PRINTER'S COPY FOR TYRWHITT'S CHAUCER
by
Atcheson L. Hench
The Alderman Library of the University of Virginia was happy to find recently that the
annotations in a fragment of a black-letter Chaucer which it owns are those of the great
english scholar and editor Thomas Tyrwhitt. It finds further that nearly all the
matching fragments of the volume, also annotated, are in the Britism Museum.
In 1944 the Alderman Library purchased, at the suggestion of the English department,
from Myers and Co. of London, a book-fragment (catalogue 340, item 107) described as
"ninety-nine leaves and portions of several others of Speght's edition of Chaucer, 1602,
most extensively annotated and corrected by Timothy Thomas . . . in connection with
Urry's edition of Chaucer's works . . . of which he was the final editor."
In 1946, Dr. George Pace, at that time of the University of Virginia English faculty,
examined the emendations and came to the conclusion that they were not those of Timothy
Thomas but were probably those of Tyrwhitt; they bore no relation to the Urry text but
were identical with Tyrwhitt's text.
That the emendations are Tyrwhitt's, Pace has now happily established as true. Recently
in London, he writes, he examined a fragment of a black-letter Chaucer in the British
Museum (press mark 641.m.19). He saw written on the recto of the leaf which precedes the
title page a note, "Bequeathed by Thos Tyrwhitt Esq. 1786."
Furthermore the volume lacks folios 1-85 and 92-108, the very folios which—except
for two two-folio breaks—are present in the Alderman fragment. All this makes a
pleasing discovery.
The Alderman fragment contains the prologue to the Canterbury
Tales and all the tales now held authentic except for the two two-folio breaks
already mentioned and a segment of the Parson's tale; it also lacks a large part of the
apocryphal Plowman's Tale. The marginal emendations, of which there are thousands, and
the instructions make it clear that the fragment is part of
Tyrwhitt's
copy for the printer. They reveal the pains-taking devotion of a great scholar to his
task. His five-volume edition of the
Tales, the first of the
modern ones, was published, part in 1775 and the rest in 1778. He was the first to make
sense out of what were then the baffling mysteries of Chaucer's language and the
supposed crudities of his verse.
The volume deserves and awaits close study.
