University of Virginia Library

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The Uncancelled Leaf of Shepherd's Memoirs of Carlyle
by
Rodger L. Tarr

Long acknowledged as a rich source for bibliographical material on Carlyle, Richard Herne Shepherd's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Carlyle (2 vols., London: W. H. Allen, 1881) exists in a hitherto unknown uncancelled state which bears interest to the scholar and collector alike. Housed in the Carlyle Library at Chelsea is Shepherd's personal copy of the first issue of the Memoirs, in which he calls specific attention to uncancelled copies that differ both bibliographically and textually from the second issue. On the front paste-down endpaper of Volume Two the following is written in Shepherd's hand:

The cancellation referred to by Shepherd concerns Henry J. Nicoll's Thomas Carlyle (Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace, 1881), one of the numerous biographies written immediately after Carlyle's death. The subsequently cancelled leaf appears on pages 317-318 of Volume Two of the first issue under "Posthumous Memoirs," and reads:

An utterly worthless compilation (full of misprints, sometimes as many as six on a single Page), of which data and the very wording are mainly taken without acknowledgment from a brief Memoir prefixed by the present writer twelve years ago to an edition of Carlyle's Edinburgh Inaugural Address.[2] This volume, like a previous one by a Mr. Wace on Tennyson, is issued by certain worthy successors of Edmund Curll,[3] and fit sponsors for such a double-distilled dunce and dullard

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as the author of it, who seem, like one of their confraternity in London [end p. 317, begin p. 318] whom Carlyle once described in one of his letters to the Carlyle to present writer, "to depend considerably on thieving, and to be R. H. S. ready to steal wherever there is no gallows to prevent."[4]

The evaluative, if not personal, ire of Shepherd here toward Macniven and Wallace and Henry J. Nicoll is not ill-founded, especially in the face of Nicoll's claim in his Preface, "All available sources of information have been searched, and every care taken to secure accuracy." Nevertheless, under obvious pressure from his publisher, W. H. Allen, Shepherd rewrote the leaf to read in the second issue:

The tone, then, of the description in the cancelled copy is demonstrably altered, yet there remains a curious irony. In both the first and second issues, the Index reference is unchanged and reads, "Nicoll, Henry J., his worthless Memoir of Carlyle, ii 317; how compiled, 317-318." Aside from its bibliographical importance, perhaps the most noteworthy aspects of the uncancelled copy are that it contains a portion of a Carlyle letter deleted in the cancelled copy, and that the reasons for the cancellation itself help document a growing split between those who sought to record accurately both Carlyle and his works and those who sought incidental profit from his name.

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