1

In his 1922 Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, Michael Sadleir could still cheerfully count himself among the “hystericals” of first-edition collecting, which he considered “a diversion of recent growth.” He offered the Excursions as the gleanings of an “enthusiasm”: “For my part to love an author is to collect him.” This objective was to be relished only in the form of first editions in their original condition: “Of the absurdity of this I am cheerfully aware” (advertisement 2, 3, 6).Footnote ⁷ With the publication of Carter and Pollard's Enquiry in 1934, what had been a cheerful “absurdity” for Sadleir darkened into an ominous sentimental element in Victorian collecting. The mark of sentimentality was, according to Carter and Pollard, the collapse of a critical space between collectors and their near-contemporary subjects. Lacking Sadleir's self-irony, the late Victorian was caught up in hero worship spurred by a marketing change in the rare book market of the final third of the century: “B. M. Pickering was advertising first editions of the Romantic poets and even Tennyson, as early as 1870, and Blake was beginning to be collected. As the distance in time between collectors and the objects of their enthusiasm lessened, their interest took on a more personal colour, and the sentimental element became gradually stronger. Collectors were interested in the lives and habits of their favourite authors; they paid more attention to minor productions; they visualised the arrival of the first copies on the author's breakfast table – a powerful influence in the creation of a taste for ‘original condition’” (100–01).

A decade after the Enquiry – in Sadleir's 1945 “Development” and Carter's 1948 Taste and Technique – the late Victorian preoccupation with original condition was acknowledged as a foundation for analytic bibliography of the nineteenth-century book, but the narrative of the Victorian collector as a passive dupe of fashion remained in place. Distinguishing mere “fashions” from “taste” in collecting, Carter defined the former (somewhat circularly) as “excrescences of a movement of taste” that produce exaggerations in the market, such as the “pamphlet-mania in the closing years of the [last] century” (Books and Book-Collectors 120). The first-edition fashion was driven by the public besottedness with literary celebrity: “There was already a keen school of collectors of Dickens and Thackeray. . . . Ruskin Societies were springing up all over England, and Browning Societies too. . . . Wordsworth and Shelley Societies were founded in London. And this close, enthusiastic study of contemporary . . . authors' lives and works engendered an atmosphere in which anyone prone to book-collecting or already a collector of something else passed very easily from study of the author to the search for his original editions” (Taste and Technique 22).Footnote ⁸ Sentimentality consisted, according to this account, in an embodiment of the author in the collected book, the collector's possession of the “original edition.”

It is true that, in publications of the 1890s on collecting, one can trace the enthusiasm in terms of a growing sense of embodiment. In 1891, in Round and About the Book-Stalls, the popular writer on collecting J. H. Slater advised collectors to seek only “early” editions by living and recent authors, a first edition being “always of more value than the ones which follow, because in the vast majority of cases it has been revised [directly] by the author” (116). By 1905, Slater had enhanced this advice by dramatizing the “sentimental interest” that comes from the “personal connection” with the author: “It may be assumed that the author has in the vast majority of cases seen and handled the book for which he was himself responsible; the very copy we hold in our hand may have belonged to him” (How to Collect Books 182). The sentimental interest is an imagined presence, inseparable from the real heft of the bound publication held in one's hands.

Despite such instances of increasingly naive sentimentality in Carter's sense, scholars have shown that embodiment as an aspect of aesthetic response developed in sophistication over the second half of the century. In the 1840s, as Judith Stoddart has shown, embodied expressions of sentiment, as compared with an earlier notion of “moral sentiment” located in the mind and heart, emerged in the physical response of the public to the British art world. The swelling crowds attending exhibitions and museums were “temporal, shifting, diverse” in how they physically oriented themselves to artworks. To artists and officials of the mid-Victorian art world, the peripatetic viewer threatened to derange “the traditional claims of art's special social status” over the viewer. Accordingly, Stoddart shows, artists responded to these changing conditions by treating the public's embodied responses as an opportunity (74). If viewers marked their identification with an artwork by getting literally too close, the artist could manage the viewer's physical proximity. Artists as different as Richard Redgrave and J. M. W. Turner devised strategies for reinstating the artwork's mastery over the viewing subject – “not, as in earlier theories of art, through [art’s] elevating effect,” but through visual means of manipulating sentimental engagement (95).

In Stoddart's account of the 1840s, sentiment is expressed by the public through its own bodies, but museumgoers remain passive, easily manipulated by artists' strategies, just as, according to Carter, the late Victorian book collector was duped by rare book speculators. In fact, late century gallery walkers, such as Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson, were more self-conscious about their bodies as registers of sentiment. Influenced by recent explanations of the physiological basis of emotion, Lee encouraged Anstruther-Thomson to record her subtle somatic responses to aesthetic stimulus. In Lee's subsequent aesthetic theorizing, as Carolyn Burdett shows, the body is not just a corporeal system of emotional aesthetic response, but a partner with the artwork in a complex “empathetic” realization of a beautiful object. The process of aesthetic enjoyment calls on our motor responses and accompanying emotions, “which we project back into the [aesthetic] form and attribute to it”: “What art does with us is indistinguishable from what we do with art: the movement is in both directions” (“Empathy” 270). While Lee was anxious to distinguish embodied aesthetic response from sentimentality, her theory was in keeping with the development of more complex expressions of sentiment that were, I believe, shared by book collectors toward the end of the century. Sentiment was understood as consisting simultaneously in embodiment, moral judgment, and a felt emanation of sensibility. Usages of sentiment, as Marie Banfield has traced the term through the late Victorian lexicon, indicate a concept increasingly distinct from sentimentality, the latter “coined early in the nineteenth century to suggest falseness of emotion or shallowness of judgment.” Sentiment, rather, originated in eighteenth-century moral philosophy to signify a “predominantly rational or intellectual concept, involving mental states and moral judgments,” and by the end of the nineteenth century the term had also been evolved by psychology into a concept “increasingly imbued with feeling, sensation or emotion that is linked to sensibility” but still anchored in judgment (4).Footnote ⁹

Just so, while Slater may have increasingly dramatized the sentimental interest of first editions in terms of a vividly embodied response to the presence of the author, he also justified the sentimental as a sentiment in the late century sense of a physically felt yet intellectual and moral response. The sentiment for the physical book, he notes in an 1898 manual, was a new phenomenon: “Of a truth, books have only recently come to be regarded as possessing a sentimental value altogether distinct from considerations of utility” (Romance of Book-Collecting 95). In Early Editions: A Bibliographical Survey of the Works of Some Popular Modern Authors (1894), which Carter and Pollard regarded as the “primer” of the new collecting (103), Slater estimated that “the search for early editions of popular modern authors . . . [had] been carried on . . . for at least a quarter of a century” and that in that time the sentiment had grown. While the pursuit may have arisen incidentally, prompted by collectors seeking early state impressions of engravings, especially in Dickens's novels, the new and more ineffable “book-man's fancy” has been “amplified” into a complex, elusive “sentiment” for the first edition in particular. An “unusual interest” attaches to early editions, Slater says, as they were likely to have been neglected or destroyed before the author's fame could bestow value on them: “[T]he fact that many people want the few copies that have escaped the wrack of neglect, makes them objects of unusual interest. The inevitable reprint comes at last, but it is not the same; sentiment still hangs around the shabby volume of years ago, with all its errors” (vi–vii). The interest is, not solely aesthetic or nostalgic, but also intellectual and moral since, he argues, first editions supply the possibility of tracing “the working of the author's mind by a comparison of the wording of one edition with that of another” and of understanding “why [the author] made the alterations,” of “enter[ing] into his thoughts, and perhaps . . . appreciat[ing] his feelings” (How to Collect Books 182). Slater thus gathers together the strands of complex sentiment: always an embodied response both to the “shabby volume” itself and to the collector's possession of the object, the sentiment is also internalized. Sentiment for the book is a matter of feeling, in the tenderness and nostalgia for the shabby original; it is an ethical regard for the book, in the appreciation of authenticity; and it is an intellectual interest, in comparing the author's original thoughts or the printer's errors to subsequent revisions, and in recapturing the author's feelings in making those revisions and corrections, following “the author through the maze of his thoughts and the development of his genius” (Early Editions v).Footnote ¹⁰

Although collectors had sought first editions by modern authors since the 1870s, a controversy broke out over the “first edition mania” in the 1890s, with opposition stirred by William Roberts, the editor of Bookworm: An Illustrated Treasury of Old-Time Literature. Roberts took his case against the new collecting to the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century, journals featuring more variety and catholicity of purpose than his own. He argued that steeply rising dealers' prices and auction competition for first editions were not justified by the books' value. For him, compared to the “monument[s] of typographical skill and artistic beauty” achieved by older books, the “dingy wrappers” and “eyesores” of modern first editions presented a melancholy prospect (“First Edition Mania” 347, 351; “Rare Books” 963). Roberts's views raised dissension of various sorts, perhaps most aggressively from Wise in the Bookman, who harbored a personal stake in combating Roberts's sneer at “too zealous persons who feed their own vanity . . . by ‘resurrecting’ from a well-merited obscurity some worthless tract or obsolete and ephemeral magazine article, and trumpeting it about as a masterpiece” (Roberts, “First Edition Mania” 349; see also Wise, “First Edition Mania” and “Early Editions”).

Despite this controversy, the perception of a new, complex and embodied sentiment for early editions cut across these lines. Roberts begins “Rare Books and Their Prices,” an article for the Nineteenth Century, by testifying to the “material existence” that “render[s]” a book as “an object of importance in the eyes of the collector”; although “its soul is dead” from obsolescence, the book's “body remains” vital for the collector (952). When he expanded this article into a book, he remained opposed to the “cult” of first editions, but he admitted to the “charm [that] is so much a matter of feeling” in the “attraction of a first edition.” Even putting aside the features of a preserved first edition that, to a bibliographer, are “much more than sentimental” (e.g., the survival of papers, typefaces, and bindings that have fallen into disuse), its appeal “falls into the category of things which are not explainable” to “the utilitarian.” The shabby volume is “esteemed as bringing our sons or grandsons nearer than any amount of written description to our own ‘old’ times.” The pleasure is “spiritual” and the “experience . . . a thing of feeling and not of argument” (Rare Books 27–29). A writer for the Cornhill Magazine agreed: “Who . . . can flout the sentiment” for a first edition, whether of the Shakespeare First Folio or of “the works of modern authors in their original dress?” ([Ellington], “Famous First Editions” 265, 269).

The latitudinarian sentiment for firsts appears to have divided decisively along party lines in the related ambition, likewise perceived as unprecedented, to amass each and every item that a modern author had published, in its original condition. As early as 1876, the Athenaeum derided the “strange mania . . . of late years for collecting every scrap ever written by writers of eminence” (“Literary Gossip”); and, in 1894, Roberts exclaimed: “The person who confines his attention to first editions is . . . not so extreme a case as the man who collects every edition of certain [modern] authors” (“First Edition Mania” 351). Comprehensive collecting of modern firsts was definitely a trend. In the chapter of The Book-Hunter in London (1895) entitled “Some Modern Collectors,” Roberts identifies numerous collectors – including T. J. Wise, Walter Slater, and Clement Shorter – as aspiring to possess “practically everything written” by the modern authors who interested them (316–18). For such collectors, Ruskin presented a particularly inviting challenge, his complex bibliographic history luring many late century collectors to stake their reputations on the comprehensiveness of their holdings. In Glasgow, for example, where a number of collectors aspired to acquiring Ruskin firsts and rarities, Bernard MacGeorge's collection was admiringly described in terms of its scope: “probably as large as any in existence, numbering altogether over two hundred volumes and pamphlets,” including “[n]early everything that Mr. Ruskin has written . . ., not only in the original editions but in subsequent ones” (Mason 293–94).Footnote ¹¹ On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Goodspeed built a thorough Ruskin collection after abandoning his regrettable false start of rebinding his holdings in uniform blue morocco, “the primary rule [being] that pamphlet issues of all kinds, if intended for sale to collectors, must be preserved in their original form.” Goodspeed went on to sustain the market stateside for Ruskin first editions, which he claimed to have “bought more of . . . abroad than any other American dealer, building up [his] own collection while replenishing the stock on the shop shelves” of his well-known Boston bookshop (261–62).

The ambition to be comprehensive in collecting modern authors proved divisive because traditionalists like Roberts refused to extend the sentiment for the physical book, which was widely shared, to “minor” publications. “Where a collector desires to have a complete series of the works written by the author,” Roberts inveighed, a handful of items takes on a disproportionate value merely because “they are exceedingly rare, and . . . that is about as much as can be urged in their favour.” In the case of Ruskin, for example, the value of first editions of the major works had actually declined in the market. However:

For Roberts, comprehensive collecting led to distortion of value, both literary and monetary, and the mounting inflation of prices for such ephemera in the mid-1890s caused him finally to denounce the “trafficking” in “the first edition craze” as “nothing more or less than bare-faced gambling” (“First Edition Mania” 354).

While Roberts and Wise sparred over whether minor pamphlets by modern authors represented worthless ephemera or “now frequently unobtainable” and therefore prized examples of a distinctive feature of nineteenth-century publishing history (Wise, “Early Editions” 48), a third kind of voice emerged in W. F. Prideaux. Writing as a self-described “complete [i.e., comprehensive] bibliographer” as opposed to a “collector,” Prideaux declared himself indifferent to “the prices at which scarce books in favour with collectors have found a market in these latter days.” He could agree with all parties respecting the charm of the first edition; for him, the “ideal library” was “one in which not a single volume has been touched by the binder's tool, but left modest, unadorned, and intactum in its virginal boards or wrapper.” But he departed from both sides by effectively flattening questions both of literary merit and of the collector's allure of rarity. What mattered was a book's “bibliographical importance,” which for “one book by any particular author is as great as the bibliographical importance of any other book by the same writer.” For, to “those who wish to trace [an author’s] literary life through his works,” the embodiment of that life in the material book means that “[e]ach book marks a stage in the growth or decadence of the writer's art.” For the “complete bibliographer,” value judgments, whether focused on intrinsic literary value or market value, pose a distraction from a dispassionate examination of an author's development, as reflected in the material record of a modern author's complete corpus (401, 403, 401).Footnote ¹²

Thus, while Carter and Pollard's narrative overwrites the complexity and self-conscious newness of the fin-de-siècle embodied sentiment for books, it also neglects how divisiveness formed specifically around the goal of comprehensiveness in collecting. Both the sentiment for the book and the aim of comprehensively collecting a chosen modern author would seem aspects of the same phenomenon, but it was the latter that produced the greatest intensity of controversy. A special irritant lay in collectors' newfound interest in nineteenth-century authors' published juvenilia. Attention to such items was logical given the aims of the comprehensive collector and of the complete bibliographer, but the resulting effect on the market was unprecedented: “competition for the possession of two or three of [Tennyson’s] earliest works is as keen as the demand for his later issues is flacid,” the Bookworm reported in 1893, when an auction realized £30 for Alfred and Charles Tennyson's Poems by Two Brothers (1827), as compared with previous typical prices of £2 (“First Editions of Tennyson”). In journalists' reports on enviable fin-de-siècle collections, certain juvenilia are repeatedly singled out as holding a special cachet. Besides Poems by Two Brothers, the prizes included Poems (1850) by “J.R.,” John James Ruskin's anthology of his son's juvenile poems, and The Battle of Marathon (1820) by Elizabeth Barrett, an early book privately printed by Barrett's father. Manuscript juvenilia likewise excited collectors when their existence was revealed by biographical and autobiographical accounts of writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Ruskin's Praeterita (1885–89). A description of MacGeorge's Ruskin collection highlights among its prized juvenilia not only the 1850 Poems but also “[o]ne great folio contain[ing] a large number of original pencil drawings signed and dated, done by Ruskin in his youth” (Mason 293). Printings of juvenilia drawing on privately held manuscript collections appeared regularly in the 1890s: Clement K. Shorter's Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (1896), which summarized the Brontë siblings' juvenile booklets, and George Allen's publications of the early Ruskin, such as the Poems (1891), The Poetry of Architecture (1893), Three Letters and an Essay . . . Found in His Tutor's Desk (1893), and Letters Addressed to a College Friend (1894).Footnote ¹³ Typically, these editions appeared in both a plain octavo for the ordinary reader and a limited-edition quarto for the collector – the latter produced using fine paper and binding and heavy with extra illustration that capitalized on advances in reproduction technologies such as photogravure.

All this activity surrounding nineteenth-century authors' juvenilia – bibliographic description, editing, reprinting, and collecting – heated the debate over first-edition collecting. Roberts singled out the prices for Poems by Two Brothers as “an illustration of the idiotic extremes to which collectors go,” and he sputtered over £90 paid for Thackeray's Flore et Zephyr: Ballet Mythologique (1836), a publication that “would be an imposition at sixpence” given its “intrinsic or other merit,” despite the work having been illustrated by the author (“First Edition Mania” 350, 348). Intemperate remarks were fueled by the perceived negligible literary value of juvenilia. Slater cautiously hedged his description of Elizabeth Barrett's Battle of Marathon, which, “like most other early productions of authors who subsequently become famous, is valued not so much on account of its intrinsic merit as for the circumstances attending its production, the personality of the writer, and its excessive rarity” (Early Editions 40–41). In 1889, when Wise and Smart sent a prospectus for their Ruskin bibliography to Ruskin and his circle at Brantwood, the sample entries focused on juvenilia – the 1850 Poems along with one of Wise's earliest forgeries, the alleged 1868 pamphlet reprint of the juvenile tale Leoni. Through his cousin, Joan Severn, Ruskin replied with polite dismissal of such “trouble over a lot of worthless stuff!” (Dearden, “Wise and Ruskin I” 48). A decade earlier, Ruskin had responded in a similar vein to R. H. Shepherd's bibliography, which was likewise sedulous in seeking out little-known early editions.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, in auctions between 1888 and 1920, in spite of Roberts's indignation over the inflated “commercial value” of these “little pamphlets” by Ruskin, Leoni outsold other Wise forgeries by four to one in terms of frequency in sales and at substantial prices.Footnote ¹⁵

Prior to the debate over the “first edition mania” in the 1890s, the collecting of modern juvenilia had already drawn fire in the 1870s. At that time, the growing sentiment that supported the editing, reprinting, and collecting of juvenilia met resistance from authors themselves, who perceived the movement as a threat to their authority and control over these publications. Disputes arose over the right of editors and publishers to reprint fugitive juvenile works by living authors without authorization, even when the works had fallen out of copyright. In these contests, which were often framed in terms of property rights, a common ground in sentiment for the material book is less in evidence. In fact, for those who perceived the first-edition movement as a threat to the rights of authorship, only books for or about children properly invited sentiment, and that sentiment was deemed to be necessarily spiritual, whereas books by children were to be ridiculed as exhibiting an obscene materiality.

2

In the 1870s, the editor who was the most active – and the most controversial – in reprinting juvenilia by writers of his time was Richard Herne Shepherd. A resourceful hunter of fugitive works by well-known modern authors, he was accused of piracy and lowly scavenging, and the prominence of neglected juvenilia among his reprints certainly suggests exploitation. However, he justified his emphasis on juvenilia by sketching out a poetics centered on the youthful imagination, and he gave sustained thought to the relation between the imaginative mind and materiality. This poetics – albeit only sketchily, almost privately developed – drew a vitriolic reaction from those who guarded authorial control and the idealization of the imagination. The conflict exposes meaningful anxieties over the “possession” of an author's development as documented in a comprehensive collection of material copies of his works.

Shepherd's legitimate achievement was not insignificant. Later acknowledged by the New Bibliographers as ranking high among the “far-sighted professionals” who helped systematize the study of nineteenth-century books (Carter, Taste and Technique 23), Shepherd pioneered the genre of single-author bibliographies of modern writers, dozens of which were published between 1870 and World War I. Although Shepherd's were mere handlists of titles, the bibliographies posed a standard for comprehensiveness. His bibliography of Ruskin (1878–81), the first to attempt completeness, laid the groundwork for the more analytic Wise and Smart Bibliography of Ruskin (1889–93), which added thorough descriptions to the itemizations (Sadleir, “Development” 147). Shepherd also laid the groundwork for exhaustiveness in bibliographies of Dickens (1880), Thackeray (1881), Carlyle (1881), Swinburne (1887), Tennyson (1896), and Coleridge (1900), the last two published posthumously.

Another of Shepherd's innovations was his revival of the -ana volume, such as Tennysoniana (1866; 2nd ed., 1879). In its heyday in the eighteenth century, the -ana had been devoted to table talk (Wilson 42),Footnote ¹⁶ whereas in Shepherd's hands, it became a biographical narrative like a miniature life-and-letters volume. Shepherd used the biography as a frame for what was in effect genetic criticism, by assembling extensive quotations of variant passages of well-known works from lesser-known, earlier published versions of poems. For example, in Tennysoniana, Shepherd threaded together liberal quotation from Tennyson's early poetry, starting with Poems by Two Brothers and the Cambridge prize poem (1829), and continued with variant, earlier states of poetry associated with the death of Arthur Hallam. Tennyson regarded the reprinting of suppressed variants as piracy, but Shepherd's commitment to preserving original states of text for study was principled. He stood in lonely opposition to the Rossetti brothers' casual approach to the editing of Blake, pleading for “historical” accuracy over D. G. Rossetti's “shaking up” of the texts, and he produced the most accurate editions of Blake in his time (Rossetti qtd. in Dorfman 106 [see also 110–14]; Shepherd, introduction, Poems of William Blake xiv).

Juvenilia figured prominently in Shepherd's bibliographies, -ana volumes, and reprints. In 1870 and 1875, Shepherd reprinted Tennyson's early The Lover's Tale (1827–28). In 1878, he compiled Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a typographic reproduction of the girlhood volumes An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826) and “Prometheus Bound” . . . and Miscellaneous Poems (1833). Also in 1878, he reprinted Early Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as well as Prose and Verse . . . by Thomas Moore, which contained early writings. In 1887, he recovered Thackeray's “Sultan Stork” and other early sketches, which he appended to his bibliography of the novelist. He did not reprint early Ruskin, but that was because Ruskin anticipated the effort. Noticing that Shepherd had unearthed forgotten letters to newspapers, Ruskin and Alexander Wedderburn were inspired to undertake their own reprints of fugitive pieces in Arrows of the Chase (1880) and On the Old Road (1885). Like Shepherd's projects, both these collections mined the juvenilia, and On the Old Road opened with “My First Editor,” an “autobiographical reminiscence” of W. H. Harrison, who edited Ruskin's boyhood poetry (see Works of John Ruskin 24: xxxviii, 85–90, 459–68).Footnote ¹⁷

Shepherd defended the revival of juvenilia as indispensable to tracing “‘the growth of a Poet's mind’” and insisted that his reprints ensured that the “materials for such a study [would not be] allowed to perish” (Tennysoniana v). For such labors, he earned a condescending obituary in the Times describing him as a “great authority upon the various editions, with their additions and emendations, of the works” of modern authors (“Richard Herne Shepherd”). From living authors themselves he attracted lawsuits. The first to seek damages was Tennyson, who bluntly treated the reprints as piracy and the biographical/bibliographic mode of study that they allegedly sponsored as illegitimate. In 1866, when Tennysoniana appeared, the poet wrote to the publisher, B. M. Pickering, that the collection was “against [his] desire” and that he bore an “infinite dislike to [this] sort of book about anyone” (Letters of Tennyson 2: 436). In 1875–76, he sued Shepherd for reprinting “The Lover's Tale” from copytext obtained from the poet's private printing of the poem in the 1830s.Footnote ¹⁸ Tennyson had already successfully sued a bookseller, J. C. Hotten, for the sale of a collection of suppressed versions of his earlier poems, Poems, 1830–1833, compiled by James Dykes Campbell (see Sinclair). Now he won an injunction against Shepherd's piracy, to which the editor admitted guilt (although, hearing of the editor's poverty, Tennyson paid the court costs; Paden, “Lover's Tale” 119–24). Tennyson flatly refused to entertain the notion that there was a legitimate public interest in scholars and collectors acquiring and studying witnesses of varying states of an author's texts, particularly early witnesses.Footnote ¹⁹

Next, in what started as another unequally matched skirmish over authority, Robert Browning attempted to prevent Shepherd from republishing juvenilia by the late Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In this case, however, Shepherd defended the right of the collector and scholar to study the modern writer comprehensively, and the confrontation ultimately prompted both Shepherd and Browning to elaborate a poetics of the youthful imagination. In November 1876, only months after Tennyson won his suit against Shepherd, Browning put the journal the Athenaeum at odds with Shepherd over the announced publication of The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1826–1833.Footnote ²⁰ Egged on by Browning, the journal argued that the proposed edition would violate the late poet's wishes as it included her 1833 translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound – a version that Barrett Browning had effectively suppressed when she published a new translation of the play in 1850. Significantly, the journal attributed Shepherd's proposed reprint to the craze for first-edition collecting and denounced reprints for which the only justification was to achieve “completeness” in a collection, even when pursued by the “ill-advised enthusiasm of [the author’s] disciples.” In this case, it did not hesitate to put down Shepherd's motive to cynical “profit” (“Literary Gossip”).Footnote ²¹

Shepherd complied with the ban on “the earlier draught of the version of the ‘Prometheus' (1833), for which a better and more mature translation was afterwards substituted,” and which he claimed (surely disingenuously) he had never had any “intention to reproduce.” But this omission was the most he would concede. With greater defiance than he had shown to Tennyson, he stood firm on reprinting the miscellaneous lyric poems that filled out the 1833 Prometheus Bound volume: “These poems have been fully given to the world, and are now among the world's possessions. Poetical students will not allow them to die, however indifferent the general public may be to them.” While admitting that “the general” may regard such poems as “caviare” for the specialist, Shepherd insists that popular opinion is trumped by scholarship. Even authors and their families wield no authority over scholarship where there is no question of copyright: “A poet himself, or the relations of a poet, may not . . . always be the best or the final judges of what should continue to hold a place in the collection of his writings.” Regardless of the doubtful intrinsic value of juvenilia “as compositions of absolute truth of fitness,” their value to “the study of [a poet’s] mind and work” should be left to the scholar to decide, not to the poet, who, Shepherd archly suggests, may be as inconsistent as Tennyson about restoring earlier pieces – or Robert Browning himself, who had resurrected Pauline in 1868. As for the allegation against him of the “vulgar motive of profit,” Shepherd points to the limited print run of the proposed Barrett edition and to the scholarly standards of his previous editing. In response to this remarkable assertion of scholarly authority, the Athenaeum laconically conceded Shepherd's claim only so far as it was a legal “technicality” allowing him access to the early poems (Shepherd, “Mrs. Browning's Earlier Poems”).

When The Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning finally appeared in December 1877, Shepherd's introduction justified omission of the 1833 Prometheus Bound in terms compliant with Browning's and the Athenaeum's interpretation: namely, that the earlier translation had been authoritatively suppressed, “replaced by the authoress in later years by an entirely new version,” and, therefore, that “to re-produce the earlier crude attempt or the girlish preface that accompanied it” would not be “wise or desirable.” Shepherd neglects to explain what constitutes “crude” and “girlish” writing, as compared with the quality of the shorter lyrics, which he calls “in no sense immature, or unworthy of the genius of the writer.” Thus, he disappoints by not exerting the critic's authority that he defended in his earlier reply to the Athenaeum, offering only a few remarks on the shorter poems. He does, however, outline a poetics of juvenilia. Identifying a “peculiar charm” – the prompt to sentiment – in the youthful imagination, he develops an idea that he had first staged in his reply to the Athenaeum. Both versions begin by impudently quoting a line from Robert Browning's Fifine at the Fair (1872), hinting at the inconsistency of the poet who has himself expressed belief in the power of the child writer's imagination:

The quotation from Fifine would have been especially galling to Browning since an important subtext of that poem is formed by Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound along with Barrett Browning's translation of the play.Footnote ²³ Regardless of whether Shepherd realized this connection, in Fifine he had hit on an apt line from a poem that searchingly explores how to reconcile aspiration to imagination and spirituality with the practical desire to live in a material world.

Shepherd, too, was attempting to relate the “nameless and peculiar charm” of the child writer's imagination to materiality. His metaphor for the child's imagination is both essentialist and developmental, presenting the writer as nature, the “bursting into bud and leaf of a new poetic genius,” as distinct from the child writer in or instructed by nature, as in Wordsworth. For the adult reader, this imagination is experienced as “charm,” but this sentiment is available to the adult only through the material book. Shepherd developed this position in an expansion of a volume of his own poetry, Translations from Charles Baudelaire, with a Few Original Poems, originally published in 1869, and republished with additions in the same year and by the same publisher as the Barrett Browning Earlier Poems. The first edition, which marked the first separately published translation of Baudelaire's poetry in English, had appeared in the context of the French poet's introduction into British literature via Swinburne's literary criticism of the 1860s and the 1866 Poems and Ballads (see Clements 66).Footnote ²⁴ Shepherd's 1877 edition opens, as did the 1869, with three translations, “A Carcass,” “Weeping and Wandering,” and “Lesbos.” The group can be read as a trilogy rather than as random selections from Baudelaire. The first poem thrusts the reader into gross materiality, a vantage from whence, in the following poem, a figure gazes searchingly for childhood paradise, but in vain. In the 1877 edition, Shepherd adds poems following the Baudelaire translations – poems that do grant access to the desired refuge of childhood, but that limit such fulfillment to the exchange of material books.

In “A Carcass,” a speaker asks his beloved to recall stumbling on a rotting carcass on a “soft, sweet summer day.” Graphically described, yet figured as a flower, the carcass becomes a memento mori for the beloved. The speaker enjoins the beloved at her death, however, to “tell the insatiate worm” that he “ha[s] kept the godlike essence and the form / Of perishable bliss!” The survival of “essence” (whether it be the speaker's or the beloved’s) is mocked by its perishability, and, in the next poem, “Weeping and Wandering,” a speaker asks “Agatha” whether likewise her “spirit turns / Far from the black sea of the city's mud, / To another ocean, where the splendour burns.” Here, where the ocean “rock[s] us like a nurse,” an essence seems imperishable and “soothes the jaded mind!” These two poems are not juxtaposed in Fleurs du mal, but their order in Shepherd's volume suggests that the “turn” of Agatha's spirit to the sea is a more promising answer to the preceding speaker's projected keeping of only a “form” of “perishable bliss.” But there may lie no consolation in yearning for a “green paradise of childlike loves”:

As Barbara Johnson comments in her analysis of apostrophe in Baudelaire's original poem: “[W]hat the poem ends up wanting to know is not how far away childhood is, but whether its own rhetorical strategies can be effective. The final question becomes: can this gap be bridged; can this loss be healed, through language alone?” (31). For Shepherd in 1877, the question undermines a naive recovery of the child writer's “nameless and peculiar charm” in the “bursting into bud and leaf of a new poetic genius.” Even the “fervid day” of mature poetry can be compromised by the withdrawal of a Wordsworthian faith in recompense for loss.Footnote ²⁶

Shepherd moderates this conclusion, however, by adding a new series of his own lyrics on childhood to the 1877 Translations, starting with “Peace,” and followed by occasional verses that he wrote originally to accompany gifts of books to children: “To Florence at Haslemere, with Blake's ‘Songs of Innocence’”; “To the Same: With Kingsley's ‘Water-Babies'”; and a valentine poem. If these addresses to children are meant as a consolation for the feckless rhetorical strategies of the Baudelaire translations, the new poems' reach is limited. The adult speaker does not easily regain contact with the childhood world, but must telegraph across the Indian main through the exchange of a material book. Florence is beseeched:

The speaker must be a version of Shepherd himself, who produced several editions of Blake, including the Songs,Footnote ²⁸ but he does not enjoy privileged access to a child's world. In apostrophizing Florence, he remains trapped in the horrifyingly material world of “A Carcass,” just as Agatha in “Weeping and Wandering” apostrophizes a lost paradise from her place amid the mud of the city. Shepherd clenches the Baudelairean materiality for his persona by concluding the additional series of lyrics (and the 1877 volume as a whole) with a new translation from Baudelaire, “A Martyr: Drawing by an Unknown Master,” that describes the violated and decapitated corpse of a woman as her haunted seducer and murderer wanders the world (Shepherd, Translations [1879] 118–20).Footnote ²⁹

Thus, for Shepherd's persona in the added poems, the materiality of the book serves as a humbling reminder that the gap separating him from paradise has not closed; the producer/giver of the book necessarily reads the text, the “lyric gift,” differently than the child recipient does. As Shepherd writes in the preface to his edition of Blake's Songs, children can cherish the poems “for their purity and simplicity,” while “grown-up men and women” will probe “the deeper meanings which always underlie the most simple of them” (Shepherd, Preface, Songs xi). The gap persists when the direction of the “lyric gift” from adult to child is reversed and a juvenile poem (i.e. a poem composed by a child, not for a child) is presented to an adult. In the sonnet “To W. T. Waite, with a Juvenile Poem,” an (unidentified) juvenile poem is presented as only a “slight tribute” to an adult recipient (Waite) who is burdened with “mirth-oppressing care”; the material document of youthful imagination can bridge, but not close, the gap (Shepherd, Translations [Reference Shepherd1869, Reference Shepherd1877] 56).Footnote ³⁰ Shepherd seems deeply ambivalent about materiality. He is drawn by a sentiment for the book that might correspond to the child's imagination embodied in nature, but he is also suspicious of materiality as a source of corruption and infection.

Despite his ambivalence, Shepherd defended his right to make the child's imagination available through at least a close facsimile reproduction of the material original. In June 1879, he brought suit for libel against the Athenaeum for the journal's attacks on his character in reviews of Earlier Poems by Barrett Browning, Poetry for Children by Charles and Mary Lamb, and other reprints.Footnote ³¹ In the course of the trial, Robert Browning appeared as a witness for the defendant, supporting the journal's objections to republication of Barrett Browning's juvenilia. While he took a decidedly unsubtle view of the motives of Shepherd's reprints for and about children, accusing the editor of opportunistic profiteering, the poet nonetheless treated the court to a complex explanation of the relation between youth and the poetic imagination, and, in his own recent poetry, his ideas about the relation of the poetic imagination to materiality were more fraught than Shepherd’s.

In court Browning at first reverted to the defense of private property, as Tennyson had done, although the Athenaeum had already abandoned that position on a “technicality” (“[w]ere it a question of tables or chairs, Mr. Browning could defend the wishes of his wife; but in the case of poems, our wise laws give him no remedy”). He also reiterated the Athenaeum's earlier published objections to the Barrett reprint as defying the personal wishes of “writers of eminence,” living and dead (“Literary Gossip”).Footnote ³² The late “Mrs. Browning,” her husband went on, “would herself, had she been alive, have objected to the republication of her earlier poems” – not just the translation of Prometheus Bound, but also the miscellaneous poems in that volume – for “[s]he was only fourteen years old when she wrote some of them.” The journal had therefore committed no libel, Browning urged, in characterizing Shepherd as a man who arrogated the “liberty to defy the wishes of the dead and to outrage the feelings of the living” (qtd. in Honan 28–29).

Browning's reversion to claims of the author's property and authority proved awkward since, as the prosecuting lawyer pointed out, the poet himself could be construed as having acted analogously to Shepherd. As Shepherd had darkly hinted in his 1876 reply to the Athenaeum,Footnote ³³ when in 1852 Browning had contributed an introduction to an edition of letters by Percy Bysshe Shelley – what later became known as Browning's “Essay on Shelley” – he likewise had not seen fit to ask permission of Shelley's living descendants. Had not Browning himself, therefore, ignored the personal rights and wishes of a “writer of eminence” and his family? Browning apparently anticipated this comparison being brought against him since he had the Shelley volume handy in court and offered to read the “Essay on Shelley” aloud – in its entirety (Honan 30).Footnote ³⁴ The offer was deflected with laughter but remains worth investigating as it was apparently by this means that Browning intended to take up Shepherd's claims respecting the nature and value of the child writer's imagination.

Thwarted of his intent to spell out his views by reading the “Essay” aloud, Browning summarized: “My essay was on the character of Shelley, and I referred to these poems [e.g., “Queen Mab”] as those of an immature boyhood” (Honan 30). What Browning apparently wished to elaborate by reading the whole of the essay's dense analysis of the “objective poet” versus the “subjective poet” was a characterization of the Barrett juvenilia as the “immature” attempts of a subjective, ideal poet – that is, the juvenilia of the poet as “seer.” As such, juvenilia are defined in the essay as mere “matter.” And why not relish this “less organised matter,” the essay goes on rhetorically, “as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect” as the great, mature poems? Why not, in short, treat literary juvenilia on Shepherd's terms as the budding leaf of poetic genius, owning a “peculiar charm” in itself, and necessary to a biographical/bibliographic study of the seer-poet? Browning answers in the essay that he “prefer[s] to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high,” and that those attainments are “less a work than an effluence” (Browning, “Essay on Shelley” 139, 151, 139). This was an exalted view of poetry that Barrett Browning herself had shared (see Chapman 74–77). In such an idealized view, which disparages the “immature” imagination, there could be no place for the biographical and genetic criticism that Shepherd reserved as the right of “poetical students.” The clay of materiality would always cling to the earliest efforts of the seer-poet, a drag on the reader's aspiration to the mature poet's vision.

Shepherd characterizes the child writer's imagination with an essentialism as purist as Browning's “effluence” but applies that essentialism to the poet's beginnings rather than to the pinnacle of achievement. Even more alien to Browning, he refuses to dispense entirely with poetry's embodiment in the material book, which is the adult's only connection with the child's imagination. His poetics is elegiac, availing an imperfect but compelling connection with a lost paradise through the materiality of the book, whereas Browning's poetics (at least in the “Essay on Shelley”) is optimistic and idealistic and repudiates any essential need for a material book at all. For Browning, insofar as the poet is “impelled to embody the thing he perceives” in a printed text, he does so “not so much with reference to the many below as to the one above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth” (Browning, “Essay on Shelley” 138). For Browning the physical book yields to apotheosis, whereas for Shepherd a “historical” approach to text and an artifactual view of the book set him against a vatic view of the poet. Just so, Shepherd defied a vatic view of Blake, as advanced by the Rossettis and the Carlylean biographer of Blake, Alexander Gilchrist, if this view meant denying the materiality of the textual witness: “Mr. [D. G.] Rossetti (though sanctioned by Mr. Swinburne),” Shepherd contended, had “no more right to alter William Blake's poems than Mr. Millais would have to paint out some obnoxious detail of medievalism in a work of Giotto or Cimabue” (introduction, Poems of William Blake xiv; see also Dorfman 65–110).

In referencing the “Essay on Shelley,” Browning fairly met the challenge of the plaintiff and his lawyer, but the response was somewhat disingenuous since by the 1870s Browning himself wrestled with an elegiac meditation on the relation of spirit to materiality. As Shepherd may have recognized in quoting from Fifine at the Fair, in this 1872 poem Browning confronts the problem of abiding with a spirit – Elizabeth, the “phantom-wife” – in a world of quotidian “things” (Browning, Poems 2: 17). Can one mourn loss, remaining faithful to spirituality and poetry, the poem asks, yet discover a truth about the nature of the material world, a truth that will liberate one by justifying fulfillment of desire?Footnote ³⁵ In Fifine, as in the “Essay on Shelley,” the subject aspires to “heaven – poetry,” but the self's experience of existence is like that of an “amphibian” – a state of swimming in uncertainty, treading the “solid-seeming” liquid “stuff” that buoys us in the world. Shepherd's implied author/translator in his 1877 Translations is a species related to Browning's “amphibian” speaker: both strive to negotiate the transition between the material world and spirit. Still, Browning would have borne little patience for Shepherd's longing gazers at the sea; in Fifine, the speaker condemns the skepticism of those who, like Byron of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, dwell on the “false fluidity” of the sea. Such is the “[c]hildishest childe,” who “‘howls'” at the gods, rather than aspiring to the “upper range.” Aloft, there “operates a Power” that, if “gained, / Evil proves good, wrong right, obscurity explained, / And ‘howling’ childishness” (Browning, Poems 2: 7, 5, 38).Footnote ³⁶

Ultimately, however, Browning may have conceded a part of Shepherd's worldview. In the dramatic idyl “Pan and Luna” (1880), which he composed within a year of the court case, he appears to have allegorized the conflict with Shepherd (Neville-Sington 219–20), but this connection has not been explained in terms of his and Shepherd's competing poetics. The poem adapts a myth from Virgil's Georgics in which Pan, the “half-god half-brute,” entraps and seduces the “Maid-Moon” Luna – the moon being the poet's habitual symbol of Elizabeth, and Pan, according to myth, being the patron of shepherds. The Maid becomes entrammeled in a deceptively inviting cloud, the “smothery coy-caressing stuff” that looks like an emanation of heaven but is in fact “simulated earth-breath.” This is, in terms of the “Essay on Shelley,” false or immature poetry. In her predicament, the maiden “with limbs all bare” is violated by the “rough red Pan,” whose “treacherous hand” is greedily “wide ope / To grasp” (Poems 2: 656–57).Footnote ³⁷ Thus far, the idyl merely allegorizes the Athenaeum's charges that Shepherd “outraged” the innocent, but Browning ventures to probe the myth and to question himself.

“Pan and Luna” is not a dramatic monologue; rather, it presents, as Betty Flowers explains, a dramatized speaker addressing an ideal reader, both of whom approximate the poet himself in interrogation of a myth – in this instance Virgil’s.Footnote ³⁸ Browning's purpose is not to retaliate against Pan's outrage but to query the meaning of Shepherd's violent appropriation and estrangement of Barrett's maiden poetry. To get at that meaning, the idyl takes up the challenge of Shepherd's having quoted Fifine against its poet and deploys an epitome of poetic figures and themes drawn from Fifine. “Pan and Luna” uses these figures to reverse the direction of the quest in Fifine; rather than starting with the amphibian speaker, who is afloat in ambiguous matter but aspiring to spirit, and then advancing with that speaker toward a confrontation with primeval materiality, the idyl starts out in the dense “one mass” of heaven and earth “hardened into black without a bound” and then advances toward reassurance of the moon's ethereality. Thus, “Pan and Luna” opens up an escape from Fifine's quest toward materiality and liberates the Maid-Moon from advancing to Shepherd's “pollut[ion]” (Poems 2: 655, 658).Footnote ³⁹ Ironically, Shepherd himself would probably have been relieved by the maiden's escape. Still, Browning's poet/speaker presses the question why, according to Virgil's myth, the Maid-Moon consented in the first place to an “eclipse” by the material world, if only momentarily – the moon “dip[ping] / Into the dark” even as she “rips / The cloud's womb through and, faultless as before, / Pursues her way” (Poems 2: 658). In this metaphor, Browning makes his riposte to Shepherd's appropriation of his line from Fifine: an “exquisite touch” does bide in the “birth of things,” as Luna is born again, “faultless as before” her encounter with Pan. But the poet also concedes that a physical, if not an exquisite, “touch,” the “dip[ping] into the dark,” was necessary to mediate this paradoxically untouched maidenhood. What is more, as the myth relates, the maid herself ultimately chooses to return to Pan. The poem ends with the speaker confronting, as in Fifine, a “monolith,” the stubborn mystery of the material world.Footnote ⁴⁰

The monolith is made of the irreducible remains of the myth in “one verse of five words, each a boon: / Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon” (Poems 2: 658). In the concreteness of this fragment – “an Imagist poem before its time,” as Daniel Karlin remarks – Browning relinquishes authority, which in the end “belongs neither to Virgil, nor to those who purport to ‘explain’ the myth he relates, nor to the poet whose ‘hold’ on the story . . . enables him to ‘keep’ no more than fragments” (110, 111). Thus, while Browning remains unmoved by a sentiment for juvenilia, and he gets his revenge on Shepherd by dismissing him as a lecherous, yet harmlessly feckless entrapper of youth, Browning does admit to compelling emotion, if not sentiment, to be found in the primordial and nearly material traces of the vernal birth of literature itself, a boon worthy of collecting.

3

While Browning allows in “Pan and Luna” for a version of Shepherd's poetics centered on the youthful imagination, the Athenaeum was not so forgiving. More conservative than Browning, for whose interests it spoke, and unable to concede any relation of the grossly material to the ideal, the journal could conceptualize a child's imagination only in strictly spiritual terms, stripped of any material association – the position Price finds implied in the Victorian bildungsroman. To assure this separation, the Athenaeum insisted that authority be maintained over the child, his imagination indulged only in books for and about children and not in books by them. The child as writer was a monstrosity, a figure that the journal parodied as a grossly material object to be regulated so it could be spiritualized for its own and the nation's good. For in the view of the Athenaeum, the appropriate encouragement of youthful writers was a matter of national interest. And it was to guard this national interest that the journal remained determined to persecute self-serving “students” who indulge in the “caviare” of their effete study of juvenilia at the expense of eminent writers' wishes and the commonwealth's interests. This was the level of anger and contempt with which the Athenaeum effectively sought to eject Shepherd from the professional world of Victorian letters. His survival rode on his libel suit, and at the core of the conflict lay not only an intense disagreement over who possesses authority to define an author's corpus but also intense anxiety over the relation of sentiment to materiality in representing the primal basis of an author's imagination, the modern author's juvenilia.

The Athenaeum reviewed editions by Shepherd of poetry for children and of poetry by children, books that prompted the reviewers to pose opposite constructions of the relation of child to adult. In a January 1878 review of Charles and Mary Lamb's Poetry for Children (1809), which Shepherd reprinted, the writer renewed charges of the editor's dishonesty but put aside that feud to discuss the Lambs' poetry itself. Reading the poetry causes the reviewer to muse on an “inscrutable” but “impassable gulf” between “the adult mind and the mind of childhood,” but he is consoled that the imaginative experience of literature in childhood forms an inalienable part of the psychological and spiritual self. The formation of this self is overseen by a Wordsworthian “literature of power”: “[I]t is impossible to calculate how enormous in moulding the mind is the power of infant literature. It is not merely that what we read in childhood we never forget, but that it becomes part of our very being.” The reviewer thus takes an approach opposite to Shepherd's in reconciling an essentialist view of the child's poetic imagination with an adult world that has lapsed into quotidian materiality. Rather than accepting materiality as a condition and using the physical book to bridge a gap between child and adult, he opens the gap only to reclose it through identification with the childhood experience of reading. According to him, childhood is summoned by the nation's “schoolmistress, Nature,” which “cr[ies] out” to the child “in every meadow and lane in England,” to read fairy tales “under the waving trees,” a pastoral (and bookless) vision of the “magic tapestry” of the child's imagination. The reviewer goes on, in Dickensian manner, to demonize the opposite in the form of misguided education policy that immerses children in “facts” and in bookish “exercises.” Although he mourns the defective adult “sympathy” that is able to witness “landscapes of childhood” only “from without, and not from within,” in fact this elegiac perspective is merely a sentimental softening of an underlying structure of authority over the childish imagination (rev. of Poetry for Children 48).

This agenda for power is revealed when the Athenaeum considers writing by a child. In the December 1877 review of Shepherd's edition of Earlier Poems by Barrett Browning, the journal takes the opposite tack from the review of the Lamb edition, characterizing juvenilia as a material, unspiritual monstrosity. The reviewer admits that youthful authors' “early” publication serves national interests by encouraging talent that might otherwise wither: “Facilities of early printing . . . seem to be necessary to the full development of a country's literary potentialities.” Publication of juvenilia can benefit the developing writer, however, only by acting as “a sort of safety-valve or ‘air-hole,’ from which escapes, to the great good of the producer, the balderdash engendered, like a bad gas, by the active forces of youth.” Whereas in Shepherd's poetics the youthful imagination is figured as nature, “the bursting into bud and leaf of a new poetic genius,” a metaphor that bestows authority on the child, here the Athenaeum calls on an “economy of Nature” in an industrial nation in order to manage its young people like a steam engine: “the more genius there is in any youthful brain the more nonsense” there is to be “got rid of.”Footnote ⁴¹ Further to the nation's advantage, if any use is to be found in publishing juvenilia at all, the safety valve will discharge not only the youth's own fatuous imagination, but also his impressionable imitations of others, “the quintessential amalgam of the literary vices of many predecessors.” To regulate the nation's literary history along with its newest and youngest productions, the reviewer calls for a mechanism whereby young people will unlearn “the concentrated essence of the sentimentality and fustian which infested the literary atmosphere of this country during the reign of Samuel Jackson Pratt.” In order to trail clouds of glory, the precocious writer must be purged of gaseous influences from the age of sentiment ([Watts-Dunton], rev. of The Earlier Poems 765).

Whereas the late Victorian collector was able to feel sentiment for the material book, the Athenaeum reviewer rigidly segregates materiality from sentiment, which is to be applied only to a memory of childhood reading. Thus separated, sentiment and materiality segue into distinct narratives about the destiny of the child's imagination, narratives that are opposed but that ultimately are made to serve identical national myths, interests, and hierarchies of power. In service to these interests, questions of literary value are to be referred to the “common-sense” of the “judicious . . . British public” and not to a “poetical student” fond of “caviare” at the nation's expense ([Watts-Dunton], rev. of The Earlier Poems 765). What rankled longest with the Athenaeum in its hostilities with Shepherd was, on the one hand, his indifference to the estimate of literary value by the “general public” and, on the other hand, his defiance of the authority and judgment of an esteemed writer and his family as to “what should continue to hold a place in the collection of his writings” (Shepherd, “Mrs. Browning's Earlier Poems”). Thus, the reviewers assaulted the character of a literary man who defied these authorities and supplied collectors with reprints of juvenilia that so exactingly reproduced the originals that they amounted to material embodiments of the child's imagination. Such a performance, in the view of one of the Athenaeum reviewers, William Michael Rossetti, earned for Shepherd a role in the “world of letters” that combined the “chiffonier” (i.e., ragpicker) with the “resurrection-man” (i.e., body snatcher). Rossetti struggles to devise a metaphor for one who reprints “early poems” and “forgotten works” that sufficiently conveys a parasitic relation to the body of the author's work: “To be one's own vampire is an unenviable lot; to be somebody else's vampire is a post to which only a tortuous ambition could aspire.” To adequately satisfy Rossetti's contempt, the vampire image must be deprived of any suggestion of autonomy and authority. A “bibliographer” who “overrules the author's preference” and “prints . . . to please some few curious literary palates” on the one hand or “omnivorous digestions” on the other must, like the juvenile writer he edits, be denied self-sufficiency, lest he exercise critical and creative authority over the mature writer, the writer's family, and the nation ([Rossetti], “Literary Revivals” 331, 332).Footnote ⁴²

The reviewer of Shepherd's edition of Barrett Browning's Earlier Poems was Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914), the solicitor turned critic and poet who later charged himself with the care of Swinburne's wrecked infantile body and poet's mind.Footnote ⁴³ As a critic, Watts-Dunton organized literary history according to “two great impulses governing man”: one was “the impulse of acceptance” in taking “unchallenged . . . all the phenomena of the outer world as they are,” the other “the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.” Literary history triumphed when the former, positivistic impulse waned and the latter impulse prevailed in a “Renascence of Wonder.” Watts-Dunton did not refuse prodigies a place in realizing this national achievement; in fact, he regarded the boy poet, Chatterton, as “the Renascence of Wonder incarnate.” What defined this “marvellous boy” as a poet was his transformative wonder in a positivistic age: “he felt that what is called dead matter is . . . in a certain mysterious sense alive” (“The Renascence of Wonder,” 237–38, 259, 260). Presumably, given the current sway of industrialism, Watts-Dunton had confidence that wonder could prevail, not through literature by children, but only through literature for children – the wonder enforced by a muscular Wordsworthian “literature of power” (for it seems likely that he authored the ideas in the review of the Lambs' Poetry for Children as well).Footnote ⁴⁴ In an instance of modern juvenilia that he was able to approve, the prose fiction of another dead boy wonder, Oliver Madox Brown (1855–74), the critic found the writing “irresistible” “with a crude power” (Douglas 275). Watts-Dunton's disgust with Shepherd arose, then, not just from a perception of the editor's dishonesty and usurpation of authority (aggravated by a solicitor's frustration that the editor's usurpation was legal), but also from a perception that Shepherd's typographic facsimiles of juvenilia confused the biography of modern poet-seers with the grossest materialism of their youth rather than discovering the potential for a “power” of wonder.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given such a simplistic scheme of literary history, Watts-Dunton's optimism, unlike Browning’s, could not tolerate a more probing connection between materiality and sentiment.

Thus, in his review of Barrett Browning's Earlier Poems, Watts-Dunton attacks Shepherd for a materialism combined with weakness. Just as W. M. Rossetti reduced Shepherd to the passivity of “somebody else's vampire,” Watts-Dunton characterizes the editor who reprints juvenilia (Shepherd is not directly named) as a “bookseller's hack” who, like an “insect,” eats away at the author's corpus. “Devoid” of “culture” or “literary taste,” the editor of reprints “must be called a bibliographer, no doubt, . . . by dint of that enormous patience” that “accompanies a dearth of intelligence” yet makes such a person “really learned in editions and in variations of texts.” A scavenger, he “scans the book-stalls” for “some forgotten production, or some inchoate form of a known production of a famous writer,” and then attaches himself to a publisher or bookseller willing to abandon “the dignity of a noble calling” (“we wish to express our astonishment and regret that publishers can be found for such undertakings as this [reprint of Barrett juvenilia] and ‘Tennysoniana’”). This fallen publisher and his hack, who would pass off the “precocious smartness” of juvenilia for poetic genius, deserve the contempt of the true “man of genius.” Any respectable author who is “about to print” and embody his genius in a physical book will “pause and consider, before he imperils his privileges as an English gentleman” by succumbing to “caterers of this kind” ([Watts-Dunton], rev. of The Earlier Poems 765–66).Footnote ⁴⁶

4

Two decades later, despite William Roberts's warnings of vulgarity, collectors continued to lay out considerable sums of cash for early editions of modern authors, but Watts-Dunton's sneers at the unseemliness of “caterers” to collectors appears to have struck home with professional literary men of the fin de siècle. The threat to hierarchies of power by editors of “minor” modern literature was as serious as consumers' construction of materially comprehensive collections that presumed to document the growth of the poet's mind. Accordingly, literary professionals of the 1890s engaged in a rhetorical struggle to exonerate themselves from the taint of the reprint editors, especially those who edited modern juvenilia.

One kind of late century editor who was disconcerted by the collecting sentiment was the compiler of the authorized life-and-letters volume. These biographies, which bookended the comprehensive modern-author collection at the opposite end of the shelf from the juvenilia reprint, were often produced by authors' descendants. As a “testamentary act,” the labor of collecting and editing a famous parent's papers mirrored the collector's material sentiment: Pen Browning opened the “certain inlaid box, into which” his parents' love letters “exactly fitted,” to expose the sacred correspondence to the public in the 1898 Letters, and Hallam Tennyson collected and organized his family papers into bound manuscript volumes that he condensed into privately printed trial volumes and finally rarefied into the 1897 Memoir of his father (R. B. B., “Note” n.p.; Millgate 27, 51). Such labors were not very different from those of the despised, parasitic editor and annotator of reprints, and perhaps this ambiguity lay behind the puzzling behavior that Millgate is hard-put to explain in Hallam Tennyson, who reinforced his father's vitriolic ban against “bibliomaniacs” with their love for “first editions,” yet printed in the Memoir the juvenilia that his father wanted suppressed (qtd. in Millgate 60). Unlike the reprint editor, the famous author's child burdened with editing the authorized life and letters was protected by his heritage from being demeaned like Shepherd, and it was precisely because Shepherd loudly disputed family authority while taking on an editorial role all too similar to that of the life-and-letters editor that he was so severely ostracized. Yet the authorized biographer was likewise beset with ambiguity in deeming which of the material artifacts of the great parent's life bore a sentiment that was publicly admissible. As Millgate remarks, the burden rendered the descendants themselves both permanently infantilized and prematurely aged (e.g., 71).

In a similar but somewhat more ambiguous position than that of the writer's blood descendant was the literary man who held membership in the writer's circle, but without the legal imprimatur of trustee or family connection. Such a writer may have shared the sentiments of the collector and the labors of the editor, yet, because of his tenuous position, he showed even greater anxiety to keep the collector at bay. W. G. Collingwood undertook the editing of the 1891 Poems of John Ruskin on the strength of his position as Ruskin's secretary, having since his undergraduate years at Oxford served as a personal follower and caretaker of Ruskin. Collingwood was never legally a trustee, however, and after Ruskin's death he held no part in editing the Library Edition, other than his scholarship being appropriated for the two volumes of juvenilia (Hilton 585–86; Dearden, “Library Edition” 53–54). In this ambiguous position, he treads gingerly in the introduction to the Poems, inflecting a poetics of juvenilia with language that shores up his editorial authority while setting himself apart from the collector. The rationale of the edition, according to the introduction, was the by now familiar plea that a “peculiar interest” is to be found “in watching development, in witnessing growth.” Thus, Collingwood allows: “It is no idle curiosity . . . that prompts the admirers of Mr. Ruskin's works to collect his boyish writings and to learn the story of his youth.” Vying with these collectors for authority, however, he asserts ownership over the subject: “When we have seen a plant burst the soil, and its long-expected bud unfold into blossom, we love every leaf and petal of it” – adding significantly, “it is our own.” As in Shepherd's poetics, the childish imagination is identified with nature, and sentiment for its productions is embodied in the material manuscript, but Collingwood jealously guards possession of this materiality from unauthorized appropriation. Sentiment or “sympathy” for the juvenile manuscripts is now emphatically linked to possession: “in the early biography of great men,” as “we follow their first steps, . . . they become our own by sympathy” (introduction v).

Finally, the most egregiously ambiguous role approximating that of the reprint editor was that of the forger. In an 1896 biobibliographic essay on Barrett Browning, Harry Buxton Forman ranked the comparative rarity of the three scarcest collector's items associated with the poet. In positioning the Battle of Marathon as one of the three items, Forman found it useful to ventriloquize (without attribution) the sarcastic arguments of the Athenaeum against the value of the Barrett juvenilia. His purpose in devaluing the rare juvenilia was not, like Roberts's, to impugn the “gambling” with rare book prices for modern firsts, but fraudulently to raise the stock of an unheard-of third item, the “privately printed” Sonnets from the Portuguese – a forgery for which he and Wise were confabulating a history (Forman 84–88).

These examples of the anxiety besetting literary men of the 1890s suggest that the destabilizing element in a material sentiment for the book had shifted somewhat from worries over transgressed authority in the 1870s to a more fraught but also subtler idea of possession. Walter Benjamin writes in “Unpacking My Library” about the “collector as he ought to be”: “[O]wnership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in [the collector]; it is he who lives in them” (67). In the popular imagination, from the Sherlock Holmes tales of the fin de siècle to present-day pulp, the pathological state of the collector is precisely one of living too much inside a collection, whether imprisoned in a museum of his own making or obsessed by sexually disturbed hoarding (see Edgar).Footnote ⁴⁷ But in more ambitious literature, as Bill Brown has argued about Gilded Age American fiction, writers elaborated subtler forms of possession as a means to probe the human relation to “things and their thingness.” The project has become obscure to us because it was overwritten by modernist literature and art, which more aggressively and “explicitly appropriat[ed] thingness as a new status for the work of art” according to modernist “art's drive to reify itself and thus to resist commodification.” Gilded Age literature and art pursued, rather differently, an awareness of there being ideas in things. This is a position that we tend now to associate with the modernist objectification of the aesthetic object, but that in the immediately prior age, Brown contends, was focused on an alternative story “of possessions and possession, which is nonetheless a story of isolating and cherishing certain objects within an evaluative context that is not the market-as-usual – the story of a kind of possession that,” like the aspiration of the “collector as he ought to be,” was “irreducible to ownership” (Sense of Things 12–13).

Attempts to explain collecting solely in terms of fetish overlook the keen observance of kinds of possession and objectification in the Gilded Age.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Henry James's novels, for example, or in the group portraits of John Singer Sargent, Brown finds a world portrayed “where all humans are objects” and “objectification . . . an inescapable human condition.” The condition is not necessarily a benign one, in either James or Sargent, but it illuminates the difference between a commodity and a “possession” in a special sense. For in James's novels, characters who are collectors behave as if “the act of collecting is one of conferring on the particularized object a value that derives from its place in the collection, not from its exchange within the world of fungible goods, nor as the manifestation of labor” – an act that is potentially appropriative but that can also be richly and humanly meaningful (Sense of Things 157, 156, 158).

At his best, the book collector's contribution to this Gilded Age project was the widespread agreement that a new “sentimental value” had arisen for the book as a material object, as Slater put it, one that was “altogether distinct from considerations of utility.” In this context, the comprehensive first-edition collection, which proved the most controversial aim of the movement, can be viewed as the most reverential. Although easily debunked as speculative gambling on the collector's part or as parasitic vampirism on the supplier's part, the comprehensive single-author collection of firsts conferred value and coherence on each and every item – a value derived from the place of the most minor pamphlet in the collection as a whole, rather than from the item's seemingly absurd price in the market. As Prideaux explained, “[e]ach book marks a stage in the growth or decadence of the writer's art” to “those who wish to trace [an author’s] literary life through his works.” In this way, possession objectified the materiality of the book, and the collector could come alive within the object, in Benjamin's sense – an experience opposite to the sentimentality that Carter and Pollard attributed to the Victorian collector and one that (apart from the biographical interpretation of the first-edition collection) anticipates the modernist objectification of art.

If the late nineteenth century literary man's declaration of ownership and authority over his archive fended off the abuses attributed to collecting, it could also be an attempt to describe the objectification of the collected object taking its place. Perhaps this sense of objectification explains the tendency to memorialize the subject in publications aimed at collectors. Collingwood characterizes Ruskin's juvenile manuscripts using archaeological and geological metaphors – “ancient Codices” containing layers of “stratification” (“Preliminary Note” 262, 265) – metaphors that suggestively resemble Browning's imagery of the “monolith” to convey the nearly material traces of primordial imagination embodied in myth. In his reprints, Shepherd replicates the originals so obsessively that, while one motive must have been the arcane appeal to the connoisseur, another was memorializing and even embalming the child writer in a material yet incorruptible past. To take the example of the Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the volume reproduces Barrett's Essay on Mind precisely as originally published in 1826 by the printer James Duncan. Apparently without benefit of photographic processes, Shepherd and his publisher typographically reconstructed Barrett's original title page, preface, and contents as Duncan had printed them, even down to the original signature callouts. The replica could not be accused of piracy or forgery since, in addition to declaring responsibility with his own title page and preface, Shepherd omitted the original printer's colophon on what would have been the final page of the Essay on Mind volume and, instead, carries on with the miscellaneous poems reprinted from Barrett's 1833 Prometheus Bound volume.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, whereas Carter accused the Victorian collector of allowing too little imaginative distance from his subject, the memorializing tendency of the late Victorian juvenilia reprint suggests the opposite – a belatedness and lengthening distance by which the collector relinquished possession of the object to its place in the past.

Attention to the thingness and even alien quality of juvenilia could also confer autonomy on the child subject, as the Athenaeum feared. In his autobiography, Praeterita (1885), Ruskin typographically replicated samples of his juvenile writing and had an early drawing engraved. While the exhibit is in keeping with the memorializing aims of this autobiography, Ruskin seems at the same time ready to accept whatever autobiographical ideas these boyhood writings may offer, as discoverable in the very physicality of his juvenile hand (Works of John Ruskin 35: 51–55).Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, from the time that “a curious packet” of the Brontës' juvenilia was “confided” to Elizabeth Gaskell, collectors have been fascinated by the tiny manuscripts as material objects and what the almost illegibly minute handwriting might imply about their writers' autonomy (Gaskell 66). The almost impenetrable physical booklets have been viewed, like the sagas they contain, as constituting an imaginative world that the Brontë siblings kept apart from adults (see Alexander, “Nineteenth-Century Juvenilia” 15–19, and “Autobiography and Juvenilia” 161–62).

The potential to release the child's autonomy through the collected object – Watts-Dunton's nightmare – is comedically explored by Stephen Crane in “The Stove” (1900), one of the Whilomville Stories. For the adults of Whilomville, commercial materialism has triumphed in the form of “collections” of porcelain tea party sets. The collections domineer over their alleged possessors, embittering sentiment so that “nobody could be happy.” In contrast, when the “angel-child,” Cora, visits her cousins in Whilomville, she totes (or, rather, her parents tote for her) a commercially manufactured iron toy stove that, unlike the matrons' porcelain collections, serves as an indomitable extension of her subjectivity. With her toy stove, “an affair of cast-iron, as big as a portmanteau, and, as the stage people say, practicable,” she wrecks the adults' tea party by cooking up a stink so materially powerful that “it was almost a personality,” an “unbidden and extremely odious guest” – like Cora herself (Crane 199, 197, 204). As Bill Brown comments about Crane's Whilomville Stories, the precocious child takes advantage of “a production of objects,” mass-produced toys, “that can effectively emancipate children as desiring subjects.” Reviewers of the stories perceived that, “over and against the discursive production of [American Gilded Age] childhood,” Crane's precocious heroes threatened a “new materialism of childhood” that could open up “a mode through which to fantasize, individually and collectively, alternative . . . economies.” Brown shows how mistaken readers have been to dismiss Crane's Whilomville Stories as merely “sentimental” (“American Childhood” 445, 468, 469, 445).Footnote ⁵¹

Did sentiment for the book open up a perception of the possible obstreperousness of juvenilia? The bookending of the comprehensive collection by the juvenilia reprint or edition on one end of the shelf, and the life-and-letters volume on the other end, was probably meant to authorize and control a promisingly precocious childhood, and not to throw open byways. The late Victorian genre in which collectors actually engaged with the contents of juvenilia, the biobibliographic essay, tended to be pretty dull, rehearsing clichés about the child being father to the man (see Axon 3–4), and the Victorian edition of juvenilia, like the life-and-letters volume, was likely to be as deliberately controlling as unintentionally revealing. But the late Victorian generation was aware of the potential for comedy. A brilliant caprice on the collector's dicey relation with the child self of a canonical modern author can be enjoyed in Max Beerbohm's 1914 sketch of life at “the Pines,” where Watts-Dunton had tamed Swinburne into a preternaturally elderly yet “beautifully well-bred child” (64).

Writing of his visits to the Pines, Beerbohm is like the Browning of “Pan and Luna,” inquiring into the meaning of the fiery mythmaker poet having been pulled to earth and domesticated in a London suburb by this respectable Pan, Watts-Dunton. Swinburne is safely rendered a memorial of himself, an elderly prodigy. He is also a book collector, prompting Beerbohm to ask rhetorically: “An illustrious bibliophile among his books? A birthday child, rather, among his toys” (76). The comedy of the sketch relies on an implicit awareness of something like Watts-Dunton's plan, published years earlier, to regulate prodigies in order to assure that they let off steam harmlessly. At the same time, the arrangement at the Pines allows for Shepherd's idea: that the most original poetic spirit remains inviolate in childhood. For Shepherd, it was a melancholy realization that this poetic childhood spirit was only remotely accessible, through an exchange of material books. For Beerbohm, a visit to Swinburne's library was an exciting, if dumbfounding, experience. Leading up to this visit, the intensely deaf Swinburne has been remote, an eerie elfin presence. Now, Beerbohm and Swinburne bound up three stairs at a time, like two boys together, only checking themselves lest “Watts-Dunton behind us might be embittered at sight of so much youth and legerity” (75). As the visitor is plied with one rare “editio princeps” (first edition) after another by the infantile figure perched on the library ladder, Beerbohm finds himself increasingly out of his depth regarding the arcane contents of the rarities (76). What else could Beerbohm do? He “sacrificed [himself] on the altar of sympathy” and bellowed “appreciation of the fount of type, the margins, the binding.” Swinburne “beamed agreement, and fetched another volume” (78, 77).