II
In 1966, the correspondence files of the Macmillan Company of New
York were presented to the New York Public Library. Had a similar,
simple
arrangement been followed in disposing of the vast archive of Macmillan
& Company of London, the story just recounted would be less
interesting,
but the convenience to scholarship would be infinitely greater than it now
is.
In the broadest and most charitable sense, scholars must be grateful that a
correspondence file of such importance and magnitude has been made more
generally accessible in public collections. We can take some consolation
from the fact that a public sale, which would have dispersed the materials
from Texas to Timbuctoo, was forestalled, but, clearly, the decisions taken
regarding the London archive have in a very real sense violated a major
collection of primary documents. Imagine for the moment the scholarly
significance of so extensive an archive retained intact, properly housed,
preserved, and catalogued, and fully
indexed, calendared, and crossreferenced so that complete retrieval by
subject, author, and chronology was instantly achievable. The collection
could then have been used by the widest possible assortment of scholars in
a
dozen fields of pursuit. Dispersed to four libraries on two sides of the
Atlantic, and stripped of its chronological sequence, the Macmillan archive
can never again be consulted as a unified historical record.
All too little has been said about the specific textual significance of
the
Macmillan papers. To the bibliographer, their special interest must
inevitably
reside in those documents which in any way touch upon the text of a given
author. Even without a detailed examination of the uncatalogued archive,
it
is possible to anticipate material which would be bibliographically crucial
in
the reciprocal correspondence files which discuss matters of emendation and
revision. Correspondence with printers confirming these points, cancel
orders, invoices for type corrections charged to authors, surviving proof
(especially corrected), printers' copies of manuscripts, stock reports, even
binding details which might assist in establishing priorities — all are
documents which might illuminate or elucidate the text by providing direct
or indirect evidence to the bibliographer which reinforces the legal,
commercial, and general aspects of bibliography that is the strength of the
whole
collection.
The archives of Macmillan & Company offer an interesting
example of
the care that must be maintained in preserving, cataloguing, and disposing
of
important manuscript documents. Through an unfortunate comedy
of errors, for which no one was really responsible, the archive has been
disengaged, dismembered, and dispersed, making it virtually impossible
ever
to reassemble it in its original state. The loss is both practical and
historical,
for the fragmentation of the collection violates the continuity that it once
possessed. The handling of the Macmillan archive, in this age of relative
bibliographical sophistication, provides its own moral that should serve as
a
warning to both scholars and publishers of the priority of claim which the
preservation of primary documents must be given. To those scholarly
explorers concerned with surveying the vast tracts of uncharted territories,
the literary dark continents, of the nineteenth-century, Simon Nowell-Smith
offers wise counsel in the conclusion of his new book on Victorian
copyright
(p. 105): "Move quickly":
The intricacies of international law are fully documented even though
bibliographers may not have fully studied the documents. But the documents
vital to the historian of nineteenth-century publishing, such as survive, are
fast being destroyed or dispersed. . . . It would be regrettable if other
Victorian records of the kind were to be allowed to disappear or to
disintegrate. Time for the bibliographer is running out.
