Footnotes

• THE COPY OF THE LIVES OF THE POETS THAT JOHNSON SENT THROUGH BOSWELL TO ALEXANDER POPE'S EXECUTOR, LORD MARCHMONT, in order to solicit information for his life of Pope which he was then writing; the episode being described by Boswell himself in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791): 'Johnson being now better disposed to obtain information concerning Pope than he was last year, sent by me to my Lord Marchmont, a present of those volumes of his "Lives of the Poets," which were at this time published, with a request to have permission to wait on him; and his Lordship, who had called on him twice, obligingly appointed Saturday, the first of May, for receiving us./ On that morning Johnson came to see me from Streatham, and after drinking chocolate at General Paoli's, in South Audley-street, we proceeded to Lord Marchmont's in Curzon-street. His Lordship met us at the door of his library, and with great politeness said to Johnson, "I am not going to make an encomium upon myself, by telling you the high respect I have for you, Sir." Johnson was exceedingly courteous; and the interview, which lasted about two hours, during which the Earl communicated his anecdotes of Pope, was as agreeable as I could have wished. When we came out, I said to Johnson, that considering his Lordship's civility, I should have been vexed if he had failed to come. "Sir, (said he,) I would rather have given twenty pounds than not have come"' (Everyman edition, 1992, pp. 899-900).
  
  Lord Marchmont has carefully inscribed each of the four volumes of this set of The Lives of the Poets on the blank page facing the title: "1779. 29 Apr: from Dr Johnson." (for his hand, see his letters in the Hardwicke papers in the British Library, Add. MSS. 35447-35449 and the Newcastle papers, Add. MSS. 32712-32922, 33055 passim). It is thanks to his handwriting and the fact that Marchmont has meticulously recorded of the date of when he received them from Dr Johnson in each of the four volumes that we can now identify them – 232 years after the event – as being the set sent by Johnson though Boswell prior to their meeting at Curzon Street on Saturday 1 May 1789.
  
  Hugh Hume Campbell, third Earl of Marchmont (1708-1794), owner of large swathes of Berwickshire and builder of Marchmont House, was an intimate of Alexander Pope and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, acting as executor to both. It was Boswell who had first approached him a year earlier: 'On Tuesday, May 12 [1778], I waited on the Earl of Marchmont, to know if his Lordship would favour Dr. Johnson with information concerning Pope, whose Life he was about to write. Johnson had not flattered himself with the hopes of receiving any civility from this nobleman; for he said to me, when I mentioned Lord Marchmont as one who could tell him a great deal about Pope, – "Sir, he will tell me nothing"'. But Boswell, who 'had the honour of being known to his Lordship', approached him all the same 'without being commissioned by Johnson'. Marchmont readily agreed to help, although not before pointing out that it had been Johnson who first 'brought Whig and Tory into a Dictionary'; and when Boswell suggested that he should revise Johnson's entry after it had been written made the famous caveat – '"So (said his Lordship) you would put me in a dangerous situation. You know he knocked down Osborne, the bookseller"'. Boswell 'elated with the success of my spontaneous exertion to procure material and respectable aid to Johnson for his very favourite work' hastened to tell Johnson. Only to be told by Johnson that he was not going to be in town to meet Marchmont and didn't care to know about Pope: 'Mrs. Thrale. (surprised as I was, and a little angry,) "I suppose, Sir, Mr. Boswell thought, that as you are to write Pope's Life, you would wish to know about him." Johnson. "Wish! why yes. If it rained knowledge, I'd hold out my hand; but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it"'. Boswell adds: 'I give this account fairly, as a specimen of that unhappy temper with which this great and good man had occasionally to struggle, from something morbid in his constitution' (pp. 867-869).
  
  When Johnson sent these four volumes through Boswell to Marchmont, they had only very recently been published; nor did he have, thanks to what he regarded as his publisher's stinginess, many copies to hand out, even to close friends. Although published separately, they were supposed to be sold only with the accompanying volumes of poetry. A second batch of Lives was to be issued in 1781, with volume vii being devoted to Pope. A set of the first four volumes had been presented to George III by 10 March 1779, although the edition was then 'not quite printed'. They were announced as published in the London Chronicle for 31 March 1779, Johnson in his diaries recording publication on 2 April. A letter by Johnson to the publisher Cadell of 13 April 1779 suggests that 'Cadell had refused to be generous with presentation copies of SJ's Prefaces, complaining that they had been "lent about" and that sales of the first installment (Works and Prefaces, sixty volumes in all) had thereby been impaired. SJ countered that, had his prefaces not been clustered together in four separate volumes, such widespread borrowing would have been difficult' (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Bruce Redford, iii, 1992, pp. 159-160, n.4; see also J.D. Fleeman and J. McLaverty, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2000, ii, pp. 1354-1357).
  
  Even though Boswell was to have his way, and the 'very agreeable interview with Lord Marchmont, at his Lordship's house' was to take place, when Johnson's 'Life' of Pope eventually appeared, Boswell thought he had been less than generous to Marchmont in wrongly accusing him of neglecting Pope's papers over which he had, in fact, no control: 'I cannot withhold from my great friend a censure of at least culpable inattention, to a nobleman, who, it has been shewn, behaved to him with uncommon politeness... After the first edition of the Lives, Mr. Malone, whose love of justice is equal to his accuracy, made, in my hearing, the same remark to Johnson; yet he omitted to correct the erroneous statement. These particulars I mention, in the belief that there was only forgetfulness in my friend; but I owe this much to the Earl of Marchmont's reputation' (p. 971).
  
  Johnson's 'Life' of Pope, which the slighted Lord Marchmont through the gift of these books helped usher into being, is of course one of the great works of biography and literary criticism in the language: 'The great defender of Pope in the later decades of the eighteenth century was Samuel Johnson. Like Spence, Johnson went back a long way. He had himself been part of the literary opposition in the late 1730s and, though he never met Pope, the two had had several shared acquaintances... On both life and writings he is judicious in the strongest and most positive sense of the term. His readiness, in his magisterially independent mode, to acknowledge faults and failings in Pope and his writings lends force to his positive judgments though, as always in Johnson, every word and every period must be pondered...The biographical details of Johnson's "Life" are exquisitely chosen and suggestive' (Howard Erskine-Hill, ODNB).

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