A NOTE ON PHOTOGRAPHY: THE MS OF ‘VANITY FAIR’

Abstract

MODERN scholars in various literary fields must often work from photographic reproductions of MS material. Particularly is this so in Australasia, where time and distance may make personal inspection of original documents difficult or impossible. The practice has its dangers unless photographs are checked and collated with the originals by some competent person; this is well known, but may be illustrated again from the following note, which will also provide a corrected short account of the MS of Vanity Fair. In their new edition of the novel (Houghton Mifflin C'ompany, Boston, 1963; Methuen, 1963), Professors Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson of the University of London offer a 'Note on the Manuscript' (pp. 669-71), based on their study of photographs of the MS of thirteen chapters now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. These photographs were lent by Professor Gordon N. Ray, who had obtained them some time ago in the course of his editorial and biographical work on The Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray, The Uses of Adversity, and The Age of Wisdom. Unfortunately, the description of the MS which results from the study of these photographs is inaccl:lrate. The MS of Vanity Fair in the Morgan Library consists of Chapters 1-5, two versions of Chapter 6, and Chapters 8-13. Chapter 7 is missing. The MS is written in two styles of handwriting, sloping and upright, on leaves of notepaper of various sizes which have been pasted into a broad album whose folios are numbered in pencil 1-112. The MS leaves are numbered in ink, and run in five sequences, two of them subject to much renumbering. Blocks of page proof, corrected and written over, are pasted in to the MS as part of the second version of Chapter 6. Most of the chapters are numbered or titled; the position of the inset illustrations which were a feature of publication in Numbers is frequently indicated within the text. Th~ photographs of this MS were unreliable in three important respects.