Uncollected Letters Research Articles

Boz, New York and a Temperance Aphorism

Abstract: Visiting America in 1842, Dickens found the problem of drunkenness in the process of being vigorously addressed. He was questioned about the prevalence of alcohol consumption in his fiction and criticized for an inferred less than totally serious regard for America’s efforts to confront the problem by promoting abstinence. His response was to question the logic and potential effectiveness of that approach. He reacted similarly to such an approach at home, consistently reiterating the view that there was “such a thing as Use without Abuse” in personal correspondence, and, sometimes coupled to arguments for moderation in other matters, in his journalism. During his 1842 visit, declining in a previously uncollected letter an invitation to attend a temperance-observing event in New York, he instead sent a striking aphorism, which thereafter appeared in temperance-promoting literature.

"Mr. Charles Dickens and the Jews": Tracing the Origin and Context of Two Statements

This paper clarifies the origin and context of two frequently quoted statements concerning Dickens's attitude to Jews. They comprise the assertion that "Jews alone are excluded from the sympathising heart of Dickens," and the apparent response that his attitude to them was not "inimica." The first statement has been traced to an editorial in the 7 April 1854 issue of the short-lived London newspaper the Hebrew Observer. The second occurs in a previously uncollected letter from Dickens, reprinted on 12 April 1854 in the Hebrew Observer and the Jewish Chronicle. The statements appeared at a time when the Jewish community, pursuing emancipation, sought to present itself positively. The editorial comprises a disappointed account of Dickens's perceived past negativity towards Jews followed by a presumed (on the slimmest of evidence) change of heart. The letter replies to an invitation to attend a Jewish cultural event, Dickens's acceptance of which would have provided a welcome indication of support. Dickens's response was to deny that he was inimical towards Jews, and to decline the invitation.

Still More to Say

ABSTRACT After Lolita brought him international fame, Vladimir Nabokov kept producing new novels while translating earlier Russian works into English. Since his death, other translations, fiction, lectures, correspondence, writings on lepidoptera, and even a dream diary have appeared. The latest book, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, offers a dazzling introduction to his work while tracing his progress from an essay on “Cambridge,” written as a Russian émigré student in 1921, to an interview with the BBC Books Programme in 1977. Scholars of American literature will be intrigued by evidence of his transformation from Russian author V. Sirin to American writer and university professor Vladimir Nabokov—including his first interview (in Russian) after arriving in New York City in 1940, his early book reviews (in English) for American journals, fascinating glimpses of his academic career at Wellesley and Cornell, and dozens of charmingly playful interviews from Lolita’s publication until his death. More than eight decades since Nabokov immigrated to the United States, there is still much to learn about his American literary career.

Benjamin B. Alexander, editor. Good Things out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends

Benjamin B. Alexander, editor. Good Things out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends

The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson

Reviewed by: The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters by Jennifer A. Williamson John Saillant The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman. A Narrative of Real Life. Including Previously Uncollected Letters. By Jennifer A. Williamson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016, 337 pages, $39.95 Paper. Jermain Wesley Loguen lived a remarkable life. Born Jarm, a slave, in Tennessee around 1814, he escaped to the North and settled in mid-state New York, although he crossed the border into Canada several times. He began reading and writing, then he preached in a number of different churches. He is now associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church although his religious interests were wide ranging and his affiliation to the A.M.E.Z. Church developed late in his life. He was an energetic abolitionist speaker as well as an incisive commentator on American religion. In a published exchange with his former mistress, he denied the justice of enslavement and he refused to buy his own freedom. His free energies were focused on mid-state New York. He facilitated the Underground Railroad in countless ways, and he participated in the famous 1851 "Jerry rescue" in Syracuse, in which a number of residents, black and white, defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and battled officials holding the runaway William "Jerry" McHenry. Like Frederick Douglass, he recruited young black men for service in the Civil War. After the War, in the last few years of his life, he traveled between Pennsylvania and New York and he sought to establish A.M.E.Z. congregations in Kentucky and Tennessee. Like Jeremiah Sanderson, he turned his attention to black life in the western United States. But he died, in 1872, in Saratoga Springs, before he could go west. His 1859 memoir is the story of his life from childhood to the repercussions of the Jerry rescue. Loguen was indicted but never tried for his role in the rescue. His memoir plays an important role in scholarship on the rhetoric and artistry of black abolitionist writing ("novelization" studies), and it should function as a model text for black voices in state history in education. This new edition contains an appendix with a selection of Loguen's correspondence. For readers of the early twenty-first century, the parts of The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, that are most likely to be of interest [End Page 302] are his novelistic account of running away and his detailed immersion in abolitionist life in New York. As a runaway, abolitionist, and Underground Railroad conductor, he set foot in Rochester, Utica, Whitesboro, Bath, Ithaca, Cortland, Troy, and Syracuse. These were important places at important moments in New York history. When New York history is taught in schools or colleges, it is crucial that students encounter black voices in local contexts. And when teachers and researchers educated in New York institutions relocate, as they sometimes do, to other states, it is crucial that they transfer this insight—that black-authored texts are a crucial part of state history—to their new environments. Once we have models of black voices at local levels, we find them all around us. In other words, "state history" should be a transferable skill in the American educational landscape. With authors like Loguen, we sharpen the skills we need to transfer, in the case at hand, from New York to other states. Williamson's "critical introduction" offers an engaging approach to the 1859 memoir. She notes his connection with Frederick Douglass, both in abolitionist activism and in the rhetoric of manliness. She enters the debate over whether it was Loguen or a white abolitionist who wrote the memoir. That debate intersects with commentary on authenticity. Using contextual evidence, Williamson concludes that Loguen was the author even if he hired a white abolitionist associate to edit the manuscript. Unfortunately, the handwritten manuscript does not, as far as we know, exist. Williamson also situates Loguen's memoir in the process of abolitionist-minded "novelization," the way in which nineteenth-century black-authored autobiographies borrowed from the...

The Uncollected Letters of William Blake

This essay focuses on the most recently unearthed letter by William Blake—one that is known but has hitherto been inadequately discussed. Blake's letter illustrates how aspects of the correspondence, previously considered mundane, in fact can play a crucial role in unearthing key minute particulars and ultimately bringing into fuller focus Blake's life and work. At the same time, the ever-increasing corpus of Blake letters little addressed by researchers underlines the need for a revised and fully annotated, historically and biographically attuned scholarly edition of the correspondence of the artist, poet, and printmaker.

Women’s Rights, Education, and the Uncollected Letters of William Ellery Channing in the Christian Inquirer

Women’s Rights, Education, and the Uncollected Letters of William Ellery Channing in the Christian Inquirer

Language Lessons: Pound's Letters to His Chinese Friends

This review examines Zhaoming Qian's newest contribution to the field of Pound studies, Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends, a collection of 162 previously uncollected letters between Pound and Chinese scholars of his acquaintance. Qian's collection answers fundamental questions that have long troubled Pound scholars: How well did Pound know Chinese? What were his translation practices, his dictionaries? Was he guided by eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalist versions of Chinese projects, or did he seek guidance from Chinese scholars directly? Qian's carefully edited collection resolves these and other uncertainties regarding Pound's Chinese influences and his Confucian philosophy.

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: A Review Essay

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad:A Review Essay Allan H. Simmons The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 8: 1923–1924 Laurence Davies and Gene M. Moore, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. lxxii + 426 pp. $180.00£90.00 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 9: Uncollected Letters and Indexes Laurence Davies, Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore, and J. H. Stape, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xlviii + 383 pp. $180.00£90.00 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volumes 1–9 Laurence Davies, et al, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 5,700 pp. $1,475.00£750.00 The publication of volumes 8 and 9 of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad in December 2007 brought to happy completion a project that began with the appearance of the first volume in 1983. To dyed-in-the-wool Conrad scholars, the emergence of these volumes of letters has afforded the sensation of aging at the same rate as Conrad. The handsome cover photograph of Conrad in 1923, by T. R. Annan and Sons, has graced each volume, holding out to the patient reader the promise of final synchrony between the private thoughts and the public image of the subject. This promise has now been fulfilled, and the result is a complete edition to celebrate and even wonder at. The scholarly excellence that sustains the nine volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad deserves recognition. Work on the editions began under the editorship of Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. By the time of Karl's death in 2004, the editorial team had been [End Page 182] Click for larger view View full resolution Front Dust Jacket, Volume 8 Printed by permission of Cambridge University Press [End Page 183] supplemented by three eminent Conradians (Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore, and J. H. Stape) in order to hasten the project's completion. The additions proved felicitous: the final four volumes have appeared since 2002. More importantly, this increased rate of production—in defiance of the publishing laws that usually appertain in these cases—saw no diminution in the standards that have been a hallmark of the edition. They were maintained and, if anything, improved upon. The editorial scholarship is at once generous and suitably supportive, and the magisterial notes, whereby letters are not overwhelmed but constantly illuminated, a continual delight. As George Steiner rightly observed, "The scholarly wealth and care of this edition, the clarity of layout and secondary material, are beyond praise" ("Darkness of the Heart," The Sunday Times, 24 August 1986, 43). At the heart of Conrad's vision of humanity stands a belief in the importance of solidarity. In many respects, the success of these nine volumes is a testament to that vision. Together, the Acknowledgements pages compile a who's who not only of Conrad scholars across the last three decades but also, extending to the legions of librarians, the broader scholarly community. The editors have been well served by the crew—and by no one more than the late Hans van Marle whose unrivalled and generous behind-the-scenes contributions steered the project home. Laurence Davies admits in his introduction to volume 9 that this "does not pretend to be the final word" on Conrad's correspondence, and since its publication a few short letters, previously unknown, have already turned up on the market and will, at the request of the copyright holder, soon appear in The Conradian, publication of the Joseph Conrad Society of the United Kingdom and journal of record in the field. Be that as it may, what he and his fellow editors have given us, though, is just about as final and scholarly an edition as we could have wished for, and in his own collected introductions, Davies has incidentally offered perhaps one of the finest biographical insights into Conrad the artist that we have. Following the series format, volume 8 includes a helpful Gazetteer of Correspondents and Chronology of the years covered, while, in keeping with the standards set by previous volumes, the annotation of the letters is formidably detailed and erudite, drawing upon expertise built up over a quarter of a century...

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume 8: 1923–1924. Ed. Laurence Davies and Gene M. Moore.The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume 9: Uncollected Letters and Indexes. Ed. Laurence Davies, Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore, and J. H. Stape.

‘Twilight lies already on these pages’ (240), wrote Conrad to Arnold Bennett about his last complete novel, The Rover (1923). He was alluding to the valedictory figure of the old sailor Peyrol and perhaps also to the enigmatic epigraph: ‘Sleep after toile, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please’. The choice of these elegiac lines, spoken by Despair in Spenser's Faerie Queene, and later to be inscribed on Conrad's gravestone, might be thought to suggest the writer's sense of his own approaching end. Yet the letters of the last nineteen months of Conrad's life reveal an undiminished commitment to his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, both new and old, and testify to a mind still actively engaged with the world around it and able to offer penetrating insights on developments in literature and the arts, contemporary events and politics. Although his physical...

The Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Algernon Charles Swinburne , Terry Meyers (review)

The Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne by Algernon Charles Swinburne , Terry Meyers (review)

Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, and: Major Poems and Selected Prose (review )

Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Terry L. Meyers. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. xxvi + 334 pp. (vol. 1), v + 487 pp. (vol. 2), v + 399 pp. (vol. 3). Hardback $475.00; 295.00 [pounds sterling]. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. xxx + 498 pp. Paperback. $24.95; 15.00 [pounds sterling] Back in the early 1960s the late, much-respected Cecil Y. Lang laid the foundation stone for modern Swinburne studies with the six volumes of The Swinburne Letters. At a stroke this exposed the biographies by Gosse (1917), Lafourcade (1932), and Hare (1949) as doing little more than skimming over the life. He went on edit unpublished and uncollected New Writings By Swinburne (1964) and select from Swinburne's poetry in the anthology The PreRaphaelite Poets (1975). Both Terry Meyers and Jerome McGann personally acknowledge Lang's assistance them, his scholarship, and his passing, in two substantial new publications that will inspire Swinburne scholars in the first decades of a new century. I can personally testify the importance of Terry Meyers' twenty-five years of labor because he very kindly allowed quotation from some of the letters in this edition for my biography A. C. Swinburne: A Poet's Life (1997). The purple cloth of these three volumes of uncollected Swinburne letters is going become as familiar a shelf companion as the navy blue of their six predecessors. Each carries an illustration for its frontispiece: volume 1 (1848-74) has an unseen Swinburne/Menken photograph from the late 1860s; volume 2 (1875-89) prints a picture of Swinburne taken at Holmwood in the 1870s, which I first unearthed for VP a few years ago; and volume 3 (1890-1909) has a Rotherstein caricature of Swinburne. In addition the Index, volume 3 also has a group of undated letters, and two appendices--Background a Family Joke, an extended footnote some of the Disney Leith-Swinburne letters of the 1890s, and some notes and corrections Lang's edition. In his introduction, Terry Meyers agrees with Henry James that everything about such a being as [Swinburne] becomes and remains fascinating (p. xv). This edition originated in 1970 when he pursued the text of a Swinburne letter whilst working on a Ph.D about Shelley. Meyers pays tribute his friendship with Swinburne collector John Mayfield, as well as his studies with Jerome McGann. Lang and Mayfield both assisted with some of the details in the copious and often remarkable annotations. Meyers' intention is to collect all of the letters by Swinburne that have come light since the last volumes of Lang's The Swinburne Letters appeared in 1962. The new edition includes letters published in journals by other scholars since the 1960s, others from printed sources that Lang (forgivably) missed, and a choice from some 1200 letters Swinburne known survive. Meyers adds, Nearly all of the letters in this edition are previously unpublished and they are collected now for the first time. There is a website which contains extra annotations and corrections at http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/swinburne/. So, do the Uncollected Letters advance Swinburne studies? And if so, how? First and foremost, Uncollected Letters prints a group of letters, and other relevant material, that relate directly the central question of Swinburne biography, namely, the identity of Swinburne's lost love (to use Lang's famous title phrase). In volume 3, Meyers annotates a number of letters written between Swinburne and his cousin Mary Disney Leith in the 1890s. Three of these letters were first discussed by Fuller in 1968 and a further seventeen by James D. Birchfield in 1980. Much of this correspondence (cy merest dozen) is in a playful cypher transposing the initial letters of words, and has numerous flagellation allusions. …

Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton

Two uncollected letters by Andrew Marvell (9 May 1668, 10 March 1673/4) and a draft of a parliamentary address in his hand may be found in the Wharton papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.1 The letters are addressed to Marvell's friend in the House of Lords, Philip, fourth Baron Wharton (1613-96). They reflect the length and closeness of their association, which in turn informs some of Marvell's Restoration publications. They also point to the winter of 1667/8 as the season when Marvell began to hope for more from Charles II as an ally against the Cavalier House of Commons.Although the very model of a parliamentary Puritan, and despite his intimacy with Cromwell, Wharton had survived the Restoration with his circumstances not much reduced to become a major aristocratic supporter of nonconformity. Marvell's eagerness to serve him is consistent with the pattern in his life of seeking to consolidate his connections with the great, not least with a series of great northern lords. Wharton came from Yorkshire and had substantial interests there. Marvell had already developed ties with the Lord General Fairfax, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Carlisle, and would later befriend the Earl of Anglesey and perhaps William Lord Cavendish (spendthrift son of the third Earl of Devonshire and himself the future Duke of Devonshire). His service to Wharton also reflects Marvell's commitment to Comprehension in the English Church - he may have embraced toleration, or at least indulgence, only more belatedly2 - and exemplifies the low-church sympathies that seem the most consistent feature of Marvell's politics.Of Marvell and Wharton's personal association there was already evidence in a set of letters from Dr Benjamin Worsley to Marvell, in the Christmas season 1671/2, addressed to him at Wharton's house in Winchendon, Bucks.3 Marvell had approached Worsley (a former army surgeon, millenarian, and the long-serving secretary of the Council for Trade) about a West-Country heiress who might make a good match for Wharton's oldest surviving son Thomas (1648-1715). He read Worsley's letters in reply, added brief comment, and forwarded them 'to be broke open by my lord Wharton' (presumably at his preferred country house at Wooburn, Buckinghamshire, where Marvell was soon to visit en route to London).4 Marvell also wrote back to Worsley on this business, which letters have not yet surfaced. Wharton had long been engaged in a concerted search for an appropriate daughter-in-law.5 In the event the present arrangement proved unsuccessful, owing in part to concerns in the family of the intended that Thomas Wharton was likely to become a courtier and a rake. Although far from a courtier under the Stuarts, he was soon a great rake and eventually an even greater Whig.6 There are signs too of Marvell advising Wharton on other business. When Worsley writes to Wharton directly a few weeks later, he urges Wharton to ignore Marvell's counsel discouraging efforts on behalf of an unnamed prisoner (presumably one arrested for conventicling since mention is made of an impending 'generall Release of all, that are in Custody or Confinement of this kinde', 23 January 1671/2, Bodleian MS Rawl. letters 50, fols 132-3).On the parliamentary side, there has been further evidence of connections between Marvell and Wharton, of which rather more deserves to be made. He is named as a supporter in Wharton's parliamentary lists at the beginning of the 1660s, and in a letter of 2 April 1667 from Marvell (London) to Wharton (presumably at Wooburn) he professes 'that I perfectly honour and therefore desire faithfully to serve you.'7 This is a fuller submission than usual in his frequent professions of service, and seems to reflect more than just the Lenten highmindedness characteristic of this letter to his Puritan patron. Some closer association also shows in his apology here that he has 'not yet anything mature enough in the businesse we used to discourse of, which might be worthy your notice. …

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index. Edited and compiled by James T. Boulton. / Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski: A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. Third Edition.

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index. Edited and compiled by James T. Boulton. / Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski: A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. Third Edition.

Review: The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index

Review: The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume VIII: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index

TWO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

This article prints and discusses two uncollected letters by Robert Louis Stevenson to the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, concerning his book Memories and Portraits.

“Our School of Design”: An Uncollected Letter by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

“Our School of Design”: An Uncollected Letter by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

The Adventures of the Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart.

Generations of readers have delighted in Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), among the most engaging accounts of life in the American West. Stewart related her adventures on an isolated Wyoming homestead with such vividness, gusto, and sympathy that she has become the woman homesteader. Until now, however, little has been known about her except what she chose to reveal in her published letters. Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewart's previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. George's extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life. George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewart's use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.

John Reed and the Russian Revolution: uncollected articles, letters and speeches on Russia, 1917-1920

John Reed and the Russian Revolution: uncollected articles, letters and speeches on Russia, 1917-1920

Emerson Responds to a Critic: An Uncollected Letter

Emerson Responds to a Critic: An Uncollected Letter