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In Volume 2 of Correspondence were published 20 letters of Edward Young to Richardson and seven from Richardson to Young. Then, in 1813-19, presumably on Phillips's initiative, 149 Young-Richardson letters were published in The Monthly Magazine. When the two sets of texts are compared, it becomes apparent that 11 of the 20 Young letters in Correspondence were compiled from pieces of 28 different letters, often of widely different dates. It is not surprising that the blame for these conflations has been laid upon Barbauld, and manuscript evidence (slight though it is) shows that she had a part in them. But the evidence also suggests that Richardson, too, may have had a part.

Three of the total of six manuscript letters listed in Appendices A and B bear marks by Barbauld indicating an intent to conflate. This is a far higher percentage than I have seen among the other correspondences (fifty per cent as against about six), and it implies that she treated the Young letters quite differently from others—differently, even, from the Richardson letters to Young, for none of the seven she printed are known to be conflations.[88] Why would she treat this one group of letters in a way untypical of her other editing?

The reason might have arisen from the character of Young's letters. They are commonly brief, often businesslike, but also often marked by some striking epigrammatic passage (such as "I pity the Dying, & envy the Dead)."[89] Abridging such letters in order to bring forward these passages would result in little more than a string of epigrams across the page; they would lose their epistolary character. Printing the letters whole, however, would retain too much that Barbauld (and Richardson) would have thought trivial; and also, because of their brevity, would result in a greater-than-average loss of page space to headings, salutations, closings, and rules between letters—a consideration that might have mattered greatly to Barbauld if she had to contend

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with Phillips to give her more pages. Her conflations, then, might have been an expedient for dealing with a particular problem not presented by the letters of other writers—not even by Richardson's to Young.

And the possibility should not be ruled out that this expedient was suggested to her by Richardson's prior editing. I have discussed the likelihood that Young's letter of 14 March 1754 came to Barbauld in two versions, one of them presumptively Richardson's conflation (p. 203 above, and note 33). Another surviving letter, Beinecke Library Osborn MS File, Folder 17575 (Young to Richardson, autograph, 23 October 1757, a MS not known to Eaves and Kimpel), bears on its verso, in a hand that resembles the hand of a Richardson amanuensis, a passage copied from a different Young letter, 27 September 1757 (Beinecke Library, Osborn 16576 [cited above], in the hand of Young's housekeeper). Both letters went through Richardson's editorial mill, for both are headed with letter numbers and page numbers according to his system and in hands of his copyists. In this instance, ironically, Barbauld chose not to adopt the offered conflation; she printed the letter accurately as it stood. The copied passage (concerning the death of Major Hohorst) appears nowhere in Correspondence.