Teaching English in Utrecht, using The Female Spectator

My Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004) includes two sections given over to reprints of sections of works by Haywood before 1850: "Ac. Reprints in monographs" and "Ad. Reprints in periodicals."

Referring to these two sections in my Introduction, I stated that "It is likely that more Haywood items will be identified as critical interest in the contents of eighteenth-century periodicals increases and as a greater number of electronic resources become available that make it easier to conduct searches of these periodicals." When I wrote this I had in mind E. W. Pitcher's 1995 identification of over a dozen reprints "of Eliza Haywood’s Stories in The Weekly Entertainer," which was published in Notes and Queries.

Well, there hasn't exactly been a flood of articles like Pitcher's, but I have identified so many reprints myself that I have had to give up trying to incorporate them into the numbering scheme I used in 2004. I haven't have time to establish precise word-counts and provide detailed references to the source text reprinted. And, because I could neither number the items, or knew exactly what details to record, I pretty much stopped collecting any information about reprints.

Having recently discovered a pretty nice example of a reprint from The Female Spectator—detailed below—I have decided that I will start (soon) to keep some sort of list of reprints here. If I ever publish a second edition of my Bibliography I will simply omit these sections.

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When I was updating my post Eliza Haywood Links, which the lists eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of works by Eliza Haywood, I stumbled upon a reprint of a lengthy story taken (with acknowledgement, which is unusual) from The Female Spectator. The reprinted story appears in James Low's The Winter Evening Or, A Collection of English Prose and Verse, 2 vols. (1780), 1.142–87. The copy of volume one, on Google Books here, is reproduced from the incomplete set in Tilburg University Library (but digitised by the National Library of the Netherlands).

The editor of this anthology, James Low (1759–1817), was a "Teacher of the English Language in Utrecht," where he studied divinity at the university. He seems to have arrived in Utrecht in 1779, married in 1780, and as ordained at Flushing in 1783. According to William Steven, who gives a biography of Low in his History of the Scottish Church, Rotterdam (1833), 232–34 (here), "his constitution, by nature healthy and vigorous, rapidly gave way" after the death of his son (at 26) and—soon after—of his wife. "He was a high Calvinist; and he was most punctual in his attendance at church courts, in whose debates, from his perfect knowledge of Dutch, he was enabled to take a part."

Low published his anthology of English verse and prose soon after he started teaching English. It was reviewed in a number of Dutch journals (here and here), and at least one German periodical (here). Copies occasionally appeared for sale in bookseller's catalogues up to the 1840s (here). After that, The Winter Evening dissapeared from view, almost completely.

Low's Winter Evening is not on ESTC, and it appears that there is no other copy in an institutional library. There was, however, a copy for sale, so I bought it. I gather it had been for sale for a considerable period, since the vendor had increased the price in some online catalogues, but not others. When I asked about this I was told that the lower price was "very outdated". The change was minimal and the book is obviously very uncommon, so I made no complaint; and once it arrived I felt I had got a screaming bargain anyway: as you can see, it is a beautiful example of Dutch paper wrappers.

The reference that Low provides for his excerpt from The Female Spectator is interesting: "Female Spectator. vol. V. p. 290—312." The "vol. V." is an error for "vol. III"; the page reference narrows down the edition that Low used for his reprint. Of the ten editions of The Female Spectator in English, only three have the story excerpted on pages "290—312": the 4th, 5th and 6th editions of 1750, 1755 and 1766 [i.e., Ab.60.6, Ab.60.7 and Ab.60.8]. Even the most recent of these appeared when Low was a child, so I am guessing he had taken his own (second-hand) copy with him, when he went to Utrecht.

Above and below are the pages where the text appears in eight of the first nine editions. Above are Ab.60.1—Ab.60.2 did not get to volume 3—Ab.60.3, Ab.60.4, Ab.60.5; below are Ab.60.6, Ab.60.7, Ab.60.8, and Ab.60.9.