The Veracity of Spence's Anecdotes

Extract

William Lisle Bowles said of the anecdotist Joseph Spence, “He seems to have opened his mouth and his ears to every thing Pope told him.” This sneer implied that Pope was a liar and Spence a gull, but the splenetic Bowles inadvertently implied something else that, if true, is of significance to English literary history: that Spence was an omnivorous snapper-up of trifles who did not judge or discriminate but merely recorded. For if Spence, gull or no gull, was an accurate and veracious recorder, his notes on the conversation of Pope and other literary figures possess great value; if he was not, they are nearly worthless. Without Spence's records our knowledge of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers would be considerably less than it is, and the biographers of Pope in particular would cut a sorry figure. Only if Spence's manuscripts had lain unknown for a century and a half, if neither Warburton nor Johnson nor anyone else had been granted a look at them, if not one of the anecdotes had ever found its way to the light, and then if a modern discoverer had published his find—then only would the ensuing sensation have brought a realization of the importance of Spence's labors and the magnitude of the debt which the world has been none too ready to pay him.