Background

James McLaverty was born on November 8, 1947, in Derby, United Kingdom. He is the son of James McLaverty and Joan Smith.

Education

James MacLaverty graduated from Pembroke College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English literature.

Career

James McLaverty was a professor of English literature at Keele University from 1972 to 2009. He has as his chief interest the eighteenth-century book trade. He is particularly interested in how the details of a book (illustration, layout, capitals, and italics, for example) can be used to express the author's meaning and in the financial arrangements between authors and booksellers. Additionally, McLaverty was a Fellow of the Centre for the Book at the British Library in 1997 and an A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellow at the Beinecke Library in Yale in 2009. Besides, he was a contributor to numerous scholarly articles to journals, including Studies in Bibliography, Library, Shakespeare Survey, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Philology, and Journal of the History of Ideas.

In 1991 McLaverty undertook a project his teacher, David Foxon, could not complete due to ill health. The book was Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, which was the fruit of years of time-consuming study. The study covers the details of the book trade in Alexander Pope's time, sometimes exploring Pope's habits of editorializing his texts, such as removing some of the capitalization and italicization that were in use at the time. McLaverty and Foxon try to unravel these habits. They display that Pope had different ways of punctuating his texts depending on what kind of audience his manuscripts intended. Pope is well known not just for his poetry but also for how he made a living from his creative endeavors. There were not many poets in his time who had managed to do so.

The next book McLaverty was involved with was the work of his friend, the late John David Fleeman. He finished the text after Fleeman died so that it might be published. The title of this volume is A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Treating His Published Works from the Beginnings to 1984. This volume not only lists all of Johnson's publications but also provides a record of his life as a writer. It also includes the continuation of that life in the press for the 200 years following his death in 1784. Besides, it says about how Johnson's career through his presence in the Gentleman's Magazine. In 1735, only two short poems appeared in it but, three years later, the magazine carried twenty-two of Johnson's works.

In 2001 McLaverty wrote his own book, Pope, Print, and Meaning, which demonstrates how all Pope's means of publication shaped the meanings of his work for his contemporaries. He points out contradictions in Pope's life, such as in the poem, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which Pope discusses the pain of being a poet and yet presided painstakingly over the publication of his poetry. Thus much of his discomfort was, McLaverty concludes, self-imposed. Otherwise, why publish at all if it were so painful? Pope claimed that he wanted to be a private man, but McLaverty points out that the public that Pope often mentions as disdainful was not only his audience but also his source of income, so he could not afford not to publish. Another question that arises in the study of Pope's works is the idea of the audience. For whom did Pope write? He wrote different versions of his poems depending on whom he thought might read his works. He wrote in one kind for collectors, in another style for the general public. McLaverty leaves that question to be answered by literary critics and as well as the historian of publishing.

Achievements

• James McLaverty is well known as a writer and educator. He taught at Keele University for more than thirty-five years. As a writer, McLaverty is currently the author of six books.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade

    (Published here for the first time, David Foxon's 1975 and...)

    1991
  • Pope, Print, and Meaning

    (Pope's fascination with print, with annotations, illustra...)

    2001
  • Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book

    (Jonathan Swift lived through a period of turbulence and i...)

    2013
  • A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1731-1759

    (James McLaverty is the editor of the book.)

    2000
  • A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1760-1816

    (James McLaverty is the editor of the book.)

    2000
  • Pope's Printer, John Wright 1976

Membership

• Johnson Club , United Kingdom

• Johnson Society , United Kingdom

• 

  Bibliographical Society , United Kingdom

Interests

• Music

Connections

Father:

James McLaverty

Mother:

Joan Smith

colleague:

David Fairweather Foxon

David Fairweather Foxon was a British Fellow of the British Academy.

Friend:

John David Fleeman

John Fleeman was the greatest Samuel Johnson scholar of his time, and like his great hero, he was serious, honest, and strenuous.