A Neglected Source for Literary Biography

Abstract

In 1932 John H. Birss caused something of a sensation in Keats circles by his discovery of the MS of the letter Keats wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke on October 9, [1816]—one of the two earliest known Keats letters. Although fragments of it had been printed in Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke's Recollections of Writers (1878), and before that in Clarke's reminiscences of Keats published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861) and the Gentleman's Magazine (1874), its full text was not known to Keats scholars until its discoverer printed it in Louis A. Holman's Within the Compass of a Print Shop (Boston: October, 1932) and in Notes and Queries for November 5, 1932. In both periodicals, an editorial note appended to the text of the letter described the circumstances under which the MS had been discovered: Birss, looking through “a little-known catalogue of manuscript letters and documents” in search of letters by Melville, happened to open the volume to K instead of M, and there found “a notation of an early Keats letter.” Following this clue, he succeeded in locating the holograph itself in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia.