Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain

321 Pages·2020·8.112 MB·English

by  Michelle Levy

Literary Manuscript Culture in
Romantic Britain
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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Series Editors: Ian Duncan and Penny Fielding
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during the Romantic Era
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Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain
Michelle Levy
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Literary Manuscript
Culture in Romantic
Britain
Michelle Levy
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
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© Michelle Levy, 2020
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ISBN 978 1 4744 5706 4 (hardback)
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The right of Michelle Levy to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and
the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1. Intentionality and the Romantic Literary Manuscript 28
2. Literary Reviews and the Reception of Manuscript Culture 64
3. Anna Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print 101
4. Lord Byron, Manuscript Poet 140
5. Jane Austen’s Fiction in Manuscript 182
6. Script’s Afterlives 214
Afterword: Blake’s Digitised Printed Script 259
References 268
Index 290
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List of Illustrations
The fi gures and colour plates may be viewed at: https://edinburgh
universitypress.com/book-literary-manuscript-culture-in-romantic-
britain-hb.html by clicking on the resources tab.
Figure
I.1 Robert Darnton, ‘The Communications Circuit’ 9
Tables
1.1 Entries in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals
with corresponding poems by William Wordsworth 50
1.2 Comparison of opening entries in Dorothy
Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour in Scotland
(DCMS 50, 54, 97) 54
4.1 Poems removed from and added to Byron’s four early
verse collections 144
4.2 Comparison of different versions of Canto I,
stanza 7B/viii, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 156
4.3 Comparison of manuscript and print versions of
Canto I, stanza 87, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 160
4.4 Unauthorised poems published during Byron’s lifetime,
published from manuscript or private print sources 168
5.1 Inventory of Austen’s surviving fi ction manuscripts 184
5.2 Comparison of Austen’s letters from J. S. Clarke and
her ‘Plan of a Novel’ 190
6.1 Major scholarly critical editions of Romantic authors 233
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List of Illustrations vii
Plates
1 John Keats, ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’,
MS Keats 2.29.2, Houghton Library, Harvard University
2 Dorothy Wordsworth, title page of Recollections of a Tour
in Scotland, illustrated by George Hutchinson (DCMS 55.i)
3 Dorothy Wordsworth, title page of Recollections of a Tour
in Scotland, illustrated by George Hutchinson (DCMS 55.ii)
4 Dorothy Wordsworth, fi rst page of ‘A Winter’s Ramble in
Grasmere Vale’ (DCMS 120)
5 Dorothy Wordsworth, last page of ‘Irregular Stanzas:
Holiday at Gwerndovennant’ (DCMS 120)
6 Barbauld’s poetry, by publication status, by decade
7 Byron’s poetic output, by poem and page length, by year
8 Byron’s poetic output, short and long poems, by date
9 Byron’s poems, long/short, unprinted/printed
10 Byron’s poems, printed/unprinted, short/long, by year
11 Byron’s short poems, printed/unprinted, by title of fi rst
publication
12 Fair copies of Byron’s printed/unprinted and short/long poems
13 Jane Austen, ‘Plan of a Novel according to hints from various
quarters’, MA 1034, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
14 Engraved letter from Anna Seward to Archibald Constable,
tipped into volume 1 of The Letters of Anna Seward. Written
between the years 1784 and 1807 (1811), 2003J-EC372,
Houghton Library, Harvard University
15 Frontispiece, The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a
Memoir by Lucy Aikin (1825)
16 William Blake, ‘The Little Boy Lost’, Songs of Innocence and
Songs of Experience, British Museum, copy T, object 13
17 William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’, Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience, British Museum, copy T, object 25
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Acknowledgements
In a book that examines how writing is transformed for print,
and that emphasises the sociable and collaborative nature of the
process, an acknowledgements section presents an opportunity to
refl ect upon the many people and institutions that have supported
my research. I am supremely fortunate to work in the English
Department at Simon Fraser University, with an exceptional com-
munity of scholars working in the fi elds of print culture and book
history. I have the incredible good fortune to be colleagues with
Betty Schellenberg, one of the leading scholars of eighteenth-century
manuscript culture, whose research, happily enough for me, ends
just before the Romantic period. We often half-jokingly discussed
issuing our books in two parts, and it is my fondest hope that this
book may be found to be a worthy follower to her Literary Coteries
and the Making of Modern Print Culture 1740–1790. I am also
grateful to Colette Colligan, who has provided me with conceptual
and organisational suggestions, ongoing moral support, and more
working titles than I care to recall. Leith Davis has also been an
enthusiastic reader of parts of the draft. Manuscript culture is a
subject that has been well plumbed by early modern scholars, and
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Margaret Ezell, for her inspira-
tional writing on women’s manuscript culture, and for her support
of my work. Many years ago, in the doctoral programme at UCLA,
Anne Mellor hooked me on the Romantic period and the contribu-
tions of its incredible women writers, and that infl uence has been
potent and persistent. During the period I have been working on this
project, I have received support from the Social Sciences Humanities
Council of Canada (SSHRC); I am grateful for their support. I have
also worked closely with the Interacting with Print group, based
at McGill University, and it has been a privilege to learn about
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Acknowledgements ix
intermediality with its fearless leaders, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper,
Jonathan Sachs and other members of the Multigraph Collective.
As the author of a study that examines several well-known
Romantic authors, two of whom (Austen and Byron) have been stud-
ied intensely and all of whom have been studied well, I am indebted
to the literary and textual scholars who have laid the foundation for
my own research. Without the work of Dorothy Wordsworth’s edi-
tors, Ernest de Selincourt and Pamela Woof, much of what I have
to say about her manuscripts would be impossible. I am also deeply
indebted to the curator of her manuscripts held at the Wordsworth
Trust, Jeff Cowton, and his staff, especially Becky Turner, for their
kindness, patience and expertise. William McCarthy has been an
invaluable source of information and support in my research on Anna
Barbauld. I was fortunate to have an earlier version of Chapter 3,
‘Anna Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print’, appear in ‘Anna
Barbauld in Script and Print’, in William McCarthy and Olivia
Murphy (eds), Anna Barbauld: New Perspectives (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 59–96. I am grateful to the pub-
lisher for permission to reproduce a revised version of this essay.
My research on Byron rests on the foundational textual scholarship
of Jerome McGann. His remarkable seven-volume Complete Poetical
Works has been a constant companion while working on Chapter 4,
and it has been my privilege to mine its contents to support my analy-
sis. The editorial work of Alice Levine has also been of great assistance,
as has the scholarship and support of colleagues and friends who
study Byron, especially Gary Dyer, Tom Mole, Jane Stabler and Andy
Stauffer, friendly compatriots on many Byron-manuscript-themed
conference papers over the years.
On Austen, the analysis that appears in this book is indebted to the
groundbreaking digital edition, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, and
scholarship by its editor, Kathryn Sutherland, as well the other editors
and scholars of Austen’s manuscript works, particularly Linda Bree,
Margaret Doody, Peter Sabor and Janet Todd. Chapter 5, ‘Jane Austen’s
Fiction in Manuscript’, is an amalgamation, expansion and reconsider-
ation of two articles: ‘Austen’s Manuscripts and the Publicity of Print’,
ELH 77.4 (Winter 2010): 1015–40 and ‘Sanditon as fragmentary draft
manuscript’, Persuasions Online 83(2) (Spring 2018), Special Issue on
Sanditon, co-edited Susan Allen Ford and Anne Toner. I thank the edi-
tors of those issues/journals and the anonymous reviewers for helping
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