On Persistent Scholarly Pet-Peeves; in which our hero is further vindicated.
Most experienced scholars have pet-peeves. Mine involve the editorial decisions and apparatus of the ‘Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith’ first published in 1975. This edition provides useful paragraph numbers and once Libertyfund published a cheap and convenient paperback version quickly became standard among young scholars. Unfortunately, many of the volumes have an intrusive editorial apparatus that shapes the reading experience by imposing interpretations on the reader and, more important, is not infrequently inaccurate. In addition, one cannot often re-construct the editorial decisions with ease. (See here some of my youthful criticisms.)
I always have unease about my complaints about the Glasgow edition because one of its best editors, A.S Skinner, was very helpful to me (then unknown to him) when I wrote my dissertation. Recently I learned of M.A. (‘Sandy’) Stewart’s (1979) devastating criticism (see here) of the first edition of the volume on Smith’s Correspondence, and this solidified my view of the whole edition. This review has only been cited once only as late as 2020, so dispersed younger scholars never noticed it. (The market in ideas is not as efficient as one would like to believe.)
For many years I felt alone in my misgivings; but then Ryan Hanley put out his Penguin edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS) with more accurate and erudite annotations. In particular, his edition re-united TMS with the so-called “Dissertation on the Origin of Languages” (hereafter Dissertation) or “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages, and the Different Genius of of Original and Compound Languages" as it is also sometimes called on some later title pages of TMS.
Smith had added the Dissertation to the (1767) third edition of TMS (see here its frontispiece) and not to the second (1761) edition (see here its frontispiece), as the editors of the Glasgow edition claim in their “introduction” to TMS (see p. 35). Somewhat strangely, the Glasgow edition places a Dissertation in the volume on (student notes of) the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The introduction to this volume (see p. 27) quietly corrects the edition of TMS to which it was added and also notes (correctly) that a Dissertation was first published in the Philological Miscellany in 1761.
Reading TMS alongside a Dissertation, thus, fits Smith’s own intentions and also allows one to understand how Smith was received. For example Sophie Grouchy’s French translation of TMS includes a Dissertation (and her own Letters on Sympathy, of course).
Anyway, earlier in the week, I had the good fortune to visit Glasgow University. My learned host, Craig Smith, had organized a special tour of some of the prize holdings of the special collections at the library with the local librarian, Julie Gardham. I nerded out when I was allowed to inspect David Gregory’s annotations in the margins of the first edition of Newton’s Principia. And I was in scholarly heaven while admiring the presentation copy of TMS that Smith offered to Lord Kames of the first edition (which, interestingly enough, lacks the publisher’s information on the front page).
We were also shown a first edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (with many student annotations often disagreeing with Smith). I looked at the frontispiece. It is faithfully reproduced in the Glasgow edition. Here’s a picture (that I have copied from the Glasgow edition):
Then, on a hunch, I turned the page. (We were allowed to touch the books with our hands.) Below the picture I took (with permission). It is de facto a book-seller’s advertisement of Smith’s TMS. (Its fourth edition was published in 1774.) It includes, of course, prominent mention of Smith’s Dissertation! This page is, alas, omitted from the Glasgow edition’s version of WN. In its place one finds a blank page.
I doubt the editors of the Glasgow edition omitted the book-seller’s advertisement of Smith’s TMS in order to hide this prominent mention of the Dissertation alongside TMS. But the cumulative effect of their decisions had been to minimize systematically that TMS and Dissertation belong together; something that had been incredibly visible to all of Smith’s post 1767 readers. And this is just one of my pet-peeves about the Glasgow edition.