Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama
Later in the fifties Foxon increased his public profile through a further and more dramatic encounter with T. J. Wise. In a letter to The Times of 18 October 1956 he revealed that Wise had been sophisticating his own books with leaves stolen from copies in the British Museum Library. The extraordinary bibliographical authority Wise had assumed in the early years of the century had already been severely dented by John Carter and Graham Pollard in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (London, 1934), but Foxon's researches revealed a different order of villainy.[18]
Foxon's discovery came from his cataloguing the Ashley Library, and began with a typical small puzzle. Ben Jonson's The Case is Alter'd turned out to have four leaves at the end inlaid, with missing elements at the head and tail of each leaf restored in pen-and-ink facsimile. When Foxon checked the Museum's copies, one turned out to lack just those leaves, and to be cropped at head and tail. This set Foxon in search of stolen Museum leaves, first in the Ashley Library and then in the library Wise had helped assemble for John Henry Wrenn in Texas. After preliminary announcements in The Times and the TLS, the whole business was thoroughly examined in a short monograph, published as a supplement to the Bibliographical Society's publications in 1959. The results of the investigation were striking. In all, 206 leaves were stolen from the Museum's copies; 89 of them were found in Ashley copies and 60 in Wrenn copies; 15 more were suspected but the copies had not been examined. Of the 47 plays with missing leaves, 41 have had at least some of their leaves traced.
Foxon's account is remarkably free from censoriousness. Wise's behaviour is studied with the same dispassionate interest that Foxon might have granted the practices of an eighteenth-century printer, and, significantly, with the same sense of historical perspective. The second section of the essay describes the turn-of-the-century patterns of behaviour that made Wise's frauds comparatively easy. There was a general willingness among collectors to make up plays with loose leaves that they might have lying around. Wise makes no secret of it; Gosse and Aitken accepted the practice without question; Wrenn makes no objection. Wise, however, took the practice to new lengths by developing a regular habit of exchanging leaves in his own copies for those in copies he was selling to Wrenn. Of course this confused the bibliographical evidence, and Foxon gives two nice examples of Wise discarding bibliographically valuable leaves because of their inferior appearance:
The Ashley copy of Eastward Hoe, 1605, is the only recorded copy of the first issue of the first edition; yet because its title was cropped he exchanged it with that from the third edition . . . which he sold to Wrenn. Two copies of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, 1612, were intermingled; in the course of this Wise discarded an unrecorded cancelland, no doubt because it had been slit as a reminder to the binder'
(6).
The first section of the essay demonstrates that Wise had taken this practice further by stealing leaves from the copies in the Museum. It sketches the conditions under which Wise would have had access to the books, and the lack of supervision so distinguished a figure would have enjoyed. Wise probably took the books home at night, removed the leaves, and returned them in the morning. Foxon calculates that the financial gains Wise would have made by the thefts bore no relation to the risk of discovery and disgrace: `clearly there are irrational motives at work which are beyond the scope of this enquiry' (5).
The final section of the discussion turns to technical matters and the evidence for Wise's thefts. Wise made no attempt to match up watermarks or chain lines, and most of his made-up copies can be detected through absence of conjugacy. Evidence to identify a leaf with its source may come from a number of indicators: stab-holes (with a discussion of problems from refolding and binding); worm-holes and patterns of worm-holes; stains; and flaws (`foreign bodies', `ill-digested lumps', `wrinkles') which the binder presses into adjacent leaves. These forms of evidence then become the basis for the fascinating discussions that follow in the list of `Plays with Stolen Leaves'. Each entry gives the Greg reference number, the details of the missing leaves in the Museum copies, and the description of the Ashley and/or Wrenn copy. The information is presented economically, but the typical final line, `Conclusion:
The stolen leaf is in the Ashley copy', is thoroughly earned.
This study is another venture involving collaborators—Fannie E. Ratchford, Emeritus Curator of the Wrenn Library, who travelled with the Wrenn books from Texas, is thanked with eleven other individuals— but the skill lay in the initial identification of the theft, the recognition of what further needed doing to advance the enquiry, and the martialling of the evidence in a particularly accessible and attractive form. Foxon himself says,
The primary purpose of this study is to warn students of the early drama of specific made-up copies, and to reconstruct as far as possible their constituent parts. It should follow that other made-up copies will be found which will fill gaps in my reconstructions and bring to light stolen Museum leaves as yet untraced. But above all I hope that it may encourage bibliographers to cast a critical eye on the copies from which they are working so that they may not be led into error or waste of time by past sophistication.
Given the importance of the British Museum Library as a source for texts of early drama, the first of these aims is an important one, but Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama is also successful in giving readers a set of clear techniques for investigating sophisticated copies.
