PUBLICATION HISTORY
Preliminary announcements for the publication of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle[.] In Which are Included, the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality appeared in the General Advertiser for 23 January 1751 and were repeated in that newspaper on 24 and 25 January. On 7 February the announcement carried a note on the “Memoirs of Lady Vane,” a work beyond doubt written by Smollett from materials supplied to him by Lady Vane and included by Smollett in his novel: “That the Publick may not be imposed on, we are authorized to assure them, that no Memoirs of the above Lady, that may be obtruded on the world, under any Disguise whatever, are genuine, except what is comprised in this Performance.” This note appeared in further announcements on 8, 9, and 21 February. Then on 25 February 1751 the General Advertiser announced publication, repeating the advertisement over the next weeks. Although there is no record for the first edition in William Strahan’s printing ledgers, convincing evidence has been assembled by the late Albert Smith to support Strahan as the printer, and the novel was issued in what Smollett described, in the “Advertisement” at the beginning of the first volume of the second edition of Peregrine Pickle, as “a very large impression.”1
Peregrine Pickle was entered in the register at Stationers’ Hall on 22 February 1751, three days before its announced publication:
[Folio 94] |
February 22d 1751 |
Then Entred for his Copy |
|
Dr Tobias |
The Adventures of Peregrine |
Smallet The Whole Pickle. In which are |
|
Included Memoirs of a Lady vj |
|
Of Quality. In four Volumes |
|
Reced nine books |
|
There is a record in Strahan’s ledgers for the second edition:
1758 |
Partners in Per. Pickle |
Feby |
Printing Do. 50 sheets, No. 1000 65–0–0 |
@£1:6:0 |
|
Settled July 18. 17592 |
This edition, heavily revised by Smollett, was published, according to the General Advertiser, on 4 March 1758. The remaining history of the text of Peregrine Pickle, for the purposes of this edition, can be quickly dispatched. Three more London editions appeared in Smollett’s lifetime. A third edition was published on 5 March 1765, according to the Public Advertiser. The details of the printing of this edition are in Strahan’s printing ledgers:
——
136:0:03
A fourth edition of the novel was advertised, as part of the announcement of the publication of the eighth edition of Smollett’s Roderick Random, in the St. James’s Chronicle for 16 September 1769. The advertisement subsequently appeared in the London Chronicle for 19 September and the Public Advertiser for 22 September. This is the first edition to have illustrations. Each of the four volumes has a frontispiece, most likely engraved by Charles Grignion from drawings by Henry Fuseli.4 Also there was a piracy called the fourth edition dated 1769 but published at an unknown date, closely following the authorized fourth edition. Although the second edition was not published until 4 March 1758, more than seven years after the first, the novel was much more popular than Smollett suggests. Both 1769 editions were printed in large enough editions to wear out their copperplates. After the publication of the Expedition of Humphry Clinker on 17 June 1771 and Smollett’s death on 17 September following, there was a revived interest in all his novels. For Peregrine Pickle there are five Dublin editions to 1775 and eleven British editions by 1779.
EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES
As is the case with many eighteenth-century writings, the autograph manuscript of Peregrine Pickle has disappeared. In fact, no printer’s copy for any of Smollett’s works has survived. The nature of the manuscript can only be deduced from letters, never intended for publication, and from an examination of manuscript revisions that the author made in a copy of the 1766 first edition of Travels through France and Italy for a new edition that was never to appear.5 The revisions for the Travels include additions, translations of passages in foreign languages, and corrections to the printed text. It might be argued that Smollett, by the mid-1760s largely free from his numerous editorial tasks, had new leisure to correct the Travels; but an examination of his other novels and translations of novels he saw through the press shows much the same care, for he left uncorrected only the kinds of errors that none but the most exacting proofreaders might have caught.6
The revisions to the Travels are written in Smollett’s neat hand, which, after more than two centuries, can be read with ease. A compositor, then, would have had no difficulty reading the author’s manuscript of Peregrine Pickle, but in the process of setting the type an overlay of normalization no doubt occurred. As John Smith notes in The Printer’s Grammar (1755), “By the Laws of Printing, indeed, a Compositor should abide by his Copy, and not vary from it. . . . But this good law is now looked upon as obsolete, and most Authors expect the Printer to spell, point, and digest their Copy, that it may be intelligible and significant to the Reader; which is what a Compositor and the Corrector jointly have regard to, in Works of their own language.” The compositor peruses his copy but, before beginning to compose, “should be informed, either by the Author, or Master, after what manner our work is to be done; whether the old way, with Capitals to Substantives, and Italic to Proper names; or after the more neat practice, all in Roman, and Capitals to proper names, and Emphatical words.” The compositor should set nothing “in Italic but what is underscored in our Copy.” When composing from printed copy and “such Manuscripts as are written fair,” Smith continues, we “employ our eyes with the same agility as we do our hands; for we cast our eyes upon every letter we aim at, at the same moment we move our hands to take it up; neither do we lose our time in looking at our Copy for every word we compose; but take as many words into our memory as we can retain.”7 Since Peregrine Pickle and the Travels are printed in the new way, numerous changes must have occurred between the manuscripts and the printed books, including some normalization of spelling.
In the lengthy manuscript additions to Letter II of the Travels—the English translation of a Latin letter to Antoine Fizes and the professor’s reply in French—Smollett followed the old practice, though somewhat inconsistently, of capitalizing nouns and some adjectives. Schooled to capitalize substantives, he continued in his habitual way.8 But he certainly knew that his capitalization and his use of the ampersand for “and” would be brought into conformity with the rest of the book. He seems to have accepted the new style, or at least acquiesced in it. In the printed text of the Travels he corrected such small matters as a transposed letter, “muscels” (the bivalve mollusc) to “muscles,” and a verb “affords” to “afford”; at the same time he allowed to stand variant spellings such as “paltry”/“paultry,” “ake”/“ach,” and so on. Smollett was not consistent in his spelling, although he did have a preferred spelling for some words; but the compositors, by taking as many words into their memory as they could retain, sometimes introduced their preferences. Smollett appears to have been content with the resulting inconsistencies in spelling as long as they were correct, and he did not attempt to restore his capitalization and punctuation. Except for the Travels, revisions by Smollett in his other works can only be discovered through sight collations.
Before turning to the revisions made for the 1758 second edition of Peregrine Pickle, it will be helpful to look at revisions in works other than the Travels to know Smollett’s usual habits for revision and correction. Revising and correcting were habitual with Smollett, and he liked doing both after his text was made public. Among his important works, only the Travels and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) received the care and revision they needed before first reaching print. His first novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), may be considered in most ways typical. Smollett wrote to Alexander Carlyle that “the whole was begun and finished in the Compass of Eight months, during which time several Intervals happened of one, two, three and four Weeks, wherein I did not set pen to paper, so that a little Incorrectness may be excused.” He recognizes that the novel contains “several inaccuracies in the Stile” but blames it, rather disingenuously, on “the hurry in which it was printed.”9 In any case, incorrectness was to be excused only for the moment, since he had two pages cancelled in the first edition and managed to make numerous changes, largely stylistic, for the second edition, published only eleven weeks after the first. He returned to make stylistic revisions in the novel for both the third (1750) and fourth (1755) editions.10 He also revised his translations of Alain René Le Sage’s Adventures of Gil Blas (1749) and Devil upon Crutches (1750) and of Cervantes’s Adventures of Don Quixote (1755).11 He made extensive revisions in his Complete History of England (1757), and in the Modern Part of the Universal History (1759–65), for which he wrote large portions and served as one of the editors.
In the first editions of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle appear all the signs of hasty composition: verbosity, run-on sentences, awkward and redundant phrases, faulty pronoun references, unintentional alliteration, and so on. With Roderick Random, as well as with his other works he revised, Smollett seems to be primarily concerned with ridding the novel of these signs of haste in composition. With Peregrine Pickle the case is much more complex, as Smollett is concerned not only with correcting the style but also with making numerous revisions, often in the form of deletions, in the text.
As early as 1925, Howard Swazey Buck drew attention to the extensive revisions and deletions that Smollett made for the second edition of his second novel.12 But revisions in Peregrine Pickle actually began before the first edition was published. Because he did not examine multiple copies of the first edition, Buck failed to note that leaf L12 of volume 3 was cancelled in most copies.13 The deleted passage occurs in the “Memoirs” and concerns an unidentified wealthy young English nobleman who breaks off his relationship with Lady Vane in order to marry. On receiving an advance copy of volume 3 of the novel, which contains the “Memoirs,” Lady Vane had second thoughts, or perhaps she showed the copy to a friend, who thought the young man described might be offended. A strong possibility also exists that this was a passage that Smollett rewrote and shaped, and Lady Vane had not seen it in its final form until it was already in print.14 In any case, Smollett, undoubtedly, had the printer cancel this passage on instructions from Lady Vane, since only she would care about the consequences. Few copies of volume 3 have survived with the leaf in the original state, suggesting that the change was caught early, perhaps while volume 4 was printing.
Smollett was anxious to have it known that he had revised Peregrine Pickle for the publication of the 1758 second edition. His efforts appeared in newspaper advertisements, were announced on the new title page (“The Second Edition, Revised, Corrected, and Altered by the Author”), and were trumpeted in the “Advertisement” that prefaced the first volume. Despite the inclusion of the infamous Lady Vane’s scandalous memoirs, the depiction of Daniel MacKercher and the famous Annesley case, and the satirical attacks on a number of well-known contemporaries such as Henry Fielding, David Garrick, James Quin, Mark Akenside, George Lyttelton, and, perhaps, William Hogarth, the first edition had not sold well. In the “Advertisement,” Smollett levels various charges at the booksellers and critics, making it clear that the failure of the novel had rankled him deeply. Nevertheless, he goes on to say, the “demand for the original” had “lately encreased”:
It was the author’s duty, therefore, as well as his interest to oblige the publick with this edition which he has endeavoured to render less unworthy of their acceptance, by retrenching the superfluities of the first, reforming its manners, and correcting its expression. Divers uninteresting incidents are wholly suppressed: some humorous scenes he has endeavoured to heighten, and he flatters himself that he has expunged every adventure, phrase and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass of the rules of decorum.
He owns with contrition that in one or two instances, he gave way too much to the suggestions of personal resentment, and represented characters as they appeared to him at that time, through the exaggerating medium of prejudice: but, he has in this impression endeavoured to make atonement for these extravagances. (1:A2v)
Apart from the textual variants discovered by sight collation, the only other piece of evidence about this revised edition is a letter by Smollett written late in 1757 to William Strahan, the printer of the edition:
I have sent two copies of P.P. vol 3.—Lady V——e’s story. You may compose from that which is incompleat in the other Parts; and if you think proper, you may prefix the two Letters in manuscript. The remaining part of the 3d volume you will find corrected in the other copy. The fourth shall be done as soon as possible. . . . I wish you would send the proofsheets of Pickle to me to be corrected.15
This letter suggests that Lady Vane revised the “Memoirs” in one copy of volume 3 while Smollett revised the remainder of the volume in another copy. “The two letters relating to the Memoirs of a lady of quality . . . sent to the editor by a person of honour,” announced in a note at the end of the “Advertisement” in volume 1, were “inserted at the beginning of the third volume.” The proof sheets of the novel were almost certainly sent to Smollett for correction, as the printing has relatively few errors.
Peregrine Pickle originally appeared in four substantial duodecimo volumes and, exclusive of the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” contains about 330,000 words. Of this number, some 24,000 words, or about eighty pages, were deleted for the second edition. Among the 306,000 words remaining there are extensive variants from the first edition, several hundred of which are corrections and revisions by Smollett. Frequently, long sentences are broken up by replacing “and” and “or” with a period, thereby eliminating certain ambiguities and quickening the pace of the novel. In the haste of composition, awkward or redundant phrases had been introduced; Smollett, particularly as a Scot highly sensitive to Scotticisms or any stylistic infelicities that might bring ridicule upon him, corrected as many errors as he could find. It is unnecessary, for example, to say that Peregrine was treated with distinction “both by one and t’other” when “both” alone will suffice (1:154, 1:139).16
Other changes affect the way a character is viewed. When Peregrine and his governor, Jolter, are caught in a storm in the English Channel, Jolter pretends to be unconcerned. In the first edition, as the storm increases, Jolter, desiring an account of the weather and the activities on deck, “looked towards the cabbin-door with the most wishful expectation” (2:3). In the second edition, Smollett changes “wishful” to “fearful” (2:3), exposing the disparity between Jolter’s pretensions and the reality of his situation and making his inevitable fall more comic. A few pages later Peregrine refuses to have his baggage carried to the customhouse and insists that if it is to be examined, it must be done at an inn. Jolter “endeavoured to perswade his pupil to comply with the customs of the place.” “But,” we are told by Smollett, “Peregrine’s natural haughtiness of disposition hindered him from giving ear to Jolter’s wholesome advice” (2:9). When a corporal arrives with a file of musqueteers to convey the baggage to the customhouse, Peregrine insults him by telling his valet in French to accompany the baggage to make sure that nothing is stolen. The corporal “darted a look of resentment” and tells our hero that “he could perceive he was a stranger of France, or else he would have saved himself the trouble of such a needless precaution” (2:10). In the second edition, the chapter ends here. In the first edition, there is an additional sentence: “Indeed this expression had no sooner escaped our young gentleman, than he was ashamed of his own petulance; for nothing was farther from his principles than the least encouragement of ungenerous suspicion” (2:10). Omitting this sentence considerably darkens Peregrine’s character, as do other revisions for the second edition, presumably so that there will be a sharper contrast with his reformation at the end. Other revisions seem to run in the opposite direction, as when Smollett eliminates many of Peregrine’s more vicious practical jokes—his hiding of Mr. Keypstick’s periwig when he is expecting a noble visitor and his perforating his aunt’s chamber pot, for example.
Another textual concern is the elimination of several of the satiric portraits from the novel. Smollett may have eliminated in its entirety the attack on Henry Fielding because he felt it was in poor taste to continue to attack the novelist after his death in 1754. George Lyttelton, Fielding’s friend and patron and the dedicatee of Tom Jones (1749), had been attacked extensively in the first edition.17 After the death of Fielding, Smollett made up his differences with Lyttelton and eliminated all satiric references to him. Also deleted are lengthy attacks on David Garrick in volumes 2 and 4. At the time Smollett was writing Peregrine Pickle he was angry about the failure of The Regicide to reach the stage. Among those he blamed was Garrick. Then Garrick produced Smollett’s farce, The Reprisal, in 1757 at Drury Lane, moving Smollett to delete the offending passages.18 Perhaps, as Smollett says in the “Advertisement,” he “gave way too much to the suggestions of personal resentment,” and “to make atonement for these extravagances” he eliminated great chunks of the novel, occasionally even an entire chapter, with only a sentence or two to cover the gap. Other satiric portraits are not deleted, but the attack on the English stage, justified for the most part, is strangely truncated.
Two compliments appear together in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle, after the conclusion of the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,” to help integrate the “Memoirs” into the novel (3:236, 3:235). One has to do with Lady Vane paying the debts of Lord William Hamilton, her first husband, out of her own privy purse. The other has to do with her motive for leaving Sewallis Shirley after he attempted to reengage her affections. In the second edition, the passage is divided into two sections, one on the payment of Lord William’s debts and one on her motive for leaving Shirley, and each appears in the appropriate place in the narrative of the “Memoirs” (3.385.17, 3.413.17; 886–87, 889, below). However, the two passages also remained at the conclusion of the “Memoirs,” which is a line-for-line reprint from the first edition, with two revisions of the kind that Smollett makes throughout the novel: “meeting were over” is changed to “meeting should be over,” and “as soon as her tranquillity” is changed to “provided her tranquillity.”
Lady Vane must have inserted the two compliments in the proper place in the narrative of the “Memoirs” in her copy of volume 3. After all, she knew where they should go. Did Smollett not realize that she had transferred the two episodes? The “Memoirs” in the second edition have more than five dozen of the kind of small stylistic revisions that Smollett made throughout the novel. How could he have made these revisions and not noticed the additions? The best explanation is that Smollett made stylistic revisions in the “Memoirs” before he passed the volume to Lady Vane for her approval and for any revisions she might wish to make. The remainder of volume 3 he revised in the second copy. When Lady Vane returned the volume, he either did not examine it or did not examine it carefully. Had he taken the time to copy Lady Vane’s corrections and additions into his own copy and sent only one copy of volume 3 to William Strahan, he would have caught the redundancy. Smollett could have been spared revising the passage had he recognized that it needed to be deleted. The failure of Lady Vane to communicate to Smollett clearly that she had incorporated the passage into the “Memoirs” suggests that she contributed little more than a few revisions to the second edition.
Sometime before the publication of the third edition of Peregrine Pickle on 5 March 1765, Smollett caught, or had pointed out to him, the somewhat redundant passage about Lady Vane paying her first husband’s debts and breaking off her relationship with Shirley, which appeared at the end of the “Memoirs” in the first two editions. The passage was deleted, so the third edition reads “that she had concealed a great many advantageous proposals of marriage, which she might have accepted before she was engaged. ¶The company were agreeably undeceived” (3:234–35). Smollett seems to have made one other change near the end of volume 2: “and each seizing an arm” becomes “and two of them seizing his arms” (2:297, 2:280.26). Smollett had left England for France in June 1763, returning in June 1765. Only these revisions in the third edition can possibly be attributed to Smollett. One more authorized edition of Peregrine Pickle, the fourth, would appear in Smollett’s lifetime, on 16 September 1769, almost a year after Smollett left England for the last time. Among the numerous variants is one substantive variant. When Smollett deleted the episode of the insurrection led by Peregrine at Winchester School and combined the opening of chapter 19 with the portion of chapter 20 where he first meets Emilia as chapter 17 in the second edition, he neglected to change the heading for the chapter in the table of contents and in the text: “He is concerned . . . gardener; heads an insurrection . . . head quarters at an inn” of the first edition becomes correctly in the fourth edition “He is concerned . . . gardener; sublimes his ideas, commences gallant, and becomes acquainted with Miss Emily Gauntlet.” Smollett may have left directions with his printer, Strahan, that when the novel was reprinted he wished these corrections made in the third and fourth editions, or perhaps his friend John Armstrong served as his agent, as he did in the cases of The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), Humphry Clinker (1771), and the second edition of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1772).19
Elsewhere an extended argument has been made for the choice of the 1751 first edition as copy-text.20 One important reason is that the first edition has the characteristics of Smollett’s manuscript, both spelling and punctuation, that have been preserved. Since the manuscript has disappeared, the first edition is as close as the editor and reader can come to what Smollett actually wrote. An historical argument can also be made. In 1750, after years of frustration in trying to bring his tragedy, The Regicide, to the stage, Smollett thought the time was right for a satiric attack on the arts and institutions of England. Much of the appeal of the novel is its exuberance, achieved through the style and the piling up of episodes. At the same time Smollett was concerned about the overall plan of the novel and its theme. He was attracted to smaller contexts: a satire on the Grand Tour, and within this context a satire on the ancients-moderns controversy, and within this context a satire on particular persons, and so on. To tear out the attacks on Garrick and Fielding is to rend the novel’s fabric. When in 1757 Smollett came to revise the first edition, the creative moment had passed, and Smollett had other concerns. Now that his anger over the failure of The Regicide, and those whom he thought responsible for that failure, had cooled, Smollett was eager to please the reading public he both courted and despised. He went to work. Perhaps Smollett felt that some of his targets of satire had lost their topicality. When he came to revise the second edition he seems to have made many of the changes, particularly the smaller ones, in their immediate contexts without thinking of them in terms of the novel as a whole. He probably did not remember after six or seven years why he had written something for the novel, and almost certainly he could not recapture the passion he felt, as his comments in the “Advertisement” suggest. He did recognize, however, the problems created by hasty composition, and he set out to correct them, just as he had done earlier for Roderick Random. Choosing a copy-text on historical grounds best resolves the problems presented by the texts of Peregrine Pickle.
Until half a century ago the last lifetime or first posthumous edition of an author’s work was considered the best text for an edition, since it was thought that it would contain the final revisions of the author. This means that most readers encountered Peregrine Pickle only in a truncated version until 1964, when James L. Clifford edited the 1751 first edition for the Oxford English Novel series. The second edition, with a longer and fuller history, having been read by the largest number of people and perhaps having been the most influential, might serve as a copy-text for an edition. There can be no doubt that the second edition had enormous popularity and was frequently reprinted into the second decade of the nineteenth century. After that time Smollett’s popularity waned, but the novel continued in print. As Smollett confesses, a number of tasteless episodes were omitted, and the satire of particular persons, many of whom were unknown to readers by the end of the eighteenth century, would not have been missed.
In a scholarly edition, however, the primary concern is with Smollett and what he wrote. A cogent argument can be made, and has been made, that the 1751 first edition not only represents Smollett at his creative best but provides a text more amenable to readers of the twenty-first century, interested as they are in the larger cultural contexts of a work of art and in a better understanding of Smollett and the age in which he lived. Smollett’s attempt to have The Regicide performed brought him in contact with some of the major figures involved with the stage and other arts in the mid-eighteenth century. The failure to bring The Regicide to the stage was one of the most important events of Smollett’s life, and much of the evidence for the details of this adventure survives in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle. This was a particularly critical time in his life. By this time he realized that he was not going to be able to make a living practicing surgery. The only occupation remaining was that of a professional author. To date the only success he had as a writer was Roderick Random and the Adventures of Gil Blas, a translation for the booksellers that brought him little money. By the time he published Peregrine Pickle the future was clouded with uncertainty.
The 1751 first edition of Peregrine Pickle, printed from Smollett’s lost manuscript or from a fair copy made from it, therefore, has been chosen as copy-text for this edition, with only errors corrected.
Compositors, paid according to the amount of type they set, in general were not interested in emendation and improvement. They normally followed their copy with some care, since they knew they would be penalized for failing to do so. Hence, the normal assumption is that substantive revisions are authorial. An alert compositor or proofreader might have corrected typographical errors such as “offender’s” for “offenders” (1:112, 1:119) and “immodest” for “modest” (1:161, 1:176), or corrected a grammatical mistake by substituting “he was received” for “we was received” (1:169, 1:180), or even occasionally made sense out of nonsense as when “general” is revised to “genial” (1:67, 1:66). Most changes in the second edition, however, are beyond the reach of a compositor and only could have been made by someone familiar with the novel. In the historical collation are included all the readings believed to have originated with Smollett.
Peregrine Pickle is a large book, and, as Samuel Johnson continues to remind us, “a large work is difficult because it is large.”21 The historical collation, with very few exceptions, covers only the first three editions and filled nearly one hundred double-spaced pages. The editor did not in every case make the right decision, but there has been an attempt to be as conservative as possible about what is included. Space, obviously, is a consideration, but it is also important not to obscure the substantive revisions that Smollett made for the second edition, with variants unlikely to be by Smollett. The readings included have been accepted among thousands. To list a small number of the classes of variants, there is “garrison” with one r or two; “sollicit,” “untill,” and “till” with one l or two; “surprise” with s or z; “practice” with c or s; “remembered” or “remembred”; “entirely” or “intirely”; “threatened” or “threatned”; “though” or “tho”; “begged” or “begg’d”; and so on. Even the heroine’s name is given as Emilia, Emelia, Emily, Emy. The variant spellings in her name have not been touched, as they are almost certainly by Smollett.22 The compositors of the third edition usually omit hyphens in double words such as “coffee-house” and “hackney-coach” and would add substantially to the list of emendations.
In the present edition no attempt has been made to achieve a general consistency in spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, because in the absence of the manuscript one cannot determine whether Smollett or the compositor was responsible for their variations. Hence the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the 1751 first edition have been retained except when they are clearly in error or when they obscure meaning or distract the attention of the reader.23 All emendations to the copy-text have been made on the authority of the textual editor. Hyphenated words at a line-end have been adjusted according to the usual practice of the first edition insofar as that practice could be ascertained from other appearances or parallels. Only the following changes have been made silently: all turned letters and wrong fonts have been corrected, the long s has been replaced by the modern letter s, “CHAP.” has been spelled out as “CHAPTER,” and the display capitals that begin the first paragraph in each chapter have not been exactly reproduced. Quotations have been indicated according to modern practice, and the punctuation in relation to the quotation marks has been normalized.24 The length of dashes and the spaces around them have also been normalized according to modern practice.
APPARATUS
A basic note in the list of emendations provides the page-line reference and the emended reading in the present text. Except for the silent alterations described above, every editorial change in the first edition copy-text has been recorded. Following the square bracket is the earliest source of the emendation and the history of the copy-text reading up to the point of emendation. All emendations marked “W” are the responsibility of the present edition. A wavy dash (~) is substituted for a repeated word associated with pointing, and an inferior caret (^) indicates pointing absent in the present text. The form of the readings to the right and left of the bracket conforms to the system of silent alterations, and there is no record of any variations except for the instance being recorded. When the matter in question is pointing, for example, the wavy dash to the right of the bracket signifies only the substantive form of the variant, and any variation in spelling or capitalization has been ignored. The italic letter c indicates the reading in the corrected state of the form, and the italic letter u indicates the uncorrected state. The italic letters om indicate that the passage was cut from subsequent editions of the novel. A vertical stroke (|) indicates a line-end.
All hyphenated compounds or possible compounds appearing at line-ends in the copy-text are recorded in the word-division list. The reader should assume that any word that is hyphenated at a line-end in the present text but that does not appear in this list was divided by the modern typesetter.
COLLATION
The present edition has been reproduced from a photocopy of the 1751 first edition in the University of Iowa Library. This copy was bibliographically collated with copies listed in the bibliographical description of the first edition given below.25 This photocopy of the 1751 first edition was sight-collated against the photocopy of the 1758 second edition in the University of Iowa Library. This copy of the 1758 second edition was bibliographically collated with the copies listed in the bibliographical description of the second edition given below. The 1751 first edition was also sight-collated with a copy of the 1765 third edition in the British Library (12614.b.30).
First I wish to give special thanks to my wife and best friend, Cynthia Burns. She has patiently lived with this project for a number of years, and it is a better work for her penetrating questions. This volume could not have been completed without the wisdom and guidance of my two administrative assistants in the University of Iowa Center for Textual Studies, James H. Sutton and Donald H. Stefanson. I am also grateful to my dedicated students on the staff of the Center who assisted me in wrestling with the complexities of this text forty years ago: Kathy Anderson, Nick Arn, Diane Abel, Fred Barnett, Janice A. Bear, Thomas Deans, John Deason, Lois Fields, L. Goulet, Nancy Harding, Robert E. Heymann, Ellen Heywood, Alan Holst, Suzanne McConnell, Kenneth Miller, Virginia Oehlerking, Debrorah Owen, Jerry Sies, Linda Tevepaugh, Elizabeth Voss, Susan Wille, and Dennis Wonderlich. Finally, the textual commentary is dedicated to the memory of my former student and friend Gary Walker. Gary was a member of a wonderful group of graduate students at Arizona State University that also included Jo Alice Blondin, John Drnjevic, Cheryl Gilbert, Kimber Knutson, Kristin Kreider, Lynn McClelland, and Joy White, all of whom worked for two summers in the 1990s on a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. The first summer the team sight-collated Don Quixote and the second summer Gil Blas. Gary’s attention to detail, accompanied by his characteristic satiric wit, humor, and a ready laugh, made what might have been an onerous task a pleasant memory. He earned his PhD while battling a virulent form of cancer and succumbed to it shortly after.
1. For Smollett’s role in the composition of the “Memoirs,” see O M Brack, Jr., “Smollett and the Authorship of ‘The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,’” in Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist: New Essays in Memory of Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 35–73. For information on the editions of Peregrine Pickle, see Albert Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle,” Library, 5th ser., 26 (1971): 39–52; and Smith, “The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1758 and 1765,” Library, 5th ser., 28 (1973): 62–64. See also Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Early Editions of the Novels of Tobias George Smollett, with Descriptive Bibliographies” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1975), 1:146–258.
2. See William Strahan’s ledger, BL Add. MS 48800, opening 89; Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Early Editions,” 1:169–73.
3. See William Strahan’s ledger, BL Add. MS 48802A, opening 57; Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Early Editions,” 1:174.
4. See Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Early Editions,” 1:175–76. A sixth edition, the first posthumous edition, appeared on 16 November 1773, according to the London Chronicle for 13–16 November 1773. For this edition the four frontispieces were reengraved (1:177).
5. This copy of the Travels is in the British Library, shelf mark C.45.d.20, 21. Apart from the manuscript revisions of the Travels and a relatively small number of holograph letters, little survives in Smollett’s hand: a one-leaf holograph note on the reign of Edward III in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, and about a dozen signed receipts and documents. See Lewis M. Knapp, “Notes on the Material,” in Letters, xvi–xvii.
6. Smollett was content to make small changes because the Travels, written at a relatively slow pace, did not require the extensive stylistic revisions of the earlier works. In the works of his later career, revision seems to have been carried out before publication; by this time he was a more experienced writer. For discussion of the composition of the Travels, see Frank Felsenstein, introduction to Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xxxv–xli. Exceptions to this generalization about reading proof, as James E. May has shown, are the Complete History and the Continuation of the Complete History. See his “The Authoritative Editions of Smollett’s Complete History of England,” in Brack, Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist, 240–305, and “A Descriptive Bibliography with Collation of Variant Readings for the Lifetime Editions of Smollett’s Continuation,” in New Contexts for British Fiction, “Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared”: Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley, ed. Christopher D. Johnson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 231–354.
7. John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar (London, 1755), 199, 201–2, 209.
8. See Bertrand H. Bronson, Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth Century England (New York: New York Public Library, 1958), 17.
9. Smollett to Carlyle, 7 June 1748 (Letters, 8).
10. The revisions in Roderick Random are discussed in detail by O M Brack, Jr., and James B. Davis in “Smollett’s Revisions of Roderick Random,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 64 (1970): 295–311; see also Smith, “The Printing and Publication of Early Editions,” 1:4–22.11. A historical collation of the first four editions appears in the Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. James G. Basker, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, and Nicole A. Seary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 525–98.
11. See also the historical collations in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, trans. Smollett, ed. Martin C. Battestin and O M Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 871–921; Alain René Le Sage, The Devil upon Crutches, trans. Smollett, ed. O M Brack, Jr., and Leslie A. Chilton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 255–78; Alain René Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas, trans. Smollett, ed. O M Brack, Jr., and Leslie A. Chilton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 637–86.
12. See Buck, A Study in Smollett, Chiefly “Peregrine Pickle” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1925), 123–207.
13. The following copies have the cancellandum: Cambridge University, Trinity College (Rothschild 1910); Indiana University Library, Lilly Library (PR3694 P4 1751); Yale University, Beinecke Library (Sm79 751 copy 2). See the bibliographical description of the first edition (below, 911–12).
14. For Smollett’s role in the composition of the “Memoirs,” see Brack, “Smollett and the Authorship,” 35–73.
15. Smollett to Strahan, November(?)–December 1757 (Letters, 63–64).
16. The first volume and page reference refers to the 1751 edition and the second to the 1758 edition.
17. For Smollett’s complex relationship with Lyttelton, see Buck, 100–112. Buck’s account of Smollett’s attempt to have The Regicide staged, however, should be used with caution, as it is filled with errors and frequently based on specious biographical interpretations of the novels. For what has come to be called the Fielding-Smollett Controversy, or the “Paper War,” especially Smollett’s attacks on Fielding in Peregrine Pickle and in A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Arts That Were Lately Practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding (1752), see Knapp, 129–33; and Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 534–35, 555. Smollett’s relationship with Fielding is canvassed by Linda Bree, “Smollett and Fielding: Rival Novelists?,” in Brack, Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s First Novelist, 142–67. See also Brack, “Tobias Smollett’s Authorship of Habbakkuk Hilding (1752),” East-Central Intelligencer, n.s. 20, no. 3 (September 2006): 5–17.
18. For Smollett’s relationship with Garrick, see Buck, 86–94; and Knapp, 51–57, 196–202.
19. For the role of John Armstrong, see O M Brack, Jr., textual commentaries in The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. Robert Adams Day and Brack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 327; The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Thomas R. Preston and Brack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 446–47; and Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Jerry C. Beasley and Brack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 445.
20. See O M Brack, Jr., “Toward a Critical Edition of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle,” Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 361–75; and “Peregrine Pickle Revisited,” Studies in the Novel 27 (1995): 260–72.
21. Samuel Johnson, preface to the Dictionary, in Johnson on the English Language, ed. Gwin J. Kolb and Robert DeMaria, Jr., Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 18:104.
22. Peregrine’s use of a more familiar name for Emilia is not related to his increased intimacy with her but is somewhat random. See, for example, Smollett’s handling of names in Ferdinand Count Fathom, 455.
23. For instance, as in earlier volumes of the Georgia Smollett, “goal,” an early spelling for “jail,” has been consistently changed to “gaol” to avoid confusion for the nonspecialist contemporary reader. See Brack, textual notes to Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Beasley and Brack, 455. The earliest references to Cadwallader Crabtree as the “Misanthrope” have the epithet with a capital. Since this is the dominant form, the capital has been retained throughout.
24. If a passage of more than one paragraph is quoted, and it is not set as an excerpt, quotation marks are placed at the beginning of each paragraph and at the end of the last paragraph. Because of the extreme length of the “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” and the Annesley case, this rule has not been followed, since there is little chance that the reader will be confused about the source of these lengthy interpolations, and the number of entries it would add to the list of emendations would be immense. Letters introduced into the narrative are always set off with vertical line-spaces in the copy-text. If the letter is in quotation marks, they have been retained. If there are no quotation marks, none have been added. Occasional quotation marks at the opening and/or the closing of letters in the first edition have been removed.
25. In the initial sight collations in autumn 1970, the 1751 Dublin edition and the posthumous 1773 London fifth edition were included. Unfortunately, the fourth edition included in the collation was the piracy (Smith, “The Printing and Publications of Early Editions,” 1:182). The editor has carefully checked the authorized fourth edition in the British Library (1206.b.1–4). Since the piracy was set from the authorized fourth edition, they share many of the same variants. All the editions in the initial collation were collated twice, and the first two editions a third time. The second edition contains a large number of nonauthorial readings that have not been included in the tables below. The collation tables for the volumes in the Georgia Edition will be included among the editor’s papers in the Texas Collection, Baylor University.