‘I May Write My name’: A Collector’s Fog-Born Elf

ABSTRACT

In a personal essay about cultic misprision of a manuscript leaf holding on one side Keats’s Sonnet to Sleep, Susan Wolfson tells a story of collecting, auctioning, and sales, from its composition in June 1820, a May 1929 auction, to news published in 1933, to eventual arrival in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Various players include John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, wily bookseller William T. Spencer, the first and long-term curator of the Keats Memorial House in Hampstead, Fred Edgcumbe, and industrialist, diplomat, and bibliophile Owen D. Young. Although Wolfson is the principle author of this essay, it reflects considerable collaborative advice from Keats scholars John Barnard and Nicholas Roe.

KEYWORDS:

• John Keats
• Sonnet to Sleep
• John Hamilton Reynolds
• Sir John Bowring
• William T. Spencer
• Fred Edgcumbe
• Willard B. Pope

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Susan J. Wolfson, A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry with Commentaries (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2022).

² Jack Stillinger takes this latest text, the June 1820 holograph, as the authoritative version, regarding it as a quasi-publication when the leaf was joined to a lady’s commonplace book (such volumes were often presented, even displayed, for others to browse); The Poems of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1978), 646.

³ These colleagues are John Barnard (Keats editor and critic), Nick Roe (Keats historian and biographer), and then a few days later Julie Carlsen (Berg Collection archivist). In many rounds of conversation and generosities, all have been so attentive as to merit credit as research collaborators; any errors or missteps are mine.

⁴ 10 May 1817; John Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (London: Pearson/Longman, 2006), 50.

⁵ John Keats, ed. Wolfson, 285–6. See also Harvard Keats Collection, MsK. 2.2.29.1–2, seq. 6. The notoriously mysterious, aggressive, eight-line fragment was probably drafted towards the end of 1819 (Stillinger, Poems, p. 676), and was first published with the title Lines/supposed to have been addressed/to Fanny Brawne in H. Buxton’s Forman, Poetical Works of John Keats. 6th ed. London: Reeves and Turner, 1898, 417.

⁶ The first known draft, titled ‘To Sleep’, is in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 30 April 1819. John Keats Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University: Ms Keats 1.53, seq. 256–7.

⁷ The information about the sale at Puttick & Simpson comes from Willard B. Pope’s PhD dissertation (Harvard University, June 1932), Studies in the Keats Circle (biographies of B.R. Haydon and J.H. Reynolds), 648–9. Nick Roe told me about this. The Bank of England inflation calculator equates £2800 to about £227,600/$US 277,000 in 2023 purchasing power.

⁸ The preview was mentioned in various newspapers, 10 May 1929.

⁹ To clarify the two auction-house remarks on p. 22 (Figure 3): (See illustration on opposite page.) refers to an unnumbered inset opposite page, a facsimile of ‘Yes! I shall live’ with a signature-initial (Figure 4); ‘On the reverse side a Holograph Verse, signed and dated’ refers to the side of the leaf that holds Keats’s holograph ‘Sonnet to Sleep’, with his signature and the date, transcribed on p. 22. My thanks to John Bernard for examining the catalogue with me.

¹⁰ Bowring (1792–1872) may have met Keats, but nothing in Hyder Edward Rollins’s The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) or in the big biographies, or in Rollins’s edition, The Keats Circle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), indicates even an acquaintance, let alone a friendship. Just a few years Keats’s senior, Bowring did circulate in some of the same orbits. He knew Leigh Hunt well, and visited him at Horsemonger Lane Jail 1813–15. He later contributed to London Magazine, edited by the publisher of Keats’s 1820 Lamia volume, John Taylor (Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections [London: Henry S. King, 1877], 60–1). Bowring’s son John Charles Bowring (born 24 March 1821, just after Keats died) is the father of the latest owner of the Album Amicorum, Major John Frederick Edward Bowring. Born 9 August 1867, he served in the Great War in the Labour Corps (Army Medal Office, Medal Index Card ID 443,735, Reference WO372/3), and died 25 April 1940.

¹¹ Nick Roe kindly shared this page with me.

¹² Edgcumbe, who was involved with the Keats House until 1950, is well known for his edition of Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats, 1820–1824 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), with a preface by M. B. Forman (son of H. B. Forman), Edgcumbe’s notes and short biographies.

¹³ Written on 21 January 1818, titled On seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair/Ode in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, 23 January; Harvard Keats Collection, MsK 1.20, seq. 71.

¹⁴ The letter would serve as credit for Keats’s authorship; it seems to have escorted the leaf thereafter because it is now in the Berg Collection’s ‘Sonnet to Sleep’ file.

¹⁵ For the dissertation, see note 7. Pope, who died in 1985, is best known for his five-volume edition of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s diaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–3) and for Invisible Friends: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842–1845 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

¹⁶ Clayton E. Hudnall surmises that Pope was researching at the Keats Memorial House in 1931; ‘John Hamilton Reynolds, James Rice, and Benjamin Bailey in the Leigh Browne-Lockyer Collection’ [at the Memorial House], Keats-Shelley Journal 19 (1970), 11–39 (p. 11). The Berg Collection file on the June 1820 holograph ‘Sonnet to Sleep’, in addition to holding Edgcumbe’s curious letter and two newspaper reports of the 1929 sale, has a cross-reference to another file holding Pope’s letter to TLS and a correspondence with the Berg archive on the matter, March 1961. When I asked about the Berg’s acquisition, Assistant Curator Julie Carlsen replied (email 6 April 2023), was ‘part of the Owen D. Young collection (one of the Berg’s founding collections, acquired I believe in 1941), and my predecessor’s catalog record described the “Yes! I shall live” verses as in Reynolds’ hand’. The Young trove was acquired May 8, 1941; among its 15,000 books and manuscripts was Keats’s last letter to Fanny Brawne, from the same summer as the leaf, August 1820. (https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/berg-collection-english-and-american-literature).

¹⁷ A. S. W. Rosenbach, Books and Bidders: The Adventures of a Bibliophile (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), 39. A dealer in rare books, Rosenbach was at heart a bibliophile and avid collector. ‘In London, where he frequently attended auctions at Sotheby’s, he was known as “The Terror of the Auction Room” … . Whenever he valued a book highly for its rarity or beauty’ [as, clearly, he did Keats’s], ‘he placed it in his private library, and such books were never offered for sale’ (C. S. B., ‘Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach’, Obituaries, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, October 1952, pp. 113–17; quotation at p. 115).

¹⁸ A.L.S. to John Keats, London, 14 October 1818. MS Keats 4.14.1. Houghton Library, Harvard University. https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl.hough:10525907.

¹⁹ Email, 24 April 2023, [email protected].

²⁰ For this consideration, the report cites Stillinger’s Poems (1978): ‘Another holograph, possibly Keats’s original draft, was extant as late as 13 June 1876, when it was sold at Sotheby’s to Charles Law, but has since disappeared; Law lent it just after he acquired it to H. B. Forman, who reported its readings in various editions beginning in 1883’ (584). See https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6089274, which displays Reynold’s manuscript, signed ‘J Keats’. When this lost draft emerged in the late 1980s, careful comparisons to Reynolds’s hand and to Keats’s determined it, signature notwithstanding, to be Reynolds’s.

²¹ ‘Common place book of Richard Woodhouse: transcripts of unpublished poems’ (Harvard Keats Collection, Ms Keats 3.2. seq. 282), cited by Stillinger, Poems, 647.

²² The Bowring family may have had more volumes than the two auctioned in May 1929. One, with ‘a number of leaves neatly excised and lacking’, came up for auction at Christie’s, 1 December 2015, with a different set of signatures and entries (over 100) from 1813–19, and likely not limited (given the contributors) to original poetry. It sold for £2000 (https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-5949413). Thomas Venning of Christie’s tells me that ‘it was consigned to us by a collector who had recently bought it from a dealer in continental Europe … . It was in poor condition, and mutilated through the extraction of several pages which presumably contained the most interesting autographs – a bit of a sad relic’ (email 24 April 2023). The size of the Album Amicorum volumes sold in 1929 is not given beyond ‘obl. 8vo’. The pages of the Album that Christie’s auctioned are sideways oblongs, 7.5'' x 4.25''. The Keats|Reynolds leaf, 6'' x 8¹/8'', folded downward to make the crease that the 1929 auction facsimile shows (Figure 4) would yield a 6'' x 4'' folio, which could have been inserted between a similar-sized octavo album’s bound pages.

²³ Not only Woodhouse but also Keats’s friends Charles Brown and Charles Dilke made copies (Stillinger, Poems, p. 646).

²⁴ Pope’s transcription in TLS of the early version of Reynolds’s quatrains draws on Studies, 648. On both occasions, he describes what Woodhouse calls an ‘Album’ as a ‘commonplace book’ belonging to Maria Pearse. Part of the Devon/Sidmouth society in which Reynolds circulated (Studies, 648, fn 1), she was a cousin of the three Leigh sisters, with whom Reynolds, James Rice, and Benjamin Bailey (London lads, all friends of Keats) were flirty on various holidays (see also TLS, p. 31). Sir John Bowring, born in Exeter, was part of this Devon world in his young years.

Some distinctions: a ‘lady’s album’, an ‘Album Amicorum’, and a commonplace book are different, but sometimes overlapping, productions. Although all start out as a bound book of blank pages, albums are for collecting inscriptions, like an autograph book, by friends and others desired, sometimes aggressively solicited; the inscriptions might be poems or some sentences of prose in addition to signatures. Album Amicorum, a genre that developed in Reformation England mostly among male university students, was for registering friendships by inscription (often in each other’s books), a sort of forerunner of the yearbook; the genre in English is called a ‘friendship book’. As Bowring’s solicitation of the Lambs’ inscription may suggest, such an album is also for recording acquaintance on the spot.

Alongside this male genre, a ‘Lady’s album’ split off into a feminized genre, fed by stationers’ marketing of ornate books (bound, stamped, with hot-pressed pages) for collecting ‘original poetry’ and displaying this for others to enjoy, admire, envy. It was in this way, a coterie publication. Byron imitated this form in 1812, in ‘Poems’ at the back of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt. The first of these is ‘Written in an Album’, dated ‘September 14th, 1809’ (London: John Murray, 1812; 205–6), for a lady (a platonic inamorata). The sensational popularity of the main work brought this provocative little farewell address into wide notice, beyond any mere domestic album displaying – in fact, this publication was Byron and Murray’s doing, not the lady’s.

A commonplace book, a formation from classical times, is for copying out miscellany, for an accumulating personal anthology and a source for quotation. Items could range from maxims and mottos, aphorisms and adages, proverbs and passages, poems, prayers, even recipes, sometimes with an owner’s comments (e.g., Woodhouse’s Keats, n. 21, above).

²⁵ The identity of the lady (not Maria Pearse) for whom this album-gift was ‘intended’ (and being assembled) in 1820 is not known (known to gallant Reynolds, of course). The version of the lines that he gave Maria Pearse some years earlier has a title, ‘Lines written in a lady’s album’, which Reynolds deleted in the later version, also putting a dash (—) in place of the word ‘Lady’ (line 3). I haven’t been unable to discover how the ‘lady’s album’ from 1820 became part of, or supplied material to, Sir John Bowring’s Album Amicorum. Perhaps she was one of his sisters. This could explain the generational transmission to Bowring’s grandson.

²⁶ London antiquarian bookseller Richard Ford cites Out of Print & Into Profit: A History of the Rare Book Trade in Britain in the 20^th Century, ed. Giles Mandelbrote (London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2006); http://www.richardfordmanuscripts.co.uk/catalogue/14686. Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly’s chapter therein, ‘Booksellers’ Memoirs: The Truth about the Trade?’ (281–308), gives information about Spencer (285–7).

²⁷ Walter T. Spencer, Forty Years in My Bookshop, ed. Thomas Moult (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 181–2. Endymion was the book Shelley had in hand when he wrote Keats a gently critical letter, summer 1820, about the over-jewelled poetry. For my essay on these remarks, see On he Flared (Rome: Keats-Shelley House, 2021), 36–8.

²⁸ Spencer spent £58,000 at auctions in 1929 alone (Daily News, 2 December 1930), perhaps taking advantage of rapid deaccession after the crash. ‘The rare book market … had suffered a prolonged depression through the 1930s’, reports William T. Reese; ‘there were many books and few buyers. The war further retarded the market in the United States and Britain, while its upheavals literally turned Europe upside down and shook it. Not since the catastrophes of the Napoleonic Wars were so many great fortunes brought low, so many ancient libraries overturned. The result was a vast outpouring of material from private and institutional hands into the marketplace’. Young may have acquired the Keats/Reynolds leaf in this decade at a low price. In the U.S. during 1930s and early 1940s, ‘the marginal tax rate stood at 90%’, and with ‘the enormous capital appreciation many collectors of this era had in their collections, and the tax bracket major donors found themselves in, the gift of a collection had immense tax advantages’ (‘The Rare book Market Today’, Yale University Library Gazette 74.3–4 [April 2000]); also at www.williamreesecompany.com/pages/articles/4/the-rare-book-market-today-by-william-s-reese. Likely for such tax advantage as well as in a spirit of philanthropy (often akin), Young agreed to sell his archive to the New York Public Library at ‘half the collection’s value’ (insured value, or market value?); https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/berg-collection-english-and-american-literature.

²⁹ Writing to Willard Pope 21 February 1961, Berg curator, Dr. John D. Gordon, reports that ‘Spencer presumably sold the manuscript to Owen D. Young’ (Berg Collection archives, correspondence, 1950–1959 [misfiled]; my thanks for Tal Nadan, Reference Archivist, The Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library, for perseverance on this question). Gordon’s presumably suggests to me that Young had the manuscript certainly before October 1933, and kept it until he donated his trove to New York Public Library, co-founding the Berg Collection in 1941. Even so archived, the chief post-Forman editors, H. W. Garrod (John Keats Poetical Works; London: Oxford University Press, 1956) and Miriam Allott (The Poems of John Keats; London: Longman, 1970), did not consult it, let alone cite it as a reference (Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems, 236). Stillinger not only did, but made it his base text (see note 2 above), because ‘album-copying constitutes publication of a sort’ (237), in this case, a first publication, under Keats’s supervision.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan J. Wolfson

Susan J. Wolfson, Professor of English, Princeton University, has published broadly on Romantic period authors, texts, issues. Her latest: On Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: The First of a New Genus (Columbia University Press, 2023). Recent publications on Keats include A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats, with Commentaries (Harvard University Press, 2022); On he flared (four essays and poem on Keats’s letters; Keats-Shelley House, 2021); ‘Keats the Reader’, in Keats’s Reading; Reading Keats: Essays in Memory of Jack Stillinger (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), ‘An Outlier and an Outcast: Keats’s Last Lifetime Volume, with Fancy, without Indolence’, European Romantic Review 2022); and with Brian Rejack ‘“Murder’d Man”: Re-examining Keats in The Examiner’ (Keats-Shelley Review, 2021).