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FOREWORD

The Greatest English Lyric? — A New Reading of Joe E. Skilmer's "Therese" by John Frederick Nims

Tudor Roses from John Tate by Allan Stevenson

The Printers and The Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Section 2 by Robert K. Turner, Jr.

Richardson's Revisions of Pamela by T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel

William Strahan's Ledgers: Standard Charges for Printing, 1738-1785 by Patricia Hernlund

"Woodcuts dropped into the Text": The Illustrations in The Old Curiosity Shop And Barnaby Rudge by Joan Stevens

Two 'New' Texts of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders by Dale Kramer

Harriet Weaver's Letters to James Joyce 1915-1920 by John Firth

The Manuscript of The Sound And The Fury: The Revisions in the First Section by Emily K. Izsak

A System of Color Identification for Bibliographical Description by G. Thomas Tanselle

The Influence of Justification on Spelling in Jaggard's Compositor B by William S. Kable

New Evidence on the Provenance of The Padua Prompt-Books of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and Winter's Tale by G. Blakemore Evans

The Library of Lady Southwell and Captian Sibthorpe by Sister Jean Carmel Cavanaugh, S.L.

Coleridge's Lines to Thelwall: A Corrected Text and a First Version. by C. G. Martin

Notes on the Destruction of The Scarlet Letter Manuscript by Matthew J. Bruccoli

Washington Irving: An Unrecorded Periodical Publication by Daniel R. Barnes

A Speech by W. D. Howells by George Monteiro

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Notes

Some New Stephen Crane Items by George W. Hallam

An Unpublished Review by Henry James by James Kraft

A SELECTIVE CHECK LIST OF BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SCHOLARSHIP FOR 1965

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262

A Speech by W. D. Howells
by
George Monteiro

A Bibliography of William Dean Howells contains the following item. 74-17. "Atlantic dinner," Boston Transcript, Dec. 17, 1874, xlvii, 1. Speech (quoted and paraphrased).[1]

The determination that Howells made such a speech is based apparently on the following paragraph in the Transcript account of the Atlantic's dinner for contributors held at Boston's Parker House on December 15, 1874.

During the evening Mr. Howells was toasted as "The Editor of the Atlantic: Such is his impartiality that he has been known to reject his own contributions." It gave him the opportunity for a most characteristic little speech, in the course of which he retorted on those critics who sometimes find the magazine dull. He said they little know how dull he might have made it if he had chosen. "They have no idea of the master-pieces of inanity and absurdity which are each month withheld from them. They cannot understand what strong restraint the editor places upon his own gifts for their sake, and how continually he rejects his own contributions." At a later stage Mr. Howells referred to his first contributions to the Atlantic, in 1860, which were accepted by Mr. Lowell, and stated that Mr. Fields uniformly rejected everything he sent.

There is no further indication of either the contents of Howells' speech or its length.

There is, however, another contemporary newspaper article that provides considerably more information on the dinner in general and on Howells' performance in particular. In fact, "A Dinner on Parnassus," which appeared in the New York Tribune (18 Dec. 1874), p. 3, actually prints in full the text of Howells' "characteristic little speech" of approximately seven hundred words. This account, unsigned, was filed by Arthur Gilman,[2] then

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in the employ of H. O. Houghton and Company, purchaser of the Atlantic late in 1873 from James R. Osgood.

To the information that this speech was printed in a contemporary account of the dinner can be added the further information that a manuscript of the speech in Howells' hand has recently come to light.[3] Made available by Houghton Mifflin Company, it is at present on deposit in Harvard's Houghton Library. Written in ink, with additional cancellations and inter-linear corrections in pencil, and spread over nine consecutively numbered half-sheets, the manuscript carries no explicit indication of the occasion for which the text was prepared. An enclosing sheet to which the pages are loosely sewn bears the penciled inscription in an unidentified hand: "Mr. H. O. Houghton — 6 Phillips Pl." This fact suggests the possibility that Gilman, after having been allowed to use the manuscript, returned it, not to Howells, but to Houghton. This may also explain its presence in the Houghton Mifflin files. The manuscript version differs slightly from that printed in the Tribune, but neither contains the reference to Lowell and to Fields which is quoted indirectly in the Transcript account. It is less likely that these were ad libitum extensions of his speech than that they were remarks offered by Howells, as master of ceremonies, at some later moment.

Notes

[1]

William M. Gibson and George Arms (1948), p. 102.

[2]

The evidence identifying Gilman as the author of this account appears in three unpublished letters: Louise C. Moulton to Arthur Gilman, 11 Dec. 1874, Houghton Mifflin Papers, Houghton Library; Whitelaw Reid to Arthur Gilman, 10 Dec. 1874, "Letter-book 24" (p. 143), Whitelaw Reid Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; and D. N. Nicholson to Arthur Gilman, 22 Feb. 1875, "Letter-book 24" (p. 735), Whitelaw Reid Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

[3]

This manuscript is of course not listed in John K. Reeves, "The Literary Manuscripts of W. D. Howells," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXII (June, 1958), 267-278; (July, 1958), 350-363; and LXV (Sept., 1961), 465-476.