<^THE WALPOLE EDITION AND YALE'S OTHER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROJECTS

When Sterling Memorial Library opened in 1930 its vast empty spaces yawned invitingly. In the stacks the seventh floor was so deserted that the stack attendant hovered around my stall out of sheer loneliness. On the open shelves were treasures that were later discovered and whisked away to the Rare Book Room. This emptiness did not last long. The rooms adjacent to the stacks were so clearly ideal for scholarly enterprises that the ensuing years brought to Sterling Library the research staffs of the editions of Horace Walpole, James Boswell, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas More (there were also smaller projects, such as the Poems on the Affairs of State). It was Edward McAdam of Yale's English department who applied the term "factory" to these collaborative scholarly enterprises. Two of the biggest projects were inspired by Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker. His undergraduate course on the age of Johnson was taken by almost the entire senior class; his graduate course on the same subject admitted only a few chosen scholars. The undergraduate course was taken by Wilmarth Lewis, who started the Walpole edition (he became devoted to "Tink" in freshman English; his devotion to Walpole came later). Frederick Pottle took the graduate course, during which he began his lifelong commitment to James Boswell. Thomas Copeland's edition of Edmund Burke's letters, compiled under the auspices of the University of Chicago, was an indirect descendant of Tinker's courses. In his own graduate course Pottle set various students to work on portions of the Boswell papers; these graduate students, operating from Pottle's office in the Hall of Graduate Studies, were really the first unofficial scholarly factory, though no new edition of Boswell was then being launched. In his reminiscences of the research editions, Lewis called his Walpole edition the "grand-daddy of them all." Although he had no training in research or scholarly editing and had never taken a graduate course, his sheer energy and infectious enthusiasm, backed by Mrs Lewis's financial resources, enabled him to enlist Yale University and its press in sponsoring a new edition of Horace Walpole's cor-