University of Virginia Library

III.

We may now advance to the year 1875. In the interval, Shepherd (1842-1895)[19] had decidedly risen in his field. He had begun to edit the poetical works of Shelley for J. C. Hotten; later, he had edited Coleridge's Osorio and the works of Dekker (in four volumes), Glapthorne (in two volumes), and Thomas Heywood (in six volumes) for John Pearson; and he had finally continued his edition of Shelley for the firm of Chatto and Windus, the successors to Hotten, for whom he also undertook to edit the works of Charles Lamb (in one volume) and of George Chapman (in three volumes). His editing began in complete anonymity, broken by the signature of "The Author of Tennysoniana" beneath a monograph prefixed to Coleridge's play. Only at the end of the period, under Chatto and Windus, was Shepherd allowed to sign his work. The total of his publications for the five years from 1871 to 1875 amounts to twenty-one volumes. One may hope that such industry had brought him a glimpse of security and independence.

On 21 April 1875 he sold to the British Museum for one pound a pamphlet of 48 pages, with only a half-title, containing his second reprint of The Lover's Tale.[20] He advertised his wares in several journals; two of his notices[21] may be here reproduced:

It is of some importance to notice that in his advertisement of 15 May Shepherd made no reference to an accompanying or available monograph upon the Tale, though that composition had then been printed, or was in the process of being printed, for Shepherd had advertised it the week before:

It seems clear that at the time Shepherd thought of his monograph only as a supplement to his volume on Tennyson, rather than as an accompaniment to his reprint of the Tale. Indeed, when on 19 May he gave a copy of the monograph to the British Museum, he seems to have suggested that it should be bound up with the museum's copy of Tennysoniana; in any case, the monograph was so bound.[22]

Later Shepherd caused some examples of his second reprint to be bound. The volume contained a preliminary fold, the monograph, the

Tale, and a gathering of 16 minor poems. (The exact form of the preliminary fold will be discussed below). One such volume he sent to Swinburne[23] with a suitable inscription:

But before August, as has been already related, the Laureate had learned that the Tale had been pirated, and had written to Pickering to demand an explanation. "I am in a great rage at this scandalous business," he wrote, with truly Victorian emphasis, and received a reply, dated 29 June, that extended over three anxious pages.[24] At this point we may turn again to the legal documents.[25] On 1 July the poet instructed the firm of Lawrance, Plews, Boyer, and Baker, of 19, Old Jewry Chambers, to make inquiries and take proceedings. They placed the matter in the hands of Henry Joseph Smith, their efficient clerk. Smith discovered the advertisement of the Tale in the Athenaeum of 24 April (which has been quoted), and on 6 July he wrote to W. C. Clifford inquiring the price of the reprint and asking, incidentally,

whether Clifford possessed a manuscript of the poem. Smith also discovered that the reprint had been advertised in a catalogue issued by Bartholomew Robson, bookseller.[26] On 19 July he bought a copy of the reprint from Robson for 15 shillings and sixpence; three days later he called again at Robson's shop and induced the bookseller to admit that the copy was one of three Robson had purchased from Shepherd. On 28 July, in reply to his inquiry sent to Clifford, Smith received a letter from Shepherd, who offered to sell, as Smith later testified, "a printed copy of The Lover's Tale, 47 pages" for one guinea; and in turn Smith sent a postoffice order, amount unspecified, "for the said Poem and other poems mentioned in his [Shepherd's] letter." On the same day, having obtained conclusive evidence, the solicitors filed with the Court of Chancery a manuscript Bill of Complaint, praying for the restraint of Shepherd, his surrender of all copies of his reprint, damages, the costs of the lawsuit, and "such further or other relief as the nature of the case may require." On 29 July Tennyson made an affidavit of the facts known to him, at Godalming in Surrey; on 30 July Smith received from Shepherd the poems he had ordered. On 31 July, a Saturday, Smith made an affidavit concerning his activities and discoveries, and Mr Vice-Chancellor Bacon, on the interlocutory application of Elliot Macnaghten, barrister for the plaintiff, granted an Interim Injunction: The injunction was served upon Shepherd on 5 August; two days later he appeared before the Court, in the person of his solicitor, Charles Armstrong, of 33, Old Jewry. On 12 August the plaintiff's solicitors filed the Interrogatories for the Examination of the Defendant, which have been quoted in part. Shepherd did not file his Answer, which has also been quoted in part,[27] until 5 October, when it was entered by his barrister, Cornelius Marshall Warmington.

To this recital of the august processes of the law it is necessary to add a note. Only one document, the affidavit of Henry Joseph Smith, mentioned that any of Tennyson's poems other than the Tale had been reprinted and offered for sale by Shepherd; and that reference (which has been quoted above) was inconspicuous. It was in fact an afterthought, inserted between the lines of the concluding paragraph of Smith's affidavit, and as an insertion correctly initialled on both sides by the notary. This fact may partially explain why the reference to "other poems mentioned in his [Shepherd's] letter" was not caught up into the Bill of Complaint, the Interim Injunction, or the Interrogatories. Therefore after 5 August 1875, though Shepherd was under an injunction not to print and distribute copies of the Tale, he was still (comparatively) free to produce and sell reprints of other poems by Tennyson.

In any case, one may suppose that it was in a rather defiant mood that on 21 January 1876 Shepherd sold to the British Museum copies of a preliminary fold and the gathering of minor poems. (The exact form of the preliminary fold will be discussed below.) Neither item was mentioned in the Interim Injunction, of course; and bound in the correct order with the reprint of the Tale which he had sold the Museum nine months before, they made up a complete example of what will be called, below, the third issue of the 1875 reprint. The three items were so bound, and the resultant volume now reposes on a shelf in the Museum.[28]

On 29 January 1876 the case was tried before Mr Vice-Chancellor Bacon; Warmington appeared for the Defendant, Macnaghten and

Edward Ebenezer Kay, Q. C., for the Plaintiff. The matter of Shepherd's reprinting of Tennyson's minor poems having been ventilated, the Court took account of it in the Perpetual Injunction: On 30 June the Taxing Master ordered Shepherd to pay, as Tennyson's costs, approximately one hundred pounds, but this charge the poet himself paid "since he heard that Mr Shepherd was very poor and that his aged mother depended on him for her livelihood."[29]

In order to discuss the 1875 reprint of the Tale, we may now resort to the relevant portion of Shepherd's Answer. The Interrogatories concerning it, as full, searching, and incoherent as those concerning the reprint of 1870, need not be quoted. Shepherd deposed as follows:

To this deposition may be added two passages from Shepherd's Bibliography concerning his reprint:

Where Shepherd thought that examples of his 1870 reprint could be procured in 1875 must be acknowledged a mystery. Smarting under Pickering's attempt to dodge all blame, did he cherish a suspicion that the publisher had not destroyed all the copies of the earlier pamphlet turned over to him by Shepherd, the booksellers, and the printers in 1870? It is more likely that when Shepherd wrote the passages he was thinking of his own friends, who might still possess the copies of the earlier reprint he had given them. As we shall see, one such friend did make the substitution here suggested.

It will be advantageous to sum up the matter concisely. In the spring of 1875 Shepherd caused Messrs Ogden & Co. to produce, from the rough proof of his 1870 production, 100 copies of The Lover's Tale, consisting of 47 pages of text followed by a blank page [48], or three gatherings, sewn. He sold a copy to the British Museum on 21 April, and advertised copies for sale, specifically described, as late as 15 May. Later he caused other items to be printed: (a) by Messrs Brawn, his monograph, of which he gave a copy to the British Museum on 19 May; (b) by Ogden & Co., again, some minor poems, which he offered for sale to H. J. Smith in a letter dated 27 July; and (c) by Messrs Brawn, again, a preliminary fold, which (to anticipate) was printed three times in slightly differing forms, and of which the form probably last in the sequence occurs in the volume sent to Swinburne between 1 and 5 August. There is no particular mystery about his employment of two different printers: Ogden & Co. were obviously the more skilled and better able to cope with verse, the Messrs Brawn were the less expensive and good enough for prose.

In his Answer Shepherd made no reference to his monograph (because it was a strictly legal production, untouched by the lawsuit) or to his reprint of Tennyson's minor poems (because the poet's solicitors had failed to mention them in the Bill of Complaint). For this reason,

in his Answer Shepherd accounted for the 100 copies of the poem, The Lover's Tale, without making any distinction between copies sold without accompaniment of any kind (such as that purchased in April by the British Museum); copies sold with examples of the minor poems (such as that ordered and obtained in July by Herbert Joseph Smith); and copies bound up with examples of both the monograph and the minor poems (such as that received in August by Swinburne). The three varieties, of which the second must be divided into two, will henceforth be termed issues [35] of the edition. All Shepherd's statements in his Answer refer to the reprint of the Tale in 48 pages, only.

It seems clear that the 55 examples held by the defendant were surrendered to the solicitors of the plaintiff, and destroyed; and that the court likewise turned over the two examples offered in evidence, which were likewise destroyed. Therefore, 43 examples at most remained extant. Fortunately, any available example of the reprint of 1875 can be identified as such by means of the two misprints (italics supplied):

The issues may now be considered in sequence:

Mr John Carter has kindly allowed me to examine a remarkable volume in his possession, from which I have drawn the above description. The Lover's Tale itself is printed on three gatherings of paper slightly yellower than that in the preliminary fold and final gathering; it does not display the misprints on pages 4 and 15. On the blank verso of the half-title to the Tale appears an inscription in the hand of Shepherd:

Under an ultra-violet lamp Mr Carter has deciphered the erasure as "Mrs O F Frank"—that is, one may scarcely doubt, either W. Evan Franks, Esq., of 8, Thurlow Place, Tulse Hill or the "C.S.F. (Norwood" mentioned in Shepherd's

dedication of the second edition of Tennysoniana. [37] The three gatherings bearing the Tale have been detached from the appended gathering (or gatherings) of minor poems in an example of the 1870 reprint, and have been substituted for the similar gatherings, identically paged, in the reprint of 1875. Shepherd's recommendation of such a substitution, in order to obviate the disfiguring misprints in the 1875 reprint of the Tale, has already been quoted; and we may suppose that he had made it orally to his friends in 1875.

The volume has been neatly bound by Kaufmann in half-calf; the edges have been cut, and the top edge gilt. On the spine, in a label of red leather, the legend appears running upwards: "The Lover's Tale. — Tennyson."

The preliminary fold and the gathering of minor poems represent the 1875 reprint. The absence of errata on the verso of the titleleaf indicates that this form of the fold was printed before Shepherd discovered the two misprints in the Tale; the form is therefore clearly prior to those contained in the issues described below. The gathering of minor poems is identical with those in the later issues.

No other example of the second issue, complete or partial, has been found.

Third issue. Title and collation as in the second issue except that (a) a list of two errata appears on the verso of the titleleaf, and (b) the Tale appears as in the first issue. The leaves in the preliminary fold are conjugate; there are five gatherings in all.

Fourth issue. The Lover's Tale and Other / Poems by Alfred Tennyson / Now First Collected with / a Monograph / London / Fifty Copies Printed for Private Circulation / M.D.CCC.LXXV.

The order here imposed upon the two last issues requires a word. Except for the presence in one issue of the monograph, which was separately printed and sold, the difference between the two issues consists of the absence or presence on the titlepage of the words "with a Monograph." The order of the two issues has no bearing upon any further point. As it seems reasonable (though it cannot be demonstrated) that the issue lacking the monograph preceded the issue containing it, they are here termed the third and fourth issues, respectively, for convenience in reference. One may note that the fourth issue was the one described by Shepherd in his Bibliography of Tennyson; and, so far as one can tell, it was the only issue of which he caused examples to be bound.

Only two examples of the third issue have been located, and these might be questioned by a hypercritical opponent. As has been recounted above, the (first) British Museum copy (shelfmark C.28.c.10) consists of three items sold by Shepherd on two different occasions, and subsequently bound together. The Museum also holds a second copy, exactly the same in every detail, which forms part of a volume of Tennysonian reprints (shelfmark C.58.b.10) bearing annotations by Shepherd. As one of the notes mentions the sale of Pickering's copy of the 1833 Tale, in 1879, he must have written in or after that year. The Museum purchased the volume in November 1895 from one Alpheus Sherwin Cody, of 4 Montague Street, London, W.C. But though the integrity of the first copy, and the date of the second, might be questioned, it seems unnecessary to question the issue which is represented by them both.

Three examples of the fourth issue are known: (1) the copy that Shepherd sent to Swinburne early in August 1875, now at Harvard;[38] (2) a copy bought by Harry Buxton Forman on 27 January 1876, according to his pencilled date on the flyleaf, which when sold with his library in 1920 was acquired by the Huntington Library; and (3) a copy bearing the bookplate of Henry Francis Redhead Yorke and the pencilled inscription, on the front flyleaf, "wa/s rhs Sept. 18/1875" — which one may suppose to indicate that the copy was purchased from Shepherd at the coded price on the date given. The third copy was bequeathed by Owen D. Young in 1941 to the Berg Collection. All three copies are in the original dark blue-gray paper boards with white paper spine.

The auction record is not illuminating. There are 18 records of examples of the Tale dated 1875. Recourse to the sale catalogues shows one of these to have lacked a titlepage, and another to have born the date 1870; but as in a similar operation one record has already been transferred from 1870 to 1875, the total becomes 17. Of these, 11 are shown by the sales catalogues to have mentioned the monograph upon their titlepages; they refer to the fourth issue in between 4 and 7 examples other than the 3 located above.[39]

The remaining 6 records seem to refer to the second or third issue in 5 examples, which are distinct from Mr Carter's copy and of course from the 2 copies held by the British Museum.[40]

CENSUS, The Lover's Tale, unauthorized reprints produced by R. H. Shepherd:

               

	SURVIVED(MAXIMUM)	LOCATED	AUCTION RECORD
1st reprint	11	1, incomplete (Carter)}
		}	5?
2nd reprint	43	}
1st issue		3? (Cambridge, Yale, WDP)}
2nd issue		1, incomplete (Carter)}
3rd issue		2 (B.M.)}	5
4th issue		3 (Berg, Harvard, Huntington)	4-7