Response to Review of The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, Eighteenth-Century Studies (review)

Melvyn New's review of our edition of The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) accuses us of redundant annotation, gossiping, seeking a popular audience, and, somewhat peculiarly, not paying enough attention to Laurence Sterne. Most seriously, he effectively charges us with plagiarism. We are pleased to have the opportunity to respond.

Given that New's piece is largely concerned with attacking us on questions of scholarly accuracy, we begin with the factual errors in his brief piece. He says that our introduction is sixty-two pages in length; it is forty-eight (264). He criticizes us for not paying enough attention to A. Linton Sells's biography of Goldsmith (264); presumably, he meant to reference Arthur Lytton Sells (he might also wish to acquaint himself with John Ginger's The Notable Man[1977], the most recent biography, of which he seems unaware). He complains that readers will have to "judge for [them]selves" whether "No!" or "No." is the correct manuscript reading of Letter 7 (65); in fact, they will merely have to read our edition and Katharine Balderston's 1928 edition more carefully than he did to see that we are agreed on the reading. He writes that our copy-texts for Letters 51 and 52 were from an article by R. W. Seitz; again, a more careful reading clarifies that they were actually from William Chambers's letter-book (270, fn. 2). He insists that the OEDhas no entry for a figurative use of "heel-piec'd" (267); it does, and it even has an example from the 1760s, the decade in question. His preamble includes an ostensibly cutting reference to "Van Egmont's Travels." The text in question was actually written by Johan Ægidius Van Egmont and John Heyman. Moreover, while New might wish that Goldsmith's review of that text "concluded" (263) with the snappy quotation he deploys, Goldsmith actually wrote three additional paragraphs. Finally, if New is planning any trips to Ireland in the near future, he should probably be aware that "Britishers" has not been considered an accurate or appropriate label for Irish people for quite some time now.

New states that our annotations "consist primarily of Balderston's notes" (264). This statement is untrue, as is its implication of plagiarism. However, our debt to Katharine Balderston's pioneering work is freely and repeatedly acknowledged. In the opening sentence of our note on the edition, we are clear that we were "advancing" her work rather than supplanting it. In instances of cross-referencing the letters with the works (in for instance Letter 10, which is given as a key example of our overdependence on Balderston) we preferred to reference Arthur Friedman. In his edition of the Collected Works, some thirty-eight years after Balderston, Friedman laid out the same correlations between works and letters, rendering reference to Balderston redundant in these cases. New also criticizes us for not crediting the Oxford English Dictionaryand Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Certainly we used both the OEDand the ODNB, but these resources are so subsumed into modern scholarship that we eschewed individual references, particularly when use is limited to establishing matters of fact (dates of birth, publication, etc). The practice is quite widespread—even as far back as Balderston's edition. Points of information in our edition beyond biographical detail are all fully referenced. Perhaps we needed a sentence in our editorial principles to this effect, but New's suggestion of plagiarism is distasteful.

Many of the differences between our approach to annotation and New's can be understood in terms of different imagined audiences for an edition of Goldsmith's letters. We have provided a wealth of additional biographical and contextual information about Goldsmith's Irish, Scottish, medical and, later, theatrical worlds. Our introductory and annotative work was driven by our sense of the growing importance of work on eighteenth-century Irish writers that seeks to restore their legacies...