The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810

T H E M O S T D I S R E P U TA B L E T R A D E This page intentionally left blank The Most Disreputable Trade Publi...

Author: Thomas F. Bonnell

17 downloads 635 Views 8MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

T H E M O S T D I S R E P U TA B L E T R A D E

This page intentionally left blank

The Most Disreputable Trade Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810 T H O M A S F. B O N N E L L

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Thomas F. Bonnell 2008 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–953220–9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Emily

Acknowledgements The trail of my indebtedness is a long one. I am grateful to every librarian who accommodated my research, however numerous the items I wished to examine. ‘You need to see them all?’ was asked more than once with requests involving a 68- or 124-volume collection, but the books always came. I visited the British Library, the Senate House Library at the University of London, the Bodleian Library and John Johnson Collections at Oxford University, the Cambridge University Library, the Liverpool City Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Record Ofﬁce, the Advocates Library, the Edinburgh City Library, the Edinburgh City Archives, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Glasgow University Library, the Mitchell Library, the University of Aberdeen Library, the Aberdeen Public Library; the National Library of Ireland, and Trinity College Library; the libraries at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, Duke University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Yale University (the Beinecke, Sterling, Medical, and Lewis Walpole Libraries), Harvard University (the Houghton, Widener, and Law Libraries), the Henry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the New York Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the Cleveland Public Library; the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Library of Congress where, in view of the daunting number of call slips to be processed, I was allowed to enter the stacks and work from the shelves. For the assistance I received everywhere I am deeply thankful, though special mention is warranted for the late Hugh Amory, Charles Benson, Iain Beavan, Iain Brown, Tom Ford, Jim Green, Brian Hillyard, Tom Horrocks, Richard Ovenden, Alice Schreyer, and the late Lady Eccles of Four Oaks Farm. For help with my illustrations I am grateful to Nathan Lunstrum, Greg D’Haeze, and Denise Massa. Except where otherwise noted, the items pictured are my own. Along the way my work was supported by an NEH Fellowship (year-long) and Stipend (summer), grants from the Bibliographical Society of America and from the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame in conjunction with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and a Mellon Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. I have also received grants from Saint Mary’s College, where the good services of Jill Hobgood in Interlibrary Loan, and fruitful collaborations with former students Kathleen Urda and Renée Young, must also be gratefully noted.

Acknowledgements

vii

Two of my chapters are revisions of articles. Chapter 4 has been reworked from ‘John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: The “Little Triﬂing Edition” Revisted’, Modern Philology, 85 (1987), 128–52, and Chapter 5 from ‘Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell’s “Connected System of Biography” and the Use of Johnson’s Prefaces’, Studies in Bibliography, 48 (1995), 193–228. By post, e-mail, and phone I have pestered friends and other kind souls for information, including Nancy Birkrem, C. Y. Ferdinand, Bob Hohl, Samuel Huang, Lisa Libby, Gavin Murdoch, Eric Nye, Richard Oram, Mark Purcell, Cathy Rodriguez, Ruth Rogers, Tim Sauer, Eleanore Stewart, and Jim Tierney. Some have generously allowed me to look at or borrow books in their possession. For similar help, whether indulging me via e-mail, alerting me to items of interest, or letting me sit down with stock in their shops, I am indebted to several book dealers and auctioneers, including Stuart Bennett, James Burmester, James Cummins, Éammon de Búrca, Christopher Edwards, Alan Grant, Gary Kane, Patrick Marrin, and Alan Rankin. At various stages I have beneﬁted from the advice of Bruce Redford, James Raven, Rick Sher, and the anonymous readers for OUP, and am indebted to Margaret Ezell, Jim Fuchs, Ken Price, and Richard G. Peterson for their encouragement along the way. And for their boundless generosity and repeated acts of assistance in every category imaginable, I am beholden to Michael F. Suarez, SJ, Bill Zachs, Chris Fox, and David Vander Meulen. Two of the people I most wished to read my work are now gone. Gwin Kolb and David Fleeman were dear, wise friends, and their deaths have deprived me of the chance to hear them tell me what they think. Words cannot repay the love and support of my parents, and I fondly recall my father’s help at the very outset in photographing the plates in Bell’s Poets at the University of Minnesota. And my greatest blessing was having been able to count on the unfailing love, patience, and humor of my wife Emily, and the inspiration of our daughter Zoë, who is life itself.

This page intentionally left blank

Contents List of Tables List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction: A New Sensibility for Classics

xi xii xiii 1

1. Our Native Classics, Complete and Uniform After the Greek and Roman Classics A Classical Apollo for Britannia Diff ’rent Sorts of Fare from a Miscellany Copyright and Canon A Reputable Trade—or Pitiful, Beggarly, Precarious?

7 9 19 24 30 34

2. The Elzevirs of Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis Gilt by Association The Character of a University-Printer Enterprising Scotsmen and the Impartial Briton An Elzevir for English Poetry Readers Glad to have them

39 41 46 51 55 62

3. William Creech and John Boyle: The Classics Spread Across Scotland The Most Celebrated British Poets As Great a Pirate as the Worst Beattie’s Place among that Fraternity All that is Valuable of the Whole English Poets The Best Schemes the Most Ruinous

68 70 75 81 87 90

4. John Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited In the Elzeverian Stile Pictures of the Highest Authority The Progress of Piracy The Brilliancy of its Reception Booksellers Printing upon One Another

97 98 106 116 124 130

5. Johnson’s Prefaces and Bell’s Connected System of Biography The Magnum Nomen An Apology to the Partners That Part which you might Call Piracy Bell’s Use of Johnson’s Prefaces Additional Materials Interwoven

134 135 140 144 153 158

x

Contents 6. The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry: William Strahan, Joseph Wenman, et al. All the English Poets of Reputation A Considerable Degree of Demand The Parnassian Library of Wenman Every Syllable Written by the Respective Authors Rendering the Collection More Complete

169 170 175 180 186 189

7. Robert Anderson’s Comprehensive View of English Poetry Active and Liberal Cooperation between Publisher and Editor Appearing as Editor Scatter’d Gems that Round Parnassus Shine The Cheapest and Most Perfect Edition of British Poets Wanting to Complete the Arrangement

199 200 207 211 216 223

8. Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library The Important Object of Easy Purchase Stamped with Universal Approbation Ardour and the British Bard Attracting the Notice of the Artist Ornamental for the Book-Case

227 228 239 248 253 261

9. John Sharpe and Alexander Chalmers: A Body of Standard English Poetry The Truly Eminent English Poets Deviation from Preceding Systems To the Curious in Prints The Minnow Tribe Swims on Perpetuating Editions in this Manner

266 268 273 282 289 297

10. Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire The ‘Old Canon’: How Sudden and How Rigid? Classically Fugitive Rejecting the Female’s Rightful Part English Canons and Scottish (and Irish) Bards Circulation of the British Classics

309 310 316 321 326 336

Epilogue: A Library to Every House

344

Select Bibliography Index of Booksellers, Printers, Publishers General Index

353 371 375

List of Tables 1.1. Multi-volume collections of English poetry, 1765–1810 2.1. The English Poets of Foulis 3.1. Poets in the Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen series 4.1. Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain: printing and publication 4.2. Portraits in The Poets of Great Britain 4.3. Early reprints of The Poets of Great Britain 5.1. Bell’s use of Johnson’s Prefaces 5.2. Kinds of sources for Bell’s lives 6.1. Bell’s ‘classics’ and the London trade’s ‘poets of reputation’ 6.2. Wenman’s Poetical Magazine and ‘Cheap Editions’ 6.3. Proprietors of the successive editions of The Works of the English Poets 6.4. Later reprints of The Poets of Great Britain 7.1. Trade orders, with prices, for Bell & Bradfute’s The Works of the British Poets 8.1. Portraits in Cooke’s Select British Poets 8.2. Roster of Cooke’s ‘Arrangement of the Poets preparing for the Press’ 8.3. Cooke’s Select British Poets: record of production 8.4. Delivery of the engravings in nos. 1–21 of Cooke’s Select British Poets

10 58 91 100 112 129 154 160 172 184 190 195 218 234 240 242 254

9.1. Sharpe’s The Works of the British Poets, as published 1805–8 and 9.2. 9.3. 9.4. 9.5. 9.6.

reissued 1818 Sharpe’s Supplement to the British Poets, as published 1808–9 and reissued 1809, 1818 Sharpe’s Translations, as published 1809–1812 and reissued 1818 Cawthorn’s reprints of The Poets of Great Britain Bagster’s Edition: The Poets of Great Britain packaged in two forms The ‘standard English poets’: a ﬁfty-year overview

276 281 283 294 295 299

List of Illustrations 1.1. Pocket editions of the English poetical classics. 1.2. Handbill for Bell’s edition listing authors, dates, prices, and bindings. 1.3. Frontispiece and dedication to Cooke’s Select British Poets. 2.1. Cooke’s edition of Pope as a prize awarded at Classical School. 2.2. A set of the Foulis Poets in the traveling library of Sir Robert Chambers. 3.1. John French’s title-page on Boyle’s edition of Dryden. 4.1. Bell’s letterpress title-pages for Thomson. 4.2. Portrait of Butler from the library of Lord Chesterﬁeld. 4.3. Bell’s ﬁrst portrait of Butler and its replacement. 4.4. Replacement portrait of Pope, as distributed with Cowley’s poems. 5.1. Manuscript index to ‘Johnson’s Poets’. 6.1. Wenman’s title-page for Thomson. 7.1. Prospectus and specimen sheet for Anderson’s edition. 7.2. Handbill summing up the contents of Anderson’s edition. 8.1. Cooke’s ‘stipple style’ engraving on a plate for Tickell’s poems. 8.2. Wrappers, front and back, to No. 74 of Cooke’s edition. 8.3. The elimination of ‘British Bards’ from Cooke’s title. 8.4. Erotic and horriﬁc elements in plates for Thomson’s Summer and Winter. 9.1. Wrappers, with prospectus, to ‘Sharpe’s Edition of the British Poets’. 9.2. Title-page, recto, and verso, of Nicholson’s edition of Lyttelton. 9.3. Anti-slavery excerpt on Nicholson’s cards, with child’s writing on verso. 9.4. One of Bell’s vignettes for Cowley, later reassigned to Dryden’s Juvenal. 10.1. Engraved title-page to Morison’s edition of Colville. 10.2. Engraved title-pages to Ossian’s Poems, 1799 and 1803. E.1. Armorial bookplates in copies of Bell’s edition. E.2. Fingerpost and index in a copy of Night-Thoughts (Bell’s edition).

14 18 24 42 63 95 105 109 110 115 143 182 203 215 233 238 251 258 274 291 292 297 334 335 346 348

Abbreviations Manuscript Collections AL AUL BL ECL GUA GUL NLS SRO

Advocates Library, Edinburgh Aberdeen University Library The British Library Edinburgh City Library Glasgow University Archives Glasgow University Library National Library of Scotland Scottish Record Ofﬁce

Newspapers and Periodicals AJ AR BC CAUEP CM CR DA DEP EA EEC GC GJ GM HJ LC LEP LyEP MC MP MR PA

The Aberdeen Journal; and North British Magazine The Annual Register British Critic Constitution: or, Anti-Union Evening Post Caledonian Mercury Critical Review Daily Advertiser Dublin Evening Post Edinburgh Advertiser Edinburgh Evening Courant Glasgow Chronicle Glasgow Journal The Gentleman’s Magazine Hibernian Journal; or Chronicle of Liberty The London Chronicle London Evening Post Lloyd’s Evening Post Morning Chronicle Morning Post Monthly Review Public Advertiser

xiv QR SEA TLS

Abbreviations The Quarterly Review The Star and Evening Advertiser Times Literary Supplement

Other References DNB ESTC NCBEL NUC OCLC ODNB OED RLIN

Dictionary of National Biography English Short Title Catalogue New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature National Union Catalogue Online Computer Library Center Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Research Libraries Information Network

Introduction: A New Sensibility for Classics Near the end of 2006, Harvard University Press produced a catalogue to mark the 500th volume in its Loeb Classical Library, listing all the titles in the series and offering discounts, with a gift premium on orders of ﬁve or more volumes. Earlier in the year, Penguin Books also observed a milestone, its sixtieth anniversary, ﬂanking its logo with ‘1946’ and ‘2006’ in advertisements, and reproducing photographs of books from those years (Homer’s Odyssey in 1946, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in 2006) on the cover of its Literature Catalog 2006. 1 The former of these enterprises continues a publishing tradition begun half a millennium ago by Aldus Manutius, the latter a tradition traceable to the last third of the eighteenth century. The strong kinship between the two can be seen when the TLS devotes an issue to ancient history or literature, its customary advertisement for the Loeb Classical Library often being echoed by one for the Penguin Classics. 2 The publishers who originated the second tradition were practitioners of the ﬁrst: Robert and Andrew Foulis, the ‘most important of the British classical publishers’ in the eighteenth century. 3 Their pocket editions of English poets, begun in 1765, spawned a publishing phenomenon that has thrived from that day to this, from their own series to the Oxford World Classics. To understand how the contours of this phenomenon took shape, one must return to the multi-volume poetry collections that sprang from the British press after 1765, collections different in nature and scope from previous publishing ventures, offering for the ﬁrst time in material form a presumptive canon of English poetry. Readers were hungry for such books, and publishers were eager to gratify their appetite. More than a dozen collections appeared over ﬁfty years, from the earliest, produced by the Foulis brothers in their Glasgow printing house, to the 1810 edition of The Works of the English Poets, edited by Alexander Chalmers, the fullest manifestation ever of an English poetic canon. Within these 1

Literature Catalog 2006 Books for Colleges and Schools, Penguin Group (USA). See, for instance, the TLS (19 Apr. 2002), [7–8], where the advertisements occupy the recto and verso of the same leaf. 3 Penelope Wilson, ‘Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century reader’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982), 77. 2

2

A New Sensibility for Classics

ﬁfty years, not only had this particular kind of literary product reached its most ambitious expression, but the governing characteristics of the modern series of vernacular classics had also been established. Why such collections ﬂourished in this period, who undertook them, what forms they assumed, how they were marketed and advertised, how they were received, how they introduced their readers to the rites of cultural consumption, and what role they played in the construction of a national literature are all questions central to my investigation. Only by situating this analysis in the context of the marketplace—the pressures and opportunities inﬂuencing publishers to make speciﬁc choices regarding particular products—can one begin to grasp how and why the physical books materialized for actual readers as they did. Distinct from the profusion of miscellanies and anthologies throughout the eighteenth century, multi-volume collections represented English poetry with full ceremony, starting with uniform physical design, and incorporating features like author portraits, biographical and critical prefaces, engraved illustrations, critical essays, and glossaries. Ranging from 20 to 124 volumes, they required a capital investment orders of magnitude above what miscellanies involved. That so many publishers tested their fortunes with these collections suggests how much today’s marketplace differs from that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Poetry was big business, proﬁtable and ﬁercely contested. A change in the way poetry was produced and sold, along with a shift in copyright law, brought change to the publishing industry itself. While the innovators forged opportunities for themselves, others found it necessary to react, some in despair, worrying that the new order—with the classics ‘laid open’, and various parties scrapping for a share of the proﬁts—would turn bookselling into ‘the most disreputable trade in Britain’. By 1810, after ﬁve decades of trade rivalry and emulation, all the main features to deﬁne subsequent canonical collections had been rehearsed in the marketplace. When Oxford University Press advertised ‘The World Classics’ one hundred years ago, it detailed an Ordinary Edition and a Pocket Edition (printed on thinner paper), with various bindings in each category to suit purchasers of different means and tastes; it heralded that more than a million volumes had been sold, and cited the praise they had garnered; it stressed what a bargain they were, and how ‘all who love good literature’ could not but value them for the ‘absolute uniformity throughout the series, the clearness of the type, the quality of the paper, the size of the page, the printing’, and choice of binding; it insisted that ‘[o]nly the world’s literary masterpieces have been, and will be, included in the series’, and boasted that a ‘great feature is the brief critical introductions written by leading authorities of the day’; it gave readers a breakdown by genre into ﬁction (37 vols.), poetry (30 vols.), essays (19 vols.), history (12 vols.), science (4 vols.), and miscellaneous (16 vols.); it even offered bookcases to accommodate the series, one (in fumed oak, with ﬁxed shelves) to hold ﬁfty volumes, another

A New Sensibility for Classics

3

(in mahogany, either polished or French stained and ebonized, with adjustable shelves) to hold one hundred. 4 Each of these selling points was articulated in the book trade between 1765 and 1810, from the glorious levels of production to the peripheral merchandizing of furniture. Yet none of it was foreordained. Rather, the elements of this discourse were devised by booksellers seeking a competitive advantage in designing and marketing poetry collections more appealing than the ones sold by their rivals or predecessors. The features we take for granted did not occur at once; their incorporation into poetry series was not natural, but contingent. Their ﬁrst causes must be located, their evolution traced. Again, the crux of the matter can be clariﬁed by recent example. In 2003 (as the Loeb Classical Library celebrated its ninetieth anniversary), the Penguin Classics unveiled ‘A Signiﬁcant Transformation’, or ‘relaunch’, which it presented as ‘an exciting opportunity for all of us to read, reread—and rethink—the classics’. Their motto for the relaunch—‘rethink the classics’—was reﬂected in their hunt for a new editor, as their posting in the classiﬁed section of the TLS revealed: ‘rethink your career / Could you provide powerful editorial leadership for the Classics?’ They were seeking ‘a new Classics Publisher’ to develop Penguin Classics and Modern Classics, someone ‘seriously interested in serious literature’, someone with ‘a real understanding of the publishing industry’ and ‘an expert eye’, someone who could ‘drive our Classics list with creativity and imagination’. This person was expected not merely to ‘act as an advocate for these books’, but also to ‘be able to demonstrate radical thinking and an appetite for literary discovery’, their ultimate goal being to make the lists ‘as widely available . . . as possible’, and ‘once more accessible’ to ‘the average reader’. In short, they wanted someone ‘who can identify a new sensibility for Classics’. 5 Creating a general sensibility for classics was precisely the task undertaken by publishers of large poetry collections at the end of the eighteenth century, and they approached it with varying degrees of the traits demanded by Penguin: creativity, imagination, radical thinking, knowledge of the publishing industry, and an eye for what might appeal to average readers. Their mission was the urlaunch to Penguin’s relaunch. Strategies for creating this sensibility can be analyzed by scrutinizing the language used by publishers. As my introductory paragraphs have shown already, it matters how publishers conceive of their products, and how they present them to the public. A telling example is offered by Daniel Aaron, president of the Literary Classics of America when it started The Library of America in the 1980s. Queried about the title of their series, he revealed that ‘We settled on 4 Two eight-page advertisements, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 1906), and Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ (Oxford, 1909). The advertisements differ, the latter one including a page dated Aug. 1915. 5 TLS (7 Feb. 2003), [10], and (7 Nov. 2003), [38]. See also the Literature Catalog 2003 of Penguin Putnam Inc.: ‘Classic Books. Fresh Looks. / Announcing the Penguin Classics Relaunch’.

4

A New Sensibility for Classics

The Library of America, because we thought that the word Library evoked the right connotations. We wanted to suggest the idea of a national library, a people’s library but something comfortable and unpretentious.’ Their choice was perhaps too unpretentious, in fact ‘easily forgettable’, and it took a long time ‘for the title to take hold’. Going into bookstores to ask if they carried the series, Aaron recounts, ‘I would draw a blank. “You know”, I’d say, “the American classics, those books with black and white jackets?” Only then would I get a response.’ 6 How did eighteenth-century booksellers get a response? What access can we gain to their voices? Archival evidence is crucial, including manuscript letters, diaries, ledgers, receipts, minutes of trade meetings, summaries of legal processes, and so on. No less valuable are sources that reveal how booksellers crafted their public rhetoric, including handbills, prospectuses, catalogues, newspaper advertisements, open letters, and even shop labels pasted inside books. Whether the booksellers were wrangling amongst themselves, reﬂecting on their practices, priding themselves on their accomplishments, striking public poses, attracting readers to their products, or congratulating buyers on their purchases, their words are essential for understanding the work in which they were engaged. Equally important to my methodology is close inspection of the commodity itself, the physical book. Just as the rhetoric for promoting these series was forged in a context of high-stakes economic competition, so too were the wares that purchasers browsed. The books themselves offer tangible primary evidence of what the publishers thought would sell. Hence their design—their bibliographical format, bindings, title-page layout, textual presentation, organization of contents, and enhancements like prefaces, portraits, and illustrations—is paramount to my pursuit. Which features were imitated, or plagiarized? How did one publisher’s innovation ﬁx the standard for subsequent editions? Where were advances followed by retreats? What patterns did the engravings follow? With what frequency were individual poets included from one series to the next? Which volumes went through more than one edition within a series, and when were they reissued with altered title-pages? The more we know about the books people purchased, the better we understand the publishers’ efforts to create, diversify, and satisfy the consumer demand for their products, to engender the habit of book-buying, and to establish a sensibility for owning and reading the English poetical classics. As no two books are the same, examining multiple copies of a title has yielded dividends. Relics of a book’s passage through the marketplace can be found in evidence that usually perishes with binding: wrappers, extra advertisements, or notices to the public tipped into a volume here and there. Differences between copies of the same book—in binding, engravings (sometimes extraneous, from 6 Kenneth Price, ‘An Interview with Daniel Aaron on the Library of America’, South Central Review, 5 (1988), 62–3.

A New Sensibility for Classics

5

other sources), marginalia, bookplates, and ownership signatures—tell of their coming into readers’ hands and their use. Obviously, the kind of evidence to be gathered varies from collection to collection. One publisher will have advertised routinely in newspapers, another rarely; a prospectus turns up for one collection, but not for another; the order of publication remains uncertain in some series, while in others, a printer’s colophons or numbered wrappers have left a trail; some collections feature engravings, some do not. These and other variables constrain my handling of each collection and dictate different ways to organize the data into tables. Similar variations in analysis are produced by the unevenness of the archival record. Where manuscripts survive, such as correspondence between a publisher and a living author included in his series, or letters between publishers on disputes within the trade, my discussion of one series will be enriched by a perspective absent from the others. The ﬁrst part of the book, Chapters 1–3, addresses conceptual issues and the three poetry series that introduced an English canon, all produced in Scotland between 1765 and 1777. In Chapters 4–6 the focus shifts to London, where rival collections squared off from 1776 through 1790, doubling the dimensions of the canon and creating room for downmarket imitators. An even larger expansion of the national enterprise, with further diversiﬁcation of products, is analyzed in Chapters 7–9, which cover developments from the early 1790s to 1810. Chapter 10 and the Epilogue offer concluding observations, with glances further into the nineteenth century to see how the canonical landscape continued to change. Booksellers’ words function as signposts throughout my study, everywhere shaping its substance and structure. The titles of section headings, chapters, and the book itself are derived from words or phrases crucial to the commercial context, and are suggestive of sharply divided perspectives. While many booksellers felt they were confronting a crisis in the trade of existential import, many also pressed forward in pursuit of sales to a broader demographic. Charges of ‘piracy’ were vented on one side, marketing terms like ‘classics’ on the other. I navigate by such terms, for it is essential to see how they were deployed; to do otherwise would wrench my analysis from the material context, allowing generalizations to get ahead of the evidence. But in quoting them, I occasionally remind my reader where they are not to be taken at face value, or where their meaning is freighted in ways unfamiliar to us. What began long ago as an effort to explore the genesis of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets grew, with disruptions and detours, into a quest for deeper knowledge of the book trade and multi-volume collections as a product. The body of evidence I consider sheds light on many areas of historical interest, beginning with (1) the business of bookselling, and the practical consequences of decisions respecting authors, formats, pricing, advertising, and so on. Given the prefaces and engravings that featured in several series, my ﬁndings have a bearing also on the ﬁelds of (2) biography and criticism, and (3) book illustration. Little

6

A New Sensibility for Classics

or no attention having been paid to some of these collections, and other data being presented in new ways, my tables contribute to a (4) bibliography of these works. The ramiﬁcations for (5) canon formation are ubiquitous, and the status of (6) editors and the role they gradually assumed in the process winds through several chapters. The impact of (7) copyright law is analyzed in places, while the survey of one collection after another overall affords a longitudinal case study in (8) consumer culture for a speciﬁc product. Lastly, (9) readers and reading are implicated at every juncture, since booksellers—merchants obsessed with readers—calculate their every move to attract one buyer or another. Book sales do not always entail reading, as we all know from volumes peering at us from our shelves. Yet that is no reason to assume, in the present case, that there was a gap of much signiﬁcance between the publishers’ assessment of their marketing outcomes and the response of actual readers to their products. 7 Most of the publishers I discuss were also retail booksellers, and they mingled with customers in their shops. They alluded to readers’ suggestions in their advertisements, and left other signs of modifying their products to the perceived wants or limitations of particular marketing experiments. How well they managed can be gauged by the great success of certain series, by the spectacular growth of the collections as a body, and by the spread of the multi-volume model to virtually every genre of writing. 7 Jan Fergus’s point is well taken, that ‘equating the production of a cheap book with its being sold and read’ is a ‘somewhat problematic equation’. The division she draws, however, between research into the supply of books, mainly through publishers’ records, and research into the demand for books through booksellers’ archives, would be hard to sustain in my study. No archive I use offers the kind of data she has plumbed so well, but in the products of the smartest booksellers, supply is highly responsive to demand, and where it is not, the remaindered books are there to tell. See Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2006), 3, 5.

1 Our Native Classics, Complete and Uniform It now appears high time that Great Britain should assume the consequence due to her merit, and pay her worthies that tribute to which their distinguished genius hath so justly entitled them. (John Bell, 1777)

A nation comes of age at different times in various ways. Dramatic military victories, economic milestones or realignments, ruptures in the political order, whether through revolution or watershed legislation—the crossing of such thresholds shapes how a nation views itself and how it is seen from abroad. In the last third of the eighteenth century, through successive developments both gradual and abrupt, publishers in Great Britain represented the nation to itself in a new light, delivering proof of its majority, of its arrival at a new stage of cultural maturity. This coming of age was expressed in distinctly material terms, as the poets of the nation—its classics, its worthies—began to be reprinted and sold to the public in one extensive multi-volume collection after another. By the 1770s a deﬁning moment in British culture had arrived, or was long overdue, according to publisher John Bell, who thought the nation derelict with respect to one of her most precious legacies. Britain, although a land of literary distinction, had not paid its writers their due homage; this was an embarrassment, a national disgrace. The day had come to put her literary house in order. What the times required was a collection of books that embodied the nation’s ﬁnest poetry. Any reader wishing to obtain such books, however, faced a sorry prospect. Bell lamented that, even for residents of London, locating ‘genuine editions’ of the English poets was a ‘business of time, difﬁculty, and vast expense’, let alone ﬁnding such volumes ‘uniformly printed, so as to appear in a library as one and the same book’. To stir up indignation in his fellow Britons, Bell maintained that the Italians already had ‘rewarded the memories of their illustrious countrymen’ through signiﬁcant publishing ventures, and that France ‘speedily followed an example so worthy of imitation’. Lagging behind, Britain had yet to pay her writers the tribute of ‘a general and uniform publication’—had yet, in short, to treat them like ‘English classics’. 1 1 Three-page prospectus for The Poets of Great Britain printed in John Dryden, The Spanish Fryar (London, 1777), sigs. H5v -H6v ; hereafter ‘Bell’s prospectus’. Since The Spanish Fryar was published

8

Our Native Classics

Beginning in 1765 booksellers created something new to British print culture, producing for the ﬁrst time multi-volume collections which summed up the nation’s poetical legacy, collections that (in another of Bell’s formulations) were ‘uniform in size, paper and type, forming one book in a library’. 2 Such publications across a range of genres have been with us ever since, on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from such iconic series as Everyman’s Library, Oxford World’s Classics, Penguin Classics, The Modern Library, and The Library of America (all thriving), to lesser series like Everybody’s Books, Nelson’s Classics, and The Muses Library (long since defunct). 3 In 1981 the rhetoric of high national purpose scripted by Bell was echoed by the founders of the Library of America. Voicing alarm over the same unaccountable negligence, they declared that, despite ‘one of the greatest assets we have as Americans’ being a wondrous ‘literary heritage’, the nation had been ‘poor caretakers of this great treasure’, and bemoaned the fact that ‘the vast majority of our best literary works are inaccessible’. Some works had ‘long been impossible to ﬁnd’, and others were too dear: ‘Hundreds of rewarding books by our ﬁnest American writers have either gone out of print or are available only sporadically in paperback or cumbersome, expensive editions. The complete works of our most valued writers can almost never be found.’ Readers had no hope of putting together a library of national classics. The shame of it led W. H. Auden to observe, ‘In Great Britain, in France, in Germany, in Italy and, I fancy, in Russia, too, such a state of affairs would be unthinkable.’ All those countries, the founders stressed, had long made their ‘great national literature’ available in handsome editions at moderate prices. 4 Fortunately, redress was at hand: ‘THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA republishes in distinctive, reasonably priced, unabridged volumes, a comprehensive collection of the notable writers and works in America’s literary heritage.’ Purchasers could now ‘collect a complete home library of American masterworks’, comprehensive in the summer, this version of the prospectus reports that publication began ‘On Saturday the 26th of April’. From April on, sections of the prospectus had appeared in newspaper advertisements, but the version at the end of Dryden’s play incorporates additional paragraphs of a broader explanatory purpose. A close approximation was the prospectus in CM (21 May 1777). 2 MP (16 June 1777). 3 Cassell & Company (London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne) published Everybody’s Books, seemingly to compete with Dent & Sons; T. Nelson & Sons, Ltd. (London and Edinburgh) published another series too, Nelson’s Poets; George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. (London), in addition to The Muses Library, published Morley’s Universal Library, and The Pocket Library (in olive bindings for poetry, scarlet for ﬁction, and peacock blue for essays and biography). 4 ‘You are invited to become a Charter Subscriber to The Library of America . . . ’ (color brochure), and C. J. Hurley, ‘The Library of America’ (six-page letter). Quotations in the next paragraph are also drawn from these and other early promotional mailings. The mischievous a fortiori logic in Auden’s mention of Russia became explicit in Jason Epstein’s rendition of the urgent mood: ‘American readers had nothing comparable to the compact French editions or the editions of standard British authors published by Oxford and Cambridge. Even the Russians had done better by their native literature, insofar as the censors permitted, than we had done’ (Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York, 2001), 127).

Our Native Classics

9

by virtue of ‘the truly complete range and richness’ of the authors included. An ‘elegant collection of matching hardcover volumes’, the books would comprise a uniform set, no matter what number were purchased. At last the country could assume its rightful standing on the global stage: ‘Now, like other nations, America can offer the world its great literary heritage in authoritative editions and in a form every reader and all librarians will ﬁnd convenient.’ The Library of America revisited themes articulated by Bell and other booksellers two centuries earlier—from the deep sense of cultural deﬁciency to its remedy in the material shape of modestly priced books, uniformly produced in a handy size with reliable texts on good paper, and published as a collection designed to comprehend the nation’s classics. There was, however, a major difference. According to Max Rudin, director of marketing and sales for the Library of America, ‘We thought of ourselves, perhaps naively, as simply a nonproﬁt project that was disseminating great American writing, but we did not think of ourselves as being in the business of selling books.’ 5 Such naivety afﬂicted no one in the eighteenth century, least of all any ‘bookseller’, a term that embraced a mixture of retail and wholesale transactions; bookbinding, sometimes printing, and occasionally typefounding or papermaking; the selling of stationery products; and publishing, the entrepreneurial initiative that turns writing into print, or, as in the case at hand, books into other books. Patronage was dead as a serious factor in the world of print, and had long to await reincarnation in the guise of the foundations, endowments, and grants organizations that would proliferate two hundred years later. The ‘business of selling books’ was exactly what publishing the classics was about, and many British booksellers busied themselves deﬁning and simultaneously exploiting a lucrative new market to succeed at it.

AFTER THE GREEK AND ROMAN CL ASSICS The multi-volume poetry collections that began to appear in 1765 intersected and embodied several late eighteenth-century phenomena, including a newfound awareness of nationalism, the cultural construction of an aesthetic realm, and an explosion of consumerism. Military conﬂicts (the Seven Years War, the war in the American colonies, the French Revolution, and war against France) created an ever-sharper sense of Britain’s national identity and interests in the world. At the same time, a burst of critical investigation into painting, music, and poetry 5 Jerome P. Frank, ‘Playing a Numbers Game at Library of America’, Publishers Weekly (19 Aug. 1988), 49. The Library of America, still a ‘non-proﬁt publishing program’, has grown more canny about selling its books, instituting a paperback series of ‘College Editions’ and a series-withinthe-series devoted to ‘The American Poets Project’. It advertises widely, including (for instance) three pages in the Literature Catalogue 2006 of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., which celebrated the 60th anniversary of Penguin Classics.

10

Table 1.1. Multi-volume collections of English poetry, 1765–1810 Title

Format/ page size (cm)

Pages per vol./ lines of text

Prices per volume/set

State

50

12◦ /12.0 × 7.0

191/30

1s./£2 10s.

b

44

8◦ /14.6 × 8.8

203/32

20

12◦ /12.8 × 7.8

217/30

1s. 4d./£2 18s. 8d. 1s. 6d./£3 6s. 1s./£1

s bd b

109

18◦ /12.5 × 7.6

207/28

68

8◦ /15.0 × 8.7

311/30

21

18◦ /12.0 × 7.2

108/26–36

[21] 75

8◦ /15.9 × 9.5

323/30

1s. 6d./£8 8s./ £12 12s. n.a./£8 10s./ £10 10s. 6d./10s. 6d. 9d./15s. 9d. £1 6s. 6d n.a./£11 5s.

s bd s bd s bd bd s

13

8◦ /24.2 × 14.5

861/130∗

10s. 6d./£6 16s. 6d. /£8 /£10 16s.

bs bn s

8◦ /22.8 × 14.2

597/136∗

11s. 41/2 d./£4 11s.

b

14

8

Our Native Classics

The English Poets Glasgow: Robert & Andrew Foulis, 1765–76 The British Poets Edinburgh: A. Kincaid & W. Creech, & J. Balfour, 1773–6 A Collection of the English Poets Aberdeen: J. Boyle, 1776–7 Bell’s Edition: The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill Edinburgh: Apollo Press, by the Martins, 1776–82 The Works of the English Poets London: C. Bathurst, et al., 1779–81 The Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library [absorbed into Wenman’s Cheap Editions and expanded] London: J. Wenman, 1780–1; expansion through 1791/2 The Works of the English Poets London: J. Buckland, et al., 1790 A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain [engraved title] The Works of the British Poets [letterpress title] (ed. Robert Anderson) [13 vols. constituted a complete set in 1795; 14th volume added in 1807] London: J. & A. Arch; Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, & J. Mundell, 1792–5, 1807 The Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland Dublin: J. Moore, 1793–1802 [reissued twice—London: A. Miller, 1800; Dublin: P. Wogan, 1804]

Vols.

136† (56) 14

18◦ /13.8 × 8.5

72–120/40

8◦ /15.4 × 9.5

328/30

85

32◦ /12.5 × 8.0

162/34

124 61

18◦ /13.4 × 7.8

198/30

n.a./£12 8s.

21

8◦ /23.4 × 14.2

649/140∗

n.a./£25

[134]

6d./£3 8s. 1s./£6 16s. 7s./£4 18s. 12s./£8 8s. 2s./£8 8s. 2s. 6d./£10 10s. n.a./£16 10s.

s, ch s, su lp s, ni s, b b

[54]

Notes: Alterations to a collection are indicated in brackets. Wenman’s series, though larger in 1792 than in 1781, still came to 21 vols. because several thin volumes became thicker in later edns. Page sizes do not include the dimensions of a binding (as in Fig. 1.1). The average pages per volume are approximate. Prices are taken from advertisements, catalogues, and occasionally a buyer’s testimony. Moore priced each volume of his Dublin edn. at half a British guinea. Since £1 British (20s.) was worth 21s. 8d. Irish, a guinea (21s.) was worth 22s. 9d. Irish. b = boards, bd = bound, bn = in boards for non-subscribers, bs = in boards for subscribers, ch = ‘cheap’, lp = large paper, ni = no illustrations, s = sewed (wrappers), su = ‘superior’. Blank spaces indicate where I have not run across the appropriate information. † Parts as issued by Cooke, to which the page range and unit prices refer; the parts may have formed 56 vols., depending on their grouping. ∗

Our Native Classics

Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets London: C. Cooke, 1794–1805 The Works of the English Poets (ed. John Aikin) [discontinued] London: J. Heath & G. Kearsley, 1802–5 The Works of the British Poets, Collated with the Best Editions (ed. Thomas Park) [continued with Cowper, Supplement to the British Poets and translated classics] London: C. Whittingham for J. Sharpe, 1805–8; continuation to 1812 [reissued in double volumes—London: J. Sharpe; Suttaby, Evance, & Fox, 1818] The Poets of Great Britain, in One Hundred and Twenty-Four Volumes The Poets of Great Britain, in Sixty-One Double Volumes [alternate title] London: S. Bagster, et al., 1807 The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (ed. Alexander Chalmers) London: J. Johnson, et al., 1810

These line counts are so much higher because the volumes were printed in double columns.

11

12

Our Native Classics

witnessed keen efforts to classify these ﬁelds, to provide them with taxonomies and situate their practices historically. This activity went hand in hand with an aesthetics that investigated the mutually deﬁning relationship between a special mode of appreciation and its distinctive object—‘literature’, for instance, as a category of expression that lent itself to a distinct kind of reading. Meanwhile, British society was undergoing a consumer revolution, one that brought a sturdy consumer ethos into being. 6 The convergence of these factors—political, aesthetic, and commercial—in vast canonical publications at the end of the eighteenth century bears out Bell’s assertion that the time was ripe for this product. 7 ‘A complete and uniform set of our native classics has been much and long wanted’, he proclaimed, fully poised to correct this imbalance between demand and supply. 8 And yet balance is not the right concept; as we shall see, the laws of supply and demand do not describe a state of equilibrium. The ﬁrst ﬁfty years of publishing the classics of English poetry illuminate a continuous experiment, one trial after another in raising the level of book production to meet the desires of readers (see Table 1.1). Neither side of the equation was ﬁxed; both were ﬂuid. The project expanded and contracted; went up-market, went down-market; was subject to all manner of recalibration and redesign as the booksellers pursued more purchasers and market share. As wares, merchandise, goods for trafﬁc—Samuel Johnson’s deﬁnitions of commodity—the English classics were offered for sale in bookshops around Britain, a tangible representation of the nation and its literary attainments, subject to large-scale production and distribution. 9 While not the ﬁrst to publish the classics of English poetry, it was Bell who most clearly laid out the impetus and rationale for the enterprise. In his mind it hinged on print culture and emulation: While the Greek and Roman classics were the only authors studied or generally known, the polished nations of Europe vied with each other in embellishing these inestimable 6 Only a sampling of the extensive work in these areas can be cited here. On political identity, see e.g. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), and Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York, 1987). On questions of literature and criticism, see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford, 2001); Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal, 1998); Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge, 1998); Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1993); Douglas Lane Patey, ‘The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon’, Modern Language Studies, 18 (1988), 17–37, and Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970). On consumerism, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982). 7 Margaret J. M. Ezell recognizes the same three intersecting factors: ‘literary aesthetics, a concept of national identity, and the concrete particulars of the economics of writing and reading’ (‘Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series’, South Central Review, 11 (1994), 2). 8 MP (25 Apr. 1777); Bell’s prospectus. 9 A Dictionary of the English Language (4th edn. 2 vols. London, 1773).

Our Native Classics

13

models of antiquity with every ornament. For LIBRARIES, size and magniﬁcence were attended to; and for general use, elegance and neatness. Hence these numerous sets of the classics, which do so much honour to modern ingenuity. 10

But this age-old contest was being superseded. No longer could it be assumed that European printers would devote their highest aspirations to ancient authors, producing texts for an international market with the aid of scholars who formed a vital community as they labored to recover and sustain a shared cultural heritage. That common cause was dissolving, leaving polished nations to strike out in a new direction. Just as sets of the ancient classics had been the proving ground for generations of European printers, sets of vernacular classics in Britain, France, and Italy were to become the means of establishing international stature; booksellers would now compete to see who could produce not the ﬁnest Homer or Horace, nor even the ﬁnest Milton, Racine, or Dante, but the most impressive national canon. A century after Dryden had ranked Milton above Homer and Virgil, lifting England into the company of Greece and Rome, British booksellers began to profess the same creed with respect to their national poetry as a body. Even as Greek and Roman letters gave way to disparate vernacular literatures in national contexts, they marked out a path whereby ‘modern ingenuity’ might continue its impressive show: printers like Aldus Manutius in Venice, Robert and Henry Estienne (or Stephens) in Paris, and the Elzeviers of Holland had provided models for the new undertakings. By invoking this tradition Bell implied an emblematic equivalence between modern and ancient classics. British poets now too deserved to be ‘studied or generally known’, that is, to be read in two ways: closely by those with a keen interest in the ﬁeld, or more pleasurably by a broader readership. As purported classics they were entitled to receive critical respect and popular recognition, and warranted commensurate treatment by booksellers. These values were encoded in the physical forms the product assumed. When applied to the works of modern authors, the venerable bibliographical features associated with sets of the ancient classics—the octavo ‘Aldine’, the duodecimo ‘Elzevir’—conveyed the message that familiarity with certain writers was obligatory for persons of any cultural pretension (see Fig. 1.1). Multi-volume collections reiﬁed the idea of the English classics in a fundamentally different way from earlier material representations of classic status. As a physical ediﬁce, for instance, the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe, designed by William Kent for display of several busts within niches, valorized English poets, scientists, philosophers, and monarchs. Plaster statues were planned by Christopher Wren as ‘a noble ornament’ for the stall ends of the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, though busts of ancient and modern authors were

10

Bell’s prospectus.

14

Our Native Classics

Figure 1.1. Pocket editions of the English poetical classics. On Andrew Foulis’s folio of Parnell (38.6 × 25 cm) alongside (A) an ‘Elzevir’ (1661; 13 × 7.9 cm) are (B) a Tonson edition of Paradise Regain’d (14.4 × 8.5 cm); (C, D) the ‘English Poets’ of Robert and Andrew Foulis in boards (13.2 × 8 cm) and vellum (12.5 × 7.9 cm); (E) Creech and Balfour’s The British Poets (15.3 × 9.5 cm); (F) Boyle’s A Collection of the English Poets (13 × 8.4 cm); (G, H) Bell’s edition, The Poets of Great Britain in wrappers (13.8 × 8.5 cm) and calf (13.1 × 8.3 cm); (I) the 1779–81 edition of The Works of the English Poets (15.1 × 9.5 cm); (J) Wenman’s The Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library (12.5 × 8 cm); (K) the 1790 edition of The Works of the English Poets (16.9 × 10.5 cm); (L, M) Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets in boards (15.7 × 9.5 cm) and calf (14.9 × 9.4 cm); (N) The Works of the English Poets, ed. J. Aikin (15.9 × 10.8 cm); (O, P) Sharpe’s Edition of the British Poets in wrappers (14 × 9.1 cm) and morocco (13.2 × 8.9 cm); and (Q) Bagster’s The Poets of Great Britain, in One Hundred and Twenty-Four Volumes (13.8 × 8.7 cm).

used instead. 11 Inﬂuenced by this example, gentlemen began dignifying their personal libraries with busts and paintings. The Earl of Halifax helped to make this fashion de rigueur, and one of the ﬁnest suites at mid-century belonged 11 John Newman, ‘Library Buildings and Fittings’, in Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.) The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ii. 1640–1850, (Cambridge, 2006), 197– 200.

Our Native Classics

15

to Lord Chesterﬁeld, who furnished his library with twenty-two portraits of poets. 12 As an ‘accretive, legible index of English literary history’ and cultural patriotism, Philip Connell has observed, the rapidly growing number of tombs and monuments at Westminster Abbey in the transept known as Poets’ Corner signaled a ‘quickening commemorative impulse’; their ‘sheer physical proximity’ communicated ‘a sense of composite literary tradition’. Shakespeare’s statue, designed by Kent and sculpted by Peter Scheemakers in 1740, led to mass-produced imitations that, as David Piper quips, ‘infected the whole breed of English poets’. From Spenser to Pope they sprang up ‘[c]rosslegged, leaning on plinths, elegantly draped and with a book or two’. John Cheere produced them at his workshop near Hyde Park Corner, soon to be rivaled by Charles Harris and other sculptors. Poets’ Corner, thus contributing to the commodiﬁcation of the literary monument, was instrumental to ‘the cultural enfranchisement of the middling orders’, as Connell sees it, and to the larger process whereby, in tandem with the commercialization of the book, ‘the institutions and ideologies of a national literature’ took shape. 13 But where were the books? This was the complaint of Sir Thomas Hanmer, who felt that Shakespeare’s works needed to be accorded the same level of symbolic investment as was implicit in Scheemakers’s sculpture. His edition of The Works of Shakespear (1743–4) was the antidote to this privileging of image over text. Anticipating John Bell’s reasoning, Hanmer argued that if other nations had ‘taken care to dignify the works of their most celebrated Poets’ with high-quality editions, Shakespeare deserved no less, and he offered up his labor ‘as another small monument designed and dedicated to his honour’. 14 Printed text was primary: the bibliographical monument, not the marmoreal, was the truest material expression of Shakespeare’s greatness. Printers and publishers like Robert and Andrew Foulis, John Bell, and their imitators pressed this logic further, demonstrating an equally compelling need for British poetry collectively to have its classic status recognized in a ﬁtting textual monument. Only a collection 12 The demand for portraits produced ‘a rather doubtful supply’ at times, as shown by a picture supposedly of the poet Cleveland fobbed off on Harley, Earl of Oxford, for his library at Wimpole; cleaning revealed the artist to have painted over the portrait of ‘some architect’. See David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford, 1982), 45, 52, 63, and 78; and Piper, ‘The Chesterﬁeld House Library Portraits’, in Rene Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford, 1979), 179–95. For more on the Chesterﬁeld portraits, see Ch. 4. 13 Philip Connell, ‘Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of the Literary Monument’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005), 558–61, 570–1; Piper, The Image of the Poet, 90. 14 ‘The Preface’, The Works of Shakespear, ed. Sir Thomas Hanmer (6 vols. Oxford, 1743–4), i, p. vi. The verso of the title-page carries the ‘Imprimatur’ of Oxford University, dated 26 Mar. 1744.

16

Our Native Classics

could provide that; only a collection could do justice to the nation’s poetic achievement. Such collections undercut Richard Terry’s contention that the eighteenth century contributed ‘surprisingly little to the drafting of a native canon, either to the protocols governing its recital or its retrospective content’. Prior to 1700 a rich ‘discourse of literary canon-formation’ existed, he points out, evident in texts where poets celebrated their literary forebears, in effect deﬁning a ‘line of canonical descent’. Yet he concedes that, even though a canon became ‘subject to its own tradition of recital’, for the moment ‘its most visible symbol remained less textual than monumental’, namely Poets’ Corner. He does not deny that ‘literature’ underwent a ‘semantic shift from the inclusive to the exclusive sense’ in the eighteenth century, nor that this is plausibly when the term came to be ‘constructed by a discourse of aesthetics or by related cultural ideas such as creative individualism, originality, artistic inspiration, and so on’, but such notions, he suggests, merely colonized ‘a preexistent conceptual space that had previously been occupied by a different set of notions’. 15 Wanting not to resolve the issue ‘without due regard to the social structures through which literary works are created and disseminated’, however, Terry consults the work of John Guillory on canons. Guillory argues that acts of judgment ‘are necessary rather than sufﬁcient to constitute a process of canon formation’. Any judgment that a work is great ‘does nothing in itself to preserve that work, unless that judgment is made in a certain institutional context, a setting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers’. For Guillory, it was schools that regulated the social practices of reading and writing in this manner. Terry tests this insight: ‘If canons are by deﬁnition institutional, that is, if they can exist only in a practical alliance with a body or institution committed to their dissemination, can we recognize such bodies in the universities and academies of eighteenth-century Britain?’ Robert Crawford has answered this query in the afﬁrmative, pointing to the emergence of English literary study in Scottish universities in the eighteenth century. But Terry answers in the negative, rejecting the idea that the school could have been such a ‘discursive instrument of transmission’, for students comprised ‘something less than the reading public at large’, and therefore ‘the ability of any institutional syllabus to dictate a version of the canon to a wider public was negligible’. 16

15 Terry, Poetry, 17–19, 36–9; and ‘Literature, Aesthetics, and Canonicity in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21 (1997), 81, 86, 90, 94–6. 16 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), 28; Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge, 1998), particularly Crawford’s ‘Introduction’; and Terry, ‘Literature, Aesthetics, and Canonicity’, 81, 90, 98, 95.

Our Native Classics

17

But another institution at this time was more vital to the social construction of a canon: publishing. 17 Poetry collections of the kind and magnitude listed in Table 1.1, unprecedented in British print culture, were aimed at no one if not ‘the reading public at large’. Sprouting up in numbers and eventually ﬂanked by other series devoted to novelists, essayists, sacred classics, and drama, these massive undertakings ﬁlled bookstalls with uniformly printed volumes by the hundreds of thousands. Far from negligible in dictating versions of the canon to a wider public, they were instrumental; far from observing older protocols governing the recital of a canon, they instituted a new protocol—lists of authors for sale within series marketed as the English classics. Unlike Terry’s tradition of recital, expressed in terms of lineal descent, poetic afﬁliation, and artistic emulation, the publisher’s list stripped away this narrative genealogy, substituting a roster of names and couching it discursively within the languages of advertising and commodiﬁcation. These lists were inserted in books, placed in newspapers, and circulated in handbills, one of the most triumphal being ‘A Chronological List of Authors Contained in Bell’s Beautiful Edition of The Poets of Great Britain’ (see Fig. 1.2). Such a list enabled readers to plot their purchases against an institutional ‘syllabus’ that powerfully articulated the idea (and the ideal) of a complete set. How much prescriptive force a list of ‘Fifty Authors, being every English Classic published within a series of Four Hundred Years’ might have had is questionable in light of the obvious tension it presented vis-à-vis Johnson’s deﬁnition of ‘classick’: ‘An author of the ﬁrst rank: usually taken for ancient authors’. Granting, as Johnson does, that the term is open to modern authors, one nevertheless spots many poets in the list who fall short of the ﬁrst rank. Understanding how they wound up being advertised as classics is no short task, for it involves scrutinizing every aspect of the market for multi-volume poetry ventures over a period of decades. Economic competition, book design, consumer psychology, the art of promotion, and other dynamics all enter the picture. Examining such factors in relation to late eighteenth-century series, as Margaret Ezell comments, allows us ‘to reconsider the ways in which commercial decisions made in previous centuries have shaped our perception of the literary past and our own contemporary sense of what “makes” a classic’. 18 Publishers are still at it, still fostering a sensibility for classics, guiding readers of every socioeconomic stripe to the books most worthy of being owned and read, from The Diary of a Rapist as part of the New York Review Classics, to Robinson Crusoe in the New York Post Family Classics Library. 19 17 Jason Epstein endorses this view in reﬂecting that ‘[w]ithin three years the Library of America had become a respected institution’ (Book Business, 138). 18 Ezell, ‘Making a Classic’, 14. 19 The New York Review of Books (2 Dec. 2004), 33; New York Post (Late city ﬁnal, 1 Nov. 2004), 1 and 21 (with a coupon).

18

Our Native Classics

Figure 1.2. Handbill for Bell’s edition, listing authors, dates, prices, and bindings. On the verso are listed the 105 plays in Bell’s British Theatre.

Our Native Classics

19

A CL ASSICAL APOLLO FOR BRITANNIA If the multi-volume collection per se was to be made an object of consumer desire, stipulating as it did an extensive series of purchases, a convenient format and modest pricing became all-important. Bell thought it only fair to make Britain’s ‘native classics’, etymologically the birthright of every British soul, accessible to all readers, to bring them ‘within the reach of numbers who have taste and desire, but who may want the means of acquiring so noble a collection upon principles more expensive, though not more elegant, than the present’. 20 The key was numbers—numbers of readers, and placing the classics within their reach. All but three of the editions listed in Table 1 were printed in smaller sizes (32mo, 18mo, 12mo, or 8vo), which rendered them more portable and less expensive. Of the two printing paradigms adumbrated by Bell—books of size and magniﬁcence for LIBRARIES, books elegant and neat for general use—it might seem paradoxical that the lowlier should have been earmarked to uphold Britain’s literary eminence. 21 The physical and semantic dichotomy between ‘LIBRARIES’ and ‘general use’ objectiﬁes a stratiﬁed book-buying public, yet delimits more than an economic boundary between market segments. In a LIBRARY, magniﬁcent folio and quarto tomes bespeak the importance of their setting, turning it into a fullblock capital noun, a PLACE to be recognized. Smaller books, ‘neat’ by contrast, call for a verb-cum-noun, the lower-case use, standing in for the practice of a ‘general’ group. One format signiﬁes individual ownership, the other common readership. A pocket volume could be elegant in its own right, but it registered its cultural weight—‘so noble a collection’—by aggregation with fellow volumes, widespread dissemination, and physical design. Either mode could be used to promote an author’s classic standing, as the experiments of Humphrey Moseley in canonical publishing demonstrated in the seventeenth century. As Trevor Ross recounts, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson in 1616 was the ‘ﬁrst self-consciously canonical edition’ of an English author. The lofty title of this folio, mirroring the Latin Opera, lent substance to the prediction that Jonson would be ‘read as Classick Authors; and / As Greeke and Latine taught in every Land’. Heralded as a Classick—a novel application at this stage—his works were thus implicitly deemed ‘worthy of institutional preservation’. The 1623 folio of Shakespeare followed suit, and in 1647 Moseley published a sumptuous folio of Beaumont and Fletcher. 22 While ‘size and magniﬁcence’ served as the model for this folio, Moseley ‘supplemented the 20

MP (25 Apr. 1777); Bell’s prospectus. Whereas in France many ﬁrst-time publications appeared in duodecimo, viewed as no inferior to other formats, in Britain it was regarded as a less prestigious format for reprints. See David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty (Oxford, 1991), 25. 22 Ross, English Literary Canon, 108, 130–4. Terry discusses Jonson’s Works as ‘a notable event’ in English publishing (Poetry, 63–5), and Joseph Loewenstein analyzes it as ‘a major event in the history of what one might call the bibliographic ego’ (‘The Script in the Marketplace’, Representations, 12 (1985), 101). 21

20

Our Native Classics

canonical hierarchy . . . mapped out by the three folios’ by choosing a ‘general use’ octavo for the rest of his canon of Caroline dramatists in the 1650s. These ‘sociable Pocket-books’, as Paulina Kewes (quoting Richard Brome) calls them, were harbingers of the smaller format that would become the bibliographical measure of Britain’s investment in her literary glory, and would tip the economic scales in the direction of a greatly expanded consumer market. 23 Ross, like Terry, locates the conceptual foundations of the canon well before the eighteenth century. He describes a ‘protracted cultural shift’ from a system of rhetorical exchange emphasizing poetic production to an objectivist culture predicated on readers’ consumption. The progress-of-poetry genre discussed by Terry ﬁts into the rhetorical paradigm deﬁned by Ross as enforcing an ‘ideology of civic humanism’. Its currency was ‘symbolic capital—fame, prestige, honour, recognition’—and poetry functioned within the system to support a network of social relations, stimulating patronage, fostering more writing, and reproducing the national culture. Poetry exercised its verbal power by circulating symbolic capital, advancing a conversation that was effective ‘only so long as it was rehearsed again and again within a literary tradition it helped to authorize’. The objectivist mode of canon formation, by contrast, promoted ‘a newer ideology of commercial humanism’ oriented towards the idea of individual authorial worth embodied in works of intrinsic value. Within this system the audience was autonomous; personal enrichment was charted in terms of ‘ever more reﬁned acts of consumption’. For the reader as acquisitive consumer, knowing about literature equaled ‘earning cultural capital, the measure of accredited competence at assessing the meaning and value of cultural goods’. Cultural capital (not symbolic capital) and knowledge (not verbal power) became central to the equation. Joseph Addison shrewdly furthered this cause by generally inviting readers ‘to polish [their] manners through a wide-ranging intercourse with modern economic society and its many products’. Speciﬁcally, he made it possible for readers ‘to derive cultural capital from the fact of having read works of the English canon’ when he popularized Milton through essays in The Spectator. ‘Never again would Paradise Lost be read merely by a ﬁt audience though few.’ 24 A decidedly dim perspective on this expansive notion of cultural capital is presented by Jonathan Brody Kramnick, who views the formation of a canon at mid-century as the by-product of critical disenchantment, a sense that ‘cultural goods were becoming too available to “middling” and “vulgar” classes and too sullied by the leveling system of consumption’. Where Margaret Ezell sees booksellers testing ‘a way of selling literature and an aesthetic vocabulary of value’, Kramnick sees the ‘demeaning argot of polite society and consumer culture’, a 23 Paulina Kewes, ‘ “Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books . . . ”: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections’, Publishing History, 38 (1995), 6, 10–12. 24 Ross, English Literary Canon, 65, 89–92, 108, 198–9, 211–13, 229, and 293.

Our Native Classics

21

noisome development that irritated those who wanted ‘to establish literature as a world unto itself ’. 25 Critics decried the pernicious effects of a burgeoning print culture and Addison’s attempt—promulgated in Spectator, no. 10—to bring philosophy ‘out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses’. In their view, the Addisonian project had ‘in some measure been defeated by its success’. Polite society, unable to read older English poetry properly, wanted it to be ‘improved’ through updated orthography, new versiﬁcation, or translations designed to overcome the ‘pastness of the author’. The spread of a new commodity culture, thought Joseph Warton, thus divested Learning of her college dress and confounded her ‘with ignorance and levity’. Joseph’s brother Thomas voiced similar scepticism in his Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754–62), insisting that hard-won qualiﬁcations like a ‘facility with older languages’ were requisite to obtain ‘access to the high-cultural works of the past’. Staking out a form of ‘professional prerogative’, he stressed that a ‘singularly learned ascesis’ was necessary to appreciate Spenser, whose work after all had been written with Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers in mind. Warton’s ‘institutional and aesthetic positions’, Kramnick concludes, were symptomatic of a ‘preference for the Elizabethan court over the modern market’. By reclaiming difﬁcult literature from a public unworthy to appreciate it, Warton enacted a ‘cultivated retreat from the public sphere into the university’. 26 From that seat in 1785, the year he published his edition of Poems upon Several Occasions by John Milton, he struck a scornful note in dismissing ‘Dr Johnson, a specious and popular writer, without taste’, for having ‘depretiated’ Milton in his Lives of the Poets. 27 Such withdrawal into the high-cultural sanctuary of the university marks a priestly disdain for the laity, to invoke the ecclesiastical metaphor that underwrites the notion of a literary canon. Canon formation by this route is retrograde, a professional maneuver of, by, and for the cognoscenti. If this was Thomas Warton’s agenda, it nonetheless was offset by the glimmering of a countervailing idea, his assertion that Chaucer ‘should be more universally studied’. An obstacle to the wider study of Chaucer was that many readers were deterred by his ‘uncouth and unfamiliar language’. Yet the ‘principal reason for his being so little known, and so seldom taken into hand’, in Warton’s analysis, was the ‘convenient opportunity of reading him with pleasure and facility in modern imitations’. The true Chaucer came seldom to hand c. 1760 because an ersatz text had gained currency in the marketplace. When translation ‘at length become[s] substituted as the means of attaining a knowledge of any difﬁcult and ancient 25

Ezell, ‘Making a Classic’, 14; Kramnick, Making the English Canon, 4. Kramnick, Making the English Canon, 22–3, 39, 44, 139–44; and ‘The Making of the English Canon’, PMLA 112 (1997), 1087–9, 1092–3. 27 Warton to Richard Hurd, 6 Apr. 1785, The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens, Ga., 1995), 518. 26

22

Our Native Classics

author, the original not only begins to be neglected and excluded as less easy, but also to be despised as less ornamental and elegant’. Through modiﬁed versions like Dryden’s, readers were ‘happy to ﬁnd the readiest accommodation for their indolence and their illiteracy’, and by such means ‘the public taste becomes imperceptibly vitiated, while the genuine model is superseded, and gradually gives way to the establishment of a more specious, but false resemblance’. 28 The prevalence of a degraded reading environment may be grounds for removing one of its causes, debased texts, from the sphere of the tea-table, but it does not follow that the genuine texts must be pulled back into the sacred preserve of the academy. Warton’s explicit desideratum—that Chaucer be more universally studied—would come about only if the authentic text were given more public exposure, not less. Lazy reading might persist, but not in all quarters, which is why his operative verb is to study. Corrosive market forces were not inevitable or irremediable. Had the vitiation of taste been ﬁnal or decisive, the issue would have been moot: the shelf-life of Chaucer already having expired, it would have been folly to wish he were more universally studied. But, as contingencies of the marketplace, the oversupply of Dryden’s translation and the undersupply of Chaucer’s original could conceivably be remedied; readers might yet be drawn to the genuine item. Important steps in this direction were taken when Thomas Tyrwhitt produced an authoritative edition of The Canterbury Tales (1775–8) and when Bell incorporated this edition into his pocket series. As often as not, a priestly withdrawal into the high-cultural sanctuary is counteracted by a low-church movement organized to spread the faith more freely. The conﬁdence of our ‘modern humanist academy’ in regarding itself as the ‘only true audience of literary texts’, Jon P. Klancher reminds us, ‘depends on forgetting the real shaping and dividing of social and historical audiences within which the “clerisy” ﬁrst found its form’. 29 Bell expressly understood himself to be carrying out Addison’s charge by treating the cultural riches of the nation as a common heritage that should be made available to all. 30 Warton himself, with his edition of Milton, participated in spreading the text and helping others to appreciate it. The complement to critical stock-taking was the literal stocking of shelves, ﬁrst in bookshops and afterwards in libraries and drawing rooms around the land. Booksellers, in short, had to keep pace with the critics, producing and marketing the cultural goods themselves. In this respect the ordering of the arts was no esoteric exercise, but part of a larger, diversely sanctioned investment in cultural capital, one that drew upon the resources—and contributed to the proﬁt—of everyone who participated in it, whether as producers, consumers, or commentators. 28 My quotations of Warton are taken from Kramnick (‘Making of the English Canon’, 1087– 9, 1092–3, and Making the English Canon, 139–44), though I am setting them up to support an alternative reading. 29 The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, 1987), 5. 30 See Epilogue.

Our Native Classics

23

A more generous depiction of canonization is seen in the frontispiece to Matthew Pilkington’s Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1731). On a shelf within the Temple of Time, ornamented with an hourglass, tomes of Homer, Virgil, and Horace are ﬂanked by the works of Milton and Chaucer, and other volumes labeled Waller, Cowley, Dryden, Addison, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Awaiting enshrinement, the works of Swift rest on an altar. Standing before his temple, Father Time receives books for the library from two Graces, who have handed him Pope, Gay, and Dorset, and are reaching for Thomson. Also destined for the Temple, as narrated in the poem illustrated by the plate, ‘Phoibo-Bathos: or the Poet’s Well’, are Congreve, Parnell, Prior, Saphira (Mary Barber), Garth, Granville, John Philips, and Young. Although attendants are present to haul away books rejected by the Graces, the process in general is a welcoming one, overseen approvingly from above by Apollo. For Howard Weinbrot the scene demonstrates the ‘expandable tenements’ of Parnassus; the ﬂurry of judgment, which ‘captures the happy blending of past and present, Greece and Rome, early and modern, and English and Irish letters’, typiﬁes a conﬁdent Britain, newly mature and ‘ready to take her own place in the world’. 31 In 1765, by quirk of history, Apollo was shunned in one groundbreaking project meant to glorify English literature, and ﬁguratively embraced in another. The Foulis brothers, Printers to the University of Glasgow, started issuing their series of English poets that year in a format matching their tastefully designed editions of the Greek and Latin classics. Operating with the very academic authority cited by Guillory as crucial to canon formation, they promoted that ‘happy blending of past and present’ between English authors and those crowned with ancient laurels. Meanwhile, Thomas Percy expressed an aversion to Apollo in his search for a frontispiece to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Soliciting ‘a subject’ from all his friends, he stipulated to Thomas Warton that ‘It should be in the Gothic Style: No classical Apollo; but an old English Minstrel, with his harp, is the ﬁgure I must chieﬂy study to introduce into the plate I would preﬁx.’ 32 Pure English iconography is what he insisted on. Bell perceived no jarring symbolism in hiring the ‘Apollo Press’ to print his Poets of Great Britain, nor did Charles Cooke, who featured the ﬁgure of Apollo in the frontispiece to his edition of ‘the most favorite British Bards’, dated 15 November 1794 (see Fig. 1.3). Across from the frontispiece, he dedicated his work to Caroline of Brunswick in anticipation of her wedding with the Prince of Wales, which occurred on 8 April 1795. In the engraving, a portrait of Caroline is attended by a woman who gazes up at Cupid. The little archer, accompanied by a putto holding Hymen’s torch, aims his bow not at the soonto-be Princess Royal, but at Apollo and Britannia on the facing page. As sunlight radiates from the heavens, Apollo holds his laurel wreath above a monument 31 32

Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, 4–5, 74. Percy to Warton, 2 June 1764, The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, 174.

24

Our Native Classics

Figure 1.3. Frontispiece and dedication to Cooke’s Select British Poets. Cupid aims to make the bond permanent between Apollo, the agent who confers classical status, and Britannia with her poets. The Poetical Works of James Thomson [1794].

on which Britannia, burin in hand, puts the ﬁnishing touches to Cooke’s title. Cupid’s arrow will redouble her passion for the British poets; Cooke’s series will solemnize it. The lyre in Apollo’s arm is at once ancient and British, classical and bardic.

DIFF’RENT SORTS OF FARE FROM A MISCELL ANY The multi-volume collections of poetry published from 1765 on were distinct from anthologies in qualitative and quantitative terms. Poetry gathering was, of course, hardly new. The appetite for anthologies, which predated Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), grew ravenous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

Our Native Classics

25

as evidenced by thousands of titles. 33 Even if their contents were uniﬁed—by theme, genre, or target audience; by historical occasion; or by ties among the poets, such as a shared alma mater or geographical region—they were essentially what their titles often declared them to be: miscellaneous. The multi-volume collection, more systematic by contrast, offered for the ﬁrst time in uniform print the poets, the works, deﬁning a cultural legacy for an audience wishing to acquaint itself with the poetic identity of the nation. The basic difference may be gleaned from John Gay, whose verses ‘On a Miscellany of Poems’, addressed to the bookseller Bernard Lintot, were included in Lintot’s Miscellany (1712). Gay likens the miscellany-maker to a cook whose mind runs upon recipes and menus: As when some skilful Cook, to please each Guest, Would in one Mixture comprehend a Feast, With due Proportion and judicious Care He ﬁlls his Dish with diff ’rent sorts of Fare, Fishes and Fowl deliciously unite, To feast at once the Taste, the Smell, and Sight. 34

To feast/a Feast: the word is verb and noun, means and end, strategy and objective. Made up of ‘diff ’rent sorts of Fare’, the success of a miscellany depends on accommodating a diversity of tastes: a bit of this, a bit of that, all so that no guest leaves the table hungry. The trick for a bookseller/cook is to bring together the ingredients ‘in one Mixture’, to ‘unite’ the ﬂavors. Anthology, as Barbara Benedict reminds us, comes from the Greek word for a bouquet of blossoms, implying ‘ﬂowers garlanded within the volume’, harmonious but distinct. The Latin root miscellane, on the other hand, refers to ‘a dish of mixed corn’, an apt metaphor for miscellanies that were stitched together from separately printed items on the basis of a common topic or genre. In technical terms Benedict uses anthology to describe a book printed on purpose, reserving miscellany for volumes sewn together from earlier remnants. Otherwise insisting on no theoretical distinction between them, she treats the miscellany as an early form of anthology, noting that they ‘constitute the same genre because they share means of material production, processes of compilation, audiences, and forms that deﬁne their cultural functions’. 35 The usual ‘jumbled quality’ of miscellanies was thought to be more inviting to consumers than a formal mode of arrangement would have been. Given that poetry could be intimidating to the novice reader, miscellanies were packaged in small bibliographical formats to put readers at ease, in keeping with the spirit 33 The list of ‘Poetical Miscellanies, Song Books and Verse Collections of Multiple Authorship’ for 1660–1800 occupies 104 columns in the NCBEL (ii. 327–430). See also Arthur E. Case, A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies 1521–1750 (Oxford, 1935). 34 John Gay Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (2 vols. Oxford, 1974), i. 38–40, ll. 1–6. 35 Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, 1996), 3–4, 7, 9, 19, 33.

26

Our Native Classics

of Edward Bysshe’s encouragement in The Art of English Poetry (1702): ‘This is a Book that may be taken up and laid down at Pleasure, and would rather choose to lye about in a with-drawing-Room, or a Grove, than be set up in a Closet.’ The volume has volition, preferring a leisured peripatetic life over the sedentary existence imposed on a book ‘set up’ in state for private study. In content as well as form the anthology was designed not for close concentration but for casual interludes, for ‘dip-and-skip reading’. Discontinuous and irregular, such reading shaped the tastes of a growing number of initiates, middle-class purchasers of books eager to participate in their literary culture for reasons of pleasure and social enhancement. The feasting metaphor covered two models of consumption—one economic, one intellectual. ‘Any reader who has or wants taste’, Benedict explains, ‘by purchasing the book enters the feast and belongs to the community; desire is the only qualiﬁcation for the consumption of this literary culture.’ The anthology thus served as ‘an avenue to criticism for an audience that might earlier have been discouraged by the demanding and serious attention that poetry can require’. 36 No eighteenth-century anthology whetted more consumer desire than Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems by Several Hands. Published in 1748, it grew from three to six volumes over eleven subsequent editions through 1782 and came to represent, according to Michael Suarez, ‘the state of poetic production and consumption at mid-century in a seemingly deﬁnitive and unassailable way’. The most popular miscellanies from earlier in the century (linked to Dryden, Pope, and Lintot) ‘had run their course and were now dated’. To Dodsley’s ﬁrst edition, published primarily to test the market, the response was so promising that he poured resources into a second edition, multiplying his use of woodcuts and engravings by a factor of twenty and putting the work on track to become ‘one of the most highly ornamented mass-market books of the period’. Apart from the capital outlay evident in its physical design, other factors added to the authoritative air of Dodsley’s Collection: multiple allusions to Alexander Pope; the prestige of Tully’s Head, Dodsley’s imprint; gentlemen editors who assisted in the project; and an aristocratic connection, nearly half the poems being written by or dedicated to peers. As a result, Dodsley’s efforts had an impact greater than that of most anthologies, an ‘unmistakable effect on the reader, suggesting that the poetic performances collected in these volumes are worthy of close attention and careful preservation’. 37 But Dodsley’s Collection hardly deﬁned a canon, despite being thought by contemporaries to represent ‘the highest standards of taste in “modern” poetry’. 36 Ibid. 9, 106, 169, 10. Like ‘dip-and-skip’ reading, Jan Fergus’s concept of ‘desultory reading’ also describes an irregular experience, where someone borrows odd volumes of a novel, for instance, to browse in them without reading the whole book (Provincial Readers, 108–9). 37 Michael F. Suarez, SJ, ‘Trafﬁcking in the Muse: Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Question of Canon’, in Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, (Oxford, 1996), 299, 301–3, 305–7.

Our Native Classics

27

How could anyone consider it ‘the repository of the best poetry of the period’, puzzles Suarez, given ‘the virtual absence of works by Young, Prior, Gay, Swift, Pope, and Smart’. 38 Seldom, in fact, did the titles of eighteenth-century anthologies hint at normative evaluations of the sort implicit in canon formation. One exception, A Collection of the Best English Poetry, by Several Hands (1717), seemed to boast the ﬁnest English verse, the fruits of a critical survey, but it turns out to have been a miscellany in the technical sense, a title-page sewn onto sundry pamphlets from the publisher’s stock. 39 Categorical claims like the one in the ﬁrst phrase—‘the Best English Poetry’—were rare in anthology titles through midcentury; the second phrase was more common, its adjective occasionally varied to suggest quality control, as in ‘the Best Hands’ or ‘the most Eminent Hands’. By mid-century, however, the use of this synecdoche was fading; hands gave way to names as title-pages resorted to roll calls of the anthologized writers. A marketplace brimming with authors was hard for readers to navigate, Benedict argues, and title-pages that advertised writers by name ‘began to function as guides through a cluttered literary culture’. This trend marked ‘the beginning of a cultural desire for an English canon’. Yet desire was not delivery, and while editorial rhetoric established ‘a critical climate hospitable to the formation of a historical canon of English authors and works’, the miscellany advanced the process only part way. The function of the anthology, then, ‘if not to canonize, [was] at least to establish contemporary authors, coteries, works, and aesthetic principles beyond the moment of the publication’. With some selections beginning to endure, anthologies from the 1750s through the 1770s became ‘increasingly uniform’, exhibiting similarities in contents, arrangement, prefatory rhetoric, and style of printing. Editorial choices were beginning to gel, and as authorial status evolved, the anthology’s traditional focus on genre yielded to a ‘reverence for names’. 40 Only in this context can an otherwise inexplicable publishing skirmish at midcentury be understood. Francis Cogan started a testy battle when he published The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets. Namely, Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon; Charles, Earl of Dorset; Charles, Earl of Halifax; Sir Samuel Garth; George Stepney, Esq; William Walsh, Esq; Thomas Tickell, Esq. Never before collected and publish’d together (2 vols. 1749). As with Dodsley, social rank may have inﬂuenced Cogan’s choices, for the ‘Preface’ asserts that the poets are ‘persons as eminent 38 Ibid. 298, 311. In this respect Dodsley’s work resembles the putative ﬁrst anthology in the West, compiled by Meleager in 60 BCE and augmented for centuries until, around 1500, it contained more than 4,000 verse specimens. Yet because the number of poets included was small, the anthology remained ‘limited in scope and intent, not an anthology setting out to deﬁne and exemplify Poetry, with a capital P ’. See Reed Whittemore, Poets and Anthologists: A Look at the Current Poet-Packaging Process. A Lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on May 6, 1985 (Washington, DC, 1986), 9–10. 39 Published by T. Warner; see W. J. Cameron, ‘A Collection of the Best English Poetry, 1717’, Notes and Queries, 203 (1958), 300–3. 40 Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 12–14, 98–9, 192, 153.

28

Our Native Classics

for their wit and genius, as for their quality and employments’. 41 They were being published as a group because the works of each were ‘too inconsiderable to constitute a volume by themselves’. But this was no miscellany ‘by several hands’. Transcending that level of randomness, Cogan purported to reprint The Works of these poets—not a selection, but in each case an authorial œuvre. His title, with unprecedented authority, implied not only that the nation’s poets had been sorted out on the basis of major or minor standing, but that within these categories further calibrations of celebrity had also been made. Miscellanies, in fact, were blamed for having complicated Cogan’s threefold editorial task: ‘to separate their writings from the works of others, amongst which they have lain scattered; to reject such as have been falsely and injuriously ascribed to them, and to gather into a body all those others as are indisputably genuine, and worthy of them’. The modus operandi of miscellanies was to unite poetic gems with ‘the performances of other persons, greatly inferior to these excellent pens’, dooming them all to be forgotten. For a while the valuable poems ‘buoyed up and kept alive those mean and unequal productions’, but soon they were likely to be ‘depressed by the superior bulk and number of those others, and descend together with them into oblivion’. A more ‘injurious’ practice, prompted by the ‘venal purposes’ of miscellanies, was to ‘prostitute’ illustrious names by falsely ascribing to them ‘the deformed and contemptible offspring of others’, making it difﬁcult to separate spurious from genuine works. Ironically, ‘the very reputation of which our authors were formerly possessed . . . hath contributed to its own ruin’. Less deplorable, but ill-judged nonetheless, was the tendency of miscellanies to ‘force into the light’ works that were ‘the legitimate issue indeed of our authors, but certainly never intended publickly to be fathered by them’. Another part of reclaiming an author’s work was to track down other writings, unanthologized, that had ‘always remained in those loose and single sheets in which they were originally printed’. The moment of rescue came none too soon for poems that could have been lost ‘if they had been suffered to continue in their former state of dispersion’. The challenges rued by the editor outline the pitfalls of recovery and attribution involved in any reprinting of an author’s complete works, labors justiﬁed in the end by a hope that the poems might ‘stand secured of that lasting reputation which they so well deserve, and . . . safely be transmitted to posterity’. In answer to this collection Jacob and Richard Tonson, with Samuel Draper, brought out The Works of Celebrated Authors, Of whose Writings there are but small Remains (2 vols. 1750), in which the same poets, with the addition of Thomas Sprat, were presented in the same order of social rank: Roscommon, Dorset, Halifax, and Garth (vol. i); then Stepney, Walsh, and Tickell, plus Sprat (vol. ii). The publishers were dismissive of Cogan: ‘As a very imperfect Collection 41 Quotations in this and the next two paragraphs are taken from the four-page ‘Preface’ (i, sigs. a1r –a2v ).

Our Native Classics

29

of the Works of the celebrated Writers contain’d in these Volumes (the Poems of Bishop Sprat excepted) have [sic] been offer’d to the Publick, we presume no Apology is necessary for the present Publication.’ For their part, the publication of these poets was sufﬁcient cause to publish them again immediately, as long as the newer edition was more authoritative. To Cogan’s ‘imperfect’ tally they added ﬁve poems by Roscommon, one by Dorset, four by Halifax, twelve by Garth, eight by Stepney, and ten by Walsh. ‘After a diligent search’, they declared, ‘we can ﬁnd no other Pieces written by those Authors, than what are here inserted’, and they hoped they had let in no ‘spurious ones’ by mistake. Tellingly, they regretted not being able to expand their roster of poets more boldly: ‘The size of these Volumes, which is greater than we expected, must be our excuse for not adding any more to them, than the Poems of Bishop Sprat.’ For the time being, they had differentiated their table of contents somewhat from Cogan’s, but— surprising though it may seem in retrospect—eagerly contemplated other minor poets who had left only ‘small Remains’. 42 If augmentation was the game, two could play. In A Supplement to the Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (1750) Cogan published everything added by the Tonsons and more. He laughed at their ‘pretensions of perfection and preeminence’, charged that their advertisements were ‘Plainly design’d to deceive the publick, and prejudice our property’, and boasted that he now had the greater number of poems by Roscommon, Dorset, Stepney, and Tickell. Loathe for readers to think he had beneﬁted from the texts of his rivals, Cogan said that several gentlemen had called his attention to pieces he had overlooked, along with ‘others which were never before collected, and some not before printed’. The Tonsons having upped the ante by including Sprat, Cogan responded by taking in not only Sprat, but also the Earl of Godolphin, Lord Somers, Ambrose Philips, and (for good measure) ‘Pieces omitted in the Works of Sir John Suckling, Mr. Otway, Matthew Prior, Esq; Dr. King, and Dean Swift’. Anxious to claim an even greater ‘advantage over our adversary’, Cogan nonetheless betrayed some uneasiness in defending his inclusion of ‘sundry pieces’ by Swift as a bonus to ‘inhance the Value of the Volume’, pieces which, ‘tho’ inferior to none’ of his other works, were prose after all, not poetry. Lest the volume begin to look too miscellaneous, Cogan salvaged the impression of deliberate design by claiming to have ‘annexed what our Great Rival promis’d, those poets of which there are but small remains’. Although the supplement had swelled ‘to a size greatly superior to the price’, Cogan protested he had chosen ‘to wave the consideration of gain, rather than incur the imputation of having protracted the work with a prospect of increasing our proﬁts’. He invited ‘judicious gentleman’ to compare ‘the executive 42 ‘Advertisement’, The Works of Celebrated Authors, Of whose Writings there are but small Remains (2 vols. London, 1750), i, sig. A2r–v . The Tonsons’ volumes came to 444 and 416 pages respectively. Slightly larger in trim size than these duodecimos, Cogan’s octavo volumes were more slender, 308 and 262 pages in turn.

30

Our Native Classics

part of these productions’ (the books as physical objects) to decide ‘which has the air of elegance, or seems the growth of Grub-street’. 43 Lost to Cogan’s second advertisement, so absorbed was he in the tit-for-tat rhetoric of one-upmanship, was the loftier if no less opportunistic goal articulated in his ﬁrst: ‘To reinstate these admirable poets, in those high posts of honour which they once deservedly ﬁlled.’ The moment was propitious. ‘Such is the peculiar fate of these times’, he lamented, ‘that though poesy now receives the greatest honors and encouragement from the public, it has not been, for this last century, in a more low and declining state’. Alexander Pope’s death in 1744 had left a vacuum; poetic ﬁre had been replaced by ‘poverty of invention, and lowness of thought, blown up and obscured by a false and unnatural pomp of expression’. Now was the time to concentrate on past writers and ‘be the more careful in preserving their remains’, for such remains were ‘already hastening into oblivion’. 44 The matter ended there for the moment, but not because this curatorial zeal had played itself out. This brief clash was a rehearsal for the real agon, when publishers would compete over the celebrated major poets, and over authors of whose writings there were large remains. Neither bouquets nor mixed dishes, the publications of Cogan and the Tonsons showcased poets, not poems, and by trying to incorporate their complete works they moved beyond anthologizing to the brink of something else. Whatever that might be, it was going to embrace more than just ‘authors of the ﬁrst rank’. That usage of classick was destined to make room for another, a more contextual one, in which sense it would extend to ‘minor’ poets like Roscommon, Garth, and Tickell. That a battle could have erupted so suddenly over such authors suggests that, already by mid-century, publishers recognized a market for a collection of poetry more ambitious than what a miscellany could offer, and also grasped the basic canonical dynamics at stake: both the readiness of readers to possess the classics, and the rudiments of completeness that such collections would formally require.

COPYRIGHT AND CANON The literary canon in this one respect is like biblical scripture: it grants a place to lesser as well as greater texts. Even if the ‘decisive status’ of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton had been achieved by the mid-eighteenth century, and the terms of their reception ‘set for years to come’, Kramnick distorts things by focusing 43 ‘To the PUBLICK’ (sig. 2v ). The margin of superiority was slim in Roscommon’s case: a distich, translated from a single verse in Lucan. The Supplement is printed in three sections, each with its own part-title page and separate sequence of signatures and page numbers. The longest, at 284 pages, contains the additional poems for the authors in the 1749 publication; the newly inducted poets occupy the next 95 pages; and Swift closes out the volume with 96 pages. 44 ‘Preface’, The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets.

Our Native Classics

31

narrowly on this threesome to explain ‘the formation of the English literary canon into its canonical form’. The Hebrew Bible makes room for Zephaniah and Haggai, not just the Pentateuch, Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah; the New Testament is deﬁned not only by the Gospels, Paul’s letters to the Christians in Rome and Corinth, and Revelation, but also by Paul’s letter to Philemon and the epistles of James and Jude. So too in the English poetical canon, John Pomfret and David Mallet ﬁnd a place in company with Pope and Milton. As Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were earning ultra-canonical status from the 1740s through 1760s, other poets also were receiving the honor conferred only by publishers: multiple reprintings. Yet copyright practices hampered the process. At stake were literary properties in authors and titles to which London booksellers laid exclusive claim, ignoring the terms of the 1710 Copyright Act (8 Anne, c. 19), which protected books then in print for twenty-one years (until 1731), and new publications for fourteen years, with an additional fourteen years if the author were still alive at the end of the ﬁrst fourteen. Against this interpretation of the law, some booksellers argued that an author enjoyed a common-law right to his work, and this right, if assigned to a bookseller, was held (as by the author to that point) in perpetuity. In short, the situation was confusing, and the powerful London booksellers did their best to deepen the confusion in order to stave off competing editions of their authors, or run them out of the market. 45 Their stranglehold on literary property is illustrated by the frustrations of John Baskerville. Initially unaffected by copyright constraints, Baskerville undertook an edition of Virgil in 1754, producing proposals and specimen sheets and eventually Bucolica, Georgica et Aeneis itself in 1757. Meanwhile he looked forward to another major project, Milton’s poems. A newcomer to the book trade, he now confronted a bitter truth: ‘The Booksellers claim an absolute right in Copys of books, as old as even Milton & Shakespeare; the former of which I did design to have printed, but am deterred by Mr. Tonson & Co threatening me with a bill in Chancery.’ He was taken aback to ﬁnd Milton’s works so jealously guarded more than eighty years after the author’s death. ‘When Virgil is done’, he wrote self-pityingly, ‘I can print nothing but another classick . . . which I cannot forbear thinking a grievous hardship after the inﬁnite pains & great expense I have been at.’ 46 Though happy to print ancient texts, it galled him to think 45 See Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britiain (1695–1775) (Oxford and Portland, Oreg., 2004). Other good sources include John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London, 1994); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, Tenn., 1968); and Gwyn Walters, ‘The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: The Battle for Literary Property’, The Library, 5th ser. 29 (1974), 287–311. 46 Ralph Straus and Robert K. Dent, John Baskerville: A Memoir (London, 1907), 97–8. The excerpts are from a letter to an unknown recipient, 4 Jan. 1957, and a letter to Robert Dodsley, 20 Dec. 1756.

32

Our Native Classics

that extra-legal pressures should conﬁne him to this arena, so he negotiated the ‘privilege’ of printing Milton’s works, two conditions of which evidently were to add the phrase ‘for J. and R. Tonson’ to his Birmingham imprint and to praise Tonson’s generosity and ‘singular politeness’. 47 He went on to print editions of Congreve and Addison (1761), again with Tonson’s approval and name on the title-page, showing what an untenable position he was in. As far as reprinting classic English authors was concerned, Baskerville was kept in leading strings by the London trade. Far north of Birmingham, the book trade in Scotland was harder to control. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Scottish booksellers vigorously challenged the copyright supremacy of the London trade. The decades-long legal struggle reached its climax in the case of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774, with the House of Lords deciding against the idea of ‘Perpetual Property’, reasoning that authors and their assigns did not enjoy a common-law right to their copy once it was printed; they only enjoyed a prescriptive right, as limited by the Statute of Anne. This ruling was undeniably historic. However, its importance as a turning point in eighteenth-century publishing should not be overstated. In certain respects, less change was seen after the decision than has been claimed; in other respects, more change had already been initiated before the decision. Without question, more printers after 1774 could take up the classics, as vividly attested by George Steevens in 1783 with a brewing metaphor: ‘No less than six editions of Shakespeare . . . are now in the mash-tub’. 48 In 1744 Tonson had chafed at the ‘ﬂagrant piracy’ of Hanmer’s edition, but, as Giles E. Dawson suggests, was unwilling ‘to tangle with so powerful an adversary’ as Oxford University. He undercut it instead by producing a cheap London reprint in 1745, and that same year, ‘by bluff and bluster’, threatened Edward Cave with a lawsuit, squelching his proposal for a pocket edition of the plays. 49 By means of intimidation, Tonson and other wealthy booksellers had enforced the status quo. Yet bluff and bluster did not end in 1774. Powerful proprietors clung to a concept of ‘honorary copyright’, tried to ruin competitors, and exploited ambiguities in the statute, pretending to retain copyrights beyond fourteen years, thus cheating authors, to whom the copyrights were supposed to revert at that

47

‘Preface’, Paradise Lost. A Poem, in Twelve Books (Birmingham, 1758), sigs. A3–A4. ‘Reed is to occupy the old Red Lattice’, Steevens continued, ‘and Malone intends to froth and lime at a little snug booth of his own construction. Ritson will advertise sour ale against his mild. Lowndes has contrived a surreptitious brewing; and another, viz. our text without notes (your true critical hops) will also soon be in tap’ (Correspondence of Thomas Warton, 481). 49 Dawson, Four Centuries of Shakespeare Publication (Lawrence, Kan., 1964), 14–17. Robert Walker’s challenge to the Tonson monopoly on Shakespeare is also discussed (12–15). See Dawson, ‘Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare’, Studies in Bibliography, 2 (1949–50), 35–48. For more on the conﬂict with Walker, see Harry M. Geduld, Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson (Bloomington, Ind., 1969), 147, 189–95. 48

Our Native Classics

33

point, of a second payment. 50 Blunt circumvention of Donaldson v. Becket was often a continuing fact of life for authors and for booksellers of lesser stature. The effects of the copyright case are exaggerated by William St Clair, who states that the ‘old canon’ was ‘a direct result of the legal judgment of 1774, and only made possible by 1774’. Before 1774, he argues, restricting his focus to London, perpetual copyright ‘prevented formal canonizing, the publication of the works of authors in a uniform series of “English Poets” ’. But he adds that, because the Scots operated under the 1710 Copyright Act prior to 1774, ‘it is not surprising that the ﬁrst formal canons of the classics of the English language should have been produced not in England but in Scotland’. 51 So formal canonizing did occur before 1774, just not in London. Other claims made by St Clair are also misleading. One ‘far-reaching’ consequence of 1774 was ‘to allow a revival of the types of printed text which had been discouraged after 1600’, he maintains, ‘above all, anthologies’. He cites a ‘huge spate of anthologies . . . which draw on the old-canon texts’ after 1774. 52 Yet thousands of anthologies and miscellanies were printed all century long, and their character did not instantly change: many before 1774 drew on old-canon texts, and many after 1774 remained topical or occasional, not canonical. For example, James Elphinston’s A Collection of Poems, from the Best Authors (1764) contained works by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison, Prior, Gray, and others; and The Beauties of English Poesy. Selected by Oliver Goldsmith (1767) included Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Shenstone, and others. If anthologies differed before and after 1774, they did so in degree, not kind. 53 Similarly, St Clair’s argument about a new breed of educational text is overly emphatic: ‘The decision of 1774 also made possible a new generation of textbooks and school books’, works that ‘drew on, anthologized, and abridged the out-of-copyright authors’. Supposedly this development was abrupt: ‘Quite suddenly, in the course of a few years from about 1780, English literature became the principal source of texts for English education. . . . Children were now offered substantial passages from famous English authors.’ 54 The force of this claim is blunted by evidence like Elphinston’s text, speciﬁcally ‘Adopted to every age, but peculiarly designed to form the Taste of Youth’, or John Entick’s New Spelling 50 See Nancy A. Mace, ‘Charles Rennett and the London Music-Sellers in the 1780s: Testing the Ownership of Reversionary Copyrights’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004), 1–23. 51 William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 123, 132. 52 Ibid. 135, 495. 53 For an authoritative discussion of miscellanies, see Michael F. Suarez, SJ, ‘The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York, 2001). 54 St Clair, Reading Nation, 137. Richard B. Sher also thinks ‘the impact of the Lords’ copyright decision should not be exaggerated’, taking issue with St Clair over the accessibility of books and concluding that ‘Britain began to emerge as a “reading nation” long before 1774’ (The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago, 2006), 27–30).

34

Our Native Classics

Dictionary (1765), a ‘Complete Pocket Companion/For those/That read Milton, Pope, Addison, Shakespear, Tillotson and Locke, or other English Authors of Repute in Prose or Verse’. Movement toward a curriculum based on readings of classic English authors (embodied in the ﬁrst of these texts, facilitated by the second) began well before Donaldson v. Becket was decided, and cannot be categorically ascribed to that cause. Did the trend accelerate? Perhaps so, but on several fronts it was already under way. Thus, while Donaldson v. Becket led the way to rival editions of the poetry canon in London, or, as Mark Rose put it, legitimized this activity, it did not bring about such enterprises in the ﬁrst place. 55 Other causes must be sought to account for them: economic forces, trade pressures, and new applications of an old printing paradigm, all in combination with intellectual ferment in various quarters. Although the resolution of the copyright quarrel was signiﬁcant for the book trade, the marketing of cheap editions of the English classics predated it by a decade. ‘The canonical status of a text or group of texts is not exclusively a property of the work itself ’, Michael Suarez observes; ‘the question of canonicity is inseparable from the question of transmission.’ 56 The transmission of English poetry had already experienced a radical shift. Correction is due, then, of overviews like the ‘Chronology of the Mass Reading Public 1774–1900’, where Richard Altick identiﬁes Donaldson v. Becket as the ﬁrst step in creating a mass market for books, followed by the ‘Cheap editions of British classics by Cooke, Bell, etc.’ beginning in ‘1776 and after’. 57 One could indulge in an inﬁnite regress of ﬁrst steps, always spotting an earlier cause, but in this instance the list should start with ‘Cheap editions of British classics by Foulis and Creech’ in ‘1765 and 1773’.

A REPUTABLE TRADE—OR PITIFUL, BEGGARLY, PRECARIOUS? In 1765, Robert and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow quietly began issuing a series of English poets. And in 1773, with the copyright case pending, William Creech and John Balfour of Edinburgh commenced printing another series. Ambitious of reaching readers beyond Scotland, Creech and Balfour thought they might gain a foothold in the enormous London market, since they enjoyed close ties with an inﬂuential member of the London trade, William Strahan—printer to 55 ‘One of the immediate consequences of the end of perpetual copyright was the legitimation of reprint enterprises such as Donaldson’s’ (Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’ Representations, 23 (1988), 69). 56 ‘Trafﬁcking in the Muse’, 312. 57 The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago and London, 1957; repr. 1983), 379.

Our Native Classics

35

(among others) Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Yet their hopes of persuading him to take a ﬁnancial interest in the scheme were unfounded. Strahan recoiled from the plan, perceiving the collection to be a breach of long-standing copyrights. Exasperated with Balfour’s pestering, Strahan set down for Creech in the bleakest terms his conviction that the book trade was in peril: I am only concerned for the Trade in general; which must soon be destroyed if every body is permitted to print every Thing. And if the Cause of Literary Property is decided against Perpetual Property, or if the Decision is long deferred . . . , I think the sooner you look out for another Occupation, the better. It will become quickly the most pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unproﬁtable, and disreputable Trades [sic] in Britain.

‘And if such Things are done’, he elaborated, ‘it matters little by whom they are done. I ﬁnd there are about ten Printers with you, that print every Thing, and who are now beginning to print upon one another. Do you not see the obvious and unavoidable Tendency of this?’ 58 The plan touched a raw nerve. Although outright piracy is what Strahan implied by the phrase ‘printing upon one another’, another practice consistent with these words was equally abhorrent to him: competition, that is, two or more booksellers publishing rival editions of Milton or Dryden, not to mention multi-volume collections of poetry. While ‘numerous sets of the classics’ might inspire young publishers on the make like Creech or Bell, Strahan wanted to stop that model for printing Greek and Roman authors from being applied to British authors, at least in the English book market. Although Strahan, Edward and Charles Dilly, and other London booksellers would in due course ﬁnd it necessary to publish their own collection, for the time being they chastened Creech with strong words. In recounting the genesis of their own project, The Works of the English Poets, Edward Dilly twice referred to the proprietors as ‘the most respectable booksellers of London’. Those in the trade who sided with Strahan and the Dilly brothers on the copyright issue routinely used the epithets capital and respectable in reference to themselves. Such persistent rhetorical usage, documented in Dilly’s and Strahan’s correspondence with Creech, worked its inﬂuence on him. Their mentoring drew Creech into ever closer alignment with their interests, and in the long run the younger man arrived at a ‘perfect amity’ with Strahan. He fashioned himself into a ‘publishing bookseller, and was possessed of much valuable literary property’. 59 A litmus test of respectability, according to Dilly, was one’s disposition towards the relief bill drafted to compensate copy-holders in the wake of Donaldson v. Becket. Supporters of the legislation were extolled, and opponents execrated, 58 Strahan to Creech, 1 Jan. 1773, The Creech Papers, SRO MS RH4/26A, reels 1–3. Permission to quote from this archive was kindly granted by Mr L. P. K. Blair Oliphant. 59 Robert Kerr, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of W. Smellie (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1811), ii. 170, 295. For Dilly’s version of how The Works of the English Poets came about, see Ch. 4.

36

Our Native Classics

in letter after letter to Creech. ‘There is not one Bookseller of Property & Character in London & Westminster but who has signed our Petition’, Dilly told Creech, ‘and we have got the Concurrence of all the Capital Booksellers of Oxford, Cambridge & other Parts’. Arrayed against them were ‘little low Stall Booksellers in Middle Row Holbourn’, persons with nothing who lusted ‘to get something by Plunder’. Such ‘Contemptible Names’ as appeared on their counter-petition ‘were scarcely ever before collected together’. They included ‘all the low Stall-keepers in Town, Vendors of old Books, circulating Library keepers &c. &c. all of which are not Possessed of a single Shilling Property in Copyright’, and north of the Tweed ‘the Names of the Edinr . Petitioners [were] but little better, they consist chieﬂy of low Pirates’. It was, he fulminated, ‘a Disgrace for a Man of any reputation to have his Name appear in the list’. 60 Personal loyalties apart, it would have been hard for Creech not to internalize opinions like these, which ideologically buttressed the purpose of his correspondence with the Dilly brothers: his shared interest in lucrative copyrights in authors like Hugh Blair and James Beattie. After Parliament defeated the relief bill, two avenues remained for the London trade to defend what it still viewed as its property. Hearing word of an Edinburgh edition of The Adventurer, Strahan outlined the London counter-offensive: ‘A small Edition of the Adventurer will be put to Press soon; and we must take what Care we can to protect the Articles that are, from time to time, invaded. We have now nothing else for it, unless when they meddle with Books still protected by Q. Anne’s Statute. In that Case we must prosecute.’ Commercial competition was to be the remedy for trade encroachments, or, in cases of actual copyright violation, the legal process. No mercy would be shown when the law was infringed; Strahan opposed ‘any body’s compromising any Prosecution; because I am quite certain nothing effectual will ever be done towards stopping their Carreer, but by making Examples of those whom we can detect, and are convicted.’ 61 Attempts to control the marketplace were aimed at driving out unwanted products and obstructing the transactions of rivals. In quick retaliation, London was to republish any contested title at an unbeatable price. ‘[O]ur best Protection’, wrote Strahan, ‘is in our own Power; I mean, to underprint every Person instantly that invades our Books.’ 62 To regulate the market in this manner they needed data on titles slated for printing in Edinburgh. Creech became their informant in the summer of 1774; it was his tip-off that led to the London edition of The Adventurer once Strahan had looked into its copyright status. ‘I cannot actually say, whether the Adventurer is within the Statute or not; but I shall enquire’, he told Creech, grateful for his help: ‘I am much obliged to you for your Hints of what is printing with you’. By means of such reconnaissance and 60 61 62

Edward Dilly to Creech, 2, 16, and 30 Apr. 1774. Strahan to Creech, 25 Aug. 1774 and 20 May 1776. Strahan to Creech, 27 Dec. 1774.

Our Native Classics

37

pre-emptive strikes the London trade meant to undermine the Scottish reprint trade, but the process was wasteful, and Strahan hoped the Edinburgh booksellers would ultimately police themselves: ‘We shall always be much obliged to you for every Hint you give of what is going forward at Edinr . but I hope they will soon do their own Business, nothing being at present so dangerous as promiscuous printing of Copies out of the Protection of the Statute.’ 63 None too subtly Creech was nudged towards implementing measures to forestall the problem. On 7 February 1776 thirteen members of the trade gathered to organize the Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society. 64 On 6 May at their ﬁrst regular meeting Creech was instrumental in establishing procedures for the body. Their progress was monitored by Strahan: The Articles you proposed at the Meeting of the Trade are all very proper, nor can I suggest any Additions to them, except that I think you should enter every lawful Book the moment it is put to Press in a Book to be kept for that Purpose in some Coffee-house, open to the Inspection of all the Trade who accede to this Agreement as we have at the Chapter Coffee-house here. 65

The Edinburgh organization was modeled on that of the London trade, centering on the accord drawn up at and symbolized by the Chapter Coffee-House. The association was voluntary and yet exclusive, dividing the trade into insiders and outsiders; its deliberations were secret; its purpose was to stabilize proﬁts by eliminating the factors of surprise and competition from the marketplace; and its enforcement policy was one of cooperative coercion. 66 Strahan took heart at the prospect of a thriving Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society. By ‘discouraging your little dirty pitiful Pyrates’, he praised Creech, ‘you may restore the Trade with you to some Reputation’. Compared with the nadir of his pessimism in 1774, this sentiment captured a ﬂicker of hope, but it was only a start. Congratulating Creech on ‘a Regulation quite necessary for preventing your hurting one another’, Strahan wished that Edinburgh would ‘soon ﬁx upon other Regulations to prevent the Hurt of the London Booksellers, as well as the Ruin of the Trade in general’. Creech was being called to his vocation: ‘You are very able to assist in this necessary Work, as you are quite Master of the Subject.’ 67 Fidelity to a cause was the promise raised by Creech’s mastery, adding a moral dimension to the ﬁnancial interests and emotional obligations that tied him to 63

Strahan to Creech, 12 July 1774. NLS MS Dep. 303, no. 1. The thirteen present were John Balfour, William Gordon, John Bell, William Graye, James Donaldson, Charles Elliot, Will Schaw, John Wood, James Dickson, William Creech, William Coke, Alexander Brown, and James Brown. A fourteenth signature, belonging to John Drysdale, is crossed out. 65 Strahan to Creech, 20 May 1776. See Richard B. Sher, ‘Corporatism and Consensus in the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: The Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society in Comparative Perspective’, Book History, 1 (1998), 32–93. 66 67 NLS MS Dep. 303, no. 1. Strahan to Creech, 20 May and 4 July 1776. 64

38

Our Native Classics

Strahan. His singular talents would be tested in the ‘necessary Work’ of restoring reputability to the trade—the end to which he was being groomed. But Strahan was ﬁghting a losing battle. He might have won the day by gradually converting Creech to his way of thinking, but all around him, in the courts of Scotland and England as well as the printing houses of Glasgow and Edinburgh and Aberdeen, his foes were turning the war in their favor. The arrangement that had served the interests of a special few so well for so long— the private auctions, organized for divvying up the spoils amongst themselves— would begin to crumble as a means of organizing the book trade and managing its markets. Pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unproﬁtable, and disreputable: the horrors sketched out by Strahan call to mind the famous cluster of adjectives in Leviathan— ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’—where Hobbes describes human life in a state of nature, without adequate political checks on individual impulses. Strahan dreaded that Creech and Balfour were unwittingly bringing about a comparable reality wherein ‘every body is permitted to print every Thing’, a miserable world of Hobbesian ravages and stress, involving the ceaseless warfare of every bookseller against every other bookseller. This is a far cry from what Hugh Amory characterized as the ‘sleepy, portand-walnut world of eighteenth-century English bookselling’. Surveying series of novels published between 1780 and 1830, Amory concluded that the ablest booksellers had suppressed their competition, and that ‘there was no more than one series in effective existence at a given period’. 68 A different picture emerges relative to poetry collections over the several decades following 1765, when two or more series at once often competed for purchasers. With great energy the publishers of these poetry collections dealt with pressures to mimic other products, to keep expanding the basic project, and generally to steal away market share, open up new market niches, or enlarge the market altogether. 68 Hugh Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration”: The Case of Cooke’s Tom Jones’, in R. Harvey, W. Kirsop, and B. J. McMullin (eds.), An Index of Civilization (Clayton, Victoria, 1993), 140, 142–3.

2 The Elzevirs of Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis When great authors can be printed with classical freedom . . . (Robert Foulis, 1774)

In the 1650s, John Pitcher has observed, something new occurred ‘as regards putting playbooks and poems into print’. Until then, canonical authors had been published here and there by different booksellers in folio and quarto volumes. Humphrey Moseley added Beaumont and Fletcher to the select list of folios, as noted in Chapter 1, but more signiﬁcantly, perceived a demand for collected editions of plays and poems in octavo. Yet Paulina Kewes cautions against seeing his poetry editions as amounting to anything like ‘Moseley’s English Poets’; they shared a resemblance, but unlike the octavo plays, fell short of forming a ‘consistent project of serial publication’. Only the plays were ‘clearly meant to be recognized as parts of a series’, though the series turned out to be ‘a publishing cul-de-sac’. Moseley’s death in 1661 ended what could have become a more expansive project. Yet the work of ‘deliberate canon formation’ was carried forward, as John Barnard suggests, by Henry Herringman and Jacob Tonson. In the early eighteenth century, Tonson published plays in octavo editions and soon thereafter duodecimos. 1 By the mid-1720s Tonson’s publications ‘contained something like the whole of English literature in duodecimo’, as David Foxon put it, wondering whether Tonson ‘saw himself as taking over the Elzevier tradition’. 2 By adopting smaller formats, D. F. McKenzie remarks, ‘booksellers like Tonson naturally found it convenient to introduce multi-volume sets’. A true multi-volume set of English poets, I argue, awaited the Foulis precedent, but McKenzie aptly stresses that Tonson’s ‘succession of English authors’ (a more accurate phrase) was ‘remarkable by any standards’, with editions of Milton, Prior, Spenser, Pope, Gay, Addison, 1 John Barnard, ‘Introduction’; John Pitcher, ‘Literature, the Playhouse and the Public’; and Paul Hammond, ‘The Restoration Poetic and Dramatic Canon’, all in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), 22, 374–5, 402; Kewes, ‘ “Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books” ’, 9–11, 13, 19. 2 Foxon, Pope, ed. McLaverty, 29, 26.

40

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

and other poets beyond his run of English dramatists. 3 In association with Dryden, Tonson added even more depth to his catalogue with translations (by Dryden and others) of Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Theocritus, Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Catullus, and Propertius. By this avenue, Paul Hammond states, he gave his readers ‘a taste of the Greek and Roman poetic canon’. 4 This appropriation of ancient authors enhanced the status of the translating tongue. Only in part was this a matter of English letters basking in borrowed glory, an effect described in John Gay’s ‘On a Miscellany of Poems’: Translations should throughout the Work be sown, And Homer’s Godlike Muse be made our own; Horace in useful Numbers should be Sung, And Virgil’s Thoughts adorn the British Tongue; . . . Let every Classick in the Volume shine, And each contribute to thy great Design. 5

Rather than showing how the British tongue might be adorned by classical gems, Tonson’s program of translation demonstrated how potent a colonizing force it was in its own right. Through such English translations of ancient poets, Samuel Johnson thought, ‘[t]he afﬂuence and comprehension of our language is very illustriously displayed’. Translations played a role in the emergence of a literary canon; when assimilated into the canon, Stuart Gillespie asserts, they strengthened the stature of both ancient author and English translator, lessening the perception of the English tradition as ‘a subordinate branch of the classical line’. The day was coming when it would ‘be as impossible to think of Virgil without Mr Dryden as of either without Mr Tonson’. 6 This trio of factors—ancient classic, English poet, ambitious publisher— converged with far-reaching results in the printing house of Robert and Andrew Foulis. The fact that ﬁve collections of English poetry were started between 1765 and 1777 suggests that the multi-volume phenomenon could not have been more timely, yet its advent was somewhat accidental. When the Foulises began printing their duodecimo English poets, it did not occur to them that they were initiating a great enterprise. Reliable income from steady sales was their sole concern. They idolized not the Elzeviers, but Robert Estienne or Stephens, 3 ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (eds.), Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst, Mass., 2002), 228–9. 4 Hammond, ‘Restoration Canon’, 394–5. The ‘long and fruitful collaboration’ between Tonson and Dryden is discussed by Keith Walker in ‘The Master of Extremes’, TLS (19–25 Feb. 1988), 193. See also his ‘Jacob Tonson, Bookseller’, American Scholar, 61 (1992), 424–30. 5 John Gay Poetry and Prose, i. 38–40, ll. 29–32, 37–8. 6 Gillespie, ‘Translation and Canon-Formation’, 7–8, 13; and Stuart Gillespie and Penelope Wilson, ‘The Publishing and Readership of Translation’, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, iii. 1660–1790, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2005), 40. Gillespie and Wilson applaud Tonson as ‘an outstanding example of the conﬂation of astute commercialism with a sense of a national literary mission’.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

41

the Parisian printer renowned for his Greek lexicon, and Henry Estienne for his exquisite folio edition of Plato. The Foulis bid for international acclaim was to be their own meticulous edition of Plato, a lavish folio of ‘size and magniﬁcence’ for libraries. 7 In the end, however, ﬁnancial strains led them to rely on smaller books for general use, books of ‘elegance and neatness’ delivering vernacular poetry. An Elzevir adapted to this end is what the age required; an Elzevir is what it got. 8 And this time there would be no cul-de-sac. Just as the name of Virgil triggered thoughts of Dryden and Tonson, the notion of the English poets would inevitably raise the idea of ‘classics’, pocket volumes, and the kind of series inaugurated in Glasgow. The day would arrive when thinking of Virgil would bring Pope and Charles Cooke into the picture too. For ‘superior answering’ in an oral examination on Virgil at the ‘Classical School’ in 1818, Thomas Edward Lindsey was awarded a copy of Pope’s poetical works from Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets (see Fig. 2.1). This comfortable substitution of an English for an ancient classic marks quite a distance from the day in 1768 when a Foulis edition of Horace was deemed the most appropriate prize for the star pupil at the Glasgow Grammar School. 9 GILT BY ASSOCIATION Eighteenth-century British booksellers often traded on the Elzevier brand, associating their products with the classical mode of printing held to have been perfected by the Dutch family. The Elzeviers sold books from 1581 to 1712, printing them as well from 1617 through 1702, notably by Abraham and Bonaventura in Leyden (1622–51) and Daniel in Amsterdam (1655–81). 10 Perennial allusions to their work indelibly linked their name to the cause of classical literature and spawned the noun ‘Elzevir’ to designate a neat pocket volume. In effect, by ﬁxing a consumer standard, the Elzeviers taught succeeding booksellers how to produce a series of classical texts. It was only half true that ‘[m]en like the Tonsons’, as Cyprian Blagdon wrote, were ‘a law unto themselves’ by virtue of their talent for ‘mak[ing] a proﬁt out of publishing Literature with a capital L’. 11 Some of the laws by which they prospered were transferable. Several booksellers, having 7 A folio of Plato was ‘the dream of Foulis’ life’. In 1746 John Wilkes, home from the University of Leyden, supported the idea, writing to Robert, ‘It would be the greatest honour to your press to print so noble an author, with as few errata as possible; and you would beneﬁt the learned world beyond what Stephens or Aldus ever did’. See David Murray, Some Letters of Robert Foulis (Glasgow, 1917), 11–12. 8 As distinct from the family name, I use the term ‘Elzevir’ in accordance with routine 18thcent. usage to designate the commonest sort of book printed and sold by the Elzeviers—the small pocket volume, usually a duodecimo. 9 Recent Acquisitions: Books before 1900, Howes Bookshop catalogue 317 (2006), item 40. 10 David W. Davies, The World of the Elseviers, 1580–1712 (The Hague, 1954), 19, 94; Alphonse Willems, Les Elzevier Histoire et Annales Typographiques (1880; repr. Nieuwkoop, 1962), 235. 11 ‘Booksellers’ Trade Sales 1718–1768’, The Library, 5th ser. 5 (1951), 252.

42

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

Figure 2.1. Cooke’s edition of Pope as a prize awarded at Classical School.

absorbed the lesson of the ‘Elzevir’, would proﬁt from publishing ‘Literature with a capital L’ in the form of multi-volume series of the English classics. The name of Elzevier was sung both early and late. Tonson advertised Paradise Lost (1711) as ‘Printed very Correctly, with a neat Elzever Letter, in 12mo. for the pocket’; Bernard Lintot described a ‘neat Pocket Edition’ of Steele’s Lying Lover (1711) as ‘Printed on a new Elziver Letter’; Edmund Curll touted four works

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

43

(1714) ‘lately publish’d on an Elzevir Letter, in a neat Pocket-Volume’. 12 Auctioneers too, when advertising the sale of a library, frequently featured Elzevirs in their list of tempting books. Summing up a century of praise, T. F. Dibdin in 1802 found it ‘impossible to refrain from seizing every fair opportunity of doing justice to the industry, the labour, the care, the correctness, and brilliance of the Elzevirian Press’. 13 A golden aura surrounded the name. Part of that aura was captured by the word neat. As deﬁned by Johnson, the adjective meant ‘elegant, but without dignity’, or ‘cleanly’, and in another sense ‘pure; unadulterated; unmingled’ (e.g. to describe wine), but this latter usage, Johnson advised, was restricted to ‘the cant of trade’. 14 In the commercial shorthand of booksellers, the term conveyed expectations regarding size (as applied to volumes), typeface (when modifying a ‘letter’), or appearance (in reference to bindings). 15 It mattered little if consumers—or booksellers, for that matter— could not identify a true Elzevier letter. What counted was recognition of a name connected with ideas of quality, aesthetic appeal, and value. To most readers, the imprint ex ofﬁcina Elzeviriana signiﬁed textual reliability and typographical quality, and any book whose advertisement invoked the Elzevier tradition brought to mind (1) a correct text, (2) printed handsomely, and (3) sold in a portable, inexpensive format. How justly the Elzevier name could be equated with the ﬁrst was open to debate. ‘Elzevir was once in high esteem’, wrote the Earl of Northumberland’s secretary to Robert Foulis in 1753; ‘For what? for the beauty of his types;— but now our young men ﬁnd him so very incorrect that they use him chieﬂy both at Schools and Colleges in certain remote places where people may read a Page before they apply the leaf properly.’ 16 If the texts of the Elzeviers eventually fell under some suspicion, the beauty of their typography was never called into 12 Foxon, Pope, ed. McLaverty, 25–6, 29. The printers’ typefaces remained a promotional touchstone into the second half of the century; The Universal Magazine (Dec. 1758) was said to be ‘Beautifully printed on a new Elzevir Letter’: LC (6–9 Jan. 1759), 28. 13 An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics (Gloucester, 1802), 11. 14 Dictionary (4th edn. 1773); I quote the ﬁrst and third senses of the word. 15 An ‘Elzevier letter’ ultimately came to mean just about any typeface of a certain size. At the expense of ﬁner discriminations, the jargon enabled the trade to function efﬁciently. Few in the trade could tell a true Elzevier letter. In Paris as late as 1895, during the sale of unwanted equipment by one type-foundry to another, some surviving Baskerville types were inventoried as vieux elzévirs and then listed in a catalogue as elzévirs anciens. See F. E. Pardoe, John Baskerville of Birmingham, Letter-Founder and Printer (London, 1975), 156; and John Dreyfus, ‘The Baskerville Punches 1750– 1950’, The Library, 5th ser. 5 (1951), 46. 16 William James Duncan, Notices and Documents Illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, During the Greater Part of the Last Century (Glasgow, 1831), 19–20. When Baskerville decided to print Horace, he intended to rely on Elzevier’s text until dissuaded by his friend and adviser, the poet William Shenstone. Shenstone briefed Thomas Percy that the printer ‘Proposes to copy Elzevir, but ye Punctuation has been objected to’; Percy agreed that ‘a thousand better readings had come to light’ since the printing of the Dutch book (R. Straus and R. Dent, John Baskerville: A Memoir (London, 1907), 35–6). Heeding the warning, Baskerville employed William Scott to edit the volume.

44

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

doubt, though S. L. Hartz has found their type design to be neither original (they were derived from earlier typefaces) nor unique (other printers bought fonts from the same type-founders). Dutch goods generally were thought to be well crafted, he explains, and the Elzeviers symbolized ‘the average Dutch printing of their epoch’. What set them apart, Hartz surmises, was ‘their evenness of production’; in printing and bookselling the house of Elzevier ‘maintained a standard which has never been surpassed’. Their fame, magniﬁed by ‘the continuous repetition of the name Elsevier through some generations’, caused a distorted idea of their dominance: books printed by Blaeu, van Ravestyn, de Jonge, de Groot, van Geervliet, Commelin, and others were ‘indiscriminately annexed as Elseviers’ by collectors enthusiastic to own the prized books. 17 With the name possessing this level of charm, the ‘Elzevir’ is an early example of a speciﬁc brand standing in for a whole class of commodities—in this case, a subset of bibliographical products—in the minds of consumers and collectors. The eminence of the ‘Elzevir’ within the generally powerful Dutch brand spoke to the vibrancy of an august tradition begun in 1501 by Aldus, who, for editions of Virgil, Juvenal, and Persius, chose a ‘very small format so that they may more conveniently be held in the hand and learned by the heart (not to speak of being read) by everyone’. The idea caught on, and octavo editions of the Latin and Greek classics ﬂowed from the presses of Sebastian Gryphius, Simon de Colines, Robert Estienne, Plantin, and others. By reﬁning this model the Elzeviers made it their own: they reduced the format to duodecimo, undertook a larger number of titles, boosted print runs, and distributed their books more efﬁciently throughout Europe. 18 Their run of thirty-ﬁve ‘Republics’ published in 24mo from 1625 to 1649 is cited by Davies as ‘the ﬁrst inexpensive series’ in modern printing. These works, some written for the series and others adapted to it, summarized a country’s government, history, topography, economy, and customs. Indicative of the special marketing of these imprints was their separate listing in the Elzevier catalog under the entry ‘RESPVBLICAE diversorum Auctorum’. 19 To Johnson’s mind they were ‘very well done’. 20 The symbolic presence of the Elzeviers in eighteenth-century Britain was strong enough for Henry Woodfall to set up business under the sign of Elzevir’s 17 S. L. Hartz, The Elseviers and their Contemporaries: An Illustrated Commentary (Amsterdam, 1955), 43, 105–7. An exception to this high standard was the ‘shabby’ work of the last Elzevier in Leyden. Why the university should have suffered the ‘disservice of an ignorant and negligent man’ bafﬂed Davies (World, 95). 18 Davies, World, 146–7; Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, NY, 1979), 142–7. 19 Davies, World, 61–3; Catalogue de l’Ofﬁcine des Elzevier (1628) (Paris, 1880), 13. Although this facsimile version of Catalogus Librorum Ofﬁcinae Elzevirianae bears the year 1628, it lists more Republics than had been printed at that point. Willems (Les Elzevier Histoire, 3) does not mention this anomaly. 20 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols. Oxford, 1934–50), iii. 52.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

45

Head. Woodfall used this logo on two of his woodblock headpieces and two tailpieces. Each ornament was inscribed ‘Elzevir’, as though representing the cumulative glories of the family ﬁrm. One headpiece appeared twenty-three times in Woodfall’s books, the other thirty-ﬁve times, more frequently than any other. 21 This headpiece was either acquired or copied by John Bedford and Charles Sympson, who used it in their 1767 prose version of Paradise Lost, translated from the French. In the ‘Preface’, under the watchful eye of Elzevir, the editor addressed ordinary readers, for whom Miltonic verse was so far ‘out of their Reach’ that they could not appreciate ‘the Beauties of the Poem’. 22 For ‘Elzevir’ to monitor, as it were, this reprieve from the challenges otherwise limiting Milton’s audience to the ‘ﬁt though few’, suggests a charitable endorsement of the broader dissemination of classical literary riches. If the composite physiognomy of the Elzevier family had assumed a kind of iconic authority, the Elzevir itself—the bibliographical product—was a talisman that bestowed classic status. This troubled John Armstrong, who raised his doubts in the poem Taste (1753): ‘But to the Ancients.’ Faith! I am not clear, For all the smooth round Type of Elzevir, That ev’ry Work that lasts, in Prose or Song, Two thousand Years, deserves to last so long. 23

Unlike Aldus in the heyday of the editio princeps, the Elzeviers did not resurrect ancient texts so much as refurbish them; reprints, many of them expertly edited, were their stock in trade. Armstrong astutely recognized that the real Elzevirian commodity was its power to enshrine, or rather to perpetuate enshrinement. Was the de facto canonization of the Elzevier imprint warranted for every text they printed? No, but because the medium of transmission was itself so revered, it operated as a claim upon the reader’s regard. The smooth round type was the metonymic equivalent of enduring value; embodiment in an Elzevir ratiﬁed a work’s supposed classic standing and implicitly foisted on readers an obligatory respect. John Bell banked on this glittering effect when publicly burnishing The Poets of Great Britain, which were printed ‘in a most delicate size, resembling 21 Richard J. Goulden, The Ornamental Stock of Henry Woodfall 1719–1747 (London, 1988), pp. x, 6, 26, 55. The Elzevir headpieces are numbered 15 and 16, the tailpieces 215 and 216. Number 16 was the most frequently used. 22 Raymond de St Maur, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or, The Fall of Man (London, 1767), sig. A2r . 23 Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic (London, 1753), 11. This kind of powerful institutional imperative caused Mark Ceres to wonder at the publication of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Penguin Modern Classics, ‘potboilers’ that now, by virtue of this sanction, were implicitly ‘worthy of serious study and contemplation’ (‘The Company of Stone’, TLS (27 July 2007), 17).

46

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

the Elzevir editions of the Latin classics’. 24 Pace Johnson, his neat pocket volumes were elegant with dignity, their delicacy given weight by their number and by his allegiance to the Elzevirian standard. The Foulises adhered to the same cause, only more so. They promoted a classical aesthetic in their book design, with graceful page layouts and restrained use of ornament, and furthered classical learning through their university post, satisfying academic needs and often working with professors who edited texts and helped supervise the press. On all these fronts the printers at the University of Leyden had provided a model.

THE CHARACTER OF A UNIVERSIT Y-PRINTER Robert Foulis, once a barber’s apprentice, devoted his spare time to the classics, attended lectures at the University of Glasgow, and tutored some of Francis Hutcheson’s students in moral philosophy. Andrew Foulis followed a more conventional academic path. A student of Andrew Rosse, Professor of Humanity, he became an accomplished scholar, took on pupils in Greek, Latin, and French, and eventually sought the Greek chair at the University, narrowly losing the position to James Moor. 25 Robert and Andrew, both ‘a good deal affected with the Bibliomania’, went to the continent in 1738 and 1739 to procure editions of the Greek and Roman classics, which ‘were then much wanted in Britain’, and sold them in London for ample proﬁt. Importing books in this manner by the hogshead, the brothers acquired ‘a pretty accurate knowledge’ of the trade. 26 Impressed with Robert’s ‘superior spirit and elevated genius’ and Andrew’s ‘indefatigable industry and diligence’, Hutcheson urged them to produce books themselves, sweetening his encouragement with a bit of start-up money and advice on which titles to publish. 27 The minutes for the University Meeting of 31 March 1743 record the election of Robert Foulis as printer to the University of Glasgow. In his petition Foulis vouched for having ‘provided himself with ﬁne Types both Greek and Latin’, and supplied printed samples to prove they met the threshold for type ‘of such exactness & beauty that he can execute printing work in either Language in such

24

Prospectus, Bell’s edition. David Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press (Glasgow, 1913), 1–3; W. J. Duncan, ‘Notes of information Respecting the Foulises from Brash’, GUL MS Murray 602 (18). 26 Duncan, Notices and Documents, 12; Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 4–6. 27 Samuel Kenrick to James Wodrow, 27 Apr. 1808, GUL MS Murray 506, fo. 117; Duncan, Notices and Documents, 10. A mentor at every step, Hutcheson was credited with ‘the chief merit in bringing [Robert Foulis] ﬁrst into notice, assisting him in his studies and patronizing him afterwards’ (James Wodrow to Lord Buchan, 9 May 1808, GUL MS Murray 506, fos. 130–1). 25

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

47

a manner as will be no Dishonour to one who bears the character of UniversityPrinter’. 28 Robert was granted ‘all the privileges belonging thereto upon this condition viz: that he shall not use the designation of University printer without allowance from the University meeting in any Books excepting those of antient Authors’. 29 Use of the ofﬁcial designation, implying institutional sanction, was not left to accident or whim. With few exceptions the imprints on Foulis editions of Greek and Latin authors carried the imprimatur of their ofﬁce, usually ‘ GLASGUAE : IN AEDIBUS ACADEMICIS Excudebant ROBERTUS et ANDREAS FOULIS ACAD EMIAE TYPOGRAPHI ’. Titles authored by professors at the university received this honor also, including works in Latin by Francis Hutcheson (moral philosophy), James Moor (Greek), and Robert Simson (math). Professors who wrote in English risked losing the designation, although it was granted variously to William Leechman (divinity), John Millar (law), William Richardson (humanity), and William Wight (history). Subject matter, too, was a factor. The only work of Hutcheson after 1744 not to receive ofﬁcial approval was his Thoughts on Laughter (1758), too slight a topic, it seems, to pass muster. 30 In their bread-and-butter work the Foulis brothers followed the threefold Elzevir paradigm: they ‘always aimed at having as perfect a text as possible, presented in a beautiful form and of a convenient and economical size’. 31 Their quest for textual accuracy led to the so-called ‘immaculate Horace’, proof sheets of which were hung in the window and a prize offered to anyone who could discover a mistake. In addition they employed a proof reader, an unusual practice for that time. Many attributed the ‘superior beauty of Messers. Foulis’s Editions of the Classicks’ to ‘the elegance and other good properties of the Types’, wrote Patrick Wilson, son of the type-founder who supplied the ﬁrm, Alexander Wilson. But since ‘every other Printer who applyed to their Foundry derived equal advantages’, he explained, the distinction of the Foulis press more likely was grounded in ‘their ardour and skill in pursuing a great deal of experiments and contrivances connected with some improved construction of the Letter-Press, the nature and due preparation of their Paper, the quality of their Ink & the peculiar condition of the Balls for distributing it over the Forms’. 32 For convenience and 28 James Maclehose, The Glasgow University Press 1638–1931 (Glasgow, 1931), 162–3; Robert Hay Carnie, ‘Scholar-Printers of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1800’, in Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1987), 302. 29 Duncan, Notices and Documents, 13. See also Carnie, ‘Scholar-Printers’, 302. 30 As for the rest, it was an odd assortment: ‘PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY’ can be found on Thomas Sherlock’s A Letter on the Late Earth Quakes (1750), George Berkeley’s The Querist (1751), Amyas Bushe’s Socrates, a Dramatic Poem (1762), the historical writings of David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, John Bell’s Travels from St. Petersburg (1763), Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1764), and a few other works, including those with a regal or bureaucratic purpose, like George III’s Speech to both Houses of Parliament (1762), James Watt’s Reports Relative to Navigation on the Rivers Forth, Gudie, and Devon (1773), and Edward Burrow’s A New and Compleat Book of Rates (1774). 31 Maclehose, Glasgow University Press, 165. 32 Patrick Wilson, GUL MS General 1087, fos. 196–7.

48

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

economy, the duodecimo edition of M. Tullii Ciceronis Opera (20 vols., 1748–9) represented the best of many small, inexpensive Foulis imprints. Contemporaries lauded the brothers for their ‘public service’. Lord Hardwicke sent the Earl of Morton a note in 1750 thanking him for his gift of the Cicero: ‘I shall with ye greatest pleasure give ye copy of ye Glasgow Tully a suitable place in my library.’ Worthy of a nobleman’s library, the Foulis edition in Hardwicke’s mind was a credit to the nation: ‘[I]t does honour to ye Scotch press’, he effused, ‘where they now print the most beautifully of any country in Europe.’ 33 Scotland had assumed its place among the sophisticated nations that paid homage to ancient Greece and Rome in print. Foulis books were noted in advertisements for library auctions, where their Thucydides might be listed alongside other smallformat imprints like the Elzevir Cicero and Livy, or where their press might take pride of place: ‘A good collection of the Glasgow and other Classics’. 34 The day was passing, however, for nations and ambitious printers to exercise their talents in this arena; the emphasis on ancient authors would gradually give way to vernacular classics. Milton’s Paradise Lost was the ﬁrst English literary work to bear the ofﬁcial Foulis imprint (1750 in quarto and octavo; 1752 in duodecimo), followed by others of Milton, culminating in the magniﬁcent folio of Paradise Lost (1770). ‘Printers to the University’ appeared on another signal work when, under the direction of James Beattie in 1768, the brothers printed a quarto edition of Thomas Gray’s poems. As a product of the nation’s printing, the Foulis quarto had ‘do[ne] honour to the Scotch press’, wrote Beattie in a message accompanying his gift of the book to Lord Monboddo, whom he hoped would ‘relish the poems’. To underscore that Gray was worthy of this exalted treatment, Beattie praised him for ‘some of the greatest efforts of poetical genius’ since Milton and appealed to the traditional literary values of Monboddo; he noted that Gray was ‘deeply read in antient learning’ and trusted his Lordship would ‘easily discover it in the Classical turn of his composition’. 35 For his part Gray was pleased: ‘I rejoice to be in the hands of Mr. Foulis, who has the laudable ambition of surpassing his predecessors the Etiennes and Elzevirs, as well in literature, as in the proper art of his profession.’ Any printer wishing to surpass the Estiennes and Elzeviers in their ‘proper art’, presswork and book production, would strive for more beautiful, more correct editions of Homer, Cicero, and the rest. What it might mean to outdo them ‘as well in literature’ is less clear, however, unless Gray was suggesting that the Foulises were more energetic in their services to learning, or had broken new ground with Poems of Mr. Gray, opening up modern (even contemporary) vernacular literature to the kind of bibliographical tribute formerly reserved for the ancients.

33 35

34 Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 23. EEC (21 Feb. 1776, 1 Feb. 1777). Dated 1 Oct. 1769 from Aberdeen, NLS MS Acc. 4796. Fettercairn 2nd Deposit.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

49

Robert Foulis was ‘a man of original genius, of a very liberal enlarged mind, and of a most benevolent disinterested spirit’, wrote James Wodrow; ‘His genius struck me as being rather of the Platonic than of the correct Aristotleian cast. I mean there was something sublime in his conceptions, darkened by a slight dash of mysticism.’ 36 Out of this sublime reach, at once admirable and quixotic, grew two grand enterprises, along with eventual difﬁculties for the ﬁrm. One involved ﬁne printing, the other painting. Robert’s imagination was ﬁred by the Stephens or Estiennes of Paris. One of the ﬁrst books he published was Aesop’s Fables, the product of a fascination dating from 1738 when, in Oxford, he inspected a manuscript of the Fables reputedly copied by Robert Stephens as a model for his types. The fonts of Stephens inspired several designs by Alexander Wilson, who supplied the Foulis brothers with types and whose labors were crucial to their folio edition of Homer (4 vols. 1756–8). Then in his prime, Wilson ‘entered warmly’ into the Foulis plans, creating ‘a complete set of Punches & Matrices after a model of the Greek characters far more elegant in the opinion of the best judges than any Greek to be found in the specimens of other Letter Foundries’. 37 The results were ‘Magniﬁcent and valuable’ in the eyes of Dibdin, who thought that, except for large-paper copies of Clarke’s Homer, no edition ‘approaches, within many degrees, the splendor and celebrity of this immortal work’. 38 But the career-long goal of Robert was to supersede the 1578 edition of Plato printed by Henry Stephens (Robert’s son) by reprinting his text and notes, but supplementing them with ‘[a]ny other readings . . . or conjectural emendations’ that could be found, and ‘all other notes of any merit, published since his edition, and all which we can procure besides’. This was old-world printing at its grandiose ideal: scholarly, perfectionistic, bibliographically ﬁt for libraries of size and magniﬁcence. Elizabeth Foulis recalled her father discussing the edition as early as 1746, not long after he was appointed University Printer. Proposals were published in 1750 and 1751 for Greek and Latin editions in three different formats—in six volumes folio, nine volumes quarto, and twenty volumes small octavo. 39 ‘I shall take care not to hurt the project of Plato by any other’, Foulis reassured a friend in 1752; ‘On the contrary whatever I engage in till that is ﬁnish’d will be concerted in such a manner as at least not to interfere with it, if they are not of importance in promoting.’ 40 He was not true to his word. In the long run, the proper art of his profession was too narrow to absorb all of his energies, and he became ‘captivated by a more splendid and as he thought a more important object, to introduce and establish 36 Wodrow underscored strong similarities ‘in sentiment and public spirit’ between Foulis and Francis Hutcheson (letter to Lord Buchan, 9 May 1808, GUL MS Murray 506, fos. 129–31). 37 38 Patrick Wilson, GUL MS General 1087, fo. 198. Dibdin, Introduction, 17. 39 Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press (2nd edn. Winchester, 1986), 146, 393–5. 40 Letter from Paris, dated 3 Feb. 1752, Some Letters of Robert Foulis, 19.

50

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

an Academy of Painting in Scotland’. 41 Grief over the deaths of his wife and a daughter in 1750 drove Robert abroad for nearly two years, during which time he mused on the project, purchased pictures, and hired French instructors to accompany him on his return to Scotland. From Paris in 1752 he articulated his plan: ‘To serve my country by propagating a relish for the ﬁner Arts there, I projected a little Academy for painting, engraving, and in process of Time for the Chief Arts that depend on Design, together with another for promoting the knowledge of Ancient Greek and Roman learning.’ 42 Under the rubric of ‘the ﬁner Arts’, the visionary scheme adumbrated a complementary connection between painting and printing, the graphic and the intellectual. With the fruits of the Foulis press already contributing to an ‘academy’ of Greek and Roman learning, the brothers pressed ahead, against the advice of more prudent friends, to open an Academy of Painting. Whether or not it ultimately provided, as Wodrow fancied, ‘the ﬁrst hint of the Royal one at London’, it was a ‘generous and noble but unsuccessful attempt’, one that for twenty years diverted their energies and dragged them into a precarious situation of mounting debt. 43 While Andrew conducted book auctions and oversaw the press, Robert focused increasingly on the Academy, which drew a bemused response. Critics, struck by the quality and discipline of their printing operation, wondered at the equivocal results of the Academy. ‘Though Poetry and Painting may be sister arts’, quipped Edward Topham, ‘I never heard that Painting and Printing were of the same family; if they are, their interests have been very opposite.’ Gripped by ‘the rage of this fancy’, he added, the printers ‘forgot their former business, and neglected an art which, from their editions of Homer and Milton, might have made them immortal, to run after paltry copies of good paintings, which they had been informed were originals’. 44 Like Topham, who was alarmed to see Foulis invest in paintings that no one else would buy, William Sturrock, secretary to the Earl of Northumberland and an old acquaintance of Foulis, wrote him to express concern: ‘I cannot help thinking that my Lord is of opinion, that a correct and well-printed Book would be more agreeable to us from your Press than anything else. These will ornament, and with great lustre too, as well as with real proﬁt, the Libraries of Popes and Princes, while your Prints lye mouldering in a dusty Corner.’ Sturrock adjured them to mind their business: ‘Print for posterity and prosper.’ 45 The tomes most eligible for papal and princely libraries were fated to remain incomplete. In despair over the Plato project, the brothers reported to William Hunter on 11 November 1766 that the expense 41 42 43 44 45

Samuel Kenrick to Wodrow, 27 Apr. 1808, GUL MS Murray 506, fo. 121. Letter to Count Betinck, Paris, 12 June 1752 (Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 58, 60). Wodrow to Buchan, GUL MS Murray 506, fo. 131. Letters from Edinburgh; Written in the Years 1774 and 1775 (London, 1776), 180–1. Letter of 26 Dec. 1753 (Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 74).

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

51

amounts to so capital a sum, that neither in the midst of War abroad nor factions at home durst we venture to go on, but rather to employ ourselves in lesser works, in hopes of being strengthened by them, and of times more favourable to a paciﬁc contemplative Philosopher. We are as much dispos’d to labour as ever, but feel a call to retire from anxious cares which are inseparable from expensive undertakings.

Yet Foulis was unable to renounce his cherished dream, even as he acknowledged that inglorious tasks were critical to his survival. Indeed, he barely mentioned the ‘lesser works’ he was counting on for renewed ﬁnancial vigor, only alluding vaguely to ‘several little English works’. 46 With this oblique reference begins the story of the duodecimo English poets. It is ironic that printers such as Robert and Andrew Foulis, deeply imbued with the old-order ethos of a Robert Estienne, should have helped to pave the way for a mass market in poetry reprints, but that is what they did.

ENTERPRISING SCOTSMEN AND THE IMPARTIAL BRITON The period during which Robert and Andrew were getting started in business was marked by aggressive growth in the Scottish reprint trade, as measured by the activity of the presses north of the Tweed and the alarm it caused to the south. If London booksellers were indifferent to Scottish material—like Poems in the Scottish Dialect (1748), Two Old Historical Scots Poems (1748), Hardyknute, A Fragment of an Antient Scots Poem (1748), and William Hamilton’s Poems on Several Occasions (1749), early Foulis titles—they were ﬁercely jealous of their literary property when it came to ‘little English works’ like those that the Foulis press had now trained its eye on. Legal confrontations were inevitable. In the late 1730s Andrew Millar initiated a round of suits over an alleged infringement of copyright in the poems of James Thomson. Twenty-nine booksellers of ‘differing temperaments and interests, and relative states of innocence and guilt’, were summoned to the bar before Millar ultimately dropped the case, possibly calculating that for the time being he had intimidated the Scots. Undeterred, the reprint trade grew, with the partnership of Gavin Hamilton and John Balfour in the vanguard, provoking Millar in 1743 to set in motion a second legal process that lasted until 1749. Joined by sixteen other London plaintiffs, he ﬁled charges against two dozen booksellers—twenty in Edinburgh and four in Glasgow—which lent the case ‘an air of national confrontation’ that only galvanized the Scottish trade. Hamilton and Balfour, the most prominent defendants, were named in the memorial for the case, along 46 Some Letters of Robert Foulis, 36–7. The only edn. of the Greek philosopher the brothers managed to print after embarking on the massive folio project was a quarto edn. of The Republic of Plato in 1763 (Gaskell, Bibliography, 423–4).

52

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

with Andrew Stalker of Glasgow. Arguing on their behalf, Henry Home (later Lord Kames) insisted that a ﬂourishing print culture in Scotland, grounded in reprinting, strengthened the British book trade by multiplying commerce in all directions. True, an established reprint trade might force London booksellers to accept payment in kind—that is, ‘Returns in Books instead of Bills or Money’ from their Scottish correspondents for the latest English titles—yet these goods, it was pointed out, would ‘fetch them the Money, with additional Proﬁts from other Quarters’. In other words, London booksellers would earn higher proﬁts by selling reprint editions than they could get from the Scots by straightforward payment. More prosperous in turn, the Scots could ‘furnish themselves vastly more extensively with London Books’, but so long as they were conﬁned to ‘remain only Retailers of Books printed at London, they must remain generally poor’. 47 Even when Scotsmen like the Foulises were allowed to reprint material under copyright, the London trade bristled. The issue was so sensitive that the brothers prefaced their quarto edition of Gray’s poems with an unusual notice: ‘Some gentlemen may be surprized to see an edition of Mr. GRAY ’ S POEMS printed at Glasgow, at the same time that they are printed for Mr. Dodsley at London. . . . The property belongs to the Author, and this edition is by his permission.’ 48 Gray had mentioned the forthcoming Glasgow edition to Dodsley, which ‘did not seem at all to cool his courage’, at the same time alerting Beattie to Dodsley’s intention, stating ‘Mr Foulis therefore must judge for himself, whether he thinks it worth while to print’. As it turned out, Dodsley saturated the market, much dampening prospects for the Foulis imprint in Gray’s view: it is indeed a most beautiful edition, & must certainly do credit both to [Foulis], & to me: but I fear, it will be of no other advantage to him; as Dodsley has contrived to glut the Town already with two editions beforehand, one of 1500, & the other of 750, both indeed far inferior to that of Glasgow, but sold at half the price. 49

Robert Foulis contrasted the Scottish predicament with the situation in Ireland, also geographically and legally remote from London: ‘As in Ireland they can print all without exception, I don’t ﬁnd that the best men among them make any scruple to encourage it; and I know the most Learned and worthy men in this country think we do public service in reprinting whatever we can according to Law, that is any way calculated to do good.’ 50 The recipient of this letter, William 47 Warren McDougall, ‘Gavin Hamilton, John Balfour and Patrick Neill: A Study of Publishing in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh (1974), 83–94, 121–2; McDougall, ‘Copyright Litigation in the Court of Session, 1738–1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 5/5 (1988), 3–7. 48 ‘Advertisement’, Poems by Mr. Gray (Glasgow, 1768), sig. a2r . 49 Letters of 24 Dec. 1767 and 31 Oct. 1768 to Beattie, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, corr. H. W. Starr (3 vols. Oxford, 1971), iii. 982–3, 1048. 50 Letter to Sir William Murray, 20 Dec. 1754 (Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 44–5).

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

53

Murray, later Lord Mansﬁeld, had appeared as counsel for the London interest in Millar v. Kincaid (1749–51) and argued in favor of perpetual copyright in Tonson v. Walker (1752), stances that led to a sense of betrayal on the part of the London booksellers when, in 1774 as Lord Chief Justice, he remained silent in Donaldson v. Becket. 51 In hopes of restoring the status quo after this ruling, the London trade petitioned the House of Commons to pass the Booksellers’ Relief Bill of 1774. Opposed to this legislation, Robert Foulis ampliﬁed the economic tenets that Home had advanced in the case of Hamilton and Balfour. The price of books, he stressed, was governed by the laws of supply and demand: ‘Take away competition between buyers, and goods become cheap. Take away competition among sellers, and goods become dear.’ As long as monopolists held sway, consumers were unable to reap the beneﬁts of ‘free competition’, that is, ‘a contention for cheapness, for correctness, for elegance, for legibility’. If, on the other hand, books were ‘more universally’ printed, they would be more universally purchased and read. The taste for books in Scotland had spread on account of its reprint trade, and from Dublin itself, Foulis wagered, London booksellers gained as much as they lost by the Irish reprint trade, because ‘wherever printing takes place, it diffuses the taste for books wider’. A market that attracted more book buyers would generate more customers able to afford prestigious London editions. Thus, to reinstate the monopoly would perversely depress ‘honest industry among the whole body of London booksellers themselves’, not to mention its ‘restraint on the industry of every printer and bookseller’ outside of London. In sum, Foulis derided the idea that reprinting elsewhere in Britain in ‘any way ostensibly hurts the London trade’. The principal injury to their economic interests was self-inﬂicted; they ‘diminish[ed] their own trade by endeavouring to bind the hands of their brethren all over the kingdom, who, if free and independent, would be able to trade with them more extensively, and on more equitable terms’. 52 Foulis also weighed the implications for international balance of trade. Throughout the republic of letters, he pointed out, ‘the learned and ingenious authors of one nation are reprinted by another’ without legal interference or ‘complaint of national injury’. A country that hobbled its reprint trade lost out on two fronts, surrendering ‘the proﬁt it brings as a manufacture’ and becoming dependent on foreign presses for ‘a great national beneﬁt’, namely affordable copies of its ﬁnest books. Self-defeating restrictions in France had led to Holland’s rivalry ‘in reprinting almost all their saleable books’. Until recently Britain had relied on foreign-made paper, thereby subsidizing wages abroad, 51

Deazley, Origin of the Right to Copy, 175, 196–7; Rose, Authors and Owners, 101. Robert Foulis, Memorial of the Printers and Booksellers of Glasgow, Most Humbly Addressed to the Honourable House of Commons, Assembled in Parliament (Glasgow, 1774), 10–11, 13–14, 16, 21. 52

54

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

but now, fed by the demands of the reprint trade, a growing domestic paper industry contributed to an ‘increase of the revenue and the national wealth’. To the extent that its monopolies drove up prices and crippled exports, Britain stunted its global economic reach. An opportunity was opening up: ‘As the English language becomes more universal’, Foulis prophesied, ‘English books will be more frequently reprinted on the Continent’. The might of Britain would be enhanced if printers freely produced goods for markets abroad as well as at home. 53 Aside from economic beneﬁts, Foulis predicted a boon for scholarship as well. Come the day ‘[w]hen great authors can be printed with classical freedom’, he hoped that competition would ensue not just among publishers to produce the cheapest or most legible books, but also among editors ‘to explain obscure passages by their comments, correct mistakes by their notes, and supply defects by their additions taken from later discoveries’. If there were still demand for an author’s work after twenty-eight years of copyright protection, Foulis saw no reason that it should not be accorded this ‘liberty’. 54 Another dividing line between the ancients and moderns would be erased, as editors could pursue at will textual work on Milton or Chaucer as freely as they could on Plato. If Thomson and Chaucer were (as Foulis desired) more universally printed, they could be (as Thomas Warton wanted) more universally read. Classical freedom, could it be realized, would boost supply and demand alike. Foulis’s vision of a healthy literary and industrial economy accords with the principles laid down two years later in The Wealth of Nations, and Robert Crawford has pictured the volumes of extensive poetry collections, ‘[l]ike Adam Smith’s pins . . . in their serried, vendible ranks’, as an example of the regularized units that were key to the industrial revolution, units suitable for ‘high-volume production . . . and widespread consumption’. 55 An ‘accident of situation’, Foulis knew, had ‘thrown almost the whole authors of Great Britain and Ireland into the possession of the London booksellers’, and they, believing this literature to be their exclusive property, ‘exerted themselves to suppress it in every quarter’ when it was reprinted elsewhere in the kingdom. Supposing the tables to be turned, he invited members of the London trade to imagine a counter-factual world in which ‘a few enterprising Scotsmen’, through purchase of literary property from Tonson, Millar, and others, had ‘become proprietors, by assignments of the common-law-right, to the most capital English authors’. Would not the London booksellers then, instead of deploring the decision in Donaldson v. Becket as ‘ruinous to them, have rejoiced in it as a

53 55

54 Ibid. 6, 9, 15, 20. Ibid. 16. The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (Oxford, 2001), 93.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

55

national and personal beneﬁt? and would not every impartial Briton have shared the joy?’ 56

AN ELZEVIR FOR ENGLISH POETRY Hazarding such classical freedom, the Foulis brothers reprinted works by English playwrights (Addison, Congreve, Dryden, Farquhar, Gay, Otway, Philips, Rowe, Shakespeare, Smith, Southerne, Steele, and Vanbrugh) and poets (Addison, Buckingham, Butler, Davies, Denham, Dryden, Garth, Gay, Milton, Parnell, Ambrose Philips, John Philips, Pomfret, Pope, Prior, Roscommon, Somerville, Waller, and Young). Of these works, most printed in octavo, virtually none publicized the Foulis ties to the university. 57 By retaining proprietary control over its name, and by withholding its sanction from most modern works, the university not only exercised control over its reputation, but also, perhaps, avoided entanglement in copyright disputes. It is startling, therefore, that ‘Printers to the University’ should have appeared on the title-pages of many of the duodecimo English poets published from 1765 through 1776, a group of imprints far from the grandeur of the folio Milton and quarto Gray, and at the heart of contested copyright terrain. With this body of texts the Foulis brothers inaugurated an era of immense literary production. Inexpensive vernacular classics in the Elzevir mold would pour from the British press, including more than a dozen projects within ﬁfty years that generated hundreds of thousands of pocket volumes devoted to the British poets. How much the brothers invested in their series is evident from the inventory of their stock ten years later. 58 Standing at the head of the list are 9815 VOLUMES of English Poets, p. 12mo. ﬁne. 9d. 17501 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - common. 7d.

Philip Gaskell notes that these books alone represented a capital investment of £880. Adding that many titles in the catalogue had been printed up to three decades earlier, he concludes that the ‘extent and character of its stock-in-trade goes far to explain why the ﬁrm was insolvent at the time of Robert Foulis’s death’. 59 That the brothers were impractical, as Gaskell insinuates, is true; the proper art of their profession did not hold Robert’s attention. Yet the series of English poets proved what an exquisite eye they had for bookselling, if neither the drive nor the relentless promotional instincts necessary for pushing their product 56

Foulis, Memorial, 4, 9. Two exceptions were Thomas Parnell, The Works in Verse and Prose (1767) and William Richardson, Poems, Chieﬂy Rural (1774). 58 A Catalogue of Books, Being the Entire Stock, in Quires, of the Late Messieurs Robert and Andrew Foulis, Printers to the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1777). 59 Gaskell, Bibliography, 54. 57

56

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

in the market. The extraordinary number of poets on hand at their demise represents not a generally poor head for bookselling, but rather a belated and imperfectly executed attempt to put the ﬁrm back on sound ﬁnancial footing. The duodecimo poetry series was a work of more far-reaching consequences than the brothers could have foreseen, and of much higher signiﬁcance than commentators—preoccupied with splendid folios, lovely quartos, and immaculate octavos—have recognized. Something about a small format book whispers ‘series’ in the ear of a publisher and ‘sets’ in the ears of readers. A single pocket volume in possession of a worthwhile text, one might say, must be in want of a companion. Edward Harwood, who considered the duodecimo Thucydides in Greek and Latin (1759) the most correct of the Foulis Greek classics and a ‘great credit to that learned University’, judged that ‘Every friend to Greek literature would rejoice to see Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch’s Lives, published in the same size, and in the same beautiful and correct manner.’ 60 Little classics tend to multiply. As James Brash, a Glasgow bookbinder and bookseller who did business with the Foulises, remembered, ‘They used to bind up Classics for sale on the Continent in Sets. These sets were printed on Foolscap 8vo. and consisted of 60 vols.’ 61 Three merchandising premises stem from this tendency to see an attractive book or two as the nucleus of a collection. As Richard Altick relates, they are ‘package psychology’, the assumption that a person buying a few volumes in a series will crave the others too; ‘brand name psychology’, the probability that someone pleased with earlier purchases will trust the publisher to maintain the quality of a series; and ‘snob appeal’, the knowledge that book-owners take pride in displaying rows of impressive titles on their shelves (i.e. the idea of cultural capital). 62 These dynamics were only gradually encouraged by the Foulises, and never fully exploited. In fact, it is unclear just when the ‘several little English works’ that were notionally a series in Robert’s mind by 1766 came to be understood as such, either by him or by the public. No prospectus was issued, and infrequent, laconic newspaper advertisements indicate a project that took shape gradually. In July 1767 the Foulises advertised an edition of Pope’s version of the Iliad (4 vols.) ‘in the same Size as Milton’s Poetical Works, printed by us’. A January 1768 advertisement, featuring a ‘SET of the ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS’ in twenty-nine small octavo volumes, proclaimed Pope’s Odyssey (3 vols.) to be ‘In the Press’ and soon to join his Iliad. The next advertisement for the Greek 60

Edward Harwood, A View of the Various Editions of Greek and Roman Classics (London, 1775),

23. 61

GUL MS Murray 602 (18). R. D. Altick, ‘From Aldine to Everyman’, Studies in Bibliography, 11 (1958), 11–12. Altick’s summary is still serviceable, though the analysis of consumer psychology has come a long way in ﬁfty years. So have patterns of consumption. See Laura J. Miller’s appraisals of the ‘sovereign consumer’, the ‘standardized consumer’, the ‘entertained consumer’, and the ‘rational consumer’ in Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago, 2006). 62

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

57

historians added ‘Milton’s Poetical Works, 4 Vols.’ to the seven current and anticipated volumes of Pope. In the shadow of the Greek classics a series of English poets was taking shape. A sharper glimpse of it was offered by a line appended to the May 1768 notice for Poems by Mr. Gray: ‘Pope’s Translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, 7 vols. in the same small size with Milton’s Poetical works’. Finally in 1769 the brothers gave the series top billing in an advertisement. Under the heading ‘Lately printed, by R. & A. Foulis, in neat pocket Volumes’, they posted Pope’s Poetical Works, 4 vols. Pope’s Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, 7 vols. Milton’s Paradise Lost, 2 vols. Shenstone’s Select Works in Verse and Prose.

At the bottom they anticipated additional imprints: ‘In a few days will be published, in the same size, Dryden’s Virgil, 3 vols.’ 63 Understated but precise, the advertisement framed a perceptible series, with highly regarded proprietors, ‘R. & A. Foulis’; ‘neatly’ uniform pocket volumes; famous poets, on tabular display; a considerable magnitude, with more than a dozen volumes already published; and assurances of further volumes. Readers could now follow its progress and consciously begin putting together a library of English poets to suit their wants and means. Two signs remained of the series having been unveiled in process, or after the fact: its lack of a title, and the puzzlement of anyone wishing to ascertain its origin. Gaskell ventured that the series ‘appear[ed] to have begun’ in 1766 with Paradise Lost in two volumes, a conjecture agreeable with the 1769 advertisement. But the 1768 notices alerted readers to Milton’s ‘Poetical Works’ in four volumes, indicating that Paradise Lost at that point was grouped with volumes printed in 1765, either Paradise Regained and Minor Poems, or an edition of Paradise Regained that incorporated the minor verse, perhaps bound in two volumes. 64 Viewed in retrospect, the series must have begun with these volumes. Why they did not ﬁgure in the 1769 list is a conundrum, unless they were out of stock. The brothers, sometimes slow to reprint titles, did not do so until 1772, when they produced Paradise Regain’d again. By 1770 the series, at thirty-one volumes, warranted its own heading in the Foulis catalogue, ‘The following ENGLISH POETS in small 12mo, at one shilling the volume’. 65 Ultimately the series grew to thirty titles in ﬁfty volumes; more than half of the titles required reprinting—sixteen of them once, four others 63

GJ (2–9 July 1767; 14–21 and 21–8 Jan. 1768; 5–12 May 1768; 9–16 Feb. 1769). Gaskell, Bibliography, nos. 445 and 446 (263–4). The full title of no. 445 was Paradise Regain’d A Poem, in Four Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes; and Poems upon Several Occasions, with a Tractate of Education. Minor Poems (no. 446) was recorded in Duncan’s checklist of Foulis imprints, but Gaskell, unable to trace it, suspects it might have been ‘an extract’ from Paradise Regained. 65 Books printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis, printers to the University of Glasgow, half-sheet folio handbill printed on both sides, dated 6 Nov. 1770 (John Johnson Collection). 64

58

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

Table 2.1. The English Poets of Foulis Year

Poet

Title

1765 1766 1767 1768

Milton Milton Pope-Homer Pope-Homer Pope Shenstone Butler Glover Prior Thomson Dryden-Virgil Young Addison Collins / Hammond Dryden Gay Waller Akenside Denham Dryden Garth Young Gray Lyttelton Parnell Mason Richardson Swift Thomson Thomson

Paradise Regain’d . . . Samson Agonistes . . . Poems Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books The Iliad of Homer The Odyssey of Homer The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq.∗ The Select Works in Verse and Prose∗ Hudibras Leonidas. A Poem∗ Poems on Several Occasions∗ The Seasons∗ The Works of Virgil The Complaint: or, Night-thoughts∗ Poems on Several Occasions∗ The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins. To which are added Mr. Hammond’s Elegies∗ Original Poems∗ Poems on Several Occasions∗ Poems on Several Occasions∗ The Pleasures of Imagination Poems and Translations; with The Sophy Fables Antient and Modern The Poetical Works of Sir Samuel Garth, M.D. Poems on Several Occasions Poems by Mr. Gray∗ Poems by the Right Honourable . . . Lord Lyttleton∗ Poems on Several Ocasions∗ Poems by William Mason, M.A.∗ Poems, Chieﬂy Rural∗ Poems of Dr. Jonathan Swift∗ Liberty, A Poem∗ Poems by James Thomson∗

1769

1770

1771

1773

1774

∗

Vols.

Reprinted

2 2 4 3 4 1 2 1 2 1 3 2 1

1772 1771∗ , 1776∗ 1771 1772 1773∗ 1770, 1775 1774

1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 1

1771, 1775 1775∗

1771∗ 1769∗ , 1776∗ 1775 1771∗ 1775

1775

1775 1773∗ 1775∗ 1776∗ 1776∗

Imprints that identify the Foulis brothers ofﬁcially as ‘PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY’.

twice (see Table 2.1). Twenty in their imprints were styled products of the PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY . 66 With the exception of the ancient classics and works by the Glasgow professoriate, no other category of Foulis publication bore the stamp of their ofﬁce as often as this little series. Granted this distinction, the English poets approached the status of the ‘antient Authors’ whose sanction was automatic. Likewise, they assumed their place in a mustering of Foulis classics on a two-leaf advertisement in Dryden’s Original Poems (1775). The 66 There were, however, inconsistencies. Shentone’s Select Works, e.g., bore the Foulises’ ofﬁcial title in 1768 but not when reprinted in 1770 and 1775; Addison’s Poems on Several Occasions and the Collins–Hammond edn. also reﬂect this on-again, off-again treatment.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

59

ﬁrst leaf belonged to Greek and Latin authors; across from them on the second leaf, their English counterparts marched in a complementary show of force. 67 Earlier imprints in the series had carried lists of the poets, but the form of this advertisement represents a maturing of the concept, suggesting that the English project was also perfectly suited to the brothers’ function as university printers. 68 In the same way that Dryden’s Miscellany ﬁgured into Tonson’s wider canonical project, the Foulises recognized the usefulness of a miscellany alongside the body of verse regularized in their uniform series. In this auxiliary capacity they published Select Poems from a Larger Collection (1775), clarifying its relationship to the rest of the series with a notice on the verso of the title-page: ‘The Editor has here omitted those poems, which he has formerly published in the compleat works of their respective authors.’ Aside from avoiding redundancy, as Michael Suarez notes, the Foulises obviously ‘did not want to compromise the success of their backlist by making many of their best works available in a single, inexpensive volume’. The forty pieces in Select Poems followed the order in which they were plucked from Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems, except for Johnson’s London, which was shifted to the end of the volume. 69 Barging in on the university printers, another pair of Glasgow booksellers, R. Chapman and A. Duncan, published their own Select Poems from Dodsley’s Collection the next year, making it ‘The same size with Messrs. Foulis’ Poets’ in order to promote it as a companion to the canonical series. ‘None of the Poems of Gray, Akenside, Mason, or Shenstone, are inserted in this Volume’, they asserted; ‘The works of these Authors are already collected in separate Volumes, and are probably in every body’s hands.’ 70 Although the books in readers’ hands surely included other imprints as well, the success of the Foulis series is implicit in Chapman and Duncan’s perception that such volumes were everywhere about them. William Mason in particular had the Foulises to thank—or blame—for including him in their series. After the verdict in Donaldson v. Becket, Mason apprised James Beattie of an application ‘from Mr Foulis of Glasgow for leave to publish an edition of my Poems’. Mason had answered ‘that the late decision of the House of Lords had entirely annihilated my Property in my own works, wch it litterally has; for as my Bookseller neglected to enter them in the Stationers Hall I have lost all right in them’. Foulis, as a result, had ‘full liberty to do what he pleases concerning them, & it would be idle in me to pretend to grant him leave, as a matter of favour. I am however much honord by his intention & I beg you 67 Original Poems (2 vols. Glasgow, 1775), i, sigs. Y1–Y2. The Greek authors were ranked by folio, quarto, ‘pocket volumes’, and 32mo; the Latin authors by quarto and ‘pocket volumes’. The format of the English poets was given as ‘small 12mo’. 68 Advertisements charting the growth of the series appear in Dryden’s Virgil (1769), Prior (1769, 1771), Collins (1771), Milton’s Paradise Regain’d (1772), Pope (1773), Collins again (1775), and Dryden (1775). 69 Suarez, ‘Production and Consumption’, 232. 70 GC (17–24 Oct. 1776).

60

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

will tell him I think so. He must be the best judge whether such a publication will be worth his while.’ 71 Foulis told Beattie that the format of Mason’s poems would resemble the 1768 quarto of Gray, in a print run not to exceed three hundred copies. ‘In the meantime’, he added, we have printed a small edition upon the new letter to go along with the 40 volumes of English Poets; which number we have hitherto kept up, though we have been obliged to print several of them oftener than once; and we are sensible that the merit of Mr Mason’s Poems, and their reputation, will make them acceptable to our encouragers, which are many more on this article than we have been accustomed to. 72

From his talk of encouragers and how numerous they were; of the titles they had been obliged to reprint, even ‘oftener than once’; and of how unaccustomed all this was, Foulis expressed a mixture of surprise and delight over the market into which they had been drawn by ‘this article’, the duodecimo English poets. Willy-nilly he was confronting consumer demand of a different order from that of the specialized market for Latin and Greek imprints, or deluxe folio and quarto volumes. Pressures to ‘keep up’ the series were alien to a master printer whose main burden had centered on perfecting an edition of Plato for the ages. Unwittingly Foulis had become an innovator, looking for ways to satisfy an unexpectedly brisk consumer demand, seeking fresh material ‘to go along with’ and to expand a popular product line. The pressure may, in fact, have prompted Foulis to act in bad faith. For while he told Beattie of the ‘small edition’ pending, he did not inform Mason, who stumbled upon it in May 1775 and laid out his grievance to Beattie: ‘I dont . . . like to see a book shabbily printed and therefore on that acct and for another obvious reason I was not well pleased to see a little paltry edition of these same Poems printed at Glascow and sold much under the London price by the Booksellers at York.’ Mason felt deceived. ‘You say Mr Foulis is a deserving Citicen’, he continued, ‘& therefore I do not wish to shew him any displeasure on this score’. Foulis had only done ‘what all Printers & Booksellers now have a right to do, from the late decision concerning Litterary Property; Yet it was idle to ask my leave to print a Quarto edition, at the very time he was either printing or had printed one in duodecimo without that leave’. 73 Worse yet, the quarto never materialized, raising the possibility that Foulis never intended to print one, or that he changed his mind about its feasibility and used Mason’s permission instead as a warrant to proceed with a duodecimo. Either way, the episode suggests that the small series had become a relatively urgent priority. On top of his sense of betrayal, Mason’s disgust over the ‘paltry’ edition reﬂects a bias against pocket volumes as a lowly form of print, no matter how neatly 71

9 May 1774, AUL MS 30/2/c. 198. Letter of 25 Oct. 1774, in Robert Hay Carnie, ‘The Letters of Robert Foulis to James Beattie’, The Bibliothek, 9 (1978), 41. 73 29 May 1775, AUL MS 30/2/c. 231. 72

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

61

produced, especially once he had looked forward to a larger format. Something akin to the quarto edition of Gray would have been grand indeed. Even more grand, the Foulis edition of Homer memorably served Winkelmann as ‘his companion at every instant of his life’. Of this same edition Gibbon rhapsodized, ‘As the eye is the organ of fancy, I read Homer with more pleasure in the Glasgow edition. Through that ﬁne medium, the poet’s sense appears more beautiful and transparent.’ 74 Subscribing to this hierarchy of value, David Murray saw the ﬁrm as having set ambition aside after their 1770 folio Milton; it was their ‘last effort’ as printers, ‘for while they continued to print and issue many books till their deaths these were of a more commonplace character, although the execution was as careful as before’. Murray’s criterion for ‘effort’ was clariﬁed by his estimate of another Glaswegian printer, Robert Urie: while Urie’s books demonstrate his technical skill he did not attempt any great work. He produced no stately quarto or folio, and conﬁned himself, as regards high class work, to pocket volumes. To a large extent he printed for the trade and produced what was in immediate demand by the general public. Many of these popular books . . . were well and tastefully printed.’ 75

By this measure, anything produced ‘for the trade’, even tasteful and handsomely produced work, deserved less esteem than the larger formats. Murray was struck by ‘the comparative unimportance of the books in English’ as compared with ‘the preponderance of Greek and Latin classics’ in their list of publications. 76 He cites the hindrance of copyright law as a reason for this imbalance, without appreciating that the ﬁrm blazed ahead with its poetry series prior to the House of Lords verdict in 1774. What Murray took to be insigniﬁcant actually marked the beginning of a shift in publishing; the economic and legal underpinnings of British print culture were changing as a function of the demand for vernacular classics. Alongside the Plato project, the English poetry series was not conspicuously grand, but the Foulises used it for twelve years to test the limits of a new market. Dwarfed physically by the folio Milton and quarto Gray, the duodecimo poets nonetheless proved to be the outsized commodity in the long run: marking a tilt towards what was ‘in immediate demand’, they provided a model of commercial potency that would be imitated again and again. Boswell characterized the brothers as a Scottish institution, ‘the two Messieurs Foulis, the Elzevirs of Glasgow’. Their dream of taking Plato farther than the Stephens had done was futile. A quixotic aspect to the dream was reﬂected years later in a curious misreading of Boswell’s copy for the Life of Johnson. Discovering the compositor to have typeset the name of the Parisian printers incorrectly, 74

75 Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 26. Ibid. 29, 31. Ibid. 41. Murray’s expertise is not to be dismissed lightly. Forty-seven of the 279 items in the Glasgow Bibliographical Society’s exhibit on the Foulises were lent by him. See Catalogue of the Foulis Exhibition Held in the University of Glasgow April 1913 (Glasgow, 1913). 76

62

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

the biographer scolded ‘Dont you know the Stephani the famous Printers!’ 77 Obviously not; the Stephens and their paradigm of printing had slipped away. The Elzevir formula, by contrast, had guided Robert and Andrew down a new path: that of publishing, at low cost and as part of a coherent series, uniform pocket volumes of English poetry. Under ﬁnancial duress, they had crossed a divide, from an old world of monumental scholarly and typographical ventures devoted to ancient Greek and Latin texts, into a new world of selling multivolume collections of modern vernacular classics to a larger and more diverse readership.

R E A DERS GL AD TO H AV E T H E M Samuel Johnson dined with the Foulises when he visited Glasgow with Boswell in October 1773. Professors Thomas Reid and John Anderson, also at dinner, departed earlier than the others, and Boswell withdrew to write a letter, leaving Johnson alone with the brothers. He ﬂed their company and begged Boswell to rejoin them. The printers, it seems, ‘teased’ him with ‘questions and doubtful disputations’, and did not defer to ‘the dictates of the sage’. To extenuate Johnson’s displeasure, Boswell offered that the brothers were prone to an ‘unsettled speculative mode of conversation which is offensive to a man regularly taught at an English school and university’, but he defended them as ‘good and ingenious men’. 78 If Johnson found the printers irritating in company, their handiwork was another matter. ‘There are two little books published by the Foulis, Telemachus and Collins’s Poems, each a shilling’, he wrote to Boswell in May 1775; ‘I would be glad to have them.’ 79 Why should Johnson send to Glasgow for an edition of Collins? Was John Langhorne’s 1765 edition, reprinted in 1771, out of stock? (A third edition came out in 1776.) Two years later he reiterated his request for George Graham’s Telemachus, ‘printed at Glasgow, a very little book’. 80 Had Boswell never sent it, or had Johnson already given one copy away? His gift of the Foulis Telemachus to Robert Chambers makes it clear he deemed it an apt 77 Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 1773, ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York, 1961), 365; revises to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Houghton MS Hyde 51 (24), ii. 329. 78 Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 365. 79 Johnson to Boswell, 27 May 1775, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford (5 vols. Princeton, 1992–4), ii. 214. Nine Foulis press titles are found in the catalogue of Johnson’s library. In octavo he owned Aeschylus (2 vols. 1746), Sophocles (1745), Anacreon (1777), and two titles by Xenophon (4 vols. each, 1762, 1764); in duodecimo he had Cicero (20 vols. 1748–9); and from the 32mo Greek series he had Pindar (3 of 4 vols. 1754), Epictetus (1751), and Anacreon (1761). See J. D. Fleeman, The Sale Catalogue of Samuel Johnson’s Library: A Facsimile Edition (Victoria, 1975), 27–8, 31, 47, 63. Since small books were often batched together without being itemized, other lots designated as ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘odd volumes’ could also have contained Foulis titles. 80 Johnson to Boswell, 18 Feb. 1777, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 9.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

63

Figure 2.2. A set of the Foulis Poets in the traveling library of Sir Robert Chambers. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.

present, just as the 1633 Elzevir edition of Gislenius’s works, also a ‘very little book’, made a suitable gift for Hester Thrale. Yet he kept the Foulis edition of Collins–Hammond (1771) for himself; it became his working copy when writing the ‘Life of Hammond’ for The Works of the English Poets. 81 Others were glad to have them too. The same Robert Chambers, later Sir Robert, ﬁtting himself out for a sojourn as judge in India, purchased a set of the Foulis poets in forty-one volumes (1768–73) and housed it in a beautiful Sheraton box for travel (see Fig. 2.2). The fact that he procured all the volumes then available, but did not ﬁll any gaps with other imprints, suggests that he viewed the product as a satisfactory collection of English poetry. 82 Another 81 J. D. Fleeman, A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1984), 18–20. 82 A plaque on top of the case, engraved ‘POETRY DIVINITY &c.’, hints that Chambers may have had another box for classics, history, and so forth. The box, which also contains a Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Blackmore’s Creation, and The Beggar’s Opera by Gay (Foulis, 1772), is

64

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

boxed set of the Foulis English Poets, housed in a miniature enclosed doublesided bookcase, was recently sold at auction. Since the item came from Scone Palace, the family home of the earls of Mansﬁeld, it may have belonged to Lord Mansﬁeld. This set contains forty-three volumes (1770–6). 83 The ﬁrst of these boxes proves that a known, marketable canon of English poetry predated 1774, and together they prove it could be purchased both in Scotland and—at least by order—in England. The variations between them, however, show that obtaining a set involved an element of unpredictability. The growth of the series can be charted in advertisements, but the roster ﬂuctuated depending on which volumes were out of stock and needed reprinting. 84 In the summer of 1774, the London bookseller Thomas Becket wrote to Charles Elliot in Edinburgh inquiring about the Foulis series. In reply Elliot provided a list of forty-four volumes, but warned ‘it is a very difﬁcult thing to get a sett complete’, explaining that it was printed ‘on 2 different papers’, and that when ordering sets ‘you either want some of the vol[s that] are out of print or you get several ones on coarse paper’. 85 Ill-adept at meeting a level of consumer demand to which they were unaccustomed, the Foulises struggled to supply sets that were not either incomplete or mismatched in paper. And if this was true for the Edinburgh market, the challenge could only have been greater in London. While their other projects foundered, the brothers gained conﬁdence in their poetry series, even when faced with the kind of competition abhorred by Strahan. ‘We have indeed got rivals at Edinburgh’, Robert wrote Beattie in reference to The British Poets, begun in 1773 by Creech and Balfour. These publishers were ‘persons of great activity’, he conﬁded, ‘but we do not ﬁnd, hitherto, that they have done us much harm; and if the public continue their favour, the collection will become more extensive’. 86 Such optimism was rare in the late annals of the Foulis press. With an eye on their competitors, the Foulises resolved to move ahead with their English poets and even expand the series. The poets had grown from a few imprints initially considered a distraction from a greater mission, to a series not only compatible with their business model, but ﬁnally necessary to it. Yet they could not manage their business nor capitalize on the success of their English Poets sufﬁciently to reverse their disintegrating fortunes. The Glasgow printers ended their days in a pitiful, beggarly, precarious state, indirectly fulﬁlling Strahan’s dire predictions for the trade, but not for the reasons in the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library. See Frederick B. Adams, Jr., ‘English and Other Bindings’, in Gabriel Austin (ed.), Four Oaks Library (Somervile, NJ, 1967), 109. Chambers landed in Calcutta in Oct. 1774 (Thomas M. Curley, Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison, 1998), 170). 83 Lot 306, Scone Palace and Blairquhan: The Selected Contents of Two Great Scottish Houses, Thursday 24 May 2007 (London: Christie’s, 2007). 84 See the advertisements in the edns. of Prior (1771), Paradise Regain’d (1772), Pope (1773), Dryden (1775), and Collins (1775), which show the collection growing from 40 to 48 vols. 85 Elliot to Becket, 30 Aug. 1774, NLS MS 43090, Charles Elliot Letterbook 1, no. 74. 86 Letter of 25 Oct. 1774, in Carnie, ‘The Letters of Robert Foulis to James Beattie’, 41.

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

65

he feared. Eventually they sunk money into a desperate scheme to reclaim peat bogs for arable use, and after Andrew’s death in 1775, Robert auctioned off his beloved paintings in London. His trip was disastrously timed, late in a season where sales had fared poorly, but he persisted, recouping just a tenth of what he considered them to be worth. He drooped homeward—‘[d]isappointed, spiritless, all his hopes blasted, his health and strength gone, . . . his countenance pale as death, his eyes sunk in their sockets’—and died in Edinburgh on 2 June 1776. 87 When Robert’s son Andrew took over the business, its insolvency came as a shock. Trustees were named to take the estate in hand and settle with creditors. Catalogues were circulated listing the bookseller’s manuscripts, prints, copperplates, and stock of books in quires, a large share of which was bought by James Spottiswood on behalf of a partnership entered into with the Foulis scion. For his part, Andrew acquired the types and printing presses that had belonged to the family and obtained a lease from the university for the printing-house, on which basis, along with a contribution of £1,000 from Spottiswood, he was appointed University Printer on 18 May 1778. 88 Andrew channeled his earliest efforts into the duodecimo poets, where depletions in stock affected nearly a third of the volumes: in 1776 he reprinted Dryden’s Fables, Gay’s Poems on Several Occasions, Thomson’s Liberty, Young’s The Complaint: or Night-thoughts, and Modern Poems: Selected Chieﬂy from Miscellanies Published Lately (a continuation, in effect, of the miscellany his father and uncle appended to the English Poets); in 1777 Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, Collins’s Poetical Works with Hammond’s Love Elegies, Gray’s Poems, Lyttelton’s Poems, and Mason’s Poems. Here the series ended, although seven years later Pope’s Iliad of Homer was republished. By this point, several other publishers had entered the market with poetry series, and Andrew—unlike his father, when Creech and Balfour presented the only rivalry—temporarily bowed out of the competition. After 1777, when Andrew turned to the ﬁrst love of his father and uncle, the ancient classics, his list concentrated on the texts, commentaries, and treatises of the old Greek and Latin curriculum. English poetry was a sideline for him by the time he reprinted Poems by Mr. Gray in octavo (1782), a step down from the 1768 quarto but still important enough for him to identify himself as ‘Printer to the University’. On Select Poems (1783), a pocket miscellany of works by Hammond, Stillingﬂeet, Akenside, and Ambrose Philips, he used his ofﬁcial designation again, unaccountably it would seem, unless he viewed the title as the prelude to a renewed run of the duodecimo poets, which in fact he had in view. In 1783 he embarked upon an experiment in stereotype printing with Alexander Tilloch. 87 Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 98–101; ‘Excerpt from letter of Robert Dewar, one of Foulis’s printers, to Elizabeth Foulis, describing the last illness and death of her father Robert Foulis’, GUL MS Murray 602 (25). 88 Murray, Robert and Andrew Foulis, 116–17, 127–8.

66

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

As recounted by Tilloch, they sold stereotyped books ‘to the trade without any intimation of their being printed out of the common way’, beginning with works that ‘were in the lowest sense of the word common: one or two histories, and a cheap edition of the Economy of Human Life’, titles like The Seven Champions of Christendom, The Twelve Caesars, ‘and such scientiﬁc and classical performances, of which great numbers are annually exported to America’. On a higher plane, Tilloch disclosed, ‘We also printed a Greek volume, Xenophon’s Anabasis, 1783, and had plates for several small volumes of the English Poets almost ﬁnished, but the latter were never put to press.’ When word of their method leaked out, they had to scrap their plans, the trade evidently being deeply wary of any books produced in ‘the new-fangled way’. 89 Having abandoned the implicit populism of this venture into stereotyping, Foulis now headed in the opposite direction, towards patronage and subscription. In 1784 he began a series of English poets in folio. The impulse to elevate the English poets into the ranks of folios destined for LIBRARIES was another sign that they had come to be regarded as classics. Judging from the peculiar composition of the series, it is likely that Foulis was prevented from printing as many as he might have intended. Beginning with The Poetical Works of James Thomson (2 vols. 1784), he moved on to Pope (3 vols. 1785), Parnell (1786), Collins (1787), Gray (1787), Hammond (1787), and Lyttelton (1787). All seven had appeared in the ﬁrst Glasgow collection, but the uniformity of Bell’s Poets of Great Britain, published in the intervening years, showed Foulis how to standardize his series, using The Poetical Works and including a prefatory life for each poet. 90 Without a ready market for the folio volumes, demand had to be whetted by subscription, as recorded in the list of ‘NAMES of the Persons by whose encouragement this Edition has been printed’. More than three hundred subscribers signed on, representing the social, political, legal, and ecclesiastical elites of Scotland, predictably, but also of Ireland and England. 91 Foulis covered all compass points in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope by dedicating each volume to a different seat of power: (1) the Earl of Mansﬁeld, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s-Bench; (2) Lord Viscount Stormont, Baron of Scoon and Balvaird, Knight of the Most Ancient Order of the Thistle, and Lord Justice General of Scotland; and (3) John Foster, Speaker of the House of Commons in Ireland. 89

Philosophical Magazine (1801), quoted from Gaskell, Bibliography, 365–7. Why they did not include illustrations is unclear. No enemy to engravings, Foulis commissioned a portrait and a dozen aquatint plates from David Allan to adorn a beautiful edn. of Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (1788). This quarto united the arts that Robert Foulis had labored to cultivate, doubly so as Allan had been trained in the Glasgow Academy. 91 There are 307 and 311 subscribers listed, respectively, in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. and The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell. Among the notable subscribers are Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and ‘His Excellency the American Ambassador at the Court of France’, the post held by Benjamin Franklin until 10 March 1785, when Thomas Jefferson succeeded him. 90

The Elzevirs of Glasgow

67

No amount of patronage could compensate for the want of another kind of ‘encouragement’, however: broad-based consumer demand. The folio poets were excessively monumental. Perhaps it was true, as one historian bluntly put it, that Andrew ‘had neither the brains nor the stability of his father’. 92 Yet his career, though erratic, also indicated that he shared at least one trait with Robert, a knack for innovation and experimentation. For him to have contemplated reviving the Glasgow duodecimo poets on a substantial scale in 1783 was remarkable, given that bookshops by then were stocked with The Works of the English Poets and Bell’s Poets of Great Britain. His objective was not merely to reprint the series for export to America, but to reinvent the multi-volume collection by means of a new technology—stereotype printing, the implications of which would unfold in the nineteenth century. 93

92

Maclehose, Glasgow University Press, 195. On the initial resistance to stereotype printing, its acceptance in the 1810s and 1820s, and its effect in reducing the price of books, see St Clair, Reading Nation, 100–1, 182–5. 93

3 William Creech and John Boyle: The Classics Spread Across Scotland It is such productions as these that do honour to a country . . . (Edward Topham, 1775)

During a two-year stay in Edinburgh, Edward Topham speculated that the Foulises could have done greater things: ‘Some years ago the Printing-ofﬁce at Glasgow was a formidable rival to that at Edinburgh; and had the two celebrated Printers there pursued their business, they might have carried away the whole trade of Scotland to themselves.’ 1 Glasgow could boast of a powerful economy and great intellectual vitality, but its book culture was unlikely ever to rival that of Edinburgh, the legal and ecclesiastical hub of the country. 2 Aggressive marketing might have boosted sales for the Foulises, but their academic disposition hampered them from drumming up and satisfying demand; they advertised spottily in the Glasgow newspapers, and hardly at all in Edinburgh. Well-informed consumers could obtain sets of their English Poets, but even as the brothers printed more of their series, hoping to expand it in search of more proﬁts, they did not ‘pursue their business’ with the single-mindedness that Topham envisioned. After telling Becket what he wanted to know about the Foulis Poets in August 1774, Charles Elliot added ‘there is a more uniform altho much larger Edit of the British Poets been publishing here two years by these great patriots for Literary property Balfour & Creech’. That collection had caught Topham’s eye: ‘A bookseller in this city, who is not only a polite man, but a man of letters, is now printing a complete set of the English Classics in duodecimo; which, with the addition of a very handsome binding, amount only to eighteen pence a volume. It is such productions as these that do honour to a country.’ 3 William Creech 1

180.

Letter XXII, ‘The Scotch Booksellers; their Publications, &c.’, dated 23 Feb. 1775, Letters,

2 On the economic and cultural strengths of Glasgow, see Richard B. Sher, ‘Commerce, Religion and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow’, in T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds.), Glasgow, i. Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester, 1995), 312–59. 3 Charles Elliot Letterbook 1, no. 74; Topham, Letters, 181. Elliot identiﬁed the format as pot octavo.

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

69

was more commercially minded than the Foulises, and aimed to penetrate the English market. When John Boyle of Aberdeen embarked upon another series a few years later, the English Classics (as Topham signiﬁcantly called them) seemed to be sprouting up all over, and if such productions reﬂected credit on a nation, Scotland was triply honored. The Foulises, Creech, and Boyle answered a need spelt out by the Faculty of Advocates, albeit in a different context. In 1773 the Faculty conducted a ‘careful Survey’ of their library in Edinburgh to ascertain ‘if any Capital Books in the several branches of Literature were wanting’. The library was solid in civil and canon law, British history, and the ancient classics, but more was deemed essential for a library reputed to be ‘the most valuable collection in Scotland’. When the holdings were found to be ‘remarkably deﬁcient in the modern Classicks’, the curators commissioned ‘a very complete Collection of the best Editions of the most approved French and Italian authors’ from abroad. The situation with respect to English poetry being no better, their report called for ‘compleating with care and attention’ the whole collection of modern classics. At issue, Douglas Duncan points out, ‘was what a learned library should be expected to provide’. 4 Outside that learned sphere, the commercial world of print faced the same challenge: to identify the most approved modern authors and remedy deﬁciencies in the market; that is, to make a fairly complete collection of classics available to the public at a reasonable cost. It has become something of an academic parlor game to identify when or by whom the concept of English literature was invented. Keith Walker names Jacob Tonson as the ‘inventor of English literature’, with his reprints of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; his cultivation of writers like Dryden and Addison; and his ‘fruitful collaboration’ with Dryden, which established ‘a pattern of author/publisher relations that has continued much the same to the present day’. Stuart Gillespie posits that ‘the generations of Dryden and Pope were felt by the eighteenth century to have invented English literature’. Raymond Williams says the term took on its distinctive modern cast in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Trevor Ross, citing Donaldson v. Becket, pinpoints 22 February 1774 as the day when ‘literature in its modern sense began’, the clear winners being ‘English readers, who could now look forward to multiple cheap editions of canonical works’. Romanticism is said by Thomas Pfau to have invented ‘literature’ as a medium for ‘professionalizing and governing a largely uncolonized middle-class interiority’. 5

4 Minutes of the Faculty of the Advocates Library, 7 Aug. 1773 (Douglas Duncan, Thomas Ruddiman: A Study in Scottish Scholarship of the Early Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1965), 37–8). 5 Walker, ‘The Master of Extremes’,193; Gillespie, ‘Translation and Canon-Formation’, 10; R. Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), 150–4; Ross, ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (1992), 14, 16; and Pfau, quoted by Scott Hess, Authoring the Self (New York, 2005), 202.

70

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

Robert Crawford’s argument for ‘the Scottish invention of English literature’ is the most germane to this and my previous chapter. Professors like Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and other inﬂuential Scots generated a canon of English writers for use in university curricula and social clubs where members polished their English language skills. The printers and booksellers of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen contributed signiﬁcantly to the process, providing a commercial corollary to Crawford’s thesis. If the lectures and reading lists produced in these towns were ‘at the root of what constitutes the university canon of English literature’, the multi-volume collections of classic poets propagated an equally potent, and more tangible, idea of a national literature. 6 THE MOST CELEBRATED BRITISH POETS William Creech was born in May 1745 at Newbattle near Dalkeith, a short distance from Edinburgh. Within a few months his father died, followed by his two older sisters in 1749. He attended Dalkeith Academy, a prestigious grammar school, and went on to the University of Edinburgh, where he took Hugh Blair’s class on rhetoric and belles lettres, ﬁnished an elite classical education, and started a course of medical study. Of several people who looked after William and his mother along the way, none was more important than Alexander Kincaid, his Majesty’s Printer for Scotland, who took William into his household in 1764 and treated him like an adopted son. Losing interest in medicine, Creech became apprentice to Kincaid and his junior partner, John Bell (of Edinburgh). 7 Kincaid saw exceptional promise in the 19-year-old and gradually began to groom him for partnership; he sent him ‘to London and the Continent on purpose to improve his knowledge of that very business which he intended him to follow’. 8 In London Creech formed a deep attachment to Strahan, who had kept up ‘a pretty constant Correspondence’ with Kincaid since their own apprenticeship together in Edinburgh. 9 After a year of ‘receiving instruction from the most eminent booksellers’, Creech in 1767 began ‘looking towards the Batavian coast’. 10 Given that the aim of his trip was to improve his knowledge of printing and bookselling, his record of this tour reveals two noteworthy stops: in Holland 6 Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford, 1992), 29 and 16–44. He elaborates his argument in The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Oxford, 1998). 7 Sher, Enlightenment, 401–4; ‘An Account of the Life of the Late Mr. William Creech’, in William Creech, Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh, 1815), pp. xi–xv, xl; hereafter ‘Life of Creech’. John Bell of Edinburgh (1735–1806) must not be confused with John Bell of London (1745–1831). Kincaid’s partner (soon to be former partner) later formed ‘Bell & Bradfute’ with his nephew John Bradfute; this ﬁrm is discussed in Ch. 7. 8 ECL MS Creech Papers, ‘Replies for Mr. Creech to the Answers for Mr. Kincaid’s Trustees in the Submission betwixt him and them’, fos. 20–1; Strahan to Creech, 19 Sept. 1768. 9 Strahan to Creech, 30 Jan. 1777. Learning of Kincaid’s death, Strahan mourned him as the ‘oldest Friend I had in the World; for we were acquainted half a Century’. 10 ‘Life of Creech’, p. xv; ECL MS Creech Papers, ‘Replies for Mr. Creech’, fo. 23.

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

71

he visited ‘The Elzivir Printing house’ and in Paris he ‘Waited on Barbou’. 11 Whereas the stop in Leyden was symbolic, given that the last Elzevier had died in 1712, Creech acquainted himself with the spiritual heir to the Dutch ﬁrm by meeting in France with Joseph-Gérard Barbou, the implementer of a plan conceived in 1743 by N. Lenglet Dufresnoy to reprint the entire Elzevir collection in small duodecimo, ‘s’il se pouvoit, aussi proprement que les Elzévirs’. Lenglet, happily ﬁnding the project to be goûté de plusieurs libraires, saw thirteen authors through the press before Barbou took it over. In the year of Creech’s visit, when Barbou published Virgil, Cornelius Nepos, Lucan’s Pharsalia, and a Latin Testament, the series stood at twenty-seven small duodecimo volumes. Under the auspices of Barbou between 1753 and 1780, it reached thirty-four titles in sixty-eight volumes. 12 The Elzevir and Barbou establishments would have been points of pilgrimage on any tour of distinguished European printing houses, but more particularly, they were shrines to the idea of the classics and their broad dissemination by means of inexpensive, small-format editions. From the careerist purpose of Creech’s journey and the fact that his ﬁrst big goal as a bookseller would be to publish the English classics, it is reasonable to hypothesize that these visits either planted the notion in his mind or conﬁrmed it. Upon his return to Edinburgh in late 1767 or early 1768 he tried, with Strahan’s fatherly support, to ‘begin the World’ in partnership with Kincaid. But Kincaid, intending to sever his ties with Bell, was slow to act. ‘I love him dearly’, wrote Strahan of Kincaid, ‘and I wish I could inspire him with Resolution to do what he really intends to do.’ He feared that Creech, mired ‘in a State of the most disgusting Inactivity and Suspence’, though otherwise ready to prove his ‘Industry, Alacrity, and Readiness to oblige’, would pick up ‘Habits of Idleness and Dissipation . . . not easily conquered’. Worried that ‘every Hour you lose now is irreparable’, Strahan encouraged him either to set up shop on his own and ‘settle a Correspondence’ in London to increase his trade, or to come to London and ‘resolve at once to remain here, without looking back, and push your own Way, as many Scotsmen have done before you’. Creech vacillated, then visited the continent again in 1770. Not until the summer of 1771 was the matter settled, to Strahan’s great relief: ‘I give you Joy upon the happy Commencement of your Connexion with my old and ever honoured Friend. . . . United, I expect to hear you carry all before you.’ 13 11

Entries for 8 Aug. and 9 Sept., ECL MS Creech Papers, ‘Notes of a Tour’. ‘Notice des éditions des auteurs latins’, in Paul Ducourtieux, Les Barbou: Imprimeurs Lyon– Limoges–Paris (1524–1820) (Limoges, 1896), 304–6. Barbou’s edns., several marked as ‘models of beauty and elegance’, are listed in a table alongside Maittaire’s Classics by Dibdin (Introduction, 60). In the work Dibdin was updating, A View of the Various Editions of Greek and Roman Classics, Edward Harwood had listed only Maittaire’s Classics (232–3). 13 Strahan to Creech, 22 Dec. 1768 and 16 July 1771. Kincaid’s partnership with Bell ended in May 1771 (‘Life of Creech’, p. xvi). Strahan is a prime example of what Sher calls the ‘London– Edinburgh publishing axis’; the goal of stronger business ties increased his desire to see Creech 12

72

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

Kincaid’s contribution to the partnership was the prestige of his name. Apparently busy with other interests as King’s Printer, stationer, and magistrate, he steered clear of ﬁnancial ties to Creech, preferring instead to lend his name to ‘introduce his young friend to his connections’. As legally clariﬁed later, ‘Mr Creech was the sole partner of Kincaid + Creech entitled to the whole proﬁts and subject to the whole losses consequent upon that concern and that Mr. Kincaid was the nominal partner not liable to a shilling of the loss whatever way the business was at that time managed.’ 14 A ﬂedgling in business, Creech looked elsewhere for someone to go halves with him on the immense poetry project, with what result is told by the imprint on The British Poets: ‘Printed for A. Kincaid and W. Creech, and J. Balfour.’ John Balfour evidently entered the project on an equal ﬁnancial footing with Creech, each being liable for half of the initial paper purchase: ‘511/2 Reams of ﬁne pott . . . for printing the British Poets’, recorded on 27 October 1772. 15 Balfour was an open-hearted man, but quick-tempered, and ‘even his friends felt his pique, however momentarily’. A veteran of the reprint wars of the 1740s and 1750s along with Gavin Hamilton and Patrick Neill, he became printer to the University of Edinburgh with William Smellie in 1765. 16 With Creech he now attempted to gain a foothold in the London market by coaxing Strahan to take a share in the project. 17 Their likelihood of success was small, as Creech surely knew, having not long since received this expression of Strahan’s anxiety: I am sorry that Piracies are so very frequent with you. This is what I have long since foreseen would be the Case, to the Ruin of the Trade every where. It is no easy Matter to cure this Evil that has insensibly got to so great a Height; . . . This I know, that if something is not done speedily to stem this Method of Proceeding it will hardly be worth any Body’s while to follow Bookselling in a fair and reputable Way. 18

Was Strahan now to embroil himself in these sad affairs? In a project involving the choicest English poetry? The ill-fated task of persuasion fell to Balfour, who had been friends with Strahan since childhood. 19 ‘I have had a good deal of Altercation with Mr Balfour on the Subject of the proposed Edition of the English Poets’, the exasperated London printer complained to Creech; ‘He thinks I am solicitous for my own private Interest. He mistakes me.’ Rejecting any implication of selﬁshness, Strahan insisted that he took ‘no particular Offence’ form a bond with Kincaid, and afterward with Balfour (Enlightenment, 304–57). On his second continental tour Creech went to Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Germany. 14

‘Life of Creech’, p. xvi; ECL MS Creech Papers, ‘Replies for Mr. Creech’, fo. 30. ‘Replies: Stationary [sic] Account’, ECL MS Creech Papers, fo. 171. 16 McDougall, ‘Gavin Hamilton, John Balfour, and Patrick Neill’, 3–5, 115–21; Kerr, Memoirs of Smellie, 400–1. 17 An ideal imprint would have included the parties that published Dalrymple’s Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (2nd edn.), which was ‘Printed for W. Strachan, and T. Cadell, London; and A. Kincaid and W. Creech, J. Balfour, and J. Bell, Edinburgh’: EEC (1 June 1771). 18 19 Strahan to Creech, 4 Jan. 1772. Sher, Enlightenment, 304, 337. 15

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

73

at the proposal, nor had ‘any particular Reason to be offended at it’, but was indignant ‘only on General Grounds’, despairing of a future where ‘every body is permitted to print every Thing’. It was this prospect that elicited his dark prophecy about bookselling becoming ‘the most pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unproﬁtable, and disreputable Trade in Britain’. 20 Guessing that Kincaid would see ‘this Matter exactly in the same Light’, Strahan ﬁgured he ‘would not readily concur in such a Project, tho’ he might take a Share of it along with you, when he saw the Thing was about to be done, whether he engaged in it or not’. 21 Judging by this candid admission, Strahan suspected that no bookseller, principled or unprincipled, would be apt to stand idly by once others had undertaken a proﬁtable venture. He himself could watch from the sidelines this time, having muddied the chances of a workable London distribution for the series, but come the day when such a collection was published in London, he probably would feel compelled to join the fray. From the outset, Creech and Balfour saw The British Poets as a vital national enterprise, introducing it on 24 May 1773 as ‘A Collection of the Most Celebrated British Poets, from Milton to the Present Time’. Similar in scope to the Glasgow edition, or as much of it as could readily be purchased at any time, The British Poets was projected to ‘consist of about 40 volumes’. The series was to be published in four separate batches, and readers could ‘pay as they receive their books’. As an inducement to subscribe, however, buyers were advised that it would be offered ‘to those who subscribe within six months, at the low price of 1s. 4d. per volume, neatly stitched in marble paper, and titled on the back’; thereafter the price would rise to 1s. 6d. and ‘be invariably adhered to’. Since the Foulis duodecimos sold for only a shilling, Creech and Balfour courted a dubious comparison in stressing the low cost of their small octavo volumes, ‘from the execution of which the Publick will be able to judge, whether it is not the cheapest book of the kind that ever was published’. 22 The publishers solicited advice from Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belle Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. 23 Blair agreed to help them, but on condition of anonymity, as appears from their mysteriously guarded disclosure: ‘This Collection is selected and arranged by a Gentleman of known taste and abilities in the Literary World’. 24 A manuscript documenting his help conﬁrms this impression: ‘Dr Blair presents compliments to Mr Creech—returns him thanks for the present of the British Poets which he does believe the most Elegant 20

Strahan to Creech, 1 Jan. 1773. Strahan to Creech, 1 Jan. 1773. Had Strahan been unaware that Creech alone was managing ‘Kincaid and Creech’, he would not have mentioned Kincaid’s possible investment in the project as a separate matter. Kincaid chose not to involve himself ﬁnancially. 22 EEC (24 May 1773). 23 One of the ﬁrst undertakings of ‘Kincaid & Creech’ in 1771 was a reprint of Blair’s Heads of the Lectures on Rhetorick, and Belles Lettres, in the University of Edinburgh (1767). Creech was the author’s Edinburgh publisher for years. 24 EEC (24 May 1773). 21

74

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

Edition of any, and shall not fail to recommend it, and avow his having had a hand in the Selection.’ 25 Blair would acknowledge his role, that is, but at his own discretion, and it seems to have remained a relatively privileged bit of information until the 1790s, when a catalogue listing the ‘British Poets from Milton to Beattie, selected and arranged by the Rev. Dr. Blair’, an advertisement referring to ‘Dr. Blair’s edition of the Poets’, and Robert Anderson’s allusion to Dr Blair as editor of the series, all suggested that the fact had become more generally dispersed. 26 But what fact? Robert Morell Schmitz’s claim that Blair ‘placed his imprimatur upon every page of the proposed text’ is unconvincing, as is his idea that the series presented ‘precisely what one would expect Blair to select as representative of British poetry’. By including Butler, Denham, and Cowley, Schmitz concedes, the collection ‘deviated somewhat from Blair’s university lectures’, in which the ﬁrst two were ignored and the third declared to be ‘at all times harsh’. In the end Blair ‘probably did no more than generally oversee the work’. 27 In Robert Crawford’s estimate, Blair was ‘the employee of the booksellers aiming to exploit a newly expanded market’. Since Crawford notes that Blair worked anonymously, his references to ‘Blair’s collection’ and ‘Blair’s British Poets’ should not be taken to imply public awareness of Blair’s counsel, though he ﬂirts with this implication by arguing that the series achieved an elevated cultural status because ‘the judgmental authority of Blair as the anthology’s supervisor lent dignity to the commercial judgment of its backers as they attempted to produce and sell a national corpus to the British market’. At any rate, Crawford admits that we cannot know ‘how far he selected the poets . . . and how far they were the choice of the publishers’. 28 I shall suggest that we can tell some of poets he selected, or at least those he did not. It is worth remarking, however, that whatever boost in conﬁdence or ‘dignity’ was felt by Creech and Balfour on account of Blair’s judgment, Blair himself was not prone to exercise his authority with much swagger. Whether or not he viewed his contribution to the collection as too peripheral to justify public acknowledgement, Blair’s downplaying of it—a vague ‘hand’ in the 25

Blair to Creech, ‘23 Dec’, but the year is missing. Bell & Bradfute, A Catalogue of Books for the Year M,DCC,XCIV (Edinburgh, 1794), 73, item 2030; ‘Literature . . . sold by Hamilton & Co. Wholesale and Retail Booksellers, at the Shakespeare Library, London, . . . [and] all the Principal Booksellers in Great Britain’, EEC (13 July 1795); and Robert Anderson, ‘Preface’, The Works of the British Poets, 14 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1792– 1807), i. [1]. These are the earliest open acknowledgements of Blair’s role I have found. 27 Robert Morell Schmitz, Hugh Blair (New York, 1948), 69–71. As his sources on this matter, Schmitz cites publications from 1873, 1888, and 1932, and seems not to know that Blair’s contribution was anonymous. 28 See Crawford, The Modern Poet, 81–4, and Devolving English Poetry, 33–6. St Clair discusses Blair’s ‘pervasive inﬂuence’ on British readers, but not in connection with The British Poets. Of Creech’s collection he notes ‘The selection made by Hugh Blair’, but then speciﬁes, as if no selection were necessary, ‘The series is made up from the individual books of the English Poets, printed by Foulis’: Reading Nation, 270–5, 525. 26

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

75

selection—ﬁts John Hill’s proﬁle of him as a supremely diplomatic, and perhaps overly cautious, man: ‘Though in the highest degree capable of advising others, yet he never did so, but when he knew that it was agreeable to them. . . . His opinion, when asked, he gave with difﬁdence, and he stated carefully the reason upon which that opinion was founded.’ 29

AS GREAT A PIRATE AS THE WORST Ten volumes of The British Poets were ‘ready for delivery’ in May 1773: Milton’s Paradise Lost (2 vols.), Paradise Regain’d, and Poems on Several Occasions; Butler’s Hudibras (2 vols.); Cowley’s Select Poems, together with Denham’s Select Poems; Waller’s Poems upon Several Occasions; and Dryden’s Original Poems (2 vols.). Slated for completion ‘within twelve months’, the series was to be ‘delivered at four different periods; 10 volumes at a time’. 30 After the opening installment, in other words, readers could expect another ten volumes every four months. By late August, however, about the time a second batch was due, Creech began advertising under his name alone, signaling the end of his partnership with Kincaid, and for a short while styled himself the ‘Successor to Mr. Kincaid’. 31 Creech and Balfour were distracted by their struggle to formalize an alliance. Strahan encouraged Creech to ‘cultivate a close Friendship and Intimacy with [Balfour], as he is really a Man who understands Business in general, and in particular, the Bookselling extremely well’. 32 As negotiations to bring this about dragged on into January 1774, Strahan urged Creech to present a ‘Plan of future Operations’ to Balfour: ‘Nothing answers better in Business, or is more honourable in itself, than a free and candid Declaration of our Sentiments on such Occasions as the present.’ He offered an inspiring vision of their future together: ‘You two ﬁrmly united in Sentiment and Interest will form a Phalanx which nothing will be able to withstand in Scotland.’ In March he stressed that the agreement ‘ought to be in writing’ if it were to be ‘useful and lasting’, and to make it ‘cordial, the very ﬁrst Article ought to be that all past Offences, real or imaginary, be buried in everlasting Oblivion’. Clearly they had squabbled. ‘[Y]ou ought to have but one Mind, and live like Brothers’, Strahan pleaded in April, ‘and then you must carry all before you.’ In June he was still urging Creech along: ‘I hope soon to hear of your having had a friendly Interview with Mr. Balfour, and that you have settled the Preliminaries of a lasting Coalition.’ This shaky state of affairs lasted through the end of the year. 33 Such protracted deliberations did 29

An Account of the Life and Writings of Hugh Blair, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1807), 165. 31 EEC (24 May 1773). EEC (25 Aug., 16 Oct., and 13 Nov. 1773). 32 Strahan to Creech, 13 Nov. 1773. 33 Strahan to Creech, 17 Jan., 18 Mar., 9 Apr., 30 June, 25 Aug., 29 Oct., 27 Dec. 1774. It ultimately became a three-way negotiation between Creech, Balfour, and William Smellie, with Balfour also soliciting advice from Strahan regarding Creech. 30

76

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

little to help Creech live up to Strahan’s conviction that ‘Punctuality, Regularity, and Precision are the very Life of Business’. When Creech was remiss in his dealings with Strahan, he got scolded: ‘This is not doing Business with any degree of Precision.’ 34 As for The British Poets, an increasingly egregious lapse from punctuality and regularity could only have gladdened the Londoner’s heart. It must have been difﬁcult for Creech to sustain his enthusiasm for the project in the face of his mentor’s withering disapproval. On 22 February 1774, the day that the ‘Literary Property Cause was carried against us’ in Donaldson v. Becket, Strahan jotted a postscript to Creech apprising him of their emergency plan: ‘We are now to apply for another Act granting us a farther Time, to indemnify many of the Trade here who have given of late Years large Sums for Copy-Rights that are by this Decision annihilated.’ In a letter that crossed this in the post, Creech had given Strahan an account of ‘the Rejoicings of our Brethren on the late Decision’. Aghast, Strahan chided him: ‘in my Opinion they have little Cause for Joy, unless the being enabled to pirate upon and ruin one another may be deemed such’. 35 How deeply the question troubled Creech is apparent from a letter written in April by the London bookseller John Murray, a fellow Scot with whom he shared a stake in the Edinburgh Magazine and Review. On the wrappers of this publication Creech advertised his books, including The British Poets. 36 After shipping one of the issues south, he began to dread how the London booksellers would react to his blurb for the poetry series. 37 Murray could ill abide this skittish humor: ‘I observed the advertisement you bid me withdraw (of your british poets) from No. 5 of the Mag. for fear of offending the London trade. . . . This, I think, is the second caution I have received from you concerning the London booksellers, which I confess astonishes me.’ Once eager for the London distribution of his series, Creech now appeared to want to scuttle public awareness of it, even after the London trade, by virtue of the copyright ruling, had been ‘evicted at law of usurping property & of oppressing their brethren— which they never were legally entitled to do’. In view of such culpable behavior, Murray was bafﬂed that Creech could remain irresolute: ‘altho this decision in a particular manner must be a great relief, a magna charta in fact to the Scotch booksellers, yet it would appear from your letters that you are willing to reinstate

34 Strahan to Creech, 13 Nov. 1773, and 26 Feb. 1778. Creech is hinted to have spent more time in social scenes ‘than was consistent with a due regard to his private concerns’, and with respect to his writing at least was said to have evinced ‘habits of procrastination’ (‘Life of Creech’, pp. xxxiii, xxxvii). 35 Strahan to Creech, 21 Feb., 18 Mar., and 30 June 1774. 36 The Edinburgh Magazine and Review was established by Gilbert Stuart, who was its main writer along with William Smellie. They each held two shares in the venture; Creech and Murray held one apiece. See William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786 (Edinburgh, 1992), 63. 37 From Oxford in 1775 the poet William Julius Mickle wrote Creech that ‘your Magazine is much read in England, (at least I often see it in different places)’.

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

77

them in their usurpation, altho by your own actions in printing you appear to be as great a pirate as the worst they complain of ’. Lest Creech miss the irony, scorn himself a pirate, and slip further into timid despondency, Murray reassured him that The British Poets was wholly legitimate: ‘But you are mistaken if you think I mean to blame you for printing books the exclusive priviledge of which is expired, for I think you have a lawful right so to do.’ Still more gently Murray pleaded, ‘I desire only to persuade you to act with consistence’, and ﬁnally roused Creech to make up his mind: ‘If you are conscious of doing what is wrong in printing these volumes, you ought not to have done it. If you are certain of promoting your business, & acting as you have a legal right to do, you have reason to be afraid of no trade, & your fears are dastardly & pusillanimous.’ Murray, suspicious of Creech’s sympathy with the booksellers’ petition, adjured him, ‘give your voice & assistance to defeat that relief for which they are now applying’; its success would ‘throw all the country booksellers in a worse state, than that from which the decision of the Lords relieved them’. Fighting against their bid for relief amounted to a moral duty: ‘If it appears to you (as it has done to the house of Peers) that the perpetual property claimed by the London booksellers has been nothing but villainous & unlawful usurpation, you ought boldly to join in a vigorous opposition to them.’ 38 It comes as no surprise that, several years later, Strahan disparaged Murray as ‘a Man with whom we wish to have no Concern in any Shape’. 39 Creech was deeply ambivalent, torn by divided loyalties and divergent interests. Caught between Murray and Strahan, men of forceful wills who were sure of their beliefs, he was uncertain how to feel as a Scot—joyful over the new ‘magna charta’ with his brethren in the Edinburgh trade, or downcast over the vexation it visited on the most eminent Scottish printer in London. Two career paths lay before him, each with a serious drawback. If he chose the ﬁrst, he would stay the course (complicit as he already was in the breakdown of perpetual copyright) and strike common cause with forward-looking men like Murray as they reconﬁgured the book trade, but thereby brand himself as a pirate in the eyes of a dear mentor. If he chose the second path, he would mold himself in Strahan’s image and try to preserve the customs of the trade, but thereby deprive himself of the respect of younger entrepreneurs and doom himself to ﬁght a rearguard battle against change. In Strahan’s frame of reference, Creech had to decide whether to be reputable or disreputable, whether to retard or abet the disintegration that pointed the way to ‘the most disreputable Trade’. 38 Murray to Creech, 8 Apr. 1774, NLS MS Murray Archives. Although Murray would partner with Creech in around 100 books over twenty-ﬁve years, his opinion of him was so low that in Mar. 1774 he referred to Creech as ‘the dancing master bookseller’ and told Gilbert Stuart that ‘If you can draw a character of a non-entity, draw this creature’s’. See William Zachs, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford, 1998), 95. 39 Strahan to Creech, 18 Mar. 1779.

78

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

Privately, at least with some correspondents, Creech leaned toward Strahan’s position. James Beattie, sympathetic to ‘the progress of the Booksellers Bill in Parliament’, shared with Creech his view of the dangers its passage would avert: ‘If the late Decision had remained unobviated, printers would have multiplied; but printing and booksellers, authors, and literature, would have gone to ruin.’ 40 Writing in a similar vein to Strahan, Creech unwittingly caused himself grief. An extract of his letter was made ‘for the Use of the Counsel’, and his words were actually read aloud in the House of Commons. The reading ‘contained only a Remark’, Strahan vouched defensively, That, in Consequence of the late Decision, much confusion would ensue; and that some Law was necessary for regulating the Trade, to prevent Printers from multiplying Editions upon each other; that Two Editions . . . of several Books had already been printed nearly at the same time in Scotland, and he doubted not that the Case would soon be the same in England; that such Practice must inevitably prove ruinous to many, and The Trade itself suffer by getting into the Hands of low Mechanics who had not been brought up to it.

Sounding just as worried as Strahan, Creech had been dragooned into their cause. His ‘voice & assistance’, ironically, had been used to support the booksellers’ petition, not to defeat it. This was mortifying to Creech, but also embarrassing to Strahan, since the extract had been used ‘without Mr. Creech’s Knowledge’. Strahan drafted an exculpatory letter and sent copies to the Edinburgh papers to dampen the outcry raised against his protégé; then, at Creech’s direction, he posted the original to Lord Provost Kincaid, in whose hands it could be inspected by anyone interested. 41 It is little wonder that Creech and Balfour, caught up in this turbulent national debate and unable privately to reach an understanding on their partnership, fell behind in publishing The British Poets. Not until 16 July 1774, two months after the entire series was to have been ﬁnished, was the second installment ready for sale, ‘vol. 11th to 20th inclusive’. Leery of raising the price of each volume to 1s. 6d., they kept it at 1s. 4d., perhaps because their six-month discount, had they stayed on schedule, would have covered the publication of this second installment. By now, the only aspect of the series proceeding as planned was the order of publication set forth in the roster of their original advertisement. In this batch of volumes came Dryden’s Fables, Ancient and Modern (2 vols.) and Works of Virgil (3 vols.); The Poetical Works of Sir Samuel Garth, M.D.; Prior’s Poems upon Several Occasions (2 vols.), and The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (the ﬁrst 2 vols.). To reinvigorate interest in their series, Creech and Balfour promised something new: ‘The last volume will contain the lives of the several poets, whose 40

Beattie to Creech, 30 May 1774. Strahan to Kincaid, 30 June 1774; and to Creech, same date. The fact that Elliot could refer to those ‘great patriots for Literary property Balfour & Creech’ two months later indicates that any damage to Creech’s image was not lasting. 41

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

79

works make up the collection.’ The lives were to be ‘printed so as to make a volume by themselves, or be preﬁxed to their works’, leaving purchasers to make their own binding choices. 42 How this idea originated they did not divulge, but possibly it was inspired by ‘A Short Account of the Life of Sir Samuel Garth, M.D.’, which they included in Garth’s poems, just as the Foulis brothers had done. Although Creech and Balfour’s promise was an afterthought, and was never fulﬁlled, the intention of linking a biographical preface to the works of each poet marked another conceptual advance over the Foulis series. The publishers grasped, if tentatively, how such a feature would enhance the authority of their collection. 43 The third ten-volume batch of volumes still adhered to the original list, delivering the rest of The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (2 vols.), his Iliad (3 vols.) and Odyssey (3 vols.); and Gay’s Poems on Several Occasion (2 vols.). For the fourth installment, however, comprising twelve volumes, the publishers adjusted their initial roster. Arriving on cue were The Poetical Works of the r.h. Joseph Addison, Esq.; Young’s Complaint; or Night-Thoughts (2 vols.) and Poems on Several Occasions; The Poetical Works of James Thomson (2 vols.); The Poems of Mark Akenside, M.D.; Select Works of W. Shenstone; and Poems by Mr. Gray. Showing up also, however, were three poets unheralded in the inaugural advertisement: Poems of Dr. Jonathan Swift (2 vols.), inserted ahead of Addison; The Poems of Dr. Thomas Parnell, appearing before Thomson; and Poems by the r.h. the late Lord Lyttelton, unexpectedly accompanying Gray. Three other changes were also evident: while ‘Colin’s poems’ were temporarily postponed, ‘Glover’s Leonidas’ and ‘Armstrong on health’ were eliminated altogether. For the moment, the collection stood at forty-two volumes. Whether the three unexpected arrivals and two disappearances were vetted by Blair cannot be known without more evidence, but this much is clear: they were departures from any plan he originally approved. Discrepancies on the title-pages of The British Poets suggest an even more tortuous road to publication. The imprint in volumes xxxi–xlii, ‘Printed for J. Balfour and W. Creech’, reﬂects the May 1773 dissolution of Creech’s partnership with Kincaid, but why this change should not have been made before the fourth installment is unclear, when the second and third also were published long after the separation. Odder still, all forty-two volumes are dated 1773, when only the ﬁrst ten were published that year. It is unlikely that so many books would be printed in 1774, or later, with an increasingly stale ‘1773’ on their title-pages. Title-page dates are usually falsiﬁed to make old stock look new, not the other way around. It is equally improbable to imagine thousands of volumes being 42

EEC (16 July 1774). Presumably this meant a separate pagination for each life. Ironically, the Foulis series, which also included Murdoch’s account of Thomson, contained one life more than Creech and Balfour’s. Both series reprinted the short life of Butler often attached to Hudibras. 43

80

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

printed only to lie in a warehouse for months on end, which would be highly imprudent after such an investment in materials and labor. It is conceivable that the volumes for the second and third installments were, as advertised, ‘in great forwardness’ when the ﬁrst was published in 1773, Creech at that point still being associated with Kincaid. Later that year, though publication had stalled, it is possible that Creech and Balfour decided to speed up their timetable, rewording their imprint (absent Kincaid now) and sending the fourth batch to press, only to become mired more deeply in personal turmoil and distracted by the politics of copyright. Even a high level of distraction, however, should not have kept them from getting their merchandise from the printing house into bookshops. Was their marketing scheme a hindrance? The batching method of delivery, which mitigated the all-at-once pressure on the publishers and ameliorated the cost of the series for consumers, may have had some hidden snares. Their pricing of the series was calculated on selling it to early subscribers at a discount, but at a higher rate for all others. Yet that higher price was not ‘invariably adhered to’; the discount was extended, then made permanent. Without question this reduced their proﬁts; only disappointing sales would have brought Creech and Balfour to this accommodation. Why they could not deliver their stock in a timely fashion, assuming the books were produced in 1773, is ﬁnally a mystery. A forty-third volume straggled into the series when Collins was published, paired (as in the Foulis edition) with Hammond—a sixth deviation from Blair’s plan. Here the alliance between Creech and Balfour ﬁnally unraveled, in spite of Strahan’s plea for them to reach ‘a better Understanding, and acquire that necessary Conﬁdence in one another . . . so desireable, and so conducive, to your mutual Interests and to the comfortable Prosecution of your several Businesses’. 44 On his own, Creech now looked for a way to conclude the project with a ﬂourish. Like Foulis in respect of Mason, he was attracted to the works of a living author, and after a delicate courtship was able to publish Poems on Several Occasions, by James Beattie, LL.D., ‘Printed for W. Creech’, his forty-fourth volume. Like Foulis, Creech supplemented his series with a miscellany, ‘FUGITIVE PIECES ; being a select collection of poems, with some originals, 2 vols.’ In its fullest manifestation, then, with the introductory discount still in effect, the set was advertised as ‘THE BRITISH POETS, 46 vols. being a neat and uniform collection of all the British Poets from Milton to the present time, printed on a ﬁne writing paper, and in a small pocket size. Price only 1s. 4d. per volume. neatly stitched in marble or blue paper, and titled on the back; and bound copies in proportion to the binding’. 45 Listings of the set from then until now bear signs of its idiosyncratic publication. For instance, a fragmentary set—‘from vol. 21st 44

Strahan to Creech, 4 July 1776. Thus begins a six-page list of ‘BOOKS printed for, and sold by W. Creech, Edinburgh’, in John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Edinburgh, 1776), [i]. I have not seen Fugitive Pieces, nor is it listed in ESTC. 45

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

81

to 30th inclusive’—was offered at £1 5s. bound and gilt in 1778, while the ﬁrst twenty volumes were auctioned recently on eBay. Sets crop up in either fortytwo or forty-four volumes. In ‘42 vols., ﬁnely bound and gilt’, it fetched £5 5s. in 1778. Often sets are double-bound, as shown by those for sale in 1794: ‘British Poets, 42 vols., bound in 21, new and neatly bound’ at £2 15s.; or ‘British poets from Milton to Beattie, selected and arranged by the Rev. Dr. Blair, printed on writing paper, 45 vol. handsomely bound in 22’ at £3 10s. Only a few shillings less (£3 3s.) was charged the following year for an unbound set of ‘Dr Blair’s edition of the Poets, 42 vols. in Marble Paper’, demonstrating how prices could ﬂuctuate. 46

BEAT TIE’S PL ACE AMONG THAT FRATERNIT Y Creech was drawn to James Beattie by his enormous popularity. In the 1770s the professor from Aberdeen was seen by many as the champion of orthodoxy, triumphant over Hume in his Essay on Truth (1770), while his Minstrel (1771) brought him fame as a poet. Both works were published by Kincaid & Bell jointly with the Dilly brothers in London; as successor to Kincaid, Creech inherited Beattie, as he had Hugh Blair. 47 Beattie’s celebrity was heightened by the award of a royal pension in 1773, in the summer of which year he had traveled to London, as rumor and his diary suggested, in pursuit of the honor. While awaiting the conferral of his pension, which in the end was ‘wrung from the Crown by . . . persistence’, he sat (Essay on Truth in hand) for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. By one estimate, Beattie was then so famous that ‘his name was known all over the kingdom to everyone who could read’. 48 Universal name recognition was a marketing consideration undoubtedly on Creech’s mind. Strahan had once advised Creech, ‘Whatever Dr. Beattie writes will be worth our taking a Concern in. . . . His Works will always have a Sale.’ 49 Beattie was crafty about his market value as a poet, insisting, for instance, on the calculated effect of a small print run. ‘It is very certain there will be but a triﬂe got by Dr Beattie’s Minstrel 2d Part’, Edward Dilly complained to Creech in April 1774; ‘the reason of the Doctor’s not allowing of more than 750 to be Printed is on 46 J. Bell’s Catalogue of Books for the Year 1778, Consisting of Several Valuable Libraries Recently Purchased (Edinburgh, 1778), 63; Bell & Bradfute, A Catalogue of Books for the Year M,DCC,XCIV, 73 and 96; EEC (13 July 1795). 47 After separating from Kincaid, John Bell brieﬂy retained an interest in subsequent edns. of both works. The Essay on Truth reached its 5th edn. in 1774, The Minstrel its 5th edn. in 1775. 48 Ralph S. Walker (ed.), James Beattie’s Day-Book 1773–1798 (Aberdeen, 1948), 26. The pension exercised Henry Grey Graham: ‘The palm of literary celebrity in the eighteenth century was not given to the great writers of Scotland—to Hume for his brilliant philosophical essays, or Robertson for his admirable histories, or Adam Smith for his unequalled exposition of work—but to Dr. James Beattie’ (Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1901), 259–60). 49 Strahan to Creech, 29 Oct. 1774.

82

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

acct of the Credit of a Second Edition appearing soon, which will give it an Eclat’. Sure enough, two weeks later Dilly groused that ‘after sending 300 Copies to Edinr. 50 Presentation Copies. 20 to the Author. and 9 to Stationers Hall, we had only 371 remaining for Sale which will be sold by Monday or Tuesday next’. Before the poem was a week old, he had ‘been obliged without waiting to hear from the Author to order a Second Edition’. Whatever inconvenience it caused the printer, the tactic worked; Creech played along with the artiﬁce, later advertising that the numbers of editions of the poem ‘speak for themselves’. 50 The poem had achieved its quantiﬁable éclat. Creech approached the poet on 7 June 1776: ‘As I am just at your period in the British Poets I wish you would allow me to add you to the respectable Body.—You may just mention what things I may take.—I will not ask you to take the trouble of correcting or revising.’ His desire not to burden the poet was well founded. Always frail, the poet now felt his health to be precarious, and on a visit to Edinburgh in May paid some friends to insure his life for a year. Back in Aberdeen he wrote to Creech, ‘I must either give over study or die. For the sake of my Underwriters, I would choose the former.’ 51 Although Creech was one of the underwriters, he was planning a new edition of Beattie’s essays, and would not have wanted him to give over study forever. But the poetry edition was to cost Beattie no effort. The honor might bolster his sagging spirits, and at the same time provide Creech with a nice ﬁnale to The British Poets. ‘If you seriously intend to honour me with a place among your British Poets’, Beattie replied, ‘I do hereby give you full power to print the two parts of the Minstrel in the Collection.’ In this quasi-legal voice he authorized speciﬁc copy-texts and directed Creech to correct one verse and omit the prefatory advertisement. So far decisive, Beattie next slipped into a vacillating tone: I have been looking over some of my other poems, but (though they have some good lines in them) they are so incorrect, that I cannot give my consent to their being reprinted. Two or three of them however I do intend to revise, and, if possible, to amend; but I have not spirits just now for such an operation. Perhaps I may do it in a few weeks; in which case I shall send you the corrected copies, to be put into the Collection, immediately after the Minstrel. 52

Time and again Creech would need to calm Beattie’s jitters about his worthiness of a ‘place among the British Poets’, his ambivalence toward various poems, and his fretfulness over being ‘correct’. Correctness was of the utmost concern to Beattie. In 1762, shocked to ﬁnd some juvenile verses reprinted in a miscellany, the poet was ‘so sensible of 50

Dilly to Creech, 16 and 30 Apr. 1774. Creech to Beattie, 7 June 1776, AUL MS 30/2/255; Beattie to Creech, 31 May 1776. This letter was not transcribed by Roger J. Robinson for The Correspondence of James Beattie, 4 vols. (Bristol, 2004). I quote from the AUL manuscripts, noting which letters also appear in Robinson’s edn. 52 Beattie to Creech, 16 June 1776, Correspondence, iii. 18–19. 51

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

83

their incorrectness’ that he ‘would not chuse to acknowledge them’. He called revisions to The Judgment of Paris in 1765 ‘corrections’, and when preparing some early works for Poems on Several Subjects in 1766, he communicated that he had ‘bestowed no little pains in correcting’ them. 53 As a poet Beattie spent his time composing new verses, correcting old ones, and disowning those he deemed incorrigible. If poetry ‘came much less easily’ to Beattie after 1768, as Roger Robinson observes, his obsession with linguistic purity was partly to blame. Correctness took on the force of a royal edict after his interview with the king in 1773. When asked about his poetry, he replied that the only poem on which he ‘set any value’ was The Minstrel. ‘My oyr [other] poems’, he continued, ‘were incorrect, being but juvenile pieces, and of little consequence even in my own opinion.’ The king asked ‘whether I did not think the English language on ye decline at present. I answered in ye afﬁrmative; and the K. agreed.’ 54 This conviction that the language itself was in decay could only exacerbate his apologetic attitude toward his verse. With the very medium of poetry beginning to falter, correctness was paramount. Beattie’s deﬁnition of correctness emerges from his views on Dryden, the ‘chief characters’ of whose style were ‘energy’ and ‘ease’: The former is owing to a happy choice of expressions, equally emphatical and plain: the latter to a laudable partiality in favour of the idioms and radical words of the English tongue; the native riches and peculiar genius whereof are perhaps more apparent in him, than in any other of our poets. In Dryden’s more correct pieces, we meet with no affectation of words of Greek or Latin etymology, no cumbersome pomp of epithets, no drawling circumlocutions, no idle glare of images, no blunderings round about a meaning: his English is pure and simple, nervous and clear. 55

By ﬁxating on these earmarks of correctness—diction that was radical, native, and peculiar to English—Beattie braced himself not just to master a language in decline but also to transcend the Scottish dialect. ‘Exercise yourself in frequent compositions in English prose’, he told a divinity student: ‘Attend to the phraseology of the best English writers with a view to correct and improve your English style. We Scotchmen ﬁnd it a very difﬁcult matter to get rid of the barbarisms of our native dialect.’ 56 To further the assimilation of his students he compiled scores of proscribed words and phrases in Scoticisms, privately 53 Beattie to Robert Arbuthnot, 24 Apr. 1762 and 5 Feb. 1765; Beattie to Thomas Blacklock, 26 May 1766, NLS MS Acc. 4796, Fettercairn Papers, 2nd Deposit, Box 91; Correspondence, ii. 12, 34, 45. 54 Roger Robinson, ‘Nature’s Kindly Plan: A New Look at James Beattie and his Poetry’, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 12 (1998), 7–8; Beattie’s diary entry for Monday, 16 Aug. 1773, AUL MS 30/1/16a. 55 ‘An Essay on Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind’, Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism; On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind; On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; On the Utility of Classical Learning (Edinburgh, 1777), 359. 56 Beattie to William Cameron, 22 Sept. 1774, AUL MS 30/1/84.

84

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

printed in 1779 and expanded for publication in 1787. Beattie understood most provincial dialects and even appreciated dialect poetry, yet when praising Thomas Blacklock for his ‘command of Scotch words’, he had to confess ‘I do not ﬁnd any traces of such a talent in myself ’. As he bluntly told Sir William Forbes, ‘I do not think the Broad Scotch a language worth the cultivating, especially as it tends to corrupt a much nobler one, the English’. 57 Many Scots shared this phobia, and when Beattie sent verses out for criticism, his friends often stood guard against ‘exceptionable words’. On a draft of The Judgment of Paris in 1764, Beattie yielded to doubts about the word stellar: ‘though supported by the highest authorities, I can readily give it up, because it can be . . . replaced by starry’. Yet his surrender was irksome, because a ‘singular advantage to our language, and one of the causes of its being so extremely well suited to all purposes of poetry’, was the wealth of ‘analogies’ from which English words were derived. Ruefully Beattie observed, ‘I know not how it happens, but of late years, especially in Scotland, when one attempts to avail himself of this privilege, his style is called affected and void of simplicity’. A linguistic double standard barred Scots from reveling in the riches of the English tongue; they were held suspect. Even before Beattie had sworn himself to a poetics of correctness, a paranoid rigor was evident in the way he invoked authority to answer his challengers: ‘Multitudinous’ was found in Shakespeare; ‘Flickering’ was used ‘by our best writers, and even by some of them who are remarkable for simplicity of style, such as Dryden’; ‘Slumberous’ was a ‘very common word in English poetry: it occurs often in Pope’. 58 Thus, when Beattie was invited to assume a place in The British Poets— amongst Dryden, Pope, Addison, Gray, the authorities he was accustomed to citing—his anxiety was understandable. After further appraisal of his poems, he reported to Creech ‘none of them worth preserving, or worth the trouble of correcting, except the Minstrel only, and two or three other little things, which some time or other I may perhaps publish in a little volume’. Presently he got cold feet: I beg you would not think of reprinting in your British poets any thing else of mine but the two books of the Minstrel. I told you before, that I did not think any of the rest worth reprinting, and but one or two of them worth correcting. You will easily ﬁll up the volume with the works of some other minor poet, or with an Index. 59 57 Beattie to Thomas Blacklock, 24 May 1768; Beattie to Sir William Forbes, 22 Oct. 1768, NLS MS Acc. 4796, Fettercairn 2nd Deposit; Correspondence, ii. 58, 65. Beattie’s sole excursion into dialect was a tribute in sixteen stanzas to the Scots poet Alexander Ross in 1768, a work of ‘splendid and vigorous Scots dialect lines’, in Robinson’s opinion. Robinson identiﬁes two motives for the poet’s anxiety about diction—a perfectionist ideal of craftsmanship and a sense of inadequacy and cultural insecurity (‘Nature’s Kindly Plan’, 8, 10). 58 Beattie to Arbuthnot, 20 Oct. 1764, NLS MS Acc. 4796 Fettercairn, Box 91; Correspondence, ii. 32–3. 59 Beattie to Creech, 19 July and 13 Aug. 1776; Correspondence, iii. 22, précis 733 (i. 194).

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

85

Crawling for cover under the epithet of a minor poet, he wanted anything but to be conspicuous, and would settle for the company of an index. These vagaries tested Creech’s resources as a therapist. When Beattie was oppressed by a sense of unworthiness, the publisher tried to build up his conﬁdence, only to be met with more denial: You are too partial to my Poetical Things. I do not think, for my own part, that any of them, the Minstrel excepted, deserves a place in your Collection. However if you are resolved to insert some of the rest, I shall in two or three weeks send you a list of such as are to be inserted, with some corrections on each. But I beg you will not put any of them in, till you hear from me again on the subject.

Gradually the poet allowed himself to be drawn out, but on condition of strict correctness: ‘Do not, I beseech you, begin to print any of my other poems, till I have time to send you corrected copies.’ By November, poet and publisher were near their goal. ‘I am sorry your Poetical Press has been stopped so long’, Beattie consoled Creech; ‘I now send you 28 pages of poetry, and shall send you what remains, about 150 lines, by next post.’ To the end he kept up a token resistance: ‘It is my real opinion that you ought not to admit any of these poems into your Collection; and I give you full power to reject the whole, or any part, of what I now send.’ 60 Before receiving this message, Creech reassured his friend that he eagerly awaited the ﬁnished copy: ‘I shall be extremely glad to receive the Poems. . . . —You really do treat some of them very harshly.—Several others deserve to be acknowledged besides those you mention.—What comes of the Judgment of Paris, and all your translations? Pray recollect yr .self, and let not your children perish.’ 61 Of his favorite child Beattie was beamingly proud: ‘Could you send me a copy of the Minstrel in the small size? I should like to see how he looks in his duodecimo form. When do you expect to ﬁnish your British poets?’ In time he betrayed some partiality toward his other offspring as well: I told you that I should not be sorry if you rejected most of these Poems. The Pygmies, and what I now send, are by much the best;—the Hermit, in particular; which, if I mistake not, is equal, or superior to any thing I ever wrote. Please to show it to Sir W. Forbes, Mr Arbuthnot, and Mr Tytler. Send me the proofs of the poems, as they come from the press, as I wish to correct them myself.

This sanguine reappraisal of his poems and desire to correct proof—an exertion that Creech had offered to spare him—accompanied his mounting impatience to behold himself in the series: ‘Pray, in which of the forty volumes am I to make my appearance? I suppose you are now near the end of that voluminous publication.’ By early 1777, still awaiting the books, he wrote anxiously to Creech, ‘I could 60 Beattie to Creech, 28 Aug., 3 Sept., and 14 Nov. 1776. See précis 736, 739, and 754 in Correspondence, i. 195–6, 200. 61 Creech to Beattie, 14 Nov. 1776, AUL MS 30/2/266.

86

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

have wished the small Edition of my Poems had come in this Box . . . —Pray, is not the whole Edition of the British poets ﬁnished? I think I saw it in Mr Balfour’s catalogue. If it is ﬁnished, please remember that I am a Subscriber, and send me my set.’ 62 An ambivalence bordering on the disingenuous appears from Beattie’s summary of the episode to Sir William Forbes, his friend and future biographer. In recounting the process he oscillates between satisﬁed and dismissive attitudes: You have heard no doubt that Mr Creech is printing the works of the British poets in 40 volumes. As he did me the honour to think me not unworthy a place among that fraternity, and had besides done many obliging things to me, I gave him leave to print the Minstrel in the Collection; and as he insisted on subjoining some others of my poetical pieces, I thought it incumbent on me to look over and bestow some correction, on such of them as were not altogether incorrigible . . . that disagreeable task is over . . . I have sent Mr Creech corrected copies of the following pieces, which however I would rather suppress than reprint: Retirement, an ode—Ode to Hope—Elegy on a Lady,—The Pygmies and Cranes—The Hares, a fable—Ode on Ld Hay’s Birthday—and the Hermit. The two last, and the Pygmies are, in my opinion, the only tolerable things in the Collection. As to all my oyr Poems, the Ode to Peace, Judgment of Paris, &c I would not rescue them one instant from oblivion, even if a wish could do it.—I have added two stanza’s to the Hermit, and made him conclude like a Christian. I have really a tolerable good opinion of that piece. 63

Not long afterward, he gave the lie to his pose that he ‘would rather suppress than reprint’. He published his poems in octavo, remarking to the Duchess of Gordon that, as an edition incorporating his ‘last amendments’, it was ‘less incorrect than any of the former editions’. 64 In the end it was not Beattie’s poetry, but his difﬁdence and coyness that proved incorrigible. ‘You may naturally ask’, he wrote to Elizabeth Montagu, how I came to publish what I think so meanly of. The truth is, that my notions of good writing have undergone a considerable change within these twelve years. I never admired my own poetry, but I thought some things in it tolerable; and the partiality of my friends made me think better of it, than I believe I should have done, if I had trusted entirely to my own judgment. 65

Asked to assume a place amongst the British poets, Beattie viewed the honor as too momentous to have been rightfully bestowed. Anxious and insecure, he disowned half of his poetic ‘children’ over the protests of his publisher, ultimately 62 Beattie to Creech, 28 Aug., 16 and 27 Nov. 1776, and 20 Mar. 1777; Correspondence, iii. 30, 34, 53. 63 Beattie to Sir William Forbes, 16 Nov. 1776, AUL MS 30/1/117; Correspondence, iii. 32–3. 64 Beattie to the Duchess of Gordon, 23 Dec. 1778, AUL MS 30/1/157. See précis 906 in Correspondence, i. 238. 65 Beattie to Elizabeth Montagu, 20 Apr. 1778, Correspondence, iii. 61. For an excerpt of Montagu’s praise in reply, see Margaret Forbes, Beattie and his Friends (1904; repr. Altrincham, 1990), 144.

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

87

to have them rescued by Forbes, who reprinted some of them in appendices to his biography of Beattie. 66

ALL THAT IS VALUABLE OF THE WHOLE ENGLISH POETS During Creech’s ﬁnal push in 1776, a series was begun in Aberdeen, another university town, with King’s College and Marischal College, founded respectively in 1494 and 1593. Much smaller than Glasgow or Edinburgh, it supported just a single printer at any given time from 1622 through the early 1700s. In the 1750s Francis Douglas ‘inundated Aberdeen with a new line of poetry’, including Chevy Chase and works by Pope, Prior, Addison, Beattie, Ramsay, and others. Responsible for nearly two-thirds of the Aberdonian imprints during this time, he published ﬁfty-three titles, seventeen of them in English literature, along with Plato and Epictetus in Greek, Bossuet, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. 67 When Douglas faded from the scene in the 1760s, his mantle fell to John Boyle. After trying his hand at newspaper publishing and paper milling, Boyle settled into printing, bookselling, and running a retail shop at the head of Broadgate, opposite Marischal College. His forty-four titles account for almost half the books printed in Aberdeen from 1771 to 1780. 68 In 1770 he published The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, a prose rendition of Paradise Lost for those not ready to handle Miltonic verse, but after some other English classics— Pope’s Iliad (1774) and Gulliver’s Travels (1775)—he produced a genuine text of Milton’s epic in 1775. Whether Paradise Lost provided the de facto impetus for a bigger undertaking, as Paradise Regain’d had done in Glasgow, or whether the Edinburgh project had given him the idea, Boyle now viewed a series of classic reprints as a worthwhile enterprise, and launched a collection of English poetry in twenty volumes. In March 1776 Boyle published proposals for printing by subscription ‘A Collection of the ENGLISH POETS, In Twenty small Pocket Volumes’. To be printed ‘on a ﬁne Writing Paper, with new Types, cast for the purpose by Dr. Wilson and Sons, Type Founder in the College of Glasgow’, the collection would commence publication on Friday, 11 May, and continue ‘regularly on the 66 See Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, LL. D. (Edinburgh, 1806; repr. London, 1824). 67 W. R. MacDonald, ‘Some Aspects of Printing and the Book Trade in Aberdeen’, in C. A. McLaren (ed.), The Hero as Printer (Aberdeen, 1976), 33, 31; Donald W. Nichol, ‘Aberdeen, Imprints and the ESTC: Towards a Deﬁnitive Bibliography’, in Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen, 1987), 311–12; Iain Beavan, ‘The Book Trade in Aberdeen and Area, 1700–1832’, in David A. Stoker (ed.), Studies in the Provincial Book Trade of England, Scotland, and Wales before 1900 (Aberystwyth, 1990), 55, 59–61. 68 R. Murdoch Lawrence, ‘John Boyle’, Aberdeen Book-Lover, 5 (1925), 35–7; Beavan, ‘Book Trade’, 55.

88

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

second and last Fridays of every Month, till the whole is ﬁnished’. The price per volume was the same as Foulis charged, ‘One Shilling Sterling, in Marble Paper Boards’. Subscribers were asked to sign up with Boyle, Robert Chalmers or Joseph Taylor, or ‘others intrusted with Proposals’. Boyle imagined these twenty volumes to be the ﬁrst part of a larger series: ‘N.B. If this undertaking meets with proper Encouragement, another Collection of other Twen[ty] volumes will be added which will comprehend all that is valuable of the whole English Poets.’ 69 The collection was projected to ‘contain the poetical Works of the following Authors’, listed in order from the most to the least voluminous: Pope’s Poetical Works, 4 vol. Dryden’s Poems, 2 vol. Swift’s Poems, 2 vol. Prior’s Poems, 2 vol. Gay’s Poems, 2 vol. Thomson’s Seasons, 2 vol.

Young’s Night-Thoughts, 2 vol. Shenstone’s Poems, 2 vol. Pomfret’s Poems Gray and Littleton’s Poems

In a second advertisement Boyle altered the list to reﬂect his intended order of publication, shifting Young and Thomson to the bottom of the second column. 70 All the poets whose complete works were to be reprinted came ﬁrst, followed by the single poems of Thomson and Young. It was imperative for Boyle to ﬁnish with highly popular works, given that he was counting on consumer demand to generate volumes xxi through xl, and although the works of Gray and Lyttelton (newly collected in the mid-1770s) were fresh and timely, The Seasons and NightThoughts were even more certain to attract buyers. Boyle placed the roster of his poets on a ‘General Contents’ page in the ﬁrst volume, but also turned the series half-title page in each volume into a marketing tool, listing all the poets there as well. No matter which volume(s) a reader bought, he or she was necessarily reminded of the rest of the collection. With uninterrupted publication on the second and last Fridays of each month, as billed, the series would have been completed in February 1777, but Boyle fell a few months behind. To waste no further time he delivered ‘Proposals for Printing by Subscription, A Second Collection of the English Poets’, dated ‘Aberdeen, July 25th, 1777’, on the ﬂy-leaves of NightThoughts, his ﬁnal title. The reception of his ﬁrst twenty volumes was, he claimed, what he had wished: The Publisher returns thanks to the Public, for the great encouragement they have given to the COLLECTION OF THE ENGLISH POETS, now ﬁnished.—And according to his former intention, and at the desire of several of those who were encouragers of the former Collection, he now proposes to publish A SECOND COLLECTION OF THE ENGLISH POETS , in Twenty Volumes, which, with those already published, will contain all the best and original Poetry in the English Language, and also some of the best and most approv’d Translations. 69

AJ (11 Mar. 1776).

70

AJ (29 Apr. 1776).

The Classics Spread Across Scotland The second grouping was to include Authors’: Spencer’s Fairy Queen, 5 Volumes Milton’s Paradise Lost, 2 vol. Waller’s Poems. Addison’s Poems.

89

‘the Poetical Works of the Following Aikenside & Armstrong’s Poems. Pope’s Homer’s Iliad, 4 vol. Pope’s Homer’s Odyssey, 3 vol. Dryden’s Virgil, 3 vol.

Whereas the ﬁrst collection focused mostly on eighteenth-century verse, the second was dominated by earlier poetry, particularly the epic—the premier English examples, along with translations from the ancient Greek and Latin. Boyle’s intention of including Spenser demonstrates an expanding notion of what the market might welcome in a set of English classics. In other ways too Boyle’s formulation marked subtle advances over the projects of Foulis and Creech. The Glasgow English Poets, never given a proper series title, spoke for themselves in lists balanced against the ancient classics; the Edinburgh series, billed as presenting ‘the Most Celebrated British Poets’, touted fame as its criterion of inclusion; the organizing principle shifted from celebrity to intrinsic worth in the Aberdeen collection, which embraced ‘all that is valuable of the whole English Poets’. 71 In material terms the volumes also matured. A series half-title page, lacking in the Foulis volumes, was added to the Edinburgh and Aberdeen editions; volume after volume reintroduced the reader to The British Poets or A Collection of the English Poets. Evolution towards a more uniform design was evident also on the title-pages proper. The titles in the Foulis series having varied from poet to poet, Creech generally held to this model, though he inched toward a more standard wording. Instead of The Pleasures of Imagination, he published The Poems of Mark Akenside, M.D.; rather than issuing The Seasons and Liberty and Poems separately, he consolidated them in The Poetical Works of James Thomson; with Addison he opted for The Poetical Works in lieu of Poems on Several Occasions. Boyle went one step further: while still varying his title-pages (and reverting to The Seasons for Thomson), he anticipated full standardization by introducing the author list on his series half-title page with the phrase ‘The Poetical Works’. These promotional and bibliographical developments, as yet only drifting toward stricter uniformity, are early signs of the entrepreneurial pressures that gradually transformed the world of bookselling into a publishing industry. As booksellers began to think of their products in new ways, a simpler style of marketing was passing. In contrast with their disciplined approach to typography, 71 The marketing cachet of the word ‘celebrated’ is seen from many 18th-cent. titles, an especially interesting example of which, curiously, comes from The Lives of Noted Highwaymen (London, c .1760). In one copy of the book containing manuscript corrections and changes, perhaps intended for a second printing, the title-page shows several alterations. In place of ‘Noted’ the reviser wrote ‘celebrated’, but then, evidently thinking the word too positive, settled on the stronger ‘Notorious’. See James Burmester, Catalogue 63 (Bristol, 2005), 22–3, item 56 (with illustration).

90

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

the Foulises were relaxed about what they called their products. The Poetical Works of Sir Samuel Garth, M.D., one of their formal titles, they advertised congenially as ‘Garth’s Dispensary, and other poems’; and their notice for Young’s Poems on Several Occasions was ‘Universal Passion and other poems’. 72 Whether haphazard or purposeful—the ephemeral advertisement calling for a familiar catchphrase, but the product itself requiring something more durable—the trade dynamics of the moment were reﬂected in these inconsistencies.

THE BEST SCHEMES THE MOST RUINOUS With the ‘old Property being laid open’, Strahan mourned, nothing but ‘universal Destruction’ lay ahead for booksellers. He never deviated from this text, preaching that the trade could not ‘honestly or beneﬁcially be carried on’, and bitterly predicting that ‘the best Schemes must necessarily become the most ruinous, as they are most likely to be adopted by different Persons in different Places at the same Instant’. 73 In August 1776—as the Foulis brothers pushed on with their series, as Creech was encouraging Beattie so that he might ﬁnish his project, as Boyle was busy with his collection—the Apollo Press in Edinburgh began printing Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain, Complete from Chaucer to Churchill. This new series was to be published in London, and would more than double the scope of the previous undertakings. At this rate, multi-volume poetry collections were turning out to be one of the ‘best schemes’ ever in the book trade. Largely speaking, the building blocks for the ﬁrst three poetry series were hewn from the same quarry (Table 3.1). The Foulis press laid the groundwork for Creech and Balfour. Twenty poets were shared by the Glasgow and Edinburgh series, their works extending roughly from 1640 to 1770, with emphasis on the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. Three of these poets—Akenside, Gray, and Lyttelton—were alive in 1765 when Foulis began; each was incorporated into the series within two years of his decease. Creech was similarly open to amending his roster. Neither Swift nor Parnell nor Lyttelton was on the list of poets ‘selected and arranged’ by Hugh Blair in 1773; none had yet been published by Foulis. Once they had appeared in the Glasgow series, however, later in 1773 and 1774, the stage was set for their addition to the fourth batch of volumes from Creech. Boyle’s place in this comparison is complicated by that fact that, shortly before he announced his second subscription in July 1777, Bell’s edition began publication. As Boyle recognized, a series that reached ‘from Chaucer to Churchill’ 72

Advertisement in The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins. To which are added Mr. Hammond’s Elegies (Glasgow, 1771), sig. I6r . 73 Strahan to Creech, 18 Mar. 1774.

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

91

Table 3.1. Poets in the Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen series Foulis 1765–76

Creech 1773–76

Boyle 1776–77

Addison Akenside Butler Collins Denham Dryden Dryden’s Virgil Garth Gay GLOVER Gray Hammond Lyttelton MASON Milton Parnell Pope Pope’s Homer Prior RICHARDSON Shenstone Swift Thomson Waller Young

Addison Akenside [Armstrong] BEATTIE Butler Collins COWLEY Denham Dryden Dryden’s Virgil Garth Gay [Glover] Gray Hammond Lyttelton Milton Parnell Pope Pope’s Homer Prior Shenstone Swift Thomson Waller Young

[Addison] [Akenside] [Armstrong] Dryden [Dryden’s Virgil] Gay Gray Lyttelton [Milton] POMFRET Pope [Pope’s Homer] Prior Shenstone [SPENSER] Swift Thomson [Waller] Young

Note: The poets in bold were unique to that series; those in brackets were slated for inclusion but never saw print.

introduced new expectations into the marketplace. Shrewdly, he pushed his time line back by another half century from that of Foulis and Creech. Even while his Spenser volumes never materialized, Boyle’s impulse clariﬁes one strategy the publishers relied on to differentiate their products. Seven of the eight choices that variously set the collections apart represented the extremes of the chronological spectrum—poets either longest dead or most contemporary. A single choice at each end of the spectrum set the Edinburgh series apart: Beattie (as we have seen) in the present, and Cowley in the past. Unique to the Glasgow series were three living poets, Glover being the ﬁrst. The copyright on Leonidas (1737) expired before the Foulis reprint of 1769, but was reinstated the next year when the poet supplanted his nine-book original with a twelve-book version. Alone among the ﬁrst ﬁfteen titles of Foulis, this superseded edition was not reprinted. William Richardson, Professor of Humanity at Glasgow and known personally to the printers, was an academic author, but his Poems,

92

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

Chieﬂy Rural (1774) sold well enough in octavo to call for another edition in duodecimo for the series. The third living choice, as discussed in Chapter 2, was William Mason. Boyle also planned to include a living poet, John Armstrong; his Oeconomy of Love (1736) and Art of Preserving Health (1744) were very popular, and his Scottish identity may also have been viewed as a marketing asset. The fact that Boyle’s project faltered before he could publish Armstrong or Spenser underscores the pressures facing him in Aberdeen in late 1777. Against the resources deployed by Bell to serve the London market and locations throughout the British Isles, Boyle stood little chance of realizing his goal. Yet it is extraordinary that he should have kept testing the waters at all after the advent of Bell’s series. Boyle’s collection, in Iain Beavan’s appraisal, ‘although now sunk in obscurity, does indicate some considerable local initiative, and presumably some large ﬁnancial outlay’. 74 It also indicates a bold distribution plan and the stubborn pursuit of a timely idea. Boyle proved himself to have a remarkably competitive spirit by trying to promote his collection under the noses of Foulis, Creech, and Bell. Nearing completion of his ﬁrst collection and beginning to advertise his second, Boyle was disarmingly honest: ‘The Publisher shall not, as is but too common . . . , offer any insult to the judgment of the public, by assuring them that “No Work of the kind is so cheap, or well printed,” &c he shall only promise that this Collection now propos’d, shall be no worse, in every respect, than the former.’ Boyle’s volumes cost the same as the Glasgow poets, and anyone who looked carefully would have noted that they copied the layout and design of the Foulis series. Some of the Foulis imprints, in fact, served as copy-texts for Boyle’s printers, as the instance of Swift shows only too well: the compositor who followed the Foulis text page for page was insufﬁciently skilled to read the French epigraph from Rochefoucault to Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. 75 If his collection was to proceed, Boyle had to expand his market beyond Aberdeen, yet his rhetoric was circumspect, for he knew that an imprint from Aberdeen might not be received as favorably as goods manufactured in the more lucrative and urban markets of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Even if there was ‘an almost insatiable appetite for books in Aberdeen in the second half of the eighteenth century’, its market was limited by the size of its population—around 16,000 in the 1770s. Readers demanded more titles than local producers could supply, and yet did not buy enough books to enable local printers to produce that variety. Both in manufacturing and retailing, production 74

Beavan, ‘Book Trade’, 62. Instead of ‘Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons toujours quelque chose, qui ne nous deplaist pas’, the compositor printed ‘Dans Padversite de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvrus trujours quelque chose, qui ne nous deplaist pas’ (Poems of Dr Jonathan Swift (2 vols. Aberdeen, 1776), i. 168). 75

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

93

and consumption, Aberdonians met their needs by going outside the area. 76 Boyle put together a distribution network across Scotland: subscriptions could be lodged with ‘Messieurs John Bell, and Charles Elliot, Edinburgh: Dunlop and Wilson, Glasgow: J. More, and R. Nicol, Dundee: James Imlach, Banff: R. Chalmers, J. Taylor, and J. Boyle, (the publisher) Aberdeen’. 77 And upon publishing the fourth volume in his collection, which completed The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., he advertised his collection, listing all the poets, in Edinburgh. 78 Ambitious but not foolhardy, Boyle prudently explained in his prospectus that ‘The Work will be put to Press when a sufﬁcient number of Subscribers are procured.’ In stark contrast with Creech, who promised a full-blown collection from the start, Boyle would not commit himself to a second phase of publication unless he was assured of subscribers. While Creech’s series progressed chronologically, it was imperative for Boyle to begin with ultra-canonical and otherwise safely fashionable choices. On the one hand this meant going straight for Spenser while bypassing Denham and Cowley, and on the other hand it meant choosing John Pomfret. A mid-century appraisal of Pomfret’s popularity suggests that Boyle was attuned to public tastes. ‘This Gentleman’s works’, according to Robert Shiels, were held in very great esteem by the common readers of poetry; it is thought as unfashionable amongst people of inferior life, not to be possessed of the poems of Pomfret, as amongst persons of taste not to have the works of Pope in their libraries. The subjects on which Pomfret wrote were popular, his versiﬁcation is far from being unmusical, and as there is little force of thinking in his writings, they are level to the capacities of those who admire them.’ 79

This difference between high- and middle-brow readers, between works and poems, revisits the distinction discussed in Chapter 1 between books for ‘LIBRARIES’ and for ‘general use’: whereas a ‘person of taste’ has a library, a special room in which to have the works of Pope, the ‘people of inferior life’ are possessed of the poems of Pomfret in a manner unmediated by place, without reference to their dwellings. However, fashion is notably relevant to both sophisticates and common readers; neither can rest easy about the dictates of education and class, even—or especially—where cultural goods are concerned. For neither group is owning the book an option, or an indulgence; it is needful as a matter of consumer self-regard. 76 MacDonald, ‘Some Aspects’, 34. For the notion that ‘local supply could not have met demand’, see Nichol, ‘Aberdeen’, 313. 77 Beavan, ‘Book Trade’, 62. Beavan calls it ‘an open question’ as to whether Boyle printed the series himself. The imprints read ‘Printed for and sold by John Boyle’. 78 CM (19 July 1776). 79 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (5 vols. London, 1753), iii. 218. On Robert Shiels’s authorship of this work, see Ch. 5.

94

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

But what Boyle’s choice effected was an erasure of the social distinctions previously expressed through ownership of this or that author. In this respect each collection embodied the same message: Pope and Pomfret—or any other two poets—had ceased to dwell in disparate worlds; side by side on the bookshelf, their proximity neutralized the polarities between place and possession, persons and people, taste and inferior life. 80 If the publishers did not believe that every volume was ‘level to the capacities’ of every purchaser, the books themselves suggested otherwise. At point of purchase, all readers were fundamentally created equal. Invidious distinctions introduced through various grades of binding did not alter the poetic content of the collections, nor could they, even in the case of a set left unbound in wrappers, diminish the purchaser’s sense of ownership over the English classics. Scholars concerned with the elitist resonance of canon formation sometimes overlook its leveling function. If Pomfret was elevated, Pope was leveled, and together, along with dozens of other poets, they made their way into the hands of readers as never before. James Lackington, listing dozens of books from the ‘choice collection’ he purchased as a young reader, casually offers evidence of the leveling just described by emphasizing that he ‘had indeed a few of the better sort, as Gay’s Fables, Pomfret’s Poems, Milton’s Paradise Lost’. 81 This best scheme was, in fact, adopted ‘by different Persons in different Places at the same Instant’. For the time being, those places (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen) were all in Scotland. As Richard Sher maintains, printing and books were indeed central to Scottish culture, but not just because of giants like Hume, Smith, and Robertson. 82 From the quickening of the Scottish reprint trade in the 1740s to the multi-volume collections of the 1760s and 1770s, print culture had taken enough hold of the public imagination for the Glasgow Journal, reporting in 1767 on the perennial copyright disputes, to offer this reﬂection: ‘It is believed that since the Union no question has occurred so generally interesting to this part of the united kingdom.’ 83 Foulis, Creech, and Balfour certainly acted as though this were true, prosecuting their ambitious schemes without waiting for any ‘magna charta to the Scotch booksellers’. While various factors slowed or halted each series—the deaths of Robert and Andrew Foulis, the difﬁdence of Creech, the abortive second phase of Boyle’s subscription—the trend was irreversible, and the multi-volume poetry series had set in motion consequences disproportionate to their little size. Creech’s British Poets brought honor to the nation, but Topham intuitively recognized more than 80 Nevertheless, the polarity between works and poems was still imprinted on Boyle’s title-pages: The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., versus Poems on Several Occasions. By the Reverend Mr. John Pomfret. 81 Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (London, 1791; repr. 1827), 98–9. 82 Sher provides an overview of his larger thesis in ‘The Book in the Scottish Enlightenment’, The Culture of the Book in the Scottish Enlightenment (Toronto, 2000), 40–60. 83 GJ (2–9 July 1767).

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

95

Figure 3.1. John French’s title-page on Boyle’s edition of Dryden. His advertisement on the facing page details Boyle’s Collection of the English Poets, and (at the bottom) shows he was also selling sets of Creech’s British Poets.

that: ‘I confess I feel a pleasure in reﬂecting that this has been the work of a Scotch Bookseller, as it seems some sort of compensation for the blow which was given by their means to literature in general.’ 84 Yes, the book trade had been dealt a blow by the copyright ruling, and the publication of literature would be affected, but the trade had not suffered ruin. And recompense could be found in the form of Creech’s handsome collection. With signiﬁcant expansion of this viewpoint, Scotland could be (and has been) credited with inventing the modern world itself. 85 Part of that world was its brash 84

Topham, Letters, 181–2. Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York, 2001). Robert Foulis ﬁgures in the story for his blending of theoretical, practical, and cultural interests (166–8). 85

96

The Classics Spread Across Scotland

consumer energy, a trait that astonished Creech and prompted him to record the transformation of Edinburgh between 1763 and 1783 in the realms of both everyday items and luxury goods. Within two decades, the number of hackney coaches and private carriages rolling about town had more than tripled; smaller consumer items like clocks and watches had multiplied more rapidly, and there had been a forty-fold increase in tea-kettles; and the value of literary property had soared. 86 Among the goods to be purchased in London at this time—ironically, after such contention—were Creech’s British Poets and Boyle’s A Collection of the English Poets. In 1777 John French reissued Boyle’s collection, substituting his own title-pages, and the ‘very curious Edition of the POETS, in 42 volumes’ listed at the bottom of his advertisement was Creech’s collection (see Fig. 3.1). 87 But the London trade would have paid little attention to them now, for by this point they were dealing with John Bell. 86

Creech, Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces, 69–70, 141. Boyle’s title-page was removed from the volume pictured in Fig. 3.1, but a copy of Poems by Mr. Gray. To which are added, Poems by the late Lord Lyttelton, allegedly ‘Printed for J. French’ (1777), still has Boyle’s separate title-page for Lyttelton’s poems in it. Internal to the volume, it was overlooked by French. See ESTC (t206390). 87

4 John Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite, Grai! (Propertius, Elegies 2. 34)

In August 1776 Gilbert Martin and sons at their Apollo Press in Edinburgh began printing Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (109 vols. 1776–82). Through February 1777 Bell stockpiled what he needed to begin publishing ‘without interruption in weekly volumes’. The printed sheets were shipped by sailing packet from Leith harbor to London, ensuring that this fourth Scottish incarnation of the English classics would not be a distant consumer good. On Friday 26 April the ﬁrst volume was published, containing the ﬁrst ﬁve books of Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic having been chosen to inaugurate the new series so that public opinion of it might, ‘with more certainty, be formed by comparison with the greatest variety of former editions’. Bell’s plan ‘to send a copy of the ﬁrst volume, as a specimen of the whole, to every bookseller in the kingdom, and also to leave one at every house throughout London’ served notice that he intended to promote his series with great vigor. 1 In addition to the largest ﬁeld of comparison, Milton’s work gave Bell an opportunity to incorporate seven of Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on Paradise Lost (1712), and to endorse Addison’s claim that ‘the ﬁrst Place among our English Poets is due to Milton’. 2 As an epigraph Addison had chosen a verse from a poem by Propertius that applauded the ascendancy of a new canon, one that honored Varro, who turned to amatory themes after translating the Argonautica; Catullus, whose Lesbia was better known than Helen; and Calvus and Gallus, eloquent confessors of love. Propertius was anxious to have Cynthia live on, gloriﬁed by his poetry, if Fame would ‘consent to rank me with bards 1 MC (14 Apr. 1777); MP (31 May 1777). An unusual set of Milton at Princeton (Ex 3859.1776), each volume containing the same two engravings, the poet’s portrait and a vignette, suggests that Bell may have ﬁtted up all four Milton volumes, not just the ﬁrst, for distribution as specimens. 2 The Poetical Works of John Milton (4 vols. Edinburgh, 1776), i. 27–67. Bell reprinted essays 267, 273, 279, 285, 291, 297, and the ﬁrst paragraph of 303, conﬂating them in ‘A General Critique upon the Paradise Lost’. He retained Addison’s initial epigraph, but deleted the others. Milton was awarded ‘ﬁrst Place’ in Spectator, no. 262, in preview of the coming critical discussion.

98

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

like these’. Because ‘something greater than the Iliad [was] coming to birth’, the old writers had to yield their ground: ‘Make way, ye Roman writers, make way, ye Greeks!’ 3 Bell placed this imperative, Addison’s epigraph, at the head of the Spectator essays, but more pointedly on the title-page of his ﬁrst volume also. Posted over the gateway to his collection, it called for the ancients to stand aside, to surrender the stage to Milton and the other classical English poets to follow. ‘The Plan of this undertaking’, Bell announced, was ‘to furnish the public with the most beautiful, the correctest, the cheapest, and the only complete uniform edition of the British Poets’. Mindful of previous efforts, he ﬁnessed the question of priority by calling his collection ‘the most liberal and extensive hitherto attempted’. 4 Unlike the Foulises, who adopted a more programmatic approach to their series only after it was under way, Bell knew from the outset what he wanted to achieve; unlike Creech, who grew difﬁdent when scolded by Strahan, Bell never ﬂinched; and unlike Boyle, who dwelt in remote Aberdeen, Bell lived at the heart of British print culture. In London he promoted the series aggressively: in newspapers, handbills, and notices placed in his other books he chronicled his progress, highlighted coming features, and vented his struggles against the entrenched interests of the book trade. In lengthy advertisements that elucidated his editorial principles along with the distinguishing features of the work, Bell provided a discursive framework for his series, one that instructed the public what to expect from a proper set of British classics. From every rhetorical angle he sought to instill in consumers not just a habit of buying his imprints, though as a bookseller that was his chief aim, but also the sensibility needed to appreciate the importance of such a national collection, and the discrimination to judge how it might best be constituted.

IN THE ELZEVERIAN STILE With sturdy promotional instincts and a sure conceptual grasp of the nature of his project, Bell invoked ‘the admired edition of the Latin classics by Elzivir’. This lineage—and the illustrious tradition of publishing what amounted to a library of classical literature in small, inexpensive volumes—was explicit in the design of Bell’s series, which was printed ‘in a most delicate size, resembling the Elziver editions of the Latin classics’, or more succinctly, ‘in the Elzeverian stile’. If his volumes were to be seen as ‘forming one book in a library’, their bibliographical identity was emphatically to be that of an Elzevir. 5 3 4 5

Propertius Elegies, ed. and tr. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 244–9. MC (14 Apr. 1777); MP (31 May 1777). MC (14 Apr. 1777); MP (7 June and 4 Aug. 1777, and 6 June 1778).

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

99

To make them ‘one book’ internally as well as externally, Bell rationalized his volumes in several ways. Whereas Foulis included three prefatory lives and a small number of illustrations, and Creech threw in two lives, and neither was consistent in their title-pages, Bell brought more structure to the enterprise, supplying each author with an engraved portrait and vignettes, uniform title-pages, a prefatory life, and poems grouped by genre and numbered in the margins. These features raised market expectations for a set of classics. Through phrases like ‘elegant consistency’ or ‘in a regular and classical manner’ Bell planted ideas of standardization and repetition at the heart of his classicizing agenda. 6 If Elizabeth Eisenstein was right to argue that the idea of standardization is inherent to print culture, Bell followed the idea to its limits. Likewise, if printers and booksellers are, as Adrian Johns argues, ‘manufacturers of credit’, Bell’s persistent advertising in conjunction with his zeal for uniformity went a long way toward creating a creditable product. 7 Where possible, Bell availed himself of well regarded copy-texts. Previous collections, he noted (with bungling in mind like that of Boyle’s compositor when copying Foulis’s Swift), had been printed ‘under the visible inﬂuence of immediate proﬁt and narrow œconomy, and loosely copied from one another, with multiplication of errors’. Bell took ‘sufﬁcient precaution’ against this defect ‘by collecting, at great expense, the original authorised folio and quarto editions; so that the present work, which is printed verbatim from these, will not be found more uniform in the manner, than correct in the text’. 8 Editions of this nature supplied his texts for Milton (ed. Thomas Newton, 2◦ , 1749–51), Pope (ed. William Warburton, 8◦ , 1751); Butler’s Hudibras (ed. Zachary Grey, 4◦ , 1744) and Genuine Remains (ed. Robert Thyer, 1759); Waller (ed. Elijah Fenton, 4◦ , 1729); Cowley (ed. Thomas Sprat, 2◦ , 1668); Spenser’s Faerie Queen (John Upton, 4◦ , 1758); and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Thomas Tyrwhitt, 8◦ , 1775– 78) and other poems (John Urry, 2◦ , 1721). As only the most signiﬁcant poets had received this level of editorial care, it was no coincidence that Bell published many of them early in the series (Table 4.1). The quickest way to buttress the authority and regularity of his ‘Elzeverian stile’ was to make a parade of standard texts. Special features from these editions and other sources were also appropriated by Bell. Glossaries were appended to the works of Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer, and the same three poets were accorded prefatory essays: Addison’s Spectator papers on Paradise Lost; John Hughes’s ‘An Essay on Allegorical Poetry’ and ‘Remarks on the Fairy Queen’ from The Works of Spenser (1715); part 6

MP (24 July and 4 Aug. 1777). Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1980), 80–8; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), 33. While Johns and Eisenstein advance radically different perspectives (see American Historical Review, 107 (Feb. 2002), 84–125), their insights are not always contradictory. 8 MP (7 June 1777). 7

100

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Table 4.1. Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain: printing and publication Poets

Colophon

Vignette

Drawn/engraved

Publication

Milton 1 Milton 2 Milton 3 Milton 4 Pope 1 Pope 2 Pope 3 Pope 4 Dryden 1 Dryden 2 Dryden 3 Butler 1 Butler 2 Butler 3 Prior 1 Prior 2 Prior 3 Thomson 1 Thomson 2 Gay 1 Gay 2 Gay 3 Waller 1 Waller 2 Young 1 Young 2 Young 3 Young 4 Cowley 1 Cowley 2 Cowley 3 Cowley 4 Spenser 1 Spenser 2 Spenser 3 Spenser 4 Spenser 5 Spenser 6 Spenser 7 Spenser 8 Parnell 1 Parnell 2 Congreve Swift 1 Swift 2 Swift 3 Swift 4

17 Aug. 1776 3 Sept. 1776 20 Sept. 1776 12 Oct. 1776 9 Oct. 1776 27 Nov. 1776 17 Dec. 1776 23 Dec. 1776 23 Jan. 1777 5 Feb. 1777 17 Feb. 1777 3 Mar. 1777 18 Mar. 1777 27 Mar. 1777 9 Apr. 1777 18 Apr. 1777 28 Apr. 1777 8 May 1777 22 May 1777 4 June 1777 14 June 1777 15 July 1777 8 Sept. 1777 15 Sept. 1777 22 Sept. 1777 30 Sept. 1777 6 Oct. 1777 18 Oct. 1777 30 Oct. 1777 12 Nov. 1777 20 Nov. 1777 29 Nov. 1777 3 Jan. 1778 10 Jan. 1778 17 Jan. 1778 24 Jan. 1778 31 Jan. 1778 7 Feb. 1778 14 Feb. 1778 28 Feb. 1778 14 Mar. 1778 21 Mar. 1778 4 Apr. 1778 8 Apr. 1778 15 Apr. 1778 22 Apr. 1778 29 Apr. 1778

1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Mar. 1777 1 Aug. 1777 1 Aug. 1777 1 Aug. 1777 26 Aug. 1777 1 Sept. 1777 16 Sept. 1777 22 Sept. 1777 5 Oct. 1777 1 Nov. 1777 12 Nov. 1777 10 Oct. 1777 1 Nov. 1777 20 Nov. 1777 20 Nov. 1777 1 Jan. 1778 10 Jan. 1778 6 Jan. 1778 14 Jan. 1778 16 Feb. 1778 16 Feb. 1778 12 Mar. 1778 21 Mar. 1778 1 Apr. 1778 10 Apr. 1778 Apr. 1778 Apr. 1778 27 Apr. 1778 10 May 1778 18 May 1778 4 June 1778 8 June 1778 1 July 1778 20 June 1778

Edwards/Hall Edwards/Hall Edwards/Hall [u/u] Mortimer/Thornthwaite Mortimer/Thornthwaite Mortimer/[u] Mortimer/Thornthwaite Edwards/Hall Edwards/Hall Edwards/Hall Mortimer/Grignion [u/u] Mortimer/Hall Edwards/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Edwards/Grignion Lowe/Sharp Lowe/Sharp Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Sharp Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Sharp Mortimer/Sharp Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Sharp Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Grignion Mortimer/Cook

25 Apr. 1777 2 May 1777 9 May 1777 16 May 1777 24 May 1777 31 May 1777 7 June 1777 19 June 1777 21 June 1777 4 July 1777 15 July 1777 4 Aug. 1777

6 Sept. 1777 13 Sept. 1777 20 Sept. 1777 27 Sept. 1777 10 Oct. 1777 22 Dec. 1777 3 Jan. 1778 22 Nov. 1777 29 Nov. 1777 9 Dec. 1777 17 Dec. 1777 10 Jan. 1778 26 Jan. 1778 4 Feb. 1778 9 Feb. 1778 24 Feb. 1778 14 Mar. 1778

11 Apr. 1778 25 Apr. 1778 11 May 1778 16 May 1778 26 May 1778 14 July 1778 18 July 1778 25 July 1778 5 Aug. 1778

Order 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 27 28 23 24 25 26 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

101

Table 4.1. (Continued) Poets

Colophon

Vignette

Drawn/engraved

Publication

Addison Shenstone 1 Shenstone 2 Churchill 1 Churchill 2 Churchill 3 Pomfret Donne 1 Donne 2 Donne 3 Garth Denham Hughes 1 Hughes 2 Fenton Dyer Lansdowne Buckingham Savage 1 Savage 2 Roscommon Mallet Somerville 1 Somerville 2 CollinsHammond Cunningham Broome King 1 King 2 Rowe Tickell Akenside 1 Akenside 2 Lyttelton G. West J. Philips A. Philips Moore ArmstrongSmith Watts 1 Watts 2 Watts 3 Watts 4 Watts 5

8 May 1778 16 May 1778 23 May 1778 1 July 1779 8 July 1779 15 July 1779 22 July 1779 29 July 1779 5 Aug. 1779 12 Aug. 1779 19 Aug. 1779 26 Aug. 1779 2 Sept. 1779 9 Sept. 1779 16 Sept. 1779 23 Sept. 1779 27 Nov. 1779 22 Jan. 1780 19 Feb. 1780 26 Feb. 1780 11 Mar. 1780 8 Apr. 1780 15 Apr. 1780 22 Apr. 1780 15 Sept. 1781 15 Sept. 1781 22 Sept. 1781 29 Sept. 1781 6 Oct. 1781 13 Oct. 1781 20 Oct. 1781 27 Oct. 1781 3 Nov. 1781 10 Nov. 1781 17 Nov. 1781 24 Nov. 1781 1 Dec. 1781 8 Dec. 1781 15 Dec. 1781 22 Dec. 1781 22 Dec. 1781 5 Jan. 1782 12 Jan. 1782 19 Jan. 1782 26 Jan. 1782 4 May 1782

1 Aug. 1778 Sept. 1778 Sept. 1778 19 July 1779 27 May 1779 4 June 1779 1779 24 Sept. 1779 1778 17 Aug. 1779 29 Nov. 1779 11 Dec. 1779 26 July 1779 6 Nov. 1779 29 Dec. 1779 14 Sept. 1779 11 Jan. 1780 16 May 1780 27 May 1780 23 Sept. 1780 16 May 1780 Oct. 1780 16 May 1780 4 Aug. 1780 2 Nov. 1781 22 Nov. 1781 5 Nov. 1781 5 Nov. 1781 24 Dec. 1781 15 Jan. 1782 19 Feb. 1782 27 Dec. 1781 25 Jan. 1782 7 Feb. 1782 31 Dec. 1781 21 Mar. 1782 7 Apr. 1782 13 Mar. 1782 5 May 1782 22 Apr. 1782

Mortimer/Hall Mortimer/Hall Mortimer/Grignion Cipriani/Bartolozzi Kauffman/Delatre Kauffman/Delatre Stothard/Delatre Stothard/Delatre Edwards/Delatre Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Delatre Stothard/Heath Stothard/Heath [u/u] [u/u] [u/u] Stothard/Grignion Sherwin/Sherwin Kauffman/Bartolozzi Stothard/Delatre Kauffman/Bartolozzi Stothard/White Kauffman/Delatre Kauffman/Sherwin Kauffman/Bartolozzi Stothard/Heath Kauffman/Sherwin Stothard/Scott Stothard/Hall Stothard/Cook Stothard/Sharp Stothard/Delatre Stothard/Delatre Kauffman/Delatre Rebecca/Delatre Rebecca/Delatre Rebecca/Bartolozzi Rebecca/Bartolozzi Stothard/Grignion

24 Aug. 1778 12 Sept. 1778 19 Sept. 1778 13 Sept. 1779 18 Sept. 1779 25 Sept. 1779 2 Oct. 1779 9 Oct. 1779 18 Oct. 1779 23 Oct. 1779 20 Nov. 1779 18 Dec. 1779 30 Oct. 1779 13 Nov. 1779

9 June 1782 19 June 1782 13 May 1782 18 July 1782 17 Apr. 1782

Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Heath

27 Nov. 1779 15 July 1780 19 Aug. 1780 23 Sept. 1780 21 July 1780 7 Oct. 1780 31 July 1780 11 Aug. 1780

25 Mar. 1782 10 Apr. 1782

4 May 1782

25 July 1782

Order 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 60 62 58 59 63 61 64 65 69 70 66 71 67 68 72 73 74 75 76 80 77 78 79 81 83 84 82 86 85 87 88 89 90 91 (cont.)

102

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Table 4.1. (Continued) Poets

Colophon

Vignette

Drawn/engraved

Watts 6 Watts 7 Pitt GrayR. West Chaucer 1 Chaucer 2 Chaucer 3 Chaucer 4 Chaucer 5 Chaucer 6 Chaucer 7 Chaucer 8 Chaucer 9 Chaucer 10 Chaucer 11 Chaucer 12 Chaucer 13 Chaucer 14

11 May 1782 18 May 1782 25 May 1782 3 Aug. 1782 3 Aug. 1782 7 Sept. 1782 28 Sept. 1782 19 Oct. 1782 9 Nov. 1782 23 Nov. 1782 14 Dec. 1782 28 Dec. 1782 4 Jan. 1783 18 Jan. 1783 8 Feb. 1783 22 Feb. 1783 1 Mar. 1783 22 Mar. 1783 17 May 1783

20 Aug. 1782 27 Aug. 1782 29 Sept. 1782 21 Oct. 1782

Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Heath Stothard/Grignion Rebecca/Marcuard

1 Aug. 1782 14 Dec. 1782 31 Dec. 1782 31 Jan. 1783 8 Feb. 1783 18 Feb. 1783 10 Mar. 1783 19 Dec. 1782 18 Mar. 1783 31 Mar. 1783 18 Apr. 1783 1 May 1783 24 May 1783 29 May 1783

Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Heath Stothard/Heath Stothard/Sharp Stothard/Delatre Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Grignion Stothard/Heath Stothard/Cook Stothard/Heath Stothard/Blake Stothard/Delatre

Publication

31 Aug. 1782 22 Oct. 1782 2 Dec. 1782

12 Apr. 1783 26 Apr. 1783 24 May 1783

Order 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Notes: The volumes are listed in order of printing. Publication dates are taken from advertisements in the Morning Post. u = the artist or engraver of a vignette is not named. Numbers indicating order of publication were printed on paper labels afﬁxed to the vols. in wrappers, e.g. ‘Bell’s / POETS / Vol. 18. / — / THOMSON, / Vol. 1.’ When bound in sets, the volumes were arranged chronologically; how they were numbered may be seen in Table 6.1.

of John Upton’s introduction to The Faerie Queen (1758); and Tyrwhitt’s ‘Introductory Discourse to The Canterbury Tales’, along with his ‘Essay on the Language and Versiﬁcation of Chaucer’. Textual annotations were adopted for Milton, Butler, and Chaucer from the editions of Fenton, Grey, Thyer, and Tyrwhitt. Initially the complete poems of each author were to be reprinted. For Milton this included his Poemata, or Latin and Greek compositions, and his Italian sonnets, but a policy of omitting verses of this kind soon emerged. Fragments of Ovid and Statius were admitted into Pope’s works, but not his Homeric translations, nor Dryden’s Virgil. Bell articulated his policy, ironically, in pleading an exception for Dryden’s versions of Horace: ‘The Translations which follow are foreign to the purpose of this Publication, which is conﬁned solely to the Original Poems of Mr. Dryden; but having a few spare pages towards the close of this volume, it is hoped the Reader will not be displeased to ﬁnd these occupied by any thing from the hand of this inimitable Writer.’ Disappointed that Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil were to be left out (works included or projected by Foulis, Creech, and Boyle), readers urged that they be added. Hoping to

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

103

comply, Bell vowed that ‘all the eminent translations, and fugitive pieces of merit, will form a continuation of this work; they will be methodically and classically arranged, with the lives and portraits of each respectable original, with necessary Notes and Elucidations’. 9 After November 1777, however, Bell fell silent on this score, and ultimately neglected his pledge. The publishers Martin and Bain made good on it in the 1790s, printing the translations in volumes identical to Bell’s ‘native English classics’. 10 Bell elaborated his policy more fully when he arrived at Cowley: ‘it is the professed design of this Work to print entire, without abstraction or mutilation of poems, or parts of poems, the whole original pieces, in English, of such of the Poets whose works claim the merit of a place in this extensive undertaking’. This clariﬁcation, once again, accompanied an excuse for another departure from policy, this time a Latin disquisition on plants that was ‘too great a part of Mr. Cowley’s poetical labours, to suffer being discarded from his other writings’. But rather than reprint the poem in its ‘original Latin garb’, Bell presented it ‘in its more modern English one’, translated for his readers by Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, and others. 11 Apart from the exceptions noted for Milton, Pope, Dryden, and Cowley, translations by fourteen other poets were allowed in, not to mention imitations and paraphrases. In several cases the pages devoted to these poems warranted section titles, running headers, and divisions within the tables of contents, suggesting either that they were not quite so foreign to the purpose of the series after all, or that Bell’s policy could be relaxed whenever ‘spare pages’ beckoned him to ﬁll up an otherwise meager volume. 12 Did any of this verse belong in a series of native English classics? For Bell, the canonical boundary between translated verse and poems indigenously English—that is, conceived in and for the native tongue—remained porous. Editorial policy regarding the arrangement of poems was less ambiguous. The contents in typical eighteenth-century books of verse, as reﬂected in the ubiquitous title Poems upon Several Occasions, were to Bell’s thinking ‘confusedly blended together’, a hodgepodge. Ignoring their often tacit chronology, he decried them for being printed ‘without any order or method observed in arranging the different pieces, epistles, tales, ballads, odes, epigrams, &c. being indiscriminately jumbled together, circumstances at the same time inconvenient and offensive to the reader of taste and judgment’. To remedy this disorder Bell presented the poems by genre, ‘classed and arranged according to their several kinds; so that the whole of the same species of writing falls under the reader’s eye 9 The Poetical Works of John Dryden, iii. 205; MP (24 July 1777). Dryden’s tales and imitations were set aside for ‘hereafter in the arrangement of Translations’. 10 Martin and Bain are discussed in Ch. 6. 11 ‘Advertisement’, dated Oct. 1777, The Poetical Works of Abraham Cowley, i, p. [lviii]. 12 The fourteen are Addison, Broome, Buckingham, Congreve, Denham, Fenton, Garth, Gray, Hughes, King, A. Philips, Roscommon, Somerville, and Tickell. See e.g. The Poetical Works of Joseph Addison, 91–122, 123–225.

104

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

in one and the same department of the book only’. 13 The section titles deﬁning each category, reﬂected in the tables of contents, were repeated as running headers; pieces that deﬁed categorization were placed into ‘Miscellaneous Poems’ or ‘Miscellanies’. While few poetry volumes had been organized in this way prior to the 1770s, Bell may have taken his cue from Tonson’s 1760 edition of Dryden, in which epistles, elegies, and epitaphs were segregated, or from Pope, who sorted his own works into ‘Epistles’, ‘Epitaphs’, ‘Epigrams’, ‘Imitations’, and so forth. Consistent with these efforts to organize the volumes methodically and classically was another touch of formality: each corpus of writing was called The Poetical Works. The various titles assigned by custom to the editions of different poets had been retained by Bell’s predecessors, ratifying the invidious distinctions implicit between the few who had risen to the threshold of Poetical Works and the many who had published Poems on Several Occasions, or had written one stellar piece, like The Pleasures of the Imagination, which overshadowed their other work. If Boyle elevated Pomfret by placing him in the company of Pope, Bell’s designation of his works as The Poetical Works of John Pomfret—the ﬁrst time this title had been applied to the poems of Pomfret and many others—ﬁnished the inclusive gesture. This ceremonious address was reinforced in each volume by an elaborate system of three title-pages, one engraved and two letterpress. The engraving functioned as a half-title page for the series, ofﬁcially presenting at the top ‘Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill’. The page was dominated, however, by a vignette or illustration speciﬁc to each volume. A caption beneath it directed the binder to the proper volume by naming the poet and which of his volumes the engraving belonged to, and guided the reader to the passage illustrated by giving the title of the poem and quoting the appropriate verses. Although Bell would choose new artists to create his engravings shortly after beginning his series, he remained content with the look of his half-title page. By contrast, he was dissatisﬁed with his early letterpress title-pages and tinkered with their design until he discovered the formula he wanted. The ﬁrst title-page in each of the four Milton volumes read The Poetical Works of John Milton and noted Newton’s text along with Addison’s essays; the second title-page of the ﬁrst volume was headed Paradise Lost, repeating the textual pedigree and adding the epigraph from Propertius. Bell made four adjustments to this design in successive volumes. (1) Beginning with Pope, the second page did not bear a separate title, but reiterated The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, beneath which was printed ‘Containing His’, followed by two columns listing the genres or individual poems speciﬁc to the volume. (2) Also 13 ‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of Abraham Cowley, i, p. [lviii]; ‘Advertisement’, dated 21 Mar. 1777, The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior, i, p. [xlviii].

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

105

Figure 4.1. Bell’s letterpress title-pages for Thomson. His two-page design would be copied by Cooke, and adapted by Wenman and Mundell, with the same testimonial verses usually being quoted.

beginning with Pope, the epigraph was shifted from the second title-page to the ﬁrst, and framed between double rules. (3) From Dryden onward the epigraph became more visually prominent (nine verses for Dryden, ten for Butler, etc.) and more testimonial, serving in effect as an advertisement of the poet’s worth. (4) From Thomson onward these testimonials were supplemented by additional verses on the second title-page (Fig. 4.1). Bell had now achieved a design to satisfy his promotional instincts. The epigraphs reached their height on the titlepages for Chaucer, each one swamped by thirty verses of praise from Gower, Lydgate, Occleve, Douglas, Dunbar, Spenser, Denham, and Akenside, along with an excerpt from The Canterbury Tales. Frontispiece portraits and prefatory biographies became standard elements of multi-volume poetry collections on account of Bell’s edition. The publisher promised ‘a Portrait of each Author, ﬁnely engraved from BUSTS or PICTURES of the highest authority’. Since the mid-1600s, editions of important authors had conventionally been adorned with portraits. Many, as well, contained lives.

106

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Because a set of classics would be imperfect, Bell argued, if it did not gratify our desire ‘to know something of the man who entertains and ediﬁes us’, he also supplied ‘a biographical and critical account of each author’. Just as the mutual inclusion of writers in a set of classics deﬁned ‘the object of the present undertaking’, the body of prefaces would form a ‘connected system of biography’ or corporate representation of that literary species, the poet. Both forms of portrayal—pictorial and biographical—contributed to the trappings of classical iconography meant to elevate the collection to the status of cultural monument. 14 At every step Bell was preoccupied with questions of presentation and representation. Where the just management of the English classics mandated ‘elegant consistency’, no point was too insigniﬁcant for editorial display, however brief. Following The Faerie Queene, with its numbered cantos, a footnote announced that Bell’s marginal verse count would resume with Spenser’s other pieces: ‘According to our usual method, the verses are numbered throughout every poem.’ 15 The operative phrase, our usual method, pinpoints Bell’s characteristic principle. Method—a systematic approach to the material in terms of both gathering and display—was essential to the classicizing agenda of his project. For readers this method had signiﬁcant ramiﬁcations. Old-order poetry volumes implied an aesthetic of randomness; whether a reader skipped about or proceeded straight through a volume of Poems upon Several Occasions, the effect was casual. 16 Bell’s new-order volumes could be sampled casually too, but they laid the groundwork for a different kind of reading. Bell doubled the size of the Foulis and Creech series, but the new standard he set for multi-volume collections involved much more than amplitude. By organizing his series into one volume of Poetical Works after another—grouped by poetic genre, with authoritative texts, line numbers, notes, glossaries, essays, engraved illustrations, portraits, and biographies—Bell readied the English poets for a regimen of comparison and study, one of the chief virtues of classical publishing as he deﬁned it.

PICTURES OF THE HIGHEST AUTHORIT Y A trade war began even before Milton was published, quick to ignite in part owing to the earlier stir created by Bell’s British Theatre (20 vols. 1776–8). Amid accusations of theft and fraud, a conger of twenty-seven booksellers had fought back with the New English Theatre (12 vols. 1776–7), only to quit the ﬁeld around the time they realized that the upstart publisher had trained his sights on 14

MP (16 May and 7 Nov. 1777); prospectus. Bell’s lives are discussed more fully in Ch. 5. ‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, vi. 186. For some reason the Dryden and Prior volumes escaped without numbered verses. 16 Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 169. 15

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

107

‘their’ poetry too, which promised to be a greater nuisance. 17 Without the legal recourse to stop Bell, they regrouped, mustered an even larger host of publishers, and tried to bully him out of business. Bell deplored the ‘collusion’ practiced to hinder his new series. In an appeal ‘To the Country Booksellers’ he blamed the trade for scheming ‘to prohibit the insertion of the advertisements for [his work] in the London Papers, over most of which they command the most pernicious inﬂuence’. Between 14 April and 12 May, before their plan was in effect, Bell had placed notices in William Woodfall’s Morning Chronicle, but as co-proprietor of the Morning Post, he otherwise lacked no outlet for advertising. Next, Bell complained, ‘they decline selling the work to their retail customers, and absolutely refuse sending it into the country on any condition’. Credit dried up for anyone not honoring the boycott, with burdensome results for Bell: [their] resolutions were ﬁrst to stop my credit, not to sell any of my publications in town or country, and not to give credit to any of their correspondents who did; which evidently had the immediate effect of compelling me to discharge all their accounts, as well as of obliging me to pay ready money for every article in business, instead of having the usual credit; and also of laying me under the necessity of sending my own articles all over the world on precarious credit, instead of receiving ready money on delivery, as is usual in publications of a periodical plan.

This would have been a serious blow to any bookseller, much less a young one with a long-range, capital-intensive project in the works. But the insult, Bell insisted, was general, not personal. By keeping his series out of their shops, the other booksellers had ‘revolted from their allegiance to the public’. 18 He was trying to spread the nation’s poetic heritage; they were choking it off. Yet Bell put the best face on things: his adversaries had given his edition ‘more praise than words can bestow.—Was it unworthy the design, or inferior to their own productions, they would give it free circulation, that it might condemn itself.’ All their fuss was an oblique expression of respect, tinged with fear. To offset their measures Bell enlisted ‘the Distributors of newspapers’ to peddle his books in London, and solicited booksellers from ‘capital towns’ throughout the country to serve as regional distributors. Evidently the appeal had some effect,

17 Bell accused the London trade of aping his work to ‘obtrude their own futile productions with less suspicion’ upon purchasers shopping for Bell’s British Theatre, and pronounced ‘sundry London booksellers’ guilty of ‘every imposition which fraud can suggest’ to hinder his sales: ‘To the Public’, Bell’s British Theatre (20 vols. London, 1776–8), i. [6]; and LC (15–18 June 1776). In rebuttal one ‘Friend to the Booksellers’ argued that the trade, having ‘paid to Authors and their Representatives many hundred pounds’, had sole rights to the material: LC (27–29 June 1776). A volume added in 1781 brought Bell’s British Theatre to 21 vols., each containing ﬁve plays. 18 MP (25 Apr., 3 and 7 May 1777, and 3 June 1783).

108

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

for in due course he advertised that ‘sets or volumes may be had of the country booksellers, at all the Camps, and the watering places’. 19 Meanwhile, Bell strengthened his competitive posture. Just as he improved his letterpress title-pages, he upgraded his artwork. To furnish a series of this magnitude with ‘engravings of masterly execution’ was a logistical challenge, one that combined print-making with mass-market bookselling on an unprecedented scale. 20 For the Milton vignettes he hired the artists working on Bell’s British Theatre, but decided to scrap their engravings in favor of ‘improved embellishments’ as soon as Milton was published. Bell realized in short order that he should not hinder the progress of his theatre series, and that his poetry series should have its own artistic identity. 21 With this in view he announced that each volume would carry an engraving ‘designed from or alluding to some part of its contents’, executed ‘in a novel and entertaining stile by MORTIMER and EDWARDS ’. This plan was to start with the ﬁrst volume of Pope on 24 May 1777, while four new Milton plates would be delivered as soon as they could be ‘executed in a stile that will not dishonour the works they are meant to embellish’. 22 Although John Hamilton Mortimer designed the plates for Pope’s works in accordance with plan, John Thornthwaite engraved them, and since Bell’s new arrangements also were geared to showcase the work of Charles Grignion, he had Grignion re-engrave them, causing four more prints to be replaced. Contributing to the confusion, perhaps, were afterthoughts about the portraits as well. As it happened, Bell replaced his ﬁrst seven portraits. The likenesses of Butler, Dryden, and Prior could not have been faulted; literally monumental, they were copied from busts in Westminster Abbey, the very deﬁnition of ‘BUSTS or PICTURES of the highest authority’. A factor in Bell’s dissatisfaction can be traced to an opportunity he had ferreted out: access to ‘a celebrated collection of pictures of authority, which have been nobly lent him for this purpose’. Details emerged when he advertised that the series would be ‘enriched’ with ‘original pictures of authority, chieﬂy taken from the grand collection of the late Earl of Chesterﬁeld, by permission, which alone will make the work inestimable’ (see Fig. 4.2). 23 But why should Lord Chesterﬁeld’s library have trumped Poets’ Corner? Of the authors on Bell’s list, for one thing, there were fewer busts in Westminster than portraits belonging to Chesterﬁeld. In the aggregate, a suite of related paintings underscored his governing notion of uniformity and reinforced 19 MP (3 and 7 May 1777, and 21 July 1779). One such ‘Distributor of newspapers’ is glimpsed in the London Chronicle: John Whorwood of ‘No. 13, Bull and Mouth-street’ lists eleven papers which he handled, with their prices (5–7 June 1777). 20 MP (25 Apr. 1777). 21 How busy they were may be seen from Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highﬁll Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in his Edition of ‘Bell’s Shakespeare’ and ‘Bell’s British Theatre’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill., 1998). 22 23 MP (16 May 1777). MP (22 Oct. and 17 Nov. 1777).

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

109

Figure 4.2. Portrait of Butler from the library of Lord Chesterﬁeld. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London.

the idea of a pictorial corollary to the ‘connected system of biography’. Moreover, by virtue of their ownership, he may have counted on an element of social cachet. Also, the bargain negotiated with Lord Chesterﬁeld’s heirs was amenable to promotional hyperbole: anyone could copy busts in the Abbey, but not images ‘nobly lent’ from the private collection of a famous lord. That Bell considered it a coup is plain from his effusive characterization of the collection: ‘the ﬁrst volume of each Author also contains a Genuine Portrait, from some Capital Picture in the grand collection of the late Earl of Chesterﬁeld, or from some other of equal authority and consequence’. 24 24 Eighteen-page advertisement, ‘BELL’ S EDITIONS’ (John Johnson Collection, Publisher Boxes), 1; my emphases.

110

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Figure 4.3. Bell’s ﬁrst portrait of Butler and its replacement. The image taken from the bust in Westminster Abbey yielded to a copy of the painting owned by Lord Chesterﬁeld.

The paintings of Butler and Prior, two of Chesterﬁeld’s ten usable pictures, were duly copied and re-engraved (Fig. 4.3). Like every Bell portrait, they were designed to assert their classical rank, sharing in visual conceits reminiscent of the 1670 engraving of Milton by William Faithorne, which was imitated for two hundred years. In this pattern, the author’s head and shoulders appear in an oval frame resting atop a pedestal; this, as David Piper observes, was ‘the equivalent in engraving of the sculpted memorial bust in its niche’. 25 Instead of following the pedestal-and-niche design, Bell presented his framed image as a painting held to the wall by a ribbon trimmed with bays, the spoils of poetic victory, and identiﬁed underneath by a plaque. Prior to publication Bell had stockpiled engravings by John Hall and John Thornthwaite, and later commissioned a few from William Sharp and Charles 25 Piper, The Image of the Poet, 17, 35–6. The convention is slightly odd in that the pedestal, which usually bears a full ﬁgure, is used to support merely the head. In architectural terms, it represents the capital and the plinth with no pillar.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

111

Grignion. As with his vignettes, however, he eventually steered most of the portraits to one engraver, settling on Thomas Cook. Having signaled that the number of Chesterﬁeld portraits was not limitless, he had been careful to advertise that other likenesses were forthcoming ‘of equal authority and consequence’. To support this contention Bell identiﬁed the provenance of his portraits, citing an ‘Original Picture’ for over half of them, with details of where they were to be found and in whose custody, as if criteria of veriﬁability gave them a measure of authority (Table 4.2). 26 Portraits identiﬁed as hanging ‘in the Collection of ’ Dr. Wall or the late Bishop of Bristol were, as a matter of attribution, similar to those of Chesterﬁeld. Not every owner was a collector, however, and another attribution—‘In the possession of ’—suggests a different mode of authority. Noncollectors may have come by their paintings through personal knowledge of the poet or his relatives, and the reiteration of ‘possession’ underscored the privileged glimpse into private holdings that Bell’s reader was given. Finding any portrait at all was problematic in several cases. In May 1779 Bell solicited the aid of anyone ‘in possession of an original painting, or a print of authority of the portrait of John Pomfret, the poet’. In July he acknowledged receiving ‘Mr. Damer’s letter’, and was ‘much obliged to him for the use of the PAINTED PORTRAIT of JOHN POMFRET, which he mentioned’. 27 Mysteriously, the portrait failed to materialize, suggesting either that Mr Damer’s offer was a hoax or that the portrait could not be veriﬁed. When the search for a likeness of Savage likewise proved futile, Bell inserted an apology in the book: AGREEABLE to the plan of this publication a portrait of the Author should be preﬁxed to this volume; but the publisher hopes the omission will not be imputed as a breach of promise, not having been able to meet with, or hear of, any picture or print ever having been done of this poet: enquiry has been made amongst the various collectors, as well as by public advertisement, without effect, and therefore he hopes this stated fact will be sufﬁcient excuse; especially as he will gladly have a portrait engraved in the best manner, and deliver it gratis hereafter to the Subscribers, should any person furnish him with, or point out where a proper subject may be met with to copy for that purpose. 28

Ascertaining whether a portrait was in fact a ‘proper subject’ could be tricky. Bell’s portrait of John Dyer, for example, said to be copied from ‘an Original Picture in the Possession of the Revd . Mr . Potter’, was a portrait not of John but of Samuel Dyer, painted by Reynolds in 1770 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771. 29 Documentation necessary to authenticate a portrait could be elusive. 26 Although the source of Bell’s second portrait of Pope was not engraved on the print, it was speciﬁed in the newspaper as being ‘after the celebrated picture of Richardson’ MP (4 Feb. 1777). 27 MP (20 May and 29 July 1779). 28 Tipped into the copy of Bell’s edn. of Savage at the University of Texas at Austin (Ak. Sa 93. B780b), the only one I have seen in which the apology survives. 29 Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (4 vols. London, 1899–1901), i. 271–2. Bell’s engraving was reproduced as the frontispiece to The

112

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Table 4.2. Portraits in The Poets of Great Britain Poet

Engraver

Date

Milton

(1) Hall (2) Cook

1 Mar. 1777 12 Nov. 1777

(1) Thornthwaite (2) Sharp (1) Hall (2) Sharp (1) Thornthwaite (2) Cook

1 Mar. 1777 12 Jan. 1778 1 Mar. 1777 12 Jan. 1778 1 Mar. 1777 20 Jan. 1778

Prior

(1) Grignion (2) Cook

1 Aug. 1777 20 Jan. 1778

Thomson

(1) Cook (2) Cook

26 Aug. 1777 21 Feb. 1778

(1) Cook (2) Cook

16 Sept. 1777 21 Feb. 1778

Waller

Cook

1 Nov. 1777

Young Cowley

Cook Cook

10 Oct. 1777 15 Dec. 1777

Spenser

Cook

15 Dec. 1777

Parnell

Cook

1 Apr. 1778

Congreve

Cook

1 Apr. 1778

Swift

Cook

21 May 1778

Addison

Cook

11 June 1778

Shenstone

Cook

July 1778

Churchill

Cook

27 May 1779

Donne Garth Denham

Cook Cook Cook

1778 6 Nov. 1779 1 Dec. 1779

Hughes

Cook

4 June 1779

Pope Dryden Butler

Gay

Inscription: source of likeness

From an Original in Ld. Chesterﬁeld’s Collection

I. Roberts del. de Bust. Westm: I. Roberts del. de Bust: Westm: Done from an Original Picture in the Collection of Lord Chesterﬁeld I. Roberts apud Bust: West: del. Done from an Original Picture in the Collection of Lord Chesterﬁeld Engraved by T. Cook from an Original Picture by Ackman Engraved by T. Cook from a beautiful Enamel by Zinck in the possession of Mr Rawley Roberts del: from a Picture in Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Collection From an Original in Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Collection From an Original in Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Collection From an Original in the possession of John Hamilton Esqr. From a Picture painted by Sr. Peter Lely in the Collection of the late Lord Chesterﬁeld Engraved after an Original Picture in the Collection of the late Lord Chesterﬁeld From an Original in the Collection of the late Ld. Chesterﬁeld From an Original Picture in the possession of Mr Thomas Hull Engraved by Cook from an Original Picture painted by Catton Sir Godfrey Kneller del. From an Original Picture in the Collection of Lord Chesterﬁeld Engraved by Cook from an Original Picture in the possession of Mr Duncomb

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

113

Table 4.2. (Continued) Poet

Engraver

Date

Inscription: source of likeness

Dyer

Cook

26 Nov. 1779

From an original Picture in the Possession of the Revd Mr Potter

Lansdowne Buckingham Cunningham

Cook Cook Cook

4 Jan. 1780 16 May 1780 27 May 1779

Broome King Rowe Akenside Lyttelton

Delatre Cook Cook Cook Cook

10 Nov. 1781 22 Dec. 1781 11 Dec. 1781 21 Jan. 1782 2 Mar. 1782

J. Philips A. Philips

Cook Cook

6 Feb. 1782 9 Mar. 1782

Armstrong

Trotter

20 Apr. 1782

Watts

Trotter

17 May 1782

Pitt Gray

Cook Trotter

30 Sept. 1782 2 Mar. 1782

Chaucer

Cook

20 Nov. 1782

G. Kneller del. Engraved by Cook from an Original Picture D. Heins pinxt.

Engraved after an Original Picture by West in the Collection of the late Bishop of Bristol Engraved by Cook after the Original Picture by Ashton in the Collection of Dr Wall Engraved by Trotter from an Original Picture by Sr. J. Reynolds in the possession of Mr Coutts Engraved by Trotter from an original Picture in the possession of Mrs Abney Newington Engraved by Trotter from an original drawing in the possession of the Revd Mr Potter of Scarning

In 1780 Bell issued a collective summons for portraits of ‘Lord Roscommon, John Philips, William Somerville, David Mallet, John Gilbert Cooper, William Collins, Aaron Hill, Edward Moore, Ambrose Philips, Frank [sic] Hammond, William Hamilton, Richard Savage, and any other English Poet not already published in this Collection’. 30 All but three of these poets made their way into the collection, several without portraits, demonstrating that it was not a necessary condition for inclusion in the series. But might it have been a sufﬁcient condition? Had suitable portraits turned up, would Cooper, Hill, and Hamilton have been admitted? Would Bell entertain the candidacy of ‘any other English Poet’ on the basis of an opportunity to enlarge his collection of engraved Poems of John Dyer, ed. Edward Thomas (London, 1903), despite ‘some doubt as to its being an authentic likeness of the poet’ (‘Note by the Publisher’, 14). 30 MP (13 July 1780).

114

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

heads? In the end, despite zealous efforts to track them down, the likenesses of thirteen poets eluded Bell’s searches, leaving him with a total of thirty-seven portraits. By September 1777, with his vignettes on a new footing, Bell publicized ‘new engagements with the most capital artists in the kingdom, at an additional expence of one thousand pounds’. Thrown off schedule by these negotiations, Bell made a virtue of it by anticipating that the public would ‘rather applaud than censure’ a postponement of Thomson’s poems ‘on account of the masterly embellishments’ once the new plates had displayed ‘the rising merit of their department’. 31 Talking about these false starts so openly, it could be argued, was unwise. Why be so candid about apparent deﬁciencies? Yet the ﬁrst rule of advertising for Bell was to keep his product continuously in the public eye. Confessing implicitly to an uncertain start and wasted resources was a small matter, compared with the occasion it provided for calling attention to his illustrations and treating as news any efforts taken to improve their quality. After October, when he ﬁrst advertised the Chesterﬁeld portraits, Bell surveyed the extent of his refurbishment. With seven portraits and eight vignettes to be replaced, he announced he would absorb the costs of ‘destroying ﬁfteen engraved plates, and re-executing as many more’. Delivery of the new prints took place as the edition proceeded. The ﬁrst, inserted ‘agreeable to promise’ in the second volume of Young on 29 November, was ‘THE NEW HEAD OF MILTON, Beautifully engraved from an original Picture in the collection of the late LORD CHESTERFIELD ’. Each successive volume, in addition to its own engraving(s), was to contain ‘a new Print for Milton, or Pope, or a new head for the preceding authors, till all the new plates are completed’ (Fig. 4.4). Original subscribers were granted ‘the beneﬁt of the ﬁrst impressions’ of the replacement prints as long as they subscribed to ‘a regular continuation of the work, as it comes out’. The distribution of extra engravings lasted through February 1778, when it was heralded that ‘NO FURTHER IMPROVMENTS’ would or could be made to the artwork. 32 Verbal display of the illustrations became a key ingredient for advertisements, with artists ﬁguring in the publication day notices for individual volumes. Bell ﬁrst called attention to a speciﬁc subject when Mortimer’s drawing for the ﬁrst volume of Pope had been produced, rendering it ‘beautifully embellished with a New Vignette, designed from the subject of the Rape of the Lock, by MORTIMER, and neatly engraved by THORNTHWAITE’. Edwards received some commissions through October, but Mortimer was given them exclusively beginning with the poems of Young. Epithets like ‘spirited print’ or ‘interesting frontispiece’ characterized his work, and his designs were said to ‘be admired as the traits 31

MP (1 Sept. 1777).

32

MP (29 Nov. 1777 and 24 Feb. 1778).

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

115

Figure 4.4. Replacement portrait of Pope, as distributed with Cowley’s poems. This vignette for Cowley is a good example of the ‘novel and interesting’ style that Bell valued in the drawings of John Hamilton Mortimer.

of a wonderful genius’. 33 In time Bell would ignore the drawings contributed by other illustrators, as evident in this summation: ‘The embellishments challenge perfection; are designed by Mortimer, and engraved by Bartolozzi, Sherwin, Hall, Grignion, and other eminent masters, who do honor to the science of engraving.’ 34 Mortimer’s fame evoked a rare note of defensiveness in Bell. Conscious that a mismatch might be perceived between such an exalted talent and the miniature arena in which it shone, Bell insisted that Mortimer’s ‘eminent rank as an artist will not be degraded by these productions’. More in tune with his usual tone of aggrandizement, he noted that artists should be ﬂattered by appearing in the 33 34

1778.

MP (24 May, 7 June, and 24 July 1777, and 6 June 1778). This advertisement appeared in CM, EEC, and EA respectively on 20, 22, and 26–30 June

116

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

physically small but grandly ambitious series. The Waller prints, for example, showcased ‘Mr. LOWE, and SHARP; two young Artists, whom the Publisher is happy to bring before the Public in so eminent a view, as this production must evidently place them in; especially in the opinion of every lover of true taste and elegance’. 35 While publication initially held fairly close to the targeted schedule of one volume per week, short delays (on account of the engravings) affected the ﬁrst volume of Thomson’s poems and the third of Gay’s. Anxious lest the public grow wary of ‘tedious interruptions’, Bell vouched for having enough volumes on hand to prevent ‘any stoppage on account of the letter-press’. Progress slowed while Bell closed his deal on the Chesterﬁeld paintings and while Cook began to copy them, starting with Waller. To ease suspense Bell shufﬂed the works of Young ahead of Waller’s, but not before six weeks had elapsed, time enough for a rumor to be spread that his series would fail in its ‘spirited execution’. Attributing the rumor to ‘artful and designing’ enemies, Bell reasserted that the presswork was moving along and that several volumes were at the ready. 36 With the artwork as authoritative as Bell could make it, publication proceeded smoothly enough from late November forward to give The Poets of Great Britain a share in his celebration when Bell’s British Theatre was completed early in 1778. Bell declared victory over the London trade in each of his publications, broadcasting his triumph under the banner of ‘OPPOSITION DEFEATED By Spirit, Perseverance, and Elegance’. 37

THE PROGRESS OF PIRACY Vainglorious rhetoric aside, the ﬁrst two years had indeed gone well. The Apollo Press sustained a good pace of production, as shown by the eighteen volumes printed in twenty-one weeks beginning with the ﬁrst volume of Spenser on 3 January 1778. The volumes were printed, shipped, folded, stitched, mated with their engravings, bound, and offered for sale in London roughly seventy days, on average, after the colophon had been typeset at Martin’s presses in Edinburgh. 38 By September 1778 ﬁfty volumes had been published, almost half the series, and only slightly behind schedule. 35

36 MP (24 July and 22 Dec. 1777). MP (1 Sept., 4 Oct., and 7 Nov. 1777). MP (18 Mar. 1778). This message was also printed as a handbill; see Stanley Morison, John Bell, 1745–1831: Bookseller, Printer, Publisher, Typefounder, Journalist, &c. (Cambridge and London, 1930), between pp. 96 and 97. 38 My calculation is based on ﬁfteen volumes (Cowley 1 through Swift 4) when the series was in full progress. Earlier volumes were either stockpiled prior to publication or held up by negotiations involving the engravings, and the volumes following Swift were purposely delayed for reasons that will appear. 37

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

117

Bell bragged he had overcome the obstacles thrown in his way by ‘forty-two of the most powerful of the London Booksellers, with their united Efforts in Town and Country’. 39 The time and resources lost because of second thoughts on the engravings were self-inﬂicted, but events beyond his control brought repeated delays from mid-1778 to late 1781. Looking back later on the trials he had faced, Bell wondered at his ability to keep going: ‘To describe the particular circumstances attending the progress of the publication of the POETS, would be painting a picture of misfortunes, which, if related, would cause mankind to doubt the practicability of surmounting them.’ 40 A catastrophic ﬁre struck on Thursday night, 30 July 1778. Martin’s printing ofﬁces in Edinburgh took up the second and uppermost stories and garret of a building located in the Pleasance; a horse stable and hayloft occupied the ground ﬂoor and part of the second. As George Paton informed Richard Gough, the English antiquary, ‘A late Fire has intirely burnt down a very elegant Printing house digniﬁed under the Title of the Apollo Press, where a small Edition of the English Poets are printed for Mr . Bell your London Bookseller.’ The loss of paper was large; Paton understood ‘that the Workman Gilbert Martin had some little time got a Stock of paper to carry on this suite all which was consumed’. Almost inevitably—Paton had ‘always condemned the situation in so hazardous a neighbourhood as Stables & Hay lofts’—the ‘calamity arose thro’ careless Hostlers’. When ignited, the newspapers reported, a ‘large quantity of hay’ in the stable below the press, together with the paper stock, ‘occasioned a ﬂame truly dreadful’, and the destruction was total: ‘By this disastrous accident, a most elegant printing-ofﬁce, with all the books, paper, printingmaterials, &c. were entirely destroyed.’ Although Martin’s property was insured for £1,400 through the Liverpool Fire-Ofﬁce, he was unable to collect the money until late October. Only then could he begin to rebuild, a process that took through June of the following year. Paton had foreseen that ‘a considerable time must elapse before another such commodious neat work house can be rear’d up’. 41 Bell’s assets, unluckily, were not insured. He bemoaned losing ‘a considerable amount’ of property in the blaze, ‘which from a mistake in [his] agent was not insured’, but did not reveal how many volumes were lost. 42 ‘[W]hat share or if any part of them perished in the Flames I do not hear’, wrote Paton, unsure whether ‘any various Quantity of these printed Poets were in the Workman’s hands at the time’; it was Martin’s general practice that ‘how[ever] soon any Authors Works or parts as Volumes were ﬁnished these commonly were sent up 39

40 Handbill in Morison, John Bell, between pp. 96 and 97. MP (3 June 1783). Paton to Gough, 10 and 17–18 Aug. 1778, NLS Adv MSS 29.5.7.(ii), fos. 218–19; EA (28– 31 July 1778); CM (1 Aug. and 28 Oct. 1778). Before the amount of Martin’s insurance coverage was made public, Paton had heard it was in the range of ‘12, 14 or 1500 £.’ 42 MP (3 June 1783). 41

118

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

to this Bookseller’. 43 Although Martin tried not to let many volumes accumulate before shipping them to London, he probably had several on hand. The last pre-ﬁre impressions to reach London included the second volume of Shenstone, printed 23 May 1778. Since January, the Apollo Press had produced nearly one volume per week, and if it kept up anything like this pace after May 23, the printed sheets for as many as eight volumes could have been warehoused on the premises by the end of July. Conceivably, then, in addition to paper stock, Bell lost several volumes. Worse yet, he was due for a shipment at the time of the ﬁre. Having just published the third volume of Swift’s poems, he had only four more in reserve: the last of Swift, then Addison, and the two Shenstone volumes. Bell released no news of his misfortune, but quietly extended the publishing interval between Swift and Addison, and again between Addison and Shenstone. Without disclosing the predicament that necessitated it, Bell announced that new type was being cast for the series by ‘Dr. Wilson of Glasgow’ (Alexander Wilson, supplier of types to the Foulis brothers) when he advertised the ﬁrst volume of Shenstone. Only after publication ceased did he reveal that the Apollo Press had burnt to the ground, ‘with all the curious collection of printing materials’, giving his series an ‘alarming shock’. 44 Word of the catastrophe was not unwelcome to Strahan, but any satisfaction he might have derived from this turn of events was muted by his sense of the damage already done to the trade. ‘I perceive that Martin’s Printing-house is burnt down’, he wrote to Creech, ‘and I heartily wish it may have the Effect you suppose, in checking the Progress of Piracy, which has already nearly ruined the Trade altogether’. 45 Creech was wrong if he supposed the ﬁre would check its progress altogether. By the next spring, to the ire of his foes, Bell let it be known that he was pushing ahead. A correspondent to the London Evening Post offered him ‘a friend’s advice’ under the pseudonym ‘Benevolus’. Benevolus and ‘many others’ had interpreted the series’ suspension as a hopeful sign that Bell had realized his ‘error in pursuing a plan so replete with impossibilities to [himself ], and injurious to a set of worthy men, [his] brethren of the trade’. Exasperated now to learn otherwise, Benevolus queried him sharply, ‘Why in the name of wonder will you persist in a contest, the very nature of which must be destruction to yourself? Or why covet the distinguishing epithet of being spirited in your business, when that very spirit contributes to embarrass you?’ This back-handed compliment was elaborated: ‘It is well known, that your labours have ever produced you more praise than proﬁt, and your Poets in particular; which must have cost more than they will produce when sold.’ Bell was heading for trouble not because of poor sales, but 43 44

Paton to Gough, 10 and 17–18 Aug. 1778, NLS Adv MSS 29.5.7.(ii), fos. 218–19. 45 MP (12 and 30 Sept. 1778). Strahan to Creech, 29 Aug. 1778.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

119

because his volumes were priced too low. To awaken him to his peril, Benevolus warned him of his competitors, ‘a set of men, whose pretensions are fair, their inﬂuence is great, and their riches, as a body of people opposing an individual, immense’. Besides, he added, a rival collection of poets now ready for sale and boasting the contributions of Samuel Johnson would lure buyers away from Bell’s edition, however lavish its engravings. If Bell were to desist, the booksellers would ‘cordially receive’ him into their fold and respect him professionally as ‘a man of abilities’, while the public would give him ‘every countenance that an honest tradesman can wish for’. 46 This document is extraordinary for its frank appraisal of Bell’s Poets and its conﬁrmation of the worry that beset the London bookselling establishment. The offer of amnesty suggests that Benevolus was an insider, or at least someone empowered to offer a truce on behalf of Strahan and others in the trade. Coming as it were from the enemy camp, his observations prove that Bell was shunned as a renegade; that his labors had ‘ever produced’ praise; that his poetry series, in view of its ‘costly embellishments’, was thought to be ruinously underpriced; and that his enterprise was in fact ‘injurious’ to the other London booksellers. For all their ‘immense riches’ they were yet uneasy, and their clout was insufﬁcient to console them in the event of Bell’s continued competition. Hence the strained and unconvincing good will of the letter. A disinterested conﬁdant, if persuaded that Bell’s product faced doom in the marketplace, plausibly could have offered similar counsel. ‘Believe me’, wrote Benevolus, ‘I write thus publicly from a friendly disposition, and wish it may have the good effect to conﬁne your industrious pursuits in business to a line which your present situation will make sure of success and comfort.’ But was the only way to get Bell to listen to reason to goad him openly, to shame him into doing himself a favor? The timing of the letter hints at a different motive for going public: to dramatize the publication of The Works of the English Poets, notices for which were beginning to dot the London papers. 47 This other edition, he predicted, ‘no doubt will be considered as the criterion of perfection, so far as respects poetical, biographical, and critical publication’. In short, Bell was offered terms of surrender, not a truce. The proprietors were on the advance, and by publishing the classic poets themselves, they would grind Bell down. But their victory would arrive more quickly if only Bell were gentleman enough to quit the market. Incensed, Bell shot back that his series had been halted by ‘an accident of ﬁre’, not by any realization of ‘error’ on his part. If not for his patience in tending to details that would ensure further success, in fact, he already could have been back

46 47

LEP (30 Mar.–1 Apr. 1779). LC (1–3 Apr. 1779); LEP (1–3 Apr. 1779); MC (2 Apr. 1779).

120

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

in business. 48 Better to hazard a longer delay, he reasoned, than to jeopardize the quality that had made his edition proﬁtable in the ﬁrst place. No doubt the ‘fortytwo men, whose interests compose the inﬂuence, and oppressions of the trade’ enjoyed an advantage: they minimized risk by dividing their property into shares and raising a subscription at £50 per share, while he had to capitalize his venture in stages and recoup his investment along the way. Under such circumstances there was no need for him to ‘blush at occasional embarrassments’. He claimed rather to ‘glory in the contest’, and refused to be intimidated by any dire forecast of Benevolus. 49 Tactically Bell now had to select a poet that would re-establish his customer base when the Apollo Press resumed operations. How grim a hiatus like this could be was expressed by Strahan in fretting over a late shipment of Blair’s Sermons. ‘The Interruption in the Sale here has been of irremediable Mischief to the Book’, he lamented, for ‘now it is nearly forgotten’. 50 To avoid this fate Bell opted for one of the two poets that deﬁned the extent of his series: Churchill. But meanwhile, in February 1779, he had suffered another setback when his illustrator died. Mourning that ‘the famous name of MORTIMER will no longer grace his future lists of artists’, Bell was anxious to reassure his customers that his vignettes would still command attention when the series resumed. The Churchill volumes would be illustrated by artists of ‘justly celebrated fame’—Giovanni Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Francesco Bartolozzi, and Biagio Rebecca—and two of the three engravings were actually produced before the volumes were printed. Bell rhapsodized over their adornments: an ‘inestimable Vignette Print’ had been engraved by Bartolozzi ‘in his best manner’ after a Cipriani design ‘made on purpose to immortalize this publication’; and ‘a charming Print’ based on an ‘original and beautiful drawing’ by Kauffman had been ‘engraved in a style of excellence’ by Jean Delatre. With such preparations, it was forecast, the series would be ‘Revived with transcendent Splendor’. 51 When the Churchill sheets were ready for shipment, one more hurdle presented itself. France had joined the American colonies in war against England, and fear of an invasion ran high during August and September. 52 French privateers roamed the English Channel, disrupting shipping lanes and schedules; merchant ships had to sail zigzag routes along the coastline, stay near shore, or await the sporadic British naval escorts. So tense was the situation in August, the month intended for publication, that authorities placed an embargo on shipments from 48 It took ‘a period of twelvemonths’, or until July 1779, for Martin to rebuild his printing ofﬁce (MP, 3 June 1783), a period veriﬁed by the colophons in the Churchill volumes. Bell’s hint that he could have resumed publication earlier suggests that he contemplated changing printers. 49 LEP (6–8 Apr. 1779). Benevolus’s letter ‘to Mr. BELL, Bookseller’ and Bell’s reply were reprinted sequentially in MP (5 and 7 Apr. 1779). Since Bell so clearly viewed the purpose of Benevolus to be malevolent, it is odd that MP should have represented the letter as ‘written in friendship to the party’ (MP, 5 Apr. 1779). 50 51 Strahan to Creech, 26 Feb. 1778. MP (21, 23, and 26 July 1779). 52 This mood was exploited by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the opening scene of The Critic.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

121

Leith harbor, forcing Bell to arrange to have the sheets brought to London by wagon. 53 The volumes reached London at last in September. By making much of the artwork by Cipriani, Kauffman, and Bartolozzi, Bell evoked a glamour foreign to the core Britishness celebrated by the collection. With ﬁfty-some volumes ahead of him, he searched for a long-term successor to ‘the late Mr. Mortimer, of immortal memory’, in humbler quarters, closer to home. Before Churchill’s poems were published he cryptically noted that future volumes would be accompanied by ‘some surprizing productions of a rising genius hitherto unknown’. Later, when the time came to reveal his choice, Bell heightened the drama by restating how Cipriani and the others, surpassing their usual ‘standard of perfection’, animated their Churchill illustrations ‘with the spirit of the poet, and display[ed] such efforts of genius as fall but little short of inspiration’. Against this backdrop Bell introduced his newfound talent: How hazardous therefore to attempt, how dangerous to the reputation of an unknown artist, must it be to present his ﬁrst acknowledged performance immediately after such works of eminence! yet to-day’s publication of POMFRET ’s POETICAL WORKS will convince the world that there is native merit in this kingdom, which only waits a fostering hand to reﬂect an honour on this country. Proud of the discovery, the Publisher proposed a subject, and STOTHARD has produced an original picture which foretells his future fame—the Cruelty of Col. Kirk he has pathetically described, and DELATTRE the engraver has tinged it with a beautiful semblance of delicate distress.

The fact that Thomas Stothard was an Englishman enabled Bell to reconﬁrm the patriotic bias of his promotions, and the fact that the artist was unknown allowed the publisher to cast himself as another Maecenas. 54 Although Britain could view any artist working within her borders, irrespective of national origin, as her own treasure—Kauffman’s departure from the country in 1781 was decried as a national disgrace—the brief focus on foreign celebrity had marked a departure from Bell’s core emphasis. 55 With Stothard now under hire, the publisher returned to expressions of nationalism. Stothard was a silk weaver’s apprentice from 1770 to 1777, but during an industry decline around 1775 he befriended some artists. A mere eighteen months elapsed between his enrollment at the Royal Academy school in Maiden 53 MP (19 Aug. 1779). The shipping between Edinburgh and London was uncertain at times, as Bell summed it up: ‘Contrary winds and want of convoy have . . . frequently detained my cargoes in port; shipwrecks and capture at sea have had also their share in interrupting my progress’ (MP, 3 June 1783). Citing the trafﬁc between Edinburgh/Leith and London, Adam Smith contrasts the transporting of goods by wagon over land and by ship at sea. Either way the journey there and back took about six weeks, but land conveyance was less efﬁcient and more costly (The Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (2 vols. Oxford, 1976), i. 32–3). 54 MP (23 July, 2 and 30 Oct. 1779). 55 ‘To the disgrace of this country be it told, that this inimitable artist in her line, has been obliged to quit England for want of that encouragement to which her genius and merit so justly entitle her’ (EEC, 5 Sept. 1781, in the summary of news from London for 31 Aug.).

122

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

Lane on 30 December 1777 and his being unveiled as a ‘rising genius’ in July 1779. The risk Bell took on him was considerable: while the Royal Academy mounted a retrospective on Mortimer in 1779, Stothard was still honing his skills, and all his vignettes for Bell’s edition (except perhaps the last few) were drawn before his training ended in 1783. One sketch was thought to display ‘a notable lack of accuracy in the proportions of both the ﬁgure and the animals’. Yet Bell’s gamble paid off, for Stothard attracted other clients not long after being ushered into the limelight. In the early 1780s he produced designs for Wedgwood, and was regaled as a ‘most astonishing artist’ on the wrappers to Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine, which cited ‘numerous encomiums in his favor . . . by several of the greatest Connoisseurs in these kingdoms; all uniformly declaring him the ﬁrst Genius of the age in this department, and earnestly recommending us to procure as many drawings as possible from the animating pencil of so distinguished and aspiring an Artist’. 56 What may have attracted Bell to this animating pencil was its early mimicry of Mortimer, whose drawings were rooted in an ‘eccentric, rebellious, and highly romantic’ sensibility (Fig. 4.4). By means of his ‘novel and interesting’ style, as Bell put it, Mortimer is said to have invented ‘the apocalyptic sublime’ in art when he exhibited Death on a Pale Horse at the Royal Academy in 1775. 57 Stothard’s debut exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1779 was a depiction of banditti à la Mortimer. Several of his early drawings were straightforward imitations of Mortimer, but by 1783 he had moved away from ‘this Mortimeresque style’ toward a rococo lightness, perhaps in conjunction with his creation of classical designs for Wedgwood. 58 For Bell this meant that the kind of striking image Stothard depicted for ‘The Cruelty of Col. Kirk’ ultimately gave way to the tamely sentimental illustrations of Chaucer. 59 The difference was summed up by the contrast between Fuseli and Stothard in a review of an 1817 Royal Academy exhibition: Fuseli paints at the command of the Furies, Stothard at the invitation of the Graces. The one dreams of dismal shades and tartarean horrors, and peoples his canvas with awful spectres and the foul committers of crime. The other looks at and delights in the sunshine of morals and of visible nature, thinks of the felicities of life, 56 Shelley M. Bennett, Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia, Mo., 1988), 2–3, 6, 8–9, and 15. 57 ‘Seldom in the history of taste can a single work be identiﬁed as the forerunner of a long line of others to the extent of John Hamilton Mortimer’s Death on a Pale Horse . . . Mortimer’s subject is apocalyptic in the true sense of the word: not a mere catastrophe but a divine revelation, a lifting of the veil’ (Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London, 1986), 1). In pictorial detail and tone, given its ‘sense of diablerie’, Paley suggests that Mortimer’s work, as etched by Joseph Haynes, might have been a source for Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy (Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), 239–40). 58 Bennett, Stothard, 10, 12, 16, and 17. 59 Pauline Grace King, ‘Thomas Stothard and the Development toward Victorian Romanticism’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1950), 41–3.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

123

contemplates Elysium and feasts our eyes and our hearts with happy realities and ideal delights. 60

If Stothard’s drawings had less dramatic impact than Mortimer’s, and if he was unable ‘to render the full range of emotions’, his work nevertheless was attractive, and the match between his ‘visual interpretations’ and the ‘universal qualities that his contemporaries associated with the classics’ made for a product with strong commercial appeal. 61 Mortimer and Stothard supplied the drawings for nearly three-quarters of Bell’s vignettes. 62 Years later, curiously, when Bell advertised The Poets of Great Britain, he mentioned only ‘the lamented MORTIMER’, who was among ‘the ﬁrst Geniuses of the age’ and whose embellishments ‘every where have conferred an increase of Fame upon BRITISH ARTISTS’. 63 In light of the solid reputation Stothard had developed by then, and also Bell’s early pride in having discovered him, it is unclear why the publisher later neglected to name him. Whatever the reason, Bell in the long run valued Mortimer’s contribution to his series more than Stothard’s. After the Apollo Press had been rebuilt and its work resumed, the outlook for Bell seemed favorable. Churchill sold well, even requiring a second impression, and printing of the series held steady from July through September 1779. But unspeciﬁed difﬁculties brought on another season of ﬁts and starts, and after May 1780 the press went dormant for seventeen months. Nonetheless Bell felt he had enough imprints, along with sufﬁcient equanimity, to declare ‘BELL’s POETS CONTINUED ’ in a July 1780 advertisement: a ‘ TEDIOUS SUSPENSION’, while ‘painful and dangerous’ to him, had brought to light ‘many ﬂattering facts: cool deliberation has conﬁrmed the excellence of the edition, and even interruption has given it additional consequence’. During this lull Bell busied himself searching for portraits of the poets still to come. By early October he 60 Bennett, Stothard, 53–4. Ruskin agreed: ‘Stothard could not conceive wickedness, coarseness, or baseness. Every one of his ﬁgures looks as if it had been copied from some creature who had never harboured an unkind thought, nor permitted itself an ignoble action.’ To this love of purity he joined ‘a love of mere physical smoothness and softness; so that he lived in a universe of soft grass and stainless fountains, tender trees, and stone at which no foot would stumble’ (ibid. 60). 61 Ibid. 29–31. Stothard’s earlier apprenticeship molded him into a ‘specialist’ amenable to producing an ‘art commodity over which he had no direct control’. In this role he cultivated a ‘rather subordinate attitude, ever responsive to the diverse needs of his employers’ (7). Given this ‘pliable and submissive attitude to the demands of his publishers and patrons’, he was often favored by employers over artists with a ‘more vitalized style of book illustration’ (28). One of Stothard’s public commissions was to decorate the ceiling of the Advocates Library in Edinburgh (59). 62 The unsigned vignette for Fenton’s poems has been variously attributed to Mortimer and to Stothard. See Benedict Nicolson, John Hamilton Mortimer ARA 1740–1779 (catalogue of an exhibition at the Towne Art Gallery in Eastbourne (6 July–3 Sept. 1968) and the Iveagh Bequest in Kenwood (10 Sept.–8 Oct. 1968)), 40; and A. C. Coxhead, Thomas Stothard, R.A. (London, 1906), 84. 63 ‘List of the English Classics Published by Mr. Bell’ (c .1790–1, John Johnson Collection), 1.

124

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

had published all his printed stock, and from the end of that month through year’s end he ran a price list of the volumes, praising their typographical merit and singing the credits of the illustrators for each poet. Not to stand still while the Apollo Press was inactive, he turned his shop into a museum and invited the public to inspect his art: ‘Beautiful assortments’ of the books in various bindings, ‘with the exhibition of the original drawings and proof prints, are now on view, gratis, at the British Library in the Strand’. 64 This notion of a gallery exhibit was later translated into bound volumes of the engravings alone, to ‘furnish a suit of the most pleasing and valuable prints’. 65 September of 1781 brought an end to the turbulent middle period of Bell’s series. The remaining thirty-eight volumes encountered only minor delays: nineteen volumes were printed in a spurt of twenty weeks from 15 September 1781 to 26 January 1782, but the pace then slowed, and printing was suspended from February through April, and again from June through July. 66 Whereas the titlepage imprints for all fourteen volumes of Chaucer (last in the series) bear the year 1782, the colophons reveal that the printing stretched into May of 1783, two to three weeks on average between volumes. Late spring brought the series to its close: by 17 May the ﬁnal volume was printed, by 29 May Stothard’s ﬁnal vignette was engraved, and by 2 June the last volume was published. ‘Elated with every feeling which triumph can inspire, I scarce know how to restrain my joy’, effused Bell in a 1,700-word letter cataloguing the misfortunes he had faced in an odyssey of ‘near seven long years’. Never, proclaimed the ecstatic publisher, had the English classics been available uniformly printed ‘until this very hour, when I have the happiness to say—THAT MY EDITION IS COMPLETED ’. 67 THE BRILLIANCY OF ITS RECEPTION The 109-volume collection encompassed, in Bell’s words, ‘every Author of Eminence’ from Chaucer to Churchill, or ‘Fifty Authors, being every English Classic published within a series of Four Hundred Years’. The edition traced British poetry ‘from the æra of Chaucer in 1328, to that of Churchill in 1761’, but 64 MP (13 July and 30 Oct. 1780). I have not discovered what caused the seventeen-month interruption. During the earlier delay caused by ﬁre Bell had also encouraged people to visit his exhibition of original drawings (MP, 23 July 1779). 65 ‘Bell’s Editions’, 1. 66 As I have not seen copies of MP for these periods, the cause of these delays is a mystery. I cannot pinpoint when Bell suffered the following hardship: ‘hard frost once locked up a large cargo of paper for three months, during which time all my presses were unemployed for want of it’ (MP, 3 June 1783). The three-month suspension of Feb., Mar., and Apr. 1782 might be the period to which he alludes, yet Jan. and Feb. of 1782 were not unusually cold, certainly not as frigid as Jan. 1780, the coldest month within the entire period of publication. From Feb. through Apr. 1782 the Apollo Press did print ﬁfteen volumes of the ‘Characteristical Edition’ of Bell’s British Theatre. 67 MP (3 June 1783).

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

125

not, as one formulation improbably had it, ‘all the British Poets’ in this period. Chronologically it was lopsided: forty-seven of the ﬁfty poets fell within a span of 140 years, from Milton, Waller, and Cowley in the early 1630s to the ﬁnal works of Gray and Akenside in the late 1760s; only Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne represented the preceding 250 years. Churchill was the titular terminus ad quem, even though others had published after his death in 1764, because he was last in order of birth, and perhaps also because his name lent the title an alliterative cadence. 68 Through different bindings Bell accommodated a spectrum of buyers, suiting progressively expensive options to a variety of purses: Complete sets, 109 vols. neatly sewed and titled, — ditto, — bound, calf, double lettered, — ditto, — calf, gilt, and registered Ditto, calf, gilt, elegantly marbled and registered Ditto, superbly in Morocco, gilt edges, —

£8 8s. £12 12s. £13 13s. £16 16s. £33 0s.

For two guineas the well-to-do could house their sets in specially designed boxes: ‘N.B. Two Cases are constructed in the shape and appearance of two folio volumes, which contain the whole of this great collection, and are well adapted for travelling in the seat of a post chaise, or for library furniture.’ 69 When only half complete, the series had been paired with the British Theatre to form ‘Bell’s Poetic, Dramatic, and Travelling Cabinet or Camp Library’, which was ‘packed in light cases for the convenience of travellers, cabinet furniture, and exportation’, or even ‘Summer residence’. Like the Sheraton cases ﬁtted out with the Foulis English poets as part of Sir Robert Chambers’s traveling library, Bell’s cases answered the desire of lettered individuals to move about in the company of the nation’s poets. The ﬁrst aim of Bell’s pricing and marketing was, however, to make the series affordable to those of smaller means. A person could, without ‘being obliged to take the set complete’, buy any volume sewn in wrappers for 1s. 6d., purportedly ‘one fourth of the price of even the meanest of other editions’. Prices went up with binding: a volume cost 2s. in an ‘ordinary plain binding’; 2s. 3d. when ‘neatly’ bound in calf; 2s. 6d. if gilt and ‘handsomely’ done in calf; 3s. when done ‘elegantly in a marble manner’; and 3s. 6d. if ‘beautifully bound in the Classic

68 Handbill headed ‘A Chronological List of Authors Contained in Bell’s Beautiful Edition of the Poets of Great-Britain’ (see Fig. 1.2); MP (31 May 1777); and MC (14 Apr. 1777). According to the chronological roster, the dates for Churchill (1728–64) and Cunningham (1728–70) suggest that the latter perhaps ought to have been named in the title. 69 ‘A Chronological List of Authors’; MP (10 Feb. 1784). A ﬁne set in the folio cases is in the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota.

126

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

style, in white vellum, with manuscript titles’. 70 These gradations—ordinary, neat, handsome, elegant, beautiful—rose to the material apex of the edition, the purest expression of its market potential: a classicism manifested in white vellum with manuscript lettering that mimicked the antique style. In May 1777 Lloyd’s Evening Post printed a letter from ‘Philo-epimelius’, a disappointed purchaser of Bell’s work. Favorably impressed by Bell’s British Theatre, he had conﬁdently ordered the ﬁrst volume of Bell’s Milton (Paradise Lost, books 1–5), sight unseen. He was chagrined to discover ‘a Scotch edition’, believing Scottish imprints to be ‘very faulty’, and disgusted to ﬁnd a text ‘abounding with errors in the spelling of the words’. His list of twenty-ﬁve spelling blunders (‘highth’, ‘iland’, ‘sovran’, etc.) demonstrated a pervasive problem; more irksome yet, the words were ‘spelt in the like manner’ wherever they occurred. Equally irritating were the apostrophes (‘pris’on’, ‘be’it’, etc.) whose frequent insertion puzzled Philo-epimelius. True to his pseudonymic love of accuracy, he deplored such textual corruption. The moral: cheap you buy, cheap you get. Having made his purchase ‘ignorant at that time of the edition intended to be printed by the Booksellers’, Philo-epimelius hoped that the proprietors of ‘the Work now coming out by Dr. Johnson’ would mind their p’s and q’s so as not to incur the like censure. As was the case with Benevolus, the pointed reference to the collection associated with Johnson raises the question of ties between Philoepimelius and Bell’s rivals. 71 In a letter of 12 June 1783 Thomas Tyrwhitt also weighed in with a scathing review of Bell’s Poets. The types were too small, grumbled the eminent Chaucerian, however well they were suited to the eyesight of ‘very young persons’, who he insinuated were ‘the principal customers of the Apollo-press’. The undiscriminating were easily duped. Bell gave them ‘a picture at the beginning of each volume’, allegedly to lull them into being ‘perfectly unconcerned about every thing else’. Bell had gone astray in using John Urry’s edition of Chaucer (1721), in which there was ‘scarce a line as the author wrote it’. What galled Tyrwhitt especially, however, was that Bell adopted his edition of The Canterbury Tales (5 vols. 1775–8) and used his name, ‘without [his] consent, approbation or knowledge’. Bell was a ‘hungry bookseller’, one who turned a proﬁt ‘without allowing the author an opportunity of rectifying mistakes, supplying deﬁciencies, &c.’ Tyrwhitt feared that ‘the errors of the press [had] been considerably multiplied’, though he had not veriﬁed his suspicion. This corruption, he confessed, he was ‘rather inclined to presume, from the known practice of Bookseller-Editors, than to endeavour to prove by collation’. 72 These were the alpha and omega of Bell’s epistolary reviews, the ﬁrst appearing within a fortnight of the series’ commencement, the second within a fortnight 70 Advertisement from 1779 bound in after The Earl of Essex (London, 1776). Either in libraries or dealers’ catalogues, I have encountered bindings in the ‘Classic style, in white vellum’ on volumes of Foulis and on full sets of Creech’s series, ‘Johnson’s Poets’, and Anderson’s edn. 71 72 LyEP (7–9 May 1777). GM 53 (1783), 461–2.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

127

of its completion. As salutatory and valedictory greetings Bell found them to be horribly off-key. On 10 May 1777 Bell dispatched to Lloyd’s Evening Post an ‘equitable reply’ to Philo-epimelius, offering to pay for its insertion if the proprietor, William Nicoll, considered it an advertisement. After waiting in vain for three weeks, he took Nicoll to task and excerpted the suppressed letter in the Morning Post. It contained the testimonial of a purchaser who asserted, contrary to Philoepimelius, that Bell’s Milton adhered to the text of Thomas Newton, as the title-page promised. Bell listed a dozen of the purportedly misspelt words and, referring to the 1770 edition of Newton’s text, cited chapter and verse to prove them correct. To clinch his argument he quoted Newton’s policy of honoring ‘Milton’s own spelling’ and ‘pointing’, the policy to which he adhered. Granted, the spelling was not modern, but it was faithful, and the apostrophes marked metrical elisions. In a bravado ﬁnish, Bell vowed ‘to ﬁnd ten errors in the former London editions of Milton, or any other book printed in London whatever, for every single error to be found in his edition of Milton’. Bell’s refutation was sound: the disputed spellings and apostrophes were indeed based on the copy-text cited, Thomas Newton’s edition of Paradise Lost (1770). Philo-epimelius knew little about Milton or was disingenuous; in Bell’s words, he was guilty of either ‘ignorant falsehood’ or ‘premeditated injury’. 73 Tyrwhitt, by contrast, as the leading authority on Chaucer, was uniquely qualiﬁed to comment on Bell’s text, and his testimony should have proven ﬁnal. But by his own admission, instead of examining the text methodically, he spotchecked to see whether errors he had ‘pointed out for correction’ had been amended, and found that Martin’s compositors had ignored one and altered two others ‘in such a blundering manner as to require still further correction’. For the rest, he assumed the worst and denounced the ‘known practice of BooksellerEditors’. Random evidence and guilt by association, then, were the basis of his judgment—understandably, in light of his displeasure. Yet Bell’s text, while not immaculate, does not warrant such dismissive scorn. 74 A third letter, published midway through the series, praised the edition warmly. An anonymous correspondent to the Morning Post heralded the works of Churchill as having done a great ‘honour to the British press’. Its arrangement of contents, ﬁne typography, and sound ‘critical judgment’ were singled out 73 MP (30 May 1777). I have collated Bell’s text against Newton’s for the ﬁrst three books of Milton’s epic, nearly 2,600 verses. Apart from the spellings under challenge, to which Bell adheres, a few other spellings are modernized, and there are differences in capitalization, punctuation, hyphenation, and so forth. The only substantive divergences are ‘Sea-faring’ for ‘Sea-fearing’ (II. 288), ‘bark’ for ‘bark’d’ (II. 654), ‘pale’ for ‘peal’ (II. 656), and ‘whether’ for ‘whither’ (III. 272). Bell wins on the balance of evidence, but his claim that he invariably follows Milton’s spelling and pointing is not true. 74 In a random collation of 2,300 verses from the Canterbury Tales, I found only two substantive errors in Bell’s text; all other deviations from Tyrwhitt were accidentals. I compared Bell’s text against every tenth page of Tyrwhitt’s, along with the text on the facing page.

128

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

for applause. Yet the writer, guessing that ‘extreme care, and attention’ had been devoted to these volumes as ‘the ﬁrst productions of the revived Apollo’, doubted whether this typographical standard could be sustained for long and feared that future volumes would drop in quality. Because even this skepticism is complimentary to the Apollo Press, one suspects that, just as Benevolus and Philo-epimelius may have had links to the London proprietors, this letter could have been drafted by an ally of Bell’s, or by the publisher himself. 75 Leaving aside these epistolary reactions, the reception of Bell’s edition can be charted more objectively by its sales. As the series advanced from 1778 through 1780, new editions of Dryden, Milton, Pope, and Thomson were called for. Bell put off any further reprinting until 1783. When the series was complete he took stock of the volumes that had become depleted since 1780, then set the Apollo Press to work on ‘Bell’s second edition’, a phrase that appeared on the titlepages of all the volumes printed at weekly intervals from late January through August of 1784 (Table 4.3). By the end of this period, fourteen out of ﬁfty poets had been reprinted (Dryden twice), or thirty-nine of the 109 volumes, more than a third of the series. Such extensive reprinting argues a strongly favorable reception. Raymond Williams asserts that, at a time when book-buying was still ‘socially limited’, and when anyone lowering the price of books helped to extend readership, Bell led the way by publishing ‘regular cheap imprints’, the most extensive of which was the The Poets of Great Britain. Serialized publication and low prices were the key to publications, like Bell’s, which ‘permanently enlarged the book-reading public’. 76 Good quality, too, was appreciable. An innovator in bindings, Bell devised a small pallet to hold the type used for lettering spines. Up to this point, ﬁnishers had worked one letter at a time, but now they could process the myriad volumes efﬁciently, and by means of this device precise lettering ‘reached its apogee’ in Bell’s trade bindings around 1780. 77 In the opinion of Stanley Morison, a reliable judge of typography, The Poets of Great Britain marked the onset of Bell’s realization that ‘adequate typographical care’ was an essential ingredient of bookselling. His shrewd choice of Martin as printer brought about a happy collaboration in terms of design. The partnership elicited Bell’s customary hyperbole in the opening phrase of his prospectus—‘Printing in Perfection from the Apollo Press’—and a paean to ‘the unequalled merit’ of Martin: ‘Every page of the work may be admired as a typographical picture which displays at once the divinity and perfections in the art of printing.’ In Morison’s more sober estimate the type, though small, was clear and well spaced, the letterpress title-pages 75

MP (27 Sept. 1779). Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), 162–4. Bell was not, of course, the ﬁrst to think of publication in series. For earlier examples, see R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge, 1957), esp. 15–25. 77 Stuart Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–1800 (Newcastle, Del., and London, 2004), 68 and 108. 76

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

129

Table 4.3. Early reprints of The Poets of Great Britain When reprinted

Volume

Poet

Colophon

Before the series was complete.

41 42 28 29 30 31 76 77 78 79 91 92 107 108 109 47 48 49 40 41 42 32 33 34 80 81 82 84 85 86 87 26 27 99 100 57 56 36 37 38 39

Dryden 2 Dryden 3 Milton 1 Milton 2 Milton 3 Milton 4 Pope 1 Pope 2 Pope 3 Pope 4 Thomson 1 Thomson 2 Churchill 1∗ Churchill 2∗ Churchill 3∗ Prior 1 Prior 2 Prior 3 Dryden 1 Dryden 2 Dryden 3 Butler 1 Butler 2 Butler 3 Gay 1 Gay 2 Gay 3 Young 1 Young 2 Young 3 Young 4 Waller 1 Waller 2 Shenstone 1 Shenstone 2 Addison Congreve Cowley 1 Cowley 2 Cowley 3 Cowley 4

23 Apr. 1778 29 Apr. 1778 4 Dec. 1779 11 Dec. 1779 18 Dec. 1779 25 Dec. 1779 27 May 1780 3 June 1780 10 June 1780 17 June 1780 24 June 1780 30 June 1780 31 Jan. 1784 7 Feb. 1784 14 Feb. 1784 21 Feb. 1784 28 Feb. 1784 6 Mar. 1784 13 Mar. 1784 20 Mar. 1784 27 Mar. 1784 3 Apr. 1784 10 Apr. 1784 24 Apr. 1784 1 May 1784 8 May 1784 15 May 1784 22 May 1784 29 May 1784 5 June 1784 12 June 1784 19 June 1784 26 June 1784 3 July 1784 10 July 1784 17 July 1784 24 July 1784 31 July 1784 7 Aug. 1784 14 Aug. 1784 21 Aug. 1784

During a lull in the series between April 1780 and Sept. 1781 when no new poets were issued.

After the series was completed. Above imprint on each title-page appears ‘Bell’s second edition.’

∗

The imprint year on the title-pages of these vols., 1783, differs from the colophon.

130

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

handsomely laid out, the engraved half-title pages smartly conceived, and the portraits ‘uncommonly well engraved from good originals’. In sum, Bell’s Poets was ‘printed in a style far ﬁner than had ever been seen before in volumes of their small size and great ambitions. They represented an edition de luxe . . . for the middle classes.’ 78 ‘In the infancy of my publication of the POETS’, Bell reﬂected, ‘the whole phalanx of the trade took alarm from the brilliancy of its reception in the world.’ 79 That competent judges admired the volumes is certain. Bell was known for having ‘many of his publications executed in an elegant small size’ by Gilbert Martin, whom George Paton considered to be the ﬁnest printer in Edinburgh, operating ‘the most elegant, jemmy printing ofﬁce in this Place, under the designation of the Apollo Press’. Boswell was struck by the physical appeal of the series: ‘I have seen a specimen of an edition of the Poets at the Apollo press, at Edinburgh, which, for excellence in printing and engraving, highly deserves a liberal encouragement.’ 80 Boswell knew the trade well enough to anticipate how the labors of the Apollo Press would be appreciated in London, which is perhaps why he celebrated the deserts of the series and not the likelihood of its success. Liberal encouragement could not be expected from that quarter.

BOOKSELLERS PRINTING UPON ONE ANOTHER The quarantine Strahan hoped to enforce when he dissuaded Creech from promoting his British Poets in London was short-lived. With printers in Scotland ‘printing upon one another’ and no legal antidote to suppress the contagion, it was bound to spread. Its outbreak in London was all the more virulent for the brashness of its carrier, John Bell, who has been called ‘a syndicate in himself ’ and ‘indisputably the most versatile member of the London printing trade at any period’. 81 Not the least bit pusillanimous, as Creech was accused of being, Bell pursued his interests with tenacity. If ‘piracy’ was the future of publishing, Strahan could only hope to impede its progress. 78 MP (25 Apr. 1777, 23 Nov. 1780); Morison, John Bell, 6, 96–7; and Stanley Morison, The Typographic Arts Past Present and Future (Edinburgh, 1944), 26–7. The presswork in the Poets, though highly satisfactory, left ‘something to be desired’ (John Bell, 6) only in the sense that Bell progressed to exceptionally high typographical standards, even ‘extend[ing] the taste for ﬁne printing to a new public’ (Typographic Arts, 26). 79 MP (3 June 1783). 80 Paton to Gough, 17–18 Aug. 1778, NLS Adv MSS 29.5.7.(ii), fo. 219; Boswell to Johnson, 9 June 1777, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 117–18. Both estimates contained an element of national pride. 81 Stanley Morison, ‘John Bell: A Note Addressed to the Members of the First Edition Club’, pamphlet tipped into copies of Morison’s John Bell bearing the London imprint, 2; P. M. Handover, Printing in London from 1476 to Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 148.

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

131

What that progress entailed in material terms Bell made explicit when he proudly ‘let the facts be known’ about The Poets of Great Britain: his investment of more than £10,000 had been turned into the towering production of 378,000 books. His ﬁgure tallies if one assumes a print run of 3,000 copies for each of 126 volumes—the 109 volumes in the series, plus the twelve reprinted between 1778 and 1780, and another ﬁve or so to account for the second impression of Churchill’s works and whatever printed sheets were lost through ﬁre or shipwreck. The project, exulted Bell, had beneﬁted the nation by giving ‘daily bread, upon an average, to not less than an hundred manufacturers for many years’. 82 In the foreground of his advertising stood the pillars of quality and cheapness— an ‘edition de luxe for the middle classes’—but in retrospect Bell brought the background into focus. By shifting attention to the many producers, he now presented his huge publishing venture as a national good in quite another sense, an engine of employment. It was well understood that a demand for goods stimulated commercial activity. One version of this economic analysis was championed early in the eighteenth century by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. The social justiﬁcation evoked by Bell was different, congruent with the theory articulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the year The Poets of Great Britain was launched. Mandeville’s outlook focused on demand, the hive of national employment reﬂecting the consumer desire for a superﬂuity of goods and services; Smith’s argument, while premised on demand, treated supply as the key to a growing economy. In the ﬁrst view, the extravagant wants of relatively few consumers cause the economy to thrive; in the second, growth in the number of producers broadens the consumer base and makes a country prosper. Like Smith, who famously illustrated the division of labor by counting as many as eighteen different hands employed in the manufacture of a pin, Bell took credit for the economic boon of a hundred workers busied in the production, distribution, and sale of his books, their earnings measured in quotidian sustenance or ‘daily bread’. 83 If success, then, was partly to be gauged by the economic activity that the project generated, one striking measure of its success was the spectacular mobilization of thirty-six booksellers and ﬁrms, united against Bell and forming themselves into a ‘phalanx’ to launch The Works of the English Poets. Edward Dilly, 82 MP (3 June 1783). Bell treated his own workers well, being among the ﬁrst to accede to a request by the United Friends, a bookbinders association, to reduce their work day from fourteen to thirteen hours—yet another cause of friction between him and other members of the London book trade. See Ellic Howe, The London Bookbinder 1780–1806 (London, 1988), 4–6, 12, and 19–20. 83 The economic paradigm offered by pin manufacturing is found in Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1741), the French Enclycopédie (1755), and curiously the introductory number of The Bee (1759), where Goldsmith also brings the general idea of the division of labor to bear on print culture, speciﬁcally magazine production. A difﬁdent essayist is reassured by his bookseller that ‘a Magazine is not the result of any single man’s industry; but goes through as many hands as a new pin, before it is ﬁt for the public’. See The Wealth of Nations, i. 14–15; Goldsmith, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (5 vols. Oxford, 1966), i. 354.

132

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

one of the proprietors of this rival edition, denigrated Bell’s product in a letter to Boswell: The ﬁrst cause that gave rise to this undertaking, I believe, was owing to the little triﬂing edition of the Poets, printing by the Martins, at Edinburgh, and to be sold by Bell, in London. Upon examining the volumes which were printed, the type was found so extremely small, that many persons could not read them; not only this inconvenience attended it, but the inaccuracy of the press was very conspicuous. 84

Dilly’s invidious judgment was laid to rest by Peter Cunningham, the Victorian editor of Johnson’s Lives, who found Bell’s edition preferable ‘in its design’ to the proprietors’ collection, but was later resurrected in the twentieth century by scholars who accepted the letter at face value. 85 While the London trade allegedly cringed to see the nation’s poets ill served in Bell’s small type, Dilly parenthetically revealed a more pressing concern: ‘These reasons, as well as the idea of an invasion of what we call our Literary Property, induced the London Booksellers to print an elegant and accurate edition of all the English Poets of reputation, from Chaucer to the present time.’ 86 Dilly’s gingerly phrasing is telling: their notion of ‘Literary Property’ was nominal, a question of ‘what we call’ rather than what they could protect at law. With no choice ﬁnally but to compete, they challenged Bell’s edition with their own collection, The Works of the English Poets. Ironically, Strahan was drawn into the contest as one of Dilly’s co-proprietors, inviting a direct comparison with Bell. The latter’s expansive vision of books in vast numbers and a legion of artisans earning their wages could not be further from Strahan’s deﬂating prognosis for the most disreputable trade. To the young bookseller, publishing the English classics was (despite the host of troubles it brought him) an exhilarating proposition, a chance to leave his mark on society, an opportunity for aggressive and even dangerously overextended entrepreneurial activity. To the older printer, having to participate in the production of such a 84

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 110. Peter Cunningham, ‘Editor’s Preface’, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (3 vols. London, 1854), i, p. v. Walter Raleigh cited a ‘very inaccurate text in type hardly large enough to be readable’ (Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1910), 128); William Prideaux Courtney and David Nichol Smith quoted Dilly’s impressions (A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, 1915), 130); Richard D. Altick pictured texts ‘printed in eye-straining type and abounding in misprints’ (Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York, 1965), 46); Lawrence Lipking cited Dilly’s ‘standard account’, adding that ‘a poor but copious Scottish edition of English poets was being circulated in England’ (The Ordering of the Arts, 410); John Wain reported that the London booksellers were relieved to discover that Bell’s volumes ‘were carelessly printed and in a type too small to be read with comfort’ (Samuel Johnson (New York, 1975), 344–5). Rejecting Dilly’s account, by contrast, W. Jackson Bate sees the dismissive rhetoric to have been an attempt to hide the booksellers’ real worry (Samuel Johnson (New York, 1977), 525) and Alice Miskimin ﬂatly states that ‘none of the charges bear examination’ (‘The Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Chaucer’, Modern Philology, 77 (1979), 38, 27). 86 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 110. 85

Bell’s Little Triﬂing Edition Revisited

133

set of classics was a depressing affair, a maneuver to shore up the integrity of his profession, a reluctantly defensive tactic to prevent the wholesale erosion of assets. Livelihood and proﬁt, obviously, were factors on both sides of this perceptual chasm. So too was ideology. To say that Bell and Strahan clashed over principles—principles shaped by their conﬂicting pursuits of wealth and power, standing and prestige—is merely to say that both were self-interested men engaged in worldly careers. While their difference in age had much to do with their opposing perspectives, their disagreement had much deeper roots. The ideological signature of one was a restless, quasi-experimental impulse to count up books, to watch their numbers magnify as they transformed, presumably for the good, the publishing trade and society. The earmark of the other was an urge to honor custom, to work within the traditional practices of the trade, to preserve as much as possible when change became inevitable. Such values suffused the letter of Benevolus, which castigated Bell to conﬁne his endeavors to a line of business which his present situations would make sure of success and comfort. But this kind of comfort echoed a bygone era, that port and walnut world which, if it ever existed, had nothing to do with the altered realities of publishing in the 1770s. The notion was a poignant anachronism. The reprint industry had upset the protocols of the whole trade, or at least the privileged part of it, and the fact that Strahan and a large group of proprietors entered the fray, plotting a rival poetry collection, showed that no one could afford to be an idle bystander. If Bell printed upon them, they would print upon Bell. The crux of what Strahan deplored was this: erstwhile copy-holders of the English classics, bereft of their monopoly, had to defend their ﬁnancial interests through competition in the marketplace. A new opportunity for proﬁt had arisen, but it was mandatory; there was no choice but to seize it. To uphold their interests they had to develop new products, had to conform to market pressures over which they no longer exercised much control. Refusing to play the game was impractical; anyone disinclined to participate might as well leave the trade.

5 Johnson’s Prefaces and Bell’s Connected System of Biography We naturally wish to know something of the man who entertains and ediﬁes us. (John Bell, 1777)

Bell lauded readers’ interest in literary biography, but regretted ‘that this curiosity has been but very partially gratiﬁed, the lives of but few of our poets being transmitted to the public along with their writings’. As a remedy, he set out to ‘convey to posterity the most authentic anecdotes relative to those eminent men, whose writings are the object of the present undertaking; and by thus forming a connected system of biography, so far as relates to this particular class of writers, bring the reader acquainted at once with the poet and the man’. 1 Under this arrangement, in theory, the lives together would form a type of literary history, a ‘system’ enabling readers to evaluate the characteristics of a ‘class of writers’ in tandem with the products of their creativity. Conceived of in this way, within the context of a full-dress collection of classic English poets, prefatory lives were indispensable. Given that Creech and Balfour failed in their promise to incorporate the ‘lives of the several poets’ into their series, Bell became the ﬁrst to implement the concept, to articulate its purpose most fully, and, by advertising ‘a biographical and critical account of each author’, to anticipate the core phrase in the title of Johnson’s Prefaces. 2 While he did not hire a literary celebrity to write them, his compiler(s) appropriated lives from authoritative editions in folio (for Cowley and Donne), quarto (for Thomson and Swift), and octavo. Where lives of such recognized standing were not to be had, Bell relied on quantity as a tangible sign of value. Willing to undertake the added costs of paper and printing entailed in this feature, Bell knew the symbolic return on his investment would be worth it. The stately life-and-works paradigm underscored once again his sure grasp of the connection between material and cultural capital. 1

Bell’s prospectus.

2

MP (16 May 1777).

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

135

THE MAGNUM NOMEN The very idea of ‘Johnson’s Poets’ enchanted Boswell. ‘[Is] not the charm of this publication’, he mused, ‘chieﬂy owing to the magnum nomen in the front of it?’ The publishers of The Works of the English Poets counted on that charm, as Edward Dilly revealed: ‘a concise account of the life of each authour, by Dr. Johnson, will be a very valuable addition, and stamp the reputation of this edition superiour to any thing that is gone before’. Their marketing ploy was transparent to one reviewer, who confessed that ‘from the ﬁrst of its being advertised, we considered Dr. Johnson’s name merely as a lure which the proprietors of the work had obtained, to draw in the unwary purchaser’. 3 Whether inspired, opportunistic, cynical, or a combination thereof, the strategy worked. Their edition became synonymous with Johnson’s name—so potent a name and so natural a choice, it would seem, that as soon as biographical and critical prefaces were slated for inclusion, Johnson would have been the only writer to be considered for the job. It was not so, however, as appears from conﬂicting accounts of what led to Johnson’s commission. Dilly’s letter to Boswell has long held sway as the authoritative version: [A] select number of the most respectable booksellers met on the occasion; and, on consulting together, agreed, that all the proprietors of copy-right in the various Poets should be summoned together; and when their opinions were given, to proceed immediately on the business. Accordingly a meeting was held, consisting of about forty of the most respectable booksellers of London, when it was agreed that an elegant and uniform edition of ‘The English Poets’ should be immediately printed, with a concise account of the life of each authour, by Dr. Samuel Johnson; and that three persons should be deputed to wait upon Dr. Johnson, to solicit him to undertake the Lives, viz. T. Davies, Strahan, and Cadell. The Doctor very politely undertook it, and seemed exceedingly pleased with the proposal.

A different story is told by poet, critic, biographer, and translator Percival Stockdale: ‘When several of the principal booksellers of LONDON had determined to publish a new edition of the english poets, they likewise determined to give a previous very short account, or epitome of the life of each poet; and a few general, and comprehensive critical remarks on his writings.’ Favorable notice having been taken of Stockdale’s work in this vein (‘especially, on this occasion . . . [his] life of WALLER’), ‘it was resolved’, he reports, ‘that I should be employed in preparing for the press, the intended edition of the english poets’. Stockdale names the bearers of the news and their role in the deliberations: Soon after that meeting, I accidentally met two booksellers; Mr. CONANT of ﬂeet-street; and Mr. EVANS of the strand; who acquainted me with the choice which their society 3 Boswell to Johnson (24 Apr. 1777), Dilly to Boswell (26 Sept. 1777), in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 108, 110–11; MR 61 (1779), 1.

136

Johnson’s Prefaces and

had made . . . and which they offered me in their united names. They told me, at the same time, that they had very warmly recommended me to that employment. I replied, that I accepted it with pleasure, and that I was obliged to them for their kind attention to me. 4

Neither account falsiﬁes the other. If supporters of Stockdale gained a hearing in preliminary discussions, only to be outvoted at a subsequent stage, these two steps would square with Dilly’s report of a strategy session among select booksellers, followed by a general conference to settle the logistics of their plan. Both authors had their advocates. In partial conﬁrmation of Stockdale’s narrative, John Nichols recalled that ‘some of the proprietors were desirous that he should be the Biographer’. 5 Among them was Nathaniel Conant, with whom Stockdale was proudly ‘on a footing of intimacy’, and who, as eventual publisher of his Six Discourses (1777) and his Inquiry into the Nature and Genuine Laws of Poetry (1778), stood to beneﬁt from a rise in Stockdale’s prestige. Yet aligned against him, Stockdale pouted, were ‘implacable, and powerful enemies, in the literary trade; whose antipathy against me, proceeded . . . from their partiality, and zeal, for their particular friends; and for the authours with whom they were connected by the ties of interest’. Among these partisans was Strahan, whom Dilly identiﬁes as a member of the committee that recruited Johnson, and whom Stockdale portrays as wielding a veto: ‘notwithstanding the great importance which the name of Dr. JOHNSON would certainly have given to any publication, I verily believe that they would have invariably adhered to their ﬁrst determination in my favour;—if it had not been overruled, and defeated by STRAHAN ’ S dislike of me; who was materially concerned in the project’. Plausibly, then, Conant and Evans urged their fellow proprietors to choose Stockdale. Their recommendation would have rested chieﬂy on The Works of Edmund Waller (1772), which had been welcomed by the Critical Review, particularly Stockdale’s ‘life of that celebrated poet, drawn up with great care, and interspersed with many ingenious observations’, although the Monthly Review credited him with ‘nothing new in the Life of Waller’ except for a ‘verbose, affected Proemium’. Perceived Johnsonian overtones in Stockdale’s prose, Howard Weinbrot hints, might have gained him support, even if the derogatory jibe in the Monthly Review shows that his style (like Johnson’s) had its detractors. 6 Crossing paths with the author, Conant and Evans let him into their conﬁdence, and on this basis—premature, and either exaggerated by one party or misconstrued by the other—Stockdale thought had been offered the commission. Evans, it seems, was a notoriously untrustworthy source; according 4

The Memoirs of the Life, and Writings of Percival Stockdale (2 vols. London, 1809), ii. 193–7. J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (9 vols. London, 1812–15), viii. 26. 6 CR 35 (1773), 50; MR 48 (1773), 319; and Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Samuel Johnson, Percival Stockdale, and Brick-Bats from Grubstreet: Some Later Responses to the Lives of the Poets’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 56 (1993), 132. 5

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

137

to Isaac Reed, he ‘never repeated anything faithfully in his life’. 7 Whether or not the faulty intelligence came from Evans, it fell to Conant to correct matters later, informing Stockdale ‘with apparent regret, of the change which had been made in the choice of the editor of the poets. He seemed to endeavour to soften my fall, by paying some empty compliments to my well-known abilities; and by ascribing the new resolution of the booksellers, merely to the preponderating, and imperious weight of JOHNSON ’ S name.’ 8 Stockdale pretended not to be ‘mortiﬁed’ by the choice of Johnson, but felt aggrieved that ‘in changing their authour, after they had ﬁxed on me; and in breaking even their verbal engagement to me, they had not used me well’. His sense of injury was aggravated when Conant invited him to index the collection. Stockdale spurned the offer as ‘an undistinguishing, vulgar, and barbarous kind of charity’, protesting improbably that he was not ‘discomposed by this ignorant, and unfeeling impertinence’; having fancied himself editor, he would not submit to the ‘punishment of index-making’. Meeting Johnson not long afterward, Stockdale peevishly related ‘these transactions with the booksellers. I informed him with a circumstantial exactness, and force, of their engagement to me, before they had made an offer of the work to him.’ In no way could Johnson have alleviated the indignity, and Stockdale reports that he ‘made me no reply; he was perfectly silent’. Johnson was nearly as reticent when Boswell solicited information about the project. In a letter of 3 May 1777 Johnson coyly replied, ‘I am engaged to write little Lives, and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets.’ 9 Eager for details, Boswell prodded him on the ﬁrst night of his visit to Johnson at Ashbourne from 14–24 September 1777. Having assumed that Johnson would direct the project, Boswell now learnt that Johnson had agreed merely ‘to furnish a Preface and Life to any poet the booksellers pleased’. Chagrined, he asked whether his friend would stoop to write a preface ‘to any dunce’s works’. ‘Yes, Sir’, Johnson retorted, ‘and say he was a dunce.’ Annoyed by Boswell’s sarcasm, he seemed ‘not much to relish talking of this edition’. 10 The littleness of the assignment was emphatic. In Johnson’s words, the task was ‘not very extensive, or difﬁcult’; as Stockdale put it, the proprietors wanted ‘a very short account, or epitome of the life of each poet; and a few general, 7 Isaac Reed Diaries 1762–1804, ed. Claude E. Jones (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946), 267–8. ‘Nothing can be more amusing than Anecdotes’, noted Reed, ‘but I have frequently thought that no reliance ought to be placed upon them unless the character of the relator is ﬁrst considered’ (276). 8 Citing Thomas Percy’s note on this matter in reference to Boswell’s Life—‘NB No mention of its being proposed by Steevens.’—Roger Lonsdale suggests that an intermediary such as George Steevens might have explored the idea of the commission with Johnson before he was approached by the Strahan delegation. See Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (4 vols. Oxford, 2006), i. 2, 78. 9 Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 20. 10 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 137; Boswell in Extremes 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York, 1970), 150.

138

Johnson’s Prefaces and

and comprehensive critical remarks on his writings’. 11 The partners requested little because they were in haste to begin production. With so many prefaces looming (ultimately ﬁfty-two), they might also have worried that anything more substantial would have been daunting. In Roger Lonsdale’s analysis, the nearly 70-year-old Johnson conceivably appreciated the offer as ‘an opportunity of collecting his remaining energies, and of ending his literary career by contributing to an elaborate and prestigious but, on the face of it, not too demanding project’. 12 That doubts were harbored about those energies is evident from the triumphal claim of Sir John Hawkins that Johnson ‘undertook and executed the task with great alacrity, and in a manner that argued not the least decline in his faculties’, and from Boswell’s air of vindication in stating that the Prefaces offered a ‘luminous proof that the vigour of his mind in all its faculties, whether memory, judgment, or imagination, was not in the least abated’. Prompted, it may be, by these assertions, Stockdale countered maliciously that ‘when [Johnson] wrote the Lives of the Poets, his Faculties were extremely on the Decline’. 13 While Boswell imagined that Johnson would exercise a more exalted editorial function, and Stockdale, hopeful of ‘preparing for the press, the intended edition of the english poets’, anticipated some measure of authority above and beyond the prefaces, Dilly’s idea of ‘editorship’ was more limited. The committees he identiﬁed—the ﬁrst to hire Johnson, a second ‘to engage the best engravers’, and a third ‘for giving directions about the paper, printing, &c.’, all three to ensure that the project would ‘be conducted with spirit, and in the best manner, with respect to authourship, editorship, engravings, &c. &c.’—equated the editorship of the collection with the monitoring of its production. That burden, as Lonsdale convincingly argues, fell upon John Nichols, who printed the Prefaces himself; goaded Johnson on, sometimes almost in daily communication with him; kept the collection in the public eye through progress reports on Johnson’s writing; generated advertisements; helped to establish the canons of various poets, turning up pieces omitted from previous editions, or tracking down the works of poets for whom collected editions had not yet been published; and saw that the

11 Samuel Johnson, ‘Advertisement’ (dated 15 Mar. 1779), Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, i–iv (London, 1779), v–x (London, 1781), i, p. v. 12 Lives, i. 2. 13 Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1787), 532; Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 370; and Stockdale to Edward Jerningham, 30 Mar. 1793, in Weinbrot, ‘Johnson, Stockdale, and Brick-Bats’, 128. Boswell’s remark upset Donald Greene, who challenged, ‘Why this apologia? Who had charged that Johnson’s mental powers might be failing?’ (‘ ’Tis a Pretty Book, Mr. Boswell, But—’, Georgia Review, 32 (1978), 30). When the Prefaces were published, Dr Douglas was impressed to ﬁnd ‘a man of seventy writing with so much ﬁre’ (Lives, i. 36). Sir Walter Scott viewed Stockdale and his slurs on Johnson with contempt: ‘A thin, vivacious, emaciated spectre, ﬂuttering about booksellers’ shops, eager to attract attention. . . . The judgments which this conceited, cockbrained, ﬁdgetty man passes upon the motives and conduct of . . . Dr. Johnson serve to shew that there is no wound festers and rankles so deeply as what is inﬂicted on personal vanity’ (‘Dr. Johnson Bows to a Bishop’, Bodleian Library Record, 1/2 (1940), 201).

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

139

Gentleman’s Magazine, which he printed and co-owned, devoted ample space to reviews of the collection. 14 Ofﬁcially Johnson took credit for the inclusion of four poets: Pomfret, Yalden, Blackmore, and Watts. But he was privy to the editorial process (knowing, for instance, that Rochester’s poems were to be ‘castrated’—the bawdy ones removed—and that Prior’s were not), and occasionally offered advice revealing a rather relaxed concept of what belonged in the collection. He casually wondered, for example, whether ‘a few pages of Fairfax would enrich our edition’, and thought it might be worth while to include Milton’s treatise on education. 15 If Johnson was responsible for the inclusion of Thomson—‘I think I have persuaded the booksellers to insert something of Thomson’, he noted cryptically in a letter to Boswell—then why did he not add that name to the other four? Had Boswell interpreted the comment in this way, would he not have said so when accounting for Johnson’s contributions to the project? If, as William St Clair posits, ‘the publishers wished to exclude Thomson’s Seasons, ready in their pique at the Scottish victory in 1774, to ignore the bestselling poet who happened to be Scottish’, their petulance caused them to think perversely, against their own interests and contrary to Strahan’s absolute stand-and-defend policy. 16 The difference between Johnson and Hugh Blair on the question of editorship is instructive. Blair evidently advised Creech on the choice of poets and order of publication, but withheld his name from the Edinburgh series, thereby shunning editorial credit. While this was acceptable to Creech, the London booksellers engaged Johnson precisely to publicize—and even exaggerate—his afﬁliation. Arrogating his name, they deceived the buying public (and risked alienating Johnson) by lettering the spines of their volumes to read ‘Johnson’s Poets’, as though he indeed were editor. Johnson chided them on ‘your edition, which is very impudently called mine’, and brooded over the affront: ‘It is great impudence to put Johnson’s Poets on the back of books which Johnson neither recommended nor revised. . . . How then are they Johnson’s? This is indecent.’ 17 Indecent or not, their tactic succeeded, and most people identiﬁed the product with him. 18 With the ‘most respectable booksellers in London’ acting indecently, 14

Lives, i. 24, 53–72. Lives, iv. 105; Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 191–2; and Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 116–17, where Redford notes that Johnson himself appended an extract from Edward Fairfax’s version of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (see Lives, ii. 55–9). 16 Letter of 3 May 1777, Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 20; St Clair, Reading Nation, 126. G. B. Hill hesitantly offered that the inclusion of Thomson ‘seems to be due to Johnson’ (Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford 1905), iii. 302). James Engell, otherwise incredulous that the booksellers could have meant to exclude Thomson, suggests that his being from Scotland, where Bell’s Poets was printed, temporarily blinded them (Forming the Critical Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 163). Lonsdale, after quoting from Johnson’s letter of 3 May, notes that ‘Thomson’s inclusion was duly mentioned in a new advertisement for the English Poets in the Public Advertiser on 7 May 1777’ (Lives, i. 9), but this advertisement had ﬁrst appeared on 18 Apr. 17 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iv. 35; and Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 226. 18 See Lives, i. 62–3 on the belief that ‘Johnson had in some sense supervised the English Poets’. 15

140

Johnson’s Prefaces and

perhaps the trade had gone awry, as Strahan had warned, the irony being that Strahan himself should be implicated in such a disreputable business trick. Such things (he might have moralized) were bound to happen in an unregulated marketplace where everyone was driven to seize a competitive advantage.

AN APOLOGY TO THE PARTNERS By 29 March 1777 the booksellers had secured Johnson’s services. 19 Since Dilly alleged that their project originated after ‘many persons’ had found fault with Bell’s edition, this scrutiny would have had to occur prior to 29 March, and yet the ﬁrst volume of Milton was not published until 25 April. Was the work inspected before its publication? Had Creech passed intelligence along to the London trade, letting them know what was afoot at the Apollo Press in Edinburgh? Not many people could have seen the imprints, unless Bell circulated his specimen volumes in March prior to publication, or displayed them at his bookshop in the Strand. Or Dilly, confusing his chronology, may have been thinking of criticisms voiced later. At any rate, the alleged shortcomings of the Apollo Press were beside the point. After the London trade had battled futilely against Bell’s British Theatre, word alone that the feisty publisher was now invading the British poets would have startled them into mustering their forces again to resist a further assault on their monopoly. As a diversionary tactic, the trade proclaimed on 9 April 1777 that its edition was ‘In the Press, and speedily will be published’. 20 As Strahan once explained the rationale for advertising a work before it was ready for release, ‘it should be advertised as about to be published, that [the bookseller] may have an Opportunity of recommending it to the Notice of Gentlemen as early as possible, who frequent his Shop, and many others connected with it’. 21 In some cases, such early notiﬁcation might induce would-be customers not to purchase a rival title already (or sooner to be) in print. In the present instance, Bell was beginning to move his product into the market, while the London conger could offer nothing but promises. To expedite production, they set ten printing houses in motion. 22 Just getting organized, however, was complicated. ‘It is computed the above Work 19 Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, i (New Haven, 1958), 263–4. 20 PA (9 Apr. 1777). 21 Strahan to Creech, 19 Nov. 1779. Premature advertising was useful to hold an impatient public at bay, as Charles Burney did in July 1784 when his Commemoration of Handel was anxiously awaited. He ‘had a single page printed, in order to advertise with truth, that the pamphlet is in the Press, & will be speedily published’, but it was a half-truth; the work did not appear until 24 Jan. 1785. The single page was set in type on 30 July. See Burney to Lord Sandwich (2 Aug. 1784) and to Thomas Twining (3 Aug. 1784) in The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, i. 1751–1784, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford, 1991), 432–4. 22 The printers and the volumes for which they were responsible are listed by J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2 vols. Oxford, 2000), ii. 1352.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

141

will not exceed 40 volumes’, they guessed on 18 April, far underestimating the project, which came to sixty-eight volumes. 23 Doubtless the presses were busy by 26 September, when Dilly told Boswell that the collection was ‘now printing’. Yet not till October 1777, it seems, did Johnson begin to write. At the outset he intended to abide by the minimal stipulation of the partners, recalling that ‘My purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we ﬁnd in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character.’ But by the spring of 1778, motivated by an ‘honest desire of giving useful pleasure’, he had cast this model aside. 24 At times he wrote quickly and voluminously, at other times not at all, and was nowhere near completion by mid-October 1778, when the printing of the ﬁfty-six poetry volumes was almost ﬁnished, leaving the proprietors with a difﬁcult decision. They faced ﬁve unappealing options: 1. To publish nothing until Johnson ﬁnished his task. This course would have prolonged indeﬁnitely an intolerable situation: ﬁfty of Bell’s volumes were available by September 1778, uncontested in the market (except for some sets of Creech and Boyle now on sale in London). 2. To publish all the poetry volumes, but hold back the prefaces until Johnson ﬁnished. This had been the plan for Creech’s edition, but as an afterthought. In this case, it would have made for a ridiculous anomaly, ‘Johnson’s Poets’ with no Johnson, utterly defeating the partners’ marketing scheme. 3. To publish what Johnson had completed to date, binding up his prefaces with the poems they introduced, while reserving the rest of the poems for similar publication, either serially as Johnson progressed or collectively when he had ended his labors. This course of action would have led to publishing fewer than half the volumes in the collection initially, and thereafter would have committed the proprietors to an uncertain, dilatory, haphazard timetable. Johnson endorsed this option. When, on behalf of the anxious partners, Thomas Cadell pressed him to explain where he stood, Johnson replied, ‘You shall publish as far as Hughes, by Christmas.’ Johnson conceded that he had ‘taken a course very different from what I originally thought on’, writing substantial lives, even ‘little volumes’ in several instances, instead of the ‘four of [sic] ﬁve pages to an authour’ as originally planned. ‘I am exceedingly sorry for the delay’, he offered, and ended on a contrite note: ‘Make my compliments, and as far as you can, my apologies to the partners’. 25 4. To publish whatever prefaces were ready, afﬁxing them to their respective poets (as in option 3), and release the rest of the poems (without prefaces), promising to sell the balance of the lives in a batch when they were ready. This 23

PA (18 Apr. 1777), repeated on 7 May. Johnson’s ‘Advertisement’, Prefaces, i, p. v. Lonsdale describes Johnson’s evolving approach to his task in Lives, i. 21–8. 25 Lonsdale brings this previously unpublished letter to light in Lives, i. 30. 24

142

Johnson’s Prefaces and

would have resulted in a half-baked product, with some prefaces joined to the works and others detached. 5. To publish the complete poems, along with separate volumes containing the prefaces Johnson had ﬁnished, and to sell the other lives in additional volumes when done. This last expedient was deemed least objectionable. On 31 March 1779, having fretted long enough, the proprietors delivered their collection with only a portion of Johnson’s work. It was a birth at once overdue and premature; only twenty-two of ﬁfty-two lives were done. The individual prefaces, while paginated for attachment to the works of the respective poets, were bound in four volumes under a separate title, to which six more were added in 1781. More like Appendices than Prefaces, their isolation from the volumes they were supposed to introduce made it awkward for readers to move from one to the other. Making this connection required leaﬁng through the index, but one reader solved the problem by drawing up an alphabetical table of poets on the ﬂy-leaves of the ﬁrst volume, indicating where their respective works and lives were located (Fig. 5.1). Observing no integral bond between the Prefaces and the collection, Bell later scoffed that Johnson’s concern in ‘Johnson’s Poets’ went no further than his ‘writing and compiling the four volumes of the lives’ (the reprint of the Prefaces in 1781 as The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets). That work, he gloated, paid ‘no reference or allusion whatever to that Edition of the Poets, more than to mine.—Nay, I will even dare him so say, that he saw even a single sheet of manuscript, or printed copy, of what is called his Edition of the Poets, before it came ﬁnished from the press.’ 26 In view of such indifference, Bell implied that Johnson’s work might just as well have been attached to The Poets of Great Britain. Ironically, some of it had been appropriated for Bell’s prefaces, the borrowing of his compilers running the gamut from the promiscuous helpings of typical hackwork to outright plagiarism. The mischief began soon after the ﬁfty-six volumes of poetry were published with the ﬁrst installment of Johnson’s Prefaces. For a compiler seeking biographical details and critical opinion, this new source was irresistible. By 26 August 1779 the ﬁrst purloined material had been printed in Edinburgh, in Bell’s ‘Life of Sir John Denham’, to accompany The Poetical Works of Denham when offered for sale in London on 18 December. Not long afterward the proprietors sought legal counsel to establish whether the offense was actionable. Advice in hand, several of them met at Anderton’s Coffeehouse on 27 March 1780. Calling themselves ‘the Committee of the Poets’, they resolved as follows: Agreed unanimously, in Consideration of the Case laid before them, and Mr Kenyon’s Opinion thereupon, that Mr Bell’s printing the Life of Denham ‘is a plain Invasion 26 MP (3 June 1783). In several prefaces, as Lonsdale points out, Johnson actually did refer to the edn., often to criticize an omission or an inclusion, and otherwise to distance himself from the ‘compilers’ of the collection (Lives, i. 64–6).

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

143

Figure 5.1. Manuscript index to ‘Johnson’s Poets’. Written on the ﬂy-leaves of the ﬁrst volume in a set of The Works of the English Poets (rectos only shown; ﬁrst and third pages), it indicates one reader’s attempt to lessen the awkwardness of shuttling between any given poem and Johnson’s critical commentary on it. Courtesy of Gavin Murdoch. of the Property of the Proprietors of the Lives written by Dr Johnson; and that they may have Remedy by Bill in Equity’, that a Prosecution be immediately commenced against Mr Bell, under the Direction of Mr Reed; and that the Proprietors be acquainted therewith.

Thirteen parties witnessed the resolution: Thomas Longman, George Nicol, Thomas Cadell, Thomas Evans, Lockyer Davis, Thomas Davies, John Rivington’s Sons, Nathaniel Conant, John Nichols, George Robinson, Bedwell Law, Benjamin White, and Robert Baldwin. 27 They chose their consultants wisely. Lloyd Kenyon was poised to receive a silk gown (on 30 June), the ﬁrst in a train of elevations which led to his succeeding Lord Mansﬁeld as chief justice in 1788. As an equity judge of superlative skill, his merits were ‘rapidity and accuracy’; perfectly versed in this branch of law, 27 ‘MS Agreement of the Booksellers, 27 March 1780’, in the Hyde-Adam extra-illustrated Life of Johnson, iii 2. 111, from the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library. I am grateful to the late David Fleeman for bringing this manuscript to my attention.

144

Johnson’s Prefaces and

he decided cases ‘without any hesitation or delay’. A century later it was said of him that ‘no judge who presided so long in the king’s bench has been as seldom overruled’, and that ‘the decisions and rulings of no judge stand in higher estimation than those of Lord Kenyon’. 28 Isaac Reed, too, was a natural choice. He was an intimate of the London literary scene, whose passion was to amplify and correct the biographical and bibliographical record of the nation. By 1780 his assistance, usually anonymous, had been vital to the notes in Nichols’s Select Collection of Poems (4 vols., 1780), the revisions of Biographia Britannica, and the republication of Dodsley’s Collection of Old Plays (6 vols. 1780), including the preface, annotations, and accounts of the playwrights. 29 More pertinent was his link to Johnson’s Prefaces, as recalled in Boswell’s summary of the help Johnson received: ‘But he was principally indebted to my steady friend Mr. Isaac Reed, of Staple-Inn, whose extensive and accurate knowledge of English literary History I do not express with exaggeration, when I say it is wonderful.’ 30 If anyone knew the exigencies of compiling lives and the practical divide between legitimate borrowing and piracy, it was Isaac Reed.

THAT PART WHICH YOU MIGHT CALL PIRACY Rather than to face this formidable legal challenge and expose himself in the courts to possible penalties—an injunction, or worse—Bell cut his losses, and withdrew the offending preface from sale. 31 Changes to the book in the ensuing months tell of his efforts to regroup and to salvage from the setback something of a commercial opportunity. The biographical half of the plagiarized preface was a jigsaw combination of elements from Johnson and Biographia Britannica, shown at its most intricate in the following passage. For the sake of comparison, the text from Athenæ

28 George T. Kenyon, The Life of Lloyd, the First Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice of England (London, 1873), 173; Edward Foss, Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England (London, 1870), 384; and DNB. Kenyon was admired for his ‘intuitive quickness in seeing all the bearings of the most complicated case, and his faculty of at once availing himself of all his legal resources’. His advice was in high demand; by around 1781 he was taking in above 3000l . a year by answering cases. See Lord Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England (3 vols. London, 1849–57), iii. 44 and 12. 29 Arthur Sherbo, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum (ELS Monograph Series, 45; Victoria, 1989), chs. 3 and 4. Reed’s anonymity was broken when the editors of Biographia Britannica expressed their gratitude, naming him twice in the ‘Preface to the Second Edition of the Second Volume’ (1780), p. viii. 30 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iv. 37. 31 Had he lost in court, Bell might have paid a ﬁne of one penny for every sheet in his custody, ‘either printed or printing, published, or exposed to sale’, and forfeited all sheets to the copyright holders, who ‘forthwith [would] damask, and make waste paper of them’ (8 Anne, c. 19, § I).

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

145

Oxonienses (AO), a common earlier source, precedes the pertinent sections from Biographia Britannica (BB), Johnson’s Prefaces (SJ ), and Bell (JB). 32 [AO] Shortly after he was prick’d High Sheriff for Surrey, and made Governour of Farnham-Castle for the King: But he being an inexpert Soldier, soon after left that Ofﬁce, and retired to his Maj. at Oxon, where he printed his Poem called Cooper’s-hill. [BB] Soon after he was pricked for High-Sheriff of the county of Surrey, and made Governor of Farnham-Castle for the King. But, not being well skilled in military affairs, he soon quitted that post, and retired to his Majesty at Oxford, where he published his poem called Cooper’s Hill. [SJ ] He was after that pricked for sheriff of Surrey, and made governor of Farnham Castle for the king; but he soon resigned that charge, and retreated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published ‘Cooper’s Hill’. [JB]

He was soon after pricked for High Sheriff of the county of Surrey, having an estate at Egham in that county, and appointed Governour of Farnham Castle; but his skill in military affairs not being extensive he resigned that charge, and went to King Charles I. then at Oxford, where, in 1643, he published Cooper’s Hill.

[SJ syntax preferred] [BB] [BB note (d)] [either source] [BB] [SJ ] [BB] [SJ ]

Throughout Bell’s life SJ provides the framework, while materials from BB are either interpolated—with phrases, sentences, and paragraphs spliced together from the two sources—or relegated to footnotes. Most of SJ 11–20, however, is quoted wholesale. Where the critical section of the life begins, Bell’s text becomes wholly Johnson’s. With the exception of ﬁve altered phrases, one sentence deletion, the omission of a few verses in the poetical examples, and the switching of paragraphs 25 and 26, Johnson’s critical discussion of Denham (SJ 21–42) is reprinted in full. Like the other volumes in Bell’s edition, The Poetical Works of John Denham was printed in an 18mo format in sixes, the ﬁrst three leaves of each gathering being signed with letters and roman numerals (e.g. D, Dij, Diij). Since each volume contains two letterpress title-pages ([A], [Aij]), the ﬁrst page of any prefatory life is p. [v], signed Aiij. ‘The Life of Sir John Denham’ appeared on pp. [v]–xviii, followed by a dedication ‘To the King’ (pp. [xix]–xxii) and the poems (pp. [23]–178). With a two-page table of contents, the book came to 180 pages, precisely ﬁve sheets of paper, for a collation of A–P6 . The paper 32 Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses (2nd edn. 2 vols. London, 1721), ii. 423; Biographia Britannica (6 vols. London, 1747–66), iii. 1646; Johnson, Prefaces, Denham 10; ‘The Life of Sir John Denham’, The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Edinburgh, 1779), p. vii. I use the text of the Prefaces, since this is what Bell’s compiler would have read; for ease of reference, however, I cite the paragraph numbers from Lonsdale’s edn. of the Lives. The 2nd edn. of Biographia Britannica (6 vols. 1778–93) began to appear in time for Bell’s compiler to make some use of its ﬁrst volume.

146

Johnson’s Prefaces and

used for Denham had a crowned horn watermark with a pendant ‘GR’, and a ‘J TAYLOR’ countermark. 33 Such was the book containing the pirated Johnsonian preface. While the ﬁnal four sheets (pp. 37–180) were never altered, changes to the ﬁrst sheet deﬁne the second and third states of this edition and its subsequent reissue. 34 As an interim measure, after the piracy had been withdrawn from sale but before a revised life had been prepared, Bell sold copies of the book without the preface, canceling pp. [v]–xviii, or seven leaves (A3 through B3) from the ﬁrst two gatherings. 35 Such copies constitute a second state, typographically identical to the ﬁrst except for the missing life. That copies in this state were sold, notwithstanding their mutilation, was the ﬁrst sign of Bell’s impatience to put this episode behind him, followed shortly by a second. Anxious lest his predicament be prolonged, Bell employed a different press (presumably closer to home, in London) to print some sheets with the revised life the moment it was ready, and resumed a limited sale of the volume—now in its third state—by inserting the fresh ‘Life of Sir John Denham’ into the gap left by the cancels. 36 Departures from the house style of Gilbert Martin at the Apollo Press include a double rule above the title of the life on p. [v], found nowhere else in Bell’s edition; block quotations of poetry which are ﬂush left, not indented as in the rest of Bell’s series; and Arabic instead of Roman numerals in the signings. In addition, the type is larger—a bourgeois letter with a small brevier or large minion for the block quotations, in place of the Apollo Press brevier with block quotations in pearl. The paper, too, featuring a ‘W’ countermark, differs from any other used by Martin. 37 The format employed was a version of 18mo called ‘sixteen pages to a half sheet of eighteens’, resulting in eight leaves, signed A 33 The watermark is closest to number 2754 (and similar to 2756 and 2758) in Edward Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hilversum, 1950). As Martin imposed his pages, the watermark and countermark wound up centered on the ﬁfth leaves of the ﬁrst and third gatherings, with portions of the ‘J’ sometimes visible on the second leaf in the gutter, and a fraction of the ‘R’ appearing at the fore-edge of the second or ﬁfth leaf of the second gathering. 34 For the differentiation between state and issue, see my ‘Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell’s “Connected System of Biography” and the Use of Johnson’s Prefaces’, Studies in Bibliography, 48 (1995), 198 n. 35 Had copies in this state been altered in no other way, the stubs of the ﬁve cancellanda would be visible between the second title-page and the dedication (p. [xix]). (Five, not seven, because A3 and its conjugate [A4] could be removed entirely.) None that I have examined ﬁts this description. Three stubs only are present in a copy at the University of Virginia: those of B1, B2, and B3. The leaves conjugate with the title-pages (A5 and A6) were cancelled at the fold, requiring the title-pages to be pasted onto the stub of B1. Other copies betray an effort either to conceal the loss of text or perhaps to strengthen the attachment of the remaining leaves of $A and $B to the rest of the volume. In copies at Wellesley and Notre Dame the ﬁve stubs crop up, not in front of the dedication, but between pp. 24 and 25, just before the C gathering. What remains of $B was lifted up; the stubs of B1, B2 and B3 were folded back in the opposite direction; and the gathering was nestled into the middle of the A gathering. Its collation: A1–2 B4–6 [stubs B1–3 A5–6 ] C–P6 . 36 To the best of my knowledge Bell was not yet printing for himself, as he was eventually to do. 37 Having seen only one copy of Denham’s poems in this third state, and hence only one half sheet, I do not know what watermark stood opposite the countermark.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

147

through A4, and numbered [v]–xx. 38 As the sixteen-page life did not ﬁt the fourteen-page gap left by the cancels (‘To the King’ starts on p. xix), the volume could have been spared its redundant pp. xix and xx if the new life had been paginated [iii]–xviii, instead of [v]–xx. 39 This third state was a stopgap. A limited supply would have sufﬁced until the revised text had made its way to Edinburgh and back, where Martin could print it in the usual house style. At this point it was simplest to reprint the entire ﬁrst sheet, which effectively made a cancel of the ﬁrst three gatherings. This new sheet from the Apollo Press deﬁnes Bell’s reissue of the Denham edition. As before, the paper bears the watermark of a crowned horn with pendant GR, but the countermark now reads ‘IV’. 40 The text of the sixteen-page life has been followed verbatim, with changes in accidentals, but has been recast in brevier type to restore the original pagination ([v]–xviii). 41 Since the ﬁrst sheet encompassed pp. [i]–36, the other features also needing to be reset were the title-pages, dedication, all of ‘Cooper’s Hill’, and the ﬁrst eighteen verses of ‘On the Earl of Strafford’s Trial and Death’. The imprint was updated to 1780, to suit Bell’s purpose in readvertising the edition. These sheets were shipped to London and sewn onto the second through ﬁfth sheets of the original 1779 stock, readying the volume for reissue. How much of Bell’s print run was affected by these changes? Of ﬁfty-one copies checked at random in various catalogues, thirty have the 1779 title-page, and twenty-one the 1780 title-page, suggesting that at least half the print run was sold before Bell reissued the edition. 42 As for the relative numbers of the 1779 issue sold in its various states, the seventeen copies I have inspected or queried others about may serve as an estimate: eleven conform to the original state (with the pirated life), ﬁve to the second state (without a life), and only one to the third state (with the sixteen-page life). If representative, this random sample implies a considerable sale of the original state (nearly 40 percent of the print run), a far from negligible number sold in the imperfect second state (between 15 and 20 percent), and a fairly minimal sale of the third state. 43

38 The term is found in Caleb Stower, The Printer’s Grammar 1808 (English Bibliographical Sources, 3/4; London 1965), 182. In this case a seven-leaf or fourteen-page version of 18mo would have been more convenient, which, had it been workable, Bell presumably would have requested. I have seen nothing of the sort in the printers’ manuals. 39 Technically this would have made pp. [iii] and iv redundant, but since the second title-page and its blank verso were not numbered, the glitch in pagination would have been less noticeable. 40 Although the same design, the 1780 watermark is smaller than its 1779 look-alike, 10.0 cm from the top of the crown to the bottom of the ‘GR’, as opposed to 11.6 cm. 41 To identify the type sizes I have relied on John Richardson, Jr., ‘Correlated Type Sizes and Names for the Fifteenth through Twentieth Century’, Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990), 251–72. 42 These results were derived from ESTC, OCLC, RLIN, and NUC (along with chance discoveries) at the time I wrote ‘Patchwork and Piracy’. 43 A copy of this third state, curiously, happened to serve as the Morisons’ copy-text for The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Perth, 1780), as evidenced by the compositor’s ﬁdelity to the sixteen-page life. The Apollo Press printing differs in scores of accidentals.

148

Johnson’s Prefaces and

The reissue was heralded in the Morning Post of 19 July 1780. 44 With his usual promotional ﬂare Bell advertised the ‘New Edition’ of Denham’s works with an open rebuke ‘To the FORTY BOOKSELLERS, who have so long, and impotently attempted by their combined wealth and inﬂuence, as well as by every plausible imposition on the public, which art could suggest, or malevolence devise, to suppress and to rival Bell’s Edition of the Poets, or to annihilate the publisher’. He trumpeted the ‘NEW LIFE of the Author, intended as a PARAPHRASE of that, which is supposed to have been written, by Dr. SAMUEL JOHNSON’. By refusing to concede that his ﬁrst life had been a piracy, and casting doubt on the allegation itself, Bell implied that his opponents had not dealt with him in good faith. Addressing his rivals ‘with contempt’, he palliated his offense and improved upon hints of their fraud: This is the ﬁrst time I have had occasion, and I chearfully crave your pardon, for I have innocently offended against the legal rules of your business, ’tho not against the daily practice of yourselves. The Life of DENHAM, which was published in my First Edition, was, it seems, inadvertently, and I solemnly declare, without my consent or knowledge, partly composed from that, which has been forced upon the world by you as the production of Dr. JOHNSON : The Poetical Works of the respective Poets, require not, and I ﬂatter myself my publication of them needs not, the aid even of a JOHNSON ’ S name to recommend them to the favour of the world.

While the piracy of Johnson could not have been inadvertent, Bell’s denial of involvement is plausible. Apart from his policy of reprinting authoritative lives, where available, and otherwise the fullest warrantable compilation, there is no reason to think that he supervised this work closely, especially if it was done in Edinburgh. As to the proprietors’ ‘daily practice’ belying their legal rules, there is a grain of truth to the charge. Publishers commonly tested their borrowing limits, though it was disingenuous to suggest that theft as extensive as the Denham piracy, and with materials so recent, was the norm. More incriminating is Bell’s view of their marginal ethics in promotional matters. The whole collection had in fact ‘been forced upon the world . . . as the production of Dr. Johnson’. To say these were ‘Johnson’s Poets’ was, as we have seen, a deceit decried by Johnson himself. No one had a better sense of marketing license—where the lines could be drawn, and where crossed—than Bell. In closing, Bell softened his grievance, portraying himself as a responsible bookseller whose initiative had been swift and voluntary: in justice, therefore, to my own feelings, and to prevent you any cause of detraction, I have cancelled that part which you might call piracy, as soon as I discovered it; and I have now substituted another account of the Author, equally circumstantial; and I ﬂatter myself which will be more acceptable; comparison will convince, the perusal may instruct and entertain you. 44

The letter/advertisement was partially reset and repeated on 20 July.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

149

The challenge to compare the two versions, an otherwise obligatory promotional topos, is all the more deﬁant because the revised life was not an overhaul. It was based on the contested text itself, the source of Bell’s legal headache, and declared merely to be ‘intended as a paraphrase’. In the biographical half of the revised preface, the erstwhile quotations from Johnson were targeted for change. Witness the following revision, compared with the original sources: 45 [BB]

In 1652, or thereabout, he returned into England; and, his paternal estate being greatly reduced by gaming and the Civil Wars, he was kindly entertained by the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, and continued with that Nobleman about a year. (iii. 1647) [SJ ] About this time, what estate the war and the gamesters had left him was sold, by order of the parliament; and when, in 1652, he returned to England, he was entertained by the Earl of Pembroke. (16; my emphasis) [1779] Mr. Denham returned into England about the year 1652, and what estate the Civil war and the gamesters had left him being sold by order of the Parliament, he was kindly entertained by the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, with whom he continued near twelve months. (x; my emphasis) [1780] About the year 1652 he returned to England; and his paternal estate being greatly reduced by gaming and the Civil wars, he was kindly entertained by the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, with whom he resided near twelve months. (x)

The tactic is clear: Johnson’s phrase (in italics) is relinquished, and the reviser retreats to BB. Obviously this kind of revision, combing through the pirated text phrase by phrase to detect and remedy the plagiarism, was possible only with copies of Johnson and BB open before the reviser. While Johnson’s preface served as a map for revision, it was also used in one instance for further, though more circumspect, borrowing. Bell’s 1779 text called upon BB and SJ to recount Denham’s appointment as Surveyor of the King’s Buildings and his receiving the Order of the Bath. Johnson’s paragraph consists of three sentences, the second of which, with two surgical transplants from BB, formed Bell’s paragraph. The reviser cut away the plagiarized words, again falling back on BB, but then quarried additional material from Johnson’s ﬁrst and third sentences: [SJ ]

Of the next years of his life there is no account. . . . He seems now to have learned some attention to money; for Wood says, that he got by his place seven thousand pounds. (17)

45 In what follows I refer to Bell’s pirated text as ‘1779’ and the revision of it as ‘1780’. For the revision I have used The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham (Edinburgh, 1780), printed by the Apollo Press, rather than the earlier setting of the text by the unidentiﬁed press.

150

Johnson’s Prefaces and

[1780] From this period to the Restoration, in 1660, there appears to be a chasm in the history of Denham’s life . . . He likewise now appears to have acquired a greater degree of economical prudence than he had been usually blessed with, as Wood informs us that he realized by his appointment upwards of 7000l . (x)

The mode of disguise here is wordiness, one of the principal means of paraphrase employed in the revision. Verbosity could also be used to mask the retention of Johnson’s verbal formulae: [1779] He seems to have divided his studies between law and poetry; for, in 1636, he translated the second book of the Eneid. (vi; SJ 7) [1780] During the period he had abstained from his favourite amusement, in consequence of his father’s admonitions, he appears to have divided his time between the study of the law and the cultivation of his poetical talents; for in the year 1636 he translated the second book of the Æneid, which was published twenty years after, under the title of The Destruction of Troy; or, An Essay upon the second book of Virgil’s Æneid. (vi–vii)

The core borrowing is embellished with a dependent clause in front (the needless reiteration of a previous point) and a relative clause at the end (merely the addition of a title and publication date). If the compiler could fall back on BB or even Wood where the biographical outline was concerned, the critical section presented no such opportunity. There were stark alternatives to retaining Johnson’s opinions: either to form independent literary appraisals or to abandon his points altogether. Even under the legal scrutiny to which the revision would have been subjected, Johnson’s ideas were considered fair game so long as some of the words were changed. The critical section itself was reorganized, with Johnson’s order of presentation being altered. 46 Remarkably, however, the paraphrase preserved Johnson’s ideas. As a measure of this retention, the following passage may be compared with its revision: [1779] He appears to have had, in common with all mankind, the ambition of being, upon proper occasions, a merry fellow; and, in common with most of them, to have been by nature, or by early habits, debarred from it. Nothing is less exhilerating [sic] than the ludicrousness of Denham. He does not fail for want of efforts: he is familiar, he is gross; but he is never merry, unless the Speech against Peace in the Close Committee be excepted. For grave burlesque, however, his imitation of Davenant shews him to have been well qualiﬁed. (xi–xii; SJ 22)

46 Johnson proceeds ﬁrst by genre (‘descriptive, ludicrous, didactic, and sublime’, though not in that order), turns to consider poetic style, and concludes by summing up the ‘petty faults’ of Denham’s ‘ﬁrst productions’. Bell’s revised life begins with the versiﬁcation, moves on through the faults, and ﬁnishes with the survey of genres (SJ 21, 36–38, 36, 39–42, 21–4, 26, 27, 29, 28, 30, 32–4, 42).

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

151

[1780] . . . in the ludicrous he generally fails of answering the end proposed. There is nothing in this species of his poetry that excites our risibility, or that tends to exhilarate. He affects to be thought a humorous writer, but Nature seems to have debarred him from being so. When he attempts to be witty he is familiar, gross, and disgusting to a chaste imagination. In every effort he miscarries, unless we except The Speech against peace in the Close Committee, which is written with some humour. His imitation of D’Avenant, indeed, shows that he was not ill qualiﬁed for grave burlesque. (xiv)

The reviser shufﬂes a few sentences, alters syntax, changes a verb from active to passive voice, makes substitutions for words and phrases, and elaborates a conceit or two. Still, the ideas and examples remain Johnson’s, even many of the key terms. Little substance is lost in paraphrase. The thoughts which do not survive—the comment about a shared human desire to be thought funny, and the glance at habit as a developmental factor—are missed for the distinctive turn of mind that they convey. As if to offset the loss of Johnson’s voice, the reviser affects a Johnsonian style, as seen for example in the revision of this sentence: [1779] Nothing is less exhilerating [sic] than the ludicrousness of Denham. (xi; SJ 22) [1780] There is nothing in this species of his poetry that excites our risibility, or that tends to exhilarate. (xiv)

Intent on parallelism, the reviser mimics Johnson’s diction by adding a second polysyllabic, Latinate word (‘risibility’ to complement ‘exhilarate’). Too much strain goes into this stylistic elevation, as is evident in the appraisal of Denham’s rhymes: [1779] . . . as exact at least as those of other poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can get. (xvii; SJ 39) [1780] . . . as well coupled as those of other poets; yet we may discern in many of them a manifest inattention . . . (xiii)

The original is relaxed and colloquial, the revision mannered and self-conscious. Blind or indifferent to the energy and relative informality of Johnson’s later prose style, the reviser echoes the allegedly ‘stiff, laboured, and pedantic’ style of the Rambler and Dictionary years. 47 This anachronism is audible in substitutions like these: 48 47 This was one view of Johnson’s prose in the early 1750s, attributed by Charlotte Lennox to readers who could not appreciate Johnson’s ‘Language, because it reaches to Perfection’, and who were therefore deaf to its ‘inimitable Beauties’ (The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford, 1989), 253). 48 The two phrases designated solely by SJ paragraph numbers do not occur in Bell’s 1779 life. Taken up for the ﬁrst time in 1780, their handling is in line with the stylistic transformation of the earlier piracy.

152

Johnson’s Prefaces and

1779 got by his place (SJ 17) ends of his verses (xvii; SJ 41) the morality too frequent (xiii; SJ 29) learned some attention to money (SJ 17) law and poetry (vi; SJ 7)

1780 realized by his appointment (x) terminations of his lines (xiii) the morality superabundant (xv) acquired a greater degree of economical prudence (x) the study of the law and the cultivation of his poetical talents (vi–vii)

While never amounting to a sustained imitation of ‘Johnsonian’ prose, this stylistic preening comes across as a bid to out-Johnson Johnson. It is tempting to regard this mimicry also as a touch of recalcitrance. What better irreverence than to tease the lawyers who would vet the revision to detect any lingering elements of piracy? In this light even a polite commonplace takes on a sly edge: [1779] The strength of Denham . . . is to be found in many lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk. (xv; SJ 34) [1780] His forte appears to have been a mode of conveying a great deal of meaning in few words, or of compressing (if we may be allowed the phrase) a large quantity of sentiment into a little space. (xvii)

Under the circumstances of legal duress, the reviser’s begging leave to use a phrase might be seen as a mock show of deference to the lawyers. Bell did not forget this lesson, or the sting to his pride. 49 Yet he had to bide his time before he could ﬁnally thumb his nose at the proprietors of Johnson’s Prefaces. In 1793 he published a second edition of The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, reinstating his 1779 piracy instead of the revised life of 1780. Fourteen years had elapsed since 1779, and because Johnson had died in 1784, the copyright on his ‘Life of Denham’ could not be renewed. So Bell had the last word. Later still, in 1807, Samuel Bagster and others reprinted Bell’s collection in expanded form as The Poets of Great Britain in Sixty-One Double Volumes. Several of Johnson’s lives now were reprinted openly, among them the ‘Life of Denham’—the full text this time, with Johnson’s name on the title-page and on the ﬁrst page of the life. 50 49 When an unauthorized abridgement was published of his imprint, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy (5 vols. 1785), Bell got the courts to grant an injunction against ‘a publication piratically taken from another’. The offense? Taking ‘facts, and even the terms in which they were related . . . frequently verbatim from the original work’. See ‘Bell against Walker and Debrett’, Brown’s Chancery Cases 452, 28 Eng. Rep. 1235. 50 When Courtney and Smith say that ‘Johnson’s Lives were incorporated in John Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain, 109 vols.’ (A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson, 147), they must have had Bagster’s edn. in mind (see Ch. 9). Had they known of any lives adopted by Bell (other than that of Savage, which

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

153

BELL’S USE OF JOHNSON’S PREFACES Sorting through the tangle of sources used in Bell’s lives brings to light the earliest practical critique of Johnson’s Prefaces, a compiler’s-eye view of their most enticing elements. Johnson’s texts provided a ready supply of material too good to pass up despite the trouble over Denham. The rapidity with which material from Johnson’s Prefaces was absorbed into Bell’s edition is noteworthy, in light of other contingencies. In most cases the compiler had to obtain other biographical sources as well, and the order in which the poets were printed also depended on pertinent copy-texts of their poems being procured. As accident and delay ordained it, there were two phases of borrowing. Had Bell kept to his initial timetable and published one volume per week, no pilfering would have occurred, for his series would have been completed before Johnson’s texts appeared in print. Yet the ﬁre that burnt the Apollo Press to the ground in 1778 kept Martin out of commission until mid-1779, by which time the ﬁrst four volumes of the Prefaces had been published (31 March 1779). After ten months of printing, the Apollo Press fell idle again until after the last six volumes of the Prefaces had appeared (15 May 1781). 51 Table 5.1, which charts the printing of Bell’s Poets against the two-phase publication of the Prefaces, shows which of Johnson’s lives were used as compared with those in print when Bell’s compiler presumably was hunting for sources. The question was moot for Johnson’s lives of Milton, Dryden, Butler, Waller, and Cowley, since Bell’s editions of these poets were published before Johnson’s lives of them went on sale. Several lives in the fourth volume of Prefaces, however, proved to be eligible targets. Pomfret and Garth were overlooked, but Denham, Hughes, and Roscommon drew the attention of Bell’s compiler. In addition to the other factors possibly contributing to the seventeen-month hiatus in the printing of Bell’s series between April 1780 and September 1781 (discussed in Chapter 4), the publication of Johnson’s Prefaces conceivably played a role. The series faltered just when Bell would have been apprised of the lawsuit, assuming the proprietors notiﬁed him soon after their resolution of 27 March. By the time Bell had sent word to Martin, the ﬁrst of the two Somerville volumes would have been in the press; and with these volumes, their colophons dated 15 and 22 April, the series abruptly ceased. Printing may have been suspended while the legal action was pending and until Bell could reissue the Denham in altered form, but after July 1780, why the further delay? Had they note on p. 17), they would have listed them on pp. 150–2, where they trace the reappearance of individual lives in subsequent publications, even where altered, excerpted, or present merely ‘in substance’. Thus they seem, pace their statement, to have been unaware of the borrowing discussed here. 51 For the publication dates, see Lives, i. 34, 46; J. D. Fleeman, ‘Some Proofs of Johnson’s Prefaces to the Poets’, The Library, 5th ser. 17 (1962), 213; and Fleeman, ‘The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings’, Studies in the Book Trade, in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford, 1975), 217.

154

Johnson’s Prefaces and

Table 5.1. Bell’s use of Johnson’s Prefaces Bell’s lives

Johnson’s Prefaces

Poet

Date printed

1779 vols.

Milton Pope Dryden Butler Prior Thomson Gay Waller Young Cowley Spenser Parnell Congreve Swift Addison Shenstone

17 Aug. 1776 9 Oct. 1776 23 Jan. 1777 3 Mar. 1777 9 Apr. 1777 8 May 1777 4 June 1777 8 Sep. 1777 22 Sep. 1777 30 Oct. 1777 3 Jan. 1778 14 Mar. 1778 4 Apr. 1778 8 Apr. 1778 8 May 1778 16 May 1778

ii

Churchill Pomfret Donne Garth Denham Hughes Fenton Dyer Lansdowne Buckingham Savage Roscommon Mallet Somerville

1 July 1779 22 July 1779 29 July 1779 19 Aug. 1779 26 Aug. 1779 2 Sep. 1779 16 Sep. 1779 23 Sep. 1779 27 Nov. 1779 22 Jan. 1780 19 Feb. 1780 11 Mar. 1780 8 Apr. 1780 15 Apr. 1780

vii iii ii vi ix viii i x i viii vi viii v x

[31 Mar. 1779

Collins Hammond Cunningham Broome King Rowe Tickell Akenside Lyttelton West, G. Philips, J.

1781 vols.

Preface used by Bell?

Time from Prefaces being published to Bell’s printing

Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable [Not in Prefaces] Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable

vols. i–iv] iv iv iv iv vi x vi v ix iv x ix

[15 May 1781

vols. v–x]

15 Sep. 1781 15 Sep. 1781 22 Sep. 1781 29 Sep. 1781 6 Oct. 1781 20 Oct. 1781 27 Oct. 1781 3 Nov. 1781 17 Nov. 1781 24 Nov. 1781 1 Dec. 1781

ix ix viii iv vi vi x x x iv

[Not in Prefaces] No [Not in Prefaces] No Yes Yes Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Unavailable Yes Unavailable Unavailable Yes Yes [Not in Prefaces] Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

4 months, 4 weeks 5 months

11 months, 2 weeks

4 months 4 months 4 months, 2 weeks 5 months, 1 week 5 months, 2 weeks 5 months, 3 weeks 6 months 6 months, 1 week 30 months

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

155

Table 5.1. (Continued) Bell’s lives Poet

Date printed

Philips, A. Moore Armstrong Smith Watts Pitt Gray West, R. Chaucer

8 Dec. 1781 15 Dec. 1781 22 Dec. 1781 22 Dec. 1781 5 Jan. 1782 25 May 1782 3 Aug. 1782 3 Aug. 1782 7 Sep. 1782

Johnson’s Prefaces 1779 vols.

1781 vols. viii

iv viii viii x

Preface used by Bell?

Time from Prefaces being published to Bell’s printing

Yes [Not in Prefaces] [Not in Prefaces] Yes No Yes No [Not in Prefaces] [Not in Prefaces]

6 months, 3 weeks

30 months, 3 weeks 12 months, 1 week

he been low on capital, Martin could not have printed Bell’s British Theatre at a healthy pace during this period. If Bell occupied himself with this and other projects, waiting to resume the Poets until Johnson’s second installment of Prefaces appeared, motivated by the desire to provide his compiler with this additional and tantalizingly rich biographical source, his delay was a gamble. Could an urge to nettle his rivals have gotten the better of his business acumen? Whatever the case, the series and Bell’s borrowing from Johnson resumed simultaneously with the Collins/Hammond volume, printed just four months after publication of volumes v–x of the Prefaces. This was roughly the same interval as had been required for the Denham piracy. Leaving aside the life of Savage, which was sui generis, twenty of Johnson’s prefaces would have been considered by Bell’s compiler. 52 Fifteen were used. When not appropriated for the main narrative, they were treated as a source of threads for interweaving or snippets to be ‘thrown into marginal readings’. If the Denham preface had not been challenged, piracy might well have been the preferred mode. Bell’s life of Roscommon, printed before the legal issue had been raised, was nearly as ﬂagrant a theft as the other, its second half taken en bloc from Johnson. 53 Subsequent borrowing, however, consisted of shorter passages, usually in lazy paraphrases which, far from disguising their origin, 52 Bell reprinted Johnson’s Life of Savage in 1780, more than a year before the biography was incorporated into the Prefaces. Copyright protection of the work, ﬁrst published in 1744, had long since expired. 53 The ﬁrst half of Roscommon’s life was reprinted from Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, ii. 344–53 (itself a near copy of Johnson’s biography in GM 18 (1748), 214– 17) up to the criticism of the ‘Essay on Translated Verse’, at which point the compiler, switching to Johnson’s preface, pirated the entire section of criticism (paragraphs 27–39). Bell was not forced to retract this preface, and the text was never changed. See next note on the authorship of Cibber’s work.

156

Johnson’s Prefaces and

preserved much of Johnson’s syntax and word choice. Apart from Denham and Roscommon, three other Johnsonian lives served as Bell’s primary source: those of Broome, Lyttelton, and Gilbert West. Strands from Johnson’s accounts of Akenside, Hughes, Ambrose Philips, Pitt, Rowe, and Tickell were interwoven with other narratives. And material for footnotes was lifted from the lives of Collins, Hammond, John Philips, and Smith. At the most rudimentary level, Bell’s compiler gathered key minutiae from Johnson—a missing date, birthplace, or name. In the life of Hughes, for instance, drawn mainly from William Duncombe’s account of the poet, the compiler embellishes a reference to ‘Mr. Montague’ with Johnson’s epithet, ‘the general patron of the followers of the Muses’ (vi; SJ 4). To the end of a paragraph in the same life the compiler tacks on this sentence: ‘The same year 1699 our Author produced a song on the Duke of Gloucester’s birth-day’ (vii; SJ 4). The need for this addition is symptomatic of the shortage of dates and titles that often confronted the compiler. What many earlier literary biographies lacked is what the Prefaces usually provided: a ﬁrmer chronology. To this obvious task Johnson brought his fascination with the course of life, especially a writer’s life, and marked with empathy the stages of his subjects’ poetic careers. For example, he notes the ﬁrst attempt of Ambrose Philips, with verses on the death of Queen Mary, to ‘solicit the notice of the world’; Bell’s compiler interrupts the account from his primary source, Shiels’s Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to insert this bit of intelligence ([v]; SJ 1). 54 Little grafts were also made of Johnson’s ‘characters’—the central, transitional section in many of the Prefaces. Examples of this borrowing are the thumbnail sketches of Tickell (xii; SJ 17) and Ambrose Philips (vii; SJ 34). Of highest biographical value were the anecdotes. As a friend of Collins, Johnson had seen ‘the guineas safe in his hand’ from an advance he accepted for translating Aristotle’s Poetics; he knew also that, the bargain never fulﬁlled, Collins had returned the sum. In abbreviated form (minus the ocular testimony), this anecdote becomes a footnote in Bell (ix; SJ 5). Johnson related a story told by Dodsley, who had sought Pope’s opinion of The Pleasures of Imagination in manuscript; ‘this [is] no every-day writer’, Pope advised him, a comment that reappears in Bell’s life of Akenside (ix; SJ 4). In his life of Smith, Johnson tells how the unlucky poet, ignoring the advice of his apothecary, died from a dose of self-prescribed medicine; how Addison asked Smith to write a history of the revolution; and how the poet had no part in corrupting the text of Clarendon’s 54 Robert Shiels drafted the copy for Cibber’s Lives, but Theophilus Cibber revised the sheets, adding notes, anecdotes, paragraphs, and perhaps even entire lives. See Lonsdale in Lives, iii. 372–3; Arthur Freeman, ‘The Beginnings of Shakespearean (and Jonsonian) Forgery: Attribution and the Politics of Exposure, Part II’, The Library, 7th ser. 5 (2004), 402–4; Raleigh, Six Essays, 120–5; and William R. Keast, ‘Johnson and “Cibber’s” Lives of the Poets, 1753’, in Carroll Camden (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago, 1963), 89–101.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

157

history. All this Johnson had on the authority of his friend Gilbert Walmsley, who had known Smith, and it winds up in Bell (vi–vii, x; SJ 43, 56–9, 71). By means of such anecdotes Johnson preserved the kind of biographical detail he prized most: volatile and evanescent impressions, related by living witnesses, which are lost forever if not set down in print. In seizing upon them, Bell’s compiler attests to their deep appeal. The Prefaces offered an even greater fund of critical opinions. From this storehouse dozens of Johnsonian renderings were pilfered. Into Shiels’s discussion of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent the compiler awkwardly inserts Johnson’s appraisal of the drama, ‘one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage, of which it still keeps, and probably will long keep, possession, the story being of a domestick nature, the fable interesting, and the language delightful’ (xiii; SJ 7). Johnson’s critical estimate of The Royal Convert is also introduced: ‘The fable of this play is taken from dark and barbarous times, and the scene is native, being laid among our ancestors. Rhodogune is a character highly tragical, vicious with a mind that must have been truly heroick if formed to virtue’ (xiv–xv; SJ 11). Where stronger praise is offered, Johnson is quoted directly and given an attribution, as when he extols Rowe’s Lucan as ‘one of the greatest productions of English poetry’ (xviii; SJ 35). The approach is similar in the life of Ambrose Philips: Johnson lurks anonymously in paraphrase where the poet’s ‘epitome of Hacket’s Life of Williams has been thought destitute of spirit’, but is openly acknowledged for his characterization of The Freethinker, which ‘Dr. Johnson styles his happiest undertaking’ (xvi, xvii; SJ 5, 28). Some of Johnson’s less favorable assessments were either ignored or mitigated. A frank appraisal of Tickell, for instance, was carefully doctored. [SJ ]

Of the poems yet unmentioned the longest is Kensington Gardens, of which the versiﬁcation is smooth and elegant, but the ﬁction unskilfully compounded of Grecian Deities and Gothick Fairies. Neither species of those exploded beings could have done much; and when they are brought together, they only make each other more contemptible. (17) [JB] Kensington Garden is the longest of our Author’s poems. The ﬁction is compounded partly of Grecian deities and partly of Gothick Fairies. The versiﬁcation is harmonious, and the language elegant. (viii)

The compiler overlooks the sarcasm about ‘exploded beings’, ignores the adverb ‘unskilfully’, and adorns what little praise Johnson admits, pairing ‘language’ with ‘versiﬁcation’ and promoting the versiﬁcation from ‘smooth’ to ‘harmonious’. Johnson’s dismissal of two tragedies by Ambrose Philips as being ‘not below mediocrity, nor above it’ (35) elicits an oblique refutation; Bell’s life counters, in reference to other poems, that ‘though they reach not excellence they are yet above mediocrity’ (xxii). Even if commercial expedience, not conviction, spurred this merest of critical quibbles, such an answer to the Prefaces offers an early hint of the polemical engagement sparked by Johnson’s texts.

158

Johnson’s Prefaces and

In more accomplished hands the interweaving and footnoting of Johnson might have been a seamless process. But, no doubt for reasons of haste, ragged edges are sometimes obvious. Where Johnson and Langhorne record different years for an event in Collins’s life, Bell’s text gives both (viii). More glaringly, text and footnote in the life of Smith are at war over the question of his student days at Oxford. The main narrative, copied from Shiels, lauds Smith for his talents, making no mention of his expulsion from the university. This unﬂattering episode, distilled from Johnson (SJ 30, 35–6, 40), is added in a footnote, with a lame attempt to mute the dissonance: ‘We must observe in this note, notwithstanding of what is said in the text, that the indecency of Smith’s behavior’ led him to be expelled (v). Incongruities also surface in the life of Akenside. Despite ﬁnding fault with his odes, the source mainly followed by the compiler granted that ‘still there is in them a noble vein of poetry, united with manly sense, and applied to excellent purposes’ (BB 2nd edn., [F]). Johnson, however, Bell’s complementary source, offered no palliatives: ‘Of his odes nothing favourable can be said’ (SJ 23). Rather than trying to reconcile the difference, the compiler leaves the verdict to the reader: ‘In this diversity of opinions the reader will determine for himself ’ (xiv–xv). Confronted with similar discrepancies, Johnson would have ruminated over the credibility of different sources or the vagaries of taste. Precisely this quality— a strong voice, an idiosyncratic authorial presence—is missing from Bell’s lives, or is lost in translation. In the life of John Philips, for example, Johnson corrects a mistaken attribution: ‘The inscription at Westminster was written, as I have heard, by Dr. Atterbury, though commonly given to Dr. Friend’ (8). Bell’s compiler copies the sentence word for word, but deletes ‘as I have heard’ (xxxviii). Johnson’s colloquial presence is masked in other cases with anonymous phrases like ‘it is said’ or ‘we are told’, substitutions which preserve the air of oral history but efface its authority. The compiler had a unique perspective on Johnson’s Prefaces. His assignment was to organize various sources as efﬁciently as possible into more or less coherent biographical and critical prefaces. The reception of Johnson displayed in his borrowings, while neither sustained nor consistent, comprises a spontaneous, pragmatic, rough-and-ready evaluation. While Johnson’s later reviewers went their heated ways, the utilitarian compiler identiﬁed materials of immediate value for adding interest, depth, or simple facts to his account. The record of what was selected, and what was altered, forms an important chapter in the early reception of Johnson’s Prefaces. ADDITIONAL MATERIALS INTERWOVEN An image for Bell’s handling of sources is provided in a footnote to the life of John Philips: ‘This life is principally copied from Dr. Sewell’s Life of Philips: where that was found defective the additional materials will be found either interwove

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

159

in the text or thrown into marginal readings.’ 55 The metaphor is apt: to mend a central text, threads from other narratives are interwoven, or patches stitched into the ‘margins’ (i.e. footnotes). The notion of an imperfect fabric, whether carefully mended or hastily patched, captures the process of compiling Bell’s lives. Charting them shows the range and practice of literary biography at the time. Table 5.2 categorizes the sources for Bell’s lives based on the taxonomy of Pat Rogers: ‘single’ lives indicate those published independently or preﬁxed to the author’s works; ‘general’ lives denote entries in universal or national dictionaries of biography; and ‘authorial’ lives come from collections dealing exclusively with writers. 56 At the outset of the series, Bell relied strongly on the single lives and multiple sources which were abundant for the most famous poets. Equally noteworthy later on, once the ﬁnal volumes of the Prefaces had been published, was the compiler’s persistent recourse to Johnson. In length the lives vary from 2 to 142 pages. At their simplest, they delivered what Johnson had been asked to provide, an ‘Advertisement . . . containing a few dates and a general character’. Such were ‘The Life of John Dyer’ and the ‘Advertisement’ for Armstrong (one of only two so designated, the other being for Mallet). 57 At their most complex, they pulled together information from multiple sources. A ﬁne example of this is ‘The Life of Waller’, for which nine sources were consulted:

r Percival Stockdale, ‘The Life of Edmund Waller’, The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose (1772), pp. [i]-lxv;

r Lord Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (3 vols. Oxford, 1707);

r Lord Clarendon, The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1759); r Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1732); r ‘Preface to the second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems; printed in the year 1690’, The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose (1772), 229–34;

r Sir Francis Atterbury, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Edmond [sic] Waller, Esq.’, Poems, &c. Written upon Several Occasions, and to Several Persons (1711), pp. [i]–lxxxii; r TC ii. 240–64; 55 The Poetical Works of John Philips, p. [v]. Subsequent citations are parenthetical: the poet whose biography is being cited will be plain from the context, the title of every volume began with ‘The Poetical Works of ’, and the imprint year may be gleaned from the colophons in Table 4.1. 56 Pat Rogers, ‘Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries’, Review of English Studies, NS 31 (1980), 149–71, esp. p. 150. A broader deﬁnition of ‘single lives’ is warranted for Table 5.2, for my use of the term embraces non-biographical features that performed the ofﬁce of introducing an edn. of an author’s works. Bell’s compiler beneﬁted from such sources in edns. of Armstrong, Broome, Butler, Chaucer, Dyer, Hammond, Parnell, and Waller. 57 Bell’s sources were the untitled preface to Miscellanies; by John Armstrong, MD (2 vols. (1770), i, pp. [iii]–[v]; and ‘Advertisement’, Poems. By John Dyer, L.L.B. (1761), pp. [iii]–v.

160

Johnson’s Prefaces and

Table 5.2. Kinds of sources for Bell’s lives Poet

Single lives

Milton Pope Dryden Butler Prior Thomson Gay Waller Young Cowley Spenser Parnell Congreve Swift Addison Shenstone Churchill Pomfret Donne Garth Denham (1779) Denham (1780) Hughes Fenton Dyer Lansdowne Buckingham Savage Roscommon Mallet Somerville Collins Hammond Cunningham Broome King Rowe Tickell Akenside Lyttelton West, G. Philips, J. Philips, A. Moore, E.

2

General lives

Other sources

No biography

1 TC TC

BB 2 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 2

Authorial lives

1 1 AO

BB BB

TC

3 2

BD

2 BB

TC

3

3 TC

1 1 1 1

1 TC TC AO

BB BB

SJ SJ SJ

1 BB

TC

1 TC

1

BB 1 TC

SJ CP NB

1 1

SJ SJ

1

SJ BB BB

TC TC TC

SJ SJ SJ SJ SJ SJ SJ

BB 1 1

BB TC CP

∗ ∗ 2

1

2

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

161

Table 5.2. (Continued) Poet

Single lives

Armstrong Smith Watts Pitt Gray West, R. Chaucer

1

General lives

Authorial lives

TC

SJ

TC

SJ

Other sources

No biography

1 1

1 NB

1

BB

AO = Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, 2nd edn. (2 vols. London, 1721); BB = Biographia Britannica (6 vols. London, 1747–66); BD = A New and General Biographical Dictionary (12 vols. London, 1761– 7); CP = David Erskine Baker, A Companion to the Play-House (2 vols. London, 1764); SJ = Johnson; TC = Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (5 vols. London, 1753). ∗ Material, perhaps newly gathered for Bell, not located in previous lives.

r BB vi. 4099–4115; and r AO ii. 24–25. Extensive quotations from Stockdale frame the narrative. The compiler, guided to several sources by citations in Biographia Britannica, interweaves threads from that entry and from Wood, Atterbury, and Cibber; and interpolates substantial passages from Whitelocke, both Clarendon titles, and the ‘Preface’ to Waller’s 1690 Works. Although the sources for Bell’s lives usually are not credited, the compiler in this case cites Whitelocke and Clarendon’s History by edition and page number (xii, xiv), refers to Wood and his Athenæ Oxonienses (vi), and acknowledges Stockdale twice (ix, xxxvii). Just as thorough was the 130-page life of Swift, which drew upon:

r John Hawkesworth, ‘An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, r r r r

D.D., Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin’, The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift (12 vols. 1756), i. [1]–71; Lord Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (3rd edn. 1752); Deane Swift, An Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character, of Dr. Jonathan Swift (1755); Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (2 vols. Dublin, 1748); and Johnson’s Rambler, no. 60.

162

Johnson’s Prefaces and

The compiler relied upon Hawkesworth for the central narrative, resorting to the other sources for elaboration and lengthy embellishment. 58 Bell’s policy was to adopt authoritative sources, whether free-standing biographies or, more typically, prefaces packaged with respected editions of the poet. Among the latter were:

r Zachary Grey, ‘The Author’s Life’ and ‘Preface’, from Butler’s Hudibras (Cambridge, 1744);

r John Langhorne, ‘Memoirs of the Author’, The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins (1771);

r Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham r r r r r r r r

Cowley. Written to Mr. M. Clifford’, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (1668); Izaak Walton, ‘The Life of Dr. John Donne’, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670); ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author’, The Works of Mr. John Gay (Dublin, 1770); William Mason, ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. Gray’, The Poems of Mr. Gray (York, 1775); Elijah Fenton, ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton’, Paradise Lost (1739); Thomas Newton, ‘The Life of Milton’, Paradise Lost (1749); Samuel Humphreys, ‘Some Account of the Author’, Matthew Prior, Poems on Several Occasions (2 vols. 1767); Patrick Murdoch, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. James Thomson’, The Works of James Thomson (1762); and ‘The Preface, with Some Account of the Author’s Life and Character’, The Works of the Late Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts (1753).

Direct copying outweighs paraphrase in the lives, and paraphrase rarely wanders far from the source text. An ‘unavoidable minimum of bare fact simply had to be retailed’, as Rogers points out, and Johnson himself was often restricted to ‘close paraphrase, diversiﬁed by elegant variations of expression’ (170). Less effort to diversify phrasing is evident in Bell’s lives. At times one source merely footnotes another, as when an excerpt from Warton’s An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Mr. Pope (1756) runs its course beneath the otherwise uninterrupted reprint of Murdoch’s life of Thomson. When material borrowed from different sources is juxtaposed, it is seldom reworked for the sake of consistency. In some cases no remedy was sought for discrepancies introduced by an alien footnote or 58

For detailed collations of all Bell’s lives, see Bonnell, ‘Patchwork and Piracy’, 212–22.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

163

consecutive borrowings that expressed jarring opinions. The compiler, unable to determine which of two sources was correct about the year Collins left Oxford for London, wrote ‘1743 or 1744’. A large seam is visible in the life of Churchill, where a lengthy ‘anecdote frequently told of him’, taken from the novel Chrysal, contradicts his portrayal (in the biography reprinted from the Annual Register) as a ‘thoughtless man . . . entirely guided by his native turbulence of temper’ (xiii). So saccharine is the former excerpt, recounting an episode in which the guinea’s owner lifts a family out of misery, that the skeptical compiler issues a caveat, ‘leaving the credit due to the story, which is much to the honour of humanity, with the reader’ (xiii). 59 When a source directs its reader to an earlier text of the author, and where Bell’s would serve just as well, the compiler always plugs Bell. In the life of Addison a reference to ‘Mr. Tickell’s 4to edition’ is changed to ‘in this edition’ (ix; TC iii. 308). In place of a specimen of King’s poetry, the compiler advises: ‘The reader will ﬁnd it, with Dr. King’s whole other poems, in this edition of his Poetical Works in two volumes’ (xix; BB [H]). Through bulletins like this the compiler escapes the charge that Bell leveled at Johnson, not to mention the sin of commercial negligence: that his lives ignored the edition to which they were attached. Ever aware of Bell’s edition as a product for sale, the compiler ﬁne-tuned many passages to alter or omit a comment that might diminish its perceived value. Nothing was wrong with the ritual lament over the paucity of information about a poet’s life, but when George Sewell, for example, wishes there were ‘a larger, as well as a better’ critical assessment of John Philips than his own, Bell’s compiler leaves the confession out of his transcription (xvii). 60 Suppressing uncomplimentary critical judgments was a recurrent impulse for the compiler. Johnson never sanitized a criticism in this fashion. It would have been unthinkable for him to hold his tongue on Tickell’s ‘Kensington Gardens’, but then his bluntness was a luxury the proprietors could afford. Since the Prefaces and all ﬁfty-six volumes of poetry had to be purchased as a set, no potential customer could decline to buy this or that poet because of a harsh Johnsonian opinion. Bell enjoyed no such leverage, and his compiler consequently may have been wary of disparaging criticisms. Why discourage a reader from enjoying the book she or he just bought (or was about to purchase), especially when the collection was being published serially and the next volume would be offered for sale the following week? Instantly squelched was any hint that a poetic idiom might be outmoded or that the works of particular poet were inadequate by themselves to form a saleable commodity. With Gray, perhaps, it could be admitted that ‘the joint stock of 59 ‘Memoirs of the Rev. Mr. Charles Churchill’, The Annual Register (1764), 58–62; and Charles Johnstone, Chrysal: or, The Adventures of a Guinea (3rd edn. 4 vols. London, 1768), iv. 90–6. 60 Sewell, ‘The Life of Mr. John Philips’, Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow, 1763), 12. In any event, the confession was obviated by a footnote ([v]) in which the compiler advertised that the defects in Sewell’s account would be repaired by additions from other accounts.

164

Johnson’s Prefaces and

both [Gray and Richard West] would hardly ﬁll a small volume’ (xii; Mason 184), but not with others: the intimation that Garth’s ‘works will scarce make a moderate volume’ was surgically removed (xiii; TC ii. 270), and the comment that Roscommon’s works ‘are not sufﬁcient to form a small volume’ was amended to read ‘hardly sufﬁcient’ (xi; TC ii. 349). 61 In view of the remoteness and topicality of Butler’s Hudibras, little known ﬁgures obviously required footnotes, but Zachary Grey’s apology for this necessity went too far, causing the compiler to omit the phrase placed here in italics: ‘[T]here being several particular persons reﬂected on, which are not commonly known, and some old stories and uncouth Words which want explication, we have thought ﬁt to do right to their memories; and . . . to explain their characters in some additional Annotations’ (12). 62 To denigrate the poetry as old and uncouth would have been poor marketing, and given the canonical project overall, such a comment could also have been regarded as voicing an inappropriate historical bias. Even if that bias was routinely expressed at the end of the eighteenth century, it was unwise to qualify the inclusion of poets like Butler, or to represent them as somehow of lesser standing because of archaic language. The compiler of Young’s life deﬂected pejorative comments in several ways. If an adjective was not to his liking, a more favorable one was substituted, as when ‘elegance’ replaces ‘terseness’ to describe Young’s style (viii; BD xii. 513). Another tack was to discredit the source: ‘By certain fastidious critics they have been stigmatized as a mere string of epigrams’ (viii). A passage like the following was simply left out: ‘[T]here is a laboured stiffness of versiﬁcation; and this is the more remarkable, as Dr. Young ever took very great pains to polish and correct the harshness of his numbers’ (BD xii. 512). Omissions like this were the simplest way to bypass an invidious remark. Where the language of Smith’s drama was indicted for being ‘too luxuriantly poetical’ and yet still monotonous (TC iv. 312), Bell’s compiler omits the thought (xii). Demeaning comments about Congreve are also suppressed. The compiler adopts only the ﬁrst half of the following quotation, which recounts how the poet’s pastoral elegy on the death of Queen Mary had been ‘extolled in the most lavish terms of admiration, but which seems not to merit the incense it obtained’ (xi; TC iv. 88). Left out too was a tepid endorsement of Congreve’s piecemeal translations of the ‘Art of Love’, The Iliad, and some epigrams, ‘in all of which he was not unsuccessful, though at the same time he has been exceeded by his cotemporaries [sic]’ (xv; TC iv. 91). A withering remark about Roscommon was shunned like poison: ‘The grand requisites of a poet, elevation, ﬁre, and invention, were not given him, and for want of these, however pure his thoughts, he is a languid unentertaining writer’ (TC ii. 352–3). 61 Again, it was Johnson’s candor that required censorship, for Shiels was quoting his life of Roscommon from GM. 62 ‘The Author’s Life’, Hudibras, ed. Zachary Grey (2 vols. Cambridge, 1744), i, pp. ix–x.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

165

If it is clear why such criticisms were neutralized or elided, a similar defensiveness regarding certain biographical details is more curious. Vacillation is evident in the life of Young: the compiler goes along with one portrayal of Young as ‘pious but gloomy’ (x), but takes exception to its refrain, converting the phrase ‘this gloominess of temper’ into its opposite, ‘so far was he from gloominess of temper’ (xiv; BD xii. 516). While four of six passages omitted from a source for Bell’s life of Dryden might have tarnished his poetic reputation, the other two presumably were deemed injurious to him as a person: Burnet’s character of the poet, said to be deﬁcient in ‘true resemblance’ (TC iii. 74–6); and a story showing Dryden to have been ‘fond of Judicial Astrology’, but cautious lest anyone ﬁnd out, ‘either thro’ fear of being reckoned superstitious, or thinking it a science beneath his study’ (TC iii. 80–2). Bell’s compiler drew a veil over the poet’s astrological calculations and trepidations for the life of his son Charles, perhaps agreeing with Johnson that the time was long past for belief in any ‘preternatural intelligence’, the current age being ‘very little inclined to favour any accounts of this kind’ (Roscommon 7). 63 Yet not all passages damaging to a poet’s reputation were glossed over or deleted. Nor, on the other side of the ledger, was the praise of any poet signiﬁcantly exaggerated. It was quicker and easier, on the whole, for the compiler to cut and paste the various source materials together without altering them much. Although praise was gently heightened on occasion, in one case an encomium in the source text was actually toned down. The compiler of Young’s life, having expunged negative comments, nevertheless accused ‘the writer of Dr. Young’s life’ of going to ‘too great a length when he says, “We may assign [The Revenge] . . . a place in the ﬁrst rank of our dramatic writings” ’ (ix). 64 Except for the straightforward reprints, each of Bell’s lives is original in one sense: nowhere previously had the sources been combined in that form. Two lives, however, go beyond the act of compilation. Fresh information crops up on Hammond and Cunningham (lives, interestingly, that were printed consecutively). In the preface to Hammond ‘[t]he writer of this Narrative’ momentarily laments a missed opportunity to obtain crucial information (ix–x). Another ﬂicker of disclosure is seen again in the dating of Mallet’s life, ‘March 1780’ (vi). This log, unique to Bell’s prefaces, serves no obvious purpose, but its relation to the date of printing, 8 April, suggests that the writer(s) hired to provide the lives worked on them close to the time they were needed at the printing house. 63 The three passages that slightly disparaged his poetry consisted of a comment that ‘Mac Flecknoe’ prompted Pope’s Dunciad, ‘and it must be owned the latter has been more happy in the execution of his design’; a footnote implying that Dryden’s translation of Virgil had been surpassed perhaps by Pitt’s; and Dr Trap’s low estimate of Dryden’s Virgil (TC iii. 76, 77, 78). 64 Typically enough, the writer of Young’s life in 1773 was to blame only in part. His glowing endorsement was copied from The Annual Register (1765), 34, which had copied and elaborated the sentiment from CP i, sig. S4r (s.v. The Revenge).

166

Johnson’s Prefaces and

Just who produced the lives may never be known. Over the course of six years Bell could conceivably have employed more than one compiler. Except for the revision of Denham’s life, a job which called for close supervision and probably occurred in London, the writer(s) who supplied Bell’s prefaces most likely worked in Edinburgh. A distinct Scotticism crops up in several lives, one that James Beattie warned was a sure sign of North British origins: the insertion of the deﬁnite article in reference to a year—‘in the 1713’, for example, instead of ‘in 1713’ or ‘in the year 1713’. 65 A Scottish identity is consistent also with ﬂeeting clues as to political bias, deviations from otherwise straightforward transcriptions of source material. Two cases in point involve William III. In the life of Swift, the source text accounts for one of the king’s miscalculations by his being ‘a stranger to our constitution’; Bell’s compiler rejects the inclusive pronoun and makes William ‘a stranger to the English constitution’ (xvi). In the life of Hughes, Bell’s source extols at some length ‘The House of Nassau’, an ode which ‘displays the Heroick Exploits of that Illustrious Family, than which none have ever distinguish’d themselves more eminently in Defence of the Sacred Rights and Liberties of Mankind’. The compiler, while managing to copy the other praises of the poem, balked at this encomium (vii). 66 The omission of a paean to William’s family suggests a cool (if not necessarily Jacobite) distance from the Anglocentric view of the Bloodless Revolution, and the disavowal of constitutional afﬁliation also signals a Scottish reﬂex. While Bell acquainted his reader ‘at once with the poet and the man’, his creation of a ‘connected system of biography’ lacked a uniform biographical approach and a consistent critical voice. But if system is taken to mean ‘any complexure or combination of many things acting together’, as Johnson deﬁned the term, then Bell’s lives ﬁt the bill. Cast together in the same prefatory role, they provided the purchaser with a broad perspective on ‘this particular class of writers’, and thus contextualized the works of the British poets. The scope of Bell’s lives refutes the bad faith imputed to him by Tyrwhitt, who alleged that his pictures were a decoy for young and undiscriminating purchasers. Condescension of that sort could be found in a contemporaneous publication intended ‘for the use of Schools’, The Beauties of Biography, whose editor asserts that most biographical entries are ‘too voluminous, and more circumstantial than is required for young People, who do not reap the greatest advantage from 65 Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (Edinburgh, 1787), 87. This work dates from the late 1770s, when Beattie circulated it privately amongst his students. The phrase ‘in the 1713’ is from the life of Hughes (xvi); other examples occur in the lives of John Philips (vii, xxi), Swift (xxxv), and Young ([5]). 66 John Hawkesworth, ‘An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin’, The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 12 vols. (London, 1755), i. 8; and William Duncombe, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of John Hughes, Esq.’, Poems on Several Occasions. With Some Select Essays in Prose (2 vols. London, 1735), i, p. viii.

Bell’s Connected System of Biography

167

dwelling long on the same subject’. 67 Where other pocket volumes provided the occasional biographical preface, Bell consistently delivered something more substantial, and although his targeted market undoubtedly included neophyte book-buyers (of whatever age), by the measure of his prefaces Bell’s reader was fully adult. His edition of John Philips, for instance, went further than either Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton (1762) or Poems on Several Occasions (1763), published by the Tonsons and the Foulis brothers respectively, among the ﬁnest commercial and academic booksellers of the century. Apart from a single paragraph taken from George Sewell’s life of Philips, the Tonsons derived their ‘New Account’ from Biographia Britannica, leaving out a few passages and all but one footnote; the Foulis brothers stuck to Sewell’s account, adding some brief notes. Bell also reprinted Sewell, but folded in sections from both the text and notes in Biographia Britannica, along with passages from Johnson’s life. 68 In contrast with the Tonson and Foulis lives, which were approximately 2,675 and 5,450 words in length, Bell’s compilation was about 9,050. (The entry on Philips in The Beauties of Biography amounted to roughly 1,175 words, a light tax on its young readers’ attention.) Likewise the life of Gray, neither the longest nor shortest of the lot, argues a signiﬁcant investment on Bell’s part. Some form of biographical preface was joined to pocket editions of Gray in 1774, 1775, 1776, and 1779; the word count for these lives, respectively, was 1,025, 850, 1,450, and 1,025. 69 Bell’s, at 5,050 words, makes the others look perfunctory. What is more, to the ‘Life of Thomas Gray’ proper—a severely abridged paraphrase of the life in The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are preﬁxed Memoirs of His Life and Writings by W. Mason, M.A. (York, 1775)—Bell’s compiler added a copy of Gray’s last will and testament, and J. Taite’s poetic tribute, ‘The Tears of Genius’. Not surprisingly in

67 Beauties of Biography: Containing the Lives of the Most Illustrious Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain, France, Italy, and Other Parts of Europe. . . . Extracted from the Biographia Britannica, Baile’s Dictionary, and Other Vaulable Works, for the Instruction of Youth of Both Sexes (2 vols. London, 1777), i, p. iii. ‘Circumstantial’ was a key evaluative term in gauging the worth of a biography; see above, where Bell promises an ‘account of the Author, equally circumstantial’ to the pirated Denham preface he was forced to paraphrase. 68 ‘The Life of Mr. John Philips’, Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton. By Mr. John Philips. With a New Account of His Life and Writings (London, 1762), [3]–23; and ‘The Life of Mr. John Philips’, Poems on Several Occasions. . . . To which is added, His Life, by Mr. George Sewell (Glasgow, 1763), [3]–28. By calling attention to their biographies on their title-pages, the Tonsons and the Foulises used this feature as a selling point. 69 ‘The Life of Mr Gray’, Poems by Mr. Gray. To which is preﬁxed, An Account of His Life (London, 1774?), pp. [iii]–xv; ‘A Short Account of the Life of Mr. Gray’, Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (Edinburgh, 1775), pp. [iii]–ix; ‘A Short Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Gray’, Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (London, 1776), pp. [v]–xviii; ‘The Life of Mr. Gray’, Poems by Mr. Gray. With a Biographical and Critical Account of the Author (London, 1779), pp. [iii]–xv. The same life appears in the 1774 and 1779 edns. The life in the 1776 edn. was written by Gilbert Stuart, who received three guineas for the piece (Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners, 57).

168

Johnson’s Prefaces and

view of the options, when a life was needed to accompany Gilbert Wakeﬁeld’s ‘classical’ edition of Gray in 1786, Bell’s won the palm. 70 No matter what their peculiarities, Bell’s reprints and compilations supplied readers with a large body of English literary biography. If they provided little that was new in the way of fact or criticism, Bell could not be faulted for scrimping on them. Where sources were sparse, the lives were necessarily brief; the compilers sought out the best accounts available and often supplemented them with other materials. At their fullest, they approximated the most informative biographies extant of their respective subjects. 70 Bell took Gray’s will and Taite’s poem from Murray’s 1778 edn., to which they were newly added. Wakeﬁeld copied the life and Gray’s will from Bell, but not the poem; The Poems of Mr. Gray. With Notes by Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, B.A. (London, 1786), pp. [v]–xxii, and [xxiii]–xxvi. Wakeﬁeld viewed his edn. as an ‘antidote’ to the criticisms of Johnson, whose strictures against Gray, ‘under the sanction of his respectable character, might operate with malignant inﬂuence upon the public taste, and become ultimately injurious to the cause of polite literature’ (‘Advertisement’, p. [iii]).

6 The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry: William Strahan, Joseph Wenman, et al. I pretend not to judge of the exact Merit of any Book, but by its Sale. (William Strahan, 1780)

If the London trade’s strategy for dealing with the Edinburgh ‘pirates’ was ‘to underprint every Person instantly that invades our Books’, they fell short of the mark when challenging The Poets of Great Britain, for they neither underprinted Bell with their Works of the English Poets nor (owing to Johnson’s tardiness) published instantly. Efﬁciency of this nature was the forte of Irish booksellers, who were paid a back-handed tribute by Strahan when he fumed over the ‘Insecurity of Literary Property, the Irish immediately reprinting in an inferior Size, and at a low Price, every new Book the Instant it is published here.’ 1 The anti-piracy measures of the London trade, premised on the willingness to sell at a loss, might work with individual titles, but the counter-offensive against Bell was too massive for that to be feasible. It was not a ‘new Book’ they had to defend themselves against, but title after poetical title in waves. The business climate was the harshest in recent memory. In 1778 Strahan deplored the ‘present immense Scarcity [of ] Money’; several thousand pounds in bills having been returned for payment, he had been drained ‘to the last Shilling’. While he and Thomas Cadell were ‘in pretty tolerable Plight’, they were hard pressed ‘to keep up our Credit, surrounded as we are with Bankrupts in every Quarter’. Every business deal required ‘much Circumspection’, and even more so ‘great Caution in embarking in large or extensive Undertakings’. Piracy and copyright bedeviled his thoughts continuously. Like the chorus in Greek tragedy, Strahan intoned the fate of the book trade, chanting darkly that the importation of Irish books ‘and the laying open Literary Property in Britain, are two incurable Evils, which are likely to render Bookselling one of the most unproﬁtable and precarious, and of course the most disreputable, of all Trades’. 2 1

Strahan to Creech, 17 Oct. 1780. Strahan to Creech, 19 Nov. 1778. ‘Bookselling is at so low a pass’, Balfour wrote early in 1780, ‘that I have sometimes . . . had thoughts of giving it up’ (Sher, Enlightenment, 357). 2

170

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

That the London trade’s poetry collection stayed on course at such an anxious time showed how crucial they considered their struggle against Bell to be. Had it been safe to let him proceed without interference, ‘great Caution in embarking’ would have stopped them from taking on this huge venture. But the cost of doing nothing was too high; they could ill afford not to publish their own collection. The number of publishers who combined to defend their interests and the vast scale of their project were signs of their refusal to allow market contours to be redrawn without a ﬁght, or the English classics to be redeﬁned without their participation.

ALL THE ENGLISH POETS OF REPUTATION In formulating a scheme to reprint ‘all the English Poets of reputation from Chaucer to the present time’, John Nichols and his co-proprietors wanted to be deﬁnitive: they aimed to match Bell’s series in scope, namely ‘every Author of Eminence’ from Chaucer onward, while echoing Boyle’s aspiration to pursue ‘all that is valuable of the whole English Poets’. 3 Curiously reticent in their newspaper promotions, however, the arena used so effectively by Bell to articulate his goals, the proprietors communicated little of their intentions. When the collection was published, they allotted an ‘Advertisement’ to Johnson, who brieﬂy described his own task without bothering to characterize the editorial decisions that shaped the edition. If neither Bell nor his rivals quite lived up to their rhetoric, both undertakings stretched the limits of what must have been deemed a feasible number of volumes for any collection to include. The London trade defended its ‘Literary Property’ by assembling the works of ﬁfty-two poets, two more than Bell’s eventual total (Table 6.1). Common to both collections were forty-two poets, their works spanning close to 140 years, from the early poetry of Milton, Waller, and Cowley in the 1630s to the ﬁnal works of Gray and Akenside in the late 1760s. The eight exclusive to Bell’s edition extended his timeline to nearly four hundred years: Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne took the collection back to the fourteenth century, while the works of Churchill, Cunningham, and Armstrong brought it up to date. All ten poets exclusive to The Works of the English Poets lived during the Restoration or early eighteenth century. By shying away from early poetry altogether, notwithstanding their pledge to reprint all the poets of reputation from Chaucer to the present, the London booksellers left themselves vulnerable to Bell’s charge that their product could not be considered a ‘general Collection of the Classics’. 4 3 Like Lonsdale, Fleeman identiﬁes Nichols as having been the ‘chief proprietor’ (‘The Revenue of a Writer’, 217). 4 MP (3 June 1783).

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

171

More peculiar than the blanket omission of Renaissance and Middle English poetry from the proprietors’ edition was their failure to make good on the document Dilly promised to convey to Boswell: ‘a list of the Poets we mean to give, many of which are within the time of the Act of Queen Anne, which Martin and Bell cannot give, as they have no property in them’. 5 One poet they hoped to secure was Oliver Goldsmith, who had died in 1774. Although the copyright in The Deserted Village (1770) would not expire until 1784, this problem was not insurmountable, for as Dilly implied, the reason for summoning together ‘all the proprietors of copy-right in the various Poets’ was to entice them—just on this occasion—to surrender their narrow claims in exchange for a share of the overall proﬁts. But Thomas Carnan, the copyholder in this instance, refused to go along with the group; absent his cooperation, Goldsmith had to be left out of the collection. 6 Whether or not such recalcitrance was met with in other cases, the London trade edition included no recent authors that lay beyond Bell’s legal reach. Ironically, it was Bell who grabbed the most current poetry. Explicitly from the start he intended to include Charles Churchill, who had died in 1764, and several of whose poems were still under copyright protection in 1777. Yet Bell knew that time would remedy their inaccessibility, and in 1779, as soon as they were fair game, he reprinted them. For the London booksellers, by contrast, who hoped to publish their collection in 1777, the Churchill copyright would have been an issue, assuming they had their eyes on the satirical poet. As with Goldsmith, they could have proceeded if the copyholders had thrown their interests in with the conger. But none of Churchill’s coterie of publishers—Flexney, Kearsley, Almon, Coote, Henderson, Moran, and Gardiner—took a stake in the collection. Flexney was Churchill’s original publisher; Kearsley published the North Briton; and Almon has been characterized as a rogue. They seem not to have associated with the group that hired Johnson. 7 Time and serial publication were also on Bell’s side when it came to Cunningham and Armstrong. Their poems were ineligible for reprinting when Bell launched his series, but by 1781 he could publish them, the initial fourteenyear protection having expired, for both authors had died (in 1773 and 1779 respectively) before copyright could be renewed. As for the rival proprietors, their slate of authors was set in 1777; they could not amend it without adding to Johnson’s work and causing further publication delays. As a legal matter, nothing kept Bell from including all ten Restoration and early eighteenth-century poets 5

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 111. Johnson, Lives, i. 10; Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 100. The claim that Chaucer, among others, was ‘squeezed out’ to make room for ‘modern in-copyright poets’ that the copyholders contributed to the collection because of their ‘keenly felt’ need for unity (St Clair, Reading Nation, 125–6) is without foundation. 7 Deborah D. Rogers, Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing (New York, 1986). 6

172

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Table 6.1. Bell’s ‘classics’ and the London trade’s ‘poets of reputation’ Poets

Volumes where located Bell’s Poets

Exclusive to The Poets of Great Britain Geoffrey Chaucer (c .1340–1400) Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) John Donne (1572–1631) Richard West (1716–42) Edward Moore (1712–57) Charles Churchill (1732–64) John Cunningham (1729?–73) John Armstrong (1708/9–79)

i–xiv xv–xxii xxiii–xxv ciii xcviii cvii–cix cvi cii

Exclusive to The Works of the English Poets John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–80) Thomas Otway (1652–85) Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset (1643–1706) George Stepney (1663–1707) William Walsh (bap. 1662, d . 1708) Richard Duke (1658–1711) Thomas Sprat (bap. 1635, d . 1713) Charles Montague, 1st Earl of Halifax (1661–1715) Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) Thomas Yalden (1670–1736) Common to both collections Abraham Cowley (1618–67) Sir John Denham (1614/15–69) John Milton (1608–74) Samuel Butler (bap. 1613, d . 1680) Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (1637–85) Edmund Waller (1606–87) John Dryden (1631–1700) John Pomfret (1667–1702) John Philips (1676–1709) Edmund Smith (1672–1710) William King (1663–1712) Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) Sir Samuel Garth (1661–1719) Joseph Addison (1672–1719) John Hughes (1678?–1720) Matthew Prior (1664–1721) John Shefﬁeld, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1647–1721) William Congreve (1670–1729) Elijah Fenton (1683–1730) John Gay (1685–1732) George Granville, Baron Lansdowne (1666–1735) Thomas Tickell (1685–1740)

The proprietors’ Works

x xi xi xii xii xi ix xii xxiv x xxxvi–xxxix xxxv xxviii–xxxi xxxii–xxxiv xliii xxvi–xxvii xl–xlii li lxvi cii xlv–xlvi lxvii–lxviii lviii lxix lvii lxx–lxxi xlvii–xlix xliv lvi lxxii lxxx–lxxxii l lxxiii

i–ii ix iii–v vi–vii x viii xiii–xix xxi xxi xxi xx xliv xxvi–xxviii xx xxiii xxii xxx–xxxi xxv xxix xxix xli–xlii xxv xxvi

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

173

Table 6.1. (Continued) Poets

James Hammond (1710–1742) William Somerville (1675–1742) Richard Savage (1697/8–1743) Alexander Pope (1688–1744) Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) William Broome (bap. 1689, d . 1745) Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) James Thomson (1700–48) Isaac Watts (1674–1748) Ambrose Philips (bap. 1674, d . 1749) Gilbert West (1703–56) John Dyer (bap. 1699, d . 1757) William Collins (1721–59) William Shenstone (1714–63) Edward Young (bap. 1683, d . 1765) David Mallet (1701/2?–65) Mark Akenside (1721–70) Thomas Gray (1716–71) George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton (1709–73)

Volumes where located Bell’s Poets

The proprietors’ Works

xcvii lxxiv–lxxv lxxxviii–lxxxix lxxvi–lxxix lii–lv lxxxiii xc xci–xcii lix–lxv xciii xcv xciv xcvii xcix–c lxxxiv–lxxxvii ci civ–cv ciii xcvi

xlix xlvii xlv xxxii–xxxviii xxxix–xl xliii xliii xlviii–xlix xlvi xliv lvi liii xlix liv l–lii liii lv lvi lvi

Note: Poets are ordered by year of death, their life-spans taken from the ODNB.

that wound up solely in The Works of the English Poets. Either from having exceeded his 100-volume projection, however, or simply not wanting them, he passed them over. The poets exclusive to the proprietors’ set were not the choicest of recent copyrights that Martin and Bell could not give, but ones they would not give—long out of copyright, and among the least distinguished in either collection. The proprietors vowed to recruit ‘the best engravers, viz., Bartolozzi, Sherwin, Hall’, to supply a frontispiece portrait of each poet. Francesco Bartolozzi, appointed engraver to the king not long after his arrival from Italy in 1764, was one of the founders of the Royal Academy in 1768. His contributions to the edition were augmented by those of two pupils—Jean Delatre, who had worked under him since leaving France in 1770, and John K. Sherwin, who, from the age of 23 in 1774, exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. Sherwin attracted students of his own, among them James Caldwall, a man twelve years his senior. Caldwall engraved more portraits for the proprietors than anyone except John Hall, who had studied under Ravenet. Sherwin and Hall would later join Bartolozzi as engravers to the king, after the death of William Woollett in

174

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

1785. 8 Portraits could be especially troublesome, as Bell certainly knew and as Strahan experienced in relation to an engraving for his edition of Hugh Blair’s Sermons (1781), which was a full year in the making. First the oil painting had to be shipped from Scotland to London, and then, even after Strahan resolved that ‘Dr. Blair’s Plate shall be pushed, and his Picture returned as soon as possible’, he had to resign himself to the stubborn fact that ‘our good Engravers here won’t be hurried’. 9 The partners commissioned only twenty-eight portraits, nine fewer than Bell. Of the poets common to both editions, Bell provided ﬁve more portraits (Gray, King, Lansdowne, Ambrose Philips, and Pitt) than his rivals. 10 Of the poets exclusive to Bell’s edition, six of eight received a portrait (Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Cunningham, Armstrong, and Churchill), whereas the proprietors came up with portraits for only two of their ten (Blackmore and Otway). 11 If they persevered less in their hunt for portraits, they were also less concerned with displaying the kind of attribution Bell used to heighten their classical authority. In only ﬁve cases was the painter of the original likeness identiﬁed (Addison and Garth by Kneller, Pope by Jervas, Thomson by Aikman, and Johnson by Reynolds), and only twice was a source speciﬁed (Rowe’s image was copied ‘From a Bust in Westminster Abbey’, and Garth’s ‘From a Picture in the possession of W. Bromﬁeld Esqr.’). Such classicizing gestures were largely absent also with respect to the poetical contents. Whereas the œuvres of most poets, in Bell’s mind, were ‘indiscriminately jumbled together’, needing to be sorted out, the proprietors let the poems stand as custom had established in prior editions of each author. Any volumes showing signs of conscious arrangement were the result of earlier editorial labors, like that of the Tonsons in their 1760 edition of Dryden: ‘In the arranging of the larger of our author’s original pieces, we have paid a strict regard to the times in which they were written; beginning ﬁrst with the earliest.’ Shorter pieces that were not sui generis were grouped by class, the Tonsons being ‘exact in arranging the epistles according to chronological order, which was never done before’, and paying ‘the same regard to the elegies and epitaphs’. 12 A case could 8 Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, rev. George C. Williamson (5 vols. London, 1909–10), i. 91 and v. 75. 9 Strahan to Creech, 17 Oct. 1780, 4 Oct. 1781. 10 The proprietors, like Bell, mistook the portrait of Samuel Dyer for that of John Dyer (see Ch. 4 n. 29). Whereas Bell attributed his portrait to an ‘original Picture’ belonging to the Reverend Mr. Potter, the proprietors’ engraving was apparently based on a mezzotint copy. See Graves and Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, i. 271–2; Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (2 vols. London, 1854), i. 352 n. 11 John Hall engraved eight of the portraits (Cowley, Otway, Blackmore, Buckingham, Prior, Gay, Parnell, Dyer); James Caldwell ﬁve (Waller, Garth, Hughes, Congreve, Pope); Thomas Cook four (Broome, Young, Shenstone, Akenside); Francesco Bartolozzi three (Milton, Addison, Watts); Joseph Collyer three (Denham, John Philips, Lyttelton); John Sherwin two (Butler, Dryden); Jean Delatre two (Rowe, Thomson); and Anthony Walker one (Swift). 12 The Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, Esq; (4 vols. London, 1760), i, p. x.

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

175

be made against such regimentation, of course, grounded in a different theory of reading, much as Anthony Stephens espoused in defending the tumble of poetic subjects in Miscellany Poems and Translations, By Oxford Hands (1685). Readers, he argued, appreciate a smattering of choices for the same reason that ‘at an Entertainment, most People are pleas’d with variety of Courses, when a standing Dish would not at all gratify their Appetites’. 13 Bell, convinced that a ﬁrm curatorial hand was required in laying out the classics, acerbically dubbed the proprietors’ edition ‘a chaos of poetical confusion’. 14

A CONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF DEMAND When Boswell scoffed at the prospect of Johnson writing the life of any dunce at the proprietors’ bidding, he expressed his dismay over an opportunity lost. The collection would have looked different had it been constructed by Johnson, judging from his previous estimate of the meager talents of several poets chosen by the proprietors. In Rambler, no. 106, he candidly mused on the holdings of many a great library: ‘Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magniﬁcent obscurity, most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered.’ As for works that had perished, Johnson noted that ‘The learned often bewail the loss of ancient writers, but, perhaps, if we could now retrieve them, we should ﬁnd them only the Granvilles, Montagues, Stepneys, and Shefﬁelds of their time, and wonder by what infatuation or caprice they could be raised to notice.’ 15 Why anyone should read them was hard to fathom, yet here they were, raised to notice again: Granville and Shefﬁeld in both Bell’s and the proprietors’ editions, Montague and Stepney in the latter edition alone. Did infatuation or caprice visit the rival collections? Were dunces let in? ‘It has often been objected to Dr. Johnson’s Collection’, confessed Alexander Chalmers, editor of the third edition of The Works of the English Poets (1810), ‘that it includes authors who have few admirers’. He admonished his readers to remember, however, that it ‘was not formed by that illustrious scholar, but by his employers, who thought themselves, what they unquestionably were, the best judges of vendible poetry, and who included very few, if any, works in their series for which there was not, at the time it was formed, a considerable degree of demand’. 16 Even if the hedging phrases (my italics) are taken to heart, it is still difﬁcult to account for the inclusion of poets like Walsh, Duke, Sprat, Smith, and Fenton, let alone Granville, Montague, Stepney, and Shefﬁeld. Several had not been reprinted for decades: not since 1701 for Stepney; for Sprat, not since 1709; for Fenton, 1717; Smith, 1729. How could such poetry be considered vendible? 13

14 Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 93. MP (3 June 1783). Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, iii–v (New Haven, 1969), iv. 201. 16 Alexander Chalmers, ‘Preface’, The Works of the English Poets (21 vols. London, 1810), i, p. vi. 15

176

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Yet Chalmers’s assertion, however unconvincing on the face of it, cannot simply be dismissed. Vendibility is affected by many factors, perhaps as much by the skill of the vendor as by the desirability of the purchased wares. The booksellers deliberated over the poetry not only in terms of what had been selling well, but also in terms of what could be sold under market conditions. In setting the contours of their collection, Nichols and his partners sized up Bell’s enterprise, just as Bell in due course adjusted his series once the proprietors’ edition had been published. Where booksellers match product against product, and react to the innovations or encroachments of rivals in a receptive market, their attempts to outdo one another stretch the limits of what otherwise might be considered vendible. This mutual gravitational pull is partly why the collections featured forty-two poets in common. Where this mirroring effect ends, however, an equally telling comparison emerges. Relative to the ten poets speciﬁc to the proprietors, the eight speciﬁc to Bell clearly were more apt to be purchased on their own merits. Because Bell published his series poet by poet and depended on proﬁts to recover his investment along the way, he began with poets sure to entice buyers, and his inaugural lineup was an index of the best-selling poets of the day: Milton, Pope, Dryden, Butler, Prior, Thomson, Gay, and so on. Yet with ﬁfty poets all told, most were far less popular. On this score, serial publication worked to Bell’s advantage: an author printed nineteenth or thirty-third in a series may attract more interest than when printed alone and displayed with unrelated titles. A volume nineteen or thirty-three ﬁts into an advertising cycle of continuity and novelty; on the shelf it magniﬁes the physical presence of the series; and for these reasons, it gratiﬁes the collecting impulse, the pleasure in accumulating related objects. The fact that several poets in both collections had for some time not warranted separate reprinting suggests that their value lay in the aggregate; that is, they contributed to a more imposing collection, a deeper representation of the nation’s poetry, and potentially larger gains for the booksellers. Whereas Bell could ill afford to incorporate many poets whose works did not appeal individually to the buying public, the proprietors were less concerned about this for two reasons: ﬁrst, the thirty-six partners and ﬁrms stood on solid ﬁnancial footing, with pooled resources adequate to publish all their poetry at once; second, their sales policy required the set to be purchased in its entirety. If an early advertising notice, stating ‘Price 2s. 6d. each sewed’ as the cost per volume, implied that volumes would be available for separate purchase, they either changed their minds or merely offered the information to demonstrate that the octavos were, in relative terms, as good a bargain as Bell’s 1s. 6d. octodecimo imprints. In any case, when their ﬁrst sixty volumes went on sale in 1779, the Monthly Review, Critical Review, and Gentleman’s Magazine quoted only the full price of £7 10s. After a two-volume index had been printed (1780) and Johnson had ﬁnished his Prefaces in six additional volumes (1781), the only persons initially eligible to purchase them were those who owned the other volumes,

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

177

or anyone ready to buy the complete set: ‘Such Gentlemen as have already purchased Sixty Volumes of this Edition of the Poets, may now purchase the Eight Volumes of LIVES and INDEX to complete their sets’. 17 The 68-volume set cost ten guineas. Many people were frustrated by this stringent marketing. One reviewer, thinking that Pope’s Homer would have been well suited for schools, lamented ‘It is a pity that we have not a separate edition of these volumes.’ 18 Others too, especially those wanting to buy only what Johnson wrote, found the purchase requirement irksome. ‘I hope you will get Dr. Johnson’s Prefaces’, Frances Boscawen peevishly counseled Mary Delany, which however is not easy, because they are not to be bought unless you buy also a perfect litter of poets in ﬁllagree (that is very small print, whereas one already possesses said poets in large letter) therefore I could not possibly give ten guineas for this smaller edition, but a friend of mine, to whom Dr. Johnson presented them, was so kind as to lend them to me. 19

Word of such lending made its way back to the proprietors, who grew jealous of granting Johnson any more presentation copies. Johnson expressed his displeasure to Cadell: Do not let us teize one another about books. That they are lent about I suppose is true, but it must be principally by those that have bought them, which would have been done much less, if you had united every writer’s life to his works, for then the borrower must have carried away near twenty volumes whereas he now takes but four. I will venture to say that of those which I have given very few are lent. But be that as it may. You must supply me with what I think it proper to distribute among my friends. Let us have no dispute about it. I think myself not well used. 20

Johnson reproaches the booksellers for their imprudence in not attaching the prefaces to the works. Just as the partners had struggled over the bibliographical puzzle of how to make the prefaces seem physically integral to the set, the marketing conundrum they now faced was the opposite: how to make the set seem integral to the prefaces. As Strahan posed the dilemma to Creech, who inquired about a separate edition of the prefaces, ‘To publish Johnson’s Lives of the Poets by themselves requires some Consideration. I shall mention it to the Partners, and tell you what they think of it. I am afraid they will consider it as tending to make other Editions of English Poets perfect, and of Course retarding the Sale of their own.’ 21 In 1779 the question had been partly moot, given that the Prefaces were unﬁnished; for nearly two years the proprietors enforced their rigid sales policy without having 17 19 20 21

18 LC (1–3 Apr. 1779, and 14–16 June 1781). GM 49 (1779), 551, reviewer’s italics. Lives of the English Poets (1905), i, p. xxvi. Dated 13 Apr. 1779, Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 159. Strahan to Creech, 19 Nov. 1779.

178

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

seriously to revisit the complaint. In 1781, however, they relented and published a stand-alone edition of the Prefaces, renaming it The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. Johnson’s proposed title had shown more caution—‘An Account of the Lives and Works of some of the most eminent English Poets’—but every qualifying word or phrase was rejected. 22 How would past and prospective purchasers of the collection feel, after all, if they bought a ‘litter of poets’ and at day’s end possessed only some of the worthiest? By purchasing Johnson’s Lives, owners of the Foulis English poets, or of Creech’s or Bell’s editions, could now ‘perfect’ their collections. Multi-volume reprints, wrote Hugh Amory, are marketed either as ‘series’ for sequential collecting, or as a ‘library, cabinet, or collection’ for purchase as a set. 23 This distinction captures the initial difference between The Poets of Great Britain and The Works of the English Poets—one a series seven years in the making, the other an all-or-nothing collection. If the purpose of the proprietors was to hinder Bell’s success in the marketplace, they had straitjacketed themselves. Bell could play both sides of the taxonomy, selling his books serially or cumulatively at any point. The annual expense to someone buying each of his volumes would have averaged £1 3s. 4d. His subscribers could spend as much or as little as they wished on binding, but would have laid out the following sums for volumes in wrappers: £2 2s. for 28 volumes in 1777; £1 13s. for 22 volumes in 1778; £1 1s. for 14 volumes in 1779; 10s. for 7 volumes in 1780; £1 2s. for 15 volumes in 1781; 18s. for 12 volumes in 1782; 16s. 6d. for 11 volumes in 1783. This would have been a total of £8 3s. 6d. 24 for 109 volumes. Customers were free to curtail their purchases at any time, resume them at will, or select a poet now and again when a few spare shillings lay near to hand. Bell’s volumes cost about the same as a single poem printed in quarto or large octavo, and less than other pocket productions with similar pretensions to elegance. 25 How affordable such prices were is a ticklish matter, though a helpful glimpse is provided by The Economist (1776), which outlines weekly and annual budgets for households of varying means. In a family of six with a servant, for instance, 22 Letter to John Nichols, May 1781, Letters of Samuel Johnson, iii. 347. As an alternative Johnson offered ‘The / English Poets / biographically and critically considered / by Sam. Johnson’, and also invited Nichols to ‘make another to his mind’. 23 Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 141. 24 When the series was complete in 1783, Bell adjusted the total price to facilitate payment in guineas (a guinea was worth £1 1s.) A full set cost £8 8s. in wrappers, £12 12s. neatly bound, and so on up his pricing scale (see Ch. 4). 25 For example, single poems by Goldsmith, The Traveller and The Deserted Village, sold for 1s. 6d. and 2s.; an anonymous poem, On the Preference of Virtue to Genius, cost 1s. 6d.; a supplement to Swift’s poems sold for £1 1s. in quarto, or 12s. sewn in two volumes large octavo or three volumes crown octavo; Courtney Melmoth’s Shenstone-Green in ‘Three neat Pocket Volumes’ with a frontispiece, sewed, sold for 7s. 6d.; and The Seaman’s Complete Daily Assistant, ‘In a commodious Size for the Pocket’, cost 3s. bound: LC (April and May 1779), 341, 343, 356, 393, 398, 404, and 438.

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

179

whose annual income was £400, the pocket expenses budgeted for the master were 4s. per week (‘including letters’), or £10 8s. per year, and £5 4s. for the mistress and four children. 26 Whereas occasional purchases of Bell’s volumes would have been well within their means, The Works of the English Poets would have absorbed two-thirds of their pocket money for the year. What people can afford depends, of course, on their spending priorities, and persons with less money at their disposal could buy some of Bell’s volumes. The bookseller Thomas Clay recorded book purchases by servants in Daventry, Rugby, and Lutterworth during the late 1770s, including one David Prowett, who in 1777 purchased Bell’s editions of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Thomson’s poems, and Young’s Night Thoughts. 27 By refusing to compete for the money of anyone with this consumer proﬁle, the proprietors surrendered the lower end of the market to Bell. The partners’ decision to publish the collection at once and sell it only as a set possibly was inﬂuenced by the haste of their planning, or the uncertainty of Johnson’s progress, but the size of the conger may also have been a factor. It was unwieldy, however galvanizing their pool of capital was. Bell answered to no one and shifted course at will, tinkering with his title-page layout or altering his engravings. Such ﬂexibility was unworkable for the proprietors. As the Foulises discovered, serial publication is messy when consumers are allowed to pick and choose titles, for the publisher must keep reprinting this volume or that, otherwise gaps in inventory will frustrate latecomers. If Strahan’s aversion to ‘imperfect Setts’ made him reluctant to publish one volume at a time in cases where it was relatively easy to sustain a customer’s interest (single titles of wellknown authors in two or three volumes), then in harder cases involving many authors in multiple volumes his aversion must have been intense. 28 It was more pragmatic for the partners to draw up a slate of poets, print them once, and be done with it, rather than to appoint another subcommittee to monitor sales and decide which of the ten printing houses to contact whenever more copies were needed of a volume. For practical reasons, then, the proprietors might have adopted the same sales regimen even if Johnson’s Prefaces had been ﬁnished on time and sewn into the appropriate volumes, and access to them might still have been impossible outside the company of that ‘perfect litter of poets’. In due course the Prefaces still would have been reprinted as a separate title, but meanwhile the proprietors would have spared themselves the grief of having created so 26 The Economist, Shewing, in a Variety of Estimates, from Fourscore Pounds a Year to upwards of 800l. how comfortably and genteely a Family may live with Frugality for a little Money (14th edn. London, 1776), 5. 27 Jan Fergus, ‘Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), 219. Fergus queries whether the entry ‘Bell’s Poets, vol. 1–2’ represents Swift, but my guess is Milton’s Paradise Lost. 28 Strahan to Creech, 19 Nov. 1779 (Blair’s Sermons), and 20 Nov. 1781 (Adam Ferguson’s History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic).

180

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

tantalizing a product: a segregated grouping of Johnsonian biographies which, perversely it seemed, was not for sale. Until they cashed in on Johnson’s work as a separate publication, the partners were committed to a partially selfdefeating marketing ploy, drawing people to their collection through the power of Johnson’s name and yet causing many to balk at the all-or-nothing purchase condition. ‘I pretend not to judge of the exact Merit of any Book, but by its Sale.’ 29 Strahan’s words could serve as a motto for any practically minded bookseller. ‘[I]t’s all a lottery; all a lottery, Sir’, mutters a ﬁctional bookseller, conversing with a customer in his shop as they browse his stock. 30 Strahan was skeptical in particular about poetry, however, once conﬁding that ‘Poetry, unless excellent, is good for nothing, and seldom sells to pay Paper and Print’. Charles Dilly agreed: ‘Poetry of all things is the most doubtful in the sale, unless the Author is well known.’ 31 These sentiments pertained to new undertakings, but it is not difﬁcult to imagine their suspicion that poets who had not seen print for ﬁfty, sixty, or seventy years might also fail to repay the investment in paper and print. Yet, if the set had to be purchased complete, what did it matter that Stepney’s works had so little independent appeal?

THE PARNASSIAN LIBRARY OF WENMAN While the Glasgow folios of Andrew Foulis tested the limits of grandiosity for a series of poetic classics, Joseph Wenman in London explored the lower reaches of the market. Part of his career was spent emulating Bell. He delved into theatrical reprints, publishing sixty-seven plays from 1777 to 1778 and another ninetyone titles by 1781 with James Harrison. 32 After this collaboration Wenman and Harrison were pulled in opposite directions by their penchant for serial reprinting. In The Novelist’s Magazine Harrison kept to the format they had used in their plays, a large octavo printed in double columns. Wenman, meanwhile, modeled his ‘ NEAT POCKET VOLUMES ’ of The Entertaining Museum; or, Complete Circulating Library on a precise product: ‘These Volumes are of the same Size, and printed in the same Manner, as Mr. Bell’s Edition of the Poets, and therefore are very portable and convenient for the Pocket.’ Bell’s product had become a touchstone, a brand-name recognized widely and favorably enough for Wenman to court a comparison. 29

Strahan to Creech, 16 Nov. 1780. ‘Benignus’s Adventure at a Bookseller’s Shop’, an excerpt from Melmoth’s Opinions; or, The History of Benignus: LC (11–14 May 1776). 31 Strahan to Creech, 9 Sept. 1774; Charles Dilly to Creech, 6 May 1773. 32 Six plays were co-published toward the end of 1778 under the imprint, ‘London: Printed for J. Harrison; and sold, likewise, by J. Wenman; and all other Booksellers, 1778.’ From 1779 onward the phrase ‘Harrison and Co.’ took the place of ‘J. Harrison’. 30

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

181

Wenman’s subtitle signaled that, in addition to Bell’s British Theatre and The Poets of Great Britain, other dimensions of Bell’s business had drawn his attention—the circulating library and the rhetorical sweep of ‘Bell’s British Library’. Ambitiously he advertised complete and perfect Editions of the most celebrated Histories, Novels, Romances, Adventures, / Peruvian, Eastern, and Arabian Tales, / Sentimental Journies, Works of Humour, &c. &c. / As well as the Performances of the best ESSAYISTS, / such as / The Adventurer, Rambler, Idler, Connoisseur, and World.

Added to his earlier forays into verse—Gay’s Fables (1777), Young’s Night Thoughts (1777), Pope’s Works (1778)—Wenman’s projects covered all points of the literary compass (drama, poetry, ﬁction, essays). To regularize his poetic offerings and make them continuous with the ﬁction and essays, he began a series expressly ‘intended as a Companion to The Entertaining Museum’. 33 For the ﬁrst time a multi-volume poetry collection was to be incorporated into a larger canonical project, where parallel series in matching product lines would deﬁne the ﬁeld of English classics across several genres. In 1780 Wenman launched The Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library, designed to ‘contain the Whole of the Poetical Works of all the justly celebrated Poets’, and also the ancient classics, ‘Elegant Translations of the most celebrated Poems, such as POPE’s Homer, DRYDEN’s Virgil, FRANCIS’s Horace’. His series title-page, fashioned as an advertisement (like Boyle’s) but printed on both sides, listed the poets in roughly chronological columns: Milton, Shakespeare, Butler, Cowley, Dryden,

Prior, Gay, Garth, Swift, Pope,

Addison, Pomfret, Congreve, Parnell, Tickell,

Thompson, Young, Churchill, Collins, Gray, &c.

With the exception of Shakespeare, the list was derivative of earlier collections. In ‘regular, uniform, and elegant editions’, two volumes each week were to be ‘regularly published’—one in The Poetical Magazine, one in The Entertaining Museum—until customers had been ‘furnished with a complete library of each’. Wenman welcomed a volume-against-volume competition with Bell. Breaking with precedent, he started not with Milton (as Foulis, Creech, and Bell had done), but rather with The Poetical Works of Cha. Churchill, no doubt because Bell had just revived The Poets of Great Britain after the Apollo Press ﬁre with 33 The Poetical Works of Will. Shenstone (3 vols. London, 1780); the quotations here and in the next two paragraphs come from advertisements for The Poetical Magazine before the title-page in vol. ii, and for The Entertaining Museum at the end of vol. iii. A version of the Entertaining Museum advertisement appeared in MP (1 July 1780).

182

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Figure 6.1. Wenman’s title-page for Thomson. Taken directly from Bell (cf. Fig. 4.1).

Churchill’s works. In fact, Wenman used that edition as a copy-text, matching Bell in format and contents; in Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination, he copied the layout of Bell’s text page-for-page; and in The Poetical Works of James Thomson he mimicked Bell’s distinctive title-page design (Fig. 6.1). The closer the resemblance, his marketing strategy seems to have held, the better a bargain his series would appear. 34 Wenman’s imprints, however, were not as capably produced; a smaller size of paper was used, which left narrower margins and occasionally led 34 The Poetical Works of Will. Shenstone and Butler’s Hudibras also seem to have been copied directly from Bell’s texts. For The Pleasures of Imagination, Bell included both the original and

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

183

to some loss of text when the books were cropped for binding. Yet, if his books did not match Bell’s in quality, the resemblance was meant to be close enough for his customers to appreciate their one advantage—cost. Price comparisons obsessed Wenman, emphasized in his advertisements with asterisks, italics, and ﬁngerposts. Each number of The Parnassian Library cost 6d. sewn or 9d. bound. The inaugural number of Churchill alone contained six works, ‘each of which Poems was originally sold for 2s. 6d.’ in quarto. In Wenman’s octodecimo format the cost amounted to only 2s. sewn (or 3s. bound) for the ‘Whole of Churchill’s Poems . . . in Four of these elegant Volumes’. 35 Sixpence per volume was nominally a third of Bell’s price (1s. 6d.), but it worked out to about half because Wenman’s numbers contained less poetry: his Churchill took up four volumes (costing 2s.), Bell’s only three (4s. 6d.); his Shenstone ran to three volumes (1s. 6d.), Bell’s to two (3s). By the middle of the decade ‘cheap’ would become his rallying cry. Wenman worried about false inferences being drawn from his prices: ‘These Volumes are not in the least abridged, as might perhaps be imagined, on account of their being sold so much cheaper than any of the old and inferior Editions, but contain every Syllable, as originally written by the respective Authors.’ For three of his ﬁrst four poets (Churchill, Thomson, Shenstone) the title-pages bore out his promise to deliver ‘the Whole of the Poetical Works’ (Table 6.2). But despite these assurances, Wenman vacillated between the œuvre and the chef d’œuvre, hedging his bets with Thomson and allowing buyers to choose either the whole package or just The Seasons. Beginning with Falconer’s The Shipwreck he decided that nothing would be lost by reprinting only the most popular works of some poets; it was better to set aside their minor performances than to preserve ‘every Syllable’. By scaling back The Poetical Magazine in this way—printing Hudibras without Butler’s ‘Remains’, and nothing but Paradise Lost by Milton— Wenman let go of the consistency characteristic of Bell’s edition. Only a year into his venture, he fell back upon the looser paradigm of Foulis, reprinting the whole works of some poets, the selected works of others, and giving his volumes a variety of titles. Wenman’s conceptual shift was the prelude to a period of dormancy after publication of volumes xix through xxi (Milton’s Paradise Lost) in 1781. Ten poets had been published so far—seven of the twenty ‘justly celebrated Poets’ from his original roster, plus three selections new to any multi-volume series: William Falconer’s The Shipwreck, accompanied by an essay in its praise from the Monthly Review; Edward Moore’s Fables for the Female Sex; and Nathaniel Cotton’s Visions expanded poems. Wenman reprinted only the ﬁrst version, but added the ‘Inscriptions’ at the end, again copying them directly from pages in Bell’s second volume. 35 Pricing was equally low for The Entertaining Museum: 1s. 6d. would buy Launcelot Greaves, which had ‘never sold for less than 6s.’; Ferdinand Count Fathom, with ‘Capital Engravings’, cost 3s. (bound in 4 vols.) or 2s. 8d. (double-bound in two), compared with 6s. for ‘old, inferior Editions’ without plates.

184

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Table 6.2. Wenman’s Poetical Magazine and ‘Cheap Editions’ Year

Poet

Title

Vols.

Price

Reprinted

1780 1780 1780 1780 1780 1781 1781 1781 1781 1781 1781 1784 1784 1785 1786 1786 1786 1786

Churchill Pomfret Thomson Thomson Shenstone Falconer Butler Gray Moore Cotton Milton Goldsmith Gay Lyttelton Akenside J. Philips Somerville Collins + Hammond Pope [miscellany] [miscellany] [miscellany] Young

The Poetical Works of Cha. Churchill Poems upon Several Occasions The Seasons The Poetical Works of James Thomson The Poetical Works of Will. Shenstone The Shipwreck, A Poem Hudibras The Poetical Works of Mr. Gray Fables for the Female Sex Visions in Verse Paradise Lost: A Poem Poems, by Dr. Goldsmith Fables. In Two Parts. By Mr. John Gay The Poetical Works of Lord Lyttelton The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem The Poetical Works of John Philips The Chase: A Poem The Poetical Works of William Collins + The Poetical Works of James Hammond An Essay on Man Sacred and Moral Poems Billington; or, Town and Country Songster Poems on Various Subjects The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts

i–iv v vi vii–viii ix–xi xii xiii–xv xvi xvii xviii xix–xxi

3s./3s. 9d./1s. 9d./1s. 1s. 6d./2s. 2s. 3d./2s. 9d./9d. 2s. 3d./2s. 9d./9d. 9d./9d. 9d./9d. 2s. 3d./2s. 1s. 1s. 1s. 1s. 1s. 1s.

1791 1790 1790 1786 1787 1783, 1787 1788 1785 1786 1786 1788 1786 1791 1792

1787 1789 1790 1791 1791

1s. 6d. 1s. 2s. 2s. 6d. 2s. 6d. 2s.

Notes: The volume numbers for Churchill through Milton were printed on series title-pages for The Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library. Prices are taken from a 1792 advertisement for ‘Wenman and Hodgson’s CHEAP EDITIONS’, all vols. ‘neatly bound’. The original prices of the 21 vols. of The Poetical Magazine appear in front of the 1792 prices for later edns.

in Verse, for the Entertainment and Instruction of Younger Minds. 36 Except for another edition of Falconer’s work in 1783, Wenman did not resume until 1784, when he inducted another newcomer into the multi-volume enterprise, Goldsmith, his poems now mostly free of copyright protection. None of the choices unique to Wenman ﬁgured in the original list for The Poetical Magazine, although the ‘&c.’ at the end of the roster had signaled that other choices would emerge. Under reformulated objectives, the poetic inventory was now integrated into a mixed-genre list of ‘New, Cheap, and Elegant Editions’ which by 1786 was being marketed under a new rubric: ‘ WENMAN ’s CHEAP EDITIONS of the MOST CELEBRATED WORKS in the ENGLISH LANGUAGE , both POETRY and PROSE ’. Along with new poetic titles Wenman reprinted earlier ones that were 36

Edward Moore was not published as part of Bell’s edition until 1782.

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

185

out of stock, and added prose writers like Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, and Goldsmith to the growing tally of Cheap Editions advertised in successive imprints: the count rose from thirty-three titles (1785, 1786) to forty (1787), forty-seven (1789), ﬁfty-four (1791), and ﬁnally ﬁfty-seven (1792). 37 Like Foulis and Creech, who supplemented their works with miscellanies, Wenman added Sacred and Moral Poems (1789), Billington; or, Town and Country Songster (1790), and Poems on Various Subjects (1791), a mixed lot for a mixed series. In the end, ten poets from the original roster never saw print: Cowley, Dryden, Prior, Garth, Swift, Addison, Congreve, Parnell, Tickell, and the one neglected by all previous editions—Shakespeare. Around 1791 Wenman was succeeded by his wife (or daughter) Elizabeth, and within a year the venture became ‘Wenman and Hodgson’s Cheap Editions’, which it remained through the ﬁnal imprint in 1794. 38 Comprised of ‘regular, uniform, and elegant editions of universally-esteemed Productions in the English Language’, the series touted itself as being ‘printed, verbatim, from the best Editions of the respective Authors, and embellished with One Hundred beautiful Copper-plates, and neatly bound and lettered’. 39 Just as the ‘best edition’, for Wenman’s purposes, frequently turned out to be Bell’s, the fact that the number of engravings was roughly equivalent to the total in Bell’s edition suggests that, even after giving up his goal of publishing each poet’s complete works, Wenman measured the scope of his project by the example of Bell. Intuitively he was on the right track to give his series an allusive title— The Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library—more evocative of a miscellany than of a multi-volume collection. There was ample room to sell books downmarket from Bell, but Wenman’s inability to sustain a lower quality series of complete poetical works suggests that the product was unsuited to his targeted market niche. It may be that a full-dress canon appealed to buyers above a certain market threshold, whether consumer demand below that point was lacking by reason of taste, resources, or education. Wenman was correct to calculate that the market for a pocket-sized series of poetry could be expanded, but found that merging the poetry with his ‘Cheap Editions’ was necessary to reach the buyers he had in mind, who also relished a variety of genres like novels, oriental tales, mock biography, apologues, educational tracts, and even a grammar. 37 Henry Fielding, A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1785), sigs. G5r –G6r ; The Poetical Works of William Collins, with The Poetical Works of James Hammond (1786), sig. O2r−v ; Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1787); Sacred and Moral Poems (1789), sigs. Ee5r –Ee6r ; The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (3 vols. 1791), ii. sigs. I4r –I5v ; and The Poetical Works of Lord Lyttelton (1792), sigs. I5v –I6v . 38 The partner was probably Edward Hodgson. Around 1790 a Mary Wenman was involved in Joseph’s business. See Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775–1800 (Folkestone, 1977), 112, 242. 39 Advertisement at back of The New Bath Guide (London, 1794).

186

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry EVERY SYLL ABLE WRIT TEN BY THE RESPECTIVE AUTHORS

What sounded like a fetish in Wenman’s formulation—‘every Syllable, as originally written by the respective Authors’—was a conviction that had been gaining ground for decades and which, tentatively in Foulis and Creech, but emphatically in Bell’s edition, became the norm for multi-volume collections of poetry that presented themselves as canonical. It had gradually evolved that nothing less than presentation of the complete œuvre could be considered due recognition of classic status for a poet. In their 1760 edition of Dryden, the Tonsons thought it unconscionable that his works had not yet been collected. ‘While editions of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespear, Milton, and many writers of a much inferior class, have been presented to the world complete’, they queried, ‘is it not surprising that Dryden, equal in almost every respect to all of them, scarcely inferior to any, has remained till now a single solitary exception?’ Justice required that they ‘unite the whole of his original poems and translations’, a task easier said than done, perhaps, to judge by their tentative claim that ‘we think we have collected all his loose pieces’. 40 The establishment of Dryden’s canon, with its full and proper publication, was a precondition of his assuming his rightful place in the literary pantheon. It is doubtful whether the gathering up of loose pieces, however essential a milestone on the road to canonization, ever enhanced the appraisal of a poet’s skill. Edward Young, for one, wanted to be spared the honor of having his weaker works disinterred. Creech had honored the wishes of Beattie in this regard, but Edmund Curll, far from deferring to Young’s request, actually printed the letter in which the poet denied having a copy of ‘the Epistle to Lord Lansdowne: If you will take my Advice, I would have you omit That, and the Oration on Codrington: I think the Collection will sell better without them.’ His appeal was ineffectual. ‘This we cannot comply with’, Curll explained in a footnote, ‘as rendering our Collection imperfect’, and placed the ‘Epistle to Lansdowne’ at the very front of the book. 41 In the rise of a literary reputation, the luxury or prerogative of an author to disown minor writings comes in conﬂict with the reader’s assertion of a right to examine the whole career. This sentiment was expressed by Cadell and Nichols in their 1778 edition of Young, whose works had been reprinted several times without any ‘one edition singly (nor even all of them together)’ managing to reprint ‘every thing published by him’. Readers curious about his lesser works were ‘obliged to seek for them in 40

Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, Esq; i, pp. [vii] and xi. The Poetical Works of the Reverend Edward Young, LL.D. (2 vols. London, 1741), i, p. (vi). The two volumes were printed before Curll procured the manuscript from which the ‘Epistle to Lansdowne’ was typeset; it was inserted into the ﬁrst volume by means of separate signatures (a–b8) paginated [i]–xxxi, giving the book two sequences of roman numerals in front of the arabic pagination. 41

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

187

detached pamphlets difﬁcult to obtain, in obscure miscellanies, or in the ﬁrst collected editions of his Works; none of which are now easily to be procured’. Some works were difﬁcult to locate, the editors acknowledged, because the poet wanted them to remain so, yet such qualms were politely to be ignored: ‘Every reason which could inﬂuence the Author to wish that any of his pieces should be suppressed, hath long since ceased to have any weight. Many of the rejected works have been much enquired after; some of them possess great merit; and all of them derive a value from being the acknowledged productions of so favourite an Author.’ All works needed to be recovered, ﬁnally, because the ‘slightest performances of a great master are always highly esteemed: and though the present volume should not be found entirely equal to those which have been heretofore made public, it must be allowed to contain pieces which will not reﬂect any discredit on their Author, and without which no edition of his works can be considered as compleat’. 42 Nothing could detract from Young’s reputation, however uneven some of the pieces were, as long as they were viewed in context of his overall body of work and understood to have contributed in some way to the fashioning of poetic genius. In some instances a publisher might retreat from this ideal, but the very need for an apology under such circumstances proved how engrained it had become, as shown by the case of Parnell. Subsequent to the volume supervised by Pope, Poems on Several Occasions (1722), editions of Parnell grew slowly to include several additional pieces, but nothing approaching a canon was achieved until Bell in 1778 joined all the poems from his Posthumous Works (1758) to those from Pope’s selection. 43 This precedent was followed by the London trade (1779), by Andrew Foulis in his folio edition (1786), and by other publishers of multi-volume collections for thirty years until 1807 when John Sharpe, bowing to ‘a recommendation, from the family of the Author, to suppress those poems as surreptitious which were not given in Mr. Pope’s edition’, agreed to reduce ‘the contents of Mr. Bell’s edition from two volumes to one.’ 44 The expectation that an author’s poetical œuvre warranted reprinting may have been one factor in Shakespeare’s tardy entry into a poetry series. Wenman was the ﬁrst to earmark his poems for the canon as distinct from his plays, although his intention went the way of the Parnassian Library. Foulis and Creech had passed over Renaissance poetry altogether, as did the London trade, and Boyle’s enterprise, though meant to include Spenser, folded before he could manage it. Bell is the one most likely to have considered Shakespeare, since his edition reached further into the poetic past and was roomy enough; a 42

The Works of the Author of the Night-Thoughts (6 vols. London, 1778), vi, pp. [v]–vii. ‘Checklist of Eighteenth-Century Editions of Parnell’, Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock (Newark, Del., 1989), 678–90. 44 ‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell (London, 1807), [5]. See also Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, 13. 43

188

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

109-volume set could easily have grown to 110. But, as Michael Dobson shows in tracing Shakespeare’s path to becoming ‘the national poet’ by the middle of the eighteenth century, his non-dramatic works were superﬂuous to the process, utterly beside the point. 45 Bell had published the poems once already, albeit as an encumbrance, to make his 1774 edition of the bard more complete. The apologetic ‘Introduction’ to Poems Written by Shakespear was a curious exercise in articulating the need for access to an author’s complete works. It offered a lesson on ‘Poetry’, calling it ‘the most digniﬁed degree of literary composition’ and identifying its ‘foremost’ expression as the drama, citing Shakespeare’s ‘acknowledged pre-eminence’ in this realm. But ‘as it is common for authors to excel in one case, and fall very short in others, so the Swan of Avon, in our idea, falls as far short of himself in his Poems, as he rises above others in his Plays’. To prove that ﬁne authors often displayed talents ‘conspicuous in one light’ but ‘exceedingly dim in another’, the editor pointed out ﬂaws in the theatrical compositions of Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Addison, Young, Thomson, Milton, and Mason, though all were superior writers of verse. Were Shakespeare’s merit ‘as a poet, a philosopher, or a man’ to be judged by his poems, in every regard he would ‘sink beneath himself ’: Many of his subjects are triﬂing, his versiﬁcation mostly laboured and quibbling, with too great a degree of licentiousness. After this last assertion it may be reasonably urged, why pieces, confessedly censurable, should be republished? To which challenge we have only to plead, that a desire of gratifying the admirers of our Author with an entire edition of his works, has induced us to suffer some passages to remain, which we are ourselves as far from approving, as the most scrupulous of our Readers.

Wholeness triumphed over aesthetic scruples, but not before the editor, soliciting a second opinion from ‘the critics’, had been advised that expunging the poems might appear to be ‘as over-strained a piece of prudery, in Literature, as the Regent Duke of Orleans’s action was, in the Arts; who towards the latter part of his life, had castigated to imperfection certain pieces in his ﬁne collection of statues and painting, in order to render them more decent objects of inspection’. 46 This highly equivocal assessment enables us to gauge Wenman’s eccentricity in planning to feature the poetry by itself. When Shakespeare’s poems ﬁnally did make their way into a collection, as we see in the next chapter, extenuating considerations were brought in to neutralize harsh opinions like these. The urge to submit all the evidence to readers, to increase their opportunity for contextual understanding through fuller pictures of literary creativity, could 45 The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford, 1992). Dobson mentions and reproduces the engraved frontispiece to Poems on Several Occasions (London, [1740]), but evinces no other interest in the edn. (141–2, 145). 46 ‘Introduction’, Poems Written by Shakespear (London, 1774), 34–6. The engraved title-page for this volume, the ninth, differs from the other eight in the Shakespeare set, also engraved, which read Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 1774).

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

189

be applied to the nation at large as well as to individual poets—at least in theory, in conversation between Boswell and Johnson. They fancied a gargantuan ‘collection being made of all the English poets who had published their volumes’. Johnson reported that ‘a Mr. Coxeter . . . had gone the greatest length towards this, having collected about ﬁve hundred volumes, I think, of unknown poets; but that upon his death Tom Osborne bought them, and they were dispersed, which [Johnson] thought a pity, as it was curious to see any series complete; and in every volume of poems something good might be found’. 47 A type of museum is implied by Coxeter’s library, not one susceptible to reprinting and mass marketing, to be sure, but a shrine to printed English poetry consisting in the thing itself, a complete record of the poetry. Its dispersal represented the waste of a rare success as measured by the great lengths to which Coxeter had gone in assembling it. That kind of effort—or, in Bell’s phrase, ‘time, difﬁculty and vast expense’—is what publishers spared the ordinary consumer in printing a more selective canon. The phantom of an all-inclusive collection—at ﬁve hundred volumes and counting, even before the unknown poets were all mustered—is alien to the exclusionary image a canon is usually thought to project. Coxeter’s library had been lost as a common national property, but what survived was his recognition that such collecting was integral to the task of national biography, and his notes were foundational for The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) and The Companion to the Play-House (1764). 48 Coxeter’s collection lived on in a virtual sense, its inﬂuence realized through a succession of multi-volume poetry collections, endeavors that not only kept expanding the boundaries of the canon, but also framed the canon within a body of poetical biography, paying tribute to the intellectual and consumer impulses ‘to see any series complete’. RENDERING THE COLLECTION MORE COMPLETE In 1790 the London conger heralded an ‘enlarged and improved edition of THE WORKS of the ENGLISH POETS ’ published in seventy-ﬁve small octavo volumes, the ﬁrst six containing prefaces, and the ﬁnal two an index. 49 Forty-two booksellers were named in the imprint, six more than in 1779: sixteen newcomers joined the group, while only ten of the original thirty-six ﬁrms disappeared (Table 6.3). The stability within the circle of proprietors, along with their ability to attract new investors, suggests a far different picture of the consequences of the ‘laying open of old property’ than Strahan had painted. The trade had not 47

Boswell in Extremes, 159–60. For the role of these works in Bell’s edition, see Ch. 5. The value of Coxeter’s efforts was appreciated by George Steevens and Thomas Warton (Correspondence of Thomas Warton, 431). 49 LC (1–4 May 1790). 48

190

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Table 6.3. Proprietors of the successive editions of The Works of the English Poets 1779–81 edition

1. C. Bathurst 2. J. Buckland 3. W. Strahan 4. J. Rivington & Sons 5. T. Davies 6. T. Payne 7. L. Davis 8. W. Owen 9. B. White 10. S. Crowder 11. T. Caslon 12. T. Longman 13. B. Law 14. E. & C. Dilly† 15. J. Dodsley 16. H. Baldwin* 17. J. Wilkie 18. J. Robson 19. J. Johnson 20. T. Lowndes 21. T. Becket* 22. G. Robinson 23. T. Cadell 24. W. Davis* 25. J. Nichols 26. F. Newbery† 27. T. Evans 28. J. Ridley 29. R. Baldwin 30. G. Nicol 31. Leigh & Sotheby 32. J. Bew 33. N. Conant 34. J. Murray 35. W. Fox 36. J. Bowen

1790 edition

[Bagster’s edition, 1807]

1810 edition

J. Rivington & Sons

F. C. & J. Rivington

F. & C. Rivington

T. Payne & Son L. Davis

T. Payne

T. Payne

J. Buckland

B. White & Son

T. Longman

J. White & Co.

Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme

Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme

Wilkie & Robinson

Wilkie & Robinson

J. Johnson W. Lowndes

J. Johnson

B. Law C. Dilly J. Dodsley H. Baldwin G. & T. Wilkie J. Robson J. Johnson W. Lowndes G. G. J. & J. Robinson T. Cadell J. Nichols E. Newbery T. Evans R. Baldwin G. Nicol Leigh & Sotheby J. Bew N. Conant J. Murray W. Fox 27. H. L. Gardner 28. P. Elmsley

Cadell & Davies

G. Robinson Cadell & Davies

Nichols & Son

J. Nichols & Son

R. H. Evans

R. H. Evans

Leigh & Sotheby

R. Baldwin G. Nichol & Son Leigh & Sotheby

J. Murray

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

191

Table 6.3. (Continued) 1779–81 edition

1790 edition

29. J. Sewell 30. W. Goldsmith 31. W. Richardson 32. T. Vernor

[Bagster’s edition, 1807]

1810 edition

W. J. & J. Richardson

John Richardson J. M. Richardson Vernor, Hood, & Sharpe

Vernor, Hood, & Sharpe

33. W. Bent 34. W. Otridge Otridge & Son 35. T. & J. Egerton 36. S. Hayes 37. R. Faulder R. Faulder 38. J. Edwards 39. W. Nicoll 40. Ogilvy & Speare 41. Scatchard & Whittaker Scatchard & Letterman

W. Otridge & Son T. Egerton R. Faulder & Son

Scatchard & Letterman

42. C. Stalker 16. J. Walker 17. Lackington, Allen, & Co. 18. Cuthell & Martin 19. J. Nunn 20. R. Lea 21. J. Deighton

J. Walker Lackington, Allen, & Co. Cuthell & Martin J. Nunn R. Lea Deighton & Son (Camb.) 22. W. Clarke & Sons Clarke & Sons 23. J. Hatchard J. Hatchard 24. Black & Perry Black, Parry, & Kingsbury 25. J. Harding J. Harding 26. E. Jeffery E. Jeffery 27. J. Carpenter J. Carpenter 28. W. Miller W. Miller 29. Payne & Mackinlay J. Mackinlay 30. Mathews & Leigh Mathews & Leigh 31. P. Wynne P. & W. Wynne 32. J. Booker J. Booker 33. Samuel Bagster S. Bagster 40. C. Davies 41. J. Stockdale 42. J. Barker (cont.)

192

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Table 6.3. (Continued) 1779–81 edition

1790 edition

[Bagster’s edition, 1807]

1810 edition

43. B. Crosby 44. J. & A. Arch 45. J. Mawman 46. J. Booth 47. J. Asperne 48. W. Grace 49. Wilson & Son (York) Notes: Reading across, one ﬁnds the same booksellers, their successors, or later permutations of their ﬁrm (as with J. Wilkie, G. & T. Wilkie, and Wilkie & Robinson). The numbers in the ﬁrst column reﬂect the order of listing in the imprint. My numbering earmarks the newcomers and shows the number of partners for each edn. For discussion of the third and fourth columns, and why it is necessary to include the third (which represents a different collection), see Ch. 9. † In 1781, ‘C. Dilly’ was listed (Edward died 1779), and ‘E. Newbery’ (Elizabeth took over after the death of her husband Francis in 1780). ∗ These names were gone from the imprint by 1781.

walked into the valley of the shadow; 1,500 copies of an expensive 68-volume collection had been sold. The willingness of the same proprietors now to print 1,500 copies of a larger and more expensive second edition, even when Johnson’s Lives could be purchased separately, underscores the proﬁtability the investors were counting on. 50 Owing to ‘the hints and recommendations of their friends’ about the 1779 collection, the new edition gave the proprietors an ‘opportunity of adding the Works of some Authors formerly omitted, and supplying some deﬁciencies which [had] been pointed out’. The additional authors, it was disclosed, had been ‘inserted in compliance with the repeated calls of the Publick; some in deference to the opinions of persons whose taste cannot be disputed; and some have found a place, from the favourable sentiments expressed concerning them to the Publishers from various quarters’. This modus operandi reveals that the ‘best judges of vendible poetry’ relied on a canvasing of voices to shape their collection. From such calls, opinions, and sentiments, running the gamut from critical expertise to popular demand, the partners ‘endeavoured to obtain the best opinions’ about the worth of various poets, and then ‘implicitly followed them’. 50 Writing to Creech on 9 Aug. 1788, Beattie said he had learnt that ‘Johnson’s Edition’ was out of print (AUL MS 30/1/289). Records for Sept. 1788 and Dec. 1789 show Andrew Strahan, William’s son, at work on volumes for the new edn. in a print run of 1,500 (BL Add. MS 48815, fo. 112v ).

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

193

Ruling out personal favorites, and ignoring ‘partialities of their own, towards the Authors selected’, the partners stood behind choices portrayed strictly in terms of objective market research, however piecemeal in its retrieval. 51 A new note had crept into the discourse surrounding multi-volume poetry collections: without functioning as ‘editors’ per se, the booksellers demystiﬁed the editorial process in a way ﬂattering to their consumers, treating them as sophisticated enough to have a stake in the collection, or, put another way, conditioning their purchasers to regard themselves as having had a hand in shaping the product. In light of this rhetoric, their choices again are rather puzzling. While the inclusion of Goldsmith ﬁlled in a gap which critics had pointed out, the expanded Works of the English Poets failed to remedy one of the chief omissions loudly decried from the start, that of Spenser. Fourteen new poets raised the total to sixty-six: Moore and Cawthorn (vol. lxv), Churchill and Falconer (vols. lxvi– lxvii), Lloyd (vol. lxviii), Cunningham and Green (vol. lxix), Goldsmith and Paul Whitehead (vol. lxx), Armstrong and Langhorne (vol. lxxi), and Johnson, William Whitehead, and Jenyns (vols. lxxii–lxxiii). Some poems overlooked in the 1779 edition were restored to their rightful authors, and on Johnson’s suggestion, Pitt’s translation of the Aeneid was inserted, enabling readers to compare it with Dryden’s version. 52 But the partners were no more diligent than before in tracking down likenesses of the poets. Although they lined up portraits for three of the new poets (Armstrong, Churchill, and Cunningham) and substituted a different engraving of Johnson, they did not trouble to have portraits engraved of several poets already depicted in Bell’s edition. 53 Since Johnson had died in 1784, the fourteen new prefaces were drafted by Isaac Reed. 54 He did so anonymously for, as the proprietors explained, few critics or biographers could have ‘the presumption to suppose themselves qualiﬁed to succeed [Johnson], or the temerity to court a comparison’. Reed’s brief notices were deftly characterized as a ‘return to Dr. Johnson’s original plan’, according to which ‘[a] few dates and facts only [were] set down, with occasionally a general character’ (p. vii). Preface and poet still did not appear side by side: the new lives were grouped with the original ones in the ﬁrst six volumes of the collection. Why, given a fresh chance (in Johnson’s words) ‘to unite every writer’s life to his works’, the booksellers chose again 51

‘Advertisement’, The Works of the English Poets (75 vols. London, 1790), i, pp. v–vi. Johnson lamented that Pitt’s translation had been left out of the collection, an omission which deprived readers of the chance to compare ‘the two best translations that perhaps were ever produced by one nation of the same author’ (Lives, iv. 95). 53 The copperplates from the 1779 edn. were reused; worn areas were touched up on a few of the plates, but otherwise they held up fairly well. 54 Sherbo, Isaac Reed, 113–14; Fleeman, Bibliography, ii. 1381. Reed also added notes to some of Johnson’s lives, signing them ‘E’ for Editor. 52

194

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

to sequester the lives was not explained, but marketing again was the likely cause. In line with their initial policy, the booksellers sold the collection only as a set. The difference this time was that a separate edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets had long been available, and was now republished by those who produced the collection. Still, by refusing to join the lives to the works, they discouraged buyers from conceiving of the volumes as separable units. Had the lives been attached to the works, browsers might have been annoyed once again at not being permitted to buy the life and works of any poet independently. This time the booksellers did not break down the price of the complete set into its pervolume cost, but advertised the seventy-ﬁve volumes (sewed) as costing £11 5s. Those who owned the earlier edition could, for £1 7s., purchase the nine volumes containing the fourteen additional poets, though it is unclear what provision was made for their obtaining the corresponding prefaces bound in ‘Volume the Sixth’. Within days, in the London Chronicle of 18–20 May 1790, Bell answered the new edition of The Works of the English Poets by recapitulating the promotional motifs of his collection: its ‘general and unexceptionable selection, judicious arrangement’; the ‘preliminary, biographical, and critical accounts of each Author, and their respective works’; ‘the utmost accuracy’ of its printing; the portraits of the authors; and ‘109 beautiful vignette frontispieces, engraved by Bartolozzi and others, principally from the original and spirited designs of the late Mr. Mortimer, Cypriani, Angelica Kauffman, &c. &c.’ He sounded an alarm like that in the 1770s about ‘false copies’ of Bell’s British Theatre; buyers were now cautioned ‘against the obtrusion of any other edition whatever of the Poets, especially as Bell’s may now be had in the most perfect and beautiful stile of arrangement, complete, or any particular Author, in separate volumes, without exacting the purchase of a whole set’. A handy pejorative, the exacting sales requirement of the proprietors could be used to arouse negative sentiment against their edition. With upscale competition from the proprietors, and down-market distraction in the form of Wenman’s look-alike volumes; with a luxury alternative in the folio poets of Andrew Foulis, and the ongoing availability of sets of Creech’s British Poets, Bell’s warning against ‘any other edition whatever of the Poets’ reﬂected the reality of a marketplace that offered increasing numbers of options in this ﬁeld. Meanwhile Bell’s edition kept up steady sales. After Bell concluded the series (1783) and replenished his stock with ‘Bell’s second edition’ (1784), he reprinted thirty more volumes between 1786 and 1788, and eighteen more between 1791 and 1793 (Table 6.4). By this point he had reprinted nearly three-quarters of his volumes, several more than once. Always aggressive, Bell established correspondents far and wide, promoting his publications through Dunlop and

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

195

Table 6.4. Later reprints of The Poets of Great Britain London: / Printed by Fry and Couchman, Moorﬁelds. / Anno [1786–87]. 1786 Parnell 1–2 1787 Thomson 1–2 London: / Printed for John Bell, British Library, Strand. / 1787. 1787 Pope 1–4 London: / Printed under the Direction of J. Bell, / British Library, Strand, / Bookseller to His Royal Highness / The Prince of Wales. / [1787–93]. 1787 Hammond-Collins 1787 Pomfret 1787 Pope 1 1787 Swift 1–4 1787 Spenser 1–2 1788 Spenser 3–8 1788 Dyer

1788 Gray–R. West 1788 Lyttelton 1788 Milton 1–4 1791 Garth 1791 Savage 1–2 1793 Akenside 2 1793 Armstrong-Smith

1793 Churchill 1–3 1793 Cunningham 1793 Denham 1793 Lansdowne 1793 Mallet 1793 Shenstone 1–2 1793 Somerville 1–2

Bell’s third edition. / Vol. I. / London: / Printed for J. Bell, at the British Library. / Anno 1793. 1793 Shenstone 1 London: / Printed by R. Hindmarsh; / Printer to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. / Anno 1793. 1793 Akenside 1 Note: The different imprints under which these titles appeared dictate their listing under separate headings. This information complements Table 4.3, which details early reprints of The Poets of Great Britain.

Wilson in Glasgow, and announcing in the Aberdeen Journal that, ‘desirous of increasing, in the north of Scotland, the specimens of his superb and elegant editions of the POETS of GREAT BRITAIN, for the course of 400 years, together with his BRITISH THEATRE’, he would rafﬂe off three sets, tickets at ﬁve shillings. 55 Perennially innovative as well, Bell opened a letter foundry, then shut it down, and ultimately overextended himself. He had a taste for ﬁne living, and at one point, as bookseller to the Prince of Wales, he entertained his patron at his house, which Leigh Hunt recounts as having brought his ﬁnancial situation to a crisis. 55 Both the theatre and poetry collections were featured in advertisements placed by Dunlop and Wilson, ‘Booksellers and Stationers, Trongate, Glasgow’ (GJ, 9–16 May 1782 and 26 June–3 July 1783). Dunlop and Wilson were criticized by Strahan for their openness to dealings with the Irish trade (letter to Creech, 20 Nov. 1781). The rafﬂe prizes advertised in AJ (9 Jan. 1786) were valued from 10 to more than 18 guineas (ﬁrst prize, a set of the Poets, bound in calf, gilt, marbled, and registered, housed in its two traveling cases). A second rafﬂe was held in Aug. or Sept. See Iain Beavan, ‘Book Lotteries in Aberdeen’, Factotum, 34 (1991), 11–13.

196

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

Legal troubles played a part, too: in 1792 one of his ventures, The Oracle, was sued for libel. When Bell failed to appear for judgment in the suit, a process was taken out against him that eventuated in the sale of his assets at the Doctor’s Commons on 8 August 1793: his quire stock and general stock of his own and others’ publications, including his editions of Shakespeare, Bell’s British Theatre, and The Poets of Great Britain. He did some reporting for The Oracle, traveling to France as a war correspondent and sending dispatches back to Britain, but was unable to extricate himself from his difﬁculties and went bankrupt in early 1795. 56 With Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry (16 vols. 1789–94) the publisher made good on half his promise to ‘form a continuation’ of The Poets of Great Britain by adding on ‘all the eminent translations, and fugitive pieces of merit’. 57 However, he never revisited his purpose relative to the translations. This opportunity was seized by the London ﬁrm of Martin and Bain, who charted the progress of their ‘Edition of THE TRANSLATIONS of ANCIENT AUTHORS by the BRITISH POETS’ in a series of dated advertisements. 58 They listed Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s Virgil and Juvenal, Garth’s Ovid, West’s Pindar, and Rowe’s Lucan as the ‘Works intended to be FIRST printed’, a phrase signaling more to follow. Purchasers were invited to consider this series as a worthy possession in itself, but it was also a quasi-ofﬁcial continuation of Bell’s edition: ‘THE ABOVE , besides being DISTINCTLY a valuable Collection, will render more complete that justly esteemed Edition of THE BRITISH POETS, printed by MR. BELL; to which this Work may, with the strictest Propriety, be added and incorporated.’ Martin and Bain published nineteen volumes: The Works of Homer: Translated from the Greek, into English Verse, by Alexander Pope (8 vols. 1794); The Works of Virgil: Translated by John Dryden (4 vols. 1795); Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Translated by Eminent Persons. Published by Sir Samuel Garth (4 vols. 1795); Ovid’s Epistles: Translated by Eminent Persons. Published by Sir Samuel Garth (2 vols. 1795); Ovid’s Art of Love: together with his Remedy of Love. Translated by Eminent Persons (1795). Juvenal, Pindar, and Lucan fell by the wayside. Taking every sales scenario into account, Martin and Bain promoted their editions as either the ﬁnishing touch to Bell’s collection, or a set unto itself, or, when bought individually and paired with the proper Bell volumes, a complement to the other poems of the translator, forming ‘their Poetical Works complete’. At 1s. 56 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London, 1949), 152; Morison, John Bell, 31–6. A notice under ‘Bankrupts’ for ‘Dividends to be made’ on 3 Mar. lists ‘John Bell, of the Strand, bookseller, at Guildhall’ (LC, 10–12 Feb. 1795). 57 MP (24 July 1777). Bell’s Fugitive Poetry is discussed in Ch. 10. 58 The ﬁrst notice, dated May 1794, is found in The Works of Homer: Translated from the Greek, into English Verse, by Alexander Pope (8 vols. London, 1794), iv, sig. Q4r ; the second, dated Feb. 1795, was placed in The Works of Virgil: Translated into English Verse, by John Dryden (4 vols. London, 1795), i. pp. [xv–xvi]; a third, dated June 1795, appears in another copy of Dryden’s Virgil at iv, sig. U6r .

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

197

6d. per volume (Bell’s original price) the works of Pope (12 vols.) were thus listed for 18s., those of Garth (5 vols.) for 7s. 6d., and those of Dryden (7 vols.) for 10s. 6d. So deep was their stock of Bell’s imprints that Martin and Bain must have made large acquisitions at the Doctor’s Commons on 8 August 1793. A résumé of Bell’s career is embedded in their catalogue: Shakespeare’s plays; Bell’s British Theatre, with sets containing early impressions of the prints; the British poets, in various bindings, with ‘Library and Travelling CASES’; and his Fugitive Poetry. 59 Individual volumes could be purchased, ‘with some Exceptions’ in the case of the poetry, indicating that certain authors, low in stock, had to be reserved for sale with complete sets. Other sets made a striking impression and to these they proudly attached their imprints: ‘BELL’s BRITISH POETS, 109 Volumes complete, with the best Copies of which the TRANSLATIONS correspond.’ Capitalizing on the chance to package their own imprints with those of Bell—that is, to make them ‘correspond’—Martin and Bain ensured that the physical resemblance involved more than a uniform appearance on the bookshelf. Their claim that their volumes could be ‘incorporated’ into Bell’s collection ‘with the strictest Propriety’ reﬂected the ﬁdelity with which they copied the smallest details. They replicated Bell’s distinctive dual title-pages and their typographical layout, with rules marking off the epigraph, a black-letter font for the publisher’s name, and an italicized Anno before the year; incorporated the same adornments and front matter, namely a frontispiece portrait, illustrations, and a prefatory life; emulated the design of Bell’s pages, with identical font sizes, running headers, line spacing, marginal verse numbers, and idiosyncratic roman numeral signatures (Miij, for instance, not M3); and followed another quirk of Bell’s volumes, the outmoded inclusion of a colophon at book’s end. Also, presumably responding to hesitations expressed in their bookshop, they promised that ‘Any possible objection’ would ‘immediately be obviated’ for readers worried that Bell’s volumes, ‘if already bound’ into sets, could not be matched. 60 Such a ﬁnicky regard for the objects produced at the Apollo Press in Edinburgh and bound in London by Bell amounted to a kind of veneration. Although stewardship of Bell’s imprints, along with their own complementary editions, was at the center of their operation, Martin and Bain offered an ‘extensive Collection of Books’ in history, poetry, and drama, ﬁlling out 59 According to ESTC, Bell’s 1786 edn. of Samuel Taylor’s An E.S.S.A.Y. Intended to Establish a Standard for an Universal System of Stenography, or Short Hand Writing had its engraved title-page altered to make the imprint read ‘London: Printed for Martin and Bain, 1794’, another clue that they had come into possession of Bell’s stock. Taylor’s work is listed in their Feb. 1795 advertisement. 60 LC (19–21 Nov. 1793). This concern might have arisen whether the purchaser of Martin and Bain’s translations already owned some of Bell’s volumes, or was browsing some of their bound stock. Bell’s edn. is referred to as ‘the ﬁrst uniformly printed, and justly esteemed Edition of the Works of the British Poets’.

198

The Best Judges of Vendible Poetry

their catalogue with the Shakespeare editions of Johnson and Steevens, Capell, and Malone, as well as with ‘Johnson’s Poets’ (the 1790 edition). The feud between Bell and the London trade no longer mattered; booksellers simply wanted to sell their books, even side by side. Both collections appealed to consumers and, as Chapter 9 will show, new life would be breathed into them later, in increasingly intertwining ways. Time vindicated both sides in the rivalry, and perhaps proved that they were the best judges of vendible poetry.

7 Robert Anderson’s Comprehensive View of English Poetry . . . the works of every poet, from [Chaucer’s] time to the present day, who has obtained a classical distinction. (Robert Anderson, 1794)

Twice during the half century following 1765 the scope of English poetry collections was radically expanded. At ﬁfty poets, Bell’s edition more than doubled the number included by Foulis and Creech; the proprietors of The Works of the English Poets included ﬁfty-two, then added fourteen more to their new edition in 1790. The second major enlargement was directed by Robert Anderson, who, working with James Mundell and Son to create The Works of the British Poets (14 vols. 1792–1807), boosted the number of poets to 115. Although he came closer to realizing Bell’s title phrase (‘Complete from Chaucer to Churchill’) than previous collections, he preferred to characterize his edition as comprehensive rather than complete. Anderson was the ﬁrst non-bookseller to wield much editorial authority over a multi-volume poetry collection. A physician by training, he practiced medicine brieﬂy, but through marriage received a ‘moderate provision’ which released him ‘from the necessity of professional labour’, enabling him to pursue literary interests that bore fruit in editions of James Græme, Robert Blair, Tobias Smollett, and James Grainger. 1 If Bell exempliﬁed the ‘Bookseller-Editor’ held in contempt by a bona ﬁde editor like Thomas Tyrwhitt, and if the proprietors of The Works of the English Poets granted Johnson little say over their project, Anderson by contrast exercised a genuine supervisory function in collaboration with the publishers. ‘Anderson’s Edition’ thus brought about a fundamental shift in responsibility for shaping the body of British poetry. A change in bibliographical format brought an equally momentous shift. Up to this point all collections had been printed as pocket editions in octodecimo, duodecimo, or small octavo. Anderson’s publishers transformed the enterprise by using royal octavo volumes printed in double columns. This format provided both new opportunities and new marketing challenges, but what they were—and 1

The Encyclopedia Britannica (7th edn. 21 vols. Edinburgh, 1842), iii. 114.

200

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

how the metamorphosis would change the nature of the multi-volume collection itself—took three years for the publishers and editor together to ﬁgure out.

ACTIVE AND LIBERAL COOPERATION BET WEEN PUBLISHER AND EDITOR John Bowyer Nichols alleged that The Works of the British Poets was ‘more creditable to the editor than to the publishers, who injured the sale of them by an ill-judged parsimony in bringing them out’. 2 The editor himself held a different view of at least one of the publishers. When James Mundell died in 1800 Anderson mourned him deeply, knowing that in future pursuits he would ‘feel the want of his active and liberal cooperation’. Mundell’s death was painted as a loss ‘indeed to literature in general, for his mind was enlarged beyond the mere lucrative views of his profession’. 3 Anderson’s respect for the printer–publisher was forged during their collaboration on the poetry series. The idea began in 1792 when Mundell and Son decided to reprint ‘the Collection of English poetry, which goes under the name of Dr. Johnson’ (The Works of the English Poets, 1790) not in seventy-ﬁve pocket volumes but ‘in six volumes large octavo’. 4 While Anderson portrayed Mundell as the princpal stakeholder in the endeavor, his praise of the ‘proprietors’ for a ‘liberal spirit of enterprise, worthy of an association of opulent booksellers’ (4) embraced Sylvester Doig and Lawrie Symington as well. 5 It was their names that were attached to the prospectus for a ‘NEW AND IMPROVED EDITION OF THE POETS OF GREAT BRITAIN , Including the Entire Works of all the Poets of established reputation that ever wrote in the English Language, FROM CHAUCER TO GOLDSMITH’. 6 On the understanding that Anderson would ‘furnish them with a Biographical and Critical Preface to the works of each author’, the proprietors eventually agreed to ‘extend their collection to twelve volumes’, provided also that ‘some limitations’ were placed on the amount of ancient poetry included (4). Yet, far 2 Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. London, 1817–58), vii. 69. Pages 69–224 in this volume, dedicated to the Anderson-Percy correspondence, provided W. E. K. Anderson with a source to fall back on when manuscripts could not be located for his fuller 1988 edn. 3 Letters dated 27 Jan. and 9 May 1801, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, ed. W. E. K. Anderson, The Percy Letters, ix (New Haven and London, 1988), 49, 59. 4 Robert Anderson, ‘Preface’, The Works of the British Poets (14 vols. London and Edinburgh, [1792]–1807), [1]. Printed with its own pagination two years after vol. i, in which it is usually bound, the ‘Preface’ will be cited parenthetically throughout this chapter with a single numeral. Other citations of the edn. will include both volume and page numbers. 5 Mention of the ‘opulent booksellers’ may have been an allusion to the Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society, founded in 1776 and reconstituted on 17 Dec. 1792 as ‘The Society of Booksellers and Stationers of the City of Edinburgh, Suburbs of Edinburgh within the Royalty, and Leith’. See Richard B. Sher, ‘Corporatism and Consensus’, 54–7, 65–6. 6 CM (13 Sept. 1792); hereafter ‘original prospectus’.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

201

from a tidy doubling of the series from six to twelve volumes, it grew in stages, each adjustment tempered by the need to maintain a feasible commercial strategy. And with respect to the publishers, there was a changing of the guard along the way. The six-volume plan was conceived before Anderson entered the picture. Learning of the design, he ‘took occasion to recommend a collection, upon an enlarged plan, which might unite the works of the ancient and modern poets in one comprehensive view’ (4), resulting in the Doig and Symington prospectus of 13 September 1792 for a series to be published ‘In Nine Volumes Royal Octavo’. Anderson’s enlarged plan called for eight volumes to ‘comprehend all [the poets] that are contained in Johnson’s and Bell’s Editions, with some additional ones not found in either’—that is, seventy poets (sixty-six from the 1790 collection, plus Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, and Richard West from Bell), along with an indeﬁnite number of ‘additional ones’. At Anderson’s behest, then, two volumes had been added, anchored by Chaucer and Spenser respectively. Yet another volume was added afterward when, in ‘the course of research’, it was discovered that ‘many of the early Poets (among whom are the names of Ben Johnson, Shakespeare, &c.)’ had been ignored ‘by all former compilers’. 7 Even before the release of their prospectus, then, Doig and Symington had expanded their scope twice with a view to ‘exhibit the progress of our national poetry, corresponding with the gradual reﬁnement of language and of manners, from the rudeness and simplicity of a remote period, to the polish and elegance of modern times’ (4). How leery the publishers were of ‘ancient’ poetry was clear from one of the ‘Conditions’ of the prospectus, stipulating that the series would commence with Milton and his contemporaries, ‘Forming the FOURTH VOLUME in the Series’, because Chaucer and ‘some of the early Poets’ were ‘not so much adapted to the taste of readers in general’. 8 Anderson himself showed symptoms of this prejudice. He held that, prior to Elizabethan times, when ‘liberty began to dawn’, literature and religion were shrouded in a ‘mantle of mystery’ that subjected people to a form of ‘mental slavery’. Shakespeare arose ‘to silence the legendary oracles of the bard and the minstrel, to regulate the wildness of romantic ﬁction’, and ‘to put to ﬂight the phantoms of allegory’ (ii. [607]). Although Anderson sometimes couched his praise of early poets in terms of their having escaped the besetting sins of their time—improbable narratives, inept versiﬁcation, uncouth diction—he never wavered in his allegiance to a ‘comprehensive view’, nor relented readily when told by the proprietors to limit the quantity of older 7

Original prospectus. Original prospectus. Verses that predated Queen Elizabeth could evoke disdain, as a reviewer of Laurence Minot’s Poems on Interesting Events in the Reign of King Edward III (1795) expressed with excoriating verve: ‘The rhimes of our antient makers, like toads discovered in a leaden cofﬁn, would excite universal disgust, were it not for the miracle of their preservation’ (MR 21 (Dec. 1796), 464). 8

202

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

poetry. He paid homage repeatedly to the men who inspired him by recovering and disseminating the works of earlier poets: the ‘amiable and ingenious’ Henry Headley, whose Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry (1787) was a model of critical sympathy and ﬁnesse; and Thomas Davies, a bookseller who ‘employed himself in reviving the noblest monuments of the dead’, and who, for publishing editions of Carew, Suckling, Browne, and others, was dubbed ‘the laudable restorer of the elder classics’. 9 The ample coverage of earlier poets prompted a more consciously historical theorizing of the project. Doig and Symington’s prospectus was the most nuanced document yet drafted in relation to a multi-volume series, even though it initially clung to an unrealistic notion of completeness: Numerous are the advantages to be derived from the complete collection of the Poetical Works of a Nation; the enlightened reader will be enabled to observe with considerable precision, the manners of the times, and to trace the progress of reﬁnement and of civilization, from the bold, natural, and energetic ﬂights of ancient Poetry, to the smooth soft-ﬂowing strains of modern composition. By a careful comparison of the writings of one age with those of another, a very competent knowledge may be acquired of the difference or parity of manners prevailing at the two different periods; and in no species of writing will this observation hold so true as in that of Poetry. Poets have always been remarkable for adapting their mode of writing to the taste of the age they lived in, in general, and to that of their most zealous patrons in particular, forming, as it were in their writings, a mirror to reﬂect the image of the past to future ages.

If Bell advocated an open-ended goal in identifying the English classics as a newly critical site of comparison and study for readers, here a more speciﬁc goal was articulated: enlightened reading, marked by the competency to discriminate the stages of reﬁnement and civilization undergone by the nation. The ‘Editors’ congratulated themselves on performing ‘an essential service to the Public, by bringing forward a work that cannot be dispensed with in any Library, and which forms in reality a Library of itself ’. 10 Three volumes were scheduled for publication ‘every twelvemonths’, at which rate the nine volumes would have been published in three years. Work stalled, however, and by November 1793 Doig and Symington had faded from the picture. Taking up with Mundell in their stead were the partners Bell & Bradfute, who forged an extraordinary link with the London ﬁrm of John and Arthur Arch. Together they promoted the series in their new handbill as a ‘CHEAP EDITION OF THE BRITISH POETS , IN ELEVEN VOLUMES ’. Organized into an address ‘To the Public’, followed by a ‘Plan of this Work’ and a specimen page of the double-column printing, the handbill announced publication of the ﬁrst three

9 For tributes to Headley, see iii. 674, iv. 113, 378, 626, 706, and 763; to Davies, ii. 678, iii. 673, and iv. 256. 10 Original prospectus.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

203

Figure 7.1. Prospectus and specimen sheet for Anderson’s edition. Promotional copy ﬁlls the verso, while the leaf facing that gives sixteen stanzas from Sackville’s ‘Induction to a Mirrour for Magistrates’. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection.

volumes, indicating that it was printed for release in January 1794 (see Fig. 7.1). 11 Prior to this, however, the ‘Plan of this Work’ had appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on 21 November 1793, the same day the Arches 11 Handbill and specimen sheet for ‘A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, on a New Plan’, John Johnson Collection, Prospectuses 36, fo. A62; hereafter ‘revised prospectus’.

204

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

advertised in the London Chronicle that the series would begin publication on 2 December. Since many of its phrases and sentences would resurface in the ‘Preface’ under the editor’s name, this revised prospectus no doubt was drafted by Anderson. Another overture at this time brought Mundell, Bell & Bradfute, and the Arches together to publish The Poetical Works of Robert Blair . . . To which is preﬁxed, the Life of the Author, by Robert Anderson, M.D. (London, 1794). 12 How delicate the Edinburgh–London courtship could be is seen from Mundell’s attempt to strike yet another bargain over Plutarch’s Lives. Charles Dilly, whose own edition stood to suffer, complained to Bell in Edinburgh that Mundell had ‘emploied his brother in Londn to offer shares of his Edition—I know two or three unsuccessful applications[.] [W]hat encouragement he ﬁnds in Scotland I cannot say but this I know The Trade here will afford him no Encouragement in such dishonourable practices.’ While Dilly implored a colleague to pressure Bell & Bradfute not to carry Mundell’s edition, George Robinson, who had no stake in Plutarch, thought him ‘foolish to write about it’. Robinson urged Bell to ‘use Mundell’s or Dilly’s Edn as you please’, and found Dilly’s indignation over this matter to be old-fashioned: ‘Dilly is what the people of the North used to call a hide bound dog’. 13 The increase from nine to eleven volumes suggests that the new publishers were more pliable than Doig and Symington. With this greater amplitude at his command, Anderson laid more emphasis on the series as a ‘CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF CLASSICAL ENGLISH POETRY ’, and deﬁned its purpose more sharply: ‘The present collection unites the works of the ancient and modern poets in one comprehensive view, and combines their respective excellencies in one common interest. It begins with the works of Chaucer, and includes the works of every poet, from his time to the present day, who has obtained a classical distinction.’ That ‘common interest’ was an invitation for readers to immerse themselves in historical study: ‘Nothing marks more strongly the characteristic features of a Nation . . . than the state and history of its vernacular poetry.’ If Britons were to understand ‘the progressive change in manners in our nation, to become acquainted with the writings of our poets, and to contrast their merits, their works must be collected, arranged, and compared’. Anderson and the publishers had collected and arranged the poets; the intense work of comparison was up to the readers. By attaching a specimen sheet to their new prospectus, the proprietors acquainted readers with their double-columned format. So accustomed was the public to the familiar Elzevir, that a visual aid illustrating how such a quantity 12

Anderson included Blair in the poetry collection; this edn. was a separate venture. Dilly to Bell (16 July 1794) and Robinson to Bell & Bradfute (24 July 1794), NLS MS Dep 317, Box 2. Robinson identiﬁes Dilly’s ally as ‘J R___’; more than one of their contemporaries might answer to these initials. Mundell’s eventual imprint for the Plutarch could only pretend to a London sponsorship: ‘London: Printed for Mozley and Co. Gainsborough; J. Mundell and Co. Edinburgh; and J. and A. Duncan, Glasgow, 1794’ (ESTC n25278). 13

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

205

of poetry could be sold so cheaply was needed to help readers get used to the idea. The London market was catching its ﬁrst glimpse of the series, but the prospectus was useful in Edinburgh too, where the series was resuming after a delay that warranted reminding readers ‘N.B. This is the publication, of which a volume, containing the works of Milton, Cowley, Waller, Butler, and Denham, has already been published.—This last will now make the Fifth Volume of the Work.’ 14 At an accelerated pace the partners vowed to publish ‘One Volume on the First of every Month . . . till the whole is completed’. On 2 December 1793 in both London and Edinburgh they published volume i, and the following year volumes ii–ix appeared on 4 January, 1 February, 3 March, 3 April, 1 May, 5 June, 3 July, and 7 August. Given that volume v had appeared in September 1792 as the inaugural volume, its pro forma ‘publication’ in April 1794 was accompanied by an unusual buy-back offer: ‘MUNDELL AND SON, Printers, foot of Royal Bank Close, will, upon application, pay the price at which they were given out by the former Publisher, for such copies as are returned to them not soiled, by those Gentlemen who do not wish to complete their collection of the British Poets.’ Those who wished to keep it, on the other hand, were urged by Bell & Bradfute to pick up their free ‘Vignette Title’, or engraved series title-page, ‘by applying to the Booksellers from whom they ordered this book’. 15 Unavailable when the inaugural volume had ﬁrst been published, the engraved title-page read A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, a designation that, to Anderson’s regret, had been ‘improperly copied . . . from Mr. Bell’s edition’ (5). No edition could be that comprehensive. Signiﬁcant changes occurred between March and August 1794. On 3 March, without comment, the monthly refrain—‘To be completed in Eleven Volumes’— was raised to ‘Twelve’, a reﬂection of their intention (not yet explicit) to add translations. Other developments surfaced in the 1 May advertisement for volume vi: ‘J. & A. Arch’ began to be listed as co-publishers (ahead of Bell & Bradfute and J. Mundell & Co.) in the Edinburgh newspapers; a full ‘List of the Authors’ could now be had from booksellers; Anderson was credited for the ﬁrst time with writing the prefaces; and a new title was introduced. 16 From this point on the series was promoted as ‘The British Poets’, and a set of letterpress title-pages, previously unanticipated, was produced to read The Works of the British Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Robert Anderson, M.D.

14 15

EEC (2 Dec. 1793). Revised prospectus; EEC (3 Apr. 1794). The dates are taken from publication day notices in

EEC. 16 The portion of the revised prospectus in EEC (21 Nov. 1793) was released under the auspices of Bell & Bradfute only. Why their newspaper advertisements should not have divulged the London connection earlier than May 1794 is unclear, since the handbill printed in Jan. (Fig. 7.1) already designated J. & A. Arch as co-publishers, unless the notices were differently tailored for Edinburgh and London audiences.

206

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

The difference between the letterpress and engraved title-pages has resulted in a bibliographical muddle. 17 On 8 September, instead of volume x, the proprietors issued volume xii. ‘Many of the Friends of this Work having expressed a desire to see the Poetical Translations’, it was explained, the publishers had gone ahead with them, rescheduling volumes x and xi for the ﬁrst days of October and November. Anderson’s prefaces kept them waiting, however, and when volume x ﬁnally appeared in January 1795, Mundell and Son apologized ‘to their Friends and the Public, for not having been able to publish the British Poets with such regularity as they expected’. Yet they trusted they would be forgiven, attributing their delay to ‘Dr. Anderson’s desire to make this Collection as complete as possible, and to do justice to the Biographical part’. Although the biographer had not ﬁnished ‘the Lives within the time he at ﬁrst thought would be necessary for that purpose’, they were optimistic that he could ﬁnish work on volume xi ‘within a few weeks’. 18 Work on volume xi also dragged on because, although it was ‘intended only to have given Selections’ of the most recent poets, Anderson ‘was not only induced to include all the Poems of each Author found in any one Edition of his Works, but to glean from different Editions, and from Periodical Publications, all that has been ascribed to each’. From a modern miscellany, the volume had turned into a gathering of complete works and grown so large (‘at least one half beyond the average thickness of the other Volumes’) that its price jumped to 16s. in boards. 19 On the afternoon of 16 March 1795 a ﬁre broke out on the premises of Mundell and Son. Because this one—unlike the blaze in 1778 that burnt down the Apollo Press—was ‘happily discovered in sufﬁcient time to prevent its spreading’, its damage was ‘not very considerable’. Mundell’s insurers, the Edinburgh Friendly Insurance Society, had their client issue a statement to vouch for their acting ‘with a liberality not inferior to any of the English insurance companies’; to inform the ‘many active young men’ who helped quell the ﬂames that the company would ‘liberally, but not extravagantly’ reward them; to warn others who had walked off with unprinted paper and ‘some letter cases’ that they would be vigorously prosecuted if the property was not returned; and to reassure Mundell’s customers that the disruption to their business would be minimal. It was hoped that the losses would ‘not occasion much delay in the publication of the British Poets’, but as the printers had ‘not yet ascertained the extent of the damage done to these works’, they were unable to ‘speak with any certainty on this subject’. Within a few days it was announced that ‘M. & S. expect to be able to publish the Eleventh Volume of this Work before the end 17 The ESTC has separate records for A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (t2891) and The Works of the British Poets (t152376), while noting that they are probably the same. See n. 74 below. 18 EEC (8 Sept. 1794, 17 Jan. 1795). 19 Handbill published by Mundell and Son for ‘The Works of the British Poets’, John Johnson Collection, Prospectuses 36, fo. A75.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

207

of May next.—Along with which they will also publish an additional volume of Translations.’ 20 This sudden addition of a thirteenth volume was a sign of the publishers’ continued conﬁdence in their product. Till then subject to continual expansion, the series now stood ﬁxed (for the time being), though it took several more months for Anderson to ﬁnish his biographies. On 21 November 1795, exactly three years after issuance of the second prospectus, The Works of the British Poets was completed ‘in 13 vols. royal 8vo, embellished with EMBLEMATICAL VIGNETTES, price £8 in boards’. 21 Before binding up their sets, subscribers had to collect their series title-pages (letterpress and engraved), along with Anderson’s overview of the genesis and rationale of the undertaking, an eight-page general ‘Preface’, dated 25 November.

APPEARING AS EDITOR When Doig and Symington, in alliance with the as yet unnamed Anderson, called themselves the ‘Editors’ of their series, while characterizing the conductors of earlier multi-volume projects as ‘compilers’, a new factor entered into the production and marketing of the poetic classics. In 1790, the ‘BooksellerEditor’ had still held sway over The Works of the English Poets. The proprietors redressed the deﬁciencies in their 1779–81 edition based upon the advice of friends, persons of taste, and the public; having obtained these opinions, they ‘implicitly followed them’. According to this model, the bookseller-editor served as a conduit, an agent who canvased opinions and supplied the market with the wants it expressed. 22 For Anderson, by contrast, to step forward as editor and lay himself open to praise or blame, was a new development. As Thomas Percy put the issue a few years later, writing to Anderson about their collaboration on an edition of Grainger, ‘when Mr. Mundell desired one of Us to be responsible, I suppose he meant that one of us should appear as editor’. 23 From this point forward, though tentatively at ﬁrst, publishers increasingly saw an advantage in producing their collections in association with a name-worthy editorial authority. In this regard, the multi-volume series reﬂected the increasing role of scholarly editing relative to the English literary classics, the market for which, as Marcus Walsh observes, ‘had become, like any mature market, stratiﬁed’. An ‘increasing expectation of textual exactness’ held true for learned editions, of course, with scholars being able ‘to assume in their readers some knowledge or at least acceptance of the consequence’ of their careful work, but this expectation ultimately rubbed off on the popular editions in their market niche as well. 24 20

21 EEC (16 and 19 Mar. 1795). EEC (21 Nov. 1795). ‘Advertisement’, The Works of the English Poets (1790), i, pp. v–vi, discussed in Ch. 6. 23 Letter dated 21 Feb. 1799, Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, 11. 24 Walsh, ‘Literary Scholarship and the Life of Editing’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York, 2001), 213. 22

208

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

Not only Anderson took his duties seriously; he knew many of his readers did too. Some publishers (following Bell, Harrison, and Wenman) would continue to brand their products with their own names (Cooke, Walker, Sharpe, Dove, etc.), but starting with Anderson’s, several collections over the next ﬁfteen years would be linked to editors like John Aikin, Thomas Park, and Alexander Chalmers. Before 1 May 1794 Anderson’s name was not used promotionally. The original prospectus had called for ‘a biographical sketch of the lives and writings of the authors’; Doig and Symington argued that an account of the poet geared towards an ‘elucidation of his writings’ and touching upon ‘every interesting particular’ of his life was ‘certainly desireable, previous to the perusal of his writings’. In the revised prospectus Bell & Bradfute maintained that ‘a biographical sketch of the author, with critical remarks on his writings’ would be ‘no unacceptable relative appendage to the poetry’, and might even ‘be deemed necessary by the common reader’—a signiﬁcant nod to the consumer expectations that previous collections had generated. But neither mentioned Anderson. An early reviewer of the series, in fact, alluded to the ‘author or authors of these lives (for whether there is one or more engaged, we do not pretend to determine)’. 25 Beginning in May 1794, however, newspaper advertisements carried the credit, but until the letterpress title-pages were distributed many purchasers would have remained in the dark about his identity. ‘Appearing as editor’ was purposely avoided by the advisers or prefacers to previous collections. Hugh Blair, although willing to have it known afterwards that he had ‘had a hand in the Selection’ of Creech and Balfour’s collection, hid his role when advertising it would have mattered, leaving the publishers cryptically to credit the aid of ‘a Gentleman of known taste and abilities in the Literary World’. 26 Johnson disavowed any responsibility for ‘his’ edition beyond the prefaces and the inclusion of four poets—to little avail, for he was identiﬁed with the project to such an extent that Anderson alluded to him as ‘the ostensible editor’ (3). Once Bell & Bradfute began naming Anderson in advertisements as their biographer, they also identiﬁed a set of Creech’s collection in their catalogue as the ‘British Poets from Milton to Beattie, selected and arranged by the Rev. Dr. Blair’, as if the time for such distinctions had arrived. 27 Only in the end, however, did Anderson emerge as editor too, donning that mantle in the ‘Preface’ and legitimizing the running headers in reviews of the work: ‘Anderson’s British Poets’, or ‘Anderson’s Edition of the British Poets’. This would have been a misnomer, like ‘Johnson’s Poets’, had he only written the lives, but by virtue of 25 BC 4 (July 1794), 43–4. The series stood at four volumes when this review was published in July. By the time the monthly reviews were bound into an annual volume, the editor was able to identify Anderson as the preface writer (xiv). 26 See Ch. 3. 27 Item 2030, A Catalogue of Books for the Year M,DCC,XCIV, 73.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

209

transforming the scope of the collection and choosing copy-texts he truly became the ‘conductor of that publication’. 28 Anderson took charge of recommending ‘the proper editions of the works to be reprinted’ (5), except for volume v and Chaucer, which had gone to press before he became editor. The goal of reprinting a poet’s œuvre was not always feasible or desirable. The ‘smaller pieces’ of Penrose, for instance, were deemed to have ‘not a sufﬁcient degree of merit to entitle them to a place among the favored productions of poetry’ (xi. 610). In some cases a lone edition might sufﬁce as copy-text, but often Anderson had to pull together texts from disparate imprints or ‘detached portions’; his success in recovering works previously overlooked was applauded by reviewers. On the opposite side of the ledger, poems were left out occasionally when there was neither the time nor resources to ﬁnd them. Thomas Warton’s Five Pastoral Eclogues, Anderson confessed, ‘eluded the diligence of the present writer’ (xi. [1053]) as did Smart’s Song to David, several poems by Shaw, Mickle’s Prophecy, and others (xi. 123, 559, 634). A letter enumerating Logan’s ‘unpublished works, and uncollected pieces’ (xi. 1029), received by the editor just two months before his general ‘Preface’ was sent to the printer, underscores the challenges he faced in establishing a poet’s canon. The biographies were Anderson’s most time-consuming responsibility. He claimed no part in writing the life of Spenser, nor the lives in volume v (Milton, Cowley, Waller, Butler, Denham), which were produced with ‘little care or diligence’ by two men ‘of learning and abilities’ (7) who desired anonymity, taking to heart the prediction that a century would pass ‘before a Genius will arise capable of compleating what Dr. JOHNSON left unﬁnished, in a manner worthy of the original Author’, and the doubt that anybody meanwhile would have ‘the temerity to court a comparison’. 29 Defying temerity, the publishers of Anderson’s edition copied the title-page billing given to Johnson: With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Robert Anderson, M.D. Anderson assumed a self-deprecating tone in the prefaces, however, deferring to Thomas Warton’s appraisals of Surrey and Wyatt, for instance, and slighting his own contributions as ‘the bungling afterstrokes of a casual hand’ (i. 593, 615). The publishers were careful to assure readers that in the prefaces as a body, Johnson’s ‘masterly Critique’ had been preserved, while pointing out that ‘the present Editor frequently marks a difference of opinion, and corrects mistaken facts’. 30 Anderson used his position to counterbalance the ‘inquisitorial strictness of Dr. Johnson’ (xi. 728). As late as the 1930s he was congratulated for trying ‘to clear Shenstone’s name from the aspersions of Dr. Johnson’. 31 The need for Anderson to keep looking over his shoulder demonstrated that to write poetical biographies in this context was to be hyper-aware of Johnson. Some 28

29 BC 7 (Jan. 1796), 25. The Works of the English Poets (1790), i, p. vii. EEC (19 Mar. 1795). 31 Marjorie Williams, William Shenstone: A Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Taste (Birmingham, 1935), 103. 30

210

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

of his biographical notices were judged worse than Johnson’s, some better. On the whole they were thought ‘sufﬁcient for general information, and drawn up with judgment’, although he was faulted for being ‘perhaps too indiscriminate in praise’. 32 Anderson himself suspected that some of his praise was ‘too lavishly bestowed’, but as a policy believed it better ‘to recommend beauties than to expose blemishes’ (7). One reviewer took him to task for the ‘dangerous and inconvenient’ practice of lifting material straight from his sources without using quotation marks. 33 In defense Anderson might have reiterated what he conﬁded in his ‘Preface’ about relying on previous biographies: ‘What use he has made of them will be obvious, as well as what is entirely his own’ (6). By far the most notable of his own contributions was ‘The Life of Johnson’, weighty enough to warrant simultaneous publication as a separate edition. Along with the rest of his prefaces, it aptly proved one reviewer’s comment that Johnson ‘was not only a biographer himself, but the cause of biography in others’. 34 Looking back on the whole undertaking, Anderson admitted that it ‘appeared to him much easier, before he engaged in it, than he found afterwards’. Understandably, he had ‘an imperfect conception of the difﬁculties to be surmounted, the disappointments to be incurred, the books to be procured and waited for, the dates to be settled, the facts to be ascertained, and the various irritating minutiæ of the press’ (8). It was boasted that he corrected inaccuracies and brought together new facts that had never before been ‘concentered’—a curious verb, appropriate to the centripetal forces of a classical collection. 35 One more task lay before him, never yet performed, but crucial to the concentric nature of a poetry collection: the drafting of a general ‘Preface’ to explain his guiding principles, and afﬁxing his name to it, ‘ROBERT ANDERSON, Edinburgh, November 25. 1795’. Anderson’s responsibilities were distinct from any that had come before. While publishers were the arbiters of admission into prior collections, Anderson now was the principal gatekeeper and accordingly received an outpouring of congratulations and advice. From Thomas Percy he heard, ‘Your edition of the Poets of Great Britain does so much honour to their Biographer and Critic, that every Friend to Literature should assist his candid and ingenious Labours.’ To Anderson’s surprise, many like-minded persons did just that: The correspondence of many respectable persons in Great Britain and Ireland, to whom I am personally unknown, I reckon no inconsiderable addition to the pleasure I have had in contributing to extend, however little, the honour of our national poetry and the boundaries of literary biography. But from those who have made the poetry of 32

BC 7 (1796), xviii; CR NS 25 (1799), 46. MR NS 26 (1798), 392–5, and NS 27 (1798), 12–13. 34 BC 7 (1796), 24. See Paul J. Korshin, ‘Robert Anderson’s Life of Johnson and Early Interpretive Biography’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 36 (1973), 239–53. 35 Mundell and Son handbill (John Johnson Collection, Prospectuses 36, fo. A75v ). 33

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

211

our country an object of deliberate investigation, I had not the vanity to expect either attention or approbation.

This recognition was to last, too, as Nichols attested in 1848; for more than half a century, Anderson remained ‘well known to the public as the editor and biographer of the British Poets’. 36

SCAT TER’D GEMS THAT ROUND PARNASSUS SHINE ‘English literature’, Anderson wrote, was ‘under no small obligations to those who have associated the scattered productions of our poets in one collection, and by that means have secured their general preservation’ ([1]). William Preston borrowed this conceit when paying tribute to Anderson for his accomplishment in The Works of the British Poets: ’Tis He, the lover of the tuneful art, With head unclouded, and with glowing heart, ’Tis He, whose cares departed genius guard, Whose ardent friendship soothes the living bard; Who boasts, in solid structure, to combine The scatter’d gems that round Parnassus shine. 37

The preservation that mattered to Anderson was general—a question not of archival storage but of publication, not of conservation but of dissemination. His purpose was ﬁrst to collect the scattered gems and then, in various ways for the beneﬁt of a widespread audience, to associate them. Because he knew it would ‘doubtless be inquired what are the deﬁciencies of preceding collections’, he set out to explain ‘on what ground [he had] judged the work, which he now presents to the world, to be necessary’ ([1]). He had high praise for the miscellany tradition, extolling Tottel, publisher of ‘the ﬁrst printed Poetical Miscellany in the English language’, and his successors. Early miscellanies had rescued ‘specimens of ancient genius’ from rotting in manuscript or being lost on account of changing tastes, the contingencies of a ‘detached and fugitive state of existence’, and the ‘depredations of time, inattention, and other accidents’. Later miscellanies preserved poems which, ‘from their brevity and unconnectedness, could not possibly have survived any length of time by themselves’. Anthologies like those of Dodsley, Pearch, and Nichols salvaged for posterity the works of recent poets, ‘men of real genius, who, from the brevity, rather than the inferiority of their writings, have been usually styled “Minor Poets” ’ ([1]). 36

Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, 1, 3–4; Nichols, Illustrations, vii. 69. An Epistle to Robert Anderson, M.D. on Recieving from Him a Present of Various Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1806), [3]–4. 37

212

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

On a larger scale, the editors of multi-volume collections of poetry, ‘uniting industry with taste’, had produced ‘uniform and elegant editions of the Works of the British Poets, in the manner of those of Italy, Spain, and France’. Britain’s assertion of poetic nationhood was thus implicitly acknowledged to have been achieved. To those responsible Anderson accorded a ‘degree of praise not much inferior’ to what he awarded the miscellany-makers ([1]). What made them slightly inferior were their perceived shortcomings. Unaware of the Foulis precedent, Anderson credited Creech and Balfour with the ‘ﬁrst collection of English Poetry which appeared in these kingdoms’. 38 Yet its elegance was ‘no compensation for its incompleteness’, he cautioned, owing to the ‘contracted list of authors marked out by Dr. Blair’. Since Blair’s function had been restricted to this exercise, the fault lay with him for including ‘none of those who have justly obtained the distinction of being denominated our older classics’, except for Milton and Cowley. ‘Nor’, Anderson objected, ‘do the contents of the work correspond with its title, many long and valuable pieces of Cowley, Parnell, Swift, and Shenstone, being omitted’ ([1]). Poets of this stature were ‘far too well known to stand in need of such partial recommendation’, a paternalistic truncation which ‘deprives the reader of that pleasure which every one feels, and of that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself ’ (2). Yet, with titles like Select Poems of Mr. A. Cowley or Select Works of W. Shenstone, Esq. (if not Poems of Dr. Jonathan Swift), Creech never pretended to summon all the evidence demanded by Anderson’s metaphor of judicial process. Here he was being faulted for not having anticipated Bell. It was Bell’s edition, lauded by Anderson for ‘containing the entire works of the authors admitted into Dr. Blair’s edition’, that uniformly reprinted poetic œuvres, raising the standard for any future work with a title like The British Poets. Anderson credited Bell also with vastly enlarging the scope of inclusion; among his ﬁfty poets, ‘three of our older classics appear, to whom no place had been given in Dr. Blair’s edition, and several modern writers of credit are adopted as legitimate and established poets’ (2). By satisfying these criteria—by reprinting a poet’s entire works, incorporating older classics, and judiciously anointing modern poets—Bell emerged from Anderson’s survey with the fewest demerits. 39 Although The Works of the English Poets was well designed to rival Bell’s work, Dilly having promised ‘all the English Poets of reputation, from Chaucer to the present time’, Anderson found the edition wanting in execution. It was disappointing that so few older classics were admitted ‘in a work which bore so close a relation to the honour of the nation, and which, from its elegance and magnitude, afforded the happiest opportunity of uniting our poets, both 38 Also blind to the Foulis English Poets, NCBEL places Creech’s set ﬁrst under the heading ‘Collections in Series’ (ii. 435–6). 39 However, Anderson does call Bell’s volumes ‘miniature’, quoting at length from Boswell’s Life of Johnson and seeming to accept uncritically the invidious comparison made by Dilly in recounting the genesis of The Works of the English Poets (discussed in Ch. 4).

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

213

ancient and modern, in one comprehensive view, and of combining their respective excellencies in one common interest’ (3). The repeated Latin preﬁx com(comprehensive, combining, common) underscores the function of a published collection: it holds poets together, enabling readers to grasp—in both senses of the word—what the editor and publishers have ‘associated’. The common interest to be served here was a more historically valid appraisal of literature: ‘Ancient poetry, in thus being exhibited to the public eye, would soon have made good her claims to notice, and of herself recovered the long-lost verdure of her bays; whilst the justice of that latitude which is commonly assigned to later improvements, from a fair opportunity of a comparative examination, might have been more strictly ascertained’ (3). Reading ancient verse alongside more contemporary verse would help to correct two related aesthetic prejudices, the undervaluing of older poetry and the overvaluing of the modern idiom. The 1790 expansion of The Works of the English Poets marked only a slight improvement, for the addition of modern poets exclusively left it still ‘deﬁcient in the works of our older classics’ and fraught with ‘instances of caprice in the admission of literary honours’ (4). Judging, fairness, legitimacy, rights, justice—Anderson extended this language of judicial review and legal entitlement to poet and reader alike. The presumption of a fair hearing was his editorial modus operandi. Readers were owed the right to examine all the evidence (the poet’s complete works) and judge for themselves. In his prefaces the editor redressed past injustices: this poet deserved a higher reputation; that one had long merited republication; another was now, at last, justly designated an older classic. Beginning with the Foulises, a poet’s inclusion in a multi-volume collection was seen to be an honor; that honor was subject to evolving critical and commercial constructions, and starting with Anderson’s edition a more explicit aura of legitimacy surrounded its conferral. Essential to the notion of a fair hearing was Anderson’s idea of ‘classical distinction’. As deﬁned by the revised prospectus, this designation extended to any poet who, ‘though not generally read, is familiar to us in conversation, and constantly appealed to in controverted points of poetical taste’. Several older poets ‘comprehended’ in the list Anderson initially put before the publishers fell short of this criterion; he italicized the names of those left out ‘on due consideration’: Chaucer, Langland, Gower; the best parts of Lydgate, Barclay, Hawes; the best parts of Skelton, Surray, Wyat; the best parts of Warner, Sydney, Sackville, Spenser, Marlow, Davies, Shakspeare, Drayton, Daniel, Jonson, Donne, Hall, Drummond, Stirling, Browne, P. Fletcher, G. Fletcher; the best parts of Quarles, King, Carew, Suckling, Crashaw, Davenant, and the translations of Fairfax, Sandys, and May.

Drawing back from this quantity of early verse, the publishers thought it ‘safer to allure curiosity into this unfrequented track of reading . . . than to run the risk of suppressing it totally, by a bulky republication of all or the better parts

214

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

of the works of those unfortunate authors, who still remain unpopular, merely from the want of being read’ (4). While the last clause might seem a tautology, Anderson was convinced that the rejected poetry was not intrinsically unpopular, only accidentally so: if readers could be induced to pick it up, they would learn to appreciate it. What the publishers had to gauge was how much of it might be picked up, lest by exceeding this psychological threshold the collection should intimidate potential readers and be ignored. As a reviewer put it, the publishers were bound to have been ‘unwilling to clog their work with authors little regarded since the time of Pope’. 40 Unlike the ancient poets, the moderns readily pleased readers, but their large number—as ‘comprehended’ in Anderson’s list—was daunting to the publishers: Marvell, C. Cotton, Sedley, Hopkins, Oldham, Pattison, Hill, Eusden, Welsted, Sewell, Blair, Hamilton, Harte, Boyse, Thompson, Cooper, Brown, Grainger, Smollet, Wilkie, Dodsley, Mendez, Jenner, Kirkpatrick, Smart, Bruce, Chatterton, Græme, Glover, Shaw, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott, Logan, N. Cotton, and Blacklock.

Again the editor was ‘obliged’ to omit the italicized poets ‘on account of the arrangements which the proprietors had made relative to the extent of the collection’ (4). While Anderson succeeded in getting the publishers to expand the series greatly, they resisted making it as large as he desired. With forty-nine poets (twenty early, twenty-nine modern) added to the sixty-six offered by the 1790 collection, Anderson’s edition reached a total of 115 poets. Mundell and Son distributed a handbill listing the poets in impressive columns, volume by volume (Fig. 7.2). 41 Anderson took pride in ushering poets into the series, cognizant that, as he had said of Bell, they were being ‘adopted as legitimate and established poets’. He boasted that ‘forty-ﬁve are now, for the ﬁrst time, received into an edition of English poetry’ (5). One by one they were inducted into the collection ceremoniously, a single sentence in each case reserved to declare the canonization proper. Of Drayton’s works, for example, Anderson proclaimed, ‘They are now for the ﬁrst time received into a collection of classical English poetry’ (iii, p. v). Although the editor sometimes replaced the verb received with either admitted or inserted, and occasionally, instead of a collection, called the edition an arrangement or chronological arrangement, the formulaic nature of the proclamation turned it into a kind of refrain that, on each new hearing, strengthened its air of ofﬁcial sanction. The most stable phrase in the canonical declaration was ‘classical English poetry’. 40

CR NS 25 (Jan. 1799), 40. From the list of modern poets Anderson omitted Richard West and Thomas Warton. He counted one poet too many in the 1779 Works of the English Poets, and one too few in the 1790 edn. By adding forty-nine to an inaccurate base of sixty-ﬁve, he reached an erroneous tally of 114, the number heralded in EEC (19 Mar. 1795) and his ‘Preface’ (5). By coincidence, Mundell and Son’s handbill left out Dorset’s name under vol. vi, and thus listed 114 poets instead of 115. 41

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

Figure 7.2. Handbill summing up the contents of Anderson’s edition. The double daggers in this advertisement—marking those poets not included in the 1790 edition of ‘Johnson’s Poets’— graphically display the enormously expanded roster of poetic classics published under the editorship of Robert Anderson. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, John Johnson Collection, Prospectuses 36, fo. A75.

215

216

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

Anderson used the term classical in a range of contexts, often in the obvious sense as deﬁned by Johnson’s Dictionary—‘Relating to antique authors; relating to literature’. A twist on this usage in ‘The Life of Jago’ suggests a kind of parity between the ancients and moderns: as part of the ‘good classical education’ Jago received from the Reverend Mr Crumpton, he was given ‘a more early taste for the English classics, than was commonly done in grammar schools at that time’ (xi. [675]). Related to matters of style or taste, the adjective modiﬁed terms like ‘regularity’ (x. 893), ‘correctness’ (x. 966), ‘propriety’ (xi. 80), and ‘simplicity’ (xi. 421), indicating qualities, like Drummond’s ‘Doric delicacy and simplicity’ (iv. 624), that Anderson was ever alert to compliment. In this vein he quoted Warton’s estimate of Surrey, who for ‘justness of thought, correctness of style, and purity of expression, may justly be pronounced the ﬁrst English classical poet’ (i. 593). The word was also used routinely in line with Johnson’s second deﬁnition—‘Of the ﬁrst order or rank’—in normative evaluations marking worth or value. 42 Tellingly, Anderson relied on the word also to express critical processes that mirrored his own editorial task: the ‘impartial classical examination’ that determined Smart’s victory in a poetry contest, for instance, or the ‘classical taste’ of Knox that led to a just estimate of Chatterton’s genius (xi. 118, 320). In this sense the word reﬂected a methodological ideal, the bringing of evidence ‘under the jurisdiction of the judgment’ (xi. 80) with suitable acumen. How otherwise could ‘The Progress of Reﬁnement’, by the reigning poet laureate H. J. Pye, be considered a ‘classical poem’ (xi. 319), if not in the way Anderson’s editorial deliberation was classical? Individual merit had to be weighed, and then plotted accurately on the historical curve of the nation’s poetry.

THE CHEAPEST AND MOST PERFECT EDITION OF BRITISH POETS Mundell and Son set out to turn a set of seventy-ﬁve small octavo volumes into six volumes royal octavo. Whereas the 1790 Works of the English Poets retailed for £11 5s. sewed, the Edinburgh series would have cost less than a third as much—£3 3s. for the whole, at 10s. 6d. per volume in boards. 43 By outgrowing its original plan Mundell’s set cost more in the end, but this 3:1 cost ratio held steady for comparable quantities of the two editions, reﬂecting the lower production costs realized from printing the text in double columns on larger paper. The key differential was the quantity of paper consumed; Mundell paid more per sheet than his London counterparts, but used less than a third the number of sheets overall. In a copy of volume v, for example, 451/2 sheets of 42 43

A Dictionary of the English Language (4th edn. 2 vols. London, 1773). LC (1–4 May 1790), 423.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

217

royal paper were needed to reprint Milton, Cowley, Waller, Butler, and Denham; the nine corresponding pocket volumes (vii–xiv and xvi) required 170 sheets of foolscap. 44 Similarly, the twelve poets in volume vii stretched through ten volumes of the London set (xxvii, most of xxviii, xxx–xxxv, xxxviii, and part of xxxix), reducing to 50 the earlier need for 187 sheets. Had these pocket volumes been sold on a pro-rated basis at 3s. per volume (sewed), it would have cost £1 7s. to buy what was offered by the equivalent royal octavo for 10s. 6d. (in boards). Without factoring in the cost of binding, which would have magniﬁed the disparity, the contrast validates the claim that Mundell’s set would be ‘the cheapest as well as the most perfect Edition of the British Poets ever offered’. 45 As the series grew more ‘perfect’ its cost rose, though not enough, even when projected to reach eleven volumes, to debar it from being advertised as a ‘Cheap Edition of the British Poets’. At ‘ﬁve guineas and a half ’ it was a bargain compared with ‘either of the two which have preceded it’, more comprehensive and yet not ‘one half the price of either’—true with respect to the 1790 set, but false relative to Bell’s edition, which in 1791 still sold for £8 8s. in wrappers. 46 When a twelfth volume was added, ‘the most comprehensive COLLECTION of POETRY and BIOGRAPHY ever offered to the Public’ rose to ‘Six Guineas per Set, in boards’. The rate of 10s. 6d., or ‘Half-a-Guinea per Volume’, was guaranteed until the series reached its conclusion; after that it would be ‘raised, on account of the thickness of the later Volumes, and the additional duty on paper’, to 12s. per volume, or £7 4s. per set, in boards. 47 Original purchasers were instructed to ‘have their sets completed by their respective Booksellers, at the former prices’, bringing what was by then a thirteen-volume expenditure to 61/2 guineas, or £6 16s. 6d. Since this rate was unavailable to newcomers, only the hiked-up price was now advertised, ‘£8 in boards’. 48 This was a far cry from £3 3s., but fully in line with the expanded scope of the project. A more accurate comparison with Bell’s edition would have taken into account the translations appended in 1794–5 by Martin and Bain: with these nineteen volumes in wrappers at 1s. 6d., the 128-volume total would have been £9 16s. 6d. Martin and Bain advertised sets bound ‘neatly’ for £15 15s., ‘in a superior manner’ at £17, and ‘extra’ for £20. 49 Although appreciably lower, the cost of Anderson’s Edition had grown closer to Bell’s than its advertisements let on, though the claim that it encompassed much more poetry was accurate.

44 Whatman & Co. manufactured the foolscap. The production cost per set of 75 vol. was £4 18s. 41/2d., less than half its retail price. See Fleeman, Bibliography, ii. 1381. 45 46 Original prospectus. Revised prospectus; Bell, ‘The British and Irish Nations’. 47 48 EEC (17 Jan. 1795). EEC (21 Nov. 1795). 49 ‘A List of Some Valuable Books, Printed for, or Sold by Martin & Bain’, dated Aug. 1795, at the back of the British Library copy of Samuel Garth, Ovid’s Epistles: Translated by Eminent Persons (2 vols. London, 1795), ii. [119]; see The Eighteenth Century (Woodbury, Conn.), microﬁlm reel 6749, no. 32.

218

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

Table 7.1. Trade orders, with prices, for Bell & Bradfute’s The Works of the British Poets Correspondent, place of business

Volumes ordered (in sequence taken)

Quires

Isaac Forsyth, Elgin William Charnley, Newcastle Angus & Son, Aberdeen Sylvester Doig, Edinburgh S. Wilkinson, Morpeth Dunlop & Wilson, Glasgow Francis Childs & Co., New York Samuel Campbell, New York Samuel Campbell, New York

3–4, 6, 7–9, 12 4, 6, 7, 8–9, 12, 10 4–7, 8, 9, 10, 12 1–4, 6–7, 6, 8, 9 6–9, 12 1–10, 12 9 1–4 5–9

X X X

Boards

X X X X X X

No. of copies

Price per copy

6 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

7s. 4d. 8s. 8s. 8s. 6d. 8s. 6d. 8s. 6d. 9s. 9s. 9s.

Note: In the second column, commas are placed between separately entered transactions.

While the Arches presumably ﬁlled orders for the collection in the south of Britain, evidence illuminating part of the web of distribution in the north, along with trade discounts, is found in one of Bell & Bradfute’s day-books. 50 As each volume was printed, the publishers took seventy-ﬁve copies, receiving the sheets in quires at 7s. per volume for a total of £26 5s. The terms they offered other booksellers, most of them also taking shipment in quires, appear in Table 7.1. Newcastle and Morpeth deﬁne the southernmost part of this marketing region, Aberdeen and Elgin the northern boundary, and New York its transatlantic reach. Especially favorable terms were allowed Isaac Forsyth, who paid 7s. 4d., a mere 5 percent proﬁt for Bell & Bradfute, perhaps because of his ordering multiple copies. The 8s. paid by William Charnley and Angus & Sons represented a 14 percent mark-up. For 6d. more Sylvester Doig had his volumes stitched and covered in boards, a discount not enjoyed by S. Wilkinson and Dunlop & Wilson, who paid the same for volumes in quires. Overseas clients paid the highest: a volume in boards cost 9s. for Samuel Campbell, and with the rise in duties on paper both he and Francis Childs & Co. later paid the same amount for shipments in quires. 51 Closer to home, and at a fuller proﬁt for Bell & Bradfute, individual subscribers paid the advertised 10s. 6d. per volume in boards. The day-book records a woman, Miss Adair, as having bought a single volume (the fourth), but month after month under the heading of ‘Sundries’ eighteen men are listed as taking their volumes. The majority were professionals, including a clergyman, three doctors, and nine lawyers (three advocates and six writers, half of whom were 50 ECL MS qYZ 325 B43 (Accession G73072). The day-book supplies the information in this and the next paragraph; it covers the publication period in 1794–5 for vols. iv–ix, xii, and x. 51 The day-book records that Charnley’s orders were transported by wagon, as the Glasgow order must have been. The others—to Elgin, Aberdeen, Morpeth, and New York—went by ship.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

219

Writers to the Signet). 52 A letter also survives from Donald McLean of Carron Bank, who subscribed to the series upon reading Doig and Symington’s prospectus of 13 September 1792. 53 From so tiny a sample it would be unwarranted to infer a mostly male readership for the series, but the preponderance of educated and at least moderately well-off men is noteworthy. If the octodecimo volumes of Bell were promoted for their ‘uncommon and delicate size, calculated for a Lady’s pocket’, perhaps thick royal octavos were destined to ﬁnd a more masculine audience. 54 Anderson said the books were designed on the plan of Vicesimus Knox’s ‘Elegant Extracts in Verse’ (4); the original prospectus pointed to the ‘Travelling Edition of Shakespeare’, the ﬁrst single volume to contain all his plays. 55 Both were royal octavos printed in double columns, an unwieldy but ideal format for compressing large amounts of poetry into a relatively small space. The publisher of Shakespeare worried that ‘an edition so singular in form’ might appear ‘surprising to many readers’, but not so much, he trusted, as to dissuade the ‘middling and lower ranks of the inhabitants of this country’ from wishing to own it. For gentlemen it could ‘commodiously be taken into a post-chaise, for amusement in a journey’; or in conversation, should a passage be disputed, the volume could ‘with great convenience, be fetched by a servant out of a library or closet’. Objections to its ‘bulk’ led the publisher to supply an extra titlepage midway through the second edition for anyone choosing to bind it in two volumes, an amenity adopted as well by the publishers of Knox. 56 Anderson’s publishers did not follow suit, even though the volumes could be cumbersome. In contrast with the trim size for Bell’s edition (13.1 × 8.2 cm) or the 1790 collection (16.7 × 10.5 cm), Mundell’s product measured 25.2 × 16.1 cm, and swelled to a thickness of 6.5 cm in volume xi. 57 Anderson’s edition, with its aim

52 All were subscribed as ‘Mr ’ unless otherwise indicated: James Dundas of Excise Ofﬁce; W. Scot P. F.; Alexr . Frazer Tytler Esqr Adv.; Dr James Anderson, Bee Ofﬁce; John McNab W. Signet Geoes St ; Wm Dunbar W.S.; Robt . Cleghorn, Farmer Stenhouse Mill; John Syme Writer at Mr Hills; John Tenning Writer; Alexr Cunningham WS.; Jno Bushly Maitland Esqr Advocate; Revd McMurray Kilmadoch; Dr Farquharson Surgeon; Dr Robert Innes Gifford Vale; James Baillie Esqr from India; John Young Inverness; Geo: Farquhar Writer; and Naismyth Hope park Adv. 53 Letter dated 24 Oct. 1792, NLS, Bell & Bradfute Papers, Box 2, Bundle 1. 54 MP (16 June 1777). Edward H. Jacobs ﬁnds that women are ‘correlated’ with small-format books in a contemporary (1789) illustration of Hall’s Library, Margate (‘Buying into Classes: The Practice of Book Selection in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (1999), 55 and 58). 55 See William Jaggard, Shakespeare Bibliography (Stratford-on-Avon, 1911), 504. 56 ‘The Preface to the First Edition’ and ‘The Preface to the Present Edition’, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works (London, 1790), sigs. a2r –a3r ; Extracts, Elegant, Instructive, and Entertaining, in Poetry (London, 1791), sig. A2v . The 1784 edn. of Shakespeare was called Stockdale’s Edition of Shakespeare: Including, in One Volume, The Whole of His Dramatic Works. 57 Vol. xi is bound in two parts in the set at the University of Notre Dame. I have given average page measurements; individual sets vary, depending on how liberally or sparingly the binder trimmed the paper.

220

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

of pushing inclusiveness to an upper limit, could not escape being hefty if it also was to remain inexpensive. In the eyes of one beholder, the set had ‘no recommendations of beauty to carry it off ’, and therefore would ‘sell undoubtedly among those who value books for their contents rather than their appearance’, particularly those ‘who have eyes adopted to the use of very small print’. 58 In like manner a few reviewers grumbled about too many typographical errors, perhaps prompted by Anderson’s candor with respect to this shortcoming (5). The sole attempt at aesthetic enhancement went largely unnoticed by the reviewers: an engraved title-page with an illustration speciﬁc to each volume, awarded (as a rule) to the poet placed ﬁrst in the volume. This ‘Emblematical Vignette’ was touted in the original prospectus as ‘bearing an allusion to the contents, and executed by a capital London artist’, but the engravings were slow to be produced. A year elapsed before Bell & Bradfute began distributing them, naming the artists in their new prospectus (Edward Francis Burney and Francis Chesham), and afterwards arranging for purchasers of the inaugural volume who had continued their subscriptions to be ‘supplied with a Vignette Title gratis, by applying to the Booksellers from whom they ordered this book’. 59 The engraved imprint, undated, reads ‘LONDON: Printed for Iohn & Arthur Arch, 23 Gracechurch Street: and for Bell & Bradfute & I. Mundell & Co. Edinburgh.’ On the letterpress title-pages, which were delivered even later, the imprint omits the street address, alters the chiseled Roman I’s to regular English J’s, and gives 1795 as the publication year, belying the fact that most of the volumes came out between 1792 and 1794. 60 The title change having been sorted out only after volume x had gone to press, volume xi is unique in having a conjugate title-page; the others had to be tipped in. 61 Both the engraved and letterpress imprints give the impression that the project was spearheaded by the Arches in London, masking the fact that Edinburgh was its nerve center and locus of editing, printing, and initial ﬁnancial backing. Still, the Edinburgh imprint of Mundell and Son appeared on separate part title-pages for each of the 115 poets. 62 They copied the distinctive title-page design of Bell’s edition: the uniform title (‘THE POETICAL WORKS OF . . . ’); 58

BC 4 (1794), xiv, and 7 (1796), xviii. EEC (3 April 1794). The ﬁrst poet in each volume captured Burney’s eye, except for the vignette in vol. x, which alludes to Gray, not Young, and the illustrations in vols. xii and xiii of West’s Pindar and Fawkes’s Anacreon. 60 Sets at the British Library and the University of Notre Dame containing only the engraved title-pages show that some purchasers neglected to pick up the letterpress counterparts. 61 Anomalously, some copies of vol. xi give 1794 as the imprint year, notwithstanding the ‘1795’ on the next leaf, the title-page of Wilkie’s poems. Only the date differs; the rest of the ‘A’ signature represents the same setting of type. 62 The title-pages throughout vol. v give their address as Parliament Stairs. Near the end of 1792 they moved to Royal Bank Close, which is their address on the title-page for Spenser and the imprints from 1793 forward. 59

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

221

the phrase ‘Containing his’ above short twin columns listing individual poems or genres; the motto ‘To which is preﬁxed THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR’; recommendatory verses, framed by double rules above and below; and the italicized Anno in front of the imprint year. Deference was shown also to Bell’s choice of recommendatory excerpts, although Mundell and Son, working with a single page as opposed to the dual pages deployed by Bell (both with testimonials), forced Anderson to be selective about which ones to quote. 63 Sometimes he subtracted a couplet or two, or revisited the source from which Bell had drawn his tribute in order to locate verses more conducive to his editorial bias. One such change suggests that Anderson rejected the idea that authorial celebrity was transparent, and thought that a classical collection demanded historically qualiﬁed assessments. Bell commended Congreve by conﬂating three passages from Dryden’s ‘Epistle to Congreve’: O that your brows my laurel had sustained! Well had I been depos’d if you had reign’d: The father had descended for the son, For only you are lineal to the throne— Yet this I prophesy, Thou shalt be seen (Tho’ with some short parenthesis between) High on the throne of Wit; and, seated there, Not mine, that’s little, but thy laurel wear— This is your portion, this your native store; Heav’n, that but once was prodigal before, To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more. (ll. 41–4, 51–4, and 61–3)

Anderson quoted the same concluding triplet, but culled very different verses leading into it: In easy dialogues is Fletcher’s praise; He mov’d the mind, but had no power to raise: Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please; Yet doubling Fletcher’s force, he wants his ease: But both to CONGREVE justly shall submit; One match’d in judgment, both o’er-match’d in wit. In him all beauties of this age we see, Etherege his courtship, Southerne’s purity; The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherly. (ll. 20–3 and 26–30)

Bell’s testimonial stresses accidents of fate: though never crowned laureate, Congreve deserved the honor and is destined in memory to occupy the nation’s poetic 63 Anderson’s edn. copied in whole or in part the testimonials on Bell’s title-pages for Addison, Akenside, Butler, Chaucer, Congreve, Cowley, Denham, Fenton, Gay, King, Lyttelton, Mallet, Milton, Pomfret, J. Philips, Parnell, Rowe, Shefﬁeld, Smith, Spenser, Swift, and Waller.

222

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

throne. Anderson’s involves itself in literary comparisons, weighing the various strengths of Congreve, his forebears, and contemporaries. Bell elicits awe for the poet’s stature; Anderson registers admiration of speciﬁc talents. Bell’s Congreve is historically indeterminate, praised for all time; Anderson situates the poet in the seventeenth century, characterizing the qualities that make him exemplary of an age. 64 This foregrounding of temporality reinforced the essential chronological basis of the edition. One reviewer, impressed to ﬁnd ‘almost the whole of the British Parnassus placed before his view’, could not have been more sympathetic to Anderson’s purpose, observing that such an edition enabled ‘the intelligent reader to ascertain the improvements of our language and the progress of our taste; to trace the genealogy of every writer from his parents, and ascertain his pedigree from the similarity of his hereditary lineaments’. 65 Anderson faulted Bell’s edition for being published ‘without any regard to chronological order’ (2), no doubt because this made historically informed comparison and study more difﬁcult. Mundell and Son honored chronology as much as possible while retaining the core sequence from The Works of the English Poets, except where doing so would have buried a major poet in the middle of a volume. Dryden, for instance, had he not been moved to the front of volume vi, would have been sandwiched between Walsh and Smith in the middle; Gay would have followed Fenton at the back of volume vii, but was held in reserve for volume viii, where he took second place to Pope, who was shufﬂed ahead so as to be featured in the opening pages. The publishers strove to greet their subscribers in successive volumes with the best poets foremost. In these thirteen volumes, welcomed as a ‘comprehensive, though not complete, collection of British poetry’, the multi-volume poetry collection reached, albeit temporarily, its carrying capacity. The latter volumes were recognized as holding ‘all the modern poets of distinction, in whose works the copy-right has expired’, though one reader would have sacriﬁced some of them to make more room for ‘older and better company’. Reviewers quibbled over particular choices, but Anderson’s impulse to usher in as many poets as possible—to make the set rather ‘too extensive than too conﬁned’—was generally applauded, while the check against that impulse (the publishers’ wary practicality) was regretted. ‘Of living writers’, one reviewer noted, there was nothing to say; ‘The Pantheon of Glory admits only the dead.’ 66

64 The Poetical Works of William Congreve (Edinburgh, 1778), [i]; The Works of the British Poets, vii. [525]. 65 BC 7 (1796), 173. 66 MR NS 27 (Sept. 1798), 9; BC 7 (Feb. 1796), 172; CR NS 25 (Jan. 1799), 42–3, 45, 50.

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

223

WANTING TO COMPLETE THE ARRANGEMENT Anderson’s sense of editorial duty to the project only increased after the last volume was published. In three areas he resolved to remain on task: by revising his lives for separate publication; by adding a volume of ‘Fugitive Poetry’; and by tracking down poems that had escaped detection so that a second edition would be more complete. Thoughts of a future edition arose in 1798, notwithstanding ‘the times being so unfavourable to literary productions’ on account of economic woes tied to the war with France. Solid sales of the collection encouraged Anderson, with Percy’s help and under Mundell’s imprint, to propose an edition of Grainger’s poems ‘preparatory to the admission of his collected works in the second edition of British Poets, which is in contemplation, the ﬁrst, amounting to 2000 copies, being nearly sold off ’. 67 While a second edition never materialized, the fact that republication of the 115 poets was considered at all shows that the collection—despite hard times—found a ready market. Just as Johnson’s Prefaces had been turned into The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Anderson wished for a separate edition of his own, with one difference: he intended to make extensive revisions. David Irving, later to become his son-in-law and himself a literary biographer, anticipated ‘many additional articles’ in the improved edition, including the lives of ‘poets lately deceased’, and expected it to be ‘a most valuable accession to English literature’. 68 Yet the revisions, begun with energy before 1799, were interrupted by other literary projects and by a pace confessedly ‘desultory, as inclination or materials led’. After more than a decade of fretful labor, the pursuit ran aground. 69 A volume of fugitive verse, in effect a modern miscellany to complement the works of ‘Uncertaine Auctors’ excerpted from Tottel in volume i, had been mentioned in Anderson’s ‘Preface’ as an item ‘still wanting to complete the arrangement’ (5). This goal too went unrealized, but another took its place. In 1806 Anderson alerted Percy to his ‘design of enlarging the collection of Poetical Translations’, disclosing that a ‘third volume is now printing, which will include, among others, Callimachus, Tryphiodorus, and Ossian’. He was scavenging high and low for material: ‘Mr. Preston gives us his Apollonius. Has your friend Mr. Meen completed his version of Lycophron? I am told there is a version of Propertius by one Drummond. Has your Lordship ever met with it? I have Mr. Nott’s Cynthia. . . . What is become of your version of Ovid’s Epistles?’ 70 67 Letter to Percy, 30 Nov. 1798 (Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, 4, 5). For reasons unclear to me, the edn. of Grainger was not published until 1836, several years after Anderson’s death. 68 Irving, ‘The Life of Robert Fergusson’, Lives of Scotish Authors (Edinburgh, 1801), 3. 69 Letter to Percy, 15 May 1811 (Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, 311). See pp. 13–14, 18, 22, 32, and 185 for references to the project, which commenced with work on the earlier poets. After the death of Mundell in 1800, a feeling of dread undercut Anderson’s determination to ‘execute the extensive plan of the Lives of the British Poets’ (59). 70 Letter dated 13 July 1806 (Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson, 226).

224

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

A third volume of translations was duly published in 1807. Inexplicably, in view of the authors supposedly sent to press, it contained not Callimachus, Ossian, and company, but rather Horace, Ovid, and Statius. 71 The advertisement for the book was aimed at two distinct markets: for ‘Purchasers of Dr. ANDERSON ’ S Edition of the BRITISH POETS ’ it was heralded as ‘Volume the Fourteenth’; but for those who had ‘limited themselves to the purchase of Dr. Anderson’s Collection of Translations’, it formed ‘Volume the Third of POETICAL TRANSLATIONS ’. Its price was ‘One Guinea, sewed’. 72 Depending on which camp they fell into, buyers had their choice of copperplate title-pages: one with the standard title (A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. Volume the Fourteenth), the other more speciﬁc (Poetical Translations. Volume the Third, Containing Francis’ Horace, Garth’s Ovid & Lewis’ Statius). In addition to the engraving, owners of the full set were also given a letterpress titlepage to regularize the volume as part of The Works of the British Poets. 73 (Despite these provisions, the fourteenth volume often did not ﬁnd its way onto shelves alongside thirteen-volume sets. 74 ) An advertisement at the back of the volume also courted ﬁrst-time buyers. The previous translations were offered at £1 10s. (sewn) to ‘the English Reader, who desires to be acquainted with the writings of the Greek and Roman Poets’, or to ‘Gentlemen, whose pursuits are not altogether of a literary nature, and who may therefore not have sufﬁcient leisure to peruse these authors in the language in which they wrote’. The whole set could still be purchased, too, at £9 15s. (sewn). 75 Adding the price of the 1807 translations, a three-volume set now cost £2 11s., and the fourteen-volume collection stood at £10 16s. 76 It was ﬁtting that a series slated for completion in six volumes, but which had grown to eight and then nine volumes while still in the conceptual phase, and in production had crept upwards of eleven, twelve, and thirteen volumes, should at last have incorporated a fourteenth. If it appears from volume xiv— or the number of translations Anderson had contemplated—that the process of 71

It was printed in Edinburgh ‘for Mundell, Doig, & Stevenson: and T. Ostell, London’. LC (24–25 Mar. 1807). Vol. xiv would have satisﬁed the reviewer who lamented, ‘Ovid and Horace are particularly wanting’ from vols. xii and xiii (BC 7 (1796), 175). 73 Some purchasers, naturally, wound up with the wrong title-page, whether from inattention or inventory imbalances at the point of sale. Vol. xiv in a set at the University of Iowa, for instance, bears the wrong engraved title-page and no letterpress title-page. 74 The ESTC listing for A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain implies that thirteen volumes comprise a full set; sixty-three institutions are identiﬁed with holdings of varying completeness (t2891). The record for The Works of the British Poets shows that fourteen volumes constitute a set; ﬁfteen libraries are listed with holdings, though a ‘-14v’ noted in nearly half indicates that the 1807 imprint never found its way into those sets (t152376). 75 ‘Books printed for and sold by Mundell, Doig, & Stevenson, Edinburgh, and W. J. & J. Richardson, J. Murray, and T. Ostell, London’ (1806–7). 76 For a ﬁnal bibliographical wrinkle, the engraved title was eventually replaced by a letterpress title-page with a fresh date: The Works of Horace, Translated by Francis . . . ; also The Works of Ovid, Translated by Garth, &c. . . . ; Likewise, Lewis’s Translation of Statius (London: Printed for Doig and Sterling, Edinburgh; and Peter Grifﬁn, Tabernacle-Walk, 1815). 72

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

225

augmentation could have continued, other evidence suggests that a limit had been reached, and that booksellers ultimately tried to reduce the collection, or package it in more manageable units. A group of London and Edinburgh booksellers printed an undated title-page for Select British Poets, and Translations; with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Robert Anderson, L.L.D., In Four Volumes, enabling themselves to sell sets of less than a third the bulk of the complete edition. For the nonce they could gather up any four volumes, as long as they drew from both the original poems and translations. 77 Another title-page was printed without the phrase ‘In Four Volumes’, thus freeing the way for sets of indeterminate length, including one at the Library of Congress in nine volumes. 78 Such truncated sets incongruously wedded a random selection of poets with their full œuvres as demanded by the norms of classical presentation. Another equally arbitrary way to pare down the magnitude of the books was to bind a volume without its full contents, as witnessed by a copy of volume ii in which Spenser and Shakespeare stand alone, stripped of the poems of Davies and Hall. Given that complete sets were still being advertised in 1807, it is probable that booksellers resorted to such expedients some time afterward, perhaps in the wake of Chalmers’s edition (1810). After collaborating with Anderson on what had turned into a prodigious collection of poetry, James Mundell moved on to other classical pastures, succeeding Andrew Foulis as Printer to the University of Glasgow on 18 November 1795. 79 Their ‘Library of itself ’, as the original prospectus had dubbed it, advertised in catalogues as late as 1814, had an immediate and a lasting impact on readers. 80 A set accompanied John Wordsworth to sea on his early voyages; left at Grasmere in 1800, it became the copy in which his brother William became familiar with Chaucer. Had it not been for this copy, the poet recalled, ‘I should have known little of Drayton, Daniel, and other distinguished poets of the Elizabeth age, and their immediate successors, until a much later period in my life’, for at this time he had ‘little money . . . to spare for books’. Visiting Scotland in 1814, Wordsworth sought out the ageing Anderson to express his gratitude. 81 77 ‘London: Printed for W. Grifﬁn, M. Maynard, H. C. Gifford, J. Brambles, J. Jonson, P. Walker, and Doig and Sterling, Edinburgh. Printed by Plummer and Brewis, Love Lane, Little Eastcheap.’ Holding roughly to the 11:3 ratio of original poems to translations in the collection overall, a set I inspected at Grant & Shaw in Edinburgh brought together vols. xiv, ix, vii, and x respectively. 78 This set, which I have not seen, is listed in the NUC. 79 Maclehose, Glasgow University Press, 204–9. 80 See The New London Catalogue of Books, Sizes and Prices (1805), 4; The New London Catalogue of Books, with Their Sizes and Prices (1807), 4; and The London Catalogue of Books, with their Sizes and Prices (1814), 21. 81 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Early Years 1770–1803 (Oxford, 1957; reissued 1968), 515.

226

Anderson’s Comprehensive View

Similarly grateful were Coleridge and Southey. On the pages of the same copy, Coleridge beseeched his infant son Hartley in future years to treasure Wordsworth’s marginalia and the older poetry: ‘thou wilt not part with this book without sad necessity and a pang at heart. Oh, be never weary of reperusing the four ﬁrst volumes of this collection, my eldest born.’ Southey exuded an avuncular fondness toward the editor: ‘To good old Dr. Anderson the poets and the literature of this country are deeply beholden.’ By pressing the publishers to include an abundance of older classics, the editor ‘gave the collection its chief, almost its only value. Many of the Elizabethan poets were thus, for the ﬁrst time, made generally accessible.’ To the degree that he had revived the ‘good old school of poetry’, Anderson had been ‘instrumental towards a reformation which was so devoutly to be wished for’. 82 Another observer, positing that Anderson’s edition had ‘secure[d] a long existence to those authors whom it comprises’, proclaimed that an ‘Englishman cannot contemplate without pride the collected works of the English poets’. 83 Paid in this coin, Anderson was awarded the very accolade he had bestowed on past gatherers of poetry as the highest form of praise. 82 Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 454. Coleridge sprinkled marginalia through two sets of the edn., one at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the other at the Victoria and Albert Museum (viii–ix). ‘Damn this Scotch scoundrel of a biographer’, he exploded over a perceived injustice to Thomson, ‘anything is possible from a Scotchman!’ (301–2). Southey’s remarks come from his review of Chalmers’s edition, QR 11 (July 1814), 504. 83 CR NS 25 (1799), 46 and 49.

8 Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library . . . a Complete Library, comprising all the most Esteemed Works in the English Language, each printed on the same Type, on the same Size, on the same Paper, and embellished by the same Artists . . . (Charles Cooke, 1794)

In the late 1780s and early 1790s, Bell tinkered with formats, reprinting Shakespeare’s plays in a smaller size than before, and Bell’s British Theatre in a larger. By tailoring the components of his British Library to different audiences, he ignored Wenman’s experiment in combining assorted genres in uniform production with his ‘Cheap Editions’. It fell to Charles Cooke to structure Bell’s idea of a national ‘library’ around Wenman’s insight that customers for inexpensive books will expand their purchases across genres when the editions are presented in the same format. He published the ﬁrst number of Tom Jones to inaugurate Cooke’s Select British Novels, or Novelist’s Pocket Library in October 1792, and two years later released a ‘Plan of Cooke’s Cheap and Elegant Pocket Library’, which he characterized in the words used above as an epigraph. 1 Seventy-seven numbers in the novel series had been issued by late 1794 when Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets was launched, as told on the printed wrappers of the ﬁrst number: ‘The great and unexampled Success which the Proprietor experienced in the Sale of his Edition of the Select Novels, he considers as an undoubted Test of the public Approbation’. Because the poetry series, ‘being intended as a Companion to the Novels, is printed on the same Size, executed on the same Plan, and embraces the similar Advantages of Cheapness, Elegance, and Portability’, Cooke was sure it would ‘meet with proportionable Encouragement’. 2 Thus began a vast reprint operation that turned Cooke into a full-service purveyor of English classics, the ﬁrst to offer parallel series of poems, novels, essays, 1 The two prospectuses are found in the John Johnson Collection, Prospectuses 36, fos. A30a and A34. The phrasing of the epigraph, as well as the rubric ‘Cooke’s Pocket Editions of the Most Esteemed Works in the English Language’, recalls the description of Wenman’s ‘regular, uniform, and elegant editions of universally-esteemed Productions in the English Language’ (see Ch. 6) 2 ‘Address to the Public’, on the back cover of nos. 1–11 and 13–21 of Bodleian Library Vet. A5 f.2131, an incomplete set of Cooke’s edn. in printed wrappers. Several blocks of type were set to print these wrappers, as evident from differences in the use of italics and capital letters. I quote from no. 1.

228

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

histories, and devotional works in matching formats. In this respect he was an ‘orthodox-innovator’, to borrow a character type coined by Stephen Skowronek to describe someone who adopts the agenda of a path-breaking predecessor, but presses ahead with the idea more systematically and persistently than its earlier champion was able to do. 3 Among eighteenth-century English booksellers he was ‘one of the few true geniuses’. 4 Cooke’s series were central to his business, and ‘the number and respectability of the Names’ he attracted as subscribers to his novels and Hume’s History of England led him to expect, when unveiling his poets, that his products would be ‘crowned with as much Patronage as ever sanctioned the dramatic or classic Page’. 5 The poetry series garnered mention in The Library Companion (1824), T. F. Dibdin’s advice on furnishing one’s bookshelves and mind. ‘It is said’, Dibdin related, that Cooke ‘made his fortune by the impression; and built a sort of baronial mansion in Epping Forest, whence he overlooked the surrounding country’. 6 The house at Walthamstow, built in 1803, two years before the poetry series was ﬁnished, was known as Belle Vue to its owner and ‘Cooke’s Folly’ to the locals. An account of it in the Topography of Essex (written by a relative, G. A. Cooke) concludes with this hyperbolic tribute: ‘nature and art have done so much that its collective beauties are not to be equalled within the circuit of ten miles of London’. 7 That Cooke’s success could be popularly attributed to the poetry series suggests a general recognition that a lucrative publishing career could be founded on reprints of classical English poetry. How beggarly or unproﬁtable could this branch of the book trade be, or disreputable, if it enabled Cooke to build with the free-spending conﬁdence of a baron?

THE IMPORTANT OBJECT OF EASY PURCHASE ‘The principal motive which induced the proprietor to submit the present edition of the Poetic Works of the Select British Bards to the Public’, Cooke declared, ‘was the inconvenient size, the inferiority in the paper and embellishments, and 3 The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 41–2. 4 Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140. 5 Back cover of no. 1, Bodleian Library Vet. A5 f.2131. Cooke’s career undercuts Altick’s argument that cheap reprints were only incidental, not integral, to the lists of ‘respectable’ publishers before 1830 (‘From Aldine to Everyman’, 6–7). 6 The Library Companion; or, The Young Man’s Guide, and the Old Man’s Comfort, in the Choice of a Library (London, 1824), 749. Along with the poetic classics, Dibdin noted that ‘a set of the NOVELISTS , published by the same bookseller, must be added to the causes of the erection of this baronial mansion’. 7 Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

229

the enormous price which have attached to former editions.’ 8 Cooke’s rhetoric of difference was matched by strategic innovations to multi-volume publishing. Nevertheless, Bell’s edition guided him with respect to (1) serial publication; (2) the octodecimo format; (3) the inclusion of a poet’s complete works; (4) prefatory lives; (5) illustrations; (6) title-page design, with testimonial epigraphs and invariable use of the phrase ‘The Poetical Works of . . . ’; and (7) a triple sequence of title-pages (an engraved series title, followed by a letterpress halftitle and then the title-page proper). In his inaugural advertisement Cooke was as emphatic as Bell had been about the production values to which he aspired: COOKE’S Elegant Pocket Editions of SELECT BRITISH POETS. illustrated with SUPERB EMBELLISHMENTS , possessing an uncommon degree of beauty and high ﬁnishing, taken

from the Paintings of Artists of the First Eminence, and executed by Engravers of no less celebrity.—The Poetry will be printed on a new Bourgeois type; the Lives of the Poets, Arguments, Glossaries, Notes, &c. in Caslon’s Pearl, and in a style of elegance that may challenge competition, on a purposely manufactured wove paper, in Octo-decimo or Eighteens. 9

The advantage in cost was ‘demonstrably evident’ if one troubled to compare his prices with those of other editions, namely ‘Johnson’s, Bell’s, and Anderson’s’. Cooke boasted that his edition was ‘nearly one third cheaper than Johnson’s or Anderson’s, and more than one half cheaper than Bell’s edition; although this is embellished and printed in a manner superior to either of them, which a moment’s inspection will clearly prove’. Whereas Wenman had implied an equivalency between his volumes and Bell’s, claiming only that they were cheaper, Cooke went further, vowing to undersell other products and surpass them in quality. But like Wenman, Cooke was wary of raising doubts. Once the public perceived ‘how inﬁnitely cheaper this selection is than any yet submitted to their choice’ and saw to what ‘a small and convenient compass’ the poets had been reduced, Cooke feared it might be ‘apprehended, that they were only given in an abridged state’. To nip this ‘conjecture’ he stated that ‘the works of every poet will be printed verbatim & literatim from the original copy, without the least deviation’. Referring to himself in the third person, Cooke used the verb at the root of advertisement to resolve the seeming contradiction between his rhetorical emphases on high quality and low cost: ‘he not only adverts to the cheapness (which is merely a secondary consideration), but to the peculiar elegance of these editions, on which he principally rests his expectation of public patronage’, stressing that his books were better illustrated 8 Quotations in this and the next three paragraphs are taken from a long notice in EEC (17 Nov. 1794), part of which is called an ‘Address to the Public’. 9 In later advertisements Cooke shifted this itemization to the beginning of a paragraph and revised his syntax: ‘Printed in a Style of Elegance that may challenge Competition, on a purposely manufactured wove Paper, . . . ,’ etc. See Elizabeth Rowe, Devout Exercises of the Heart (London, [1796]), sig. M6r .

230

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

and printed on better paper than ‘any works of the poets at three times the expence’. Strahan would have said ‘I told you so’ had he lived to read the explanation of how these cost savings were achieved. ‘This important object of easy purchase’, Cooke disclosed, had ‘been effected by deserting the usual mode of printing with preposterous margins, considerable spaces between the lines, and unnecessary blanks before and after divisions’, by means of which previous editions of the poets had ‘been enhanced to a double expence, without embracing one good purpose for their end’. Disregarding any effect this typographical ‘mode’ had on legibility or aesthetic appeal, Cooke staked out a course of narrower proﬁts: ‘Our plan of easy purchase has also been further promoted by the sacriﬁce of a very considerable portion of the proﬁts usually attached to works of known celebrity.’ While holders of copyright (like Strahan) and sellers of cheap reprints (like Bell) stood at opposite ends of the publishing spectrum in the 1770s, Cooke now blurred the distinction between them, alleging in effect that both were dedicated to unjustiﬁable proﬁts and depicting himself as a champion of cheaper reprints. Strahan would have thought his fears had come to pass: in a degraded bookselling environment, lower typographical standards were presented as a virtue, the result of intense pressure for higher sales on lower proﬁt margins. In truth there was a growing demand for books of every quality and description. Cooke positioned himself in the market by coupling his undeniable (but slight) compromises in page layout with a generous schedule of ‘embellishments’. Sellers of cheap reprints found their market, yet their success caused little erosion of value in more expensive imprints. At the high end of the market more costly editions (such as Thomas Bensley’s) continued to be produced, and middlepriced editions of the best known poets—Milton and Thomson, for example, ﬁrst in the parades of Bell and Cooke—kept being published regularly. It could even be argued that by satisfying consumer demand at the lower reaches of the market, multi-volume editions spurred publishers to ﬁnd new ways to justify middle-priced volumes, among them innovations in editing classic works which had previously been reprinted without much attention to ‘value added’ components. Yet cheapness, though paramount to the marketing of Cooke’s and other pocket editions, did not inhibit the more creative publishers from offering options to vary their prices and proﬁts. Each volume in Bell’s edition represented essentially the same package: all were printed on the same paper, contained the same number of engraved vignettes and portraits, and cost the same amount. The crispness of engraving varied, depending on how fresh the copperplate was when a print was pulled, but whether pristine or faint, its quality had no bearing on Bell’s price. Binding was the variable that accounted for his differential pricing: he offered several grades of binding, though volumes could be bought in wrappers and bound to speciﬁcation as richly or plainly as desired. Cooke offered fewer bindings than Bell, selling volumes at ‘Ninepence per Volume, Sheep, lettered;

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

231

and Sixteenpence in Calf, gilt and lettered’. 10 Bell meanwhile demonstrated a more sophisticated way to stratify the market, one that harbingered Cooke’s approach. In 1791 Bell devised a price scheme based on variables other than binding. With a new edition of Bell’s British Theatre he again ‘intreated’ customers to become patrons of ‘ﬁne printing’ and ‘beautiful book embellishments’, but now gave them choices in paper (grade and size) and illustrations (number and quality): The FIRST SORT will be printed on Vellum Paper, small size, price One Shilling and Sixpence, with Vignette and Characteristic Prints. The SECOND, an ordinary sort, is printed on coarse Paper, price Sixpence each, with inferior Impressions of the Character Print only. But, at the request of many Amateurs of ﬁne Works, another sort is printed on Royal Paper, with extensive Margins, and will contain PROOF IMPRESSIONS OF BOTH PRINTS, and sold at Five Shillings each Play.

This pricing system magniﬁed the differential between the deluxe product and a baseline purchase. Whereas The Poets of Great Britain in its costliest binding (£33) sold for four times the amount of a modestly bound set (£8 8s.), a tenfold gap separated the ﬁnest copies of the plays from ‘ordinary’ ones—before binding, which could widen the disparity. 11 The pecking order among purchasers had steepened: the new choices ushered in a sharper rhetorical bias (coarse versus Royal, inferior versus PROOF), suggesting that the more leeway purchasers were given to exercise their taste and ﬁnancial resources, the more stress the publisher laid on consumerism as a self-deﬁning act. This message was reﬁned when Cooke introduced more variables in marketing his Select British Poets. The gradations in his merchandise began with a distinction between ‘SUPERIOR EDITIONS’ and ‘CHEAP EDITIONS’. Cheap editions were ‘neatly printed, on a good Paper’ with ‘an elegant Engraving in every Number’, but owing to ‘their Cheapness’ they did not ‘possess the great Advantages peculiar to the other Editions’. Superior editions, exhibiting ‘an unrivalled Specimen of the Typographic Art’, were ‘printed with the utmost Neatness, on ﬁne wove Vellum Paper, of the most delicate Colour and Texture, highly glazed and hot-pressed ’, and contained more engravings: ‘highly ﬁnished Scenic Representations; Vignette Frontispieces, Portraits of the respective Authors, and other additional Engravings, as also the First Impressions of the Plates, worked off in the manner of Proofs’. 12 Priced at sixpence and one shilling respectively, the cheap and superior editions corresponded to the third- and second-tier products elaborated in a later advertisement that described ‘THREE EDITIONS’. 10 ‘Cooke’s Cheap and elegant Pocket Editions of the esteemed Works in the English Language’, The Poetical Works of Lyttelton (London, [1804]), sig. K4r . 11 Bell, ‘The British and Irish Nations’, [1]. 12 ‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library’, in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (London, [1795]), 2.

232

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

At two shillings—double the cost of the second (superior) edition, and quadruple that of the third (cheap)—the so-called ‘First Edition’ stood at the apex of Cooke’s product line in ‘unexampled Splendor’. It offered every feature of the superior edition, but ‘to give some of the Poets an additional Lustre, the Proprietor has had the Prints worked off in Colours’, a process that demanded ‘the extra Expence of procuring from the Artist, Plates in Stipple-Engraving; as the Stroke Engraving does not admit of Printing in Colours, or of producing that great Degree of high ﬁnishing and beautiful Effect; for the Delicacy of the Stipple Style, far exceeds that of the Stroke, and is inﬁnitely more ornamental’ (Fig. 8.1). From the superlative workmanship of both ‘Press and Pencil’, the First Edition was promised to appear ‘in the gayest Attire of Paper, Print, and Embellishments’. 13 Whereas every set of Bell’s poets contained the same number of engravings, the quantity in any set of Cooke’s edition depended on the customer’s choice. At a minimum, purchasers acquired an illustration without counterpart in Bell, a ‘Scenic Representation’ designed to be bound in opposite the passage it depicted. At twice the price they received a portrait of the poet and a ‘Vignette Frontispiece’ in each volume that served (like Bell’s) as a series half-title page. Owing to the increased emphasis on illustration, and the intricate link between price and the number and quality of prints each volume afforded, Cooke emblazoned his title-pages with this marketing theme: the half-title page claimed the edition was ‘EMBELLISHED WITH SUPERB ENGRAVINGS’, while the letterpress title-page credited him with personal oversight, its imprint declaring the series to have been ‘PRINTED AND EMBELLISHED Under the Direction of C. COOKE’. Having promised ‘a complete Collection of the Portraits of the respective British Bards’, ratifying the idea that images of the poets were essential to a collection of classics, Cooke was just as disappointed as Bell when he failed to locate a suitable image. 14 After some likenesses had eluded him, he scripted an apology that incorporated a policy statement as well as a plea for help in bringing to light any pictures of which he was unaware: SEVERAL Applications having been made for the Portrait of FALCONER , we are under a Necessity of repeating what we have set forth upon a former Occasion, which was, that we shall never omit the Introduction of the Portrait of any Author that can possibly be procured; but, as there is no Portrait of COLLINS extant, the Proprietor cannot embellish this Work with the Head of the Author. The Readers are therefore requested to take Notice, that, whenever a Portrait is omitted in future, it is to be imputed to the Cause we have already assigned; and should any of the Subscribers or their Friends be in Possession of Paintings or Drawings of Portraits of any of the Authors which may be omitted in the 13 ‘Address to the Public’, on the back cover of nos. 37–43 and 47 of Bodleian Library Vet. A5 f.2131. 14 EEC (17 Nov. 1794).

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Figure 8.1. Cooke’s ‘stipple style’ engraving on a plate for Tickell’s poems. Details from different copies are shown (Ohio University, PR3735. T5A17 1796x and 1796y) to illustrate how the stipple technique contrasts with line engraving. In the example at top, the stippling can be seen in the sky and clouds, the distant hills, the tree leaves, and the sign. Courtesy of the Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries.

233

234

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Table 8.1. Portraits in Cooke’s Select British Poets Title

Poet

Attribution: ‘Engraved by . . . ’

Date/Credit

CESP CESP

Thompson Shenstone

15 Nov. 1794/∗ 10 Jan. 1795/∗

CESP CESP CESP

Akenside Cunningham Goldsmith

W. Ridley, from an Original Painting W. Ridley, from a drawing in the possession of T. Smith, Esqr. Ridley from an Original Painting W. Ridley, from an Original Drawing W. Ridley, from a Painting in the possession of the Rev. Mr Williams W. Ridley, from a Painting in the possession of the Rev. Mr Williams E. Mackenzie, from a Painting of Sir Joshua Reynolds, RA W. Ridley, from an Original Painting, in the possession of Thos. Brown Esqr. W. Ridley, from a Bust of Roubilliac’s, in the possession of the Proprietor W. Ridley from a drawing taken from a Bust in the possession of the Proprietor W. Ridley, from a drawing taken from a Bust in the possession of the proprietor W. Ridley, from an Original Painting by Sr. G. Kneller W. Ridley, from a Drawing by R. Corbould W. Ridley, from an Original Picture W. Ridley, from an Original Painting W. Ridley, from an Original Painting by Sr. G. Kneller W. Hopwood, from an Original of Sr. Godfrey Kneller W. Ridley, from a Drawing by W. H. Brown W. Ridley, from an Original Painting P. Granger, from an Original Painting in the possession of the Rev. T. Banks Ridley, from an Original Painting, in the possession of the Rev. D. Smith Strange from a Print of Vander Gucht Granger, from a Drawing by W. H. Brown Granger, from a Drawing by W. H. Brown W. Ridley, from a drawing by W. H. Brown taken from an Original Painting Hopwood from an Original Painting by I. V. Bank J. Granger from a drawing by R. Corbould taken from a Painting by B. West, RA W. Ridley, from a drawing by W. H. Brown, taken from a Painting of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s

[Goldsmith [Goldsmith, M.B. CESP

Gray

CESP

Pope

CESP

Milton

[CESP

Milton Addison

CESP CESP CESP CESP

Rowe Congreve Broome Waller

CESP

Parnell

CESP CESP

Armstrong Otway Dr Young Smollett Lord Lansdown Johnson [Dr Johnson Shakespeare Dr. Blackmore Lord Lyttelton Dryden

31 Jan. 1795/∗ 28 Mar. 1795/# 2 May 1795/∗ 12 Jan. 1799/∗ ] 9 Jan. 1808/+] 23 May 1795/∗ 18 July 1795/∗ 23 Jan. 1796/∗ 23 Jan. 1800/∗ ] 13 Feb. 1796/∗ 7 May 1796/∗ 11 June 1796/∗ 4 Aug. 1796/∗ 22 Oct. 1796/∗ 22 Oct. 1796/∗ 5 Nov. 1796/# 10 Sept. 1796/# 3 Dec. 1796/∗ n.d./∗ 21 Jan. 1797/$ 4 Mar. 1797/$ 16 Feb. 1799/$] 19 Apr. 1797/$ 7 July 1797/+ 9 Sept. 1797/$ 1 May 1798/+

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

235

Table 8.1. (Continued) Title

Poet

Attribution: ‘Engraved by . . . ’

Date/Credit

Dr Garth

Granger, from a drawing by W. H. Brown, taken from a Painting of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Granger, from a drawing by W. H. Brown, taken from a Painting of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s R. Granger, from an Original Drawing R. Granger from a Painting by Sir Josha. Reynolds S. Noble from a drawing by W. H. Brown J. Hopwood from a Painting by G. White R. Woodman, from a Painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller John Dunn, from a Print of Vertu’s Chapman, from an Original Painting, in the possession of T. Roberts, Esqr. E. Mackenzie, from a Painting of Sir Joshua Reynolds, RA

1 May 1798/+

Shefﬁeld

Glover Dodsley Mickle Dr. Watts Prior Butler Gay Warton

1 May 1798/+

13 Sept. 1800/+ 1 Jan. 1801/+ 1 Jan. 1800/+ n.d./$ 1 May 1802/+ 18 Feb. 1804/$ 4 Aug. 1804/+ 9 Jan. 1808/+

Notes: Early on, ‘Cooke’s Edition of Select Poets’ (CESP) appeared at the top of each engraving. Portraits that were re-engraved are given in brackets below the original entry. The poets’ names are presented as engraved, as are the attributions, written in an arc along the bottom of the oval frame. The symbols in the fourth column tell how Cooke was credited: (∗ ) Printed for C. Cooke, 17, Paternoster Row; (#) Printed for C. Cooke, Paternoster Row; (+) Printed for C. Cooke; and ($) Engraved for C. Cooke.

Course of the Publication, and will favor the Publisher with them, they will be faithfully copied, and delivered, gratis, to the Subscribers. 15

Instead of alerting the public to hunt for portraits of speciﬁc poets in advance of publication, as Bell had done, he enlisted his readers to locate potential sources after the fact, once it could be inferred that his own efforts had been unavailing. Following Bell’s lead, however, he played up the authority of each portrait by including whatever information he had on the provenance of each likeness. From his own gallery came two of the images, drawn from busts of Pope and Milton ‘in the possession of the Proprietor’ (Table 8.1). Cooke’s rationale for pairing the life of a poet with his works emerged on the ﬁrst page of the ﬁrst life in the series, ‘The Life of James Thomson’. A biography, the anonymous writer stated, was obligatory: ‘the desire which the public always shews of being more particularly acquainted with the history of an eminent author, ought not to be disappointed; as it proceeds not from mere curiosity, but chieﬂy from affection and gratitude to those by whom they have been 15 Notice ‘To the READER’, tipped inside the front wrapper of no. 39, The Poetical Works of William Collins (London, [1796]), Bodleian Library, Vet. A5 f.2131/39.

236

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

entertained and instructed’. Cooke’s lives initially served another purpose, too. Into Thomson’s biography, it was announced, ‘the Editor has inserted Extracts, containing a few beautiful Passages selected from the many which so forcibly mark the Seasons: this may induce the Possessor to turn to the Poem itself, which cannot be too much admired, or too often read’. Why should the possessor of the book need an inducement to look into the poems? These extracts were not aimed at readers in ‘polite and fashionable Circles’, among whom the ‘Merits of the several Bards’ were already subjects of ‘Animadversion’; they were intended as an aid for ‘our juvenile Readers, who have not perused the Poets’. The ‘Beauties’ on preview, it was thought, would enable young readers ‘to form an Idea of the Excellence of the Author; as it must be ever pleasing to possess a Bouquet culled from the choicest Flowers, and including all that is lovely and elegant’. This rudimentary aesthetic training was meant to continue, for the editor promised to pursue ‘the same Rule in the Lives preﬁxed to the Works of the subsequent Poets; so that the Reader, previous to perusal, may form a Judgment of the Beauties of the respective Productions’. 16 In effect, Cooke introduced an element of anthology reading—the chance to savor a few hand-picked morsels—into a series that was anything but an anthology: a succession of complete poetic works. Because this prospect might intimidate readers who had not yet ‘perused the Poets’, the preliminary sampling eased them into the task of forming their judgments. The value of this help was underscored by Goldsmith’s assurance that ‘of all his compilations, his Selection of English Poetry showed most the art of his profession’. Although his fee of £200 was ‘easily acquired’, it was fair ‘compensation for the labour’, Goldsmith argued, for ‘a man shews his judgment in these selections; and he may be often twenty years of his life cultivating that judgment’. 17 Concern for the uninitiated reader was further evident when the series reached Milton, ‘the boast of this country, and admiration of the world’. The writer of Milton’s life speculated on the causes of the ‘slow progress’ of Paradise Lost ‘both in sale and reputation’: Besides, in those days, reading had not become a general amusement; and very few indeed, but persons of the ﬁrst rank, had attained to a degree of erudition competent to judge the merits of so learned and sublime a work. The professors of literature were as learned as those of any other time; but there were very few persons of the middle class who read for amusement or instruction, in comparison with the numerous purchasers of the various productions of the present age. 18

16

The Poetical Works of James Thomson (2 vols. London, [1794]), i, pp. ix, vii–viii. ‘The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B.’, The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London, [1795]), p. vi. 18 ‘The Life of John Milton’, The Poetical Works of John Milton (2 vols. London, [1795]), i. pp. [v], xiv. 17

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

237

Embedded within the passage is a sorites: reading had now become a general amusement; as a general amusement it involved the middle class; and the reading middle class demographically represented a sizeable number of purchasers. In this respect print culture in the 1790s differed vastly from the one into which Milton’s epic poem had been introduced. The prefacer stops short of implying that middle-class readers could absorb ‘so learned and sublime a work’, but the passage suggests that highly competent readers are not the sole measure (nor perhaps the best) of the health of the nation’s literary economy. The slippage in topics from erudition to amusement to ownership suggests an alternative vantage point: when ‘the various productions of the present age’ (even Paradise Lost) attracted ‘numerous purchasers’, it was a sign that production and consumption were keeping pace with one another in a robust and diverse print culture. Not to miss out on any part of the spectrum, it was Cooke’s explicit intention ‘To adapt the Work to all Classes of Readers’. 19 This was an increasingly realistic goal in light of the burgeoning print economy of the 1790s. What Wordsworth said of groundbreaking authors—that they had to create the taste by which their works could be appreciated—held true for dynamic and original publishers who created markets for their goods. 20 A middle-class appetite for books had to be whetted before it could be satisﬁed. To foster this sensibility, Bell had relied heavily on newspaper advertisements. Cooke denigrated the ‘Channel of the News-papers, wherein are copiously detailed specious advantages that do not exist, and pompous promises that are never performed’. 21 His own copious notices appeared on the wrappers of his volumes in numbers, or at the end of bound books, where his rhetoric, attached to the very product, invited a ‘Test of public Approbation’. After passing that test, and in ‘Justice to his Efforts’ to keep his prices low, Cooke hoped his readers would confer on him the essential Service of communicating to their Friends the singular Cheapness and Perfection of the present Publication. This kind Recommendation will exempt him from the Necessity of making his Works known by the expensive Mode of Advertisements, and enable him to appropriate the Sums thus saved, to the additional Lustre of this Work, which will ultimately tend to the Credit of the Publication, and the Satisfaction of the Subscribers. 22

A remarkable tactic, Cooke asked the public to circulate favorable reports of his edition, trusting in their sophistication as consumers to see how their own interests were served by helping him to lower his overhead costs. Even in our own 19

Back cover of nos. 37–43 and 47 in the Bodleian. ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London and Boston, 1974), 210. 21 Back cover of no. 1 in the Bodleian. Cooke did advertise in newspapers, but only occasionally. 22 Back cover of nos. 37–43 and 47 in the Bodleian. On no. 1 he referred to the savings realized by dispensing with frequent newspaper advertisements as a ‘retrenchment’. 20

238

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Figure 8.2. Wrappers, front and back, to No. 74 of Cooke’s edition. This number (Bodleian Vet. A5 f.2131/74) contains a portion of Dryden’s poems. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

day, it has been suggested, word of mouth is a highly effective way of promoting books. 23 Cooke’s advertising was conspicuous on the packaging of his books. His wrappers were covered with print: front and back they outlined his promotional themes, laid out consumer options, and tabulated the poets (with prices) that had been or were to be published in the series—rehearsing from every angle, as it were, the sales pitch to be used by anyone inclined to serve as one of his ﬁeld representatives (Fig. 8.2). One such volunteer was the boy Leigh Hunt, whose reminiscence about Cooke’s edition is a veritable summary of the publisher’s talking points: How I loved those little sixpenny numbers containing whole poets! I doted on their size; I doted on their type, their ornaments, on their wrappers, containing lists of other poets, 23 Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (Chicago and London, 1982), 202.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

239

and on the engravings from Kirk. I bought them over and over again, and used to get up select sets, which disappeared like buttered crumpets; for I could resist neither giving them away, nor possessing them.

Part of the charm of the edition was its advertising apparatus, linked to the physical object as indelibly as the type itself and graphic adornments. The lists fed dreams of future purchases; anticipation was almost as exhilarating as possession. Whenever reprimanded by his teacher, Hunt recalls, ‘I would comfort myself with thinking of the sixpence in my pocket, with which I should go out to Paternoster Row, when school was over, and buy another number of an English poet’. 24 Space on the wrappers was limited for these inventories of desire. While they were churned out week after week with new data identifying part numbers and titles, the lists Cooke offered in his book advertisements actually changed more frequently to reﬂect the growth in his Pocket Library The satisfactions of keeping track, of accounting for books owned and books yet to be purchased, were implicit in the heading of one advertisement: ‘ENUMERATION of the Works Published in COOKE ’s POCKET EDITIONS of the MOST ESTEEMED AUTHORS ’. Series by series, the authors and titles comprising Cooke’s project were recorded in two- and three-column tables, with prices afﬁxed, enabling readers to chart their purchases and calculate the necessary resources.

STAMPED WITH UNIVERSAL APPROBATION The lists that eventually would enthrall Hunt began with a roster of Cooke’s Select British Poets in 1794, presented as an ‘Arrangement of the Poets preparing for the Press, which are intended to be published in the order enumerated, and at the uncommonly low price afﬁxed to each’ (Table 8.2). Such was the disparity between, say, Milton and Mallet, or Dryden and Dyer, that even a 10-year-old boy might have been perplexed by Cooke’s promise that ‘The above Poets will be followed by others of equal estimation.’ Equal to whom? The essential point was that the ranks of these thirty-three poets were going to swell. 25 Deviations from the enumerated order reveal how ﬂuid Cooke’s plan actually became in process. Cunningham switched places with Goldsmith; Gray came forward; Milton stood aside for Pope; Young and Dryden were postponed; Mallet moved ahead; Collins appeared from nowhere; and so on. Before long, Cooke 24

Hunt, Autobiography, 77. EEC (17 Nov. 1794). The wrappers of nos. 1–21 of the ‘Superior Edition’ of the series carried this same list, but not the ‘Cheap’ prices. Thomson, for instance, cost 3s., Milton 6s., Pope 7s., and so on. 25

240

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library Table 8.2. Roster of Cooke’s ‘Arrangement of the Poets preparing for the Press’ Thomson Shenstone Akenside Goldsmith Cunningham Milton Pope Young Falconer Parnell Dryden

1s. 6d. 1s. 6d. 1s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 1s. 0d. 3s. 0d. 3s. 6d. 3s. 0d. 0s. 6d. 1s. 6d. 2s. 6d.

Lyttelton Addison Watts Gay Churchill Prior Pomfret Congreve Butler Swift Cowley

0s. 6d. 1s. 0d. 4s. 6d. 2s. 0d. 2s. 0d. 2s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 1s. 0d. 2s. 6d. 3s. 0d. 3s. 6d.

Mallet Rowe Armstrong Gray Shakespear Denham Hammond Fenton West Dyer Tickle

1s. 0d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 0s. 6d. 1s. 0d.

was printing at will, which indicates that beyond the ﬁrst nine or ten poets— essential for capturing public attention at the outset—the intended order was provisional, though to some degree it reﬂected the publisher’s sense of descending poetical stature. A shift in strategy, however, was evident in the lengthy postponements of Young and Dryden: an engraving of Young’s portrait gathered dust for two years before his poems were published in 1798, and Dryden did not appear until 1799. Cooke must have realized that if he did not reserve a few major poets for later volumes, he risked losing the attention of consumers. Also, incorrect price estimates indicate that many practical details were yet to be settled: in the printing house, for instance, the works of Milton ran to eight numbers, costing 4s. in the Cheap Edition, not 3s., and the anticipated nine numbers for Watts were in due course whittled down to four, costing 2s., not the projected 4s. 6d. Cooke did not predict how extensive his undertaking would be, in contrast with Bell, who promised a series in the neighborhood of one hundred volumes. To gain an accurate bibliographical record of the project is a challenging proposition: the series was open-ended, and no advertisement I have seen gives a full roster of poets; no set that I have been able to ﬁnd is complete; Cooke omitted the year from his imprint, perhaps wishing to keep his stock ‘fresh’ in shops and bookstalls; and no two sets are bound alike. The edition was issued in numbers, with readers being instructed to bind them into volumes of a certain size, resulting in different poets keeping company with one another from one set to the next. Cooke too combined them without system when selling his volumes in boards with printed labels: he paired Garth with Johnson in one copy, for example, but with Falconer and Cunningham in another. 26 Despite 26

Garth joins Johnson in one of two sets at the BL (Cup 501, a. 7), the label reading ‘BRITISH / With Plates. / VOL . XIX’, and joins Cunningham and Falconer in a copy at Harvard (KC 12373) with the label ‘COOKE ’s / POCKET / LIBRARY’. Both labels specify the poets too. Concerning the shift at this time from boards being treated as a temporary expedient to their being POETS ,

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

241

this bibliographical morass, one can piece together a full series and deduce its order of publication by cross-checking the imprints against the expanding roster of advertised poets, noting dates on the engravings and in the watermarks (paper displayed the year of manufacture beginning in 1794). By my count, Cooke’s Select British Poets grew to include ﬁfty poets in ﬁfty-six volumes (Table 8.3). 27 In addition, Cooke’s editions of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, Cunningham, Gray, Milton, and Lyttelton all required second editions; Goldsmith, Pope, and Falconer went through three editions. ‘[N]ot any will gain admission but such as have been stamped with universal approbation’, vouched the publisher. 28 All ﬁfty poets had appeared in at least one prior collection, but Cooke’s choices were framed mostly by Bell’s edition and The Works of the English Poets. He reprinted thirty-three of Bell’s ﬁfty poets. Of those omitted, the earliest—Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne—seem to have been rejected deliberately; others accidentally fell by the wayside, including Churchill, Cowley, Denham, Dyer, Swift, and West, all listed in the original roster. 29 Portraits of Churchill and Swift were actually engraved, as was true for Hughes and John Philips, but no poems were printed to join them. 30 These miscalculations and fruitless expenses show that Cooke kept adjusting his plans as he proceeded. In at least two cases Bell’s edition provided the model for Cooke in a further sense as well: in matters of canon and arrangement, Bell’s Dryden and Prior served as his copy-texts. 31 Endorsements by Johnson exercised their pull. Cooke knew that ‘Johnson’s Poets’ by and large had not been chosen by Johnson, but seized upon the exceptions. ‘[W]e have to remark’, urged the compiler of his ‘Life of Watts’, that the poet ‘stood so high in the opinion’ of Johnson ‘that his poems were considered an optional form of permanent binding, see Jonathan E. Hill, ‘From Provisional to Permanent: Books in Boards 1790–1840’, The Library, 6th ser. 21 (1999), 247–73. The boards of the Harvard copy are lavender, its spine green, supporting Hill’s conjecture that publishers took care to enhance the visual appeal of their boards so as to give them a fashionable dimension (270–1). 27 This assumes an ideal set bound with one engraved title-page per volume. A set with Shaw and Dorset bound separately (it had no such title-page) would have had ﬁfty-seven volumes; one bound after Pope had been reprinted in two volumes would have had ﬁfty-ﬁve. The NCBEL cites fortyeight volumes ‘at least’. See Bibliography for advertisements listing from twenty-four to forty-six poets. 28 ‘Cooke’s Cheap and elegant Pocket Editions’, sig. K5r . 29 The roster of poets given by St Clair under Cooke’s name (Reading Nation, 528) is incorrect; he has listed Bell’s edn. 30 The four engravings are found in ‘A Series of Proof Portraits and Embellishments, executed by First Rate Artists, to illustrate the Best English Novelists, Poets, and Essayists’, unique to the Hornby Collection in the Liverpool Central Library. The set, which has neither a printed nor an engraved title-page, is catalogued as ‘A Collection of Portraits and Illustrations from Charles Cooke’s Edition of Select Novels, British Poets, &c.’ (4 vols. London, 1792–1803). 31 Bell’s advertisements and editorial notes reappear in The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior (London, [1802]), 36, and in The Poetical Works of John Dryden (3 vols. London, [1798]), i. 1– 2, ii. 110, and ii. 148). On the other hand, Cooke’s rationale for including The Art of Poetry (iii. 243) counters Bell’s explanation for excluding several odes by Horace.

242

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Table 8.3. Cooke’s Select British Poets: record of production Part/Poet

1 Thomson 2 3 4 Shenstone 5 6 7 Akenside 8 9 10 Cunningham 11 12 Goldsmith 13 Gray 14 Pope 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 Milton 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Mallet 31 32 Falconer 33 Addison 34 35 Congreve 36 37 Fenton 38 39 Collins 40 Broome

Year

Date of vignette (drawn/ engraved)

Date of series title-page (drawn/ engraved) style

Date of portrait

Watermarks in paper

1794

5 Nov. (K/N) 29 Nov. (K/D) 13 Dec. (K/D) 13 Dec. (K/W) 27 Dec. (K/N) 10 Jan. (C/H) 24 Jan. (C/W) 14 Feb. (K/W) 28 Feb. (K/N) 14 Mar. (K/Rh) 4 Apr. (Bu/W) 18 Apr. (Bu/W) 25 Apr. (K/Sm)

15 Nov. (C/D) BB

15 Nov.

1794, 1795

1794 1795 1795

1795 1795 1795 1795

1795

1796

1795 1796 1795 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796 1796

23 May (C/W) 13 June (G/N) 3 July (K/W) 11 July (K/Sm2 ) 25 July (Bu/Gw) 29 Aug. (K/W) 11 Sept. (K/N) 26 Sept. (Bu/He3 ) 7 Nov. (C/Sa) 23 Oct. (K/Nu2 ) 21 Nov. (K/Nu) 28 Nov. (K/Ri) 19 Dec. (K/Nu) 8 Jan. (K/Ri) 13 Feb. (K/Nu) 12 Mar. (Br/St) 9 Apr. (K/Ri2 ) 20 Nov. (Bu/St) 16 Jan. (Bu/He) 12 Dec. (C/W) 21 Jan. (C/W) 30 Apr. (C/He) 12 Mar. (C/Ch) 30 Apr. (K/-) 16 Apr. (K/N) 30 Apr. (K/N) 9 July (K/Ch) 6 Aug. (K/Ch)

27 Dec. (C/H) BB

1794 10 Jan. 31 Jan.

1794, 1795

4 Apr. (C/H) BB

28 Mar.

9 May (C/N) BB

2 May

23 May (C/W) BB 13 June (C/H) BB2

23 May

1794, 1795 1798 1794, 1795, 1804 1794, 1795 1795, 1803, 1806

28 Feb. (C/W) BB

18 July 1 Aug. (C/W) BB3

7 Nov. (Br/H) BB

19 Dec. (C/H) BB2 23 Jan.

1796

13 Feb. (C/H) BB

1794, 1795 20 Feb. (C/W) BB 13 Feb. (C/H) BB 29 Mar. (C/W) BB

13 Feb.

14 May (C/Ch) BB

11 June

1795, 1796, 1801, 1802 1794 1794, 1795 1794, 1795

30 July (C/W) PL 16 July (C/W) EPL 4 Aug.

1795 1794, 1795,

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

243

Table 8.3. (Continued) Part/Poet

41 42 Tickell 43 44 Waller 45 46 47 Armstrong 48 Rowe 49 50 Parnell 51 52 53 Lansdowne 54 55 Otway 56 Shakespeare 57 58 59 Smollett 60 Pomfret 61 Johnson 62 Blackmore 63 64 Dodsley 65 Lyttelton 66 Walsh 67 Moore 68 69 Langhorne 70 71 72 Dryden 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Year

1796 1796 1797 1796 1796 1797 1796

1796 1797 1796 1797 1797

1797 1797 1797 1797 1797 1797 1797 1797 1798

1798

Date of vignette (drawn/ engraved)

Date of series title-page (drawn/ engraved) style

13 Aug. (K/Ch) 30 July (K/Ch) 3 Sept. (K/Ch) 22 Oct. (K/Ri) 22 Oct. (K/Ri) 4 Jan. (K/Ch) 5 Nov. (K/W) 16 Apr. (K/N) 25 Feb. (K/B) 17 Sept. (K/Ry) 22 Oct. (K/Me) 26 Dec. (K/W) 28 May (K/N) 14 Jan. (K/W)

20 Aug. (C/H) PPB

4 Mar. (K/N) 17 Feb. (K/W) 14 Mar. (K/N) 29 Apr. (K/W) 9 May (K/Nu) 24 June (Bu/Wo) 22 July (K/Ch) 29 July (C/W) 26 Aug. (C/W) 11 Aug. (K/Ri) 9 Sept. (K/Ri) 26 Sept. (K/Nu) 18 Nov. (C/W) 16 Dec. (C/W) 10 Jan. (C/W) 10 Feb. (C/W) 3 Mar. (C/W) 31 Mar. (C/W) 5 May (C/W2 ) 26 May (C/W2 ) 7 July (C/W) 19 Aug. (C/H) 29 Sept. (C/W3 ) 20 Oct. (C/N3 ) 17 Nov. (C/W) 8 Dec. (C/H3 ) 21 Dec. (C/W3 )

24 Sept. (C/Gr) PP 19 Nov. (C/H) BB

5 Nov. (C/H) PPB 13 Aug. (C/W) SBP 12 Nov. (C/Gr) PP

Date of portrait

22 Oct.

5 Nov. 7 May 31 Jan. 22 Oct.

Watermarks in paper

1796 1794, 1795, 1796 1794, 1795, 1796 1794, 1795 1794 1794

1794 1 Apr. (C/H) PP

21 Jan. 10 Sept.

1795

4 Mar. (C/W) PP 1795 14 Mar. (C/H) PP 3 June (C/W) PP 10 June (C/W) PP 7 July (C/Cl) PP 9 Sept. (C/R) PP 1 July (C/H) PP 14 Sept. (C/H) PP

19 Apr. n.d. 4 Mar. 7 July

1795 1794, 1796 1795 1795

30 Sept. (C/H) PP 16 Dec. (C/H) PP

1795 1797, 1803, 1804 1795 1795

20 Jan. (C/H) PP

1796

9 Sept.

1 May

1795, 1797, 1798

21 June (C/W) PP2

21 Sept. (-/-) PP 17 Nov. (C/H) PP3

(cont.)

244

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Table 8.3. (Continued) Part/Poet

82 83 Young 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 Mickle 92 93 Garth 94 Shefﬁeld 95 Warton 96 97 Glover 98 99 100 101 Rochester 102 Savage 103 104 105 Watts 106 107 108 109 Somerville 110 111 112 113 Prior 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 Butler

Year

Date of vignette (drawn/ engraved)

1799 1796 1799

11 Jan. (C/W3 )

1799 1801 1798 1800 1798 1800 1800 1800

1800 1800 1801 1801

1801 1802 1802

1803 1803

1 Feb. (C/R) 7 Mar. (C/W2 ) 23 Mar. (C/R2 ) 13 Apr. (C/W) 4 May (C/W2 ) 4 July (C, S/W2 ) 21 Sept. (K, S/W) 24 Oct. (C, S/W2 ) 26 Oct. (T/A) 6 Dec. (T/R)

Date of series title-page (drawn/ engraved) style

Date of portrait

Watermarks in paper

3 Dec.

1795

1 Jan. 1 May

1796, 1798

28 Feb. (C/H) PP

1 June (C/H) PP2

7 Nov. (C/H) PP

3 Jan. (T/N)

4 Jan. (C/H) PP

25 Jan. (C, S/Ch) 9 May (T/A) 24 May (T/R) 1 Mar. (T/Sm) 3 May (T/W) 12 July (T/Sm) 17 Oct. (T/W) 1 Dec. (Dr, S/No) 7 Nov. (T/Rh) 1 Dec. (T/Rh) 10 Jan. (T/Rh) 12 Apr. (T/Rh) 1 May (T/Sm) 1 June (T/Wa) 12 Sept. (T/R) 1 Apr. (E/H) 16 Oct. (T/Sc) 1 Mar. (E/H) 22 June (T/W) 1 May (T/A2 ) 1 May (T/A2 ) 28 May (T/A) 27 Aug. (T/Sc2 ) 10 Dec. (T/Sc2 ) 11 Feb. (T/Sc2 ) 30 Apr. (T/Wa2 ) 14 May (T/A)

18 Jan. (C/H) PP

1 May 1795 14 June (C/H) PP 28 Apr. (C/H) PP

1796 13 Sept.

1 Sept. (C/H) PP

1795 1795, 1798

24 Jan. (C/H) PP n.d.

1795, 1799

22 May (C/H) PP

1799, 1800 16 Oct. (C/H) PP

1 May

1799, 1800

10 July (C/H) PP 26 Jan. (C/H) PP2 1801

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

245

Table 8.3. (Continued) Part/Poet

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 Gay 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 Hammond + Sprat 136 Shaw + Dorset

Year

1804 1804

1805 1805

Date of vignette (drawn/ engraved) 21 June (T/W) 23 July (Br/Wa) 1 Sept. (T/A) 21 Dec. (T/Wi) 21 Jan. (T/A) 18 Feb. (T/Ev) 21 Apr. (M/H2 ) 9 June (M/Wa2 ) 28 June (T/H) 4 Aug. (M/H) 29 Sept. (M/H) 15 Nov. (T/Wi) 24 Nov. (C/H2 ) 16 Feb. (M/H) 5 Dec. (M/H)

Date of series title-page (drawn/ engraved) style

Date of portrait

Watermarks in paper

8 Dec. (C/H) PP 11 Jan. (C/H) PP2 18 Feb. 4 May (J/W) PP

1800

4 Aug. 24 Nov. (C/H) PP2 5 Dec. (C/H) PP

1803 1803, 1804

Notes: The engravings are listed chronologically by poet, not necessarily as they were issued from one numbered part to the next. Most of the numerals in the ﬁrst column are printed on the wrappers of a set at the Bodleian Library. The set ends with no. 94, but is missing nos. 12, 22–36, 44–6, 48–53, 56–9, 61, and 83–90; I have paired poets with the missing numbers in which I believe they were contained on the basis of the engravings found with them elsewhere. Cooke seems to have stopped keeping a running tally by the time he issued Savage, the wrappers of which are numbered 1, 2, and 3. For illustrative purposes, however, I continue the running count, assigning nos. 102–4 to Savage, and so on. The year beside each poet pertains to the dated vignettes, series title-pages, and portraits in the neighboring columns. The variant wordings of the series title-pages are abbreviated as follows: BB, the original, occupied seven lines: Cooke’s Pocket Edition / of the Original & Complete Works of / Select British Poets, / or Entertaining Poetical Library / containing the Poetic Productions of the most / Esteemed British Bards, / Superbly Embellished. PPB (eight lines) offers the same title, but moves Poetic Productions to its own line, making the next (in tiny lettering) of the most Esteemed British Bards. The phrase British Bards disappears from the other four titles. In relation to the BB version, SBP (four lines) omits the three lines following Select British Poets, while EPL (ﬁve lines) omits the two lines after or Entertaining Poetical Library; PL (six lines) does the same as EPL, but divides the phrase just cited, showcasing Poetical Library on a line by itself; PP (seven lines) alters the antepenultimate and penultimate lines to read containing the most Esteemed / Poetic Productions, the latter phrase emphasized in larger letters. Superscripts in the third and fourth columns indicate engravings intended for the second or third volume of a poet. Artists’ names: A = Armstrong, B = Bromley, Br = Brown, Bu = Burney, Ch = Chapman, Cl = Cole, C = Corbould, D = de Moulinville, Dr = Drummond, E = Edwards, Ev = Evans, G = Graham, Gw = W. Grainger, Gr = Granger, H = Hawkins, He = Heath, J = Johnson, K = Kirk, Me = Meadows, M = Mowson, N = Neagle, No = Noble, Nu = Nutter, R = Raimbach, Rh = Rhodes, Ri = Ridley, Ry = Ryder, S = Satchwell, Sa = Saunders Sc = Scott, Sm = Smith, St = Strange, T = Thurston, W = Warren, Wa = Waite, Wi = Widnel, Wo = Woodman. The years found in the watermarks of the papers Cooke used are recorded in line with the ﬁrst entry for each poet, except for Milton, half of whose works were printed on paper with no year indicated.

246

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

inserted in the Collection of the English Poets, published in 1779, at his express recommendation’. Johnson’s avowal of responsibility for Watts, Blackmore, Pomfret, and Yalden was duly quoted, but not even the ‘declaration of Dr. Johnson’ could earn Yalden a place in Cooke’s edition. 32 Anderson also inﬂuenced Cooke, as six poets sanctioned by his edition now debuted in a pocket series: Dodsley, Mickle, Shakespeare, Shaw, Smollett, and Warton, most of them absent from Cooke’s preliminary roster and none published before 1797. With few exceptions Cooke followed a policy of reprinting the complete poems of each author. At the extremes of piety and impiety, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns were excluded on the basis of Johnson’s disparagement, while many of Rochester’s poems were omitted for violating the ‘purest principles of moral rectitude and social virtue’. 33 These, however, were departures from the policy articulated from the outset in the pages of Akenside: ‘This Edition contains the whole of Mr. Akenside’s writings. It has been prepared with expense and attention: and the kind supporters of this extensive undertaking may rest assured, that no exertions shall be spared, during its progress, on the part of the Proprietor.’ This statement was reinforced by the rationale given for inserting a piece not intended for publication, along with some other additional pieces which were ‘known to be genuine, and which certainly are no discredit to their Author’. 34 As for Hunt’s recollection that sixpenny numbers encompassed ‘whole poets’, the works of only around a dozen poets were meager enough to ﬁt into a single number. On average the numbers contained between 72 and 120 pages, an ‘unusual quantity of Letter-press, given at the Price’, Cooke claimed. 35 More meager still, the works of the last four poets were paired together in single numbers, Hammond with Sprat, and Shaw with Dorset. For the ‘Purposes of Uniformity and Economy in binding’ Cooke recommended that purchasers ‘unite Two or Three of the smaller Works in one Volume, so that not any one, when bound, may contain less than 288 Pages, nor more than 360’. 36 Yet many poets, their works ﬁlling two or more numbers, could be bound separately. The poems of Thomson, for instance, comprising three numbers, formed a single volume. More proliﬁc poets required extra volumes: three were needed for Dryden, while two sufﬁced for Milton, Young, Prior, Butler, and Gay. Pope’s works, originally paginated to occupy three volumes, in later editions were crowded into two. Cooke, like Bell, restricted himself to ‘the original Productions of the respective Poets’, but not to discourage readers ‘partial to the Translations’ of Greek 32

‘The Life of Dr. Watts’, The Poetical Works of Isaac Watts (London, [1801]), p. [v]. The Poetical Works of Isaac Watts, xviii; The Poetical Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (London, [1800]), xii. 34 The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, xii, xvi–xvii. 35 ‘Cooke’s Cheap and elegant Pocket Editions’, sig. K4r . See also EEC (17 Nov. 1794). 36 Advertisement at back of Poetical Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, sig. F6r . 33

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

247

and Latin classics, he vowed to publish ‘those much esteemed Productions, Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s Virgil, Garth’s Ovid, and Francis’s Horace’, with ‘others of equal Celebrity’. He intended to do so in his signature manner—not as a supplement to the Select British Poets, but in a parallel series, ‘a separate Work, upon a Plan precisely similar to the present’, so that his customers would ‘not be disappointed of possessing Editions of them on a Scale corresponding with the present Selection’. 37 Perhaps hindered by this insistence upon his trademark thoroughness, his brand, he never got around to it. Ravages to the economy caused by the war with France hurt the enterprise. While the series never shut down, one of his engravers, Abraham Raimbach, described how Cooke’s ‘publications were not regular, languishing, as did every thing connected with the arts, under the paralysing inﬂuence of a war, waged with, perhaps, unprecedented inveteracy’. 38 Cooke registered his patriotism through Richard Corbould’s depiction of a couplet from Addison’s ‘Letter from Italy to Charles Lord Halifax’: ‘ ’Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia’s isle, / And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile’ (ll. 139–40). In the plate, Liberty stands proof against the enervating temptations of two cornucopias: food spilling from one, representing the luxurious climes that produce wine and olive oil (ll. 131–6), and coins from the other, indicating the foreign gold by which ‘Th’ ambitious Gaul’ had tried to sow political disunity (ll. 153–8). The Phrygian cap atop her staff is deﬁantly not the bonnet rouge of revolutionary France. A degree of political opportunism can be seen in Cooke’s presenting his edition of ‘the most favorite British Bards’ to Caroline of Brunswick in anticipation of her marriage to the Prince of Wales. This dedication, engraved on 15 November 1794, months in advance of their 8 April 1995 wedding, complemented his earlier dedication of Cooke’s Edition of Select Novels to the prince. 39 Although a future payoff might have lurked in Cooke’s mind—if Bell could become bookseller to the Prince of Wales, why not he too?—the series might beneﬁt in the short run if he capitalized on the upcoming wedding. Besides, some product identity was needed, and the tradition of a mythically central bard, though strongly Welsh, ﬂattered Britons in general. 40 Yet in 1796 he altered course, and erased the epithet ‘British Bards’ from his title. Why, only eighteen months into the series, would Cooke obliterate the controlling metaphor of the bard? The marriage of the prince and princess, to be sure, had gone sour; by early 1796 they had separated, but this development would not have turned the bardic emphasis into a marketing liability. Other factors convinced the publisher that little was to be gained by retaining it. The aura of ‘the Bard’ had faded. 37

‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of James Thomson (London, [1794]), viii. Memoirs and Recollections of the Late Abraham Raimbach (London, 1843), 26. 39 Prospectus for ‘Cooke’s Select British Novels, or Novelist’s Pocket Library’. 40 Other booksellers also took advantage of the occasion to draw attention to their wares. In Feb. the nuptial pair was saluted in an advertisement for a book on the Welsh bards. 38

248

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library ARDOUR AND THE BRITISH BARD

On 22 November 1794 Cooke published Thomson, followed by Shenstone, Akenside, Cunningham, Goldsmith, and Gray—in sharp contrast with Bell’s opening sequence of Milton, Pope, Dryden, Butler, and Prior. Bell began with Milton in part to display his product in the context of the largest number of competing editions. Although Thomson provided a similar opportunity—the 1790s saw thirty-two British editions of The Seasons—Cooke awarded him pride of place for different reasons. 41 True, Milton was ‘the boast of this country, and the admiration of the world’ and stood foremost in proof of poetry’s superiority over history and novels: ‘Poetry opens a more extensive Field for the Flights of Fancy, and the Indulgence of the Imagination . . . : for what can be a more luxurious Banquet to the speculative Mind than the sublime Descriptions of Milton, the enchanting Pictures of Shenstone, the rustic Scenery of Thomson, or the beautiful Imagery of Akenside.’ 42 But in this group, Milton was the odd poet out, considering the difﬁculty of his verse, his veneration of Italian and classical models, and his politics. Cooke launched his series with poets whose pictures, scenery, and imagery were more amenable to constructions of British nationalism and evocative of a bardic interplay with landscape. ‘Bardic nationalism’, as Katie Trumpener has shown, was tied to a sense of the landscape and its historical depth, a sense of place repeatedly conveyed by Cooke’s illustrations. The insistent Britishness of the edition reﬂected a strategic embrace of its farﬂung market. Looking at the imprint on Cooke’s wrappers, Amory exclaimed, ‘what an inroad Cooke had made into the traditional centers of piracy in Scotland and Ireland!’ The booksellers ready to sell Cooke’s edition included ‘J. Archer and W. M’Kenzie, Dublin; T. White, Cork; W. Moffatt, Waterford; Watson and Co. and J. Ogle, Edinburgh; Messrs. Brash and Reid, Glasgow; J. Burnett, Aberdeen; T. Hill, Perth; and all Booksellers and News-men in Great Britain and Ireland’. 43 The presence within this network of smaller centers of population (Cork, Waterford, Aberdeen, Perth) shows Cooke’s determination to reach into all corners of the nation, where, if Trumpener is right, a ‘new degree of imaginative sympathy and community’ was spreading to form the basis of a middle-class cultural nationalism—not to mention consumerism. 44 The ﬁgure 41 Ralph M. Cohen, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ and the Language of Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), 271, 482–5. In fact, 1794 was a peak year for reprints of The Seasons. 42 ‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of James Thomson, vi. 43 Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 142; wrappers of nos. 1–21 in the Bodleian. 44 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997), 32–3. For a seminal study on perceptions of social and political cohesion, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

249

of the bard served as a vehicle for bringing together an imagined community as wide as Cooke’s network of distribution. Again Cooke’s prefaces functioned as a primer, unifying the collection through the leitmotif of the bard. Cunningham was characterized as a ‘tuneful Bard’, Shenstone referred to as a ‘charming pastoral bard’, and Dodsley remembered as publisher of ‘a Collection of Poems, by eminent bards’, an incongruous recasting of the last portion of Dodsley’s title, by Several Hands. 45 A tutorial in bardic reading was delivered at the beginning of the ‘The Life of Mark Akenside’: In perusing the Works of such an animated and moral writer as Mark Akenside, the heart feels itself deeply engaged: in every subject its dearest and best interests are materially concerned; while every impressive page abounds with the sterling of sentiment, thought, and originality. In the dear and interesting cause of publick and private virtue, our Author appears to glow with an ardour becoming a British Bard. He writes to the feelings; but those feelings are no where led astray, either by the tinsel of unmeaning harmony, or the bursts of affectation. No; our Poet’s mind is infused throughout his numerous and varied subjects; and in no instance do we ﬁnd him amusing the fancy at the expence of the understanding.

Where the essential bard glows with ardour, the heart and mind of the reader must dilate to absorb the virtuous warmth. Every line of The Pleasures of Imagination displayed ‘a heart in love with virtue’, the effect of which was ‘to raise the genius of our moral Bard, to an exalted height’. Wherever Akenside probed the afﬁnities between beauty, truth, and goodness, ‘the Bard dwells with an enthusiasm worthy of his impressive subject’. 46 These accolades were revised and expunged of the word Bard in Cooke’s second edition of Akenside. The tone of praise was retained—the poet’s ‘impressive page’, for example, was marked by ‘originality of genius and sublimity of sentiment’—yet the opening passage was condensed and moved to the middle of the life. Shorn of its instructional purpose along with the conceit of the bard, the passage could now be placed where such discussions usually were situated, following the narrative of the poet’s life. 47 If bardic nationalism was in its heyday, dissenting voices were also to be heard. In an entry in Bell’s New Pantheon (1795) the bard was deﬁned as ‘a poet by genius and profession, who, in the language of Ossian, “Sung the battles of heroes, or the heaving bosoms of love” ’. Beneath trees they ‘touched the string’ of their harps, ‘each to the chief he loved’. In oral cultures there was a place for bards, but their role had been obviated by the advent of writing and printing; ‘when a language, in its progress to maturity, is enriched with variety of phrases, ﬁt to 45 ‘The Life of John Cunningham’, The Poetical Works of John Cunningham (London, [1795]), p. ix; ‘Life of Dodsley’, The Poetical Works of Robert Dodsley (London, [1797]), 6, 8. 46 ‘The Life of Mark Akenside’, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, v–vii (BL 11613.h.1/15). 47 ‘The Life of Mark Akenside’, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, x (BL Cup 501.a.7/4).

250

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

express the most elevated thoughts, men of genius aspired to the higher strains of poetry, leaving music and song to the Bards’. Except for simple verses, the entry concluded, ‘[i]t is now agreed that no poetry is ﬁt for musical accompaniment’. 48 This anti-primitivism was not new. Johnson, according to Trumpener, thought the cult of the bard ‘a deluded, retrojecting fantasy’, in contrast with the reality of a rising ‘professional literati in a commercial society’, whose careers, documented in The Lives of the Poets, were gauged by their success in negotiating the world of print. 49 Poetry worthy of the name was not sung; it was purchased and read. These two paradigms were conﬂated in the original series title, Cooke’s Pocket Edition / of the Original & Complete Works of / Select British Poets, / or Entertaining Poetical Library, / containing the Poetic Productions of the most / Esteemed British Bards, / Superbly Embellished. Once the dissonance of this conﬂation came to bother him, Cooke removed the epithet ‘Esteemed British Bards’ from his engraved title-pages in 1796, eventually reassigning that position of elaborate prominence, after several design changes, to the phrase ‘Poetic Productions’. 50 The distinction was urgent enough for Cooke to commission new Vignette Frontispieces for several poets that had already been published (Fig. 8.3). 51 The very materiality of Cooke’s series, the collection as a commodity, was now inscribed on its title-pages in greater prominence. Productions were at the center of the multivolume enterprise: poets and publishers created products, and readers consumed them, leading to more production and ultimately—with sufﬁcient reprinting— classical standing for the poet. The tension played out graphically on the engraved title-pages seeped into Cooke’s ‘Life of Shakespeare’, where bards were belittled and modernity praised. The compiler, citing an idea ‘very forcibly expressed by one of his biographers’, lauded Shakespeare for managing ‘to silence the legendary tales of the bard and the minstrel, to regulate the wildness of romantic ﬁction, to put to ﬂight the phantoms of allegory, and to advance original poetry to the summit of perfection’. The biographer mentioned in passing but not credited by name was none other than Robert Anderson, whose 1793 preface laid the basis for Cooke’s in substance and phrasing. During the Elizabethan age, ‘an æra favourable to genius and learning, when liberty began to dawn, and dispel the mists of Gothic ignorance, and its puny nursling, Superstition’, reason established ‘its empire, over the human mind’, removed the mantle of mystery from religion and literature, and freed people ‘to exercise their intellectual powers, and assert their right 48 Bell’s New Pantheon; or, Historical Dictionary of the Gods, Demi-Gods, Heroes, and Fabulous Personages of Antiquity (2 vols. London, 1790), i. 124–7. 49 Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 78–9. 50 See the note to Table 8.3 for a description of the variants. 51 In the process of the re-engraving, Akenside’s Works became Akenside’s Poems, an example which casts light on an inconsistency in the series. Across the range of poets there seems to be no discernible cause for preferring ‘Works’ in some instances and ‘Poems’ in others.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

251

Figure 8.3. The elimination of ‘British Bards’ from Cooke’s title. His altered conception of the series is evident from the redesign of his title-pages.

to think for themselves’. While Shakespeare may have helped to quell bardic legends, his poems were vitiated by conforming to ‘the taste of the times, when prolixity and circumlocution, even on trivial subjects, were . . . approved’. Venus and Adonis (‘universally approved in his life-time’) and The Rape of Lucrece (which also enjoyed a ‘reputation in his day’) may have outshone other contemporary works ‘in the line of what is called narrative poetry’, but they upheld the kind of tradition evident ‘throughout the Gothic ages’ that honored Lucretia as a moral exemplar, a subject treated by Chaucer ‘and other bards of antiquity’. Tastes had changed, and Shakespeare’s poems were ‘not read, perhaps, with the same pleasure in modern as in former days, being deemed too long, and therefore tedious’. Poetic energy could be found in many sonnets, but some were less forceful and most lacked ‘the charm of variety’. Yet if Shakespeare’s poetic (as opposed to dramatic) abilities ‘may not have been of the most splendid kind’, allowances ﬁnally were to be made for historical contingencies:

252

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

The merit of his writings can only be estimated by their conformity to those rules which were prescribed, as the poet’s guide, in his own age; and if his poetical works are brought to this standard, and in that view opposed to those either of preceding or contemporary writers, we hesitate not in concurrence with the opinion of the most impartial and competent judges, to conﬁrm his title to a decided superiority, both with respect to comprehension of mind, and force of expression.

Notwithstanding these misgivings, the prefacer designated Shakespeare ‘the greatest genius that ever graced this or any other country’ and made liberal use of adjectives like astonishing, incomparable, extraordinary, and superior. Twice in this vein Shakespeare was called ‘the immortal bard’, the term here apparently stripped of any pejorative overtones. 52 In other cases as well Cooke’s prefacer relied on Anderson to resolve ticklish matters of evaluation, particularly where Anderson had tempered blunt judgments of Johnson. The prefacer, for example, claimed that Johnson had ‘done much injustice to Mallet’ to conclude that ‘[a]s a writer, he cannot be placed in any high class. There is no species of composition in which he was eminent.’ Taking a cue from Anderson, the prefacer countered that if Mallet could not ‘be admitted as a ﬁrst rate poet’, he was ‘certainly an elegant and pleasing writer’, one whose works if ‘perused with candour’ would ‘be found entitled to much approbation’. With Tickell it was the same. Again in answer to Johnson, who wrote that the poet ‘cannot be denied a high place among the minor poets’, the prefacer quoted the remarks of a ‘more candid censor’, namely Anderson: ‘if by the term minor Poet the quantity of his poetry is meant, he is not improperly so called; but, if the quality is understood, it is a disparagement. If he cannot be placed in the ﬁrst rank of poets, he has at least an unexceptionable claim to the second.’ 53 Anderson’s edition was useful for Cooke in this regard, enabling his prefacer to neutralize the kind of unfavorable critical opinions in source materials that Bell’s compilers tended to ignore or amend. Gratitude to Anderson was openly expressed in the ‘Life of Langhorne’, in tandem with the observation that ‘Dr. Johnson did not introduce any strictures upon the productions of contemporary poets’. While Langhorne had thus been ‘exempted from the severe censure of that rigid, though judicious critic’, he likewise had been ‘deprived of the credit that might have resulted from his commendation’. Fortunately his works had been commented on by Anderson, ‘that elegant biographer’, a performance worthy of a tribute to ‘his erudition, his discernment, and his candour’. 54 Yet the nuances of Anderson’s opinions were at times lost in translation. In keeping with his metaphor linking canonical literary decisions to legal processes, 52 ‘Life of Shakespeare’, The Poetical Works of William Shakespeare (London, [1797]), [5], 9, 12–15; compare ‘The Life of Shakspeare’, Anderson’s edn., ii. 607, 610. 53 ‘Life of Mallet’, The Poetical Works of David Mallet (London, [1795]), pp. xi–xii; ‘Life of Tickell’, The Poetical Works of Thomas Tickell (London, [1796]), p. viii. Compare Anderson’s edn., viii. 407, ix. 677. 54 ‘Life of Langhorne’, The Poetical Works of John Langhorne (London, [1798]), 17. Compare Anderson’s edn., xi. 207–16.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

253

for instance, Anderson had declared ‘it would be doing [Shakespeare] an injustice to try [his poems] by a comparison with more modern and polished productions’; rather, they had to be ‘tried by the standard of poetical excellence established in his own age’. Advancing the same reason as Anderson—that is, because ‘the style and manner of writing ha[d] been progressively improving’ since Shakespeare’s time—Cooke’s prefacer stated that ‘it would be highly illiberal and disingenuous to place his poems in a comparative view with the polished and reﬁned productions of more modern bards’. 55 Placing in view is very different from placing on trial. The purpose of Cooke’s edition was precisely to place poets in view alongside one another; this was the essence of his national enterprise. If anything, Shakespeare’s inclusion was more momentous in Cooke’s edition than in Anderson’s, for the latter was ‘comprehensive’, the former by deﬁnition (and title) Select. In either case, the inclusion was grounded in historical accommodation and fraught with ambivalence, though in Cooke’s edition there was perhaps the greater danger that a ‘comparative view’ would result in a mixed judgment—not just for Shakespeare but for other poets, too—at odds with the ‘universal approbation’ advertised in his promotions. In a correspondingly mixed fashion, the term ‘bard’ was used with connotations variously honoriﬁc, neutral, or derogatory. In spite of the inconsistency, Shakespeare as the silencer of bardic legends helped Cooke lay to rest the founding conceit of his edition.

AT TRACTING THE NOTICE OF THE ARTIST Illustrations were one of the features that whetted Leigh Hunt’s appetite for more volumes. For anyone purchasing the numbers as they were published, the engravings could add a Janus-faced quality to the experience, for many of them illustrated verses printed in a different number: buyers found themselves looking ahead to a number not yet published, or back to a number already in hand (Table 8.4). For example, the engraving that accompanied the ﬁrst number of Shenstone depicted a scene from a poem given in the second number; the second number carried an illustration of verses found in the ﬁrst. In the case of Pope, the series title-pages were delivered in the wrong order; only in the eighth and ﬁnal number did buyers receive the engraved title to volume i. A similar situation relative to Johnson’s Adventurer, where the plates were not keyed to the text as issued in sixpenny numbers of Harrison’s British Classics (1785), led David Fleeman to think that the mismatches ‘perhaps acted as an inducement to purchasers’. 56 55

‘Life of Shakespeare’, 14–15; Anderson’s edn., ii. 610. Fleeman, Bibliography, i. 362. Bell apologized to his readers when the vignette in one of his volumes happened to illustrate a poem from another. 56

Table 8.4. Delivery of the engravings in nos. 1–21 of Cooke’s Select British Poets

1 Thomson 2 Thomson 3 Thomson

Vignette illustrating

on Page

in which part

Title-page

[i–iv], v–xxiv, 1–108 109–216 217–318, i–ii

Summer Winter Spring Autumn Anacreontic Elegy XVI The Dying Kid Pleasures of Imagination Pleasures of Imagination The Complaint Fancy On a Pile of Ruins The Hermit Elegy in a Churchyard Eloisa to Ablard Summer: Pastoral II Horace, Bk. II, Ep. i

40 121 27 84 147 72 169 47 25 217 106 21 54 69 i. 92 i. 30 ii. 203

1 2 1∗ 1∗ 5∗ 4∗ 5∗ 7 7∗ 9 11∗ 10∗ 12 13 15∗ 14∗ 19∗

BB

The Rape of the Lock Windsor Forest Sappho to Phaon

i. 60 i. 49 i. 78

15∗ 15∗ 15∗

The Dunciad Winter: Pastoral IV

iii. 143 i. 36

21∗ 14∗

[i–iv], v–li, 52–96 97–192 193–272, i–iv [i–iv], v–xix, 20–108 109–80 181–263 [i–iv], 13–80 81–152 [i–iv], i–xxviii, 29–84 [i–iv], v–xxiv, 25–72 [i–iv], i–xxxvi, 1–44 45–128 129–200 [i–iv], 5–12 13–96 97–180 181–238, i–ii [i–iv], 5–24 25–108 109–220

Portrait

P

BB P P BB P BB BB BB BB2

P P

P BB3

BB1

Notes: This table shows how Cooke put engravings (vignettes, series title-pages, portraits) into his readers’ hands as he issued his series in parts. The early numbers from Bodleian Vet. A5 f.2131 provide an adequate picture. (The contents of no. 12, though missing from this set, can be inferred.) The printed title-pages are indicated by bracketed roman numerals in the ‘Letterpress pages’ column; roman numerals without brackets represent either the prefaces or tables of contents. An asterisk in the ﬁfth column indicates that the verses illustrated by the vignette issued with that part were located in a different number. In the sixth column (as in Table 8.3), BB represents the wording of Cooke’s original series title-page, and the superscripts in Pope’s case designate which volume the title-page was to be bound with. Otherwise it is clear where the engraved title-pages and portraits were meant to wind up.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

4 Shenstone 5 Shenstone 6 Shenstone 7 Akenside 8 Akenside 9 Akenside 10 Cunningham 11 Cunningham 12 Goldsmith 13 Gray 14 Pope (vol. i) 15 Pope 16 Pope (vol. ii) 17 Pope 18 Pope 19 Pope (vol. iii) 20 Pope 21 Pope

Letterpress pages

254

Part / Poet

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

255

At worst, Cooke must have rationalized, this unpredictability would be mildly annoying; at best, it might count as one of the pleasures of serial collecting. Never had the ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting been closer siblings. Cooke’s Select British Poets contained more illustrations than Bell’s edition: 127 Scenic Representations, 56 Vignette Frontispieces, and 26 portraits. Added to the artwork in his other series, commissions on this scale lend credibility to the claim that in the annals of book illustration Cooke helped to provide ‘the ﬁrst steady market for the work of English engravers and artists’. 57 This body of artwork ‘emboldened’ him to solicit the ‘Countenance of all the Lovers of the Polite Arts, to whom the effusions of exalted Genius must ever appear Objects for beautiful Illustration’. 58 Recurring motifs in the objects depicted suggest that his titlepage claim, ‘PRINTED AND EMBELLISHED Under the Direction of C . COOKE’, reﬂected his genuine engagement in the process. What direction Cooke gave his artists—chief among them Richard Corbould for the Vignette Frontispieces; Thomas Kirk, Corbould, and John Thurston for the Scenic Representations—can only be loosely inferred. A strict contractual authority was exercised by Sir Thomas Hanmer over his edition of Shakespeare (1743–4), for which Francis Hayman agreed ‘to design and delineate a drawing to be preﬁx’d to each Play of Shakespeare taking the subject of such scenes as the said Sr Thomas Hanmer shall direct’. Not only did Hanmer select each subject, he also ‘dictated as well as he could the form the designs should take’. 59 Cooke’s control involved the right of disapproval; Raimbach made his engravings ‘under the implied condition of “No cure no pay”—that is, if Cooke did not approve, I was to expect nothing’. Cooke was a ‘rather pompous gentleman-publisher’ in these dealings, inclined to ‘dispense his patronage among the hungry artists, with an air of conscious superiority’. 60 The artists were allowed some leeway in choice of subject. A degree of autonomy is implied by a brief digression addressing the selection of a scene to illustrate Goldsmith’s poems: The Hermit hold [sic] equal estimation with the rest of his poetic productions; and its beauties did not fail to attract the notice of the artist. The subject is delineated in a masterly manner by the pencil of Mr. Kirk, to which ample justice is done by the Engraving of Mr. Anker Smith; and, through the united skill of those ingenious Artists, produces a very chaste and elegant Vignette. 61

In contrast with the conﬁdent reinforcement of Cooke’s advertising emphases in this passage, the insistence that The Hermit was worthy of a picture is defensive, 57

Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140. ‘Catalogue of the Works of the Pocket Library Already Published’, 2. 59 Edward Hodnett, Text and Image: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature (London, 1982), 52, 69. 60 Raimbach, Memoirs, 25. 61 ‘The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B.’, xxi. 58

256

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

as if readers might have expected instead a scene from The Traveller or The Deserted Village. The caption beneath the engraving offered a key to the beauties that attracted the artist’s notice: Then, pilgrim, turn, thy cares forego: All earth-born cares are wrong: Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.

The mood of quiet reﬂection evokes one of several recurring visual images in the series. If, as Cooke alleged, his artists were drawn to ‘Subjects which illustrate the most interesting Passages’ in the poems, they evinced a remarkably consistent interest in certain subjects. 62 Cooke either hired artists with a predilection for these subjects, or steered them into chosen paths. Of exceptional interest were passages centered on the language of visualization. Verbs like see, look, glare, picture, view, survey, glance, and gaze, along with other words linked to sight, elicited a high number of drawings; they functioned as verbal cues, prompting the artist to test a passage for its visual potential. Such words focused attention on a landscape or natural prospect, but also heightened the drama of an encounter centering on sexual tension or physical violence. The favored visual motifs included settings of bucolic simplicity or sylvan ease; scenes of solitary contemplation and creative inspiration; situations that carried a sexual charge; and moments that captured the imminence of or aftermath of violent bodily injury. A proleptic survey of these pictorial themes could be found in the earliest illustrations. The Vignette Frontispiece and four Scenic Representations for Thomson were devoted to The Seasons, the most frequently illustrated English poem for a period of 150 years. Cooke’s ﬁve engravings, one of twelve sets newly conceived in the 1790s, helped to mark the second major phase in illustrating The Seasons, after a lengthy phase dominated by the drawings of William Kent. 63 The Vignette Frontispiece presents an idyllic natural world that appears repeatedly in the Select British Poets: usually a wooded enclosure (often beside a stream) that offers protective shade to a person who might be reﬂecting, or ﬁshing, or conversing with a companion. ‘Beside the dewy border let me sit’, reads the caption from Summer, followed in the text by other details that Corbould incorporated in his drawing: ‘There in that hollowed rock, grotesque and wild, / An ample chair moss-lin’d, and over head, / By ﬂowering umbrage shaded . . . ’ (ll. 622, 624–6). Judging from the frequency with which similar verses were selected for illustration, Corbould and others were alert for passages of natural description amenable to picturesque treatment, especially where an 62 63

On the captivating charge carried by the word interesting, see Ch. 9. Cohen, Art, 250, 253, and 279.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

257

element of the wild or grotesque added a touch of stimulation to an otherwise soothing environment. The ﬁgure seated beside the dewy border is emblematic of a type frequently pictured in the series: a writer, or at least a soul capable of internalizing ‘the sweetness of the shade’ and given to the habit of poetic invocation—‘Now come bold Fancy, spread a daring ﬂight, / And view the wonders of the Torrid zone’ (ll. 629, 631–2). The imaginative life in Cooke’s illustrations is often depicted in conjunction with actual writing tools, not the conventional accoutrements (the lyre, for instance, or a shell) used by Bell’s illustrators to signal classical ideas of poetic inspiration or craft. 64 The solitary ﬁgure in leafy shade, the bank of a stream, and the idea of writing objectiﬁed through paper and quill are all revisited, with a strong infusion of pathos, in the Scenic Representation designed for Spring. Sheltered by the ‘dun umbrage’ that hangs ‘Romantic’ over the brook, and losing himself in ‘heart thrilling meditation’, a lover, ‘Thrown, amid drooping lillies, swells the breeze / With sighs unceasing, and the brook with tears’ (ll. 1024–6, 1028–9). Terms suggestive of deep sensibility operated as a powerful hook on all of Cooke’s artists, especially words with a dark emotional valence—sighs, woe, cares, sorrow, despair, weeping, melancholy, and especially tears. The word trembling was a nearly irresistible lure, quoted expressly in nine captions, but ﬁguring in other illustrations also by lurking in a nearby verse and lending its agitation to the vignette. Kirk’s hunt for a subject from Summer ended in the description of a ruddy maid in a state of arousal over the charms of a rustic youth: ‘Half naked, swelling on the sight, and all / Her kindled graces burning o’er her cheek’ (ll. 356–7). Pausing from their agricultural labors, the two seem about to refresh themselves with amorous play—the youth, his shirt discomposed to reveal half his torso, stares at the exposed breasts of the maid seated beside him as she unties a ribbon in her hair (Fig. 8.4). With a scenario like this so readily taking form in Kirk’s mind, no wonder some observers found the passage to be ‘indelicate’. 65 Had Kirk been interested in a more elaborate voyeuristic encounter he would have picked the ‘soul-distracting view’ enjoyed by Damon when the bathing Musidora, ‘in full luxuriance’, unwittingly displays herself to his ‘lawless gaze’; not even Paris ‘panted stronger, when aside / The rival-goddesses the veil divine / Cast unconﬁn’d, and gave him all their charms’ (ll. 1303–19). 66 The point is not that the most erotically potent material was necessarily chosen for illustration,

64 After 1790 the image of an isolated poet became a commonplace in illustrations of Thomson’s work (ibid. 267). Elsewhere, for Pope’s poems, Kirk repeatedly depicted composition: Sappho writes, Eloisa writes, a Dunce writes, even weeping Cupids write with their golden darts. 65 Ibid., 296. 66 Wordsworth observed that in ‘any well-used copy of the “Seasons” the book generally opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of the stories (perhaps “Damon and Musidora”)’ (‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, 204).

258

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

Figure 8.4. Erotic and horriﬁc elements in plates for Thomson’s Summer and Winter.

but that sexual passages often attracted the notice of Cooke’s artists, and that voyeurism is apparent in many prints. When Kirk settled on the love story of Palamon and Lavinia from Autumn, the pleasures of erotic contemplation became more intricate. At ﬁrst sight Palamon is taken with her beauty: ‘He saw her charming; but he saw not half / The charms her downcast modesty conceal’d’ (ll. 229–30). In these verses Kirk captured ‘the very moment love and chaste desire / Sprung in his bosom’ (ll. 231–2). Lavinia, unlike the ruddy maid in Summer, is demurely dressed; born to an inﬂuential family, she has wound up, by a trick of fortune, laboring in the ﬁelds. The very charms concealed from view assume a graphic immediacy in Palemon’s imagination: ‘What pity! that so delicate a form’, he regrets, ‘Should be devoted to the rude embrace / Of some indecent clown’ (ll. 237–41). Hovering about the vignette is a nobleman’s troubled fantasy of class violation and rustic sexual possession—only averted when Lavinia’s identity is clariﬁed and Palemon marries

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

259

her. A more overt sexual tease is found in the illustration to Savage’s ‘Valentine’s Day . . . to a Young Widow Lady’: He kneel’d. Her snowy hand he trembling seiz’d, Just lifted to his lip, and gently squeez’d; The meaning squeeze returned, love caught its lore, And enter’d, at his palm, through every pore. (ll. 71–4)

Through the ﬁgure of a putto, Thurston invites the reader to join the game: the airborne child holds the strings which secure the widow’s dress, looking out at the reader as if mischievously awaiting a signal to disrobe her. More generally, several prints in the series depict verses involving joy and delight. Kirk’s illustration to Winter was the ﬁrst of many frightening scenes (Fig. 8.4). Disoriented in a blizzard, a shepherd loses his way and freezes to death, tormented by remembrance of his wife, children, and friends. Deadly Winter ‘Lays him along the snows, a stiffen’d corse, / Stretch’d out and bleaching in the northern blast’ (ll. 320–1). Often the vignettes at this end of the psychological spectrum were drawn from words in a class with death, die, and horror. Corbould, in his drawing for Langhorne’s The Country Justice, worked death and partial nudity into a scene that stopped a ﬂeeing felon in his tracks. At the sight of an infant clinging to its ‘mother’s lifeless breast’, The pitying robber, conscious that, pursu’d, He had no time to waste, yet stood and view’d; To the next cot the trembling infant bore, And gave a part of what he stole before. (part II, ll. 218–21)

Just as the thief is transﬁxed by the tragic scene, several other persons in Cooke’s engravings are rendered immobile by strange or horriﬁc visions. Fair Ulla, for instance, spellbound by the witch in Mickle’s ‘The Sorceress’, falls to her knee with hands aloft, while ‘every joint, as marble bound, / Felt horror’s darkest dread’ (ll. 175–6), and sinks down lifeless at the sight of her lover beckoning to her from the grave. The verbal cues that ﬂagged such terrifying scenes for possible illustration by Cooke’s artists correlate well with the ‘poetic terms’ or watchwords used by Thomson to evoke the sublime: admire, astonish, astound, daunt, dreadful, howling, marbled, and others. 67 This relish for sensational scenes dated from the earliest phase of Cooke’s career, when he took over the business at 17 Paternoster Row from his father John 67 Cohen, Art, 274–6. Cohen analyzes Catton’s depiction of ‘immovable uncontrol’ in his 1793 illustration of the drowning sailor (Summer, ll. 992–1000), centering on the line ‘In wild amazement ﬁxed the sailor stands’ (272–3). Arthur Barker discusses readers’ craving for ‘delightful sensationalism’ in Milton (‘ “And on his Crest Sat Horror” ’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (1942), 430).

260

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

in 1788. 68 In advertising the illustrations to an edition of Flavius Josephus, most of them gruesome, he dwelt on every shocking detail, including cannibalism: ‘The daughter of Eleazar, during the siege and famine at Jerusalem, having killed her suckling infant, and eaten a part, to appease the dreadful cravings of hunger, offering the mangled remains to the savage band who, at this juncture, had forcibly entered her house, to demand the provisions they supposed she possessed.’ Another offered ‘A representation of the death of Aristobulus, the eldest son of Hyrcanus, king of the Jews, expiring in all the horrors of conscience and despair, after exercising the most unnatural barbarities, and perpetrating the murder of his mother and brother.’ 69 These narrative summaries extended beyond the moments being depicted, highlighting every lurid circumstance related to them. The gore in these descriptions calls to mind Wordsworth’s contemporary denunciation of ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’. The verses that fascinated Cooke’s illustrators featured dungeons, ghosts, howling tigers, phantoms, assaults, spectres, seductions—an abundance of horror. Whether or not the artists, by selecting such passages, were subject to the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ that Wordsworth deplored, their engravings were symptomatic of something larger. If the apocalyptic sublime ﬁrst expressed by Mortimer reached its efﬂorescence at this time, amidst pressures for political reform in Britain and shock waves from across the English Channel (ﬁrst revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars), illustrators in general—not just those preoccupied with divine revelation— were interested in terror and strove in their art to produce a similar nouveau frisson. 70 Of course Cooke saw nothing degrading about it. He celebrated the ‘happy Combination between the Arts of Poetry and Painting’. The art forms were indebted to each other, he argued, the painter having the ‘Imagination of the Poet’ to thank ‘for all his happiest Subjects’, and in return the ‘best Productions of the Muse’ receiving new lustre from ‘the Embellishments of the Pencil’. Their combined efforts provided ‘an Employment for the Mind, at once elegant, delightful, and instructive; and, when recommended with every Degree of Taste and Elegance, they must evidently claim the liberal Patronage of the Admirers of Poetic Genius, exerted in all the Display of lively Fancy’. Accordingly, the design of Cooke’s series was ‘to combine the sublime and reﬁned Ideas of the Poet, with the picturesque and elegant Representations of the Artist; and 68 James Raven, ‘Location, Size, and Succession: The Bookshops of Paternoster Row before 1800’, in Robin Meyers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century, (Newcastle, Del., and London, 2003), 119. 69 ‘A New and Elegant Work . . . ’, four-page advertisement for The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus and other Cooke imprints (c .1789), 2. 70 Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800’, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1992), 747; Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime, 1.

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

261

to present at once, to the Mind and the Eye, the most beautiful and striking Objects, in all the Harmony of Verse and Force of Colouring’. 71 Viewed in this way, the illustrations drawn by Cooke’s artists were not sickly, but striking; they appealed to a taste not for outrageous stimulation, but for forceful coloring; their designs were indicative not of a degrading thirst, but of a lively fancy.

ORNAMENTAL FOR THE BOOK-CASE Cooke said that the editions of Bell and Anderson marked ‘extremes of diminutive inconvenience and ponderous inutility’, Bell’s octodecimo volumes measuring about 13.1 × 8.2 cm when bound (13.8 × 8.8 cm in wrappers) and Anderson’s royal octavos about 25.2 × 16 cm. Appreciably larger than the former, but far smaller than the latter, the Select British Poets occupied ‘a happy medium’ between the two, its format, an ‘Octo-decimo or Eighteens’, measuring roughly 14.7 × 9.4 cm when bound (15 × 9.5 cm in wrappers). By virtue of its intermediate size, Cooke’s edition was ‘rendered Ornamental for the Book-case, and equally convenient for the pocket; as it forms an agreeable travelling companion, happily adapted for amusement at the ﬁre-side, and equally commodious for passing leisure hours when nature and the seasons invite us abroad’. 72 The two features touted here, portability and ornamental potential, were consistent promotional themes. The emphasis on a ‘commodious size . . . well adapted for conveyance’ shows how literally Cooke intended his edition to be ‘a Pocket Companion’ or vade mecum. To suggest that his books be carried outdoors was no stilted conceit, as in the Van Dyck portrait of Suckling alfresco with a Shakespeare folio, or Kneller’s image of Pope in a landscape with a folio of Homer, or Wright of Derby’s pose of Sir Brooke Boothby reclining by a stream with a hefty quarto. 73 Anderson’s books, like these ‘more ponderous’ than Cooke’s, were ‘consequently less portable’. Rather than study, which was Bell’s usual operative term for the way the English classics were to be approached, leisure deﬁnes the normative mode of reading for Cooke. Not coincidentally, the notion of reading outside at nature’s behest correlated well with the kind of poetry pushed to the fore in his sequence of publication. The twinned themes of peripatetic reading and ornamental display were blended in the idea of portable libraries. As Bell had advised, his volumes, though of a ‘delicate size, calculated for a Lady’s pocket’, would as a set ‘form a truly elegant ornamental appearance, in the drawing-room, dressing-room, or study; and may be cased so as to render them a portable and compleat travelling, 71

‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library’, 4. EEC (17 Nov. 1794). 73 Piper, The Image of the Poet, 38–41, 62–3, and 94–5. The portraits date, respectively, from the late 1630s, 1716, and 1781. 72

262

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

poetical, biographical, and critical library’. 74 The two boxes that housed his poets, which ﬁt beneath a carriage seat, were designed to look like folio volumes and could be shelved as such. Cooke also produced ‘Portable Bookcases’ to facilitate travel with his Pocket Library, and reminded purchasers that his volumes were ‘equally eligible for the bookcase’—a message that puzzled Hugh Amory, who shrugged, ‘whatever that means’. 75 It means, I think, that novice consumers were being initiated into the protocols of ownership and display. Why bother saying that books could be placed where anyone might put them anyway? Little tutoring should have been necessary, it might seem, but the middle class (an epithet used by Cooke) was not practiced in using books as furniture. They needed some encouragement to see themselves as having the power to accumulate goods and place them in evidence, goals supremely well served by multivolume series or ‘libraries’ of books—small, uniform, affordable, and proliﬁc in number. How Cooke’s ‘Portable Bookcases’ compared with Bell’s is unclear; he is mute on their design, and I have not seen them. In some detail, however, he described another ‘contrivance’: He has also had another Bookcase constructed, which occupies a space of only seven inches from the back of the room, a circumstance which, for small apartments, must be peculiarly convenient and desirable; nor is it less eligible for a room of great extent. This new and commodious contrivance, contains and exhibits to view, as many works as other Bookcases of ﬁve times its magnitude, and may be purchased at one Third of the Expence. A bookcase upon this commodious, yet elegant plan, may be seen at the warehouse of the Proprietor, who engages to supply the Nobility and Gentry with Bookcases upon the same plan, adapted to any space required. 76

Modest gentry at the end of the eighteenth century, James Raven writes, could afford bookcases and library furniture, production-line models designed after ‘the latest fancies of the rich and famous’. In 1793 a ‘straight-front library bookcase’ standing 8 feet high and 5 feet wide, with six shelves above (protected by sash doors) and two below (protected by ﬂat-panel doors), cost £3 12s.; a simple bookcase, 3 feet by 3 feet, with three shelves (protected by sash doors), cost 17s. 77 Cooke’s model fell somewhere in between, its chief beauty being that it ‘exhibited to view’ a great many volumes, thus ﬁlling the eye. To argue for magniﬁcence of effect required an about-face: ‘Notwithstanding this edition is printed on so convenient a scale, yet its dimensions are of that magnitude as to render it inﬁnitely more ornamental to the book-case than 74

75 MP (7 June 1777). Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140. ‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library’, 4. 77 Raven, ‘From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996), 190–1; The Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, and Designs of Cabinet Work (2nd edn. London, 1793), 44, 47. 76

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

263

either an octavo or folio.’ 78 Magnitude is an odd word to pair with ornamental, yet indispensable where the rhetorical context calls upon an octodecimo volume to surpass a folio in visual effect. Cooke mastered this message, describing the decorative potential of his publications, starting from the premise that they formed ‘a COMPLETE LIBRARY’. Uniformity and force of numbers were his trump card—several series, each printed with the same type on the same paper in the same size—making his volumes ‘inﬁnitely more decorative to the library than an arrangement in the promiscuous sizes of Quarto, Octavo, Duodecimo, &c.’ By these means, Cooke ﬂattered himself, ‘his Editions will gain admission into the Libraries of the Literati, and the most fashionable of the present Age’. 79 In its most expensive form, with a full complement of engravings allowing their owner to relish the ‘combined Efforts of such eminent Artists’, Cooke claimed his edition was worthy of entry into yet another elite realm, ‘the Cabinets of the Curious’. 80 His appeal to ‘the polite and fashionable Circles, the Virtuoso in Embellishments, and the Admirers of Decorative Elegance’ must be seen, yet again, in the light of a precedent set by Bell, who said that his engravings would ‘claim the attention of every lover of the ﬁne arts, and become hereafter CABINET CURIOSITIES rather than be retained as ornaments of the author which they at present enrich’. 81 Both sets of prints became products apart from their respective editions. Bell sold the engravings for his British Theatre and for Shakespeare, colored, framed, and glazed, and gathered up the portraits and illustrations from The Poets of Great Britain for separate sale. Cooke likewise argued that his prints held exceptional value for collectors. Proof impressions on large paper sold for sixpence each. An ‘Abatement of one-third’ was granted on purchases of the complete engravings to any single series, or more than one hundred miscellaneous prints from different series, and anyone buying ‘a complete Set of the Engravings to all the Works, amounting to near a Thousand’, received a discount of ‘half the Price of the detached Prints’. 82 At these rates, the 26 portraits from the Select British Poets would have cost 13s., the 127 illustrations £2 2s. 4d. (discounted by a third from £3 3s. 6d.), and both together with the 56 series title-pages, 209 in all, £3 9s. 8d. For the especially curious, these sets afforded an extra delight: the opportunity to trace the design changes which affected the framing of the central image in the Scenic Representations as the series advanced. Many years into production, any set was apt to include a range of engravings both early and late. Initially Cooke’s house style called for the scene to be contained within an oval, with allegorical ﬂourishes above and below, all conﬁned within a cross-hatched rectangle, above which stood ‘COOKE ’ S EDITION OF SELECT BRITISH POETS’. Over time the 78

EEC (3 Mar. 1794) on Hume’s History, identical in format to Cooke’s Poets. ‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library’, p. 4. 80 81 Ibid. Back cover of no. 37 in the Bodleian; MP (26 July 1779). 82 The Poetical Works of John Gay (London, [1804]), sig. T6r . For a fairly complete set of this nature, see the volumes in the Liverpool Central Library cited above in n. 30. 79

264

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

title was eliminated, and the ornaments outside the oval spread beyond the rectangular border. Later on the rectangle dissolved away, leaving the central image to ﬂoat amidst a profusion of adornments. As the copperplates periodically were refurbished, in some cases for new editions of a poet, the engravings were altered to reﬂect the changing style. To let people admire the artwork that his vignettes were based on, Bell publicized that ‘the original drawings are in exhibition at the BRITISH LIBRARY in the Strand’. 83 Cooke also turned his bookshop into a gallery so that ‘the Public may form an idea of the superior Execution of the Embellishments, which accompany this Pocket Library’, and see what engravings lay ahead in the series. The paintings and drawings were on view ‘free of Expence, from the Hours of Nine to Three, at the Proprietor’s Exhibition Room in Paternoster Row’. The portraits were eventually returned to their owners; Cooke thanked those who had ‘kindly favoured him with the use of Originals high in the Estimation of the Virtuoso’, assuring his customers ‘that the Copies have not fallen off from the Merit of the Originals’. 84 The other works, after they had been copied and ‘submitted to Inspection’ in his shop, were sold at ‘considerably under their original cost’, though Cooke provided no clue as to their price range. 85 T. F. Dibdin cites several multi-volume collections in The Library Companion, and addresses readers who ‘may be in possession of one of the minnow tribes of editions, published twenty or thirty years ago, with Bell’s plates, or those by Cook [sic], in Paternoster Row—in which the young pencil of Kirkman [sic] was so beautifully exercised’. 86 By focusing on Bell’s engravings, not the edition per se, and on Cooke’s employment of Kirk, he implies that the graphic endowments of these books were the feature ﬁttest to be remembered. The groundwork for this ﬁxation on the ornamental was laid in the 1790s in passages like the following, meant to explain ‘the wide circulation of the British Classics’, in a tribute to (or advertisement for) a new edition of Bell’s British Theatre: indeed we may date the revival of, if not the original taste for, ﬁne Printing & elegant Book Embellishments in England, to the enthusiasm & perseverance of Mr. Bell in that line of Business—for the productions of the Press may be said to have been in a barbarous state in this Country, until he awakened public curiosity, and invited emulation by his beautiful editions of the Poets of Great Britain, and of our immortal dramatic Bard.

According to the encomiast (likely Bell himself ) the ‘avidity’ of reception for these works gave rise to the emulative efforts apparent in the ‘present spirited 83

84 MP (23 July 1779). ‘Advertisement’, The Poetical Works of James Thomson, vii. Wrappers for no. 37 of Cooke’s Select British Poets; ‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library’, 4. Some of the originals are in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140). 86 The Library Companion, 749. 85

Charles Cooke’s Pocket Library

265

plans of Boydell and Macklin’. 87 To be sure, Boydell’s Milton and Shakespeare Galleries were as far removed from the bookshop exhibits of Bell and Cooke as history painting was from book illustration, and the nature of Macklin’s Gallery of Poets differed as well, but the fever of representation connected to an upwelling of interest in the classics of British poetry was common to each case. The conceit raised by Bell and elaborated by Cooke was perfected by John Sharpe, who, as we shall see in the next chapter, began an eight-year run of The Works of the British Poets in 1805. Sharpe’s turn of phrase for his product—cabinet volumes—invited neophyte middle-class patrons to think of their purchases as akin to collecting objects for a cabinet of curiosities. Not virtuosi in any real sense, the customers of Bell, Cooke, and Sharpe nonetheless aspired to build collections, and if the choice of books (prescribed by the publisher) showed no particular expertise on their part, it betokened compliance with a concrete standard of taste, dictated ostensibly by competent judges of poetry. To the extent that the metaphor was an invitation to pretense, it calls to mind the literary commonplace of books purchased merely for show. In The Love of Fame (1725–8) Edward Young satirized the crimson bindings on Codrus’s ‘gaudy shelves’ and the extravagance of Lorenzo, who sold his house to procure a ‘choice collection’ of rare Roman, Greek, and Oriental titles. It was a sad fact that science ‘should be purchas’d by the yard / And Tonson, turn’d upholsterer, send home / The gilded leather to ﬁt up thy room’. Whether unread classics published by Tonson, or tomes measured to speciﬁcation by a ‘yardage’ dealer, or wooden planks painted to resemble book spines, the results are always derisory. Fifteen years later in his Night-Thoughts (1742–5) Young used (or minted) a new word, ‘Book-case’. 88 This fresh coinage suggests that innovations in domestic furnishings were needed to accommodate the spread of a book-buying habit to a new demographic. A time-line plotted in twenty-year intervals highlights the gradual democratization of ‘cultured’ book-buying over the course of the eighteenth century— from Codrus and Lorenzo’s foppish mania over ‘pompous books’ in the 1720s, to the emergence of the word ‘Book-case’ in the 1740s, to the advent of the multivolume vernacular poetry series in Glasgow in the 1760s, to the completion of Bell’s edition in the 1780s (advertised as looking ﬁne in a bookcase), to Sharpe’s cabinet volumes at the dawn of the 1800s. Two basic impulses were intertwined through it all: the urge for distinction in terms of cultural enrichment, and a desire for ornament and display.

87 ‘The Competition of BELL, BOYDELL, and MACKLIN ’, LC (9–11 Dec. 1790). Bell’s stature in book illustration is attested by Burnim and Highﬁll, John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture. 88 Love of Fame, Satire II, 57–84; Night-Thoughts, V. 257. The OED credits Young with the earliest use of ‘Book-case’.

9 John Sharpe and Alexander Chalmers: A Body of Standard English Poetry The Writings of Cowper . . . have secured to their author no mean rank among the standard poets of his country; an elevation not at this day attainable, without sound and prominent excellence. (‘Brief Account of William Cowper, Esq.’, 1804)

In the decades after Foulis, Creech, and Bell ﬁrst set Britain’s poetic house in order, the multi-volume poetry collection became an institution, simultaneously expressing and exploiting a national ambition. In 1805, as Cooke brought his project to an end, John Sharpe started a series called The Works of the British Poets, extending to nearly ﬁfty years an unbroken chain of continuity: from 1765 to 1812, from Foulis through Sharpe, one publisher after another produced the classical English poets. At no time during this period was Britain devoid of a bookshop with one or more series in progress—collections for sale, with the lure of more volumes of uniform description to come. While an active reprint trade existed before 1765, the multi-volume series moved it to a new plane and helped spur the growth of a mass market, supplying novice consumers as never before with products to collect through a directed program of purchases, and ﬂedgling readers with an agenda of cultural self-ediﬁcation. Once viliﬁed as pariahs injurious to the trade, those who followed this branch of reprinting had secured a lasting place for themselves. As the book trade evolved into a publishing industry, the functions formerly united in the eighteenth-century bookseller sorted themselves out, leaving a more modernlooking publisher at the heart of the enterprise. By 1800 few members of the trade would have ﬁt Tyrwhitt’s earlier characterization of the ‘known practice of Bookseller-Editors’, or Horace Walpole’s dual epithet for Bell, ‘Bookseller & Editor’. 1 Less and less did the ﬁrst capacity subsume the second. Building on the precedent of Anderson’s edition, the publishers of several series begun after 1800 turned the editorial function over to respected men of letters, their identities becoming key factors in marketing the editions. As publishers tested 1 Manuscript annotation to the verses, ‘And Bell’s whole choir (an ever-jingling train) / In splayfoot madrigals their pow’rs combine’, in Walpole’s copy of William Gifford’s The Baviad (London, 1791), 3, in the Lewis-Walpole Library. The couplet alludes to Bell’s Della Crusca anthology.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

267

the constraints and opportunities in publishing the British classics, some tried out larger book formats, while the perennially appealing pocket editions held fast to their market. Along with the new prominence of named editors came a more thoughtful disclosure of editorial procedures. Anderson’s borrowing of terms (like rights, justice, and legitimacy) from the legal lexicon gave rise to the notion that, theoretically, all candidates were granted a fair hearing; measurement against a standard was now, allegedly, the editorial norm, displacing an earlier threshold of supposed celebrity. By the turn of the century, as the epigraph concerning Cowper implies, some of the anomalies attendant upon ‘elevation’ or canonization were thought to have been ironed out, and the process now seemed to be predicated on rational criteria, if only as vague as ‘sound and prominent excellence’. 2 But the body of poets—or corpus poetarum in fancier phrase—had reached the point where it presented an editorial dilemma: whether to prune it back, or let it grow ever larger. Meanwhile, a new generation of poets weaned itself on sets of the classics. Robert Burns owned Bell’s edition; so did Wordsworth. The latter also possessed a set of Anderson’s edition, in the margins of which, as discussed in Chapter 7, Coleridge implored his son Hartley to treasure its riches. Southey sang the praises of Anderson, thanking him for helping to reform poetical tastes at the end of the eighteenth century. For Keats, who carefully marked up a copy of Bell’s Spenser, such editions even began to deﬁne poetic aspiration. ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death’, he predicted in October 1818, solacing himself upon the poor reception of Endymion; multi-volume collections were the ‘most immediate and obvious embodiments’ of what he had in mind, Jack Stillinger asserts, and despite the numbers of second-tier poets in such publications, Keats was ‘clearly conscious of canonicity in the modern sense’. 3 The entry recording Bell’s edition in Wordsworth’s library summed up a double hegemony in the industry with respect to the poetic classics: ‘Bell’s Poets: 109 vol: with Johnson’s Lives 4 vol:’. Bell’s collection continually inﬂuenced the design and marketing of poetry series, just as Johnson’s contribution inescapably affected the continuing enterprise. Bell encouraged consumers to own both, tempting those who bought his Poets with this notice: ‘N.B. Johnson’s Lives and Prefaces also may be had separate, or in addition, by such as desire them.’ 4 2 ‘Brief Account of William Cowper, Esq.’, William Cowper, The Task, A Poem in Six Books (Albany, 1804), p. xxii. 3 ‘The Great Scottish Poet Robert Burns’s Collection of the Poets’, Charles W. Traylen Catalogue 118 (Guildford, Nov. 1995), item 17; ‘A Catalogue of Wordsworth’s Library rendered in the handwriting of his daughter’, Chester L. Shaver and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue (New York, 1979), 23; Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, 454; Greg Kucich, ‘A Lamentable Lay: Keats and the Making of Charles Brown’s Spenser Volumes’, Keats–Shelley Review, 3 (1988), 1–22; and Jack Stillinger, Reading ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (Oxford, 1999), 115–17, 120. 4 LC (18–20 May 1790).

268

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Elements of the two projects intermingled in various ways: James Edwards advertised a set of the Works of the English Poets bound with all of Bell’s ‘cuts’; Johnson’s Lives of the Poets could be found illustrated with Bell’s portraits; and, as we shall see, the lives themselves, once their copyright lapsed, gravitated into Bell’s edition. 5 As new editions of the English poetic classics were produced, Bell’s and Johnson’s works kept regenerating themselves, looming so largely in the minds of the producers—the printers, editors, engravers, and prefacers—that each new undertaking incorporated aspects of them or engaged in some form of dialogue with them.

THE TRULY EMINENT ENGLISH POETS ‘We open the volume’, wrote an incredulous Wordsworth, sizing up The Works of the English Poets, ‘and to our astonishment the ﬁrst name we ﬁnd is that of Cowley!—What is become of the morning star of English Poetry? Where is the bright Elizabethan constellation? . . . where is the ever-to-be-honoured Chaucer? where is Spenser? where Sidney? and . . . where Shakespeare?’ 6 Wordsworth would have nothing to do with the critical bias of a poet like Robert Merry, who lauded the progress of English verse ‘From rugged CHAUCER, with uncouthest phrase, / To the chaste classic race of later days’, or even an editor like Anderson, who saw the ‘progress of our national poetry’ in terms of a ‘gradual reﬁnement of language and of manners, from the rudeness and simplicity of a remote period, to the polish and elegance of modern times’, and who celebrated Gray’s poems as ‘a kind of standard of the correctness to which English poetry has arrived in our days’. 7 Wordsworth lampooned Gray’s poetic diction while pointing out gaps of unconscionable magnitude in the canonical poetic ﬁrmament. Even where Chaucer and Spenser were included in collections, their works had presented publishers with a tactical challenge. Bell issued Spenser early in his series, but Chaucer last, as if wary that publishing these fourteen volumes sooner might have daunted his customers. Anderson’s publishers worried that readers would balk at a large initial dose of older verse: they thought it ‘advisable to commence [their] undertaking with Milton’ rather than the two volumes containing Chaucer and other early poets, whose works were ‘not so much adapted to the taste of readers in general’. 8 And whereas too few (or no) older 5 James Edwards, A Catalogue of a Select Collection of Ancient and Modern Books (London, 1789), 135, item 3688; advertisement signed ‘J. Bowen, No. 40, New Bond-Street’, offering copies of Johnson’s Lives with ‘thirty-eight animated Prints’, all thirty-seven of Bell’s portraits plus one of Johnson, MP (3 Mar. 1783). 6 ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, 208–9. 7 ‘Della Crusca’ [Robert Merry], Diversity. A Poem (London, 1788), 20; Anderson’s edn., ‘Preface’, 4, and x. 200. 8 CM (13 Sept. 1792).

A Body of Standard English Poetry

269

poets were admitted, too many from recent times were let in, and the collections had come to incorporate, as Henry Headley scolded, ‘a most unworthy rabble’. 9 Percival Stockdale was as indignant as Wordsworth and Headley over the defects of The Works of the English Poets. In Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets, a cluster of essays begun in 1795 but not published until 1807, he settled old scores: one with the booksellers, for having tantalized him with an offer to edit the work, the other with Johnson, for his bluntness and critical misprision. By attending to ‘our TRULY eminent Poets’—the adverb serving as a ﬁllip, or ‘additional expression of distinction’—Stockdale tried to undermine the authority of the edition that featured ‘the Poets of Dr. Johnson’, some of whom were without ‘the least pretensions to eminence’. ‘I will not so profane the shades of Spenser; Shakespear; and the divine Milton’, he fumed, ‘as to rank the feeble Pomfret; Yalden; good Isaac Watts; and Sir Richard [Blackmore];—“rumbling rough, and ﬁerce,”—that inﬁnite accumulator of confused, and barbarous verses; with our most eminent English Poets.’ To thrust such names in with ‘that glorious class’ was to be guilty of a ‘gross critical misnomer’. 10 That this misnomer was created by the booksellers, not Johnson, when they reprinted his Prefaces under a new title, was beside the point, as was the fact that they had chosen all but four of the poets in the collection. Stockdale’s animus was aimed at Johnson. Of all the minor poets he could have used to exemplify his point, he chose the four recommended by Johnson. 11 No one had critically ranked Yalden with Milton, of course, yet for his poetry to be published in the same collection, and his life written with others of the ‘most eminent poets’, implied a sort of equivalence. To rectify this absurdity, Stockdale purged the assemblage of all undistinguished names, and retained—or added where overlooked—writers he deemed to be genuinely great, starting with Spenser and followed by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Young, Chatterton, and Gray. 12 Had Stockdale actually edited a new collection, doubtless he would have admitted other poets, but the lectures as written imply a small, exclusive pantheon. In view of such vehement criticism, as well as the challenge to the pocket edition mounted by Mundell and Son (discussed in Chapter 7), it was clear that The Works of the English Poets stood in need of repair. The ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century saw several attempts to reconceptualize the project. Around 1801 Sir James Mackintosh was invited ‘by a body of London booksellers, to 9 Select Beaties of Ancient English Poetry (2 vols. London, 1787), i, p. xxxii. See Laura Mandell, ‘Canons Die Hard: A Review of the New Romantic Anthologies’, Romanticism on the Net, 7 (Aug. 1997), accessed 13 July 2007 . 10 Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets (2 vols. London, 1807), i, pp. vii, ix, 232, and 233. 11 See ‘Life of Watts’, Lives, iv. 105. 12 To judge Stockdale as he judged others, one wonders at his devoting six lectures to Chatterton, when he allotted three to Dryden, two to Milton, Pope, Young, and Gray, and only one each to Spenser and Shakespeare.

270

A Body of Standard English Poetry

superintend a new edition of Johnson’s Poets’ and make it into ‘a corpus poetarum from Chaucer to Cowper’. Mackintosh, trained to medicine and the law, fretted over the idea of writing lives and criticisms for the ancient poets, especially Chaucer and Spenser, but consoled himself with thinking that the ‘criticism, in such a work as this, ought not to be very learned or recondite, but such as every man of good taste can feel’. As an amateur, he tried to persuade himself that he enjoyed a better chance of making ancient poetry popular again, for he could connect with readers more directly ‘without the viginti annorum lucubrationes of Warton and Tyrwhitt’. To this quality, he thought, could be traced the popularity of Johnson’s Lives, written when ‘intercourse with the world had considerably softened his style’. In part because Johnson lacked the disposition for enthusiasm, his criticism was ‘on a level with the majority of readers—persons of good sense and information, but of no exquisite sensibility’. But Mackintosh need not have worried, for the proposal was dropped. 13 A similar opportunity was given to John Aikin, a physician whose preface to Thomson’s Seasons (1779) anticipated the literary pursuits that occupied him when illness later forced him to retire from medicine. Editions of Armstrong’s Art of Preserving Health (1795), Pope’s Essay on Man (1796), Green’s The Spleen and Other Poems (1796), and the poems of Goldsmith (1796) and Milton (1801), along with The Biographical Dictionary and other editorial work, brought him to the attention of James Heath and George Kearsley when they decided to tear down and rebuild The Works of the English Poets. Heath and Kearsley had steered clear of the conger that published the 1790 pocket octavo edition, and would do so again when the 1810 royal octavo edition was undertaken. More readable than either of these, their own choice of format was a middle-sized octavo. For distribution they set up arrangements with Bell & Bradfute in Edinburgh, Brash & Reid in Glasgow, and Archer & Colbert in Dublin. 14 Around 1801 Aikin began to work on the ‘new edition of “Dr. Johnson’s English Poets,” improved in point of selection, and enriched with certain additions’. In his opinion, the 1790 edition had not corrected the fundamental ﬂaw of the 1779–81 collection. ‘The original edition’, he stressed, could with no propriety be regarded as a body of English poetry, comprising all the poetical works in the language which had once possessed a degree of fame, and were still occasionally read and quoted. The omission of Spenser, as well as of several other celebrated names, sufﬁciently proves that the intention of the publishers was of a totally different kind, and that selection was their leading principle. 13 Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh (2nd edn. 2 vols. London, 1836), i. 168, ii. 175–6; Courtney and Smith, A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson, 135. 14 ODNB; LC (15–17 June 1802). Lucy Aikin does not tell when her father accepted the editorship, but discusses the project between a letter dated 7 July [1800] and her ﬁrst mention of the year 1801: Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. (London, 1823; repr. Philadelphia, 1824), 132–3.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

271

So formidable was the ‘now immense mass of English poetry’ that selection had to be the editorial rule: ‘good taste’ and ‘the practicability of publication’ demanded it. Aikin thus retreated from the idea of a body of English poetry based on classical distinction as deﬁned by Anderson; it was a workable notion, as Anderson had shown, but could not be reconciled with taste. Far from treating the 1790 edition as sacrosanct, only to be augmented with earlier and later poets, Aikin was eager to clean house and get rid of many poets who, after all, had never been sanctioned by Johnson. Under no obligation therefore to retain ‘works characterized by mediocrity and imperfection’, Aikin began shaping a collection to give ‘the English reader a classical library of the most approved poetry of his country, unencumbered with those inferior productions upon which temporary reputation bestowed unmerited consequence’. 15 He could not, however, jettison so much as to invalidate his publishers’ claim to its most precious asset, Johnson’s name. ‘Much the greater part . . . of Dr. Johnson’s collection has been preserved’, he contended, ‘whence his name has without scruple been continued.’ Nor did the publishers scruple to display at the top of their advertisements, ‘JOHNSON’s POETS, re-edited by Dr. AIKIN’. They planned to reprint Johnson’s prefaces ‘without the least change or diminution’, although Aikin reserved the right to ‘subjoin’ more circumspect remarks of his own wherever Johnson’s were ‘warped by prejudiced and defective judgments’. Where Johnson had not written lives, Aikin would perform the task, adopting ‘the same plan of uniting biography and criticism’. 16 In June 1802 Heath and Kearsley started publishing The Works of the English Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Re-edited, with New Biographical and Critical Matter, by John Aikin, M.D., awarding pride of place to Spenser, in six volumes. By starting with Spenser, as Lucy Aikin recounts, they showed that the faults of earlier editions were being remedied: ‘The strange omission of the author of the Faery Queen by Dr. Johnson,—an unpardonable instance of neglect or prejudice,—was the ﬁrst deﬁciency which [the editor] found to supply.’ Once this glaring oversight had been corrected, Aikin progressed through familiar terrain. Published later that year were the works of Cowley (3 vols. [vii–ix]), followed in 1803 by Butler (2 vols. [x–xi]), and in 1805 by Milton (3 vols. [xii–xiv]). Lucy records that at this point ‘the circumstances of the publisher put a stop to the undertaking’. 17 Those circumstances were perhaps roiled up a bit by an ambush. Just before Spenser was expected, another ‘new and complete Edition’ of The Works of Edmund Spenser in seven octavo volumes, edited with ‘an extensive Life of the Poet’ by the Reverend Henry John Todd, was advertised by Francis and Charles Rivington, Thomas Payne II, Thomas Cadell Jr. and William Davies, and 15 ‘Advertisement’, The Works of the English Poets, ed. John Aikin (14 vols. London, 1802–5), i, pp. i–ii. 16 LC (15–17 and 22–24 June 1802); ‘Advertisement’, p. iii. 17 Memoir of John Aikin, 133.

272

A Body of Standard English Poetry

R. H. Evans. As partners in publishing Milton’s poems (6 vols. 1801), also edited by Todd, they said they were printing Spenser ‘in a Manner similar’, creating the impression that they too had a series in the making, and that buyers might have their pick of products and choice of editor. 18 The fact that Todd did not sign his name to a ‘Preface’ until 13 June 1805, three years after his edition was said to be ‘In the Press’, suggests that the Rivingtons and their partners advertised the work in 1802 to waylay purchasers of Aikin’s edition. 19 If Heath and Kearsley were hurt by this tactic, the injury was not decisive, for their editorial stance struck a welcome chord. ‘When Dr. Aikin began to reedite Johnson’s collection’, Southey recalled, ‘it was well observed in the Monthly Magazine, “that to our best writers there should be more commentary; and of our inferior ones less text.” ’ The poetic era covered in former editions of The Works of the English Poets, he asserted, had begun ‘just where a general collection should end’. 20 Aikin was right to deny space to mediocre poets reprinted in the 1790 edition only because they had been included in the original collection. To advance ‘in chronological order, and with all the speed compatible with the attention necessary for the proper execution of the undertaking’ may have been sound editorial practice, but at such a careful pace, it would have taken years for Aikin to reach his ultimate goal, and ‘to embrace the works of some later poets, which, by their acknowledged excellence, seemed to have secured a lasting seat among the choice productions of the British Muse’. Illustrations were also introduced into the project for the ﬁrst time (that is, besides portraits), ‘engraved by Mr. Heath, in a very superior Style of Excellence’. With these embellishments, in addition to its more generous layout of the text on the page, the product presented itself as ‘A Splendid Edition’. 21 In this combination of elements can be seen a fundamental miscalculation. Even a smaller, more illustrious canon could ill sustain consumer demand in a project of this magnitude, expensive both in terms of its relatively luxurious format and the editorial time devoted to each poet. At 7s. each, the fourteen volumes cost £4 18s. already, and the series was still in its early phase. For a largepaper copy of Butler’s works one person paid £2 1s.–£1 4s. for the two volumes, and 17s. for binding. 22 Purchasing the whole series in this manner would have been expensive. Ironically, it was not a body of English poetry like Anderson’s 18 LC (5–8 June 1802) and repeated on 12–14 and 19–22 June; Aikin’s edn. was advertised on 15–17 and 22–24 June. 19 The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. H. J. Todd (8 vols. London, 1805), i, sig. A6r . 20 Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices (3 vols. London, 1807), i, p. vii. 21 HJ (4 Jan. 1802). 22 Copy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, PR3338.A1. On the ﬂyleaf, above the tally of expenses, the owner records, ‘I bought these Books, of John White, Bookseller in Fleet Street; Dec. 10th. 1804’. Two of Aikin’s volumes cost more (14s.) than new 2-vol. edns. like Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems by Charlotte Smith (12s. for pocket vols. with plates in boards) and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (2nd edn., 11s. for foolscap octavo volumes in boards); see LC (5–7 and 26–28 Jan. 1802).

A Body of Standard English Poetry

273

that proved to be impracticable, but the approach of Heath and Kearsley. Not for nothing had other series made a virtue of their low cost. Collections of poetry ﬂourished in pocket sizes and in the larger double-column format, but had limited economic feasibility in such a generous octavo format.

DEVIATION FROM PRECEDING SYSTEMS John Sharpe patterned his early career after Bell’s even more closely than Wenman had: an edition of Shakespeare paved the way for ‘Sharpe’s Edition of The British Theatre’. Not to ignore Cooke, he also produced a series of essayists called the ‘British Classics’ and later in life undertook ‘Sharpe’s Select Edition of the British Prose Writers’ (1819–21). 23 His poetry series, The Works of the British Poets, Collated with the Best Editions: By Thomas Park, F.S.A. (1805–12), gave Thomas Park a degree of visibility from the start not enjoyed by Anderson. By the same token, however, the phrase printed on the wrappers of each volume—‘THE TEXT COLLATED WITH THE BEST EDITIONS, By THOMAS PARK , ESQ . F. S . A .’—suggests that his editorial ambit was narrower. The fact that he wrote neither a preface to explain his editorial objectives nor biographical notices to accompany the poems suggests why, despite the credit given him on each title-page, ‘Park’s edition’ never entered into common parlance, as it had with Anderson’s edition. Rather, as with Bell and Cooke, his series was styled ‘SHARPE’s EDITION of the BRITISH POETS ’ on the blue printed wrappers in which it was merchandised, although his title-pages proper omitted this designation (Fig. 9.1). A prospectus appeared on the back cover of the wrappers: THIS Work will be printed in Cabinet Volumes, at the very low price of Two Shillings each: the PAPER will be of the ﬁnest fabric Messrs. Whatman can supply: the TYPE will present an appearance of openness, clearness, and beauty, and will in that respect emulate our most expensive publications: the volumes will likewise be neatly sewed and labelled; so that, although the periodical expense amounts to no more than a Weekly Shilling, the Public will receive them in a form far more commodious than by the customary mode of numbers, which are frequently lost, and create a farther expense to put them together. In addition to this advantage, every Subscriber will have an opportunity of selecting the Authors most consonant to his taste . . .

As so often before, the books were described as ‘neatly’ made. But to the other claims, long since de rigueur, Sharpe brought his own touch: the paper quality was ﬁne, but he speciﬁed its manufacturer; he itemized the aesthetic properties of the type; and he calculated the average ‘periodical expense’ for the consumer. The freedom to buy individual volumes was presented in terms ﬂattering to purchasers, Sharpe’s reference to their taste suggesting that their discernment was 23 An advertisement for Shakespeare and ‘The British Theatre’ was printed at the back of The Guardian (2 vols. London, 1804), ii, sig. Ff4r–v .

274

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Figure 9.1. Wrappers, with prospectus, to ‘Sharpe’s Edition of the British Poets’.

equal to the task—implicit in the phrase ‘Cabinet Volumes’—of forming a choice collection. 24 The reader’s ‘weekly shilling’ was based on his or her purchasing the twoshilling volumes at their fortnightly publication interval. For the sake of comparison, Cooke issued Akenside in three sixpenny numbers with three illustrations for 1s. 6d. (‘Cheap Edition’), or with six engravings and a portrait for 3s. (‘Superior Edition’). Sharpe’s two-volume Akenside cost 4s. without illustrations, or, with two engravings, 5s. Though smaller in page size, Sharpe’s volumes were thicker than Cooke’s numbers, and more ‘commodious’ as well in their self-containment, for each volume was separately paginated and had its own title-page. Some sophistry may be detected, however, in Sharpe’s hinting that ‘numbers’ cost more than might appear because they were frequently mislaid and had to be replaced. I doubt they were lost about households more often than other small books in wrappers, even though their texts might begin, say, on p. 181 in the midst of a poem, for the pertinent data (poet’s name, part number, series title) stood out as clearly on most of Cooke’s wrappers as on Sharpe’s. 24 ‘Prospectus’, back cover of the printed wrappers for Sharpe’s Edition of the British Poets, parts XI and XII, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, M.D. (2 vols. London, 1805). By agreement, the purchasers of Whatman’s business in 1794 continued using his watermark.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

275

In late 1804 Sharpe produced enough imprints and engravings to ensure a successful launch for his series. The many copperplates dated 1 January 1805 suggest an attempt to prevent any delays relating to illustrations (Table 9.1). Where an author had written too little to ﬁll a volume, Sharpe explained that ‘an auxiliary Poet will then be introduced, whose productions may be considered as so much clear gain to the Purchaser’. This invidious distinction between canonical and auxiliary poets was limited to a few cases. Since the poems of Blair and Glynn were very meager, even when combined, Sharpe balanced out the volume with individual poems: ‘the Editor has ventured to deviate from the regular plan of this Edition of the BRITISH POETS by subjoining a selection from the voluminous Works of Boyse, the acknowledged excellence of whose DEITY will scarcely require any apology for its introduction: still less will apology be required for Bishop Porteus’s Poem on DEATH, which bears such close analogy to the general contents of the volume’. The inclusion of Porteus marked a further departure from protocol, in that he was still alive; ‘it is believed’, wrote Sharpe, not ruling out any further exceptions, that his ‘insertion’ would ‘form the only instance of introducing the production of any living Author’. 25 Collins and Gray together opened the series, Collins seeming to be a favorite of Sharpe’s, as evident from an earlier well-illustrated edition. In February the proprietor happily acknowledged ‘the liberal encouragement he ha[d] received on the publication of the ﬁrst volume’, and pledged to ‘endeavour by the most sedulous exertion to render this work still more worthy of public patronage and favor’. These grateful words, inserted in the last volume of Milton, who came next in the series, prepared the way for the other poets announced in the ‘First List of publication’, in a slightly revised order: Goldsmith and Beattie came next, where Lyttelton and Hammond were to have appeared, and when it was time to publish these two poets, they in turn displaced Falconer and Day, pushing them into the ‘Second List of publication’. 26 This change was clariﬁed on the wrappers to the second volume of Akenside (part XII)—‘Part XIII. will comprize the Poetical Works of LYTTELTON and HAMMOND’— showing how important it was to keep customers informed. Milton was nearly restored to the primacy he held in the earlier series of Foulis, Creech, and Bell, but Sharpe otherwise adhered to the aesthetic promoted by Cooke’s initial choices, publishing Gray, Goldsmith, Thomson, Cunningham, and Akenside early on. Although Sharpe agreed with Cooke’s sense of altered poetic tastes, he considered Bell’s edition to be the industry standard, the collection to be equaled or surpassed. Noting, for example, that Dryden’s fables from Chaucer and Boccaccio had been ‘entirely omitted in Mr. Bell’s edition of the Poets’, Sharpe offered them in numbers 26 and 27 of his series, well in advance of Dryden’s original works 25

Ibid.; The Poetical Works of Blair, Glynn, &c. (London, 1807), [v]. Notice dated 9 Feb. 1805, Critique on Paradise Lost, by the Right Hon. Joseph Addison. With Remarks on the Versiﬁcation of Milton, by Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1805), following p. 166 (sig. L4r ) in a copy at the University of Chicago. 26

276

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Table 9.1. Sharpe’s The Works of the British Poets as published 1805–8 and reissued 1818 Part number/poet Imprint Vignette year

Drawn/ engraved

Bound in 1818 in Imprint 42 vols. 54 vols. year

1 Collins & Gray 2 Milton 1 3 Milton 2 4 Milton 3 5 Milton 4 6 Critique on Milton 7 Goldsmith & Beattie 8 Thomson 1 9 Thomson 2 10 Cunningham 11 Akenside 1 12 Akenside 2 13 Hammond & Lyttelton 14 Pope 1 15 Pope 2 16 Pope 3 17 Pope 4 18 Falconer & Day 19 Somerville 1 20 Somerville 2 21 Mallet 22 T. Warton 23 Hamilton 1 24 Hamilton 2 25 Johnson & J. Warton 26 Dryden Fables 27 Dryden Fables 28 Shenstone 1 29 Shenstone 2 30 Waller 1 31 Waller 2 32 Young 1 33 Young 2 34 Young 3 35 Young 4 36 Cotton 37 Butler 1 38 Butler 2 39 Butler 3

Thomson/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Fuseli/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Fuseli/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Burney/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Thomson/Cardon Westall/Tomkins Stothard/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Hamilton/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Burney/Tomkins Smirke/Tomkins Thomson/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Westall/L. Schiavonetti Smirke/L. Schiavonetti Singleton/N. Schiavonetti Devis/L. Schiavonetti Hamilton/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Thomson/Tomkins Westall/N. Schiavonetti Westall/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Smirke/Cardon Singleton/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Smirke/L. Schiavonetti Smirke/L. Schiavonetti Westall/Tomkins Westall/Tomkins Smirke/L. Schiavonetti Smirke/Tomkins Smirke/N. Schiavonetti Smirke/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins

30a

21a

1

1

2

2

3a

[3]

37a

25a

20

15

35a 25

23a 19

27b

20a

18

13

19

14

30b

21b

15

10

29b 39b 28

20b 27a x

37b

25b

7

7

22

16

4

x

23

17

24

18

35b 5

23b 4

6a

5a

1805 1805

1805 1805 1805 1805 1805 1805 1805

1805 1805 1805 1805 1805 1805 1806 1806 1806 1806

1806 1806

1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Feb. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1805 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806

1808 1808 1814 1814 1814 1814 [?] 1809 1809 1808 1808 1814 1811 1811 1811 1811 1808 1808 1808 1808 1809 1809 1811 1812 1813 1814

1811 1811 1813 1812 1812 1812

1813 1813 1811 1811 1812 1812 1812 1812

A Body of Standard English Poetry

277

Table 9.1. (Continued) Part number/poet Imprint Vignette year

Drawn/ engraved

Bound in 1818 in Imprint 42 vols. 54 vols. year

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Oct. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 1 Jan. 1806 3 [?] 1807 1 Jan. 1807 1 Feb. 1807 1 Jan. 1807

Westall/Cardon Westall/Cardon Westall/N. Schiavonetti Opie/Tomkins Singleton/L. Schiavonetti Tresham/Tomkins Tresham/Tomkins Smirke/Tomkins Devis/Cardon Westall/Tomkins Westall/Cardon Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Singleton/Tomkins Westall/Cardon

36

24

13

8b 9

1 Jan. 1807 1 Jan. 1807 1 Apr. 1807 1 Apr. 1807 10 Apr. 1807 25 Apr. 1807 8 May 1807 23 May 1807 1 June 1807 1 Jan. 1805 1 June 1807

Westall/Cardon Westall/Cardon Westall/Cardon Westall/Wright Westall/N. Schiavonetti Westall/Wright Westall/N. Schiavonetti Westall/Cardon Westall/Tomkins Tomkins/Tomkins Devis/Cardon

4 July 1807 17 July 1807 14 Aug. 1807 29 Aug. 1807 1 Oct. 1807 1 Oct. 1807 10 Oct. 1807 21 Oct. 1807

Westall/Wright Hamilton/Cardon Westall/Cardon R. Cook/Cardon R. Cook/L. Schiavonetti R. Cook/L. Schiavonetti R. Cook/N. Schiavonetti Westall/Cardon

1 Sep. 1807 7 Nov. 1807 21 Nov. 1807 5 Dec. 1807 19 Dec. 1807 1 Jan. 1808

Westall/N. Schiavonetti R. Cook/Tomkins 31 R. Cook/Cardon R. Cook/N. Schiavonetti 32a Stothard/Tomkins 21 Stothard/Tomkins

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

Langhorne 1 Langhorne 2 Gay 1 Gay 2 Gay 3 Glover 1 Glover 2 E. Moore Dryden 1 Dryden 2 Dryden 3 Swift 1 Swift 2 Swift 3 Swift 4 Smollet, Bruce & Logan Tickell J. Philips Addison Dyer Denham Burns 1 Burns 2 Savage Blair, Glynn, Boyse & Porteus Thompson Jenyns Parnell Prior 1 Prior 2 Prior 3 Armstrong Shaw, Lovibond & Penrose Churchill 1 Churchill 2 Churchill 3 Watts 1 Watts 2

1806 1806

1806 1806 1806

1806

1807 1807

1807 1807 1807 1807 1807 1807 1807 1807

1807 1807 1807 1807

1807 1807

1807

1807

14a 38

26

29a 8

x 5b 6

9a 16

11

17

12

41a

27b

10b 6b 10a 26a 3b 40

x x x x [3b] 28

14b 33b

x 30b

26b 32b 12b 11

x x x x

12a 34a 33a

x 22b

1814 1814 1812 1812 1812 1814 1814 1813 1813 1813 1814 1814 1814 1814 1813 1813 1813

1813 1813 1807

1807 1807 1807

x

x (cont.)

278

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Table 9.1. (Continued) Part number/poet Imprint Vignette year

Drawn/ engraved

Bound in 1818 in Imprint 42 vols. 54 vols. year

78 Green & Jago 79 Scott 80 Garth 81 Jones 1 82 Jones 2 83 Mickle 84 Hoyland, J. H. Moore, Headley & Russell 85 Oram, Bampfylde & Lovell

R. Cook/N. Schiavonetti Stothard/Cardon Kauffman/Cardon R. Cook/Cardon Devis/Vendramini Devis/Cardon Thurston/Agar

27a

1808 1808

12 Jan. 1808 30 Jan. 1808 10 Feb. 1808 11 Feb. 1808 27 Feb. 1808 21 Mar. 1808 9 Apr. 1808 7 Aug. 1807 7 Aug. 1807 1 Aug. 1807

Westall/N. Schiavonetti Westall/N. Schiavonetti Westall/Meadows

∗

1809

Cowper 1 Cowper 2 ∗ Cowper 3 ∗

1808 1808 1808 1808

1808

1 July 1809

Smirke/Cardon

30 Aug. 1809 Smirke/Cardon

x x x

39a 9b 42

8a

1808

x

34b 41b

22a 31a

41c

31b

1808 1808 1808 1808 1808 1808 1808 1808

29 30a

1818 1818 1818

Notes: ‘Directions to the Binder’ in a copy at Yale (Sterling Ib55 t805 v.51) specify how to bind the set in 42 vols. (84 was also an option), and where to place each engraving, if not as a frontispiece. I give details of the vignettes across from the pertinent poets; gaps in these columns point out which poets were not illustrated. The asterisks beside Cowper show that he was extra to the original series, though incorporated in the 1818 reissue. In the last two columns, pertaining to the 1818 reissue, an ‘x’ indicates where a poet was left out, and the imprint dates, when compared against those in the second column, reveal which volumes were 2nd edns. (most were). The letters a, b, and c show whether a poet was bound ﬁrst, second, or third in a shared volume, and the square brackets refer to a volume I have not seen.

(numbers 48–50); by keeping the fables ‘obviously detached’ and publishing them long before the rest of Dryden, he hoped to accommodate ‘those who are in possession of, and are desirous of adding them to, Mr. Bell’s work’. 27 With respect to Parnell, again ignoring Cooke’s edition, Sharpe reduced ‘the contents of Mr. BELL’s edition from two volumes to one’ in deference to the poet’s descendants, who desired only the poems authorized by Pope’s 1718 edition to be reprinted. 28 Homage to Bell was reﬂected also in the design of Sharpe’s titlepage: a black letter font was used by Charles Whittingham for the phrase ‘Printed at the Stanhope Press’, the typographical ﬂourish used by the Martins for their ‘Apollo Press’. Sharpe seems to have agreed with Leigh Hunt, who, while partial to Cooke’s series, considered Bell’s Poets of Great Britain to be ‘unquestionably superior to it’. 29 27 ‘Advertisement’, dated 4 Jan. 1806, Fables from Boccaccio and Chaucer: by John Dryden (2 vols. London, 1806), i. [3]. Bell’s decision to omit the fables apparently solidiﬁed his policy of reprinting ‘the whole original poems, in English’ of his poets. See Ch. 4, n. 9. 28 The Poetical Works of Thomas Parnell (London, 1807), [5]. 29 Hunt, Autobiography, 151.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

279

Sharpe found it necessary to articulate his ‘deviation from preceding systems’ in discussing the other towering inﬂuence on poetry collections, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Sharpe reprinted that work in tandem with his series, albeit with a caveat: ‘Notwithstanding that the series of British Poets, to which this edition of Dr. Johnson’s biographical work is intended as an accompanyment, differs in some respects from the plan followed by that illustrious writer, it has been thought eligible to publish complete his “Lives of the most eminent English Poets.” ’ Around this literary landmark, a site for historic preservation, the sands of popular taste and critical reputation had shifted: While, however, such a degree of respect seemed due to the labours of the father of our Poetical Criticism, some amendment, as to the selection of authors, long since demanded by the general voice, appeared indispensably requisite to the perfection of any new plan for the publication of our national poetry. This improvement will certainly be attempted in the enumeration of those writers who are designed to form the subjects of the present undertaking.

While Johnson’s work in toto was incorporated into the collection, the poets about whom he wrote were shown no such deference. Three decades after publication of The Works of the English Poets, a change in blueprint was demanded, yet this ‘deviation’ left Sharpe in the same quandary faced by the proprietors of the 1790 Works of the English Poets: commissioning prefaces for poets newly added to the series. ‘What remains to be effected’, he advised, ‘towards the farther illustration of the Lives of the Poets’ would be offered in a ‘distinct Work’. 30 That work never appeared, although it was entrusted to the right person: ‘BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES will be hereafter given of Poets not included in Dr. Johnson’s Lives, by Thomas Park, Esq. F.S.A.’ 31 A published poet who had been trained as an engraver, Park nurtured a passion for collecting, annotating, and editing books. By the age of 30 he had begun to amass the library of early English poetry later catalogued as Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica, and in 1802 was admitted a Fellow to the Society of Antiquaries. 32 Lowndes praised Sharpe’s edition as ‘the only one in which proper, or indeed any, attention was paid to the correctness of the text’, crediting Park with being ‘the most competent to whom such a task has ever yet been assigned’. Lowndes was sorry, however, that the collection was not ‘completed according to the design of its editor’. 33 His disappointment, though maybe keener because of the missing biographies, primarily alludes to another 30 ‘Advertisement’, dated 1 Nov. 1805, in Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (7 vols. London, 1805–6), i. [3]. 31 ‘Books published and sold by W. Suttaby, Stationers’ Court, London’, a nine-page advertisement in the 1809 reprint of the volume containing the works of Falconer and Day, p. [1]. 32 See A. F. Grifﬁths, Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica; or, a Descriptive Catalogue of a Rare and Rich Collection of Early English Poetry (London, 1815). 33 William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (4 vols. London, 1834), iii. 1473.

280

A Body of Standard English Poetry

aspect of the project that seems to have been conceived after William Suttaby took over as lead proprietor. ‘As Proprietor . . . of the “BRITISH CLASSICS” and “BRITISH POETS” (originally projected by Mr. Sharpe,) the present Publisher’ Suttaby in 1810 advertised where the collections stood. The undertaking, he explained, ‘divides into Modern and Ancient; either of which divisions forms an entire work’. Nothing about ancient poetry had been said by Sharpe, but here emerged a clear plan: ‘The department of Ancient Poetry will comprise (in Twenty-one Volumes) all that is estimable in the writings of our Early Poets.’ Unfortunately no contents were listed of the volumes evidently mapped out by Park, whom the DNB called ‘the best informed student of his time “in our old poetical literature and biography” ’. Since Suttaby drafted this advertisement (1809–10) when publication of Chalmers’s edition was imminent, a collection modeled on Anderson’s (discussed below), his desire to add older poetry was a strategy to keep the project as competitive as possible in the marketplace. This reasoning also explains his portrayal of the ‘Modern Series’ in two different ways within the eight-page advertisement. A table of the poets, with volumes and prices, complete as published by Sharpe, dominates the ﬁnal page: ‘85 volumes, neatly sewed and labeled, or formed into 42 Volumes, in Boards’, selling for ten guineas with the illustrations, or eight guineas without. On another page the Modern Series is said to be ‘complete in Forty-four Volumes, price in boards Eleven Pounds’, from Milton to Cowper, the additional volumes and cost attributable to Cowper. Named on Chalmers’s titlepage as the terminal poet in that collection, Cowper had not ﬁgured in Sharpe’s scheme. 34 While the Ancient Series never left the drawing board, a twelve-volume Supplement to the British Poets (1808–9) was published at £1 10s. illustrated, equal to the price of 2s. 6d. per volume. The ﬁrst volume and a portion of the twelfth delivered ‘Additional Poems, Not inserted in the Works of the Poets’, poems omitted by mistake from the complete works of the canonical poets. The other volumes provided an anthology of ‘the better poems of thirty-nine authors, who, if the old principle of collection were now tried, must be entirely excluded from great works’ (Table 9.2). Of these poets, noted the ‘Advertisement’ dated 1 July 1809, ‘twenty-two are to be found in Dr. Johnson’s English Poets; while seventeen more, which made no part of his scheme, are selected, for the ﬁrst time, from various sources’—that is, previous multi-volume collections. Demoted from the central canon, as it were, these poets could be ‘agreeably presented to the world’, their wheat having been winnowed from chaff: ‘From all that was once heterogeneously amalgamated, much, it will be seen, is now not unbeneﬁcially extracted. Who would not aspire to rescue the “Creation” of Blackmore from the chaos of his verse; but, who desires to know much more of 34 ‘Books Published and Sold by W. Suttaby, Stationers-Court, Ludgate-Street’, pp. 3–8 of an advertisement printed on sigs. Y3–Y6 of The Letters of Pliny (London, 1810), 3, 6–8.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

281

Table 9.2. Sharpe’s Supplement to the British Poets as published 1808–9 and reissued 1809, 1818 Part When Imprint Poets no. bound year 1 2

i xii

1808 1808

3

ii

1808

4

iii

1808

5

iv

1808

6 7

v vi

1808 1809

8

vii

1809

9

viii

1809

10

ix

1809

11

x

1809

12

xi

1809

Additional Poems Additional Poems [T. Warton] Rochester Roscommon Otway Pomfret Dorset Stepney Walsh Smith Duke King Sprat Montague Rowe Hughes Shefﬁeld Congreve Fenton Blackmore Lansdowne Yalden Pattison Hill Broome Pitt A. Philips G. West Harte R. West Cawthorn Lloyd Cooper P. Whitehead Brown Grainger Wilkie Dodsley Smart Graeme W. Whitehead Blacklock General Titles

Date of vignette

Drawn/engraved

1 Jan. 1808

Hamilton/Bartolozzi

1 Aug. 1808

Hamilton/Bartolozzi

1809 in 1818 in 5 vols. 54 vols.

i

xxxii

ii

xxxiii

iii

xxxiv

iv

xxxv

v

xxxvi

20 Aug. 1808 Singleton/Vendramini

1 Oct. 1808

1 Nov. 1808 1 Dec. 1808

Singleton/Vendramini

Westall/Cardon R. Cook/Cardon

1 Feb. 1809

Stothard/Meadows

8 Mar. 1809

Stothard/Vendramini

30 Mar. 1809 R. Cook/Cardon

29 Apr. 1809 31 May 1809

R. Cook/Cardon Westall/Meadows

1 July 1809

Westall/Tomkins

Notes: The general title-pages (issued in Part 12) for the volumes when bound (second column) correspond to the volume numbers printed on the signature pages throughout the texts. Information about the vignettes is placed in line with the poet whose verses were illustrated. Of the poets to have ‘additional poems’ delivered via the Supplement, Warton is the only one listed here because his work received an engraving. As indicated by the numeral placement in the last two columns, volumes ‘i’ and ‘xxxii’ begin with Rochester.

282

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Pomfret than his “Wish?” ’ The Supplement was ‘necessary to the completion’ of Sharpe’s edition for ‘those admirers of poetry who may desire to possess, within some just compass, the more estimable effusions of our Minor Poets’. 35 In order ‘to perfect the general Plan’, the publishers proceeded with a run of translations in thirty-four numbers, marching directly ahead where Bell and Cooke had procrastinated and reneged (Table 9.3). Sharpe’s edition thus was the only series to move forward, in uniform dress and without hesitation, from a canonical collection of English verse into a full supplementary anthology of minor verse and ﬁnally the Greek and Roman classics in translation. The project never became Suttaby’s alone, for Sharpe did not exit the stage. Indeed, the imprints indicate quite a degree of ﬂux. The ﬁrst edition of Pope (1805) was printed ‘For John Sharpe’, the second (1808) ‘For John Sharpe; and Sold by W. Suttaby’. That remained the imprint for volume i of the Supplement, but Taylor and Hessey were added to volumes ii–xii as sellers, and later as publishers (in the 2nd edition of Joseph Warton in 1811, for example), with the ﬁrms of Suttaby, Evance, and Hutchings, and Sharpe and Hailes. In 1818, when the collection (with Supplement) was reissued in 54 volumes as The Works of the British Poets; Including the Most Esteemed Translations from the Greek and Roman Authors, the series title-pages—attached to a few ﬁrst editions, but mostly second editions printed from 1811 to 1814—named Sharpe as co-publisher with Suttaby, Evance, and Fox. 36

TO THE CURIOUS IN PRINTS Bell, Cooke, and Sharpe all grasped that incorporating an extensive array of copperplate engravings into their collections would appeal to many purchasers separate from the poetry. The prints they commissioned, along with the artwork that accompanied their series in other genres, mark an era of growing capital outlays in book illustration. By making a show of their excursions into this ﬁeld of book production, the three publishers redeﬁned the pocket classic, raising consumer expectations as well as erecting market hurdles, or economic barriers to entry into that product realm. Unlike Bell and Cooke, who promised a portrait of each poet but frequently failed to ﬁnd likenesses, Sharpe dispensed with that goal. Unworried about consistency, he provided a total of seventeen likenesses in seven engravings— Swift and Pope receiving individual treatment, with groupings of three poets on each of the ﬁve other copperplates. The central frame in these portrait clusters is 35 ‘Advertisement’, dated 1 July 1809, Supplement to the British Poets. Collated with the Best Editions: by Thomas Park, F.S.A. (12 vols. London, 1808–9), i, sig. [A2]r–v . 36 Another interesting reissue had appeared in 1817, the year after Cooke’s death—the residual sheets of his edn. of The Poetical Works of Richard Savage under a new imprint, ‘Printed for C. Cooke, Paternoster-Row, and Reprinted for A. K. Newman & Co. Leadenhall-Street’. See Fleeman, Bibliography, i. 107, and Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 140–1.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

283

Table 9.3. Sharpe’s Translations as published 1809–12 and reissued 1818 Part Imprint Poets no. year

Vignette

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

1809

1 July 1809 29 July 1809 Aug. 1809 1 Oct. 1809 2 Dec. 1809 1 Nov. 1809 1 Feb. 1810 1 Mar. 1810 31 Mar. 1810 30 Apr. 1810 31 May 1810 29 June 1810

15 16 17 18 19

1810 1810

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Homer, Iliad

1809

Homer, Odyssey

1810

Virgil, Pastorals, Georgics Virgil, Æneis

1810 1810

1811

1811

1812

1812

1812 1812

Horace

1812

R. Cook/Heath R. Cook/Smith R. Cook/Engleheart R. Cook/Mitan R. Cook/Armstrong R. Cook/Neagle R. Cook/Warren Thomson/Golding Thomson/Golding Thomson/Noble Thomson/Smith R. Cook/Mitan West/L. Schiavonetti 1 Dec. 1809 R. Cook/Engleheart

Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, & Tyrtæus Homer, Batrachomuomachia, Hymns, Odes, Epigrams Anacreon, Sappho, & Musæus 30 Oct. 1810 Pindar 1 Jan. 1811 30 Jan. 1811 Hesiod, Works and Days 31 Aug. 1811 Hesiod, Theogony 1 Sep. 1811 Coluthus Apollonius Rhodius 30 Oct. 1811 30 Nov. 1811 1 Jan. 1812 31 Jan. 1812 Ovid, Metamorphoses 30 Mar. 1812 30 Apr. 1812 Tibullus Tibullus, Sulpicia Juvenal Juvenal, Persius Lucan

Drawn/engraved

Westall/Tomkins R. Cook/Cardon R. Cook/Cardon Westall/Raimbach Westall/Smith

R. Cook/Engleheart R. Cook/Noble R. Cook/Engleheart R. Cook/Noble Howard/Noble Devis/Landseer Stothard/Cardon Howard/Pye, Finden 30 June 1812 Howard/Smith Howard/Fittler 31 Aug. 1812 Howard/Finden 30 Sep. 1812 R. Cook/Smith 30 Nov. 1812 R. Cook/Rhodes 1 Jan. 1813 Joseph/Taylor Fuseli/Smith

1818 in 54 vols. xxxvii xxxviii xxxix xl xlvi xlvii xliii xl l xlii xli

xliv xlv xlix l li lii liii liv xlviii

Notes: Titles are included next to a poet’s name where there could be some confusion over the works contained in a volume. Where dates are missing next to the artists’ names, the information was trimmed off the plates in the copies I examined.

284

A Body of Standard English Poetry

larger, a stellar eminence ﬂanked by satellites: Milton, accompanied by Cowley and Denham; Waller, with Butler and John Philips; Dryden, with Garth and Parnell; Addison, with Prior and Gay; and Gray, with Young and Thomson. The engravings depict an intimate gallery, a Poets’ Corner in miniature, interspersed amongst the pages of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Vignettes, on the other hand, ﬁgured largely in Sharpe’s edition, one reason why Raimbach numbered him ‘among the most active speculators in ornamental literature’. 37 Sharpe was no less forward than Bell or Cooke to advertise his illustrations in a way that ﬂattered himself, his readers, and the nation: ‘But to gratify the Amateurs of Pictorical Embellishments, and to afford an opportunity of possessing specimens of BRITISH ART, even to those whom expense has hitherto forbidden it, an Edition will be printed, each volume of which will contain a highly ﬁnished Engraving, by the most EMINENT ARTISTS.’ Volumes could be bought without the engraving, but for an extra sixpence, or the ‘very moderate price’ of 2s. 6d., a reader could procure the ‘superior advantages’ of the illustrated edition. 38 The weekly shilling thus had to be augmented by threepence. Sharpe continued to promote his artwork in relation to his Supplement, Translations, and British Classics, stressing, for instance, his ‘best efforts to render the present volume alike gratifying to the lovers of letters and of the ﬁne arts’. 39 Once more, originality was a selling point, touted in advertisements like the one for a volume ‘Embellished with AN ELEGANT ENGRAVING, from a drawing executed on purpose for the work, BY RICHARD WESTALL, R.A.’ Somewhat less sensationalistic than Cooke’s illustrations, many of Sharpe’s engravings reveal similar thematic interests. The emphasis on artwork having been produced ‘on purpose’ for speciﬁc volumes of Bell, Cooke, and Sharpe contrasts with an earlier practice in editions of ancient classics like The Iliad or The Metamorphoses, scores of which all through Europe were illustrated with engravings copied from other editions. British artists were protected from having their images reproduced in this manner by the Copyright Acts of 1735 and 1767. 40 But while exact copying was legally prohibited, a subtler pattern of interaction emerged in the choice of subjects from one poetic series to the next: the artists for Sharpe, like Cooke’s before them, often resorted to the very passages selected by Bell’s illustrators. Sixteen of Cooke’s plates depicted the verses used as captions for engravings in The Poets of Great Britain, roughly one match for every six of Bell’s prints. Stothard, for instance, illustrated a moment of political drama from Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health: ‘Time shakes the stable tyranny 37 Raimbach praised Sharpe as a ‘perfectly honest and honourable man in all his dealings’ (Memoirs, 108). 38 ‘Prospectus.’ 39 ‘Advertisement’, Supplement to the British Poets, i, sig. [A2]v ; and ‘Books Published and Sold by W. Suttaby, Stationers’ Court, London’ (2–3), where the ‘distinguished names’ of ten painters and ten engravers are printed beside one another in parallel columns (3). 40 Hodnett, Text and Image, 24–5.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

285

of thrones, / And tott’ring empires rush by their own weight’ (II. 543–4). Twenty years afterwards Kirk depicted the same two verses for Cooke, a remarkable choice given that Armstrong’s poem exceeds 2,000 verses. Likewise with two other lengthy poems bursting with picture-worthy scenes, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, the couplets illustrated by Mortimer for Bell later struck the fancy of E. F. Burney when he conceived his drawings for Cooke. If it is true, as Raymond Picart observes, that few artists ‘think out for themselves the problem of illustrating, by re-reading the text they have to illustrate’, one alternative was for them to review what previous artists had done before choosing a subject. 41 Even where the identical verses per se were not selected for illustration, artists liked to respond to an earlier design. For Rowe’s version of the Glaucus and Scylla episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, Stothard, drawing for Bell, illustrated the couplet ‘Her Glaucus saw as o’er the deep he rode, / New to the seas, and late receiv’d a god’ (ll. 9–10). In Cooke’s volume, the verses depicted by Kirk in which Scylla returns the scrutiny—‘She sees his face divine, and manly brow, / End in a ﬁsh’s wreathy tail below’ (ll. 22–3)—resulted in a print that mirrored Stothard’s image. The inﬂuence of Bell’s plate is evident also in Cooke’s engraving for Prior’s ‘Solomon’, where Thurston picked up the narration from the point where Edwards’s illustration left off (II. 376–7, 378–80): Love had ordain’d that it was Abra’s turn To mix the sweets and minister the urn. With awful homage and submissive dread, The maid approach’d, on my declining head To pour the oils.

In answer to Edwards’s somewhat prudish tableau of the mixing of sweets, Thurston’s rendering of the maid’s approach conveyed a scene of more sensuous intimacy. Nearly one in ﬁve of Sharpe’s illustrations took its cue from an image in Bell or Cooke; eighteen times his artists resorted to the earlier series and offered their own renderings of the same subjects. In a few cases, where the artists for both Cooke and Sharpe took their lead from Bell’s plate, the result is a notable chain of representation focused on a single passage. A provocative image from one of Waller’s poems, for example, successively engaged Mauritius Lowe, Kirk, and Westall. His poem ‘To a Fair Lady, Playing with a Snake’ describes a woman who eschews love, only later to cuddle a snake; the moral is not to mistake the graver for the lesser danger. While each caption quotes the moral of the poem, the scene is drawn from the following verses: ‘Thrice happy snake! that in her sleeve / May boldly creep; we dare not give / Our thoughts so unconﬁn’d a leave’ (ll. 10–12). Lowe responds to the textual tease, opening the virgin’s blouse to reveal the ‘bliss’ of the snake ‘in that nest of snow’ (ll. 13–14). Kirk and Westall, on the 41

Quoted by Cohen, Art, 251.

286

A Body of Standard English Poetry

other hand, keep her primly clothed, respecting the poet’s demure if rhetorically insincere limits. Thus guided by previous choices of text, the illustrators of these series enjoyed rethinking earlier images and offering fresh pictorial interpretations. 42 Any study of their work would have to explore the depth and complexity of this interplay, but provisional observations can be offered: (1) the artists regularly consulted the engravings from earlier series; (2) their choices to illustrate the same verses constituted a form of dialogue with the earlier drawings; and (3) the resulting images clustered around speciﬁc passages warrant extra consideration when assessing the ‘sister arts’ in book illustration. That so much money should have been spent on engravings underscores their powerful marketing logic. Hugh Amory has observed what a striking ‘economic paradox’ it was for publishers of cheap books to spend ‘large extra sums on “decorations” at the very moments when this investment was apparently most at risk’. Why they did so is suggested by the shared etymology of illustration and illustrious: to make bright. As a means of distinction, plates deﬁne ‘an identity that is, in fact, hard to reproduce’, Amory explains; publishers used them to secure their editions, a strategy he dubs ‘proprietary illustration’. Plates functioned as ‘a kind of trademark’, but not in the sense that claims to sole possession of any design would necessarily hold up in court; the publishers actually lost the argument that their ‘plates were so annexed to the letterpress’ as to be legally defensible. Artwork guarded the distinctiveness of an edition, rather, ‘by capitalizing the risk of entry’. Amory reckons that producing an engraving cost roughly half as much again per copy as for paper and letterpress in the accompanying volume; this heavy expense raised the stakes of entering the market and helped to ‘keep out riff-raff ’. 43 When Bell projected a cost of £1,000 for illustrating his series, he seems to have estimated (whether factoring in the hundred vignettes he anticipated, or those with the portraits too) spending between £7 and £10 per copperplate on artistic labor and materials. Production costs rose over time, starting with wages. Stothard’s ﬁrst designs for Bell earned him a half guinea; in 1780 he was paid around £1 by Harrison for an octavo-sized drawing; by 1793 he charged £1 for a ‘slight design’ for a pocket edition; in 1797 Cadell & Davies gave him two and a half guineas per drawing for their edition of Shenstone’s Poems. By 1809 he was receiving around £5 for a woodblock design, but 20 guineas per illustration by 1813. In 1814 Westall’s labor rated ‘Ten guineas a day in his ordinary practice’. 44 The inﬂation reﬂected in these latter costs was general to the economy: the rent on a property in Yorkshire grew from about £16 8s. in 1793 to £25 in 1809, but only three years later jumped to £33; and the rent collected on a farm of 42 Nor did the competition end with Sharpe. One of Bell’s engravings for Churchill, reconceived for Sharpe’s edn., came into play again when E. F. Burney illustrated a later edn. of the poet. 43 44 Amory, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 137–9. Bennett, Stothard, 15, 43.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

287

225 acres in Norfolk rose from about £11 10s. in 1770 to £17 15s. in 1806, but by 1814 had exploded to £62 4s. 45 The engraving process was more expensive, for reasons told by Robert N. Essick. Though the designer laid out the basic motifs and composition of an image, ‘its speciﬁc visual qualities, its tonal and textural variety, and even details of facial expression and gesture can be, and usually were, profoundly affected by the hand and eye of the engraver’. 46 Raimbach’s average price in the 1790s was six guineas, squaring with ‘the six or seven guineas’ that Cooke ‘dealt out’ for each plate. A copperplate needed to be refurbished during a print run. Upwards of ﬁve hundred prints could be pulled before signs of wear required the plate to be touched up. How these costs broke down can be seen in Raimbach’s work for Sharpe’s edition: Suttaby paid him twenty-ﬁve guineas for each plate, on which he engraved two illustrations side by side, plus fourteen guineas more for ‘reparations during the printing of 6000 or 7000 impressions’. 47 Given this enormous print run, twice the number of Bell’s ﬁrst edition, a lot of repair would have been needed. Indistinct prints now and again indicate that Bell, Cooke, and Sharpe were not vigilant at all times in monitoring the ‘reparations’ to their copperplates. Yet variations in quality were turned to promotional use, to entice buyers into distinguishing themselves by grade of purchase. Through advertisements pitched ‘To the CURIOUS in PRINTS’ Bell encouraged persons who delighted in prints to buy early while pristine copies were still available. While subscribers to the series were promised crisp prints, and the more afﬂuent were invited to buy deluxe sets with proof impressions, latecomers risked being left with plates of lesser quality. 48 Nineteenth-century engraving technology put an end to such appeals. Instead of a limited supply of superior prints, steel engravings produced any number of equally acceptable copies, a development rued by Raimbach for ‘destroying, at the same time, root and branch, the long established system of proofs and early impressions, which contributed so much to the advantage and respectability of the profession, by holding out inducements to connoisseurs and lovers of rarity, to form collections of choice examples’. 49 When Tyrwhitt berated Bell for misappropriating his text of The Canterbury Tales, he expressed collateral disgust for the publisher’s illustrations. A young reader who encounters ‘a picture at the beginning of each volume’, he huffed, will be ‘perfectly unconcerned about every thing else’. 50 Tyrwhitt’s disdain captures the suspicion that pictures are too alluring, at best an irrelevance to the textual purposes of a book, at worst a distraction. The slur against Bell’s motives draws 45 Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s Social Tables 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 399. 46 ‘William Blake, William Hamilton, and the Materials of Graphic Meaning’, ELH 52 (1983), 865. 47 48 Raimbach, Memoirs, 108–9. MP (12 Jan. 1779). 49 50 Raimbach, Memoirs, 143–4. GM 53 (1783), 461–2.

288

A Body of Standard English Poetry

a line between the verbal and the visual, a line that opposes high culture to low, intellect to impulse, elite reﬁnement to popular taste. With his imputation that Bell beguiled his readers, exploiting the glamour of illustration to subvert the textual basis of publishing, Tyrwhitt joins Strahan as a cynical witness to the betrayal of their professional callings. 51 The language used to promote such engravings would only have deepened Tyrwhitt’s alarm. Bell called attention to ‘interesting’ frontispieces done in a ‘novel and entertaining stile’. 52 The verb to interest then conveyed something more visceral than it does today: ‘To affect; to move; to touch with passion; to gain the affections: as, this is an interesting story.’ Interest is what drew Raimbach to Thurston’s designs, which, however ‘mannered and incongruous’, were yet ‘captivating to the eye’. Musidora’s tale furnished ‘so many artists with a subject’ and so many publishers of Thomson ‘with a captivating embellishment’, that an editor of The Seasons (1816) deﬁed ‘common prejudice’ by denouncing them as ‘vulgarly conceived’ and ‘coarse in sentiment’. 53 Illustrators and observers alike agreed upon the power of an image to arrest one’s attention, for good or ill, and publishers hoped their engravings would exert this pull on the buyer. To the extent that young readers were drawn to illustrated pocket editions of classics, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb offer glimpses into their perspective. Hunt’s enchantment with Cooke’s poets—his doting on their size, type, and engravings—was discussed in Chapter 8. Lamb recounted his boyhood pleasure in the engravings for novels by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, penning verses to Thomas Stothard: ‘How often have I with a child’s fond gaze / Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done’. 54 Such doting and poring express an unhurried indulgence in objects of fascination. Whether Hunt’s failure to mention textual purity lays him open to Tyrwhitt’s charge of negligence is an open question, but far from being ‘unconcerned about every thing else’, he was enamored with all aspects of the edition, even the advertising, through which, as he dwelt on those list-imprinted wrappers, he absorbed the honor roll of poets and plotted future acquisitions. Even supposing that purchasers were unduly attracted to the plates, a more charitable view of books and the young might have counted it an advantage: ‘I would let [a boy] at ﬁrst read any English book which happens to engage his attention’, wrote Johnson, ‘because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book.’ 55 The challenge of getting books into the hands of novice readers applied to anyone of small cultural 51 How galling it would have been for Tyrwhitt to ﬁnd Bell’s plates bound into his edn. of The Canterbury Tales, as in a copy at the University of Chicago. 52 See Ch. 4; also the clause ‘interesting frontispiece, the drawings of which, were made on purpose for this work, by Mr. MORTIMER’: MP (24 July 1777). 53 Johnson, Dictionary; Raimbach, Memoirs, 28; Cohen, Art, 291 and 293; italics mine. 54 ‘To T. Stothard, Esq. on His Illustrations of the Poems of Mr. Rogers’ (Bennett, Stothard, 54). 55 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, iii. 385.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

289

attainments, whether reasons of income, education, or age, had limited their reading. Condescending gestures are found in books like Gay’s Fables (1810), where the ‘motive’ for illustration was ‘to render those pleasing compositions more intelligible to youth’, and where the editor spelt out how each element of the print was to be interpreted. 56 At the back of Adventures of Jemima Russell, An Orphan (1799), the printer A. Neil of Sommers Town solicited other ‘new works of genius’ for publication, welcomed advice on which passages to illustrate, and promised never to ‘obtrude on an intelligent Community any Tale, which might, in the smallest degree, convey contagion of vice to the innocent and youthful heart’. 57 Bell, Cooke, and Sharpe never belittled readers in this fashion, whatever other accommodations they made for keeping prices low and letting readers absorb the poetry at their own speed. Their visual enticements depended on a level of appreciation for ‘novel and entertaining’ subjects, which involved exploring the poetic context that gave rise to the picture. As Cooke described it, the ‘instantaneous Effect’ accomplished by the painter demanded comparison with ‘the elaborate Detail’ of the poet (derived as well from imagination). ‘The Union, therefore, of Poetry and Painting affords an Employment for the Mind at once elegant, delightful, and instructive’, he concluded, such that ‘the most beautiful and striking Objects, in all the Harmony of Verse and Force of Colouring’ were necessarily presented ‘at once to the Mind and the Eye’. 58 What harm, then, if publishers capitalized on copperplate illustrations to stimulate sales of poetry? Cooke drafted the concept of this pleasure into the title of his Select British Poets, or Entertaining Poetical Library, as Wenman had done in his Entertaining Museum; or, Complete Circulating Library.

THE MINNOW TRIBE SWIMS ON The shoals of pocket volumes characterized by T. F. Dibdin as ‘the minnow tribe’ kept increasing. Beginning around 1804, years before taking on Sharpe’s edition, William Suttaby published his own mixed-genre series à la Wenman, advertising ‘New and elegant Editions of the following popular POEMS, &c. printed by Corrall, on a ﬁne wove paper, hot pressed, and of a convenient pocket size, ornamented with rich Engravings’. Alongside The Pilgrim’s Progress and Addison’s Spectator, he published Paradise Lost, Night Thoughts, The Seasons, and the ‘Poetical Works’ of Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, and Elizabeth Rowe, the ﬁrst female poet advertised in connection with a multi-volume series. Suttaby and Charles Corrall continued 56 ‘Advertisement to this New Edition’ and ‘Explanation of the Frontispiece’, Fables, by John Gay, ed. William Coxe (London, 1810), sigs. A2r–v . 57 ‘To the Friends of Literature, and Public in general’, Adventures of Jemima Russell, An Orphan (Sommers Town, 1799), sig. H2r . 58 The Poetical Works of John Gay, ii, sig. T4r .

290

A Body of Standard English Poetry

their series through 1808. 59 In 1809 it turned into ‘Suttaby’s Miniature Library’ once Suttaby became chief proprietor of Sharpe’s edition, which now was more consistently referred to as the ‘Cabinet Edition’. In these distinct series (respectively modeled on Wenman and Bell), Suttaby served two levels of readers. The works of Somerville in the Cabinet Edition (2 vols.) cost 5s., for example, while The Chase sold for 8d. in the Miniature Library; the Cabinet Edition offered Pope’s Poetical Works for 10s., the Miniature Library his Poems for 4s. If Poetical Works were too lofty, costly, or demanding for some readers, so were Poems for others. George Nicholson went about as far down-market as one could go and still retain some of the key bibliographical traits of the multivolume series. His Literary Miscellany, begun in Manchester in 1794 and later produced from Poughnill near Ludlow, held to two of Bell’s standard features in a minimalist way, squeezing a portrait onto the recto of his title-pages and a condensed biography on the verso, as pictured with Lyttelton in Fig. 9.2. In this 1797 edition, nineteen of Lyttelton’s poems are printed on forty-six pages with nine separate sequences of pagination. As Nicholson explained, ‘each piece, even in the same pamphlet’ was ‘generally printed in a detached form’ so that readers, could select ‘particular favourite pieces, for the Parlour, the Closet, the Carriage, or the Shade, unencumbered with such as may be disapproved’. The problem with ‘compilations designed for Pocket Companions’ was that they did not ‘suit all readers; for either nothing is found congenial to the taste, or the compositions admired are accompanied with many unworthy of notice’. With Nicholson’s approach to the poems (‘some abridged, and the best printed entire’), readers could put together their own ‘neat pocket volumes’, suited to their various ‘ages, capacities, dispositions, and situations’. Further down-market still, Nicholson printed short poems or excerpts on cards measuring 12 × 7.8 cm: ‘Those printed on one side, sell at one penny each; on both sides, three half-pence. Neat cases at threepence each, to hold twenty ﬁve cards’. 60 A complete set ﬁlled ﬁve cases. When Nicholson reprinted Lyttelton’s poems in 1800, he included a fourteen-page life and paginated the poems consecutively. A person maturing with Nicholson, so to speak, could have graduated from buying Lyttelton’s ‘Advice to a Lady’ on card no. 113, to owning a few pamphlets with a title-page from the 1797 batch, to purchasing a new 64-page edition in 1800. Moving up the consumer ladder like this was the likely future of one Jane Scott as she practiced writing ‘Book’ on one of Nicholson’s cards (Fig. 9.3). 61 59 Advertisements in The Poetical Works of Shenstone (London, 1804) and The Poetical Works of John Milton (London, 1808). 60 ‘In Pamphlets’ and ‘On Cards’, advertisements on a copy of Poems by William Collins (1796) in wrappers (Beinecke, shelfmark Poems 56), no. 25 in The Literary Miscellany, priced at 3d. Nicholson always had a London distributor; at this time, in summer 1796, it was ‘T. Knott, 47, Lombard-street, and Champante & Whitrow, Jewry-street, Aldgate’. The Library Company of Philadelphia has a good set of The Literary Miscellany in 13 vols. (O Eng Lit Misc 1812). 61 Incomplete set, twenty-six cards in a ‘neat case’ with ‘The Literary Miscallany on Cards’ and Nicholson’s imprint (‘Bradforth Printed and sold by George Nicholson, and sold also by T. Knott,

A Body of Standard English Poetry

291

Figure 9.2. Title-page, recto and verso, of Nicholson’s edition of Lyttelton. A portrait and prefatory life, features made virtually obligatory by the success of Bell’s edition, are here delivered within the most limited possible compass.

Notwithstanding competition from Cooke, and later from Sharpe, Bell’s edition retained its market share. His stock changed hands again, however, apparently in a fraudulent manner. In Bell’s Weekly Messenger of 1 May 1796, Bell decried the events of 1795 that left his property in the possession of George Cawthorn. Having formed a partnership with Cawthorn in the British Theatre, Bell found him to be a ‘KITE, . . . hovering round me, until an opportunity should offer when he might pounce upon, and destroy me as his unsuspecting prey’. Cawthorn agreed to purchase Bell’s premises, allegedly ‘under a pretence of serving’ him, but before the bargain had been concluded ‘took premature and violent Possession of them’, including most of the ‘Property and Books then on the Premises’. 62 No. 47, Lombard-street, London, and by all other Booksellers’) on one side, and on the other side ‘CLASS’, with ‘1’ penned in to designate the school level, and signed by Mary Scott, evidently Jane’s older sister. 62 Facsimile in Morison, John Bell, between pages 50 and 51.

292

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Figure 9.3. Anti-slavery excerpt on Nicholson’s cards, with child’s writing on verso. For young Jane Scott, initiation into the culture of books began with tiny steps. Having practiced writing her full name on another card in this set of The Literary Miscellany (which belonged to her older sister), she wrote her ﬁrst name again on the back of an excerpt from Cowper’s The Task, and tried out her best cursives on the word ‘Book’.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

293

Parts of Bell’s edition were out of stock, inevitably, owing to the sale of individual volumes. ‘[W]e seldom see it entire’, Anderson observed, ‘but meet with its contents wandering separately, and disjointed in every catalogue’. 63 Martin and Bain had not redressed any of these depletions, but rather held certain volumes in reserve for sale only with full sets. Cawthorn resumed Bell’s practice of replenishing the stock as needed, reprinting at least ﬁfty-nine volumes from 1796 through 1803 (Table 9.4). For the sake of uniformity he followed the Apollo Press house style, though under an evolving imprint. Laying claim to Bell’s mantle ever more authoritatively, he published ﬁrst under the name of the British Library, revived the epithet of the Apollo Press, even using black letter, and ﬁnally identiﬁed himself as ‘Bookseller & Printer to Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales’. Priced much as they were twenty years earlier, 109-volume sets now sold from £8 ‘neatly sewed and titled’ up to £31 10s. ‘bound superbly in Morocco’. Having come into possession of Martin and Bain’s stock as well, Cawthorn offered their volumes of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid—‘three of the most celebrated Poets of Antiquity’—as ‘The Continuation of the British Poets’. 64 Meanwhile he added two more volumes to Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry (vols. xvii– xviii, 1796–7), billing it as ‘a Supplement to the Poets of Great Britain’. Bell’s product was deemed so valuable that thirty-three bookselling ﬁrms joined forces to republish the whole collection in 1807 (see Table 6.3). Because Samuel Bagster’s name stood out in capital letters at the bottom of the imprint, the set was called ‘Bagster’s edition’. 65 Known as ‘Bible Bagster’ for his polyglot editions of the Bible, Bagster regretted that the ﬁrst sale on his opening day in business in April 1794 had not gone to a friend of his father’s, who planned to buy a family Bible as his very ﬁrst customer. That distinction went to a person who entered the shop before Bagster ate breakfast, and spent £18 on various titles, beginning with a set of Johnson’s Poets. ‘Truly joyful and hopeful were my feelings on this early sale’, the bookseller remembered, as he adjusted his window display where the poetry had been; ‘it was regarded as an omen of future success’. 66 It was an omen, too, that he would remember the commercial potential of this other, non-biblical canon. Bagster and his partners, setting four printers to work at once, enlarged the collection from 109 to 124 volumes (Table 9.5). To save customers money on binding, they marketed the set in two forms, taking 63 ‘Preface’, 2. Complete sets of Bell’s edn. are actually pretty easy to locate in libraries; sets of Cooke are the rare ones. 64 ‘New Publications Printed for George Cawthorn, No. 132, Strand’, The Poetical Works of Thomas Tickell (London, 1801), sig. P6r–v . In The London Catalogue of Books, with their Sizes and Prices (London, 1799), Bell’s Poets in 109 vols. was listed (p. 12) at £8 8s., and its ‘Continuation, 20 vol.’ (i.e. the translations of Martin and Bain) at £1 10s. 65 William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, revised and enlarged by Henry G. Bohn (6 vols. London, 1869), iv. 1898. 66 Samuel Bagster of London 1772–1851: An Autobiography (London, 1972), 123. Bagster mistakenly recalls it having been a 45-volume set.

294

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Table 9.4. Cawthorn’s reprints of Bell’s Poets of Great Britain LONDON: / Printed for, and under the Direction of, / G. CAWTHORN, British Library, STRAND. / M DCC XCVI. 1796 Collins/Hammond 1796 Fenton

1796 Hughes 1–2 1796 Pope 1–4

1796 Young 1–2

LONDON: / PRINTED FOR, AND UNDER THE DIRECTION OF, / G. CAWTHORN, BRITISH LIBRARY, STRAND. / [year]. 1797 Butler 1 1797 Cunningham 1797 Gay 1–3 1797 Moore

1797 Prior 1–2 1797 Roscommon 1797 Somerville 1–2 1799 Donne 1–2

1799 Milton 2 1799 A. Philips/Smith 1799 J. Philips

LONDON: / PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY / G. CAWTHORN, BRITISH LIBRARY, STRAND. / 1800. 1800 Donne 3

1800 Gray/R. West

1800 Mallet

LONDON: / PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY / G. CAWTHORN, NO. 132, STRAND. / [year]. 1800 Thomson 2 1801 Buckingham

1801 Butler 2 1801 Rowe

LONDON: / PRINTED at the APOLLO PRESS, / BY GEORGE CAWTHORN, NO. 132, STRAND. / BOOKSELLER & PRINTER TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS / THE PRINCESS OF WALES. / 1801. 1801 Thomson 1 LONDON: / PRINTED AT THE Apollo Press, / BY GEORGE CAWTHORN, NO. 132, STRAND. / BOOKSELLER AND PRINTER TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS / THE PRINCESS OF WALES. / [year]. 1801 Butler 3 1801 Tickell 1801 G. West 1801 Dryden 1

1802 Dryden 2–3 1802 Broome 1802 Fenton 1802 Watts 1–7

1803 Addison 1803 Collins/Hammond 1803 Young 1–4

Notes: As in Table 6.4, where the changing imprints were also of interest, the reprints here are grouped according to the various imprints used by Cawthorn, which record stages in and shifting conceptions of his career.

the trouble to print different series title-pages listing different contents, one headed The Poets of Great Britain, in One Hundred and Twenty-Four Volumes, the other The Poets of Great Britain, in Sixty-One Double Volumes. 67 Fifty-four poets were included. Three poets from Bell’s original roster were abandoned (Donne, Hughes, and Shefﬁeld), while seven newcomers were added, arriving by way of 67 Two of the volumes in the double-bound set were triple-bound: vol. lii had Dyer, G. West, and Lyttelton (otherwise vols. ciii–cv); vol. lx had Armstrong, Goldsmith, and Johnson (vols. cxix, cxxi–cxxii). Robert Browning’s copy, now in the Cleveland Public Library, was double-bound.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

295

Table 9.5. Bagster’s Edition: The Poets of Great Britain packaged in two forms Poets

Singlebound

Doublebound

Poets

Singlebound

Doublebound

Chaucer Spenser Waller Milton Butler Denham Cowley Dryden Roscommon Rochester King Prior Lansdowne Pomfret Swift Congreve Addison Rowe Watts J. Philips/Smith Parnell Garth Fenton Tickell Somerville

1–14 15–23 24–5 26–9 30–2 33 34–6 37–46 47 48 49–50 51–3 54 55 56–9 60 61–2 63–6 67–9 70 71–2 73 74 75 76–7

1–7 8–12a 13 14–15 16–17a 12b 18–19a 20–4 17b 19b 25 26–7a 27b 28a 29–30 28b 31 32–3 34–5a 35b 36 37a 37b 46b 38

Pope Gay Broome Pitt/Green Young Savage Thomson A. Philips Dyer G. West Lyttelton Hammond/Collins E. Moore Shenstone Mallet Gray/R. West Akenside Cunningham Churchill Falconer Armstrong Jenyns Goldsmith Johnson Jones

78–88 89–91 92 93 94–7 98–9 100–1 102 103 104 105 106 107 108–9 110 111 112–13 114 115–17 118 119 120 121 122 123–4

39–44a 45–6a 47a 47b 48–9 50 51 44b 52a 52b 52c 53a 53b 54 55a 55b 56 59b 57–8a 59a 60a 58b 60b 60c 61

Note: The letters a, b, and c indicate relative position where two or three poets are bound in one volume.

The Works of the English Poets (Rochester from the 1779 edition, and Falconer, Goldsmith, Green, Jenyns, Johnson, and Jones from the 1790 edition). This was no surprise, since shareholders in the 1790 edition (or their successors) made up almost half the proprietors of Bagster’s edition. In total, eleven volumes were dropped from Bell’s edition, but twenty-six were added. Among the volumes winnowed from the original collection were four of Watts (from the original seven) and one of Cowley (from four), while the volumes brought in included Dryden’s Virgil, Pope’s Homer, Rowe’s Lucan, Addison’s Ovid, and a volume of commentaries on Spenser. 68 The intervening series of Anderson, Cooke, and Sharpe left little if any trace on the collection. It was still recognizably Bell’s product, though modiﬁed by 68 ‘The Psalms of David’ and ‘Hymns and Spiritual Songs’ were dropped from the poems of Watts. ‘Of Plants’ was dropped from the poems of Cowley, along with Nahum Tate’s dictum that ‘every Englishman, as far as was possible, should be master of their beloved Cowley entire’ (The Poetical Works of Abraham Cowley (3 vols. Edinburgh, 1777), iii, p. xi).

296

A Body of Standard English Poetry

some ‘Johnsonian’ features, like the seven new poets and the Greek and Roman classics in translation. A more dramatic modiﬁcation was the inﬂux of prefaces from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, proclaimed on nearly every title-page (e.g. The Poetical Works of Edmund Waller. With the Life of the Author, by Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.) and on the ﬁrst page of most prefaces (e.g. ‘The Life of Waller. By Samuel Johnson, L.L.D.’). For poets whose lives Johnson had not written (Armstrong, Churchill, Cunningham, Falconer, Goldsmith, Green, Jenyns, Johnson, and Moore), Bagster reprinted Reed’s brief headnotes from the 1790 edition. Several were falsely attributed to Johnson, either because the compositors knew no better, or because blocks of type were left standing from the printing of one volume to the next. On the title-page and at the top of the preface Johnson was wrongly credited with the lives of Armstrong, Churchill, Falconer, and Moore. For Cunningham an incorrect attribution appeared on the title-page, though not in the heading of the preface; for Green the error was just the reverse. 69 Substantial prefatory lives (styled ‘Essays’) now appeared for Chaucer, Spenser, and Jones. And, as if to atone for Bell’s unauthorized use of Tyrwhitt’s edition of The Canterbury Tales, and to annul his angry charges in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1783, the anonymous editor pledged ﬁdelity to ‘Mr. Tyrwhitt’s evident intensions’. By honoring the Chaucerian’s most ‘matured reﬂections’, the editor warranted that the text and notes would ‘essentially promote the design of Mr. Tyrwhitt’. 70 Bell’s copperplates were put to use, some of them altered and many in need of refurbishment. An odd sort of economy was practiced in relation to two of the poets dropped from the collection: the plates designed for the ﬁrst two volumes of Donne were reassigned to Dryden (vol. ii) and Moore; the one made for Shefﬁeld was given to Goldsmith. Four other illustrations were reassigned in this manner: Butler 3 (to Pope 3), Cowley 3 (to Dryden’s Juvenal), Watts 1 (to Falconer), and Watts 2 (to Jenyns) (Fig. 9.4). To accommodate the transfer of Bell’s plates into Bagster’s poets, the line in each vignette naming ‘Bell’s Edition’ was rubbed out, an erasure that made the plates suitable for other editions too, as an extraillustrated set of Sharpe’s edition proves. The illustrations for the ‘Continuation’ of Bell’s edition were reused for the translations of Pope and Dryden, with Bagster’s publication data replacing what had been engraved at the bottom for Martin and Bain. Like Bell and Cooke before him, Bagster sold proof impressions of the plates on large paper, and ﬁtted up sets of the volumes in boxes for travel. 71 69 For lives written ‘by Samuel Johnson, LL.D.’ to have replaced Bell’s prefaces made good sense. For the sketchy 1790 headnotes to have been substituted for Bell’s more adequate accounts of Armstrong, Churchill, Cunningham, and Moore, however, was a loss. 70 ‘General Advertisement to the Present Edition of Chaucer’s Poems’, The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (14 vols. London, 1807), i, pp. ix–xi. 71 The Boston Public Library has a set of proof impressions of the plates. Sir Thomas Dalrymple Hesketh, the 3rd baronet (1777–1842) owned a set of the collection in boxes; see Books and Manuscripts from the Fermor-Hesketh Library at Easton Neston, Sotheby’s Sale L09223 (15 Dec. 1999), item 186. Bagster’s edn. is pictured on p. 67 and in the frontispiece.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

297

Figure 9.4. One of Bell’s vignettes for Cowley, later reassigned to Dryden’s Juvenal. When Bell’s plates were reused for Bagster’s edition, three of the four lines from Bell’s original title at the top were (as here) usually rubbed out.

PERPETUATING EDITIONS IN THIS MANNER All but one of the thirty-three proprietors who published Bagster’s Poets entered into the conger of forty-nine ﬁrms (see Table 6.3) that backed an even larger project, already under way, the third London edition of The Works of the English Poets (1810). Naturally the partners did not want to pit one pocket edition against another; looking for an ampler model, but not the unworkable octavos employed in Aikin’s experiment, they revisited the format of Anderson’s edition, a royal octavo printed in double columns. Like Mundell and Son, they gave control over the project to an editor responsible for biographical prefaces and a general introduction, and by whose name the edition would be known. Alexander Chalmers, like Anderson and Aikin, had a background in medicine. In 1777 a surgeon’s post awaited him in the West Indies, but a change of heart

298

A Body of Standard English Poetry

induced him to venture instead to London, where, as John Bowyer Nichols noted, ‘no man ever edited so many works for the Booksellers’. His projects included editions of Fielding (10 vols. 1806), Johnson (12 vols. 1806), Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (12 vols. 1807), and two multi-volume projects, The British Essayists (45 vols. 1803) and later the General Biographical Dictionary (32 vols. 1812–17). Reﬂecting on ‘the ofﬁce of Editor’ during his work on the essayists, Chalmers stipulated that the editor’s task, once limited to collating texts with ‘original folios’ or ‘the best editions in other forms’, now mandated a level of critical and biographical engagement, a consideration of ‘the history of each work, and of the lives of such of the writers as were less generally known’. 72 By this view, the editorial approach of Thomas Park to Sharpe’s edition—absent the prefaces that never materialized—was outmoded, however carefully he might have ‘collated’ the texts. In Chalmers’s mind, curatorial attention to text had to be followed by an equally careful explication of context. Engaged on 8 August 1805 to prepare ‘a new edition of Johnson’ Poets’, Chalmers took on a ‘great labour’, for the canon he chose was as vast as Anderson’s 73 (Table 9.6). In fact, Anderson’s edition was indispensable as a model. Its piecemeal expansion from six to fourteen volumes in several stages stood in for years of market research; Chalmers and the London proprietors could simply use it as a precedent for their edition in scale and format. Conﬁdent in this approach, they adopted the same sales policy as with previous editions of The Works of the English Poets, selling their twenty-one volumes only in sets for £25. The collection included 129 poets, plus translations of the ancient classics. The publishers did not deviate from chronology to please subscribers, as Anderson had, to ensure that each volume in the series opened on the works of an important poet; instead they reprinted the core body of poets in the order established in 1779 and 1790, indifferent as to whether a volume opened with a major poet, a minor poet, or a continuation of poems from the preceding volume. Chalmers’s labors culminated in a general ‘Preface’ to the collection, one much shorter than, and perhaps unintelligible without reference to, its counterpart in Anderson’s edition. ‘It has ever been the practice in our literary tactics, since Editorship has been in fashion’, it was later said, ‘for the learned commentator to reserve himself for the chief display of his critical powers, in the shape of “ESSAY,” “INQUIRY,” or “DISSERTATION,” until after his volumes are printed’. 74 Anderson and Aikin had contributed to making editorship ‘fashionable’ in publications of this nature, along with the requisite essay, although in Aikin’s case, his essay written in advance of the series rather than in retrospect, he could only point in the direction the project was headed, and had no inkling that it would founder. Chalmers was indebted to the thoroughness and authority of Anderson for the 72 ‘Advertisement to the First Edition’, dated Jan. 1803, The British Essayists; with Prefaces, Historical and Biographical, by A. Chalmers, F.S.A. (45 vols. London, 1817), i, pp. [i]–ii. 73 Fleeman, Bibliography, ii. 1411. 74 Notice in Sharpe’s British Prose Writers (London, 1821). See Ch. 10 n. 1.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

299

Table 9.6. The ‘standard English poets’: a ﬁfty-year overview Chalmers’s Edition

Previous collections

i Geoffrey Chaucer

Be

N

A

ii John Gower John Skelton Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Sir Thomas Wyatt George Gascoigne George Turberville

A A A A

iii Edmund Spenser Samuel Daniel

Bo

Be

A A

iv Michael Drayton William Warner

Ba

A A

v William Shakespeare Sir John Davies John Donne Joseph Hall Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling Benjamin Jonson Richard Corbet Thomas Carew William Drummond of Hawthornden

W

A A A A A

Be

Co

A A A

vi Sir John Beaumont Giles Fletcher Phineas Fletcher Francis Beaumont William Browne Sir William Davenant William Habington Sir John Suckling William Cartwright Richard Crashaw Sir Edward Sherburne Alexander Brome Charles Cotton vii Abraham Cowley Sir John Denham John Milton

Ba

A A A A A A

A

F F

Cr Cr Cr

Bo

Be Be Be

N N N

W W

R R R

A A A

M M M

Co Co Co

S S

Ba Ba Ba (cont.)

300

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Table 9.6. (Continued) Chalmers’s Edition viii Edmund Waller Samuel Butler John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon Thomas Otway John Pomfret Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset George Stepney John Philips William Walsh John Dryden ix John Dryden (cont’d) Edmund Smith Richard Duke William King Thomas Sprat Charles Montague, 1st Earl of Halifax Thomas Parnell Sir Samuel Garth Nicholas Rowe Joseph Addison x John Hughes John Shefﬁeld, 1st Duke of Buckingham Matthew Prior William Congreve Sir Richard Blackmore Elijah Fenton John Gay xi George Granville, Baron Lansdowne Thomas Yalden Thomas Tickell James Hammond William Somerville Richard Savage Jonathan Swift

Previous collections

F F

Cr Cr

Bo

Be Be

Be Bo

Be

Be F

Cr

Bo

Be

Be Be

F F

Cr Cr

F

Cr

Bo

F

Cr

Bo

F

Cr

Bo

Cr

F

Cr

Bo

R R

A A

M M

Co Co

N

R

A

M

Co

N N N

R R R

A A A

M M M

Co Co

R R R R R

A A A A A

M M M M M

R R R R

A A A A

M M M M

Co

R R R R R

A A A A A

M M M M M

Co Co Co Co

R

A

M

Co

R R R R R R

A A A A A A

M M M

Co Co Co Co Co Co

R R R R R R R

A A A A A A A

M M M M M M M

N N N N N

N N N N N

Be

N

Be Be Be

N N N N N N

Be Be

Be Be Be Be Be

W

W

W W

N N N N

Be Be Be Be

Be

F

N N

N N N N N N N

W W W

W W

W

W W W W

M M

S S

Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba

Co Co Co Co

S

Ba

S

Ba

Ba Ba

S S S

S

S

Co Co Co Co Co Co

Ba Ba Ba Ba

Ba Ba Ba Ba

Ba S S S S S

Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba

A Body of Standard English Poetry

301

Table 9.6. (Continued) Chalmers’s Edition xii William Broome Alexander Pope Christopher Pitt James Thomson xiii Isaac Watts Ambrose Philips Gilbert West William Collins John Dyer William Shenstone Edward Young xiv David Mallet Mark Akenside Thomas Gray George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton Edward Moore James Cawthorn Charles Churchill William Falconer John Cunningham James Grainger Samuel Boyse xv William Thompson Robert Blair Robert Lloyd Matthew Green John Byrom Robert Dodsley Thomas Chatterton John Gilbert Cooper Tobias Smollett William Hamilton of Bangour xvi Christopher Smart William Wilkie Paul Whitehead Francis Fawkes Edward Lovibond Walter Harte John Langhorne

Previous collections

Bo

Be Be Be Be

N N N N N N N N N N N

F

Cr

Bo

F

Cr

F

Cr

F F

Cr Cr

Bo Bo

Be Be Be Be Be Be Be

F F

Cr Cr

Bo Bo

Be Be Be

N N N

F

Cr

Bo

Be Be

N

Be Be

R R R R

A A A A

W W

R R R R R R R

A A A A A A A

W W

R R R R R R R R R

W W

W

W W W W

R R

M M

Co Co

S

M

Co

S

Co

S

M M M M

Co Co Co Co Co

S S S S

Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba

A A A

M M M

Co Co Co

S S S

Ba Ba Ba

A A A A A A A A

M M M M M

Co Co

S S

Ba Ba

Co Co Co

S S S

Ba Ba Ba

A A A A A A A A

Be

Be

[S] S S M S

R

R

A A A

Ba

Co

Co

A A A A

Ba Ba Ba Ba

S S

S Co

S (cont.)

302

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Table 9.6. (Continued) Chalmers’s Edition

Previous collections

Oliver Goldsmith John Armstrong Samuel Johnson xvii Richard Glover William Whitehead Richard Jago Henry Brooke John Scott William Julius Mickle Soame Jenyns xviii Nathaniel Cotton John Logan Thomas Warton Joseph Warton Thomas Blacklock Richard Owen Cambridge William Mason Sir William Jones James Beattie William Cowper xix (Pope) Homer, Iliad (Pope) Homer, Odyssey (Dryden) Virgil, Æneis (Dryden) Virgil, Pastorals (Dryden) Virgil, Georgics (Dryden) Juvenal (Dryden) Persius (Pitt) Virgil, Æneid (Pitt) Vida, Art of Poetry (Francis) Horace xx (Rowe) Lucan (Grainger) Tibullus, Sulpicia (Fawkes) Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Coluthus, Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, Moschus, Musæus Ovid, Metamorphoses (Lewis) Statius (Cooke) Hesiod

W Cr

F

Bo

Be

R R R

A A A

Co Co Co

S S S

A A A

Co

S

R

Cr

R W

Ba Ba Ba

S

A A A

Co

A A A

Co

S S S

Ba

S S S S

A F S S S∗

Ba

Co Co Co Co Co

S S S S S S S

Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba

Co

S

Co

S S S S S S S S S

Cr

F F F F F

Cr Cr Cr Cr Cr

Bo Bo Bo Bo Bo

MB MB MB MB MB MB

N N N N N N N

W W W W W

N

R R R R R R R R R

W MB

MB

N

R

A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A

M M M M M M M

S

A Body of Standard English Poetry

303

Table 9.6. (Continued) Chalmers’s Edition

Previous collections

xxi (Hoole) Ariosto (Hoole) Tasso (Mickle) Lusiad Omitted by Chalmers William Richardson Richard West John Brown James Graeme Aaron Hill William Pattison Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst Cuthbert Shaw Michael Bruce Thomas Penrose John Bampfylde Robert Burns Thomas Day Richard Glynn Henry Headley Francis Hoyland Robert Lovell Sir John Henry Moore Samuel Marsh Oram Beilby Porteus Thomas Russell Ovid, Epistles, Art of Love (G. West) Pindar (Creech) Lucretius Homer, Hymns, Odes, Epigrams, (Polwhele) Tyrtæus

F Be

A A A A A A A A A

MB MB MB

N

R

A A A A A

Ba

Co

S S S S S S S S S S S S [S] S

S S S S

Notes: A = Anderson, Ba = Bagster, Be = Bell, Bo = Boyle, Co = Cooke, Cr = Creech, F = Foulis, M = Moore, MB = Martin & Bain, N = Nichols, R = Reed, S = Sharpe, W = Wenman. Nichols and Reed respectively supervised the 1779–81 and 1790 edns. of The Works of the English Poets. Underlined initials represent an unrealized intention to include a poet or work. Wenman and Cooke alluded to extensive schemes for incorporating translations, but only the authors they explicitly mentioned are listed, none of whom materialized. For a full list of the poets Anderson wanted to include, see Ch. 7. A bracketed ‘S’ shows where Sharpe added single poems to expand unacceptably thin volumes, and the asterisk next to the ‘S’ for Cowper signals that the poet was appended to Sharpe’s series after the fact. Since Martin & Bain designed their translations expressly as a continuation of Bell’s edn., ‘MB’ is recorded in Bell’s column. Only one Homeric hymn was included by Anderson; for Pindar, he added six odes translated by H. J. Pye that West had passed over. Anderson’s version of Coluthus was translated by ‘Mr. C—’, and Sharpe’s versions of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus were done by Richard Polwhele.

304

A Body of Standard English Poetry

prerogative he assumed in his ‘Preface’: he took it for granted that readers were familiar with the multi-volume projects Anderson had surveyed, along with the issues involved in their critical reception, and accordingly dispensed with any general characterization or historical overview of such publishing ventures. At the outset Chalmers struck a defensive note: ‘The Preface to a collection like the present, necessarily involves an attempt to apologize for its defects, and from this some degree of egotism is inseparable. Candour, however, will not fail to make liberal allowance for the many difﬁculties which surround an undertaking of this magnitude.’ What this opening generalization masks is the fact that, as far as editorial function was concerned, anonymity, not egotism, had been the rule for poetry collections until the mid-1790s. The egotism he cited was of recent vintage, inseparable from the editorial task and necessitating an apologia only after editorship had become the norm. While phrases such as ‘a collection like the present’ and ‘an undertaking of this magnitude’ could be construed as nods to editions only like Anderson’s or his own, Chalmers gestured more broadly: ‘The fate of the few collections which have been made of this kind readily pointed out that the objections of critics would be directed, either against redundancy, or defect, and it is as likely that I shall be blamed for admitting too many, as for admitting too few, into a work professing to be a B ODY OF THE S TANDARD E NGLISH P OETS.’ 75 The contradictory complaints anticipated by Chalmers echo a criticism lodged by Robert Southey not long before: The collections of our Poets are either too scanty, or too copious. They reject so many, that we know not why half whom they retain should be admitted; they admit so many, that we know not why any should be rejected. There is a want of judgment in giving Bavius a place; but when a place has been awarded him, there is a want of justice in not giving Mævius one also.

Horace’s sentence regarding middling poets ‘is disproved by daily experience; whatever the Gods may do, certainly the publick and the booksellers tolerate them’. 76 What booksellers tolerated, of course, was what they thought would sell. As Chalmers characterized his task, he was ‘left at liberty, generally, to form a collection of the more ancient poets to precede Dr. Johnson’s series, and of the more recent authors to follow it’ (vi). Although the earlier collection had been faulted for including authors with little appeal—‘an objection’, he added, ‘which perhaps gains strength by time’—Chalmers underscored that Johnson had not chosen them, but rather the booksellers, who unquestionably were ‘the best judges of vendible poetry’. Implicitly they still were, and whether Chalmers agreed with the decision or not, the canon preﬁgured by the 1779 and 1790 75 76

‘Preface’, The Works of the English Poets (21 vols. London, 1810), i, p. [v]. Specimens of the Later English Poets, i, p. vi.

A Body of Standard English Poetry

305

Works of the English Poets was left intact—naturally so, it might be said, given the direct line of descent from the 1779 edition to the 1810 edition. Sharpe’s edition had deviated from categorical deference, but nevertheless reprinted Johnson’s prefaces in their entirety out of respect for ‘the father of our Poetical Criticism’, a sentiment endorsed by Chalmers: ‘Dr. Johnson’s Lives, after all the objections that have been offered, must ever be the foundation of English poetical biography. To substitute any thing in their room would be an attempt, by the ablest, hazardous, and by inferior pens, ridiculous’ (ix). Chalmers did, however, leave out twenty-one poets that had appeared in previous collections, mostly in the editions of Anderson and Sharpe. Around this central canon, then, Chalmers was ‘left at liberty, generally, to form a collection’. Generally? What were the constraints? How did the marketplace limit his horizons? To Chalmers there were ‘perhaps but two rules by which a collector of English poetry can be guided. He is either to give a series of the BEST poets, or of the most POPULAR , but simple as these rules may appear, they are not without difﬁculties, for whichever we choose to rely upon, the other will be found to interfere’ (v–vi). The question ‘who are the best poets?’ did not lend itself to absolute judgments; it was ‘perpetually recurring’, forcing an editor to wrestle with ‘all the disputed points in poetical criticism’ and the vagaries of individual taste. Popularity was no less problematic, ‘a criterion of uncertain duration, sometimes depending on circumstances very remote from taste or judgment’. As neither criterion alone sufﬁced, Chalmers steered by ‘a mixed rule’. When selecting from the ‘vast masses of poetical writers’ who had published since 1779, popularity appeared to be the ‘necessary and decisive criterion’ (vi). As to poets of bygone eras, on the other hand, popularity was so far ‘out of the question’ that an editor could not ‘by any powers of praise or criticism . . . give them that degree of favour with the public which they once enjoyed’ (vii). One tactic regarding the early poetry, it occurred to Chalmers, would have been ‘to execute more amply by ENTIRE WORKS’ the plan laid down ‘so excellently by Mr. Ellis’ in Specimens of the Early English Poets. Yet it was vain, he recognized, ‘to attempt to revive authors whom no person would read, and to ﬁll thousands of pages with discarded prolixities, merely because they characterized the dulness of the age in which they were tolerated’. For pre-Miltonic verse, then, his object was to give a ‘series as might tend, not only to revive genuine and undeservedly neglected poetry, but to illustrate the progress and history of the art from the age of Chaucer to that of Cowley’ (vii). He hoped thereby to preserve an ‘outline of the principal revolutions of our poetical taste and style’ (viii). Thus the common complaints against multi-volume projects, Chalmers concluded, had been fundamentally misconceived: ‘the question of too much or too little in these collections, does not depend on the previous consideration of the merit of the poet, so frequently as on the relative rank which he seems destined to hold among his brethren’. Relative rank, not abstract merit nor

306

A Body of Standard English Poetry

popular reception, became the crucial consideration: ‘Some may be admissible in a series, who would make but an indifferent ﬁgure by themselves’ (v). Some formerly popular writers, he noted, were no longer read, and ‘others, who seemed on the brink of oblivion, if not sunk in its abyss, [had] by some accountable or unaccountable revival, become the standing favourites of the day’ (vi). Given the instability of popular tastes and critical judgment, Chalmers came to believe that a collection should prompt continual re-evaluation; ‘it is not improbable’, he explained, ‘that by perpetuating editions in this manner, the fame that has sunk in one revolution of taste may be revived in another’ (v). In short, the value of a canon—its potential through time—could be realized only ‘by perpetuating editions in this manner’. Chalmers thus arrived at something akin to the theoretical insight of Guillory mentioned in Chapter 1, gleaning that the institutional context of his editorial project mattered more than the imprimatur of his individual judgments. Precisely because of Anderson’s achievement, Chalmers saw himself as inheriting the process, exercising his judgment within (to revisit Guillory’s words) ‘a certain institutional context, a setting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers’. On account of this understanding, his epithets for the project were less self-congratulatory than Anderson’s, words like ‘catalogue’ or ‘collection’, but most often ‘series’. A glimpse at Southey’s Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807) helps to put the editorial challenge into perspective. Intending his work to complement George Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790), Southey undertook ‘to exhibit specimens of every writer, whose verses appear in a substantive form, and ﬁnd their place upon the shelves of the collector’. His task, it might be thought, would have differed substantially from that of an editor examining earlier poetry. ‘Down to the Restoration’, Southey reﬂected, ‘it is to be wished, that every Poet, however unworthy of the name, should be preserved. In the worst volume of elder date, the historian may ﬁnd something to assist, or direct his enquiries; the antiquarian something to elucidate what requires illustration; the philologist something to insert in the margin of his dictionary.’ The Restoration was ‘the great epoch in our annals, both civil and literary’, and Britons looked back on it as Romans under the empire remembered ‘the age of the Republick’. Yet, for different reasons, Southey treated the works of ‘later’ poets with the same regard, deciding to preserve ‘the reprobate, as well as the elect’. Because mediocre poets ‘characterise their age more truly’, they provide a better estimate of public taste, which suited his purpose: ‘My business was to collect specimens as for a hortus siccus; not to cull ﬂowers as for an anthology’. No living poets were included in this ‘dried garden’ of 223 poets, the most recent, Cowper and Joseph Warton, both having died in 1800. ‘Of my contemporaries I am not required to speak’, Southey explained; ‘they do not fall within the limits of this series; there are many among them of whom it would have given me pleasure to speak in

A Body of Standard English Poetry

307

praise, and this I say, that silence may not be interpreted as implying censure’. 77 His silence on this score, however, and insouciance on the question of inclusion versus exclusion, may be interpreted as two deft editorial dodges. David Irving, by contrast, tried earnestly to grapple with the matter of current critical reputation. Contemplating the merit of Falconer’s Shipwreck, which the public ‘has always been accustomed to regard with a favourable eye’, he cautiously offered that such ‘uniform popularity . . . may be adduced as a pretty strong proof of its intrinsic merit’. Whereas many factors might ‘confer a short-lived reputation upon poets of inferior genius’, that reputation would ‘very speedily decay’ if it did not ‘rest upon a true foundation’. As if sensing the circularity of his appeal, he stated that ‘[t]he scrutinizing impartiality of mankind must at length display itself ’. Only the long view could be trusted. ‘Shefﬁeld, Montague, and Granville, were once extolled as the legitimate sons of Apollo’, he recalled, ‘but indignant time has erazed their names from the rolls of fame.’ 78 Despite T. F. Dibdin’s characterization of Chalmers’s edition as ‘an invaluable Collection of legitimate English poetry’, Chalmers eschewed the distinction between the legitimate and the illegitimate, between the elect and the reprobate. 79 Instead of thinking in terms of ‘the legitimate sons of Apollo’, he conjured up the metaphor of ‘a B ODY OF THE S TANDARD E NGLISH P OETS’—not the B ODY but a B ODY. Although ‘standard’ is a weighty adjective—deﬁned by Johnson as ‘That which is of undoubted authority; that which is the test of other things of the same kind’—Chalmers’s indeﬁnite article gave the phrase a tentative cast, signaling the provisional nature of his judgments. Something of this critical subtlety, this alertness to relative degrees of stature, was anticipated by the editor who characterized Cowper as having secured ‘no mean rank among the standard poets of his country’. The idea of a ‘standard’ literature gained ground during the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century. Chalmers and the proprietors of The British Essayists, tickled with the ‘rapid sale’ of the collection, were happy to ﬁnd it ‘generally considered as a standard in every juvenile library’. 80 The idea grew more explicit in Walker’s British Classics, a mixed-genre series published ‘periodically, one, or perhaps two, appearing each month’, so that purchases could ‘be continued in a regular series; in which case they will form a complete Library of standard English Literature’. Summing up the features that had come to deﬁne a well-accoutred pocket series, each volume contained ‘an entire Work, a Life of the Author, or a Critical Essay’, and was ‘embellished with a Vignette Title and Frontispiece, designed and engraven by the best artists, from the most interesting and characteristic 77

Specimens of the Later English Poets, i, pp. iv, vii–viii, xxxii. ‘The Life of William Falconer’, Lives of Scotish Authors, 78. Poor Shefﬁeld, Montague, and Granville: perennial examples of worthless poets. 79 The Library Companion, 747–9. 80 ‘Advertisement to the Second Edition’, dated Dec. 1807, The British Essayists, i, p. [v]. 78

308

A Body of Standard English Poetry

Subjects’. In such dress, how standard were, say, the poems of Peter Pindar? ‘His works, in this collected form, have passed through several editions, and continue to be read with avidity’, remarked the editor, but conceded that ‘a more critical investigation of his rank as a poet, necessarily belongs to some distant period’. 81

81 John Wolcot, The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq. (4 vols. London, 1809). The promotional copy is quoted from the advertisement for ‘Walker’s British Classics’ (iv, sig. Y6r–v ), and the critical circumspection from ‘Memoirs of the Author’ (i, pp. vi–vii).

10 Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire To explain that our volumes in English will range together as those of Elzevir in Latin did a hundred years ago, is surely now superﬂuous. (John Sharpe, 1821)

The ﬁnal number of Sharpe’s British Prose Writers (1819–21) brings our story full circle, back to the prototypical Elzevir imprint and the Stephens of Paris who stirred the dreams of Robert Foulis: The intelligence of the present age, and its increasing bibliographical taste, have sufﬁciently apprised most readers of the genealogy of the ‘Collectiones Auctorum’, from the ‘Poetæ Græci Principes, excud. Hen. Steph. 1566’, to the Poets and Prose Writers, as displayed on hot-pressed wove paper by Mr. Sharpe.

Whether or not most readers were familiar with the lineage of the Collectiones Auctorum, they understood the trend in canonical series and had absorbed enough promotional rhetoric to require Sharpe to explain why the British Prose Writers would not extend beyond ﬁfty numbers. There were many more ﬁne writers, he conceded, but being from ‘the other half, drawn from the recesses of our literature’, they were ‘of a less popular description’. Still, he encouraged ‘the kind reader who will honour the collection with a place (lined with green baize) in the left hand box in the seat of their travelling chariot’ not to rule out the hope of being ‘accommodated in time with a similar set, to ﬁt in the box on the right side also’. 1 Within this context, the Elzevir functioned to assure that authors would range together—that is, move into the world with other chosen authors in a mutually constitutive format. That understanding of the Elzevir was shared by Walker’s British Classics, an advertisement for which culminated in the themes of widespread circulation and national glory: ‘The size of these volumes is that which has been so long celebrated on the Continent, by the name of Elzevir, and has not only been deemed the most convenient for readers in general, but is most happily adapted for presents to young persons’. In order that its readers might ‘gratify their curiosity and improve their taste’, the series would admit no 1 Untitled notice, dated ‘May, 1821’, inserted in Sharpe’s Select Edition of the British Prose Writers, number L, Sir William Blackstone, Analysis of the Laws of England (London, 1821), sig. a 1v . The series came to 50 numbers in wrappers, for binding in 25 volumes.

310

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

works ‘but such as have been honoured by the universal sanction of criticism and popularity; such as have been approved by teachers of wisdom and the arbiters of taste, and may be circulated with conﬁdence, as the proudest Triumphs of English Genius’. 2 An international stage is implicit in this boast. Books so portable were especially well suited to spreading British culture abroad. While publishers facilitated the transport of their multi-volume collections through the British countryside, they entertained visions of an imperial march of British authors around the globe. The circulation of English authors—through export or by means of the traveling libraries of British diplomats, merchants, and wanderers—went hand in hand with the circulation of the English tongue. ‘As the English language becomes more universal’, Foulis had prophesied, ‘English books will be more frequently reprinted on the Continent.’ 3 English letters were bound to be sown wherever the English language spread, and when the seeds germinated and took root, English books would be reprinted, strengthening the commercial underpinnings of empire. This prospect of dissemination was presented as a good thing, the proliferation of trade generating competition and wealth in line with Adam Smith’s theories. This remains the argument of free trade advocates today, countered by those who view such inﬂuence as damaging to native economies (cultural, linguistic, and commercial), just as invasive species disrupt indigenous ecosystems. But in what ways had ‘English Genius’ disrupted other literary ecosystems within the British Isles? The third edition of The Works of the English Poets (1810) provides the perfect vantage point for looking backward and forward. The historical high point of the English poetic canon in terms of its massive size, it allows us to reﬂect on how fugitive or miscellaneous verse on the periphery came to be redeﬁned, how women were left out, and how other national identities within Britain were minimized. As the ‘body of standard poetry’ kept increasing in the course of its ‘triumph’, it also kept breaking apart and generating splinter canons on the side.

THE ‘OLD CANON’: HOW SUDDEN AND HOW RIGID? With Chalmers’s edition in 1810 the ﬁrst great wave of production relative to the English poetical canon reached its climax. Thereafter the body of poets held together by Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, sustained and augmented through three editions over thirty-one years, began to fragment; and the goal of incorporating the complete poems of ‘every English classic published within a series of Four Hundred Years’, established by Bell and advanced (along separate paths) by Anderson and Bagster through 1807, faded. Neither Bell nor Johnson 2

The Works of Peter Pindar, iv, sig. Y6v .

3

Foulis, Memorial, 15.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

311

disappeared at this point, but their dominance had run its course. A watershed had been reached, perceptible in retrospect on the occasion of the next grand multi-volume collection, published in 1822 by Whittingham at the Chiswick Press, The British Poets in 100 volumes, not long after the reissue of Sharpe’s edition in 1818. 4 Not surprisingly, since Whittingham had printed Sharpe’s edition, he took that work as his point of departure: ‘To the works of the authors contained in Sharpe’s collection are added those of our ancient poets, and also of several of our modern; so that the series now extends from Chaucer and Spenser to Burns and Cowper.’ Of course the Bell/Johnson decades had left their residual effects: Whittingham reprinted many of Johnson’s Lives, and copied Bell by adding Chaucer and Spenser. Otherwise, however, his 1822 ediﬁce rested on a nineteenth-century foundation. Within a few years Sharpe published The British Anthology: or, Poetical Library (8 vols. 1824–5), in which he lamented that the canon was crumbling. In contrast with Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Beattie, and Burns, who were still ‘indeed securely gliding down the stream of time’, Dryden and Pope had largely been ‘laid aside’; and while the ‘leading Poems’ of Milton, Thomson, and Young had been ‘multiplied with endless profusion’, those of Prior, Shenstone, and other authors had ‘sunk into comparative neglect’, along with the lesser poems of the great authors generally (i. [5]). His anthology was an attempt to shore up a canon whose time was acknowledged to be past. Overall, the dynamic ﬂuctuation charted in poetry collections from the 1760s into the 1820s—with products marketed to different readers at various times for sundry purposes, with one canon full to bursting and another shrunk to the merest anthology—contrasts starkly with the static situation described by William St Clair, who stresses the ‘astonishing conservatism’ and ossiﬁcation of ‘the old canon’. That canon, he states, was ‘the ﬁrst . . . to be made widely and cheaply available, the most stable, the most frequently reprinted, and the longest lived’. While a new canon began to arise in the 1850s, published ﬁrst by Gall and Inglis (1853–1890s), then Routledge (beginning in the late 1850s), and later Warne (1865 onward), the ‘old canon of the British poets ﬁnally came to an end’ only with the ‘series launched in 1870 by Robert Bell . . . at the time when the poets of the romantic period were at last all coming out of copyright’. Having set this criterion for the emergence of a new canon—the lapse of copyright for all the Romantic poets—St Clair asserts that the old canon ‘lasted more than a hundred years’. 5 The old canon, by St Clair’s deﬁnition, ‘began with Chaucer and ended with Cowper’. With more than ﬁfty authors in some old-canon lists, and a dozen or 4 Like Suttaby, Whittingham published a mixed-genre series, Whittingham’s Cabinet Library, before tackling his more formal canon. 5 St Clair, Reading Nation, 128, 130, 548–49, 715–18. Are Robert Bell’s The Classic Poets (128) and Bell’s English Poets (549) meant to refer to Robert Bell’s Annotated Edition of the English Poets (29 vols. 1854–7)? See Crawford, The Modern Poet, 85.

312

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

less in others, ‘the core was nearly always the same. It consisted, alphabetically, of Samuel Butler, some works of Chaucer, Collins, Cowper, Dryden, Falconer, Gay, Goldsmith, Gray, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Spenser, Thomson, and Young.’ Was this true in 1798? 1837? If this roster is taken to reﬂect, say, the state of affairs c.1810, it would be woefully inaccurate, neglecting nearly half of the core canon at the time; as Table 9.6 showed, eleven additional names—Addison, Akenside, Denham, Garth, Hammond, Lyttelton, Parnell, Prior, Shenstone, Swift, and Waller—had appeared (or were advertised to appear) in at least eleven of the thirteen full-dress poetry collections published through 1810. Alternatively, supposing his roster to reﬂect the situation c.1830, then it reveals a startling erosion of the canon from the time of Chalmers, ﬂatly disproving the claim that the old canon was ‘locked in’. Indeed, Sharpe’s prefatory comments to The British Anthology suggest that such erosion had taken place. Judging by his evidence, however, the canon was not static. True, the artiﬁcial constraint of his ﬁfteen-poet list enables St Clair to state categorically that the canon ‘contained no Gower, no Marlowe, nor any of the other contemporaries of Shakespeare, no Drayton, no Herrick, no Lovelace, no Marvell, no Herbert, and no women writers’, but elsewhere he names Gower and Drayton explicitly as having been included in Chalmers’s edition. He sets himself up for another contradiction by claiming that ‘the poets of the 1790s such as William Hayley and Charlotte Smith did not join the canon even when their works fell out of copyright’, later recording their entry into the canon in 1825, along with Hannah More, Kirke White, and Byron’s Select Works, as sanctioned by Jones’s Cabinet University Edition of the British Poets. The presence of Smith and More here also belies the total exclusion of women. 6 Evidence at variance with St Clair’s argument can be found in other collections too. William Suttaby and Charles Corrall, as we saw in Chapter 9, advertised The Poetical Works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe in a series with Shenstone, Milton, Young, Thomson, Pope, Gray, Somerville, Falconer, Goldsmith, and others. Dove’s English Classics featured poems by Byron and the works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 7 William Mavor and Samuel Jackson Pratt proudly introduced pieces ‘from the works of several modern poets of deserved eminence’ in the 1820 edition of their Classical English Poetry for the Use of Schools, and Young Persons in General, among them Coleridge, Southey, Bowles, Thomas Campbell, Sir Walter Scott, Hannah More, and Mrs Barbauld. Similarly eager to showcase up-to-date extracts, the editor of The Beauties of the Poets of Great Britain, carefully selected from the Works of the best Authors (3 vols. London, 1826) reprinted verses by Byron, Sir Walter Scott, 6

St Clair, Reading Nation, 128, 533–4. Another mixed-genre series, it also included works by Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Clara Reeves, Hester Chapone, Mrs Newel, and Mrs Piozzi. St Clair provides ample evidence of women authors in the canon, but usually in other genres; his claim that there were no women is restricted to the poetical canon. 7

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

313

Wordsworth, Southey, Kirke White, and Thomas Moore, along with Mrs Piozzi, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Opie, and others. 8 More porous and elastic than St Clair would have it, the canon thus kept evolving in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. By the second half of the century a bifurcation was evident. The Edinburgh publisher William P. Nimmo, cited by St Clair, is a case in point. Working on two fronts around 1869, he issued Editions of the Poets, a ‘Mid and Late Victorian’ collection containing the Romantic poets, meanwhile selling a 48-volume Large Print Unabridged Library Edition of the British Poets from Chaucer to Cowper. In the ﬁrst of these, characterized also as ‘Nimmo’s Popular Edition of the Works of the Poets’, Longfellow, Scott, Byron, Moore, and Wordsworth joined the ranks of Cowper, Milton, Thomson, Beattie, Goldsmith, Pope, and Burns. In the other enterprise, supposedly restricted to the old canon, Nimmo ﬁlled six of the forty-eight volumes with the poetry of William Lisles Bowles, Sir Walter Scott, Kirk White, and James Grahame, violating the advertised limits of the series. 9 By contrast, there was no tampering with the poetic boundaries deﬁned by ‘Chaucer to Cowper’ when Minor English Poets 1660–1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers’ ‘The English Poets’ [1810] was published a century later. 10 Generations have gone back to Alexander Chalmers, and Robert Anderson remained ‘well known to the public as the editor and biographer of the British Poets’ for over ﬁfty years, because what those editors did was never done again. 11 The point is not that the poets from Chaucer to Cowper were never again reprinted so fully, which is obvious, but that publishers never again reprinted the poets of a preceding era so thoroughly. Victorian publishers canonized the Romantic poets in staggering print runs (in the tens of thousands), but without the same breadth of coverage. ‘Of the 2,000 or 3,000 or so poets who had tried their art and their luck during the age of Scott and Byron’, St Clair observes, ‘only about twenty or thirty were ever later reprinted in Great Britain.’ 12 Thus, even after the works of the Romantic poets were in the public domain, the canons of Gall and Inglis and of Routledge were altogether different from the enormously capacious collections that Anderson and Chalmers were spurred to form. In the end, any resilience enjoyed by the old canon hinged less on the closing of ‘brief copyright windows’ in 1808 and 1842 than on a loss of faith in the need

8

An earlier edn. of this anthology was published in 1821. St Clair, Reading Nation, 548, 715; extra information from ‘Nimmo’s Library Edition of Standard Works’, a 20-page advertisement in The Autobiography of Flora M’Donald (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1870). 10 Selected from Chalmers’s 21 volumes by David P. French in 1967, this collection itself ran to 10 volumes, published in New York by Benjamin Blom. 11 Chalmers’ edn. could still be purchased at mid-century; see The London Catalogue of Books Published in Great Britain (London, 1846), 61. The remark about Anderson comes from Nichols, Illustrations, vii. 69. 12 St Clair, Reading Nation, 305. 9

314

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

for—and proﬁtability of—the same kind of canon. 13 In this respect, the new canon was wholly new. Moreover, the canon generated offshoots and splinter canons at a higher rate than attempts to alter the central body of poets per se. Some of these were inspired by questions of national identity, as discussed below, but others focused on subcategories, like the ‘series of handsome and cheap Volumes’ advertised by the London printer Walter Spiers to form a collection of ‘Standard Early English Authors’. 14 Spiers’s production was the latest expression of a different recuperative impulse, one that had run a separate course alongside the canonical mainstream beginning with Percy’s Reliques in 1765. But while works like Headley’s Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry (1787) and Ellis’s Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790) contributed to more specialized poetic studies, they ultimately inﬂuenced the central canon as well, as acknowledged by Robert Anderson. Another element of ﬂuidity involved the adjustments and recalibrations of the publishers as they ﬁne-tuned their products, or the course corrections adopted if they misread the market. The range of products offered by some, like ‘Suttaby’s Miniature Library’ as opposed to his ‘Cabinet Edition’, or the editions of Bagster and Chalmers being produced by the same publishers, suggests how difﬁcult it is to broadly characterize the market, or the generality of readers, in any era, much less the ideological ramiﬁcations of the poetry being sold to different customers. Old-canon anthologies, St Clair maintains, ‘steep[ed] British children of the post-Enlightenment urban and industrialized nineteenth century in the preEnlightenment rural religious culture as it had been imagined and celebrated by writers of the previous century’. While not ‘a fully coherent body of texts’, old-canon poetry, novels, essays, and conduct literature ‘shared many common features’. The poets speciﬁcally wrote on ‘love of God, moral lessons, family love and affection, elegies for the dead’; they celebrated the values of a pre-industrial society; and ‘the poetry of the three favorites, Young, Thomson, and Cowper’ both ‘implied and proclaimed’ that God’s benevolence ‘is proved by the design of the natural world’. Poetry that praised Nature, God, and the rhythms of rural life in this manner was felt to inspire ‘awe, wonder, a sense of the sublime, and—therefore according to the theory of natural religion—a sense of piety’. Publishers of ‘old-canon lists’, by this measure, ‘not only ignored the discoveries of the Enlightenment, but offered Counter-Enlightenment to readers who knew nothing of the Enlightenment’. 15 The tenuousness of such blanket reasoning is suggested by the example of William Hone, the radical bookseller quoted by St Clair: 13 14 15

St Clair mentions these changes to copyright law, ibid. 127, 414. Miller’s Catalogue of Cheap Books on Sale at 404, Oxford Street, no. 1 (1840), 32. St Clair, Reading Nation, 133–4, 137.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

315

when Cooke’s Poets commenced, I bought the poems of Thompson and Goldsmith. . . . They were the ﬁrst poems I read and I derived from them lasting beneﬁt. The simplicity and tenderness of ‘The Deserted Village’ and ‘The Traveller’, and the just descriptions and noble sentiments of the ‘Seasons’ reﬁned and elevated my mind. I saw nature with a new-born sight; in its quiet scenery I felt emotions of peaceful delight unknown to me before—my affections went forth to every living thing; my heart expanded with rapturous joy.

The ‘lasting beneﬁt’ of Hone’s empathic expansion of heart expressed itself not in piety but in political satire, including ‘a parody of the biblical ten commandments’. 16 Neither religious awe nor reverence for nature is tied irrevocably to a single ideology. Love of God can lead to civil rights as well as to witch-hunts; the Bible has been used to defend slavery and to abolish it. Furthermore, where St Clair wishes to argue that the old canon ‘was not only of the past but was ideologically selected from that past’, he conveniently reduces his ﬁfteen-poet list to ‘the three favorites, Young, Thomson, and Cowper’. The works of Dryden, Pope, and Gay—not to mention Swift or Prior—can hardly be seen as furthering a sense of rural religious culture. Thus, even supposing many publishers and editors to have been enamored of a backward-glancing ideology, ‘old-canon lists’ per se would not have been very useful. A case in point is provided by the Reverend John Adams, whose anthology, The English Parnassus (1789), has this lengthy subtitle: ‘Being a new selection of didactic, descriptive, pathetic, plaintive, and pastoral poetry, extracted from the works of the latest and most celebrated poets’. Like the sort of publication St Clair has in mind, it emphasizes the morally instructive, the descriptive, and the rural; includes Young, Thomson, and Cowper; and features a clergyman as editor whose explicit purpose with each ‘extract’ was ‘either to improve the taste of the young Reader, or to inspire sentiments of wisdom, virtue, and benevolence’. Yet the anthology contains a host of other poets—more new than old, with ﬁve women. 17 Depending on how one interprets Adams’s design, his anthology unsettles St Clair’s argument in one of two ways: an editor who wanted to advance piety needed either to ignore the traditional canon, since so much of it had to be jettisoned, or to modify it (as with ‘the latest and most celebrated poets’), opening it to any voice that served the proper ideology, and thus altering it beyond recognition. If the multi-volume collections embodied an ideology, it was nationalism, a patriotic self-regard that cut across demographic divisions. The publishers tried 16 Ibid. 529, 676. John Barnard discusses the satirical radicalism of Hone in ‘Print Culture and the Book Trade’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford, 2005), 78–81. 17 ‘Advertisement’, The English Parnassus (London, 1789), sig. A3. On the title-page are listed ‘Dr. Beattie, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Hawksworth, Dr. Ogilvie, Dr. Young, Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Falconar [actually two sisters: Maria and Harriet], Miss Moore, Miss Carter, Hon. C. Fox, Churchill, Cowper, Hayley, Warton, Fitzgerald, Burns, Pratt, Jerningham, Pope, Thomson, Philips, Blair, &c. &c.’ Among the other poets is Ann Yearsley.

316

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

to reach as many buyers and readers as possible—simple or erudite, in rural regions and urban centers, from servants to the bourgeoisie, the professional ranks, and aristocrats. They were conscious of their role in deﬁning the cultural capital of Britain, even where their epithets (classics, not canon; amor patriae, not nationalism) do not match ours. After taking over as lead proprietor of the ‘BRITISH CLASSICS and BRITISH POETS’ in 1809, Suttaby thought it proper to update the public on ‘how far he has proceeded in these National Undertakings’. Though launched ‘at a time when peace seemed again to assist the cultivation of the arts’, Suttaby reﬂected on how these works ‘had continued under circumstances highly disadvantageous’, an allusion to wartime. 18 From the start, when the Foulis brothers ‘in the midst of War abroad’ and faction at home turned their attention to ‘lesser works, in hopes of being strengthened by them’, the multi-volume poetry series often appeared at times that required special economic exertion and national will-power. The most intensive periods of canon formation were played out against the backdrop of war, the 1776–83 rivalry between Bell and the London trade being coterminous with the war to retain the American colonies, Anderson’s edition (1792–1807) being launched during tensions caused by the French Revolution, and Cooke’s edition (1794–1805) extending through the difﬁcult ensuing war. 19 Doubtless the turmoil of the First World War was what enabled Thomas Humphry Ward in 1918 to add a ﬁfth volume to The English Poets, comprised almost wholly of copyrighted works, extending that series from Browning to Rupert Brooke. 20

CL ASSICALLY FUGITIVE For nearly ﬁve decades the commercial pressures exerted by and upon multivolume collections of poetry expressed a sturdy logic of expansion. The Foulises, without any preconceived design, added title upon title to their growing series of English classics; Creech and Balfour from the outset embraced a comparable number of poets; Boyle embarked upon an open-ended production, hoping to multiply his books in stages as the market encouraged him; Bell more than doubled the number of volumes published in the previous projects; the London trade edition matched the number of poets included by Bell, and both collections were augmented when republished later; with Anderson, the number of poets doubled yet again, while the grand summation of Chalmers edged slightly higher. 18

Advertisement in The Letters of Pliny, 3. Crawford, noting the coincidence also, pictures the poetry series as ‘mustered and regularized rows of the English or British poets’ ranged against their continental counterparts, a ‘standing army on one’s shelves’ and ‘an exploitable patriotic gesture’ (The Modern Poet, 92). 20 Ward gratefully listed the copyright owners, The English Poets (5 vols. London and New York, 1885–1918), v, pp. v–vi. 19

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

317

If this body of poetry is likened to a tree, it sprouted ever more branches and foliage while its root structure grew deeper and deeper. As these canons grew more densely inclusive, Wenman stumbled upon the countervailing logic of contraction. Wishing to imitate Bell, but to price his books even more cheaply, he found that the lower reaches of the market could not support such full representation. His endeavor probably would have ground to a halt (like Boyle’s) had he not altered course to recuperate his market. He scaled back his plan and introduced ﬁction, essays, letters, and conduct books into his series, establishing a formula that led to subsequent mixed-genre series like Walker’s and Dove’s Classics. If the approaches of Bell and Wenman mark the point and counterpoint of the canonical process—one highly focused, aiming at thorough representation; the other less systematic, emphasizing variety—Cooke capitalized on both ideas at once, staking out the middle ground to create a range of classics in parallel series, uniform in design, each one amply inclusive without nearing the kind of plenitude attained by the more comprehensive collections. Along the way, a new complementary function arose for the miscellany visà-vis the multi-volume collection. Sets of classical poetry begged for a companion volume (or volumes) containing popular pieces by lesser poets. Before the advent of huge canonical projects, miscellanies positioned themselves in the market relative to other miscellanies. Once Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands had grown from three to six volumes, other miscellanies marketed themselves as extensions of it: A Collection of the Most esteemed Pieces of Poetry . . . By the late Moses Mendez, Esq; and Other Contributors to Dodsley’s Collection (1767, 1770), George Pearch’s A Collection of Poems (2 vols. 1768; 4 vols. 1770, 1775), and John Nichols’s A Select Collection of Poems (8 vols. 1780– 2). John Almon practiced the same strategy: after publishing his New Foundling Hospital for Wit (6 vols. 1768–73), he launched The Fugitive Miscellany (2 vols. 1774–5) to gather up ‘such Fugitive Pieces, in Prose and Verse, as are not in any other Collection’, including unpublished poems that had been ‘handed about in Manuscript’, printing them in the same format so that ‘such Gentlemen as chuse to have both, may be enabled to bind them uniformly’. 21 While miscellanies serving this goal of continuous accretion persisted into the nineteenth century (like The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, 8 vols. 1801–14), a new kind of miscellany, operating within the framework of a larger canon, shed this essentially casual purpose. Although the ofﬁcial rationale for such volumes initially was that they ﬁlled in gaps within the canon, eventually they also validated the need for pruning back a profusely overgrown canon. The Foulises and Creech appended miscellanies to their series, precedents followed by Bell, Wenman, Anderson, and Sharpe. The London booksellers tacitly did so too, encouraging readers to associate particular anthologies with 21

The Fugitive Miscellany (2 vols. London, 1774–5), i, sig A2r .

318

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

The Works of the English Poets, those of Dodsley and Nichols. 22 When plans for their edition became public in 1777, James Dodsley (Robert’s successor) advertised a new edition of the Collection of Poems, ‘printed in the same Size and Manner as the Edition of the English Poets, which is to be published by Dr. Johnson’. 23 Although the anthology had enjoyed great popularity for more than two decades, Michael Suarez suggests that sales of the 1775 edition may have pointed up the need for change. 24 Dodsley engaged Isaac Reed to annotate the anthology, a task he also performed for a new edition of Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays (1780), Nichols’s Select Collection of Poems, and a refurbished edition of Pearch’s anthology (1783). Simultaneously, albeit indirectly through Nichols, Reed aided Johnson with his Prefaces by supplying bits of biographical and bibliographical information and by occasionally correcting proofs. In fact, as Roger Lonsdale details, an intricate interplay involving Johnson’s composition of the later Prefaces and accidental omissions from the poems in The Works of the English Poets shaped some of the contents and editorial apparatus of A Select Collection of Poems. 25 In the middle stood Nichols, the de facto editor of ‘Johnson’s Edition’, with fellow co-proprietor Dodsley. The latter published his new anthology in 1782, the same year Nichols ﬁnished his series, both of them (with Reed) perhaps purposely not wrapping up their projects until Johnson had completed his Prefaces. Meanwhile, obviously privy to what was taking shape, a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1780 had marveled at the prospect: ‘Dr. Johnson’s Poets with Dodsley’s and Pearch’s Collections, and the Miscellany lately published by Mr. Nichols, would furnish the polite scholar with a complete library of English poetry’. 26 This line of thinking guided George III in organizing his traveling library. On a visit to Weymouth in 1795, the king journeyed with a ‘closet library’, its nucleus formed by nineteen titles jotted down from memory, among them ‘The Works of the English Poets, by Sam. Johnson, 68 vols. 12mo. / A Collection of Poems, by Dodsley, Pearch and Mendez, 11 vols. 12mo. / A Select Collection of Poems, by J. Nichols, 8 vols. 12mo.’ 27 Nichols quarried the anthology tradition back to Dryden’s Miscellany for its best products. ‘On Dryden’s foundation the present superstructure is begun’, he declared, adding that ‘almost every undertaking of a similar nature has been consulted, and material parts incorporated’: he ‘epitomized’ the collections of Fenton and Steele, and ‘occasionally’ selected from those of Pope, Pemberton, 22 Nichols’s collection was ‘sold by all the Proprietors of the late elegant Edition of the English Poets, with which work these volumes are uniformly printed’: LEP (25–27 Jan. 1780). 23 DA (24 Apr. 1777). 24 ‘The Formation, Transmission, and Reception of Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands’, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (6 vols. London, 1997), i. 73–4. 25 26 Lives, i. 53–75. Sherbo, Isaac Reed, 31–43; Suarez, ‘Formation’, i. 76–8. 27 Dibdin thought George III possessed the ‘ﬁnest private library (of his own collecting) in Europe’, and characterized him as ‘no inconsiderable bibliographer’ (The Library Companion, pp. vii–viii).

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

319

Lintot, and C. Tooke, winding up with a sizeable number of poems that possessed ‘considerable merit; being the productions of men of real genius, who, from the brevity rather then the inferiority of their writings, have usually been styled “Minor Poets” ’. So as not to burden purchasers with any redundancies, Nichols reprinted nothing from Dodsley’s collection, Pearch’s supplement, or The Works of the English Poets. ‘To all or either of these,’ he summed up, ‘this Selection will be a suitable appendage’, not least because, as he asserted with pride, he had recovered ‘a considerable number of good poems’ by Pope, Swift, Prior, Watts, Parnell, Rochester, and numerous others, pieces ‘which are not to be found in any edition of their works’. 28 Bell drew likewise upon ‘the Miscellaneous Collections of Dodsley, Pearch, Mendez, Nichol, &c. &c. and also the best Poetical Compositions which have not hitherto been published in any collected or regular Form’ to form his miscellany, Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry (16 vols. 1789–94). As ‘a Supplementary Collection’ it offered ‘a neat arrangement of such Classical Fugitive Pieces’ as were not included in The Poets of Great Britain, featuring ‘the choice Poems only of Dodsley’s and such other pieces as are deserving of perpetuity’. He encouraged purchasers of his Poets to buy the series, but also courted those who owned ‘any other edition of the English Poets’, producing it in a format closer to that of The Works of the English Poets than to his own collection. 29 This format, coupled with his decision not to print many more copies than there were subscribers, reveals that Bell targeted an upscale market with this series, a circumstance intuited by Mrs Abington in forwarding to him a poem that would appeal to the Duke of Dorset’s social circle. 30 At the time of his bankruptcy Bell was projecting the series to reach twenty-ﬁve volumes, but after his stock fell into the hands of George Cawthorn, only two more were added (1796–7), bringing a complete set of Fugitive Poetry to eighteen volumes. 31

28 ‘Advertisement’, dated 1 Jan. 1780, A Select Collection of Poems: With Notes, Biographical and Historical. (8 vols. London, 1780–2), i, pp. vii–x. The value of Nichols’s approach, as opposed to the scavenging that ﬁlled many miscellanies, was recognized by John Murray, who a few years later tried to entice John Aikin to perform the same task for twenty guineas: ‘Out of Dodsley Pearch Mendez & other collections of poems one collection may be formed of half the size (say 6 Vols.) more choice & excellent’ (letter of 31 Dec. 1784, NLS Murray Archives). 29 Advertisement in Robert Merry, Diversity. A Poem, which lays out proposals for the work; LC (18–20 May 1790); and facsimile of handbill in Morison, John Bell, between pp. 36 and 37. 30 Mrs Abington, having received vol. i of the miscellany, hoped that Bell could ﬁnd room in vol. ii for a poem by ‘Honorio’, ‘On seeing the celebrated Portrait of Mrs. Abington by Sir Joshua Reynolds at Knowles in Kent’, which paid tribute to ‘Sackvilles gen’rous race’ and ‘Thrice happy Dorset’. She felt that the poem would ‘be a means of recomending the works to many of the Dukes Friends’ (Folger MS Y.c.7, fos. 10–11). Although Bell did not comply, the poem was published in Poems: by Anthony Pasquin (2 vols. London, 1789), i. 178. 31 At the back of vol. xvii appeared this notice: ‘Mr. Cawthorn, having become the Proprietor of the volumes already printed of this elegant Work, proposes to complete it on the original plan. For the sake, therefore, of uniformity, it is his intention to give, in the successive Volumes, a series of Title Pages to cancel those of the preceding. August 7th, 1796.’

320

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

What made this arrangement ‘neat’ or ‘classical’ was Bell’s grouping the poems together by genre and theme, thus differentiating his product from the de facto miscellany of the London trade in the same way that Bell’s edition, by sorting poems into ‘departments’, had set itself apart from the ‘chaos of poetical confusion’ embodied in The Works of the English Poets. Each volume of the miscellany, he asserted, could thus ‘be considered as a complete Work, being composed of a distinct Class of Poetry’: (i) Ethic Epistles; (ii) Epistles Familiar and Humorous; (iii) Epistles Critical and Didactic; (iv) Epistles Descriptive and Narrative; (v) Epistles Satirical and Perceptive; (vi) Epistles Panegyrical and Gallant; (vii) Epistles Heroic and Amatory; (viii) Elegies Moral, Descriptive, and Amatory; (ix) Elegies Local, Sympathetic and Funereal; and Monodies; (x) Poems in the Stanza of Spenser; (xi) Poems Imitative of Spenser, Poems in the Manner of Milton; (xii) Odes. Class the First [philosophy]; (xiii) Odes of the First, Second [morality], and Third Class [mythology]; (xiv) Odes of the Third and Fourth Class [topography]; (xv) Odes of the Sixth Class [occasional verse]; (xvi) Odes of the Seventh Class [politics]; (xvii) Odes of the Eighth Class [nature]; and (xviii) Odes of the Ninth Class [the arts], Class the Tenth [pagan theology]. 32 Sharpe regulated his adjunct anthology differently, based on a conviction that the canon had reached a level of surfeit: ‘S O great is the accession to the stock of our national poetry, that no apology should seem necessary for offering to poetic readers a classical edition of the SELECT WORKS OF THE MINOR POETS’. To restore some balance to the canonical project, he relegated twenty-two of ‘Dr. Johnson’s English Poets’ to his Supplement to the British Poets, demoting them from the central canon even as Chalmers retained them. With the addition of seventeen other poets selected ‘for the ﬁrst time, from various sources’, the Supplement comprised ‘the better poems of thirty-nine authors, who, if the old principle of collection were now tried, must be entirely excluded from great works’. Although that old principle—the criterion of reprinting a poet’s full œuvre—still governed Sharpe’s main series, it was inimical to the fame of lesser poets, for their works could not be ‘agreeably presented to the world’ without a winnowing. ‘From all that was once heterogeneously amalgamated’ Sharpe extracted their best efforts. ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘would not aspire to rescue the “Creation” of Blackmore from the chaos of his verse’, and who desired to read much more of Pomfret than ‘The Choice’? In relation to The Works of the British Poets, Sharpe urged that his Supplement was ‘necessary to the completion of that work, to those admirers of poetry who may desire to possess, within some just compass, the more estimable effusions of our Minor Poets’. 33 32 Bell’s miscellany is treated with condescension by N. Hardy Wallis in ‘Fugitive Poetry: An Eighteenth Century Collection’, Essays by Divers Hands, NS 13 (1940), 43–66. Yet it included Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Goldsmith’s The Traveller, Beattie’s The Minstrel, and poems by Mason, Smollett, Thomas Warton, Elizabeth Carter, and many others. 33 ‘Advertisement’, Supplement to the British Poets, i, sig. A2r−v .

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

321

Sharpe’s handling of the minor poets indicates how vastly the terrain had been altered since publication of The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets and The Works of Celebrated Authors, Of whose Writings there are but small Remains. The question of what constituted a ‘minor’ poet was now affected by a different set of dynamics. In 1749 and 1750 Cogan and the Tonsons had faced off against one another upon an ill-deﬁned landscape littered with miscellanies of every description and void of any signiﬁcant textually reproduced (as opposed to pictorial or monumental) poetical canon. Sharpe’s miscellany of 1809 took form in opposition to a richly textured backdrop, in direct dialogue with such a canon. In referring to their miscellanies as classical, Bell and Sharpe underscored their orderliness. Signiﬁcantly, both publishers repudiated the ‘chaos’ they diagnosed in other poetic products, and provided methodical remedies. Relative to the miscellany tradition, they diverged from the succession of products that delivered a theoretically endless accumulation of verse, thus endorsing Nichols’s earlier efforts to distill the best poetry from early eighteenth-century miscellanies, and Murray’s recognition that mid-century miscellanies also required winnowing. Bell and Sharpe reﬁned this process by introducing other elements of editorial control, genre classiﬁcations in the former instance, and a more authoritative presentation of ‘minor poets’ in the latter. Their classical anthologies presented bodies of extra- or para-canonical poetry on an appropriately grand scale.

REJECTING THE FEMALE’S RIGHTFUL PART Some women writers were reprinted in the mixed-genre series, and many in anthologies. They were under-represented, however, and such publications embodied a more relaxed version of the canon; the formal poetic canon remained exclusively male. None of the major collections ‘admits even a solitary female writer’, Richard Terry reminds us, even though they supposedly represented the ‘entire corpus of English poetry’ and were produced ‘in sufﬁcient bulk to make this claim seem convincing’. In collections of such magnitude, how could the literary contributions of women have been overlooked? 34 Yet the absence of women in the major collections of the 1770s through 1790s, Terry warns, must not be construed to be ‘the eighteenth-century’s verdict on women’s poetry’ in its totality. These publications were not ‘the sole form of literary production to stand in material relation to national canon-formation’. Terry shows that collections of authorial biography, particularly George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), were instrumental in ushering women into their own canon as well as into the general 34 Terry, Poetry, 252. Many investigations of this prejudice have been conducted over the past thirty years. Terry provides a convenient survey in his ﬁne chapter on ‘Making the Female Canon’.

322

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

poetic tradition. He analyzes John Duncombe’s The Feminiad (1754), exploring the strengths and contradictions entailed in the poet’s celebration of female literary genius, and ﬁnding that the poem ‘may have pointed out a gap in the literary market’, for two of his acquaintances, George Colman the younger and Bonnell Thornton, published Poems by Eminent Ladies the following year. This 1755 anthology, its enlargement into Poems by the most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland in 1773, and its continued metamorphosis over three more editions through 1780 have been discussed by Margaret Ezell, who argues that the changes in the successive editions marked ‘the beginning of the formation of a more sharply deﬁned notion of “feminine” writing and its relationship to the male literary world’. 35 This ‘gap’ in the literary market grew more pronounced in the late 1770s with Bell and the London booksellers. The prominence of the rival poetry collections and their all-male composition created two opportunities for James Harrison: he started The Novelist’s Magazine; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Entertaining Miscellany (23 vols. 1780–8) and The Lady’s Poetical Magazine; or, Beauties of British Poetry (4 vols. 1781–2). The latter was an anthology by, for, to, and about women. Poems by women account for 10 percent of this large anthology, each volume upwards of ﬁve hundred pages. Harrison positioned their poems primarily in the ﬁrst and ﬁnal volumes: ten of ninety-nine poems in the ﬁrst volume are by women, six of seventy-two in the second, three of seventy-eight in the third, and twenty of seventy-ﬁve in the fourth. His twenty-two women poets were as follows, grouped by the number of poems included: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (six ‘Town Eclogues’); Mary Whately (later Darwall) and Elizabeth Carter (four); Mrs Brooke, Mary Collier, Miss Pennington, Mrs Hampden Pye, and Miss Roberts (two); Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Sally Carter, Countess of C—, Frances Greville, Miss Heys, Mary Leapor, Charlotte Lennox, Judith Madan, Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Scott, Anne Steel, Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Tollet, Mrs Tomlins (one). In each volume, the opening poem (written by Harrison) highlights assumptions regarding the anthology—its editorial rationale, for instance, or the interests of women readers—and the closing poem calls attention to matters of form and process, like Gay’s ‘On a Miscellany of Poems’, which concludes the ﬁrst volume, and Duncombe’s ‘The Feminead; or, Female Genius’, which ends the fourth. Harrison versiﬁed his guiding principles in an ‘Introductory Address’: Too long has Man, engrossing ev’ry art, Dar’d to reject the Female’s rightful part; As if to him, alone, had been conﬁn’d, Heav’n’s greatest gift, a scientiﬁck mind. (ll. 1–4) 35 Ibid., 253, 260–73. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore, 1993), 112–17.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

323

As opposed to ‘rougher arts’ that require a man’s physical strength, women ‘boast an equal pow’r with all mankind’ in arts that ‘humanize the mind’ (ll. 15–16). In Harrison’s conceit, given that the ‘sacred art of Poetry’ grows out of love, women could not be denied their voice; as Nature admonishes, ‘In arts which owe their being to the fair’, why should women be refused their ‘equal share’? Men were morally obligated to ‘share the road to fame’. These convictions, however, were undercut by others that—as parsed by Ezell in relation to Ballard, Colman, and Thornton—led to ‘the ironic result of a celebration of female achievement which preserves texts and names for future generations, but at the same time narrows the focus with which the materials are viewed and blocks entirely those texts and authors who do not ﬁt within the parameters’. 36 Mindful of the sensitivities of female readers, Harrison thought it his duty not only to pick the most pleasing bouquet as he ‘traverse[d] Nature’s garden all around’, but at the same time to eradicate anything ugly or morally obnoxious. He had to be on guard against the type of ﬂower, for instance, that ‘hardly blooms before it knows decay’, lest its ‘foul breath’ be allowed to ‘contaminate the whole’. Snakes too needed to be removed, so that no one could accidentally ‘place her foot upon the adder’s head’. A woman could browse his anthology, thus rid of danger, and ‘safely pluck whatever ﬂow’r she please’; ‘each fairone’ would be able to ‘adorn / Her brow with roses, fearless of the thorn’. Monitoring women readers four decades later with the same sheltering objective, Dibdin approved of the authors in Sharpe’s edition, discovering none among them ‘which a female need fear of being found upon her toilette or boudoir table’. 37 Harrison opened the second volume with another poem of his own, explaining to his ‘Fair Patronesses’ that if his ‘little piece’ (14 pages long) met with approbation, he would ‘lay before them, at the commencement of each future volume, somewhat of a different kind, the best he may be able to produce’. Reprising the theme of Edward Moore’s ‘The Female Seducers’, the ﬁrst poem in the anthology after the ‘Introductory Address’, he called his poem ‘Albina and Lothario, or, The Fatal Seduction’ and characterized it as ‘a specimen of that species of poetry he wishes to see cultivated by persons of superior genius and learning’. The third and fourth volumes also opened with Harrison’s poems: ‘Conjugal Felicity. Addressed to Mrs. H—, Before Her Marriage with the Author’, and ‘A Monody to the Memory of the Seven Innocents, Offspring of James and Mary Woodmaon, Who Were Consumed by Fire, in the Dwelling-House of their Unhappy Parents, Leadenhall Street, London, January 18, 1782’. These three poems describe the arc of a woman’s life from pre-marital, to connubial, to parental concerns. A perceptive reader might have seen it coming, based on the ‘Introductory Address’, which urges women to respect the culture of the mind and to recognize their own capacity for knowledge, but deﬁnes that knowledge largely along prudential lines 36

Ibid., 117.

37

Dibdin, The Library Companion, pp. xiv–xv.

324

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

within the domestic sphere, as when Harrison extols Queen Charlotte: ‘Skill’d in each art that serves to polish life, / Behold in HER, a scientiﬁck wife!’ Elegant, peace-loving, dutiful, ‘compleat’ in mind, Charlotte is held up as a pattern of virtue in her every role as wife, mother, Christian, queen, and friend. In the multi-volume collections, verses by a female poet were occasionally chosen for a title-page encomium. Judith Cowper’s poem in memory of John Hughes was excerpted to serve this function in Bell’s edition, as was Katherine Talbot’s reﬂection ‘On Reading Hammond’s Love Elegies’. Two instances occur in Cooke’s edition as well: Anne Wharton’s ‘Elegy on the Earl of Rochester’ and Hannah More’s panegyric on John Langhorne. This last example betrays crippling assumptions about the worth of a woman’s poetry, as More extols the virtues of Langhorne’s poetry in a manner consistent with the overvaluation of male poets and the exclusion of women. In almost comically sharp terms she addresses the concerns of quality and endurance in poetry—questions on which any poet’s inclusion in the series might seem to have rested—and proves herself a perfect handmaiden to male celebrity. The episode that produced More’s laudatory verses is recounted in Cooke’s prefatory life. 38 In the summer of 1773 Langhorne visited Weston-super-Mare, near Uphill where ‘the ingenious Hannah More’ lived. Meeting ‘the female bard’ on the beach one day, he scrawled a salutation in the sand with a stick: Along the shore Walk’d Hannah More:— Waves, let this record last;— Sooner shall ye, Proud earth and sea, Than what she writes be past.

More returned the compliment ‘with the same facility of genius’, using her riding whip: Some ﬁrmer basis, polish’d Langhorne, choose, To write the dictates of thy charming muse; Her strains in solid characters rehearse, And be thy tablet lasting as thy verse.

This exchange reinforces the characterization of their friendship as spirited and affectionate—even ﬂirtatious—yet decorous. 39 Langhorne’s littoral tribute is playful, combining trotting rhythms with an elevated apostrophe to the elements and hyperbolic praise. More replies with faux sententiousness in measured pentameter, chiding him on his choice of medium. ‘Highly pleased with this effusion 38 ‘Life of Langhorne’, The Poetical Works of John Langhorne (London, [1796]), 11–12. Mary Alden Hopkins suggests that the two poets met frequently while walking or riding along the beach. If they missed one other, ‘they left verses in a cleft post which served as a private post ofﬁce’. See Hannah More and her Circle (New York, 1947), 39. 39 Hopkins, Hannah More, 38–41.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

325

of the lady’s muse’, Langhorne wrote down the verses and presented them to her ‘at her house near the sea, where they adjourned’. Afterwards More penned twenty-eight verses to commemorate the incident. Unlike the initial exchange, its courtly formula balancing mild reproof against elaborate compliment, More’s new effort was an exercise in panegyric. First citing the range of Langhorne ‘sweetly-varying muse’ from social to meditative verse, More praises his ready wit on the beach: ‘How soon, obedient to thy forming hand, / The letters grew upon the ﬂexile sand’ (ll. 5–6). Should a ‘lost traveller’ chance upon this poem and her own, with ‘sudden joy’ he would sigh, ‘This letter’d shore hath smooth’d my toilsome way’ (ll. 8, 9, 12). And yet, the two efforts being unequal, his appreciation would yield to invidious criticism: Hannah, he adds, though honest truth may pain, Yet here I see an emblem of the twain, As these frail characters with ease imprest Upon the yielding sand’s soft watery breast; Which, when some few short hours they shall have stood, Shall soon be swept by yon impetuous ﬂood. Presumptuous maid! so shall expire thy name, Thou wretched feeble candidate for fame. (ll. 13–20)

In gendered imagery the ‘soft watery breast’ of the sand yields, More’s ‘frail characters’ too easily ‘imprest’ on it. Intellectually and even morally weak, her words are ﬁttingly impermanent, their erasure by the ﬂood justiﬁed. The sandy medium, inappropriate for receiving Langhorne’s poetic conceit, becomes a metaphor for her poetic self, washed away in a few short hours. As the traveler now turns to Langhorne’s work, his appraisal—in the verses used for Cooke’s title-page encomium—becomes even more pointedly gendered: But Langhorne’s fame in yon ﬁrm rock I read, Which rears above the cloud its towering head; Long as that rock shall rear its head on high, And lift its bold front to the azure sky; Long as these adamantine hills survive, So long, harmonious Langhorne, thou shalt live, While Envy’s wave shall lash and vainly roar, And only ﬁx thy solid base the more. (ll. 21–8)

Unyieldingly masculine, the ‘adamantine hills’ tower, rear, and lift themselves into the sky with phallic persistence. For Langhorne or any poet in the series, size of reputation and endurance were precisely the qualities that Cooke wanted to advertise. Although it may seem facetious in this context to cite Johnson’s criteria for achieving classic status and the ‘privilege of established fame and prescriptive

326

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

veneration’—that is, pleasing many and pleasing long—More is likely to have had his ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ in mind, where he contrasts the lasting ‘adamant of Shakespeare’ with dissoluble poets of sand. 40 While More, having internalized a cultural bias against women poets, portrayed her writing as presumptuous, this blinkered attitude and denigration of her talent were also in part a rhetorical ﬂourish. Her early literary pursuits were encouraged by Langhorne, and in the long run she would chart a career that is better remembered than his. 41 With a penchant for giving fulsome ﬂattery, she might have been slyly self-conscious about it here, punning on her name in the last line—‘And only ﬁx thy solid base the more’—to acknowledge the worth of her own verses, sturdy enough (as Cooke clearly felt) to reinforce the basis of Langhorne’s reputation. Or she may also have recognized on a intuitive level what the quantitative research of Jan Fergus has shown, that many works by women were published, but not so many republished: ‘Over as short a time as ﬁfteen years, women’s writing disappears’. 42

ENGLISH CANONS AND SCOT TISH (AND IRISH) BARDS The literary canon fashioned by the Scots promoted what Robert Crawford calls an ‘Anglocentric (though not solely English) Britishness’. 43 This apt phrase captures a critical tension between a desire for participation in the dominant culture and the fear of surrendering deeper regional identities to that culture, of being absorbed to the point of invisibility. This tension played itself out in print culture through the efforts of various publishers to advance the standing of Scottish or Irish poets within, or against the backdrop of, the English poetical canon. From one ofﬁcial collection to the next, a tug-of-war occurred between the terms English and British. By referring to their series as ‘The English Poets’, the Foulis brothers denoted language, setting it apart from their Greek and Latin texts. Creech, possibly to differentiate his product from the Glasgow volumes, called his project The British Poets. Boyle, wishing in turn perhaps to distinguish his series from the Edinburgh project, used A Collection of the English Poets. Bell’s series, with double the amplitude of the previous collections, took on a grander 40 ‘The sand heaped by one ﬂood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.’ See Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vii–viii (New Haven, 1968), vii. 61, 70. 41 In his review of Sir Eldred of the Bower, and the Bleeding Rock, he praised her for ‘every charm of ease, elegance, pathos, and melodious numbers’, and heralded her as mistress ‘not only . . . of the living languages, but of the classics also’: MR 54 (Feb. 1776), 89, 97. 42 43 Provincial Readers, 84. Devolving English Literature, 30.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

327

title, The Poets of Great Britain, in answer to which the London booksellers published The Works of the English Poets. In this back-and-forth, the term British struck a clear political chord; English played tricks on the ear, resonating with political overtones even when used as a linguistic label. That inescapable note, of course, served the patriotic cause of the London trade; denigrating Scottish printers for supposedly shoddy workmanship, they claimed that their endeavor would ‘do honour to the English Press’. Thomas Ewing might have placed an Irish spin on his ‘compleat and uniform Edition of the English Poets’, but the Dublin publisher died in 1776 after he announced the series. He backed into the project, declaring books already published to be part of it (Akenside, Congreve, Farquhar, Garth, and Shakespeare— more plays, actually, than poetry), but announced that editions of Milton, Prior, Pope, Gay, Thomson, Swift, and Parnell would be ﬁnished ‘with all possible Expedition’. Between Farquhar, Congreve, Swift, and Parnell, writers either born or educated in Ireland, and Akenside, educated in Edinburgh and resident there for long periods, nearly half of his initial roster was essentially non-English. Ewing promised a ‘Life of the Author by his best Biographer’, and notes or illustrations ‘carefully collated from the best English Editions’, whether aware of Creech’s intentions relative to prefatory lives or not is unclear. 44 If anyone was to produce a canon bearing the stamp of its Irish origins, it should have been James Moore two decades later with The Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland in eight volumes (1793–1802). A member of the Society of United Irishmen, his publications throughout the 1790s were heavily political, culminating in The Constitution: or Anti-Union Evening Post, a newspaper issued from December 1799 through July 1800 at the climax of the political turmoil. 45 His largest undertaking, an 18-volume edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (1790–7), ‘a heavy and very weighty business, such as never before was attempted by an individual of my profession in this country’, strained his resources but elicited his deepest pride as an Irish printer. 46 The Encyclopedia hampered his progress on the poetry collection. When the inaugural volume of Moore’s British Classics, a series of essays to parallel the poetry, was published in April 1793, the ﬁrst volume of poetry (‘to match the above Work’) was promised for May. 47 The volume of poems begun in 1793 did not appear until 1795, however, when it was published as ‘Volume the Second’ in tandem with ‘Volume the First’, Johnson’s Lives. 48 Like the Encyclopedia and 44 Select Catalogue of Books: Printed for and Sold by Thomas Ewing Bookseller in Capel-Street, Dublin (c .1776), 15–17. See James W. Phillips, Printing and Bookselling in Dublin, 1670–1800: A Bibliographical Enquiry (Dublin, 1998), 232–4, 294–7. 45 M. Pollard, A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800 (London, 2000), 415–16. 46 47 DEP (26 Jan. 1793). DEP (6 Apr. 1793). 48 Some copies of ‘Volume the Second’ were sold with their original 1793 title-page, others with an updated 1795 imprint. As a result, some sets are catalogued with 1793–1802 as the publication years, others 1795–1802, and in some cases ‘1793’ is guessed to have been a misprint. It was not.

328

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

Moore’s British Classics, the poetry series was printed in royal octavo in double columns (the format of choice for Mundell and Son in Edinburgh in 1792). Its affordability and Johnson’s name were its chief selling points. ‘Dr. JOHNSON ’ S EDITION of the BRITISH POETS ’ Moore headed the announcement of his third volume in 1800. ‘This Work, which is printed in 75 volumes in London, and sells for 20l . is now offered to the public at four guineas’, he declared, projecting the full price of his collection, and working Johnson’s name into the advertisement four more times. 49 Two more volumes were published in 1800, followed by the sixth and seventh in 1801, and the ﬁnal volume in 1802. Patrick Wogan reissued the collection in 1804, adding eight engraved portraits to the volumes—half of them copied from Bell’s portraits, accompanied by the same attributions. 50 Despite its title, The Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland was no more inclusive of Irish writers than The Works of the English Poets, of which it was a modiﬁed reprint. Moore included ﬁve of the fourteen poets that were added to the 1790 edition (Cawthorn, Churchill, Falconer, Lloyd, and Edward Moore), and dropped ﬁve that had been present from the outset (Blackmore, Ambrose Philips, Pitt, Watts, and Gilbert West), the net result being a collection of ﬁftytwo poets. Nor, in its printing and binding, was any Irish identity asserted. The text in each volume was headed ‘The English Poets’, and the binder’s titles tended to be ‘British Poets’ or ‘Johnson’s Poets’; Moore’s own printed label for his copies in boards read ‘JOHNSON ’ S POETS’. ‘British’ and ‘English’ were the terms largely in play too for the Edinburgh collection of Anderson. One reviewer, applauding the editor ‘for genius, taste, and information’, called his series a ‘valuable acquisition to English literature’, predicting that, as a ‘collection of British Poetry and Biography’, it would ‘promote and perpetuate the most imperishable monument of Britain’s glory’. 51 A sharper political edge was evident in David Irving’s praise for Anderson as ‘a gentleman to whom our national literature is more indebted, than to the collective body of Scotish nobility’, that nation being Scotland, not Britain. 52 Irving’s gratitude was premised on Anderson’s embrace of Scots, not those incorporated in previous series (like Thomson, Mallet, and Armstrong), but others ﬁrst designated as ‘classics’ by Anderson: Blacklock, Blair, Bruce, Drummond, Græme, Grainger, Logan, Mickle, Smollett, and Wilkie. In thus promoting Scottish literature, however, Anderson went about his business sotto voce; other than introducing Wilkie as the ‘Scottish Homer’ and mentioning the Scottish 49

CAUEP (22 Mar. 1800). Moore left the book trade in 1802, and died the following year. A London reissue of his collection bears the imprint of ‘Andrew Miller, Strand’ and the year ‘1800’ in all volumes. I cannot explain this puzzle, other than to say that in 1800, with ﬁve volumes published, Moore promised the remaining three soon. Given that the 75-volume London edn. of was out of print, the moment was opportune for someone to sell Moore’s volumes in London. 51 BC 7 (Feb. 1796), 184. 52 ‘The Life of Robert Fergusson’, Lives of Scotish Authors, 2–3. 50

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

329

parentage of Cunningham and Shenstone, he typically downplayed references to Scotland per se, preferring the epithet ‘North Britain’. 53 Chalmers, another Scot, slightly extended the representation of a Scottish tradition, but, as Crawford points out, reafﬁrmed ‘the policy set by Anderson, i.e., that even when a Scottish editor is presenting a national body of British work or English work with a substantial Scottish presence, the language must be monoglot English’. Anthologies of British poetry still today avoid works in Gaelic, Welsh, and Scots. Economic reasons were only partly the cause; ‘political-aesthetic considerations’ led the Scots to censor their heritage and accept that ‘the British national body should (supposedly naturally) have only one tongue’. 54 This pressure was felt with irksome force by James Beattie, as shown in Chapter 3. The title of Creech’s series, The British Poets, should have given him leeway to imagine himself ﬁtting in as a Scot, though naturally the ‘fraternity’ of Milton, Dryden, and Pope might cause him trepidation. Yet the notion of a ‘British’ canon did nothing to lessen the bedeviling doubts he experienced over the correctness of his poetry. ‘We who pass all our early youth in Scotland’, he reﬂected, ‘and never hear pure English spoken till we be twenty years of age, labour under great disadvantages in acquiring that tongue. We are obliged to study it as a dead language, and without the assistance of a master.’ Very apt, then, ‘to imitate bad models’, Beattie attributed some of his youthful ‘miscarriages’ to a faulty ‘admiration of Thomson’s poetry and sentiments’ and his intoxication with ‘the melancholy strains of Young’. Their style and composition were ‘very unclassical, at least in the Seasons and the Nightthoughts’. 55 Beattie’s recantation of his early enthusiasm for Thomson, an Anglo-Scot, is a vivid example of the linguistic anxiety that provided a ready market for lecturers offering to rid people of their regional dialect and pronunciation, the better to thrive in a culture (and an economy) dominated by London. This aspiration ran high in the years when Creech was publishing The British Poets. During this time the Edinburgh newspapers were dotted with advertisements of lectures on proper English. Typical of these was ‘A Public Class for reading ENGLISH’ starting on 13 November 1775, ‘when Mrs. BAKER proposes reading from Seven to Eight every evening, Saturday excepted, a portion of one or more of the following Poets, viz. Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Pope, Young, Dryden, Gray, Goldsmith: Prose authors, Robertson, Sterne, Johnson, Melmoth, &c.’ Mrs Baker had taken lodgings commodious enough to accept ‘young Gentlemen’ for room and board, where they could ‘have the advantage of reading and conversing in the English Language’. When Courtney Melmoth (Samuel Jackson Pratt) came to town in January, he advertised a ‘COURSE of LECTURES upon the ARTS of 53 54 55

See e.g. Anderson’s edn., xi. 213, 422, 900, and 1154. The Modern Poet, 99–100. Beattie to Elizabeth Montagu, 20 April 1778, Correspondence, iii. 61.

330

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

Correct Pronunciation and Elegant Delivery Of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE’. 56 As Mrs Baker’s notice shows, these lecturers did more than furnish auditors with well-enunciated words and phrases; they prescribed a roster of canonical authors. Melmoth’s syllabus also can be reconstructed from the advertisements for his lectures week after week in the newspaper. 57 Not everyone was as pliant as Beattie in the face of this cultural prescription. Viewed with disdain by some, the English language and its canon could be resisted. The idea of Scots attending lectures on Scottish soil to change their way of speaking was anathema to one Mr Young, who in March 1776 reminded his countrymen of their own poetic heritage: At a period when the attention of the Public is so laudably engaged in the Study of the Language of our Sister Kingdom, it is hoped it will not be deemed improper to pay some regard to that of our own,—and that an effort to keep alive some of the ﬁrst pieces of Poetry that can adorn any Language, will meet with the approbation of those possessed in any degree of the Amor Patriae, or who do not wish the Scotch name to sink into utter oblivion.

As an antidote to the English lectures, Young organized his own ﬁve-part ‘Lecture on the Scottish Language’. 58 Even if economics was the underlying force to be feared, driving many Scots ﬁrst to neglect and eventually to forget their language, English poetry was party to the threat. Enough was enough; it was time to establish an alternative canon, or witness the oblivion of ‘the Scotch name’. This was how the crisis looked to James Morison and Robert Morison, Jr., printers and booksellers in Perth. In the 1780s they published The Scotish Poets to stand against the other multi-volume collections. On the wrappers of their series they printed their prospectus: ‘It is proposed that this Edition shall contain a complete Sett of the Works of the celebrated Scotish Poets, worthy preservation, from King James I. to Fergusson and Bruce, which will probably require Seven Volumes.’ The Morisons deplored the fact ‘That neat and correct Editions of our celebrated Scotish Poets are not to be had’, reminding potential buyers and readers that such a collection had long been ‘a considerable desideratum in our Literature’. Hence their purpose: ‘To remedy this, and to produce a work to rival the productions of our Sister Kingdom, are the professed intentions of this Publication.’ 59 This last point is peculiar, for, with the exception of The Works of the English Poets, all the collections to date had been produced in Scotland, not the ‘Sister Kingdom’. Morison’s turn of phrase captures the impression that Scottish print 56

EEC (23 Oct. 1775, 27 Jan. 1776). A later syllabus of Pratt’s is mentioned in the ﬁrst section of this chapter, Classical English Poetry for the Use of Schools and Young Persons in General (several edns. 1801 and after). 58 EEC (9 Mar. 1776). Crawford also ﬁnds this to be a rich example (Devolving English Literature, 24). 59 ‘Particulars of the Plan of Morison’s Edition’, Poems on Various Subjects by R. Fergusson (2 vols. Perth, 1788–9), NLS shelfmark L.C. 82. 57

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

331

culture had been co-opted; the collections might as well have been the products of England, even those with inclusive titles, for ‘English literature’, as Crawford underscores, promoted ‘a London-centered cultural hegemony even as it championed Britishness’. 60 The Morisons ended their prospectus by gesturing to its commercial risks: After what has been said, it is perhaps unnecessary to mention, that the very elegant manner in which it is proposed to conduct this work, must be accomplished at a very great expence; an expence, which a very large Subscription alone can compensate. It is therefore recommended to public patronage, and not only to those who have a particular relish for this species of writing, but to all who feel interest in the honour of their country.

Their appeal was remarkably frank: supporting The Scotish Poets was a patriotic act verging on moral duty, even if one had no taste for poetry. Some readers would relish the product, but even those who had little intention of reading it were urged to buy it anyway. Every single purchase furthered the cultural interests of Scotland. Beyond the ﬁve volumes of The Scotish Poets (The Works of James I, King of Scotland (1787), Select Works of Gawin Douglass (1787), Select Poems of Wil. Dunbar (1788), and Poems on Various Subjects by R. Fergusson (2 vols. 1788– 9), the Morisons, like other publishers of national collections, supplemented the project with two miscellanies, A Select Collection of Favourite Scotish Ballads (4 vols. 1790) and A Select Collection of Fugitive Scotish Poetry (1790). ‘Circumscribed’ by the plan of The Scotish Poets, which ‘would not admit many valuable pieces highly meriting preservation’, they undertook the second miscellany to receive ‘such Fugitive Pieces, as do not correspond with the plan of either the Poets or Ballads’, and invited readers to send them ‘[a]ny poetical productions of this Country, worthy of the public eye’. One of the fugitive pieces being incomplete, they even advertised that ‘if any Lover of Poetry feels disposed to ﬁnish this little Fragment’, they would ‘republish the whole in a still more splendid manner’. 61 Readers could thus, in either of two ways, by laying down money or taking up their pens, boost the production of Scottish fugitive verse. Meanwhile, the Morisons distributed The Scotish Poets through George Mudie and Peter Hill in Edinburgh and John Murray in London. Having struck such a nationalistic pose, the Morisons were uneasy with their editorial decision regarding Fergusson’s poems: ‘The Publishers of this Collection, ﬂatter themselves the insertion of the ENGLISH Poems of Fergusson will be excused, as they wished to present their Readers with a complete copy of his Works.’ Their qualms were justiﬁed, if the opinions expressed by David Irving held much currency, namely that Fergusson was ‘scarcely entitled to the rank of 60

Devolving English Literature, 43–4. ‘To the Public’, advertisements on front and back of ‘No. I. / [Price One Shilling.] / of a Select Collection of Fugitive Scotish Poetry; (Chieﬂy Originals)’. 61

332

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

a classical English poet’, and that his reputation rested ‘almost solely upon the merits of his Scotish compositions’. Because Fergusson had studied (perhaps too attentively) the writings of ‘several classical English poets’, his English verses were imitative, trivial, and fatiguing to the ear; less well acquainted with Scottish verse, ironically, his Scots language poetry placed him in the ranks of Ramsay, Burns, Ross, and Macneill. Of keen interest to Irving was where these modern Scottish poets situated themselves on a linguistic spectrum deﬁned by ‘correct’ English at one end and the Scoto-Pictish dialect at the other. 62 From a ﬁnancial perspective, poems in dialect or other ‘British’ languages were inherently problematic, as John Clark, editor of The Works of the Caledonian Bards (1778), had discovered. Enamored of the ‘energy and force’ of the Highland tongue, Clark faced a cruel irony in his struggle to memorialize it: any translation of its vivid poetic idiom would ‘disgust[] those who are acquainted with the originals’, but the originals, ‘taken from the mouths of persons now living in the Highlands’, could never be published in the Gaelic, ‘owing to the small demand for books in that dialect’. Despite his will to preserve it, then, Clark published the poetry in translation while the originals were evaporating from living memory. Even his hope of salvaging a few parallel passages in the notes for the sake of comparison came to nothing, for he was dissuaded by ‘several gentlemen [who] objected to the inserting any part of the original, as useless to the English reader, for whose beneﬁt alone this work was published’. 63 A genuine canon of Caledonian verse for a Scottish audience was not commercially feasible, but an ersatz canon for an Anglophone readership was. As continuous reproduction is essential to keep any canon current, the efforts of the Morisons were forgotten by the 1820s when John Anderson Jr. complained of the literary landscape. He was sorry that, given the ‘many National Publications’ that had appeared in Scotland over the previous twenty years, there had been ‘no connected and uniform series of her Classical Poets’. To ﬁll the void he created a new series, The Poets of Scotland, its purpose being ‘to embody these productions in a neat and uniform Cabinet Edition’, with lives of the authors, criticism on their writings, and illustrations ‘superiorly engraven’ by the best artists. At least four volumes were published in this series, including the works of Ramsay, Fergusson, Beattie, Blair, Bruce, and Alexander Wilson. 64 Another way to remedy under-representation was for booksellers to print neglected authors in the guise of a major collection, in effect adding them to the canon quasi-ofﬁcially through the branding (or pseudo-branding) of their product. When the Morisons printed Ossian in 1795, they connected him to Creech’s British Poets through an epigraph from Blair (‘We may boldly assign 62

‘The Life of Robert Fergusson’, 38, 45–8. The Works of the Caledonian Bards. Translated from the Galic (1778), 10, 17. 64 ‘Works Just Published by John Anderson, Jun.’, printed at the back of The Poems of James Beattie, LL.D. Robert Blair, and Michael Bruce (Edinburgh, 1823), 7–8. Uniform with these ‘Edinburgh Classics’ Anderson published a companion series, ‘Edinburgh Select British Theatre’. 63

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

333

Ossian a place among those whose works are to last for ages’), but when James Morison, newly appointed ‘Printer to the University’ at St Andrews, effectively augmented Cooke’s Select British Poets with his edition of The Whigs Supplication; or, The Scots Hudibras, by Samuel Colvil, in 1796, he did so by means of physical imitation, mimicking Cooke’s engraved series title-page and actually hiring the same artists to draw the vignette (Corbould), engrave it (Warren), and provide the cursive titling (Roper) (Fig. 10.1). James Imray of Glasgow took this mode to the next level of ﬁdelity with his ‘Pocket Edition of Ossian’s Poems’ in 1799, using the same artists again for his engraved title-pages, but also appropriating additional signature phrases like ‘Pocket Edition’ and ‘Superbly Embellished’. Moreover, Imray copied the design of Cooke’s letterpress title-pages with equal scrupulosity, down to the hollow font used for tall capitals on the ﬁrst page, a black-letter ‘Imray’s Edition’ to mirror ‘Cooke’s Edition’, and the hallmark ‘EMBELLISHED WITH SUPERB ENGRAVINGS’, these phrases placed between sets of double rules. Even Cooke’s many woodcut tailpieces, fastidiously copied, were sprinkled throughout. Following Imray, and in fact reproducing his two engraved title-pages with their own names at the top, Denham and Dick in Edinburgh printed another ‘Pocket Edition of Ossian’s Poems’ in 1803 in the manner of Cooke, though they dispensed with the tailpieces. Both, however, availed themselves of the Blair epigraph (Fig. 10.2). 65 Designed to look as if Cooke had produced them, these editions were meant to thrust Colvil and Ossian (with Blair’s implicit blessing) into their rightful places alongside the Select British Poets. If publishers could amend the canon in this quasi-ofﬁcial manner as producers, so could readers as consumers by means of their bindings. Ossian again was incorporated into Blair’s poets, after the fact, when a reader attached his works to Creech’s edition. This person took three books—Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem (2 vols. 1771) and Carthon, The Death of Cuchullin, and Dar-Thula (1769)— and bound them as volumes xxiii–xxv of a set with ‘British Poets’ lettered on its spines, either a full Creech set double-bound in twenty-two volumes, or a partial set consisting of two installments (one of the three ten-volume installments, plus his fourth in twelve volumes). 66 It is tantalizing to wonder how inclusive of the Scottish tradition Sir Walter Scott would have been had he, and not Chalmers, edited the fullest rendition of the British canon. He proposed doing so in 1805, but the idea went nowhere. 67 65 Ossian’s Poems, translated by James Macpherson, Esq. (2 vols. Glasgow, 1799); The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal. Translated by James Macpherson, Esq. (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1803). 66 As my need to speculate indicates, these volumes got separated from the rest of the set. 67 To James Ballantyne on 12 Apr. 1805 Scott wrote, ‘I have imagined a very superb work. What think you of a complete edition of British Poets, ancient and modern? Johnson’s is imperfect and out of print; so is Bell’s, which is a Lilliputian thing; and Anderson’s, the most complete in point of number, is most contemptible in execution both of the editor and printer. There is a scheme for you! At least a hundred volumes, to be published at the rate of ten a-year.’ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (12 vols. London, 1932–7), i. 248.

334

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

Figure 10.1. Engraved title-page to Morison’s edition of Colville. The mimicry of Cooke’s title-page, including its design and production by the three artists used routinely by Cooke, promoted the standing of such volumes as integral to an expanded national canon.

Several years later, in Waverley, he would use the idea of competing national literatures as indicators of character. Flora MacIvor sees through the eponymous hero’s ambivalent ﬂirtation with the Jacobite cause. ‘High and perilous enterprise is not Waverley’s forte’, she conﬁdes to Rose Bradwardine;

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

335

Figure 10.2. Engraved title-pages to Ossian’s Poems, 1799 and 1803. Like Morison’s in Fig. 10.1, these title-pages followed Cooke’s design to signal canonization, only here Denham and Dick copied directly from James Imray. I will tell you where he will be at home, my dear, and in his place,—in the quiet circle of domestic happiness, lettered indolence, and elegant enjoyments of Waverley-Honour. And he will reﬁt the old library in the most exquisite Gothic taste, and garnish its shelves with the rarest and most valuable volumes; and he will draw plans and landscapes, and write verses, and rear temples, and dig grottoes.

Contently he would also ‘lie shadowed by the boughs of the huge old fantastic oaks’ and ‘repeat verses to his beautiful wife, who will hang upon his arm’. Rose sighs, imagining that Flora will become the happy spouse, and missing the irony of Flora’s vision: every facet of this landed ease registers an attitude of political quiescence, the literature in the library no less ornamental than the grotto and the landscapes. Flora, in contrast, spends part of the novel in the lonely regions of Glennaquoich, where ‘her resources in French, English, and Italian literature, were likely to be few and interrupted; and, in order to ﬁll up the vacant time, she bestowed a part of it upon the music and poetical traditions of the Highlanders, and began to feel the pleasure in the pursuit’. Later, in rebel-occupied Edinburgh, she enters into a dispute over whether the Gaelic or Italian language ‘was most liquid, and best adapted for poetry’. After seven Highland women have raucously defended their ancestral tongue, the more seemly Flora ‘produced some reasons

336

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

to show that it was not altogether absurd’. Rose argues for the Italian tongue, which Waverley has helped her study. Waverley diplomatically observes that Rose has ‘a more correct ear’ than Flora, but is ‘a less accomplished musician’. His prejudice emerges, however, when he teasingly adds, ‘I suppose Miss MacIvor will next compare MacMurrough nan Fonn to Ariosto’. Like Gabriel confronted by the radical political energy of Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Waverley takes shelter in the presumed superiority of continental tradition. His bias in favor of correctness does not blind him to the musical powers of Flora, though he scoffs to think that an indigenous tradition could ever be placed on a par with polite culture. 68 Although the trappings of Waverley-Honour are contemporary with the 1740s setting of the novel—the grotto and the fantastic oak evocative of Pope and Gray—the nuances of this literary quarrel are anachronistic. Throughout the eighteenth century, personal attainments in French and Italian letters were vainly displayed by those who had been on the Grand Tour, but the framing of the ‘poetic traditions of the Highlanders’ in opposition to ‘French, English, and Italian literature’ was characteristic of Scott’s own time. Deﬁning the dynamics of the issue in this fashion was in part the product of multi-volume collections having washed across the land for several decades.

CIRCUL ATION OF THE BRITISH CL ASSICS Astonished by ‘the rapid and general diffusion of KNOWLEDGE for the appetites of all ages and sexes’, Dibdin rhapsodized on the growth of multi-volume collections, commending in particular ‘the pocket editions of our best writers in poetry and prose, so assiduously, so neatly, and so reasonably, put forth by Messrs. SUTTABY, EVANCE, and FOX’. He was impressed by their low price, their ‘delightful’ typographical execution, their ‘very respectable’ frontispieces, and their amazing numbers: ‘Within these last twenty years, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND volumes of the whole, collectively, have been dispersed at home and abroad, averaging 35,000 copies per annum. Upon such a vast scale does knowledge, of every kind, travel.’ 69 Conceived of in this way, as massive bodies moving at considerable speed, the pocket editions seemed to express basic laws of motion and gravity. To some of their publishers, the collections represented forceful energies—one centripetal, the power of the British classics to attract the cultural products of other countries or to remake them in its own image; the 68

Waverley, ed. Andrew Hook (London, 1985), 370–1, 169, 377–8. Dibdin, The Library Companion, pp. xiv–xv. The ‘last twenty years’ were 1805 to 1824, the earlier year having seen the launch of Sharpe’s edn., the series to which he refers. 69

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

337

other centrifugal, a strong projection of English literature into the world as a facet of Britain’s imperial outreach. The gravitational pull of the British canon, powerful in proportion to its mass, placed it at the center of European literatures in the mind of Bell. Formerly alarmed by Britain’s negligence, Bell later declared that in the contest among nations to produce their authors in a classical format, The Poets of Great Britain had become the ‘object of emulation’. ‘FRANCE and ITALY stand foremost in competition’, Bell reckoned, particularly the former, who have already printed One Hundred and Fifty Volumes of their own most celebrated POETS and NOVELISTS, closely copied after the style and manner of BELL’s Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, both as to size and embellishments; tho’ confessedly inferior to the execution of the English.

As a specimen of the French effort, Bell had one ‘Sett of the French Authors’ bound for display at his British Library in hopes of selling ‘complete Setts . . . from the French Advertisement’, which he duly quoted: ‘viz. Collection de petits Formats, en beau Papier, belle Impression, et belles Graveurs, en 150 Tom.— Cette Collection deviendra precieuse tant pour le Choix des ouvrages, que pour la Beaute des Editions’. 70 The fact that Bell would showcase one advertisement within another, and think of himself as selling from that advertisement instead of from the complete set on display, expresses the quintessential consumer ethos he so zealously fostered. How a product was promoted, how it was packaged in adjectives, was fundamental to its allure, even when a potential customer had the chance to handle it physically. Advertising framed the whole transaction. In this same year, 1784, Petrarch and Dante led the way in Italy’s ﬁrst massive reprint series, Parnaso Italiano, printed in Venice (56 vols. 1784–91). It is unclear whether Bell had these imprints yet, but he offered ‘a few Copies’ of several Italian authors (Ariosto, Petrarch, Forteguerri, Dante, Guarini, and Tasso) in fourteen volumes ‘now publishing, as Companions to the above’—that is, companions to The Poets of Great Britain. 71 Subsequent publishers sang a similar refrain; Walker’s Classics were advertised as A ‘COLLECTION of the WORKS of the most popular English Poets, and of those Prose Writers who have attained Classical Fame; with Translations from the Greek and Roman Classics, Prose and Verse; and Translations of the best French and Italian Authors’. 72 At the center of this constellation of literatures was the British canon. 70 MP (29 May 1784). Precisely what publication Bell was advertising is unclear to me. The closest item I have found is Annales poetiques ou Almanach des muses depuis l’origine de la poesie françoise, 40 vols. duodecimo, published in Paris 1778–88 (Bibliotèque nationale de France, shelfmark Ye 11559–11599). 71 72 MP (10 Feb. 1784). The Works of Peter Pindar, iv, sig. Y6r .

338

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

While internationally minded British booksellers absorbed other literatures into their sales, they did everything they could to circulate their products abroad. Pocket volumes were perfect for overseas sojourns. The outﬁtting of British subjects for travel was integral to George Cawthorn’s business, a message he engraved on his shop label: ‘Great allowance to / Merchants & Gentlemen /going Abroad.’ 73 Overseas sales were more important. Bell sent copies of the Morning Post to his contacts in France, occasionally translating a lengthy advertisement for Bell’s edition, complete with currency conversion: ‘On peut avoir chaque volume separe, pour dixhuite sols d’Angleterre, ou qui devient a trente sols de France.’ 74 By the 1790s the London trade sanctions against Bell had faded, to everyone’s beneﬁt, he asserted, and to the greater glory of British print culture: ‘Most of the London Wholesale Booksellers have laudably and liberally banished all interested prejudices, and propose to give this Work a free Circulation, as a means of convincing the World, that the Productions of the BRITISH PRESS are not at present to be excelled by the Artists of any Country upon earth.’ His former foes, the futility of their opposition having long been apparent, may even have hoped that Bell’s series would, as he phrased it, ‘challenge the Admiration of the World’, for if it helped to expand the market for imprints in English, they all might reap the advantage. 75 They had a mutual interest in global proﬁts. In the same way that the reputation of all seventeenth-century imprints from Holland was boosted by the perceived high quality of Elzevier imprints in particular, and the term Elzevir could be applied generically to any pocket-sized Dutch imprint, the value of English letters was thought to rise with any enhanced impression of the vitality of British print culture and its products. So Bell argued, on the occasion of reprinting Bell’s British Theatre and advertising anew his other large ventures: ‘To enterprises like the above is Britain indebted for the extension of her literary fame: no small portion of which has been derived from the wide circulation of the British Classics, promoted by the elegant & accurate manner in which they have been produced.’ 76 ‘Enlightened and generous nations’, said Robert Foulis, ‘rejoice to see their literary fame wafting over land and seas’. 77 His son Andrew knew that pocket classics were eminently exportable, and had his experiment in stereotype printing not aroused suspicion, he and Tilloch would have produced thousands more 73 Here are the rest of his credentials: ‘Sold by G. Cawthorn, / Bookseller, Binder, / Stationer, / Printer & Publisher. / British Library, / 132 Strand’, with ‘Schools supplied / on the lowest terms’ and ‘Books bot . sold or exchad .’ The label survives in several volumes of a set of The Poets of Great Britain at the University of Michigan. 74 ‘Le Sieur Bell, Marchand Libraire a Londres, a la Librairie Britannique dans le Strand’, MP (6 Sept. 1783 and repeated thereafter). 75 76 ‘The British and Irish Nations.’ LC (9–11 Dec. 1790). 77 Foulis, Memorial, 6.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

339

volumes for sale overseas in sets or partial sets. America, the market on which they primarily set their sights, was on the minds of many exporters, because booksellers in the young republic imported reliable titles from Britain more often than they risked publishing new works, and would also accept so-called ‘rum books’— volumes dumped into colonial markets at a discount after their appeal had dried up in Britain. 78 The inevitability of exporting the British classics was taken for granted by Dibdin, who in praising Sharpe’s edition noted that ‘Thousands of copies are circulated abroad; especially in America.’ 79 When sure-to-sell English authors began being reprinted in America, Cooke’s imprints again were chosen as models, this time for straightforward copying—text, plates, ornaments, all. Milton and Thomson received this treatment. 80 Such ‘quasi-counterfeit editions’, to use Hugh Amory’s term, went beyond the Scottish imitations previously discussed, and their poorer quality, though not proof of Amory’s contention that ‘a well-engraved plate is as difﬁcult to forge as a pound note’, suggested that ‘Cooke had achieved a kind of de facto international copyright’ by virtue of his excellent illustrations. 81 In due course Mitchell, Ames, and White in Philadelphia reprinted the British canon on a massive scale. Theirs was the ‘First American Edition / of the / British Poets / in Fifty Volumes’, according to the engraved title-page, or, as the letterpress title-page had it, The Works of the British Poets, with the Lives of the Authors, by Ezekiel Sanford. Based on Sharpe’s edition, this collection had been meant to include ‘the complete works of all the poets, from Chaucer to the present time, in an hundred miniature volumes, of four hundred pages each’, but after consideration, the publishers decided that a more select edition would be ‘less onerous to themselves’ and ‘more acceptable to the reader’. They cut the proposed number of volumes in half, but kept their eyes on the same poets, opting to include ‘the complete works of the more celebrated, and select poems of the more obscure’. Like Sharpe, recognizing that the ‘Lives of Johnson will stand as monuments of classical biography, so long as elegance of diction, acuteness of criticism, or depth of moral reﬂection are esteemed among men’, they retained them in their collection, with some misgivings (which echoed Sharpe’s). Concise

78 Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia, 1996), 4, 12–16. 79 Dibdin, The Library Companion, pp. xiv–xv. On North America as a thriving market for book exporters, see St Clair, Reading Nation, 374–93, and James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748– 1811 (Columbia, SC, 2002). 80 No doubt there were others too. On Thomson, copied by Budd and Bartram in Philadelphia, see Cohen, Art, 289. 81 What mattered in these copies, Amory stresses, was ‘not the authenticity of the text . . . but the authenticity of the illustrations and indeed of the publishing format’. See ‘ “Proprietary Illustration” ’, 137, 143–5.

340

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

notices sufﬁced for the rest, except for better known poets, to whom more attention was given, especially to refute ‘ill-founded criticism’. 82 Falling sick, Sanford was replaced by Robert Walsh, Jr., whose eventual ‘Preface’ provided a brief survey of multi-volume collections over the previous half century, almost a third of which is taken up with lists of the poets added or excluded along the way. Walsh’s contribution to the genre comes in his ﬁnal paragraph, where he reﬂects on the decision to reduce the bulk of the collection. Readers, he expected, would ‘probably experience no real loss of pleasure’ on account of this choice. At ﬁrst, he noted, the English ‘paid no regard to their earlier poets’, but a ‘revulsion of taste’ had come about, causing them ‘to think it their duty to compensate unusual neglect by overrunning admiration’. Many poets were ‘dragged to light with antiquarian zeal’ from the ‘oblivion of blackletter’ in which they had slumbered, ‘and whatever author had written any thing in the shape of verse, was deemed worthy of a name and a place in the temple of the British Apollo’. By this means an ‘immense mass of vapid poetry’ had been ‘foisted into the later collections on the other side of the water’. Fifty volumes would sufﬁce to house ‘all that is excellent in English poetry’; Americans felt no ‘necessity of sustaining the national character by a superstitious reverence of English authors, merely because they are old’. 83 By thinning out the trees as they replanted the forest, Sanford and Walsh deﬁned an American—more pragmatic, less reverential—version of the British poetic classics. It was another matter altogether to reprint them where a different tongue prevailed. Foulis’s prophecy about the spread of English printing as the language became more ‘universal’ was put to the test shortly after publication of The Works of the English Poets, when I. C. Dieterich began to reprint it in Göttingen. The project stalled after Milton (2 vols. 1784), Dieterich quickly recognizing that a full-blown canon was too challenging. 84 Elsewhere it was determined, however, that German speakers were ready for an anthology of English poetry, one put together by Joseph Retzer or, as Hester Lynch Piozzi jotted in her copy, ‘edited by a Literary Society of English Gentlemen at Vienna’. Retzer and the others sifted through three hundred volumes of poetry to form a miscellany ‘after the manner of the Elite de Poesies fugitives’, focused mostly on eighteenth-century writers. ‘[I]f a few old english poems are inserted here and there’, added Retzer, however, ‘they will appear, as not ungraceful Ruins’, the poetical equivalent of architectural follies diversifying the landscape and evoking the idea of the past without placing 82

The Works of the British Poets (50 vols. Philadelphia, 1819–22), i, p. ix. Walsh, ‘Preface’, i, p. xi. Like Anderson, unaware of the Foulis precedent, Walsh cited the collection ‘made by Dr. Blair, of Edinburgh, in 1773’ as the ﬁrst, and relied on Dilly’s biased portrayal of Bell’s edn. 84 That Dieterich’s plan extended beyond the Milton volumes I infer from his half-title page, which reads The Works of the English Poets. This signals an intention of reprinting a signiﬁcant number of volumes, if not necessarily the whole collection. 83

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

341

strenuous demands on the reader. While he had not been ‘nicely solicitous about the chronological order of the poets’, Retzer praised ‘the usefulness of such a plan’ and protested, ‘I should rejoice with all Germany’ if a qualiﬁed person ‘would favour the world with such an authentick literary history of English Poetry’. 85 That this hypothetical history would be applauded throughout Germany and ‘the world’ Retzer mentions as though it were cause for little wonder. Indeed, the market eyed by Dieterich must have extended far beyond Göttingen, and readers of English anywhere would have appreciated his product design. By attaching Johnson’s preface to Milton’s poems, Dieterich joined the halves of the project that time and chance had severed, an accommodation dictated by simple logic and the London booksellers’ original design, but not offered even in 1790 when The Works of the English Poets was republished, the proprietors still being enmeshed in their defensive commercial strategy. Dieterich was ahead of his time, and the prescience of Foulis would be borne out by an astounding 5,370 volumes in the ‘Collection of British and American Authors’ produced by the Tauchnitz family of Leipzig from 1841 to 1943. 86 Similar ventures sprang up in France, most prominently the Galignani editions produced in Paris. In fact, as William St Clair points out, English books produced offshore ‘were sold in all the places in mainland Europe where the overseas British were to be found’, and these books, ‘much read by those to whom English was not their ﬁrst language, indeed may have contributed to its spread’. 87 ‘Parsons and Galignani’s British Library in Verse and Prose’, issued in numbers, grew large enough from 1804 to 1809 to occupy twenty bound volumes. Their shop in Paris was called the ‘English, French, Italian, German and Spanish Library’, far more cosmopolitan than that of another Parisian bookseller (F. Louis) a decade later, the ‘French and English Library’. 88 Amidst this swirl of literatures, some in the expatriate British communities stayed in touch with British publishers. From Bengal in 1779, Gilbert Ironside wrote to John Almon in answer to ‘an advertisement at the commencement of your Fugitive Miscellanies, a kind of Beating order for Poetical Volunteers, with an assurance of a favourable reception 85 Choice of the best poetical pieces of the most eminent English Poets (4 vols. Vienna, 1783), i, pp. iv–vi. Piozzi’s inscribed copy is ﬁlmed on The Eighteenth Century, Reel 1842, no. 4. 86 See William B. Todd and Ann Bowden (eds.), Tauchnitz International Editions in English 1841–1955: A Bibliographical History (Newcastle, Del., 1988). In the Oak Knoll catalogue Tauchnitz is called ‘An “international institution” in spreading Anglo-American culture throughout the world’. Upwards of forty million volumes were produced, including the output of the post-war years in Hamburg (1946–9) and Stuttgart (1952–5). 87 St Clair, Reading Nation, 297–8. His whole chapter on Galignani is very informative. 88 Giles Barber, ‘Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books in France from 1800 to 1852’ The Library, 5th ser. 16 (1961), 268; imprint of F. Louis’s edn. of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; a Tale (Paris, 1818).

342

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

& present entertainment; as a recruit of the Muses, I accept your invitation’. From Stockholm in 1794, Alexander Seton Esq. ordered three works printed by Morison as advertised in a Scottish newspaper. 89 Or someone like Sir Robert Chambers, having brought the Foulis English Poets to Calcutta with him in a Sheraton box, moved beyond his own literary heritage, amassing a collection of Indian texts (as resources and leisure from his judicial duties permitted), ‘without which early Sanskrit research by the British would have been much the poorer, if not impossible’. 90 Visiting India in the mid-1980s, Daniel Aaron, President of the Literary Classics of America, examined copies of various titles in The Library of America ‘that had gone the rounds. They were a bit smudged after six months of circulating, but they were holding strong.’ Not only that gave him satisfaction, but also the evidence that ‘the quality and beauty of our books have been commended worldwide—in England, Germany, France, Italy, India, and Japan. It’s encouraging to see students all over the globe reading the Library.’ 91 On it goes. The path blazed by Robert and Andrew Foulis became heavily worn. The Memorial of the Printers and Booksellers of Glasgow in 1774, saluting the members of the House of Commons as ‘the wise and potent representatives of the people of Great Britain, and of the whole British empire’, had laid out the potential for a thriving commercial future in which out-of-copyright authors were printed with ‘classical freedom’, domestic or ‘home consumption’ was greatly enlarged, and the production of English-language books accompanied the progress of the English tongue around the globe. 92 That future came true. Whether the book trade was more or less ‘disreputable’ at any point during this era of growth and upheaval is open to debate. The political implications we seize on today differ, in many respects, from those that eighteenth-century businessmen were likely to see when grappling with one another or facing the challenge of remaining solvent, but it would be arrogant to assume that Robert Foulis, John Bell, William Strahan, and other booksellers and printers of their time were less sophisticated in understanding their trade—in knowing what larger issues were at stake and what their activities ‘meant’. No one was more sharply aware or deeply interested in the inherent connections between commerce, class, politics, and the law. 89 Letter of 17 Feb. 1779, BL Add. MS 20,733, fo. 55; ‘To The Scottish Poets 5v. stitd . / To Life of Sir W. Wallace 3v. stitd . / To Scottish Ballads 4v. stitd .’ (Bell & Bradfute Day Book 1794–5, ECL MS qYZ 325 B43, entry 10 Mar. 1794); ‘This Day is Published / By R. Morison & Son, Perth, / . . . The Psalms of David, / . . . In the manner of the Scottish Poets, Ballads, Wallace, &c.’ (EEC (16 Mar. 1795), later than Seton’s order, but exemplary of Morison’s advertisement). 90 91 Curley, Chambers, 413. Price, ‘Interview’, 70. 92 Foulis, Memorial, [1], 15, 21–2.

Splinter Canons, Fugitives, and Empire

343

‘Should the unhappy period ever arrive, when this empire, like that of Greece or Rome, shall sink under the weight of her prosperity,—still the towering pyramids of genius, raised by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, will remain to point out what she was.’ 93 The pyramid under review in this case happened to be Anderson’s edition, but in its vicinity were many more, erected between 1765 and 1810, their construction inspiring similar projects up to the present day. 93

BC 7 (Feb. 1796), 184.

Epilogue: A Library to Every House . . . every intelligent reader should possess the complete writings of the world’s great poets. (John B. Alden, 1883)

T. F. Dibdin’s wonderment over the 700,000 volumes of Sharpe and Suttaby circulating the globe echoed Bell’s proud tally of the 375,000 volumes he produced with The Poets of Great Britain, a number that grew with his own reprints and those of Cawthorn, the translations added by Martin and Bain, and Bagster’s republication of the entire collection. Such ﬁgures, stupendous for their times, recall the essential purpose of the Elzevir: to put the classics into a multitude of hands. This line of publishing grew exponentially from the very start of the nineteenth century. Series of classic novels rippled outward, the Dublin publisher Thomas Henshaw starting ‘A New and Elegant Edition of Select Classic Novels’ in 1800, followed in 1803 by the Cork publisher Edward Henry Morgan, who called his place of business ‘The Classic Novels Ofﬁce’. 1 From 1815 to 1818 Thomas John Dibdin edited Dibdin’s London Theatre, printed for Whittingham and Arliss and issued in weekly numbers with embellishments for a shilling. 2 And the phenomenon spread beyond poetry, novels, plays, and essays. For just two examples, in Chapter 3 I cited editions from series for Forbes’s Life and Writings of James Beattie (1824), published as part of ‘The Christian’s Cabinet Library’, and Lackington’s Memoirs (1827), which was vol. xviii in Autobiography. A Collection of the Most Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves. Bell took satisfaction in thinking of himself as ‘the ﬁrst projector of this elegant and useful mode of publication’. Looking back on his career in 1813, he claimed to have altered the landscape: ‘O F those classes of literature which have been formed into elegant and portable Volumes, so as to accompany the Reader and Student as a constant personal instructor, the POETS OF GREAT BRITAIN have 1

CAUEP (3 May 1800, also 10, 27 May, and 8, 22, 26 July); Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas; Prince of Abissinia (Cork, 1803). Both series were inspired by Cooke’s success. 2 No. 75, in wrappers, Sir Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (London, 1816); ODNB.

A Library to Every House

345

been the model and example ever since their ﬁrst publication.’ He conceptualized his achievement in terms of Addison’s injunction to bring philosophy ‘out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses’: It was the just praise of a great man, that he brought philosophy from Schools and Academies into the daily commerce of life. Perhaps it may not be too much to say, that some portion of this credit is due to the man, who, by reducing the best Works of Literature from their cumbersome and inconvenient magnitude, and therein, in a great degree, abridging their expence, has put the means of instruction and amusement into every hand, and given a library to every house. 3

Retheorizing—at this advanced stage—the signiﬁcance of his life’s work, Bell put his own spin on Spectator, no. 10. The publisher, in parallel with the great man, brought cultural goods into daily use, disseminating them through literal commerce at an affordable price. If Anderson had performed ‘an essential service to the Public, by bringing forward a work that cannot be dispensed with in any Library, and which forms in reality a Library in itself ’, Bell pushed the metaphor to the extreme; he envisaged bringing ‘a library to every house’. 4 The classics of English poetry were the common property of the nation, but individual readers participated in it through private ownership. Pocket editions appealed to readers of every description and elicited a vibrant sense of ownership, as marked here and there by a heartfelt inscription, or ﬁne binding, or bookplate. For some readers they were ﬁrst and only copies, for others extra copies, often purchased for travel, whether to resort spas, military camps, or places overseas. One of Nicholson’s slight volumes was given an elaborate inscription: ‘Charles Hurt junr : had this Volume bound in Basil = Leather, by Cotes of Wirksworth: for 1s ./2d :—November: 1: 1809.—N: B: some of the Numbers of the Literary Miscellany included in this Volume were given A: 1800: to C: H: junr : then with the Revd: Gilbert Beresford as a private tutor, by his friend, Parker Beresford’. 5 Readers passed the books on to their sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces. A set of Boyle’s collection, purchased by or for George Kendall after the late 1770s, became the property of W. J. Kendall in 1810, then of Lucy Lumb Kendall in 1826. 6 Although copies from several series (Bell’s, Wenman’s, Morison’s, Cooke’s, and Sharpe’s in my 3

Handbill for ‘Bell’s Edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries’ (John Johnson Collection). Prospectus to Anderson’s edn. 5 In a copy of Poems by Alexander Pope, Esq. (Poughnill, 1801), courtesy of David Vander Meulen. Hurt goes on to record ties of consanguinity and marriage within the family. A copy of Cooke’s Young (Yale, Sterling Ik Y85 C800 v. 2) is inscribed ‘Mary Densons Book presented her by Mrs. Henry Ellsworth in memory of her mother Mrs. A. W. Goodrich November 27th 1818’. Three generations signed a copy of Andrew Foulis’s edition of Akenside (Glasgow, 1777), ﬁrst ‘E. James’, then ‘E. James to Caroline James’, and later ‘Caroline James to Edward J. Young’, who himself wrote ‘Edward J. Young—1839. from his Mother’. Examples could be multiplied. 6 Bodleian 12 Theta 640–59. 4

346

A Library to Every House

Figure E.1. Armorial bookplates in copies of Bell’s edition.

encounters) survive in wrappers, their usual dress was a trade binding, but with considerable frequency a fancier binding or bookplate tells of an elevated provenance. As humble an imprint as Wenman’s can turn up in diced blue russia leather, and armorial bookplates are pasted in many a pocket edition, that of William Hale Symons in a copy of Cooke’s edition, and those of Colonel William Inglis and Lady Kinnaird in copies of Bell’s edition (Fig. E.1). 7 Investment in the books—ﬁnancial, intellectual, emotional—spanned class and rank. Wealthy and educated readers, however, though addressed in advertisements about elegant bindings or proof impressions of plates, made up a smaller market 7 Lady Kinnaird and her husband Charles, eighth Lord Kinnaird of Inchture, traveled extensively through Europe, but most often to Italy, motivated in part by an interest in archeology. Their son George William Fox Kinnaird, spending much of his youth in Italy, caught the passion and conducted important excavations near Rome. See ODNB. Whether Lady Kinnaird carried The Poets of Great Britain about with her, or lodged it in Rome for their routine sojourns, the set ultimately wound up in a Roman bookshop (Ex Libris) for sale in 2000. Though faded, its binding in green straight-grained goatskin resembles the examples in Stuart Bennett’s chapter on deluxe bindings; see Trade Bookbinding, ﬁgs. 5.13 and 5.21.

A Library to Every House

347

than did the common readers to whom the pocket edition primarily catered. Mitigation of expense was only one rationale for serial publication; as Bell explained, inexperience in reading was another: ‘The ADVANTAGES of LARGE and VALUABLE WORKS being published Periodically, at short Intervals, consist principally in the Inducement to Young Minds, and to Persons not accustomed to sedentary Studies, to read such Works as they wish to become acquainted with, regularly in the Process of Publication.’ 8 Obtaining a collection at once might overwhelm such readers; yet they could pace themselves if the classics were prescribed in manageable doses, one volume at a time. From 1777 to 1790 to 1813, Bell never wavered from his high-minded ideal of study for the English classics. A level of disciplined reading was achieved by an owner of Night-Thoughts; passages in this copy, a vade mecum in a vellum wallet binding, are marked with ﬁngerposts and indexed (Fig. E.2). Cooke, as we saw, envisioned a more leisurely peripatetic mode of reading in the 1790s, but nothing so lax as what Richard Phillips recommended in 1809 to answer the ‘complaint among the lovers of English Literature, that our language has been deﬁcient in Lounging, or Parlour-window Books’. Appropriately he listed books of anecdotes (Addisoniana, Swiftiana, etc.) and other titles, including his two anthologies, Mavor and Pratt’s Classical English Poetry (mentioned in Chapter 10), and Pratt’s Cabinet of Poetry. 9 The ‘Elzevir’ remained popular into the 1820s with Sharpe’s publications. Till then, delicate pocket editions continued to exert some of the charm that Dibdin identiﬁed with the original Elzevir Classics, produced with ‘consummate care’ in a form ‘at once fascinating and useful’. In reference to Sharpe’s edition, Suttaby in a similar vein bragged that ‘Painting’ had been engaged ‘to heighten the fascinations of Poetry’. 10 But the Elzevir had not fascinated everyone. When Baskerville, facing a copyright barrier, had lamented he could ‘print nothing but another classick’, he opted to make ‘a pocket Classick in one size larger than the old Elzevirs’. 11 This circumlocution, odd for a printer who could just as easily have alluded to an Aldine-sized imprint, suggests how closely the Dutch name was linked with pocket editions at the time. In 1830 that changed. By then, lower production costs enabled publishers to sell larger volumes more cheaply than before. As a result, The Aldine Edition of British Poets, published by William Pickering in ﬁfty-three volumes (London, 1830–52), became the new model for multi-volume series, copied by Little, Brown & Co., for instance, in their ‘Complete Collection of the British Poets, from Chaucer to Wordsworth’, and 8

Bell, ‘The British and Irish Nations’. Advertisement headed ‘Lounging Books, or Light Reading’, LC (21–22 Sep. 1809). 10 Dibdin, Introduction, 62; ‘Books Published and Sold by W. Suttaby’, in The Letters of Pliny, 6. 11 Straus and Dent, Baskerville, 97–8. Baskerville’s Horace, the result of this decision, struck Edward Harwood as ‘the most beautiful little book, both in regard to type and paper, I ever beheld’ (View, 174). 9

348

A Library to Every House

Figure E.2. Fingerpost and index in a copy of Night-Thoughts (Bell’s edition). Each entry relates to a ﬁngerpost in the text, although the reader did not manage to index them all.

advertised as follows: ‘The size and style of the volumes are those of PICKER ING ’ S ALDINE POETS ’ for 75 cents a volume ‘bound in the Aldine style’. 12 This next generation of series has been studied by Richard Altick, who concludes one essay with the ringing praises of readers. Cassell’s National Library worked wonders in the neighborhood of a Lancashire workman, several of whose friends gave up drinking ‘for the sake of taking and reading your beautiful little books’. Moved by the same series, Sir John Hamilton proclaimed ‘what a joy of life I obtained from these, and how greatly they made life worth living!’ 13 Such testimonials bring us to John B. Alden of New York, who published a ‘Cyclopedia of Poetry’ starting in 1882, a venture that generated the assertion used as my epigraph to this chapter. In 1883 he began a semi-weekly series called The Elzevir Library. While this work differs from the titles that otherwise have engaged me, it is instructive to see how Alden pushed the logic of the ‘Elzevir’

12

‘Late Publications of Little, Brown & Co.’, at back of The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (Boston, 1854). On lower manufacturing costs in the 19th cent., see St Clair, Reading Nation. 13 ‘From Aldine to Everyman’, 23–4.

A Library to Every House

349

to its conclusion; centered on the vastness and egalitarian ideology of the Elzevir enterprise, his advertising reveled in a discourse of books by and for the million. 14 ‘ELZEVIR, as of course every lover of beautiful and rare books knows’, Alden reviewed, was the family of printers ‘who were among the ﬁrst to introduce the handy, charming, and usable small volume’ in departure from ‘the unwieldy and unattractive quartos and folios of the earlier days’, and whose imprint was still highly prized for ‘uniform excellence in scholarship and tasteful typography’. Just how charming and usable his own volumes were was described in testimonials printed on the blue-gray covers of The Elzevir Library, alongside other promotional copy, lists, prices, and reviews. Some of these vivid endorsements were perhaps fabricated, but they offer a proﬁle of the readers that made up Alden’s market. One reader picked up on the signiﬁcance of the series title: ‘Independent of its intrinsic value, it possesses in printing, binding, and general get-up all the daintiness and attractive beauty that the title of “Elzevir” implies.’ As if to ease well-heeled readers out of their prejudice in favor of larger formats, he added that ‘Any lady or gentleman may be proud of owning such a little treasure of a volume, which combines the utile with the dulce.’ The point of the series, in every material respect, was its ‘dainty, worthy dress’. 15 Aiming to produce ‘a unique cyclopedia of the world’s choicest literature’, Alden explained himself in a prospectus: ‘It is intended that each number of THE ELZEVIR LIBRARY shall contain a complete literary gem, a characteristic specimen of the best product of the brain of the author who is represented.’ Alden translated an Arnoldian emphasis on ‘the genius of thinkers of the world’ into the idiom of self-improvement. ‘[I]f reading is the road to greatness’, opined one reviewer, then, in view of the ready availability of Alden’s books, ‘great men ought to be plentiful’. Each successive title of The Elzevir Library implicitly was ‘worth its weight in gold to any young man or woman who aspires to worthy culture’. 16 Alden played on the insecurities of such aspirants. It might 14 Each ‘Volume’ in The Elzevir Library consisted of several ‘Numbers’. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, as ‘Volume I. No. 1’, published on 2 Jan. 1883, includes the advertisement for ‘Cyclopedia of Poetry’. In the paragraphs that follow I draw on pamphlets I.4 (12 Jan. 1883), Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life of Washington Irving; I.12 (9 Feb. 1883), W. Mattieu Williams, World-Smashing, Meteoric Astronomy, Lunar Volcanoes; I.13 (13 Feb. 1883), S. H. Peabody, A Half Hour in Natural History; I.16 (23 Feb. 1883), Frank H. Norton, Paul Gustave Dore; I.26 (30 Mar. 1883), Robert Burns, The Cotter’s Saturday Night, and Other Poems; I.30 (13 Apr. 1883), David Pryde, Highways of Literature; I.41 (10 May 1883), C. Edwards Lester, Peter Cooper; II. 67 (10 July 1883), Canon F. W. Farrar, Seneca and St. Paul; and III.124 (31 Jan. 1884), S. Baring-Gould, Legend of the Wandering Jew. Alden’s ‘cover pages’ are cited as follows: ‘w.1’ and ‘w.2’ refer to the front cover (recto and verso), ‘w.3’ and ‘w.4’ for the back cover (recto and verso). Extra leaves of advertising, numbered in Roman numerals or parenthetical Arabic numerals, are cited as ‘p. IV’, for example, or ‘p. (3)’. 15 ‘The Beautiful Elzevir Editions’, I.41, p. IV; Joseph Crosby, Zanesville, Oreg. ‘The Books Are Beautiful, So They All Say’, I.12, p. I; ‘Poetry Series I’, II.67, p. (8). 16 ‘ANNOUNCEMENTS’, I.1, w. 1 (renamed ‘PROSPECTUS’, I.4, w.1); Tribune, Sioux City, Iowa, ‘What is Said of The Elzevir Library’, I.1, w.3; The Champion, Atchison, Kan., III.124, w. 4; ‘ELZEVIR CLASSICS’, II.67, p. (7); ‘Science Series I’, II.67, p. (9); II.67, p. (7). Alden reiterated

350

A Library to Every House

be reassuring to know that his Ancient Classics FOR ENGLISH READERS were designed ‘to open to the unlearned English reader the beauties and treasures of classic lore’, but perhaps less comforting to be told that these were the ‘famous writers not to know something of whom would be lamentable ignorance’. Owning books was crucial. People had once educated themselves ‘by perusing borrowed books by the light of a pine-knot ﬁre’; now, personal copies of The Elzevir Library provided the ‘ “corner-stone” on which to build a ﬁrst-class education’. If it was true that ‘every intelligent reader should possess the complete writings of the world’s great poets’, then ownership was obligatory for anyone interested in intellectual growth. A solecism in one advertisement turned the situation on its head: ‘They are really gems that should be in possession of every family in the land.’ 17 Without the deﬁnite article before possession, the books themselves appeared to exercise a claim upon everyone in the land. Literature by rights could lay hold of a people. Scenarios of consumer choice dramatized the fact that money was tight for many of Alden’s readers. ‘You do tantalize me so’, wrote a correspondent who had saved $5 to buy some clothes; he ordered Alden’s books instead. A man ‘living on a claim alone—300 miles to the nearest railway’ received $5 from his mother ‘to buy some comfort in the shape of meat’; he wound up ‘stinting [his] stomach to give [his] mind a treat’. Another person protested, ‘I must stop buying from that man Alden, or else—well, say, farewell to tobacco.’ He gave up tobacco. 18 Sacriﬁce, the message conveyed, may be necessary to obtain cultural enrichment. But Alden tried to minimize the sacriﬁce: ‘Cheap, Cheaper, Cheapest, is the proper fashion in which to characterize this literary enterprise.’ A school administrator hunting for texts found ‘just the thing’ in Alden’s series: ‘good literature and as cheap, almost, as forest leaves’. The ‘purses’ of buyers, on a scale descending from ‘comfortable’ through ‘ordinary’ to ‘short’, were of constant concern. The ancient classics, Alden said, were ‘now for the ﬁrst time brought within reach of the mass of readers who need and delight in such pearls of literature’. Illustrations, too, like Gustave Doré’s, were now ‘placed within the reach of thousands who have longed to possess them’. One reader, long unable to obtain standard works of history, effused, ‘we whose purses are so shallow may gratify our longing’. In economic terms, one reader rhapsodized, ‘The ELZEVIR the Arnoldian theme in billing the contents of his Cyclopaedia of English Literature as ‘the best productions of English and American intellect from the earliest to recent times’ (I.41, p. VIII). 17 I.1, w. 4; ‘Cyclopedia of Fiction,’ I.26, p. 3; ‘Cyclopedia of Poetry’, I.1, p. IV; ‘What is Said of The Elzevir Library’, Rural Citizen (Jacksboro, Tex.), I.1, w. 3. 18 E. Boynton, Calistoga, Cal.; R. M. Mason, Prince Albert, N. W. Ter. Canada; and C. M. Edwards, Barrie, Canada, all under the heading of ‘JUVENILE JOY!’, III.124, w.4. Alden whetted consumer appetites at a higher level of buying power, too: ‘Whoever desires to possess (and who, with comfortable purse, does not?) the complete writings of the four really great novelists of the world, wants them in dress worthy of such grand productions. Good large type, good paper and printing, and handsome binding, are essentials; if possible, one wants also the numerous illustrations of the best artists’ (‘The Great British Novelists’, I.16, w.3).

A Library to Every House

351

LIBRARY is perfection, and the poor will always be your debtor for the happy idea.’ 19 By stimulating consumer demand Alden professed to serve a larger purpose. Access to cultural goods could be achieved, he thought, not through government largesse or organized charity, but through private enterprise and personal ownership. ‘The Elzevir is the best solution to “The Free Library” question; after all, no books are read with such interest as our own, and young people are educated by the very presence of a home library.’ 20 But if owning books was ever to approximate a national ‘Free Library’, distribution on a massive scale was essential. Alden thus set out to create ‘A LITERARY “AVELANCHE”’, declaring on the cover of Farrar’s Seneca and St. Paul that he had sent out ‘100,000 copies of this issue, of THE ELZEVIR LIBRARY’ as a specimen to drum up interest and spread the word that ‘About 125 Tons, or 500,000 volumes of choice books are now ready’. He encouraged anyone who felt ‘philanthropically inclined’ to ‘found a library’ by giving his product ‘to someone one who has not known the luxury of good and beautiful books’. ‘ “Plant”, thus, a volume’, he cheered, ‘and watch it grow!’ A vision unfolded in Alden’s imagination:

If the very choicest literature, presented in the most charming dress, at a cost that is merely nominal, can tempt the millions to indulge in the most delightful and worthiest of all luxuries—books—I propose to found at least a million libraries within the next ten years!—a library to every sixty inhabitants is surely not too much. Within three years past the books I have sent broadcast more than quadruple the number of those in the Astor Library, and soon the number will pass that of the British Museum. 21

Like Johnny Appleseed, Alden broadcast his imprints and deputized others to plant, attempting to transform the cultural landscape through the germinal potency of his idea. In challenging the elite status of institutions like the Astor Library and British Museum, Alden became the champion of mass culture, which he felt would prevail in the end: ‘men who give us cheap books’, one advertisement heralded, ‘are benefactors of the race’. Not enough could be said ‘in praise of this effort to give good books to the multitude at merely nominal cost’. He proved himself to be ‘the people’s friend’ by bringing the classics to ‘the increasing millions of intelligent readers’. 22 The metaphor of a military campaign, a ‘battle for good books at low prices’, sharpened the political edge of his populism. Alden rallied 19 The Post-Express, Rochester, N.Y., I.1, w.3; Dr J. E. Sanborn, Rockport, Mass, I.30, w.3; ‘Dore’s Celebrated Bible Gallery’, I.13, p. II; Mrs W. A. Kelly, Tawas City, Mich., ‘Cyclopedia of History’, I.4, p. II; John B. Lybrook, Blacksburg, I.1, w.3. The Elzevir Library had competitors in the ﬁeld of cheap literature, as shown by Alden’s boast that ‘Even the Dime Novel is distanced in the extreme economy of cost’ (I.30, p. (1)). 20 Dominion Churchman, Toronto, ‘Voice of the Press’, I.30, w.3. 21 II.67, w.1; I.41, p. XII. 22 Commonwealth, Boston, Mass, I.1, w.3; Lutheran Visitor, Prosperity, NC, I.30, w.3; I.30, p. (1); and Blackburn’s Free South, Little Rock, Ark., I.30, w.3.

352

A Library to Every House

readers to ‘enlist for life in the happy ranks of The Literary Revolution’. Armed with a 25-cent coupon, an enlistee could speed victory along: ‘Every “Recruit” whom you inﬂuence to join the ranks of The Literary Revolution materially helps on the battle—the books thereafter to be published, which you want, will be published so much the cheaper, or made so much the better, and will so much the more rapidly appear.’ Cheap prices were ‘an incalculable boon’ to the typical recruit, a poor boy with ‘an immense appetite for books, and a short purse’. As the battle widened, a reactionary observer could be excused for feeling a sense of horror: ‘What IS the world coming to? The poorest man is now put on an equality with the richest, so far as books are concerned.’ In a land where ‘everybody [could] afford to have beautiful books’, this person feared that the social order was being overturned. 23 The world of publishing had of course been altered: ‘Mr. Alden has made a most decided revolution in the book publishing business.’ A correspondent familiar with industry trends wrote, ‘You have aided much in breaking down the conventional ﬁfty-per-cent booksellers’ proﬁt; and I observe that even in England books are now being issued by (and for) the million at sixpence, that have heretofore been published by the hundred at a pound.’ Sympathetic to Alden’s crusade to smash the barriers to book ownership, he waved their common standard: ‘As one of the people, I beg cordially to thank you for the good you are doing.’ The ultimate metaphor for The Elzevir Library, however, was religious, not political. At the top of one issue Alden posted a bulletin of messianic urgency: ‘SPECIMEN.—This “Wandering Jew” brings you a glimpse of the coming “Literary Millenium.” Spread the good news.’ Enjoined to carry forth the gospel of Alden, reader-purchasers became the apostles of a new creed. 24 This late nineteenth-century eschatological vision provided a triumphal answer, from the opposite side of the ideological divide, to the terse but equally apocalyptic warning of Strahan one hundred years earlier. The book trade had undergone convulsive change. The commercial realities Strahan faced in the closing years of his life were those, in embryo, that would eventuate in Alden’s good news. 23 III.124, pp. (1)–(2); Nelson F. Bird, Foxboro, Ontario III.124, wp. 4; p. II; Central Baptist, St Louis, Mo., III.124, w.4. 24 Torch of Liberty, Wausau, Wis. I, I.30, w. 3; Joseph Crosby, Zanesville, Oreg., I.12, p. I; S. Baring-Gould, Legend of the Wandering Jew, III.124, w. 1. The Gazette, St Joseph, Mo., I.1, w. 3.

Select Bibliography POETRY COLLECTIONS IN SERIES

See Table 1.1.

POETICAL MISCELLANIES AND OTHER COLLECTIONS Bell’s British Theatre (21 vols. London: J. Bell, and York: C. Etherington, 1776–81). Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry (18 vols. London: J. Bell, 1789–94 (vols. i– xvi); G. Cawthorn, 1796–7 (vols. xvii–xviii)). The British Anthology: or, Poetical Library (8 vols. London: John Sharpe, 1824–5). The British Essayists; with Prefaces, Historical and Biographical, by A. Chalmers, F.S.A. (45 vols. 1803; repr. London: Nichols & Son, et al., 1817). Choice of the best poetical pieces of the most eminent English Poets, ed. Joseph Retzer (4 vols. Vienna: Sonnleithner & Hoerling, 1783). Classical English Poetry for the Use of Schools and Young Persons in General, eds. William Mavor and Samuel Jackson Pratt (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Browne, 1820). A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, ed. Robert Dodsley. Introduction, Notes, and Indices by Michael F. Suarez, SJ (6 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997). A Collection of Poems, from the Best Authors, ed. James Elphinston (London, 1764). The English Parnassus, ed. John Adams (London, 1789). The English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (5 vols. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1885–1918). The Fugitive Miscellany (2 vols. London: John Almon, 1774–5). The Lady’s Poetical Magazine; or, Beauties of British Poetry (4 vols. London: J. Harrison, 1781–2). Minor English Poets 1660–1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers’ ‘The English Poets’ [1810], ed. David P. French (10 vols. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967). Modern Poems: Selected Chieﬂy from Miscellanies Published Lately (Glasgow: Andrew Foulis, 1776). The New English Theatre (12 vols. London, 1776–7). The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (6 vols. London, 1768–73). The Poetical Miscellany (London: T. Cadell, 1769). The Scotish Poets (5 vols. Perth: R. Morison & Son, 1786–9). Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Henry Headley (2 vols. London: T. Cadell, 1787). A Select Collection of Favourite Scotish Ballads (4 vols. Perth: Morisons, 1790). A Select Collection of Fugitive Scotish Poetry (Perth: Morisons, 1790).

354

Bibliography

A Select Collection of Poems: With Notes, Biographical and Historical (8 vols. London: J. Nichols, 1780–2). Select Poems from a Larger Collection (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1775). Sharpe’s Select Edition of the British Prose Writers (25 vols. London: John Sharpe, 1819– 21). Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices, ed. Robert Southey (3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Reese & Orme, 1807). Supplement to the British Poets. Collated with the Best Editions: by Thomas Park, F.S.A. (12 vols. London: J. Sharpe, 1808–9). A Supplement to the Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (London: F. Cogan, 1750). Variétés Angloises (London: Chez J. B. ∗∗∗ Imprimeur-Libraire, 1770). The Works of Celebrated Authors, Of whose Writings there are but small Remains (2 vols. London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1750). The Works of the British Poets (50 vols. Philadelphia, 1819–22). The Works of the Caledonian Bards. Translated from the Galic (1778). The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (2 vols. London: F. Cogan, 1749).

OTHER PUBLISHED SOURCES Adams, Frederick B., Jr., ‘English and Other Bindings’, in Gabriel Austin (ed.), Four Oaks Library (Somervile, NJ, 1967). Adventures of Jemima Russell, An Orphan: A True and Pathetic History (Sommers Town: A. Neil, 1799). Aikin, Lucy, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. (London, 1823; repr. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824). Allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (54 vols. Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2005–7). Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1957; repr. 1983). ‘From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830– 1906’, Studies in Bibliography, 11 (1958), 3–24. Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Amory, Hugh, ‘ “Proprietary Illustration”: The Case of Cooke’s Tom Jones’, in R. Harvey, W. Kirsop, and B. J. McMullin (eds.), An Index of Civilization (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University, 1993). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983). Armstrong, John, Miscellanies; by John Armstrong (2 vols. London, 1770). Taste: An Epistle to a Young Critic (London: R. Grifﬁths, 1753). The Artists of the World (10 vols. Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 1999). Atterbury, Sir Francis, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Edmond Waller’, in Edmund Waller, Poems, &c. Written upon Several Occasions, and to Several Persons (London, 1711).

Bibliography

355

Bagster, Samuel, Samuel Bagster of London 1772–1851: An Autobiography (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, Ltd., 1972). Baker, David Erskine, A Companion to the Play-House (2 vols. London: T. Becket & P. A. Dehondt, et al., 1764). Barber, Giles, ‘Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books in France from 1800 to 1852’, The Library, 5th ser. 16 (1961), 267–86. Barker, Arthur, ‘ “And on his Crest Sat Horror”: Eighteenth-Century Interpretations of Milton’s Sublimity and his Satan’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (1942), 421–36. Barnard, John, ‘Introduction’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–25. ‘Print Culture and the Book Trade’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557– 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Bate, W. Jackson, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Beattie, James, The Correspondence of James Beattie, ed. Roger J. Robinson (4 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2004). Essays on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism; On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind; On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; On the Utility of Classical Learning (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1777). James Beattie’s Day-Book 1773–1798, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1948). The Poems of James Beattie, LL.D. Robert Blair, and Michael Bruce (Edinburgh: John Anderson, Jr., 1823). Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (Edinburgh, 1787). Beauties of Biography: Containing the Lives of the Most Illustrious Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain, France, Italy, and Other Parts of Europe. . . . Extracted from the Biographia Britannica, Baile’s Dictionary, and Other Valuable Works, for the Instruction of Youth of Both Sexes (2 vols. London, 1777). Beavan, Iain, ‘Book Lotteries in Aberdeen’, Factotum, 34 (1991), 11–13. ‘The Book Trade in Aberdeen and Area, 1700–1832’, in David A. Stoker (ed.), Studies in the Provincial Book Trade of England, Scotland, and Wales before 1900 (Aberystwyth: University College of Wales, 1990), 54–75. Belanger, Terry, ‘Tonson, Wellington and the Shakespeare Copyrights’, in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), 195–209. Bell, John (of Edinburgh), J. Bell’s Catalogue of Books for the Year 1778, Consisting of Several Valuable Libraries Recently Purchased (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1778). A Catalogue of Books for the Year M,DCC,XCIV (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1794). Bell, John (of London), ‘Bell’s Edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries’, John Johnson Collection. ‘Bell’s Editions . . . ’, John Johnson Collection.

356

Bibliography

Bell, John (of London), ‘The British and Irish Nations Are respectfully intreated to become The Patrons of Fine Printing. And of Beautiful Book Embellishments’ (c.1790–1). ‘A Chronological List of Authors Contained in Bell’s Beautiful Edition of the Poets of Great-Britain’ (London, c.1783). ‘List of the English Classics Published by Mr. Bell’ (c.1790–1), John Johnson Collection. Bell’s New Pantheon: or, Historical Dictionary of the Gods, Demi-Gods, Heroes, and Fabulous Personages of Antiquity (2 vols. London: Printed by and for J. Bell, 1790). Benedict, Barbara M., Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). ‘ “Service to the Public”: William Creech and Sentiment for Sale’, EighteenthCentury Life, 15 (1991), 119–46. Bennett, Shelley M., Thomas Stothard: The Mechanisms of Art Patronage in England circa 1800 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1988). Bennett, Stuart, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–1800 (Newcastle, Del., and London: Oak Knoll Press and British Library, 2004). Biographia Britannica (6 vols. London, 1747–66). Biographia Britannica (2nd edn. 6 vols. London, 1778–93). Blagden, Cyprian, ‘Booksellers’ Trade Sales 1718–1768’, The Library, 5th ser. 5 (1951), 243–57. Bonnell, Thomas F., ‘Bookselling and Canon-Making: The Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776–1783’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 19 (1989), 53–69. ‘John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: The “Little Triﬂing Edition” Revisited’, Modern Philology, 85 (1987), 128–52. ‘Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell’s “Connected System of Biography” and the Use of Johnson’s Prefaces’, Studies in Bibliography, 48 (1995), 193–228. Books and Manuscripts from the Fermor-Hesketh Library at Easton Neston. Catalogue for Sotheby’s Sale L09223 (15 Dec. 1999). Boswell, James, Boswell in Extremes 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 1773, ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961). Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–50; 2nd edn. of vols. v–vi only, 1964). Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, rev. George C. Williamson (5 vols. London: George Bell & Sons, 1909–10). Burney, Charles, The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, i. 1751–1784, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Burnim, Kalman A., and Philip H. Highﬁll Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in his Edition of ‘Bell’s Shakespeare’ and ‘Bell’s British Theatre’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, ed. Zachary Grey (2 vols. Cambridge, 1744). The Cabinet-Makers’ London Book of Prices, and Designs of Cabinet Work (2nd edn. London, 1793).

Bibliography

357

Cameron, William J., ‘A Collection of the Best English Poetry, 1717’, Notes and Queries, 203 (1958), 300–3. Campbell, Lord, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England (3 vols. London, 1849–57). Carnie, Robert Hay, ‘The Letters of Robert Foulis to James Beattie’, The Bibliothek, 9 (1978), 33–46. ‘Scholar-Printers of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1800’, in Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment: Proceedings of a conference held at the University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 298– 308. Case, Arthur E. A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies 1521–1750 (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1935). Catalogue de l’Ofﬁcine des Elzevier (1628) (Paris: Joseph Baer, 1880). Catalogue of the Foulis Exhibition Held in the University of Glasgow April 1913 (Glasgow, 1913). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt (5 vols. London: T. Payne, 1775–8). Cibber, Theophilus, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (5 vols. London: R. Grifﬁths, 1753). Clarendon, Lord, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (3 vols. Oxford, 1707). The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1759). Cohen, Ralph M., The Art of Discrimination: Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ and the Language of Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Connell, Phillip, ‘Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of the Literary Monument’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005), 557–85. Cooke, Charles, ‘Address to the Public’, Edinburgh Evening Courant (17 Nov. 1794). ‘Catalogue of the Works Already Published of Cooke’s Uniform Cheap and Elegant Pocket Library.’ Two-page advertisement (listing 25 poets) in William Walsh, The Poetical Works of William Walsh (London, [1797]). British Library, 11613.h.1/4. ‘Catalogue of the Works Already Published of Cooke’s Uniform Cheap and Elegant Pocket Library.’ Two-page advertisement (listing 34 poets) in Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. A Tale (London, [1797]). ‘A Collection of Portraits and Illustrations from Charles Cooke’s Edition of Select Novels, British Poets, &c.’ (4 vols. London, 1792–1803). Liverpool Central Library, Hornby Collection. ‘Cooke’s Cheap and elegant Pocket Editions of the most esteemed Works in the English Language, Superbly Embellished.’ Six-page advertisement (listing 46 poets) in George, Lord Lyttelton, The Poetical Works of Lord Lyttelton (London, [1804]). New York Public Library, NCI p.v. 16. ‘Cooke’s Select British Novels, or Novelist’s Pocket Library’ (London, 1792). John Johnson Collection.

358

Bibliography

Cooke, Charles, ‘Enumeration of the Works Published in Cooke’s Pocket Editions of the Most Esteemed Authors.’ Two-page advertisement (listing 42 poets) in Samuel Butler, The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler (London, [1803]). British Library, 11613.h.1/35. ‘List of the works already published in Cooke’s Pocket Library.’ One-page advertisement (listing 39 poets) in John Cunningham, The Poetical Works of John Cunningham (London, [1795]). Harvard, Widener Library, KC 12373; British Library, 11613.h.1/37. ‘List of the Works Already Published in the Pocket Library.’ Two-page advertisement (listing 38 poets) in Richard Savage, The Poetical Works of Richard Savage (London, [1800]). Duke University Library, E 12mo #345 v. 13 no. 1. ‘List of the Works Already Published which Form a Part of Cooke’s Select Pocket Library.’ One-page advertisement (listing 28 poets) in Oliver Goldsmith, Essays by Dr. Goldsmith (London, [1799]). Princeton University Library, 3756.3.1799. ‘List of Works Published in Cooke’s Pocket Library.’ Two-page advertisement (listing 38 poets) in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Poetical Works of the Earl of Rochester (London, [1800]). Library Company of Philadelphia, O Eng Roch. ‘A New and Elegant Work . . . ’, c.1789. ‘Plan and Catalogue of Cooke’s Uniform, Cheap, and Elegant Pocket Library.’ Twelve-page advertisement (listing 24 poets) in Mark Akenside, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (London, [1795]). Bodleian, Vet. A5 f. 1489. Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Courtney, William Prideaux, and David Nichol Smith, A Bibliography of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915). Cowper, William, The Task, A Poem in Six Books (Albany: Whiting, Backus & Whiting, 1804). Coxhead, A. C., Thomas Stothard, R.A. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1906). Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Creech, William, Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh: Printed for John Fairbairn, et al., 1815). ‘The Crofton Pamphlets’, Friends of the Library of Trinity College Dublin Annual Bulletin (1956). Curley, Thomas M., Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). Davies, David W., The World of the Elseviers, 1580–1712 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954). Dawson, Giles E., Four Centuries of Shakespeare Publication (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Libraries, 1964). ‘Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare’, Studies in Bibliography, 2 (1949–50), 35–48.

Bibliography

359

Deazley, Ronan, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695–1775) (Oxford and Portland, Oreg.: Hart Publishing, 2004). Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics (Gloucester, 1802). The Library Companion; or, The Young Man’s Guide, and the Old Man’s Comfort, in the Choice of a Library (London: Harding, Triphook, & Lepard; and J. Major, 1824). The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (22 vols. Oxford, 1921–2). Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Dreyfus, John, ‘The Baskerville Punches 1750–1950’, The Library, 5th ser. 5 (1951), 26–48. Dryden, John, The Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, Esq; (4 vols. London: J. and R. Tonson, 1760). Ducourtieux, Paul, Les Barbou: Imprimeurs Lyon-Limoges-Paris (1524–1820) (Limoges: Imprimerie-Libraire Limousine, 1896). Duncan, Douglas, Thomas Ruddiman: A Study in Scottish Scholarship of the Early Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965). Duncan, William James, Notices and Documents Illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, During the Greater Part of the Last Century (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1831). Duncombe, William, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of John Hughes, Esq.’, Poems on Several Occasions. With Some Select Essays in Prose (2 vols. London, 1735). Dyer, John, Poems. By John Dyer, L.L.B. (London, 1761). The Poems of John Dyer, ed. Edward Thomas (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903). Earle, Peter, Making of the English Middle Class (London: Methuen, 1989). The Economist, Shewing, in a Variety of Estimates, from Fourscore Pounds a Year upwards of 800l. how comfortably and genteely a Family may live with Frugality for a little Money (14th edn. London: J. Bell, 1776). Edwards, James, A Catalogue of a Select Collection of Ancient and Modern Books (London, 1789). Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (2 vols. in 1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). ‘An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 87–105. The Elzevir Library (New York: John B. Alden, 1883). The Encyclopedia Britannica (7th edn. 21 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1842). Engell, James, Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Entick, John, The New Spelling Dictionary (London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1765). Epstein, Jason, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001).

360

Bibliography

Essick, Robert N., ‘William Blake, William Hamilton, and the Materials of Graphic Meaning’, ELH 52 (1983), 833–72. Ewing, Thomas, Select Catalogue of Books: Printed for, and Sold by Thomas Ewing Bookseller in Capel-Street, Dublin (Dublin, c.1776). Ezell, Margaret J. M., ‘Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series’, South Central Review, 11 (1994), 2–16. Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Fairer, David, ‘Historical Criticism and the English Canon: A Spenserian Dispute in the 1750s’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 24 (2000), 43–64. Feather, John, A History of British Publishing (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell Publishing Ltd., 1994). Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). ‘Provincial Servants’ Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Fleeman, J. D., A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson (Occasional Publication, 17; Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1984). ‘The Revenue of a Writer: Samuel Johnson’s Literary Earnings’, in Studies in the Book Trade, in Honour of Graham Pollard (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1975), 211–30. The Sale Catalogue of Samuel Johnson’s Library: A Facsimile Edition (ELS Monograph Series, 2; Victoria: University of Victoria, 1975). ‘Some Proofs of Johnson’s Prefaces to the Poets’, The Library, 5th ser. 17 (1962), 213–30. Forbes, Margaret, Beattie and his Friends (1904; repr. Altrincham: J. Martin Stafford, 1990). Forbes, Sir William, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, LL.D. (Edinburgh, 1806; repr. London: William Baynes & Son, 1824). Foss, Edward, Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England (London, 1870). Foulis, Robert, Books printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis, printers to the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1770). John Johnson Collection. A Catalogue of Books, Being the Entire Stock, in Quires, of the Late Messieurs Robert and Andrew Foulis, Printers to the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1777). Memorial of the Printers and Booksellers of Glasgow, Most Humbly Addressed to the Honourable House of Commons, Assembled in Parliament (Glasgow, 1774). Foxon, David, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Bibliography

361

Frank, Jerome P., ‘Playing a Numbers Game at Library of America’, Publishers Weekly (19 Aug. 1988), 49. Freeman, Arthur, ‘The Beginnings of Shakespearean (and Jonsonian) Forgery: Attribution and the Politics of Exposure, Part II’, The Library, 7th ser. 5/4 (2004), 402–27. Gaskell, Philip, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press (2nd edn. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986). Gay, John, Fables, by John Gay, ed. William Coxe (London, 1810). John Gay Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Geduld, Harry M., Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1969). Gifford, William, The Baviad (London: R. Faulder, 1791). Gillespie, Stuart, ‘Translation and Canon-Formation’, in S. Gillespie and D. Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, iii. 1660–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). and Penelope Wilson, ‘The Publishing and Readership of Translation’, in S. Gillespie and D. Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, iii. 1660–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Goldsmith, Oliver, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Goulden, Richard J., The Ornamental Stock of Henry Woodfall 1719–1747: A Preliminary Inventory Illustrated (Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society, 3; London: Bibliographical Society, 1988). Graham, Henry Grey, Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1901). Graves, Algernon, and William Vine Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. (4 vols. London, 1899–1901). Gray, Thomas, The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, corr. H. W. Starr (3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Poems by Mr. Gray (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1768). Poems by Mr. Gray. To which is preﬁxed, An Account of His Life (London: A. Millar, 1774). Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (Edinburgh: Alexander Donaldson, 1775). Poems by Mr. Gray. A New Edition (London: J. Murray, 1776). Poems by Mr. Gray. With a Biographical and Critical Account of the Author (London: R. Tomlins, J. Chandler, D. Watson, & H. Middleton, 1779). The Poems of Mr. Gray. With Notes by Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, B.A. (London: G. Kearsley, 1786). Greene, Donald, ‘ ’Tis a Pretty Book, Mr.Boswell, But—’, Georgia Review, 32 (1978), 17–43. Grifﬁths, A. F., Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica; or, a Descriptive Catalogue of a Rare and Rich Collection of Early English Poetry (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orm, & Brown, 1815). Guillory, John, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

362

Bibliography

Hammond, Paul, ‘The Restoration Poetic and Dramatic Canon’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 388–409. Handover, P. M., Printing in London from 1476 to Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). Hartz, S. L., The Elseviers and their Contemporaries: An Illustrated Commentary (Amsterdam and Brussels: Elsevier, 1955). Harwood, Edward, A View of the Various Editions of Greek and Roman Classics (London: T. Becket, 1775). Hawkins, Sir John, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London: J. Buckland, et al., 1787). Hawksworth, John, ‘An Account of the Life of the Reverend Jonathan Swift, D.D., Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin’, The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift (12 vols. London, 1755). Heawood, Edward, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Hilversum, 1950). Herman, Arthur, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). Hess, Scott, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (New York: Routledge, 2005). Hill, John, An Account of the Life and Writings of Hugh Blair, D.D. (Edinburgh, 1807). Hill, Jonathan E., ‘From Provisional to Permanent: Books in Boards 1790–1840’, The Library, 6th ser. 21 (1999), 247–73. Hodnett, Edward, Text and Image: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature (London: Scolar Press, 1982). Hopkins, Mary Alden, Hannah More and her Circle (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1947). Howe, Ellic, The London Bookbinder 1780–1806 (London: Merrion Press and Desmond Zwemmer, 1988). Hunt, Leigh, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Cresset Library, 1949). Irving, David, Lives of Scotish Authors (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1801). Jacobs, Edward H., ‘Buying into Classes: The Practice of Book Selection in EighteenthCentury Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (1999), 43–64. Jaggard, William, Shakespeare Bibliography (Stratford-on-Avon: At the Shakespeare Press, 1911). Johns, Adrian, ‘How to Acknowledge a Revolution’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 106–25. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Johnson, Samuel, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, i (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). A Dictionary of the English Language (4th edn. 2 vols. London: W. Strahan, et al., 1773). Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vii–viii (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford (5 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992–4).

Bibliography

363

Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Peter Cunningham (3 vols. London: John Murray, 1854). The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (10 vols. London, 1779–81). The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, iii–v (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). Johnstone, Charles, Chrysal: or, The Adventures of a Guinea (3rd edn. 4 vols. London, 1768). Keast, William R., ‘Johnson and “Cibber’s” Lives of the Poets, 1753’, in Carroll Camden (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Kerr, Robert, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of W. Smellie (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1811). Kenyon, George T., The Life of Lloyd, the First Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice of England (London, 1873). Kewes, Paulina, ‘ “Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books . . . ”: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections’, Publishing History, 38 (1995), 5–21. King, Pauline Grace, ‘Thomas Stothard and the Development toward Victorian Romanticism’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1950. Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Knox, Vicesimus, Extracts, Elegant, Instructive, and Entertaining, in Poetry (London: Rivingtons, et al., 1791). Korshin, Paul J., ‘Robert Anderson’s Life of Johnson and Early Interpretive Biography’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 36 (1973), 239–53. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, ‘The Making of the English Canon’, PMLA 112 (1997), 1087–1101. Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Kucich, Greg, ‘A Lamentable Lay: Keats and the Making of Charles Brown’s Spenser Volumes’, Keats-Shelley Review, 3 (1988), 1–22. Lackington, James, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (London, 1791; repr. Hunt & Clarke, 1827). Lawrence, R. Murdoch, ‘John Boyle’, Aberdeen Book-Lover, 5 (1925), 35–43. Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: World Classics, 1989). Leslie, Charles Robert, and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (2 vols. London: John Murray, 1854). Lindert, Peter H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s Social Tables 1688– 1812’, Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 385–408. Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

364

Bibliography

Loewenstein, Joseph, ‘The Script in the Marketplace’, Representations, 12 (1985), 101– 14. The London Catalogue of Books Published in Great Britain. With Their Sizes, Prices, and Publishers’ Names (London: Thomas Hodgson, 1846). The London Catalogue of Books, with their Sizes and Prices (London: Bent, 1799). The London Catalogue of Books, with their Sizes and Prices (London: Bent, 1814). Lowndes, William Thomas, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (4 vols. London: William Pickering, 1834). The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, rev. Henry G. Bohn (6 vols. London: Bell & Daldy; New York: Scribner, Welford, & Co., 1869). Lowry, Martin, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). McDonald, Peter D., ‘Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?’, PMLA 121 (2006), 214–28. MacDonald, W. R., ‘Some Aspects of Printing and the Book Trade in Aberdeen’, in C. A. McLaren (ed.), The Hero as Printer (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Library, 1976). McDougall, Warren, ‘Charles Elliot and the London Booksellers in the Early Years’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds.), The Human Face of the Book Trade: Print Culture and its Creators (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1999), 81–96. ‘Copyright Litigation in the Court of Session, 1738–1749, and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 5/5 (1988), 2–31. ‘Gavin Hamilton, John Balfour and Patrick Neill: A Study of Publishing in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1974. McElroy, Davis D., Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1969). McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982). McKenzie, D. F., ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve’, 1981, repr. in Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (eds.), Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Mackintosh, James, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. Robert James Mackintosh (2nd edn. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1836). Mace, Nancy A., ‘Charles Rennett and the London Music-Sellers in the 1780s: Testing the Ownership of Reversionary Copyrights’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004), 1–23. Maclehose, James, The Glasgow University Press 1638–1931 (Glasgow: At the University Press, 1931). Macpherson, James, Ossian’s Poems. (2 vols. Glasgow: J. Imray, 1799). The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (2 vols. Edinburgh: Denham and Dick, 1803). Mandell, Laura, ‘Canons Die Hard: A Review of the New Romantic Anthologies’, Romanticism on the Net, 7 (Aug. 1997), accessed 13 July 2007. Maxted, Ian, The London Book Trades 1775–1800 (Folkestone: Wm. Dawson & Sons, 1977). Merry, Robert (‘Della Crusca’), Diversity. A Poem (London: John Bell, 1788).

Bibliography

365

Miller, John, Miller’s Catalogue of Cheap Books on Sale at 404, Oxford Street, 1 (1840). Miller, Laura J., Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Milton, John, Paradise Lost. A Poem, in Twelve Books (Birmingham: Printed by John Baskerville for J. and R. Tonson, 1758). Miskimin, Alice, ‘The Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Chaucer’, Modern Philology, 77 (1979), 26–55. Moorman, Mary, William Wordsworth: A Biography. The Early Years 1770–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Morison, Stanley, John Bell, 1745–1831: Bookseller, Printer, Publisher, Typefounder, Journalist. &c. (Cambridge: Printed for the Author, at the University Press, 1930; also, London: The First Edition Club, 1930). ‘John Bell: A Note Addressed to Members of the First Edition Club’ [1930]. The Typographic Arts Past, Present, and Future (Edinburgh: James Thin, 1944). Murray, David, Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1913). Some Letters of Robert Foulis (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1917). A New and General Biographical Dictionary (12 vols. London, 1761–7). The New London Catalogue of Books, Sizes and Prices (London: Bent, 1805). The New London Catalogue of Books, with their Sizes and Prices (London: Bent, 1807). Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987). Newman, John, ‘Library Buildings and Fittings’, in Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (eds.), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ii. 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 190–211. Nichol, Donald W., ‘Aberdeen, Imprints and the ESTC: Towards a Deﬁnitive Bibliography’, in Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds.), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 309–15. Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (9 vols. London, 1812–15). Nichols, John Bowyer, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. London, 1817–58). Nicolson, Benedict, John Hamilton Mortimer ARA 1740–1779. Exhibition Catalogue, Towne Art Gallery in Eastbourne, 6 July–3 Sept. 1968 and the Iveagh Bequest in Kenwood, 10 Sept–8 Oct. 1968. Orrery, Lord, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (3rd edn. 1752). Paley, Morton D., Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Pardoe, F. E., John Baskerville of Birmingham, Letter-Founder and Printer (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1975). Parnell, Thomas, Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1989). Patey, Douglas Lane, ‘The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon’, Modern Language Studies, 18 (1988), 17–37. Patterson, Lyman Ray, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).

366

Bibliography

Percy, Thomas, The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Robert Anderson. ed. W. E. K. Anderson, The Percy Letters, ix (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988). Philips, John, Poems Attempted in the Style of Milton. By Mr. John Philips. With a New Account of His Life and Writings (London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson, and T. Lownds, 1762). Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1763). Phillips, James W., Printing and Bookselling in Dublin, 1670–1800: A Bibliographical Enquiry (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998). Pilkington, Laetitia, Memoirs (2 vols. Dublin, 1748). Pilkington, Matthew, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1731). Piper, David, ‘The Chesterﬁeld House Library Portraits’, in Rene Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 179–95. The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portaits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Pitcher, John, ‘Literature, the Playhouse and the Public’, in J. Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 351–75. Pollard, M., A Dictionary of Members of the Dublin Book Trade 1550–1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 2000). Preston, William, An Epistle to Robert Anderson, M.D. on Receiving from Him a Present of Various Poetical Works (Edinburgh: Mundell, Doig, & Stevenson, 1806). Price, Kenneth, ‘An Interview with Daniel Aaron on the Library of America’, South Central Review, 5 (1988), 60–71. Propertius, Propertius Elegies, ed. and tr. G. P. Goold (Loeb Classical Library, 18; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Raimbach, Abraham, Memoirs and Recollections of the Late Abraham Raimbach (London: Frederick Shoberl, Jr., 1843). Raleigh, Walter, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). Raven, James, ‘From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ‘Location, Size, and Succession: the Bookshops of Paternoster Row before 1800’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century (Newcastle, Del., and London, 2003), 89–126. London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). Reed, Isaac, Isaac Reed Diaries 1762–1804, ed. Claude E. Jones (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946). Remer, Rosalind, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Ribeiro, Alvaro, and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Bibliography

367

Richardson, John, Jr., ‘Correlated Type Sizes and Names for the Fifteenth through Twentieth Century’, Studies in Bibliography, 43 (1990), 251–72. Robinson, Roger, ‘Nature’s Kindly Plan: A New Look at James Beattie and his Poetry’, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 12 (1998), 7–11. Rogers, Deborah D., Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing (New York: Peter Lang, 1986). Rogers, Pat, ‘Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries’, Review of English Studies, NS 31 (1980), 149–71. Rose, Mark, ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’, Representations, 23 (1988), 51–85. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Ross, Trevor, ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (1992), 1–27. ‘The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century’, ELH 63 (1996), 397–422. ‘Just When Did “British bards begin t’Immortalize”?’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 19 (1989), 383–98. The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). St Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). St Maur, Raymond de, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or, The Fall of Man (London, 1767). Schmitz, Robert Morell, Hugh Blair (New York: King’s Crown Press of Columbia University Press, 1948). Scone Palace and Blairquhan: The Selected Contents of Two Great Scottish Houses, Thursday 24 May 2007 (London: Christie’s, 2007). Scott, Walter, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (12 vols. London, 1932–7). Waverley, ed. Andrew Hook (London: Penguin Classics, 1985). Sewell, George, ‘The Life of Mr John Philips’, Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1763). Shakespeare, William, Poems Written by Shakespear (London: J. Bell and C. Etherington, York, 1774). Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works (London: John Stockdale, 1790). Stockdale’s Edition of Shakespeare: Including, in One Volume, the Whole of His Dramatic Works (London: John Stockdale, 1784). The Works of Shakespear, ed. Sir Thomas Hanmer (6 vols. Oxford, 1743–4). Shaver, Chester L., and Alice C. Shaver, Wordsworth’s Library: A Catalogue (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979). Sher, Richard B., ‘The Book in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in The Culture of the Book in the Scottish Enlightenment (Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 2000), 40–60. ‘Commerce, Religion and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow,’ in T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds.), Glasgow, i. Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 312–59.

368

Bibliography

Sher, Richard B., ‘Corporatism and Consensus in the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: The Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society in Comparative Perspective’, Book History, 1 (1998), 32–93. The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & their Publishers in EighteenthCentury Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). (with Hugh Amory), ‘From Scotland to the Strand: The Genesis of Andrew Millar’s Bookselling Career’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds.), The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade (Newcastle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001). Sherbo, Arthur, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum (ELS Monograph Series, 45; Victoria: University of Victoria, 1989). Skowronek, Stephen, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997). Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ii (2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Spenser, Edmund, The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. H. J. Todd (8 vols. London: F. C. and J. Rivington, et al., 1805). Steele, Sir Richard, et al., The Guardian (2 vols. London: John Sharpe, 1804). Stillinger, Jack, Reading ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Stockdale, Percival, Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets (2 vols. London: Printed by D. N. Shury, for the Author, 1807). ‘The Life of Edmund Waller’, in The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose (London, 1772). The Memoirs of the Life, and Writings of Percival Stockdale (2 vols. London, 1809). Stower, Caleb The Printer’s Grammar 1808 (English Bibliographical Sources, 3/4; London, 1965). Straus, Ralph, and Robert K. Dent, John Baskerville: A Memoir (London, 1907). Suarez, Michael F., SJ, ‘The Formation, Transmission, and Reception of Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands’, in Robert Dodsley, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, with a New Introduction, Notes, and Indices by Michael F. Suarez, SJ (6 vols. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997), 1–119. ‘The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 217–51. ‘Trafﬁcking in the Muse: Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Question of Canon’, in Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 297–313. Terry, Richard G., ‘Literature, Aesthetics, and Canonicity in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21 (1997), 80–101. Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Topham, Edward, Letters from Edinburgh; Written in the Years 1774 and 1775 (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1776).

Bibliography

369

Traylen, Charles W., ‘The Great Scottish Poet Robert Burns’s Collection of the Poets.’ Charles W. Traylen Catalogue 118. Guildford, Nov. 1995, item 17. Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Wain, John, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1975). Walker, Keith, ‘The Master of Extremes’, Times Literary Supplement (19–25 Feb. 1988), 193. ‘Jacob Tonson, Bookseller’, American Scholar, 61 (1992), 424–30. Waller, Edmund, The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose (London, 1772). Wallis, N. Hardy, ‘Fugitive Poetry: An Eighteenth Century Collection’, Essays by Divers Hands, NS 13 (1940), 43–66. Walsh, Marcus, ‘Literary Scholarship and the Life of Editing’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 191–215. Walters, Gwyn, ‘The Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: The Battle for Literary Property’, The Library, 5th ser. 29 (1974), 287–311. Warton, Joseph, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756). Warton, Thomas, The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995). Weinbrot, Howard D., Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ‘Samuel Johnson, Percival Stockdale, and Brick-Bats from Grubstreet: Some Later Responses to the Lives of the Poets’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 56 (1993), 105–34. Whitelocke, Sir Bulstrode, Memorials of the English Affairs (London, 1732). Whittemore, Reed, Poets and Anthologists: A Look at the Current Poet-Packaging Process. A Lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on May 6 ,1985 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986). Wiles, R. M., Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Willems, Alphonse, Les Elzevier Histoire et Annales Typographiques (Brussels, 1880; repr. Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1962). Williams, Marjorie, William Shenstone: A Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Taste (Birmingham: Cornish Bros., 1935). Williams, Raymond, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). Wilson, Penelope, ‘Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 69–96. Wolcot, John (‘Peter Pindar’), The Works of Peter Pindar (4 vols. London: J. Waller, J. Harris, et al., 1809). Wood, Anthony à, Athenæ Oxonienses (2nd edn. 2 vols. London, 1721). Wordsworth, William, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

370

Bibliography

Young, Edward, The Poetical Works of the Reverend Edward Young, LL.D. (2 vols. London: Curll, Tonson, Walthoe, et al., 1741). The Works of the Author of the Night-Thoughts (6 vols. London: T. Cadell & J. Nichols, 1778). Zachs, William, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1998). Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Zionkowski, Linda, ‘Territorial Disputes in the Republic of Letters: Canon Formation and the Literary Profession’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 31 (1990), 3–22.

Index of Booksellers, Printers, Publishers Unless otherwise speciﬁed, London was the place of business. For references to the London booksellers when acting collectively, look under ‘London Trade’. The practices of the book trade are sorted out in the General Index, not here under individual names, which would create too much duplication. For example, the order in which poets were published in a series was important for several booksellers. Instead of addressing this topic repeatedly under John Bell, John Boyle, Charles Cooke, James Mundell, and Joseph Wenman, I give the sub-entry ‘strategic publication order’ under ‘marketing’ in the General Index. Aldus Manutius (Venice) 1, 13, 44, 45 Alden, John B. (New York) 344, 348–52 Almon, John 171, 317, 341 Anderson, John Jr. (Edinburgh) 332 Angus & Son (Aberdeen) 218 Arch, John and Arthur 10, 192, 202–5, 220 Archer, J. (Dublin) 248, 270 Asperne, James 192 Bagster, Samuel 11, 152, 191, 293–7, 310 Baldwin, Henry 190 Baldwin, Robert 143, 190 Balfour, John (Edinburgh) 10, 34–5, 37 n, 38, 51, 54, 68, 72–80, 90, 134, 316 Ballantyne, James (Edinburgh) 333 n Barbou, Joseph-Gérard (Paris) 71 Barker, James 191 Baskerville, John (Birmingham) 31–2, 43 n, 347 Bathurst, Charles 190 Becket, Thomas 64, 190 Bedford, John 45 Bell, John (Edinburgh) 37 n, 70, 71, 81, 93 see also Bell & Bradfute Bell, John (London) 7, 10, 12–13, 17, 19, 22, 23, 34, 97–133, 134, 143–4, 171–3, 176, 180–1, 188, 195–6, 212, 221–2, 227, 231, 261–2, 263, 264–5, 291, 293, 310–11, 317, 319, 337, 338, 344–5 Bell & Bradfute (Edinburgh) 10, 70 n, 202–5, 208, 218, 220, 270 Bensley, Thomas 230 Bent, William 191 Bew, John 190 Black & Parry 191 Black, Parry, & Kingsbury 191 Booker, Joseph 191 Booth, John 192 Bowen, Joseph 190 Boyle, John (Aberdeen) 10, 69, 87–96, 98, 170, 181, 317

Brash, James (Glasgow) 56 Brash & Reid (Glasgow) 248, 270 Brown, Alexander (Edinburgh) 37 n Brown, James (Edinburgh) 37 n Buckland, James 190 Burnett, John (Aberdeen) 248 Cadell, Thomas I 135, 141, 143, 169, 177, 186, 190 Cadell (Thomas II) & Davies 190, 271–2, 286 Campbell, Samuel (New York) 218 Carnan, Thomas 171 Carpenter, James 191 Caslon, Thomas 190 Cassell & Company 8 n Cave, Edward 32 Cawthorn, George 291, 293, 294, 319, 338 Chalmers, Robert (Aberdeen) 88, 93 Chapman, Robert (Glasgow) 59 Charnley, William (Newcastle) 218 Childs, Francis (New York) 218 Clarke (William) & Sons 191 Clay, Thomas (Daventry, Rugby, Lutterworth) 179 Cogan, Francis 27–8, 29–30, 321 Coke, William (Edinburgh) 37 n Colbert (Dublin) 270 Conant, Nathaniel 135–7, 143, 190 Cooke, Charles 11, 23–4, 34, 41–2, 227–65, 275, 317, 339 Cooke, John 259–60 Coote, John 171 Corrall, Charles 289–90, 312 Creech, William (Edinburgh) 10, 34–8, 64, 68–9, 70–86, 90–1, 93, 94–6, 98, 99, 118, 130, 134, 140, 177, 212, 316, 327 Crosby, Benjamin 192 Crowder, Stanley 190 Curll, Edmund 42, 186 Cuthell & Martin 191

372

Index of Booksellers, Printers, Publishers

Davies, Charles 191 Davies, Thomas 135, 143, 190, 202 Davis, Lockyer 143, 190 Davis, William 190 Deighton, John (Cambridge) 191 Deighton & Son (Cambridge) 191 Denham & Dick (Edinburgh) 333, 335 Dent & Sons 8 n Dickson, James (Edinburgh) 37 n Dieterich, I. E. (Göttingen) 340–1 Dilly, Charles 35, 36, 81, 180, 190, 204 Dilly, Edward 35–6, 81–2, 131–2, 135–6, 138, 171, 190, 212 Dodsley, James 190, 318 Dodsley, Robert 26–7, 52, 59, 211, 249, 317 Doig, Sylvester (Edinburgh) 200–2, 204, 207, 208, 218, 219 Donaldson, James (Edinburgh) 37 n Douglas, Francis (Aberdeen) 87 Draper, Samuel 28 Drysdale, John (Edinburgh) 37 n Duncan, Alexander (Glasgow) 59 Dunlop & Wilson (Glasgow) 93, 194–5, 218 Edwards, James 191, 268 Egerton, Thomas & John 191 Elliot, Charles (Edinburgh) 37 n, 64, 68, 93 Elmsley, Peter 190 Elzeviers (Holland) 13, 39, 40–6, 48, 70–1, 98, 309, 338, 349 Estienne, Robert and Henry (Paris) 13, 40–1, 44, 48, 49, 51, 61–2, 309 Evans, Robert Harding 190, 271–2 Evans, Thomas 135–7, 143, 190 Ewing, Thomas (Dublin) 327 Faulder, Robert 191 Flexney, William 171 Forsyth, Isaac (Elgin) 218 Foulis, Andrew II (Glasgow) 65–7, 180, 187, 194, 225, 338–9 Foulis, Robert and Andrew I (Glasgow) 1, 10, 23, 34, 40–1, 46–65, 68–9, 80, 90–2, 94, 98, 99, 167, 179, 183, 266, 309, 310, 316, 338, 340 Fox, William 190 French, John 95–6 Fry & Couchman 195 Galignani (Paris) 341 Gall (James) & Inglis (Robert) (Edinburgh) 311 Gardiner, J. 171 Gardner, Henry Lasher 190 Goldsmith, William 191

Gordon, William (Edinburgh) 37 n Grace, William 192 Graye, William (Edinburgh) 37 n Hamilton, Gavin (Edinburgh) 51, 53, 72 Harding, John 191 Harrison, James II 122, 180, 286, 322–4 Hatchard, John 191 Hayes, Samuel 191 Henderson, Andrew 171 Henshaw, Thomas (Dublin) 344 Herringman, Henry 39 Hill, Peter (Edinburgh) 331 Hill, Thomas (Perth) 248 Hindmarsh, Robert 195 Hone, William 314–15 Imlach, James (Banff ) 93 Imray, James (Glasgow) 333, 335 Jeffery, Edward 191 Johnson, Joseph 190 Kearsley, George 11, 171, 270–3 Kincaid, Alexander (Edinburgh) 10, 70–3, 75, 78, 80, 81 Lackington, James 94 Lackington, Allen, & Co. 191 Law, Bedwell 143, 190 Lea, Richard 191 Leigh & Sotheby 190 Lintot, Bernard 25, 42 Little, Brown, & Company (Boston) 347–8 London Trade 31–2, 37, 52, 53, 96, 106–7, 116, 117, 119, 130, 131–2, 135–6, 140, 148, 169–80, 189–94, 212–13, 269–70, 293, 297–8, 327, 341 Longman, Thomas II 143, 190 Longman (Thomas Norton), Hurst, Rees, & Orme 190 Louis, F. (Paris) 341 Lowndes, Thomas 190 Lowndes, William 190 Mackinlay, John 191 M’Kenzie, W. (Dublin) 248 Martin, Gilbert (Apollo Press, Edinburgh) 10, 23, 90, 97, 116–18, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 132, 140, 146–7, 153, 171, 197, 278, 293 Martin & Bain 103, 196–8, 217, 293, 296 Mathews & Leigh 191 Mawman, Joseph 192 Millar, Andrew 51, 54 ‘Miller, Andrew’ 10, 328 n Miller, William 191

Index of Booksellers, Printers, Publishers Mitchell, Ames, & White (Philadelphia) 339–40 Moffatt, W. (Waterford) 248 Moore, James (Dublin) 10, 327–8 Moran, C. 171 More, J. (Dundee) 93 Morgan, Edward Henry (Cork) 344 Morison, James and Robert Jr. (Perth) 330–1, 332–3, 334 Moseley, Humphrey 19–20, 39 Mudie, George (Edinburgh) 331 Mundell, James (Edinburgh) 10, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 214–15, 216, 220–1, 222, 269 Murray, John I 76–7, 190, 319 n, 321, 331 Murray, John II 190 Neil, A. (Sommers Town) 289 Neill, Patrick (Edinburgh) 72 Nelson & Sons 8 n Newberry, Elizabeth 190 Newberry, Francis 190 Newman, A. K. 282 n Nichols, John 136, 138–9, 143, 144, 170, 176, 186, 190, 211, 317–19 Nichols (John) & Son 190 Nichols, John Bowyer 200, 211 Nicholson, George (Bradforth; Poughnill; Manchester) 290–2, 345 Nicol, George 143, 190 Nicol (George) & Son 190 Nicol, Robert (Dundee) 93 Nicoll, William 127, 191 Nimmo, William P. (Edinburgh) 312 Nunn, James 191 Ogilvy & Speare 191 Ogle, John (Edinburgh) 248 Otridge, William 191 Otridge & Son 191 Owen, William 190 Parsons & Galignani (Paris) 341 Payne, Thomas I 190 Payne, Thomas II 190, 271–2 Payne & Mackinlay 191 Pemberton, John 318 Phillips, Richard 347 Pickering, William 347–8 Richardson, James Malcott 191 Richardson, John 191 Richardson, William 191 Richardson, William, James & John 191 Ridley, John 190 Rivington, Francis & Charles 190, 271 Rivington, Francis, Charles & John 190

373

Rivington (John) & Sons 143, 190 Robinson, George 143, 190, 204 Robinson, George I, George II, John & James 190 Robson, James 190 Routledge & Sons 8 n, 311 Scatchard & Letterman 191 Scatchard & Whittaker 191 Schaw, Will (Edinburgh) 37 n Sewell, John 191 Sharpe, John 11, 187, 265, 266, 273–89, 309, 320–1 Sharpe & Hailes 282 Smellie, William (Edinburgh) 72 Spiers, Walter 314 Spottiswood, James 65 Stalker, Andrew (Glasgow) 52 Stalker, Charles 191 Stephens, Henry and Robert, see Estienne Stockdale, John 191 Strahan, William 34–8, 64, 70–3, 75–8, 80, 81, 118, 120, 130, 132–3, 135–6, 139, 140, 169, 177, 180, 190, 230, 352 Suttaby, William 280, 282, 287, 289–90, 312, 316, 347 Suttaby, Evance, & Fox 11, 282, 336 Suttaby, Evance, & Hutchings 282 Symington, Lawrie (Edinburgh) 200–2, 204, 207, 208, 219 Sympson, Charles 45 Tauchnitz (Leipzig) 341 Taylor, Joseph (Aberdeen) 87, 93 Taylor & Hessey 282 Tilloch, Alexander (Glasgow) 65–6, 338–9 Tonson, Jacob I 39–40, 41, 42, 59, 69, 265 Tonson, Jacob III and Richard 28–9, 30, 31–2, 41, 54, 104, 167, 174, 186, 321 Urie, Robert (Glasgow) 61 Vernor, Thomas 191 Vernor, Hood, & Sharpe 191 Walker, John 191 Warne, Frederick 311 Watson & Co. (Edinburgh) 248 Wenman, Elizabeth 185 Wenman, Joseph 10, 180–5, 187, 188, 227, 229, 273, 289, 317 Wenman & Hodgson 184, 185 White, Benjamin 143, 190 White (Benjamin) & Son 190 White (John) & Co. 190 White, T. (Cork) 248 Whittingham, Charles 11, 278, 311

374

Index of Booksellers, Printers, Publishers

Whittingham & Arliss 344 Wilkie, George & Thomas 190 Wilkie, John 190 Wilkie & Robinson 190 Wilkinson, Stephen (Morpeth) 218 Wilson & Son (York) 192

Wogan, Patrick (Dublin) 10, 328 Wood, John (Edinburgh) 37 n Woodfall, Henry 44–5 Woodfall, William 107 Wynne, Peter 191 Wynne, Peter & William 191

General Index Italicized page numbers after the poets’ names indicate where they are listed in tables or advertised rosters. The artists who produced portraits and illustrations, or whose work was copied, are identiﬁed in parentheses. Aaron, Daniel 3–4, 342 Abington, Frances 319 Adams, Rev. John 315 Addison, Joseph 23, 32, 33, 34, 39, 55, 58, 69, 79, 84, 89, 91, 101, 103 n, 129, 172, 181, 185, 215, 240, 242, 277, 294, 295, 300, 312 portraits 112, 174 and n, 234, 284 Spectator 20–1, 22, 97, 99, 104, 345 advertisements: catalogues 57, 86, 208 ﬂy-leaves 58–9, 64 n, 80, 88, 95, 224 handbills 18, 116, 214–15 newspapers 68, 93, 107, 114, 127, 148, 170, 203–5, 237, 342 prospectuses 87–9, 128, 200, 202–3, 204–5, 219, 227 shop labels 338 tipped-in notices 111, 232, 235 title-pages 88, 105, 181 word of mouth 237–8, 352 wrappers 76, 237–9, 273–4, 288, 330 advertising 17, 90, 99, 114, 176, 337 crafty 81–2 educative 98 premature 140, 272 Agar, John Samuel (engraver) 278 Aikin, John 11, 270–3, 298, 319 n Aikin, Lucy 271 Aikman, William (painter) 112, 174 Akenside, Mark 58, 59, 65, 79, 89, 90, 91, 101, 105, 156, 158, 173, 184, 195, 215, 240, 241, 242, 248, 249, 275, 276, 295, 301, 312, 327 portraits 113, 174 n, 234 Aldine Edition of British Poets, The (1830–52) 347–8 Altick, Richard 34, 56, 348 Amory, Hugh 38, 178, 262, 286, 339 Anacreon 215, 283, 302 Anderson, Robert 10, 199–226, 246, 250–3, 261, 266–7, 268, 298, 304, 306, 310, 313, 316, 328–9, 343 anthologies 25, 27, 33–4, 236, 280, 322 see also miscellanies Apollo 23–4, 307, 340

Apollo Press, see Gilbert Martin in other index Apollonius Rhodius 215, 223, 283, 302 Ariosto, Ludovico 303, 336, 337 Armstrong, Cosmo (engraver) 244, 245, 283 Armstrong, John 45, 79, 89, 91, 92, 101, 159, 170, 171, 172, 193, 195, 215, 240, 243, 277, 295, 302, 328 portraits 113, 174, 193, 234 Ashton, Matthew (painter) 113 Atterbury, Sir Francis 158, 159, 161 Auden, W. H. 8 Ballard, George 321, 323 Bampfylde, John 278, 303 Bank, I. V. (painter) 234 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 312, 315 n, 322 Barber, Mary (‘Saphira’) 23 Barclay, Alexander 213 bards 23, 228, 232, 245, 247–53 bardic nationalism 248 Barnard, John 39 Bartolozzi, Francesco (engraver) 101, 115, 120, 121, 173, 174 n, 194, 281 Beattie, James 36, 48, 52, 59–60, 78, 81–7, 91, 166, 186, 208, 276, 302, 311, 329, 332 Beaumont, Francis 19, 39, 299 Beaumont, Sir John 299 Beauties of Biography, The (1777) 166–7 Beauties of English Poesy, The (1767) 33, 236 Beauties of the Poets of Great Britain, The (1826) 312 Beavan, Iain 92 Behn, Aphra 103 Bell, Robert 311 and n Bell’s British Theatre (1776–81) 18, 106–7, 108, 116, 125, 126, 140, 181, 194–6, 227, 263, 264, 291 Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry (1789–97) 196, 293, 319–21 Bell’s Edition. The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (1776–82) 10, 90, 97–133, 142, 148, 153–5, 178, 180, 187, 194–8, 201, 212, 217, 220–1, 229, 230, 232, 241, 261, 263, 264, 267–8, 275, 278, 293–4, 326–7, 344–5

376

General Index

Benedict, Barbara 25–6, 27 Billington; or, Town and Country Songster (1790) 184, 185 biographies, see prefaces Bion 215, 283, 302 Blacklock, Thomas 84, 214, 215, 281, 302, 328 Blackmore, Sir Richard 139, 172, 215, 243, 246, 269, 280, 281, 300, 328 portraits 174 and n, 234 Blagdon, Cyprian 41 Blair, Hugh 36, 70, 73–4, 79, 80, 90, 120, 139, 174, 208, 212, 332–3 Blair, Robert 199, 204, 214, 215, 275, 277, 301, 328, 332 Blake, William (engraver) 101 book bindings 14, 125–6, 128, 197, 230–1, 240–1 n, 293–4, 333, 345–6 book-buying: as ‘cabinet’ collecting 178, 263, 265, 273–4, 290, 332 instilling the habit 4, 98, 290, 292 lists for purchasers 17, 18, 57, 88, 95, 238–9, 266 from advertisements 219, 337, 342 psychology of 17, 56 resources for 178–9, 239, 350 second copies 177, 346 subscription (funding the printer) 66–7 subscription (standing orders) 73, 80, 88, 111, 114, 219, 228, 237, 273, 287, 331 see also ownership bookcases 2, 63–4, 125, 197, 261–3, 265 book design 4, 17, 19, 46, 128, 130, 177, 197, 219–20, 229–30 title-pages 104–5, 182, 197, 220–1, 245, 250–1 290–1, 333 uniformity 7–8, 9, 12, 66, 89, 98–9, 183, 227, 263, 282 book formats 13, 14, 26, 39, 56, 60–1, 66, 85, 145–7, 199–200, 204–5, 216, 227, 262–3, 270, 345 Aldine 13, 44, 347–8 Elzevir 13, 41–3, 45–6, 47, 62, 71, 98, 99, 205, 309, 338, 347, 348–9 folio 19–20, 39, 48, 49, 61, 66, 180, 194, 261 quarto 19, 39, 48, 60, 183, 261 royal octavo 180, 216–17, 219, 261, 297, 328 small octavo 19, 20, 39, 44, 68 n, 73, 216–17 pocket volumes 19–20, 39, 41, 44, 60–1, 85, 87, 115–16, 130, 177, 178, 180, 261, 336 Boscawen, Frances 177

Boswell, James 61, 62, 130, 135, 137, 138, 139, 144, 171, 189 Bowles, William Lisles 312, 313 Boydell, John 265 Boyse, Samuel 214, 215, 275, 277, 301 British Anthology; or, Poetical Library, The (1824) 311 British Essayists, The (1803) 298, 307 British Poets, The (1773–76) 10, 64, 68, 72–87, 94–6, 141, 194, 208, 212, 326, 332–3 British Poets, The (1822) 311 Brome, Alexander 299 Bromley, William (engraver) 243 Brooke, Henry 302 Brooke, Mrs 322 Brooke, Rupert 316 Broome, William 101, 103 n, 156, 173, 215, 242–3, 281, 294, 295, 301 portraits 113, 174 n, 234 Brown, John 214, 215, 281, 303 Brown, W. H. (draughtsman) 234–5, 242, 245 Browne, William 202, 213, 215, 299 Browning, Robert 294 n, 316 Bruce, Michael 214, 277, 303, 328, 330, 332 Buckhurst, Thomas Sackville, Lord 213, 215, 303 Buckingham, John Shefﬁeld, 1st Duke of 55, 101, 103 n, 172, 175, 215, 244, 281, 294, 294, 300, 307 portraits 113, 174 n, 235 Burnet, Gilbert 165 Burney, Charles 140 n Burney, Edward Francis (illustrator) 220, 242, 243, 276, 285 Burns, Robert 267, 277, 303, 311, 332 Butler, Samuel 58, 74, 75, 91, 99, 100, 102, 129, 162, 164, 172, 181, 184, 215, 240, 244–5, 248 271, 276, 294, 295, 300 portraits 108–10, 112, 174 n, 235, 284 Byrom, John 301 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron 312, 313 Bysshe, Edward 26 Caldwall, James (engraver) 173, 174 n Callimachus 223–4 Cambridge, Richard Owen 302 Campbell, Thomas 312 Camoëns, Luis de 303 canon (individual poets): authorial œuvres 28–9, 82–7, 102–3, 138, 183, 186–9, 212, 229, 246, 280, 305, 319 Poetical Works, not Poems 66, 89–90, 93, 103–4, 212, 229 task of recovery 28, 186–7, 209, 210–11, 223

General Index canon (national body of poets): causes 1, 13, 16, 20–1, 27, 33–4, 40, 61, 70 compared with biblical 30–1, 293 complete 9, 12, 17, 69, 103, 124, 170, 176, 181, 188–9, 199, 202, 205, 222 criteria 89, 213, 221–2, 239, 252–3, 267, 305–6, 309–10 leveling effect 20, 94, 104, 239, 269 materiality 12, 13–16, 70, 250, 267 socially constructed 16–17, 33–4, 70, 226, 306, 307 expansion 23, 199, 200–1, 212, 214, 222, 224–5, 316–17 contraction 225, 271, 279, 280, 290, 311, 312, 317, 320, 339–40 inclusion/exclusion 23, 74, 89, 113–14, 139, 171–3, 183, 189, 193, 210, 212–14, 241, 268–9, 294–5, 304–5, 307, 328 ‘elder classics’ 21–2, 89, 90–1, 164, 170–1, 187–8, 200–1, 212–13, 241, 250–2, 268, 280, 304, 311, 340 living authors 59–60, 80–7, 90–2, 222, 275, 306 women 312–13, 321–6 Capell, Edward 198 Cardon, Anthony (engraver) 276, 277, 278, 281, 283 Carew, Thomas 202, 213, 215, 299 Carter, Elizabeth 315 n, 322 Carter, Sally 322 Cartwright, William 299 Cassell’s National Library 348 Catton, Charles (painter) 112 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 40, 97 Cawthorn, James 193, 215, 281, 301, 328 Chalmers, Alexander 1, 11, 175–6, 280, 297–8, 304–7, 313, 316, 329 Chambers, Sir Robert 62–4, 125, 342 Chapman, James (engraver) 235, 242, 243, 244 Chatterton, Thomas 214, 215, 216, 269, 301 Chaucer, Geoffrey 21–2, 23, 99, 102, 122, 125, 170, 172, 201, 213, 215, 268, 295, 296, 299, 311, 312 portrait 113, 174 text 126, 127, 296 Cheere, John 15 Chesham, Francis (engraver) 220 Chesterﬁeld, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of 15, 108–11, 112, 114 Churchill, Charles 101, 120–1, 125, 127, 129, 163, 170, 171, 172, 181, 181–3, 184, 193, 195, 215, 240, 241, 277, 295, 301, 328 portraits 112, 174, 193, 241

377

Cibber, Theophilus 156 n Cipriani, Giovanni Battista (illustrator) 101, 120, 121, 194 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 159, 161 Clark, John 332 Classical English Poetry for the Use of Schools (1820) 312 classical touches: annotations 102, 168, 327 authoritative attributions 108–9, 111, 174, 235, 328 chronological arrangement 204, 214 numbering of verses 106 organization by genre 103–4, 174–5, 320 publication in sets 12–13 standard editions 99, 126, 134, 162, 327 vellum bindings 125–6 visual conceits 23–4, 110 classics 3, 5, 13, 69, 71, 98, 124, 170, 210 Greek and Roman 12–13, 19, 23, 31, 35, 40, 46, 56–7, 61, 65, 97–8, 224, 247 vernacular 13, 48, 55, 61–2, 97–8, 103, 204 classic status 19–20, 66, 106 complete works required 30, 183, 186–9, 206 conferral 45, 213, 214 deﬁnitions 17, 170, 213, 216, 270–1 life-and-works paradigm 134 representations 13–14, 15–16 Cole (engraver) 243 Colman, George (the younger) 322, 323 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 226, 267, 312 Collection of the Best English Poetry, by Several Hands, A (1717) 27 Collection of Poems, A (1768, 1770, 1775) 211, 317–19 Collection of Poems by Several Hands, A (1748–82) 26–7, 59, 211, 317, 245, 317–19 Collection of Poems, from the Best Authors, A (1764) 33 Collection of the English Poets, A (1776–7) 10, 87–96, 141, 326 Collection of the Most Esteemed Pieces of Poetry, A (1767, 1770) 317–19 Collier, Mary 322 Collins, William 58, 62–3, 65, 66, 79, 80, 91, 101, 113, 155–6, 158, 162, 173, 181, 184, 195, 215, 232, 242, 275, 276, 294, 295, 301, 311, 312 Collyer, Joseph (engraver) 174 n Coluthus Lycopolites 215, 283, 302 Colvil, Samuel 333 Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, A, see The Works of the British Poets (1792–1807)

378

General Index

Congreve, William 23, 32, 100, 103 n, 129, 164, 172, 181, 185, 215, 221–2, 240, 242, 281, 295, 300, 327 portraits 112, 174 n, 234 Connell, Philip 15 consumerism 2, 9, 12, 17, 19, 20–1, 56, 60, 96, 189, 208, 237, 262, 337 self-regarding 93–4, 193, 231, 265, 273–4, 315–16 see also book-buying Cook, Richard (illustrator) 277, 278, 281, 283 Cook, Thomas (engraver) 100–2, 111, 112–13, 174 n Cooke, Thomas 215, 302 Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets (1794–1805) 11, 24, 41–2, 227–65, 278, 333 Cooper, John Gilbert 113, 214, 215, 281, 301 copyright 30–8, 51–5, 59–60, 68, 72–3, 91, 94–5, 132, 142–3, 152, 169, 171, 173, 184, 222, 268, 311, 313, 342 Booksellers’ Relief Bill 35–6, 53, 76–8 Copyright Act (1710) 31, 36, 171 Copyright Acts (1735, 1767) 284 Bell v. Walker and Debrett 152 n Donaldson v. Becket 32–4, 53, 54–5, 59, 69, 76, 78, 139 Millar v. Kincaid 53 Tonson v. Walker 53 see also piracy copy-texts 92, 99, 126–7, 182, 209, 241 Corbet, Richard 299 Corbould, Richard (illustrator) 234, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 255, 256, 259, 333 Cotton, Charles 214, 299 Cotton, Nathaniel 183, 184, 214, 215, 276, 302 Coxeter, Thomas 189 Cowley, Abraham 23, 74, 75, 91, 93, 99, 100, 115, 129, 134, 162, 172, 181, 185, 212, 215, 240, 241, 268, 271, 295, 295, 299 portraits 112, 174 n, 284 Cowper, Judith (later Mrs Madan) 322, 324 Cowper, William 11, 266, 270, 278, 292, 302, 311, 312, 314–5 Crashaw, Richard 213, 215, 299 Crawford, Robert 16, 54, 70, 74, 326, 329, 331 Creech, Thomas 215 cultural capital 20–1, 22, 56, 93, 134, 262, 312 Cunningham, John 101, 165, 170, 171, 172, 174, 193, 195, 215, 240, 241, 242, 248, 249, 275, 276, 294, 295, 301, 329 portraits 113, 234 Cunningham, Peter 132

Daniel, Samuel 213, 215, 225, 299 Dante Alighieri 337 Davenant, Sir William 213, 215, 299 Davies, Sir John 55, 213, 215, 225, 299 Dawson, Giles E. 32 Day, Thomas 276, 303 de Moulinville, J. P. (engraver) 242 Delany, Mary 177 Delatre, Jean (engraver) 101–2, 113, 120, 121, 173, 174 n Della Crusca, see Robert Merry Denham, Sir John 55, 58, 74, 75, 91, 93, 101, 103 n, 105, 172, 195, 215, 240, 241, 277, 295, 299 portraits 112, 174 n, 284 plagiary of ‘Life of Denham’ 142–52 Devis, Arthur William (illustrator) 276, 277, 278, 283 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall 43, 228, 264, 289, 307, 323, 336, 339, 344, 347 Dibdin, Thomas John 344 Dibdin’s London Theatre (1815–18) 344 Dobson, Michael 188 Dodsley, Robert (as poet) 214, 215, 243, 246, 281, 301 portrait 235 Donne, John 101, 125, 134, 162, 170, 172, 201, 213, 215, 294, 294, 299 portrait 112, 174 Dorset, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of 23, 27–9, 172, 214 n, 245, 281, 300, 319 Douglas, Gavin 105, 331 Dove’s English Classics 312 Drayton, Michael 213, 214, 215, 225, 299, 312 Drummond (illustrator) 244 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 213, 215, 216, 299, 328 Dryden, John 13, 22, 23, 33, 39, 55, 58, 65, 69, 75, 78, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 100, 108, 129, 165, 172, 174, 181, 185, 186, 215, 240, 243–4, 248, 269, 275–6, 276, 277, 294, 295, 300, 311, 312, 329, 343 portraits 112, 174 n, 234, 284 Virgil 57, 58, 89, 91, 102, 181, 193, 196–7, 215, 247, 295, 302 Juvenal 40, 215, 302 Persius 40, 215, 302 Dryden’s Miscellany 26, 40, 59, 318 Duke, Richard 172, 175, 215, 281, 300 Dunbar, William 105, 331 Duncan, Douglas 69 Duncombe, John 112, 322 Duncombe, William 156 Dunn, John (painter, engraver) 235

General Index Dyer, John 101, 159, 173, 195, 215, 240, 241, 277, 295, 301 portrait 111, 113, 174 n Dyer, Samuel 111, 174 n economics of the book trade: balance of trade 53–4 boycotts 107 capital 2, 55, 92, 107, 119, 120, 131, 176, 179, 237, 282 competition 2, 3, 17, 27–30, 35, 36, 38, 53, 64, 78, 89–90, 132–3, 140, 182, 194 discounts 218 distribution 92–3, 107–8, 194–5, 218, 248 employment 53–4, 131, 132 inﬂation 286–7 market share 12, 38, 291 monopoly 53, 77, 133, 140 payments 52, 107, 169 proﬁt margins 218, 230, 352 risk 132, 169–70, 180, 286 shipping 97, 117–18, 120–1, 218 n supply and demand 12, 22, 30, 53–4, 60, 61, 67, 92–3, 131, 175, 185, 230, 237, 332 trade alliances 37, 107 wartime slumps 51, 120, 169, 223, 247, 316 wealth creation 52, 53–4, 131, 310 see also advertising; marketing; pricing Edinburgh Booksellers’ Society 37, 200 n Edinburgh Friendly Insurance Society 206 editing 3, 45, 46, 54, 73–5, 138–9, 170, 192–3, 199, 207–13, 216, 230, 266–7, 297–8, 304–7 ‘bookseller-editor’ 59, 126–7, 137, 207, 266 Edwards, Edward (illustrator) 100–1, 108, 114, 285 Edwards, Sydenham (illustrator) 244 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 99 Ellis, George 305, 306, 314 Elphinston, James 33 Elzevir Library, The (1883) 348–52 Engleheart, Francis (engraver) 283 English language 40, 83–4, 310, 329–30, 340–2 English Parnassus, The (1789) 315 English Poets, The (Foulis, 1765–76) 10, 51, 55–64, 65–6, 68, 79, 80, 91, 125, 326, 342 English Poets, The (Ward’s, 1885–1918) 316 engravings 108–9, 110–11, 114–15, 120, 173–4, 185, 193 n, 229, 232, 239, 254, 275, 339 proofs or ﬁrst impressions 114, 124, 231, 263, 287, 296

379

refurbishment, alterations 264, 287, 296–7 sold separately 124, 263, 296 stipple technique 232–3 Entertaining Museum; or, Complete Circulating Library, The (1780–1) 180, 289 Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary (1765) 33 Epstein, Jason 8 n Essick, Robert N. 287 Eusden, Laurence 214 Evans, William (engraver) 245 Everybody’s Books 8 Everyman’s Library 8 Ezell, Margaret 17, 20, 322, 323 Fairfax, Edward 139, 213 Faithorne, William (draughtsman, engraver) 110 Falconar, Harriet and Maria 315 n Falconer, William 183, 184, 193, 215, 232, 240, 241, 242, 276, 295, 301, 307, 312, 328 Farquhar, George 327 Fawkes, Francis 215, 301, 302 Fenton, Elijah 99, 101, 102, 103 n, 162, 172, 175, 215, 240, 242, 281, 294, 295, 300, 318 Fergus, Jan 6 n, 326 Fergusson, Robert 330–2 Finden, William and Edward Francis (engravers) 283 Fittler, James (engraver) 283 Fleeman, David 253 Fletcher, Giles 213, 215, 299 Fletcher, John 19, 39 Fletcher, Phineas 213, 215, 299 Forbes, Sir William 84, 85, 86, 87 Forteguerri, Niccolo 337 Foster, John 66 Foxon, David 39 Francis, Philip 181, 224, 247, 302 Fugitive Miscellany, The (1774–5) 317, 341–2 fugitive poetry 103, 196, 223, 319, 331 Fuseli, Henry (illustrator) 122–3, 276, 283 Garth, Sir Samuel 23, 27–9, 55, 58, 78–9, 91, 101, 103 n, 172, 181, 185, 195, 196–7, 215, 224, 244, 278, 295, 300, 312, 327 portraits 112, 174 and n, 235, 284 Ovid 196, 247 Gascoigne, George 299 Gaskell, Philip 55 Gay, John 23, 25, 27, 39, 40, 55, 58, 65, 79, 88, 91, 94, 100, 129, 162, 172, 181, 184, 215, 240, 245, 277, 294, 295, 300, 312, 322, 327 portraits 112, 174 n, 235, 284 George III 83, 318

380

General Index

Gibbon, Edward 61 Gillespie, Stuart 40, 69 Glasgow Academy of Painting 49–50 Glover, Richard 58, 79, 91, 214, 215, 244, 277, 302 portrait 235 Glynn, Richard 275, 277, 303 Godolphin, Sidney, 1st Earl of 29 Golding, Richard (engraver) 283 Goldsmith, Oliver 33, 131 n, 171, 184, 185, 193, 200, 215, 236, 240, 241, 242, 248, 255, 275, 276, 295, 302, 311, 312, 315, 329 portraits 234 Gordon, Jane, Duchess of 86 Gough, Richard 117 Gower, John 105, 213, 299, 312 Graeme, James 199, 214, 215, 281, 303, 328 Graham, George 62 Graham, John (illustrator) 242 Grahame, James 313 Grainger, James 199, 207, 214, 215, 223, 281, 301, 302, 328 Grainger, W. (engraver) 242 Granger, B. (J? P? R?) (engraver) 234–5, 243 Granville, George, see Lansdowne Gray, Thomas 33, 48, 52, 57, 58, 59, 65, 66, 79, 84, 88, 90, 91, 102, 103 n, 162, 163–4, 167–8, 173, 181, 184, 195, 215, 240, 241, 242, 248, 268, 269, 275, 276, 294, 295, 301, 311, 312, 329 portraits 113, 174, 234, 284 Green, Matthew 193, 215, 278, 295, 301 Greville, Frances 322 Grey, Zachary 99, 102, 162, 164 Grignion, Charles (engraver) 100–3, 108, 110–11, 112, 115 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 337 Guillory, John 16, 23, 306 Habington, William 299 Halifax, Charles Montague, Earl of 14, 27–9, 172, 175, 215, 281, 300, 307 Hall, John (engraver) 100–1, 110, 112, 115, 173, 174 n Hall, Joseph 213, 215, 225, 299 Hamilton, William (illustrator) 276, 277, 281 Hamilton, William, of Bangour 51, 113, 214, 215, 276, 301 Hammond, James 58, 63, 65, 66, 80, 91, 101, 113, 155–6, 165, 173, 184, 195, 215, 240, 245, 276, 294, 295, 300, 312 Hammond, Paul 40 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 15, 32, 255 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of 48 Harris, Charles 15

Harrison’s British Classics 253 Harte, Walter 214, 215, 281, 301 Hartz, S. L. 44 Harwood, Edward 56 Hawes, Stephen 213 Hawkins, Sir John 138 Hawkins, W. (engraver) 242, 243, 244, 245 Hawkesworth, John 161–2 Hayley, William 312 Hayman, Francis (artist) 255 Headley, Henry 202, 269, 278, 303, 314 Heath, Charles (engraver) 283 Heath, James (engraver) 11, 101–2, 242, 270–3 Heins, John Theodore (Dirck) (painter) 113 Herbert, George 312 Herrick, Robert 312 Hesiod 215, 283, 302 Heys, Miss 322 Hill, Aaron 113, 214, 215, 281, 303 Hill, John 75 Hobbes, Thomas 38 Homer 1, 13, 23, 40, 49, 61, 283, 293 see also Alexander Pope Hoole, John 303 Hopkins, Charles 214 Hopwood, J. (W?) (engraver) 234–5 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 23, 40, 102, 181, 224, 283, 302 Howard, Henry (illustrator) 283 Hoyland, Francis 278, 303 Hughes, John 99, 101, 103 n, 153, 156, 172, 215, 281, 294, 294, 300 portraits 112, 174 n, 241 Hume, David 35, 81, 94 Humphreys, Samuel 162 Hunt, Leigh 195–6, 238–9, 246, 253, 278, 288 Hutcheson, Francis 46, 47 illustration 26, 99, 104, 108, 120–3, 207, 220, 229–30, 253–61, 282 alluring to readers 126, 287–9 costs 114, 119, 282, 286–7 drawings exhibited 124, 264 poetry and painting 260–1, 286, 347 recurring motifs 256–9, 284 same passages depicted 284–6 see also engravings; portraits Irving, David 223, 307, 328, 331–2 Jago, Richard 214, 215, 216, 278, 302 James I 330–1 Jenner, Charles 214 Jenyns, Soame 193, 215, 277, 295, 302 Jervas (Jarvis), Charles (painter) 174 Johns, Adrian 99

General Index Johnson, R. (illustrator) 245 Johnson, Samuel 12, 17, 33, 40, 43, 44, 62, 126, 177, 189, 193, 208, 209–10, 215, 241–2, 243, 250, 271, 276, 288, 295, 302, 310–11 portraits 174, 193, 234 Prefaces, Biographical and Critical / Lives of the Poets commissioning and composition of 135–8, 141–2, 318 disjunct from poems 141–2, 193–4, 341 ‘inquisitorial’ judgments 21, 157, 209, 250, 252, 271 intimidating to rivals, successors 119, 193, 209, 223, 305 mined by Bell’s compilers 153–8, 160–1 monumental presence 267–8, 271, 279, 296, 305, 311, 327–8, 339 phrasing of titles 134, 178 and n, 209, 269 plagiarized 142, 144–5, 148–52 republished separately 142, 177–8, 223 sold only with complete set 163, 177–8, 179–80, 193–4 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ 325–6 Rambler (no. 60) 161 Rambler (no. 106) 175 Jones, Sir William 278, 295, 296, 302 Jonson, Benjamin 19, 23, 201, 213, 215, 299 Joseph, George Francis (illustrator) 283 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) 40, 44, 196, 215, 283 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 52, 53 Kauffman, Angelica (illustrator) 101, 120, 121, 194, 278 Keats, John 267 Kent, William 13, 15, 256 Kenyon, Lloyd 142–4 Kewes, Paulina 20, 39 King, Henry 213 King, William 29, 101, 103 n, 172, 174, 215, 281, 295, 300 portrait 113 Kirk, Thomas (illustrator) 242, 243, 244, 255, 257–9, 264, 285–6 Kirke White, Henry 312–13 Kirkpatrick, James 214 Klancher, Jon P. 22 Kneller, Sir Godfrey (painter) 112, 113, 174, 234–5, 261 Knox, Vicesimus 216, 219 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody 20–2, 30–1 Lady’s Poetical Magazine, The (1781–2) 322–4 Lamb, Charles 288

381

Landseer, John (engraver) 283 Langhorne, John 62, 158, 162, 193, 215, 243, 252, 259, 277, 301, 324–6 Langland, William 213 Lansdowne, George Granville, Baron 23, 101, 172, 174, 175, 195, 215, 243, 281, 295, 300, 307 portraits 113, 234 Leapor, Mary 322 Lely, Sir Peter (painter) 112 Lenglet Dufresnoy, Nicolas 71 Lennox, Charlotte 151 n, 322 Lewis, William Lillington 224, 302 libraries: grandiose 13, 14–15, 19, 48, 50, 93, 263 formed by multi-volume series 178, 202, 225, 263, 307, 345 circulating 36 institutional 13–14, 69, 123 n, 351 traveling 63–4, 125, 197, 261–2, 296 and n, 309, 310, 318 Library of America 3–4, 8–9, 342 Lintot’s Miscellany (1712, 1714) 25, 26, 319 Literary Classics of America 3 Literary Miscellany, The (1794–1812) 290–2, 345 literary property, see copyright literature: ‘invented’ 11–12, 69–70 rescued 20–1, 95 ‘standard’ 99, 266, 307 Liverpool Fire-Ofﬁce 117 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, The (1781), see Samuel Johnson Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, The (1753) 155 n, 156, 159–61, 163–5, 189 Lloyd, Robert 193, 215, 281, 301, 328 Loeb Classical Library 1, 3 Logan, John 209, 214, 215, 277, 302, 328 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 312 Lonsdale, Roger 138 Lovelace, Richard 312 Lovell, Robert 278, 303 Lovibond, Edward 214, 215, 277, 301 Lowe, Mauritius (illustrator) 100, 116, 285 Lowndes, William Thomas 279–80 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) 196, 215, 283, 295, 302 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 40, 215 Lycophron 223 Lydgate, John 105, 213 Lyttelton, George Lyttelton, Baron 58, 65, 66, 79, 88, 90, 91, 101, 156, 173, 184, 195, 215, 240, 241, 243, 276, 295, 301, 312 portraits 113, 174 n, 234, 290–1

382

General Index

McKenzie, D. F. 39 Mackenzie, E. (engraver) 234–5 Mackintosh, Sir James 269–70 Macklin, Thomas 265 MacNeill, Hector 332 Macpherson, James (‘Ossian’) 223–4, 249, 332–3, 335 Madan, Mrs, see Judith Cowper Mallet, David 31, 101, 113, 159, 165, 173, 195, 215, 240, 242, 252, 276, 294, 295, 301, 328 Malone, Edmond 32 n, 198 Mandeville, Bernard 131 Mansﬁeld, William Murray, 1st Earl of 52–3, 64, 66, 143 Marcuard, Robert (engraver) 102 marketing: branding 4, 41, 43–4, 56, 139, 148, 180, 197, 208, 247, 273, 286, 328, 332–3, 338 consumer feedback 26, 102, 192–3, 197, 298, 314, 317 exporting 66, 338–9, 342 geographic reach 92–3, 195, 218, 248 name recognition 81, 135, 137, 139, 148, 180, 266, 271 product differentiation 91–2, 171 product mimicry 90–1, 134, 170, 173, 176, 180, 185, 229, 235, 246, 280, 298, 328 selling points 2–3, 26, 78–9, 99, 105–6, 114, 134, 173, 194, 208, 229, 238–9, 261, 273, 284, 307, 328 strategic publication order 82, 88, 89, 93, 97, 99, 176, 181–2, 183, 201, 222, 239–40, 248, 268, 275 stratiﬁcation of buyers 207, 230–2, 290, 314 see also pricing Marlowe, Christopher 213, 312 Marvell, Andrew 214, 312 Mason, William 58, 59–61, 65, 91, 92, 162, 302 Mavor, William 312, 347 May, Thomas 213 Meadows, Robert Mitchell (engraver) 243, 278, 281 Melmoth, Courtney, see Samuel Jackson Pratt Memorial of the Printers and Booksellers of Glasgow (1774) 342 Mendez, Moses 214, 317–19 Merry, Robert (‘Della Crusca’) 268 Mickle, William Julius 209, 214, 215, 244, 246, 278, 302, 303, 328 portrait 235 Milton, John 13, 20, 21, 23, 30–1, 31–2, 33, 34, 39, 48, 55, 56–7, 58, 69, 75, 89,

91, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 129, 162, 172, 181, 184, 195, 215, 230, 236–7, 240, 241, 242, 248, 265, 268, 269, 271, 276, 294, 295, 299, 312, 327, 329, 340, 343 portraits 112, 114, 174 n, 234, 284 text 126, 127 miscellanies 24–30, 65, 206, 211, 290, 317–21 distinct from collections 2, 25 supplemental to canon 59, 80, 185, 196, 223, 280, 331 Mitan, James (engraver) 283 Modern Library, The 8 Modern Poems: Selected Chieﬂy from Miscellanies Published Lately (1776) 65 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord 48 Montagu, Elizabeth 86 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 312, 322 Montague, Charles, see Halifax Moor, James 46, 47 Moore, Edward 101, 113, 172, 183, 184, 184 n, 193, 215, 243, 277, 294, 295, 301, 323, 328 Moore, Sir John Henry 278, 303 Moore, Thomas 313 Moore’s British Classics (1793) 327–8 More, Hannah 312, 324–6 Morison, Stanley 128, 130 Mortimer, John Hamilton (illustrator) 100–1, 108, 114–16, 120, 121, 122, 123, 194, 260, 285 Moschus 215, 283, 302 Mowson, T. (illustrator) 245 Murdoch, Patrick 162 Murray, David 61 Musæus 215, 283, 302 Muses’ Library, The 8 nationalism 9, 12, 73, 121, 123, 206, 247, 248, 309–10, 315–16 American 8–9, 339–40 British/English 166, 310, 326–7, 328, 331, 336–9 cultural heritage 7, 8, 22, 53, 107, 211, 345 Irish 327–8 rivalry between nations 7, 8, 13, 15, 53, 212, 334–7 Scottish 92, 328–32 Neagle, John (engraver) 242, 243, 244, 283 Nelson’s Classics 8 New English Theatre (1776–7) 106–7 New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1768–73) 317 New York Post Family Classics Library 17 New York Review Classics 17 Newton, Thomas 99, 104, 127, 162

General Index Noble, S. (engraver) 235, 244, 283 Northumberland, Hugh Percy, Earl (later Duke) of 43, 50 Novelist’s Magazine, The (1780–8) 122, 180, 322 Nutter, William (engraver) 242, 243 Occleve, Thomas 105 Oldham, John 214 Opie, John (illustrator) 277 Opie, Amelia 312 Oram, Samuel Marsh 278, 303 Orrery, John Boyle, 5th Earl of 161 Ossian, see James Macpherson Otway, Thomas 29, 172, 215, 243, 281, 300 portraits 174 and n, 234 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 40, 102, 196, 223–4, 283, 293, 295, 302 ownership 19, 56, 94, 262, 290, 292, 350 bookplates 345–6 inscriptions 345 and n marginalia 142–3, 226, 266 n, 347–8 Oxford World Classics 1, 2–3, 8 paper 53–4, 80, 117, 206, 229, 273 cost 72, 216 quality 55, 64, 87, 231 quantities 72, 216 sizes 68 n, 72, 182–3, 216–17 watermarks 145–6, 274 n Park, Thomas 11, 273, 279, 298 Parnaso Italiano (1784–91) 337 Parnell, Thomas 23, 55, 58, 66, 79, 90, 91, 100, 172, 181, 185, 187, 195, 212, 215, 240, 243, 277, 295, 300, 312, 327 portraits 112, 174 n, 234, 284 Paton, George 117, 130 Pattison, William 214, 215, 281, 303 Pearch, George 211, 317–19 Penguin Classics 1, 3, 8, 45 n Pennington, Elizabeth 322 Penrose, Thomas 209, 214, 215, 277, 303 Percy, Thomas 23, 207, 210, 223, 314 Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus) 40, 44, 215, 283 Petrarch, Francesco 337 Pfau, Thomas 69 Philips, Ambrose 29, 55, 65, 101, 103 n, 156, 157, 173, 215, 277, 281, 294, 295, 301, 328 portraits 113, 174 Philips, John 23, 55, 101, 156, 158–9, 163, 167, 172, 184, 215, 294, 295, 300 portraits 113, 174 n, 241, 284 Pilkington, Laetitia 161, 322 Pilkington, Matthew 23

383

Pindar 196, 215, 283, 303 Pindar, Peter, see John Wolcot Piozzi, Mrs., see Hester Lynch Thrale Piper, David 15, 110 piracy 35–7, 72, 148 actual 142–52, 155 alleged 32, 118, 130, 169 Pitcher, John 39 Pitt, Christopher 102, 156, 173, 174, 193, 215, 281, 295, 301, 328 portrait 113 Æneid 165 n, 215, 302 Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755) 322 Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland (1773) 322 Poems on Various Subjects (1791) 184, 185 Poetical Magazine: or, Parnassian Library, The (1780–81) 10, 180–5, 187, 194 Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, The (1801–14) 317 poetry: ‘correctness’ in 82–4 demand for 2, 30, 61, 69, 175 older verse uncouth 21, 164, 201–2, 213–14, 268 rankings (‘ﬁrst order’, ‘minor’, etc.) 28, 30, 211, 216, 252, 266, 282, 305–6, 307–8, 320–1 reﬁnement of 201, 202, 222, 249–50, 253, 268 shift in taste 226, 248, 275, 279, 305–6, 311, 340 Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey 15, 16, 108–10, 174, 284 Poets of Great Britain, in One Hundred and Twenty-Four Volumes [or Sixty-One Double Volumes], The (1807) 11, 152, 293–7 Poets of Scotland, The (1823–24) 332 Polwhele, Richard 303 Pomfret, John 31, 55, 88, 91, 93–4, 101, 104, 111, 121, 139, 172, 181, 184, 195, 215, 240, 243, 246, 269, 281, 282, 295, 300, 312 Pope, Alexander 15, 23, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 55, 56–7, 58, 65, 66, 69, 78–9, 84, 88, 89, 91, 93–4, 99, 100, 104, 129, 173, 181, 184, 195, 215, 240, 241, 242, 248, 269, 276, 294, 295, 301, 311, 312, 327, 329, 343 portraits 112, 114, 115, 174 and n, 234, 282 Iliad, Odyssey 57, 58, 65, 79, 89, 91, 102, 177, 181, 196–7, 215, 247, 295, 302 Porteus, Beilby 275, 277, 303 portraits 99, 105–6, 108–15, 173–4 and n, 193, 232, 234–5, 282, 290–1, 328

384

General Index

Pratt, Samuel Jackson (‘Courtney Melmoth’) 312, 329–30, 347 prefaces: anticipated by Creech, Ewing 78–9, 327 obligatory feature 66, 99, 105–6, 134, 235–6, 290–1 sources for Bell 144–66 tutorial function 236, 249 Preston, William 211, 223 prices 10–11, 55, 57, 68, 73, 78, 80–1, 88, 125, 176–7, 178–9, 183, 194, 196–7, 206, 207, 217, 224, 231–2, 240, 272, 273–4, 280, 284, 290, 328 pricing 19, 53, 80, 118–19, 128, 237, 246 emphasis on cheapness 34, 73, 98, 183, 184, 202, 216–17, 229–30, 350 ‘underprinting’ 36, 52, 139, 169, 229 Princess of Wales 23, 247 Prince of Wales 195–6, 247 printing: meticulous quality 44, 47 stereotype method 65–6, 67 types 42–4, 46–7, 49, 87, 126, 132, 177, 206, 220, 229, 238, 273 print runs 81–2, 131, 192, 223, 287, 313 Prior, Matthew 23, 27, 29, 33, 39, 55, 58, 78, 88, 91, 100, 129, 139, 162, 172, 181, 185, 215, 240, 244, 248, 277, 294, 295, 300, 311, 312, 327 portraits 108, 110, 112, 174 n, 235, 284 Propertius, Sextus 40, 97–8, 104, 223 Pye, Charles (engraver) 283 Pye, Henry James 216, 303 n Pye, Joel Henrietta (‘Mrs. Hampden Pye’) 322 Quarles, Francis 213 Raimbach, Abraham (engraver) 243, 244, 247, 255, 283, 284, 287, 288 Ramsay, Allan 87, 332 Raven, James 262 Ravenet, Simon François (engraver) 173 readers 5, 20, 94, 188, 218–19 and n, 224, 290, 314, 331, 348–52 ‘common’, ‘vulgar’, etc. 20, 45, 93, 208, 270, 352 experienced 21, 93, 192, 236, 270 inexperienced 25–6, 128, 236, 266, 347 mass market 12, 20, 34, 108, 128, 131, 133, 266, 336, 344, 351 middle class 15, 20, 69, 130, 219, 236–7, 248 servants 179 women 218–19, 323 young 126, 166–7, 236, 288–9, 309, 315, 347

reading 17, 19, 44, 61, 175, 186, 204, 214, 236 altering one’s taste 21–2, 213–14, 226 casual (‘dip and skip’) 26, 106 leisurely 13, 261, 340–1, 347 serious (‘study’) 13, 21–2, 26, 45 n, 106, 202, 261, 344–5, 347 Rebecca, Biagio (illustrator) 101–2, 120 Reed, Isaac 32 n, 137, 143–4, 193, 296, 318 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) 23, 314 reprint trade 32, 52–5, 133, 266 Holland 53 Ireland 52–3, 169, 195 n, 248, 327–8 Scotland 35–7, 51–5, 72, 76, 94–5, 126, 130, 139, 248 Retzer, Joseph 340–1 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (painter) 81, 111, 113, 174, 234–5 Rhodes, Richard (engraver) 242, 244, 283 Richardson, William 47, 58, 91, 91–2, 303 Ridley, W. (engraver) 234, 242, 243 Roberts, James (draughtsman) 112 Roberts, Miss 322 Robertson, William 94 Robinson, Mary 312 Robinson, Roger 83 Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of 139, 172, 215, 244, 246, 281, 295, 300 Rogers, Pat 159, 162 Roper (engraver) 333 Roscommon, Wenworth Dillon, 4th Earl of 27, 28, 29, 55, 101, 103 n, 153, 155–6, 164, 165, 172, 215, 281, 294, 295, 300 portrait 113 Rose, Mark 34 Ross, Alexander 332 Ross, Trevor 19, 20, 69 Rosse, Andrew 46 Roubiliac, Louis-François (sculptor) 234 Rowe, Elizabeth 289, 312, 322 Rowe, Nicholas 101, 156, 157, 172, 196, 215, 240, 243, 281, 294, 295, 300 portraits 113, 174 and n, 234 Lucan 196, 215, 295, 302 Rudin, Max 9 Russell, Thomas 278, 303 Ryder, W. (engraver) 243 Sackville, Charles, see Dorset Sackville, Thomas, see Buckhurst Sacred and Moral Poems (1789) 184, 185 St Clair, William 33–4, 139, 311–5, 341 Sandys, George 213 Sanford, Ezekiel 339–40 Sappho 215, 283, 302

General Index Satchwell, Robert William (illustrator) 244 Saunders, J. (engraver) 242 Savage, Richard 101, 111, 113, 155, 173, 195, 215, 244, 259, 277, 295, 300 Scheemakers, Peter (sculptor) 15 Schiavonetti, Luigi (engraver) 276, 277, 283 Schiavonetti, Niccolo (engraver) 276, 277, 278 Schmitz, Robert Morell 74 Scoticisms (1787) 83–4, 166 Scotish Poets, The (1786–89) 330–1, 342 n Scottish dialect 51, 83–4, 329, 332 Scott, Edmund (engraver) 101 Scott, John (engraver) 244 Scott, John (poet) 214, 215, 278, 302 Scott, Mary 322 Scott, Sir Walter 312, 313, 333–6 Sedley, Sir Charles 214 Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry (1787) 202, 314 Select British Poets, and Translations (n.d.) 225 Select Collection of Favourite Scotish Ballads, A (1790) 331, 342 n Select Collection of Fugitive Scotish Poetry, A (1790) 331 Select Collection of Old Plays (1780) 144, 318 Select Collection of Poems, A (1780–2) 144, 211, 317–19 Select Poems (1783) 65 Select Poems from a Larger Collection (1775) 59 Select Poems from Dodsley’s Collection (1776) 59 serial publication 75, 80, 87–8, 107, 128, 176, 178, 179, 205, 240, 347 series: mixed-genre 2, 181, 184, 185, 227, 289, 307, 317 essays 181, 227, 273, 298, 327 novels 181, 227, 344 plays 39, 40, 180, 273, 332 n, 344 other 17, 44, 227, 247, 273, 344 Sewell, George 158–9, 163, 167, 214 Shakespeare, William 15, 19, 23, 30–1, 32, 34, 69, 84, 181, 185, 187–8, 201, 213, 215, 219, 225, 240, 243, 246, 250–3, 255, 265, 268, 269, 299, 312, 327, 329, 343 portrait 234 Sharp, William (engraver) 100–2, 110, 112, 116 Sharpe’s British Classics 273 Sharpe’s Select Edition of the British Prose Writers (1819–21) 273, 309 Shaw, Cuthbert 209, 214, 215, 245, 246, 277, 303 Shefﬁeld, John, see Buckingham Shenstone, William 33, 57, 58, 59, 79, 88, 91, 101, 129, 173, 183, 184, 195, 212,

385

215, 240, 241, 242, 248, 249, 276, 295, 301, 311, 312, 329 portraits 112, 174 n, 234 Sher, Richard B. 94 Sherburn, Sir Edward 299 Sherwin, John K. (illustrator and engraver) 101, 115, 173, 174 n Shiels, Robert 93, 156–8 Sidney, Sir Philip 213, 268 Singleton, Henry (illustrator) 276, 277, 281 Skelton, John 213, 299 Skowronek, Stephen 228 Smart, Christopher 27, 209, 214, 215, 216, 281, 301 Smirke, Robert (illustrator) 276, 277, 278 Smith, Adam 35, 54, 66 n, 70, 94, 121 n, 131, 310 Smith, Anker (engraver) 242, 244, 255, 283 Smith, Charlotte 312 Smith, Edmund 101, 156–7, 158, 164, 172, 175, 195, 215, 281, 294, 295, 300 Smollett, Tobias 185, 199, 214, 215, 243, 246, 277, 301, 328 portrait 234 Somers, John, Baron 29 Somerville, William 55, 101, 103 n, 113, 173, 184, 195, 215, 244, 276, 294, 295, 300 Southey, Robert 226, 267, 272, 304, 306–7, 312–13 Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790) 305, 306, 314 Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807) 306–7 Spenser, Edmund 15, 21, 30–1, 39, 69, 89, 91, 91, 93, 99, 100, 104, 125, 170, 172, 193, 195, 201, 213, 215, 225, 268, 269, 270, 271, 295, 295–6, 299, 311, 312, 343 portrait 112, 174 Sprat, Thomas 28–9, 99, 162, 172, 175, 215, 245, 281, 300 Standard Early English Authors (c . 1830) 314 Statius, Publius Papinius 102, 224, 302 Steel, Anne 322 Steele, Sir Richard 318 Steevens, George 32, 173 n, 198 Stepney, George 27–9, 172, 175, 215, 281, 300 Stillinger, Jack 267 Stillingﬂeet, Benjamin 65 Stirling, William Alexander, 1st Earl of 213, 299 Stockdale, Percival 135–8, 159, 161, 269 Stormont, David Murray, 7th Viscount, Baron of Scone and Balvaird (later 2nd Earl of Mansﬁeld) 66

386

General Index

Stothard, Thomas (illustrator) 101–2, 121–3, 276, 277, 278, 281, 283, 284–5, 286, 288 Strange, J. (engraver) 234, 242 Sturrock, William 43, 50 Suarez, Michael, SJ 26–7, 34, 59, 318 Suckling, Sir John 29, 202, 213, 215, 299 Sulpicia 283, 302 Supplement to the British Poets (1808–9) 280–2 Supplement to the Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets, A (1750) 29–30 supply and demand, see economics of the book trade Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 209, 215, 216, 299 Suttaby’s Miniature Library 290 Swift, Deane 161 Swift, Jonathan 23, 27, 29, 33, 58, 79, 87, 88, 90, 91, 100, 134, 161, 173, 181, 185, 195, 212, 215, 240, 241, 277, 295, 300, 312, 327 portraits 112, 174 n, 241, 282 Taite, J. 167 Talbot, Katherine 324 Tasso, Torquato 303, 337 Tate, Nahum 103 Taylor, J. (engraver) 283 Temple of British Worthies 13 Terry, Richard 16–17, 20, 321–2 Theocritus 40, 215, 283, 302 Thompson, William 214, 215, 277, 301 Thomson, Henry (illustrator) 276, 283 Thomson, James 23, 51, 58, 65, 66, 79, 88, 91, 100, 129, 134, 139, 162, 173, 181, 183, 184, 195, 215, 230, 235–6, 240, 241, 242, 248, 256–9, 269, 275, 276, 294, 295, 301, 311, 312, 314–5, 327, 328, 329 portraits 112, 174 and n, 234, 284 Thornthwaite, John (engraver) 100, 108, 110, 112, 114 Thornton, Bonnell 322, 323 Thrale, Hester Lynch (later Mrs. Piozzi) 313, 322, 340 Thurston, John (illustrator) 244, 245, 255, 278, 285, 288 Thyer, Robert 99, 102 Tibullus, Albius 215, 283, 302 Tickell, Thomas 27–9, 101, 103 n, 156, 157, 163, 172, 181, 185, 215, 233, 240, 243, 252, 277, 294, 295, 300 Todd, Henry John 271–2 Tollett, Elizabeth 322

Tomkins, Peltro William (illustrator, engraver) 276, 277, 281, 283 Tomlins, Mrs 322 Tooke, C. 319 Topham, Edward 50, 68, 94–5 Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) 24, 211, 223 translations relative to English canon: causal 40 integral 58, 91, 205, 207, 223–4, 298 orbital 337 supplemental 102–3, 196–7, 282, 293 Tresham, Henry (illustrator) 277 Trotter, Thomas (engraver) 113 Trumpener, Katie 248, 250 Tryphiodorus 223 Turberville, George 299 Tyrtaeus 283, 303 Tyrwhitt, Thomas 22, 99, 102, 126, 127, 166, 199, 266, 270, 287–8, 296 Upton, John 99, 102 Urry, John 99, 126 Vandergucht, Gerard (painter) 234 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony (painter) 261 Vendramini, Giovanni (engraver) 278, 281 Vertue, George (engraver) 235 Vida, Marco Girolamo 302 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 13, 23, 31, 41, 44, 283, 293 see also John Dryden; Christopher Pitt Waite, W. (engraver) 244, 245 Wakeﬁeld, Gilbert 168 Walker, Anthony (engraver) 174 n Walker, Keith 69 Walker’s British Classics 307, 309–10, 337 Waller, Edmund 23, 55, 58, 89, 91, 99, 100, 129, 135–6, 159, 161, 172, 215, 243, 276, 295, 300, 312 portraits 112, 174 n, 234, 284 Walmsley, Gilbert 157 Walpole, Horace 266 Walsh, Marcus 207 Walsh, Robert Jr. 340 Walsh, William 27–9, 172, 175, 215, 243, 281, 300 Walton, Isaak 162 Warburton, William 99 Ward, Thomas Humphry 316 Warner, William 213, 299 Warren, Charles Turner (engraver) 242, 243, 244, 245, 283, 333 Warton, Joseph 21, 162, 276, 302 Warton, Thomas 21–2, 23, 209, 215, 244, 246, 270, 276, 302 portrait 235

General Index Watts, Isaac 101, 139, 162, 173, 215, 240, 241, 244, 246, 269, 277, 294, 295, 295, 301, 328 portraits 113, 174 n, 235 Waverley 334–6 Wedgwood, Josiah 122 Weinbrot, Howard 23, 136 Welsted, Leonard 214 Wenman’s Cheap Editions 10, 184–5 West, Benjamin (painter) 113, 234, 283 West, Gilbert 101, 156, 173, 196, 215, 240, 241, 281, 294, 295, 301, 328 Pindar 196, 215, 303 and n. West, Richard 102, 164, 172, 195, 201, 215, 281, 294, 295, 303 Westall, Richard (illustrator) 276, 277, 278, 281, 283, 284, 285–6 Wharton, Anne 324 Whately, Mary 322 Whatman, James 217 n, 273, 274 n White, Charles (engraver) 101 White, George (painter) 235 White, Henry Kirke, see Kirke White Whitehead, Paul 193, 215, 281, 301 Whitehead, William 193, 215, 281, 302 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 159, 161 Widnel, J. (engraver) 245 Wilkie, William 214, 215, 281, 301, 328 William III 166 Williams, Raymond 69, 128 Wilson, Alexander (poet) 332 Wilson, Alexander (typefounder) 47, 49, 87, 118 Wilson, Patrick 47 Winkelman, Eduard 61 Wodrow, James 49 Wolcot, John (‘Peter Pindar’) 308 Woodman, J. (R?) (engraver) 235, 243 Woollett, William (engraver) 173 Wordsworth, John 225 Wordsworth, William 225–6, 237, 260, 267, 268, 313 Works of the British Poets, The (1792–1807) 10, 199–226, 229, 280, 343

387

Works of the British Poets, Collated with the Best Editions, The (1805–8) 11, 266, 273–89, 305, 311, 323, 336, 339 Works of the British Poets, with the Lives of the Authors, The (1819–22) 339–40 Works of the Caledonian Bards, The (1778) 332 Works of Celebrated Authors, Of whose Writings there are but small Remains, The (1750) 28–9, 30, 321 Works of the English Poets, The (1779–81) 10, 35, 119, 126, 131–2, 135, 170–80, 212–13, 270, 318, 327, 340 Works of the English Poets, The (1790) 10, 189–94, 198, 200, 201, 213, 214–15, 216–17, 229, 268, 293, 295, 328 Works of the English Poets, The (1802–5) 11, 270–3 Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, The (1810) 11, 175, 280, 297–307, 310 Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets, The (1749) 27–8, 321 Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, The (1793–1802) 10, 327–8 Wren, Christopher 13 Wright, J. H. (engraver) 277 Wright, Joseph, of Derby (painter) 261 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 209, 213, 215, 299 Yalden, Thomas 139, 172, 215, 246, 269, 281, 300 Yearsley, Ann 315 n Young, Edward 23, 27, 55, 58, 65, 79, 88, 91, 100, 129, 164–5, 173, 181, 184, 186–7, 215, 240, 244, 265, 269, 276, 294, 295, 301, 311, 312, 314–5, 329 portraits 112, 174 n, 234, 240, 284 Zink (Zincke), Christian Friedrich (painter) 112