Editing the Remains of Thomas Traherne

Abstract

In the light of emerging revisions in the biography of Thomas Traherne, major editorial projects currently under way, and advances in editorial theory, this article offers a fundamental re-assessment of the nature of the text of ‘Poems of Felicity’, the posthumous sequence of religious lyrics assembled by his brother Philip in the early years of the eighteenth century. This notorious case of fraternal re-writing, much vilified in the twentieth century, is contextualised by comparing the biases of early eighteenth-century attempts to publish the remains of Traherne with those of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article recognises the act of collection as one of appropriation, and looks for apparent acts of anticipating and directing reader-response. What emerges is the clear impossibility of reconstructing an ur-text, especially one driven by an autobiographical model, and the inevitability of taking into account a piece of book-making designed for ‘the public good’.