Thomas F. Bonnell – författare

A publishing phenomenon began in Glasgow in 1765. Uniform pocket editions of the English Poets printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis formed the first link in a chain of literary products that has grown ever since, as we see from series like Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics. Bonnell explores the origins of this phenomenon, analysing more than a dozen multi-volume poetry collections that sprang from the British press over the next half century. Why such collections flourished so quickly, who published them, what forms they assumed, how they were marketed and advertised, how they initiated their readers into the rites of mass-market consumerism, and what role they played in the construction of a national literature are all questions central to the study.The collections played out against an epic battle over copyright law, and involved fierce contention for market share in the 'classics' among rival publishers. It brought despair to the most powerful of London printers, William Strahan, who prophesied that competition of this nature would ruin bookselling, turning it into 'the most pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unprofitable, and disreputable Trade in Britain'.Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets were part of such a collection, dubbed 'Johnson's Poets'. The third edition of this collection, published in 1810, brought the national project to its high water mark: it contained 129 poets, plus extensive translations from the Greek and Roman classics. By this point, all the features that characterize modern series of vernacular classics had been established, and never since has such an ambitious expression of the poetic canon been repeated, as Bonnell shows by peering forward into the nineteenth century and beyond.Based on work with archival materials, newspapers, handbills, prospectuses, and above all the books themselves, Bonnell's findings shed light on all aspects of the book trade. Valuable bibliographical data is presented regarding every collection, forming an indispensable resource for future work on the history of the English poetry canon.

This volume is the third in the Yale Boswell Editions’ manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, a four-volume sequence designed to stand as a research supplement to the Hill-Powell version of the Life. The first volume, edited by Marshall Waingrow and covering the years 1709–1765, appeared in 1994, and the second, 1766–1776, edited by Bruce Redford with Elizabeth Goldring, in 1998. In this volume, for the years 1776–1780, Thomas F. Bonnell continues the genetic transcription of Boswell’s heavily revised manuscript—a master narrative into which Boswell keyed scores of satellite ‘Papers Apart’ and other documents—in the system devised by Waingrow for the series. The text picks up at the point at which Boswell and Johnson return to London after a Spring jaunt in 1776 to the English midlands, and follows Johnson through the years during which he began, laboured on, and then produced the first several volumes of the greatest work of his later career, the Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to The Works of the English Poets (commonly known as the ‘Lives of the Poets’). Bonnell’s transcription tracks the many and various changes made in manuscript, proof, revises, and successive published editions, identifies (and for the first time in many instances definitively corrects) compositorial and other misreadings and errors that have long remained undetected, and restores a revealing array of deleted and lost material.