The Devil's Details (16 page)

^*
Young boys were usually employed for this work, but a girl was not unknown.

^*
See the
Oxford English Dictionary
: “Tang … I. 1. A projecting pointed part or instrument. a. The tongue of a serpent formerly thought to be the stinging organ ….” E. Rayher assures me that type once removed from the mold cools quickly. A child's fingers would not be burned; but the tang's rough edge could prick a daydreaming child.

^*
Tweezers were called botkins; specialized printing terminology has been avoided when possible. Annotation, not the printed book, is our subject; printers enter only because they are necessary to a full understanding of the wonder of the first footnote.

^*
Sometimes the effort to contain margin notes and repress footnotes is even more obviously connected to the issue of maintaining law and order in an age of exuberance and gunpowder. A dismal treatise on the laws of Moses by John Weemes jumps to mind. Weemes should have been saved by providence for our current era, when he would have served splendidly in traffic court; he delights in minutiae and in the pounding of a gavel. A right-hand column appears in the pages of his book but is used solely for emphasis, never for amplification. No footnotes are allowed, of course. While detailing lawful ceremonies, Weemes confronts a biblical text in which “Lions, Oxen & Cherubims” appear. The cherubims make him nervous. He immediately describes an elaborate system of wings. Wings cover their faces and feet. Two wings stretch out to cover whatever is in between. The text tells us “the Lord would not have them to appeare naked ….” And the margin note echoes shrilly, “The Lord would have the Cherubims covered and not to appeare naked.” A cigar is sometimes a cigar but this kind of excess of decorum registers as almost certainly more than merely an excess of decorum. See John Weemes,
An Exposition of the Lawes of Moses
(no city given: J. Dawson, F. J. Bellamie, 1632), p. 36.

^*
Cowley's biographer, Thomas Sprat, betrays some annoyance with Cowley's failure to employ his gardening skills “for Practice and Profit” but instead “presently digested it into the Form which we behold ….” The bottom line, though, is that his spying remained a secret. See Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

^*
Her translation does not include those notes either because her publisher was frightened by the added expense or because her Latin was not up to it. John Dryden questioned her Latin skills. See Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

^*
Anyone may be tempted to extend the analysis of this ingenious “reversal of the hero's fortune.” The tabernacle is often thought of as the “temporary abode of the soul,” a notion that Behn's two-directional asterisk makes nicely ambiguous. The tabernacle was crucial during the Israelites' years of wandering; Behn's displeasure that the “brother” for whom she obviously has affection “went wandering” is evident. The attentive reader will notice that this critic has put such perhaps salacious speculations down here rather than in the “body” of the text. For uses of the word
tabernacle
see Stuart Berg Flexnor, editor in chief,
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 1933.

^*
There is no need for flow charts if the convenience of the reader is kept firmly in mind. The present writer has used reference marks to indicate explanatory notes; he has used numerals to indicate notes that are wholly or in large part references. Thus these later can be easily skipped should the reader be uninterested in checking the author's scholarship. Also for the convenience of the reader,
ibid.
is used but not
op. cit.
or
loc. cit.
A cluster of
ibids
is decorative and alerts the reader to a cluster of references to the same title. However,
op. cit.
and
loc. cit.
often entail a frustrating retreat back through pages already read in order to find the necessary reference.,

^*
Layabouts
may strike some as too harsh a term for Pope's coterie. They did some writing certainly, and took long walks, but spent an awful lot of their time lying around Pope's living room gossiping and joking.

^*
The count was achieved in the following manner. A page was found to have 7¼ inches of usable space. Seventy-nine pages provide 572 inches of usable space. Each inch of page space can accommodate four lines of verse; the 358 lines of the poem, therefore, take 89½ inches, which was rounded to 90, leaving 482 inches for the notes. The notes in smaller print and double columns fit sixteen lines into an inch. Four hundred eighty-two inches of page space could house up to 7,712 lines of notes; this has been rounded off to account for the unused space between notes. A precise count would be of interest but seems beyond this present writer's patience.

^*
Commentators have, of course, always paid attention to the use of the footnote in
The Dunciad Variorum
as a satirical weapon employed against certain scholars, writers, and publishers. Peter W. Cosgrove, in 1991, is the first to properly emphasize that Pope was using the footnote against itself. “Pope's real intent may be seen, … not as a defense of individual word but as a defense of poetry in general against textual criticism.” P. W. Cosgrove, “
Undermining the Text: Edward Gibbon, Alexander Pope, and the Anti-Authenticating Footnote in Annotation and Its Texts
,” ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 138. See also Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 111-8.

^*
Bentley, it has to be said, deserved some firm correction, if not Pope's bullying. Milton has Adam and Eve leave Eden with some reluctance. “They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.” Bentley, a stickler for facts, reminds us that Eve “had professed her Readiness and Alacrity for the journey …” and that “there were only the two of them in Eden, and they were not more solitary now than they had been before.” But facts are not drama, and Bentley's revision of Milton's verse loses something:
Then hand in hand with social steps their way
Through Eden took, with Heav'ly Comfort Cheer'd.
See R. J. White,
Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 216.

^*
For the sake of comparison: A two-volume edition of the nineteenth-century heavyweight
War and Peace
weighs three and a half pounds; a
Remembrance of Things Past
edition is four pounds. The latter, opened, is a perfectly adequate eight by twelve inches.

^*
The story of Bardot's disrobing is part of moviemaking lore. Apparently Goddard's financial backers insisted on it; they undoubtedly had in mind the American market of young, intellectual males.

^*
Contemporary writers might well envy the seventeenth century's orthographic independence; to separate
everybody
into
every body
in this context supplies a sensuous reverberation that has to be appreciated by the most intellectualized reader (or film critic).

^*
The source of this quotation eludes me. To ask readers for help is one of the best uses to which a footnote can be put. Ignorance is as much a part of scholarship as knowledge; both should be
acknowledged
.

^*
Gibbon wasn't about to let his bête noire rest with just one sour note. Several volumes later, immersed in the Crusades when so much un Christian behavior was exercised on behalf of Christian doctrine, a note turns the reader to Shakespeare's Henry IV for a more genuine and appropriate expression of love for country and mayhem. Fair enough, until he manufactures an excuse to refer to Dr. Johnson's edition of the play, and to Dr. Johnson's own notes, “the workings of a bigoted though vigorous mind, greedy of every pretense to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed.”

^*
Hume would have labeled this digression “commentary” and hustled it to the back of the book. But digression, as Bayle demonstrated conclusively, is as much a part of the thought process as a metaphor or a well-chosen example or, for that matter, logic's excluded middle, which Hume was so inordinately fond of.

^*
That the footnote is not just an artifact of scholarship nor its survival the concern of the scholar is a major theme of this book. Humanism and the layperson have as much at stake as scholars in the struggle to keep the footnote alive.

^*
Poor Tom Jones has had questions raised about his picaresque status—he seems always to have his status questioned. Common sense, however, should convince us that a hero who travels as much as Tom, and who suffers as many pratfalls as Tom, is picaresque. For a contrary view and fuller discussion of this, see Stuart Miller,
The Picaresque Novel
(Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), pp. 131-5.

^*
“Indeed, [Abelard] communicates a singing quality to topics ordinarily unmelodious. Few other Scholastics remain as readable and alive”: Paul Edwards, editor in chief,
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(New York and London: Macmillan and The Free Press, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, p. 6.

^*
Ranke after a time became a firm supporter of the footnote; but his policies, if not his intentions, undid the footnote, as we will see. His subconscious must take some of the blame.

^*
A single citation could have been inserted at the end of this paragraph; some writers, pulling Ranke, would have done just that. However, making the author work rather than the reader is a firm principle of this book even at the risk of unnecessary duplication. Judgment is required, of course; for example, no citation was given for the single word
formidable
, an elision some might regret.

^*
Modern readers understandably may resist the reduction of war to sport; the example of a skilled use of footnotes remains. Menzel has Gibbon's ability to change our perspective with a single phrase or even a single word. Another footnote of his explains the ransom acquired by a French king: “The Spanish crown diamonds (an incredible number) were … sent to Paris ….” That parenthesis is such an exact exclamation of wonder, we (or the children within all of us) are actually there, standing on tiptoes, the better to see the jewels. Wolfgang Menzel,
The History of Germany, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time
, vol. 3, trans. Mrs. George Horrocks (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 2.

^*
†The details of the carnage have not been included here; they are unnecessary to make my point.

^*
Miss Porter mentions receiving letters from Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and India. Miss Jane Porter,
The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance
(New York: Derby & Jackson, 1857), p. 23.

^*
Edward Heron-Allen occasionally used the pseudonyms Christopher Blayre and Nora Helen Warddel. No evidence has been uncovered to suggest that he resorted to the changes in name in order to continue to use footnotes unimpeded.

^*
The reviewer is full of admiration for
Barnacles in Nature and in Myth
. Unfortunately, he appears to place responsibility for the position of its footnotes upon Heron-Allen instead of upon the publisher, where it properly belongs. See George Sarton, “
Edward Heron-Allen
,”
Isis
, vol. xii (May 1929), pp. 340-1.

^*
The simplicity of many of Belloc's titles may be significant. In addition to
On
, he published On Anything,
On Everything, On Something, On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
. A general disdain for ornamentation of any kind may account for his particular dislike of footnotes.