University of Virginia Library

Tennyson's The Lover's Tale, R. H. Shepherd, and T. J. Wise
by
W. D. Paden

In one of the more puzzling portions of his Bibliography of Tennyson,[1] T. J. Wise asserted that Richard Herne Shepherd had caused to be printed and distributed, in 1870 and 1875, no less than six separate piratical editions of The Lover's Tale. Carter and Pollard proved that what Wise called the "First Pirated Edition" was produced after 1880, and showed that there was no evidence to connect it with Shepherd.[2] The present paper argues that what Wise called the "Second Pirated Edition," though such an edition was produced by Shepherd, has heretofore been misdescribed; that something produced by Shepherd is represented by what Wise called the "Third Pirated Edition"; but that the last three of Wise's six editions must be dismissed as imaginary. In somewhat distant relation to his account of the Tale, Wise described The New Timon (1876) as another piracy by Shepherd; the present essay attempts to show that this pamphlet was in fact a forgery produced about 1898, three years after Shepherd's death

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.

II.

At this point we may turn to the legal documents of 1875 and extract their evidence concerning the year 1870. Before he instituted his lawsuit Tennyson had written to Pickering, as the owner of the only copy of the Tale known not to be in private hands, and had received in reply an account of some events of 1870. In consequence the Bill of Complaint composed by Tennyson's solicitors contained the following passages:

The reprint of 1870 was made the subject of a magnificently thorough set of Interrogatories by the poet's solicitors. Only the latter half of them need be quoted here. Shepherd was required to say[7]

In his Answer Shepherd replied at length:

As the reader may calculate, at most 11 copies escaped destruction by Pickering. (To anticipate, there is nothing to suggest he did not destroy the copies he impounded.) Because the pamphlet received no publicity of any kind, which would have advertised its rarity and desirability, for five years; because only one copy that was sold had been bound; and because the known recipients of gift copies were not likely to possess bibliographical expertise, one would not expect more than 2 or 3 copies to have survived until the present day.

Much later, Shepherd wrote[11] that his reprint of 1870 was "without title, table of contents, or monograph, and it lacked completeness in regard to the collection of Minor Poems, while including some others afterwards acknowledged and restored." The consequences of the remark are radical. The reprint did not contain Shepherd's monograph on the Tale: Wise's "First Pirated Edition: 1870," which does contain

it, is thereby proved to have been no production of Shepherd but, as Carter and Pollard proclaimed on other grounds, a forgery. The reprint possessed no titlepage; Wise solemnly announced the titlepage of the "Second Pirated Edition: 1870" in full: one must conclude that Wise's description of the edition is, to say the least, unreliable. The matter of the minor poems will be discussed at a more convenient place. Meanwhile, one is left without any technical description of Shepherd's reprint of 1870 beyond the sentence that has been quoted, and an inference from another of Shepherd's remarks[12] that the Tale itself exactly filled 3 gatherings, paged [1]-47, [48]. The census conducted by the present writer has turned up an example of one component of the 1870 reprint,[13] but no complete copy.

The auction record, in Book Auction Records, Book Prices Current, and American Book Prices Current [14] requires close inspection. There are 26 records of sales of copies of the Tale said to be dated 1870. On reference to the sale catalogues, one of these turns out to have been dated 1875; on the other hand, two examples said to have been dated 1868 and 1875, respectively, turn out to have been dated 1870,[15] so that the total rises to 27. Of these, according to the sale catalogues, 19 contained the monograph and were therefore examples of the forged "First" edition.[16] One record is too perfunctory to allow any deduction.[17] In the remaining 7 cases, reference to the sales-catalogues shows

that the copies lacked titlepages. A similar example may be added, from the list of copies said to be dated 1875, and also a ninth listing of a copy which, being sold in a batch with other books, was not recorded by BAR or BPC. The 9 records[18] may be shown to deal with 5 different examples; but because of the mainly negative character of our knowledge of the 1870 reprint, we cannot be sure that any of the 5 represent it. The subject will be resumed below.

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

IV.

At this point one may turn to consider Shepherd's little monograph: The Lover's Tale / A Supplementary Chapter to Tennysoniana. / (Only Fifty Copies Printed.) On the verso of the titlepage appears the legend, "Price Two Shillings"; the text fills pages [3]-8. Though the pamphlet bears no date, Shepherd's actions in advertising the edition in the Athenaeum of 8 May, and in presenting an example to the British Museum on 19 May 1875, prove conclusively that he produced it in that year. In his Bibliography of Tennyson (II, 9-10) Wise implied that the monograph was printed in 1870, but later in a rare absentminded moment, he gave the pamphlet its true date of "[1875]", in his Ashley Library (VII, 1925, p. 161).

Copies are held by the Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles (bound with a copy of Tennysoniana, 1866), Princeton, and Texas.

V.

The evidence concerning the pamphlets of minor poems is not easily understood. To recapitulate, the only available evidence concerning the minor poems in the 1870 reprint consists of one sentence by Shepherd (p.9): in comparison with the 1875 reprint "it lacked completeness in regard to the collection of Minor Poems, while including some others afterwards acknowledged and restored." In other words, in 1870 Shepherd did not reprint all the minor poems which Tennyson had published before that time only in periodicals and the like, and he did reprint some minor poems which before 1875 Tennyson gathered from their places of first publication into his collected works. As no complete copy of the 1870 reprint has been located, and the standard description has been proved unreliable, we cannot be sure exactly what Shepherd's sentence means. Turning to the year 1875, we may recall that Shepherd made no reference to any pamphlet of minor poems in his advertisements of April and May. In his letter of 27 July he offered to sell to H. J. Smith not only a copy of the Tale, but some "other poems." The volume which Shepherd sent to Swinburne in the first days of August contained a gathering of 16 pages, numbered [49]-64, which bears 16 minor poems. Shepherd sold an exactly similar gathering, similarly paged and containing the same poems, to the British Museum on 21 January 1876.

In his Bibliography of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1901), a description of a set of the poet's works gathered together by Dodd, Mead and Company, Luther S. Livingston announced the existence of two undated pamphlets of minor poems (pp. 58, 66). He gratefully acknowledged the assistance he had derived from the proof-sheets of Wise's Bibliography in which, seven years later, more detailed descriptions of both pamphlets appeared (II, 10-12, 14-16). As neither pamphlet appears in the catalogue of the Ashley Library, or now exists among Wise's books in the British Museum, one is thrown back upon the Dodd, Mead set of Tennyson, which was acquired by George H. Richmond, a book-dealer, and then purchased in 1904 by Pierpont Morgan. The two pamphlets may be separately considered.

(A) According to Livingston, Shepherd issued with his 1870 reprint of the Tale an undated second part of sixteen pages, containing sixteen minor poems by Tennyson, which he also sold separately, at 2 shillings. Livingston gives the collation as "Title and text, pp. 1-16"; reference to Wise's bibliography shows that the pamphlet of sixteen

pages should be described as having no title or half-title, but a dropped head on the first page, reading Poems. One is surprised to discover that the Morgan Library holds no example of the pamphlet, nor according to its records did it receive one in the Dodd, Mead set. Yet Richmond wrote to Morgan on 9 December 1904, referring to himself in the third person, "The set sold you comprises everything purchased by Mr. Richmond from the former owners, and every addition made by him to it. . . .[41] Again, one should suppose that any ordinary entry in Livingston's list was unquestionable evidence that an example of the item was included in the Dodd, Mead set, for though his titlepage promises "notes referring to items not included in the set," these notes are distinguished not only by smaller type, but by the prefixed warning, NOTE. Livingston's entry for the 16-page pamphlet is certainly not a note. But if a copy of the pamphlet existed in the Dodd, Mead set, it does not seem to have passed to Richmond, and certainly did not pass to Morgan. One may consult neither the example described by Wise, nor that described by Livingston. Unfortunately, the census conducted by the present writer has not located any other copy.

A look at the list of minor poems subjoined by Livingston is even more perturbing, for the poems are exactly the same as those in the 1875 gathering. Shepherd remarked that his 1870 reprint, in comparison with that of 1875, "lacked completeness in regard to the collection of Minor Poems": it is therefore clear that the pamphlet cannot be considered the second part of Shepherd's 1870 reprint. Further, the pamphlet cannot have been printed by Shepherd before 1875, because it includes one poem, beginning "Here often as a child I lay reclined," which he said (p. 22) he did not know until it was reprinted by another man in 1875.

Wise lists the poems, of course, as occurring on the relevant pages of his "Second Pirated Edition: 1870." His description of the edition has already been termed unreliable because it includes a titlepage, whereas Shepherd said his 1870 reprint had none; we now have a second reason to doubt the description. The minor poems which it lists cannot, according to Shepherd, have been those he reprinted in 1870; and the list includes one poem which Shepherd had not heard of before 1875.

Returning to the pamphlet, one must reject the date of 1870 given it by Livingston and Wise. Did it appear in 1875? It differs in only

one point from the gathering Shepherd sent to Swinburne (as part of a volume) in 1875 and sold to the British Museum in January 1876: its pages are numbered [1]-16 rather than [49]-64. No such gathering exists in any known example. The only auction record of the Tale which mentions that in the copy the minor poems have separate pagination, also asserts that the minor poems are preceded by a half-title;[42] and the gathering here in question has no half-title. The auction record of separate pamphlets of minor poems is also disappointing. Of the 6 records, 5 turn out on recourse to the sales catalogues to refer to pamphlets containing not 16, but 32 pages, so that they must be considered under (B), below. The single remaining record concerns the sale at Sotheby's, in the B. B. MacGeorge sale (#1305), on 1 July 1924, of a copy of Shepherd's 1875 reprint of the Tale, including his monograph. The catalogue adds, "At the end of the vol. appears a Collection of Minor Poems, 16 pp., issued in 1870. . . ."[42] After the first moment, one recollects that the fourth issue of Shepherd's 1875 reprint does include his monograph and, at the end, 16 pages of minor poems — paged [49]-64; and according to the standard accounts of Livingston and Wise, the last item had appeared in 1870. The record may conceivably refer to an example of a gathering paged [1]-16, but it is far more likely to refer to one paged [48]-64.

In sum, the evidence for the existence of an undated pamphlet, paged [1]-16, containing 16 minor poems, consists at present of Livingston's entry and its probable source, known to be unreliable, in Wise. The evidence is insufficient. At present, one must suppose no such pamphlet to have existed.

(B) According to Livingston, Shepherd issued with his 1875 reprint of the Tale an undated second part of 32 pages, containing 18 minor poems by Tennyson, which he also sold separately. The pamphlet has a half-title, reading Poems, with blank reverse.

The Morgan Library holds two examples (one unopened), received as part of the Dodd, Mead set. The auction record consists of the five sales already mentioned, of which one refers to the example now held by the Huntington Library, and all five possibly may so refer.[43] Only

the three examples have been located. There are also records of two sales which conceivably referred to other copies.[44]

An examination of the poems in the pamphlet causes cheerful confusion. It lacks 3 poems which the known 1875 gathering contains.[45] It contains 5 poems which the known 1875 gathering lacks, and which were published by Tennyson in the Imperial Library Edition of his works, in 1872.[46] In other words, in comparison with the known 1875 gathering the 32-page pamphlet lacks completeness in regard to the collection of minor poems, while including others acknowledged and restored to his canon by Tennyson in 1872. The 32-page pamphlet fulfills the fragmentary description, the only one we possess, of the second part of Shepherd's 1870 reprint. For the moment its identity seems clear.

But one further matter remains. Livingston and Wise not only dated the 32-page pamphlet as of 1875, they listed "an absolute reprint" of it: The New Timon and the Poets (1876).[47] When examples of the 32-page pamphlet and The New Timon are placed side by side for close inspection, it is immediately clear that they were printed from the same rather careless setting of slightly battered type. Many botched overprintings and occasional cracked types appear in the same places in both.[48] It seems advisable to consider the known history of The New Timon.

VI.

Harry Buxton Forman acquired a copy of The New Timon — or placed it, bound, upon his shelves — on 25 September 1899, when he wrote his initials and the date within it. There was an example in the Dodd, Mead set of Tennyson's works which Livingston described, with the aid of advance proofs of Wise's Bibliography, in 1901. A gap of almost twenty years separates these two dates from the next appearance of an example, in the sale of Part I of Buxton Forman's library in March 1920, when the first copy mentioned above sold for $410. At the sale of the second part of the library, in April, a second copy of The New Timon sold for $250. In 1921 the Huntington Library acquired a copy from Quaritch, Yale obtained a copy from an unrecorded source, and Lord Esher bought a copy, no doubt in London. In 1922 Cornell purchased an example; at some time prior to 1923 A. C. Chapin, who was to bequeath his library to Williams College, bought a copy through Lathrop C. Harper.[49] Not until 1926-1927 did any copies, other than Buxton Forman's, appear in the auction rooms; then two were sold, and another in 1930, and a third in 1932; after the last year, one must remember, the Depression damped down the trade in rare books. In or before the later 1930's an example was bought by Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut); in 1939 a copy was sold at auction; in 1945 a copy was bought by the University of Michigan from Quaritch. One further example was sold at Sotheby's in 1946.

This narrative is somewhat surprising, for Wise had remarked in 1908 (II,21) that

And he later opined (Ashley Library, VII, 1925, p. 139) that Shepherd's issue of The New Timon "must have been a small one, for the pamphlet is now by no means easy to find." The comments read oddly when one recalls the sudden appearance of 5 examples in 1921-1923, after the two very high prices ($410 and $250) attained by copies in the sales of Forman's library.

As most of the known copies appeared subsequent to the sale of Buxton Forman's library, it seemed conceivable that after Forman's death his son, Maurice Buxton Forman, might have released one of those small parcels of pamphlets that his father had long been in the habit of "salting down," as he termed it. Since, as I have been informed, Mr Mudie of Quartch's, together with Wise, made the probate valuation of Forman's library, and since the firm of Quaritch sold examples of The New Timon in 1921 and 1945, it seemed natural to ask them whether they had, in fact, bought a small batch of copies from the younger Buxton Forman about 1920. In a courteous and candid reply, of 22 January 1963, Mr A. R. Newton of Bernard Quaritch Ltd. wrote, in part,

One need not say that, whatever the provenance of their first eight examples, Quaritch purchased and sold them in entire good faith. In view of the extremely slender record of the pamphlet, it seems clear that the firm must have obtained a "remainder" from someone. Mr Newton's letter provides no distinct evidence to connect the remainder with Maurice Buxton Forman, and any suggestion that he was its source must here be explicitly withdrawn. The available data concerning The New Timon may be arranged as follows:

The New Timon:

• (1) Buxton Forman's first copy: "full [green] levant morocco, Jansen style, inside dentelles, uncut, by Riviere"; according to his pencilled note, acquired (?or shelved) on 25 September 1899; sold with his library at the Anderson Galleries (Part I, #865) on 15 March 1920; then or later obtained by C. T. Crocker; presented in the Crocker Collection to the University of Virginia in 1961.
• (2) Buxton Forman's second copy: "sewn, uncut, in slip case"; ?also acquired in 1899; sold with his library at the Anderson Galleries (Part II, #1089) on 26 April 1920.? Resold at the Am. Art Assoc. Galleries, sale of Thomas Ogden Amelia (#192), on 27 October 1930; "stitched, in half red morocco case." ? Acquired by Connecticut Wesleyan "in

  ---

  139

  
  
  
  the late 1930's": "paper, uncut, enclosed in red case with morocco back" [MS addition to the library's copy of the printed catalogue card, by courtesy of the librarian]; subsequently stolen.
• (3) T. J. Wise's copy, described in the advance proofs of his Bibliography, which were consulted by L. S. Livingston in or before 1901; Ashley Library VII (1925) 139: "bound in red levant morocco by Riviere"; now in the British Museum.
• (4) Dodd, Mead & Co.'s copy, obtained in or before 1901: "stitched, uncut"; purchased by George H. Richmond and by him sold to J. P. Morgan in 1904; now in red leather solander case, uniform with most of the Morgan Tennysons.
• (5) [1] Huntington copy, bought in 1921 from Quaritch: "stitched, without wrappers."
• (6) [2] Yale copy, acquired in 1921 from an unrecorded source: "stitched and uncut."
• (7) [3] Harvard copy; acquired by Lord Esher in 1921, according to his pencilled note; obtained by Harvard at Sotheby's in 1946: "stitched, without binding or wrapper"; still partly unopened.
• (8) [4] Cornell copy, bought in 1922; condition when acquired not recorded; since acquisition, bound by the library.
• (9) [5] Copy acquired by J. A. Spoor (1851-1926); sold with his library, which had been held in storage since his death, at the Parke-Bernet Galleries (Part II, #1003) on 4 May 1939; "stitched, uncut, small stain on upper margin of title-page, in a half green levant morocco solander case."
• (10) [6] Williams copy, purchased for A. C. Chapin before 1923 by Lathrop C. Harper: "sewed, uncut, [partly unopened,] in cloth folder, [brown quarter-] morocco slip case" — bracketed information by the courtesy of the Custodian of the Chapin Library.
• (11) [7] Copy sold at the Am. Art Assoc. Galleries in a miscellaneous sale (#897) on 23 November 1926: "sewn, uncut, enclosed in quarter red morocco slip case and inner cloth folder." ?? Sold at Hodgson's, as the property of John Drinkwater, on 25 May 1932 (#127): "stitched." ? Sold by Quaritch to Michigan in 1945: "stitched."
• (12) [8] Copy sold at the Am. Art Assoc. Galleries in the sale of the library of Major W. van R. Whittall (#1279) on 14 February 1927: "stitched and uncut, as issued in quarter brown levant morocco slip case, inner cloth wrapper"; then or later acquired by Owen D. Young, who bequeathed it to the Berg Collection in 1941.

Though some of the details are speculative, as they have been marked, the table shows that in 1899-1901 The New Timon is recorded only in connection with Wise and (no doubt through Wise) with Forman

and the Dodd, Mead set of Tennysons. (We may push the date of its probable production back one year, for a copy of the associated 32-page pamphlet of minor poems was sold in New York in 1898). The circumstances are disquieting.

One is not surprised to discover that the text of the poems is set in Miller and Richards 17 Long Primer, which Carter and Pollard designated as "C" and identified in eleven forgeries (Enquiry, pp. 67, 379). It is of some importance to note that the type dissociates the pamphlet from the "First Pirated Edition" of The Lover's Tale, for that is printed in Clay's Long Primer No. 3, which Carter and Pollard designated as "A"; had the two productions been printed in the same type, it would have been fairly probable that they were printed at the same time, in some conjunction of purposes. As it is, the "First Pirated Edition" must have been produced before 1894, when the firm of Clay shifted from type "A" to type "C" (Enquiry, p. 64); and The New Timon must have been produced (assuming that Clay's produced it, like the rest of Wise's forgeries) in 1894 or later.

Of the display types in the pamphlet, it may suffice here to remark that the first line on the titlepage of The New Timon is set in the same type as the word "London" on the titlepage of William Morris, The Two Sides of the River, a possible forgery; and similarly, the fifth line on the same titlepage (i.e., "with other omitted") is set in the same type as the word "by" on the Morris titlepage.

The paper consists of almost exactly two-thirds esparto and one-third chemical wood. Esparto had been introduced into papermaking in 1861. Chemical wood was first produced in Sweden, in 1874; the English imports were 485 tons in 1874, less than a thousand tons in 1875, and slightly over a thousand tons in 1876.[50] It is therefore impossible that the 32-page pamphlet of minor poems and The New Timon were printed in 1870. It is possible that they were printed in 1876, but very unlikely. A much later date seems indicated.

Though the evidence of the paper, the types, and the known history of The New Timon does not provide an absolute proof that the pamphlet was produced by Wise, and (therefore) that the associated 32-page pamphlet of minor poems was also his work, the circumstances blend too well with the known facts of Wise's career to leave room for serious doubt. The argument may be said to lead to a virtual certainty.

In the succeeding pages Wise's responsibility for both pamphlets will be assumed, for the sake of brevity.

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.

VIII.

As these pages have sought to explain a number of Wise's decisions and actions by reference to his desire to discredit Shepherd and Shepherd's bibliographical work, the matter should be briefly considered. In the later 1890's Wise was enjoying his fabulous career (1886?[53]-1905?) as a forger of literary rarities. According to the latest tally, by 1896 he had produced 40 forgeries (he was to add 22 more),[54] and there had already been some slight unpleasantness about one of them, the forged edition of Swinburne's Sienna.[55] In these circumstances, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Wise, who was both an imaginative and a prudent man, decided to erect a lightning rod — or, to speak more plainly, to arrange matters so that if his fraudulent productions should be denounced, and his connection with them intimated, the blame could be easily and convincingly placed upon another man.

For the position of lightning-rod Shepherd possessed exceptional qualifications.[56] He had been involved for over a quarter-century in bibliographical chores and adventures. He had had slight and usually unfortunate relations with such authors as Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne. He had been publicly charged with producing and distributing unauthorized and illicit pamphlets, he had admitted his guilt, and he had died.

A number of questionable aspects of Shepherd's career had been broached and confirmed by his admissions under cross-examination in the trial of Shepherd v. Francis, the libel suit which he preferred against the Athenaeum in 1879 (Times, 17 July, p. 6). After the verdict went in his favor the Athenaeum, in its issue of 21 July, had vengefully broadcast whatever it could draw from the cross-examination to his discredit. The account included references to the Laureate's suit to stop the piracy of The Lover's Tale, and the resulting decision

of the Court of Chancery. The affair was quietly mentioned by Shepherd, with full details about his illicit reprints, in his Bibliography of Tennyson, which his surviving brother published in 1896, to his memory. That document, indeed, gives a general impression of candor and of a selfless enthusiasm for literature. But what if matters could be so arranged that Shepherd's candor would show as shameless lying, his enthusiasm as a pursuit of petty gain?

Wise had already (about 1890) produced his forgery of Shepherd's 1870 reprint of the Tale; his effort to compose a convincing account of it for his bibliography of Tennyson may have brought the larger opportunity to his mind. He need only increase Shepherd's supposed editions of the Tale to the number of six, and provide ocular evidence of these farcical activities in the shape of The New Timon, whose date seemed to make clear that Shepherd had cocked a snook at the Court of Chancery: once these were accepted as evidence of Shepherd's conduct in the affair of the Tale, who could doubt that in his time he had achieved many shadier feats never called to the attention of the law?

If these speculations are correct, by the turn of the century Wise had prepared and held in readiness a defence against any suggestion that he had been the source of certain nineteenth century pamphlets. For about thirty years — from about 1905 to 1934 — he refrained from further illicit productions, his bibliographical authority rose to towering heights, and his earlier apprehensions naturally diminished. In 1934, when confronted by Messrs Carter and Pollard's Enquiry, he promptly brought forward the old defence. In his first public statement, in the Times Literary Supplement of 12 July 1934, he quoted a letter recently sent him by Maurice Buxton Forman, whom (he wrote) he had asked "for any information he could give me regarding his father's store of manuscripts and pamphlets." The son of his old friend had written, in part,

But the defence, like the Maginot Line, was ineffective. It could not withstand the evidence of text, printing-types, and paper that Carter and Pollard brought forward. It was, in fact, so ineffective that no one has thought to define the careful preparations that seem to have lain beneath it.

Notes