The Hyde Edition offers scores of texts transcribed for the first time from the original documents a feature of special importance in the case of Johnson's revealing letters to Hester Thrale, many of which have been available only in expurgated form. The Hyde Edition is also the first systematically to record substantive deletions, which can yield intimate knowledge of Johnson's stylistic procedures, mental habits, and chains of association. Furthermore, its ownership credits document the current disposition of the manuscripts, hundreds of which have changed hands during the last four decades. Finally, the annotation of the letters incorporates the many significant discoveries of postwar Johnsonian scholarship, as well as decoding references that had previously resisted explanation. The result is a far richer understanding of Samuel Johnson's life, work, and milieu. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

George Steevens was one of the most learned of the eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare. Indeed, his primary concern throughout his life, when he was not perpetrating one of his learned hoaxes, was the explication of the text of Shakespeare's plays and poems. A well-to-do bachelor, friend of Samuel Johnson and a few other notables, and the enemy of somewhat more members of the intellectual life of London, he had the leisure and the energy to pursue his inclinations. Professor Sherbo traces Steevens' achievement as editor of Shakespeare and collaborator in his friend Isaac Reed's Biographea Dramatica (1782) and in his friend John Nichols' Genuine Works of William Hogarth. Without the labors of Steevens eighteenth-century scholarship would not have made the advances that it did.