Scribleriana Transferred: Manuscripts and Printed Matter, 2010–2012, Part 1

• • Christopher Edwards (Wallingford, Oxon.) has listed for c. $950 a manuscript letter signed from Joseph Addison (Whitehall, 8 April 1707) to his old friend George Stepney (1663–1707), then on a diplomatic mission to the landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. The letter, 2 pp. 4to (223 × 170 mm.) is unpublished. It is written in another’s hand, but Addison signed, dated and directed it and added “a couple of corrections and additions including a postscript which apologizes for ‘using so often another hand.”

• • Quaritch’s English Books (summer 2011) includes a manuscript transcription of a revised version of Mark Akenside’s “Hymn to Science,” a 15-stanza Miltonic ode that originally appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine during 1739. It is tipped into the first edition of Akenside’s Poems edited by the author’s friend Jeremiah Dyson (W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1772), 4to, in contemporary marbled calf (£650). “Hymn to Science” is not included in Poems 1772. Quaritch, after noting Akenside’s penchant for revising “earlier poems in later life,” indicates, “The present manuscript has more than twenty substantive differences, mostly alterations of single words, though one line is entirely rewritten and the order of two stanzas swapped.” A note attached to the MS indicates it was “given me by Doctor [Edward] Barnard Provost of Eton & in his own handwriting.” Quaritch suggests the note may have been written by Dr. George Hardinge, a family friend, with whom Akenside corresponded while Hardinge was at Eton studying under Barnard in the 1750s; Hardinge was identified by Dyson as owning a transcript of a different Akenside poem (Index of English Literary Manuscripts, AkM 2).

• • William Reese of New Haven has listed an autograph letter signed from Edward Cave (in full), publisher of the Gentleman’s Magazine, to “Mr. [Lewis] Paul, Birmingham,” dated 14 October 1740 ($850). Cave invested in a wool-spinning machine (carding cylinder) that Paul had patented and was to be building. Cave complains of Paul’s failure to show when Cave expected, after information from the Birmingham printer Thomas Warren, to have occasion to introduce Paul to “Cardmakers, & Mechanics.”

• • Christopher Edwards’s List 53 (November 2012) includes a short manuscript by Philip Doddridge written inside his friend Dr. James Stonhouse’s copy of Louis Ellies Du Pin’s The Evangelical History: or, the Life of our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ (Timothy Childe, 1712), bound with The Evangelical History, Part the Second (Tim. Childe, 1707), 8vo, with frontispiece (frt) and 5 plates in vol. 1 and folding map and 13 plates in vol. 2; in cont. calf (£450). Edwards locates in the ESTC only the British Library copy for the Du Pin volume, but now Cambridge is also listed (perhaps this copy), and Cambridge is one of five to hold the second, anonymous work. Dr. Stonhouse set up a country infirmary in Northampton in 1743 and, in part from Doddridge’s influence, took holy orders. On the recto of vol. 1’s frt, Doddridge, making free with Stonhouse’s books, wrote an account, dated 5 December 1744 and signed “P Doddridge” below, of his engagement with Du Pin on reading his “Life of Christ” for the first time: “I found a remarkable agreement between my Harmony & ye order in wch he has disposed his History especially in ye Story of ye Resurrection of Christ” (the note includes a list of “perfect Coincidences”).

• • A printed employment form of the Universal Register-Office completed by office manager John Hutchinson and others offers insight into the office established by John and Henry Fielding in 1750. The document, 1 p. 4to, is listed in Quaritch’s English Books and Manuscripts (c. February 2012) and reproduced with great clarity (£650). John Fielding turned the office over to John Hutchinson in 1761. Under the heading for the office on Bishopsgate-Street comes a standard form that describes the applicant for employment and then a paragraph introducing a query about the applicant with the reminder that the applicant’s next employer and “Public Justice” require an honest answer to queries about the applicant’s past employment. Five queries begin with one...