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"Pen, Ink, and Paper": The Significance of Literary Manuscripts
From: The British Library
| By:
Christopher Fletcher |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What is so important about the original manuscript of a literary work? Especially when the text is widely available in books or online. In a discussion of the manuscripts of three famous and quintessentially Romantic poems, Christopher Fletcher, curator of modern literary manuscripts at the British Library, suggests that these precious objects have much to teach us. Writing about John Keats's "Hyperion," William Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Fletcher explores some of these poems' modest secrets. |
 art of the significance of a manuscript, as opposed to, say, a popular paperback edition--or, indeed, electronic text--lies in what might be termed its iconic quality. This is perhaps particularly the case when considering the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, for whom the act of composition attained an almost sacred quality. A kind of radiant text, the literary manuscript might be seen to capture magically the mysterious moments of Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity," Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief" or the truth that, for Keats, may be discovered in whatever "the imagination seizes as beauty." |
The desire to acquire and preserve such unique testaments to creativity intensified in relation to the burgeoning reputations of their authors-- reputations that, in some cases, reached almost mythic proportions. Robert Southey, a friend of Coleridge's, whose connection with the "Kubla Khan" manuscript is clarified below, protested as early as 1831 that "I have entered into a society for the discouragement of autograph collectors; which society will not be dissolved till the legislature in its wisdom shall take measures for suppressing that troublesome and increasing sect." No such measures were, of course, taken, allowing the quest for relics to reach an apotheosis in the second half of the century--fueling, in turn, a healthy trade in forgeries. |
One of the great collectors of the period, T.J. Wise, had a shrewd eye for the bibliographical and scholarly import of manuscripts. Yet there is no doubt, looking through Wise's magnificent Ashley collection of manuscripts and rare books (acquired by the British Library after his death, in 1937), that there was another strong motivation at work. One particular item perhaps best illustrates the point. Wise commissioned his bookbinder to gather together in one lavish leather-bound volume various emotionally charged items. A letter from Mary Shelley describing her last months with her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, before his death by drowning off the Italian coast, is bound not only with locks of the couple's hair but with fragments of the poet's ashes, recovered from the famous cremation on the beach. The result is nothing short of a literary shrine, designed for the disciple rather than the scholar of literary Romanticism. |
Today, even the most world-weary curators or objective literary professors would admit to a feeling of reverence when handling the manuscripts of Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth or Shelley; certainly, their inherent value as cultural treasures of national importance is inarguable. Yet it is precisely through a clear-sighted scrutiny of these documents that we can test some of the myths that have come to be generally associated with the Romantic movement and, moreover, with the particular works of its leading exponents. |
Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
Few poems have created the same degree of debate as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," much of which centres on the circumstances of the poem's composition. For a century after the poet's death, the only clear authority for both the verse fragment and the story of its genesis was the published edition of 1816. In his celebrated preface, Coleridge provides a compelling autobiographical narrative: |
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in "Purchas's Pilgrimage": "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." |
The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that can indeed be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. |
On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away. |
In 1934 the only known autograph manuscript of the poem came to light. Sometimes referred to as the Crewe manuscript, it now forms a part of the British Library's collections, as Additional Manuscript 47890, f.189-189v. A full discussion of the manuscript, its provenance and its literary and biographical significance is given in Hilton Kelliher's article "The 'Kubla Khan' Manuscript and Its First Collector," in the Autumn 1994 British Library Journal. However, a few very general observations here will serve to illustrate the relevance of the manuscript to the initial question posed by this essay. |
At the end of his manuscript, Coleridge writes and signs the following note:This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797. |
In an article in the British Museum Quarterly of 1963-4, T.C. Skeat neatly draws attention to the differences between the published and the manuscript accounts of the poem's genesis. The manuscript, he points out, gives the date of composition as fall, rather than summer, of 1797; it fails to mention the author's poor health or his having retired to the farmhouse (which is more exactly located); it is much more matter-of-fact about the published "anodyne," which is opium, and the slight "indisposition," which is dysentery; there is no reference to "Purchas's Pilgrimage," and the profound sleep becomes a reverie; the length of the poem as originally conceived in the vision is only vaguely hinted at, rather than given as no less than "two to three hundred lines"; and, finally, the man from Porlock is omitted. |
The discrepancy may perhaps be attributed to mere abbreviation on the part of Coleridge. But there is an irresistible suspicion of embellishment on his part, which, whether by design or not, has certainly enhanced the Romantic conception of the poet's unique apprehension of imaginative forces far beyond the understanding of mere mortals--such as, for instance, the irritating man from Porlock. Far better, after all, that an increasingly well-regarded poet and critic be "indisposed" before composing a visionary masterpiece than afflicted by dysentery! |
The plot thickens when the text of the poem itself is considered. Despite the author's claim that "Kubla Khan" could hardly be considered in terms of conventional composition, given that "images rose up as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort," the text of the published poem differs in some 10 substantive respects from that set down in the manuscript. |
Having recorded his effortless and artless vision, his unsolicited gift of the unconscious imagination, "instantly and eagerly," why would the author then feel the need to revise it? Can one really improve upon a vision? And even if, in the absence of this particular manuscript (which, Kelliher has established, was in the possession of Robert Southey by 1804), Coleridge were trying to remember rather than improve his work; even if, in fact, he were transcribing an earlier, perhaps original, draft of the poem, the simple existence of two differing authorial versions surely dims the mystical glow long bestowed by the preface upon the poem. |
William Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
William Wordsworth's poem  in praise of daffodils is one of the best known in the English language. Its first-person account of the heroically isolated figure discovering in nature a sublimity that, in moments of "vacant" or "pensive" mood, "flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude," gives us the very definition of English Romanticism. Wordsworth first published the untitled poem in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) under the general heading "Moods of my own mind," reinforcing its central theme of lonely inspiration. |
It perhaps comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to discover that the only surviving manuscript of this poem is not in the poet's hand but in that of his wife, Mary. In 1953 the British Library acquired the printer's manuscript of Poems, in Two Volumes, consisting of packets sent to the publishers Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme between November 14, 1806, and early April 1807. |
As well as writing out the poem "Daffodils" (and making an intriguing false start), Mary copied out several others; a good many were transcribed (and retranscribed) by his sister, Dorothy, and a friend, Sara Hutchinson, while Coleridge added a single stanza and some numbering to another. Although the entire volume bears Wordsworth's revisions, annotations and instructions, just a few poems were copied out by him. |
It would be wrong to suggest--from this evidence alone, at least--that Wordsworth's poems owe not as much as one might imagine to the "bliss of solitude" or any flash upon the inward eye. All the poems were, in one way or another, no doubt copied out from original autograph drafts. What can be established, however, is that the Romantic vision of the poet working upon his texts in splendid isolation (where emotion can be "recollected in tranquility") may well stop some way short of the rather labour-intensive business of getting them into a shape good enough to print. |
Rather than looking at a manuscript to question the assumptions one might have been led to make about a text in its published form, the third and final example perhaps vindicates what at first sight might appear to be an unrealistically Romantic claim made by a poet on behalf of his craft. |
John Keats's "Hyperion"
In a letter of February 27, 1818, Keats famously declared, "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." The notion is strongly reminiscent of the extraordinary processes of poetic creation described in Coleridge's preface; poetic graft of the conventional workaday sort defers to those "things" that effortlessly rise up, in one obscure way or another, from the imagination. |
Toward the end of the year, while nursing his dying brother, Tom, Keats started "Hyperion," a poem describing war among the ancient gods. One glance at the manuscript is enough to establish that the lines certainly did not come with any degree of imaginative fluency. And, sure enough, fulfilling the terms of his own florid simile while securing a small victory for the sincerity of Romantic belief, Keats abandoned a poem he found too contrived. "I have given up Hyperion," he wrote on September 21, 1819, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it--Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations." |
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