University of Virginia Library

II

Following Johnson's death in 1784, Steevens continued his work on Shakespeare. In 1785 a new edition of the Johnson/Steevens Shakespeare

appeared, and although much of the editorial work had been entrusted to Isaac Reed, Steevens contributed new notes to all of the plays.[38] Steevens would later resume direct editorial control and in 1793 published another edition, in large part as a response to Malone's edition of 1790. In 1800 Steevens died while working on still another edition, which Reed published in 1803 as containing "the last improvements and corrections of Mr. Steevens."[39] What may be surprising is that Steevens's involvement with the Dictionary also continued long after Johnson's death.

The copyright held by the original proprietors of the Dictionary (Longman, et al.) had expired[40] and, while their fifth edition folio—essentially a reprint of the fourth—was still selling at £4.10.0, two substantially cheaper competing editions began to appear in the fall of 1785. James Harrison offered a folio reprint of the first edition supplemented by a life of the author in one hundred weekly numbers at six pence each, while John Fielding published the first English quarto edition in forty-eight weekly numbers at a shilling apiece.[41] Longman quickly responded:

Before the end of the year the proprietors published new and competitively priced quarto (Q6) and folio (F7) editions of the Dictionary, both in weekly numbers, which incorporated Johnson's "last improvements." That the changes were mostly minor and numbered only about two hundred and fifty went understandably unremarked. But such was the cachet of these "final revisions" that Harrison began to advertise, falsely, that his edition was also based on the Reynolds copy. (Since Harrison's was actually a reprint of the

first edition of 1755, it failed in fact to include even those revisions Johnson had made for the fourth edition of 1773.) If the number of surviving copies is any indication, Longman and the other proprietors, with their concurrently published sixth edition quarto and seventh edition folio, easily prevailed over the competition.

Equally unremarked was that the proprietors had procured "a corrector for the press [who took] some independent and fairly intelligent care that the sixth and seventh editions should be accurately printed."[43] It is highly probable that this corrector was George Steevens whose diligence in this regard was renowned, Malone having called him "one of the most accurate correctors of the press . . . in the world."[44] The evidence consists of changes which had long before been suggested by Steevens in the BL copy but which appear for the first time in the 6th edition.[45] Several are relatively minor corrections in punctuation and spelling. At Aim 5 in the last line of the quotation from Henry IV Part II "intreasur'd" is emended to "intreasured," restoring a metrically necessary syllable. At Air 5 (which had been sense 4 in F1), in the first line of the Lear quotation "vengencies" is altered to "vengences." At Anatomy 5, in the quotation from Comedy of Errors "a needy hollow-ey'd" gains a needed comma. And at To Deck 3, in the second line of a quotation from Spenser, "Fit to adorn the head, and deck the dreary tomb," "head" is corrected to "dead." Such seemingly insignificant variants might easily be laid to the vagaries of compositorial practice if we did not have Steevens annotations in the BL copy to indicate that they were in fact deliberate corrections.

A more substantive example is found at To Case 2 "To cover as a case" which Johnson illustrates with a quotation from Steevens's favorite play: "Then comes my fit again, I had else been perfect; / As broad, and gen'ral, as the casing air, / To saucy doubts and fears. Shakesp. Macbeth." Johnson had, as he so often did, abridged the quotation. In the BL copy Steevens marked the third line for deletion—not to save space, but to preserve sense—but the line is retained in F4. In the 1773 Johnson/Steevens the passage reads in full: "Macb. Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect; / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock: / As broad, and general, as the casing air: / But now, I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears. But Banquo's safe." Steevens certainly understood Johnson's method of compressing quotations; but in the "Preface" to the Dictionary Johnson himself acknowledged that "The examples are too often injudiciously truncated," and this is just such an example. The excision of the second line creates no difficulty, but without the fourth line the final phrase is rendered nonsensical. In Q6 the quotation, although further truncated, for the first time makes passable sense. The range of Steevens's literary expertise is further illustrated by his handling of Direful. In F1-F4 an illustration from Pope read: "The

wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring / Of all the Grecian woes, O goddess, sing." In the BL copy Steevens crosses through the quotation, and offers a different version: "Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess sing." As it happens, both versions are authorial. The former had been the original opening of Pope's translation of the Iliad, and the lines were printed thus in the quartos and folio editions of 1715 and the first and second octavo editions of 1720. The latter version represents a revision which first appeared in the third octavo edition of 1732.[46] While Steevens may have been unaware of the earlier version and believed Johnson's rendering to be erroneous, I find it more likely that he preferred the revised lines as representing Pop's final thoughts. Whatever the case, in Q6 the lines read: "Achilles' wrath, to Greeks the direful spring / Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly Goddess! sing."

The evidence of Steevens's hand is apparent in Q6, but by 1785 the BL materials were in the possession of Charles Marsh, who procured them when Johnson's library was sold. Since Steevens and Marsh were both Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries, however, they must have been well acquainted, and it seems plausible that March would have allowed Steevens direct access to the materials he had annotated.[47] It is also possible that, with his prodigious memory, Steevens simply recalled some of the infelicities that had drawn his editorial attention in the BL copy but had remained uncorrected in the fourth edition. Whatever the case, it appears certain that Steevens himself saw the new editions through the press. And the Puck does not stop here.

Over fifty years ago William Todd characterized "the proper discrimination and ordering of multiple editions" as "perhaps the most vexing" problem facing the bibliographer of eighteenth-century literature, asserting that "undenominated reprints are to be suspected everywhere," and that one may suspect "the presence of two or three concealed editions in practically every major production in the eighteenth century. . . ."[48] Such is the case with the sixth edition of A Dictionary of the English Language. In his magisterial A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, J.D. Fleeman notes that this edition

Fleeman's explanation that variant press figures signal reimpression or reimposition depends on the unspoken assumption that the printing of the sixth edition took place exclusively from 1785-87, with the further implication that large quantities of type were kept standing. But in fact both physical and archival evidence shows that while the title-page date of 1785 is maintained, the sixth "edition" was reprinted from new settings of type several times over the next ten years. A full account of the complex printing history of this edition is beyond the scope of this essay, but several preliminary observations may be made.

The evidence that type was reimposed from one format to another comes directly from the Strahan ledger, where there are notations indicating savings from what Strahan calls "overrunning," both from quarto to folio and vice versa (fol. 97v). But, within the quarto itself, I have found no evidence that suggests copies issued in parts were from impressions separate from those issued complete.[50] Publication in weekly numbers began 19 November 1785 and ran through 30 June 1787. But on 17 February 1787 the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser ran the following advertisement:

With printing now completed, the sixth edition was available in several forms. While distribution of the printing-in-parts proceeded, the proprietors issued the edition as completed volumes as well, following the general practice with serial publication.[51] Later gatherings—those of the latter parts of Vol. I, most of Vol. II, and perhaps the title page and preliminaries as well— would then have been printed in sufficient quantities to satisfy both forms of publication, while Vol. I gatherings which had previously been sold out in parts would have been reset and printed off as necessary to make up complete sets. (Type for the earlier gatherings is unlikely to have been left standing

for sixteen months.) Six of the nine Q6 copies I have examined exhibit a pattern that supports this hypothesis: they are essentially invariant in the latter portions of Volume I and the whole of Volume II, while in the first two-thirds of Volume I most gatherings are found in two different type settings and a few in three.[52]

Q6 provides a tremendous quantity of press-figure data since there are 141 gatherings in Vol. I, 137 in Vol. II, with the majority figured in both formes. One feature that may have contributed to Fleeman's puzzlement is that some sheets from a single typesetting are differently figured, most often with identical figures in one forme, and variant figures in the other. In comparing the BL and DVM copies I noted ten such occurrences in Vol. I; perhaps significantly, all but one occur between 5Q and 6T and the other is found in gathering `a' of the preliminaries, which would have been printed shortly after the completion of 6X, the final sheet of Vol. I. (In Vol. II there are only four examples, more randomly assorted.) I have also found examples where, coincidentally, formes from different settings of type have the same figure in roughly the same location on the page. And on at least one occasion a press figure actually undergoes a stop-press correction.[53] But in most cases in the sixth edition, different press figures imply different settings of type, and individual copies may be composed of a dizzying variety of reset and identical gatherings, depending on the number of copies of particular earlier gatherings that were still on hand when the decision was made to issue the edition in complete volumes. This possibility is further complicated by an advertisement that appeared on 21 December 1787: "GENUINE EDITIONS, . . . On Saturday, January 5, 1788, will be published,/Number I. of the Folio, and Number I. of the Quarto/Edition of/A Dictionary of the English/Language . . ." (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser). The advertised "Conditions" are that the parts, consisting alternately of three and four sheets, will be issued weekly until completion, the folio to be composed of eighty sixpenny numbers, the quarto of seventy-eight. The process of serial publication appears to have begun again, while complete editions are still being offered at two guineas. Whether this new issue represents an actual reprinting of the parts or a new offering of parts left from the earlier printing has yet to be established, but entries in the Strahan ledgers which are not cited by Fleeman support the former interpretation. Under the heading "Johnson's Dictionary 4to" is an entry dated January 1789 which records charges for printing a run of 2000 copies of signatures c-k—the preliminary gatherings of Vol. I which cover "The History of the English Language"—

and signatures "B-3Z" of Vol. II.[54] These are the same signatures Strahan had printed in 1786 when the run had been between 3000-3500 copies. In a second ledger, again under the heading "Johnson's Dictionary 4to," are additional entries which record the printing of these same signatures yet again, with the prelims printed in January 1791 (2000 copies), sigs. "B" and "C" in July of 1793 (2000 and 1500 copies, respectively), and "D-Z" in December of 1795 (1275 to 1325 copies).[55] The copy of the sixth edition held by the University of Virginia must come from this last printing, since much of it is printed on paper whose watermark is the date "1794".[56] This edition (for it comes from a separate setting of type) is apparently intended to be indistinguishable from the earlier printings. The title-page date remains 1785 and the list of proprietors is identical to that in Vol. II of the earlier printing, even though at least four—L. Davis, W. Owen, W. Richardson, and J. Murray—were dead by 1794.[57] The collation also duplicates that of the earlier issues:

Even the anomalous parenthetical signings which intrude in the alphabetical sequence of the preliminaries and the curious signature "4F-M" which appears on 4F1 are repeated. This puzzling state of affairs may be explained in part by a comment made by Andrew Millar—bookseller, publisher, and one of the original proprietors of the Dictionary—concerning Hume's essays: that he regarded them as classics and never numbered editions when there was little need to "puff" them.[58] Todd concludes that "A close facsimile was, then, what [the booksellers] oftentimes attempted to produce.[59] The Dictionary would certainly have been considered a classic—and, particularly in the unabridged quarto format, it continued to be quite a profitable venture for its proprietors.[60] With the cachet of containing the "last improvements"

from Dr. Johnson's hand, the sixth edition would have required no additional puffing. But the proprietors apparently saw the Dictionary as something more than a cash cow, for as they reprinted it they continued to have it improved— almost certainly by George Steevens. In the 1795 printing of the sixth edition several corrections which had been proposed by Steevens over twenty years previously appear in a printed edition of the Dictionary for the first time. All are textual corrections to Shakespeare quotations: Under Censer 2, in a quotation from Taming of the Shrew, "Here's snip, and nip, and cut, and slish, and slush," "slush" is corrected to "slash." Under Chamberlain 3, in the quotation, from Macbeth, "We will with wine and wassail convince," the word "so" is inserted after "wassail." In the Macbeth quotation under Farrow, "Pour in sow's blood that hath litter'd / Her nine farrow," "litter'd" is altered to "eaten." Under To Fast, in the Cymbeline quotation "Last night the very god shew'd me a vision," "god" is corrected to "gods." And under Green adj. 4, in a quotation from Romeo and Juliet, "Lies festering in his blood," "blood" is corrected to "shroud."

Since the annotated British Library materials end with the letter "I/J" they do not include even all of Volume I of the folio Dictionary, which ends with the letter "K", and Vol. II is not represented at all. It is possible that Steevens annotated a complete copy, and that the end of the first and all of the second volume have been lost. I have as yet made no attempt to collate Vol. II, either between F4 and Q6, or between the early and late printings of Q6. But I have done so for the letter "K," which runs only to a dozen pages in the quarto edition. I was not surprised to find that between the early and late printings of Q6, there are two substantive corrections, both to quotations from Macbeth. [61]

Most if not all of the changes Steevens introduced in seeing the successive editions through the press would have gone unremarked by readers. As Johnson had reassured the public in the "Advertisement" to the revised fourth edition of the Dictionary, the owner of a previous edition "needs not repent; he will not, without nice collation, perceive how they differ. . . ." Yet the regard in which the proprietors held Johnson's Dictionary as a cultural icon apparently dictated that if they were to reprint it, they should also improve it. And George Steevens, through his anonymous ministrations carried out over a period of nearly twenty-five years, sought "not merely to obtain justice to Shakespeare," but justice to Johnson as well.