Annotated Copies of Early Editions of Johnson's Dictionary: A Preliminary Account

Early responses to Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language included manuscript annotations, sometimes very extensive, in copies of the dictionary. This article surveys twenty-one copies of eighteenth-century editions of the dictionary with critical or informative annotations, bearing on etymology or usage, adding new words or senses, or improving the supply and referencing of quotations. Some of these copies are extant in institutional or private collections, and others are unlocated. The annotators include Johnson himself; members of his circle including Edmund Burke, Samuel Dyer, Edmond Malone, Hester Piozzi, and George Steevens; and other readers including Leigh Hunt, Horne Tooke, Noah Webster, and John Wilkes.

‘Too late for antique vows’

This chapter reads John Keats in the context of the influence of Leigh Hunt and the wider radical Enlightenment. One problem posed by a secular modernity is whether prayer—and forms of religious practice more generally—can be maintained as part of an increasingly abstracted philosophical religion that exits the form of Christianity. Circles of elegy, nostalgia, and scepticism pose this problem of a ‘post-Christian’ prayer. In ‘Ode to Psyche’, Keats tries to imagine a prayer detached from Christianity’s mournful theology; in the Catholic and Gothic tones of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, he is repeatedly drawn by the seductive lure of superstition and the rich concrete forms of devotion. The chapter concludes by reading ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ as stylizing a scene of prayer to Moneta, a goddess embodying the uncertain transitions between religious epochs, thus dramatizing his most pressing spiritual dilemma.

The first item in the first issue of The Liberal: Byron's The Vision of Judgement

The Liberal is one of the most important journals of the Romantic period, the brainchild of Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Byron. It was inevitable that Byron's poem, an attack on Robert Southey, the poet laureate, would be in the first issue. 7,000 copies were printed and 4,000 sold, enough to make the new journal a huge success.

Leigh Hunt, The Story of Rimini (1816), title page and first page of Hunt's dedication to Byron

There was good reason for Hunt to dedicate his poem to Byron. For one thing, Byron helped him secure John Murray as a publisher--and for another, the name "Byron" attached to almost any publication, regardless of quality, was an excellent sales tool. Rimini, with its bodice-ripping apparatus, would probably have sold reasonably well even without the dedication. Murray was repelled by Hunt, regarding him as a money-grubber with unacceptably liberal politics.

‘Second Generation’ Romantic Poets

A new generation of poets flourishes during the politically turbulent years, 1810–1824. The chief names are Byron, Shelley, and Keats. They are associated with rebellion, solitary genius, lyricism and dying young, but this is an oversimplification. More recent perspectives emphasize social networks, with the journalist and poet Leigh Hunt a key figure. That the second generation can be represented by three names is challenged by the diversity of poets writing during this period, and the variousness of the poetry written. Poetry was at the centre of cultural life.