David Foxon

David Fairweather Foxon, bibliographer: born Paignton, Devon 9 January 1923; Assistant Keeper, Department of Printed Books, British Museum 1950-65; Professor of English, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario 1965-67; Reader in Textual Criticism, Oxford University 1968-82, Lyell Reader in Bibliography 1975-76; Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford 1968-82 (Emeritus); Senior Resident Fellow, Clark Library, UCLA 1974-75; Sandars Reader in Bibliography, Cambridge University 1977-79; FBA 1978; President, Bibliographical Society 1980-81; married 1947 Dorothy Jarratt (died 1988; one daughter; marriage dissolved 1963); died Oxford 5 June 2001.

Up to 30 years ago, the books of the 18th century were an almost uncharted zone; almost all catalogues stopped short at 1700. It was David Foxon's achievement to set a standard for recording books of the later period that has determined the work of a whole generation of those who have followed him in the same field.

English Verse, 1701-1750: a catalogue of separately printed poems with notes on contemporary collected editions was published in two fat quarto volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1975. It was the product of 25 years of work, most of it conducted before photocopying had come to make the comparison of what might or might not be two copies of the same book so much easier. Before that, you not only had to go to the libraries that held the books, not so well catalogued then as now, but you had to see, hold in the mind's eye, and record on paper (no word-processors then) a multitude of details that no one had tried to describe before, such as precise forms of imprint, printers' ornaments, even press-figures.

These facts had to be studied and put together with observations of other copies, and the whole organised into an accurate record of this or that book, and the record of all those books welded into an alphabetic catalogue, buttressed with all manner of indexes to help the reader identify otherwise anonymous works, all books issued by a particular printer or binder, and so on. This was done in the intervals of the work by which Foxon earned his living.

Why the 18th century, why verse? The first was an irresistible challenge, simply because it was uncharted, and verse in the first half of the century was the natural, all-pervasive form of public expression – it captivated its age as television does ours. Satire, flattery, love, drama, public events, the beauties of nature, all were expressed in verse. Verse was no light diversion; it could make or break public figures as journalism can now. Did not Pope, the greatest poet of the time, write "Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God afraid of me"? He did not exaggerate, and it was verse as the mirror of the age that first drew Foxon to his period, and held him in thrall through the years and travail that followed his first embarking on it.

David Foxon was born in Paignton, the son of a Methodist minister, and went to Kingswood School. He won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, but it was now 1942, and some quite extraordinary and uncharacteristic matching of ability to need sent him straight to Bletchley, where he learned the habit of looking for minute but tell-tale traces of evidence and unexpected connections between them.

He reached Magdalen in 1945, where he was to read English under C.S. Lewis and Jack Bennett, and Lewis's catholic approach to English literature, to see it against the background of the society in which it was written, was as lasting as his forensic training at Bletchley. While still an undergraduate he married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Arthur Jarratt, so a job was essential; he joined the Civil Service, but, after two rather dispiriting years in the Town and Country Planning Office, he applied for and got an assistant keepership in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum.

On his first day, he was greeted by the then Keeper of Printed Books, Frank Francis, who told him where he was to work, cataloguing until he got good enough to revise others' work, what the hours were, where to get a house key, where the canteen and the gents were, how to apply for leave, and then asked, "And now, what work will you do while you are here?"

Those were the days when the academic staff got through their duties before lunch, and were expected to produce "real" work thereafter. So the foundations of English Verse, 1701-1750 were laid, though it was some time before the shape of the eventual work became clear.

In the meantime, there was plenty of more mundane but congenial work to be done. In 1950 the flow of books from country-house and other libraries to booksellers and auction houses was unabated. Although American university libraries were beginning the great sweep that took so many books across the Atlantic, shillings rather than pounds would still buy most 18th-century books. Reading catalogues and checking books for sale (always ordered "on approval") was a regular task that brought thousands of English books through his hands, and gave him a thorough grounding in the distinguishing marks of books of any particular period.

He also had a sharp eye for any anomaly or anachronism that might betray a false imprint or a "sophisticated" copy. This was put to a new test when he came to catalogue the Ashley Library, the great collection of English literature made by Thomas James Wise. Wise had been the great pundit of his subject, author and publisher of substantial bibliographies, but his reputation had been substantially dented by the publication in 1934 of An Enquiry into Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, by John Carter and Graham Pollard, which convicted him of forging works by his favourite 19th-century authors. The British Museum had bought his library from his widow after his death.

Wise had published the catalogue of his library, but when Foxon came to compare his copies of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays with the museum's he found leaves missing in them which corresponded with those inserted in Wise's. Matching torn edges, ink-stains and creases, he discovered Wise as thief as well as forger. The result of his researches was published by the Bibliographical Society as Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama: a study in theft and sophistication in 1959, and it made Foxon's name as a bibliographer of acute observation and expository power. Years later, a packet of torn leaves bought at the sale of Wise's Hampstead house after his widow's death turned up; it proved to contain the defective leaves that Wise had discarded to replace them with the leaves he stole from the museum.

One of the books that Foxon had added to the museum's collection was a copy of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), the first edition of Fanny Hill, which it had not previously possessed. This led to a thorough investigation of the English market for pornography, a then unfashionable subject (the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial was still in the future). Foxon studied the scanty remains, and also the proceedings of trials for issuing libertine and seditious books, and built up a convincing picture of this under-the-counter trade, which originally appeared as a series of articles in The Book Collector, later published as a book, Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (1965). One of his discoveries had been a set of fragments of prints, which he identified as parts of a set of engravings of the infamous "Aretine's Postures". This conjecture was confirmed when a copy of the long-lost original was discovered.

The British Museum was not a happy place in the 1960s; space for books was desperately short, it was overrun with readers attracted by the recent publication of its complete catalogue, and, when it came to buying books, books once available were all too often snapped up by richer American libraries. In 1965 Foxon left, first to become Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, then, in 1968, Reader in Textual Criticism and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He was now able to concentrate on English Verse, 1701-1750, and its publication was rightly hailed as a landmark, not merely in its subject but also in bibliographical technique.

It was no coincidence that next year, in 1976, after a conference on the subject, the British Library (as it had now become) undertook a full-scale recataloguing of its 18th-century holdings, which became in time a world catalogue of English books, 1701-1800.

In 1976 as Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford Foxon delivered six lectures on "Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade", following them with the Sandars Lectures at Cambridge in 1978 on "The Stamp Act and the Periodical Press". In these he used visual imagery as well as the spoken word to depict with unforgettable brilliance a mass of evidence, typographical and textual, which illuminated not merely his subjects but the history of the book trade and society as a whole in the period. His delivery needed the widest screen and a dramatic performance; it got both, but the result defeated publication until James McLaverty heroically produced the Lyell Lectures in 1991; the Sandars Lectures remain unpublished.

By now Foxon had retired from his Readership, becoming an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham at the same time in 1982. His later years were much troubled by ill-health, and he lived an almost reclusive life at Headington. He had been President of the Bibliographical Society in 1980-81, but had to be persuaded to come to London to receive the society's Gold Medal in 1985. He had been such an electric, vital figure in youth and middle age, and no one who knew him then will forget his speech, allusion and metaphor packed with wit, his delivery of a cynical phrase belied by a grin, corner of mouth turned down, eyebrow raised, the whole punctuated with sketches in the air by cigarette in well-worn holder.

Now, if the wit and the grin remained, it was as if he had been worn out with the labour of getting his magnum opus out, his energy all gone. But no one could have guessed from those vivid lectures that they were his farewell to a subject that he adorned for so long.

Nicolas Barker