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The Publication and Profits of Dryden's Virgil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Dryden's profits from the publication of his translation of Virgil have long been a topic of considerable interest and speculation. Malone, in 1800, pieced together as much information as he could gather from secondary sources then available to him; but he was explicit in regarding as fragmentary his interpretations of Dryden's profit from this work. The whole question is indissolubly bound up with the agreement between Dryden and his publisher, Jacob Tonson, for the publication of the translation.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1938
References
1 R.E.S., xiii (July, 1937), 297–306.
2 The original copies of both parties are preserved in the British Museum: Add. MS. 36933, Add. Ch. 8429. Although Malone and Saintsbury knew nothing of this agreement, Mitford, curiously enough, did know it. In a footnote on p. xxxix of his Life, prefixed to the American edition of 1854, he describes it briefly; but he apparently gave it little study.
3 The Prose Works of John Dryden, ed. Edmond Malone, i, 235.
4 Malone, as I shall show later, made a mistake in interpreting the following passage from one of Dryden's letters: “I have done the seaventh Eneid in the country; and intend some few days hence, to go upon the eight: when that is finish'd, I expect fifty pounds in good silver.”
5 The explanation, I think, is to be found in a letter to Tonson (Malone, i, ii, 46), in which Dryden complains about a money payment and demands “guinneys” at 29 shillings—a temporary value. Saintsbury, for some reason, increases the first subscribers to 102. As printed in the folio edition, the lists Number 101 and 250.
6 Malone, i, ii, 43.
7 London, 1918.
8 This is corroborated in several of Dryden's letters; see especially those printed in Malone, i, ii, 44, 47.
9 In Cambridge University Library, Add. MS. 4429 (10).
10 For other references to these subscriptions, see Malone, i, ii, 38, 40, 43. The chronology and the dates of these letters, as fixed by Malone, are not always right.
11 Dobell, loc. cit.
12 The Letterbook of the 2nd Earl of Chesterfield, B.M. Add. MS. 19253.
13 In N. & Q., 5th Series, vii, 386, John Taylor communicates notes from a MS, in which a Mr. Graham, a friend of Dryden's, records: “Mr Dryden own'd to me that by ye money paid him by Mr Tonson, by his Dedicats & by his Subscripts he got 1400t for his Translatn of Virgil.”
14 The material for this article was collected during a year's study in England on a fellowship granted by the American Council of Learned Societies.