University of Virginia Library

Thomas Love Peacock began writing poetry as a schoolboy at Englefield Green, submitted a prize-winning poem to a juvenile magazine as a fourteen-year-old clerk in the City of London, and published his first volume of poetry in November or December 1805, shortly after his twentieth birthday.[1] Although most reviewers treated Palmyra, and Other Poems indulgently, the volume was a financial failure, and Peacock later dismissed it as "a very juvenile production."[2] When he published a combined "Second Edition" of The Genius of the Thames, Palmyra, and Other Poems in 1812, he included only the two longest poems from his first volume, and even these were heavily revised. On 11 November 1811, he remarked in a letter to his friend Thomas Forster: "Ballantyne is printing a second edition of the Genius of the Thames, Palmyra, and Fiolfar, together with an Inscription for a mountain-dell, being its first appearance on any stage. Palmyra is quite a new thing, about half as long as before, and containing little more than a fifth of the original lines. The King of Norway too stalks forth in a new suit of armour. All my other poems I consign to the tomb of the Capulets."[3] If nearly all his earliest published poems were thus consigned to oblivion, it is hardly surprising that the same fate should have overtaken Peacock's unpublished juvenilia, the bulk of which remained wholly unknown until the 1920s, when two important manuscript collections came to light. Unfortunately, only one of these sources was available for inclusion in the standard Halliford edition of Peacock's Works, which was in progress from 1924 to 1934.

The first of these manuscript collections was appended to a copy of the first edition of Palmyra, and Other Poems in a contemporary calf binding, purchased by Michael Sadleir from a "country bookseller" in August 1923 and now in the Robert H. Taylor Collection of the Princeton University Library. Bound at the back of this volume are 104 extra leaves, the first thirty-seven of which contain transcripts of twenty-three "Additional Poems | by | Thomas Love Peacock | Chiefly written at an | early age"—all dated in a list

of "Contents." Since the additional poems are dated from January 1801 to January 1804 and the extra leaves contain an 1806 watermark, it seems likely that the transcripts were made within a few years of the publication of Palmyra by or for someone in Peacock's family who had access to a large quantity of his early verse in manuscript.[4] From this volume the Halliford editors derived texts of twenty previously unknown poems by Peacock. However, their satisfaction with the discovery was somewhat dampened by their inability to gain access to another manuscript volume that was advertised by a Southend bookseller in the Publisher's Circular on 4 February 1928, and "promptly bought by a London dealer, who refused to let it be seen, but stated in May that he had sold it to an American customer."[5] This manuscript book—which has now been available to scholars for more than half a century in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, but has not hitherto been described in detail—contains twenty-eight early poems in Peacock's own hand, all arranged in chronological order and carefully dated from June 1798 to September 1804. While only four of the poems are hitherto unpublished, the Berg MS makes valuable additions to our knowledge of the canon, chronology, text, and literary antecedents of Peacock's juvenilia.[6]

The Berg MS is a large quarto manuscript book entitled "Poems, | by | T. L. Peacock." The entire volume consists of seventy-eight leaves measuring 11 5/8 inches by 9 3/16 inches, bound in full diced calf, with gilt tooling, gilt edges, and marbled endpapers. The title "POEMS" is stamped in gilt on the spine. Peacock's original manuscript evidently consisted of sixty-eight leaves of wove paper containing the watermark "John Hays | 1803". To these the binder added ten leaves of laid paper (five at the beginning and five at the end) with the watermark "Russell & Edmeads | 1799". The recto of the second leaf of wove paper contains the title, followed by an epigraph from Martial. The first and third leaves of wove paper are blank, as is the verso of the title leaf. The text of the twenty-eight poems is written in Peacock's neat copperplate hand on both sides of the next forty-one leaves, which are paginated from 1 to 82. Each poem begins on a new page, and each is dated at the end. The handwriting resembles that of Peacock's fair copy of his contemporaneous verse drama "The Circle of Loda," which is also written on

both sides of the leaf, with similar page numbering.[7] The remaining twenty-four leaves of wove paper were left blank by Peacock, though he may at first have intended to reserve them for additional poems. The style of the binding and the date of the watermark in the binder's leaves both suggest that the manuscript was bound at an early date—probably not long after Peacock finished copying the poems in September or October 1804.

The subsequent history of the volume is obscure. Almost the only thing that can be concluded with certainty is that the Berg MS was not available to the copyist of the Sadleir-Taylor MS. A pair of brief penciled notes on pages 34 and 35 appear to have been added by someone familiar with the neighborhood of Chertsey, for one of them identifies the subject of Peacock's poem "On the Death of Mr Pembroke" as the father of the Rev. Charles Pembroke, who became Rector of Weybridge and Curate of Chertsey in 1827 and died around 1847.[8] Some time after 1847, an unidentified antiquary used eleven blank leaves at the end of the book—turning it upside down and beginning from the back on the third binder's leaf—for a manuscript index to Michel-Ange de La Chausse's Romanum Museum, sive Thesaurus Eruditae Antiquitatis, originally published in 1690, followed by transcriptions of the title pages of two books: an edition of Tasso's Aminta published at Oxford in 1726 and the second edition of Thomas Forster's Original Letters of John Locke, Alg. Sidney, and Lord Shaftesbury, privately printed in London in 1847. The handwriting—or rather hand printing—of this second set of additions is very different from that of the penciled notes; it does not appear to be Forster's, and it is certainly not Peacock's.

While the strict chronological arrangement of the poems makes it seem most unlikely that the Berg MS was prepared with a view to publication, it would appear that the volume was intended as a more or less comprehensive collection of the poems that Peacock thought worthy of circulation and preservation in September or October 1804. Its contents include two-thirds of the poems he is known to have written during the period that it covers, and most of the omissions are relatively easy to explain. The "Answer to the Question, 'Is History or Biography the More Improving Study?'" was a mere exercise, and in any case it had been published in The Monthly Preceptor, or Juvenile Library for February 1800. The two "Epigrams" (January 1801) might have been rejected as too trifling, the verse letter "Liberty" (January 1801) as too full of personified abstractions or too politically outspoken, the verse letter to his grandfather Love (11 August 1801) as too topical or too crudely patriotic, and the fragment "From the Revelations" (? 1801) as too enthusiastic—if, indeed, they were not simply deemed inferior work. More personal considerations are likely to have influenced the omission of all eight of the poems that may be associated with Lucretia Oldham, "the beauty of Shacklewell Green," with whom Peacock appears to have been in love at

least from November 1802 to November 1803.[9] Perhaps Peacock looked back on his adolescent infatuation with some degree of regret or embarrassment, or perhaps he merely wished to avoid any exposure of his personal feelings or personal relationships. In any case, it is worth noting in this connection that even the four verse letters in the Berg MS contain almost no personal information about the writer or the unidentified recipients.

The twenty-eight poems that Peacock included in the Berg MS contain almost nine hundred lines of verse in a variety of genres as well as a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the collection is the high proportion of satirical and humorous pieces—about a third of the total number, including most of the longer poems. In this respect, the Berg MS contrasts sharply with the Palmyra volume, in which the only two humorous pieces are relegated to a section of "Nugæ" at the end. Although the presence of three imitations of Ossian should not surprise anyone who has read Byron's Hours of Idleness, it is surprising to find no imitations or translations of the classics—which may be a sign of diffidence in the young self-educated scholar. Of the four new poems, the earliest—a schoolboy effusion entitled "Midsummer Holidays. | Written at twelve years of age."—is the most revealing, for it is the only poem Peacock is known to have written between the ages of nine and fourteen. Apart from this specimen of very early work, all the poems were written between his fifteenth and nineteenth birthdays.

As an independent collection in which the poems are chronologically arranged and carefully dated, the Berg MS is the only contemporary document that allows us to trace the development of Peacock's versification. Each poem is dated at the end, at least with the month and year, but in seven cases with the day of the month as well. Since more than half its dates are not recorded elsewhere, the Berg MS makes an important contribution to the chronology of Peacock's early work. For eleven of the poems the Berg MS confirms the dating of the Sadleir-Taylor MS or some other source, and for two more its dating differs only slightly from that of other manuscripts. On the other hand, for fourteen of the poems the Berg MS provides the only available evidence, or in two cases the only precise evidence, for dating. It also gives the correct date for "Peace," which is obviously misdated in the Sadleir-Taylor MS.[10] Perhaps the most important contribution of the Berg MS to the chronology of Peacock's verse is its establishment of early dates for seven of the eight poems that he later included in Palmyra, and Other Poems. With the exception of "To a Young Lady Netting," which is dated October 1803 in a separate manuscript in the Pforzheimer Collection,[11] the remaining poems in the Palmyra volume are all likely to have been written between October 1804 and October 1805, after the completion of the Berg MS.

The dating of two of the latest poems in the Berg MS also has significant

implications for dating the manuscript of "The Circle of Loda" and the private printing of The Monks of St. Mark. An "Ancient War-Song" dated August 1804 in the Berg MS also appears as the opening "Chorus of Bards" in Peacock's undated verse drama "The Circle of Loda," which is written on paper with an 1801 watermark.[12] Since it seems unlikely that Peacock would have included one, and only one, of the lyrics from a finished drama in a collection of his shorter poems, it is reasonable to suppose that the "Ancient War-Song" was originally written as an independent work and only later incorporated into "The Circle of Loda." This would suggest that "The Circle of Loda" was written late in 1804 or early in 1805, before Peacock recast some of the material from the drama in the narrative form of "Fiolfar, King of Norway," which was published with Palmyra.

The appearance of "The Monks of St Mark" in the Berg MS plays an important part in a more complex argument for redating the rare private printing of that poem.[13] The octavo half-sheet containing The Monks of St. Mark has always been dated 1804 because at the end the poem is dated September 1804. But Peacock often dated his manuscript poems in this manner, and the Berg MS confirms that September 1804 was the date of composition—not necessarily the date of printing. Indeed, if Peacock had printed the poem at that time, it is unlikely that he would have taken the trouble to copy it into the Berg MS. Moreover, the fact that The Monks of St. Mark was printed by Thomas Bensley, the printer of the Palmyra volume, in the same typographical style, on the same size paper, with the same font of type, the same measure, the same page length, and the same kind of headline strongly suggests that The Monks of St. Mark was printed at the same time as Palmyra, in the autumn of 1805. Since the typographical similarities are too striking to be a matter of coincidence, there would appear to be three possible ways to account for the relationship between the two works. (1) The Monks could have been set in type as a specimen of the typographical style to be employed in the Palmyra volume. (2) The Monks could have been originally intended for inclusion in the Palmyra volume but removed from the book after the poem had been set in type. (3) The Monks could have been deliberately printed in the same style as the Palmyra volume, either while the volume was being printed or shortly thereafter. The third supposition seems somewhat less plausible than the others, mainly because the lack of a separate title page, with the consequent odd placement of the printer's imprint at the bottom of the first page of text, suggests that The Monks of St. Mark was not planned as a separately printed work.

In addition to the texts of four wholly or partially unpublished poems, the Berg MS provides substantive variants in the text, title, or epigraph of all but one of the twenty-four previously published pieces. For the eight

poems published with Palmyra, as well as for The Monks of St. Mark, most of the textual variants in the Berg MS are early readings that Peacock subsequently rejected, but in the case of "Levi Moses" the Berg MS has two or three dialect spellings that are likely to have been unintentionally normalized, either by Peacock himself or by the compositor of the Palmyra volume. The textual situation is very different for the fifteen posthumously published poems, only three of which have survived in any other holograph manuscript. For the remaining twelve—and especially for the ten that are otherwise available only in the carelessly copied Sadleir-Taylor MS—the Berg MS offers many textual improvements, both in substantives and in accidentals. In several cases the Sadleir-Taylor MS appears to have been copied from early versions, if not rough drafts. Its texts of the satirical verse letters "Sir Peter Bohea" and "The Alarmists" are often corrupt, and its text of "Paddy's Lamentation" normalizes most of the dialect of the comic Irishman. The superiority of the Berg MS is particularly evident in the consistent texture of its accidentals, including its underlining for emphasis and its characteristically heavy punctuation. Although it has its share of errors incidental to copying, most of these involve such minor matters as omission of underlining or quotation marks. The Berg MS should, then, provide the copy-text for at least sixteen of the poems in any future edition of Peacock's poetical works.

At least a few of the dozen variant titles throw some kind of new light on the poems in question, most notably the subtitle identifying "The Monks of St Mark" as "A Tale of Wonder." But perhaps the most interesting additions to the existing text are thirteen otherwise unrecorded epigraphs. Taken as a group, these new epigraphs not only reflect Peacock's literary taste but also suggest that the range of his early reading may have been more limited than has often been thought. Of the nine new Latin epigraphs, six are from the first book of Horace's Odes, while two more are from Virgil's Eclogues (the other one is an anonymous tag). The only Greek epigraph is from the Anacreontea, the two Italian ones are from Ariosto and Metastasio, and the only English one is from Pope. Since most of the poems in the Berg MS survive in other manuscript or printed versions, it is surely surprising that only two of its fifteen epigraphs appear elsewhere: the passage from Juvenal that introduces "Levi Moses" in the Palmyra volume and the line from Il Pastor Fido that identifies the source of the "Translation from the Italian of Guarini" in the 1875 edition of Peacock's Works. The Palmyra volume is, to be sure, somewhat more sparing than the Berg MS in its use of epigraphs, but the omission of all epigraphs from the Sadleir-Taylor MS suggests that the copyist simply ignored them—either because she did not consider them important or because she did not know Latin or Italian. Even if many of the new epigraphs are more decorative than functional, they clearly testify to the care with which Peacock prepared the Berg MS.

Since it would be impractical to reproduce the entire text of the Berg MS, I instead provide a poem-by-poem description of its contents, including a detailed collation of the previously published poems with the texts in Volumes 6 and 7 of the Halliford edition of Peacock's Works. The entry for each

poem contains the following details, to the extent that they are applicable and/or available. (1) The title, followed by the page(s) of the MS on which the poem appears. (2) The epigraph, if any, with a line reference and a translation. (3) The date which appears at the end of the poem. (4) Details of other manuscript or printed texts, including variants in title, epigraph, or date. (5) Reference to the text in the Halliford edition with which the manuscript has been collated. (6) Substantive variants, followed by separate lists of variants in capitalization, underlining or italics, hyphenation, elision, or spelling—but only the most significant variants in punctuation.[14] (7) The full text of the poem if it is wholly or substantially unpublished. (8) Miscellaneous notes on sources, analogues, influences, quotations, or other matters of literary interest. In the case of substantive variants, the reading of the Berg MS follows a lemma containing the reading of the Halliford edition. In the separate lists of non-verbal variants, all readings are those of the Berg MS. The only silent changes I have made in quoting Peacock's MSS have been to omit the dots under superscript letters, to omit the superfluous quotation marks at the beginning of each new line of a quotation, and to regularize the number of ellipsis points to three.