20-volume California Dryden Project took ‘on a life of its own’

As a graduate student at Harvard after World War II, Vinton Dearing helped one of his professors compile a collection of letters by the influential 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope.

So when he heard in 1948 that UCLA was looking for scholars to assemble the complete works of the 17th-century English poet, playwright and essayist who had inspired Pope, the 28-year-old confidently threw his hat in the ring.

“In my ignorance, I said, ‘I’ve already done this kind of work,’� Dearing, now a professor emeritus of English, recently recalled.

Little did he know that producing the definitive works of John Dryden would prove so consuming that the project would, as Dearing says, “take on a life of its own.�

Now 53 years and 12,217 pages later, the final book in the 20-volume California Dryden Project has rolled off the presses, providing the first entirely updated look at the author’s poems, prose, translations and plays in nearly two centuries.

Some 18 scholars — half of them from UCLA — spent five decades searching for Dryden’s ultimate intentions among variations in hundreds of editions of his works. These editors not only corrected printers’ errors and incorporated changes Dryden later made himself, but also tried to read all the books that he would have read in order to better understand his era and explain his language, style, techniques and allusions. The support staff remembers using punch cards to keep track of textual variations in what was one of the first applications of computer technology to the humanities.

“We wanted the collection to reflect what Dryden would want us to read if he could look over our shoulders,� said Dearing, who joined the university in 1949 and took over as editor-in-chief when he retired from teaching in 1991. “I’m really satisfied with the results. Everything was done very carefully by first-rate thinkers all along the line.�

Born 15 years after William Shakespeare’s death, Dryden today rings a bell only with the most diligent of English majors, but he wrote 28 works for the stage and was named poet laureate of England in 1670. By his death in 1700, Dryden was the most famous English writer of his generation, and he was buried next to Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

“When he died he was the foremost poet, dramatist and writer of prose of his day,� Dearing said. “He was tremendously versatile.�

Dryden’s best-known work is the 1681–82, two-part, satirical poem, “Absalom and Achitophel,� but “All for Love,� a 1678 play based on the lives of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, is considered to be his masterpiece. Though rarely performed today, the play is said to rival Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.� A prolific translator of classical literature, Dryden is also known for his translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid,� which Penguin still publishes in paperback.

Nevertheless, Dearing believes Dryden’s most lasting influence is felt in the realm of prose.

“In Dryden’s day, writers felt formal English should be more like Latin prose with verbs at the ends of clauses and sentences,� Dearing said. “But Dryden said, ‘Let’s write the way we talk, putting the subject first and then the verb and then the object,’ and he did it so well that his view triumphed. Today all popular writing is indebted to him.�

As a published set, “The Works of John Dryden� tackles the author’s writing in chronological order within each genre (poetry, drama and prose). But the set didn’t roll off the presses that way. Editors joke that the only volume to be published in order was the first one, completed in 1956. Ever since, the UC Press published volumes in the order in which editors completed their work.

“If we waited for them to come out in order we’d’ve been at it for 150 years,� quipped Geneva Phillips, the project’s managing editor since 1964.

As a result, the final volume to be published (the last in the poetry section) is actually the seventh volume in the series. Dearing took on the task after the departure of the scholar originally chosen for the job. Volume VII assembles poetry produced in the last three years of Dryden’s career, including the poems “Alexander’s Feast� and “To Granville,� as well as “Fables,� a large collection of poems translated from Greek, Latin, Italian and Middle English, including works by Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer. The collection also includes the only work that Dryden is known to have written in Latin — a poem memorializing a Cambridge professor who died when Dryden was a student there in the 1650s.

Today only one member of the Dryden team — Jeanette Gilkison, now the English Department’s office supervisor — remains on UCLA’s payroll. The two UCLA professors who launched the California Dryden Project in 1949 are long gone. Edward Niles Hooker died the year after the publication of the first volume, and H.T. Swedenberg Jr. died in 1978. Many others retired along the way.

Even though the editors averaged one volume every two and one-half years — a brisk clip in academic publishing — producing the definitive Dryden took nearly as long as it took the author to write and publish his works. But such steady determination has paid off. Over the years, the set has established itself as a staple for scholars specializing in the author.

“It’s a purely scholarly affair, but it’s been bought by probably every major library in the world,� said Phillips, now retired.

As an indication of the set’s loyal following, about a third of the press run for “The Works of John Dryden Volume VII: Poems, 1697–1700� was spoken for six months ago, according to press officials.

The set is being billed as the most complete overhaul of Dryden’s oeuvre since the Scottish poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott produced a complete edition in 1808. George Saintsbury, an English scholar, revised that edition between 1882 and 1893, but his efforts were mostly confined to augmenting the footnotes, Dearing said.

“The time had come for much more annotation,� he said.

The UC Press set presents a definitive version of each work, followed by a thorough, modern commentary and footnotes that detail significant variations in editions published before 1700.

While it would technically have been possible to complete such a project anywhere, the vast Dryden holdings at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library inspired UCLA faculty to launch the project here, Dearing said. The rare book library specializes in 17th- and 18th-century literature and is home to the largest Dryden collection outside the British Library.

“You start out by asking, ‘What’s at hand?’� Dearing said.