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The Veracity of Spence's Anecdotes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Austin Wright
Austin Wright*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Institute of Technology
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Extract

William Lisle Bowles said of the anecdotist Joseph Spence, “He seems to have opened his mouth and his ears to every thing Pope told him.” This sneer implied that Pope was a liar and Spence a gull, but the splenetic Bowles inadvertently implied something else that, if true, is of significance to English literary history: that Spence was an omnivorous snapper-up of trifles who did not judge or discriminate but merely recorded. For if Spence, gull or no gull, was an accurate and veracious recorder, his notes on the conversation of Pope and other literary figures possess great value; if he was not, they are nearly worthless. Without Spence's records our knowledge of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would be considerably less than it is, and the biographers of Pope in particular would cut a sorry figure. Only if Spence's manuscripts had lain unknown for a century and a half, if neither Warburton nor Johnson nor anyone else had been granted a look at them, if not one of the anecdotes had ever found its way to the light, and then if a modern discoverer had published his find—then only would the ensuing sensation have brought a realization of the importance of Spence's labors and the magnitude of the debt which the world has been none too ready to pay him.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , March 1947, pp. 123 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947

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References

1 Bowles' edition of Pope (1806), ii, 418, m.

2 John Dennis, The Age of Pope (1894), p. 206.

3 Robert Carruthers, The Life of Alexander Pope, 2nd ed. (1857), p. 126.

4 William Stebbing, Some Verdicts of History Reviewed (1887), p. 77.

5 Walpole's Letters, ed. Toynbee, xi, 175.

6 Editor's advertisement in Remarks and Dissertations on Virgil; with some other Classical Observations: by the late Mr. Holdsworth. Published with several Notes, and Additional Remarks, by Mr. Sfence (1768).

7 Anecdotes, ed. Singer (1820), p. 237.

8 In the possession of James M. Osborn, Esq., of Yale University.

9 Singer, pp. 134-135..

10 If the point is raised that Spence should have incorporated mention of his uncertainty into the “fair copies” from which the printed editions were later made, it should be remembered that he himself did not supervise the publication.

11 Modern Philology, xxxiii (1936), 187-193.

12 Singer, p. 148.

13 Singer, p. 296.

14 The original reading is preserved in a partial transcript of the Anecdotes preserved in the Huntington Library, where it is catalogued as HM1271. The page reference is fol. 84r.

15 Singer, p. 358.

16 Huntington Library, HM1271.

17 The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934), p. 6, n.

18 Huntington Library, HM1271, fol. 45v. Young also emphatically denied Pope's story about Addison's plan to take holy orders (HM1271, fol. lv; see Singer, pp. 191-192). Since this was simply a case of disagreement between authorities, Spence was justified in retaining Pope's account, but he should of course have added Young's contrary testimony.

19 Singer, p. 5.

20 Pope's Works, ed. Elwin-Courthope, x, 541-542.

21 Singer, p. 10.

22 Singer, p. 35.

23 Line 274.

24 Singer, p. 47.

25 Elwin-Courthope, vn, 417, n.

26 Singer, p. 196.

27 Singer, p. 158.

28 Elwin-Courthope, vi, 155.

29 Singer, p. 164.

30 See the note to Epistle iii, line 308.

31 Singer, p. 165.

32 Elwin-Courthope, x, 179.

33 Singer, p. 154.

34 Elwin-Courthope, ix, 318.

35 Singer, p. 14.

36 The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (Philadelphia, 1841), iii, 316.