The History of England - Vols. 1 to 6 Read Free Page B

superior to his materials; he speaks of weaknesses, blunders, cruelties as a physician speaks of epidemic diseases.” No less effusive was the Earl of Chesterfield, who rightly predicted that this was “the only History of England that will go down to Posterity.”
    Still another way of assessing, now statistically, the continued acceptance of the History may be discovered in the printers’ own accounts. Confronted by six massive quarto books, gradually appearing one or two at a time, even the most assiduous readers, as Hume anticipated, would become less and less interested, especially when each succeeding volume took them backward to epochs of lesser concern.
    Nonetheless, the complex printing records, when reduced to tabular form, disclose a total quarto issue hardly surpassed, in this period, for work of any kind.
    Printed
    1754 1757 1759 1761 1762 1763 1764 Total
    “Stuarts”
    1 [5]
    2,000
    750
    800 [225?]
    3,775
    2 [6]
    1,750 750
    750 255
    3,475
    “Tudors”
    1–2 [3–4]
    2,250
    750
    250 3,225
    “Ancient”1–2 [1–2]
    2,000 750
    2,750
    Before the long-produced, expensively priced but highly successful quarto issue had run its course, the History was already destined to appear in a more economical PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011)
    10
    http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/695
    Online Library of Liberty: The History of England, vol. 1
    format designed for an even wider audience—and ultimately in a radical transformation of the text. The first hint of this new enterprise appears in a letter from Hume to his publisher concerning the full quarto edition then pending for 1762.
    I am very glad, that you are in so good a way, and that you think so soon of making a new Edition. I am running over both the antient History & the Tudors, and shall send you them up by the Waggon as soon as they are corrected. Please tell Mr Strahan [the printer] to keep carefully this Copy I send up, as well as that which I left of the Stuarts: For if you intend to print an Octavo Edition next Summer, it will be better to do it from these Copies which are corrected, than from the new Edition, where there will necessarily be some Errors of the Press.
    Actually the octavo edition, a smaller format in eight volumes, did not appear until 1763 and then, effective 1 November, was sold either as a complete set leather bound for £2.8s., or under an ingenious installment plan of one volume a month unbound for 5s. Acting on what he believed to be sufficient warrant from the quarto sales, still continuing at £4.10s. a set, the publisher enthusiastically ordered five thousand copies of this cheaper issue, a printing far exceeding total production of all preceding editions. About this extraordinary venture Hume soon voiced nothing but contempt: Andrew Millar, the publisher, had been “rapacious”; the book was “ill-printed”; misleading statements about its lagging sales were quite “detestable”; and such an enormous issue effectively prevented him from introducing, in another, still further revisions.
    To promote these sales Millar eventually resorted to a deceptive technique which, it seems, went quite unnoticed by Hume at the time and has gone undetected ever since.
    Beginning with the quarto issue of 1762 all titles uniformly read A New Edition, Corrected , excepting only an octavo issue now appearing in 1767, which suggestively announced A New Edition, With Corrections, and some Additions. Close inspection of this “edition” discloses, however, that it is merely a reissue of the 1763 octavo with substitute titles.
    Quite undeterred by his cheap 1763–1767 fiasco, Millar next imagined that he might profit still further from his more affluent clientele, and accordingly produced in 1770, under the imprint of Thomas Cadell, a magnificent “Royal Paper” quarto edition priced at £7.7s. Copies of this as well as the earlier £4.10s. quarto issue, then designated as “Small Paper,” were still being advertised in 1778, a clear