University of Virginia Library

6. Interpreting variant physical features

From one of my own articles I offer an instance of how the particulars
of a text can affect the impact and understanding of a book in society and
how those elements themselves are affected by factors that bibliographical
analysis can reveal. The example comes from a piece called "The Printing of
Pope's Dunciad, 1728." The question at issue was, Which Dunciad came
first? The circumstances were similar to those of another eighteenth-century
work, Rousseau's Émile, thirty-four years later: its earliest publications, with
false imprints, were an octavo and a duodecimo, printed from the same
setting of type but with precedence uncertain.[15] The Dunciad problem commanded
widespread attention from the early 1850s, when W. J. Thoms,
editor of Notes and Queries, asked readers to send him their copies of the
numerous early editions so that he could untangle the poem's history. His
account was soon challenged, but it stood until R. H. Griffith published the
first part of his Pope bibliography in 1922. Meanwhile T. J. Wise had been
preparing the Pope section of the catalogue of his own collection, The Ashley
Library, and the following year he contested Griffith's ordering of the
Dunciads. Griffith responded in the second part of his bibliography in 1927,
and in this nasty scholarly brawl Wise countered in his catalogue A Pope
Library (1931). Wise then died, conveniently allowing Griffith the last
word—at least until David Foxon revived the question in a 1958 TLS
article and in his catalogue English Verse 1701-1750 (1975). This scholarly
wrangling was one impact the forms of the text had on society, as was the
vast differential in prices that the two early forms commanded at auction.
But most germane to present purposes is the influence the texts had on perceptions
of Pope.

Much of the debate over priority had centered on a handful of textual

variations between the two formats. The most prominent discrepancy involved
the opening word: was the preferred reading "Book" or "Books"?
The plural form might be expected, for the line "Books and the man I
sing" would then parallel the beginning of the Aeneid. Thoms, however,
had decided that the singular "Book" came first and that it was Pope's
intended form. That reading provided a basis for the controversial but
widespread nineteenth-century view that Pope's writing was motivated by
petty personal animosities and that The Dunciad was not a general satire
on dulness but rather a particularized attack on one person. The 1916
Grolier Club Catalogue of an Exhibition Illustrative of the Text of Shakespeare's
Plays shows that such an impact was not simply a possibility but an
actuality: amid the editions of Shakespeare it includes what it specifies as the
"First edition, first issue" of The Dunciad, with the reading "Book," calling
this "Pope's revenge for the Shakespeare Restored of [Lewis] Theobald,"
which had attacked Pope.

By the time I started to work on the question, scholars had offered
plausible but conflicting explanations about the direction of the variants.
Literary analysis by itself could go no further. By analyzing physical features
of the copies I was able to determine that the printing of the duo-decimo
and octavo had been unorthodox, with the first half of the poem
printed first as a duodecimo and then as an octavo, and then the second
half done the same way. The plural "Books" was the original reading, with
the "s" falling out as the type was reimposed for the octavo, only to be
restored for three subsequent printings from the same setting. Methods of
analysis included those of Thoms: comparing multiple copies of what
seemed to be the same books, as well as comparing those in a wider context
against copies of the three later printings. They also involved examining
the paper (which meant of course that only the originals would suffice),
tracking running titles as they were reused throughout the book, and
analyzing the printer's ornaments, the latter in part to assess contemporary
reports about who printed the book. Of the two most significant responses
I've had, the more useful has been the one that confirmed my conclusions—
useful not because that person agreed with me, but because he had duplicated
some of my work, determined that my report of the evidence was
accurate, and judged that my interpretation best accounted for the physical
features of the book. The disappointing one came from an eighteenth-century
scholar who merely said, "They didn't do things that way." His
comment neither added insights that would strengthen my argument nor
provided objections that could be used to test my case. To refuse to reconsider
assumptions is simply not a way to advance understanding.

The bibliographical investigation of this set of the publications has
incidentally led to a number of other glimpses into their role in their
immediate culture. It has revealed that an advertisement in the duodecimo
for a poem called "The Progress of Dulness" was false—and that what investigators
might consider to be documentary evidence was actually Pope's

ruse for disguising authorship from those who had heard he was writing
what became known as The Dunciad. (The advertised title had in fact been
Pope's original one, but he changed it when he realized that the spine label
would be "Pope's Dulness.") Identification of variants brings to light social
dynamics by showing how published Keys that tried to identify the poem's
characters prompted responses from Pope in subsequent editions. The complex
but identifiable pattern of production over five impressions provides
detailed insight as well into how working-class folk went about their jobs
in a small printing shop two hundred years ago. The analysis has also revealed
modern prevarication by bringing to light a leaf that Wise had
supplied in a copy now at the University of Texas and on which he had
based some of his argument with Griffith.

Finally, the fruits of comparing copies remind us in a more general
way that, for any era, not all texts of a work are necessarily the same as each
other. When, for instance, we read Robert Darnton's oft-reprinted essay
"What is the History of Books?" our understanding is affected by the form
of the piece that we encounter, and it is increased if we are clear about what
the text is that we have before us. Did Rigaud order thirty copies of an edition
on "August 16, 1770," as most of the sources listed in note 2 above have
it, or on "6 August 1770," as only in Books and Society in History, which falls
in the middle of the series of reprintings?[16] Did crates of books have to be
"sealed at the point of entry into France" or (as Books and Society in History
uniquely indicates) were they to be "unsealed at the point of entry into
France"?[17] Is the well-known chart of "The Communications Circuit" intended
to include "Trees | Sheep | Papyrus" (as it does in the form reproduced
in Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker's essay "A New Model for
the Study of the Book"), or is it not?[18]