Frost in England: A Publishing Incident

Abstract

cerpt. Additionally, he tampers with Miss Bates's (and Whittier's) comma after Elginbrod (21) and her colon (Whittier's comma) after Love (31). Although he unconsciously rights a wrong when he restores Whittier's capital in Nature (i i), he has pressed the seal of sanction upon Miss Bates's errancy and thus become her accomplice in obfuscating the authentic source for over sixty years. Last link in the vitiated chain is welded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his English Men of Letters biography of Whittier (New York, 1902), 128-130. The line of derivation here is from Pickard, duly footnoted, but, oddly, Higginson reverts to Miss Bates's lumbering tactic of double and single quotation marks, which Pickard had effectively scrapped. In the summer extract Higginson varies the punctuation twice, fails to capitalize Spiritualism as Bates and Pickard did, capitalizes his as Bates and Pickard did not, and truncates the last paragraph. He departs from Pickard only once in the 2nd Month segment, replacing Whittier's, Bates's and Pickard's colon with a period following life (lo). Gratuitously compounding confusion, he refers to Miss Bates as Madame Roger; her surname in marriage was Roge. There is no telling what dismemberment the summer letter endured, but it is safe to say that, three removes from inception, Whittier's 2nd Month letter has lost much in the transmission. The motto is patent: Caveat lector.