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I.
Some of the facts related to Shepherd's production of piracies of Tennyson's Lover's Tale have long been known, but the whole story has never been told. For the purposes of this essay the story must be given in exact detail from the documents connected with the poet's chancery suit, of 1875-1876, to stop the piracy. One publication dated 1870 must be examined in the light thrown by the documents; and similarly, several publications dated 1875; and also a publication dated
According to Tennyson's own statement, he wrote The Lover's Tale in his nineteenth year, that is, in 1827-1828. In 1832 he included the poem in the manuscript for his second volume of verse, to be published by Edward Moxon.[3] At the last moment he became convinced that the Tale was too full of faults for publication, and directed Moxon to omit it from his volume. Seventy-five years later Wise quoted[4] a letter written by Arthur Hallam in 1833 to the effect that, subsequent to his decision, Tennyson caused six copies of the poem to be printed at his own expense, and directed that these be placed in Hallam's hands for distribution among their college friends.[5] Though the letter is otherwise unknown, one may perhaps venture to accept the quotation as genuine; but one must add that it is rather more than probable that Moxon, who was generous with his authors, sent several additional copies to the poet at Somersby. The known examples, though they were issued in brown paper wrappers, are not mere proofs or offprints, for in them the poem is provided with a formal titlepage bearing Moxon's
The copy which the poet presented to John Forster is of particular interest. Forster gave it to Robert Browning, who lent it to Thomas Powell. The last gentleman probably sold it before the time in 1849 when he fled from the accumulating consequences of his dishonesty to New York,[6] for though he mentioned Tennyson's youthful poem in his Living Authors of England (N.Y., 1849), he haughtily declined to quote from it (p. 41: "it is decidedly unworthy of his reputation"). On 16 June 1870 the copy was sold in London by Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, as item 493 in "the Library of a Gentleman Deceased," to Basil Montague Pickering, the bookseller and publisher. This was the first time the Tale had emerged from the seclusion of private ownership; before then its existence had been only vaguely known. In the Fortnightly Review of October 1865 (II, 393) the Hon. J. Leicester Warren had remarked, after a discussion of Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), "It is worth noticing that a poem entitled A Lover's Story [sic] was about this time privately printed. Only a few copies were issued. I know not if any are still in existence." And R. H. Shepherd, a devoted student of the Laureate's work, therefore had tentatively listed A Lover's Story among "Poems attributed to Tennyson" in his Tennysoniana (London: Pickering, 1866; p. 158). Now the public sale of a copy caused a minor stir of publicity, of which one bit may be quoted from the Athenaeum of 2 July 1870 (p. 19):
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