code and Cypher School, which at the outbreak of war had moved from London to Bletchley Park, where it was known as War Station X, or Room 47 Foreign Office, or Government Communications Headquarters.[10] But before going to Bletchley in 1942 Foxon had secured his place at Magdalen College, Oxford. The choice of course was difficult for him. He had performed at a high level in the School Certificate in all subjects and he might have specialized in science or mathematics, but it was traditional for the brightest boys at Kingswood to take classics and Foxon sat the Oxford scholarship exam for Literae Humaniores (Greats). It was C. S. Lewis, a member of the interviewing panel, who suggested that on the basis of his general essay he would be better suited to English, and he sat for an English scholarship successfully the following year. He had to wait until 1946 before he could take up his place.

War-Time Intelligence

Bletchley Park was a crucial experience for Foxon, socially and intellectually. It allowed him to mix freely with a variety of gifted, if eccentric, academics, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, at an early age (he was only nineteen when he went); it gave him training in codebreaking; and it introduced him to his future wife, June (`Jane') Jarratt. After five weeks in Aberdeen with the Gordon Highlanders (in theory the Bletchley workers were seconded from their units), Foxon was sent to Bletchley, where, after training, he eventually took over from Sydney Easton in charge of a small section deciphering Italian submarine codes; his future wife was a member of the unit. Intercepted messages were translated and then passed on to naval intelligence, who plotted the movements. The work was not exciting but the training was significant for Foxon's later career. A relish for puzzles (and for setting up puzzles), the ability to recognize and interpret patterns, the habit of working from established knowledge (a code book captured on a commando raid) to gain new knowledge, and the sense of intellectual activity as a cooperative venture, all stayed with Foxon and influenced his subsequent work. It can hardly be a coincidence that across the Atlantic, Fredson Bowers, Charlton Hinman, and William H. Bond were members of a naval communications group engaged, as Foxon was shortly to be, in cracking Japanese ciphers.[11]

Foxon's transfer to Japanese intelligence came after the fall of Italy. The major tasks in this operation fell to the Americans, with the British in a supplementary role, but one of the British responsibilities was an intercept station in Ceylon and Foxon was sent out there in the summer of 1944, just before D-Day. His was essentially a desk job as co-ordinator of cryptographic intelligence, largely from the Americans. During his time in Colombo, problems with Foxon's health that had plagued him at school resurfaced. He was capable of working very intensely for short periods, but he rapidly became exhausted; it was as though he had difficulty in sustaining the high levels of energy and activity that demanding work generated in him. Although various specialists had been consulted, there was no diagnosis, and Foxon had to learn to manage his energies and ration their output. This was a matter of serious sympathetic concern to Hugh Alexander, later director of GCHQ at Cheltenham, when he came out to Ceylon on a visit in 1944, but there was no solution to the problem, and these periods of exhaustion continued throughout

Foxon's working life, resisting treatment through drugs or psychoanalysis. Only in the mid-eighties, after Foxon's retirement in 1982, did a research programme incidentally reveal that he had an adrenalin abnormality, exceptionally high levels of adrenalin accounting for both the periods of high-level activity and the subsequent exhaustion.

Colombo allowed Foxon to develop his interest in music. Though never a star performer, and untrained in musical theory, Foxon had developed his enthusiasm for music at Kingswood School and played the piano as a relaxation. When the War made the piano inaccessible, he bought a Dolmetsch treble recorder and took it with him to Ceylon. In Colombo, Ronald Johnson, later head of the Scottish Office, had become the focus of musical activity among local musicians and service personnel, and, through his friendship with Johnson, Foxon became involved in chamber music, lieder singing, and choral music. In particular, he was able to develop his interest in music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (especially Purcell and Handel) which was particularly suited to his new recorder. Music became a lifelong love, and record-collecting Foxon's major hobby.

Oxford

Foxon returned from Ceylon at the end of the War, and in 1946 began a shortened degree course at Oxford, where Jane Jarratt was already part of the Bletchley diaspora, the friendships made during the War continuing to exert an influence for the next ten years or so. An important link was through Theo Chaundy, Reader in Mathematics and Student of Christ Church, who had been part of Bletchley's reserve force and now offered something like a second home to Jane Jarratt and to Foxon. With Chaundy's son, Christopher, Foxon experimented with electronics and built his first loudspeaker in the Chaundys' workshop, establishing an interest in hi-fi that was to last until his death. Undergraduate study with Jack Bennett and C. S. Lewis was a success. Foxon joined in a discussion society, the Lyly club, with other Magdalen men, and took Lewis's advice to sample Oxford lectures outside his subject. Egon Wellesz, composer and pupil of Hindemith (whose small audiences were particularly in need of Foxon's support), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, diplomat and author of Eastern Religions and Western Thought, made a particularly strong impression, as did Kenneth Clarke, who showed that a lecture could be constructed round illustrations. Clark's example was something Foxon remembered in preparing his Lyell lectures in Oxford in 1976.

In 1947 David Foxon and Jane Jarratt married. Her background was

very different from his. Her father Sir Arthur Jarratt had progressed from being a cinema pianist to assuming a public role as the manager of a national chain of cinemas, a friend of Lord Mountbatten's, and a film producer in alliance with Alexander Korda, Herbert Wilcox, and Michael Balcon. Jane Jarratt had come to Bletchley from the Central School for Speech and Drama, and through his marriage Foxon became tangentially connected to a more glamorous social world, though Jane Foxon herself had little time for film society, refused to be presented at court, and much preferred the comradeship of Bletchley. I gained the impression that Foxon relished the contact with the entertainment industry more than she did. The couple shared an interest in the arts, particularly music, and, as Jane brought with her a small private income of £200 a year, they were able to live a modest, cultured life, with a wide circle of friends. A daughter, Deborah, was born in 1952. Although the Foxons were divorced in 1963, they remained friends, sharing holidays and family concerns, until Jane's death in 1988.

After graduating with first-class honours Foxon started research for a BLitt on the relationship between words and music in the seventeenth century. Although he was given a supervisor from the Music Faculty, Jack Westrup, he was left very much to his own devices. He set himself to read every Restoration play for what it had to say about music and even settled on Purcell's ceremonial odes as a specific topic, but he felt little confidence in his progress with what was potentially a very large project. At this point, late 1948, a circular appeared offering a final opportunity to apply for the civil service. Many of Foxon's Bletchley friends had taken that route and he now decided to follow them. He took the exam successfully (passing out second in mathematics) and survived the country house weekend and the interview with the selection board. (Some flavour of the exercise is conveyed by C. P. Snow's asking Foxon whether he considered it was more important to be than to do.) Foxon was sent to Town and Country Planning, but a casual meeting over lunch changed his career. Angus Wilson, a friend from Bletchley, was now back at the British Museum Library (his piercing tenor soon to become famous during his superintendency of the reading room), and Bentley Bridgewater, who had also been at Bletchley, was now secretary of the Library. These two persuaded Foxon that work at the Library would be more congenial to his temperament and talents, and he successfully applied for transfer to the Museum.

British Museum Library

Foxon joined the British Museum Library staff in 1950. After a few months training, he became involved in the Library's major project, the

revision of the general catalogue. This work had begun in the 1930s and Foxon came in at the beginning of the letter D. Much of his time was spent on Defoe, where the experience with first editions, chapbooks, and cheap reprints proved invaluable. Subsequently he became involved with Dickens before the revision was brought to a halt. His attention then turned to the Ashley Library, T. J. Wise's collection of English literature. The Ashley Library had been bought en bloc by the Museum in 1937, and its printed books were being added to the catalogue as it was revised. With the major project abandoned, the Ashley books had to be incorporated into the current catalogue, and Foxon was given that responsibility. In 1957 he was put in charge of antiquarian purchasing, and Julian Roberts, who became his colleague a year later, has praised the energy and enthusiasm Foxon brought to this side of the Library's work after the financial difficulties and fierce competition from American libraries of the inter-war years. Roberts has also paid tribute to Foxon's general influence on the Library in the late fifties and early sixties, quoting a comment from the Principal Keeper of Printed Books on Foxon's leaving, `We are all Foxonians now.'[12]

The Library brought Foxon into contact with the Bibliographical Society. Frank Francis, then Deputy Keeper of Printed Books but later to become Director of the Museum, was Secretary of the Bibliographical Society and editor of The Library. [13] He encouraged Foxon to become involved in the Bibliographical Society, and he soon became its librarian, spending lunch-hours and Saturday afternoons in the library at the top of a spiral staircase over the British Academy offices, then at the back of the Royal Academy. Foxon served ex officio on the Society's Council, and started to write for The Library and the Book Collector on points he came across in his cataloguing. Francis also made a helpful suggestion. He pointed out to Foxon that a post at the Library opened up the possibility of undertaking some major research project—a seed that was later to bear fruit in the catalogue English Verse, 1701-1750.

Foxon saw his early years at the Library as marking an important change in British bibliography, with many of the important influences coming from America. He looked on the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1940) and John Hayward's catalogue of the Rothschild library as the last gasps of a dying world.[14] The CBEL had great value as a handbook for literary scholars, but it worked by listing books

rather than by identifying and describing them. It was a fine example of enumerative bibliography, but it was bibliographical only in a thin sense. Hayward's folio two volumes were more sophisticated in analysis, but their chief aim was to promote the trophies of a rich collector and the number of copies examined was consequently restricted. The catalogue was useful to scholars but it addressed their interests, literary or historical, indirectly. Foxon felt a sympathy for both these forms of bibliography—the scholarly handbook and the detailed record of copies— but he thought the future of bibliography lay in the fusion of the two. He was excited by the new bibliography, mainly centred in the United States. In conversation he singled out the founding of Studies in Bibliography by Fredson Bowers in 1948 as a central event; he was conscious that Bowers's emphasis on physical evidence and on the wide consultation of copies was a continuing influence on him. Other work that greatly impressed Foxon in this period was Allan Stevenson's essay on paper in the first number of Studies in Bibliography and his `Watermarks are Twins' in volume four, and Bill Todd's work on press figures in his thesis. The Americans exposed weaknesses in the gentleman collectors, and these Foxon was determined to avoid.

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.

Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama

Later in the fifties Foxon increased his public profile through a further and more dramatic encounter with T. J. Wise. In a letter to The Times of 18 October 1956 he revealed that Wise had been sophisticating his own books with leaves stolen from copies in the British Museum Library. The extraordinary bibliographical authority Wise had assumed in the early years of the century had already been severely dented by John Carter and Graham Pollard in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (London, 1934), but Foxon's researches revealed a different order of villainy.[18]

Foxon's discovery came from his cataloguing the Ashley Library, and began with a typical small puzzle. Ben Jonson's The Case is Alter'd turned out to have four leaves at the end inlaid, with missing elements at the head and tail of each leaf restored in pen-and-ink facsimile. When Foxon checked the Museum's copies, one turned out to lack just those leaves, and to be cropped at head and tail. This set Foxon in search of stolen Museum leaves, first in the Ashley Library and then in the library Wise had helped assemble for John Henry Wrenn in Texas. After preliminary announcements in The Times and the TLS, the whole business was thoroughly examined in a short monograph, published as a supplement to the Bibliographical Society's publications in 1959. The results of the investigation were striking. In all, 206 leaves were stolen from the Museum's copies; 89 of them were found in Ashley copies and 60 in Wrenn copies; 15 more were suspected but the copies had not been examined. Of the 47 plays with missing leaves, 41 have had at least some of their leaves traced.

Foxon's account is remarkably free from censoriousness. Wise's behaviour is studied with the same dispassionate interest that Foxon might have granted the practices of an eighteenth-century printer, and, significantly, with the same sense of historical perspective. The second section of the essay describes the turn-of-the-century patterns of behaviour that made Wise's frauds comparatively easy. There was a general willingness among collectors to make up plays with loose leaves that they might have lying around. Wise makes no secret of it; Gosse and Aitken accepted the practice without question; Wrenn makes no objection. Wise, however, took the practice to new lengths by developing a regular habit of exchanging leaves in his own copies for those in copies he was selling to Wrenn. Of course this confused the bibliographical evidence, and Foxon gives two nice examples of Wise discarding bibliographically valuable leaves because of their inferior appearance:

The first section of the essay demonstrates that Wise had taken this practice further by stealing leaves from the copies in the Museum. It sketches the conditions under which Wise would have had access to the books, and the lack of supervision so distinguished a figure would have enjoyed. Wise probably took the books home at night, removed the leaves, and returned them in the morning. Foxon calculates that the financial gains Wise would have made by the thefts bore no relation to the risk of discovery and disgrace: `clearly there are irrational motives at work which are beyond the scope of this enquiry' (5).

The final section of the discussion turns to technical matters and the evidence for Wise's thefts. Wise made no attempt to match up watermarks or chain lines, and most of his made-up copies can be detected through absence of conjugacy. Evidence to identify a leaf with its source may come from a number of indicators: stab-holes (with a discussion of problems from refolding and binding); worm-holes and patterns of worm-holes; stains; and flaws (`foreign bodies', `ill-digested lumps', `wrinkles') which the binder presses into adjacent leaves. These forms of evidence then become the basis for the fascinating discussions that follow in the list of `Plays with Stolen Leaves'. Each entry gives the Greg reference number, the details of the missing leaves in the Museum copies, and the description of the Ashley and/or Wrenn copy. The information is presented economically, but the typical final line, `Conclusion:

The stolen leaf is in the Ashley copy', is thoroughly earned.

This study is another venture involving collaborators—Fannie E. Ratchford, Emeritus Curator of the Wrenn Library, who travelled with the Wrenn books from Texas, is thanked with eleven other individuals— but the skill lay in the initial identification of the theft, the recognition of what further needed doing to advance the enquiry, and the martialling of the evidence in a particularly accessible and attractive form. Foxon himself says,

Given the importance of the British Museum Library as a source for texts of early drama, the first of these aims is an important one, but Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama is also successful in giving readers a set of clear techniques for investigating sophisticated copies.

Compiling English Verse, 1701-1750

By the time the Wise discoveries were in print, Foxon was launched on his catalogue of English verse. In the early fifties, after the publication of Donald Wing's short-title catalogue, 1641-1700 (New York, 1945-51), the Bibliographical Society had been considering the possibility of preparing a similar catalogue for the eighteenth century. A working-party was set up, under Harold Williams, to see whether the project should be taken further and Foxon took on the responsibility of estimating how many entries there might be. When it was decided not to go ahead with the proposed project, Foxon decided to embark on his own verse catalogue for the first half of the century. What he decided to aim at was `a short-title catalogue with frills' (English Verse, 1701-1750, xi): something that offered more bibliographical information than STC and Wing, but less than Greg's Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59). The project would give him more scope for bibliographical sophistication than his cataloguing at the Museum, and allow him to pursue his long-standing interest in the poetry of the period.

As Foxon records in the preface to his catalogue, a stimulus for his work was Fredson Bowers's paper on his proposed bibliography of the

Restoration drama, read to the Bibliographical Society on 18 November 1952.[19] `This lecture was my inspiration', he declared nearly twenty years later.[20] Foxon decided that, like Bowers, he would consult multiple copies, but that, whereas Bowers intended to use microfilms, he would use the position of signatures as a means of identification:

Although Foxon recognized the limited precision Madan's method gave him, he continued to value its economy and utility.

Foxon's first task was to make a skeleton catalogue with pencil entries (including shelfmarks where available) in preparation for detailed information in ink when he had seen the copies. He used forms on pressure-sensitive pads of six slips each, ordered from the Stationery Office. The slips (8″ x 5″) consisted of eight central boxes (4 full-length and 4 half-length), with the borders forming larger boxes (1″ deep at the top, 1½″ wide at the side). In the centre top went the title; to the left the date; to the right the location. In the central division were recorded: imprint; collation; pagination; half-title, errata, frontispiece, advertisement, watermark, press-figures; ornaments; miscellaneous. The recording of first lines began later, proposed by someone during Foxon's stay at Harvard—he always regretted that he could not acknowledge his debt by naming the proposer. The top slip would be used to create the main entry in the catalogue, the five subsidiary slips to create the indexes.

Foxon began his work by reading the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, before moving on to author-bibliographies and Dobell's poetry catalogues from before the War. He read in the BM Catalogue and visited the Bodleian at weekends to consult the catalogues there. An interest from the beginning was printer's ornaments, which in this period provide opportunities for printer identification.

Foxon established a file of printer's ornaments, even though he found it difficult to get the quality of pictures he wanted, but it was soon clear that a photographic record of all printer's ornaments would be too expensive and cumbersome. During his period at Harvard in 1959, however, he had access to a Polaroid camera with close-up lens, which helped him to identify Edinburgh piracies in the period, piracies that had, for example, perplexed the bibliography of Pope. The files of these ornaments have been given to the National Library of Scotland.

Serious work on examining books for the catalogue began only on a visit to North America from 1959 to 1961. For this Foxon applied for a Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund. These annual awards enabled about thirty British men and women in their late twenties or early thirties (Foxon was a little old at thirty-six) to go to America for a year or more. The scheme was administered with personal and financial generosity. It provided around $300 a month, a rented car for six months (Foxon had a special arrangement for a year), and appropriate introductions. Foxon went for eighteen months, carrying his catalogue slips in a single large suitcase inherited from his father-in-law. Nominally he was at Harvard and Yale, but he managed to fit in many of America's scholarly libraries in his nine months of travel between the two. It was an exciting time to be in the States, coinciding with John Kennedy's nomination for the presidency, and Jane and Deborah came out to join Foxon for a three-month holiday. They met in Quebec and drove across America to California and back.

Libertine Literature

The return to the British Museum brought a sense of anti-climax. There was talk of Foxon's being given time to complete his catalogue, but it never materialized. Indeed, the next serious step towards completion was delayed until Foxon left the Museum in 1965. Nevertheless, this period saw the publication of four important articles in the Book Collector in 1963 as a result of the accidental discovery of an advertisement for The School of Venus, or the Lady's Delight in the Daily Advertiser for 25 August 1744. Foxon recognized this as a reference to L'École des Filles, a French pornographic work referred to in English literature but with no known English translation. The discovery that there had been a translation set off an enquiry into early English pornographic publications, their continental antecedents, and finally, in an article requested by John Hayward, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Fanny Hill. The essays were subsequently issued together as Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745, and then published, with an

introduction by Foxon, in the United States in 1965. This was a pioneering exercise in the scholarly history and bibliography of pornography, and one still referred to today.[21] Using legal records, advertisements, and bibliographical and literary analysis, Foxon was able to show the patterns of diffusion of the texts and estimate their potential importance as historical sources. Publication of articles on such a subject, even ones as scholarly as Foxon's, was still regarded as daring, and one distinguished bibliographer warned Foxon that it would ruin his career. But Foxon's period in psychoanalysis, and a short research visit to the Kinsey Institute during his time in the States, gave him confidence to pursue these intellectual puzzles like any others encountered in his work, and Hayward, who was the editor of Rochester, encouraged him. Publication was timely, for it coincided with the new freedom in sexuality recorded wistfully by Philip Larkin in his `Annus Mirabilis':

Although Foxon had no programme of liberation in mind, he was bibliography's representative in this historical shift, and the measured tone of his writing goes alongside a conviction that old hypocrisies must be blown away and new moral judgements made.

In Libertine Literature Foxon interprets the advertisement for The School of Venus as a clue to a hidden vein of English culture. It had been assumed there had been no pornography in the seventeenth century, except for Rochester, and that the first legal proceedings had been against Curll in 1727. Foxon argues that, on the contrary, there had been rapid importation of French pornography and a willingness to risk prosecution. The first chapter is informed by his visits to the Public Record Office during his lunch hours and lists government actions against pornography from 1660 to 1745. He paints a lively picture of the trade in pornography by printers, publishers, and hawkers, with a particularly telling glimpse of the Brett family, who sent out their children to buy `The Complete Set of the Charts of Merryland' and The School of Venus for selling on to customers, and of George Spavan, who made a guinea a week from sales of The School of Venus alone. The

account of gentleman purchasers includes Pepys, Wycherley, Learnerd, and Ravenscroft, but perhaps the most amusing episode is the attempt of the gentlemen of All Souls to print Aretine's Postures at the University Press. Sadly for the young gentlemen, Dean Fell turned up unexpectedly and confiscated the prints and plates; about sixty prints had already been distributed `but Mr. Dean hath made them call them in again and commit them to the fire' (1964 edn., 7).

from Aretine onwards, while the third, on Satyra Sotadica and Vénus dans le cloitre, examines a series of translations of the former, including a `sucker-trap' from that most respectable of booksellers, Jacob Tonson. In the final chapter, on Fanny Hill, Foxon tells the story of its prosecution, printing a letter from its author Cleland for the first time, and then, partly on the basis of ornament evidence, clarifies the bibliography of the early editions. He shows that the version with the sodomitical episode is the first, and it was on this understanding of the textual history that Peter Sabor was later to base his edition for Oxford University Press in 1985. The proposal in the late sixties that Foxon should himself edit the text for the Oxford Novels series was turned down on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe.

English Bibliographical Resources and Canada

In 1965 Foxon left the British Museum to take up a post as professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. The Museum was not proving an encouraging environment for his work, and two Canadians, Kathleen Coburn and George Whalley, who had met him through their work on the Bollingen Coleridge edition, persuaded him to think of a move to Canada. Foxon's divorce had been finalized in 1963, and a new job in a new country had a self-evident appeal. He accepted a post in Whalley's department at Queen's, but before going to Canada he made a tour of British libraries in an attempt to draw his catalogue towards a conclusion by inspecting as many further copies as he could.

Foxon could afford his British trip only because he had become involved in a facsimile-publishing enterprise. When he returned from the States in 1961, Foxon had brought back microfilm of a large number of broadsides, and his first thought was that it would be a good idea to publish them in facsimile. But attempts to get good quality photographic enlargements failed through lack of adequate equipment. Nevertheless, Foxon had become persuaded of the value of xerox reproduction during his time in America, and the arrival of the Museum's first proper machine in 1963 confirmed his view that a book could be reproduced well enough to provide publishable copy. He found that

this view was shared by his Hampstead neighbour, Peter Elstob. Elstob was a man with an unusual and varied career: novelist, balloonist, recorder of the Spanish Civil War (in which he had fought), manager of the Arts Theatre Club, and secretary of International PEN. Elstob had been in touch with Gregg International of America about photolitho publishing, and, with Foxon's advice, the project emerged of publishing English Bibliographical Resources. There were three series: 1. Periodical lists of new publications; 2. Catalogues of books in circulation; 3. Printers' manuals. Foxon had discovered many of the facts about the editing and publishing of early book lists through his work on dating for his catalogue, and he had published some of the information in an article in The Library in 1963. These catalogues were now made available in facsimile and formed the basis of the first series. Foxon's role was that of editor; he found the materials and wrote the introductions. Gregg were responsible for production, and Elstob for sales. The series was offered for subscription, with considerable success, and Foxon's share of the subscription financed his tour of British and Irish libraries from March to August 1965. He worked through the Bodleian and Cambridge University libraries, the major Irish and Scottish libraries, and as many provincial libraries as he could, especially hoping to find locally printed materials.

Though he left for Canada with no thought of returning, Foxon's stay there was short. He relished the informality of Canada—returning to Oxford, he found it formal and stuffy by contrast—and he enjoyed both his teaching and the social life of the department at Queen's. The post in North America made him eligible to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was successful in being given an award for 1967-68, spending the time in Oxford preparing English Verse for publication. During this period the Readership in Textual Criticism became vacant (it was perhaps the only post that would have tempted Foxon to return to Britain); he applied and was appointed.

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.

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:

Publications by David Foxon

1953

`Binding Variants in the Brontës' Poems', Book Collector, 2 (1953), 219-221.

`Some Notes on Agenda Format', The Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 163-173.

Review of S. Roscoe, Thomas Bewick: A Bibliography, The Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 206-209 [see also `The Bibliography of Bewick' (1954) below].

1954

`The Bibliography of Bewick', The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 209 [reply to S. Roscoe's response to 1953 review].

`The Printing of Lyrical Ballads, 1798', The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 221241.

1955

`The Golden Treasury, 1861', Book Collector, 4 (1955), 252-253 [see also `The Golden Treasury, 1861' (1956) below].

`A Piracy of Steele's The Lying Lover', The Library, 5th ser., 10 (1955), 127129.

The Technique of Bibliography, The Book, No. 6 (Cambridge: National Book League, 1955).

`E Typis Palgravianis', Book Collector, 4 (1955), 252.

1956

`Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 77-78.

`Another Skeleton in T. J. Wise's Cupboard', TLS, 19 October 1956, 624.

`Concealed Pope Editions', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 277-279.

`Fielding's The Modern Husband, 1732', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 76-77.

`Forger and Thief. A New Chapter in Cautionary Tale of Thomas J. Wise', The Times, 18 October 1956, p. 11.

`The Golden Treasury, 1861', Book Collector, 5 (1956), 75 [see `The Golden Treasury, 1861' (1955) above].

`On Printing "At One Pull", and Distinguishing Impressions by Point-Holes', The Library, 5th ser., 11 (1956), 284-285.

1957

`The Chapbook Editions of the Lambs' Tales from Shakespear', Book Collector, 6 (1957), 41-53.

1958

`Two Cruces in Pope Bibliography', TLS, 24 January 1958, 52.

Review of Edwin Elliott Willoughby, The Uses of Bibliography to the Students of Literature and History, Journal of Documentation, 14 (1958), 214-215.

1959

`Modern Aids to Bibliographical Research', Library Trends (April, 1959), 574-581.

`Oh! Sophonisba! Sophonisba! Oh!', Studies in Bibliography, 12 (1959), 204213.

`Prior's A New Collection of Poems, 1724 &c.', Book Collector, 8 (1959), 69-70.

Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama, Supplement to the Bibliographical Society's Publications, No. 19 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1959).

1961

`Re-shuffle or Declare?', TLS, 17 February 1961, 105 [letter].

[With W. B. Todd] `Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama: A Supplement', The Library, 5th ser., 16 (1961), 287-293 [250 offprints were available at special price].

1962

Review of Thomas J. Wise: Centenary Studies, ed. William B. Todd, The Library, 5th ser., 17 (1962), 263-264.

1963

`John Cleland and the Publication of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure', Book Collector, 12 (1963), 476-487 [reprinted in Libertine Literature (London, 1964) and Libertine Literature (New Hyde Park, NY, 1965)].

`Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745', Book Collector, 12 (1963), 2136, 159-177, 294-307 [reprinted in Libertine Literature (London, 1964) and Libertine Literature (New Hyde Park, NY, 1965)].

`Monthly Catalogues of Books Published', The Library, 5th ser., 18 (1963), 223-228.

[With Frank H. Ellis] `Prior's Simile', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 57 (1963), 337-339.

1964

Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (London: Book Collector, 1964) [revised reprint of Book Collector, 12 (1963), 21-36, 159-177, 294-307, 476-487].

[Ed.] English Bibliographical Sources (London: Gregg Press; Archive Press, 1964-68). Three series:

Series 1: Periodical lists of new publications
• 1. The Monthly Catalogue, 1714-1717
• 2. The Monthly Catalogue, 1723-1730
• 3. A Register of Books, 1728-1732
• 4. Bibliotheca Annua, 1699-1703
• 5. The Annual Catalogue, 1736-1737
• 6. The Gentleman's Magazine, 1731-1751
• 7. The London Magazine, 1732-1766
• 8. The British Magazine, 1746-50
• Series 2: Catalogues of books in circulation

  ---

  112

  
  
  
  • 1. Andrew Maunsell, The Catalogue of English Printed Books (1595)
  • 2. William London, A Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England (1657, 1658, 1660)
  • 3. Robert Clavel, A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the End of Michaelmas Term 1672 (1673)
  • 4. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the End of Trinity Term 1674 (1675)
  • 5. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the end of Trinity Term 1680 (1680)
  • 6. Robert Clavel, The General Catalogue of Books Printed in England since the Dreadful Fire of London, 1666. To the end of Michaelmas Term 1695 (1696)
Series 3: Printers' manuals
• 1. James Watson, The History of the Art of Printing (1713)
• 2. John Smith, The Printer's Grammar (1755)
• 3. Philip Luckombe, The History and Art of Printing (1771)
• 4. Caleb Stower, The Printer's Grammar (1808)
• 5. John Johnson, Typographia (1824)
• 6. Thomas C. Hansard, Typographia (1825)
• 7. Charles H. Timperley, The Printer's Manual (1838)
• 8. William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841)

Review of Norma Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper, Book Collector, 13 (1964), 91-95.

Review of Herman Teerink, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan Swift, Book Collector, 13 (1964), 379-380.

1965

`Defoe: A Specimen of a Catalogue of English Verse, 1701-1750', The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 277-297.

Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1965) [revised reprint, with an introduction, of Book Collector, 12 (1963), 21-36, 159-177, 294-307, 476-487].

`The Reappearance of Two Lost Black Sheep', Book Collector, 14 (1965), 75-76.

Review of Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press, The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 251-252.

Review of Terence J. Deakin, Catalogi Librorum Eroticorum, The Library, 5th ser., 20 (1965), 253-254.

1969

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969).

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 1714 (Menston: Scolar Press,

1969).

Review of The Houghton Library, 1942-67, The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 255-256.

1970

`More on Robinson Crusoe, 1719', The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 57-58.

Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description (Los Angeles: School of Library Service, Berkeley: School of Librarianship, Univ. of California, 1970).

`The Varieties of Early Proof: Cartwright's Royal Slave, 1639, 1640', The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 151-154.

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr Pope to Dr Arbuthnot, 1734, Epistle VII, To Dr Arbuthnot from Works, Volume II, 1735 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

[Ed.] Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

[Ed.] James Thomson, The Seasons, 1730 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

Review of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, ed. by O M Brack, Jr., and Warner Barnes, The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 266-268.

Review of A Ledger of Charles Ackers, ed. D. F. McKenzie and J. C. Ross, The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 65-73.

Review of Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning, The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 174-175.

1975

English Verse, 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975).

`Stitched Books', Book Collector, 24 (1975), 111-124.

1978

`Greg's "Rationale" and the Editing of Pope', The Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978), 119-124.

1979

Letter to the Editor, Publishing History, 6 (1979), 113-115 [on trade discounts].

Review of Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader, Review of English Studies, n.s. 30 (1979), 237-239.

1980

`Poems Autographed by the Author', Factotum, 8 (1980), 21-23.

1991

Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Notes