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Some New Sources of Johnson's Lives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edward Hart
Edward Hart*
Affiliation:
University or Washington Seattle 5
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Extract

John Nichols, as printer of the Works of the English Poets, was frequently asked by Samuel Johnson to supply material while the biographical prefaces were being composed. Boswell (friend of Nichols and fellow member with him of Johnson's Essex-Head Club) recorded the fact that Nichols did supply Johnson with material for the Lives. Boswell introduced, with the following statement, a few of the thirty-one letters from Johnson to Nichols: “That he, however, had a good deal of trouble, and some anxiety in carrying on the work, we see from a series of letters to Mr. Nichols the printer, whose variety of literary inquiry and obliging disposition, rendered him very useful to Johnson.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 6 , December 1950 , pp. 1088 - 1111
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. ed. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), iv, 36-37.

2 See, e.g., the opinion of G. B. Hill in his Johnsonian Miscellanies (Oxford, 1897), ii, 70 n. 2.

8 This letter was printed for the first time by Nichols in the Gentleman's Magazine, lv, i (Jan., 1785), 9. The text is from Hill-Powell, Boswell, iv, 36.

4 There is a note upon Duke in the Original Works, iii, 138 n.b. An addition to this note is on p. 307 of the same volume.

5 In every place where I have quoted from Johnson's Lives I have taken the text from the edition of 1783, the first to have the benefit of his corrections and additions.

6 This letter was first published in the Gentleman's Magazine, lv, i (Jan., 1785), 10. The text is from Johnson's Letters, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1892), ii, 159.

7 See Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812-15), vi, 628 n.

8 Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield. … To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life. By M[atthieu]. Maty, M.D., ed. J. O. Justamond (London, 1777).

9 Johnson was mistaken in this. See Johnson's Lives, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), ii, 313, n. 1. See also the Gentleman's Magazine, lvii, ii (Sept., 1787), 780.

10 This letter was first published in the Gentleman's Magazine, lv, i (Jan., 1785), 9. The text is from Hill, Letters, ii, 180.

11 Lives of the Poets, iii, 75 n. 2.

12 The 1781 edition follows Nichols in the matter of this date and reads “(1733).”

13. Johnson was mistaken in saying that Broome resigned Pulham. See Worthington T. Barlow, Memoir of William Broome (Manchester, 1855), pp. 6-7.

14 RES, xiii (April, 1937), 50.

16 This letter was first published in the Gentleman's Magazine, lv, i (Jan., 1785), 10. The text is from Hill, Letters, ii, 195-196.

16 See The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the time of Dean Swift. … By Mr. Cibber (London, 1753), iv, 164-177. For a discussion of the real authorship of Cibber's Lives see Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1927), pp. 119-120.

17 See Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, i, 63-64.

18 See ibid., viii, 388-389.

19 See The Principal Additions and Corrections in the Third Edition of Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets; collected to complete the Second Edition [of 1781], pp. 516-518. These sheets, intended to be distributed free by Nichols to purchasers of the 1781 edition, are very rare. The only copy I know of is in the Bodleian Library, shelfmark 279 e. 81*, and was formerly in the possession of Dr. R. W. Chapman.

20 Hill has a note on 1707, saying merely “In 1717.” He probably had in mind the Poenis on Several Occasions published by Fenton in 1717, and referred to by Nichols as the “volume of his own poems.” Johnson made it clear in the foregoing letter to Nichols that he meant the Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems which Fenton had edited. These were published without a date in 1708 or 1709.

21 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, i, 633-634.