‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1800–1829’:
UPDATE 5 (August 2004–August 2005)

Peter Garside, with Jacqueline Belanger, Sharon Ragaz, Anthony Mandal

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles, general editors Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In particular it offers fresh commentary on the entries in the second volume, which was co-edited by Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling, with the assistance of Christopher Skelton-Foord and Karin Wünsche. The present report represents the fifth and last Update in what was intended to be a series of annual Reports, each featuring information that has come to light in the preceding year as a result of activities in CEIR and through contributions sent by interested individuals outside Cardiff.

The entries below are organised in a way that matches the order of material in the English Novel, 1770–1829. While making reference to any relevant changes that may have occurred in previous Updates, the ‘base’ it refers to is the printed Bibliography and not the preceding reports. Sections A and B concern authorship, the first of these proposing a change to the attribution as given in the printed Bibliography, and the second recording the discovery of new information of interest that has nevertheless not led presently to new attributions. Section C includes one additional novel (though not seen), which appears to match the criteria for inclusion and should ideally have been incorporated in the printed Bibliography. Section D lists a title already in the Bibliography for which a surviving copy could not be previously found, while the last two sections (E and F) involve information such as is usually found in the Notes field of entries. As previously, those owning copies of the printed Bibliography might wish to amend entries accordingly. An element of colour coding has been used to facilitate recognition of the nature of changes, with red denoting revisions and additions to existing entries in the Bibliography, and the additional title discovered being picked out in blue. Reference numbers (e.g. 1805: 10) are the same as those in the English Novel, 1770–1829; abbreviations match those listed at the beginning volume 2 of the English Novel, though in a few cases these are spelled out more fully for the convenience of present readers. EN3 refers to the online The English Novel 1830–36 (http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/1830s).

This report was prepared by Peter Garside, with significant inputs of information from Drs Jacqueline Belanger and Sharon Ragaz, while working on the last stages of the now completed online database British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception (http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk). A number of the details included in this last report are already incorporated there, and it is hoped that those not assimilated will be added at the next updating of the database. Information relating to the first English translation of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816: 22) has kindly been supplied by Cecil Courtney of Christ’s College, Cambridge; that relating to William Child Green’s The Woodland Family (1824: 44) by Gillian Hughes.

A: New and Changed Author Attributions

1819: 47
[?GILLIES, Robert Pierce].
OLD TAPESTRY; A TALE OF REAL LIFE. IN TWO VOLUMES.
Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and Co. for W. and C. Tait, Prince’s Street; and G. and W. B. Whittaker, Ave-Maria-Lane, London, 1819.
I xiii, 325p; II 319p. 12mo. 12s (ECB, ER, QR).
ER 31: 556 (Mar 1819); QR 21: 268 (Jan 1819).
Corvey; CME 3-628-48253-4; ECB 422; NSTC 2M18581 (BI BL, C, E, O).
Notes: Dedication ‘to Flint Popham, Esq.’, signed ‘M. W. M. Brasen-Nose College,’ Oxford, Mar 1819. Normally attributed to M. W. Maskell, matching the initials of the Dedication. This title, however, was claimed as Gillies’s at least twice during appeals to the Royal Literary Fund (RLF). ‘Old Tapestry. A Novel. 2 vols. 1816 [sic]’ features in a ‘List of Works’ sent as part of an appeal in Apr 1838 (RLF 22: 708, item 5); and again as part of a completed list of ‘Titles of Published Works’ on a form dated 2 Jan 1850, this time as ‘Old Tapestry a Novel—12mo. Edinb. 1819’ (RLF 22: 708, Item 19). The Edinburgh manufacture and management of the work also accords with Gillies’s career.

B: New Information Relating to Authorship, but not Presently Leading to Attribution Changes

1805: 10 ANON, THE MYSTERIOUS PROTECTOR: A NOVEL. DEDICATED TO LADY CRESPIGNY. Further to the apparent attribution of this novel to Lady Crespigny in J. Brown’s Circulating Library in Wigan, as reported in Update 4, advertisements have been found in the Morning Chronicle and Star newspapers for 6 Dec 1805 stating that the novel was ‘Corrected and revised by Lady Crespigny’. This evidently formed part of a marketing ploy, however, and no mention of any such direct assistance is found in the ultra-respectful Dedication of the novel to Lady Crespigny signed ‘M. C.’. Lady Mary Champion de Crespigny (1748?–1812), née Mary Clarke, is one of most commonly-found persons in subscription lists to novels early in the 19th century. Apart from writing The Pavilion. A Novel (EN1 1796: 35), she was also the acknowledged author of A Monody to the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood (London: Cadell & Davies, 1810).

1805: 68 TEMPLE, Mrs {F.}, FERDINAND FITZORMOND; OR, THE FOOL OF NATURE. A review in the Flowers of Literature for 1806 identifies the author as the same Mrs Temple whose Poems it had reviewed in 1805: ‘Her preface is here signed F. Temple: the Poems appeared under the name of Laura Sophia Temple’ (p. 502). The title is also mentioned in an introductory section on ‘Novelists’ in the same issue of the journal: ‘Mrs. Temple, the fair author of some excellent poems, of which we took ample notice in our preceding volume, has produced a ponderous novel, in five volumes, entitled Ferdinand Fitzormond’ (p. lxxvii). The combined attribution also gains credence in view of all three works involved, Flowers of Literature, Ferdinand Fitzormond, and Poems (1805), being issued by the same publisher, viz. Richard Phillips. On the other hand, according to J. R. de J. Jackson’s Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770–1835 (1993), pp. 346–47, Laura Sophia Temple (1763–after 1820) was married to Samuel B. Sweetman, which does not accord with the initial ‘F’. as found in the ‘Advertisement’ to Ferdinand Fitzormond. There may, however, be some significance in Temple’s mother, the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Temple, being named Frances. The address ‘To the Reader’ in Poems (1805) is dated ‘Chelsea, Dec. 16, 1804’; the ‘Advertisement’ to Ferdinand Fitzormond, London, May 1805. Laura Sophia Temple was also the acknowledged author of Lyric and Other Poems (1808) and The Siege of Zaragoza, and Other Poems (1812).

1808: 47 GENLIS, [Stéphanie-Félicité, Comtesse] de, SAINCLAIR, OR THE VICTIM OF THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF MADAME DE GENLIS. According to the concluding comment to a notice of Genlis’s The Siege of Rochelle (1808: 48) in the Critical Review, the above title was also translated by Robert Charles Dallas: ‘This novel, as well as ‘Sainclair’, which we have already noticed, is translated, as we understand it, by Mr. Dallas, the author of Percival, &c.’ (Appendix to 3rd ser. 13 (Jan–Apr 1808), 525–28). Unlike 1808: 48, however, the present title-page does not attribute the translation to Dallas, and the Critical Review’s assertion must be regarded with some scepticism in view of this inequality.

1816: 22 CONSTANT DE [REBECQUE], Benjamin [Henri]; [WALKER, Alexander (trans.)], ADOLPHE: AN ANECDOTE FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF AN UNKNOWN PERSON, AND PUBLISHED BY M. BENJAMIN DE CONSTANT. An account of this first English translation, together with valuable details concerning Alexander Walker, the translator, can be found in C. P. Courtney, ‘Alexander Walker and Benjamin Constant: A Note on the English Translation of Adolphe’, French Studies, 29: 2 (Apr 1975), 137–50. As Courtney describes, Walker (1779–1852) was a medical student in Scotland, and contributor to several medical journals, who came to London to seek literary work, and was in communication with Constant (who had also studied at Edinburgh University) during the latter’s visit to England (Jan–July 1816). Walker went on to have a prolific literary career of his own, writing or contributing to a variety of medical and scientific works, and acting from 1824 as the general literary editorial of the hugely ambitious though short-lived European Review, whose aim was to publish editions simultaneously in four different languages. Walker was evidently committed to the Encyclopaedic ideal, and a strong sense that all knowledge is related underlies a succession of more popular informational works produced in the 1830s, including The Nervous System (1834), Intermarriage (1838), Women psychologically considered … (1839), and Female Beauty (1837), the last nominally at least by Mrs Alexander Walker. Library catalogues, however, have sometimes failed to link the translator of Constant with the ‘physiologist’ Alexander Walker, and indeed there has been a more endemic failure to bring the whole oeuvre under one single identified author. A copy of Walker’s somewhat eccentric pamphlet The Political and Military State of Europe, 1807; an Address to the British Nation … (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1807) reportedly contains a list of other works by Walker in preparation, including novels, though without precise titles for the novels being given.

     Additional information about the original editions of Adolphe in French that shortly preceded the above translation can be found in Courtney’s meticulously detailed A Bibliography of Editions of the Writings of Benjamin Constant to 1833 (London: MHRA, 1981), pp. 47–62. Whereas the EN2 1816: 22 entry merely states ‘Paris, 1816’ for the French original, in actuality there were clearly two separate editions in French, one published from London and one from Paris, the London edition slightly ahead of the other. The first of these (Courtney 18a) bears the imprint of Henry Colburn (London) and Tröttel [sic] and Wurtz (Paris); this was entered at Stationers’ Hall on 7 June 1816, having been delivered on 30 Apr to the London printers Schulze and Dean. The first Paris edition (Courtney 18b), published by Treuttel and Würtz in association with Colburn, and presumably set from proofs sent from London, appears to have been published on or about 15 June 1816. A second edition (Courtney 18c), effectively a reissue of the first Colburn French edition, with new preliminaries and the addition of a ‘Préface de la seconde édition’, was probably first issued in July or Aug [additional source: first advertisement in Morning Chronicle, 17 Aug 1816]. Walker’s translation (Courtney 18i), another Colburn production, incorporates the same Preface, and a copy was apparently entered at Stationers’ Hall on 3 September 1816. A useful summary of the chronology of the different editions can also be found in C. P. Courtney, ‘The Text of Constant’s Adolphe’, French Studies, 37: 3 (July 1983), 296–309 (pp. 296–97); while similar bibliographical information also features in the Introduction to the same author’s edition of Adolphe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

1819: 23 [BALFOUR, Alexander], CAMPBELL; OR, THE SCOTTISH PROBATIONER. A NOVEL. A useful account of this novel, and the three others written by Alexander Balfour (see 1822: 17, 1823: 21, and 1826: 12), can be found in David Macbeth Moir’s ‘Memoir’ of the author in Balfour’s posthumously-published Weeds and Wildflowers (Edinburgh, 1830). Whereas the above novel was published from Edinburgh by Oliver & Boyd, its three successors were published by A. K. Newman at the Minerva Press, this offering a fairly unusual instance of a domiciled Scottish fiction writer publishing in London at the height of the indigenous ‘Scotch Novel’ (James Hogg provides another instance). Moir offers a critical commentary on each title, with that on Highland Mary (1826) pointing to two levels of esteem in the fiction industry: ‘if we seldom find it in the boudoir of the great, the circulating-library copies are dog-eared, and thumbed to tatters,—no very uncertain criterion (whatever be Mr Hazlitt’s theory) of its merits’ (p. lxxxv).

1825: 30 FOUQUÉ, [Friedrich Heinrich Karl], Baron de la Motte, THE MAGIC RING; A ROMANCE, FROM THE GERMAN. Further support for Update 4’s identification of Robert Pierce GILLIES as the translator can be found in the Royal Literary Fund archive, where this title forms part of lists accompanying three appeals by Gillies to the Fund (RLF 22: 708, Items 5; 8, 19).

1826: 38 [GILLIES, Robert Pierce], TALES OF A VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN. NSTC 2G10257 and 2A15071 describe Harvard as attributing this title to George Robert Gleig. No substantiation, however, has been discovered for such an attribution, and the present Hollis electronic catalogue for the Harvard libraries makes the more conventional attribution to Gillies. Nevertheless this title, and the second series of Tales of a Voyager (1829: 33), seem to sit awkwardly with other contemporary works by Gillies. In his Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (3 vols., 1851), Gillies’s narrative covering the years 1825–30 highlights only one novel: ‘Returning to town at Christmas 1829 […] the first use I made of my little gasp of time was to finish a book, “Basil Barrington” for which Mr. Colburn paid me £200 before it was written’ (III, 213). Basil Barrington and his Friends (EN3 1830: 50) mentions no other works ‘by the author’ on its title-page, which seems an odd omission since Colburn was also the publisher of both series of Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean. Two other works published in the early 1830s, Ranulph de Rohais (EN3 1830: 51) and Thurlston Tales (1835: 46), published by William Kidd and John Macrone respectively, do however describes themselves as ‘by the Author of “Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean”’. Both these latter are likewise conventionally attributed to Gillies, though whether by title association or for more substantive reasons is a moot point. Certainly, viewed as whole, the two series of Tales of a Voyager together with Ranulph de Rohais and Thurlston Tales appear to form a distinct group, with Basil Barrington lacking any visible connection with any of its constituents.

     Further doubt is cast by the records of the Royal Literary Fund, which include a series of appeals made by Gillies and lastly his widow, which as a matter of course meant providing lists of his works. ‘“Basil Barrington and his Friends” in three vols. published by Colburn’ is given prominence in Gillies’s first letter to the society on 20 June 1831 (RLF 22: 708, Item 1), and was subsequently listed in appeals made in 1838, 1846, 1850, and 1859 (Items 5, 8, 19, and 28). At no point on the other hand is there any mention of the two series of Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, Ranulph de Rohais, or Thurlston Tales. Certainly in his appeal of 1850, Gillies introduced the possibility that not all his writings were included: ‘I regret to say that some of these are the only part of my published works which it is in my power to obtain & submit to the society’ (Item 19). But it is unlikely all four novels would be suppressed or difficult to find; and, unless other supportive evidence can be found, Gillies’s authorship of 1826: 38, 1829: 33, as well as EN3 1830: 51 and 1835: 46, must be considered as at least doubtful.

 

C: New Titles for Inclusion

1825
ANON.
DE COURCY: A TALE.
Isle of Wight: The Author, 1825.
397p.
CLU-S/C PR.3991.A1.D34 [not seen]; xNSTC.
Notes. Described from the CLU copy in OCLC Accession No. 3787624, and not found in any other catalogues. Evidently a rare of Isle of Wight imprint, which nevertheless has the external makings of full-length work of fiction.

D: Titles Previously not Located for Which Holding Libraries
Have Subsequently Been Discovered

1824: 44
GREEN, William Child.
THE WOODLAND FAMILY; OR, THE SONS OF ERROR, AND DAUGHTERS OF SIMPLICITY. BY WILLIAM CHILD GREEN.
London: Printed and published by Joseph Emans, No. 91 Waterloo Road, 1824.
lii, 557p. 8vo, ill.
Manchester, Deansgate Library (Special Collections); xNSTC.
Notes: Engraved t.p. gives title as ‘The Woodland Family; or The Sons of Error and Daughters of Simplicity. A Domestic Tale’. Author’s Preface dated 30 July 1823. Every third gathering of four numbered at foot of page alongside signature from No. 1 to No. 23, indicating an issue in parts. Eight engraved plates (one missing in present copy), including Frontispiece.
Further edn: 1826 (MH 18488.8.10; NSTC 2G20225). This Harvard copy has the imprint of ‘J. M‘Gowan and Son Great Windmill Street, Haymarket’.

E: New Information Relating to Existing Title Entries

1801: 60 SICKELMORE, Richard, RAYMOND, A NOVEL. OCLC entry (Accession No. 49374069), itself based on copy in Library at University California, Berkeley (PR.5452.S16.R3.1801), describes as containing ‘List of subscribers’—vol. 1, pp. [vii]–xii’. None was found in the Corvey copy used for the Bibliography entry,

1822: 76 TROTTER, Robert, LOWRAN CASTLE, OR THE WILD BOAR OF CURRIDOO: WITH OTHER TALES, ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE SUPERSTITIONS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS OF GALLOWAY. OCLC entry (Accession No. 43658913), itself based on copy in Library at Columbia University (GR145.G3.T76.1822g), describes as containing ‘Subscribers’ names’, pp. [160]–168. The BL copy at RB.23.b.12566 is also reported as saying ‘List of subscribers’ names within numbered pagination at end of text’, that pagination ending at p. 168. The copy at E NG.1177.f.4, which formed the Bibliography entry, ended at p. 157, and so evidently lacked the subscription list.

F: Further Editions Previously not Noted

1807: 15 COTTIN, [Sophie Ristaud]; MEEKE, [Mary] (trans.), ELIZABETH; OR, THE EXILES OF SIBERIA. A TALE, FOUNDED ON FACTS. ALTERED FROM THE FRENCH OF MADAME DE COTTIN. The Bibliography entry is based on the Minerva Press edition, located at Yale University, at that point considered to represent the first published translation. Advertisements in the Morning Chronicle on 23 Jan 1807 and the Star on 18 Feb 1807 point to a possibly earlier 1-vol. edn issued by Oddy and Co., W. Oddy, and Appleyards. These adverts are apparently matched by the entry in OCLC (Accession No. 12265756), itself based on the copy at Indiana University (PQ2211.C53.E613.1807). The Indiana catalogue describes this as: Elizabeth, or, The Exiles of Siberia: A Tale founded upon Facts from the French of Mad. Cottin, London: Printed for Appleyard [and 2 others], 1807, 254p. The Glasgow University Library catalogue also describes a similarly-titled work (Sp. Coll. Z6-l.22), published by Appleyard, 1807.

1816: 37 JOHNSTONE, Mary, THE LAIRDS OF GLENFERN; OR, HIGHLANDERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. A TALE. OCLC entry (Accession No. 32517107), itself based on copy in Library at the University of North Carolina (PR.4826.J6.32.L3), describes a copy of this novel with the joint imprint: London: Printed at the Minerva Press for A. K. Newman: Edinburgh: John Anderson’. John Anderson’s name is missing in the Corvey copy used for the Bibliography entry, whose t.p. and colophons match that of a routine Minerva Press title. It is not impossible, though, that the work was actually initiated in Edinburgh, and then sold on to Newman and Co.