Hume's "Bellmen's Petition": The Original Text

Hume Studies Volume"XXIII, Number 1, April 1997, pp. 3-7 Hume's "Bellmen's Petition": The Original Text M. A. STEWART Writing to Dr. Clephane on 18 February 1751, Hume mentioned a satirical "Sheet call'd the Bellman's Petition" that he had recently written, but had been unable to find a printer for in Edinburgh.1 By 10 March he apparently had a printer, but could not yet say if the job was done.2 Burton was to identify this work with a printed broadside that we now know to have borne the nominal date of 27 January, which gives some indication of the delay in publication. Although the short title used in Hume's casual correspondence has stuck, there seems no good reason to retain it. The full title indicates that the Petition was written in the name of the whole company of Bellmen (i.e., bellringers) rather than that of the individual who ostensibly subscribed the covering Letter. Burton reproduced a segment of the Petition in a victorianized version, from a copy of the original.3 A full but more garbled transcription containing both syntactic and semantic anomalies had been published independently, without recognizing Hume's authorship, in a nineteenth-century literary miscellany called The Scotch Haggis.4 This version—the only one generally known by the middle of the present century—was reproduced as Appendix B in J. V. Price's The Ironic Hume, and excerpted with its errors compounded in E. C. Mossner's Life of David Hume. There are in fact at least three extant copies of the original,5 two of which have come into the public domain only recently. These have been collated to provide the text which follows.6 Although it is possible now to offer a more M. A. Stewart is at the Philosophy Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LAl 4YG, U.K. email: a.stewart@lancaster.ac.uk 4 M. A. Stewart authentic text, one anomaly still remains in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Letter accompanying the Petition. If Hume had been deliberately trying to reproduce the style of an uneducated writer it is unlikely he would have limited it to a single solecism. The three words proposed for restoration in the text below are not the only possibility; but their accidental deletion would be explainable in the light of the immediately preceding clause. The original consists in a half-sheet of common (unwatermarked) paper, printed on both sides within an area approximately 29.1 χ 14.1 cm. The surviving copies have been variously trimmed to page sizes between 32.3 and 30.2 cm. in length and between 19.7 and 16.5 cm. in width. The Bodleian copy has lost the final line of page 1 through close trimming. NOTES 1 J. Y. T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (London: Clarendon Press, 1932) I 149, corrected from the original in the National Library of Scotland. It must have been the satirical tone that caused the difficulty. There was no block to the publication of measured criticism of the case for increased ministerial stipends. Fifteen church elders who dissented in the vote of the General Assembly in 1750 found a printer for their Exposition of the Reasons of Dissent from a Resolution of the last General Assembly, to Apply to Parliament for an Augmentation of Stipends, &c. (Edinburgh, 1750). 2 Hume to Gilbert Elliot, HL 1156. Hume was then living at Ninewells, and if he continued to be obstructed in Edinburgh could perhaps have found a printer in Berwick. 3 J. H. Burton, Life and Correspondence of David Hume, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1846), 1:317-19. Burton's transcription contains two errors in wording. 4 The Scotch Haggis: Consisting of Anecdotes, Jests, Curious and Rare Articles of Literature (Edinburgh, 1822). The same title was used for other literary compilations at other dates, but these did not include Hume's piece. 5 Bodleian Library, Vet. Al b.3 (57); National Library of Scotland, APS. 4.96.45 (to be recatalogued); id., Crawford Miscellaneous Broadsides 1397 (on deposit). Cambridge University Library disclaim any knowledge of the copy credited to them in David Hume...