Excerpt from A Supplement to Allibone's Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, Vol. 1: Containing Over Thirty-Seven Thousand Articles and Enumerating Over Ninety-Three Thousand Titles

The title of the original work indicates the period covered by it as extending to the latter half 'of the nineteenth century. The earlier and later portions of it, however, were taken up and completed at long intervals, and the entries were not brought down to a common date under all the letters of the alphabet. The author's first intention seems to have been to end the work at the year 1850, and from A to O inclusive the entries, barring accidental omissions, were completed to that. Date. But before publication many additional insertions, extending in some instances to 1858, were made under those letters, without any attempt to comprise the full lists Of the intervening years. The remainder Of the work covers a much more extended period, with a more uniform limit, the entries from P to Z embracing complete lists to the end of 1869, with additions almost equally full to about the middle of 1870. Hence the period covered by this Supplement is also a variable one. Under the letters A'to 0 it begins with the year 1850, - without, Of course, repeating the entries of a later date' in the original work, - and under the remaining letters it begins with the year 187 0. The whole extends to the end of 1888, with a very few entries of later date, mostly to include a completed series of volumes or related works or the last pro ductions of a recently deceased writer. It would have been easy to insert many addi tional titles, as was done in the original work; but no complete lists to a later date could have been prepared without delaying the press and the compiler did not desire to leave a straggling line Of projections instead of a fixed boundary, and thus impose upon some future successor what has been one of the embarrassing complications of the present task, the necessity, namely, Of referring. At every step to the entries in an earlier work and connecting his own with them by a process of dovetailing. In the course of this labor many entries of earlier dates than those mentioned, which had been omitted by Allibone, have been supplied 'in the Supplement, but not systematically, and only, of course, in the case Of authors whose publications extended to those dates, 1850 under A to O, and 1870 under P to Z. The general plan and method of the original-work have been followed in the Supplement, with slight modifications. The bibliographical details have been more uniformly and distinctly separated from the biographical matter no references have been introduced in the list of an author's works to others on the same subject or of a kindred nature by difl'erent writers, and it has not been thought necessary to inform the reader where critical articles from which no quotations are given may be found, any former need of this kind being now supplied by Poole's Index to Periodical Literature.

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