Month: July 2021

The First Printed Female Author?

It seems to have been Proba. The first printed edition of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi came out in 1474. That was only five years after the first printed edition of Virgil himself (1469). It’s a good indicator of her reputation in the Renaissance.

Today, Proba benefits from the rush to find female writers to study, and she has been reassessed as a Good Poet again. I have Wikipedia’s word for it (“During the 19th and 20th centuries the poem was criticized as being of poor quality, but recent scholars have held the work in higher regard”). I’m more likely to value a Renaissance critic’s opinion of what’s “clene and chast Latin” (thus Wikipedia tells me John Colet described Proba’s poem) than a twentieth-century critic’s, so the reassessment of Proba is welcome.

Slaves Escaping Up the Hudson

In 1841, an English abolitionist named Joseph Sturge came to the United States to report on the state of slavery there. On his way up the Hudson to Albany, he met a couple who were escaping from slavery in the South. Striking up a conversation with them, he found out how they did it.

On the evening of the 17th, in company with several of my abolition friends, I started for Albany, where the State legis­lature was then in session. The distance from New York is about a hundred and fifty-five miles, and is fre­quently per­formed by the steamers, on the noble river Hudson, in nine hours and a half up the stream, and in eight hours down. On these steamers there is accom­mo­dation for several hundred passen­gers to lodge, and the fare is only one dollar, with an extra charge for beds and meals. For an additional dollar, two per­sons may secure a state room to themselves.

As night drew on, and the deck began to be cleared, I observed a well-dressed black man and woman sitting apart, and sup­posing they could obtain no berths on ac­count of their color, I went and spoke to them. I told them I and several others on board were aboli­tion­ists. The man then informed us they were escaping from slavery, and had left their homes little more than two days before. They appeared very intel­ligent, though they could neither read nor write, and described to us how they had ef­fected their escape. They had obtained leave to go to a wedding, from which they were not ex­pected to return till the evening of the day fol­lowing. Having procured forged certificates of freedom, for which they paid twenty-five dollars, each, they came forward with expe­dition by railway and steam boat. They had heard of emanci­pation in the British West Indies, and the efforts of the abolitionists in the States, but they were unac­quainted with the existence of vigilance committees, to facil­itate the escape of runaway slaves. We assisted them to proceed to the house of a relative of one of our party, out of the track of the pursuer, should they be followed. There is little doubt that they have safely reached Canada, for I was told at Albany, public opinion had become so strong in favor of self-emanci­pation, that if a runaway were seized in the city, it is probable he would be rescued by the people.

I would also point attention to the fact, which is brought to light by this relation, that the slave-holders have not only to contend with the honest and open-handed means which the abolitionists most righteously employ,* to facil­itate the escape of slaves, but with the mercenary acts of members of their own community, who live by the manu­facture and sale of forged free papers.

*See Deut. xxiii. 15, 16 [“Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.”].

——A Visit to the United States in 1841.

Noon Talfourd and Some Other Guy

I just opened an 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine. On one page are two poems, and the editor cannot restrain his enthusiasm for one of the poets.

It is with high gratification that we present our readers, this month, with this elegant original poem from the pen of Sergeant NOON TALFOURD, of England, the author of “Ion,” and, perhaps, the first living poet of his age. In the letter accompanying the verses he speaks of them as “my last effusion on an occasion very dear to me—composed in view of Eton College after leaving my eldest son there for the first time.”

The other poem is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

It is possible—now that I think of it, probable—that the editor who wrote this little footnote was Edgar Allan Poe. He was one of the editors at Graham’s at the time, and we know what he thought of Longfellow. I suspect that I may know what he thought of Talfourd, too: namely, that the most insulting thing he could do was praise a trivial little sonnet by Talfourd and not even mention the much more substantial poem by Longfellow that appeared on the same page. It’s the sort of thing that would amuse Poe.

Gulliver and Gilliver

Jonathan Swift’s famous book is known to us as “Gulliver’s Travels” because, apparently at the last minute, he put the name “Lemuel Gulliver” on the title page as the author. Where did that name come from? I am not the first to figure this out, but it seems to be a fact so little known that it almost counts as an original discovery: there was a bookseller named Lawton Gilliver with whom Swift and the Scriblerians were associated. It is typical of Swift to make an insulting pun on the name of someone he knew, and given the name “Gilliver,” what other pun could Swift possibly make in order to put his name on the title page of a book of exceedingly improbable and unbelievable adventures?

I only noticed this because I was looking for a good edition of Pope’s works, and found that a very expensive-looking edition was published by Lawton Gilliver in 1735. The bells immediately rang. Association with Pope is enough to prove association with Swift, but I did find his name mentioned here and there in connection with Swift as well.

Google and DuckDuckGo each return exactly one legitimate result for Gilliver and Gulliver together: an article from the Huntington Library Quarterly in 1949 that appears to have made the same discovery. Google finds this text in it: “…seller Lawton Gilliver, who became Pope’s regular publisher for the next eight years. The similarity between the names Lawton Gilliver and Lemuel Gulliver is…” On every other page that mentions both names, “Gilliver” is a misprint for “Gulliver,” or vice versa, all doubtless due to the position of the U and I keys on a QWERTY keyboard.