An Introduction to: The Story of the Injured Lady
(Jim McLaverty)
- Abbreviated title
- The story of the injured lady
- JSA Identification Number
- 9_1_2
- Teerink/Scouten Number
- 66
- ESTC Number
- T39445
- Copy and its Location
- CUL , Williams 188
- Publisher and Printer
- Miscellanies. By Dr. Swift. The eleventh volume., Vol. xi., pp 103-118.
- London, Hitch, Charles Davis, Charles Dodsley, Robert Cooper, Mary, 1746.
Commentary
This seems to be the second printing of the Story, following Mrs Cooper’s collection of the essay with poems (this is a prose volume). There is also a printing by Faulkner in Works, vol. VIII in the same year. Swift probably wrote the piece at the time of the Union between England and Scotland, in 1707, but why it should have surfaced in London in the year of his death is unclear.
There are very few difference in substantives between the three editions of 1746, and Herbert Davis is mistaken in saying this edition does not have ‘In a Letter to her Friend, with his Answer’, as a sub-title in the dropped-head (The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, vol. ix, p. 369).
In typography this edition continued the tradition of the Swift-Pope Miscellanies, with small capitals at the beginning of paragraphs and capitals at the beginning of nouns; a tradition that was going to undergo a radical revision with Hawkesworth’s edition of 1755.
The ordering of the names of the booksellers in the imprint is probably merely a reflection of seniority (sometimes seniority was abandoned to acknowledge ownership of copyright). It’s very likely that the publication was directed by Dodsley.
Robert Dodsley was born 13 February 1703 and died 23 September 1764. In his early life he was footman to Charles Dartiquenave and others, but gained admission to literary society through his poems and plays. Pope set him up in business with £100 in 1735. He published for Pope and became one of the foremost literary booksellers of the century, publishing Akenside, Shenstone, the Wartons, Collins, Gray, the Annual Register, Percy’s Reliques, and his innovative collections of poems and plays.
Thomas and Mary Cooper took over Thomas Warner’s trade publishing business when he died in 1733. The business was highly successful and continued until Mary’s death in 1761.
References: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. ix, pp. 1-12, 369; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. ii, pp. 169-75; Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750’, Library, 6th ser. 4 (1982), 99-134; James E. Tierney, ‘Robert Dodsley’, in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154, The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820, ed. James E. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1995).