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WHAT DID ANNA BARBAULD DO TO SAMUEL RICHARDSON'S CORRESPONDENCE? A STUDY OF HER EDITING
by
William McCarthy
Although Anna Letitia Barbauld's biography of Samuel Richardson still enjoys the respect of Richardsonians, her editing of his correspondence has been much less fortunate. Comparing the manuscript letters now held in the Forster Collection and elsewhere with the texts published in 1804 under Barbauld's editorship as The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Richardsonians have seen differences that make a modern editor cringe.[1] The printed texts are usually abridged, without notice; they are often reworded in small ways; their spelling and punctuation are generally altered; a number of them are misdated; and twenty-five of them appear to have been spliced together out of perhaps fifty-six separate letters. One editor, contemplating the correspondence of Richardson and Edward Young as printed in Correspondence, accused Barbauld of forgery.[2] Faced with the differences between manuscript and 1804 texts, Richardsonians today regard Barbauld's edition as (at best!) worthless, and have resolved to prepare a new one.[3]
There is a further reason for a new edition. As Peter Sabor pointed out years ago, Correspondence has long been regarded, erroneously, as a complete edition. In fact the 442 letters represented in it, besides being abridged, amount to only about a quarter of the Richardson correspondence known to exist today, and a still smaller proportion of what existed in 1804. Although it fills five and a half volumes, Barbauld's is a selected correspondence—as its title page declares, and as she herself stated in her preface to it. She regarded her editorial task as primarily (in her words) "the necessary office of selection."[4]
That we need a complete edition of the Richardson correspondence, edited to modern scholarly standards by modern methods, is not in doubt. A good place to begin, however, is with a fresh look at Barbauld's editing. As her biographer-in-progress I am obliged to consider her Richardson work as part of her life. Barbauld's was the first large publication of Richardson's letters, and in the course of that labor she also became his first biographer: as Richardson's work was an event in her history, so hers was an event—even a defining event—in his. And so it will remain, for there are about 280 letters of which Correspondence seems to be the only surviving text; for them, Richardsonians are stuck with her work, like it or not. It therefore behooves us to try to understand what she did, and why she did it. Barbauld's biographer can bring to that effort information not possessed by Richardsonians. Moreover, going through the letters from the point of view, as it were, of Barbauld herself is a way to raise awareness of what happened to them before they came to her.
Hitherto it has been assumed that any difference at all between manuscript and printed text must have been Barbauld's personal doing: if even a comma was changed, she changed it.[5] That assumption agrees poorly with the known practices of eighteenth-century publishing, but it could not be specifically refuted as long as no one could distinguish her marks on the manuscripts from other people's. Richardsonians could recognize Richardson's marks on them; to recognize hers, a Barbauldian is required.[6] To appreciate the importance
At his death Richardson left seven or eight volumes of letters (according to one report; they may well have been more than that).[8] It is well known that late in life he reviewed his correspondence with an idea of publishing parts of it as commentary on his novels. Anyone who has read Tom Keymer's book on Clarissa and her readers will know how much Richardson's correspondence revolves around people's responses to his fictions;[9] Richardson was perfectly right, although rather ahead of his age, to project an edition of it. He worked through the letters with care, making copies and having copies made, marking passages for deletion, disguising names, and making stylistic changes. Most of the surviving manuscript versions of letters that Barbauld published show some sign of Richardson's prior work on them—a fact to which I shall return. The manuscripts are a mix of original letters and copies by Richardson and several copyists; thus letters by one and the same writer may appear in three different hands, with further annotations and changes in Richardson's. (Indeed, they show two distinct Richardson hands: pre- and post-Parkinson's.) A single letter may itself exhibit three or four hands. There are indications of further work on the letters by someone in Richardson's family in 1780.[10] Thus marked and re-marked, they would have posed interpretive challenges to any outsider looking at them for the first time, even in 1804.
In February 1804 the letters were bought by the bookseller Richard Phillips, and they remained his property until he sold them at auction in 1828.[11] He immediately hired Barbauld to make a selection for print, and the
At the ends of letters she often curtails the closings. In Figure 2, having deleted the sentence which led into it, she rewrites the close: "I am," the apostrophe "s" tacked onto the first "Your," and "&c A Hill" are hers. Observe that Richardson—or somebody—preceded her: the vertical stroke deleting lines 13-14, and the "Your" in line 15, are not hers.
Neither on these nor on other pages has Barbauld changed punctuation or other accidentals, except occasionally to capitalize a word that opens a
Figure 1. Forster MSS 48.E.7 (Vol. XIII.2), fol. 50r, from Aaron Hill to Richardson, 29 July 1741. Reproduced from Harvester Microforms edition (1986) by permission of V & A Picture Library.
Figure 2. Forster MSS 48.E.7 (Vol. XIII.2), fol. 47r, from Aaron Hill to Richardson, 13 April 1741. Reproduced from Harvester Microforms edition (1986) by permission of V & A Picture Library.
This, then, is how Barbauld typically marked up a manuscript. On some points her work shows an effort to get back to the original texts: thus she reinserts names that Richardson had deleted or disguised in the Lady Bradshaigh and Wescomb letters, and she must have instructed the press (by her use of contrasting ink) to observe her deletions rather than Richardson's, for that is what the printed texts usually do, except when hers reinforce his. She sought information about Richardson's forty-four correspondents, interviewed people, sent inquiries, consulted reference works, and waited—by her own account—"to the last moment" for some promised information on Lady Bradshaigh that never came.[20] She was engaged in a project analogous in some respects to Johnson's Lives of the Poets or her own British Novelists later; had it been allowed to run its course, her work would have taken considerable time.
But her work was not allowed to run its course. Phillips, the owner of the letters and the publisher of the edition, was a difficult man to work for.
Given this hurried production, with copy being distributed among five different printing houses, it should perhaps be no surprise that for most of the printed letters no manuscript texts survive.[24] But there is much to learn
More important, however, are the inferences that can now be drawn about the published texts themselves. Knowing Barbauld's markings on them, we can collate the manuscripts with the printed texts and see how closely those texts observe her markings. The results of my collation of 104 letters with their counterparts in Correspondence are presented in summary form in Appendix A below. They show that the printed texts observe Barbauld's markings closely—but that they also very often differ from the manuscripts in ways that cannot be traced to marks by Barbauld or anyone else. The differences are verbal (sometimes clearly misreadings by compositors but also sometimes different phrasings and added words) and deletional (usually of just a few words, but in one case the absence of almost one-third of a letter, in the manuscript of which Barbauld had marked no deletions at all).[26] To attribute all these differences to one person would be rash: the production of a six-volume book involves many people besides its nominal editor. Moreover, it would be rash even to assume that all the differences result from interventions during the book's production.
Many, however, clearly do result from intervention. Volume 3 presents
Figure 3. Forster MSS 48.E.6 (Vol. XII.1), fol. 116r, from Thomas Edwards to Richardson, 20 November 1754. Reproduced from Harvester Microforms edition (1986) by permission of V & A Picture Library.
Whether made before or during composition, the marks imply that the printer worked from copy that was complete and final to that point. But collation of the Forster manuscripts that correspond to Volume 3, pages 1-96, with the printed text reveals a discrepancy equivalent to thirty-three manuscript lines of text. Between Barbauld's markup of the letters and the printer's accurate notation of this gathering, there must have occurred at least some of the additional changes described above as appearing in the printed texts and including, in this case, the deletion of thirty-three manuscript lines. Recall that Barbauld, when she sent the first Edwards letters to Phillips, asked for "clean sheets of each." I take this to mean that she wanted clean copy, transcripts of the letters that would embody her deletions. She may have wanted them to read proof against.[28] Did she also, however, mark them further and send them to the press as copy? This conjecture allows the inference that the Forster counterparts of Volume 3, pages 1-96, did not serve as copy for the printer—an inference that would explain both the thirty-three line discrepancy and the fact that none of them bears a gathering notation, although they equal four gatherings' worth of printed text.[29]
On reflection, it would make perfect sense for Barbauld to have worked in this way. By using transcripts, she would have protected the original letters from printing-house damage and reduced the risk of compositorial error in setting the texts; it was a responsible way to work. The appearance of gathering marks on the manuscripts for pages 97 and later suggests, then, either that she succumbed to Phillips's demands for speed and began sending him the original manuscripts as copy or—more likely—that Phillips himself in his impatience to publish began passing her marked originals directly to the press, ignoring her request for transcripts. His impatience may also have driven her to cut corners: two of the last letters in the Edwards correspondence show manuscript evidence of conflation.[30] I emphasize manuscript
The inference of transcripts, however, still leaves questions. If Barbauld had transcripts made, did she herself then change them in the ways I have described? Some kinds of changes, such as further deletions, are probably hers; but other small changes would have occurred by error in the course of transcription, and, being pressed for time, she would have overlooked them. (If Phillips's transcriber worked in the same way that printers worked, she would not in any case have received the originals back with the transcripts and would not have been able to check them for accuracy.[31]) The inference of transcripts also cannot explain the fact that similar small differences appear between the printed texts and the manuscripts that we know served as copy for them. Any manuscript bearing a gathering notation certainly saw the inside of a printing house, yet collation of those manuscripts with Correspondence also turns up differences. It seems necessary, then, to infer changes in the very process of printing, or in proofs, or in both.
Besides the question of editorial intervention between Barbauld and the press (whether by her or by someone else), however, there is the near certainty that some 1804 texts differ from surviving manuscripts because the surviving manuscripts were never the manuscripts on which those texts were based. I refer, here, to alternative versions of letters in the collection as it came to Barbauld. Evidence of alternative versions is not rare. For example, Edward Young's letter to Richardson dated 14 March 1754 exists in a manuscript copy and two printed texts, and both printed texts give an entire sentence that the
Thus the question of multiple versions of letters in Richardson's collection brings us back to Richardson himself, the first person to edit his correspondence. He did to it—or at least contemplated doing to it—everything that Barbauld has ever been accused of doing. In his own words, he "altered, mutilated, disguised, or omitted" passages that might reveal the identities of the writers.[35] That he was prepared to rewrite his own letters is evidenced by his notation on one of them (FC XVI.1, f 57r, an undated copy of a letter "To Doct. C—"), "To be better written, if not wholly omitted." That he often altered letters (those of others as well as his own) stylistically is evident from insertions and changes in his hand throughout the Forster Collection. Although we cannot be sure that he conflated letters, he certainly had no qualms about the idea of conflating them: thus he brackets in red ink a paragraph in one letter and tells himself to "Transcribe [it] to next Letter but one for ye Sentiments."[36] During 1758 he and Lady Bradshaigh collaborated on a rewrite of their correspondence, the dimensions of which can be guessed from remarks they make to each other about their work. Thus Lady Bradshaigh, evidently responding to edited texts he has sent her for review:
I have taken away the 2 first letters, as useless, besides Indelicate, & Ill wrote. . . .
The Lines, words, or paragraphs that I wish to have restor'd, are either notch'd, or wrote in the margin, restor'd.
You will find many passages dismiss'd concerning a subject, about which, we never cou'd agree. . . .
I was doubtful whether I shou'd let remain what I said of my Dear & worthy mother, I have alter'd severall things on that Subject. . . .
Wou'd it be improper to leave what is said of a certain young friend of mine in the manner you will find it?
(21 April 1758; FC XI, f 240r)And Richardson approves this caution even though they have no intention of actually publishing the results, for some day a third party may read their correspondence: "Were ye worst to happen, . . . we are under no Obligation to any body, or to ye Public (as second or third Persons perhaps wd think themselves) to keep to ye Letter of ye Correspondence as it passed."[37]
The criteria to which Bradshaigh and Richardson appeal ("indelicate," "ill wrote," "improper") declare that Richardson's editing, like Barbauld's later, was not based on the ethic modern editors work by. He did not aim to produce historically exact texts ("ye Letter of ye Correspondence as it passed"), for such texts would include matter never meant for consumption by third parties (let alone the public at large), whether because it was private, likely to appear trivial, or likely to injure its writer's public image.[38] Richardson recognized that the value of his correspondence lay in its discussing his novels and issues raised by them. Like other eighteenth-century editors of private letters, he—and after him, Barbauld—aimed to minimize the merely local and temporary in them and thus to concentrate attention on their general interest.[39] Barbauld is working to that end when, for example, confronted with Thomas Edwards's frequent maunderings about not receiving or not sooner answering Richardson's letters, she cuts them; she sees that they lack general interest. Confronted, on the other hand, with a lengthy exchange between Richardson and his young friend Sarah Wescomb, in which Wescomb gives lame excuses for not keeping a promise to write to him and Richardson unmasks her excuses with exquisite irony, Barbauld perceives the novelistic character of the exchange and its relevance to questions
And now to the practical question that this study should try to answer: How much reliance can today's editors place on the texts of the 280 or so letters known only from Barbauld's edition?
Because the editing of each letter is, speaking statistically, an independent event, no statistically valid prediction about Barbauld's undocumented editing of any one letter can be extrapolated from her documented editing. She can be expected to have treated different situations somewhat differently, as she evidently did with the letters of Edward Young (Appendix C). In her actual performance, however, we can certainly observe consistencies, and from them we may form impressions. The following table represents in summary the information reported in Appendices A and B (excluding the Young correspondence).
| Hill | Edwards | Wescomb | Bradshaigh | Other | |
| Number of MSS in Appendix A | 6 | 43 | 16 | 11 | 23 |
| Number of MSS in Appendix B | 17 | 16 | 9 | 33 | 4 |
| Number of MSS marked by ALB | 22 | 53 | 24 | 44 | 13 |
| Number marked for conflation | 3 or 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Number bearing ALB deletions | 18 | 53 | 24 | 43 or 44 | 10 |
| Range of %s of text deleted | 7.6-60 | 4.4-61.7 | 7.1-56.9 | 1.7-67 | 6.5-43 |
| Average % of text deleted | 29.4 | 31.2 | 33.5 | 35.75 | 21.3 |
| Number bearing ALB verbal changes | 6 | 5 | 15 | 22 | 8 |
| Average number of verbal changes | 2.5 | 2 | 3.2 | 3.33 | 3.75 |
| Number of printed letters with unmarked variants | 6 | 33 | 15 | 10 | 10 |
| Average number of unmarked variants | 5.2 | 4 | 5.5 | 10.7 | 5 |
The table is arranged by correspondence because Barbauld did not treat every correspondence in exactly the same way. For example, she made, on average, slightly larger cuts in Bradshaigh-Richardson letters than in others (no doubt because some of those letters are inordinately long). Column 5, however, lumps together correspondences represented by a few manuscripts each. The numbers in Line 3 do not always agree with the totals of Lines 1 and 2 because not every manuscript text listed in Appendix A (Line 1) was actually marked by Barbauld; thus only one of the Echlin letters is counted in Line 3. I count a letter as "marked for conflation" (Line 4) if it bears a bracket or an asterisk in Barbauld's hand; if it does not, I do not count it even when I suspect the published text was conflated by her (in the case of two or three additional Edwards letters). Line 5 draws from column 4 of Appendix A and column 3 of Appendix B; the range of percentages of text deleted (line 6) is based on the ratio of the line numbers given in columns 4 (Appendix A) and 3 (Appendix B) to the line numbers given in columns 3 and 2 respectively. Line 7 states the average percentage of text deleted as the ratio of the total of columns 4 and 3 to the total of columns 3 and 2. Line 8 gives the total number of manuscripts bearing Barbauld's verbal alterations (apart from deletions); line 9 gives the average number of those alterations per manuscript, counted as numbers of words; in the Bradshaigh letters, these are often restorations of disguised names. Lines 10 and 11 derive only from Appendix A, for they attempt to summarize ways in which the published texts vary further from the marked manuscripts. The numbers in Line 11 exclude added footnotes and larger deletions of text (Edwards, 3:35-38, 41-48, 50-55, 56-58, 78-80; Bradshaigh, 4:213-217 and 6:90-96) and rephrasings and transpositions to tidy up Wescomb's grammar.
Although we cannot, from these numbers, predict anything about Barbauld's treatment of any single one of the 280-odd undocumented letters, I believe the numbers do allow four conclusions about that group as a whole, the Young letters always excepted.
1. Almost all of the 280 printed letters may be presumed to abridge their originals. The abridgements may range from as little as two lines to fully two-thirds of the original text; the average abridgement, over the group, would seem to be about thirty per cent.
2. Almost all the 280 printed letters may be presumed to depart from their originals in occasional details of wording, introduced by Barbauld into the copy sent to press, by later intervention, or by both. A good number of these variants will be restorations of names disguised by Richardson, and would therefore count today as appropriate editorial emendations.
3. Of the 156 letters that Barbauld marked (the total of Line 3 in the table), only eight or nine—that is, between five and six per cent—actually bear directions to conflate. Some fourteen letters besides those of Edward Young appear to be conflations, but the conflations, I have suggested, are not inevitably Barbauld's. I would propose that if the manuscript text of a letter whose printed text is known to be conflated does not actually bear
This conclusion carries a corollary. Just as we ought to admit the possibility that conflated texts in Correspondence may be Richardson's, we ought also to admit the possibility (even, I would argue, the likelihood) that when the published texts differ significantly from existing manuscript versions that bear no corresponding Barbauld marks, they were printed from other copies, presumably now lost, that represented Richardson's own revisions. Accordingly, the editors of the new edition should give thought to treating such Barbauld texts as authorial variants from their copytexts.
4. Finally, within the limits stated above, over ninety per cent of the 280 letters known only from Correspondence (minus the Young letters) can be trusted to represent with substantial accuracy the parts of their originals that they do print. From the standpoint of the modern editor they may not be first-class citizens of the Richardson canon (we would all prefer to have the manuscripts on which they are based), but they are not aliens to it. The problem that now confronts Richardsonians is not that of determining the relation of Barbauld's texts to their manuscript originals, but rather that of divining what relation those now-lost originals bore to the letters that Richardson and his correspondents actually exchanged.
APPENDIX A
The Manuscript Counterparts of Texts in Correspondence: Summary of Collations
Of the 442 letters represented in Correspondence, manuscript texts are known (as of 2002) to survive for 111. Of those, I have been able to study 99 originals and 5 more in photocopy.[41] The list below is arranged by volume and page (first column). The Forster MSS bear several different numerations; I use the one used by Eaves and Kimpel (second column). Manuscript lengths (third column) and amounts deleted ("dels," fourth column) are counted in lines; counts include headings, closings, and partial lines. Barbauld's marks on the manuscripts (fifth column) normally include writing a heading, as in Figure 1 above, so I seldom mention headings individually. The sixth column lists variants in the printed texts not indicated by Barbauld marks on the surviving manuscripts.
| Pages | MS Text | MS Length | ALB Dels on MS | ALB Changes on MS | Unmarked Variants |
| 19-22 | FC XIII.2, ff 16-17 | 86 | 16 (plus 23 by SR) | Adds 2 words to fill a gap | 2 words added[42] |
| 66-69 | ff 46-47 | 60 | 8 | Dels 8 words, changes 2 words, adds 2 words | 4 words del, 1 name expanded |
| 75-78 | ff 50-51 | 64 | 12 | Adds 3 words | 2 words changed (1 corrects MS error) |
| 83-86 | Princeton University AM 14598 | 46 | 3.5 | Dels, then restores opening | 8 words del, 2 added, 6 changed |
| 87-88 | Morgan Library MA3269[43] | 26 | none | Adds signature | 1 word changed |
| 97-99[44] | FC XIII.2, ff 61-62 | 49 | none | none | 4 words del (mostly in closing), 1 added |
| Richardson to Samuel Lobb | |||||
| 189-192 | Morgan Library MA1024(9)[45] | 37 | none | none | 6 lines lacking; a place-name & closing differ from MS |
| Volume 2 Richardson-Young Correspondence (see also Appendix C) | |||||
| 32-33 | Morgan Library MS 1026(6) | 32 | Seemingly all; copy was different MS? | none | 11 lines lacking; 1 sentence & 1 word differ from MS |
| 38-39 | Berg, NYPL | 25 | ALB brackets 10 lines from this MS dated 27 April 1756; they are printed on 2:39 as part of the letter there dated 21 July 1757. | none | |
| 40 | Beinecke Library Osborn 17575[46] | 15 | 1 | none | 1 word differs |
| 48 | Wellesley College | 24 | 3 words | none | 7 lines lacking; prtd as 1st paragraph of 30 April 1758 letter[47] |
| 57 | Beinecke Library Tinker 2365 | 20 | none | Inserts cross and dagger at end of paragraph 1 | Prtd text inserts 2 paragraphs where ALB's cross and dagger appear (source unknown) |
| Colley Cibber to Richardson | |||||
| 171-172 | Berg, NYPL | 25 | none | none | none |
| 172-174 | Princeton Univ. MS Taylor | 40 | none | none | 4 words differ from MS; 2 del[48] |
| Richardson to John and Susanna Highmore Duncombe | |||||
| 251-257 | Brotherton Collection, Leeds | 100 | none | Adds heading | 11 lines lacking; 7 words differ, 1 transposition[49] |
| 300-307 | BL MS Add. 20084 | 84 | none | none | 2 words changed, 2 added, 2 del; 1 transposition |
| 308-311 | Houghton Library fMS Eng. 759.4 | 47 | Dels, then stets, 8; but printed text dels 4 | Changes 3 words, adds 3; disguises a name | 10 words del, 2 added, 2 changed; 2 names disguised |
| "Orthodoxus Anglicanus" to Richardson | |||||
| 327-333 | Boston P L Ch.G 12.46-48 | 90 | 3 words | Adds a footnote | Adds heading; 3 words changed, 2 added (1 in fn) |
| Volume 3 Richardson-Thomas Edwards Correspondence[50] | |||||
| 1-3[51] | FC XII.1, ff 5-6 | 45 | none | none | 2 words added, 1 changed |
| 5-10 | ff 12-13 | 100 | 15 | none | Footnote added; 1 name restored; 3 words del, 4 changed |
| 11-18 | ff 20-21 | 124 | none | none | 2 footnotes & 1 word added; 3 words del, 2 changed |
| 19-24 | ff 25-26 | 112 | 20 | none | none |
| 24-26[52] | f 29 | 50 | 24 | none | 2 words added, 1 del, 1 changed |
| 27-29 | f 36 | 39 | 8 | none | 1 word changed |
| 30-32 | ff 37-38 | 51 | 8 | none | none |
| 33-35 | ff 41-42 | 70 | 27 | none | 3 words added, 2 del, 1 changed |
| 35-38 | ff 43-44 | 69 | none; an asterisk in rt margin of first paragraph is probably hers | none | 22 lines lacking; 1 word differs |
| 38-40 | f 46 | 47 | 16.5 | Moves closing, dels 2 words & signature | none |
| 41-48 | ff 47-49[53] | 150 | 39 (but 2 were printed anyway) | none | 1 line & 1 word del; 1 word added, 1 changed |
| 48-50[54] | f 67 | 46 | 23 | none | 1 word added, 1 del, 2 changed |
| 50-53 | ff 68-69 | 53 | 10 (incl PS) | none | 2 words del, 1 added; FC PS replaced by another text, source unknown |
| 53-55 | f 74 | 43 | 12 | none | Footnote added; 3 lines del; 2 words changed |
| 56-58 | ff 76-77 | 85 | 33 | none | 9 lines del; 4 words changed |
| 59-62 | f 78 | 52 | 15 | none | 1 name restored, 2 words del |
| 62-65 | Beinecke Library Gen MSS 237 | 66 | 12 | none | date changed, probably by error |
| 66-68 | FC XII.1, ff 84-85 | 50 | 13 | none | Footnote & 1 word added, 2 words changed |
| 68-70 | f 86 | 31 | 9 | none | 8 words del, 1 transposition |
| 70-73[55] | ff 88-89 | 77 | 25 | none | 2 words del, 2 transposed |
| 73-74 | f 90 | 52 | 29 | none | a name restored; 2 words changed; 1 transposition |
| 75-77 | ff 91-92 | 49 | none | none | footnote & 1 word added; 23 words del, 2 changed |
| 78-80 | ff 95-96 | 95 | 45.5 | none | 1 line del; footnote & 1 word added; 2 words changed |
| 81-84 | ff 104-105 | 55 | 8 | none | 4 words transposed |
| 84-87 | f 106 | 50 | 11 | none | a name restored; 1 word added, 2 del |
| 88-92 | ff 108-109 | 102 | 17 | none | Footnote & 1 word added; 3 words del, 1 changed |
| 93 (poem) | f 110[56] | 18 | none | none | author's name added |
| 94-96 | ff 112-113 | 54 | 21 | none | none |
| 96-98 | ff 116-117[57] | 47 | 29 | none | 3 words added, 1 changed |
| 98-101 | f 118 | 38 | none | none | footnote added |
| 101-103 | ff 121-122 | 47 | 13 | none | a name disguised; 2 words del |
| 104-107 | ff 123-124 | 76 | 21 | none | a name disguised; 1 word added, 3 changed |
| 107-112 | ff 128-129 | 90 | 4 | Dels "her," inserts "Miss Sutton's" to compensate for del | 1 word del, 2 changed |
| 112-115 | ff 130-131 | 80 | 27 | none | 1 word added, 3 changed |
| 115-119 | ff 132-133 | 100 | 28 | none | 9 words del, 2 added, 2 changed, 2 transposed |
| 120-123 | ff 137-138[58] | 50 | 4 | none | none |
| 123-125 | ff 140-141 | 48 | 12 | none | 6 words del |
| 128-129 | ff 142-143 | 54 | 25 | Only a 9-line paragraph is printed, as part of letter dated 28 July 1755; in that paragraph ALB dels 4 words and inserts "on account of my health"; an X marking the paragraph is presumably her instruction to a copyist. 20 lines not del by ALB are not printed. | |
| 126-130 | Hyde Collection | 71 | 13 | ALB's X in margin corresponds to place where paragraph from FC XII.1, f 143 (above) is printed in this letter. Unmarked variants: 1 word added, 4 changed, 10 del (a PS). | |
| 130-132 | FC XII.1, ff 162-163 | 101 | 17 (plus 17 by SR, & 16 ambiguous) | Inserts "am" in closing | none |
| 132-135 | ff 160-161 | 51 | 12 (plus 5 by SR) | none | a citation del; 1 word changed |
| 135 | f 171[59] | 16 | 9 | Appears to have changed date | 1 word del |
| 135-137 | ff 172-173 | 57 | 22[60] | Appears to have disguised 2 names | none |
| Richardson to Hester Mulso | |||||
| 234-238 | National Library of Scotland MS 582:595 | 83 | 23 | Restores 2 names, disguises 1; moves a phrase, shortens closing | 1 word added, a name restored |
| Richardson-Wescomb (later Scudamore) Correspondence[61] | |||||
| 239-243 | FC XIV.3, f 4[62] | 76 | 22 | Adds heading; 8 disguised or illegible names are del in black (by SR?) and not printed | 4 words changed, 4 del |
| 250-255 | Huntington HM 6894 | 105 | 17 | none; only a heading, "R to Miss Westcomb no date" | 17 lines & 41 words lacking; 11 words differ[63] |
| 256-261[64] | FC XIV.3, ff 45-46 | 106 | 42 | Adds "I am sorry" to repair a cut | 2 sentences rephrased; 12 words del, 4 added, 2 changed |
| 261-270 | ff 47-49[65] | 134 | 33.5[66] | Moves salutation, dels 8 words | 1 word changed |
| 271-275 | ff 50-52 | 145 | 63 | Adds 4 words, changes 1, then dels them with their context; dels, then restores, 4 words; adds 2 words, changes 1 | 5 words added[67] |
| 275-281 | ff 53-54 | 77 | 12 | Adds "Yours &c" | 1 transposition, 1 word changed |
| 281-285 | ff 57-58 | 106 | 34 | none | 2 words added, 4 changed, 1 del |
| 285-293 | ff 59-60[68] | 92 | none | none | 4 words changed |
| 294-298 | ff 61-62 | 82 | 35 | Adds "&c" to close | 4 words changed, 2 del, 1 added |
| 298-305 | ff 63-64 | 121 | 47 | none | 1 name restored |
| 306-310 | ff 65-68[69] | 147 | 71 | Adds 2 words, changes 4 | 4 words added, 1 changed |
| 320-321 | ff 126-127 | 53 | 25 | Adds "we" | 1 word changed |
| 322-323 | FC XIV.2, f8 | 28 | 2 (a PS) | Adds footnote; restores names disguised by SR | 6 words del, 2 added |
| 324-327 | ff 35-36 | 83 | 16.5 | Adds 4 words, changes 4; corrects a spelling, adds a semicolon | 6 words changed, 1 added, 3 del |
| 328-329 | f 7[70] | 45 | 19 | none | 1 word added; 1 transposition |
| 330-332 | ff 25-26 | 73 | 38 | Adds "My dear Sir"; changes 2 words, adds 3; reduces closing to "Yours &c." | none |
| Volume 4 Frances and Thomas Sheridan to Richardson | |||||
| 143-144 | Princeton MS Taylor | 26 | none | Inserts asterisk and fn | a contraction expanded |
| 159-164 | Harvard pfMS Thr 5.7 (27) | 92 | 6 | Changes 1 word | 2 words added, 1 del, 3 changed |
| 165-167 | Houghton Autograph File | 61 | 17 | Changes a spelling | 1 transposition; 2 words del, 1 added, 1 changed |
| 167-174 | Harvard pfMS Thr 5.7 (23) | 163 | 13 | none | none |
| Richardson-Lady Bradshaigh Correspondence | |||||
| 185-194 | FC XI, ff 153-156;[71] XV.2, f 27 | 278 | 111 | Changes 5 words, adds 1; adds signature[72] | date & 10 words changed, 2 words added, 5 del |
| 213-217 | FC XI, f 2[73] | 69 | 6 | none | 5 lines & 2 words del; a disguised name restored; 1 word changed; signature added |
| 217-238[74] | ff 3-10, 12 | 611 | 303[75] | Adds 2 words, changes SR's "amiable girl" to "Clarissa"; adds wrong signature | 10 words changed, 10 added; date del; signature corrected |
| 238-249 | ff 13-14,[76] 11, 15-16 | 306 | 130 | Adds 3 words & signature | 11 words changed, 5 added; 1 name restored |
| 250-257 | ff 17-18 | 131 | 24 | Inserts "dear" to create salutation, 12 words to create closing | 1 word added, 2 del, 3 changed; 1 transposition; a MS error corrected |
| Volume 5 Richardson to Lady Echlin | |||||
| 24-28 | FC XI, ff 126-127[77] | 96 | 30 | Reduces closing compliments to "&c" | 1 word changed |
| 33-38 | Beinecke Gen MSS Misc 1335, F-1 | 71 | none | none | 16 lines & 12 words lacking; 21 words differ[78] |
| 42-45 | same | 61 | none | none | 14 lines lacking; 1 sentence added |
| 48-51 | same | 50 | none | none | 7 lines & 1 word lacking; 1 word added |
| 58-62 | Princeton MS Taylor | 52 | none | none | 7 sentences lacking |
| 63-67 | Beinecke Gen MSS Misc 1335, F-2 | 64 | none | none | 12 lines lacking |
| 80-82 | Beinecke Gen MSS Misc 1335, F-1 | 42 | none | none | 14 lines lacking; 3 words differ |
| 86-88 | Folger Library Black Box R | 65 | none | none | 25 lines lacking; 4 words differ, 2 names restored |
| Samuel Johnson to Richardson | |||||
| 281-282 | Morgan Library MA 1009 | 18 | none | none | 1 word changed, closing shortened |
| 283-284 | Huntington HM 20821 | 51 | 22 (incl PS) | Inserts a fn | 2 words changed |
| Pages | MS Text | MS Length | ALB Dels on MS | ALB Changes on MS | Unmarked Variants |
| Erasmus Reich to Richardson | |||||
| 297-298 | FC XV.3, f 66 | 31 | none | none | Correspondence text embodies entire rewrite of FC text |
| Volume 6 Richardson-Lady Bradshaigh Correspondence | |||||
| 40-48 | FC XI, ff 19-20[79] | 76 (of MS correspond-
ing to printed text) |
40 | Dels date; changes 1 word | prints date; a name restored; 3 words changed; signature added |
| 90-96[80] | ff 22-23 | 118 | 50 | Restores a name; adds 2 words, changes 1 | 1 sentence del; a name expanded; 4 words changed, 3 added (1 corrects MS error) |
| 265-267[81] | f 148 | 44 | 24 | Restores 6 names disguised by SR | none |
| 270-276 | ff 149-150[82] | 124 | 33 | Restores 3 names, changes 3 words | 10 words added, 2 del, 2 changed |
| 276-279 | ff 201-202 | 79 | 31 | Adds 1 word to closing | 1 name restored, 1 word changed |
| 279-288 | ff 205-208 | 205 | 48 | none | 3 names restored; 3 words added, 7 changed |
APPENDIX B
Manuscripts Marked by Barbauld but Not Printed
This list derives almost entirely from the Forster Collection; I have not examined every surviving Richardson letter for signs of Barbauld's editing. Nor have I listed every Barbauld-marked letter I have examined, for not every Barbauld mark suggests an intention to edit. The 80 letters listed here are all marked in ways similar to those that were printed.
| MS | MS Length | ALB Dels | ALB Changes on MS |
| FC XIII.2, f 8 | 26 | 6.5 | Adds heading, "A Hill to R" |
| f 10 | 38 | 7 | none[83] |
| f 22 | 40 | 23 | none[84] |
| f 31 | 39 | none (SR has del entire letter, then marked it "stet") | Adds headings, "Miss Hills to R" and "NB This letter may come after all Aaron Hill's & immediately before Gilbert Hill's"; at end, adds signature, "Astrea Hill" and note, "in answer to a letter sending the 2st [sic] Vols of Pamela" |
| f 32 | 12 | 4 | none |
| f 57 | 40 | 24 | "PS*" in black ink on verso may be direction to copyist to append undeleted lines to a different letter |
| FC XIII.3, f 5 | 36 | 8 | None. Previous edits by SR include large dels. |
| f 12 | 49 | 18 | "R to AH" at head |
| f 13 | 35 | 17 | * on recto may indicate intention to conflate. |
| ff 14-15 | 59 | 9 | * on 14r and "PS*" on 15r appear to to indicate transfers of text. |
| f 16 | 30 | 6 | none |
| ff 18-19 | 58 | 10 (a further 5.5 del, then stet) | "A Hill to R" at head; inserts name, "Carteret"; changes 1 word |
| f 41 | 36 | 14 (also SR dels) | "A H to R" at head; adds 2 words to fill a gap caused by a tear; * on verso appears to mark a passage for transfer to head of letter (marked by * on recto) |
| ff 57-58 | 98 | a long note by SR at head, and a SR footnote, but no text | Inserts a footnote replacing the del SR footnote |
| f 93 | 25 | entire text | none |
| f 124 | 31 | 11 | Adds "R" to heading |
| FC XV.2, ff 74-76 | 97 | 15 | Changes "I" to "we" (twice) |
| MS | MS Length | ALB Dels | ALB Changes on MS |
| Penn Historical Soc, MS Gratz 11/4 | 19 | none | Brackets 6 lines (as if for selection; see n. 83 for similar marking by SR) |
| FC XV.2, f 12 | 41 | 13 | Inserts 4 words to compensate for cuts |
| FC XII.1, f 9 | 17 | 4 | none |
| f 11 | 15 | 5 | none |
| ff 14-15 | 90 | 11 | none |
| f 24 | 26 | 9 | none |
| ff 27-28 | 60 | 24 | none |
| ff 33-34 | 53 | 11 | none |
| ff 39-40 | 49 | 5 | none |
| f 58 | 58 | 23 | none |
| f 75 | 41 | 22.5 | none |
| ff 93-94 | 56 | 34.5 | none |
| ff 134-135 | 65 | 30 | none |
| f 144 | 36 | 7 | none |
| f 154 | 39 | 8 | none |
| f 166 | 35 | 12.5 | Adds "R to E" at head |
| ff 167, 169[85] | 54 | 7 at least; 17 more uncertain | Adds "E to R" at head, "X" in margin on 167v |
| ff 168, 182 | 49+ | 29 at least | ALB marks "X" in margin on f 168 (intending to conflate with above letter?) |
| FC XIV.3, f 71 | 34 | 8 | Reduces close to "Your's &c" |
| ff 72-73 | 82 | 42 | Inserts 2 words at head and 1 word in text |
| ff 74-75 | 71 | 22.5 | Inserts 2 words, changes 2, capitalizes 1 (new sentence following a del) |
| f 104 | 43 | 5 | none |
| ff 113-114 | 48 | 17 | Adds 3 words, changes 4 |
| ff 135-136 | 69 | 17 | none |
| FC XIV.2, ff 9-10 | 65 | 37 | none |
| ff 55-56 | 82 | 18 | Changes 1 word |
| f 58 | 22 | 10.5 | Adds heading, "Mrs Scudamore to R" |
| FC XI, f 138 | 43 | 6 | Adds "to R" to heading |
| ff 142-143 | 77 | 14 | Adds "Lady Bradshaigh to R"; restores 2 disguised names |
| ff 145-146 | 55 | 14 | Restores 2 names; heads letter "Lady Bradshaigh to R" in error, corrects to "Mrs Woodhurst to R" |
| ff 151-152 | 85 | 57 | Restores 1 name |
| ff 157-158 | 119 | 44 | Restores a name, moves closing, adds signature |
| ff 163-164 | 81 | 20 | Dels disguised names, inserts closing formula |
| ff 165-166 | 153 | 83 | none[86] |
| ff 173-174 | 53 | 31 | Inserts 1 word to fill a gap |
| f 175 | 71 | 16 (plus 15 more del and then stet) | Adds heading |
| f 177 | 52 | 16 | Adds heading |
| ff 178-179 | 104 | 18 (plus 11 more del and then stet) | Adds heading |
| ff 181-182 | 90 | 51 | Adds heading |
| f 183 | 42 | 13 | none |
| ff 185-186 | 105 | 62 (plus 9 more del and then apparently stet) | Changes 1 word |
| f 187 | 46 | 4 | none |
| f 188 | 63 | 11 | Adds heading |
| ff 190-191 | 71 | 29 | none |
| ff 195-196 | 73 | 32 | Adds heading |
| f 197 | 39 | 12(?) | Restores disguised name in heading |
| ff 203-204 | 72 | 37 | Restores 2 names |
| ff 209-212 | 218 | 51 | Adds heading |
| ff 213-216 | 237 | 105 | Adds heading |
| ff 217-218 | 91 | 45 | none |
| ff 223-224 | 78 | 49 | Adds heading, moves signature |
| ff 225-226 | 117 | 64 (plus 3 more del and then stet) | Adds heading |
| f 234 | 58 | 1 (plus 6 more del and then stet) | Restores a disguised name |
| f 235 | 34 | 9 | Adds, then dels, heading |
| f 236 | 48 | 32 | Adds heading |
| f 237 | 22 | 5 (of which she stets 3) | Adds heading, restores a name |
| ff 257-258 | 73 | 42 | Changes "him" to a name |
| ff 259-260 | 86 | 7 | Moves date to head |
| f 261 | 54 | 19 | Adds heading |
| ff 272-274 | 133 | 35 | Adds 3 words to repair a cut |
| Beinecke Library Gen MSS 237, Box 5, F 231 | 92 | 22 | Dels 5 names; inserts "I," "my dear Sister," "a late" (replacing "this" in MS), & "friend" (replacing "Sister") |
| Princeton U L MS Taylor | 156 | 11 | none |
| Princeton UL MS Taylor | 87 | 19 | Dels a name; brackets 21 lines in margin of last page, as if for transfer elsewhere.[87] |
APPENDIX C
The Richardson-Edward Young Correspondence
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
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.
Notes
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The letter containing the poem (SR to Edwards, 28 July 1754) is marked only once by Barbauld and omitted from Correspondence.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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