The Age of Johnson follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., in most matters. These guidelines provide examples of Chicago style and explain the few departures our house style makes from it.
All submissions to The Age of Johnson should be double-spaced throughout, including quoted extracts and endnotes. A page number should appear in the upper right corner.
Other than in direct quotations, spelling and punctuation should follow standard American practice.
Always include the serial comma: "Boswell, Thrale, and Hawkins."
Follow Chicago's rules for possessives of nouns ending in s: s's for all words (class's, Wilkes's, Rasselas's, Rabelais's) except Greek names, Jesus, and Moses.
Dates should take the form "17 April 1765," with no commas. In the text, spell out all months; in citations, abbreviate the names of months longer than five letters: Jan., Feb., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec.
In decades, use an apostrophe to indicate omitted digits, not to mark the plural: the 1770s should be the '70s, not the 70's.
Use [sic] sparingly, only when there is a genuine danger of confusion.
Indicate sections in your article with either centered arabic numerals or centered section titles. Keep the section titles short; they'll have to fit on a single line in Small Capitals.
Book reviews should provide the author or editor, the work's full title (underscored or italicized), the place of publication, the publisher, the date, and the number of pages (with preliminary pages in lowercase roman numerals):
Harry M. Solomon. The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 340.
There is no need for ISBNs or prices.
In reviews themselves, provide page numbers for all quotations. Book reviews contain no footnotes: if you cite another work, put the complete citation in parentheses.
Quotations should always be taken from either original or standard scholarly editions. Avoid nonscholarly editions unless you particularly want to comment on their editorial matter.
Original orthography should be preserved litteratim in quotations, except that (1) 'inverted commas' should be replaced with "quotation marks" as necessary; (2) commas and periods outside quotation marks should be moved inside to conform to American practice; (3) passages predominantly in italics (such as in prefaces) can be silently converted to roman; and (4) if the sentence requires a change in the case of the first letter of a quotation ("[T]hus"), make the change silently (without brackets). Any other departures should be indicated.
There is usually no need for leading or trailing ellipses in quotations.
Use 'single quotation marks' (inverted commas) for quotations within quotations. If the two quotations, inner and outer, are coterminous — e.g., "'like this'" — there is no need for two sets of quotation marks.
Indicate Small Caps in quotations with either small capitals in your typescript (a feature available on most word processors) or double underscore. Please distinguish small caps from ALL CAPS.
On their first appearance, all works should be cited in full in an endnote. Thereafter, cite page numbers in parentheses in the text (see below).
Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 127.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64), 3:314.
Alexander Pope, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–69).
Fulke Greville, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections, Critical, Satyrical, and Moral (London, 1756), pp. 163–64.
Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, from the Year 1581 till Her Death, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 1:97.
Modern reprints — i.e., true reprints that photo-reproduce earlier editions — need not include information about the reprinting, although later editions should be cited as such.
The Rambler, ed. Walter Jackson Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vols. 3–5 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969).
Scholarly books released as part of a publisher's series need not include the name of the series.
D. W. Jefferson, "Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit," Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 225–48.
Howard Weinbrot, "Twentieth-Century Scholarship and the Eighteenth-Century Canon," Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2000): 395–414.
To refer to an individual page in a journal article, follow the full citation with "on p." and the page number:
Robert DeMaria, Jr., "The Politics of Johnson's Dictionary," PMLA 104 (1989): 64–74, on p. 68.
W. R. Keast, "Johnson and Intellectual History," in New Light on Dr. Johnson: Essays on the Occasion of His 250th Birthday, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 247–56.
Again, to refer to a specific page within a range, use (for example) "pp. 247—56, on p. 252."
All Citations: "University Press" is always abbreviated "Univ. Press": "Oxford Univ. Press," "Univ. Press of Kentucky." "University" is spelled out, however, in other references: "Library Chronicle of the University of Texas," "University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press," "University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature," etc.
Book titles within book titles appear in quotation marks:
W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the "Rambler" and "Dictionary" of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).
After a work has been cited fully on its first appearance, subsequent citations can appear parenthetically in the text, giving only the page or line numbers. There is no need to indicate this with "Cited hereafter as . . ." unless confusion is likely (as, for instance, when quoting multiple editions of the same work).
Short quotations should be run in the the text, with the parenthetical citation after the quotation but before the closing punctuation:
As Hedrick notes, "Johnson sees words without a past as a mob of rebellious bastards" ("Fixing the Language," p. 426).
Longer quotations should appear as indented extracts, with the parenthetical citation after the closing punctuation:
Nations, like individuals, have their infancy. A people newly awakened to literary curiosity, being yet unacquainted with the true state of things, knows not how to judge of that which is proposed as its resemblance. (7:82)
Most works should be cited by page number (exceptions appear below). Parenthetical page numbers should always come after the quotation. In citations of single-volume works, give the page number, always preceded by "p." for a single page and "pp." for multiple pages. If the work being cited is not immediately clear from context, provide an author's name or short title followed by a comma: "(Greene, p. 45)"; "(Schwartz, Problem of Evil, pp. 17–23)."
For multi-volume works, give the volume number and page numbers separated by a colon (without "p." or "pp."):
Poems, 1:365.
Lives, 3:137–45.
Citations of notes should include the page number, a space, and "n" for note or "nn" for notes. If the notes are numbered, include the note numbers:
"This must be a mistake in Mr. Shandy; for Graaf wrote upon the pancreatick juice" (Tristram Shandy, 2:791 n).
Mossner "impl[ies] no evaluation of the latest revival of the native tradition" (The Life of David Hume, p. 376 n. 1).
In citations of multiple pages, give at least two digits for the ending page: i.e., "pp. 196–97," not "pp. 196–7." A hyphen should never precede a zero: closing page numbers in the first decile of each hundred (100 through 109, 200 through 209, etc.) are shortened (104–9, 401–7, etc.). (These rules apply to all inclusive numbers, such as line numbers and dates.)
| p. 196 | 4:196 |
| pp. 196–97 | 4:196–97 |
| pp. 196–204 | 4:196–204 |
| pp. 204–7 | 4:204–7 |
| pp. 1350–55 | 4:1350–55 |
Do not use "f." or "ff." to indicate following pages; always provide a complete page range.
For unnumbered pages, specify the signature, using "r" and "v" for recto and verso:
sig. A2r
sig. B1r–v
2:sig. A4v–B1r
In citing manuscripts that are foliated rather than paginated, use "fol." or "fols.," again specifying "r" and "v":
Henry Mackenzie to John Pinkerton, 6 Jan. 1806, in BL Add. MS 29747, fols. 85v–86r
Not all works are best cited by page number: in some works, line numbers, numbered aphorisms, Bekker or Stephanus numbers, and so on are more appropriate.
Poems are usually cited by line number. Specify "line" or "lines" only when confusion would otherwise result.
For other works not commonly cited by page (such as acts and scenes, book and line numbers, or numbered works within a larger work), use arabic numerals separated by periods.
Horace, Odes, 4.1.3.
Aristotle, Poetics, 1453b2.
Hamlet, 1.3.1–12.
Paradise Lost, 11.94–97.
Periodical essays should be cited by both page and essay number, omitting "No.": Rambler 4, Spectator 419. Novels may include chapter number, but should always include a page reference for the best edition.
Letters should be cited by sender, recipient, date, and page (or folio) number:
Johnson to Boswell, 25 Feb. 1775, in Letters, 2:181
Michael Lort to Lord Hardwicke, 11 May 1773, in BL Add. MS 35350, fol. 45r
Some works are cited often enough in The Age of Johnson that standard cue titles have become familiar. As usual, a full citation is always necessary on the first appearance. Thereafter, however, the following short titles are preferred:
Please do not send unsolicited diskettes or E-mail attachments: best is to contact the editor by E-mail about a submission. Any article or review, once accepted, should be submitted either on a diskette, a CD-ROM, or as an E-mail attachment. Any of these file formats is acceptable, in order of preference:
Please do not send Nota Bene, Claris Works, or Lotus Word Pro files, which I cannot read; please convert the text to one of the formats above.
Avoid sophisticated formatting or desktop publishing: adjusted margins, typefaces, font sizes, spacing, tab settings, and so on simply have to be removed before your article can be set. Don't worry about aesthetics: provide the plainest possible formatting.
Differences between a typescript and the electronic version of the document are easily missed. If you have hand-corrected or otherwise marked up the typescript, be sure to note this prominently in a cover letter.
If anything is unclear, please contact the editor:
Jack Lynch, Editor
The Age of Johnson
Department of English
Rutgers University
360 M. L. King Blvd.
Newark, NJ 07102
jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu