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Identification of New York Public Library
Manuscript "Suckling Collection" and of Huntington
Manuscript 198
by
C. M. Armitage
In his recent thoroughgoing "Editorial Experiment: Suckling's 'A Sessions of the Poets'," L. A. Beaurline speculates that the New York Public Library MS "Suckling Collection" (N), which ends with a note initialled "JH," may have been transcribed by James Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-89).[1] Mr. Beaurline notes, however, that R. W. Smith, the Library's Keeper of Manuscripts, thinks that the hand is eighteenth or early nineteenth century, rather than mid-nineteenth. This opinion supports my contention that N was transcribed by Joseph Haslewood (1769-1833), sometime between 1822 (the date in the watermark of the paper) and 1833.
Aside from the apparent evidence of the hand, other factors militate against identifying "JH" as James Halliwell-Phillipps. In the first place, he would probably have included the initial of each part of his surname, as is the initialling practice among persons with hyphenated surnames. Most significantly, since N is, as Mr. Beaurline has shown, "clearly a copy" of a few pages of Huntington MS 198, and since HM 198 contains half-a-dozen notes which in content and handwriting significantly resemble the one in N and which were written before 1833 by a "JH" who may reasonably be identified as Joseph Haslewood, there is little doubt that he was the transcriber of N.
Haslewood once owned the two manuscript miscellanies which comprise what is now known as HM 198. From the auction of his effects they passed, via Thorpe,[2] to Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough (1795-1837), (the avid collector of MSS who bankrupted himself trying to prove in print that Mexico had been colonised by the Israelites, an attempt which finally cost him his life when he contracted typhus fever in debtor's prison in Dublin — see D.N.B.). The notes by "JH," which comment either on the original format of the MSS or on the difference between the manuscript and the printed versions of some of the poems, are couched in a florid style which D.N.B. shows to be characteristic of Haslewood, as is the title page: "M.S.S. RECORDS OF THE MUSE, ORIGINAL AND SELECTED, Gathering felicitous Ideas and distinguished Effusions by [a list of authors] who flourished during the elden Days of Q. Elizabeth, K. James Ist and Charles Ist & IInd." With the pages bearing this title and the notes interpolated, the two miscellanies were bound in separate volumes by Charles Lewis in 1832. They subsequently became part of the library of Henry Huth, for whom they were re-bound by Francis Bedford in one volume. It was drawn on by A. B. Grosart for his 1872-73 edition of Donne's poems, in which it is referred to as the "Haslewood-Kingsborough MS" or "H-K."[3]
Apart from the evidence that the line of ownership offers, that H-K and HM 198 are the same MS can be seen as soon as Grosart's versions of the 24 poems which he acknowledges to be wholly or partly derived from H-K are compared with the versions in HM 198. They regularly correspond, for example in such revealing matters as Grosart's having ceased to follow H-K after 56 lines of the 76-line poem "Come Fates I feare you not" — which in HM 198 contains just 56 lines; and in his noting that the name "John Done" is appended to the poem "True love finds witt" on page 165 of H-K — which is exactly where that name, spelt thus, appears in HM 198.
Notes
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