University of Virginia Library

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

1876. As the exposition will be burdened with a multitude of details of widely varying kinds, the reader must be so courteous as to accept a somewhat artificial arrangement, designed to present together the documentary and bibliographic evidence concerning the publications of each particular year, in turn, in the order of time. Specifically, the events of 1870 will be presented by passages drawn from legal documents of the year 1875, and this will be done a number of pages before the chancery suit and its connected documents are themselves fully exhibited. The entire affair will be more easily comprehended if the exposition is preceded by a history of the poem, The Lover's Tale, prior to July 1870.

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

name and the date 1833, on the first leaf of the first gathering. That Tennyson himself received some copies from the publisher seems to be indicated by the fact that, though there is no particular reason to suppose any of his Cambridge friends ever returned their copies, he was able to present examples to at least two men with whom he became intimate considerably later than 1833, namely, John Forster and William Ewart Gladstone.

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):

No scholar who has worked on literary periodicals will have much doubt as to the source of the squib; it came, in all probability, from the author of Tennysoniana, Richard Herne Shepherd, himself.