poets put great pressure upon the space available. Forty-eight poets were included in the booksellers’ list: to these Johnson himself added the names of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret, and Yalden. On the title-page of the first separate edition of the Lives thirty-six booksellers figure as proprietors of the work.
When this separate edition appeared, and the book was an assured success, the booksellers, of their own free motion, sent the author another hundred guineas. Malone comments on the extraordinary moderation of Johnson’s demand. ‘Had he asked one thousand, or even fifteen hundred guineas, the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would doubtless have readily given it.’ But Johnson refused to listen to any blame of them. ‘Sir,’ he said to Boswell, ‘I have always said the booksellers were a generous set of men. Nor, in the present instance, have I reason to complain. The fact is, not that they have paid me too little, but that I have written too much.’ In the statement prefixed to the separate edition he explains this further: ‘My purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character, but I have been led beyond my intention, I hope, by the honest desire of giving useful pleasure.’
It is idle to challenge an agreement made between free agents. Johnson was a bad bargainer. He paid ‘less attention to profit from his labours,’ says Boswell, ‘than any man to whom literature has been a profession.’ He took a hundred pounds for Rasselas—to which the booksellers added twenty-five pounds later. Nothing would have induced him to chaffer about his wage; and he did not think it a hardship to stand by his agreements.
