University of Virginia Library

Forster Collection MSS 48.E.5-10 (Vols. XI-XVI), Victoria and Albert Museum (hereafter cited as FC and volume number), plus others listed in Appendices A and B below. Quotations in this essay from the Forster MSS and from Dyce Letters (n. 22 below) are reproduced with permission of the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum. For a full list of the MSS known as of 1970 see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 620-704, an inventory for which everyone who tries to make sense of the Richardson letters must be profoundly grateful. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed., The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson . . . . Selected from the Original Manuscripts. . . . To which are prefixed, a Biographical Account of that Author, and Observations on his Writings, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804); hereafter cited as Correspondence.

The accusation is made by Henry Pettit, ed., The Correspondence of Edward Young, 1683-1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. xxxiv; he based it on comparison not with MSS (for the Richardson-Young correspondence, few MSS survive) but with the texts printed in The Monthly Magazine in 1813-19. Peter Sabor has asserted categorically that "no letter printed by Barbauld should be assumed to be reliably presented" ("Publishing Richardson's Correspondence: `the necessary office of selection,' " Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989], p. 241). The apparent number of letters in Correspondence is 411. The figures of 25 composite letters and their 56 originals are mine, based on collation and the notes of Eaves and Kimpel. However, as I will remark below, very few surviving MSS show Barbauld in the act of conflating letters; most of the conflations are inferred.

The general editors of the edition, to be published by the Cambridge University Press, are Tom Keymer and Peter Sabor. I am grateful to them for urging me to publish the findings in this paper and for several stimulating discussions of the Forster MSS. For other assistance I am grateful to Anna Lou Ashby and John Bidwell, of the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Correspondence, 1:vi. See Sabor, "Publishing Richardson's Correspondence," pp. 240-241.

"Mrs. Barbauld . . . altered spelling and punctuation for the sake of consistency" (John Carroll, "Introduction," Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], p. 7); "Mrs. Barbauld modernized spelling and punctuation" (Eaves and Kimpel, p. 439). John August Wood, quoting a passage from Correspondence, censures Barbauld in a note for "neglect[ing] to supply the marks closing Lady Bradshaigh's quotation" ("The Chronology of the Richardson-Bradshaigh Correspondence of 1751," Studies in Bibliography, 33 [1980]: 185n).

"Some of the markings on the extant manuscripts must be Mrs. Barbauld's, since they indicate cuts which she made" (Eaves and Kimpel, p. 439). True, but, as we shall see, there is surer ground for identifying her marks. An assumption that any mark not Richardson's must be hers seems to underlie William Sale's claim that pages 5 and 13 of the MS of "The History of Mrs. Beaumont" (Pierpont Morgan Library MA377) bear "marks and notes by Mrs. Barbauld by way of instruction to the printer" (Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of His Literary Career with Historical Notes [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1936], pp. 102-103). Manuscript pages 1 and 17-19 do indeed bear marks by Barbauld, but the marks on pp. 5 and 13 are not in her hand.

The history of the Richardson letters has been told many times. See Aleyne Lyell Reade, "Samuel Richardson and His Family Circle," Notes and Queries, 12th ser., 12 (1923): 6-7, 83-84; Carroll, "Introduction," pp. 3-11; Eaves and Kimpel, pp. 436-439; and Sabor, pp. 238-242.

"Seven or eight" was the number of volumes of Richardson-Lady Bradshaigh correspondence mentioned in the will of Richardson's son-in-law in 1787 (Reade, p. 6); apparently the will mentioned none of the other correspondences. The Catalogue of Manuscripts, Autograph Letters, Charters, &c. sold at auction by J. W. Southgate (1828) included ten large and many small lots of Richardson letters (the letters that today occupy six volumes in the Forster Collection, plus others), and by 1828 many letters had been lost.

Tom Keymer, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).

One of the few surviving MS Edward Young letters (Pierpont Morgan Library MA 2967, 10 April 1750) actually bears the date "1780"—and is so dated in its Monthly Magazine text (38 [1814]: 431). It is not printed in Correspondence.

A. N. L. Munby, The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (London: Athlone Press, 1962), p. 68, identifies Phillips as the owner of the letters auctioned by Southgate (n. 8 above).

Presumably Phillips could not have taken possession of the letters before 11 February, the date probate was completed on the will of Anne Richardson, their last owner (Reade, p. 84). On 25 February Barbauld's niece Lucy Aikin wrote to a friend that "an amazing hoard" of Richardson letters "have been purchased by Phillips & put into the hands of my aunt Barbauld. . . . She has only been a few days in possession of them" (MS 920 ROS 39, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries).

She explains the importance of chronology in an instructional essay published after her death; see Barbauld, A Legacy for Young Ladies (London: Longman, 1826), pp. 148-156.

For the quotation, see n. 22 below.

Ordinarily her written annotations on the letters are in black or brown ink. Greenink annotations in her hand occur on FC XI, ff 151v ("Roger"), 173r (an inserted "was"), 185r ("dwelt"), 273r ("Lady E has"); XII.1, ff 9r ("&") and 33r ("I"); and XV.2, f 12r ("Clarissa"). To other eyes her deleting ink may appear slate-blue or even (when it has faded) grey, but it almost always contrasts clearly with the previous inks on the letters, which are brown, black, and red.

And except for two spelling changes: one in FC XIV.2, f 35v, and one on the MS of Frances Sheridan to Richardson (see Appendix A below, Vol. 4, pp. 165-167). On XIV.2, f 35v she also inserts a semi-colon—the only instance of punctuation change I have seen in any letter marked by her.

Likewise in a note she appended to the "Orthodoxus Anglicanus" letter (Appendix A below, Volume 2, pp. 327-333), where she uses the ampersand and dash typical of her letters and manuscript poems; again, the text in Correspondence normalizes her accidentals.

Young to Richardson, 7 Aug. 1751 (Correspondence, ed. Pettit, p. 368). Or this: "Most part of what I now send I dictated to [a] female hand,—the errors of which, in spelling, the composer will easily amend" (ibid., p. 488). "Compositors . . . have always acknowledged two duties: one is to set the words of their copy in type as exactly as possible . . .; the other is to ensure that the typographical `style' of the result—the spelling, capitalization, punctuation, italicization, and abbreviation . . . accords with the conventions of the time and place" (Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography [1974; rpt. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995], p. 344).

Volume 1 was printed by Lewis & Roden, Volumes 2 and 5 by J. Adlard, Volume 3 by Richard Taylor (a friend and protegé of Barbauld), Volume 4 by T. Gillet, and Volume 6 by W. Marchant.

Barbauld to the Rev. Mark Noble, 26 Oct. 1804 (Bodleian Library MS Eng. misc. d. 158, ff 87-88). Barbauld wrote to Richardson's grand-daughter, Sarah Moodie, for family information; Moodie replied on 28 March (Reade, pp. 167, 469; Ninth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Part I [London, 1883], p. 487b). Moodie lived in Bath; Barbauld may have gone to see her in person, for there survives a note to Barbauld from "S." Hoare (said to be a daughter of David Hoare of Bath, but more likely Sarah, the daughter of the banker Samuel, of London) about procuring a house in Bath. On the verso of the note Barbauld scribbled a list of "Queries" regarding Richardson's correspondents; for example, "Who was Miss Ferrer & is her ode to Cynthia printed" and "Who was Miss Westcombe afterwards Scudamore" (The Fales MS Collection, Box 5, Folder 10; Fales Library, New York University). These queries are reminders that the public record on Richardson was a lot thinner then than now. Another list of Barbauld queries concerns Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier (Beinecke Library, Osborn Files, Folder 724). Barbauld also asked Phillips to send her books: the Biographia Britannica and John Nichols's Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer (Barbauld to Phillips, 20 Apr. 1804 [see n. 22]; Phillips to Nichols, 24 Apr. [1804; MS Eng. lett. c. 362, f 36, Bodleian Library]). This research is very similar to Samuel Johnson's for his Lives of the Poets; see William McCarthy, "The Composition of Johnson's Lives: A Calendar," Philological Quarterly, 60 (1981): 53-67.

He thus describes himself to the poet William Hayley: "I enter with Zeal into all my conc[erns] & like to superintend the progress [of] my Publications" (William Hayley MSS, xxx.15, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University; quoted by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum to whom rights in this publication are assigned). My characterization of Phillips is gathered from a reading of all 21 of his letters to Hayley, 1804-10; they must be seen to be believed. Phillips was notorious for coarseness and stinginess: "Edmund Curll the Second," William Taylor called him (J. W. Robberds, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich [London: Murray, 1843], 1:379).

Barbauld to Phillips, 20 Apr. 1804 (MS, Dyce Letters 26.E.3, f. 9, Victoria and Albert Museum; emphasis hers). The letter begins, "I should think myself much to blame if I were unmindful of your interest in this business, but in truth I have only waited. . . ." The copy for beginning Vol. 4 consists, she says, of "Delany Dewes & Donnellan"; in total, that would account for the first 119 pages of the volume.

Eaves and Kimpel say July (p. 438), but they seem to have misread the notice in The Monthly Magazine (17 [1 July 1804]: 600) on which they depend: there Correspondence is reported to have been published in May. May 26 is the date given in the publication notice to the frontispiece portrait in Vol. 1. On the other hand, The Monthly Magazine announced on 1 June (17:466) that Correspondence "is to be published in a few days." On 25 April— five days after her response to Phillips's reproaches—Barbauld predicted that she had at least two weeks' more work to do (Barbauld, ALS to "Madam" misdated 1806, ThompsonClarkson MSS 1:13(i), Friends House Library, London). Another letter of this period (exact date unknown) testifies to the stress she felt: "I am very busy; being, as I believe you know, deeply engaged in the job I have perhaps rashly undertaken" (E. C. Rickards, "Mrs. Barbauld and her Pupil," Murray's Magazine, 10 [1891]: 712).

That seems to be the case today for about 280 letters printed in 1804, but they did not all go missing in printing houses; the 1828 auction catalogue lists a number of MS letters known today only from Correspondence. The Young-Richardson letters, however, had been largely destroyed or lost by 1828, most likely during 1813-19, while being published in The Monthly Magazine.

Just how little editorial control Barbauld may really have had is perhaps suggested by one of the unprinted letters (FC XIII.2, f 31), which she annotated with the direction, "NB This letter may come after all Aaron Hill's & immediately before Gilbert Hill's." Neither the letter thus annotated nor letters by Gilbert Hill appear in Correspondence. Was she proposing, and Phillips disposing?

An anomaly of the edition may be explained by some such disagreement—in this case, a disagreement which Barbauld would have won. A group of Richardson-Lady Bradshaigh letters (by far the largest of Richardson's correspondences, and arguably the most important) closes Volume 4; Volume 5 then prints other correspondences, closing with a couple of poems and a fragment of fiction, "The History of Mrs. Beaumont." Although the edition was expected to fill "five or six" volumes (Monthly Magazine, 17 [1 March 1804]: 159), the actual sixth volume, consisting entirely of more Richardson-Bradshaigh letters, looks very much like an afterthought. Did Barbauld, appreciating the importance of those letters, demand that Phillips give her that sixth volume? Or were its letters the "new matter" that Phillips sprung on her sometime after February? The texts printed in Volume 6 are among the confused texts in the edition, with misdatings and some conflations; if 6 was an afterthought, Barbauld might have had to prepare copy for it in a rush.

The letter is Thomas Edwards to Richardson, 28 Feb. 1752 (FC XII.1, ff 43-44; Correspondence, 3:35-38). The only mark on the letter that is probably Barbauld's is an asterisk next to line 17 on f 43r.

They could also have been made post-hoc, by the press corrector, to check the continuity of the printed sheets; but I interpret them as either predictive or simultaneous with composition for two reasons: they are in different hands, and one of them is inaccurate (FC XIV.3, f 46v, "N 265" at the place where in its volume p. 261 begins), which it would not be if it recorded a gathering already printed off. See Percy Simpson, Proofreading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 50, and Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, pp. 40-43. See also n. 43 below.

"I want them to refer to," she says (see n. 22).

In Volume 3, pages 1-96 comprise gatherings B-E.

The conflated letters are 3:126-130, in which Barbauld has transferred to a letter dated (in Correspondence) 28 July 1755 a paragraph from a letter dated (in FC XII.1, f 143r) 18 June 1755; and 3:135-137, dated 12 July 1756 in Correspondence but of which the first paragraph is transferred from a letter dated 25 May 1756 in FC XII.1, f 171r. See Appendix A, below, for details of her markings on these letters.

"It does not appear . . . that copy was normally returned to the author with the proof until the later nineteenth century" (Gaskell, p. 352).

Quite possibly Phillips himself, or an agent, also intervened in the transcripts. Phillips owned the letters, and in later years he published others of them in magazines. With the magazine texts Barbauld had nothing to do; presumably they were the work of Phillips and the agent(s) he then employed. Thus, in 1808-09 there appeared in the European Magazine 28 letters between Richardson and Sarah Wescomb, twelve of which can be collated against Forster manuscripts. Three of those twelve—FC XIV.3, f 104 (European Magazine, 54 [1808]: 94-95); FC XIV.2, ff 55-56 (EM, 55 [1809]: 101-102); and FC XIV.2, f 8 (EM, 54 [1808]: 97, dated 2 Oct. 1754)—are letters whose manuscript originals Barbauld had marked up, and the third was actually printed in Correspondence (3:322-323, there dated 22 Oct.). The magazine texts of those letters differ from the Barbauld-marked manuscripts in the same kinds of ways (except that they ignore most of Barbauld's deletions) as the 1804 texts differ from their Barbauld-marked originals. Was Phillips—or his agent—responsible for these differences on both occasions?

The MS (a copy by one of Richardson's copyists) is Pierpont Morgan Library MS 1024(6); the printed texts are Correspondence, 2:32-33 (abridged), and Monthly Magazine, 41 (1816): 230-231. Eaves and Kimpel also discuss this letter (pp. 183-184n).

To be sure, both printed texts could be conflated, Monthly Magazine printing the whole of the Morgan manuscript which Barbauld abridged and then following Barbauld in adding to it the other sentence. This theory would of course call in question the accuracy of the Monthly Magazine texts of the Young-Richardson letters, which hitherto have served as the standard for condemning Barbauld's; and it would not explain why Barbauld deleted the entire Morgan letter. The problem is further complicated by the fact that the intrusive sentence occurs also in Young's letter dated 12 Dec. 1749 in Monthly Magazine 38 (1816): 430, not printed by Barbauld. Even if she could be shown to have lifted the sentence from the 1749 letter and inserted it into 1754, that would still not account for Phillips's including it in both letter texts. The Morgan MS, it must be remembered, is not Young's original letter; conceivably, the MS itself is an abridged or even conflated text.

The relation of printed text to MSS is somewhat muddied in this case by the fact that printed text sometimes agrees with HM in not observing FC's deletions and verbal changes. Barbauld certainly did not use FC; had she done so, she would presumably have printed the date of the letter. Neither, however, could HM have served as copy for the final printed text, for few of the deletions and none of the verbal changes in Correspondence are marked on it.

A third argument for multiple versions is the letter of Erasmus Reich to Richardson, dated 10 May 1754 in Correspondence, 5:297-298. Its MS counterpart today, FC XV.3, f 66, is unsigned and undated, and is headed (by Richardson) only "From Mr. . . . . [sic] Bookseller at Leipsick"; Richardson's index to the correspondence (XV.3, f 1) also leaves the name blank. Finally, the 1804 text represents an entire rewrite of Reich's weak English. Since there would have been no way for Barbauld to guess from this surviving MS or Richardson's index who wrote this letter or when, she must have used a different MS; and the most reasonable inference is that she used a version rewritten, signed and dated by Richardson himself. A notation by Richardson on FC XI, f 228v, "See in M. Reich's Letters, dated 7 7bre, 1757," shows that Richardson had compiled a file of Reich's letters.

For other indications of multiple versions, see notes 44, 45, 74, 78, and 79 below.

Richardson to Mrs. Scudamore, 1 Sept. 1758 (FC XIV.2 f 6r), referring to his own letters; Richardson assures Scudamore that her letters have been "scratched . . . thro' . . . as letters never to appear." Carroll, quoting this passage ("Introduction," p. 6), asserts that Richardson's editing was not really "as thorough as he suggested in this letter." That judgment can be based only on the MSS known today, and even then it is debatable, as we are about to see. It should be noted that early observers of the MSS perceived that Richardson had worked them over: he "arranged and corrected great part for the press," states the Monthly Magazine announcement cited in n. 25.

Notation on Aaron Hill to Richardson, 21 July 1736 (FC XIII.2, f 10v). Besides signifying removal of the marked text to another letter, Richardson's "transcribe" may also have meant "rewrite"; for when he urges Lady Echlin to send him her "Remarks" on Clarissa he asks her "not to have [them] transcribed. I ever admired the first flowings of a fine Imagination" (FC XI, f 126r). But his admiration of "first flowings" did not prevent his revising both his own and those of others. For another instance of possible conflation by Richardson (this one wrongly blamed on Barbauld), see below, note 80. And for indications that transcription did imply revision for one of Richardson's correspondents, see note 50 below.

FC XI, f 227v (2 Jan. 1758). I am grateful to Peter Sabor for bringing this and the previous passage to my attention. Some of the Richardson-Bradshaigh letters now in FC XI are evidently relics of their joint editing (a particularly messy example is FC XI, ff 19-20); others are copies by Richardson's amanuenses; still others are original letters, especially from her to him. Barbauld deserves praise for managing to make as much sense as she did of them.

Good examples of Richardson's concern for his image are provided by his notes to himself to omit or tone down passages that praise him too highly. (See Figure I for an instance.) Were he to let them stand, he would be perceived as grossly egotistical. An additional reason in support of the argument that the Young letter of 14 March 1754 once existed in another copy besides the one we now have is that the passage not printed in its Correspondence text contains fulsome praise, just the sort of thing Richardson would have told himself to omit (see p. 9 above). Barbauld, for her part. took care to avoid the "impropriety" of publishing letters "of any living character" (Correspondence, 1:v), and she disguised the names of living people.

I argued this position—that eighteenth-century editors of private letters worked to a standard of "general interest," not historical particularity—some years ago in Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 135-138. Of course, "general interest" could be satisfied by epistolary representations of friendly behavior, and thus much local detail could be preserved—as it is by both Richardson and Barbauld in their editings of the correspondence.

For Barbauld's cuts of Edwards on not receiving or sooner answering Richardson's letters, see FC XII.1, ff 12, 37, 74, 88, 108, 121, 141, and 163. The Richardson-Wescomb exchange is Correspondence, 3:281-305.

For photocopies of the five letters whose originals I have not seen and of additional MSS of three others, and for descriptions of ink colors on some of them, I am grateful to the Bodleian Library (and Dr. Colin Harris); the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Folger Shakespeare Library (and Heather Wolfe, MSS Curator); the Haverford College Library (and Diana Peterson, Archivist); the Hyde Collection (and Marcia Levinson, Curator); the Huntington Library (and Gayle M. Barkley, MSS Assistant); and the National Library of Scotland (and Dr. Iain G. Brown, Principal Curator, MSS).

Throughout the Hill letters, Hill's MS " `em" is changed to "them" in the printed texts. The change seems to follow Richardson's own precedent: on FC XIII.3, f 18r, he changes an " `em" to "them."

The MS (Hill's autograph) bears a gathering notation, "Vol. I. C 25," but the printed letter occupies pp. 87-88. In Volume I, gathering C does begin on p. 25. This letter might have been initially destined for pp. 25-26 and removed to its present, chronologically more accurate, position during production. Were Hill letters part of the "new matter" sent by Phillips that required Barbauld to alter her selection, thus changing the placement of this one?

Gathering F in Vol. I begins on p. 97, but the MS bears no gathering notation. The MS is blotted, and it bears Richardson's deletion stroke throughout; did Correspondence print from a different Richardson copy?

The original letter that went through the post. The entire absence of Barbauld marks on the MS and the change of the place-name from "Hungerford-Parley" in MS to "the Devizes" in Correspondence make it nearly certain that Correspondence prints from a different Richardson copy.

The verso of this letter bears a transcription of a passage from another letter (Young to Richardson, 27 Sept. 1757, Beinecke Library Osborn MSS Box Y, Folder 16576), as if copied for insertion into this one. The passage does not appear in Correspondence, nor have I found it in the Monthly Magazine texts. The hand of the transcription resembles that of a leading Richardson amanuensis (the hand, e.g., of FC XI, ff 259-260), but I am not sure of the identification; perhaps the transcript was made in 1780.

The MS (dated 9 April 1751) has been trimmed for mounting; perhaps the margin bore Barbauld's direction to conflate.

Dated 27 May 1750 in Correspondence; MS date (partly torn off) is "May 2[ ] 175[ ]; dated by Eaves and Kimpel [29?] May 1753. No marks by Barbauld.

MS bears no Barbauld mark except heading. The Highmore letters came to Barbauld (or Phillips) from Highmore herself (Correspondence, 1:v), hence presumably would not have undergone editing by Richardson. Barbauld probably had this and the next letter copied and did her editing on the copies. Did she treat the third letter differently because Phillips was nagging her?

Edwards's side of this correspondence is also represented by Bodleian Library MSS 1011-12, his letterbook copies. They often differ substantively from the FC texts, the letters he actually sent to Richardson. Apparently Edwards revised his letters when he transcribed them.

Gathering B in Vol. 3 begins on p. 1, but the MS bears no gathering notation. Nor any marks by Barbauld.

Gathering C begins on p. 25, but the MS bears no gathering notation.

FC is incomplete; missing text supplied by Bodleian MS 1012, pp. 1 ff (the Edwards copybook text, which Barbauld did not see). MS length refers to FC.

Gathering D begins on p. 49, but the MS bears no gathering notation.

Gathering E begins on p. 73, but the MS bears no gathering notation.

The letter containing the poem (SR to Edwards, 28 July 1754) is marked only once by Barbauld and omitted from Correspondence.

Fol. 116r bears gathering notation, "Vol. 3 F 97" (see Figure 3 and discussion).

Fol. 137r bears gathering notation, "Vol 3 G 121."

Fol. 171 is SR to Edwards, 25 May 1756 (copy), reduced by cutting to 16 lines. (Fol. 170 is another fragment of the same letter.) In Correspondence, f 171r is printed as the opening of SR to Edwards, 12 July 1756.

Including the first 8 lines, which are replaced in Correspondence (letter of 12 July 1756) by the text of f 171r. No Barbauld asterisk indicating these changes appears on either 171 or 172.

In this correspondence, Barbauld follows Richardson's lead in tidying up Wescomb's poor grammar. But tonal effects created by Richardson's underlinings of words in MS are lost in Correspondence, which does not print his underlinings. Barbauld and Correspondence also consistently misspell Wescomb's name.

Fol. 4r bears gathering notation, "Vol. 3.M 241."

Two MSS exist, HM (SR's original letter, actually posted) and FC XIV.3, ff 7-8 (his file copy). HM is lightly and FC heavily edited by him; the direction of editing is from HM to FC. Although Barbauld marked HM and not FC, the Correspondence text differs enough from both to prompt speculation that it was printed from a third SR copy.

Fol. 46v bears gathering notation, "N 265," at the place where p. 261 in Correspondence begins. The copy was thus four pages shorter at this point than anticipated.

Fol. 48r bears gathering notation, "Vol. III. n 265."

Of which Richardson had previously deleted 21; his name changes are ignored.

"I," a word often omitted by Wescomb and supplied by Richardson himself in her letters.

Fol. 59r bears gathering notation, "Vol III O 289."

There is a gap of one leaf or more between f 66 and f 67.

FC is a scribal copy. Richardson's autograph (Haverford College Library, Roberts Autographs 145) bears Barbauld's heading, "R to Mrs S.," but is not otherwise marked by her.

Fol. 156r bears gathering notation, "Vol IV K 193."

Barbauld's changes include replacing Richardson's "my divine girl" with "Clarissa."

Fol. 2v bears gathering notation, "Vol.IV. L 217," at a place which in Correspondence occurs on p. 216. A similar notation on f 2r, "214 Vol 4," does not designate or correspond to a gathering, and seems to be a post-hoc notation by a later hand.

A variant text of pp. 226-228 is given in Barbauld's "Life" of Richardson, 1:xlviii-l: evidence that this letter also existed in different versions?

Each of Barbauld's major dels (ff 6v-7r, 7v-8r, and 10-12) surrounds a gap of one leaf or more in the text as we now have it. Did she make them in response to gaps already there?

Fol. 14r bears gathering notation, "Vol IV M 241." The place of f 11 in this letter is unclear; it may belong to a different letter.

Fol. 126r bears gathering notation, "Vol V B 25" at the point where, in Correspondence, gathering C begins. FC is incomplete; Richardson's autograph file copy (Hyde Collection) agrees with Correspondence 5:21-24 (apart from the latter's deletion of 21 lines) in all but two words. Probably FC was copied from Hyde.

MS is Richardson's original letter. The total absence of editorial marks, here and on the following Echlin letters, suggests that Barbauld used different versions.

MS is heavily edited by Richardson and Lady Bradshaigh; there is a gap of 3 leaves between ff 19 and 20. Fols. 19r (lines 24-32) and 19v do not correspond to the text in Correspondence, pp. 42-47; part of that text may print from the missing leaves, but it also appears to conflate this letter with another (now lost). Although the MS is marked by Barbauld it was not necessarily copy for the conflated text, for f 19 shows no mark cuing in the other text. Did Barbauld use another version, already conflated by Richardson and Bradshaigh? A marginal note in Bradshaigh's hand reads, "This introduced a gash by restoring a former" at the point where f 19 and Correspondence part company, and on f 20 Bradshaigh's marginal text is marked by an X for insertion into the main text.

Wood, "Chronology of the Richardson-Bradshaigh Correspondence," asserts that because the Correspondence text of this letter (dated 29 March 1751) includes text from 8 April 1751 it must be "another of Mrs. Barbauld's composites" (p. 189). But FC XI, ff 2223, in Richardson's hand, clearly bears both dates; if the text is a composite it is his, not Barbauld's. Wood's confusion may have stemmed from an error by Eaves and Kimpel, who describe FC XI, ff 22-23 as the end of the letter begun 29 March 1751 when it is in fact the beginning. Perhaps Wood did not see the MS.

Gathering N begins on p. 265, but the MS bears no gathering notation. The end of the letter is missing.

Red-ink insertions by Richardson are printed in Correspondence, but his deletions are ignored.

This letter bears many marks by Richardson, including his red-ink bracket around a paragraph and a note, "Transcribe to next Letter but one for ye Sentiments."

Fol. 22 is the beginning of Aaron Hill to Richardson, dated (in another hand) 12 April 1739; it does not correspond to the letter of the same date in Correspondence, 1:2223. Eaves and Kimpel speculate that the printed text may be the latter part of the letter beginning on f 22.

Fol. 169 has been cut across the top; part of this letter is missing.

On this letter, which is in Bradshaigh's hand, SR has changed the date and inserted several short passages.

Richardson himself enclosed 35 lines in square brackets with a note, "Between [ ] transcribed to Miss P."

Eaves and Kimpel note, however, that both Correspondence and Monthly Magazine texts of Richardson to Young, 29 May 1759, include a paragraph that also occurs in Richardson to Young, 18 Dec. 1758 (known only from Monthly Magazine).

James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Box Y, Folder 16576, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.