University of Virginia Library

VII.

It is now time to consider Wise's descriptions of Shepherd's supposed reprints.

"First Pirated Edition: 1870." A forgery. One cannot be sure that Wise had ever seen a copy of Shepherd's genuine 1870 reprint; but if he had not, one may suppose he was aware[51] of Shepherd's casual account of it as "without title, table of contents, or monograph" and lacking "completeness in regard to the collection of Minor Poems, while including some others afterwards acknowledged [by Tennyson] and restored [to the canon of his collected works]." In either case, Wise must have known that the genuine reprint of 1870 had no titlepage and therefore bore no date, so that he could confer priority on his forgery by a dated titlepage. But if the forgery was to contravene Shepherd's account by the presence of a titlepage, in ordinary prudence the account should be discredited as thoroughly as possible; therefore, perhaps, Wise decided to exclude all minor poems from his production and to include the monograph.[52]

"Second Pirated Edition: 1870." Whether or not Wise ever saw an example of Shepherd's genuine edition of 1870, he did not attempt to give a description of it compatible with Shepherd's remarks. In the description he invented, he asserted that the minor poems were separately paged, in order to make more plausible the 32-page pamphlet, separately paged, which he had produced himself. This was the important point, so far as Wise was concerned; all his other details do no more than suggest that in 1875 Shepherd sent a copy or proof of his earlier production to the printer.

"Third Pirated Edition: 1875." Wise drew his description from an example of the third issue of Shepherd's 1875 reprint. If he inspected the two copies held by the British Museum, it is odd that the numerous tell-tale stamps in the first of them did not cause him to infer the existence of the first issue. Apparently, he did not know the second issue of the reprint. The fourth issue he described cursorily, at the end of his account of Shepherd's reprints (II, 19):

This passage implies that Shepherd in defiance of the Court of Chancery retained copies of his 1875 reprint after 5 February 1876. Only one bit of available evidence might be considered to support Wise's charge. This is the second of the copies held by the British Museum, which contains an example of Shepherd's reprint of The Window [1869], an example of the third issue of his 1875 reprint of the Tale, and pages bearing Timbuctoo which have been extracted from some edition of Cambridge Prize Poems. One of Shepherd's notes proves that he had the volume in his hands after 1878. As it was bought by the British Museum in 1895 (shelfmark C.58.b. 10), it may have been known to Wise, and have furnished a practical basis for his implied charge. But one may suppose that Shepherd had given his two reprints to a friend at the times they were produced; and that the friend later caused them to be bound up, together with the pages bearing Timbuctoo, and asked Shepherd to enrich the volume with his comments. Therefore, the volume does not prove that Shepherd retained an example of his 1875 reprint in defiance of the order of the Court.

The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that Shepherd stayed carefully within the letter of the law. He produced interleaved copies of the authorized edition of the Tale (1879), in which he wrote a brief historical preface and noted the variants of the 1833 text. No doubt he took the variants from his original transcript, made at Pickering's request in 1870; this, it is a bit startling to notice, he did not offer to surrender in his Answer of 1875. Examples of the interleaved and annotated form are held by Harvard, the Huntington Library (two), Princeton, and the present writer.

The copies of the fourth issue to which Wise referred were those described by Shepherd as bound in "blue and white paper boards, entirely uncut" and in "half roan, with edges cut and tops gilt". Wise may well have known the example in boards held by his friend Buxton Forman since 27 January 1876. By disregarding the fact that the fourth was the issue described by Shepherd in 1896, and the only issue mentioned by him, he not only increased the confusion surrounding the subject, but generated more suspicion of Shepherd's good faith.

"Fourth Pirated Edition: 1875." Wise wrote that "The only differences between the Third and Fourth editions are (a) that the two errors occurring in the text were corrected, (b) that the list of Errata was accordingly omitted from the reverse of the Title-page." As Shepherd swore that the Tale was printed only once in 1875, it is impossible to suppose that an edition (or issue) such as Wise described can have existed.

At the same time, a copy here and there may have been made up, at Shepherd's suggestion, in such a way that it would fulfill the description — that is, several of Shepherd's friends may have caused to be bound together in the proper order the three gatherings bearing the Tale from the 1870 reprint, and the preliminary fold and final gathering from the second issue

of the 1875 reprint. Mr Carter's copy is such a made-up example; a few others — 10 at most — may have been produced by Shepherd's other friends, and some of these may in time appear.

Such copies were made up without fraudulent intent of any kind. Their owners desired to arrange a volume containing both a text of the Tale without disfiguring misprints and an anthology of Tennyson's minor poems still (in 1875) not gathered into his collected works. It is possible that Wise inspected such a made-up copy which (unlike Mr Carter's) bore no betraying inscription dated 1870, and based upon it his description of the "Fourth Pirated Edition." He may have been bewildered by the apparent multiplicity of Shepherd's editions (or issues), and convinced that Shepherd's accounts of them were incomplete and misleading. But it is also possible that Wise saw no made-up copy, and created his "Fourth" pirated edition out of the whole cloth, as another production discreditable to Shepherd.

"Fifth Pirated Edition: 1875." According to Wise, the final component of this edition is the pamphlet of 18 minor poems, paged [1]-32,[52a] which we know to have been printed from the same setting of type as The New Timon ("1876"). If the arguments of this paper are accepted, one must believe that Timon was produced by Wise after 1893, most probably in 1898. The "Fifth" edition therefore cannot have existed.

"Sixth Pirated Edition: 1875." According to Wise, this edition was exactly the same as the "Fifth" except that the minor poems were paged not [1]-32, but [49]-64. The list of the poems shows that Shepherd would have published the collection before, rather than after, 1872; indeed, because no complete example of Shepherd's 1870 reprint has been located, we cannot prove that these 18 poems were not the ones he reprinted in it. Be that as it may, it is impossible to suppose that Shepherd included these 18 poems in his 1875 reprint, in any circumstances. Wise must have invented his "Sixth" Pirated Edition" out of the whole cloth. His motive seems clear; he wished to multiply the pirated editions supposedly distributed by Shepherd in order to discredit Shepherd's statements about his reprints.

The New Timon ("1876"). One may suppose that Wise invented his "Fifth Pirated Edition" in order to provide a plausible reason for the existence of the 32-page pamphlet of minor poems; and that he produced the 32-page pamphlet in order to explain the existence of The New Timon. But why did he produce The New Timon? It cannot have been an ordinary

commercial venture, since (so far as we can tell) he sold only one example in twenty years. The matter is not clear; however, had circumstances made it advisable for Wise to insist upon Shepherd's irrepressible dishonesty, he would not have been able to produce any examples of the "Second," "Fourth," "Fifth," or "Sixth" pirated editions of the Tale — but he could have produced an example of The New Timon. He may have created it as a bit of irrefutable evidence.