© 2003 by Oxford University Press
William Toldervy and the Origins of Smart's a Translation of the Psalms of David
1 St Anne's College Oxford
William Toldervy (1721–62), a Shropshire-born Londoner who combined a faltering career in the linen trade with writing for the bookseller William Owen, has passed almost unnoticed in the rich scholarship on Christopher Smart. Yet his three books—Select Epitaphs (1755), The History of Two Orphans (1756), and the unfinished England and Wales Described (1762)—reveal him to have been among Smart's most loyal and supportive friends, and a keen public promoter of his writing during the confinement for madness that was also Smart's creative heyday. Smart had some involvement in Select Epitaphs (perhaps as a translator), and in England and Wales Described Toldervy loses no opportunity to keep the poetry of his incarcerated friend in the public eye. His only novel, published in the immediate aftermath of Smart's mental breakdown, has several unrelated points of interest, among them its extensive inclusion of printed music and its anticipations of Smollett and Sterne. Its most significant feature is a premature chapter-length puff for Smart's Translation of the Psalms of David (1765), which antedates by more than six years the earliest other unambiguous references to this project. As well as confirming the suspicion of scholars that the versification had a much longer gestation than is otherwise provable, and that much of it was probably composed alongside Jubilate Agno, the chapter gives new insight into the aesthetic and commercial thinking behind the project.