University of Virginia Library

Cooper and His Copyists

Fortunately for Cooper editors, Cooper in one invaluable letter briefly
overcame his customary reluctance to discuss his processes of composition.
When responding on 12 April 1835 to a flattering request from the then
Princess Victoria for an autograph of his work, Cooper wrote to the intermediary
Aaron Vail (U.S. chargé d'affairs in London) that he chose to honor
the princess' request by

The work of several Cooper editors (see especially James P. Elliott, The
Prairie, and Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, The Red Rover) confirms the
broad lineaments of Cooper's description here of his habitual practice of writing,
proofing, and publishing in the 1830s and beyond. Two points concerning
his disclosures about his inscribing the text, collaborating with an amanuensis,
and overseeing the resulting corrected copy through the press, need to
be made more explicit.

First is the role of the amanuensis. Cooper indicated to Vail that he corrected
the fair copy before it passed "into the hands of the printers." But he
does not state that he made such corrections against the original manuscript
itself. Doubtless in the commerce of his family circle he easily could have responded
to queries from his copyists about passages they had difficulties with;
but without a zealous comparison of their version with his original, he would
not have caught plausible substitutions his copyists made, consciously or by
accident. Thus the amanuensis fair copy represents a close collaboration of
author and family members, but one that, in the absence of a careful comparison
with the original, began the process of introducing variants into those
final intentions Cooper had expressed when he completed the manuscript.

As was his practice, first with his nephew William and later with his wife
and daughter, while traveling in Europe (1826 to 1833), Cooper preferred to
have someone in his family circle make a fair copy for the press of his own
first draft. Cooper, as we shall see, had problems enough with the New York
printers who set the six novels (through Last of the Mohicans) which he published
before leaving for Europe and which established his early fame. But
at least with the New York printers and publishers, he had the benefit of
personal associations and frequent visits to the city. However, for the seven
new novels and Notions of the Americans written during the European sojourn,
he had to endure printing and publishing variously in Paris, Dresden,
Florence, and London.

Cooper doubtless decided that the necessity of entrusting to non-English-reading
printers the setting of his manuscripts made it prudent to oversee
the re-copying of the original by someone who could unpack his own dense
and crabbed writing into a script easier for compositors new to his hand to

set proof from. Early and late, Cooper's handwriting is difficult. Writing with
paternal advice to his son Paul on 9 November 1843, Cooper urged him to
"attend to your hand-writing. I am a living proof of the importance of such
an accomplishment" (L&J, 4.426). After Cooper began journeying in earnest
on the Continent, attendance in person at the printing shop became inconvenient
(though he continued insisting on reading and returning proofs);
providing a fair-copy manuscript to foreign printers became all the more
worth the extra labor.

Apparently anticipating the need for a confidential amanuensis while
abroad, Cooper had made arrangements for his brother William's son, William
Yeardly Cooper (1809-1831), to accompany the family in Europe.
William faithfully carried out the copyist duties for Prairie, Red Rover,
Water-Witch, and part of Bravo until his terminal illness and untimely death
on 1 October 1831, after which Cooper's wife Susan and daughter Susan assumed
the duties of copyists. Cooper subsequently tried unsuccessfully to
persuade his niece Elizabeth Caroline DeLancey to join the Coopers in Europe
to take on William's tasks (L&J, 2.159).

Only one chapter, a late one not in William's hand, survives of the
amanuensis copy of Bravo, but the CE scholarly texts of Prairie and Red
Rover (both 1827) and The Water-Witch (1830; in preparation) disclose William's
practices as collaborator with his uncle. James P. Elliott has studied
William's role in detail in his 1985 edition of Prairie, the Cooper title with
the most material, in more varied forms, available for critical editing. Eliott's
analysis substantiates Cooper's 1835 comments to Aaron Vail concerning his
practices of composition.

The extant witnesses for Prairie demonstrate that Cooper lightly revised
his manuscript, presumably before William's recopying. In his copying,
William made numerous small changes, doubtless both intentional and
from misreadings. William guessed at words he could not read (Cooper's
"deserted swale" becomes "detested swell" in William's version); he dropped
phrases and simplified or made parallel phrases and constructions; and he
often imposed his own grammar and pointing, altering his uncle's characteristic
rhetorical pacing.[3] Further, when he admitted defeat in reading an
authorial word or phrase, William left a blank—for which often as not, his
uncle, when revising William's copy, provided wording different from the
original manuscript. In short, while William's fair and large hand made the
labors of the Paris printers of the novel far easier than Cooper's would have,
he made many small changes in accidentals and substantives that found their
way into the first and subsequent editions.

Thomas and Marianne Philbrick, the editors of the CE text The Red
Rover, for which William's amanuensis copy survives, report very similar
findings about William's practices as copyist. They identify 740 substantive
variants introduced by the amanuensis, of which Cooper caught almost half

(360) and restored his holograph final intentions. But for 380 other readings,
William's version passed into the first edition and persisted until critical
editorial scrutiny caught such errors as William's "stopping," "resumed,"
"superiors," "rain," and "accompanied" for, respectively, the author's "stooping,"
"returned," "seniors," "vain," and "unaccompanied."[4] Only (as Cooper
rightly speculated to Vail) when the diligent CE editor became one of those
"who take the trouble to compare them" (the various witnesses) did we gain
"an insight into the secrets of authorship" in terms of Cooper's collaborations
with his amanuensis (L&J, 3.145).

The second point from Cooper's letter to Vail requiring comment is the
author's practice of not referring to the original manuscript when reading
proofs. Except under the most unusual circumstances, Cooper read and corrected
the printer's proofs set from his own manuscript or from the fair copy
(in the case of Bravo, printed by Richard Bentley in London). As is known
from those few cases where proofs survive (Prairie and Afloat and Ashore), he
corrected errors as he saw them, and made changes in areas always of concern
to him (for example, the proper registration of dialect.) But, as with the fair
copy, he did not correct the proofs against either his own or the amanuensis
copies. In accordance with Richard Bentley's interpretation of the legal obligations
for obtaining British copyrights, Cooper's manuscripts were sent to
Bentley, who kept them. Thus they were not available to Cooper when he
read the proofs set from them. Indeed, he made clear to Bentley that in setting
Bravo, "[i]t is not necessary to send back the copy [of "nearly all of the manuscript
of second volume"], as I scarcely ever refer to it . . ." (L&J, 2.93).

In summary, the first printed text of Bravo was subjected to two transcriptions
of the author's extant manuscript, the fair copy and the first proofs, both
of which Cooper read and revised—but not against his own final intentions
inscribed in his manuscript. The experience of the CE strongly confirms
Cooper's speculations—those CE editors who have "take[n] the trouble to
compare" extant manuscripts with the printed texts Cooper proofread have
indeed found that the latter "differ materially from the manuscript."