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The Publication of Landor's Early Works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In an era when many English writers were becoming identified with a single publisher, Walter Savage Landor distinguished himself by the singularity of dealing with perhaps more publishers than any other writer in English literature. Not taking into account the editors of periodicals, Landor's separate volumes (sometimes, to be sure, mere pamphlets) made their appearance from the houses of at least twenty-eight publishers in the seventy years of his productivity. The story of his relations with his publishers, then, will obviously not be a simple one, and yet it throws a great deal of light both on Landor himself and on the condition of his text.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948
References
1 Preft.ee, second edition of Gebir (1803), p. vi.
2 For his dates at Oxford, cf. R. H. Super, “An Unknown Child of Landor's”, MLN, liii (June, 1938), 416–7.
3 Poems of Walter Savage Landor (1795), p. i, note.
4 Large parts of the correspondence of Cadell & Davies have appeared from time to time in the hands of various booksellers, and have been bought by Dr. John Johnson, whose collection was published by Theodore Besterman, The Publishing Firm of Cadell & Davies, 1793–1836 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), but no Landor correspondence is in this collection.
6 MS in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, N. Y. Public Library; printed, like that of June 4, by kind permission of the Library. As usual, Landor had underestimated the size of his book, which came to 115 leaves octavo (230 pages). Hayley's volumes were probably his Poems and Plays, 6 vols. (1785), which were published by Cadell in a format identical with Landor's poems.
8 MS inserted in a copy of Landor's Pentameron, in the Petrarch Library willed to the Cornell University by Daniel Willard Fiske. The date of this letter, like the preceding, presents a problem, since the “February 10” of the publishers' endorsement was a Tuesday, and since the letter clearly is a sequel to the previous one. Only the cipher is legible in the postmarked date. The late Stephen Wheeler, by quoting only the sentence beginning “For my own part, …” gives a curiously false impression of the letter, and he is of course wrong to imply that Professor Fiske found the letter in Landor's villa at Fiesole, which Fiske at one time occupied (Wise, Landor Library, pp. xiii–xiv).
7 John Forster, Landor (1869), i, 53.
8 T. J. Wise and S. Wheeler are wrong when they say (Landor Bibliography, p. 2) that the published price was 5s.
9 Forster, i, 59. The lampoon on Clarke was cancelled by Landor in the copy of the volume he revised.
9 The letter, with the draft of the publishers' reply, is in the Library of the University of Chicago, and is printed with the kind permission of the Director.
10 Forster, i, 58.
11 S. Wheeler, ed., Landor's Poetical Works (Oxford, 1937), i, 482.
12 Critical Review, xix (April, 1797), 405.
13 E. H. Coleridge, ed., Coleridge's Poetical Works (Oxford, 1931), p. 89.
14 The publishers originally estimated that 1000 copies of the Poems would come to “very near if not quite 70-0s-0d”, and stated that Landor's account would be credited with 2s lOd for every copy sold. The thirty-six copies sold by July, 1795, would reduce his debt by 5.2s.0d., at that rate. Since in April, 1797, he owed 62, we may assume that no more than twenty additional copies were sold; if the original cost was less than 70, perhaps the total sale hardly exceeded the first thirty-six copies.
15 The date of composition of these three poems is uncertain. On the basis of Landor's own various statements all three can be put at 1794, but it is most unlikely that a man who had already written Gebir should have published in 1795 a collection of works so much less mature. Landor's story that he composed Gebir in Wales, then lost the manuscript for four years, cannot be accurate.
16 The MS was purchased from W. T. Spencer of London by the Princeton University Library in the summer of 1941, but was lost at sea through enemy action; there remains only the bookseller's transcript of the original.
16 MS in the Berg Collection, N. Y. Public Library. The postmark may be “[17]99.”
17 The name of Sharpe nowhere appears in the first edition of Gebir, but the paper and type are identical with those that bear Sharpe's imprint. A Warwick directory of 1830 names the firm of Henry Sharpe & Son as “printers, booksellers, stationers, and newspapers proprietors and publishers.”
18 From the cancelled leaves of Poetry by the Author of Gebir, p. 108 (Wheeler, ed., Landor's Poetical Works, I, 495).
19 Footnote to the Preface of the second edition of Gebir (Wheeler, i, 473).
20 Forster, I, 105.
21 The firm of Rivingtons was purchased in 1890 by Longmans, who inform me that they have none of the old firm's records.
22 From the cancelled “Postscript to Gebir” printed in 1800 (Wheeler, ed., Landor's Poetical Works, 1,482).
23 T. J. Wise, Landor Library, pp. 11-12 and facsimile. Wise asserts that the issue with the French Preface is the second issue, but Wheeler (Landor's Poetical Works, ii, 549) wisely expresses doubt. Surely this volume presents an exact parallel to what happened to the other volume printed in 1800.
24 Monthly Epitome, iv (June, 1800), 237, and Monthly Magazine, ix (June 1, 1800), 474.
25 The watermarks show that this volume (including the cancelled sheets of 1800) was printed from the same stock of paper (dated 1797) as part of Gebir. The paper of Poems from the Arabic and Persian is also watermarked “1797.”
28 On the next to the last page of those later cancelled is a note beginning, “This volume has pretty well escaped the errors of the press: but the author thinks it unfair to overlook some passages which may be less satisfactory to the reader. Tho' the copies have long been printed off, he determined that they should not be given to the public tillhe had solved that question in particular which relates to the second quotation from Montaigne.”
27 Forster, i, 140, 191 n.
28 It is listed in the Monthly Magzaine, xiv (October 1, 1802), p. 259. The price is given variously by the reviews as 2s and as 2s 6d.
29 Forster, i, 106. A small volume of Landor's Latin verse, Iambi, exists apparently in an unique copy which was owned by Wise and is described in his Landor Library (p. 9) as “privately printed at Oxford in 1800.” The volume bears no imprint, and I have not been able to examine it closely enough to add anything to his description of its history.
30 The numeration of the lines in the first edition was inaccurate, and led Wise and Wheeler (Landor Bibliography, p. 11) to assert erroneously that the first edition contained 1844 lines.
31 The copy of the first edition in which Landor inserted these revisions is in the Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. It contains a good many manuscript footnotes which were not printed in the second edition.
32 Cf. De Quincey's “Recollections of Charles Lamb” (1838) and “Notes on Walter Savage Landor” (1847).
33 “Sermone nostro incepi; Latino deinde partes aliquot tentavi. Rogabas, cum versus aliquot videras, haud paucos sanè numéro neque admodum rudes, ut Latine totum darem, legerentque qui Anglicè nesciunt. Dubitantem, cunctantem, haerentem, hortatus es, ex-citâsti, impulisti. Postridie ejus diei in quo Bonaparta Consul Perpétua nuncupatus est, a Parisiis in Trianonem Minorent secessi, et earn aedium partem per duos menses habitavi quam habitaverat infelix regina, cujus deambulans in hortis opusculum diu an tea inchoa-tum absolvi” (Poemata el Inscriptiones, p. 349). Landor refers, of course, to his visit to Paris in the summer of 1802.
34 “Opus igitur suscepi; eôque libentiùs cemplexus sum, quôd certior factus essem gallicâ mox lingua inquinandum iri; qua nihil aut in carmine rudius inficetiusve, quodve aures im-mitius lacesset, iisdem perpetuô cantilenae modis–aut in sermone, ad quem tutiùs con-fugiunt, tenuius, solutius, imbecilius; quâ usa, cum etiam Homerico sceptro innitetur, fracta atque elumbis miserè balbutit atque intercidit Poesis. Stipula, quâ tantô meliora interférant, hoc nostrum noluimus disperdi” (Gebirus, pp. v-vi).
35 Forster, 85. The reference is to Gebir, 1,170-7.
36 Wise, Lanior Library, pp. 16–17. Dovaston was a twenty-year-old undergraduate in 1803.
37 Wise, p. 17. I have seen no more of the letter than the few lines Wise prints. Wise is not quite correct in describing two distinct issues of the volume; the copy in the Harvard College Library has the title-page and errata of Wise's “second issue”, but the original, uncancelled reading on p. 78 that Wise makes a point of his “first issue.”
38 E. H. R. Tatham, “Some Unpublished Letters of W. S. Landor”, Fortnightly Review, xcm (Feb., 1910), 364, corrected from a copy of the MS by Mr. Malcolm Elwin.
39 Ibid.
40 Forster, i, 394–5. It is perhaps worth mentioning once in every article on Landor that Forster's use of letters is so inaccurate as to be frequently almost dishonest.
41 “Pauca libet subjicere. Si quid lucelli reportaverit domum librarius, id jussu meo dabit Lipsiensibus, immeritâ laborantibus paupertate. Atqui vix ausim sperare fore ut apud eum postulentur haec CC. exemplaria me vivente” (p. xxxii).
42 Forster, i, 407.
43 “Bis contigit mihi peregrinari cum typographo scripta mea Britannico committerentur. In illis nonnulla sunt menda, quae nova mox editione corrigam; in his, etsi neminem habui cui rogatiunculam facerem ut prelum curare vellet, pauciora erunt comperta, spero, et quibus lector facile ignoscat” (p. ix).
44 Forster, i, 415.
45 From a copy of the MS lent me by Mr. Malcolm Elwin.
46 Forster, i, 429.
47 Ibid., i, 435.
48 The two letters from Southey are in the Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
49 A very inaccurate statement in a letter Landor wrote to Lady Blessington on January 13, 1838, is not to be taken seriously: “Nearly forty years ago I gave my Latin poems to Munday and Slatters of Oxford to print an edition of them, stipulating that they should not even advertize them” (A. Morrison, The Blessington Papers, p. 129).
50 Cf. Forster, i, 416.
50a William Meyler, who established the Herald in 1792, died in 1821, but the firm continued.
51 Forster, i, 256 n. The copy of Simonidea which Landor presented to Southey is now in the Bodleian. There is no need to speculate here on the identity of the woman who selected the poems.
52 Robinson's initial is corrected to “G” in ink on the only extant copy.
63 Wise, Landor Library, p. 56.
64 Forster, i, 256 n.
55 Cf. Wise, Lander Library, p. 81.1 have received a transcript of the original letter in the British Museum through the kindness of Professor William Ringler of Princeton just in time to insert this summary in the proofs. I cannot find the required apology in the Classical Journal, which was, however, at this very time running a long and most favorable review of Landor's Idyllia Beroica.
56 Forster, i, 286.
67 Ibid., I, 290.
68 The MSS of all Southey's letters to Landor are in the Forster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
59 Forster, i, 299.
60 Ibid.,, 301–2.
61 Ibid., i, 303.
62 Ibid., i, 304. Whether Landor refers to the printer of the first edition of Gebir or of the second is not clear; probably the latter.
63 J. Murray, ed., Lord Byron's Correspondence (London, 1922), i, 146.
64 Elwin (Savage Landor, p. 132) asserts that an anonymous Appendix to Mr. Trotter's Memoirs of Mr. Fox was announced as an eight-penny pamphlet in Murray's list of forthcoming publications in December.
65 Gifford assailed Landor in Examination of the Strictures of the Critical Reviewers on the Translation of Juvenal (1803), pp. 7-8, and Landor returned the compliment in the Preface to the Latin poems in Simonidea, p. 71.
66 S. Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, i, 199-200.
67 Forster, i, 359.
68 Ibid., i, 363.
69 Ibid., i, 367–8. In consequence of his disappointment, Landor abandoned a parallel between Peterborough and Wellington which he had hoped to add to his Commentary.
70 Wise and Wheeler, Bibliography of Landor, pp. 36–7. Forster, i, 358 n., produces evidence that at least one other copy found its way into circulation.
71 Dobell's (Tunbridge Wells) Catalogue No. 17 (1936), item no. 560.
72 Bibliography of Landor, p. 42. The only copies of the Courier which I have seen for January 19 and April 21, 1814, did not contain letters of Calvus.