John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century

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Tseng 2004.2.20 08:57 6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 1 of 864

THE ELIZABETHAN CLUB SERIES 9

6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 2 of 864

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

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Pencil drawing of John Payne Collier by Thomas C. Wageman, ca. 1816; reproduced by permission of Collier’s great-great-granddaughter, Mrs. Wendy Gillett.


JOHN PAYNE COLLIER cholarship and orgery in the ineteenth entury

Arthur Freeman & Janet Ing Freeman

VOLUME I

Yale University Press

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New Haven and London


Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College. Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2004 by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Charles Ellertson and typeset in Minion type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freeman, Arthur, 1938– John Payne Collier : scholarship and forgery in the nineteenth century / Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-300-09661-5 (set : alk. paper) 1. Collier, John Payne, 1789–1883. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Forgeries. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation—History—19th century. 4. Literary forgeries and mystifications—History—19th century. 5. English literature— Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 6. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Bibliography— Methodology. 7. Scholars—Great Britain—Biography. 8. Editors—Great Britain—Biography. 9. Forgers—Great Britain— Biography. I. Ing, Janet Thompson. II. Title. pr2951.f74 2003 822.3'3—dc22 2003061261 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


contents

VOLUME I List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii Abbreviations in the Text and Notes xxi A Note on Spelling and Transcription xxvii

I. The Life of John Payne Collier part one: 1789–1820

3

Family—Henry Crabb Robinson—Household and Early Circle—Radicals and Romantics—1811: The Coleridge Lectures—Newspapermen: Thomas Barnes and His Friends—James Perry—Essayist and Collector, 1814–16— The Critical Review—Marriage—Breadwinner, 1817–20—Criticisms on the Bar—The Edinburgh Magazine—‘The Scrape’—The Poetical Decameron

part two: 1821–31

101

Early Verse and The Poet’s Pilgrimage—Hammersmith, 1821–25—The Freebooter Episode—Family, 1820–25—Septimus Prowett and Dodsley’s Old Plays—Punch and Judy

part three: the 1830s (i)

149 The History of English Dramatic Poetry—New Faces in the Circle: Dyce, Devonshire, and Egerton—The Society of Antiquaries—A Digression on Forgery—George Steevens and Thomas Warton—HEDP: Questioned Data—Evidence—Devonshire and ‘A Sort of Librarian’—The Troublesome Affair of Kynge Johan

part four: the 1830s (ii)

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228 The Books of Richard Heber—William Henry Miller—The Bridgewater House Library: New Facts, New Particulars—The Protectorate

v


vi

contents Manuscript—The Bridgewater Catalogue—‘Poor Drudge or Hack’— Farther Particulars

part five: the societies and shakespeare (i)

316

James Orchard Halliwell: Early Years—The Percy Society—The Shakespeare Society—Dulwich College Revisited: The Alleyn Papers— Malone and Dulwich—Henslowe’s Diary

part six: the societies and shakespeare (ii)

377 Reasons for a New Edition of Shakespeare—Shakespeare’s Text—The Bridgewater Folio—Commentary and ‘Life’—Peter Cunningham and the Revels Accounts—Reviews and Reaction—Dyce Again—Shakespeare’s Library and the First ‘Reprint Club’—Joseph Hunter

part seven: shakespeariana

446 Shakespeare Society Papers—The T. C. Croker Episode—Memoirs of Actors—B. H. Bright and the Roxburghe Ballads—Halliwell, Trinity College, and the British Museum—The Stationers’ Registers and the Hall Commonplace Book—Collier’s 1848 Masques: Red Herrings, New Problems—Obligations—Marlowe: A Project Released—Shakespeare’s House—The Museum Commission

part eight: the perkins folio (i)

563 The Hermit of Holyport—Notes and Queries and W. J. Thoms—The Perkins Folio Announced: Notes and Emendations—Germany—Richard Grant White and America—The Issue of Presentation: Extracts and the 1853 Shakespeare—Coincidental Suggestions—The Case for Forgery: Early Warnings—The Search for Provenance

part nine: away from perkins

640 Halliwell Again—The Hillier Affair—The Roxburghe Club Drayton— Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Coleridge Pursued: Literary Cookery—Seven Lectures—Shakespeare Pursued—Hamlet, 1603—The Taming of the Shrew, ‘1607’—Mommsen and Pericles—The 1858 Shakespeare—Collier and Dyce: The Last Act

part ten: the perkins folio (ii)

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718 The Museum Inquisition—Provenance Revisited—The Scientific Approach—The Search Widens—1860: Expostulation and Reply— 18 February–15 March—Herman Merivale—The Will Warner Episode— The Investigation Continues—The Complete View


contents

vii

VOLUME II

part eleven: after perkins

825 Halliwell and the Collier Shelves—The Works of Edmund Spenser—Child and Collier: An Interlude—‘Drayton’s Own Copy of Spenser’—Periodicals, 1861–63—Reprints: The Red Series—Rarest Books—William Carew Hazlitt—Echoes of Perkins, and a Counter-Hoax—Green and Blue Series, and Trevelyan Papers

part twelve: the long last years

898 Bereavements—Hazlitt, Thoms, and Ouvry—Pen Friends: J. W. Ebsworth and Alexander Smith—The Americans: Furness, Norris, and Crosby—New Adversaries: F. J. Furnivall—Alexander Grosart—Swinburne: A Sunny Episode—Reprints, Ballads, and Poems—Reminiscences: An Old Man’s Diary—Pseudo-Shakespeare—The ‘Purest Text’ Shakespeare, 1875–78— Last Days at Maidenhead

epilogue: property and reputation

996

appendices I. Collier’s Physical Forgeries 1031 II. Red Herrings 1037 III. Collier’s Pseudonyms 1042 IV. Publications on the ‘Perkins Folio’, 1852–62 V. Books Dedicated to Collier 1055

1049

II. Bibliography of Works by John Payne Collier introduction 1059 a. books and pamphlets 1064 b. contributions to books and periodicals 1347 c. indirect contributions 1393 d. rejected and doubtful attributions 1395 works cited Manuscript Sources for the Life of Collier Printed Sources 1402

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index

1423

1399



illustrations

VOLUME I John Payne Collier, about 1816

frontispiece

following page 376 John Dyer Collier James Perry Title-page of Collier’s annotated Poet’s Pilgrimage Marked proofs of The Poet’s Pilgrimage Thomas Amyot Henry Crabb Robinson Francis Egerton, first Earl of Ellesmere William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire Sir Frederic Madden Alexander Dyce Richard Heber William Henry Miller James Orchard Halliwell (-Phillipps) Joseph Hunter Peter Cunningham Samuel Weller Singer

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William John Thoms

ix

6956 Freeman and Freeman / JOHN PAYNE COLLIER (VOLUME I) / sheet 10 of 864 Tseng 2004.2.20 08:57

x

illustrations

VOLUME II John Payne Collier, 1873

frontispiece

following page 1056 Forged verses, ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’ Forged document of 1608 naming Shakespeare Forged accounts listing a 1602 performance of Othello Page from the ‘Hall Commonplace Book’ Expense account of John Willoughby, with forged insertions Four examples of forged interpolations in the 1632 ‘Perkins Folio’ Letter from Collier to John Bruce, 1841 Letter from Collier to W. J. Thoms, 1881 The sale of Shakespeare’s house, 1847


preface

This is a bio-bibliography: that is, a biography of John Payne Collier (1789–1883), keyed to an account of his published writings over a period of nearly seventy years. That large and influential body of work—editorial, critical, historical, and bibliographical—is what distinguishes Collier, as a student and reviver of early English literature, from a host of industrious contemporaries: he was perhaps the most knowledgeable, and certainly the most active and prolific, commentator of his time on the drama, poetry, and popular prose of Shakespeare’s age, bridging the long gap between titans like Thomas Warton and Edmond Malone and the rise of ‘scientific’ bibliography in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What distinguishes him further, however, is not the intrinsic merit or originality of his work (although much of it exhibits both, as well as prodigious labour), but the large-scale, pernicious, and pervasive corruption of literary history it has engendered, through a lifetime’s supply of misinformation, false evidence, forgery, and fabrication. It is this aspect of Collier’s double career that has dominated studies of his oeuvre, with its true, false, and questionable testimony, for more than a century—although no systematic effort has hitherto been mounted to treat the mixture coherently, laying to rest what is spurious, while preserving the valid and valuable. Collier’s positive achievements, and his earned place in the history of scholarship, merit latter-day recognition as well: dozens, even hundreds of discoveries and revaluations have perpetuated his name, through standard editions, compilations of still-pertinent data, and fresh critical appraisals, the last o en informed by a poet’s eye and ear for the remarkable in a welter of unexplored early text. We have tried to do justice to Collier’s good work and assess its significance, and to maintain a balance between (deserved) praise and blame. His long life itself, packed with intellectual incident, mirrors nineteenth-century literary culture in multiple aspects: the worlds of publishing and publicity, newspaper journalism, literary societies, theatres and clubs, librarianship and bibliophily, and above all the reawakening of public interest in the English literary past. One obituarist called him, with good reason, ‘the most successful seconder of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt in reviving a study of the works of the Elizabethan xi


xii

preface

writers’, which in turn ‘had so marked an effect upon the poetry of the present century’; and Collier is also to be thanked for preserving, in shorthand reports, early lectures of Coleridge on Shakespeare which would otherwise have been lost to us. His own memoirs of a youth and early manhood passed among literary giants and the minor lights in their train make compelling, if forever untrustworthy, reading: had he done no more than preserve his recollections he would still interest posterity. This last aspect of Collier’s career has played a large part in our study, for the circle of his mentors, friends, colleagues, and adversaries makes a remarkable roll-call. From his early Romantic heroes Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, and his acquaintances Hazlitt, Godwin, Keats(?), Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, and Leigh Hunt, through early Victorian contacts with Dickens, Thackeray, George Cruikshank, and John Forster, to a late link with Swinburne, Collier dwelt comfortably among literary lions; less celebrated but closer friends and associates included most of the leading English antiquaries and editors, as well as loyal pen-friends in Germany, Scotland, and the United States, and luminaries of the newspaper world (James Perry, Thomas Barnes, John Easthope, and John Walter II), the theatre (Macready, the Kembles), book-collecting and bookselling (Heber, Daniel, Bright, Phillipps, Corser and Huth, R. H. Evans and Thomas Rodd), and public life (Collier’s patrons the sixth Duke of Devonshire and the first Earl of Ellesmere, and Chief Justice Lord Campbell). We have paid special attention to several men, some of them biographically neglected, whose interaction with Collier was long-standing and significant: antiquaries and editors Thomas Amyot, John Bruce, Joseph Hunter, Thomas Wright, and W. J. Thoms, Robert Lemon and W. B. D. D. (‘Alphabet’) Turnbull of the Record Office, the Manchester fabricator James Crossley, the Anglo-Australian Barron Field, ‘poor’ Peter Cunningham, and William Carew Hazlitt, the essayist’s grandson; ballad and early music specialists William Chappell, Edward Rimbault, and J. W. Ebsworth; rival or friendly Shakespearians S. W. Singer, Charles Knight, and Tycho Mommsen of Oldenburg; Americans Francis James Child, Richard Grant White, and H. H. Furness; and the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, whose upright loyalty to his younger friend, and his avuncular concern for him, endured more than sixty years. Relationships with Collier could and did prove difficult, and among friends-turned-foes we count especially Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum, whose own intemperate but invaluable diary is among our principal sources, and the best-loved and best-persecuted intimate of Collier’s early years, the Rev. Alexander Dyce. James Orchard Halliwell (-Phillipps), perhaps Collier’s only rival in the century for productivity in their common areas of research, had his ins and outs too with Collier over some four decades, but remained unestranged at the end. Out-and-out literary enemies


preface

xiii

include the exposers of Collier’s Shakespearian forgeries, Clement M. Ingleby, N. E. S. A. Hamilton (of the British Museum), the chessmaster/Shakespearian Howard Staunton, and the elusive, obsessed Andrew E. Brae; the ‘Prince of Librarians’ Antonio Panizzi, whose great catalogue Collier opposed, to his sorrow; and the severe heirs of Collier’s pioneering and corrupt editorial corpus, Frederick J. Furnivall and Alexander B. Grosart. Whatever we came finally to think of John Payne Collier—and fi een years in his company cannot have passed without some sympathy and affection— our initial concern has been with the dark side of his work. As biographers we have tried to respond to the first and last questions everyone asks: Why would anyone with Collier’s undoubted abilities gamble so recklessly, and on so many occasions, on hoaxing his audience? Why was it, in the words of Sir George Warner (Dictionary of National Biography, 1887), that Collier ‘sacrificed an honourable fame won by genuine services to English literature . . . to one fatal propensity’? The temptation to crack this nut cleanly has ever been with us, and to what extent we have succeeded in even denting it our readers may judge; but we hope not to have taken a glib line on the undoubtedly complex motives for a lifetime of intermittent perversity. Although Collier’s apologists in his own day and ours have submitted alternative scenarios for the hundreds of falsifications we calendar, involving for the most part alternative blame, there is really (alas) no case at all for Collier as innocent dupe or conspiracy victim. Any attempt to understand John Payne Collier that begins by positing his literary crimes as ‘unproven’, however charitable or high-mindedly suspended such a judgement might seem, simply forfeits the opportunity to explain him at all.

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Collier’s myriad forgeries and falsifications are by no means dead-letter distractions in the world of modern scholarship: dozens of new works each year are still contaminated by uncertainty or error deriving from Collier, or from the o en hapless attempts of his successors to cope with his far-flung dragon’s teeth. Were only physical forgeries at issue the task of dismissing them would be easy, but these are comparatively few (see Appendix I), and by far the more insidious mischief is by way of ‘report’ in Collier’s vast range of publication—e.g., ‘I have before me’ a copy of a now-unlocated text, or ‘A friend of mine informs me’, etc., etc. Add to these unconfirmed and unconfirmable statements the fact that they proliferate wildly, reappearing from volume to volume via reprint or citation in whatever form Collier adopted or his followers trusted, and the need for root-and-branch pursuit will be clear. Our solution has been to endow our bibliography of Collier’s published works—the chronological list of 185 volumes and sets (‘A’ numbers), more than 500 periodical papers and articles, and a few


xiv

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linked items—with a list of ‘Questioned Data’ (QD) for each entry, identifying statements that have been suspected in the past as false or misleading, or now deserve to be. Some of these QD, which are numbered sequentially and by entry for easy cross-reference, have turned out to be verifiable, and should help to combat another of Collier’s dangerous legacies: the ‘contagion of forgery’, as we have called it elsewhere, or the shadow cast on genuine evidence by the mere fact of its origin. Other QD may be honest mistakes or misjudgements by Collier—dismissible as such, but not based upon a corrupt or untrustworthy source. In many cases the problem involved is addressed in the main text, to which reference is given. In the interest of preserving narrative coherence in the biography, we have endeavoured to minimize duplication between it and the bibliography by cross-referring instead of repeating. For the convenience of those who want a no-frills synopsis, we have ‘graded’ each QD on a sliding scale, from sans-serif ‘A’ and ‘B’ (certainly or probably genuine) to ‘D’ and ‘E’ (probably or certainly false), via ‘C’ (we simply don’t know), and with ‘H’ (apparently honest mistake) and ‘N’ (no judgement called for) alongside; we have normally resorted to ‘B’ and ‘D’ when the materials involved seem to be clearly genuine or clearly false but remain unlocated. These are no more than summary opinions, based in most cases upon more extended exposition in the text; any new discovery or reconsideration will of course moderate such conclusions, which are restricted to detachable sigla for that reason. Between our biography and bibliography are five appendices, treating (I) all the physical forgeries now known to us, and some others (‘landmines in waiting’) that probably exist but whose location we have not ascertained; (II) ‘red herrings’—suggestions of forgeries by Collier, beyond those addressed in the text and bibliography, which we believe groundless; (III) pseudonyms employed by Collier in books, periodicals, and collections of essays; (IV) the literature of the ‘Perkins Folio’ controversy, 1852–62; and (V) books dedicated to Collier by his contemporaries. Our MS sources are indicated specifically in the text and footnotes, and there is a narrative summary of their whereabouts at page 1399, followed by a list of printed sources; a list of abbreviations used in the text and notes appears at page xxi, and there is a separate preface to the bibliography at page 1059. While the entire career of John Payne Collier has been our chosen province, and we ourselves have come to regard the light and dark parts of it as complementary, and worth more than case-by-case clearance or censure, object-oriented users of these volumes will have other priorities: our index is designed (in part) to guide them directly to the individual texts and QD they require, with no need of the bio-bibliographical tour. A final note: our documentation and indictive arguments in the biographical text may seem at times over-zealous, but from the outset of our study we


preface

xv

have been painfully aware of how open to dispute and misunderstanding such matters can be. Without wishing to belabour the obvious or the conceded, we have tried to imagine Collier himself—a trained barrister—peering over our shoulders through every stage, as keen to catch us out in argumentative leaps as we are to present our best case. Readers who will accept that we have not consciously drawn conclusions beyond what extant records confirm may address the citation selectively. London, February 2003



acknowledgements

A project involving two of us for fi een years, and in some respects stretching back over another three decades, has incurred a large number of debts, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. Our dependence upon prior scholarship is largely recorded at pages 1018– 29, with special note of the unpublished research of A. W. Ashby. Here we wish to thank libraries and repositories that have unfailingly welcomed us, allowed us to quote from material in their collections, and o en provided services beyond any expectation. In London: the Athenaeum Club, the British Library, the Corporation of London (Guildhall Library and the London Metropolitan Archives), the Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, Dulwich College Library, the John Murray archive, Lambeth Palace Library, the London Library, the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum), the TNL Archive, the Public Record Office and Family Records Centre, the Roxburghe Club, and the libraries and archives of the British Museum, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Worshipful Company of Stationers, City University, the Institute of Historical Research, the University of London, King’s College, and University College. Elsewhere in Great Britain: the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Central Library, Manchester; the Shakespeare Centre Library and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Somerset Record Office, Taunton; the Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich; the Trustees of the Trevelyan Family Papers at the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle; the Bodleian Library and English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; and the libraries of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Reading. In New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library (National Library of New Zealand, Wellington); and in the United States: the Armstrong Browning Library (Baylor University, Waco, Texas); the Boston Public Library; the Chapin Library (Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts); the Clements Library (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.; the H. H. Furness Manuscript Collection (University of Pennsylvaxvii


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acknowledgements

nia, Philadelphia); the library of the Grolier Club, New York City; the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the New York Public Library; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; and the libraries of Harvard University (the Houghton and Widener Libraries and the Harvard Theatre Collection), Princeton University, Vassar College, and Yale University (Beinecke Library and the James and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection). For extraordinary support we thank the Centre for the Book at the British Library, through whose fellowship programme Janet Freeman enjoyed special access to the collections in 1995–96, and—sine qua non potest esse—the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, whose more than generous publication subsidy permitted our work to see the light in the form we had envisioned. Our thanks are also due to our editors at Yale University Press, John Kulka, Margaret Otzel, and Ann Hawthorne; to the designer, Charles Ellertson; and to our friend and agent, Jane Gelfman. Librarians and archivists past and present who have particularly helped us are Melanie Aspey, Alan Bell, Sue Berry, John Bidwell, W. H. Bond, Michael Bott, Diana Chardin, John Creasey, Stephen Crook, Peter Day, Sarah Dodgson, Mark Farrell, Stephen Ferguson, Annette Fern, Elizabeth Freebairn, Elizabeth Fuller, Vincent Giroud, John Goldfinch, Lesley Gordon, Wayne G. Hammond, Mihai Handrea, P. R. Harris, Mervyn Jannetta, Brian Jenkins, Susan Jones and other members of the Athenaeum Indexing Project, Hilton Kelliher, Richard Luckett, Joy McCarthy, Mairi Macdonald, David McKitterick, Leslie Morris, Virginia Murray, Robin Myers, Jean Newlin, Elizabeth Niemyer, Bernard Nurse, Richard W. Oram, Robert Parks, Ronald D. Patkus, Ann Payne, Michael Pearman, Jan Piggott, Suzanne Porter, Katherine Reagan, Mairi C. Rennie, David C. Retter, Arlene Shy, Theresa Thom, Daniel Traister, Kay Walters, Bruce Whiteman, and Heather Wolfe. We owe very special thanks, for their generosity in response to a host of nagging enquiries, to Jean Archibald, Thomas V. Lange, Stephen Parks, Mary L. Robertson, Roger E. Stoddard, Stephen Tabor, and Georgianna Ziegler. Private collectors who have shared Collierian materials with us include Tyrus Harmsen, Giles Mandelbrote, and Toshiyuki Takamiya. Without our own collection of books and manuscripts we could not have faced up to our task, and that has long depended on hints and offers from colleagues in the booktrade. We are grateful to everyone who supplied us over the years or alerted us to available resources, but in particular to Julian Browning, James Burmester, the late Robert Clark, James Cummins, Roy Davids, Christopher Edwards, Simon Finch, William F. Hale, Martin Hamlyn, A. R. Heath, David Holmes, Jolyon


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Hudson, Brian Lake, Anthony and William Laywood, Peter Miller and Tony Fothergill, John Price, Jonathan and Lisa Reynolds, Justin Schiller, Michael Silverman, John Walwyn-Jones, Stephen Weissman, and John Wilson; to Robert Harding and John Manners of Maggs Brothers, Ltd.; and—for nearly thirty years’ assistance, encouragement, and indulgence—to the firm and staff of Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., notably Lord Parmoor, Nicholas Poole-Wilson, and the late Edmund M. Dring. Colleagues and fellow-scholars who provided essential help on many fronts, and tolerated our monomania, are Nicolas Barker, Peter Beal, Eric Berryman, John Blatchly, Peter Blayney, Martin Butler, the late Giles E. Dawson, A. S. G. Edwards, Donald Farren, R. A. Foakes, Roland Folter, Mirjam Foot, Colin Franklin, Paul Grinke, Werner Gundersheimer, Robert D. Hicks, Robert D. Hume, Ian Jackson, the late William Alexander Jackson, Ricky Jay, David Jenkins, Laurie E. Maguire, Louis Marder, Judith Milhous, Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, Paul Needham, Alan H. Nelson, Katharine F. Pantzer, Anthony Payne, Julian Pooley, John Porter, Richard Proudfoot, Donald H. Reiman, Joe Riehl, the late Samuel Schoenbaum, Albert Tricomi, Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, Valerie Wayne, Oskar Wellens, Anthony West, Joan Winterkorn, John Wolfson, Henry Woudhuysen, and Joyce Youings. We want especially to thank three friends among the above: Theodore Hofmann, for his enthusiasm and innumerable timely kindnesses since the mid-1960s; Marvin Spevack, for sharing with us his bio-bibliographical research on James Orchard Halliwell in rich detail; and Arnold Hunt, who in recent years unearthed considerable Collierian data for us, and read our text through with great care and patience, preserving us from many errors and infelicities—not to say (of course) all. And finally, our gratitude must be recorded to John Payne Collier’s great-great-granddaughters, Wendy Gillett and the late Diana Rees, who allowed us to consult, and eventually to acquire, a large and biographically rewarding Nachlass of manuscripts, letters, and annotated books, which we promised to put to good use. Some of our conclusions may seem poor return for their hospitality and trust, but we hope that a balanced account of their remarkable ancestor—neither demonizing nor a whitewash—will justify both.



abbreviations in the text and notes

Arber

Ashby papers

BARB

Beinecke Bentley BL BLM BM

Bodl. BoPL Boswell-Malone BRH Bullough Camden Society Minutes CET Chambers, ES

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Chambers, WS

Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, 5 vols. (London, 1875–94; reprint, 1950 and 1967) Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455–56: notes by Arthur William Ashby toward a biography and bibliography of John Payne Collier, ca. 1949–51 J. P. Collier, A Bibliographical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1865; reprint, 1966) Beinecke Library, Yale University Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1941–68) British Library, London British Lady’s Magazine British Museum, London (the Museum Library, founded in 1753, became part of the British Library in 1973) Bodleian Library, Oxford Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass. William Shakespeare, Plays and Poems, ed. Edmond Malone and James Boswell Jr., 21 vols. (London, 1821) Bulletin of Research in the Humanities Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London, 1957–75) Minute Books of the Camden Society, Royal Historical Society, London Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923) E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1930) xxi


xxii Child CMI Crum

CUL DAB Dawson Dickens, Letters Dickey DNB Dyce Collection EETS EHR ELH ELR EMS EUL FF and FF/K

FJF Folger Forster Collection Furness Collection Ganzel

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GM Greg

abbreviations Francis J. Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, 1882–98; reprint, 1957–65) Clement Mansfield Ingleby Margaret Crum, ed., First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969) Cambridge University Library Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1927–36) Giles Dawson, ‘John Payne Collier’s Great Forgery’, SB 24 (1971), 1–26 The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1965–2002) Franklin Dickey, ‘The Old Man at Work: Forgeries in the Stationers’ Registers’, SQ 11 (1960), 39–47 Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols. (London, 1885–1901) Books and papers of Alexander Dyce, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Early English Text Society English Historical Review English Literary History English Literary Renaissance English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700 Edinburgh University Library Books and manuscripts in the collection of Arthur and Janet Freeman, London; ‘FF/K’ indicates material formerly in the possession of Collier’s descendants, some of which was cited by Dewey Ganzel as ‘Koop’ Frederick James Furnivall Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Books and papers of John Forster, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London H. H. Furness Manuscript Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Dewey Ganzel, Fortune and Men’s Eyes: The Career of John Payne Collier (Oxford, 1982) Gentleman’s Magazine W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London, 1939–59)


abbreviations Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines

xxiii

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (unless otherwise stated, reference is to the 7th ed., 1887) Hamilton N. E. S. A. Hamilton, An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakspere, Folio, 1632 (London, 1860; reprint, 1973) Hardy T. D. Hardy, A Review of the Present State of the Shakespearian Controversy (London, 1860) Harmsen Collection of Tyrus Harmsen, Pasadena, Calif. Hazlitt, Handbook William Carew Hazlitt, Handbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (London, 1867) HCB Folger MS V.a.339: the so-called Hall Commonplace Book HCR Henry Crabb Robinson HCR Correspondence Correspondence, 32 vols., arranged chronologically, Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Diary MSS 101.1–33 (1811–67), Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Reminiscences Reminiscences, 1790–1843, written 1846–59; 4 vols., Dr. Williams’s Library, London HCR Travel Diary Travel diaries, 1801–66, Dr. Williams’s Library, London Heber sale Sale catalogues of Richard Heber’s books and MSS (London, 1834–37) HEDP J. P. Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry . . . and Annals of the Stage, 3 vols. (London, 1831; reprint, 1970) HEP Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1774–81; reprint, 1968) HHF Horace Howard Furness HLB Harvard Library Bulletin HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin Huntington Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. IELM Index of English Literary Manuscripts (1980–) ILN Illustrated London News Ingleby, Clement Mansfield Ingleby, A Complete View of the Complete View Shakspere Controversy, Concerning the Authenticity and


xxiv

abbreviations

Genuineness of Manuscript Matter . . . Published by Mr. J. Payne Collier (London, 1861; reprint, 1973) JEGP Journal of English and German Philology JOH James Orchard Halliwell(-Phillipps) John Murray archives Archives of John Murray, London JPC John Payne Collier JPC Diary Folger MSS M.a.29–40, 12 vols. (1872–82) JPC Early Diary Folger MSS M.a.219–28: JPC’s diary (1811) and notes of lectures by Coleridge, 10 vols. (1811–12) JPC Memoirs Folger MS M.a.230, written ca. 1879 JPC sale Sale catalogue of JPC’s books and MSS, Sotheby’s (London), 7–9 August 1884 JWE Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth L-A-R R. W. Lowe, English Theatrical Literature, 1559–1900: A Bibliography, rev. J. F. Arnott and J. W. Robinson (London, 1970) Lee Sidney Lee, Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies . . . A Census of Extant Copies (Oxford, 1902) Lemon Robert Lemon, Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries (London, 1886) LOA J. O. Halliwell’s ‘Letters of Authors’, 300 vols., Edinburgh University Library Lowndes W. T. Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature, rev. Henry Bohn, 6 vols. (London, 1864; reprint, 1967) LSE Leeds Studies in English McKerrow Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland, 1485–1640 (London, 1949) Madden Diary Bodl. Eng.hist.c.140–182: private diary of Frederic Madden, 43 vols. (1819–72) Malone, Inquiry Edmond Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (London, 1796; reprint, 1970) MLN Modern Language Notes MLR Modern Language Review Mostyn Papers Mostyn Papers, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth MP Modern Philology MSC Malone Society Collections


abbreviations Munby, Phillipps Studies N&E

N&Q NCBEL

Nelson & Seccombe New Variorum

NLS NLW NMM NYPL OED OHEL OMD Ouvry sale PBSA Pepys Ballads

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Pforzheimer Catalogue PML PMLA PQ PRO REED RES Rollins

xxv

A. N. L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1951–60) J. P. Collier, Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays, from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632 (London, January 1853; reprint, 1970); N&E II indicates the 2d ed. (London, June 1853) Notes and Queries George Watson and Ian Willison, eds., New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1969–74) Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700 (1987) New Variorum Shakespeare, begun by H. H. Furness in 1871 and since 1933 published under the sponsorship of the Modern Language Association of America, New York National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth New Monthly Magazine New York Public Library, New York City Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1989) Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford, 1945–) J. P. Collier, An Old Man’s Diary, Forty Years Ago, 4 vols. (London, 1871–72; reprint, 1975) Sale catalogue of Frederic Ouvry’s books and MSS, Sotheby’s (London), 30 March–5 April 1882 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Broadside ballads in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge; published in facsimile, ed. W. G. Day, 5 vols. (1987) The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library: English Literature, 1475–1700 (New York, 1940; reprint, 1997) Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City Publications of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly Public Record Office, London Records of Early English Drama Review of English Studies Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-


xxvi

RORD Rudick SA SB SBT-RO Seven Lectures

Sibley SP SPD Spevack SQ SR STC

Steele

TCC TCD Tilley

TNL Archive

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TLS Trevelyan Papers UCL VPR

abbreviations Entries (1557–1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Chapel Hill, 1924) Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Michael Rudick, ed., The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, Ariz., 1999) Society of Antiquaries, London Studies in Bibliography Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, ed. J. P. Collier (London, 1856; reprint, 1975) Gertrude M. Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques, 1500–1642 (London, 1933) Studies in Philology State Papers Domestic Marvin Spevack, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: A Classified Bibliography (Hildesheim, 1997) Shakespeare Quarterly Stationers’ Registers, Worshipful Company of Stationers, London Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. 2d ed., ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) Robert Steele, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns . . . 1485–1714, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1910) Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College, Dublin M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) Archives of Times Newspapers Limited (News International), London Times Literary Supplement Trevelyan Family Papers, Robinson Library, University of Newcastle University College, London Victorian Periodicals Review


abbreviations Warner

WCH WCT Wellesley Index Wing

xxvii

G. F. Warner, Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College . . . at Dulwich (London, 1881); continued by F. B. Bickley, Catalogue of the Manuscripts . . . Second Series (London, 1903) William Carew Hazlitt Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols. (Toronto, 1966–89) Donald Wing, ed., Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 2d ed., 4 vols. (New York, 1982–98)

a note on spelling and transcription In transcribing modern manuscript material (which consists principally of correspondence, diaries, memoranda, and reminiscences), we have expanded abbreviations other than ampersands, brought down superscript letters, and in some instances normalized punctuation, in particular replacing sentenceending dashes with full stops. Significant interlineations and deletions have been indicated as such. Transcriptions of shorthand passages in Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary have been taken from R. Travers Herford’s manuscript key, shelved with the original diaries in Dr. Williams’s Library. Robinson frequently switched into and out of shorthand within a single sentence, and to enhance the readability of his text we have not signalled shorthand passages in our transcriptions. Quotations from printed works are as exact as possible, including the various spellings of Shakspere, Shakspeare, etc. that appear in the writings of Frederic Madden, C. M. Ingleby, Charles Knight, and others; Collier himself unswervingly preferred the conventional ‘Shakespeare’, telling Madden in 1837 that ‘I would rather rectify one syllable that he wrote, than find the true way of spelling the name of all the Poets that ever lived’ (BL Egerton MS 2841, fols. 172–73). Titles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works are generally given in a modernized form (Farewell to Military Profession, not Militarie), unless the old spelling form remains in general use (The Faerie Queene, Kynge Johan). Titles of MS works and some ephemeral published works (broadside ballads in particular) are given within quotations, as are citations from the Stationers’ Registers. Unless otherwise indicated, line references to Shakespeare are to the second Riverside edition (1997).



I

The Life of John Payne Collier



part one

1789–1820

‘Nonsensical as it may seem’, John Payne Collier reflected at the brash age of twenty-two, ‘it gives me some pleasure to think that the period at which I was born was marked by some extraordinary occurrence’—echoing, if unwittingly, the boast of Owen Glendower, with no Hotspur to prick his conceit.1 His nativity, in the ‘great dawn’ of 1789, fell just six months before the storming of the Bastille, but other datemarks would now seem more relevant: one year a er Byron, three before Shelley, and seven before Keats. Longevity personified, Collier died in September 1883, surviving the Romantic trinity by six decades, and his mid-life friends Thackeray and Dickens by thirty and twenty-three years. The ‘Nestor of English Literature’ (as one obituarist called him) was still at ninety intent on contextualizing his own life, weaving together in halting memoirs his recollections of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, of actors and theatres, publishers and newspapers, book collectors and libraries, and reminding posterity of the formidable service to literary history that his own nearly two hundred publications had already rendered. To some extent we have followed our subject’s lead in examining his vast and chequered output in its immediate setting; for while the culture of earlier centuries became his effective milieu and refuge, he laboured, accomplished, and transgressed in his own. This long-lived custodian of the literary past—a more than proprietary and less than scrupulous keeper, be it said—was no less a child of his protracted time. He was born on 11 January 1789 in New Broad Street in the City of London, the first son and the second of five children of a cultivated and initially well-to-do young couple, John Dyer Collier and Jane Payne. Both parents came of respectable mercantile stock, from families accustomed to providing their offspring with both practical education and some kind of material legacy, as individual circumstances might permit. Circumstances for the London Colliers and the infant John Payne would rapidly alter, although an inherited tradition

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1. JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811.

3


4

the life of john payne collier

of professional independence endured. So, stubbornly, did the strain of intellectual invention, perceptible for at least two generations before John Payne himself exhibited its best and worst aspects. As a family they functioned, cooperated, and struggled, and as a family the Colliers, with John Payne in their midst, may first be considered.

Family In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there were Colliers or Collyers in the vicinity of Witney, Oxfordshire, who operated fulling-mills—factories for processing woollen cloth—and the family still retained a modest interest in at least one in John Payne’s day.2 Jeremy Collier (1650–1726), the famous nonjuring historian and controversialist whose best-known work is an extended attack on the corruptness of the Restoration stage, is supposed to have been ‘distantly related’, but no real evidence of this survives.3 John Dyer Collier’s father, John, however, was a considerable figure whose activity bridged commerce and literature. Born in Stoke Newington (North London) about 1732, John Collier studied medicine in Edinburgh and in 1756 set up an apothecary’s practice in Newgate Street, in the City of London. He married Mary Dyer, the daughter of a wholesale linen-draper, through whom his business prospered, and his relatives now included the Maltbys of Norfolk as well as the eminent Calamys, traditional dissenters, or ‘noncons’, as his descendants faithfully remained. Grandfather John was able to purchase a sleeping partnership in the firm of John Devaynes (Apothecary to the Queen’s Household and to the Charterhouse), moved to Charterhouse Square, and had accumulated a small fortune of £40,000 or £50,000 by 1785, when he sold his practice and abruptly retired.4 At Theobald’s

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2. The Collier name can be found in Witney records of the thirteenth century; by the sixteenth century members of the family were identified as ‘clothiers’ (i.e., engaged in the control and direction of cloth manufacture) and ‘fullers’. See James L. Bolton and Marjorie M. Maslan, eds., Calendar of the Court Books of the Borough of Witney, 1538–1610, Oxfordshire Record Society, vol. 54 (Oxford, 1985); and Alfred Plummer, The Witney Blanket Industry (1934). 3. Collier referred to Jeremy as ‘my ancestor’ in a letter to the sixth Duke of Devonshire, 13 July 1832 (Chatsworth, uncalendared correspondence), and in his MS memoirs written in late 1879 claimed that his grandfather was indeed descended from him (JPC Memoirs, p. 1), but he was less emphatic in a diary entry of the early 1870s: ‘My Grandfather was a younger son of Joshua Collier, & he had brothers named Thomas and Jeremy, the last aer the Old Nonjuror, who was distantly related, but how near I have never attempted to ascertain’ (JPC Diary, undated entry made between 10 November 1872 and 27 April 1873). 4. JPC gave both figures, claiming £40,000 in the undated diary entry of 1872–73 and £50,000 ‘if not more’ in the Memoirs, p. 2. In the biography of Collier that appeared in the 1862 and subsequent editions of Men of the Time, ed. Thompson Cooper, his grandfather was described as ‘in


1789–1820

5

Park in Hertfordshire (1785–89) and Amersham and High Wycombe (1790–93), the apothecary devoted himself to authorship, publishing at High Wycombe in 1791 a massive paraphrase of the Bible ‘intended for the perusal of the young’, Historical and Familiar Essays on the Scripture of the Old Testament (2 vols.), followed in 1797 by two further volumes of Historical and Familiar Essays on the Scripture of the New Testament. Later he would gather, again for ‘my young Friends’, Essays on the Progress of the Vital Principle from the Vegetable to the Animal Kingdoms and the Soul of Man, Introductory to Contemplations on Deity (1800), dedicated to his cousin Edmund Calamy of Lincoln’s Inn; and finally he turned from juvenile instruction to ‘addresses and consolations to the old’ with Thoughts on Reanimation, from the Reproduction of Vegetable Life, and the Renewal of Life aer Death of Insects; Containing a Brief View of Nature, as She Is Fulfilling Her Benevolent Designs in the Two Systems (1809), an appropriate last topic for the valetudinarian. John Collier’s two sons, Joshua and John Dyer, attended Charterhouse School in nearby Charterhouse Square, where John Dyer learned Latin and Greek, and picked up French and a smattering of Italian. But Charterhouse was not succeeded by Oxford or Cambridge, a decision—possibly reflecting religious considerations—that John Dyer bitterly resented in later life. Their father had determined that both male children should be merchants, and gave them each £10,000 at their coming-of-age, a gesture evoking (perhaps deliberately) the appropriate parable. Unfortunately for the family, both sons’ speculations mirrored those of the more celebrated Old Testament beneficiary. Joshua, the elder brother, invested his stake capital in shipping and the oil trade, and with the increased popularity of natural gas lost not only his original £10,000 but a further large sum advanced him by his father, and having brought the latter into a partnership that failed, the whole of John Collier senior’s life earnings were ‘swallowed up by bankruptcy’.5 Joshua had married one Jane Landon, the daughter of a silk merchant—‘reckoned handsomer but not so engaging as my mother’, his nephew remarked—whose personal fortune was luckily secured in trust and remained unattached by her husband’s creditors. An inheritance from old John in 1816 would later provide Joshua with a modest annuity, and a er about 1802 he spent much of his time in France, latterly separated from his wife and six children; he was contemptuously described by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1823 as ‘a common gambler’ (HCR Diary, 1 November). But

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1775, one of the medical attendants on the household of Queen Charlotte’. Cooper’s entry was undoubtedly based on information provided by Collier himself, and is probably the source of the DNB statement that John Collier was a ‘London physician’. 5. JPC Diary, undated entry of 1872–73. The bankruptcy of Joshua Collier, ‘oil-man’, was published in The Times on 6 May 1793; the elder Collier seems not to have been named.


6


John Payne Collier remembered his paternal uncle as generous, and indeed his own family sought refuge with Joshua’s in their lean times. Like all the Colliers, Joshua had a scribbling bent, contributing papers to the Philosophical Magazine and Nicholson’s Journal, and composing at least three short replies to wellknown writers on accountancy (E. T. Jones) and political economy (Malthus and Baron Lyndhurst). John Dyer Collier turned twenty-one in 1783.6 He soon put his £10,000 birthright into importing Spanish Merino wool, like the oil trade a promising business but headed for trouble.7 He travelled in Spain, where he learned Spanish well enough to impress a law court some twenty years later, and in March 1786 married Jane Payne, the lively and intelligent daughter of a deceased sugar refiner of Rutland Place, Upper Thames Street, who had le her £7,000, yielding an ultra-secure £120 a year.8 The couple took a smart house at 36 New Broad Street, where their first daughter, Jane, was born on New Year’s Day 1787. Their first son, John Payne, followed in just over two years. John Dyer and his wife were intellectually demanding parents, and John Payne’s personality and career owe perforce to their influence. A conventionally stable upbringing, however, was not one of their gi s to the child, although 6. Two years later he sat for the fashionable miniaturist George Engleheart; the resulting portrait, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is reproduced in its 1959 Portrait Miniatures catalogue, plate 25, and in our illustrations. 7. John Dyer Collier’s dates are 17 February 1762–27 November 1825. ‘Mr. Collier of New Broad Street’ was sufficiently well-known in the trade to be approached in 1787 by Evan Nepean, acting for Sir Joseph Banks and ultimately for George III, on the subject of importing Merino sheep to England. Collier referred the question to Henry Hinckley, a colleague or partner in Spain, but nothing seems to have followed directly from their efforts to procure Merinos from Bilbao. See Harold B. Carter, His Majesty’s Spanish Flock (Sydney, 1964), p. 76; and The Sheep and Wool Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1781–1820, ed. Harold B. Carter (1979), pp. 116 and 152–53. 8. She was born 18 May 1768 and died 20 October 1833. The figure of £7,000 is JPC’s, and he frequently referred to Jane’s income as £120 per annum in his Memoirs; Henry Crabb Robinson, who was intimately familiar with the Collier finances, gave Jane’s fortune as £10,000 in his MS reminiscences (i:104, written in 1846). Jane had two younger sisters: Mary married William Field, and Elizabeth married George Proctor, a retired Indian civil officer. John Payne, sugar baker or refiner, is named in several mid-century London directories, and from 1765 had premises in Thames Street near Puddle Dock, at first in partnership with a man named Bishop, but from 1767 on his own. His brother Samuel joined him as a partner in 1774, and is later listed alone at the Upper Thames Street address. John Payne died a widower in October 1775, leaving his considerable property in trust for his three daughters, then aged four to seven, who were placed under the guardianship of his mother, brother, and two friends (PRO PROB 11/1012). Jane Payne’s mother, also Jane (b. 1748), was the daughter of Stephen London, a prosperous leather finisher of Kingston-on-Thames, and his wife Mary Phillips. The births of all three Payne daughters were registered with the Carter Lane (Blackfriars) Presbyterian Meeting; in February 1750 John Payne had registered the birth of a son, Samuel, from a previous marriage, but the boy presumably predeceased him.


1789–1820

7

John Dyer’s first financial reversal cannot have been all his fault: the French Revolution, that ‘extraordinary circumstance’ which tickled John Payne’s sense of destiny, spelled disaster for the Spanish Merino wool supply. It also wrought havoc in the domestic wool-spinning industry of England, and John Dyer was not an isolated victim. In the autumn of 1789 the Colliers gave up their house in New Broad Street and decamped to Leeds, where John Payne’s earliest recollections include a bee-sting, an amputated chilblain, and ‘the large dog bringing in a bone from the churchyard and being beaten for it’.9 The family remained at Leeds for about thirty months, while John Dyer struggled to salvage his business. But Saxony wool had won the day, and John Dyer was obliged to pay off his Spanish contracts out of his own funds, his coadjutants having shrewdly fixed everything in his name.10 He seems narrowly to have skirted bankruptcy, and the family was now dependent upon Jane’s inherited income alone. With no professional training and no obvious prospects, John Dyer Collier migrated with his wife and three children (Mary, or ‘Polly’, was born at Leeds in late 1791) to his father’s retreat at High Wycombe, and subsequently to cheap lodgings with a shoemaker at Worthing. Tempers became strained; John the apothecary was in no position to help, with his savings under siege from Joshua’s creditors; and John Payne remembered his mother ‘o en in tears’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 14). By 1793 they were installed in a small cottage at Thames Ditton, across the river from Hampton Court, where John Dyer, now aged thirty-two, and self-instructed from his father’s cast-off Blackstone, commenced to read for the bar. A fourth child and second son, Richard Price—named a er another famous ‘noncon’ and family connection, the Newington Green moralist and political philosopher (1723–91)—was born at Thames Ditton when John Payne was five.11 One further son, William Field, was later christened with the name of Jane Collier’s brother-in-law, a tallow importer who provided the family with a brief and unexpected period of prosperity in 1795–98. Still reading law while coping with creditors and a ‘bad ague’ contracted while bathing near his riverside cottage, John Dyer had reluctantly assumed the management of an unpromising soap factory in Great Suffolk Street, Southwark, at Field’s invitation. A er a short stay with uncle Joshua in nearby West Square, the family took up quarters in the factory building, and by dint of hard work and a ‘glib tongue’ in merchan-

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9. Collier recalled these episodes in his Memoirs and in an autograph note in his copy of W. J. Thoms, Human Longevity (1873), now BL C.45.d.26. 10. JPC named these as John Maitland, M.P. for Chippenham, and one Metcalf; Diary, undated entry of 1872–73. 11. Collier called Price ‘my grandmother’s cousin’ in OMD, iii:55, and Mary Dyer Collier is named in Price’s will; see HCR Diary, 24 February 1825.


8


dising John Dyer turned the business around. In less than four years of administration, with Jane’s help as bookkeeper, he more than doubled its output and banked a personal dividend of £2,500; whereupon William Field sought to restrict his manager to a fixed salary, and John Dyer Collier resigned in a huff. In the summer of 1798 he converted his entire savings from the soap business into a 250-acre farm at Abridge near Epping, which proved an unmitigated disaster. For nearly four years, remembered John Payne, he ‘struggled on, from bad to worse . . . finally lost all his capital and was made bankrupt. He was in confinement part of the time & the misery and grief to us children and our mother is not to be described.’ 12 Their only unassailable income was again Jane’s £120 a year, and by mid-1802 John Dyer and his long-suffering wife, with five children under age sixteen, were once more at loose ends in London. Joshua took them in briefly, and John the apothecary (who had resumed his practice a er losing his own savings in Joshua’s failure) managed some help; they took lodgings in Lambeth, with an engraver who taught Jane the rudiments of his trade, and subsequently in Pimlico. With the prospect of a late legal career yielding to family demands, John Dyer Collier at forty became, in the words of his friend and creditor Henry Crabb Robinson, ‘a bookseller’s fag’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:218). Authorship, journalism, reportorial and editorial work became the mainstay of the Colliers henceforth.

Henry Crabb Robinson Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1869), lawyer and literary enthusiast, o en characterized as ‘the diarist’, was John Dyer Collier’s junior by thirteen years, and Jane Payne Collier’s by seven. The son of a staunch dissenting family of tanners in Bury St. Edmunds, he had been denied, like John Dyer, a much-desired university education. Throwing up a legal apprenticeship in Colchester, he came to London in April 1796 to seek work as a solicitor’s clerk, but a timely inheritance freed him from wage-slavery. So provided, from the outset of his cosmopolitan bachelor career he expressed strong Republican sympathies and a literary taste more radical and prescient than most of his dilettante contemporaries, including the Colliers.13 By 1799 he knew Thomas Holcro , William Hazlitt, and William Godwin personally, and was reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb, all later to be intimate friends. But the acquaintance which he himself says ‘changed the whole course of my life’ was with John Dyer Collier, his wife, and his children, especially John Payne; Robinson’s diary, reminiscences,

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12. JPC Memoirs, p. 47. The bankruptcy of ‘J. D. Collier, Abridge, Essex, farmer’ was published in The Times on 3 May 1802. 13. For Robinson’s early political views see Corfield and Evans 1996.


1789–1820

9

and voluminous correspondence remain, a er John Payne Collier’s own writings, the most significant source for any account of the early life of the latter, and for our purposes invaluable.14 In his first years in London Robinson frequented the evening ‘forums’, public (but polite) debates on social issues held at Coachmaker’s Hall and elsewhere, and before June 1797 had observed from afar one ‘occasional speaker of extreme liberal opinions who was distinguished from all others by an aristocratic air— his voice very sweet tho’ feeble—his tone that of a high bred man. . . . He was accompanied by his wife, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.’ They met briefly, and on 13 July Robinson encountered Jane at another forum in company with a friend, a Miss Dawson. Carriages being unavailable a er the debate, Robinson gallantly escorted the ladies home to Southwark, and a few days later John Dyer called on the young clerk to thank him. An invitation to dine at the soap factory followed (13 August), and an association that endured for the lifetimes of all was begun. ‘My intimacy with [John Dyer] encreased and during my life to no family have I ever been so much indebted for happiness as to the Collier family’, wrote Robinson (always a bachelor) nearly fi y years later. And having loyally concealed his own feelings for Jane—despite seven years of sharing a roof and three decades of personal correspondence—he committed them retrospectively to paper in 1846: ‘Of Mrs Collier I will say only thus much, that of all the women I have ever known she is the one with whom I should have been most willing to have passed my life in marriage’—adding, immediately, ‘Now, their eldest son John Payne Collier, the editor of Shakespeare, is one of my most respected friends’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:91). Robinson continued to visit the Colliers at Hydes Farm in Essex, while John Dyer mismanaged his capital away. In January 1799 the younger man lent his friend £400, which predictably vanished with the rest. When in May 1802 John Dyer became formally bankrupt, he asked Robinson not to prove his outstanding debt for proportionate settlement, ‘because he would treat it as a debt of honour’. Meantime Robinson had embarked on a protracted Lehrjahr in Germany (it turned into five), and in March 1803 John Dyer proposed a further

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14. Crabb Robinson bequeathed his papers—diaries and travel journals (1811–67), correspondence, and manuscript reminiscences (compiled between 1845 and 1853)—to Dr. Williams’s Library, London. In addition to incoming letters the correspondence includes copies of many outgoing letters and in some cases the originals, presumably returned to HCR aer the deaths of the recipients. Three volumes of extracts from the papers were published in 1869 (ed. Thomas Sadler); in the 1920s Edith J. Morley edited a further three volumes of HCR’s correspondence, and in 1938 published Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, a final three volumes of extracts from the diaries and reminiscences. Morley’s biography of the diarist, The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (1935), has not been superseded; the diary and reminiscences are now available on microfilm.


10


rearrangement: in lieu of £20 per annum interest, Robinson should lodge with the Colliers when in London (‘You have a rascally debtor, and you might conveniently contrive to put yourself under his roof and set his Beef and Pudding at work to rub off a little of the score’).15 Robinson, ever unattached, was pleased with the suggestion, and on his return to London in early 1806 moved in with the Colliers at 3 Little Smith Street, Westminster. He would remain more or less en famille until July 1813. The authorship trade that John Dyer Collier embraced in 1802 was hard work, but like his son he was never a shirker. He began by editing a miscellaneous journal, the Monthly Register (founded in April by Charles and John Wyatt), his task being to write or procure ‘theoretic and practical’ articles on law, commerce, agriculture, genealogy, architecture, and literature. By August he was publishing contributions from Robinson, now at Jena, describing the renaissance of philosophy and belles-lettres in Germany (Robinson had already met Goethe, Herder, and Wieland, and supplied translations of Goethe, Schiller, and Klopstock for a largely unappreciative audience),16 but at the end of March 1803 the father of five was again out of a job: ‘The Wyatts have found that I have now procured them sufficient connection to go on with the work without my assistance’, he wrote to Robinson. ‘I had an agreement with them for six months which they were obliged to eke out because I would not take the hint & be gone’(HCR Correspondence, 29 March 1803). But John Dyer’s new professionalism sustained him. He had meantime composed a useful treatise on the law of patents (no doubt inspired by his work for the Wyatts), for which the Wyatts declined to pay him sixty guineas, and so he published it himself in July 1803. An Essay on the Law of Patents for New Inventions, with two chapters ‘on the general history of monopolies . . . to the time of the Inter-regnum’ and an appendix listing all patents granted from 1800 on, is a 316-page octavo dedicated to Baron Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, printed ‘for the Author’ by Andrew Wilson, and sold by Longman and Rees. A bound-in slip offered the author’s services as agent for patent applications, and the folding plate illustrating Arkwright’s machinery was engraved, John Payne Collier later recalled, by Jane Collier. A year later she told Robinson that 1,000 copies had been printed, and 250 to date sold at 10s. 6d., of which the Colliers would net 7s.; one agency for a patentee had by then made them about £12, and three more were in prospect (HCR Correspondence, 25 June 1804). ‘Beating about in all directions for the employment of his pen’, as John Payne

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15. HCR Correspondence, 29 March 1803. 16. Collier rejected a translation of Schlegel sent in 1803, suggesting to his friend that the Wyatts did not have a high opinion of ‘your poetical effusions’; see Wellens 1983, pp. 108–09.


1789–1820

11

later put it, John Dyer projected a novel ‘upon a Spanish story’, which he dictated in part to his wife before May 1803 (JPC Memoirs, p. 56). But Elvira ‘is abandoned at least for the present’, Jane told Robinson in September; her son said it was completed and submitted to several publishers, but rejected and finally lost. Other piece-work included ‘a history of Egypt at 1 Guinea & a half per sheet’ and the translation of a novel, Etienne François de Lantier’s Voyageurs en Suisse (4 vols., 1803–04, for John Badcock); and ‘we have a concern in an Agricultural Magazine, but the proprietor is very poor & I fear also a rogue’—he paid £2 12s. 6d. a sheet. Richard Phillips, the Whig ‘master of hacks’, gave John Dyer three guineas a sheet for work in the Law Journal, based on parliamentary and trial reports taken in shorthand, but this was a short-lived arrangement. Jane Collier contributed to the precarious family income by colouring prints for a bookseller, putting to use the techniques learnt in Lambeth. ‘He squeezed me in price so that with the childrens help I could only make £2 10s. a month’, she told Robinson, and ‘I was up at 6 & worked till eight, but I have applied . . . for some Botanical colouring which I hope will be more productive’ (HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1803). A better venue for John Dyer’s journalism was the Daily Advertiser and Oracle, a respectable Tory newspaper owned by Peter Stuart, whose brother Daniel controlled the Morning Post and the Courier. ‘My father was more successful in political than in poetical compositions’, his son recalled, and those submitted to the Oracle ‘were so well liked that Peter Stuart . . . agreed to give my father a guinea for every column he supplied’ (Memoirs, p. 57). From this new outlet John Dyer Collier’s work caught the sharp eye of John Walter II, proprietor of The Times, and a casual vocation became a career. Walter called at the house in Little Smith Street, a bargain was struck, and ‘my husband has become a Reporter!!!’ wrote Jane to Robinson (HCR Correspondence, 31 August 1804). In April 1804 he began to cover proceedings in the Court of King’s Bench and at parliamentary sessions for The Times, once more employing shorthand to advantage. His son soon would follow him. From Jena in December 1803 Henry Crabb Robinson enquired anxiously from John Dyer of ‘your plan as to John [Payne]. I confess I have my suspicions that you have not with due reflection determined on the life he shall lead—I fear this. I heard long ago of his being actually at or about to go to Westminster School. And lately you talked of his learning German. Do you mean to breed him up to Authorship? But perhaps these Questions are impertinent’ (HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1803). Indeed John Payne received virtually no formal education at all; whereas his uncle Joshua (not a ‘bookish man’) sent two sons to Westminster School, which was nearly on John Dyer’s doorstep, John Payne continued in family tutorials at home. The father whose own schooling


12


terminated at Charterhouse was no mean linguist, however, and before he was nine John Payne had classical grammar to study, while in the evenings John Dyer read plays aloud to the family: ‘Here, under my father’s tuition, I may say that I began my knowledge, though I cannot say study, of Shakespeare.’ In the subsequent farm years at Abridge, aged ten to twelve, John ‘used to do any work of which I was capable—especially scare-crowing; but my Father made me take my books, Latin or Greek with me, and some part of the day he used to come out & hear me say my lessons. . . . I drove plough, and thus saved the cost of a boy, but still I was kept going with my education: that was never neglected, even if my F[ather] was away from home. I rather disliked Latin, but I liked Greek. My Father made me learn by heart the Catalogue of ships in Homer!’ 17 These beginnings may not have been rock solid, for on the family’s return to London ‘by industry & my father’s aid [I] made up for lost time in Greek and Latin; but I never became a good scholar and to this day I am very ignorant as to metres & quantities so that I am almost afraid to open my mouth when a classical question is proposed’ (JPC Diary, 16 January 1878). John’s older sister, Jane, studied Latin alongside him, and ‘as for Greek my father was never remiss, and if I am only a moderate Grecian it was not his fault’. Indeed a Christmas visit to Eton in 1807, when John Payne stayed with his uncle the Rev. Richard Godley, found John Dyer urging his son to resolve ‘some of the difficulties which must be unavoidable, under the ignorance of your instructor’, in his understanding of Greek prosody, by questioning his host on a variety of abstruse particulars.18 In a long and self-conscious letter that flattered the young man’s grasp of the scholarly issues, John Dyer poured out his somewhat pompous Hellenophilia: the Greek language ‘is the most complete, harmonious, expressive, & beautiful that ever engaged the wonderful organ of human speech, & . . . the best means to improve the English tongue, & the other barbarous dialects of the north, is to understand correctly & apply faithfully, the energy grace & variety of the former’.19 By practical contrast, Jane taught her daughters French, a language that John Payne always ‘disliked’ but half-mastered, and he was later to pick up a better-than-average reading knowledge of Italian. When Crabb Robinson came to live in Little Smith Street in early 1806 ‘he taught me German’, while ‘I taught him, or more properly improved him in Greek and Latin’, John Payne saucily added, ‘as his early education had been neglected’.20 17. JPC Memoirs, p. 33; JPC Diary, 18 April 1878. 18. Godley (1780–ca. 1848) was the second husband of Jane Payne’s sister Elizabeth; he was an Eton scholar, B.A. and M.A. (1806) of King’s College, Cambridge, and later prebendary of Chester. 19. John Dyer Collier to JPC, 26 December 1807; FF/K MS 610. 20. JPC Memoirs, p. 53. In a diary entry of 27 January 1881 Collier recalled that he had also had German lessons from the elder Frederic Shoberl, a publisher with whom he was later much involved.


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Jane Payne Collier, with her modest training in draughtsmanship and engraving, may have encouraged what John Payne called his ‘knack for taking likenesses’. We have found no extant evidence of such skills, but he claimed that ‘one of them, that of Sir Vicary Gibbs had actually been published by a print-seller in the Strand’, and in Collier’s copy of the Gordonstoun sale catalogue (1816) a tantalizing bibliophile relic once survived, ‘a portrait of R[ichard] Heber, a pencil drawing by J. P. Collier’.21 By the beginning of 1806, moreover, John Dyer had imparted to his son the mysteries of shorthand, which would prove of life-long service to him. For the moment, its use was more practical to the father: John Payne could now help with the courtroom and parliamentary reporting for The Times, and could decipher and transcribe John Dyer’s notes. This was the first kind of ‘authorship’ John Payne was bred up to, and by the age of seventeen he was ready to assume his own share of the Collier family cottage industry— literature, in the broadest sense, the generation of text. In the narrower sense, John Payne had already developed a youthful taste for fiction, poetry, and drama. There were novels by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith at the Abridge farm, and John Dyer’s cousins the Calamys made a present to young John Payne of Robinson Crusoe: Collier remembered it vividly as the 1785 edition published by John Walter’s new Logographic Press, a two-volume octavo with engraved plates by Robert Pollard. Although there was already at least one Shakespeare on the family shelves, the boy coveted his own set, and in his teens purchased, volume by volume as he could pay for it, John Bell’s attractive but editorially undistinguished duodecimo edition.22 And in about 1806 father gave son a Faerie Queene ‘in four or five small volumes. I did not read them so much as I devoured them’, John Payne remembered, and the resulting ‘possession’ with Spenser formed the basis of his own first attempts at versifying, ‘when I was 18 or 19’. Yet that harmless practice, when—no doubt shortly—projected as a métier, drew a coolly ironic response from John Dyer: ‘Ovid (like you) had in view the duties of the bar, but (not I hope like you herea er) he abandoned his professional studies for the metric art . . . . His subsequent history will be a lesson to you not to fall into the same error’.23 21. JPC Memoirs, p. 66, apparently referring to a date of about 1805; JPC sale, lot 381. 22. Thirteen of the fourteen volumes (1785–1809) survive, some annotated by Collier, who in 1835 presented the set to his eldest son (now FF/K). 23. JPC Memoirs, pp. 125–26; John Dyer Collier to JPC, 27 December 1807. The moralizing but gentle conclusion to this letter, which JPC retained all his life, deserves quoting: ‘I have never my dear represented the steep ascent of literature as an easy path; the pure stream you partake of & the pure air you inhale, the fragrant odours you enjoy, the delicious fruits you taste in your progress are rewards which if you know how to value you will obtain. But supposing my dear you knew none of the ways which lead to this sacred Temple. Is there any course you could take[?] Would you descend into the lower walks of life? Would you tread the dirty road of dishonour? Would you grope in the dark recesses of ignorance, or in the yet filthier haunts of Vice[?] I declare


14


Collier’s earliest memories of play-going are similarly keen: Sarah Siddons with her half-brothers John and Charles Kemble in Sheridan’s Pizarro (a famous revival in October 1803 at Covent Garden), Mrs. Siddons with John Kemble and George Frederick Cooke in Venice Preserved (November–December 1803, ‘perhaps the drama that at this instant has le the strongest impression upon my mind’), and the same trio in Shakespeare. Jane Collier was devoted to Covent Garden and Drury Lane, explained her son, ‘and [as] my father could not always accompany her, she sometimes availed herself of the escort of young Robinson, generally taking my elder sister or myself with them’ (Memoirs, p. 54). He told Lord Glengall ‘that I could go back [in theatrical memories] even to 1797’, the Southwark soap-factory years, which would square with Henry Crabb Robinson’s first acquaintance with Jane (OMD, i:19); but John Payne’s more specific recollections were nearly all of 1803–08, following the Colliers’ return to Westminster. He remembered Charles Mathews as Jabel in The Jew (1803 or 1806), John Liston as Sheepface in The Village Lawyer (Haymarket, June 1805), and Joseph Munden as Sir Francis Gripe in The Busy Body (1808). If he indeed saw the bibulous Richard Suett in the same role (OMD, i:19), it cannot have been in 1805, but no later than 8 December 1802 (Drury Lane). With Robinson’s return to London and installation with the Colliers the theatrical excursions may have continued, as the home-schooling and moral education clearly did, but John Payne’s principal activity was now his apprentice journalism. In early 1806 he accompanied his father to the celebrated trials of Sir Thomas Picton, the murderer Richard Patch, and Viscount Melville. At Picton’s, for sanctioning torture during his administration of Trinidad, John Dyer Collier impressed his son by giving evidence on a point of Spanish law, from a law book ‘which nobody could understand’; for this he ‘had the special thanks of the Lord Chief Justice’, the formidable Lord Ellenborough, but his own anonymous report in The Times of 24 February forbore to take personal credit. Patch was convicted of murdering his partner Isaac Blight on 6 April, and John Payne sat with his father ‘in front of the dock . . . when the murderer’s hand, to my young horror, touched my shoulder’. On 29 April began what Robinson called the ‘great event of the Season’, Lord Melville’s fi een-day trial for corruption in Admiralty affairs. John Dyer procured ‘occasional admission’ for his lodger, but his son was apparently already a working assistant (‘My father went to aid to God my dear I care not much which direction you prefer so that you do but preserve your truth purity & virtue & with these I had rather have you the most witless of human beings than the most profound learned & ingenious without them. I have always thought that in the path of knowledge you would take these companions by the hand & if you had not met with them it would have been both your greatest misfortune & ruin.’ Nearly seventy-five years later the addressee remembered his father as ‘singularly excellent in every virtue, & as upright as an arrow & as honest as daylight: I never knew him to do an unworthy thing in his life’; JPC Diary, 17 February 1881.


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in the report of the proceedings and I helped him’), and in addition to the reports in The Times a book came of it, published by B. Crosby and Company of Paternoster Row. This venture earned John Dyer a hundred guineas, said his son, and if there was any even stenographic contribution by seventeen-year-old John Payne, it would constitute his first ‘book appearance’.24 At much the same time John Payne began to report parliamentary debates, and with his press privileges was able to swank with his avuncular friend: on 3 March, ‘a er Tea, Mr Collier’s Son proposed taking me with him to the House of Lords’, Robinson wrote to his brother Thomas. ‘It was a night of interest. And the door keepers turned several away while we were there, but John stepped forward, said he came from the Times, beckoned to me & I marched in under the Character of a reporter’ (HCR Correspondence, 5 March 1806). The ‘juvenile reporter’, as Robinson describes him in a letter to Jane from Bury St. Edmunds (4 February 1806), published his first independent article in the spring of this year, an account of a speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Henry Petty, later Marquess of Lansdowne. ‘I was considered by some older rivals to have failed in my first attempt’, John recalled nearly seventy-five years later—can he have meant his father among them?—‘but Mr Walter did not complain’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 72). Indeed Walter had consistently encouraged the young man, increasing his salary from an initial one and a half guineas per week to two, and by now to three. Apparently his personal earnings were pooled, for he estimated the ‘combined’ income of the family as £1,200–1,300 in these years; but he must have retained enough to go on buying books. His ‘strong, and even greedy, desire’ for a collection of his own, as he later described it, was already at work.

Household and Early Circle

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For the period from mid-1806 through early 1811, John Payne’s seventeenth through twenty-first years, fewer details survive, but our overall picture of the Collier household is one of a busy professional family in variegated action. Buoyed by steady employment, in December 1806 John Dyer gave up Little Smith Street and took a ‘good comfortable house’ at 56 Hatton Garden, a broad thoroughfare leading north from High Holborn. Robinson followed them, and the grandparents John and Mary Dyer Collier moved in as well, no doubt paying their own way, for the apothecary had come out of his early retirement and successfully replenished some of the savings he had lost on his sons. Just before the move John Dyer had travelled to Germany on John Walter’s 24. JPC Memoirs, p. 70. We have not identified this version of the trial report (there are several), and Collier’s ‘hundred guineas’ is problematic, as he tended to double such figures.


16


behalf to cover the imminent confrontation of the Prussian and French armies. His sensational report of the taking of Hamburg on 26 November by Napoleon’s forces was a great scoop for The Times, and Robinson wrote to his brother Thomas that his friend had ‘remained in that Town 2 days a er the French were there, and escaped at last leaving everything behind him. He was forced to steal out of the gates without a second shirt to his back or stockings to his feet’ (HCR Correspondence, 3 December 1806). Robinson himself in 1806 continued to pursue his literary acquaintancemaking, and little else: Hazlitt, Anna-Laetitia Barbauld, the Aikens, Amelia Opie, and above all Charles and Mary Lamb, whom he met through Catherine Clarkson early in the year. He accompanied brother and sister to the premiere of Charles’s ill-fated Mr. H at Covent Garden on 10 December, when Lamb joined enthusiastically in the hissing, and saw them home a erward. A proposal to accompany the two sons of Alexander Davison, a wealthy merchant, on a very grand tour of America—two years, with a draughtsman to record the scenery, and with a European excursion to follow—came finally to nothing, and he sank to considering a job as ‘a bookseller’s journeyman’. In February 1807, however, through John Dyer’s intervention, Robinson began to put his continental experience to use. Walter hired him to travel to Altona, near Hamburg, and report on the events preceding the fall of Danzig and the Treaty of Tilset. He remained abroad for eight months at a guinea a day plus expenses, returning to London in November to an impressive new salary of £400 per annum, soon increased to £500. His domestic tasks were to monitor and select news items from foreign newspapers, and to act occasionally as theatre critic for The Times. The latter assignment might have appealed strongly to young John Payne, but Robinson professed to find it uncongenial, as it conflicted with his social routine: ‘I confess [it] alarms me—Not for the labour of writing, but for the waste of time previously’, he primly informed John Dyer, from Bury St. Edmunds, on 8 November 1807. By the end of January 1808 the increasingly benign John Walter had promoted Robinson from ‘a kind of foreign editor’ to ‘the Editor’ so styled, or at least this was Robinson’s understanding; he was now to answer letters on Walter’s behalf, and occasionally to ‘make calls upon persons of respectability’, and Walter told him ‘certainly you can’t appear otherwise than as a principal [and therefore] you might be known expressly as the Editor’.25 Thus a er eleven months’ employment at The Times John Dyer’s protégé found himself in charge of his landlord at about double his fixed salary—although John Dyer clearly regarded himself as eligible to free-lance. 25. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 25 January 1808, HCR Correspondence; quoted in Stanley Morison’s History of The Times, i:142–43.


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Robinson’s ‘editorship’ was short-lived, however, for within five months he was again off on a continental mission, this time to report from Corunna on the campaigns in Spain, and he remained on the Iberian peninsula until January 1809. In his absence, apparently in November 1808, John Dyer Collier and John Walter quarrelled, and Collier père ‘transferred his services as Reporter to the [Morning] Chronicle. He & Walter were embittered against each other, and I thought Collier most to blame’, Robinson later recalled (HCR Reminiscences, i:416). The cause of this ri is not known, although John Dyer’s short fuse over matters of money and dignity is well documented. Robinson told his brother that ‘all, I am sure, is owing to an inherent pride & impatience at the restraints & mortifications his want of fortune subjects him to, which encrease with his years’, and wrote from Spain to both parties ‘with the hope of effecting a reconciliation’ (HCR Correspondence, 27 November 1808). But John Dyer, ‘very imprudent’ as Robinson thought him, had parted company with Walter for good. His stipend (no more than six or seven guineas weekly, during ‘term and Parliament’) may have been at issue; and perhaps his activity away from The Times (see below) had begun to annoy Walter, who had a paternalistic streak as employer—although Robinson’s reiterated ‘most to blame’ suggests that the employee had provoked the divorce. Nonetheless John Payne’s position with Walter appears not to have been compromised. At twenty he had served nearly three years in the ‘regular corps of Reporters’ formed by Walter in 1806 ‘in order that his paper might rival [James Perry’s] ‘‘The Morning Chronicle’’, which had been for some time famous for its parliamentary debates’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 71), and losing the volatile father gave Walter no incentive to discharge the son. He raised John Payne’s salary from three guineas to four. It was Robinson instead who was sacked within the year, though so amicably that he and Walter remained good friends for life. Walter cited ‘the great advance in the sale of the paper’ and ‘the mechanical business [which] has become so principal a feature of it’; and Robinson, who had been dri ing into the office at five in the a ernoon and o en departing by nine, replied equably that ‘engagements like that we formed depend upon mutual convenience, and when either party finds it in his interest to dissolve it, he has a perfect right to do so’.26 He maintained his solicitude for John Payne and later for his brother William Field Collier in their work with The Times, and forty years later served as John Walter’s executor.

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It may be appropriate to attempt a reconstruction of the Collier household in this period: let us say the spring of 1808. In the house described by Robinson 26. HCR Correspondence, 17 August 1809; the letters to and from Walter, copied into a letter to Thomas Robinson, are printed from that source in Morison, i:145–46.


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as ‘good’ and ‘comfortable’, at the northern end of Hatton Garden, nine Colliers resided, plus Henry Crabb Robinson, plus whatever servants the family employed. Quarters were close—Robinson at first was ‘actually debating with myself the propriety of staying here, as I fear I am incumbering the family’— but clearly manageable; the common rooms in 1811 could accommodate dinner for twenty-seven, followed by whist and dancing. The inhabitants ranged in age from about twelve to nearly eighty. Senior were John Collier the apothecary (seventy-four) and his wife (seventy-eight). Old John had finally retired from active practice, having salvaged a tidy nest-egg, its value unknown to and underestimated by his children and grandchildren—prudent secrecy, perhaps. In 1808 he was probably putting the last touches to Thoughts on Reanimation, published ‘for the Author’ in 1809 by J. and E. Hodson, a firm of printers in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, not far from the Colliers’ residence. The apothecary’s wife, Mary Dyer, four years older than he, would survive him by nine years, amply provided for in a will re-dra ed by Robinson, which would cause some bad blood.27 John Dyer Collier at forty-six, in harness at The Times, was still casting about for projects to supplement the family income. Early in the year he had generated an instant biography of Abraham Newland, the legendary cashier of the Bank of England who had died on 21 November 1807; for twenty-five years this worthy ‘had slept . . . at his apartments in the Bank, without absenting himself for a single night’. John Dyer’s publishers were Crosby and Co., who had supposedly paid him a hundred guineas for the report of the Melbourne trial; his printers were again his neighbours J. and E. Hodson, a fact that may suggest self-financing. Like Collier’s patent law book, The Life of Abraham Newland contains practical additions (‘some account of that great national establishment [the Bank of England]’ and ‘an Appendix containing the late correspondence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the Bank, and a List of the Statutes passed relative to it’), the last of the correspondence being dated 5 February 1808; and the whole project, according to his son, ‘took one week to compose and another to print it, though it formed a respectable and creditable volume of nearly two hundred pages’. This John Dyer accomplished ‘without a scrap of information supplied to him’, marvelled John Payne, an observation that may lend a hint of self-mockery to his father’s whimsical preface: ‘The writer has had no occasion, in imitation of some modern biographers, to give a diffuse list of au-

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27. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 12 December 1806, HCR Correspondence; HCR Diary, 24 February. The elder Colliers had le Hatton Garden by 8 June 1811, when HCR recorded visiting them at Newington Green. But on 23 February 1815 he noted that ‘I dined at the Colliers. Mrs C. and the old lady have quarrelled, and the old people threaten to leave’; shared housing was perhaps resumed when the younger family moved to Salisbury Square in April 1814.


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thorities printed and manuscript, nor has there been any motive to search the great libraries at Paris and Rome, in hope of discovering some neglected composition, or latent anecdote, absolutely insignificant, but relatively important’. Elsewhere he claimed to have failed to find out Newland’s first school only ‘a er the utmost diligence we have employed’, suggesting exhaustive inquiry: for a seven-day task this claim verges on fiction.28 At forty, Jane Payne Collier continued to conduct a social life of her own, while managing the extended household and educating the younger children. Her personal if pooled income was rising, from £120 per annum in the first years of the century to £300 by 1814.29 Robinson, now aged thirty-three, was clearly still smitten with her, and some members of his new literary circle, like the Lambs and William Hazlitt, formed friendships with her more or less independent of John Dyer. He seems not to have resented this overmuch, nor to have confused loyalty in marriage with submissiveness. When recording the religious differences (and domestic harmony) of the parents of Abraham Newland, he struck a deliberately personal note: ‘we are advocates of that dissonance of opinion, without rancour or acrimony, in either party to the marriage contract, which indicates sanity and strength of intellect, a due respect for the sacred character of truth, and an admission of its superiority in all the relations of domestic and social life’ (p. 5). Jane attended the playhouses with Robinson and with other friends, made and broke off acquaintances on her own initiative, and even passed three unchaperoned weeks in 1809 with her younger admirer at his brother’s house in Bury St. Edmunds. There was never any hint of impropriety: the Thomas Clarksons were there too, and Robinson took Jane to visit the radical philanthropist Capell Lofft and the new dissenting minister Thomas Madge. Jane’s behaviour must not have seemed untoward to John Dyer, to her family, or to Robinson—who was scandalized by the domestic arrangements of the Godwins, the Hazlitts, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the spring of 1808 Robinson was busier with his own social affairs than with John Walter’s work, but his income held steady and sufficient. A year earlier he had felt ‘much pressed for room’ at Hatton Garden, but feared that living alone was beyond his unsalaried means. Now, however, when he could afford to take accommodation for himself, he remained, bridging the household agegap between John Dyer and Jane and their five children; he would stay five

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28. OMD, iii:55. John Dyer inscribed one copy to his son, ‘From the Author: an anxious father to a beloved son—J. Payne Collier’. A note by JPC adds: ‘My father might then well be ‘‘anxious’’, having a Wife & five children, and very little to keep them upon excepting what he received from ‘‘The Times’’. He got on better aerwards’ (JPC sale, lot 98; now BL 10827.bbb.8). 29. ‘C[ollier] said he has now an income of 18 hundred a year, 3 from Mrs C.’s fortune’; HCR Diary, 1 May 1814.


20


more years, and haunt the tea- and supper-table for decades a er that. He must be considered as ‘family’ in this period, when Lofft breakfasted, Coleridge dined, and the Lambs spent the evening ‘with us’, and the suppers, whist parties, and dances arranged by the Colliers were always, in Robinson’s own words, ‘at home’. Young Jane Collier, whom Robinson called Jenny, was now twenty-one, and like most of her siblings not one to marry young and leave home. John Payne was nineteen, a full-time newspaper reporter juggling poetry, play-going, bookbuying, and billiards as hobbies: his was a crowded adolescence. Mary (‘Polly’), whose travels in the 1820s suggest a liveliness beyond Jane’s, was sixteen, and Richard Price fourteen. Richard, rebellious and improvident, and later regarded as the black sheep of the family, may have already developed the temper that would flare in quarrels with his father in the years 1818–25. William Field Collier, the youngest, may also have been a handful when young—in a letter of 1806 to Jane Collier, Robinson calls him ‘little fiery Will’—but he took work at The Times in 1815 and seems never to have caused any trouble, nor earned much acclaim. He died young in 1830 of a brain tumour. The principal breadwinners in the Collier household by 1808, John Dyer and John Payne, were bound to an irregular but arduous schedule of working hours. John Walter II, in his competition with the Morning Chronicle for the best full account of parliamentary debates—now the main thrust of ‘news’ for all the leading daily papers—probably imitated James Perry’s system of reporting in relays: a reporter would cover two hours of the session, give way to a colleague, write up his shorthand, and deliver the longhand text to the typesetters, before returning to the House of Commons or Lords to spell his replacement. In twos or threes reporters would thus alternate, the last of them in a long parliamentary session going back to the printing-house with only the last segment to add, thus enabling the newspaper to close up and issue its morning hard copy as early as possible. This system would have stretched Walter’s complement of four to six reporters, but a staff of the same number served Perry, and some priorities must have been raised if sessions in the Commons and the Lords conflicted, or competed for interest with each other or with the more sensational trials in the law courts.30 Parliamentary debates sometimes lasted until well past midnight, and a reporter or his alternate was in contractual thrall to them, whenever they ended. Parliament normally sat for about thirty weeks in the year. These were timetable facts at 56 Hatton Garden. And there was more piece-work, or what began as it. Both Walter and Perry were reluctant to pay their parliamentary reporters a stipend other than per

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30. See Christie 1970a and Aspinall 1955.


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diem or sessional, with extras for special assignments, and John Dyer Collier necessarily sought further sources of income. His principal independent pursuit, begun sometime before 1811 and probably by 1808, was a service to provide provincial British newspapers with up-to-the-minute handwritten abstracts of London and foreign events, selected and digested for republishing all over the country. Perhaps Crabb Robinson, whose experience in Altona had led him to assess continental news-summary services for John Walter, inspired Collier’s domestic enterprise;31 and the ‘letters’ generated from Hatton Garden filled a profitable niche in the trade. John Payne ‘lent [his father] active assistance . . . in the preparation & transmission of these’, which found clients in Bristol, Newcastle, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin;32 and later Richard and William joined in the enterprise. The work was laborious and time-consuming, and conflicted materially with John Dyer’s and John Payne’s commitments to The Times and later the Morning Chronicle, but it brought in several hundred pounds a year from the start, and well over a thousand at its peak (1813). Although subscriptions fell off by half a er the Peace of 1814, in 1818 profits a er expenses were still about £640, and constituted for Richard his sole source of income. This led to a struggle between second son and father, who distributed the takings as he saw fit, retaining a good share for himself even a er his retirement from active participation.33 Long and irregular working hours may have curtailed John Dyer’s theatregoing more than his wife’s or his lodger’s, but the Collier household was hardly unsocial. From Robinson we hear of frequent dinners and suppers, whist parties and musical evenings, and forty-five years on John Payne himself remembered a pattern of events as ‘not unusual’ at home: ‘tea was concluded before eight in the evening, and about eleven a supper, hot and cold, was served up in the diningroom, and the company, without any excess either of eating or drinking, did not separate till one or two in the morning. These parties may have commenced when I was sixteen or seventeen years old [sic, but more likely a er 1807], and they continued until I quitted my father’s roof, and had a roof of my own’.34 Robinson records the occasionally even later night, with friends breaking up at four. What convivial but well-behaved circle of intimates and acquaintances can

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31. Morison, i:138. 32. JPC Memoirs, p. 73. To his list may be added Norwich: in 1863, forwarding an autograph requested by C. H. Watson, Collier noted that ‘the name of the ‘‘Norwich Mercury’’ is familiar to my ears: my Father, some 30 [sic] years ago, was one of its London Correspondents’; 8 June 1863, Harvard Theatre Collection. 33. A profit-sharing formula was worked out on John Dyer’s return to farming in 1818. 34. N&Q, 8 July 1854, p. 21.


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we reconstruct for the hospitable Colliers? Blood relations included at least two of the ten children of Brough Maltby, a wholesale draper who had married Mary Dyer Collier’s sister, and Edmund Calamy the barrister, grandson of the biographer and a cousin on the Collier side. The Maltby cousins, Rowland and William, served as solicitors for the bankruptcies of both John Dyer and Joshua Collier, and the younger William may have been John Payne’s first bibliographical acquaintance. Also a barrister with literary leanings, a friend of Richard Porson and Samuel Rogers, and later of Alexander Dyce, William Maltby abandoned his law practice in 1808–09 to succeed Porson as librarian of the new London Institution. The principal founder of this subscription repository had been the bibliophile West India merchant George Hibbert, and Maltby’s assistant during his twenty-five-year librarianship was William Upcott, the leading autograph collector of his day. Maltby himself was credited with a remarkable memory and knowledge of books,35 and John Payne cannot but have encountered these early in life: Robinson met Maltby as early as 1797, at Joshua Collier’s house, so the propinquity was long-standing. Edmund Calamy of Lincoln’s Inn may have been closest to the old apothecary, who had in 1800 dedicated to him his Essays on the Progress of the Vital Principle. John Payne remembered him as ‘the Edmond of my youth’ (JPC Diary, 27 March 1879), but Calamy le London for retirement near Exeter in 1812, aged sixty-nine, and died four years later. Jane’s sister Mary and her husband, William Field, perhaps temporarily unwelcome a er the soap-factory debacle of 1798, were dinner guests again at ‘a family party’ with Mr. and Mrs. ‘D Paine’ in 1811 (HCR Diary, 23 June); the other Payne sister, Elizabeth (Proctor, later Godley), was then living at Eton. Her sons George and Robert, aged thirteen and ten in 1808, would marry Jenny and Polly respectively in 1818 and 1820. John Payne mentions also ‘the Landons’ among his in-law relations: Jane Landon had married uncle Joshua in 1787, and their sons—one and three years younger than John Payne—attended Westminster School in 1801–05, a few blocks from the Colliers in Little Smith Street. In 1808 Joshua and his family were all resident in France, whence they would return only a er the war, in May 1814. Old friends and new neighbours of the Colliers included the Dr. Joseph Adamses. Joseph (1756–1818), a physician and former apothecary, editor of the Medical and Physical Journal, lived a stone’s throw from the Colliers at 17 Hatton Garden. Old John Collier dedicated his Thoughts on Reanimation (1809) to this medical man, and Adams was one of two non-family mourners noted

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35. In his reminiscences Dyce remarked that ‘in a knowledge of bibliography [Maltby] could hardly have been surpassed’; Schrader 1972, pp. 210–11.


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by Robinson at the funeral of the apothecary, on 7 February 1816. The Dawson sisters of Leeds, Alice and Mary—from the extensive nonconformist Yorkshire family—crop up as friends and fellow forum-goers with Jane Payne as early as 1797; they were house-guests in October 1811, when Coleridge was produced at dinner, ‘to give them a treat’. ‘These are two very respectable Women’, Robinson thought, ‘with sufficient intelligence to understand & relish literary conversation, of amiable manners & with character that secures general esteem’ (HCR Diary, 21 October 1811). Robinson himself probably introduced four or more of the six Stansfeld brothers—also from Leeds, ranging in age in 1808 from twentyfour to eleven—into the Hatton Garden circle: he had met the eldest brother, George, in Altona in 1805, where George had warned him in time to evacuate. In January 1811 we hear of ‘the four Stansfelds & Bakewell’ dining at the Colliers’, when ‘the young ones were merry’; ‘three Stansfelds’ in February; and Hatton Stansfeld alone in July. The latter (b. 1793) formed a partnership in a dairy with Polly’s husband Robert in 1825, and John Payne later remembered him as the man ‘who took a wife and poison in the same year’.36 ‘Bakewell’ was Robert Bakewell the geologist (1768–1843), originally a woolstapler of Nottingham and Wakefield, whose relations with the Colliers had their ups and downs. Robinson first met him in 1798, an ‘intimate friend’ of John Dyer, who ‘professed real regard’ for the then-farmer, and ‘yet to me freely confided his friend’s faults of vanity & ambition (as friends are in the habit of doing)’. When John Dyer’s financial affairs reached a crisis in 1802 Bakewell ‘behaved ungenerously: therefore I broke off all acquaintance with him—for many years’, Robinson recalled in 1846, describing him elsewhere as ‘a heartless man’.37 Bakewell published his Observations on Wool at Wakefield in 1808, but then turned his attention to geology and mineralogy, and removed to London with his family, where he lectured and wrote. The Bakewells were frequent dinner guests in 1811, although on 26 November John Payne recorded in his diary that he found their company ‘dull’, adding haughtily (at age twenty-two): ‘I am quite out of my element with young people.’ But by 20 February 1812 Bakewell senior had broken with the Colliers, according to Robinson ‘in consequence of an affronting letter Mrs C. wrote to [him]. She feared B. encouraged an acquaintance between John [Payne] & Miss B. & rather indelicately insisted on the acquaintance being broken off ’ (HCR Diary, 30 October 1818). This is the first we have heard of John Payne and any young woman, and Jane Payne’s firm behaviour—John was now, a er all, twenty-three—deserves to be remarked. Nor was Robinson approving of John’s intimacy with the young 36. Collier’s annotated copy of OMD (Folger W.b.505), ii:118. 37. HCR Reminiscences, i:101; HCR Diary, 30 October 1818.

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23


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Bakewells: ‘I was fearful’, he wrote to John in September 1812, ‘that you preferred the Company of your inferiors to that of your superiors’.38 It is worth noting, however, that the Bakewell brothers, Robert Jr. and Frederick, later pursued serious scientific and literary careers, Robert emigrating as a geologist to Connecticut, Frederick publishing such works as Philosophical Conversations (1833) and Natural Evidence of a Future Life (1835, several editions), the latter work echoing old John Collier’s concerns. The Collier-Bakewell ri went apparently unmended until a half-reconciliation between Jane and Robert in 1818, and a further rapprochement a er the death of John Dyer in 1825.

Radicals and Romantics Not unnaturally, John Payne’s published memories of the circle of his youth concentrate upon literary figures, some of whose interplay with the Colliers may have been comparatively slight. But John Dyer’s personal acquaintance certainly included William Godwin, Thomas Holcro , and John Thelwall, the strain of radicalism perhaps shared from the forum days of the 1790s, ‘a period of great political excitement’, as John Payne later put it, following ‘the acquittals of Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall and others’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 54)—the others including Holcro , dramatist, novelist, and translator of Beaumarchais. John Dyer introduced Crabb Robinson to Holcro as early as October 1797; Robinson found him ‘harsh and forbidding in his manners’ (Lamb said ‘candid’, ‘upright’, and ‘single-meaning’), while admitting that ‘I admired [him], yet he never liked me’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:93). From 1799 to 1803 Holcro and his family lived abroad, eluding creditors, but from 1803 to his death in 1809 he was back in London, cranking out fiction, poetry, plays, and theatrical history, and failing as a publisher. His widow Louisa (daughter of Louis Sébastien Mercier, author of the famous L’An 2440) was at least thrice a guest at Hatton Garden in 1811–12, along with ‘Miss Holcro ’ (probably Fanny, the novelist and translator) and a Miss Mercier. In 1812 Louisa married another dramatist, James Kenney, and ‘the Kennies’ turned up there as well. John Payne Collier in later life remembered Louisa as ‘a charming French woman’, but Holcro , ‘a frequent visitor at my father’s house when I was a boy’, rather as ‘a remarkable man, very ugly, very clever, but just not clever enough’ and ‘not very agreeable company’ (OMD, ii:110). In 1816, however, reviewing Hazlitt’s edition of Holcro ’s memoirs, he tempered his judgement, describing the late bugbear as ‘a man of unblemished integrity’.39 Holcro ’s co-defendant

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38. HCR to JPC, 27 September 1812; FF MS 346. 39. Critical Review (May 1816), p. 451.


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of 1794, John Thelwall (1764–1834), also figured with his ‘good angel’ wife in the Colliers’ whist-parties of 1811–13. He took a large house in nearby Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1809, where he established a clinic for stammerers, whose ‘entertainments’ Robinson attended—marvelling in 1815 at hearing Milton’s Comus recited in chorus. William Godwin, like Holcro , may have known John Dyer since the 1790s. Crabb Robinson, a passionate early convert to Political Justice (‘no book ever made me feel so generously’), was one of many contemporaries to have been attracted by Godwin’s work and repelled by his conversation and behaviour. ‘He took great liberties with me’, Robinson recollected in 1846. ‘Indeed, that he did with every one’, although he had not yet begun to beg loans from even casual acquaintances, ‘which ultimately forced me to break with him’ (HCR Reminiscences, i:116). Godwin or ‘the Godwins’ dined with the Colliers at least three times in 1811–12, and a ‘Miss Godwin’ (Frances?) danced with Robinson at a large party in Hatton Garden in January 1812. John Payne Collier seems to have been equally unimpressed with ‘the great apostle of the new school’, recording his opinions a day a er Godwin dined with the family (JPC Early Diary, 13 October 1811): He is a man who tho’ he ought to be above conceit possesses it in a high degree: the very tones of his voice are manufactured; the set of his countenance is settled by previous thought & his sentences are studied. There is besides about him an affectation of simplicity & a pretence of being unlearned. It is bad enough when a man pretends to more learning than he is worth but surely to assume ignorance or rather an appearance of it is several degrees worse. In the first instance the man is ashamed of being uneducated, in the last he is ashamed of God’s gi s and his attainments. It also shews much artifice. Godwin at the same time is a man of taste—of talents—& ought to be above this pettyness which may be le to ladies of the blue stocking or the boarding school. He is a very good hearted man a er all I believe, and beyond dispute an honest man. Another circumstance shews him to have a narrow mind. He keeps a booksellers shop in Skinner Street but he is ashamed of having his own name over the door so he affixes the maiden name of his wife.40 . . . I was very attentive to him during the whole time he was at our house and did not hear him say one thing I thought worth remembering. He seemed anxious rather to display the ignorance of others than his own learning unless by contrast. . . . Mrs G. a woman of a shewy kind and by no means de-

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40. This garbled charge clearly reflects gossip misunderstood by young John: the signboard in fact read ‘M. J. Godwin’; St. Clair 1989, pp. 291–92 and 546n.


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ficient in impudence was not there. Mr Godwin has had the misfortune of not meeting with wives of the most exemplary character: witness Mary Wolstonecro . Another prickly liberal of the Lamb-Godwin circle was the great essayist William Hazlitt, who was to join John Dyer as a parliamentary reporter on the Morning Chronicle in 1812 and to edit Holcro ’s Memoirs in 1816.41 Ten years earlier Robinson had helped Hazlitt to find a publisher for his Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), but his report of Hazlitt’s lifelong gratitude (Hazlitt is supposed to have told Mary Lamb that Robinson ‘was the first person that found out there was anything in me’) may be as faulty as his recollection that Eloquence was Hazlitt’s first book. Robinson’s early esteem for Hazlitt’s genius (‘the cleverest person I know’) was perspicacious, however—Hazlitt’s sister-in-law replied ‘Cleverest? We all take him to be a fool’—and when Hazlitt lived in or visited London Robinson saw him, as the Colliers may also have done. John Payne himself later recalled that Hazlitt was ‘a warm admirer of three pictures in my father’s drawing-room’ and ‘very partial to my mother’.42 At the supper-parties in Hatton Garden, John Payne recollected, ‘my acquaintance with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, and others, began’, although ‘Coleridge was not so frequent a visitor as some others’ (N&Q, 8 July 1854). These contacts came largely through Robinson, as did the visits from Capell Lofft to breakfast and dinner in May 1809. Charles Lamb was the conduit, the most affectionate and accessible of the Romantics, whose own friends were numberless, and whose kind words about them brighten every appropriate biography. Robinson met him in early 1806, and it is characteristic of Lamb’s spontaneous enthusiasm that a few months later Robinson found himself at the first (and last) night of Lamb’s play, in the company of the author and his sister. He had not been invited to Thomas Holcro ’s similar flop, The Vindictive Man, which opened and closed at Drury Lane a few nights before. Charles and Mary Lamb remained life-long friends of Robinson, and were frequent visitors to the Colliers’ in the years Robinson lodged with them; they appear to have warmed especially to Jane, but John Payne, who remembered seeing Charles Lamb together with Coleridge in Hatton Garden when he was (so he said) ‘about sixteen or seventeen’, deliberately cultivated a literary intimacy with the author of Elia. He developed a taste for punning that Lamb may have inspired, and many years later he dedicated to Lamb his only book-length poem, The Poet’s Pilgrimage, begging ‘genius’ to judge him with ‘charity’. Lamb

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41. A letter from Charles Lamb to John Dyer Collier, asking the latter to recommend Hazlitt to the editor of the Chronicle, is provisionally dated 4 October 1812 by Marrs, iii:85–86. 42. OMD, i:32–33; but see QD 180.13 regarding the poem there printed.


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in his turn gave tempered approval to John Payne’s published verse and prose, and made him a present of Elia (1823), ‘inscribed . . . in return for one of my Poet’s Pilgrimage’.43 Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1826, Crabb Robinson unflatteringly described John Payne as ‘an affectionate indeed passionate admirer of your brother’s works’, whose ‘own writings will never acquire any character’, adding however that ‘Lamb respects them and the writer’—so that Elia again provided the echo of a puff (HCR Correspondence, 6 January 1826). The figurehead of the Romantic poets, however, was no constant visitor to the Collier establishment: Robinson’s particular but distant characterization of the Collier family in 1826 suggests as much. Wordsworth’s visits to London a er 1803 had been infrequent, and his society much in demand. Robinson met him through Lamb on 15 March 1808, at the time of Coleridge’s first lectures on poetry, but there is no sign of any contact then with John Dyer and his family. Four years later, revisiting Coleridge, Wordsworth walked with Robinson ‘towards the city and called on Serjeant [William] Rough and the Colliers’ (HCR Diary, 10 May 1812), and this may have been their first meeting. It provoked a small social fiasco, for Wordsworth agreed to dine in Hatton Garden on Sunday 17 May, and then ‘wrote on Friday to say a prior engagement which he had forgotten when he accepted Mr C.’s rendered it impossible to come’. All the other bidden guests—Robinson named five—were ‘disappointed by the absence of Wordsworth’, and Robinson did not again record him chez Collier until 1815, when on 28 May he noted in his diary that he ‘dined at Colliers with a party assembled to see the poet Wordsworth. . . . The a ernoon passed off pleasantly, but the conversation was not highly interesting.’ Indeed John Payne in 1856 stated that he ‘had not seen Wordsworth before . . . 1811–12’, although ‘a erwards I met him rather frequently’, and elsewhere he suggested that their intercourse was regular, if intermittent (‘he has much aged within the last four or five years’).44 But John Payne’s ‘memories’ of Wordsworth a er 1822 are suspect, as will be shown; and there is no independent evidence of Wordsworth’s participation in the earlier period of John Dyer’s suppers and soirées in Hatton Garden.45 Of Coleridge’s visits, however, there is evidence, although John Payne called them ‘less frequent . . . than some others’. In 1872 he described one, ‘the first time I saw Coleridge and Lamb together: they came to my father’s; he was then living

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43. OMD, iv:84. The taste for punning is noted in JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811. 44. Seven Lectures (1856), p. liv; OMD, i:88–90 (purporting to record the events of 1832). 45. Dorothy Wordsworth dined at the Colliers’ in October 1810; she was then staying in London with the Lambs, having travelled there from Bury St. Edmunds with HCR. Many years later she recalled this visit in a letter to HCR (25 February 1826), mentioning Jane Collier’s ‘hospitable kindness’.


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in Hatton Garden, but was not at home’. The two bandied Shakespeare allusions with Jane Collier, which her son professed to remember in detail, and ‘both made themselves very agreeable, and even my young mind was struck by the pleasant way in which they treated the familiar topics of conversation. . . . Coleridge, as I thought, especially endeavoured to adapt his remarks for the younger children. I . . . was a most greedy listener. They did not stay long, but went away with Robinson’ (OMD, iii:99–100). This otherwise credible episode is dated impossibly about 1805–06 by John Payne; Robinson met Coleridge only in March 1808, and first broke bread with him in 1810. But on a Sunday before Christmas 1810 Coleridge was certainly a guest of the Colliers, for Robinson wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth that he ‘spent an a ernoon with us’ and ‘was delightful’ (HCR Correspondence, 25 December 1810). And on 20 October 1811, just before beginning the Shakespeare lectures that John Payne would record in shorthand, Coleridge dined with the family and a party of friends, and held forth to mixed effect. Robinson records that his presence was sought as ‘a treat’ for the visiting Dawson sisters, who joined with the Joseph Adamses and several others as a kind of audience. Coleridge ‘spoke of poetry, and gave an opinion of Southey’, Robinson wrote in his diary. He ‘denied all merit to Scott . . . [but] nevertheless did not seem inclined to place Southey above Scott. He considered neither of them as poets. [He] spoke of his own poems with seeming disesteem. . . . He mentioned that when his poems were first published he was accused of being inflated and bombastical in his style; but now he is ranked with those who delight in false simplicity.’ The company, at least one of whom arrived a er supper, remained until midnight. For John Payne, who ‘felt vast reverence for Coleridge’, ‘the greatest man of the present day, and in some respects unrivalled in any former age’, this proved an inspiring occasion, which he evoked at some length in his own short-lived diary of 1811. By 13 October he had already met Coleridge ‘several times, and was highly delighted with a fund of anecdote and humour’, and four days later he had encountered him at the Lambs’, intending ‘that if I saw him I would set down on the tablet of my memory everything that he said worthy of recollection’. In forty-five minutes of Coleridgean conversation or monologue, however, John found ‘my mind . . . so burdened with the things worthy of recollection that he said that I was obliged to relieve myself by quitting his company, and not attending to him for the remainder of the night’: such was the effect of Coleridge’s wit and eloquence upon the (now) twenty-two-year-old. Coleridge’s expostulations at Hatton Garden equally ravished the young man’s attention, and to Robinson’s laconic summary of the talk he added, in his diary, points made by the philosopher-poet about Humphry Davy, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, military punishments (at length, against flogging), criminal


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law, state trials, and policy toward Sicily, and on Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and another ‘no poet’, Thomas Campbell. Collier felt that the company ‘suffered . . . a severe loss indeed, as [Coleridge’s] memory would not serve him to repeat two of his Poems, one called the ‘‘Walk of the Devil’’ ’. John Payne’s devotion to Coleridge bore immediate and rich fruit, in the shorthand transcript of two lectures on Shakespeare given a month a er the inconsistently dazzling dinner-party performance at Hatton Garden. Robinson, however, may have the last word on the latter event: Coleridge, he wrote to his brother, ‘became, if I may use the phrase, bodily drunk, while his mind was, tho’ weak, quite sober. He became quite incapable even when he was solving metaphysical riddles. To change the subject, I begged him to repeat to the ladies ‘‘The Devil’s Walk’’—he could not recollect a single stanza. . . . I then perceived that his face was deadly pale, his eyes staring from the sockets, his lips quivering; he was bodily drunk. He staid half an hour a erwards, began sentences he could not end, but uttered not a single impropriety nor forgot himself a moment’ (HCR Correspondence, 30 October 1811). The following day Robinson asked Coleridge what had transpired; Coleridge explained that the Colliers’ brandyand-water was stronger than gin-and-water, his accustomed tipple, and that he had unwisely consumed the same quantity. Less glamorous than the Romantic poets among John Payne’s early acquaintance, but far more influential in his career, was an attorney from Norwich, Thomas Amyot (1775–1850), the first serious antiquary the young man had met. Robinson, who had become acquainted with Amyot at Norwich in 1794, introduced him to the elder Colliers, and by February 1811 (if not earlier) ‘the Amyots’ were dining in Hatton Garden. As private secretary to the patrician Whig minister William Windham, Amyot had resided in London since 1806, reaping a series of lucrative appointments in the Colonial Office which supported him a er Windham’s death in 1810, and le him leisure to pursue scholarly and bibliophile interests. Though publishing little save a collection of Windham’s speeches and a few later archaeological papers, he built up a distinguished reference and ‘rare book’ library of his own, and frequented the British Museum, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and Buckingham House, as well as the necessary booksellers and auction-rooms. His generosity to other scholars, including beginners, was conspicuous: the historian John Bruce (1802–69) recalled in 1851 that ‘more than thirty years ago . . . Mr. Amyot endeavoured in vain to procure [me] admission to the British Museum’, and when the Librarian Joseph Planta proved ‘inexorable’ (Bruce was well under age), Amyot ‘set apart a place for the writer in his own library, gave him unrestricted access to his wellstored shelves, fetched him books from every room of his house, procured him


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access to the library of the Society of Antiquaries, and—best of all—to the noble library of George III, then lying unconsulted at Buckingham House’.46 Amyot need not have taken similar trouble with young John Payne Collier, for John Dyer managed that for his son at a surprisingly early date. That Amyot in some manner encouraged John Payne’s antiquarian bent we can credit, however, for Collier in his Poetical Decameron (1820) makes Amyot his ‘Morton’, the indulgent interlocutor who approves the arcane disclosures of ‘Bourne’ (= Collier), while ‘Elliot’, the more up-to-date Robinson-figure, remains sceptical. Amyot’s active collecting would have inspired any neophyte,47 and his later services as go-between ‘were innumerable’, Collier recollected: introductions to Henry Ellis and Frederic Madden at the British Museum, and above all to the Duke of Devonshire in 1830—the last invaluable office acknowledged by Collier in correspondence, but never in print.48 Amyot proposed Collier to the Society of Antiquaries in 1830, and joined him in the largely thankless administration of the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare Societies. Collier found fault only with Amyot’s indiscriminate generosity (‘I should take [his assistance] the more kindly if I did not know that he was just as ready to give his aid to people who in my opinion do not deserve it’, he complained to Robinson in 1829), but Jane remonstrated with him about his ingratitude, and thought him ‘repentant’.49 A few of Amyot’s suggested readings appear in Collier’s first Shakespeare (1842–44); Collier dedicated his Roxburghe Ballads (1847) to Amyot ‘in testimony of long friendship and sincere esteem’ and—perhaps less loyally— addressed to him New Facts Concerning the Life of Shakespeare (1835), the first and most flagrant of his biographical impostures. Precisely how early the young man met Amyot we cannot say, although John

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46. Bruce’s memories appear in his obituary notice of Amyot, which follows another by Henry Crabb Robinson in the Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 35 (January 1851), 3–9; Bruce was at that date the principal editor of the journal, and authorship is assigned to him in the marked file copy now in the Folger Library (see Kuist 1982, p. 37). Ganzel (p. 419, n. 12) attributed this anonymous piece to Collier and treated it as autobiographical. Another young beneficiary of Amyot’s encouragement was Charles Hartshorne, the would-be bibliographer; see Hunt 1993, p. 41. On Amyot see also Corfield and Evans 1996. 47. His library was more historical than literary (Dugdale, Hearne, Camden, Strype, etc.), but he did own a First Folio (Richard Farmer’s copy), as well as a Second and a Fourth (sale, Sotheby’s, 10 February 1851). 48. JPC Memoirs, p. 124; JPC to Madden, March 1829, BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–8; OMD, i:13; Jane Collier to HCR, 20 June 1830, and JPC to HCR, 18 January 1831, HCR Correspondence. In OMD (iv:26), Collier said that Amyot also introduced him to ‘Lord G. Levison Gower [sic], his old plays and MSS.’, although elsewhere in OMD (ii:79) Collier credited the introduction to Charles Greville. 49. JPC to HCR, 27 December 1829, and Jane Collier to HCR, 20 June 1830, HCR Correspondence.


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Payne recounts a visit to one of Amyot’s ‘rather smart parties . . . when I was merely a lad’ (OMD, iv:25). Ostensibly William Windham himself (d. 4 June 1810) was there, and Queen Caroline made a spectacular entrance, ‘discovered on a pedestal, as the statue of the injured Hermione in ‘‘The Winter’s Tale’’ ’ when a dark curtain was ‘at a signal drawn up’. Collier hastens to explain that ‘this was the only time I ever saw Queen Caroline in private’, but the story seems unlikely on several counts. Robinson, who would surely have been present if John Payne were, never mentions it, nor recollects any meeting with the unfortunate spouse of George IV.

1811: The Coleridge Lectures On 8 January 1811, at the age of thirty-five, Henry Crabb Robinson began to keep his celebrated diary, which he maintained faithfully until a few days before his death in 1867. John Payne Collier, ‘twenty-two years and ten months old within a day’, started a diary of his own on 10 October 1811, and abandoned it a er forty-nine days.50 Short though it is, the young man’s journal of 1811 documents the commencement of a literary career in intimate detail—ambitions, doubts and preoccupations, social and moral opinions, reading and writing—the more revealing because it has escaped the characteristic revisionary attention of the mature autobiographer. Like most diarists, he tries to be frank: ‘I dare say on reading over tomorrow, if I should not be ashamed to do it, I shall be disgusted with the nonsense I am writing; but however it may be, I write from the feeling of the moment, and if therefore I am ashamed of what I write I must be ashamed of my feelings.’ His father, he remarks, keeps a diary in private shorthand, and has complained that Gibbon wrote his ‘with the obvious view of publication’; but John Payne chooses longhand, as ‘I wish it to be read by others as well as by myself at some distant period: that is the fact’. He assesses his own character with the somewhat theatrical candour of post-adolescence, finding ‘a large portion of Vanity’, ‘the love of praise’, and ‘a dubiously valuable quality, . . . Ambition’, which he has o en, he says, defended in moral debates. ‘A young man without ambition or emulation (which is nearly the same thing)’, he declares, ‘is a pest to Society; whether he is a pest to Society or a blessing to it with Ambition may, I think, depend upon himself.’ 51

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50. The surviving diary, together with Collier’s notes on Coleridge’s lectures, was lot 301 in the JPC sale; the ten parts or ‘brochures’ are now Folger MSS M.a.219–28. Some of the diary entries are transcribed in Foakes 1971, which also contains (pp. 154–56) a detailed physical description of Collier’s notebooks. 51. JPC Early Diary, 10 October 1811. A year later Collier took the opposing position in a debate


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John’s introspection is more interesting to most of us than his record of the current events in seven autumn weeks, and certainly more so than the literary passages he laboriously copied from Pope, Johnson, Thomson, Burns, and Suckling. At twenty-two he was still profoundly dependent on household and family, and given to self-pitying melancholia: Who shall ever remember me with affection? They tell me at home ‘John, you are gloomy and discontented—You have ceased to be cheerful—Your pleasure is to plague your Sisters and torment your Mother and to disobey your father & set a bad example for your brothers’. If this be true am I fit to be an inmate under such circumstances—Oh no, let me keep my sorrow to myself—Let me pine alone—Let me not rejoice in seeing others as miserable as myself. . . . My Sister Mary used to notice me & now she seems always to avoid me. He was ‘greatly disheartened in all my studies’ because ‘my memory is so bad’ and ‘my ability is so small’. ‘I feel myself wholly inadequate to the study of the Law. . . . And yet if I do not pursue the law what am I to follow? Am I to be a Reporter all the days of my life? Am I to drag along the valley of existence which far from being covered with luxuriance and flowers serves only as the channel of a muddy river that carries to the sea of eternity all the filth of the world—Oh no—Both ways I am defeated’.52 The last overladen metaphor might prepare us for John’s alternative ambition, expressed a few days later: ‘I o en wish I was a poet, but at least I am half way, I enjoy poetry: altho’ it is not in my power to make a Sun I can bask with transports in its beams’ (5 November). And consume poetry he certainly did, from Thomson’s The Seasons and Hayley’s Epistle to Romney to Cowley’s The Mistress (with some of Cowley’s Latin poems, which he discussed with Robinson) and Martial’s epigrams, which he apparently began to translate. On 5 November he also began Paradise Lost for the first time (‘At my age it might seem a little extraordinary’) and kept hard at it, a book a day.53 On 15 November

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at the Philological Society, reported in HCR Diary, 10 November 1812. Speaking ‘on the Question Whether the love or the contempt of fame is of the greatest benefit to Society’, the young man ‘dwelt on the evils of ambition to Society, & the pains of emulation to the individual’; but while excusing Collier’s poor showing on the grounds that ‘I have reason to think he spoke worse than usual’, Robinson was not impressed: ‘His Speech was not equal to my expectations. He had the common places of speechifying, the head & tail pieces, formularies which when they are added to specific knowledge and set off what is to the purpose are of some use, but as a substitute for argument &c. are very wretched. . . . He attempted imagery, but very unsuccessfully.’ 52. JPC Early Diary, 1 November 1811. 53. The copy he annotated then (ed. Thomas Park, printed by Charles Whittingham) is now in FF/K; several of the underlined passages are discussed in the diary entries.


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he alternated Milton with part of The Tempest, and earlier he had absorbed the prefaces to Shakespeare of Johnson and Pope, Joseph Spence on the origins of Roman poetry, Goldsmith’s ‘Heroic Warlike Women’, and George Steevens’s account of the early English stage. He now also conned a little more of Blackstone’s Commentaries, in earnest of his half-hearted legal pursuits. Apart from the unsurviving translations of Martial, the diarist composed in this period at least one letter for publication to the Morning Chronicle. Sent on 29 October and signed ‘A Dreamer’, it offered ‘a view of what our situation may be 50 years hence under the semblance of a Dream’. We hear no more of this, nor of a projected letter to the Chronicle on the idea, suggested by Goldsmith, of raising a female militia; neither letter, as far as we know, was published. And he copied into his entry for 30 October a six-stanza ‘mock German Ode, written about a year ago’. Elsewhere he alludes to a more youthful obsession with writing verse in imitation of Spenser—‘when I was 18 or 19 . . . I devoted day & night to it’ (Memoirs, p. 126)—and we shall return to the vexed chronology of his early poetical efforts. Theatre- and church-going in October and November 1811 were regular pursuits for John Payne: he saw Twelh Night at Covent Garden and Measure for Measure with the Kembles and Mrs. Siddons on 13 November, as well as Isaac Pocock’s farce The Green-Eyed Monster and Thomas Dibdin’s The English Fleet in 1342 (30 October). Although never in his life conspicuously religious (‘I am a Unitarian if anything’, he wrote in his diary on 12 October 1879), he keenly devoted the Sunday mornings of his youth to services at the dissenters’ famous Essex Street Chapel, where in 1811 Thomas Belsham occupied the pulpit. John gave admiring summaries of three of Belsham’s sermons, and recorded another by Dr. Manning of Exeter: his attendance clearly was voluntary and enthusiastic. Outdoor sport of any kind seems not to have attracted young Collier. On 11 October he went shooting in Islington Fields, which led him to reflections on the cruelty of hunting, and on death itself. Public lectures were more his style; before the advent of Coleridge on 18 November he had listened to John Thelwall discussing ‘the comprehension & compressibility of the English language’, and five weeks earlier Thelwall’s sixteen-year-old son Algernon expatiating on astronomy. John Payne thought the father’s lecture ‘entertaining, for it is the one [of a series] in which he has talked least about himself ’, but found the son’s presumptuous (‘It strikes me it is the highest arrogance for a boy of 16 to lecture on a subject on which Newton & the greatest men that ever lived have professed their comparative ignorance’). And on 12 November, probably at Guy’s, he heard the chemist and philanthropist William Allen on ‘mechanics’, and joined an interesting post-mortem: ‘I a erwards saw some pupils of the Hospital take Nitrous Oxyde or gas produced by the Nitrate of Ammonia put


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into a retort, aerified & caught in a bladder or other vehicle [i.e., ‘laughing gas’]. It appeared to produce the most lively sensations of joy: indeed to make them for about two minutes quite frantic. Others it had a different effect upon, as it made them insensible to everything but the delight they felt, and they fell down without motion.’ John seems not himself to have participated in the experience, but he speculated almost wistfully about its implications: ‘If by a mere change of the air we breathe it is so easy to make men taste the most exquisite sensations of rapture, how easy would it be for the Creator to convert the Globe into an actual heaven. Perhaps in Heaven they breathe this kind of air.’ 54 John’s social intercourse in these seven weeks leads up—it now seems inevitably—to the Coleridge lectures on Shakespeare of 1811–12. Lamb, Godwin, even the satirist John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’) all figure in John’s diary, but the lion of the autumn was Coleridge himself, and the most memorable passages are those concerned with the great man’s conversation and opinions. ‘A few months’ before his entry of 13 October the diarist ‘was in Coleridge’s Company several times, and was highly delighted with a fund of anecdote and humour, much good nature and correct observation, besides a vast extent of knowledge delivered with much eloquence. . . . Coleridge is a man very fond of the display of his abilities, and . . . very usefully so—for no one can hear him speak if he be ever such a dolt but must improve by what he says.’ Recalling in particular an evening’s disquisition on Falstaff (‘That Falstaff was no Coward but pretended to be one’, etc.), John noted that ‘no one spoke but [Coleridge], and no one wished to speak, indeed he kept us on the continual listen and laugh so that it was almost impossible’. On 17 October John spent an hour at the Lambs’ in the presence of Coleridge, so dazzled by the monologue that he withdrew to absorb it in memory (‘It is impossible for a man to talk better’); and three days later occurred the brilliant but chaotic dinner-performance at Hatton Garden. The Collier diary of 1811 effectively terminates on 18 November, converting itself into reports on the formal discourses that Coleridge had come to London to deliver. This now-celebrated ‘Course of Lectures on Shakespear and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry’ was presented on Mondays and Thursdays from 18 November through 27 January 1812 at Scot’s Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street, under the auspices of the London Philosophical Society. Fi een talks were promised, but in the event seventeen were given; admission was two guineas for the series, or three ‘with the privilege of introducing a Lady’. Robinson was particularly energetic in circulating Coleridge’s prospectus and collecting subscriptions (he

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54. A dozen years earlier S. T. Coleridge had undergone a similar introduction to laughing gas, through Humphry Davy; Holmes 1989, p. 245.


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was ‘hurt’ by the reluctance of Walter to advertise the event in The Times; Walter finally consented, but ‘not with a good grace’), and on one occasion ‘walked into the city to distribute Coleridge’s bills’. John Dyer Collier (John Payne wrote in 1856) ‘proposed that all his family, old enough to profit by them, should attend the Lectures’, and ‘on applying for tickets, Coleridge sent us a copy of his prospectus’. Like Robinson, however, the Colliers apparently paid their way in: Coleridge did not paper his house.55 John Payne may have attended the entire course, but his surviving reports and transcripts cover only the first through third, sixth through ninth, and twel h lectures, and it is possible that the Colliers’ subscription (two guineas was no insubstantial sum) was divided among family members. Nonetheless, John’s hero-worshipping shorthand record of what he heard remains of the greatest value, for despite its incompleteness and likely imprecision it gives us the gist of Coleridge on Shakespeare for 1811–12, available from no other source—for Coleridge wrote nothing down.56 Had the young man gone on to no further activity, good, bad or indifferent, a niche in literary history would still be his. The largely unwarranted controversy that attended the publication of these fortuitous transcripts some forty-five years later belongs to another chapter. The 1811 diary that began with a renunciation of shorthand concluded with a return to its use, for which posterity must be grateful; for Coleridge’s language was obviously better served by such on-the-spot transcripts than by memorial report. Seven months earlier shorthand had brought John Payne Collier a spell of employment away from his father, the newsletters, and The Times, and this resulted in his first title-page byline, or in effect his ‘first book’. Alexander Bartholoman, the proprietor of the York Herald and publisher of Bartholoman’s Complete Law Reports for the York assizes of 1811, was probably a subscriber to the Colliers’ news-service, and when he sought to engage a reporter from London to cover the Nisi Prius Court during the Lent session (his own man, Michael Ellis of York, handled the Crown Court) he approached John Dyer Col-

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55. HCR Diary, 18 and 14 November 1811; Seven Lectures, p. vii. Coleridge’s providing the Colliers with a printed prospectus hardly amounts to ‘a special invitation . . . urging them to attend’ (Ganzel, p. 19). 56. Robert Southey, in a letter of 13 November 1811, urged Coleridge’s host John Morgan to impress upon the lecturer ‘the fitness of having them taken down in shorthand, as a duty which he owes to himself, and his friends and his family and the world’, and Coleridge himself noted in a letter to Sir George Beaumont (7 December) that ‘several of my Friends join to take Notes’. These included, for lectures 3–5, one J. Tomalin, mentioned as a guest at the Colliers’ five times by HCR in 1811–12, and possibly the James B. Tomalin who wrote to HCR in 1843 and 1853; Inez Elliott, Index to the Henry Crabb Robinson Letters in Dr. Williams’s Library (1960), p. 34. See Foakes 1987, i:153–62.


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lier for a recommendation. On 1 March John Dyer offered the job to Robinson, who accepted but almost immediately regretted it. Robinson was on the verge of committing himself to the study of the law (two days later he resolved upon that course, a decision ‘I am willing to hope may prove one of the most important in my whole life’), and he fretted about the consequences of appearing as a reporter while embarking on a legal career. Thomas Amyot agreed with him, and Robinson tried to renege, pointing out to John Dyer ‘the objection taken to reporters being called to the bar’, although later he confessed that his true motives were ‘indolence & the unconscious consciousness . . . that I should be a bad reporter’ (HCR Reminiscences, ii:23). Initially John Dyer Collier seemed sure of finding a substitute, but this fell through on 8 March, and Bartholoman was to publish an announcement of his supplementary London reporter in the Herald for the next morning. Understandably annoyed by Robinson’s diffidence, John Dyer quarrelled with him in the evening, but by midnight ‘decided John [Payne] should go to York, & so relieved me from the distress I felt before’ (HCR Diary, 8 March 1811). Robinson, now off the hook, never again accepted work as a named reporter; John Payne travelled immediately to York, where he took notes on eighty-one causes heard before Sir Alexander Thomson in the Nisi Prius (civil) Court. Few of these were momentous in any respect, and some were tedious indeed, but John Payne may have taken a bookish interest in Raper and Others vs. Kearton and Others, an action seeking to recover lands on the basis of lineage. For the key evidence here produced was an old family Bible (described in bibliophilic detail as ‘a Breeches Bible’ of 1604, with the point of that whimsical epithet explained by the reporter), in which a handwritten pedigree may have been altered by the use of ‘vitriolic acid’ or ‘copperas water’; the leaf bearing it is described as formerly ‘loosed’, and now separated. Thomson observed that ‘all the writing looked equally old, and the ink was of the same colour’, but if this was meant to lead the jury to respect the claim, it failed: the case ended, a er twelve hours, with an award to the plaintiffs of one shilling (Bartholoman’s Reports, pp. 131– 37). A fascinating possibility—but one apparently beyond proof—is that John Payne may have encountered, while at York, the most notorious literary forger of his era. William Henry Ireland, whose Shakespearian impositions of 1794– 95 were still green in everyone’s memory, had migrated to York late in 1810, and was imprisoned for debt in York Castle, where the Nisi Prius Court sat, at precisely the time of Collier’s attendance. Ireland did not appear before Thomson in the Lent assizes (nor was there any reason he should have done), and was freed by October, but he wrote satirical verse on the same judicial event that John Payne chronicled in prose: A Poetic Epistolary Description of the City


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of York, Comprising an Account of the Processions and Entry of the Judges at the Present March Assizes (by ‘Amicus’; York, 1811). Nearly seventy years later Collier would imply that he knew nothing of Ireland personally, but if he had even heard of his incarceration nearby, a frisson of some sort might have affected the reporter of 1811, as the accidental touch of the murderer Patch had in 1806. On 26 March John Payne was back in London—‘well & in high spirits’, thought Robinson: ‘he appears to have enjoyed & profited by the excursion’. The published volume of Bartholoman’s Reports (A1) contains 115 pages of the young man’s transcriptions, ranging in length from a sentence or two to ten pages, and his name as reporter appears prominently on the title: ‘john payne collier, of Hatton Garden, London, Esquire’. John Dyer might have been pleased, but instead was ‘disposed to be out of humour . . . I am sure without reason’, Robinson noted. Curiously, John Payne himself never in any subsequent memoir or journal mentioned the York law courts, his precipitous trip, or his own unexceptionable debut on a title-page.

Newspapermen: Thomas Barnes and His Friends Despite his halfhearted pursuit of a career in law—he was admitted to the Middle Temple on 31 July 1811—newspaper reporting continued to dominate John’s working hours, and his day-to-day life remained centred on The Times. But office politics in Printing House Square also began to involve him, and with his father and Robinson now absent, John’s choice of friends and allies became increasingly important. Three of the latter, men of literary tastes and influence with John Walter II, were Thomas Massa Alsager, Barron Field, and above all Thomas Barnes. Alsager (1779–1846), ten years older than John, had given up operating a bleaching factory near the King’s Bench Prison to write for The Times on finance (a column called ‘State of the Money Market’) and on music, his special interest. He is now best remembered as an early enthusiast of Beethoven, as a friend of the Wordsworths and a sponsor of Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb, and as the man who lent his copy of Chapman’s translation of Homer to Charles Cowden Clarke, who shared it with Keats. Alsager was a keen whist-player in Lamb’s circle, and doubtless figured in some of the whist-parties at Hatton Garden; he entertained John Payne Collier at least twice in 1812–13, at dinner (with Robinson and Thomas Barnes) on 6 November and again on 21 March (with Robinson, John Dyer, and Jane). He became a shareholder in The Times and remained a power there for thirty-five years, when as joint manager he was accused of ruinously mismanaging its budget. In despondency over this and the death of


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his wife, in 1846 Alsager cut his own throat; thirty years later Collier misremembered that ‘he speculated, and shot himself ’.57 Barron Field (1786–1846), only three years John’s senior, was among the first near-contemporaries with literary ambitions to appear in John’s company. The son of a London physician and apothecary to Christ’s Hospital, he reviewed plays for The Times from about 1805–06 to 1810, before going on to study the law—and, unlike John, sticking with it.58 Field also travelled in the Lambs’ circle, and made one at the Collier’s whist-party for Charles (21 June 1811) and at Hatton Garden dinners with Godwin (13 October 1811) and Godwin and Coleridge (22 January 1812). ‘A young man not deficient in quickness’, John thought him (Early Diary, 13 October 1811); with Robinson he visited Field’s chambers on 30 March 1812, meeting Lamb and Barnes once again, where the talk was of Leigh Hunt, who eight days earlier had published in the Examiner his famous libel on the Prince Regent (‘a violator of his word, a libertine . . . a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps’). Field had known Hunt for several years, having subscribed for the latter’s Juvenilia (1801) when he was only fi een and Hunt nineteen. He entered the Inner Temple in June 1809 and had terminated his drama reviewing for The Times by 1810, but his interest in early English plays and literary history continued, as did his intimacy with Hunt, Lamb, and Barnes. As early as 1808 he had written for Hunt’s Examiner, and in 1810–11 he contributed ten pieces to Hunt’s Reflector, a quarterly of just one year’s duration. Three of these, headed ‘The Law Student’, may well have inspired, alongside Barnes’s Parliamentary Portraits, John’s own series of ‘Criticisms on the Bar’, composed for the Examiner eight years later: each sequence offered impressionistic sketches of personalities in the high courts, and spared few sensibilities. Field wrote also for the Quarterly Review and produced a popular book on Blackstone’s Commentaries (1811), but in 1816 he went out to Ceylon as advocate-fiscal, and then to New South Wales as a judge. In Australia he wrote verse (First Fruits of Australian Poetry, 1819, reviewed generously by Lamb for the Examiner) and assembled materials toward The Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales, which he edited in 1825. He was back in private practice in England from 1824 to 1830, and then spent ten years more on the bench in Gibraltar, as Chief Justice. His final retirement to Torquay marked a return to the enthusiasm of his youth, editing Thomas Heywood’s and Thomas Legge’s plays for the Shakespeare Society, his old colleague’s antiquarian publishing club. On Field’s death in 1846 Collier completed the Heywood edition himself. 57. See Donald H. Reiman in Cameron et al., v:264–66; D. E. Wickham 1981; Morison, i:413– 16; and JPC Diary, 10 March 1877. 58. See the biographical introduction by Richard Edwards to the 1941 Sydney reprint of Field’s First Fruits of Australian Poetry (pp. viii–xi).


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In 1808 or 1809 Field introduced Thomas Barnes (1785–1841) to John Walter II and The Times; in retrospect, this is perhaps the most significant thing he did in his life. Barnes, who as editor from 1817 to 1841 was to lead his newspaper into a century’s pre-eminence, was perhaps at that time an unlikely recruit. Son of a wealthy solicitor, he had enjoyed all the educational advantages denied to young Collier, beginning with eight years at Christ’s Hospital (four of them in close company with Leigh Hunt), where he excelled in classics and Italian literature.59 In 1804 he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, with continuing success in classical studies—Porson took a liking to him—to which he added talents in swimming, cricket, and boxing: on one occasion he unwittingly challenged the great pugilist Tom Crib and, when Crib revealed himself, took him back to his rooms for an impromptu wine-party. Barnes was famously handsome, well enough off, and universally popular; and he was already a noted carouser. He came down from Pembroke in 1808 and entered the Inner Temple in November, hoping eventually for a fellowship at Cambridge. In the meantime, through Barron Field, he went to work on The Times, covering law cases and political meetings, and taking over from Field as dramatic critic in 1809–10. Henry Crabb Robinson solemnly approved of his new colleague, whom he regarded as a suitable friend for John Payne. ‘Barnes . . . has a good countenance’, he recorded on 16 March 1812, ‘and is a man who I dare say [will] make his way in the world. He has talents and activity and inducement to activity’, as well as ‘a great deal of knowledge and converses well’ (30 March). To John himself Robinson primly recommended Barnes to replace the society of inferiors such as the young Bakewells: ‘Barnes is a very sensible man and with knowledge much beyond your’s. From your intimacy with him I draw hope that you will soon be satiated with the mere elegancies of polite literature’.60 Barnes seems also to have charmed John Dyer Collier, for John Payne later recalled (in a hostile account) that he ‘was intimate in my father’s house [and] . . . used to borrow wine out of my father’s cellar’ (OMD, ii:15). Wine indeed, or brandy and water, nearly undid the young toper for good in the winter of 1811–12. Barnes drank himself silly at Thomas Hill’s Sydenham house with a literary party, and collapsed on the walk back to his inn. He was found lying in a snowdri , ‘endeavouring to pull the snow over his body, and indistinctly muttering, ‘‘I can’t get the counterpane over me!—I can’t get the counterpane over me!’’ . . . The result might have proved fatal, had not he been rescued in the nick of time from his perilous predicament. Dearly, however . . . did he pay . . . [for] a frightful attack of rheumatism crippled him for several months, and as many years elapsed before he fully shook off the effects of this Bacchanalian bivouac.’ 61 John 59. See Hudson 1944 and Morison, vol. 1. 60. HCR to JPC, 27 September 1812; FF MS 346. 61. Horace Smith, quoted in Hudson 1944, p. 13.


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Payne must have been remembering this as the ‘long, serious illness’ that Barnes underwent ‘while he lived in Lamb-buildings’, when ‘I used to call upon him almost daily’ (OMD, ii:14). Recuperative holidays were in order (at Brighton, for example, in late 1814), and apparently John’s sojourn at Margate in September 1812 was in company with his new friend, for Robinson, writing to John at that seaside resort, closed a long letter of 27 September with ‘my best remembrances to Barnes’. Leigh Hunt wrote that Barnes ‘might have made himself a name in wit and literature, had he cared for anything beyond his glass of wine and his Fielding’, a tongue-in-cheek estimate of one who—abandoning literature certainly—was later described by Lord Lyndhurst as ‘the most powerful man in the country’. Barnes’s circle in these early days included Lamb, Theodore Hook, the Smith brothers Horace and James, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Thomas Campbell, and Wordsworth, and by 1818 B. R. Haydon and Keats, in addition to Hunt. But to Hunt, his old schoolmate, he was probably closest. Like Barron Field he contributed to the Reflector in 1810–11, eight pieces including ‘Stafford’s Niobe’, an essay on Anthony Stafford’s curious prose tracts of 1611, which throws out a conjectural two-part parallel with Paradise Lost and suggests that Milton may have read Niobe. John Payne Collier in 1816 and 1820 appropriated this unconvincing suggestion as his own, without crediting Barnes. Barnes also wrote, like Field and finally Collier, for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, providing in 1814–15 a long series of ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ under the pseudonym ‘Criticus’. These may also be compared with Collier’s ‘Criticisms on the Bar’ four years later, which combine Field’s subject matter in the Reflector with Barnes’s familiar approach to his lawmakers. Like ‘Criticisms on the Bar,’ Barnes’s ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ were collected into a single volume (1815), subtitled ‘Sketches of the Public Character of Some of the Most Distinguished Speakers of the House of Commons’. But a er his appointment to the editorship of The Times in 1816, Barnes published little of his own, at least under his own name. His Cambridge fellowship eluded him, and his study of the law led to less even than Collier’s, but his brilliant later career as a newspaperman rendered these failures slight. He died unexpectedly at fi y-six, and his famous discretion about private affairs—including his unconventional domestic arrangements—leave us nothing from his side concerning a breach with Collier that was finally bitter and deep. A er five years of good friendship, it would seem, Collier and Barnes began to fall out. An initial coolness between them in 1817 had hardened by 1823, when Barnes and Alsager dismissed John from his second stint with The Times. Seeds of the quarrel may have been sown much earlier, however, with Barnes’s unrepaid borrowings from John Dyer’s wine-cellar and other liberties. Barnes’s father had died while his son was still up at Cambridge, so Collier relates, ‘and


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le him . . . a few thousands, which he contrived very soon to get through’; wherea er he became ‘so poor, and so much in debt, that I constantly used to lend him small sums’. These small debts were subsequently compounded with a loan of twenty pounds ‘in one sum, a er I married [i.e., a er 20 August 1816]’, and despite an increased salary as ostensible editor of The Times (a er 1817), Barnes ‘never offered to pay me what he owed me’ and ‘has never forgiven me the small obligation I laid him under’. John Payne was understandably irritated about this situation as early as 23 December 1817, when he told Robinson that Barnes was not his friend, having ‘borrowed money of him long ago and forgot to repay him’ (HCR Diary). And it still rankled in 1846, when five years a er Barnes’s death Collier explained to John Walter II his own second departure from The Times as a direct result of his old generosity: ‘Mr Barnes owed me money—he died owing it me—and as it was not convenient to him to pay me, he did not like to have me a standing reproach about him in the office. This is my interpretation of the matter’; in another letter, ‘Mr Barnes took a dislike to me because he was my debtor’, and the wine-borrowing story was repeated, although ‘out of my own family this has never been mentioned until now, & I never wish to allude to it again’.62 ‘I cared little for the £20’, he still insisted in 1871 (OMD, ii:15), though by 1877 the sum had become £10, not £20, and Collier was not sacked, but ‘quitted [the] Newspaper’ over the matter; subsequently ‘Barnes avoided me in the Strand—that was natural, as he owed me money which he could not pay, and gratitude which he could not feel’ (JPC Diary, 24 April and 6 May 1877). All this may be true, or not untrue, as Robinson’s early testimony would suggest, but Barnes’s biographer was sceptical (Hudson 1944, p. 8), and certainly Barnes’s prosperous father was alive for several years a er his son came down from Cambridge. Perhaps, too, the unacknowledged obligations between the young friends were double-ended: Collier appropriated the older essayist’s conjecture about Stafford and Milton, not once but twice, without crediting him, and his own early career as a ‘retrospective critic’ followed Barnes’s so closely as to suggest some kind of patronage or a practical leg-up. Barnes preceded Collier in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, as he would precede him in the British Lady’s Magazine, where John published his earliest antiquarian résumés. And Barnes’s passionate, proselytic espousal of Italian poetry—he declaimed Metastasio with Hunt as a schoolboy, ‘as loud as we could bawl, over the Hornsey Fields’, and drummed Dante unmercifully into the head of Charles Lamb—may account for his younger friend’s early interest in Italian verse. No one else among John Payne’s immediate acquaintance knew Italian well.

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62. JPC to Walter, 15 April 1846 and 4 January 1846, Walter Papers 297 and 292, TNL Archive.


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Much of the pain of a money-borrowing snub might also be explained if Barnes—irreverent, handsome, convivial, and cut out for advancement—was effectively John’s choice of guide and example, a surrogate elder brother in literary pursuits. John Dyer must have accepted Barnes’s use of his house and winecellar, and he and Jane Collier apparently visited Leigh Hunt in Surrey Gaol in 1813 in the company of Barnes, Hunt’s great friend; John Payne later alleged that he too waited on Hunt ‘two or three times a month’ (OMD, iv:95), but no memory from Hunt or anyone else in the circle of visitors confirms this claim. And of course there was Robinson to praise Barnes to the skies, and in late summer 1812 a high-spirited joint excursion to Margate, over John Dyer’s objections. John Payne’s personal commitment to Barnes, if latterly betrayed over nothing but cash, would easily translate itself into lasting resentment. Sometime in 1812, however, when John Payne Collier first resigned—or was sacked—from The Times, Barnes was almost certainly not the cause of it. The occasion is obscure. In 1880 Collier recalled that he le ‘mainly on account of a dispute with the person who at this date had the chief management of the establishment, and who took an aversion to me on the unfounded pretext that I was endeavouring to supplant him’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 78). Elsewhere he added—repeatedly—that he was offered higher wages, and for less work, by James Perry, proprietor of the great rival daily, the Morning Chronicle, where John Dyer now was employed. But Perry and John Walter II shared a practice of not poaching each other’s employees unless contractually free, so it is unlikely that Perry instigated such a move. Nor can Barnes have been in 1812 ‘the person who had . . . the chief management of the establishment’, although seventy years on Collier would occasionally conflate his first leaving The Times (1812) with his later dismissal by Barnes and Alsager (1823); Barnes was still his friend, mentor, and holiday companion in the late summer of 1812, his link with Leigh Hunt, and the intermediary who, three years later, brought John back to The Times.63 The aversion to John was more probably taken by Dr. John Stoddart (1773–1856), to whom Walter ceded editorial control of the paper between 1813 and 1816. Stoddart, a contentious right-wing Tory and inflexible Royalist, was the brotherin-law of William Hazlitt, whom he disliked, and (inevitably) a friend of the Lambs. He was pilloried by Thomas Moore as ‘Dr. Slop’ for his invective political leaders, and by the end of 1815 a worried John Walter II licensed Barnes, a committed Liberal, to censor or suppress Stoddart’s columns. This move led to intolerable conflicts, and Stoddart lost out, being dismissed late in 1816.64 John

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63. HCR Diary, 7 June 1815, noting that ‘Barnes proposed him to W[alter]’ and that ‘W. said he should probably take him’ as a law reporter; six months earlier (8 December 1814), Robinson had recorded that Barnes was among the guests at the Colliers’, where he ‘chatted till late’. 64. See Morison, i:157–64.


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Payne Collier’s three years away from The Times coincide almost precisely with Stoddart’s management of the paper, and it is reasonable to suppose him the enemy in power—although fear on his part that young Collier might ‘supplant’ him may seem far-fetched. Just when in 1812 Collier le The Times is uncertain, but the expedition to Margate with Barnes in late August suggests a new freedom. John Dyer had implacably opposed his son’s junket, probably because his help with the family newsletters was by now essential, and Crabb Robinson played the peacemaker: ‘Today I interfered . . . with a very good & decisive effect between John and his father. John had resolved to go to Margate against his father’s will’. Robinson shrewdly suggested that young John yield on Margate, and ‘at the same time . . . propose to his father to give up his share [i.e., share of profit] in the letters’, which ‘would set him at liberty altogether’. This stratagem worked to perfection, and John Dyer ‘amicably’ gave his twenty-three-year-old son leave to go (HCR Diary, 21 August 1812). The reporter in John Payne would or could not take a complete holiday, however, and during less than one month in Margate lodgings he submitted no fewer than ten communiqués, short and middle-length sketches of fashionable life at the seaside resort, for publication in the Morning Chronicle. Perhaps he was already in James Perry’s employ, or on trial with the paper, but The Times rarely printed such light correspondence, and Collier took care not to sign any of his letters.65 They appeared on page three of the newspaper in a column headed ‘The Mirror of Fashion’ every two or three days between 2 and 25 September, normally dated from Margate two days before. General descriptions of the town, native population and visitors, dress, and diversions range from amiable to satirical, the latter in Robinson’s opinion ‘almost malevolent, so much so that if you were known I should think the people of the place justified in inflicting a chastisement on you; not precisely feathering & tarring but a little dancing à la Sancho Panza’. Most of the articles reported on the local theatre, some others on masked balls, suppers, a promenade, and a pig- and a jackass-race. But the one letter with significant ramifications was that of 20 (published 22) September, on a performance of ‘Messrs. Punch, Judy, and Co’. before the Church of St. John the Baptist. This unparalleled—and now known to be fictive—account of a Punch-play with an ‘allegorical and poetical’ conclusion impressed Robinson’s friend William Rough, the lawyer and poet, who ‘has been praising your Puppet Show Article warmly without knowing you were the Author of it’. In 1812, of course, Collier’s invention of a spurious puppeteer’s plot—Spanish and French

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65. His authorship is established by Robinson’s comments in his letter to JPC of 27 September 1812.


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Revolutionary overtones, Punch finally ‘triumphant over Doctors, Death and the Devil’—cannot but have passed for blithe and innocent fun, whether Robinson and Rough or even James Perry recognized it for such. But sixteen years later the professional drama historian would revive this canard, taking advantage of his own youthful anonymity to conceal its true source, and make it a mainstay of his account of traditional puppet-plays: and the jeu d’esprit became, retroactively, literary forgery de facto, and John Payne Collier’s earliest essay in deception.66

James Perry The celebrated newspaperman James Perry was born in Aberdeen in 1756, the son of a house-builder, James Pirie.67 He le Marischal College a er about three years’ study without a degree when his father’s business failed; he then passed a year as a solicitor’s clerk, and may have worked in a drapery shop (so Alexander Dyce told Collier, but the same was contemptuously said of Thomas Barnes) before joining a company of travelling players. As a fledgling actor he toured Scotland and the north of England with one of the Booths and Tate Wilkinson; he met and quarrelled with Thomas Holcro and was finally discouraged from a career on the stage, either by a blighted love affair or by the professional criticism of George Anne Bellamy’s actor-husband, West Digges.68 He next clerked in Manchester for two years, where like all the Colliers he participated in debating societies, and came to London in 1777 at just twenty-one. He soon made good as a miscellaneous writer and parliamentary reporter, first with the General Advertiser and the London Evening Post. Later he founded the European Magazine (1782) and le it to become editor of the distinguished Gazetteer in 1785, simultaneously overseeing John Debrett’s Parliamentary Register.69 Part of the appeal of the Gazetteer for the maturing Perry was the proprietors’ political commitment to Charles James Fox and the Whig opposition. Perry was then, and continued to be all his life, a dedicated adherent to ‘the principles of Whiggism’ in politics and—as he put it to Samuel Parr in 1805— in the ethics of publishing.70 In late 1789, with a new partner, James Gray, he acquired the moribund Morning Chronicle, and over the next decade transformed

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66. See Freeman and Freeman 1993 and below, A9. 67. See Christie 1970b; Asquith 1973; and OMD, ii:42–45. 68. The first explanation comes from Collier’s OMD account and is considered ‘not . . . in character’ by Perry’s biographer Ian Christie. 69. Although his biographers seem reluctant even to mention them, his best-known (pseudonymous) publications were two lubricious satires in verse, The Electric Eel (1777, three editions) and An Epistle to Mademoiselle D’Eon (six editions in 1778). 70. Quoted in Christie 1970b, p. 343.


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it into the leading Whig organ of its era, the most dependable record of parliamentary activity, and a daily newspaper second only in circulation to the The Times. By 1812–13, under John Stoddart’s editorial control, The Times might be perceived as arch-Tory; the Chronicle never swerved, in James Perry’s lifetime, from strong Whig. Perry’s character, in his mature years, has been widely described—by Hazlitt, Holcro , Leigh Hunt, William Jerdan, Pryse Lockhart Gordon, Mary Russell Mitford, and Collier himself, among his contemporaries. Energetic and lively (Hunt), extroverted, convivial, a consummate table-talker (Mitford, 1813), bon viveur, and clubman: a friend of Hunt’s summed him up as ‘a thorough gentleman, who attracted every man to him with whom he was connected’. He had ‘remarkably small quick eyes’, Collier remembered, and stooped shoulders (OMD, ii:45). His up-to-date literary and cultural tastes were a far cry from those of John Walter II, and he published and consorted with poets like Coleridge, Moore, Rogers, Thomas Campbell, and Byron (his fellow Hampden Club member), with playwrights like Holcro and Sheridan, and with essayists, critics and social theorists ranging from Richard Porson (briefly his brother-in-law), George Dyer, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt to the young radicals James Mackintosh and Joseph Jekyll and the economists John Ramsay McCulloch and David Ricardo. To the witty classicist Porson he remained especially close, sharing his house with him for several years; with Byron and Hobhouse he dined and drank wine in excess on more than one convivial occasion.71 Perry was also a dedicated bibliophile, and the first book collector on the grand scale whom Collier had yet met. Although William Maltby and Thomas Amyot may have introduced him to the idea of a significant private library, Perry’s ‘beautiful assemblage of curiosities’ (Poetical Decameron, i:x) must have been an eye-opener for the young antiquarian. The highly personal choice of its contents reflected the collector himself more than most libraries do, and its emphasis on the ephemerally popular, the rare, and the minor, among early literature—always books and pamphlets with a potential for ‘rediscovery’— sorted well with Collier’s predilection for disclosing novelties, rather than reexamining standard works. Perry’s taste might have seemed arcane, even perverse, to his more sober-sided contemporaries: on shelves that took nearly six thousand auction lots to disperse in 1822—at least twenty thousand volumes, including tracts and pamphlets—there was practically no divinity, law, science, or natural history, little world history other than modern, and very few books in folio format. The classical texts were nearly all relatively recent and finely bound (‘octavo et infra’ throughout), and there was no more than token repre71. Marchand 1957, ii:567 and 613.

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sentation of foreign travel, British topography, and books with coloured plates or major engravings. Perry possessed only three incunables, though remarkable ones: a fine Gutenberg Bible, ‘discovered in a monastery abroad by a gentleman who sold it to Mr. Perry’; a Catholicon ‘ascribed to the press of Mentelin’ (in fact printed by Adolph Rusch); and the Caxton translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He had Shakespeare’s four Folios and a handful of English Reformation texts, but the strength of his collection unquestionably lay in minor poetry and fiction, English and French, much of it very rare. His penchant, going back to the libertine tastes of his twenties, was clearly for the bizarre or the ‘curious’, and his holdings of facetiae, drolleries, burlesques, satires, and epigrams must be counted among the largest of the era. He had long runs of authors dear to Collier, or soon to be dear: Greene, Churchyard, Nashe, Lodge, Samuel Rowlands, George Wither, John Davies of Hereford, and John Taylor ‘the Water Poet’. His Defoes ran to forty-six volumes, and a scanning of his sale catalogue reveals dozens of unique or all-but-unique specimens of English popular literature before 1700, mouth-watering rarities in 1822 for devotees like Richard Heber (who bought most that he lacked).72 Perry’s collecting activity may have been largely outside of the salerooms, though we find him buying a unique poem (David Gwyn, Certain English Verses, 1588) for £12 12s. at the Brand Sale in 1807, and several lots at the Roxburghe and Towneley sales of 1812 and 1814. As late as 1818–19, when his health had deserted him, he was still paying high prices for signally rare little books in the James Bindley dispersal, outbidding Heber, and some of the copies that stem from Longmans’ Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica may have come to Perry not from that high-priced retail catalogue of 1815, but from the covert auction turn-out of 1818.73 When Collier first glimpsed his collection we cannot be sure, but Perry is certainly the ‘one gentleman’, and one only, whom Collier thanked in the preface to his Poetical Decameron (1820): the personal acquaintance ‘equally distinguished for his enterprise in purchasing and his liberality in lending his rarities’ who remains unnamed ‘because he would think a public acknowledgement one of the worst returns for an act of private friendship’. The two texts that Collier especially starred as from his benefactor’s ‘beautiful assemblage’, T. M.’s Microcynicon (1600) and Lodge’s Alarum against Usurers (1584), were both acquired

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72. A Catalogue of the Curious and Extensive Library . . . which Will Be Sold by Auction (R. H. Evans, 4–16 March 1822). 73. This sale was advertised as Bibliotheca Selecta: A Catalogue of the Library of an Eminent Collector, Removed from the North of England (R. Saunders, 16 February 1818). The collector was rumoured at the time to have been one Midgeley (see De Ricci 1930, p. 92), elsewhere named as ‘Midgeley of Rochdale’ or ‘James Midgeley’, but perhaps a stalking horse for Longmans themselves, at least in respect of the Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica lots.


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by Perry, through his friend Thomas Hill, at the 1819 Bindley auction. Perry died at Brighton in December 1821. The precise date of Collier’s joining the Morning Chronicle is uncertain, although the Margate letters of September 1812 may signal a beginning. John Dyer Collier had already been with Perry for nearly four years, and John Payne’s new employment can scarcely have been accidental. ‘I soon followed him [to the Chronicle], with no increase of salary, but a change to less arduous duties’, John Payne wrote in 1872 (OMD, iv:88); on other occasions he maintained that Perry paid him more than John Walter (JPC Memoirs, p. 79; JPC Diary, 24 April 1877). John Dyer seems to have had Perry’s ear at this time, for it was he whom Charles Lamb had approached about Hazlitt, ‘at his wits end for a livelihood’, on 4 October 1812: ‘Mrs. Collier has been kind enough to say that you would endeavor to procure a Reporter’s situation for W. Hazlitt. . . . I am sure I shall feel myself obliged to you for your exertions, having a great regard for him.’ Perry hired the difficult essayist within six days, at four guineas a week.74 Hazlitt, who soon fell out with Perry, was one of John Payne’s new colleagues on a staff of parliamentary reporters rather larger than that of The Times. Besides John Dyer, who may have had other duties, there were the hard-drinking Irishmen Mark Supple and Peter Finnerty, the dour Scottish classicist John Black, one David Power, and the miniaturist W. H. Watts. So many resident columnists may have been more than enough, and over Christmas of 1813 John Payne found himself on a six-week mission to Holland, reporting on the withdrawal and redeployment of French forces there prior to the Battle of Waterloo. ‘There was a severe competition in London for priority of intelligence’, he recalled in 1880, though he adds little more than that the weather was cold and ‘I met with no particular adventures’. He remained principally at the Hague, but could iceskate to Rotterdam in an hour on the canals (‘I was a pretty good skater’), where he stayed in the best hotel in quest of suppertime gossip, and also visited the fortified town of Gorinchem (JPC Memoirs, p. 79). Collier’s later recollections of Holland were principally of solitary reading (he took only Clarissa with him, but purchased a Rabelais of a thousand pages, ‘which I read from beginning to end with many bursts of companionable laughter, though I had nobody with me to enjoy it’), of meeting a few other English reporters and merchants, and of buying books and engravings, cheap because of the war. He acquired his 1553 Rabelais, a 1552 Giolito Boccaccio, and a tractvolume that included the 1538 Wittenberg edition of Johann Agricola’s Tragedia Johannis Huss, which he retained all his life (JPC sale, lot 838), as well as various prints and engravings, including portraits of Flemish and Dutch painters and a 74. Marrs, iii:85–86.

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fine impression of Raphael’s Vierge aux Roches. His ‘great find’, he later claimed, was ‘an imperfect copy of Tyndale’s Gospel of St. Matthew, to which the date of 1526 has been assigned’. In An Old Man’s Diary Collier stated that he paid a florin for this remarkable fragment, and traded it in about 1832 to Thomas Rodd for books ‘to the value of two or three pounds’. Rodd eventually sold it, said Collier, for £50 to Thomas Grenville, in which case the young bibliophile’s oneflorin discovery must be the unique Grenville copy of all that survives of the first extant printing (1525) of the English New Testament, now in the British Library (OMD, i:iii–iv). But there is good reason to be sceptical about that claim: see QD A180.1. By mid-January the French had withdrawn from the area, and as many of the ports were closed with frost Collier thought himself lucky to procure passage from Scheveningen—open for one day—to Harwich in a forty-foot two-masted fishing boat. He shared the cost of the hazardous return with two other Englishmen, and at the last minute the three of them took in a stranded sea-captain from Berwick. This turned out to be providential, for in a squall they lost their steersman overboard, and the Berwick captain manned the helm and got them safely to port. Collier was back with his family in London by 22 January, his swag intact, exhilarated by the voyage if unimpressed by the Dutch: ‘he comes with no great love for the people or country & has a strong tincture of Smelfungus in him’, Robinson reported.75

Essayist and Collector, 1814–16 John Payne Collier passed his twenty-fi h birthday in Holland in January 1814. By now he had been writing professionally for at least eight years, with many thousands of column-inches of anonymous report or transcription to his credit —if credit were given—as well as ‘communications’, commissioned by or submitted to newspapers, and no doubt the odd review, leader, or informational notice. His name had appeared on the title-page of one book, and some version of his work in perhaps one other. On the unpublished or unpublishable side he had composed a good deal of poetry, and had kept his 1811 diary with its records of Coleridge et al. But the Margate letters of August–September 1812 to the Morning Chronicle are the earliest examples we know of rudimentary ‘periodical essays’ from his pen. Such occasional social, historical, or literary commentary—ranging from unattributed squibs to the enduring brevities of Lamb,

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75. ‘Smelfungus’ was the name given to Smollett on the publication of his xenophobic Travels through France and Italy (1766). In his memoirs Collier claimed he was in Holland ‘a few months’; Crabb Robinson’s diaries record both his departure on 3 December 1813 and his January return, and his dispatches can be found in the Chronicle from 15 December through 19 January.


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Hunt, Hazlitt, and De Quincey—was the mainstay of dozens of Regency journals, and a source of income for countless literary hopefuls. Even the meanest of such work may have seemed preferable to the drudgery of reporting or recapitulating the news, as Collier and his father had hitherto been bound to do, and among those who mattered to them it was certainly more highly esteemed. In November 1814 Robinson found John Dyer Collier flirting with the opportunity to buy into a monthly journal, the long-established but foundering Critical Review, while his son had become involved with an alternative project. Jane Collier seemed ‘full of the new literary concern in which John [Payne] is to bear a part, the British Ladies Magazine’, Robinson wrote, adding sceptically that ‘by its being begun by a person who was forced to advertise for writers [it] must certainly fail’.76 In its first two years of monthly publication, however, the British Lady’s Magazine proved moderately successful, both intellectually and commercially.77 By no means a fashion-and-gossip organ, it offered an ‘open and non-partisan view of life’ to its readership, and announced a ‘general instructional purpose’. The editor was the bookseller John Souter, who in 1814 was also involved in the distribution of the Critical Review. The contributors to the first issue included Leigh Hunt himself (two poems, one of them his sonnet to Thomas Alsager) and Thomas Barnes, who projected a series of ‘Retrospective Criticism’, articles on early writers like those he had written for Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. In the event, however, Barnes provided only two such antiquarian essays, unremarkably lightweight, in January and February 1815, before giving way as retrospective critic to his young former colleague John Payne Collier. John, alongside his father, had sensibly kept up his position with Perry and the Morning Chronicle, but in the autumn of 1814 he had also paid an extended visit to France, which gave him new matter for literary report. Henry Crabb Robinson, having at last moved out of the Colliers’ overcrowded house in July 1813, continued to dine with them and record their activity on a regular basis; in September 1814 he was spending part of his annual expatriation in Paris, and offered his hospitality to John. John turned up unexpectedly late, having come via Rouen with his cousin Joshua, a conspicuously inappropriate travel-

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76. HCR Diary, 20 November 1814. Oskar Wellens (1984) assumed that Robinson’s ‘John’ referred to John Dyer, but Robinson always called the older man ‘Collier’ in his diary, reserving ‘John’ for the son. 77. The first series under the title British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany (hereaer BLM ) comprised twenty-nine issues, dated 1 January 1815 to 1 May 1817, published by J. Adlard and edited by John Souter; the New British Lady’s Magazine, or Monthly Mirror of Literature and Fashion, consciously less intellectual, continued under a new editor (D. MacKay) and publisher (Robins and Company) until 31 December 1819. See Mary Anne Schofield, ‘The British Lady’s Magazine’, in Sullivan 1983, pp. 62–66.


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ling companion. ‘His objects and pursuits were not at all mine, and had no relation to mine’, John Payne drily recorded (JPC Memoirs, p. 99), and on reaching Paris they parted at once. John had most hoped to spend time at the Musée du Louvre, like Robinson in September, but Robinson himself was on the verge of returning to England, and the Louvre was now closed to the public for the season (Robinson noted in his diary that he had taken ‘a last look’ on 5 October, the very day John arrived). ‘Bitterly disappointed’, but with commendable audacity—one thinks of his bluffing Robinson past the sentries at the House of Lords in 1806—the younger man called on the intimidating conservateur Baron Vivant Denon, and elicited no less than a private pass for three weeks’ admission. ‘I remained in Paris for the three weeks, and no day passed that I did not avail myself of the kind Baron’s card’, Collier later recalled, slaking his thirst for ‘not copies, but the renowned originals’ of sculptures and paintings. ‘There were not twenty strangers in the Louvre on any day, so that I had the advantage of seeing everything at my leisure, and without the inconvenience of the slightest crowd’, he exulted, as well he might: ‘I look back upon this expedition to Paris as one of the luckiest events of my life; . . . it will be a source of happiness to me as long as I live’ (OMD, i:48). When Robinson and he next met in London, John, with an almost proprietary air, ‘praised greatly the collection of armoury which I had neglected to see’ (HCR Diary, 3 November 1814). Robinson le Collier with an introduction to the old radical expatriate Helen Maria Williams, but John’s principal activity outside the museums seems to have been theatre-going, observing among others the comédienne Mlle. Mars, who had ‘unquestionably passed her zenith’, and the great Talma in Voltaire’s Oedipus, though he later remarked: ‘I must own to a prejudice against the serious productions of the French stage’ (OMD, i:48). His recollections were nonetheless vivid enough to provide six substantial reviews of the Paris productions for the British Lady’s Magazine, published between January and August 1815, revealing that he had also seen Beaupré in Tartuffe, Baptiste cadet in Les femmes savantes, and St. Prix in Corneille’s Horace, as well as Mlle. George in Racine’s Bajazet and Mlle. Volnais in L’École des femmes. These notices, on the whole lively and facile, with an occasionally pedantic digression on the nature of drama in general, or the difference between the English and French stage in former years, appeared over the initials ‘A. Z.’, as did two articles on the life of the actress Mlle. Raucourt (March) and ‘Molière’s Critique upon His Ecole des femmes’ (September), and a communiqué purportedly from ‘a theatrical acquaintance’ (June) about the revival of anti-English satire in Paris. The last, describing ‘a new a erpiece’ at the Theatre de Vaudeville, in which the absurd Milord and Milady Higgs and their vulgar son Bobbie decamp in fear of Bonaparte’s return, ‘was very successful, and is one of thirty [satires] produced within


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the last month, only six of which have been played a second time’. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify or dismiss this report: but it has the ring of the Margate Punch-play to it, and if French comic theatre of 1815 were as meticulously chronicled as English puppetry is, such a canard might turn into a crux. As it is, ‘Letter from Paris—New Piece against the English’ may simply be considered Collier’s imaginative ‘filler’, as ‘A. Z.’, for the June issue of BLM. ‘T. B.’, who is almost certainly Thomas Barnes, remained with the British Lady’s Magazine for only two issues, and indeed his contributions as ‘Retrospective Critic’ are at once feeble and thoughtlessly condescending. It is possible that he was ‘the writer . . . no longer connected with the British Lady’s Magazine’ about whom the editor apologized to an annoyed correspondent in the third issue (March), which contained an essay on The Duchess of Malfi signed ‘I. P. C.’ In April ‘Retrospective Criticism’ returned to what had been promised in February, an account of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, and the new columnist explained the delay of a month as owing to ‘the desire of varying this department of our miscellany and of making it entertaining without frivolity, and instructive without dulness’. Collier’s implicit aspersions on Barnes may seem ungrateful, but the phrase ‘entertaining without frivolity and instructive without dulness’ clearly appealed to his editor, for it was repeated verbatim in the preface to the second volume (1816), long a er Collier had gone. There are seven more articles in the BLM signed ‘I. P. C.’ or ‘C. P. I.’ (an inversion John employed several times) between January and August 1815, all certainly by Collier, including pieces on John Heywood’s interlude The Four PP; on William Cartwright’s tragicomedy The Lady Errant (1651); on James Howell’s Familiar Letters; on a travelogue called France Painted to the Life (1657, ‘by a learned and impartial hand’, in fact Peter Heylyn) that had amused the late tourist; and a two-part historical and philological discussion of St. Valentine’s Day. During his later association with Ackermann’s Repository (1820) Collier would reprint the first part of ‘St. Valentine’s Day’, with a few minor changes and no credit to the defunct BLM. ‘C. P. I.’ also provided a piece headed ‘Newly-Discovered Antiquities at Westminster Abbey’, on excavations in the Dean’s Yard (August); and a light-hearted letter in July, on ‘French Bonnets at the Theatre’, signed ‘U-No-Hoo’, is surely Collier’s, for it also appeared, revamped, in Ackermann’s Repository five years later. It is a protest against obstructive feminine headgear worn in the cheap lower seats (‘I am one of those who, from motives of economy, as well as taste, are in the habit of sitting in the pit’) and it includes an appropriate quotation from Chapman’s tragedy The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois. Citations like this of lesser-known early drama and popular literature may be good clues to Collier’s authorship of anonymous periodical articles at this early period, although a gen-


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eral familiarity with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton is not really enough: eleven further unsigned reviews in BLM have also been credited to Collier, but we treat these as ‘doubtful’ or ‘rejected’ (Bibliography, pages 1396-98). In particular he is unlikely to have reviewed run-of-the-mill modern fiction, which he disdained all his life, and his opinions of fashionable contemporary poets like Scott and Byron were never so vapid as those in the BLM ’s unsigned reviews.78 Six substantial notices of the contemporary London theatre, signed ‘Tom Nashe the Younger’ or ‘T. N.’, are very probably Collier’s, however. They appeared between March (following two dissimilar, unsigned pieces, which may be by Barnes) and August, a er which unsigned reviews resumed. And there are five uninspired contributions in verse, signed ‘Poetaster’, which seem to be his—for one of them, ‘Coelesta’s Posey’ (April 1815), is ‘humbly inscribed to Miss M. L. P, of P ’: Collier was to marry his fiancée of long standing, Mary Louisa Pycro of Putney, in August 1816. John’s antiquarian essays for the British Lady’s Magazine, his first efforts in what became nearly seventy years’ work at ‘retrospective’ criticism, exhibit a remarkably wide command of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century English literature, not easily acquired. He may have lost little in forgoing school and university, where no curriculum would have led him to Webster, Cartwright, and John Heywood, let alone pre-Restoration theatrical history; but the task of securing his primary and secondary reading-matter, at a time before the unprivileged scholar had free access to scarce or costly books, was still considerable. A year later, on projecting the series ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ for the Critical Review, the Colliers claimed ‘ample resources’ for quotation ‘either in their own, the libraries of their friends, or of public institutions’, and from these John must have educated himself, on the terms each resource imposed. We have seen him familiar with, or welcome to visit, the distinguished private library of Thomas Amyot and perhaps by now that of James Perry; he may also already have met John Bellingham Inglis (1780–1870), an eclectic book collector with a penchant for the English drama that could supplement Perry’s curiously nontheatrical taste. The London Institution, through William Maltby, was known to the family, and the British Museum, a hard nut for most young readers to crack, had yielded unusually early to John’s importunities, like the Lords’ gallery and the Musée du Louvre. In 1879 he told Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth that he had first visited the British Museum ‘with my Father more than 70 years ago: the then Senior Librarian relaxed the rule, as to age, on my account, for I was then between 16 and 17 only; the first book I called was—what do you

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78. Collier’s contributions to BLM were first noticed in Wellens 1984 and 1985.


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think? ‘‘Capt Cooke’s [sic] Voyages’’’.79 Thirty years earlier he had said much the same to the Commission on the Constitution and Government of the British Museum. When asked: ‘How long have you frequented the reading-room of the British Museum?’ John replied: ‘For at least 40 years. I first came here quite as a boy . . . when I was less than 16 years old. My father was acquainted with Mr. Planta’—principal librarian from 1799 until 1827: he who proved ‘inexorable’ in the case of John Bruce—‘and Mr. Planta gave me facilities that were extremely convenient to me, and my father too.’ 80 Although Collier was prone to exaggeration in later life, this was a true story, and indeed his precocity was even greater than he now recalled: as ‘John Payne Collier, Little Smith Street, Westminster’, he had been granted admission for six months on 11 November 1803, as a mere fourteen-year-old. His familiarity with the Museum collections by the time of his Critical Review articles is self-evident, and Reading Room call slips signed by him before March 1818 survive in the Osborn Collection at Yale.81 Robinson and John Dyer Collier himself, among ‘friends’, could no doubt supply the odd volume, but John Payne had been accumulating his own books for more than a decade. We recall his teenage purchase of Bell’s Shakespeare, and his trawl of undervalued rarities in Holland; in 1816 we hear him complain about the drawn-out publication and high price to subscribers—‘of whom we are one’, at £3 10s. a volume—of Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities (1810–16), and lament that Sir Egerton Brydges’s tantalizing antiquarian reprints were ‘limited to from 60 to 100 copies’ while his meretricious original verse was ‘popular’ both in press-run and in price. The working young bibliophile had no love for such ‘dear-bought specimens’, which ‘only circulate . . . among collectors, who place them within their bookcases in bindings too costly for use; and though they are thus preserved from destruction by the worms, yet, like bodies embalmed, if they keep their original shape and appearance, they are inapplicable to any advantageous purpose. Russia leather and hot-pressed drawing-paper are most destructive opponents of the enlarged interests of literature’. But given the chance himself to assemble rare texts for study and republication, even ‘dearbought’, John was no stranger to the collectors’ marketplace. Frequent allusions to what this or that early edition fetched at Evans’s or Sotheby’s ‘lately’, ‘while we are engaged in writing this review’, or ‘about three months ago’ show him

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79. JPC to Ebsworth, 3 January 1879; Folger MS Y.c.1055 (64). 80. Report of the Commissioners . . . with Minutes of Evidence, Great Britain, Parliamentary Reports (1850), xxiv, qu. 5004. 81. Beinecke Osborn Files 3532. The registers show four renewals in 1804–07, but the volume for the period mid-1810 to 1819 has long been missing from the Museum archives. John Dyer Collier, recommended by Planta, obtained his first ticket on 17 June 1803, and his later renewals coincided with his son’s.


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haunting the rooms, and in mid-March 1816 he splashed out at J. G. Cochrane’s auction sale of the library of Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun.82 Gordon’s collection, assembled nearly two centuries earlier, was virtually a time-capsule of English books and pamphlets, and while some fetched high prices from such enthusiasts as Richard Heber, James Bindley, and the emergent William Henry Miller, bargains were to be found among the less glamorous lots, especially those of controversial, devotional, or theological works. Collier’s taste was more demandingly literary, however; he bought nine not-inexpensive lots under his own name, and others ‘through my friend and agent Rodd’, that is, Thomas Rodd the elder (1763–1822) of Great Newport Street.83 Collier remembered outbidding ‘even . . . such book-cormorants as Heber’ for certain rarities (JPC Memoirs, p. 95), although none of the nine titles he acquired in his own name for £4 17s. 6d. would have concerned Heber overmuch. Among them we can identify James Mabbe’s 1623 translation of Guzmán de Alfarache (lot 102, 10s. 6d.), the 1620 (i.e., 1625–20?) English Decameron with ‘three leaves mended’ (lot 313, £1 4s., perhaps = JPC sale lot 349 with ‘some leaves defective’), Lodowick Carlell’s play of 1639, Arviragus and Philicia (lot 605, 10s.), an imperfect copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1631–32 (lot 880, 11s.), George Gascoigne’s 1576 Droomme of Doomesday, with ‘corners of the leaves damaged’ (lot 1036, cheap at 3s.), and A Compendium . . . of Certain Ordinary Complaints of Divers of our Countrymen (1581) by ‘W. S.’, once identified as Shakespeare, but now known to be William Stafford (lot 2165, 16s.). This last gave Collier an out-ofthe way illustrative footnote on May-games for his article on Philip Stubbes in the Critical Review a year later. How many of Thomas Rodd’s 260-odd purchases at the Gordon dispersal were destined for Collier is unknown, although Collier recalled in 1879 that ‘I loaded my shelves and lightened my purse so considerably, that even my family remonstrated against the expenditure’. One costly commission may have been lot 1048, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1629), a late quarto of the pamphlet that calls the young Shakespeare ‘an upstart crow’. Rodd paid four guineas for this in the rooms, and just six weeks later Collier published a long retrospective account of it in the Critical Review. Other black-letter texts might have served

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82. Critical Review, September 1816, pp. 247 and 239; June 1817, p. 641; August 1816, p. 121; and May 1817, p. 533. We have noted purchases by ‘Collier’ in a number of sales of 1815, including those of the Duke of Graon and the comedian James Dodd, as well as the first sale of the Duke of Devonshire’s duplicates. 83. Although Collier’s dealings were primarily with the younger Thomas Rodd (1796–1849), he recalled the father in BARB (1865), saying that he and John Dyer ‘were at the same public school; they aerwards met in Spain, and it was in the year 1804, or 1805, that my father first took me to the old book-shop then kept by his worthy, though less fortunate school-fellow. This was, in fact, my introduction to the early literature of our country’ (i:x–xi).


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him (there are six editions between 1592 and 1637) but the critic chose this one, ‘printed by John Haviland for Henry Bell, 1629’, which happens to be very rare: only three institutionalized copies are now known. Slender volumes costing a week’s wages each might well have alarmed Collier’s family, though he assured his readers in the May Critical Review that such ‘works [by Greene] are now usually sold at from five to ten guineas’, and the 1629 Groatsworth did not in fact survive in his final library. A copy of the book did find its way to James Perry, however (his sale, lot 2144), so perhaps Perry himself bought it in 1816 and lent it to John—though at just this time Perry was in no mood for favours. More likely John passed it along at a price, when the thrill of possession had cooled. While bearing in mind that the bibliophile Collier always professed a high-minded reluctance to sell rare books and manuscripts systematically at a profit, a certain amount of commerce in kind among collectors and dealers is inevitable in the pursuit of collectibles. Educated as he had become in the cash value of what he sought, John Payne may well have supplemented his income, or paid for some part of his activity, by a little astute ‘private dealing’ or barter.84 Meanwhile there was trouble at home, perhaps long overdue. Robinson had given up his rooms at 56 Hatton Garden in mid-1813, and in April 1814, between John Payne’s two continental excursions, the Collier family changed house once again. Still nine strong in number, now aged from sixteen to eightyfour, they moved south of the Strand to 11 Salisbury Square, a stroll from the river and The Times, close by the Temple and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a few blocks east of the Chronicle offices. John Dyer was now fi y-two, and at twentyfive John Payne may have been suffering parental guidance less willingly than before. He had struck out on his own with the British Lady’s Magazine; he had travelled; and his salary at the Chronicle was not much, if at all, less than his father’s. While the provincial newsletters still required his participation, his book-buying and other potentially expensive avocations could ‘distress’ John Dyer and Jane, perhaps even the siblings. ‘Books, beauty, and billiards were my chief pursuits until I married’, he allowed his 1832 persona to own in 1871 (OMD, ii:91); and billiards, for which he confessed ‘an inordinate love’, proved a treacherous passion: ‘they were my stumbling block’ (JPC Diary, 16 January 1878). Competition with semi-professionals normally cost John only a few shillings a match, for he ‘never risked more’, but even so ‘I am sorry to confess [I] spent all my spare money and time upon it’ (OMD, ii:66), and at least once he was burned. ‘My love of Billiards got me into a dishonest & disgraceful scrape at one

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84. In the preface to BARB (1865), Collier remarked that ‘as I never was rich enough to collect, and keep, what may be called a library, [Thomas Rodd the younger] sold them again, and very seldom at a loss’ (p. xi).


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time’, he confided in his unpublished diary (6 May 1878), ‘out of which [Crabb Robinson] helped me & gave me the kindest & soundest advice. To this moment I feel shame and remorse regarding it, and I might have been severely punished.’ Indeed John’s ‘billiard-masters’, as he called them, were a dangerous lot, including one Bailey, who ‘was a erwards hanged for forgery: he was a most gentlemanlike gambler, and dressed to perfection: his tailor hanged him’ (OMD, ii:66); and the sharper William Weare, who was murdered by one of his victims, John Thurtell, in 1823. Thurtell claimed to have been cheated of £300 at cardplay by Weare, at Rexworthy’s billiard-rooms in Spring Gardens, while Collier, ‘having played hundreds of games of billiards with him’, appears to have escaped lightly: ‘[Weare] was a regular black-leg, and was content to do business in a small way, if he could get no larger prey’. A less sinister opponent, if we believe John—for the story occurs only in manuscript—was John Keats, whom ‘I knew, or saw a good deal of . . . when he was quite a young man and, as I understood, a medical or surgical student walking the hospitals. He played a great deal at Billiards, and so did I, in Chancery Lane & at the bottom of it in Fleet St[reet] in a room. . . . There I o en played with Keats, who, as I remember, was not so good at the game as I was’.85 An unlikely sportsman we may think him, but the gambler in Collier, cautious and aware of his own limited skills, yet ultimately hazarding all his resources, is here to be glimpsed. At more physical competition he seemed content to spectate, watching fellow reporter William

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85. The undated diary entry, written between 29 July and 10 August 1873, continues: ‘He was then a very cheerful, though thoughtful young man, rather short of stature but with regular pleasing features and a good forehead. I knew at that time that he was poetical, but he did not talk much on those subjects. Aerwards, or about the same date I used now & then to meet him in the book shop of Taylor & Hessey, the booksellers in Fleet Street. . . . One day Keats & I & another were there and he took up a copy of Milton: standing on the opposite side of the table to me he rather unexpectedly began a sort of lecture on Milton, reading out various pages, and, to my surprise, maintaining that no great poet ever wrote a great passage with a complete knowledge at the time of writing that it was great: he poured it out by inspiration and was not fully aware of its beauty or grandeur until he read & reflected upon it some time aerwards. In this position I expressed my non-concurrence and claimed, for Milton especially, that aer writing, & even during the writing of a passage, he had a most distinct knowledge of the excellence of what he composed, and of the value of every word it contained.—Keats still urged that when a poet had completed lines of unexampled merit he had a sort of muzzyness (his own word) in his mind, a sort of indistinct knowledge of his own meaning and of the merit of the mode in which he had conveyed it.’ The basis in fact of these anecdotes, never printed by Collier, is difficult to assess. Keats does not figure in any of his published reminiscences, but his mid-nineteenth-century reputation may not have encouraged John to feature him in Seven Lectures (1857) or BARB (1865), and he died too early for the supposed span of OMD. Keats’s celebrated speculation to Woodhouse on the ‘sense of delight’ that a billiard ball might have of its own roundness, smoothness, and speed of passage (Amy Lowell, John Keats [1925], ii:104–05) does suggest some acquaintance with the tables.


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Hazlitt play at the Fives Court in St. Martin’s Street, Leicester Fields (‘he was famous for what are called Volleys’, he told Hazlitt’s grandson); he rowed uncompetitively on the Thames, especially while courting Mary Louisa. Even chess he renounced, when ‘I lost a game once most provokingly by postponing the move of a pawn. It cost me a night’s rest and I never played again. No game was worth it.’ 86 In mid-December 1814 Jane Collier told Henry Crabb Robinson that her husband’s ‘behaviour becomes every day more odd. He is mortified to find that he is of little consequence and that little attention to him is paid by his son’s friends. This puts him in a temper.’ Robinson sympathized with Jane, as nearly always, and his perspective on the deteriorating Collier family relations must be evaluated accordingly. On 1 February 1815 Robinson took tea with the Colliers, when ‘Mrs C. informed me that John has gone to live out of the house by the desire of his father. The occasion or pretence is because John stays up late at night.’ Robinson could not resist interpreting the departure: ‘I believe there is no better reason [for it] than [John Dyer] Collier’s intolerable vanity, which is hurt by finding that his son is more attended to than himself.’ Driving the stake in, he continued: ‘John has much more understanding than his father; I fear that Mr Collier has not love enough for his own son not to be mortified at perceiving or suspecting the superiority. Poor Mrs C. suffers a great deal’ (HCR Diary). Another explanation for John Dyer’s bad temper that Robinson had noticed, but did not here apply, was the old bugbear of family economy: three months earlier the paterfamilias ‘had lost one half of his letters [i.e., the income from the newsletters], which I have been long apprehensive would follow from the peace’ (HCR Diary, 28 October 1814). For John Payne domiciliary independence was exhilarating, if short-lived. In later years he frequently alluded to the time ‘when I quitted my father’s house’ as a personal watershed. His new lodgings in Smith Square lay a brisk walk along the Embankment from the Chronicle offices, but conveniently adjacent to the Houses of Parliament. He may have gone on dining at his parents’ home, but Robinson reported more friction in Salisbury Square: ‘Mrs C. and the old lady [Mary Dyer Collier] have quarrelled, and the old people threaten to leave’.87 For once Robinson thought Jane at fault (‘certainly Mrs J. C. has acted very foolishly’), most likely because the senior Colliers still had an estate to bequeath. In June, furthermore, the father-son team at the Chronicle proved subvertible. Over at The Times, Dr. Stoddart’s authority had diminished, and Thomas

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86. JPC to William Carew Hazlitt, 2 June 1867, BL Add. MS 38,899, fol. 386; JPC Diary, 14 March 1879. 87. HCR Diary, 23 February 1815. We have not found the source of Ganzel’s statement (p. 21) that ‘for his mother’s sake, he continued to take his meals with the family’.


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Barnes proposed his strayed friend once again to John Walter II, this time as a law-court reporter. Walter consulted with Robinson, who ‘gave [John] a high character which I believe he deserves . . . and I declared my belief that he would soon be quite competent as a Reporter of law-proceedings. . . . W. seemed glad that J. C. does not live with his father &c. And I assured him that J. C. would have no friendly feelings toward Perry incompatible with any duties towards W.’ In the event ‘W[alter] said he should probably take him’, and shortly therea er John Payne returned to The Times (HCR Diary, 7 June 1815). The precise date of his defection is uncertain, but it must have been before the beginning of November, when Perry sacked John Dyer from the Chronicle, a er seven years’ service. This latest reverse in the father’s tempestuous journalistic career turned out to be final: he never returned to a newspaper. Robinson first heard that it happened ‘in consequence of a hoax having been played on Collier’, but added ‘I was not surprised at this. P[erry] I have no doubt was offended by John Collier leaving him and therefore readily availed himself of the first pretence for dismissing [John Dyer]’ (HCR Diary, 7 November 1815). Robinson considered this sad, and felt that ‘but for Collier’s pride he might have retained his situation’ (14 December), but it is hard to imagine him grovelling. John Walter II also ‘thought John Collier coming to him was the cause of Perry’s dismissing Mr C.’, and at Christmas ‘kindly offered . . . to relinquish [John Payne], if Perry would on John’s going back take Mr Collier again’ (26 December). Nothing came of that gesture, and as Walter was entirely satisfied with his new employee, John remained on The Times, where his brother William soon joined him as a novice reporter—again thanks to Robinson’s overtures (26 December). John Payne may once more have felt beholden to Barnes, and the young essayist’s work for the British Lady’s Magazine, from which Barnes had apparently been dropped, ceased abruptly. On 31 January 1816 old John Collier died, aged eighty-four. The provident apothecary, having seen his lifetime provisions dissipated by his two sons and experienced the a erblow of Joshua’s creditors’ claims upon what he himself had retained, clung cannily to a final small fortune which proved ‘much greater than we had expected’. John Payne in 1880 remembered his grandfather’s worth as not less than £5,000, plus about £400 in gold (JPC Memoirs, p. 113), but Henry Crabb Robinson knew better: in 1814 he had helped the old man dra his will, settling £1,250 in safe ‘three-percents’ on both John Dyer and Joshua, and the remainder on his widow for life. As he died with about £7,000, including a cloth mill at Witney from the ancient Collier inheritance, the widow’s portion was substantial (at least £4,000). Worries about Joshua’s ‘flighty’ habits had induced the apothecary to secure his moiety of the widow’s residue for the


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daughter-in-law and grandchildren, which Robinson arranged (‘one of the few acts of my life on which I look back with pleasure’) and which infuriated Joshua. Joshua took his brother to court—while simultaneously seeking a loan from him—and mortgaged ‘all he possessed or had any interest in to a large creditor, a worthy Quaker named Sherry’. Robinson somehow reclaimed this transaction, preserving the property ‘in trust’ for the family; and long a erward, when the prodigal uncle survived his wife (1839), he ‘received the interest from me—more than £100 per ann: till he died [1844] . . . and yet he never forgave me for what I had done’.88

The Critical Review In this difficult winter the immediate legacy of £1,250 to John Dyer Collier was a godsend, although John Payne complained that ‘it served him in no stead, for he threw up his profitable newspaper engagements in London and the provinces, and yielding to his old propensity took a large clay farm’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 113). But John Dyer had already lost his position at the Chronicle, and seen his earnings from the provincial newsletters diminish, subject only to further decline in the post-Napoleonic pax Britannica. What the legatee did first, in fact, was to purchase an independent literary journal and try to conduct it for profit. The venerable Critical Review, founded in 1756 by Tobias Smollett, had fallen on hard times; it boasted no clever staff like the Edinburgh or the Quarterly, no publisher of books like Constable, Blackwood or Colburn to puff his own wares in it, not even a consistent political stance to ensure the loyalty of a like-minded readership. A long liberal tradition had dissolved with its transfer in January 1814 to a Tory proprietorship, and under one George Frederick Busby as editor it lost most of its earlier audience; Thomas Kenrick described it later as having then ‘reached such a state of insignificance that to sink lower is impossible’, blaming ‘the infamous political opinions it promulgated’.89 Over eighteen subsequent months it ran through three publishers. John Dyer Collier himself had in November 1814 ‘nearly involved himself . . . in becoming a shareholder . . . but luckily found the p [publisher or proprietor? the shorthand word beginning with ‘p’ is unclear] to be not respectable before he had advanced his money’ (HCR Diary, 20 November 1814). In April 1816, however, he bought the magazine outright for the nugatory sum of £160, and Robinson thought that as ‘there is no loss on the present publication . . . the speculation

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88. HCR Reminiscences, ii:168. Robinson wrote here that John Collier ‘died worth £9000’, but the estate was sworn under £7,000 when the will (PRO PROB 11/1577) was proved 12 February 1816. 89. Wellens 1978, p. 688, quoting The British Stage (1817), i:207–08. See also Roper 1961.


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[is] not a very dangerous one’. Furthermore ‘it keeps Mr C. out of mischief and finds employment for him and son’ (HCR Diary, 1 May 1816). John Dyer took a new broom to the Critical Review. Its first number under his sole proprietorship (May 1816; the April issue reflected an editorial coalition) announced ‘a complete change . . . not a single individual formerly concerned having now any connection with it’. Henceforth, he declared, the policy would be one of ‘impartiality’, ‘industry’, and ‘fullest detail’, the reviews ‘avoiding alike the two extremes of mere analysis and separate essay’. The new Critical Reviewers—unnamed, as usual—‘will not be merely ‘‘the discoverers and collectors of the faults of writers’’ . . . neither will they be the lavish eulogists of folly and inanity’. Elsewhere the proprietor promised a return to the original principles of critical reviewing as proclaimed in 1756 (‘to exhibit a succinct plan of every performance, to point out the most striking beauties and glaring defects’, etc.) and attributed these stirring phrases to Samuel Johnson.90 They are not by Johnson, in fact, who had nothing to do with the inception of the Critical Review, although the Colliers—John Dyer especially—may have thought so.91 John Dyer had genuine innovations in mind, however: there was to be greater ‘notice of foreign valuable publications’, for ‘the connections of the Proprietors of this work abroad, and their acquaintance with modern languages will enable them to supply this deficiency’; and (‘a novelty to periodical publications of this kind’) ‘a department . . . under the head of ‘‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’’ ’, devoted to ‘the early literature of Great Britain’. Articles there would reprint specimens and extracts of works ‘sometimes of intrinsic value, and sometimes of mere curiosity’, although ‘the forgotten trash of former times will never be raked from the dust, unless for the sake of illustrating some valuable point connected with history and antiquities’; in other words, they would form a sequel to John Payne Collier’s aborted retrospections in the British Lady’s Magazine. The politics of the new Critical Review were not hinted at, but from the repudiation of the recent past and the sacking of the old staff en groupe, one might have guessed their direction—broadly liberal once more, as reviews and choice of matter for review would confirm: Bentham on parliamentary reform, Malthus, Weyland, Ricardo and Burrows, anti-slavery testimony, and The Attempt to Divorce the Princess of Wales Impartially Considered. John Dyer saw mostly to these, while John Payne—with Robinson, occasionally—concentrated on literary reviews; the family’s literary politics were of course liberal as well, and for its brief late blossoming the Critical Review provided the Romantic anti-

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90. Critical Review, December 1816, p. 554, quoting the preface to the 1756 volume. 91. Johnson did contribute a few reviews to the Critical Review in 1763–64.


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establishment with a significant new rostrum. Later commentators may have overestimated its influence, but there is no doubt that the circles of Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Lambs, and Leigh Hunt would have considered the Colliers’ new venture both friendly and useful.92 Service to his literary friends probably brought Henry Crabb Robinson into the fold, for in the fourteen issues of the Critical Review that ensued, only he, John Payne, and John Dyer Collier can be clearly identified as contributors: the Collier administration of the magazine from May 1816 to June 1817 was another family enterprise and a father-son partnership like the day-to-day newsletters and some aspects of their newspaper journalism, and the willingness of the two to work on this new enterprise together ought not to surprise us—even a er John Payne’s departure from home and the Chronicle. Robinson remained cautious, of course. On 5 May he ‘finished reading the Critical Review 1st No.’, that is, the number for April 1816, and reflected that ‘on the whole the articles were executed with average propriety in the style of the old reviews’, although ‘a little flippancy belongs to the trick of reviewing’, and ‘the perception of it is greatly increased by the knowledge the reader has of the author’.93 Robinson himself was that reader, and he considered that John Payne Collier’s articles—on Singer’s History of Playing Cards and Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, perhaps among others— were ‘much better’ than John Dyer’s. On 6 July he was increasingly doubtful: ‘I read the 3rd number [June 1816] of the Critical Review under the Colliers’ management and I continue to fear that the attempt will not succeed—and indeed it is a hopeless & injudicious plan to execute by 2 persons, neither scholars nor men of science, a review which requires such variety & extent of powers’. But meanwhile, in spite of his misgivings, he had contributed two reviews to the same number, and would add one (of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe) to that of July. Reviewing, he reminded himself, was ‘an occupation which had somewhat amused me, but in which I must not indulge’, as it had distracted him from his law-studies in the past two or three months, and seemed ‘to threaten the entire Loss of the little legal knowledge I have acquired’ (HCR Diary, 13 June 1816). By the end of November he was no more positively impressed, telling John Payne’s wife ‘freely, that I do not think the Critical Review can possibly

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92. The NMM approved the ‘complete change’ and ‘important alterations’ in July, with particular reference to ‘a department entitled Bibliotheca Antiqua, or a review of old works of much interest and curiosity which are not easy of access. . . . For this part of the undertaking we are informed the editors have ample resources’ (pp. 527–28). 93. HCR Diary, 5 May 1816. The April number appeared under the old banner of the Tory proprietors, but with contributions orchestrated by the new owner. John Dyer in mid-April must have inherited a half-completed or half-printed issue, which he restructured, while retaining the old masthead until he announced his own major changes.


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succeed’ (27 November). But he nonetheless continued to supply the odd article, especially during John Payne’s illness in February 1817.94 In three articles on the last years of the Critical Review, Oskar Wellens attributed a large number of the unsigned 1816–17 reviews to John Payne and John Dyer Collier and to Henry Crabb Robinson.95 His 1983 canon for John Payne amounts to forty-seven reviews over fourteen months, plus the signed sixteenpart ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’; in our bibliography we have added seven more reviews as probably by John Payne, but subtracted twelve attributions as ‘without foundation’ or ‘doubtful’. As virtual co-editor of the Critical John Payne may of course have provided many of the shorter notices, which give little more than a summary of plot or subject, as well as the replies to correspondents and listings of publications and events; on the other hand, despite Robinson’s hint that the two Colliers were responsible for everything—which his own participation belies—it is always possible that outside reviewers, even other family members, occasionally chipped in. We have limited ourselves to considering substantial contributions for which conservative textual evidence strongly suggests John Payne Collier’s authorship. These are largely reviews of new works of poetry, plays, theatrical memoirs, antiquarian or bibliographical studies, some fiction, and a few French books reflecting his recent excursions. Most important for John himself, certainly, were his painstaking notices of contemporary poets, Romantic or reactionary, notably Coleridge, Byron, and Southey, but also Scott, Moore, John Wilson, James Hogg, Edward Quillinan, and John Hamilton Reynolds. John Payne Collier’s review—or reviews, as we believe them to be—of Christabel; Kubla Khan, a Vision; and The Pains of Sleep, the first new collection of poetry by Coleridge in some thirteen years, amplifies the homage he had paid the philosopher in his diary of 1811, and the service he rendered him, and posterity, by transcribing his early lectures on Shakespeare. In the first ‘Collier’ number of the Critical Review (April 1816, ‘Works in the Press’) appears what may be the earliest notice of the forthcoming volume in print: ‘Mr. S. T. Coleridge has in the press a new and corrected Edition of his poems, including ‘‘Christobell’’, a singular fragment—an effort of his youth. He is also preparing a metaphysical work.’ 96 The full six-page review comes in the May number, and

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94. HCR Diary, 18 February 1817; Wellens 1981, p. 99, misconstrued this illness as John Dyer’s. 95. See Wellens 1978, 1981, and 1983. Some attributions are revised in the course of the three articles. 96. The earliest notice of Christabel listed in E. H. Coleridge’s edition (1907, p. 99) is that in the May 1816 Monthly Literary Advertiser, which followed a note by Byron in the March Gentleman’s Magazine that referred to manuscript versions of the poem; see also Erdman 1958. The mis-


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with its almost unstinting praise it is the most positive review of any new volume of verse written for the magazine by John Payne. ‘This very graceful and fanciful poem [i.e., ‘Christabel’: ‘Kubla Khan’ is mentioned only in passing, and ‘The Pains of Sleep’ is extracted without comment] . . . is enriched with more beautiful passages than have ever been before included in so small a compass’, he wrote, having submitted seven descriptive passages ranging from ‘a beautiful picture’ and ‘a most effective finish’ to an ‘exquisite’ contrast, and ‘lines, finer than any in the language upon the same subject, with which we are acquainted’. Inevitably John must play the critical arbiter (‘we could, it is true, point out expressions that might have been better turned, and lines that perhaps might have been better omitted’), and he must quote from Ben Jonson’s Discoveries, and boast that ‘we read [Christabel] in M.S. two or three years ago’ (Robinson had a copy), but the review is one of the very few highly favourable ones that Coleridge received. Devastating attacks by Hazlitt in the Examiner and Thomas Moore in the Edinburgh Review le only four positive notices to console him: Collier’s in the Critical Review and pieces in the Literary Panorama for July 1816, in the European Magazine for November, and in The Times itself for 20 May 1816. The last, appearing five days before declared publication, was reprinted two weeks later, slightly abridged, in Coleridge’s ‘own’ newspaper, the Courier; it has recently been rediscovered and reprinted, and has been attributed to Charles Lamb, Henry Crabb Robinson, Barron Field, and others.97 But a comparison with the Critical Review notice leaves little doubt that the same hand wrote both: the opinions, the choice of passages to praise, even phrases in the expository prose are interchangeable, and little is added to The Times account beyond allusions to Milton, Chaucer, Burns, and Wordsworth (all Collier touchstones), and a characteristically pedantic correction to Coleridge’s ‘calling the principle of scanning by accents, rather than syllables, a new one. . . . The truth is, that our oldest ballad-writers were guided by no other principle.’ Collier, as we think, successfully utilized his new state of grace at The Times—no small achievement, given John Walter II’s feelings—to flesh out his yet-unpublished Critical Review notice for a much wider public, and thus to do Coleridge one more loyal service. Nor was Coleridge unmoved: sending John Payne tickets for his lectures

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spelling ‘Christobell’ may reflect the title of the parody that appeared in the April 1815 European Magazine, ‘Christobell, a Gothic Tale’. 97. David Erdman attributed the Times review to Lamb in 1958, followed by Lewis M. Schwartz (who was unaware of Erdman’s article) in 1970, Donald H. Reiman (The Romantics Reviewed, Part A: The Lake Poets [New York, 1972], ii:890) and J. R. de J. Jackson (Coleridge: The Critical Heritage [1991], ii:246). In 1998 Chris Koenig-Woodyard followed Wellens 1981 in attributing the Critical Review version to Robinson, adding that Collier himself ‘certainly had a hand in the review’, but unaccountably reasserted the Lamb claim to the Times version.


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of January and March 1818, he asked him ‘to regard [them] as a humble testimony of my sincere respect for you, and of the grateful sense, I entertain of your disinterested and very friendly services—the more affecting to me, because even the rancorous Hatred of Hazlitt . . . has not been so injurious to me as the coldness and passiveness of those, who profess privately the highest admiration and yet permit the very works, they extol to be systematically excluded from the Quarterly Review’.98 One puff alone might have merited such thanks, and two—out of four in the world—certainly did.99 Back at the Critical Review the treatment of Lord Byron was different indeed. John Payne surely wrote the condescending notice in the April issue of Hebrew Melodies . . . no. II, with Appropriate Symphonies and Accompaniments, by J. Braham and J. Nathan: ‘this second number . . . certainly superior to the first, though we doubt if it will sell so well, as his Lordship is going out of fashion, more especially with his female readers’. A short retrospective account of Byron’s publications found English Bards ‘undoubtedly the best production of his pen’, noting that because it was (reputedly) suppressed, ‘the satire, which formerly sold for four or five shillings, not long since was purchased at the hammer for more than two guineas’. Hebrew Melodies itself was ‘sentimental’, in ‘a most unmusical metre’, and ‘a sort of poetical profanation of the Holy Writ not to be endured’, although the reviewer qualifiedly admired ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold’ (‘we regret that the last verse does not continue to heighten the description’) and praised other individual songs. An offhand tag, unidentified, from the preface to Paradise Lost offers one clue to John Payne’s responsibility for this ten-page damp squib, but his gratuitous quotation from Sir John Harington’s ‘Apology of Poetry’—the introduction to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591)—pretty well nails it down. Collier also cited Harington’s ‘Apology’ knowingly in his ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ essay on Francis Meres (June 1816), and would return to it in detail in his Poetical Decameron (1820).100 Henry Crabb Robinson’s protective admiration for Goethe no doubt led him to castigate Byron’s Manfred in the June 1817 Critical as an imitation of Faust,101 but John Payne more likely contributed the negative reviews of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III (November 1816) and The Prisoner of Chillon (December 1816). They renew the aspersions cast on Hebrew Melodies about fashion, remuneration, and the implicit luxury of self-exile, and reflect high-handedly on Byron’s

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98. Coleridge to JPC, 17 January 1818, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 (7); printed in Griggs, iv:813. 99. The Times review was first attributed to Collier by Oskar Wellens in 1982; he did not however link it to the Critical Review version, which he had earlier attributed to Robinson. 100. In the latter, see esp. ii:188. 101. HCR Diary, 22 June 1817.


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versification; they also reprint an unacknowledged French source (in French) at length, and expose an inaccurate use of an old word, which Shakespeare and Spenser ‘employ . . . extremely o en’. One might suspect Collier of envy, but he consistently treated Byron as a ‘popular’ poet, isolating his best passages as worthy, and appeared to regard him principally as a victim of his own literary over-production. Collier’s strictures on Robert Southey’s poetry, however, are unambiguous. It may be said that the Laureate’s ponderous narrative or elegiac verse made an easy target in 1816, but John’s dissection of The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (May 1816) was harshly acute. Southey shared ‘a misfortune to men [like himself ] who . . . write a great deal, that they get into a habitual swing of style, and acquire a facility of composition that sometimes precludes all efforts of thought’; in place of originality or nervous energy one met everywhere with ‘prosaic detail’ and ‘hacknied epithets’, and the Spenserian stanzas were so flat that ‘we can find no adequate reason why [The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo] should not have been written in prose’. Collier emphasized Southey’s debt to Spenser by supplying for comparison an ‘exquisite passage’ from The Faerie Queene, and for no more reason than usual the parallel octave (in Italian) from Tasso; Southey’s allegorical strain in the sub-section ‘A Vision’ he found likewise derived from Spenser, and disappointingly dull. Indeed Collier’s twelve-page review was as much in praise of Spenser as in dispraise of Southey, reflecting the fact that the reviewer was at this time at work on an allegorical poem of his own, in Spenserian stanzas. Six years later he would publish it as The Poet’s Pilgrimage, unabashedly appropriating Southey’s title, which he ridiculed here (‘he might more properly term [it] . . . ‘‘The Poet Laureate’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’’ ’). More derision met The Lay of the Laureate; Carmen Nuptiale (July 1816). ‘When first the title caught our eye’, John Payne asserted, ‘in its ostentatious black letter, we really imagined that it was a satire upon Mr. Southey’. In fact it was another solemn Spenserian allegory, and Collier’s review savaged it passage by passage, scattering along the way allusions to Milton’s Eikonoklastes, Lydgate, Gower, Hoccleve, Chaucer, and Shakespeare’s Lucrece. The busy journalist found Southey’s prolixity a chaffing-matter too, noting that he ‘writes currente calamo, and, as his friends report . . . he regularly emits forty lines every morning before breakfast’.102

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102. Southey himself believed that JPC was responsible for a biographical sketch in the NMM for July 1814 (pp. 566–71), but we find this unlikely (it may, however, possibly have been written by John Dyer Collier). Southey named John Payne in a letter to his son-in-law, the Rev. J. W. Warter, 17 August 1831 (‘He once wrote a life of me in a magazine—never having seen me, nor knowing anything of me, but what he could pick up by asking questions from as many of my acquaintances as he could meet with, and the result was about as accurate as you might suppose it


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Thomas Moore fared little better with the reviewer: his Sacred Songs were polished and ‘pretty’ but superficial, and lacked the ‘fervour of piety’ (June 1816); Lalla Rookh, while ‘generally harmonious’, exhibited ‘neither force nor dignity’ but ‘perversion of taste and deficiency of judgement’—although ‘there is no living poet who has had greater practice or possesses more skill in the lyrical measures of the English language than Mr. Moore’ (June 1817). Scott’s Harold the Dauntless John thought too feeble for its own author, and believed it, like The Bridal of Triermain, ‘a tolerably successful imitation of some parts of the style of Sir Walter Scott . . . but we are weary of it before we reach the end’: this is not, we think, tongue-in-cheek. He found James Hogg’s sentiments ‘very common-place’ in Mador of the Moor, and thought his anonymous parodies in The Poetic Mirror: or, The Living Bards of Britain unamusing and presumptuous (August and November 1816). A nearly charitable but double-edged notice was allowed Keats’s friend John Hamilton Reynolds for his ‘Coleridgean’ first volume of verse, The Naiad, a Tale, with Other Poems (October 1816). Although its ‘poetical prettiness’ was ‘apt to degenerate into affected trifling and paltry conceit’, Collier wrote, ‘we must admit, on the other hand, that the prettinesses are in many places as refined and delicate as any that we have read: the opening is singularly beautiful; all the little touches are given with a grace and precision not easily rivalled’. Qualifications follow, given somewhat de haut en bas, but finally young Reynolds ‘displays so much talent, that we hope to see him affix his name to something of higher aim in its subject, and greater originality in its style’; this was about the most favourable of the eight reviews he received for The Naiad.103 John Payne and the Critical Review failed to notice another first book—with a vignette of Spenser, no less, on its title-page—namely John Keats’s Poems, which appeared in March 1817. John Payne probably covered new plays in print for the Critical Review, as he had done for the British Lady’s Magazine, but the few notices we attribute to him are perfunctory. One unlucky victim of a crushing dismissal was William Monney, whose Caractacus, a New Tragedy had been refused for performance, and was self-published to defy its ‘suppression’. John, hard on amateurs, made cruel fun of the author (October 1816) and, when Monney attempted a jocular reply, insulted him all over again in the next issue. More significant were John Payne’s long reviews of two contemporary theatrical memoirs, Anna Plumptre’s

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to be’), and in another to John Kenyon (28 March 1837), saying then that the editor of the NMM had ‘put the dates [of Southey’s life, provided by him] into the hands of Payne Collier, who got acquainted with my wife’s sister . . . and . . . got from her all the details he could’; Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Warter (1856), iv:238 and 500. 103. See L. M. Jones 1984, pp. 74 and 330. Collier recalled Reynolds and the poem (misnaming it ‘The Mermaid’) in OMD, iv:60–62.


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Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (January 1817), which offered some gratuitous Shakespearian commentary and a good deal about James Shirley; and Hazlitt’s Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcro (May 1816). The latter, in which Hazlitt drew on James Perry’s recollections as well as his own, permitted John Payne to add personal memories from ‘our first introduction to the acquaintance of the subject’: house parties in Hatton Garden, Holcro losing gracefully at draughts, and a sighting of him recuperating from asthma at Margate in 1808, which ‘Mr. Hazlitt has omitted to mention’. John’s youthful admiration for Holcro (‘a man of unblemished integrity’) helped make this seventeen-page review one of his longest, with space for a little dig at Perry (as ‘Mr. P., the severity of [whose] Scottish creed’ conflicted with ‘the liberality of Mr. Holcro ’s religious tenets’). Hazlitt was not given much credit for the production, although he wrote most of it; John Payne would later review The Round Table with friendly enthusiasm, however, for both Hazlitt and his co-essayist Hunt. Writing in 1865 to Hazlitt’s grandson with reference to the young man’s novel Sophy Laurie, Collier confessed, or rather boasted, that he had read no ‘modern’ novels since Scott’s,104 and in an imaginary conversation with the sixth Duke of Devonshire he declared that, save for Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe, novels ‘form a class of reading for which I have no partiality . . . I have tried over and over again’ (OMD, iv:96–97). Few indeed were his fiction reviews, but perhaps no one else could supply all of them for the Critical Review. Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, still ‘by the [anonymous] author of Waverley’, allowed John to quote from Alexander Barclay’s fi eenth-century adaptation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools, and to suggest that the novelist (taken to be one Forbes, aged twenty-seven, son of a Scottish baronet and former student of Dr. Valpy) might improve himself by reading some old plays (May 1816). The same hand seems to have reviewed Tales of My Landlord (December 1816), Jane Porter’s The Pastor’s Fire-Side (February 1817), Fanny Holcro ’s Fortitude and Frailty (April 1817), and Thomas Love Peacock’s anonymous Melincourt (May 1817). Fanny Holcro attracts the reviewer’s sympathy as a writer’s daughter in search of independent acclaim, like John Payne himself; the author of Melincourt is taken to task for over-cleverness and for misrepresenting the metre of Chapman’s Iliad. Three reviews of French books on European affairs also appear to be John’s, reflecting his recent visits to Paris and introducing otherwise unlikely quotations from Chapman and Marston; and the sympathetic notice of Henry Milton’s Letters on the Fine Arts, Written from Paris in the Year 1815 (October 1816) mentions attending the Louvre in 1815 ‘day a er day, with unwearied assiduity’, and re-

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104. ‘I have never looked into a ‘‘Novel’’ since ‘‘Woodstock’’ by Sir W. S. It is a principle with me to avoid them, & I am a great loser, I am sure, by my abstinence’; 23 September, BL Add. MS 38,898, fol. 298.


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capitulates observations on the Paris theatre that ‘A. Z.’ had contributed, not long since, to the British Lady’s Magazine. Antiquarian subjects, especially those bibliographical, fell naturally to John. In the first ‘Collier’ number of April 1816 he levelled a sixteen-page salvo at the bookseller and antiquary Samuel Weller Singer for his elegant but undisciplined Researches into the History of Playing Cards. Beginning with provisional compliments (Singer was ‘a learned and liberal dealer’ and ‘no individual engaged in the business of a bookseller [is] as competent as himself to the task’), Collier soon took Singer’s measure as a historian of printing, trumping his laborious accounts of early xylography and typefounding with his own fund of rival —and largely superior—scholarship. Predictably, he supplied several passages from seventeenth-century popular literature bearing on cards; and he complained that the luxurious engravings had priced the book (at four guineas) out of range, with an unworthy text: ‘the fact is, that quite sufficient pains were not bestowed on the letter-press, and the author trusted too much to the merit of the plates introduced’. A passing slight to Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania (‘a book much overvalued both in price and estimation’) confirmed Collier’s attitude toward this sort of grand book; Dibdin had praised Singer’s Playing Cards warmly. Whether Singer, who had by now in fact abandoned bookselling for genteel authorship, ever learned who his reviewer was in the Critical Review, we do not know; but thirty-seven years later his denunciation of Collier’s new Shakespearian readings helped to bring about their exposure as forgeries. Four months a er slating Singer, John Payne examined William Young Ottley’s An Enquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving upon Copper and Wood (August 1816), in a positive but linked review that repeated or revived many of the same animadversions. Despite his own thirst for rarities and original editions Collier remained consistently hostile to the ‘Roxburghe’ school of costly reprints and elegant bibliophile publications; a surprisingly gentle estimate, ostensibly of Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges’s feeble poem Bertram (September 1816), was most notable for its complaints about the expensive Lee Priory reprints sponsored by Brydges and the retentive habits of ‘mere black letter’ collectors. About Dibdin himself, the self-appointed shepherd of that flock, Collier was habitually caustic, even on the Bibliomaniac’s pulpit oratory. In the Critical Review for September 1816 appears a devastating notice of Dibdin’s revamped Typographical Antiquities, volume three (and last, although more were projected and subscribed for). Although the pre-Collier Critical Review had—unsurprisingly—bypassed volumes one (1810) and two (1812), John made it his business to survey the whole project. As with Singer he began with compliments (‘this great undertaking’, ‘a man of profound learning’, ‘a man of pre-eminent


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talents’) before drawing up sharply: ‘his learning is of a very inapplicable, and comparatively useless kind’, and ‘his taste has been depraved from a natural love of the beautiful, to an artificial admiration of the curious’. While all investigations of the origin and progress of printing ‘must, almost necessarily, be productive of some useful information . . . this excuse . . . will not apply to the mere divers into the depths of black-letter darkness, who exhaust those lives that might have been devoted to valuable acquisitions, in employments to which they blindly attach an imaginary and factitious importance’. Just what Collier so passionately resented is still unclear (indiscriminate pursuit of rarity? bad literary judgement? ignorance? wealth?), but whatever it was he seemed to blame Dibdin, and went on to impugn the improvident rector of gulling his old subscribers and pursuing the more lucrative project of his Bibliotheca Spenceriana at their expense. A sore point with Collier was that he himself had subscribed, and felt cheated by the lower quantity and quality of the ‘embellishments’ in volume three. And to wind up his tirade, more in anger than sorrow, he signalled one book in his own modest collection (The Lyfe of Prestes, STC 6894) that Dibdin had ‘entirely omitted’, and one other (Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, 1553) that hardly merited citation from Richard Heber’s ‘stupendous’ collection, since ‘we have ourselves [Joseph] Ames’s copy’ together with The Rule of Reason, ‘and for the whole we only gave a guinea’. Quite apart from his literary reviews, the sixteen-part ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ constitutes John Payne’s most significant project for the Critical Review. These retrospective essays on Elizabethan and pre-Restoration literature were the only initialled or otherwise signed contributions in the magazine under the Colliers; they were praised as ‘particularly valuable and ably-written’ by Thomas Kenrick in The British Stage (1817–22), and Collier himself extracted and had bound up together the complete series for his own use.105 Longer and more discursive than their predecessors in the British Lady’s Magazine, they usually concentrate on a book at a time, like Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Meres’s Palladis Tamia, Coryate’s Crudities, or Stanyhurst’s and Fleming’s translations of Virgil, but range freely about in the commentary and footnotes, so that Greene leads to Marlowe, Lodge, Nashe, and Gabriel Harvey; Heywood’s Apology for Actors to his plays and to the Puritan opposition to the stage; and one translation to another. Besides that on Heywood’s Apology, the theatrical essays treat Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses (with a glance at Stephen Gosson), and a little tract of 1643, The Actor’s Remonstrance, which John had found in the British Museum. Collier’s two-part, twenty-five-page study of James Shirley, perhaps encouraged by the news of a forthcoming edition from William Gifford, de105. JPC sale, lot 33; now BL 836.f.26.

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serves special credit for both its perceptions and its precedence; it is by far the earliest substantial account of ‘the last pre-Restoration dramatist’ and his works.106 The Marprelate Controversy was summarized in a brief piece on Pappe with a Hatchet, which John thought by Thomas Nashe; and Sir Robert Dallington’s A Method for Travel (1598) allowed him to reflect on France past and present. And a textual comparison of Edward Fairfax’s spirited translation of Tasso (1600) with the ‘tame’ eighteenth-century version by John Hoole (February 1817) must have been helpful to Leigh Hunt, who undertook the same turn in the Indicator no. 25 (29 March 1820). Indeed John may have supplied his old editor with the suggestion, among others, for Hunt thanked one ‘J. C.’ at the end of the same number for ‘both of the subjects mentioned’ which ‘he will be happy to take up’. John’s critical discrimination in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ is remarkably sure, and remarkably sound. Again and again he selected passages that supported whatever inextravagant claims he had staked for his minor poets and pamphleteers, and despite what Robinson and others regarded as a preference for the arcane, a lay reader of 1816 could have done worse than follow his lead. Time has vindicated many of young Collier’s opinions of his contemporaries—what he says about Byron, Southey, and Moore, for example, seldom seems witless or dated—and his resurrection of earlier poet-translators such as Fairfax and Stanyhurst, like his fascination with the scattershot trifles of Nashe, Greene, and Heywood, now strikes us as more prescient than eccentric, although prejudice in favour of his own discoveries may distort some of Collier’s estimates. His critical etiquette is likewise patchy, for he rarely gives more credit to fellow scholars than he must, and o en takes back what he gives: Edmond Malone, for example, deserved better from the young antiquary than the ironic epithets ‘indefatigable’ and ‘industrious’, and Malone’s formidable chronology of the English stage need not have been qualified sniffily with the phrase ‘if [it] may be relied upon’. This unattractive aspect of Collier’s citation will recur and recur. Identification of direct sources, at this early date, was also inconsistent. Some of the books treated in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ were certainly on John’s own shelves, including the copy of Charles Aleyn’s verse History of Henry the Seventh (‘the small volume before us . . . [which] was once in the possession of the

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106. In fact unpublished until 1833, the edition was announced in the March 1817 Critical Review as ‘in the press’, six volumes ‘handsomely printed by Bulmer’. Collier’s articles have been entirely overlooked by NCBEL, DNB, G. E. Bentley’s Jacobean and Caroline Stage, etc. He would return to Shirley with three essays in the London Magazine, May–October 1820; his transcript of three of Shirley’s works, two of them discussed in the ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ articles, is Houghton MS Eng 785 (some paper watermarked 1815).


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celebrated antiquary Thomas Hearne’) and William Stafford’s Certain Ordinary Complaints (1581), purchased at the Gordon sale and put to use in the article on Stubbes (April 1817, p. 422). Others, like Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1629), may have been his or on loan, for the current prices he suggests for his originals are daunting: Coryate’s Crudities ‘usually sells at from eight to twelve guineas’, Greene’s pamphlets ‘are now usually sold at from five to ten guineas’, a copy of Stanyhurst’s Virgil made £9 15s. at Evans’s three months earlier, Fleming’s Georgics alone (he was dealing with Bucolics too) was priced fi een guineas by Longmans in 1815, and Thomas Churchyard’s A True Discourse Historical (1602) ‘always sells at a high price’. One volume now ‘on our table’ may have had a provenance provocatively unstated: we last met with Staffords Niobe and Niobe Dissolv’d into a Nilus (1611) in the hands of Thomas Barnes, who identified it as ‘the second edition (the first I have never seen)’ when writing about it in Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in October 1810. Collier’s copy in October 1816, surely the same, ‘is the second edition . . . a first has never we believe been heard of ’, and Niobe ‘is of extreme rarity’. Did Barnes cede this volume to John Payne, or did Barnes borrow it from the new boy at The Times in 1810? Whatever the ownership, Barnes certainly was the first to conjecture Milton’s acquaintance with Stafford’s text, and to give the two sets of parallel passages that no longer convince Miltonians; Collier could not have done this in 1810, for he began to read Milton only a year later. But in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ the article on Staffords Niobe— which in every way supersedes Barnes’s slight effort for the Reflector—presents Barnes’s brief thesis, and the very passages he evoked, as its own introduction, without any acknowledgement (‘It seems certain that Staffords Niobe was not only known to, but used by Milton’, etc.). These are peccadilloes, if not simply discretionary silences; but one essay in ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ raises considerations more sinister. This, the second piece in the series (June 1816), concerns A True Discourse Historical of the Succeeding Governours in the Netherlands (1602), ‘a very curious and a rare historical tract’ compiled by the superannuated soldier-poet of the ‘drab age’, Thomas Churchyard. Collier extracted his quotations from a copy which ‘is rendered peculiarly valuable by the insertion of twenty lines in the old English, fourteen syllable measure upon a blank page, in a hand writing obviously of about the date when the book was printed’. He went on to speculate, with a great show of caution, upon the authorship and script of the verse: ‘At the bottom are the letters Th. Ch. the usual mode in which Churchyard signed his pieces, and it is not impossible that the whole is an autograph: the circumstances that lead to a contrary conclusion are that Churchyard in 1602 was in his 82nd year, whereas these verses do not seem to have been penned by an infirm hand, and the spelling is not as singular as he usually made it. The lines are an eulogy upon Sir John Norris and


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Sir Philip Sidney, and well merit transcribing.’ Collier’s professed ‘transcript’ follows: What greater guerdon can we give to Norrice his hie name Than that it shall while time indures have ever growing fame? In Portugale in Royal France, no lesse likewise in Spaine, In Netherlands with much renowme in Ireland and Britaine, He lawrell won for victory’s with manie a grieslie wound, His lawrell crown shall thunder stroke nor lighning ere confound. The thrones of kings may bee orethrown by time a foe to all, But under deadlie stroke of time his fame shall never fall! It is immortal, fresh and green, and ever must remaine When towers of brasse and marble tombes do show them selves but vaine.— With him Sir Philip Sidney too shall be recorded hie Who over death victoriouslie hath gain’d the victorie: Unequall’d in the British court or field with martial power When death him struck with bullet foule death was not conquerour. Now to what lo ier hight of fame can this great worthie clime, A victor over enemies, victor ore death and time? Though age and sicknesse me assaile, I feele againe returne The ardent fires wherewith whilom I did full fiercelie burne: Why could not Churchyard die with them, he must full sore complaine Not crawle into his welcome grave, his crotches age and paine? ‘A man who could thus write’, the essayist solemnly concluded, ‘was no very contemptible poet.’ Readers’ opinions may vary, yet there are so many lines metrically padded out and so many insipid epithets and lame rhymes that few now would judge these the work of even a very debilitated professional writer. Churchyard has never been systematically edited, but no subsequent critic seems to have taken ‘What greater guerdon’ seriously; and no copy of the book with such an ‘insertion’ has ever been independently described. Indeed even Collier failed to mention the poem in The Poetical Decameron, which four years later devoted considerable attention to Churchyard’s rariora, and the whole episode might have been overlooked had not its perpetrator seen fit to mark up his own set of ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ with authorial second thoughts, and republish the tell-tale result.107 That these cannot be corrected ‘readings’ of an old text, or editorial normalizations, is sufficiently obvious: the last line, for

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107. See Wood 1925a; Chambers, WS, ii:385; and Freeman and Freeman 1993, with a reproduction of the annotated poem at p. 9.


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example, turns from ‘Not crawle into his welcome grave, his crotches age and paine’ to ‘Not creepe into his lonesome grave, made welcome by his paine’. Even such evidence of tampering would still not quite seal the case, but nearly four decades a er the exercise Collier chose to resurrect his imposture in Archaeologia (1852), as part of an article on ‘Sir Walter Raleigh, His Character, Services, and Advancement’. There he reprinted the twenty poor lines, still ‘well worth preserving’, ‘precisely as they stand’ in ‘a copy of this tract [the True Discourse Historical] now before me’. And, recklessly enough, he supplied the poem in its creatively revised form, trusting perhaps that no one then would compare the 1852 text with that of the perished Critical Review. The glib little hoaxes of Collier’s 1811 Margate letter on ‘Punch’ and the perhaps imaginary French farce about Milord Bobbie in the British Lady’s Magazine (1815) were not, a er all, major corruptions of literary history, though the former has come home to haunt puppet-show scholars. But the verses by ‘Th. Ch.’ constitute a more serious offence, perhaps John Payne Collier’s first venture into literary fabrication—not forgery, for there is no reason to think he bothered to write out the lines ‘in a hand writing obviously of the date when the book was printed’. That he knew what he was doing in May 1816 (aged twenty-seven) is quite clear; that he appreciated something of the risk he was taking may also be inferred from the absence of his signature at the foot of this instalment. It can hardly be accidental that while numbers 1 and 3–5 of ‘Bibliotheca Antiqua’ are initialled ‘C. P. I.’ or ‘C. P. J.’, and 6–16 are signed ‘J. P. C.’, only no. 2, on Churchyard, bears no subscription. In the event of an outsider’s inquiry, one supposes, the legally trained young hoaxer could disown the one essay of sixteen that lied. Did anyone but John himself know what was afoot, or did anyone care? With no clear history of deceit immediately either side of the Churchyard concoction it is hard to imagine solemn concern from a fraternity of reporters, although Crabb Robinson no doubt would have regarded such a prank as ‘too clever’. And, had Robinson known, we should probably have heard of it. But John Dyer Collier, who had been sacked from the Chronicle six months earlier, a er being victimized by an unspecified ‘hoax’, must have been in a position to ask, if he wondered at all, what the truth was about any such ‘discovery’. In old age John Payne remembered John Dyer as ‘upright as an arrow & as honest as daylight’, a man who could hardly have condoned even a literary imposture. It is a biographical commonplace that one forger younger than John, William Henry Ireland, was inspired by a motive of impressing or duping his father, and John Payne’s tacit rivalry with John Dyer might alert us to the same kind of motive. But we are very short on hard evidence here, and it may be better to remember than John Payne desired nothing more than to be ‘no very contemptible


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poet’ himself. If John Dyer even read his son’s work with interest, we cannot now know.

Marriage The death of old John Collier early in 1816 had le John Dyer and Jane with some ready money, but John Payne with only expectations: on his grandmother’s death, as the first-born grandson, he would inherit a fulling-mill at Witney worth about £800.108 Nevertheless he ‘lightened his purse’ at the Gordon of Gordonstoun book-sale in March, and in August he committed the extravagance of marrying Mary Louisa Pycro of Putney, his mother’s first cousin. John had known Mary Louisa since at least January 1813, when Robinson mentions a ‘Miss Pycro ’ among a theatre party, with Jane Collier, John Payne, and Robinson’s young nephew Tom. By January 1814 he seems to have regarded himself as engaged, if an allusion to the relief felt by ‘my dear intended’ at his safe passage from Holland is precise (JPC Memoirs, p. 93); and we have noticed a poem by John in the British Lady’s Magazine (April 1815) ‘humbly inscribed to M. L. P , of P ’ (B22). In his memoirs John spoke of courting Mary Louisa by water in 1815, rowing up the Thames in ‘my boat’, which he kept moored at Westminster Bridge: ‘she lived at Putney, in a good house, with large garden, stabling, &c.’ Still, it is curious that Robinson never mentions Mary Louisa again before hearing from Jane ‘that on the [date le blank] John P: Collier was married to his cousin Mary Pyecro ’ (HCR Diary, 24 August 1816). The couple wed at St. Mary’s, Putney, on 20 August 1816, the Rev. Richard Sandilands presiding, and all four of the witnesses were from the Pycro household.109 At twenty-nine, Mary Louisa was two years older than John, but the youngest of twelve children (five living, in 1817) of Frances London and a once prosperous Whitechapel sugar refiner, William Pycro . William had died in 1806, worth about £20,000, but his estate was stretched thin among widow and children, for in 1817 none of Mary’s three elder sisters, aged thirty-three, forty-three, and forty-nine, was married, or would be.110 Captain Charles Pycro (1779–1854),

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108. John Collier le the ‘estate called Witney Mill in the County of Oxford unto my eldest grandson’; John Payne sold it in 1831 for £800 (Jane Payne Collier to HCR, 23 September 1831, HCR Correspondence). 109. The group consisted of Mary Louisa’s brother Charles, her sisters Emma and Harriet, and Emily Caroline Phillips, a relation of Frances who lived with the Pycros and would in 1829 marry John Payne’s youngest brother, William. 110. They are named in Frances Pycro’s will, written 20 January 1817 and proved 5 June 1820; PRO PROB 11/1631. Mary Louisa was born 13 September 1787; her mother was the older sister of Jane Payne Collier’s mother, Jane London Payne.


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Mary’s only surviving brother, had worked for The Times, had reported from Gallicia with Crabb Robinson in 1809, and had escaped with Robinson a er Corunna without ‘anything but the clothes they wore’ (OMD, iv:38). He could take care of himself, and the mother and unmarried sisters were housed and provided for, but Mary Louisa’s independent fortune in 1816 brought her no more than £100 per annum, and Frances Pycro could not or did not provide an additional dowry.111 Robinson of course worried about everything, gloomily remarking in his diary on 24 August that ‘this is not a splendid marriage. M:P: is not handsome [and] her fortune is but small’. ‘But on the other hand’, he conceded, ‘she has the character of a sensible prudent woman & I believe this praise she does deserve—John is doing a bold act in marrying with prospects of affluence so little chearing.’ John himself many years later confirmed one of Robinson’s somewhat churlish opinions: ‘my wife, though a very charming, well educated, and accomplished woman, is not a beauty’ (OMD, ii:91). Yet he hastened to add that ‘she is a great deal better [than ‘a beauty’]’, and elsewhere described her with uncondescending respect: ‘She had been well-educated & was excellently accomplished—a good musician with some skill in drawing & sketching, besides being mistress of four languages—English, French, Italian and German: in the last’— selfish credit, perhaps—‘she was of essential use to me’ (JPC Diary, 2 November 1873). There is never a harsh word in Collier’s diaries, memoirs, or letters about Mary Louisa herself, nor any hint by Robinson or anyone else of marital discord. Six children were born in eleven years, although John subsequently developed some intransigent attitudes towards sex, and Mary Louisa’s painful death from cancer in 1857 le him heartbroken.112 But Robinson’s fears about fortune, the blasted ‘prospects of affluence’ and the ‘bold’ (i.e., foolhardy) step of commitment to breed, instead of feathering a nest first, also materialized remorselessly,

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111. Robinson’s diary note of 24 August 1816 gives the figure £100; on 1 November 1823, however, Robinson noted that John Payne had only £60 per annum from his wife’s income. In his 1879 Memoirs (p. 96) Collier noted that Frances ‘had given me no fortune with my wife who had property of her own consisting mainly of productive shares in the Pelican Life Office and a freehold at Edmonton’; three years earlier he had estimated his income from the shares as £120 (JPC Diary, 8 May 1876). 112. Late in life Collier developed an obsession with the idea that many men (he named Charles Dickens, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, and Frederic Ouvry) died as a result of sexual activity: ‘Let no man look at a woman aer he is 60: that is the very utmost limit. ?50, perhaps’ (JPC Diary, 2 July 1879). He himself, he claimed at age 92, ‘never touched my wife aer I was 45 or thereabouts’ (28 May 1881). Other diary entries suggest sexual qualms at an earlier age: ‘My dear little delicate Wife used to exclaim ‘‘What nasty creatures women are’’ and it is true . . . I shall never forget how shocked & disgusted I was when first I became acquainted with the nastyness of women, accidentally, as nearly as possible 80 years ago. What I thought then, I think still’ (28 December 1880).


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and Collier’s late reflections on the consequences of his choice make bitter reading. ‘As a Bachelor’, he wrote of the detested Lord Campbell, ‘he could escape from reporting when he was called to the Bar, which I never could do, as I had foolishly married; and I married the best of wives, altho’ it kept me poor, and I never could escape from my connexion with the d d Newspapers’ (Diary, 17 July 1881); and ‘My great error was marrying before I could earn [from] the Bar enough to keep a family. This has kept me an ‘‘underling’’ ’ (7 October 1881). Let us however set these regrets against Collier’s lighter memories of marriage— his relaxed life in the 1820s, his ‘sweet little wife’, and his fond children—and remember, if only to balance the accounts, that Henry Crabb Robinson feathered his own nest for three decades, toward no similar use. John and Mary Louisa honeymooned six weeks in France, taking along with them one of her unmarried sisters, undoubtedly Emma, aged thirty-three. They saw Versailles and Fontainbleau, and at Paris ‘there was no theatre worth going to that we did not visit, and no place of amusement that ladies could with any propriety go into that we did not see’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 106). A er Paris they stopped briefly with Mary Louisa’s relations in Boulogne, and returned to their new home in Vincent Square, Pimlico, to find all their movable belongings stolen and pawned by the housekeeper. Soon they were settled well in, however, and on 3 November Robinson thought ‘the house . . . tho’ small, genteel in its appearance, and the air of comfort about it, and the respectability of the situation of married man etc., made [John] appear enviable’ (HCR Diary). John would never have expected it in 1816, but his honeymoon tour proved his own last foreign jaunt: the next sixty-seven years of his life passed no farther from London than Brighton and the Isle of Wight to the south, Exeter and Plymouth to the west, and Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, to the north.

Breadwinner, 1817–20

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Even before visiting the newlyweds in early November 1816, Robinson had drawn up an estimate of their financial resources: Mary Louisa had but £100 per annum (Robinson would later reduce this figure to £60), and between his salary as a reporter, the Collier family newsletters, and by ‘literature’—that is, ‘writing reviews &c. and by shorthand writing occasionally’—John might add nearly £400, but no more. The hard work for the Critical Review ‘will not add to the family income’, Robinson feared, and altogether ‘I do not suppose [John] can muster up even 5 hundred a year’ (HCR Diary, 24 August 1816). Nor was Robinson averse to sharing his misgivings with Mary Louisa, whom he attended alone for the first time on 27 November, and ‘chatted for some time with her on family affairs. I gave my opinion freely that I do not think the Critical Review


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can possibly succeed’. At the heart of his worries was John’s easygoing pursuit of a respectable career, and in particular his diffidence, six years now in evidence, toward the law. ‘He has talents’, wrote Robinson primly, ‘& if he had more ambition & less vanity he might succeed at the bar’. But John Payne had long balked at legal training and discipline, despite Robinson’s prodding. It was in March 1811 that Robinson had decided to give up newspaper-work for the law, and in July of that year he had certified John as ‘a Gentleman of Respectability’ at the Middle Temple for the same course of study. But while Robinson took his seat at the bar in May 1813, John dawdled unenthusiastically over his Blackstone and made little headway. Later he maintained that his new marital responsibilities impeded his qualification, ‘because I could not then afford to relinquish my connexion with newspapers’. Newspapermen were then mercilessly snubbed by the legal profession,113 and a clean break from reporting seemed necessary for any serious hope of legal preferment. Robinson had made his in 1811, but John would not, or could not: ‘I much wished to put on my wig and gown, but I could not afford to live without the income derived from newspapers’, he claimed (JPC Memoirs, p. 96), blaming domestic circumstances again. But little evidence suggests any sustained effort on Collier’s part to make good as a lawyer, and in 1818–19, perhaps out of impatience, he virtually put paid to his prospects with a journalistic coup de scandale. Ten years later he would finally be called to the bar, but by then, Robinson knew, ‘he will never have the perseverance necessary to success and he has no connections to give him business of favour’ (HCR Diary, 26 November 1828). If not to the practice of law, might John adapt himself to a less insouciant journalistic career? ‘I wish sincerely’, wrote Robinson on 23 December 1817, ‘that J. C. would either study the law earnestly or endeavour to gain [John Walter II’s] favour if he means to continue all his life connected with newspapers.’ Walter had been grumbling about his wayward young star’s extra-reportorial activities, even to his taking the house at 27 Vincent Square, a new development in what had been Tothill Fields, Pimlico. Only a week a er John’s wedding Walter complained to Robinson that Vincent Square was too far from the Times office, which Robinson thought unreasonable, for ‘C.’s occupation is definite and he is not liable to be called on at all times’. By ‘definite’ Robinson meant regular: John had negotiated a steady salary from Walter of six guineas a week year-round (HCR Diary, 5 February 1818), but with this stipendiary concession Walter seems

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113. JPC Memoirs, p. 96. See also Aspinall 1945: on 23 February 1810 the journalist George Farquharson petitioned the House of Commons to complain of an 1807 Lincoln’s Inn rule excluding those who wrote for newspapers from being called to the bar; in the course of discussion (23 March) Richard Brinsley Sheridan pointed out that eighteen of the ‘about 23’ then employed as parliamentary reporters were university-educated, and ‘most of them graduates’.


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to have thought himself entitled more exclusively to calls on John’s time. The Collier family newsletter business, always a sore spot with Walter, continued to irritate him: this now constituted for John Dyer his only real source of income, as it did for Richard, while William’s share supplemented the modest two and a half guineas a week that Walter paid him. But John Payne, who Robinson knew was ‘the principal person alone competent to write the letters’, was essential to the entire operation, which Walter in turn may have considered at odds with his own interests at The Times. Matters hardly were improved in late 1817 when John Dyer attempted to expand the family business, in some measure at Walter’s expense, while simultaneously preparing to retire to a farm;114 the last move would leave John Payne effectively responsible for four interdependent incomes.115 Walter took offence at John Dyer’s actions, Robinson wrote, ‘without any right to do so’, although one may sympathize with the proprietor’s frustration. ‘He was unreasonable enough to wish that [John and William] should in no way assist their father’, and even though ‘he seemed half ashamed of himself ’ Walter proposed to offer John compensation if he would give up his part in the enterprise. But Walter seems seriously to have underestimated its size (‘he speaks as if he thought he [John Dyer] had only 2 or 3 letters [i.e., subscribers]—I took care not to undeceive him’), and John Payne was in no position to comply. The dispute wound down for the moment to accusations of tardy copy and working-to-rule, which Robinson ‘excused only on the ground of [John’s] wife’s ill health’, but finally a new contract was necessary (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817). John sought a reduced but all-year-round weekly wage of five guineas (or 260 guineas per annum, equal to Watts’s pay at the Chronicle) for reporting Parliament, which normally sat about thirty weeks. Walter, who ‘says he allows no man such a salary’, countered with an offer based on the length of each session, with a weekly half-guinea rise for poor William thrown in, and in August 1818 they settled at 200 guineas for John’s parliamentary assignment alone (HCR Diary, 4 August 1818). Walter had

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114. James Lawson, the Times printer, died aged fiy on 7 December 1817, and the paper reported that ‘his eldest son will succeed him in the management of his various concerns’, one of which was a newsletter business similar to the Colliers’. At once John Dyer ‘wrote letters to L.’s Correspondents stating that L.’s son was not old enough to continue the correspondence, and mentioning the assistance he had from his three sons’; Walter himself, however, had meanwhile ‘taken [young Lawson’s letters] under his management’ (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817). 115. On his return to farming John Dyer proposed that thirty-two equal shares of net income be divided nine each to John Dyer and John Payne, ten to Richard, and four to William, who by now had a small salary from Walter. Richard sought twelve shares instead, or three-eighths, with John Dyer and John Payne on eight each, which John Dyer refused to grant; they apparently settled on a simpler arrangement, based on expectations of about £600 in all, namely £200 net for Richard, £100 for William, and the remainder to be divided between John Payne and John Dyer (HCR Diary, 2 June 1818).


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had much of his own way (John ‘has to give up part of his salary to Walter in order to be able to write the letters’, Robinson summed up), yet the two went on haggling for months about quarterly instalments, payment on account, and even a Christmas advance. By late 1818 John’s combined income from the Times and the newsletters was no more than it had been in 1816, and he gave way on Vincent Square too, taking a ‘comfortable . . . tho’ small & dark’ house in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street (HCR Diary, 14 October 1818). The first year of John’s marriage saw the expiry of the Critical Review, which, as Robinson had predicted, had contributed little to the young couple’s earnings. Its last number (June) followed close on the birth of their first child, Mary Frances, at Vincent Square, on 27 May 1817. John may have been for the first time in his life in some debt, from the honeymoon, the depredations of the faithless housekeeper, and extravagances like a piano for Mary Louisa and his own rariora.116 In the next eighteen months, therefore, he sought outside work with at least four periodicals: Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, Colburn and Shoberl’s New Monthly Magazine, and Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts. His contact for the last two was an old family friend, Frederic Shoberl. Shoberl (1775–1853), the miscellaneous writer, translator, printer, and publisher, always inspired John’s affectionate memories. He had been ‘very kind & useful to my father, when he wanted help—even pecuniary’ and had introduced John Dyer to the Wyatt brothers and later John Payne to Colburn and Ackermann; when a boy (about 1805–06, he wrote elsewhere) John Payne ‘was taught something of German’ by Shoberl, ‘and I should have learned a good deal more, if I had been as industrious as my master . . . was painstaking and capable’.117 Crabb Robinson, who knew Shoberl through the Colliers, recalled his humble beginnings as a porter for Longmans who married the family cook, ‘and having worked his shoulders long enough, thought he could transfer the labour to his brains’; but he was ever ‘a very worthy man’, and when in April 1818 a partnership had been mooted between Shoberl and John Dyer to operate the Cornwall Gazette, a conservative newspaper issued at Truro, Robinson thought it a much better plan for John Dyer than farming again. But this project fell through, and Shoberl in June le London for Truro to edit and publish the Gazette by himself.118

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116. The piano was purchased from James Kenney, who on 25 May 1818 wrote from Paris asking for payment of the balance (Folger MS Y.d.341 [94]). Collier later recalled of this period that ‘I found myself a little short of money’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 114). 117. JPC Diary, 27 and 30 January 1881; OMD, ii:10. 118. Robinson’s portrait of Shoberl, written in 1848, is in his Reminiscences, i:350. He suspected that an agreement concerning the Gazette could not be reached because John Dyer wished too great a share in the profits; HCR Diary, 22 April 1818.


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Before departing, however, Shoberl troubled himself considerably on John Payne’s behalf. He recommended the younger man to Henry Colburn, who had co-founded with him the New Monthly Magazine, and he arranged for John to take over his own editorial duties on Rudolph Ackermann’s colour-plate monthly, the Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, &c. Little came of the first introduction: as Collier wrote to his friend on 10 August, Colburn ‘talked to me one day [in June] somewhat definitely, but a erwards it dropped away. The next month he sent for me & offered to let me do the Provincial Intelligence, which of course I would not undertake, indeed I could not have done it if I would, for I get no country papers’.119 One review by ‘J. P. C.’ found its way into the NMM, however, ‘On the Poems of Richard Lovelace’ (September 1818, but dated 8 June). This brief notice corrected some ‘deficiencies’ in the recent edition of Lovelace by S. W. Singer, whose Playing Cards had been flayed in the Critical Review: John was spoiling, one must think, for a literary vendetta, or at least tempting reprisal.120 The Repository assignment went well from the outset, Collier rather highhandedly finding ‘the subject of the fine arts . . . much neglected & very injudiciously, & this is a matter I am striving to remedy’—although ‘any hints from your experience’ (of nine years, in fact) would be helpful. ‘The Printer (Harrison) and I go on very smoothly at present & I do not see any reason why any roughnesses should occur. As for Ackermann I have not had a glimpse of him since you le town . . . I believe however that he will not be dissatisfied with what I have done.’ Collier’s gratitude, at the close of this letter—the earliest by Collier we know—seems unfeigned: ‘I assure you, Shoberl, I am very much obliged by the interest you took in my concerns, & the pains you took to forward them’. Shoberl remained in Truro for seventeen months, during which time John Payne may have edited the Repository single-handed for Ackermann,121 while reporting Parliament for John Walter II and managing the newsletters a er John Dyer’s move to his farm (mid-1818). To the Repository he also contributed several essays under more than one pseudonym in 1818–19, and others in 1820–21, a er Shoberl had resumed his old office. These were for the most part sketchy and brief, lightly annotated extracts from old popular literature, sometimes no more than reprints of selected extracts already made by Egerton

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119. JPC to Shoberl, 10 August 1818, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (176). 120. Many years later Collier mentioned Singer’s edition to W. C. Hazlitt: ‘Ritson is accuracy itself compared with Singer. I have followed the latter through many of his editorial attempts & always found him miserably careless. I, too, collated his ‘‘Lovelace’’, and never trust him for a single line’; 24 September 1863, BL Add. MS 38,898, fols. 220–21. 121. The magazine’s ‘notes to contributors’ during this period include several messages to ‘Antiquarius’, who was certainly Collier, but these may be nothing more than an attempt to inflate the list of correspondents.


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Brydges in Restituta.122 As ‘Antiquarius’ Collier provided four slight retrospective articles in 1818–19: on costume in the reign of Elizabeth (‘I happened the other day at the British Museum to be turning over a collection of old public documents’); on a ‘perfect Blue Beard’ of Prague, who murdered eighteen wives by witchcra ;123 on the celebrated hog-faced lady, Tannakin Skinker; and on ‘Early Travels in France’. The last piece consists of extracts from Dallington’s A Method for Travel, simply copied from Collier’s longer essay in the Critical Review for November 1816.124 Similarly, as ‘P’s & Q’s’ the stand-in editor recycled his jeu d’esprit in the British Lady’s Magazine for July 1815 as ‘Remonstrance against Large Bonnets’ (November 1819), while as ‘L. W.’, a er Shoberl’s return, he would adapt another 1815 BLM piece as ‘St. Valentine’s Day’. Other unsigned contributions may be Collier’s too, but he prudently refrained from publishing his own verse: those of his poems signed ‘Humphrey Gubbins’ that appear in the Repository all date from 1821, when Frederic Shoberl was back in the chair.

Criticisms on the Bar The Repository piece-work may be trivial, but it was innocuous and it paid. Necessity, however, proved the mother of some less auspicious invention by Collier in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, 1818–19. This project of twenty periodical essays, which John later called ‘foolish, flippant, and fatal to my prospects, if I ever had any’,125 originated in his law-court reporting for Walter, Perry, and Bartholoman of York, and along with his stigmatized newspaper activities, blighted (he thought) his intended legal career. ‘For a few guineas weekly’ Collier engaged to supply Hunt’s liberal but muck-raking journal with profiles of thirty celebrated barristers, describing their mannerisms, appearance, and personality

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122. The latter are principally the nine pieces signed ‘D. Wr’, appearing between August 1818 and June 1821, which have so little original matter in them that attribution is undemonstrable (Bibliography, page 1398). But they coincide with Collier’s other contributions and mirror his ‘touchstones’: James Howell (3), Thomas Heywood (2), Anthony Munday, et al. 123. This five-column account, with extracts—supposedly based on ‘a curious old pamphlet’ of 1622, A Discourse of News from Prague in Bohemia—is certainly a fabrication: no such title is known (nor are the ‘French and German copies’ it is said to follow), nor is the case elsewhere recorded. 124. Collier’s own file copy of this is marked up passage by passage as setting-copy for the 1819 version. 125. As he wrote on the flyleaf of his own copy. Collier’s son, John Pycro, copied this and two other comments by his father into a second copy of the book (FF); one, dated 1860, reads: ‘J. Payne Collier is very sorry that he ever wrote this poor book: it has stood in my way ever since. It would not be forgiven, and I do not wonder.’ In yet another copy presented to Frederic Ouvry, Collier remarked that the book proved ‘to have always been a Bar to my progress in the [legal] profession’ (Ouvry sale, lot 313; FF).


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as well as their eloquence, examining techniques, and the success rate of their causes. These appeared as ‘Criticisms on the Bar’ over the pseudonym ‘Amicus Curiae’ between 27 July 1818 and 3 January 1819, and were collected in one stout duodecimo volume published by Simpkin and Marshall in 1819. Clearly they were inspired by the ‘Parliamentary Portraits’ of Thomas Barnes, writing as ‘Criticus’ in the same organ four years before, or at long range by Barron Field’s ‘The Law Student’ in Hunt’s Reflector, 1810–11. But the true carrot was money, as Collier claimed: ‘I was tempted beyond bearing to put my pen to paper in that way for the sake of earning a few guineas weekly. I never regretted it but once’, he told J. W. Ebsworth in 1875, ‘and that has been, as they say, ever since.’ 126 The pay was finally not insubstantial, or so Collier says: £100 for the series, and a further £100 from the book, its text slightly augmented.127 Why such casual if mildly supercilious essays caused so much trouble—when Barnes’s similarly provocative ‘sketches of the public character of some of the most distinguished speakers in the House of Commons’ scarcely impeded his rise at The Times—Crabb Robinson, once again, may explain. Reading in October 1818 ‘a large number of Examiners, chiefly for the sake of John Collier’s criticisms on the Bar’, Robinson was unequivocally severe: ‘These did not by any means please me—not that the criticisms were on the whole ill done, but that the thing itself ought not to have been done at all. It seems an impertinent intrusion of public censure where there is no right whatever to play the part of a critic. Actors, public performers of every kind & authors, invite criticism . . . but the Barrister, tho’ he acts before the public, does not act for the public, and it is scandalous to bring forward the infirmities of body & mind to amuse an idle & malignant public’ (HCR Diary, 17 October). Of course Robinson reacted like the lawyer he was, subject to the same intrusive impertinence; John himself never regarded his ‘criticisms’ as personally scurrilous. ‘To be merely a Reporter’, he acknowledged, ‘was enough against me [in the Law], but to criticize the leaders of the profession I was just entering was absurd and injudicious almost beyond possibility’ (JPC Diary, 10 July 1881). Still he went on to perpetuate the ephemeral series as a book, albeit with some details so ened or cut,128 and he remembered the result as ‘liked by most people’ and met by ‘a considerable sale’. ‘I was wrong in ever consenting to write the essays’, he conceded at last—though politically and practically, not morally or artistically wrong, he implied—and he

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126. 8 September 1875, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (37). 127. JPC Memoirs, p. 114, probably a considerable exaggeration. 128. For example, a comment on James Topping (‘his mental as well as his bodily vigour are impaired’) is deleted in the book version. However, no changes were made to the portrait of Sir John Gurney, which Robinson found ‘particularly offensive, and also unjust’, and there is an added slur on the personal appearance of Charles Wetherell (p. 235).


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reserved his deepest regret for the betrayal of his prized anonymity. ‘Upon the title-pages of some copies . . . my name was surreptitiously inserted’, and ‘the addition of my name was calculated to do me harm’.129 The recklessness of this episode, which Collier persistently attributed to ‘want of judgement . . . the great deficiency of my life’ (JPC Diary, 10 July 1881), may remind us more forcefully of other ad hominem gestures in print by the young antiquarian critic. John had by now twice baited Singer, dismissed Dibdin and by implication all ‘black-letter’ bibliophiles, and condescended to the late, revered Edmond Malone; in 1818–20 he would add George Steevens, Isaac Reed, Edward Capell, Richard Farmer, Richard Hurd, George Chalmers, Dr. Johnson, Thomas Warton, Thomas Campbell, and August Schlegel to his blacklist of faint praise or censure, with scarcely a scholar or critic in his field to prefer as a worthy ally. Mercifully for him there seems to be no evidence of retaliation by the law-court grandees he had chosen to spite; nor, for that matter, is there much record of reward from those he had praised.130 Collier’s favourites included Sir Samuel Romilly, Serjeant William Draper Best, Henry Peter Brougham (later Lord Chancellor), Thomas Denman (later Lord Chief Justice), John Lens, and Charles Warren. Best (1767–1845, later Baron Wynford) was ‘one of the principal ornaments of this court [of Common Pleas]’, whose ‘qualifications as an advocate before a jury . . . are probably more eminent than those of any other man now practicing in Westminster-hall’. He ‘possesses perspicuity and acuteness, if it do not amount to subtlety’—Collier was never given to unqualified praise—‘in a very striking degree’, he was a forcible and energetic speaker (yet not always ‘fluent’), and his ‘action’ (i.e., rhetorical gesturing) was ‘varied without pretence’ (although ‘perhaps he uses his right hand too much—or . . . his le hand too little’). As ‘a man of considerable gallantry’ Best ‘always seems to treat the so er sex [as witnesses] with peculiar lenity’, but this was ‘an error on the right side’, as ‘great consideration is undoubtedly due to a female in such an unwonted situation’, and ‘it much too frequently happens, that witnesses of this sex are treated with needless rudeness, if not with wanton coarseness’. These are among Collier’s principal criteria in Criticisms on the Bar: eloquence or the lack of it in court, learning, fairness, civility and quick-wittedness, and a record of victory (‘let him be assisted by a junior council, who can answer

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129. OMD, iv:95. We have not found this in type, but we have in contemporary MS (FF), and a remainder issue of 1839 was advertised by J. Templeman as by ‘J. P. Collier, Barrister at Law’. Collier further remarked that ‘aer I had been called to the Bar of the Middle Temple [in 1829] it was oen thrown in my teeth’; JPC Memoirs, p. 116. 130. More than thirty years later Collier successfully asked Lord Brougham to support his application for a government pension; JPC to Brougham, 7 and 9 June 1850, UCL Brougham Papers MSS 726 and 709.


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formal objections, and success is very possible in a bad, but almost certain in a good cause’). Best’s ‘talents and his prudence’ won John’s admiration, not ‘his general information regarding literature, the arts, and matters of taste’, which was no better than ‘instinctive’, nor ‘his political conduct and opinions’, with which ‘I have nothing to do, and I am glad of it’. Serjeant Lens, the celebrated political independent, impressed Collier above all with his propriety of deportment and speech (‘a vulgarism seldom or never escapes his lips . . . and his sentences are usually full and complete’), his mild manner, unquestioned learning, straightforwardness, and dedication to the cause at hand. Unlike many successful advocates, he behaved ‘with equal respect towards his inferiors, his equals, and his superiors’, no doubt a trait particularly attractive to the thin-skinned reporter. Sir Samuel Romilly (1757–1818) was already and untimely dead when Collier’s estimate of him appeared, but ‘the benignity of his nature’, his clearheadedness, sincerity, and the ‘nervous and forcible eloquence, in which he has never been exceeded, I doubt if ever equalled, by any lawyer in any age’, led Collier to unabashed eulogy; he had himself hoped to edit Romilly’s speeches in Parliament ‘with a selection of those delivered in his professional capacity’, but ‘was discouraged by the little interest that seemed to be taken by the public . . . a er his decease’. Brougham (1778–1868), another M.P. with ongoing business in the lawcourts, was well enough known to require only a perfunctory character, but his formidable ‘intellect . . . industry . . . acuteness and judgement’ earned Collier’s respect, if Brougham’s oratory did not: ‘his voice and manner are not the happiest: the first . . . o en very impoliticly commences in so high a key, that he is exhausted before he arrives at his conclusion’. The account of Thomas Denman, which first appeared in the book version of Criticisms, allowed Collier to recall ‘the difference in the behaviour of the English and Irish students when dining in the hall of the Middle Temple’, and to admire ‘the warmth of feeling and generosity of disposition’ of the latter, while disapproving their ‘flippant flourishes’ and ‘unrestrained self-confidence’. Denman’s learning and delivery elicited Collier’s hearty approval: he was ‘much better than a mere lawyer’. Among those to whom Collier awarded mixed reviews were James Scarlett, later Baron Abinger, whom he had encountered seven years before, at York (ingenious if abrupt, unpretentious but well-educated—‘false quantities . . . are never heard from him’); the Attorney General Sir Samuel Shepherd (he was hard-of-hearing, took too much snuff, and while candid, fair, and ‘a gentleman’, lost too many cases); the solicitor general Sir Robert Gifford; Sergeant Copley (Baron Lyndhurst, the son of the painter: an ‘ambitionist’); and John Gurney (‘a tolerable criminal Lawyer, and nothing more’). Sir John Vaughan employed language ‘the coarsest and most vulgar’, with ‘a share of low humour’; the popu-


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lar Oxford circuit-court barrister Philip Dauncey had quickness and cunning, but was ‘little more than a mere talker’; on the northern circuit—York again— Jonathan Raine was the best man for a horse cause or one of shipping insurance (he is ‘up to the tricks of the trade’) but was roughly spoken and addicted to puns. Sir John Bosanquet had good family connections but ‘no commanding talent’, and would make a good judge; Sir John Richardson was learned and experienced, but ‘his voice and manner are both unfortunate—the one is asthmatic, and the other spasmodic’, and like Raine he indulged in ‘bad puns and coarse jokes’. Collier’s targets for all-out dispraise number at least six. Sir Arthur Piggot, the former Attorney General, died in September 1819, a year a er Collier described him as illogical, phlegmatic, repetitive, and trifling. ‘I do not know any man who practises in the same Court [of Chancery], who has less pretensions to any thing approaching the ornaments of rhetoric’, John declared, and as for ‘action’, ‘he looks more like an automaton than a living creature, and never directs his eyes toward the individual he is addressing’. No better was Samuel Marryat, ‘one of the most clumsy, negligent speakers that ever opened his lips’; he was zealous but obtuse, physically repulsive, and ‘of wit or humour . . . has not a particle’. About languages other than English ‘he seems to know nothing, and to care less: in the true spirit of John Bull, he apparently despises all foreigners but those that happen to be his clients’. Other barristers were ‘unintelligible’ (William Harrison, K.C.), ‘destitute of sound judgement’ (William Wingfield, K.C.), ungentlemanly, vulgar, and given to intimidating witnesses (James Topping, K.C.), while Charles Wetherell (K.C., knighted 1824) was insufferably long-winded, tedious, illogical, ostentatious, and vain. We hear in passing of ‘the laborious and mindless Sugden and Preston’, characters to which one nineteenth-century annotator took violent exception,131 and of one ‘Mr. Peel, a young man of overrated abilities, who will never do better than he has done, nor attain a higher rank than that of a debater’ (p. 172). The last imprescient sneer Collier must have particularly regretted, as in the 1830s he would seek Robert Peel’s patronage, without tangible success. But injudicious, harsh, and condescending as many of the Criticisms are, the book is not all caricature, nor worthless as social or political commentary. Collier’s well-turned general reflections on the decline of courtroom oratory, on the high cost both to the government and to private litigants of long prosecutions, and on the treatment of witnesses by barristers possessed value in their own time, and his account of prevailing courtroom procedures, as well as the inti-

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131. ‘Of all men, Sugden (aerwards Ld. St. Leonard) least deserved this epithet which shows too plainly the incompetency of Mr Collier to judge by any other test that than of success’; note in FF copy 2, p. 102.


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mate biographical data in each sketch, are of independent interest to students today. How damaging the publication really was to the ambivalent careerist— who seems to have blamed his failure in the law upon everything but his own efforts—we cannot be sure: Barron Field, a er all, survived a no less impertinent breach of decorum as ‘the Law Student’ of Leigh Hunt’s Reflector in 1810–11. And the anonymity that John claimed was broached by unscrupulous enemies could have been more cautiously guarded, had he cared to do so: who else, a contemporary might ask, would lace modern law-court vignettes with quotations from Marlowe, Webster, and Chapman among dramatists, Churchyard, Surrey, Spenser, Hall, Wither, and Donne among poets, and Feltham, Nashe, Browne, and even Anthony Stafford’s Niobe among essayists of the pre-Restoration? The signposts were there, and writ large, even to the epigraph that Collier supplied for his 1819 title-page: ‘‘‘I have done in this nothing unworthy of an honest life and studies well employed’’.—Milton, Preface to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.’

The Edinburgh Magazine John’s final periodical project in 1818 involved Archibald Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, an old monthly journal (the Scots Magazine) newly renamed—not to be confused with Constable’s more famous quarterly Edinburgh Review, nor with the Edinburgh Monthly Review (1819–23), nor with Blackwood’s rival Edinburgh Magazine, known as Blackwood’s. Its antiquarian bent and what Blackwood’s regarded as its ‘dullness’ may have derived from its original co-editor, the Register Office copyist Thomas Pringle, who went on to emigrate and become the first ‘South African’ poet writing in English; its budget for original contributions was punitive, and save for Hazlitt, who from Constable’s pages could growl back at Blackwood’s, few distinguished writers are found here.132 Collier told Shoberl on 10 August of his engagement (‘I have . . . had an offer from one of the Edinburgh Magazines which is advantageous and respectable’), and between December 1818 and December 1819 he supplied six articles ‘On the English Dramatic Writers Who Preceded Shakespeare’, with three more, concluding the series, between June 1820 and February 1821.133 These were once again ‘retrospective’ essays, devoted to reviving sixteenth-century plays that Shakespeare’s had eclipsed, and while they embody significant revaluations—

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132. Barbara J. Dunlop in Sullivan 1983, pp. 133–37, notes that in 1819 only £15 was budgeted for all the contributions to each quarter’s three issues. 133. JPC to Shoberl, 10 August 1818. See Wellens 1993, but in fact there are only nine articles by Collier, not ten (cancel that for February 1821), and the letter cited in Wellens’s note 9 refers to copies of Collier’s Poet’s Pilgrimage, not to periodical contributions.


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hardly at Shakespeare’s expense—they come with claims and counter-claims against earlier critics that border on the shrill. Collier later described the articles as ‘impertinent and self-sufficient’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 122), and the roll-call of his victims is impressive, if ominous: Malone was again patronized as ‘selfconceited’ and ‘one whose chief, if not only, merit is to discover facts’; Bishop Hurd and Richard Farmer were among ‘ridiculous’ commentators; and the now-fashionable August Schlegel, whom Robinson admired, ‘knew nothing of any body but Shakespeare . . . in other words, he was totally ignorant of the production of any of his contemporaries’, and this want of knowledge led him into ‘gross errors’, like many before him. And the great Thomas Warton, while ‘almost the only man . . . who joins a correct and delicate taste to a profound knowledge, and as deep a love of his subject’, nonetheless seemed ‘to speak as if no author had preceded Shakespeare who had written a play upon a similar system’. As if swatting flies Collier proceeded to patronize Samuel Johnson’s iconic Prefaces to Shakespeare, citing as its ‘only really good part’ its ‘justification, upon principle’, of the old English playwrights’ flight from the unities.134 As for the plays and playwrights under consideration, Collier gave short shri to the early mysteries, moralities, and interludes, concentrating instead upon Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Edward II ), Greene ( James IV ), and Peele (Edward I ), the ‘classical’ Misfortunes of Arthur, and the problematic Taming of a Shrew. But anyone who dismissed Malone’s chronological scholarship did so at his own risk, and one essay found John confidently misrepresenting Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a source, not an echo of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V. Another, on The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (1595), presented the vexed ‘bad quarto’ of 3 Henry VI as a work indubitably by Marlowe—a speculation in fact introduced by Farmer and Malone, though Collier credited only George Chalmers—and treated it as Shakespeare’s inspiration.135 William Godwin read this provocative argument (December 1818), decoded the initials, and on 7 February 1819 wrote to Collier enquiring where Chalmers’s argument had appeared, and ‘whether Christopher Marlow’s name appears at full length in the title-page to the said play’. It does not, needless to say. Nor does Collier’s reaction sur-

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134. Edinburgh Magazine, December 1818, p. 527 (Malone, Warton, and Johnson); February 1819, p. 127 (Schlegel and Malone); April 1819, p. 350 (Hurd and Farmer). 135. Although aware only of the 1600 and 1619 reprints of the True Tragedy, Malone by 1790 was persuaded (at the suggestion of Richard Farmer) that it was the work of Christopher Marlowe, and that Shakespeare had earlier adapted it (Shakespeare [1790], i:280; cf. Boswell-Malone, ii:313 ff.). In 1799 George Chalmers first described his own unique quarto of 1595 (A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers, pp. 292–300) and further endorsed the Farmer-Malone hypothesis. Collier misleadingly implied that Chalmers had revealed a new text, not merely a new edition, and that Malone, Steevens, et al. knew of neither, much less of Marlowe’s ‘authorship’.


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vive, but Godwin called on him in Bouverie Street three times in the next six weeks, and when, later on in the series, Collier acknowledged the recent edition of Marlowe by Godwin’s friend James Broughton, he did not reiterate his—or Chalmers’s—misattribution.136 Like his father’s since 1806, John Payne’s household was from the start an extended and busy one. Emma Pycro , who had accompanied the couple on their honeymoon, moved into 27 Vincent Square on their return, and apparently remained en famille without intermission over the next forty years. Children materialized in short order: the birth of Mary Frances Collier, nine months a er the wedding, preceded that of the first son, John Pycro , by less than two years (22 April 1819), and that of William Proctor by four (8 May 1821). Mary Louisa meanwhile suffered from ill health, wrote Robinson (HCR Diary, 22 December 1817), and her husband had long been subject to bouts of quinsy, perhaps a complication of childhood tonsillitis; Jane once told Robinson that she had kept John, when young, in flannel waistcoats ‘next his skin’ all winter long.137 The near-suburban atmosphere of west Pimlico may thus have suited the family, but not John Walter II, and their retreat to 3 Bouverie Street, a few doors from the highly trafficked Fleet Street, cannot have done them much good. Between addresses they rented a ‘pleasantly situated’ house for the summer in Windsor Street, Putney, near the Pycro s, where Robinson visited them in July 1818, going out on the river in Captain Pycro ’s boat.138 John seems always to have been happiest in riverside homes. By the late summer of 1818 John Dyer Collier had converted his father’s legacy into another dream of agricultural self-support, leasing a 300-acre farm, Smallfield Place, near East Grinstead, Surrey. Into this enterprise he drew Jane’s nephew, Robert Proctor, a twenty-year-old with an adventurous streak, who was now courting Mary, the second Collier sister, while his brother George courted the elder, Jane. George and Jane married on 2 September 1818, saving

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136. See Donald H. Reiman in Cameron et al., vi:770–72, publishing Godwin’s letter, with commentary. James Broughton, who had edited five plays by Marlowe in 1818, was probably the ‘impertinent friend’ who suggested Collier as the author of the Edinburgh article, and may have asked Godwin to investigate; see Seyler 1975 and Reiman 1976. In February 1821 Collier wrote that no more extracts from Marlowe were necessary, as ‘all the dramatic pieces attributed to Marlow have been reprinted, and . . . are thus easily accessible’; Edinburgh Magazine, p. 148. 137. HCR to Thomas Robinson, 15 January 1807, HCR Correspondence: ‘John had several years a long winter cough which made her & Mr C. very apprehensive of its affecting his lungs.’ 138. HCR Diary, 6 July 1818. In his letter to Shoberl of 10 August Collier said he had ‘removed my wife & family (how paternal & dignified) a little way out of town and . . . taken a furnished house until next quarter day [i.e., Michaelmas, 29 September] when it is probable that some other houses will be vacant’.


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her from a return to the farm,139 but Mary accompanied her father, mother, and suitor to Smallfield Place. Paterfamilias and prospective son-in-law soon fell out (they ‘agree so ill that in the nature of things they never can well agree’, Jane told Robinson; and although John Dyer worked hard the farm turned no profit, and Jane suffered from John Dyer’s temper.140 ‘She is the scapegoat to bear all’, Robinson wrote, ever partial, but he could not effect a division of the land between the quarrelling partners, and on 21 December 1820 Robert Proctor married his Polly and le Smallfield Place, John Dyer, and the increasingly ‘wretched’ Jane to themselves.141 He went briefly into the ‘stock broking’ business with the feckless Richard Collier,142 and in late 1822 set off with his bride and infant son on a financial mission to Peru. Robert and Mary Proctor and oneyear-old Robert crossed South America from Buenos Aires to Lima by horsecart and occasional ra , traversing the dangerous high passes of the Andes on mule-back, and spent the next year in and about Lima. On his return to England Proctor too joined the literati with a lively Narrative of a Journey across the Cordillera of the Andes, which John Payne helped him to publish. Richard Collier did not join his father’s farming household in summer 1818, having already le home to share quarters with his old chum Hatton Stansfeld (HCR Diary, 6 May 1818). Richard’s sole support now, save a little agency work at the Stock Exchange, was the newsletter business, from which he perhaps drew more than he deserved, and his situation was complicated by a secret marriage to his pregnant mistress in October 1820. William too, underpaid by but in thrall to The Times, needed somewhere to live, and may have moved in with John from mid-1818 onward. At least Robinson met him constantly in Bouverie Street in 1818–20, where they o en played chess, the game John had abandoned. And Robinson, once again, became ‘family’: on the rustication of John Dyer and Jane he arranged to take his meals out of term with John Payne in Bouverie Street, ‘as I did with his father. Tho’ I do not feel towards the young people as I did toward Mrs C., yet I have great comfort in being thus relieved from the necessity of providing for myself ’ (HCR Diary, 29 October 1818). He contributed one guinea a

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139. A graduate of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, George Proctor (1795–1881) was ordained just before the wedding and was created a doctor of divinity in 1829. He served as master of Lewes Grammar School and rector of St. Michael’s, Lewes (1820–29), and as master of Elizabeth College, Guernsey (1829–31); he later conducted his own school at Brighton and from 1846 to 1860 was the incumbent at Monken Hadley, Middlesex. 140. HCR Diary, 13 April 1819. ‘Twice the money and twice the stock of cattle, horses, etc. could not have made it profitable’: JPC Memoirs, p. 141. 141. HCR Diary, 17 September and 31 December 1819. 142. HCR Diary, 21 December 1820, doubting that this would result in substantial earnings for Robert.


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week toward his keep, which Jane—unhelpfully—once told him was ‘too much’, but Henry scrupulously insisted on paying (HCR Diary, 13 April 1819).

‘The Scrape’ For The Times and John Walter II, John Payne Collier’s work in 1817–20 seems never to have been so demanding that his parallel activities—the family newsletters, the literary projects, and the independent editorial tasks—greatly suffered. His earlier duty was to report the law courts, the King’s Bench in particular (whence much of his Criticisms on the Bar), although ‘I agreed to aid the parliamentary department if either House sat later than 10 oClk’.143 A er August 1818 he served principally as parliamentary reporter, and in that capacity he experienced one trial of his own, in which his courtroom experience paid unforeseen dividends. The details of this incident deserve recounting, especially as it has since been represented as a case either of fabrication and deliberate dishonesty on John’s part, or of false arrest and cynical prosecution by political hypocrites.144 Neither was really so: what occurred was as follows. On 8 June 1819 Collier reported, as usual, from the lower House, covering a debate on taxation. Joseph Hume, the great radical advocate of the underclass, made a strong speech decrying (in the words of The Times) ‘a military mania prevalent that cost the kingdom incalculable sums’, with ‘bands trapped in scarlet and gold . . . daily paraded about the streets, as if to mock the squalid poverty of the lower orders’. When the last words were met by ‘(laughter, from the ministerial benches)’, Hume turned on his mockers, declaring: ‘Ministers might laugh, but let them look at the other side of the picture’; and then, according to The Times, his counter-attack became personal: ‘let them survey the miseries of the poor laborious industrious wretches at Carlisle, or even of the unhappy beings they meet in our streets, and . . . there would be found but one man among them who would still keep a smile upon his countenance, and that would be a smile of self-congratulation from a right honourable gentleman (Mr. Canning), that by habitually turning into ridicule the sufferings of his

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143. JPC Diary, 4 September 1878. He noted that at the Hone trials (17–19 December 1817) ‘I had no assistance & it was very hard work’ (Diary, 23 September 1881), but also that in compensation Walter gave him a bonus of £20 (29 May 1877). 144. It was tendentious of E. K. Chambers (1891, p. 24) to blend the events of June 1819 with his general account of Collier’s forgeries; Donald H. Reiman hinted at the same connection in Cameron et al., vi:771, as does S. Schoenbaum (1991, p. 246). Morison (i:128–29) badly garbled the story, and Ganzel (pp. 25–26) converted it into a case of ‘the establishment’ vs. Collier, which is equally inappropriate. Collier’s subsequent career is not mentioned by Michael MacDonagh, who devoted a chapter of The Reporters’ Gallery (1920) to the event (pp. 330–36, ‘A ‘‘Times’’ Reporter at the Bar’).


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fellow creatures, he had been able to place himself so far above their unhappy condition (continued cheers).’ Now this last thrust—Hume apparently naming Canning, and the evidence of ‘continued cheers’ from the opposition—was political dynamite. Hume flatly denied introducing the Prime Minister’s name or any reference to his career, and wrote so to the editor of The Times, now Thomas Barnes. Barnes published a retraction and a ‘correct’ version of the speech on 14 June, and attempted to call on Hume personally to apologize, but was denied access. Canning himself on the same day ‘raised the question of a breach of privilege’ (i.e., a violation of the grace to report parliamentary proceedings), and although Hume admitted that he had rejected Barnes’s conciliation, the House, on the motion of Charles Watkin Wynn, summoned the printer of the paper to its bar.145 Charles Bell’s statement on 15 June was brief: ‘he had received the paragraph complained of from John Payne Collier’. He withdrew, and Collier was called in and examined.146 Collier’s position was difficult, but by virtually all accounts he acquitted himself well. He took full responsibility for the misrepresentation, and disclaimed any malicious intention. Owing to ‘the confusion and disorder which sometimes prevail in the gallery’ he had been unable to hear clearly some of Hume’s remarks, and, ‘anxious to collect what had occurred during the confusion . . . I asked a stranger who was placed before me, and from him I received, if not in exact words, at least the point which I a erward embodied in my report’. The ‘stranger’ could not now be identified, and Collier’s original shorthand notes had vanished, ‘though I have used every diligence in looking for them this morning . . . the reason, perhaps [for their disappearance] . . . [is] that being occupied in other pursuits, I o en write upon the slips which I have used in taking my short-hand notes’. He declared that the text as printed in The Times was ‘a correct one’, precisely what he had submitted, thus exonerating Barnes and Walter from any part in the offence. He maintained that he had good reason to believe that Hume meant to evoke Canning as the scoffer at poverty (‘I had a strong feeling that allusion was made [here] to Mr. Canning by the hon. member . . . from the frequent allusions which, in my opinion, were made to him during the whole of the hon. member’s speech’), but having since read Hume’s own version of the relevant passage, he acknowledged that no specific mention of Canning was made there;147 the text that Hume provided a er the fact was, however, ‘the

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145. Morison, i:129 (misdating the retraction as 7 June). Watkin Wynn was the good friend and patron of Robert Southey and the dedicatee of his Madoc. 146. Unless otherwise indicated quotations are from Hansard’s ‘official’ Parliamentary Debates, the text of which differs in some details from the Times version of the proceedings. 147. The version provided by Hume to The Times and published on 14 June (‘from the most


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only circumstance which induces me to think that I was mistaken’. All things having been said, he hoped that the House ‘will now allow me to express my sincere, but manly contrition, for having in misrepresenting, however unintentionally, any thing that occurred, committed this error. I had no intention but to give the most faithful account in my power’, he asserted, saying that ‘this is the first time during the 10 years I have been engaged in reporting, that any objection has been made against any report that came from my hands’. Incidentally, he added, the gallery conditions did make a difference: reporters covered the debates in relays, and ‘from want of proper accommodation’ as well as ‘from the circumstance of one gentleman [replacing a colleague] in the middle of a speech’, misunderstandings were bound to take place: ‘allusions are o en made to what occurred before the individual gets into the gallery, and which, even when he hears, he cannot always understand’. Similar misunderstandings of ‘what has occurred in debate [take place] . . . even among honourable members’, he remarked with some courage, ‘and of course the difficulty of hearing must be greater to those who write’. Having assumed sole responsibility for the offending paragraph, given a plausible if unprovable explanation of its origin, and submitted a formal apology to the House, he was temporarily excused. The ensuing debate among the members reveals some of the partisan aspects of the complaint against The Times, and may reflect a personal animosity between Canning and John Walter II. Although Collier had testified unequivocally, Wynn remained firmly convinced ‘that the publication in question could not be the result of a mistake’. Clearly he had hoped to implicate Walter and Barnes, but even without their complicity ‘nothing . . . could make him believe that it was anything but a gross and libellous publication’; a er a precedent or two, indicating that any report of personal reflections made by one member upon another in the course of a debate was ‘a high breach of the privileges of the House’, he moved ‘that the said paragraph is a scandalous misrepresentation of the debates and proceedings of this House, a calumnious libel on the character of one of its members, and an aggravated breach of its privileges’. Most of the members who spoke to the motion felt that its wording, and the punishment which its wording must prompt, were too strong. Some, like Charles Bragge Bathurst, suspected Collier’s account of ‘circumstances . . . singularly co-incident’—the commotion, the fortuitous stranger whose ‘offensive’ account was accepted on faith, the loss of the rough notes—and wondered, understandably, ‘that the name [Canning], with the addition of cheers, should

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authentic source’) differs not only from that reported by Collier on 9 June but also from the Hansard text, which would have been compiled from newspaper reports and ‘corrected’ by Hume before publication.


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have been inserted in a parenthesis’, that is, typographically set apart. Others regarded the defence as ‘ingenuous, rather than . . . ingenious’ (George Philips), and thought that John’s conduct at the bar ‘recommended him to [our] most favourable consideration’ (James Abercromby). Thomas Brand felt that ‘a clear statement, [and] a manly apology had been made’ and the majority may have agreed with Christopher Hely-Hutchinson, who ‘believed the witness had not been influenced by the malignant feeling, or desire, to insult the right hon. gentleman’. Hutchinson went so far as to state that ‘as he could not keep intention out of his view . . . he could not join in any vote, the almost necessary consequence of which would be a commitment to Newgate’, but this would not wash. The meticulous Lord Castlereagh had reminded his colleagues to address the offence, which was indisputably a breach of privilege and a gross libel, and suggested that any extenuating arguments from the defendant be considered only in a subsequent petition for leniency; and the mover Charles Watkin Wynn returned to insist that the terms of his original motion of complaint were correct. Wynn made much of the published phrase ‘(continued cheers)’—‘a circumstance’, as he pointed out, that ‘the reporter could not possibly mistake’, and a detail that ‘he certainly considered as giving a character and colour to these proceedings’. Even Abercromby had thought these words ‘a sort of scenic description which heightened [the] effect’ of the ‘untrue account of what had been said’, and the House was persuaded to pass Wynn’s resolution. Much later in the session, and too late to help Collier, the ‘Burdettite’ William Williams remembered that on 7 June he had sat behind Hume and heard him begin his discursion with the words ‘The right hon. gentleman [i.e., Canning] and the hon. gentlemen around him, may smile’, and that ‘soon a er this there certainly were several cheers’.148 Pretty clearly the members realized that The Times of 9 June had not misrepresented Joseph Hume’s rhetorical intentions at all: Hume had meant to bait Canning and his ministry, and apparently drew some applause. What The Times had done wrong was to spell out the slur, especially when Hume, as is probable, had kept it properly oblique. What Collier wrote was not so much a falsification of the Commons debate as an ill-judged embroidery, whatever its source: the parenthetical identification, and the ‘scenic description’, he could not resist. That is technically fabrication, of course, but in this instance by no means misleading in spirit, as John’s contemporaries seemed willing to accept and excuse it. Perhaps the unlucky defendant was thought of, by many, as having violated a privilege which Parliament and its members did not really deserve. It now fell to the House to consider John’s punishment, and the inexorable

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148. The Times account of 14 June, however, says that Canning was not present at the time.


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Wynn moved ‘that Mr. Collier be committed to Newgate’—‘a very short term’ might suffice, but a precedent must not be set by excusing the culprit. Here however the moderates made a stand, Brougham recognizing ‘that the House in general believed [Collier’s story] . . . as to the origin of the gross mistake’, and proposing that Collier be committed ‘to the custody of the serjeant at arms [of the House of Commons] instead of to Newgate . . . [for a] term as short as possible’. Some haggling over precedent ensued, and Wynn actually suggested that Collier might prefer Newgate, whose lodgings were free, while the attentions of the serjeant at arms would cost money. To this William Smith, the distinguished liberal M.P. from Norwich, finally spoke: he ‘knew the young man personally, and could assure the House that he was a person of respectable connexions, of good education, and of excellent behaviour. There could, therefore, be no doubt that he would prefer the punishment of being taken into the custody of the serjeant at arms to the degradation of being committed to Newgate’.149 Two other members spoke of the defendant’s ‘education’, ‘refined feelings’, and ‘literary talents’, and Wynn capitulated ‘to the general wish of the House’. It was ordered ‘that John Payne Collier, for his said offence, be committed to the custody of the serjeant at arms’. Crabb Robinson called on the prisoner at once, finding him ‘in good spirits’, with ‘Mrs C.’ (probably Jane) already present. Walter and Barnes soon came along, and Robinson’s concern ‘lest this might hurt C. with Walter’ turned to relief, for Walter was in fact pleased with John’s conduct: ‘by his gentlemanly behaviour he raised the character of the reporters and he completely relieved W. from the imputation of having altered the article’. Perhaps the visitors had taken in the remarks of Sir James Mackintosh late in the session, when that distinguished liberal had ‘fully acquitted [Collier] of wilful intention’, praised his ‘talent and education’ and his ‘demeanour . . . at their bar’, and gone on to ‘express his opinion in favour of the generally improved character of the public press’, saying that ‘he never recollected a period in which their columns exhibited more general decorum, more general ability, more exemplary abstinence from attacks upon private life. . . . This great and valuable improvement in the public press had arisen from the superior talents, judgment, and character of the proprietors, and the improved advantages and better condition, in every respect, of the gentlemen employed under them’. Music, no doubt, to John Walter’s ears: he later made Collier a present of £50 (as Mary Louisa told Robinson; John himself reported £100), saying that he ‘need not return the surplus a er

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149. This defense of John may owe something to an earlier episode involving the two men: in March 1817 Smith had attacked Robert Southey in the House for having turned his back on his youthful political views as expressed in Wat Tyler, and Wynn had replied on his friend’s behalf.


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paying the fees [only £14 or £15 in fact], & hoped it would be some compensation for the inconvenience he had suffered by his imprisonment’ (HCR Diary, 23 June 1819). Robinson thought this ‘very generous certainly’ and grumbled that John had been ‘very foolish & inconsiderate’; but John Walter II would have realized that he himself and The Times were Canning’s targets, not the careless report. For Walter’s relations with Canning were prickly indeed at this period, as the newspaper moved steadily away from supporting Lord Liverpool’s government. The Peterloo Massacre two months later would bring it into outright opposition, and this ‘insult’ may have served to accelerate the conversion.150 Walter initially wished John to remain in custody until the end of the term, four weeks away, as some kind of symbolic victim, but Robinson sensibly dissuaded him, and helped to prepare John’s petition. The next day William Smith presented the petition, stressed Collier’s respectable character and avowed good intentions, and moved to discharge. Discussion was brief, though Sir Francis Burdett (who had not been present at the previous hearing) perversely tried to re-open the case, arguing ‘that the words used were nearly similar to those reported, and that there were cheers about the same time (Cries of ‘‘No, no’’)’. He questioned the very right of the House to accuse and also judge, and he maintained that ‘where there was no ill intention there could be no crime’, and that therefore the House could not punish at all. Several exasperated members protested, Lord Castlereagh pointing out that Burdett was doing his own ‘client’ an injury with these arguments, and that Collier had acknowledged his guilt. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay (an amateur Shakespearian) rose to observe that intellectually capable persons like Collier bore an increased, not a diminished, responsibility for their public actions, and ought not to be excused because of the talents or superior capacities they abused; but he would give him the benefit of the doubt. Hely Hutchinson reported that he had conversed with the prisoner and found him credible and penitent, but also that the controversial ‘cheers’, which he had investigated, were illusory (‘not a single cheer had been given’). The motion to release Collier passed unopposed; a reprimand (‘in strong unmeaning words’, Robinson wrote) was administered, and he was discharged from custody. What with Walter’s largess and the chorus of approval for his conduct at the bar, the event ended in a sort of triumph for John, although the hazards he ran were not inconsiderable. In later years he referred to it as a ‘scrape’ and no more, never including it among the causes of prejudice against him in legal endeavours.151 Nor did it lead him to lament his

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150. ‘The Times never forgot the insult’; Morison, i:129. 151. OMD, iv:88; JPC Diary, 4 September 1878: ‘I got ‘‘the Times’’ into a sad scrape by misreporting ( pitching it too strong was the gallery phrase) what passed in the H. of Commons’.


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dependence ‘upon the whims of powerful men’, nor had he been ‘intimidated, unjustly accused, and humiliated to satisfy the ambitions of others’.152 In fact he had done rather well: even Canning, in later years, remembered his ‘manly’ defence with approval, and bore him no ill-will for the slur.153

The Poetical Decameron Eight months a er his thirtieth birthday, John Payne Collier projected his first ‘antiquarian’ book. ‘It occurred to me that I might make an agreeable book by supposing three or four friends meeting together and conversing cheerfully, unostentatiously and unpedantically upon such subjects’, that is, literary history and rare books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; on 6 September 1819, halfway through his series of pre-Shakespearian essays for the Edinburgh Magazine, he wrote to Constable’s, offering ‘as tempting as I could make it . . . what I meant to be a dignified 4to volume’. Robert Morehead, Pringle’s successor as editor, countered that ‘such a subject could be more saleably treated in small 8vo’, and Collier ‘readily agreed’.154 The Scottish firm promised him £100 for two volumes, and he set to work forthwith.155 By 22 March 1820 production at the Whitefriars press of Thomas Davison was well under way, and finished copies of The Poetical Decameron could be purchased for 21s. on 15 April. Although apprehensive that it would never appeal to a wide readership, Morehead and Constable’s especially liked the title of Collier’s book. Of course ‘The Poetical Decameron’ is no more than a conscious echo of The Bibliographical Decameron, T. F. Dibdin’s grossly elegant collection of bibliophile gossip, published in three formidable quarto volumes in 1817. Everything that Collier professed to dislike about Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities and his coterie of ‘black-letter’ enthusiasts could be multiplied in this expensive production, the ‘high-water mark of the Dibdinian bibliomania’;156 but echo its title he did, perhaps with ‘poetical’ intended as a deliberate corrective for ‘bibliographical’. In fact Collier’s two modest octavo volumes are even more bibliographical, in the strict sense, than Dibdin’s. The pretext and structure of The Poetical Decameron are simple, and like-

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152. Ganzel, p. 26. 153. So Collier reported in OMD, iii:86; in the same passage he also referred to Sir James Mackintosh, ‘who had also taken some sort of fancy to me’. 154. JPC Memoirs, pp. 122–23, stating that he had begun the book while living in Vincent Square. Copies of outgoing letters to Collier and to the printer are in the Constable Papers at the National Library of Scotland, MSS 790 (p. 653) and 791 (pp. 20, 31, and 58). 155. As he oen appears to have done, Collier in later years would double the figure: he claimed £100 in his diary, 16 January 1878, but £200 in the Memoirs. 156. W. A. Jackson 1965, p. 31.


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wise reminiscent of Dibdin: conversations on literary topics among old friends, real persons in pseudonymous disguise expressing characteristic differences of opinion, but summoned primarily to excuse the telling of tales about old books. Whereas Dibdin’s more than two dozen interlocutors may be identified (among others) as Heber, Bindley, Bolland, Chalmers, Haslewood, Drury, Sir Walter Scott, and Dibdin himself, Collier’s cast of just three are modified characters of himself (‘Bourne’, the leading speaker who generally has the last word), Thomas Amyot (‘Morton’, a countrified antiquary inclined to agree with Bourne’s dicta), and Henry Crabb Robinson (‘Elliot’, the modernist of the group, who ‘had been much abroad’, and who remains sceptical of the more arcane revaluations). The first setting for the dialogues is in a sailing wherry on the Thames, starting (as John might have done) from Westminster Bridge. The ten conversations of The Poetical Decameron treat many old friends among books and writers, for Collier reworked into his text material from the British Lady’s Magazine, the Critical Review, and even the ongoing series for the Edinburgh Magazine. Heywood, Wither, Harington, Lodge, Marston, Nashe, and notably Churchyard are discussed and extracted, though not Churchyard’s mock-poem from the Critical Review. Stafford’s Niobe returns from the Critical (i:244 and ii:45), as do Philip Stubbes (ii:235–39), Fleming’s Virgil (i:105–11), and The Actor’s Remonstrance (ii:323–26). Newer subjects include Charles FitzGeffrey and the pioneers of blank verse, while the precedence of early English satirists bulks large. Bishop Hall and his famous boast of being the ‘first’ are inspected in the third conversation, with his rivals Donne, Lodge, and Nashe (but not Surrey), and his immediate successors Marston, Middleton, Parrot, Goddard, Brathwaite, and Breton (conversations IV–VI). Perhaps Thomas Warton’s old History of English Poetry led Collier to concentrate on these minor lights, and to consider their relationships, but the appraisals by Bourne o en strike us as fresh and persuasive; likewise the brief account of anti-theatrical tracts and their wittier replies (conversations IX and X) could not easily have been bettered in 1820. The Poetical Decameron did provide rival students of ‘golden age’ verse with critical novelties and not a few signposts, although few who came a erward ever acknowledged its service. Less creditable were Collier’s renewed affronts to his own scholarly precursors. He nailed his colours to the mast of non-obligation: ‘the author . . . knew that the chief recommendation of his work, a er all, would be its originality . . . and it has therefore been a principle with him to avail himself as little as possible of other men’s labours’. Such a declaration of independence permitted him, he may have believed, to display contempt for Malone (yet again, ‘a punctilious puny’), George Steevens (‘self-worshipping . . . self-conceited . . . an uninformed mass [and] a chaos of confused quotations and pedantic allusions’), Johnson,


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Warburton, and old Lewis Theobald (‘a dull dust-raking drudge’). These harsh opinions in the mouth of Bourne met with Morton’s ‘Have some forbearance towards the dead’, but Elliot was made to say in reply: ‘If they are dead, that is all the good that may be said of them’; mercifully, in real life, Henry Crabb Robinson did not know he was figured as Elliot. Contemporary commentators fared little better: Nathan Drake’s ‘pretence of learning was almost offensive’, for he drew all his evidence from modern (and uncited) anthologies, and Henry John Todd, the veteran librarian and editor, was subjected to nearly four pages of lo y ‘correction’.157 Praising none of his predecessors, Collier was almost equally stingy about living friends. ‘In executing this task’, he announced in his preface, ‘the author has been chiefly indebted to his own industry aided by good fortune, which, as a reward for his early and zealous attachment to the pursuit, seemed to throw in his way valuable relics and sources of information that others . . . had not enjoyed. He was unknown to the literary world; and though, had he stated any important object, the libraries of many collectors would no doubt have been freely thrown open to him, yet . . . he was unwilling to ask a favour’. Hence, necessarily, he relied on institutional collections, on his own small accumulation of texts, and on the library of ‘one gentleman . . . , equally distinguished for his enterprise in purchasing and his liberality in lending his rarities’.158 The last was James Perry, Collier’s formidable former employer, whose equivocal regard for the younger man may have mellowed with his own failing health. From Perry’s remarkable library Collier chose at least two star books to describe, Thomas Middleton’s Microcynicon and Lodge’s Alarum against Usurers (1584). But his source is never identified: ‘The name of this gentleman’, he assured his readers, ‘is only not inserted because he would think a public acknowledgement one of the worst returns for an act of private friendship’. One other provider, never acknowledged, was John Bellingham Inglis, who must have supplied Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession, also a very rare book in any edition.159 Novelties, bibliographical and critical, were ever the pursuit of the ambitious scholar, as the personae of The Poetical Decameron all find understandable. In an exchange about Steevens and a putative source for The Puritan, a pseudoShakespearian play, Bourne remarks: ‘When I first read that play, and observed the correspondence [with Peele’s Jests], I imagined that I had made a discovery’. Morton, the sceptic, moots that ‘perhaps you made another, viz. that your dis-

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157. Poetical Decameron, i:vi–vii, xxv–xxviii, xxx–xxxi (Drake), and 291–94 (Todd). 158. Ibid., p. ix. 159. Years later Collier noted this loan in a letter to David Laing: ‘It is many years since I had his ‘‘Farewell to Military Profession’’ of 1606, in my hands: the copy I used was borrowed, I think, from Mr Inglis’; 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17.


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covery was not new?’, and Bourne diffidently admits that ‘Steevens refers to the point in a note—that is to say, he hazards a conjecture’. Subsequently the interlocutors bandy about, for some twenty-six pages, an argument for Barnaby Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession as the source of Shakespeare’s Twelh Night; this was a viable suggestion, and apparently new in print at the time, but Collier may not have unearthed it himself.160 Reference to the dedication of a manuscript by Thomas Lodge as ‘written and signed in the author’s own hand’ stems from original material then in Collier’s possession, which has attracted latter-day scrutiny (see QD A3.1), but there are no otherwise questionable data in the two published volumes. Reactions to The Poetical Decameron were scattered and civil, if unenthusiastic. Reviews found it ‘heavy and useless’(Monthly Review) and ‘too much out of the beaten track’, though ‘the author . . . has exposed in a favourable light many rare and hitherto unknown productions of our elder poets, of considerable intrinsic value’ (Gentleman’s Magazine). In a letter of 16 May 1820 Charles Lamb thanked John for a gi of the volumes, with a characteristic palimpsest of reservation and praise: ‘I have not such a Gentlemans-book in my collection: it was a great treat to me, I got it just as I was wanting something of the sort—I take less pleasure in books than heretofore, but I like books about books’.161 John must have sensed what ‘the sort’ meant, coming from Lamb. Crabb Robinson, the unacknowledged original of Elliot, seems not to have examined the work until 1824, when he read two dialogues only and found them ‘thoroughly uninteresting and unreadable—talk of books valuable only for their antiquity and scarcity, soon fatigues’.162 The publisher Archibald Constable, initially enthusiastic, paid John his promised fee promptly (20 March 1820), but remaindered some of the original 750 or more copies a er 1824, ‘& the book [was] then found on every stall’. John expressed himself bitter, fi y years later, about that: ‘The greediness of Publishers o en does the Author great injury’, he wrote in his diary; ‘they buy the book but tell him it will not sell and therefore can only print

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160. Poetical Decameron, i:48 (Peele) and ii:133–41 and 145–63 (Riche). On the latter, see Freeman and Freeman 1993, p. 6 and note. 161. Folger MS Y.d.341 (101); printed in OMD, iv:85–86; and in E. V. Lucas, ii:275. Lamb’s lightly annotated copy is now at Houghton. 162. HCR Diary, 21 July 1824; he concluded, perhaps with some implicit credit to Collier, that he then ‘read 3rd vol of Arabian Nights—This work also drags’. But even the copy that Collier presented to his son John Pycro (FF) was largely unopened until recently. In 1832 and 1835 Collier told David Laing he was ‘thoroughly ashamed’ of most of the book, which he regarded as ‘ill-conceived and ill-digested’ (JPC to Laing, 9 July 1832 and 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17); in late life he reconsidered, remarking that ‘the two small octavo volumes shewed a good deal of out-of-the-way reading & that at all events I was an industrious & capable young struggler’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 124).


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500 copies of it. The fact is that it costs them very little more to print 1000 copies than 500. They sell the 500 directly, perhaps; and a erwards 100 or possibly 200 more: thus they have still 300 on their hands: those 300 they sell for a comparatively small sum in ready money . . . such was the case with my first book the ‘‘Poetical Decameron’’ 2 Vols sm 8vo 1820. Such is constantly the case, though Constables were most respectable publishers: they cleared their warehouse & put ready money, perhaps £50, in their pockets’.163 163. Diary, 19 September 1877.


part two

1821–31

‘I began reading J. P. C.’s allegorical poem’, wrote Henry Crabb Robinson in his diary for 15 November 1820, ‘but it did not much please me and I soon desisted.’ He had been sampling, with a beady eye, Collier’s only sustained literary enterprise of an imaginative nature—a mini-epic in four cantos which saw print in 1822 and 1825 as The Poet’s Pilgrimage, an Allegorical Poem. In later life Collier came to regard it as his principal achievement in any form, and his best claim to remembrance, the work ‘by which, if at all I shall live’. ‘I thought, and think, that I never wrote anything else that was half as good’, he told J. W. Ebsworth in 1879: it is ‘a trifle . . . of which I am not ashamed’. ‘Too bad, perhaps, for praise’, he wrote elsewhere, as if soliciting contradiction, and ‘too good to quite destroy’.1 Although Robinson had been unimpressed in 1820, Lamb two years later was generous, and so (supposedly) was Wordsworth; at least one contemporary reviewer admired the poem, forecasting ‘posthumous fame’ for the author ‘if Mr. Collier will continue to write’. And indeed, although The Poet’s Pilgrimage was scarcely so precocious a performance as Collier would claim, it has its graces and handsome passages, and a central conviction that may carry some readers further than Robinson. Had he persisted in his youthful ambition, John Payne would probably now be considered a minor Romantic poet of the generation of Keats, perhaps of the stature of John Hamilton Reynolds, Thomas Pringle, or Caroline Bowles Southey. That he is not is no critical injustice, however, for his ‘allegorical poem’ on its own does not raise him past promise, nor do his shorter effusions outshine those of most amateurs in the periodical press. Despite his dedication to poetry itself (‘I can bask with transports in its beams’), John’s devotion to writing it may seem less than heroic: he was unapt to suffer repeated rejection in the name of his art. But at least once, risking the kind of condescension he could and did mete out to other beginners, he chanced his own hand.

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1. JPC to J. W. Ebsworth, 1 May and 12 August 1879, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (75 and 86); Collier’s 1879 inscription to ‘Miss Lassell’ in the Folger copy of the 1822 issue (W.a.174). An inscription to Frederic Ouvry three years earlier in a copy of the 1825 issue employs almost the same words (FF).

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The genesis of The Poet’s Pilgrimage, and the history of its publication, are characteristically mystified in the author’s reminiscences. ‘I began it in 1807’, he wrote, late in life, ‘& did not finish it till 1813 or 1814. Then I laid it by for years’, in fact until 1821, when, ‘adding some stanzas & changing the preliminary matter’, he published it privately (1822).2 Elsewhere he stated that it was ‘composed between years 1808 and 1814’, and again, that ‘the four cantos (and more that I a erwards destroyed) were written between the ages of eighteen and twentyfour [i.e., 1807–13], a er I had just read Spenser’ (OMD, iii:111 and i:8). What he ‘a erwards destroyed’ he identified in another context: ‘This [the published text of four cantos] is only one third part of my original design, [a] good part of which I had at one time executed, but in a fit of vexation & despondency I destroyed various other Cantos, which I had composed or sketched out under the titles of ‘‘The Poet’s Purgatory’’ and ‘‘The Poet’s Paradise’’. The whole would thus have consisted of three Books, divided into Twelve Cantos.’ 3 One further canto, perhaps the fi h, ‘was very critical’, Collier told the Rev. Richard Hooper in 1858, as ‘in it I gave the characters & characteristics of many poets—especially modern’.4 The loss of this, if indeed it existed, we must surely regret. That sequels to The Poet’s Pilgrimage were projected is clear, as the preface to the 1822 volume confirms: ‘though Purgatory and Paradise yet remain, the portion now printed is complete in itself, and people may be found to get through four cantos who would be loathe to undertake twelve’. That these were ever completed may be moot, for Collier compares himself to Davenant, who ‘broke off his great poem [Gondibert] in the middle of the third book’, much as ‘the author [i.e., Collier] has stopped short in his voyage, merely because it was his pleasure’. But if the tale of suppressed matter is believable, the dates of original composition that John provides are not, unless the revisions of ca. 1820 were so drastic as to constitute virtually all of the poem as we know it. Collier, as we have already seen, habitually exaggerated his own precocity, in this instance representing what is probably the work of his years twenty-nine through thirty-two (1818–21) as that of eighteen through twenty-four (1807–13), slightly touched up. John’s true Lehrwerk in poetry indeed may go back to 1807 or even earlier, but it is quite different in both manner and design.

Early Verse and The Poet’s Pilgrimage

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‘I began authorship before I was sixteen’, wrote Collier in 1872, ‘but when about two years older I looked back with scorn at the unredeemable rubbish I had put 2. Note in Collier’s own copy, FF/K. 3. Note in ibid. 4. Note in a copy of the 1825 issue inscribed to Hooper, 1 June 1858, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.


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upon paper. I adopted Walter Scott as my first model, and composed a poem, in four or five cantos, upon a story in some respects resembling the ‘‘Alonzo and Imogine’’ of Monk Lewis. Still earlier I had written some ballads . . . [and] a comedy, in which, I recollect, an Irishman played a prominent part . . . a tragedy on a merely-invented fable . . . [and] the words of an opera, in which my principal singer was imprisoned, and (of course) freed by his mistress’ (OMD, iv:81–82). Of the latter performances ‘no trace . . . remains in my memory, nor, I sincerely hope, anywhere else’, but in his eighties John published what he said were verse juvenilia of 1805–10: a fragment of a melancholy ballad (OMD, iv:82), four eightline stanzas from ‘some hundred’ of an epic on Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s American discoveries (OMD, iii:96–97), and various amatory or whimsical songs ‘in the old style, which even then I affected’ (OMD, i:1). To 1807 or 1808 he assigned ‘A Rustic Love-Song’:5 Seest thou yonder blushing flower, Peeping from forth the thicket bower, Still glistening with the dewy shower, Ere the hot sun’s invading? Such and so fair is my Dorilace, Such is her beauty, and such her grace, . . . By 1809–10 ‘I was pretty well acquainted with the character of our older lyrical poetry, and was fond of imitating it’; hence ‘A Bachelor’s Lyric of Life’ (OMD, iv:6–8): Fields, fields, the green fields, With all the country yields, And trees to lie under at leisure: Birds, birds, joyous birds, And the lowing of the herds, That fill all the welkin with pleasure. Eight similar stanzas conclude with:

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Wife, wife, a pretty wife?— No, no, upon my life; And yet I would not be too lonely: I so dote on all the sex, That the rest I would not vex By living but for one, and one only. 5. A Few Odds and Ends for Cheerful Friends (1870), p. 16. Collier’s annotated copy, in which he inserted dates of composition and other remarks, is now Huntington PR 1125 C6 vol. 17 (see A170).


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This ‘was written, of course, before I was married’, like ‘The Remembrance’ (‘Why so scornful, lady fair?’), which was addressed not to Mary Louisa, but to ‘the sister of a friend in the Foreign Office’, of whom we hear no more (OMD, i:1–2). Of roughly the same date, supposedly, was ‘Song of the Shepherdess’, again an Elizabethan-Jacobean pastiche:6 ’Tis not the Court nor City fine Can give to me the true delight That among the fields is mine, Happiness from morn till night! Cities are Rich and fair, But such wealth we well can spare. By 1811, as we have seen from his early diary, John was moonstruck with poetry, reading Milton for the first time, alongside Shakespeare, Cowley, and Thomson, and translating a little Martial. His earliest verse that survives unreconstructed—for the specimens quoted above have certainly been subject to retouching—is found here, a ‘Mock German Ode, written about a year ago’, which the diarist has ‘just pitched upon’ (Early Diary, 30 October 1811). This is a heavy-handed parody of the gothic verse-tale, evoking ‘Monk’ Lewis’s Tales of Terror and its imitations or send-ups more than any German precedent, and what literary satire may have been intended is simply embarrassing: [the corpses of the enemy:] Tears of blood their dead eyes weep And on the floor below Streams half congealed of blood do flow Clotted with gangreen flesh that in their wounds did grow. [the barbarous victors:] Quick as the clammy draught they quaff Bursts the unrestrained laugh ... They wheel about In hideous rout Their spears they clash The skulls they dash With mighty crash

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6. Stanza 1 of four, A Few Odds and Ends, pp. 11–12. Collier has annotated his copy ‘Original, as far as it deserves the epithet . . . written . . . perhaps in 1809 or 10’. The metrical design seems to imitate Donne’s ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’.


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[the weeping captive:] Her lovely eyes cerulean blue Were bloodshot & distended Her cheek had lost its wonted hue With spattered gore ’twas blended ... But hark! What means that dismal yell Re-echoing from the Vaults of Hell? Still, it may have been good fun as recitative, and John’s high spirits are evident. He was, however, already twenty-one or twenty-two, and no Chatterton. Over the next five years he persisted with short narratives and gallant lyrics,7 publishing for the first time in the British Lady’s Magazine for February 1815 (‘Three Sonnets of the Vision of Ambition and Hope’); by now his verse was formally smooth and semi-professional, if undistinguished in subject matter. He had been caught up in the new vogue for sonnets, sending a selection from France to Crabb Robinson at the end of 1814 (HCR Diary, 30 December), and addressing one to a friend of his own age, William Pitt Eykyn. Eykyn (b. 1790) was a fellow student with John at the Middle Temple from 1815 onward, called to the bar in 1821; in An Old Man’s Diary Collier called him ‘my first and dearest’ friend, who ‘went blind at thirty, and died before he was forty’.8 About 1814 (‘eleven years since’, said John in 1825) I wrote A sonnet to you, long perhaps thrown by, Where Milton’s sacred words I dar’d to quote, That ‘something which the world would not let die’, Or not at least resign it ‘willingly’, He thought to pen —and so had Collier, projecting what was to become The Poet’s Pilgrimage.9 Another ‘final’ sonnet bade farewell to the muse ‘just before I married on 20 August 1816’, hardly a promise kept, but symptomatic of John’s apprehensions about practising law, and perhaps about imminent marital responsibility. He made it the last poem in his collection A Few Odds and Ends for Cheerful Friends (1870), where it is dated 1815:

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7. ‘To Fairest Cynthia’, ‘Cupid’s Hiding-Place’, and ‘Woman’s Constancy’, A Few Odds and Ends, pp. 47–48, 24, and 22. 8. OMD, ii:117–18. The friend is identified by Collier as Eykyn in two annotated copies of OMD, Folger W.b.505 and Houghton *65J-270. 9. ‘To W. P. E.’, The Poet’s Pilgrimage (1825), p. vi.


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Farewell Sonnet Farewell, I o have said, to verse and song! Farewell, each noble, each harmonious line, That which men call, and justly call, divine; Thou hast consumed my youthful hours too long. And come, ye graver studies of the mind, The endless labyrinths of tangled law: Within your intricacies I must wind; From you the means of living I must draw, To live by tangling error, making flaw! Oh, base invention of our modern wit, An insult vile to the ethereal soul! O en as thus I said, or thought of it, My heart has spurn’d the mercenary dole, And smil’d at want, than in such wealth to roll. But this is a conventionally insincere sonnet of renunciation, like Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Leave Me O Love’, and the muse would soon tempt him again. There is a music far beyond the sound Of instruments, though touch’d with featliest skill; Harmony breathing from the heav’n-blest ground, As wavering vapours from the dewy hill: It feeds the heart and eyes when all is still; More felt than seen, and more, I ween, inspires Than sounds that through the moon’s blue beams distil On the far ear from high monastic quires, Lighted at midnight hour with dim religious fires. (The Poet’s Pilgrimage, I.viii)

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It is always possible, as Collier repeatedly claimed, that the idea of The Poet’s Pilgrimage and some written-out form of it began in 1807 or so, and that it was ‘finished and laid by’ in 1813–14, only to be revived, cut, and polished in 1820–21. But if so, what survives reflects later attention so much that one may best take the poem as the product of John’s mid- to late twenties, with all the resonance of the secondary Romantic period (Shelley in particular), rather than that of the early Wordsworth or of Coleridge before Christabel. The form of The Poet’s Pilgrimage is entirely Spenserian, the nine-line stanzas of The Faerie Queene—with their distinctive concluding Alexandrine—assembled into four cantos of 58, 58, 54, and 59 verses respectively; Spenser’s ‘six books’ of 1590–96 contain twelve cantos each of approximately the same num-


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ber of stanzas, or about eighteen times Collier’s gross output. That John consciously emulated Spenser from an early age we know from his own testimony, although he played down his debts to other poets, especially the moderns: ‘As far as regards the stanza and some few points of the general design’, he wrote in his 1822 preface, ‘the author is an imitator;—‘‘one who steers by other’s maps, and can therefore make no new discoveries’’, but in other respects he follows no precursor, and ‘‘sails in untried seas’’.’ The matter of the poem, like that of his first sonnets for the British Lady’s Magazine and many of his diary daydreams, is the poet himself, his response to his calling and his dedication to its demands; it is here presented as an allegorical overland journey, through varied and difficult terrain, with and without a companion or guide (pilgrim, fellow wanderer, disgruntled hermit, et al.). Dante provides one obvious precedent for the expedition: H. F. Cary’s complete translation of the Commedia had appeared in 1814, but John, who had already met Thomas Barnes, was later at pains to cite Dante in the original Italian (Poet’s Pilgrimage, pp. 118–20). The only modern writer to figure in the ‘Notes’ to the 1822 text is Wordsworth, and Collier’s immediate debt to The Excursion, though unacknowledged, is heavy indeed, both for language and for matter: Collier’s guiding Pilgrim clearly reflects Wordsworth’s ‘Wanderer’, as Collier’s hermit in canto III does Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary’. Verbal parallels could be adduced from beginning to end, but the beginning will do: High in the east the sun of July shone, Upland and valley steaming with the heat . . . (The Poet’s Pilgrimage, I.1.1 2) ’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high: Southward the landscape indistinctly glared Through a pale steam . . . (The Excursion, I.1 3)

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The Excursion had been published in August 1814, a date that sorts well with John’s announcement to W. P. Eykyn in the same year that he ‘breath’d the same hope’ as the young Milton, of composing ‘ ‘‘something which the world would not let die’’’. Another contemporary spur, if more a challenge to outdo than a pattern to follow, was Southey’s part-allegorical poetical journey, reviled by John in the Critical Review for May 1816. Loath as Collier would have been to admit it, his Poet’s Pilgrimage owes at least its title to Southey’s Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, and Southey’s smooth but vapid Spenserian cadences may have inspired the hot critic to counter with his own. Coleridge is perhaps to be glimpsed in the deliberate richness of the rhetoric—epithets more ‘gorgeous’ than Wordsworth would have chosen—the incantatory rhythm of the narra-


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tive, and its occasionally obtrusive medievalism. Perhaps by 1821 Collier had absorbed a little Keats too, to the same effect, though we find no direct evidence of it; of Shelley, on the other hand, there seems to be an audible echo early in the first canto: O en and o en have I watch’d this stream . . . Have thought its murmur its blithe spirit’s song (I.3.1, 4; emphasis added) If this is a conscious or accidental appropriation of a famous phrase in ‘To a Skylark’ it must be a late one, for Shelley’s poem was not generally available to British readers until mid-1820.10 Collier’s subsequent attitude toward Shelley bordered on the condescending: in 1844 (B194) and in An Old Man’s Diary (1872) he called attention to three passages ‘almost verbally borrowed from Shakespeare’, which cannot ‘tend to establish his originality’. ‘I do not mean for a moment to say that he wished to copy without acknowledgment’, he added, ‘but his mind was perhaps imbued with Shakespeare, and he wrote down almost mechanically the expressions that first presented themselves, not recollecting at the time where he had found them. Such has been the origin in other authors of many imputed plagiarisms, perhaps some of my own’ (OMD, iv:39– 40). A more revealing self-assessment vis-à-vis Wordsworth would be hard to imagine. It is difficult to suggest the merits, such as they are, of The Poet’s Pilgrimage by extracting passages, for the lapidary effects—imagery and description, the sort of ‘fine detail’ Collier admired in Christabel—are on the whole much less impressive than the sum of the parts. The narrative—consecutive perils, treacherous weather and footing—rattles along at a good pace, with enough variety to keep most readers engaged. What may defeat them, however, as they may have bored Robinson, are the implicit presuppositions that the narrator matters, that his pilgrimage is meaningful, even that the pursuit itself of poetry as a calling is important. All these Collier appears to have assumed his readership shared as données, and he never sought to establish or confirm them by argument or even hyperbole. In particular the significance of the pilgrim-hero requires some pleading at least, and in its absence the whole action of the poem may seem all but pointless. At worst it will also seem pompous and egotistical, the very qualities Collier discerned and derided in Southey. Technically, the verse of The Poet’s Pilgrimage also betrays what Collier found objectionable in other workaday poets like Byron and Southey—the haste (despite years, as he claims, of ‘putting it by’) in original composition, and no doubt

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10. The lines show no revision in the manuscript used as printer’s copy in 1822 (Dyce 2314).


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some impatience in revision. The vocabulary mingles archaic and up-to-date terms, sometimes to ridiculous effect; inversions can be appalling (‘A few almost invited were to seize / Whatever most their wayward choice would please’), and clearly dictated by rhyme, which is the weakest part of the prosody: many convey the impression that the poet has selected his rhyme halfway through the line that requires it. Lord Byron may also be guilty—too o en—of the same laziness, but his adroit currente calamo solutions to a rhyming quandary usually rescue the day. Whenever John began The Poet’s Pilgrimage, it was finished enough to show to Crabb Robinson in November 1820. The manuscript itself, which John later presented to Alexander Dyce, had been fairly copied on paper mostly watermarked 1818 (a few sheets in cantos III–IV have an 1817 mark), although there are revisions and additions throughout, which may have occurred at any time before publication; some further additions (e.g., stanza 49 in canto I) appear in the printed text but not in the extant manuscript—which is also the printer’s copy—and were presumably made in proof in 1821–22. For in 1822 Collier paid for the publication himself, having perhaps been rejected by a ‘thriving tradesman’ among publishers, who callowly suggested that it be re-written in prose. Keen to explain away his descent into vanity, Collier later declared that it ‘would never have been printed, if a poor compositor had not asked me to give him a job’, and that ‘I gave the job of printing the Poet’s Pilgrimage to a poor man in 1821’.11 The ‘poor man’ or ‘struggling typographer’ (OMD, i:7–8) represented as seeking work, however, was Launcelot Harrison of 373 Strand, the well-established printer of Ackermann’s Repository, active in his profession from at least 1807 to 1842. Collier would have known him from his editorial stint with Ackermann’s, during Shoberl’s absence, but there is no evidence that Harrison was hard up in 1821. The press-run was certainly modest, although again Collier’s account is unreliable: he alternates estimates of ‘one hundred’ with ‘only fi y’ copies struck off (‘I am not sure’, he wrote in his own copy, ‘I think it was fi y’) and claims he destroyed ‘many’, and even that ‘I burned 50 [of 100] upon the spot’.12 We know in fact that at least ninety copies were available on 24 September 1822, when John offered them to Archibald Constable in Edinburgh. Constable replied on

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11. JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 17 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (162); notes in Collier’s own copy. 12. JPC to an unidentified correspondent, 25 June 1880, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (127). John Martin was probably reporting Collier misinformation when he asserted that ‘of the one hundred copies originally printed, eighty-five were destroyed’; A Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (1834), p. 535; repeated in his second edition (1854), p. 287.


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4 October, excusing the firm gracefully: ‘we would accept your offer with pleasure but the fact is we are at present changing our place of business, and are in such confusion that . . . your 90 books would be lost sight of ’. They ‘would recommend your putting them into the hands of a London Bookseller’, but ‘at the same time we doubt you easily getting a publisher, from the number being too limited’.13 The last phrase must have stung: here the ‘exclusivity’ that Collier the critic had censured in Sir Egerton Brydges’s reprints had come home to haunt Collier the poet. Having printed his own poem, however, John was apparently chary of distributing it. He had prefaced the main text with four new sonnets (not in the Dyce manuscript), one addressed ‘To Young Poets’, and one ‘To William Wordsworth’, and to Wordsworth (he said) he sent a copy, as he did to Lamb on 12 December 1822, with a presentation sonnet in manuscript.14 Crabb Robinson and John’s parents must have received copies, but none from the 1822 issue was publicly sold, and the book is now very rare.15 Such diffidence elicited no public reviews, and what private opinion Collier reports is not altogether credible: Wordsworth, he wrote in 1871, ‘highly praised the first two cantos, which he had finished just before writing to me’ (but no such letter survives); and ‘Lamb wrote me word that, while reading it, ‘‘he almost forgot he was not reading Spenser!’’ ’ (OMD, i:7). The last may not be untrue, although again the evidence is lost, but it may also be a little tongue-in-cheek: for Robinson noted in his diary on 8 January 1823 that Lamb ‘spoke respectfully of an allegoric poem John Collier has written’, praising its style as ‘remarkably good’, but adding that ‘ ‘‘it is like a collection of the duller parts of Spenser, and not quite so good’’ ’. Robinson himself, who had put down the manuscript unfinished, thought Lamb’s character ‘not a strong recommendation and yet no mean praise’, and now found that the poem ‘has a merit in versification and in plan etc., and it adds to my respect for [John], tho’ it has no great poetical merit, nor can be ever popularly interesting. . . . I envy J. C.’s power in doing this, but with so much power would rather have translated a masterpiece.’ John himself recalled in 1871 that Robinson ‘was ‘‘sure it must raise me in the opinion of all my relations and acquaintances’’ ’, praise that sounds cautious enough. Kindhearted as ever, in spite of his ‘Spenserian’ quip, Lamb had also reported receipt of the book to John Dyer Collier

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13. Constable Papers, NLS MS 791, pp. 625–26. 14. Another sonnet, ‘To the Dissuaders from Poetry’, may again echo Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’: ‘I saw an eagle on a mountain high, / While in his noonday glory Titan shone . . . His broad sky-scattering pinions flapp’d in scorn: / Then upward flew with far-resounding wing, / Directly upward’. 15. Lamb’s copy is now at Houghton. In our own search for copies, we have seen only three and had a report of one more (Crabb Robinson’s, at the University of Indiana).


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(6 January 1823), in a letter thanking the Smallfield farmer for his gi of a Christmas pig. ‘John Collier Junior has sent me a Poem’, he wrote, ‘which (without the smallest bias from the aforesaid present, believe me) I pronounce sterling’.16 But there remains no trace of approval from father to son. It seems curiously unprofessional of John to have printed The Poet’s Pilgrimage and then virtually to have suppressed it, although Constable’s recommendation of ‘a London bookseller’ may have led him to an unwelcome encounter a er 1822. He told Alexander Smith in 1868 that the poem ‘was not widely circulated because I was chilled in the undertaking, when a man to whom I read Canto I said, ‘‘Aye, aye; that is all very well & very true, but might it not have been just as well said in prose’’?’ 17 And in An Old Man’s Diary (iii:107–10) is a wry poem about the episode, ‘The Poet and the Publisher’, confusingly dated 1821. The philistine praises the applicant for choice of subject, and ‘some good sense’ which ‘your real poets very seldom deal in’, but sums up market considerations as ‘That’s the best poetry that pays the best’. ‘‘You author-folks write too much poetry. You think yours fine: perhaps it is: excuse me; I mean not to disparage, or decry What you have read: it really did amuse me. Try it in prose, good sir; I recommend it; And bring it to me when you have re-penn’d it.’’ The poet’s response to this casual banter is bitter indeed, an unrelieved complaint about his bondage to ‘verse! sweet verse! ah, much deluding verse . . . the blessing of my life—my heaviest curse’, and the ‘cause of my poverty—my children’s ill’. ‘Why’, he demands, ‘did I thwart my father’s wise intent, In giving me a lucrative profession, Where powers of speech, which some call’d eloquent, Perhaps had led ere now to wealth’s possession? I shipwreck’d all friends’ hopes by strength of weakness, And if I now submit, ’tis not in meekness.’ Again we conclude ‘farewell, verse! for ever farewell’, as John had done before marriage, but now—and surely ‘The Poet and the Publisher’ was written long a er 1821—the prizes of a career in the law seem long lost: he is ‘oustripp’d by all my friends’, some of whom ‘have ascended the judicial chair, / And most have wealth which industry attends’. All this, we may note, a er rejection by a crass

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16. PML MA 1151; printed in E. V. Lucas 1935, ii:360–62. 17. JPC to Smith, 14 April 1868, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (180). This age-old quip was just what Collier himself had used against Southey’s Pilgrimage.


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bookseller, ‘a drudge, without a soul or sense, / Who weigh’d the worth of Poetry by pence’. John’s ambivalence about his poetic calling, if such it seemed to him, is expressed over and over again in poems about poetry, or rather about being a poet, and his vacillation over distributing The Poet’s Pilgrimage reflects the same uncertainty. Having printed a tiny (and anonymous) edition and having given away only a few copies, having failed to interest Constable and perhaps others in publishing it, he decided in 1825 to reissue the remainder, this time with his name on the title. By then he was commercially involved with Septimus Prowett, a publisher in Old Bond Street, and Prowett’s name appears in the revised imprint as ‘printed for’; but in fact the sheets of the poem are simply what had survived from the 1822 project, with the first four leaves stripped away and replaced by a new title, a reprint of ‘To the Reader’, and three new prefatory offerings. Gone were ‘To Wordsworth’ and the three other sonnets of 1822;18 in their place were a translation from Ariosto ‘printed by the author in the first number of the New Series of the London Magazine [January 1825]’, the sonnet to W. P. Eykyn describing the genesis of the poem ‘eleven years’ before, and the dedicatory sonnet to Charles Lamb that John had written into Lamb’s copy in 1822. This last, with its somewhat presumptuous familiarity (‘Charles, to your liberal censure I commit / This book’) may have seemed to call in a favour or to lend the reissue merit by literary association; but Collier was not the only author so to pursue Lamb. Copies, from the number remaining, were sent out for review, and four very decent notices were received, from the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Literary Chronicle, the New Monthly Magazine, and (oddly) the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register.19 All were anonymous, but the first promised that ‘they who will peruse his Poem will be amply repaid by the overflowing sweetness of his numbers, instinct with the spirit of the mighty masters, and will feel no slight desire that he who can so purely feel and so elegantly express poetical ideas, should never be destined to feel alone, nor to sing in vain’. Although the phraseology was ‘occasionally somewhat remoter than the antique . . . we dare predict for it an abiding reputation, when more noisy and more talked-of productions are forgotten. Like the immortal Milton, our poet may not find ‘‘fit hearers’’ in his own generation; but if we mistake him not, he is of a temperament that can commit the claims of genius to posterity, in proud anticipation of his reward.’ The Asiatic Journal found The Poet’s Pilgrimage ‘a work which discovers the genuine spirit of poesy . . . imbued with the spirit of the great masters, enlivened by a ray of intelligence which it is not in their power to impart. . . .

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18. Another reason, perhaps, to be sceptical about Wordsworth’s supposed enthusiasm for the first two cantos. 19. For references to the reviews, see A7.


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If Mr. Collier will continue to write for posthumous fame, we think he stands a fair chance of acquiring it’. Reviews like these should have pleased John mightily, but he continued to blow hot and cold over distribution. The publication (as Prowett’s, presumably) was advertised ‘once’, and ‘3 copies were sold before I recalled it’, he wrote in his own copy.20 ‘In this way it got to Oxford, Cambridge, & the Brit. Mus.’ In fact only the latter two deposit libraries possess copies now, and more likely received them by gi . Collier’s alternation between pride in his poem and despair of its success (the Asiatic Journal had told him that he was unlikely to earn much from poetry), or its abject failure to sell, may account for its being once more withdrawn; over the next sixty years he gave copies away, and most now seen bear some sign of presentation. Doubts about his talent and performance never ceased to nag him, though ‘the following lines [are] composed in a different and much more healthy spirit [than that of ‘The Poet and the Publisher’]’: Am I a poet? Then, no mortal power Can make me more; nor can it make me less. Am I no poet? I’ve well spent my hour: To love the Muse has been my happiness! Nor of that happiness can Fate deprive me, Though not one syllable I wrote survive me. (OMD, iii:111) One hopes, for his sake, that the last sentiment was sincere.

Hammersmith, 1821–25 On 8 May 1821 a third child, William Proctor Collier, was born to John Payne and Mary Louisa, and near the end of September the family of five, with Mary Louisa’s sister Emma, changed quarters once again. Abandoning the insalubrious Bouverie Street rooms, so convenient to the Times office, they took Hope House, a cottage on the Thames at Hammersmith, ‘at the end of what was called Hammersmith Terrace’ (OMD, ii:88). Within fi y yards lived, in retirement, the celebrated actress and singer Mrs. Rosomon Mountain; a garden ran down from Hope House to the river, the Colliers’ rent was £70 per annum, and ‘four happier or idler years I never spent’, John remembered (OMD, iv:89–90). He rowed and sailed with his children and read constantly, even on the water, his boat loaded with books. He studied ‘as far as I did study it’ Italian, and ran through the poets—Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Pulci—‘together with as many of the

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20. Collier may have been referring to the presence of the title in the May 1825 list of forthcoming works in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, p. 629.


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novelists as I could lay my hands upon; for I had then resolved not to look into any book that was not in the language of the garden of earth and heaven— of flowers and poetry’.21 On 4 November Robinson, le behind in the City (‘I am condemned to dine at chop houses’), walked to Hammersmith and ‘found [John] in a very comfortable house there and his family around him, even enviably’ (HCR Diary, 16 February 1822 and 4 November 1821). If by his retreat John antagonized John Walter once more there was no immediate sign of it, nor did the idea of his taking on added work at the Star, as a translator, seem to bother the proprietor of The Times. To Robinson’s surprise, Walter ‘did not think the situation incompatible with Collier’s engagement with him’ and ‘expressed himself more kindly about Collier than he had ever done before’ (HCR Diary, 4 November 1821). Perhaps in retrospect Walter’s benevolence, or indifference, would seem ominous. John did not take up the position on the Star (it was ill-paid, and a prospective editorship was not in the offing), but he continued to eke out his Times salary with piece-work. For the Edinburgh Magazine he concluded his ‘English Dramatic Writers’ in February 1821, and banked a belated payment from Constable in October 1822.22 To Ackermann’s Repository he contributed at least three short essays in 1820, and six more in 1821, as well as four verse translations from the Italian, signed ‘Humphrey Gubbins’. And of course he was preparing The Poet’s Pilgrimage for the press, and the family newsletters, with their £150 stipend to John, did not write themselves. Scarcely ‘idle’, but for once doing much as he pleased, John’s first two years in Hammersmith may indeed have seemed blessed. Even being sacked by The Times in August 1823 did not quite dash Collier’s Hammersmith idyll, for he was soon re-employed. But given his eight years of steady work for the newspaper—not to mention seven prior years, 1806–12— the firing requires some explanation. Robinson first heard about it on 6 August, at the Times office, and was ‘vexed . . . somewhat’ that ‘Alsager & Barnes have dismissed John Collier—I suspect not without sufficient reason tho’ I know nothing of the circumstances’. Dining with John Walter II on 15 November he accepted the proprietor’s word that ‘J. P. C. was dismissed because he shirked his duty, which I believe to be true’. Indeed Walter had complained to Robinson more than two years earlier about Collier’s ‘shirking’, and ‘was very bitter in his

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21. Several of the fourteen verse translations from the Italian gathered up in Beinecke Osborn MS d.199 undoubtedly date from this period: one is on paper watermarked 1822, six on paper of 1824, and two on paper of 1825 (the paper of the remaining five is unwatermarked). An introductory note on a translation from Boccaccio suggests that Collier entertained his family with readings from his work (‘following the example set on a previous evening, [I am about] to give some specimens of Boccaccio’s Italian prose turned into English verse’), but of the extant translations only one saw print, The Happy Man’s Shirt, privately published by Collier in 1850 (A76). 22. Constable to JPC, 4 October 1822, NLS MS 791, p. 626.


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statements’; this was shortly before John’s removal to Hammersmith, and when Robinson had warned John about Walter, John ‘seemed mortified’ and wrote a letter explaining himself. That appeared to mollify Walter at the time (HCR Diary, 27 May 1821), but provocations continued to accumulate: John’s dolce far niente on the riverbank, no doubt; the ongoing newsletter business; and now even the underpaid presence of John’s brother William in Printing House Square. Walter told Robinson that William (whom he also soon dismissed) was ‘a burthen to the concern’, and Robinson accepted this too. John’s old fallingout with his mentor and friend, whatever its cause, probably tipped the balance, for it was Thomas Barnes as editor, with his close associate Alsager as manager, who actually sacked him. Walter ‘denied all personal interference’, and ‘denied also that there was any personal hostility on the part of Barnes toward Collier’, but of the last protestation Robinson, who knew John’s side of the story, thought otherwise (HCR Diary, 15 November 1823). So did Mary Louisa, who ‘feels bitterly and not unreasonably against Barnes’ (HCR Diary, 7 December 1823), and so certainly did John, whose lifelong resentment of his treatment, which we have sampled above, invariably held Barnes, and not Walter, to blame for it.23 Within two months, however, John had been re-hired as a parliamentary reporter by his employers of 1813–15. The Morning Chronicle of 1823 was not quite what he had le , although its mixture of political journalism with theatrical and literary reviews, and its editorial commitment to Whig principles, remained largely unchanged. James Perry had died in December 1821, and his executors sold the newspaper, which in 1789 had cost him £150, to William Clement for £42,000. Clement, ‘a mere tradesman, without literary training or political knowledge’, was already the proprietor of two other weekly papers, the Observer and the Englishman, and soon would initiate the racy Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle.24 He did not interfere, however, with the administration of the editor of his new daily, who since 1817 and the retirement of James Perry had been John Black. Black (1783–1855) was the orphaned son of a Perthshire pedlar and a poor

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23. Whatever the main cause of Collier’s departure from The Times, it certainly was not what Dewey Ganzel (pp. 32–33) stated it to be. Ganzel cited and quoted from ‘an anonymous article, ‘‘The Periodical Press’’, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in May 1823’, believing that it was by Collier, and that its caustic remarks on the management of The Times cost Collier his job (‘Walter quickly discovered the identity of the author and fired him on the spot’). But as everybody then knew, especially Barnes and Walter, the article was by William Hazlitt: see Morison, i:492, giving Barnes’s reply to the article; and cf. HCR Diary, 6 December 1823 (quoted in Morley 1938, i:299). Ganzel’s misattribution would appear to stem from his confusion of the Edinburgh Magazine and the Edinburgh Review. 24. Charles Mackay, Through the Long Day (1887), i:54. Mackay was with the Chronicle from 1834 to 1844.


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farm girl, who survived a bellicose youth (he is said to have delivered a dozen challenges before he was thirty) and came to London with literary ambitions in 1810. There he translated Goldoni and Schlegel and Humboldt for booksellers, and Perry hired him onto the Chronicle, where he met John Dyer and John Payne Collier, and William Hazlitt, who may have patterned his own Scottish divorce on Black’s miserably unsuccessful precedent.25 Like Perry and like John Payne, he was a book collector from an early age—he shared with both men a particular love of facetiae and jest books—and his library, when sold in 1844, numbered some 30,000 volumes; but although there is a stray record by Robinson of his dining at Hammersmith (HCR Diary, 2 March 1821), Black is conspicuously absent from Collier’s own memoirs. His best-known columnists on the Chronicle were Albany Fonblanque, Thomas Campbell, James Mill, and the young John Stuart Mill, who contributed his first work to the paper in the year of Collier’s return. Some contemporaries thought Black dull if unswervingly principled, and politically inconsistent (he bearded the government over the Peterloo Massacre, but annoyed ‘liberals’—and lost circulation—by rejecting Queen Caroline’s cause); Mill admired him, however, and called him ‘the first journalist who carried criticism and the spirit of reform into the details of English institutions [i.e., law, police-court reporting, freedom of the press on matters of religion]’ (DNB). Collier’s silence about Black cannot count him out of the younger man’s life: Black hired him when Barnes sacked him, and for some twenty years John worked under Black as his editor. For the alternation of Times and Chronicle in John Payne Collier’s newspaper career was now over (Times 1806–12, Chronicle 1812–15, Times 1815–23); although he would appeal unsuccessfully to Walter in 1846 for another chance with The Times, he remained with the Chronicle from 1823 until his retirement from newspapers in 1848. And Black remained there as well nearly all of this time, under Clement’s proprietorship as under Perry’s, and under a third, John Easthope’s, when the paper was re-sold in 1835. At sixty, in 1843, Black was persuaded to step down. Twenty-six years at the dailies is an era, as Collier well knew. John’s salary from the Chronicle was £270 per annum—about five guineas a week, perhaps more than John Walter II had latterly allowed him. He still needed supplementary income, and gained some by writing for Clement’s Observer and Bell’s Life in London.26 Poetry remained cheap, but he approached Thomas Campbell at the NMM on 22 December 1823, noting that magazines

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25. P. P. Howe 1928, p. 308, is wrong in saying that Black ‘emerged with success’ from the undertaking. On Black, see also Robert Harrison in DNB (1885), and Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections (1877). 26. JPC Memoirs, p. 77. Bell’s began publication on 3 March 1822, but we have not identified any pieces clearly by JPC.


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now were not only ‘much more respectable’ than formerly, but ‘they pay better than they used to do’, and suggesting a series of articles ‘consisting chiefly of translations from the Opere burlesche of the most celebrated Italian Poets’. These he would supply ‘if it should appear worth your while to make it worth mine to send them’, and they would be purged of ‘all the indecencies, grossness & impieties which such pieces commonly contain’, while preserving ‘the wit, salt & spirit of the original. I am not aware that this ground has yet been at all trodden in English, and about two or three pages might make an agreeable variety in the publication you conduct.’ 27 Campbell, whom Collier had not yet met, appears to have declined the offer, and over the next year John’s verse-translations (from Ariosto, Gabriello Chiabrera, Benedetto Menzini, Goethe, and Schiller) appeared in Taylor and Hessey’s London Magazine instead. There at least he was warmly received, his ‘clever translation’ of Menzini’s Cupid’s Revenge being praised by the editors in January 1824 as ‘at once light, simple, and fanciful, without owing anything to the poor hard used flowers and dews, and roses of the every-day Muse. The translator [who signs himself ‘‘N. O. H. I.’’, i.e., ‘‘JOHN’’ anagrammatized] is a stranger to us’ (p. 4). But the critical articles that John mooted to Campbell, along with his translations of rime burlesche, would wait ten years to be aired.

The Freebooter Episode On 1 November 1823 Crabb Robinson estimated John’s total resources at £480 yearly, with £270 from the Chronicle, £60 from Mary Louisa’s inherited capital, and £150 from the family newsletters. The last may have come under threat of redistribution, with William Field ‘in daily fear of being dismissed’ by The Times, leaving only his share of the newsletters to sustain him. On 8 February 1824 the fourth Collier child, Jane Emma, was born a er Mary Louisa’s ‘dangerous’ pregnancy’ (JPC Diary, 22 April 1880). The curious affair of John’s part in a rogue periodical may reflect the uncertainties and the demands of this period. Far in spirit from the respectable New Monthly Magazine, the Freebooter was a shabby, ephemeral weekly, notable mostly for an original lithograph vignette on each title-page, and with its miscellaneous contents o en filched from its rivals, as its name and motto (‘Ex rapto vivens’) cheerfully suggested. Its first number appeared on 11 October 1823, its twenty-eighth and last on 1 May 1824. Among its short and breezy antiquarian articles were several on theatrical history, ‘antient drama in England’, early actresses, and old lyric poetry and ballads. Izaak Walton was the subject of two notices and some correspondence: in the

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27. Letter bound in Houghton *57-1874, a copy of The Poetical Decameron.


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second number (18 October 1823) a two-column piece headed ‘Izaak Walton’ and signed ‘Ed.’ described ‘a manuscript in the Lansdowne collection of the British Museum which throws some light upon the early life of Izaak Walton’, followed by an account of a dedicatory poem to Walton by S[amuel] P[age] in his Love of Amos and Laura (1619).28 The alleged Lansdowne manuscript, in ‘hand-writing . . . evidently of about the time of the Revolution’, was said to establish Walton’s place of education (Stafford), his removal to London and apprenticeship ‘to one Homes, ‘‘a sempster’’, with whom he lived until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old’, and his marriage ‘before he was twenty-four years old, and while he held a shop near the Exchange’. The account was supposedly ‘written in a rough, sketchy style’, and consisted ‘rather of biographical hints and anecdotes than of events relating to any of the persons mentioned in the volume, of which the notice of Walton forms a very small part’; but the memorialist also ‘speaks of [Walton] as a ‘‘very sweet poet in his youth, and more than all in matters of love’’ ’. This last would appear to confirm a mysterious allusion by Page in 1619 to ‘thy verse [in which] no ill thing can be clothed’, although no surviving body of poetry by Walton was or is known. And by extension, the other new biographical particulars in the Lansdowne manuscript would seem the more credible. Waltonians were territorial scholars, and it is not surprising that the manuscript cited in the Freebooter provoked scepticism. The industrious and prolific antiquary Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, editing The Complete Angler in 1836, reported that ‘considerable trouble has been taken to discover the MS. alluded to; but no trace of it can be found in the British Museum; and it is presumed that the article [in the Freebooter] is a mere fiction. . . . If such an interesting account of Walton really existed in a collection so well known and so fully catalogued as the Lansdowne MSS., it is impossible to suppose that it would not long since have been brought to light’ (i:iii). And ‘one of the few facts stated in it can be disproved’, namely, that Walton married before he was twenty-four: in fact he was married at the age of thirty-three (this had emerged since 1823 and the Freebooter), and no prior wife was ever then mentioned. Nicolas did not see fit to pursue the perpetrator of the ‘mere fiction’, but in 1860, at the height of the Perkins Folio controversy, Thomas James Arnold attempted to pin it on Collier: About thirty-five years ago, Mr. Collier is said to have been the editor of a periodical called The Freebooter. . . . In the number for October 18th, 1823, appeared a paper signed ‘Ed.’, giving some particulars relative to the life of

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28. Page’s work is part of STC 4276, but his verses addressed to Walton do not figure in the earlier edition of 1613; see Thomas Corser, Collectanea Anglo-Poetica (1860), i:24.


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Izaak Walton. . . . It soon a erwards transpired that this was a fabrication; that there were no such particulars among the Lansdowne manuscripts. This matter gave rise to much remark in literary circles at the time; but it passed over as such things will do, and was forgotten; and although it was to some extent revived in 1836, when Sir Harris Nicolas . . . referred to the particulars, but without any personal allusion to Mr. Collier, it was not placed prominently enough before the public to occupy their attention for any length of time.29 Collier replied promptly to Arnold’s charge, thirty-seven years on, acknowledging that he had been somehow involved: ‘The reader may remark also the most unfair manner in which an attempt is there made to connect me with a disreputable paper called The Freebooter, not merely as a correspondent, but actually as the editor of the publication in which an improper use was once made of my name’. For this ‘improper use’, he declared, ‘the real editor a erwards endeavoured to make amends. . . . The transaction occurred so long ago, 1823, that it had quite escaped my memory; . . . The whole matter was explained to the late Sir H. Nicolas, and to Mr. Pickering, his publisher’.30 Collier thus seems to have known the identity of the editor (and Arnold may well have extrapolated that Collier edited the periodical from the offending contribution’s having been signed ‘Ed.’), but in fact Collier’s name never appears in the Freebooter.31 If therefore the editor apologized to Collier for some ‘improper use’, it was of something other than his name—perhaps his text, his ideas, or his hoax. For what Arnold in 1860 did not indicate, or realize, is that the Freebooter’s account and text of Page’s (genuine) dedicatory poem to Walton followed closely The Poetical Decameron of the previous year (ii:109–12), where ‘Bourne’ had preened himself upon rediscovering the verses—‘rather strange, recollecting the unremitting pains taken within the last twenty or thirty years to collect the minutest facts regarding Walton’.

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29. T. J. A., ‘The Old Corrector’, Fraser’s Magazine 61 (February 1860), p. 187. 30. Reply to Hamilton (1860), p. 7n. Both Nicolas and Pickering were by then dead, but Pickering had by no means been convinced by Collier’s explanation, if ever he was given one: in his own copy of the separate issue of Nicolas’s Lives of Walton and Cotton (now in the Beinecke Library), he wrote, beside the note on p. iii, ‘This Article was fabricated & furnished to the Editor of the Freebooter by John Payne Collier Esq.’ 31. The first seven numbers of the Freebooter were printed for William Oxberry, the actor and theatrical publisher, before publication was taken over by Benjamin Johnson of 2 Herbert’s Passage, Strand. Johnson caused ‘the early numbers’ (at least nos. 1 and 2) to be ‘reprinted, in consequence of numerous applications for complete sets’ (notice in no. 8 [29 November 1823], p. 128), but a comparison of the Johnson reprints of the first two numbers (BL and FF copies) with the Oxberry originals (HRC) reveals no alterations in the Walton article; there is no reference to Collier by name in either.


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Half the article in question, then, was at least based on Collier’s research, and the fraudulent half seems predicated upon the Page-Walton evidence; and the prose style of ‘Izaak Walton’ in no. 2 of the Freebooter is not unlike Collier’s. Still, it is possible that the editor, whoever he was, merely took the hint or notes for the item directly from John. For John’s input is nowhere else to be divined, despite the suggestive antiquarian topics in later numbers: an extract from Paul Hentzner’s Travels in no. 6; ‘Ancient Theatres in London’ in no. 4; ‘Antient Dramatic Entertainments in England’ in nos. 8, 10, 13, and 17; selections from Lyly, Carew, Ben Jonson, and a Shakespeare-related ballad, ‘The Frolicksome Duke’ (genuine!), as well as verse-translations from Boiardo and others. These are stylistically and structurally unlike anything by Collier we know, and not up to his critical or scholarly standards. But ‘Izaak Walton’ well could be his through and through, as T. J. Arnold thought, and as a last scrap of gossip also suggests. Shortly a er Arnold’s published imputation Alexander Dyce wrote to Frederic Madden, ‘I have a very decided impression that Collier once confessed to me, long ago, that he forged as a joke, that Walton paper; but, a er the lapse of so many years, I could not swear to his having so confessed. I am, however, sure that Thomas Rodd, on the first appearance of the (Ellesmere) Southampton letter [another questioned document], said to me, ‘‘Why should not Collier have invented it, since we know that he invented a Walton paper?’’ ’ Dyce was by then no friend to John, nor was Madden, but the tale has a credible ring to it.32

Family, 1820–25 John Dyer Collier’s second experiment with farming turned out no more successful than his first. By the beginning of 1820 he owed Robinson £100 over and above his original loan, £170 to his future son-in-law Robert Proctor, and £230 to his mother. The farm itself was worth £1,900 without crops, Robinson thought, but John Dyer refused to consider selling it, despite the entreaties of his wife, his son Richard, and Robinson too. Jenny’s husband, George Proctor, advised Robinson not to lend John Dyer any more money, as he felt the farm would soon be lost (HCR Diary, 18 June 1820), but on 6 July before going on tour the long-suffering creditor sent him a further £70. Another £70 followed in March 1822, which ‘I ought not to grant but know not how to refuse’ (17 and 30 March 1822). The children continued to defect: Richard, who had never come down to

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32. Dyce to Madden, 24 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 252–53. In his diary (2 July 1859) Madden noted that the matter was first brought to his attention by Henry Ellis, who apparently said that ‘Mr C. was always suspected to have forged it!’; and a second letter from Dyce to Madden includes Dyce’s recollection of having once told the story to Ellis, ‘to whom, indeed, it was no novelty’(26 March 1860, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.c.96, fols. 257–58).


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Smallfield Place, secretly married his mistress in October 1820; and on 21 December Polly wed Robert Proctor and moved away. George Proctor became master of Lewes Grammar School and rector of St. Michael’s, Lewes, in mid-1821 (HCR Diary, 21 May); and William and John Payne remained busy in London. Only Jane stayed on, ‘increasingly wretched’ with John Dyer’s ‘very bad temper’, but unwilling yet to abandon her husband. In May 1822, visiting John Payne and Mary Louisa, ‘she grew angry, and cried when she complained of the want of sympathy in her children, who say she must leave the farm—and this she says she cannot survive!!!’ (HCR Diary, 5 May). By the end of November, however, she was considering flight, and over the next sixteen months she vacillated and sought advice from Robinson and others. John Dyer had by now become ‘very religious’, conducting family prayers at Smallfield Place daily; but while Jane lived on in hope of persuading him to relinquish the farm, he would not budge. In mid-April 1824, a er another opportunity to sell had slipped by (HCR Diary, 8 February), Jane renewed her resolution, came to London, and took yet more advice. This time John Dyer was difficult, ‘bitter’ and ‘absurd’ thought Robinson, attempting to distrain her income, and everyone in the family offered a view: Robinson, who as ever played peacemaker, found ‘nearly as many different opinions as there were persons’ among them (HCR Diary, 14 July 1824), with John Payne, perhaps surprisingly, taking John Dyer’s side. A form of ‘capitulation’, but not of ‘surrender at discretion’, was worked out by Robinson, ‘more than Jane [Proctor] or her mother liked, and hardly enough for J. P. C., who leans most of all to his father, though he is very considerate and kind’. A reconciliation materialized, and by November Robert Proctor and Polly indicated a willingness to ‘take the farm off their hands’. This transaction became a reality in December (HCR Diary, 2 November and 7 December 1824). The Robert Proctors had returned from Peru earlier in 1824, and by December Robert had completed his lively Narrative of a Journey across the Cordillera of the Andes. Although Robinson found Proctor ‘ignorant of botany, geology, mineralogy, history & politics—in short of almost everything which could have contributed to enrich his narrative’, he thought the book ‘readable’, which it certainly still is (HCR Diary, 23 May 1825). John Payne may have helped polish the text for his brother-in-law, and he negotiated terms with his Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable on Proctor’s behalf;33 but Proctor’s gesture of taking over the cursed farm at East Grinstead constituted more than a fair recompense. In the same month old Mrs. Collier died, leaving a providential annuity of

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33. Copies of Constable’s letters to Collier, 18 December 1824 to 5 February 1825, are in NLS MS 792; on 10 June 1825 Constable, lamenting that the book had not sold very well, asked Collier if he could ‘manage some short article on it in some one of the morning papers’.


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£300 to John Dyer, among other bequests. John Dyer promptly settled his old and new debts to Robinson, paying him £436 15s. 16d.—full principal with interest—on 22 January 1825, an action which, with his recent behaviour toward Jane, Robinson found ‘has added greatly to my feeling and respect for him’. John Dyer was now ‘poorly’ in health, at age sixty-two, and he and Jane set off on a three-and-a-half-month tour of Switzerland, northern Germany, and France. They departed on 27 June, met Robinson in Geneva on 31 August, reconnoitered at Interlachen on 15 September, and returned with him via Berne, Basel, Kehl, Metz, Reims, Douai, and Lille, reaching London a er a Calais–Dover passage on 9 October.34 Although ‘in excellent health & spirits’ abroad (HCR Travel Diary, 31 August 1825), John Dyer again fell seriously ill in November, and called in Crabb Robinson to alter his will. He was obsessed with reducing Richard’s share of the family newsletters in favour of William—an adjustment that both Robinson and John Payne had opposed—and when Robinson put him off until consultation with John Payne ‘tomorrow’, he replied: ‘Tomorrow—that may be ages.’ These were his last words that Robinson heard: John Dyer Collier died on 27 November 1825, aged sixty-three. At his burial on 2 December, at Bunhill Fields near his forebears, eight mourners were present: his three sons, Robert Proctor, William Field, Robinson, Joshua Collier’s son-in-law Edward Jones, and the Rev. Thomas Madge of Essex Street Chapel, who had presided over John Dyer’s father’s interment in 1816 and would preside over Jane’s in 1833.35

Septimus Prowett and Dodsley’s Old Plays John Payne Collier’s stay by the river at Hammersmith (1821–25) may seem to have been blighted by family irruptions and upheavals in his newspaper employment, but his memories of the period were rosy. Aside from poetry, books, summertime boating, and family life, he seems genuinely to have enjoyed the routine of his day-to-day work and its casual rewards. ‘I o en did not get away [from] the M[orning] C[hronicle] office till 12. 1. 2. 3. or 4. in the morning’, he wrote nearly sixty years later (JPC Diary, 30 December 1880), ‘a er all the stagecoaches had long le the White-horse-Cellar, and when I was therefore obliged

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34. HCR Travel Diary, 9 August–20 October 1825. 35. John Dyer le his household goods to Jane, whom he considered ‘amply provided for by her marriage settlement’, and divided the remainder of the estate (sworn under £1,500) equally among the five children; as executors, Robinson and John Payne respectively received a painting and 100 guineas (PRO PROB 11/1706). At the death of Mary Dyer Collier in December 1824, John Payne had come into full possession of Woodford Mill at Witney, which he let in November 1826—presumably when the previous lease expired—for £30 per annum (Ashby Papers, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455, p. 117).


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to walk home, six miles from the M. C. Office. I was never very tired and when I sometimes did not reach home till a er daylight I did not go to bed or even lie down on it, but on a temporary resting-place on pillows &c. made up by my dear little Wife, & there I laid for 2. 3. or 4 hours sleeping most comfortably. I then woke up greatly refreshed, &, having washed & dressed, I took a good breakfast & by noon I was in my garden or in my boats close at hand. Then I almost invariably took my children on the water, and a erwards dined and was ready to be off again to my duties in London at 3. 4. 5. or 6 o’Clock, as the case might be. I never had a day’s serious illness’. But upon the death of John Dyer and a small but enticing inheritance from both father and grandmother, John Payne reconsidered his life-style and residence. By Christmas he had removed himself, his wife, her sister, and four infant children to 23 Hunter Street, Bloomsbury, back in the heart of professional London. Literary piece-work remained John’s necessary resource, and the publisher Septimus Prowett (1797–1867) entered his life in 1824. Many years later Collier dismissed him and his brother Richard as ‘sons of a country clergyman’ who ‘might have done well . . . [but] did not understand money’.36 Their ambitions were not inconsiderable, however, and Septimus is best remembered for the grand project of John Martin’s Paradise Lost (1823–27), ‘one of the most sumptuous and complicated schemes ever undertaken by a publisher’, as Martin’s biographer calls it.37 This entailed commissions in advance of no less than £3,500 for the celebrated mezzotints, and such an outlay may seriously have overextended Prowett. Like all publishers he was hit by the financial panic of December 1825, when such giants as Whittaker, Hurst and Robinson, Constable, and Ballantyne went under, and as Charles Knight recollected, ‘the publications of 1825 would no longer sell in 1826; the new works projected, written, half printed, advertised, must wait for a more propitious time’.38 Writing to John Murray in February 1827, Crabb Robinson spoke of Prowett’s ‘failure’, but Prowett was still in business in Pall Mall a year later, and John was still providing him with copy. By late 1832, however, his failure had been noted again, this time in print, and he seems to have stopped publishing new works in 1830. Collier’s editorial projects for Prowett did suffer from these vicissitudes, as apparently did his purse, but for four productive years and twenty-one volumes their two names are linked. Prowett’s forte was book illustration, and it was probably his idea to pub-

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36. JPC Memoirs, pp. 137–38; their father was in fact a London grocer and tea merchant (see Hanley, Cooper, and Morris 2000). As ‘R. & S. Prowett’ or ‘S. & R. Prowett’ the brothers published together at Worcester in 1820 and in London from 1821 to 1823; among their works was Tyrwhitt’s Chaucer in five volumes (1822), issued in conjunction with William Pickering. 37. Thomas Balston, John Martin, 1789–1854 (1947), pp. 96–97, with some further account of the Prowetts. 38. Passages of a Working Life, during Half a Century (1864–65), ii:43.


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lish the fashionable illustrations to Schiller by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch with a bilingual text of two poems. Retzsch (1779–1857) had gained an international reputation with his meticulous ‘outlines’ to Goethe’s Faust, first published in 1816 and re-engraved for the English market by Henry Moses for Boosey and Sons in 1820. Similar illustrations to Shakespeare, Schiller, and Bürger followed, and in 1824–25 Prowett procured Moses to render twenty-four of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s Fridolin, oder der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer and Der Kampf mit dem Drachen.39 Collier’s metrical translation was evidently well in hand by 18 February 1824, when Robinson recorded that ‘J. P. C. called—he brought his Ballad of Fridolin which I went over with him—an agreeable exercise’. Later he added that Collier ‘has made under my correction a translation of Schiller’s Fridolin for Retsch’s Outlines’ (HCR Diary, 11 March 1824)—a further indication that the project began with the artwork—and Collier acknowledged Robinson’s assistance ‘here and there’ (OMD, ii:11). Mary Louisa, whose German was ‘of essential use’ to Collier, cannot but have helped too, but the translation is much clumsier than John’s Italian attempts, partly because he chose to replicate Schiller’s metre and rhyme scheme in tight ballad-stanzas, while the narrative, which is really the point of the exercise, takes a back seat. Reviews were mixed, the NMM finding Collier’s rendering ‘flowing and easy’, while Blackwood’s dismissed it as ‘very unequally executed. In the attempt to be very close and literal, the meaning has o en been missed. . . . Some of the verses are well; but on the whole, the translation is feeble’. The first part of Fridolin was published on 5 March, and six days later Robinson reflected that Retzsch’s ‘outlines [are] not so fine as those to Faust’ (HCR Diary, 11 March 1824); the second part was ‘just published’ by 15 May. Collier’s part in the completed volume was fully signalled on the title-page, where he is identified as ‘Author of the Poetical Decamerone’. At the end of the bilingual facing text came a nine-page prose commentary, ‘Remarks on Retsch’s Outlines to Fridolin’, which is probably Collier’s as well, given its passing quotations from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Luigi Pulci. An incidental puff for the recent translation of Faust by Lord Francis Leveson Gower may strike us as uncharacteristically generous, but prescient, for nine years later Leveson Gower would inherit the Bridgewater House library that sustained Collier’s researches for well over a decade. The following year Prowett published, again in two instalments, The Fight with the Dragon, with sixteen more Retzsch-Moses outlines. Collier was still ‘Author of the Poetical Decamerone’ on the title-page, suggesting that he had

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39. Boosey and Sons issued a rival edition of the latter in 1825, and a third (with translation by J. W. Lake) was published by Ackermann and Tilt in 1829; see Robert Pick, Schiller in England 1787–1960 (Leeds, 1961).


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little to do with the proofreading, but his verse—twenty-five twelve-line stanzas this time, less balladic—is a little smoother. These two picture books, Collier later remarked, ‘were sufficiently popular & profitable’, and indeed are by no means uncommon on booksellers’ shelves even now. ‘I had only £10 for my work’, he complained, but no magazine would have paid him more for five hundred lines of undistinguished translation.40 And on the strength of the new relationship, presumably, Prowett put his name to the 1825 reissue of The Poet’s Pilgrimage. In less than two years John’s name had appeared on the titles of three volumes of verse from a respectable publisher, in a stable with Thomas Tyrwhitt, Canova, and John Martin’s Milton: the money itself cannot have been that disappointing. A more important result of the Prowett-Collier relationship, however, was editorial. In 1825–27 the publisher issued a new edition, in twelve volumes, of the anthology of pre-Restoration English drama known as ‘Dodsley’s Old Plays’, having engaged John to re-edit it. Collier’s contributions varied in quality and quantity among the sixty dramatic texts and the prefatory matter involved, and he would later belittle his efforts; but this was his maiden editorial task in a career largely devoted to such work. His own scholarly standards, his methodological practice, and in some measure his literary taste all are exhibited distinctly, if embryonically, in the 1825–27 Dodsley, a work whose service and influence have long been underestimated. To appreciate the Prowett-Collier project one must understand something of its prior history. Robert Dodsley (1703–64), poet, playwright, and publisher, first conceived of his Select Collection of Old Plays as a mere reprint of ‘the best and scarcest of our old Plays’, for which he would ‘search out the several Authors, select what was good from each, and give as correct an Edition of them as I could’. Having access to the Harleian collection of more than six hundred out-of-print plays, many of them already known to be very rare, he hoped ‘to snatch some of the best pieces of our old Dramatic Writers from total Neglect and Oblivion’ by means of republication. Dodsley solicited subscriptions to such a series of reprints, in ten volumes, in 1743; the eventual result (12 vols., 1745–46, though dated 1744 throughout) was eked out with modest introductory and explanatory notes, some rudimentary collation, and what seemed to him necessary emendation. He had thought originally to preserve the old style of his copy-texts, but abandoned that idea as ‘plainly impossible, unless I could have [always] met with the first editions; for in every Edition the Orthography was generally adapted to that then in use. I also consider’d, that tho’ this might 40. Note in one of his copies of An Old Man’s Diary (Houghton *65J-270), ii:11.

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have been entertaining to the Curious, to the Generality of Readers it would have been very disagreeable’ (i:xxxvi). Thus A Select Collection began its long life dedicated in part to ‘the common reader’, a tradition continued by Isaac Reed in 1780, John Payne Collier in 1825–27, and finally William Carew Hazlitt in 1874. Dodsley’s most enduring achievement was perhaps the selection itself, his choice of sixty-one plays from ‘between 6 and 700’ that he confronted in Lord Harley’s collection.41 He eliminated authors widely available in collected editions (Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher) and a few plays, like Doctor Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi, known from individual reprints or adaptations. He ‘generally preferr’d Comedies to Tragedies’, but he gave the first modern editions of The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, The Malcontent, and Edward II, and his canon, though modified by his successors, exercised great influence on both readership and revival. Over the next thirty-five years only three attempts were made to build on Dodsley’s selection. At Dublin in 1750 William Rufus Chetwood brought out an ill-edited compilation of six additional plays (including Fair Em and Blurt Master Constable), impertinently appropriating Dodsley’s own title word-forword. In 1773 Thomas Hawkins of Magdalen College, Oxford, published fourteen early plays in three volumes, as The Origin of the English Drama. Three of these had been in Dodsley, although Hawkins gave a much superior text of The Spanish Tragedy (‘almost a different work’) and maintained that Gorboduc, ‘being printed by Dodsley from a surreptitious copy, has hardly a single speech the same with the present edition’ (iii:xvi). On the other hand there was little point in repeating Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which both Dodsley and Hawkins took from the late Kirkman quarto of 1661. Hawkins’s major contributions are his early texts (Everyman, the Digby Massacre of the Innocents, Supposes, Cambyses), but he is also the first editor of George Peele (David and Bethsabe) and of Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda. In 1779 George Steevens, by far the most deeply-read of eighteenth-century dramatic commentators, added Six Old Plays on which Shakespeare Founded his ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Comedy of Errors’, ‘Taming of a Shrew’ [sic], ‘King John’, ‘Henry IV. and V.’, and ‘King Lear’. They are presented as ‘Shakespeariana’, but of course widen the range of non-Shakespearian drama in reprint. By now Robert Dodsley had died, and at the behest of his brother James, the genial antiquary Isaac Reed took on the task of revising Dodsley’s Old Plays for a sec-

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41. See Solomon 1996, pp. 93–96. The contents of Dodsley’s original collection and of those discussed below are detailed (with some inaccuracy) in W. C. Hazlitt, A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (1892), pp. 267–73; the 1830 ‘White’ edition of The Old English Drama is also imperfectly described there.


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ond edition in twelve volumes.42 While preserving most of Dodsley’s apparatus, Reed in 1780 corrected errors and expanded the annotation with footnotes of his own, as well as those of his friends Steevens, Samuel Pegge, and Thomas Tyrwhitt, and his publisher, John Nichols. The format thus began to resemble the ‘variorum’ editions of Shakespeare that Dodsley might now seem to complement, a group-project further suggested by Reed’s acknowledgement of help from Thomas Percy and others on individual points. Reed took some pains to improve the 1744–46 text, although much still remained for his successors to ‘purify’, and he supplied eleven new plays while deleting a dozen. The casualties were in part ‘lately published in a complete edition of one author’ (i.e., five plays by Massinger), in part late adaptations, and the rest ‘are such as have been thrown out by the advice of a gentleman, whose sentiments concerning them must be confirmed by every one who will afford them a perusal’ (i:xxi–xxii). This arbiter was probably Steevens, whose abundance of annotation throughout the new collection practically denotes him a co-editor with Reed. The eleven novelties are all happy replacements, including The Jew of Malta, Chapman’s All Fools, The First Part of Jeronimo, and others by Dekker (The Honest Whore, both parts), Thomas Heywood, and Davenant. ‘Reed’s Dodsley’ remained canonical, for both selection and text, for nearly half a century. During the next twenty-five years Reed himself gathered notes toward a subsequent revision, but without publishing one. On his death (1807) his markedup set of Dodsley passed to Octavius Gilchrist, the editor of Richard Corbet, who added his own notes and in 1814 apparently printed, but never circulated, proposals for publishing a new edition ‘in 15 vols., 8vo, with Biographical Notices Critical and Explanatory’. A. H. Bullen, in DNB (1889), wrote that ‘the scheme was abandoned owing to the appearance of [Charles Wentworth] Dilke’s ‘‘Old English Plays’’’, but this is hard to understand, as Dilke had restricted himself to ‘non-Dodsley’ plays, and curtailed his project in anticipation of Gilchrist’s revision (Dilke, Old English Plays [1814–15], i:xxii). Perhaps Gilchrist had intended to incorporate some of the twenty-four plays chosen by Dilke in his own Dodsley, and gave up in disappointment; but Dilke’s editorial work is hardly imposing, and Dodsley itself was long out of print.43 More than likely Gilchrist, whose antiquarian work consists mainly of personal advice (to Gifford and to Boswell and Malone) and pamphlets or reviews of other editors’ performances (Henry Weber’s Ford, Jones’s Biographia Dramatica, Chalmers and others on Jonson

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42. See Tierney 1988, p. 508. 43. William Blackwood, writing to James Crossley on 9 August 1821, was ‘sorry I have no copy of [it]—it is scarce and a new edition has been long promised’; Crossley Papers 7626, Manchester Central Library.


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and Shakespeare) never summoned the energy to finish the task. He also made proposals for an edition of Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, with no result, although again Collier may have been the beneficiary of his notes.44 He died from a longstanding consumptive complaint, aged forty-four, in 1823, and at the sale of his distinguished library (5–11 January 1824) the annotated Dodsley fetched no less than £29 10s. Septimus Prowett acquired it, and set about to republish it. Prowett’s new editor approached his task much as Reed had done forty-five years before, by considering redundancies and omissions. Since 1780 the corpus of pre-Restoration drama in reprint had been extended by anthologists like Sir Walter Scott, Dilke, and the anonymous editor of The Old English Drama (1824– 25). Scott’s three-volume Ancient British Drama (1810) was no more than hackwork for William Miller—the texts of the fi y-seven plays are all taken from Dodsley and other modern sources—but Dilke (1814–16) had avoided mere repetition, and the 1824–25 editor had revived eight more plays, including The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad, and Marlowe’s Dido.45 John Ford’s plays had been edited by Henry Weber in 1811, and a new edition by Gifford was in progress; Gifford also had undertaken a collected James Shirley, although he would not live to complete it, and Prowett and Collier therefore eliminated Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and three plays by Shirley. In their place were to be a play each by Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and George Peele, none of whom had figured in Dodsley’s or Reed’s canon. Prowett’s ‘Prospectus of a New Edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ as published in 1825 (and clearly written by Collier) also projected ‘a Supplement upon the same plan, including first-rate specimens, never reprinted and only in the hands of collectors’, as well as ‘a volume of Masques and Pageants, of which neither Mr. Dodsley nor Mr. Reed furnished any examples, and which, independently of other attractions, include some of the best lyric poetry in our language’. ‘Correctness of text will be the first great object’, promised Collier, and while additional notes and illustrations would be admitted, ‘the Editor will be especially careful not to burden the page with useless annotations and ‘‘the ostentation of vain learning’’.—If a word require explanation it can usually be given as well by one apposite reference to a contemporary author, as by a hundred’, he added, no doubt reflecting on the variorum editors of Shakespeare, especially Steevens and Malone. Biographical matter would be ‘short but full, and accurate, omitting nothing of importance that modern research or the diligent reading of the Editor can supply. In the volume now printed’—that is, volume 2, where the

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44. See McKerrow 1958, v:158. 45. The plays were most likely edited by the publisher, Charles Baldwyn, but the collection has at times been credited to Collier: see below, p. 1395.


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‘Prospectus’ appears—‘will be found some matter new even to the most industrious of our literary antiquaries.’ As in Reed’s 1780 apparatus, notes would be credited to earlier editors, and although Collier himself was never named in the ‘Prospectus’ or on the twelve title-pages of 1825–27, notes ‘added by the present Editor’ were to be signed ‘C.’ Prowett had hoped to complete publishing his Dodsley, in twelve volumes, within one year, ‘a volume being regularly delivered to the public every month’. Volume 2 was the first from the press (the ‘Prospectus’ that begins it is dated 30 April 1825), and volume 1 ‘has been reserved [to the end] for the purpose of rendering the preliminary matter as complete as possible’. In the event, publication dragged on until early 1827 (see A8), and although a version of the supplement of ‘first-rate specimens’ appeared in 1828–29, the promised volume of masques and pageants never materialized. For the shortcomings Collier later blamed Prowett, while minimizing his own role in the project: in 1842 he described it as ‘excepting . . . some scattered notes’ restricted to editing ‘six additional plays, then inserted for the first time’,46 and in 1873 he told W. C. Hazlitt that he had ‘very little to do with’ the text itself. ‘I was to have had £20 per vol.’, he then explained, ‘but the failure of Prowett caused me only to be rewarded with a mere trifle, and I could not work for nothing, so the book was mangled. . . . As it is, I look back to D. O. P. with great dissatisfaction.’ 47 Collier’s retrospective diffidence may have been genuine, and perhaps the curious omission of his full name from the work may reflect his qualms at the time, while a cash shortfall may explain some insouciant annotation in the last two or three volumes. But Collier cannot have thought himself altogether cheated, for he went on to supply Prowett with independent copy in 1828–29 (Punch and Judy, two editions, and five supplementary plays). Nor was his editorial participation as casual as he suggests. All but five of the sixty-two plays contain notes by ‘C.’, ranging from half a dozen ‘illustrations’ to extensive commentary and textual remarks.48 Despite his disclaimer to Hazlitt, Collier did concern himself with the text as printed by Reed, for most of the plays embody his corrections of the 1780 text from ‘old copies’, with notes calling attention to Reed’s mistakes, and in several instances he claimed to have employed significant unconsulted originals (Q3 of Gorboduc, Q1 of 1 Honest Whore, Q1 and Q2 of The White Devil ) and to have collated a range of early texts afresh. Thus

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46. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil (Shakespeare Society, 1842), notes to pp. xvi and xxxi. This may be the source of Ganzel’s statement (p. 35) that Collier’s work was limited to the last six volumes of Dodsley. 47. JPC to Hazlitt, 27 February 1873, BL Add. MS 38,901, fols. 380–81. 48. There are really only sixty-one plays, as Collier retained a four-page ‘spoken poem’ by Lydgate in vol. 12 simply because Dodsley and Reed had included it; Hazlitt in 1874 cut it out.


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1 Honest Whore is given from the first quarto of 1604, ‘collated with those of 1615, 1616 and 1635’; Ram-Alley from both the 1611 and 1636 quartos; and Reed’s hybrid text of The Merry Devil of Edmonton is corrected, perhaps gratuitously, from a 1655 quarto that Reed spurned as ‘unworthy’. Not all these collations have proved thorough,49 but Collier’s texts were certainly better, by virtue of his comparisons, than those of Dodsley and Reed. In Reed’s Damon and Pythias ‘not less than fi y important variations and errors have been detected, consisting of words omitted, and words accidentally inserted, independently of errors of the press’; casting bread on the waters, Collier noted that ‘an Editor was not responsible’ for the last. In The White Devil ‘more than a hundred [gross errors] have been discovered and corrected in this edition’, largely because ‘the former reprint was made from the most corrupt of old copies’, and Collier had utilized the earliest and best. These achievements are by no means slight, although Collier’s treatment was inconsistent, and some commentary is essentially incomplete (e.g., May’s The Old Couple, with not a note in the last three acts), while a few other play texts, notes and all, are virtually untouched. His editorial principles are indeed admirably conservative, and usually lead him to rely on the earliest copy, but he shared with his contemporaries some ambivalence about unreconstructed originals: the use of a 1657 sixth quarto of Lingua (first printed in 1607), for example, or the 1655 Merry Devil of Edmonton, is hard now to justify. But usually Collier preferred what was oldest—even if ‘corrupted’ by ignorant printers who seemed to have misread or mis-heard—to arbitrary improvement by latecomers: in this sense he is very much a ‘modern’ textual editor, though not so conscious of his own rationale as to reject every temptation to vary. Faced with what he calls ‘nonsense’ he will suggest emendation, but he is comparatively punctilious in recording the original reading, and his conjectures are on the whole persuasive. An impressive proportion of them remain enshrined, in footnotes at least, in more recent editions of the Dodsley playwrights and plays. In addition to textual notes Collier provided stage directions, generally helpful (Reed and Dodsley were stingy with these), and a modicum of ‘illustrations’, glosses, and parallels beyond those given by Reed and Gilchrist et al. Again the quantity varies from play to play, but most of Collier’s contributions have to do with the writers, the early editions, and the history of the stage. Biographical notices of Collier’s favourites—Dekker, Marston, Heywood, Marlowe, Chapman, and Webster—are much enlarged, and of course the lives of Nashe, Greene, Lodge, and Peele are all new to Dodsley. Beyond this, six literary nov-

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49. For criticisms, see, e.g., The Merry Devil of Edmonton, ed. William Amos Abrams (Durham, 1942), pp. 53–54, and Lordling Barrey, Ram-Alley, ed. Claude E. Jones (Louvain, 1952), pp. xxv–xxvii.


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elties, scattered over five volumes, deserve special notice as the kind of ‘matter new even to the most industrious of our literary antiquaries’ that was promised in Collier’s ‘Prospectus’. One of these, perhaps the most striking, appears in a prefatory footnote to the first published play in the work, Gammer Gurton’s Needle (ca. 1560?), which Reed (a er Hawkins) called ‘the first performance which appeared in England under the name of a Comedy’. Collier describes the recently-discovered play Ralph Roister Doister, which had been edited in 1818 from a unique quarto then presented to Eton College, and then from unassailable contemporary evidence reveals its author: Nicholas Udall, by coincidence the master of Eton. Udall died in about 1557, so that ‘we may decide, almost with certainty, that ‘‘Rauf Roister Doister’’ is older than Gammer Gurton’s Needle’, and is hence the earliest regular comedy in the English language. This dual revelation, which Collier later called ‘my first literary discovery’, remains widely accepted (the attribution entirely so; the priority of the two plays is still sometimes debated), and its importance in literary history is indeed ‘not inconsiderable’, as Collier proudly remarked (BARB, i:v)—although modern editors have been reluctant to credit him properly.50 Two de-attributions are also important. In a prefatory note to Marlowe’s Edward II Collier was the first to point out that Marlowe could not have been responsible for the text, as it stands, of Lust’s Dominion (published in 1657 as ‘written by Christofer Marloe, Gent.’): a passage in act I, scene 3 is unquestionably based upon a pamphlet of 1599, six years a er Marlowe’s death. This observation scored neatly on the recent anonymous editor of Hero and Leander (1821)—in fact the captious dilettante T. G. Wainewright, although the series editor was none other than Collier’s old target S. W. Singer—who felt that one ‘can hardly fail to observe [in Lust’s Dominion] the variety and melody of Marlow’s versification’; it might also have scored on C. W. Dilke (had Collier bothered to notice him), for whom ‘Lust’s Dominion is a much better play [than Doctor Faustus]’.51 A year later George Robinson, editing Marlowe’s Works in three volumes for Pickering, reprinted the play but accepted Collier’s demonstration as ‘pretty clear . . . that it is the composition of a later writer’; and since then no

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50. Among them, Chambers, W. C. Hazlitt, J. Q. Adams, J. M. Manley, and A. W. Reed; see Freeman and Freeman 1993, also pointing out a few discrepancies in Collier’s later account of the discovery. 51. Dodsley’s Old Plays, ii:313; Hero and Leander, ed. Wainewright, p. xxix; C. W. Dilke, Old English Plays (1814–15), i:91. Wainewright had gratuitously savaged The Poetical Decameron in his preface: ‘a more undiscriminative, prolix piece of verbosity about antiquarian trifles, quisquiliae, scarcely could have graced or disgraced the heaviest of those periodicals from which it is compiled. How Mr. Dibdin must chuckle when he glances his eye from the Templar’s Decameron to his own brisk publications!’ (p. xxi).


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scholar has seriously claimed Lust’s Dominion for Marlowe.52 Another dismissal is the seventeenth-century bookseller’s attribution of The Thracian Wonder to John Webster and William Rowley, Collier considering it ‘unworthy [of ] both or either of the authors to whom it is assigned’ (vi:208), and suggesting that a poem on the same matter by William Webster (1617) might have inspired the mistake. Dilke had reprinted the play in 1815 as veritably Webster’s, and Collier, who had ridiculed the attribution in The Poetical Decameron (i:260–69), now repeated his arguments in Dodsley. Again he seems to have been the first to repudiate it, although Alexander Dyce—who himself did not cite Collier in his 1830 edition of Webster—has been credited with the rejection.53 Three more short texts, all important and all subsequently controversial, involve Chapman, Marlowe, and Greene, and even Shakespeare at one hearsay remove. At iv:107–08 Collier reprinted ‘for the first time’ the dedication of Chapman’s All Fools in a sonnet ‘To my long lov’d and honourable Friend, Sir Thomas Walsingham’. The leaf containing this printed text was found, Collier said, ‘in a copy [of All Fools] in the possession of Mr. Rodd, of Great Newport Street’, which subsequently passed to the editor. Walsingham’s famous diffidence may have accounted for its cancellation, for the Rodd-Collier copy of All Fools, now at Texas, is the only one known to contain it.54 Collier himself reprinted the unique leaf sometime in the next fourteen years (in modern types on wove paper), and the existence of such a reprint, as well as the mistrust to which all Collier’s novelties were later subjected, has led to some doubt about the genuineness of the original or, latterly, its relevance to All Fools rather than ‘some other book of the time’ (Greg, no. 219). Ironically, the first to denounce it as a forgery was a pestilent latter-day forger himself, T. J. Wise, but there is really no reason to suspect it (see QD A8.3). Similar qualms have attached to the ‘curious MS. fragment of one quarto leaf ’ of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, ‘which came into the hands of Mr. Rodd of Newport-street not long since’ and was also acquired by Collier before 1831. This now-famous relic, first published in Dodsley (vii:244–45), has drawn fire ever since, scholars having severally described it as (a) Marlowe’s autograph preliminary dra of a scene; (b) a scribal variant of un-

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52. Marlowe, Works, ed. George Robinson (1826), i:xii. A century later a revisionist editor quibbled that only eighty-six lines in the text are incontrovertibly post-1599; Lust’s Dominion, ed. J. LeGay Brereton (Louvain, 1931), pp. xv–xvii. 53. J. L. Brereton, ed., Lust’s Dominion (Louvain, 1931), p. x: ‘Dyce, who leads the pack upon [Kirkman’s] trail, bays out the story’; F. L. Lucas, however, did name Collier (1927, iv:246). The article in the Retrospective Review, 7 (1823), 87–120, probably derives from Collier’s Poetical Decameron and at any rate is later: ‘we cannot conceive that Webster could have written anything so bad, and indeed Rowley is also vastly superior to it’ (p. 119). 54. Even if the dedicatory sonnet is part of another book (e.g., May-Day or The Widow’s Tears), it survives nowhere else.


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known provenance; and (c) a modern forgery by Collier. It is certainly not (c) and probably not (a); see QD A8.2. In 1825 Collier made no claim whatever ‘that it is in the hand-writing of Marlow’, and again he seems to have made a fair case for his evidence. A third prefatory note has caused as much or even more controversy. At iii:3, Collier wrote that ‘a copy of this play [George a Greene, or the Pinner of Wakefield (1599)] was in Mr. Rhodes’s collection’, bearing the inscription ‘in a hand writing of about the time when it was printed, ‘‘Written by . . . . a minister who acted the piner’s pt in it him selfe. Teste. W. Shakespeare. Ed. Juby saith it was made by Ro. Greene’’.’ 55 Such evidence may seem too good to be true, giving us as it does a glimpse of Shakespeare as theatrical gossip, and for many years the quarto itself (RhodesThorpe-Heber-Devonshire-Huntington [duplicate]-Folger) was regarded with deep suspicion. W. W. Greg, who began by distrusting it, reversed himself later, and in 1931 identified the handwriting as that of Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels under Elizabeth and James I. Despite Greg’s palaeographical authority doubts lingered, and a summary as recent as 1973 was typically cautious: ‘The MS notes . . . were first discovered by Collier, so the possibility of forgery must be added to the uncertainties about the notes themselves.’ 56 But physical forgery (by Collier, at least) is again out of the question, for Collier took his citation— indeed slightly miscopied—from the auction-sale catalogue of William Barnes Rhodes (Sotheby’s, 18 April 1825), where it is printed in full, and more accurately in fact than by McKerrow or Greg. Whatever its origin the quarto was so inscribed while Rhodes—who died a year a er his sale—possessed it; Collier, incidentally, never did. Once more there is nothing misleading about his footnote in Dodsley, properly pointing to the Rhodes catalogue, where his latter-day doubters never bothered to look.57 It is not unreasonable, given later disclosures, to be sceptical about ‘novelties’ in Collier’s Dodsley; but in fact there appears to be nothing seriously suspect in the entire work. One might raise an eyebrow at one last gratuitous nugget, a fragment of an unknown book printed by Wynkyn de Worde, yet another find ‘very recently discovered by Mr. Rodd, of Newport Street’. ‘It is the last leaf of a tract’, Collier wrote, ‘the running title of which is ‘‘Ragmannes Rolle’’, [and which] purports to be a collection of the names and qualities of good and

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55. This is also alluded to at vii:168, as ‘sold in 1825’, Collier by then having identified Ed. Juby as ‘an actor and author’ and having attempted to resolve the contradictions in the two statements. 56. See Greg 1911d and 1931c; and William Nestick, ‘Robert Greene’, in Logan and Smith 1973, p. 82. 57. Alan H. Nelson canvassed the controversy in 1998 and found the inscription authentic; his evidence is entirely persuasive.


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bad women in alternate stanzas’; from it Collier printed (xii:307–08) a versified colophon by Wynkyn, eight lines headed ‘Lenvoy of the prynter’, beginning ‘Go lytyl rolle, where thou arte bought or solde’. This charming little poem remains, we think, unrecorded elsewhere, and the fragment itself cannot now be found. Collier’s speculations about ‘Ragman’s Roll’ (repeated briefly in HEDP, ii:223) indicate however that he was as yet unaware of the fi eenth-century manuscript of this poem at Bodley, printed in 1844 by Thomas Wright (Analecta Literaria, pp. 83–88) and in 1864 by W. C. Hazlitt (Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, i:68–78). More to the point, and exonerating the editor of Dodsley once more, Hazlitt identified the de Worde fragment (‘one leaf only is known’) from its pre-Dodsley source—‘See Rodd Catalogue for 1825’—and there it is.58 Of course Collier would have been mad to designate the scholarly Rodd, one of the most respectable booksellers living, as his alibi for a fabrication (or three). Rodd deceased would be, however, a different matter. Collier later would claim credit only for six new texts in Dodsley, those he himself edited for the first time. The original design of substituting a play each by Lodge, Greene, Nashe, and Peele for one of Ford and three of Shirley allowed him to supply the earliest modern editions of four pre-Shakespearian (or at least ‘pre-mid-Shakespearian’) specimens, and he chose significant ones. The Wounds of Civil War, a Roman tragedy, is the sole independent drama by Thomas Lodge, the polymath ‘university wit’ and physician whom Collier later presented (unacceptably) as actor and stationer. As copy-text for Dodsley, vol. 8, Collier may have relied on a quarto purchased or borrowed from Thomas Thorpe, who had paid £4 10s. for Rhodes’s in April 1825 (lot 1542), for Dodsley differs in some readings from the Garrick–British Museum quarto.59 Collier’s apparatus is unimpressive (his quotation from Gosson’s Plays Confuted at vii:3 is garbled, and he missed the echo of Tamburlaine in act III); perhaps he was hurried. In the same volume appears Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, again ‘for the first time inserted’, a good text from which Alexander Dyce later adopted two notes, while disputing one emendation—and never naming its editor. In volume 9 Collier presented what may be his best editorial novelty, the first modern reprint of Summer’s Last Will and Testament, a complicated comedy by Thomas Nashe now best known for its plague-time lyric (‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss . . . Brightness falls from the air . . . Lord have mercy on us!’). The preface and notes are extensive, and many of Collier’s illustrations

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58. Thomas Rodd, Supplement to a Catalogue of Books for 1825, no. 8428: ‘Ragmannes rolle, 7s. Imprinted at London in the Flete-strete, at the signe of the Sunne, by Wynkyn de Worde: a fragment of the last leaf of a singular Poem unknown to any Bibliographer’. 59. Collier certainly owned a copy of the play by 1852 (letter to David Laing, 15 May, EUL MS La.IV.17). This is presumably the one bought by Ellis for £14 5s. in the Ouvry sale, lot 995.


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and readings engaged the attention of the fastidious R. B. McKerrow, though with minimal acknowledgement.60 Peele’s Edward I was, and remains, an editor’s nightmare. Collier in volume 11 thought it ‘hardly possible that any play should have been worse printed . . . in 1593; and the copy of 1599, though it makes a few corrections of the grosser blunders, yet introduces several new ones, and implicitly adopts others’. In 1888 A. H. Bullen concurred (‘the text throughout is vile . . . the labour of the treadmill is child’s play to the editing of it’), and in 1911 Greg found 1593 ‘representing a very corrupt text . . . mutilated . . . [with] possibly some scenes altogether excised’.61 Faced with all this, Collier, the first to take on the editorial task, did remarkably well, supplying a readable text that makes sense even of such mangled or misplaced passages as lines 1671–86 and 1949–57.62 Edward I requires more emendation than most editors will find comfortable, and although Collier remained conservative with the old readings, he was never so slavishly principled as to let gibberish stand unchallenged. Occasionally he admitted defeat, as have most of his successors (e.g., at lines 1937–56), but many of his conjectures have proved enduring. Alexander Dyce, for example, who sniffed in private that Collier’s text was ‘very badly edited’,63 in fact publicly acknowledged ‘the editor of Dodsley’ as his own source for no fewer than twenty-five substantive emendations, while disputing only seven others; and he compounded his flattery by adopting some fi y-five more without credit bestowed.64 Later editors such as A. H. Bullen and Frank S. Hook have perpetuated many of these. Collier’s last original contributions to Dodsley come in volume 12, with the new texts of Apius and Virginia and The World and the Child. The former ‘tragicall comedie’, by one R. B., written about 1564, is not to be confused with John Webster’s play of the same name, some sixty years later. It is indeed ‘uncouth’, as F. L. Lucas described it, and Collier’s edition, nearly bare of annotation, was the first since the original quarto of 1575. ‘Probably our earliest extant dramatic production publicly represented’, he thought it, and ‘curious as holding a middle

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60. Nashe, Works (1958), iv:416–44 and v:158. Collier may also have intended to edit the Nashe-Marlowe Dido, Queen of Carthage, despite its presence in The Old English Drama (1825), for in his copy of George Robinson’s 1826 Works of Christopher Marlowe (FF) the text of that play is elaborately collated with the 1594 quarto; Collier has noted that ‘the errors are now & then important as on p. 369, where three lines of the original are omitted’. 61. Peele, Works, ed. Bullen (1888), i:xxxii; Greg 1911c, p. v. 62. Line numbering from the Malone Society reprint (Oxford, 1911); the play is not divided into acts and scenes. 63. Dyce to Philip Bliss, 30 May 1827 (BL Add. MS 34,569, fol. 427), repeating a comment first made some weeks earlier (10 May, letter bound in Folger PR2731 D8 copy 2 As. Col., vol. 1 [Dyce’s 1828 Peele]). 64. The Works of George Peele, ed. Dyce (1828; 2d ed., 1829).


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station between the old Moralities and historical plays’ (xii:339). Preston’s Cambyses might already have challenged for priority, but John Bale’s Kynge Johan had not yet been discovered. The World and the Child (or Mundus et infans, a characteristic morality play of 1500–20) is also little more than a bald reprint by Collier, who described the unique original quarto (Wynkyn de Worde, 1522) only as ‘discovered in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin’ a er 1812— the date of Dibdin’s second volume of Ames. He did not mention his own immediate source, which demonstrably is the Roxburghe Club edition of 1817, Earl Spencer’s gi to his bibliophile confrères.65 Volume 12 of Dodsley, with its appendices of supplementary notes, chronological list of the plays, glossarial index (‘especially enlarged in the biographical matter’), and errata for all volumes, appeared in April 1827, and brought Prowett’s original project to a conclusion. Publication had been regular up to a point, volume by volume at monthly intervals from April through December 1825, each advertised in the Literary Gazette (vol. 9 was ‘just published’ on 17 December), but with the banking and bookselling crisis in that month Prowett’s agenda was capsized. Volume 1, planned to be ‘reserved’ until the end, is in fact dated 1825 on its title, and contains Collier’s ‘Advertisement’ subscribed January 1826; and although he speaks here of the contents of the final three volumes as if already in print, they were not. On 7 February 1826 John presented a set as it stood—presumably of volumes 1–9 only—to Henry Crabb Robinson, who fretted about its cash value in difficult times: ‘This is an expensive work— more than £5—and it distresses me how to make a return for it’ (HCR Diary). Although Prowett would surely have found Dodsley easier to sell when complete, the last two or three volumes proved awkward hurdles: Knight’s memory of ‘new works projected, written, half printed, advertised’ which ‘must wait for a more propitious time’ might apply literally to this series. Volumes 10 and 11 are dated 1826 on their titles, while 12 trailed into 1827, and no announcement of any of these appeared in the Literary Gazette—one more publisher’s economy? An advertisement issued by Prowett in April 1827 finally reports the ‘New Edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ as ‘just completed in twelve volumes’.66 ‘Beautifully printed upon yellow laid paper, crown octavo’, a full set would now cost £5 8s., or £8 9s. on large paper, ‘uniform with Gifford’s Ben Jonson’ or the Boswell-Malone Vari-

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65. Comparison of Collier’s text with the Roxburghe version and the original as re-edited by J. M. Manly (1897, i:354 ff.) demonstrates this dependence, even to words and lines omitted. See also the interesting account by Ian Lancashire (1973) of the the and return of the original. 66. The advertisement (‘Important works recently published, by Septimus Prowett, 62, Paternoster Row.’, 8 pp.) notes that the first part of the third volume of Canova ‘was published on the 31st of March’, while the third part of Outlines from the Ancients ‘will be published on the First of May’; FF.


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orum. As Robinson remarked, this was an ‘expensive work’, although Collier’s gain from it may have been ‘a mere trifle’, and the supplements of new plays and masques, which would have earned him prestige at least, remained unachieved. No doubt in the cold bookselling climate of 1827–28 Dodsley stuck on the publisher’s shelves like Martin’s extravagant ‘Milton’ (at twelve or twenty-four guineas a proof-set), but Martin at least had his fee in advance. Collier’s sense of mistreatment, rather than bad luck, would still rankle fi y years on. The 1825–26 panic le few unaffected, and although Collier seems to have lost nothing directly—sixty or seventy banks failed in six weeks, but John and Mary Louisa were spared—his profession, like Prowett’s, suffered when the public were poor. ‘Literary employment’, what John required to eke out his newspaper income, became elusive, and for two years Crabb Robinson’s diary recites a litany of concern over the fortunes and prospects of the burgeoning Collier family. Despite his inheritance of £300 or £400 at his father’s death in November 1825, and the economical move to Hunter Street in December, John was struggling. Rare-book purchases amounting to nearly £23 at the sale of W. B. Rhodes in April 1825 may have anticipated Prowett’s ‘twenty pounds a volume’ for Dodsley—or half that, if Collier’s habitual exaggerations are considered— and may later have seemed badly mistimed; a fi h child, Emma Letitia, was born to the Colliers on 21 May 1826. ‘John is not prosperous’, recorded Robinson in July 1826; ‘John and his family are well, but not the most prosperous’, echoed Jane Collier to Robinson in October, adding, ‘I wish he had more worldly wisdom’.67 In November John leased out the Witney mill he had inherited from his grandmother for £30 per annum, but simultaneously he borrowed £100 from Robinson; within less than a year he owed Robinson £250 more. On 27 November 1827 Mary Louisa gave birth to their sixth and last child, Henrietta Anna Robinson Collier, but Robinson, who regularly agonized over John’s improvidence and the plight of the Collier dependents, never mentions the compliment of this double namesaking. ‘John has suffered respectable talents to divert him from pursuits by which he might have improved his fortune. Had he had no literary abilities he might have become a lawyer and would have had a fair chance at the bar’, he wrote on 17 August 1827. But if ruefully parochial, he never was mean: ‘I fear he will not be able to pay [the debt of £350] . . . however I shall never distress him by demanding it and I trust my brothers will not do so should the debt ever become theirs.’ In this deepening slough, John’s search for outside work met with little success: he ‘cannot find literary employment’, Robinson reported in the spring of 1827, thinking him ‘hardly able to live as he does’ (HCR Diary, 17 May). William 67. HCR Diary, 27 July 1826; HCR Correspondence, 10/11 October 1826.

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Gifford, the all-powerful chief of the Quarterly Review, had died in December 1826 with his edition of James Shirley unfinished, and Robinson and Amyot recommended John to complete it. Collier was indeed well versed in Shirley, and had always treated Gifford in print with tact bordering on obsequiousness. He was probably the best man for the job, but Gifford’s publisher, John Murray, let a week pass without answering Robinson’s letter. ‘This was what I might have expected from the character of the man’, fumed the diarist, and eventually the Shirley project was given to a new editorial presence in London, the Rev. Alexander Dyce.68 Six years elapsed before the Gifford-Dyce Shirley was finally published, the first and last modern collected edition. Collier’s published allusions to Gifford, as editor of Jonson, Massinger, and Ford, turned almost at once from the gratuitously laudatory to the gratuitously sharp: it is hard to find John gainsaying an opinion of Gifford before the latter’s death, or endorsing one a erwards—until Gifford proved a stick to beat Dyce with, in 1833. Original verse and translations—in the London Magazine and in the annuals of 1827–28, The Amulet and Shoberl’s The Forget-me-not—remained ill-paid, and Robinson’s estimate remained cheerless: ‘A forenoon lounging over books’, he recorded on 10 December 1827, ‘Collier’s Translations from Casti—a sort of labour which nothing but perfection can render tolerable and even then—in the words of Johnson ‘‘if we leave him only his merit, what will be his praise?’’ ’ Two short pieces sold to William Hone for The Table Book at the end of 1827, published in 1828, were likewise more honorific than remunerative. In this bleak arena at least Prowett remained, and whatever he thought of his experience with Dodsley, John filtered the rest of his editorial work of 1825–28 through the same firm, or through its copyright-holding successor, Thomas White. The proposed supplement to Prowett’s Dodsley, advertised in 1825, was to have contained ‘first-rate specimens [of the drama], never reprinted and only in the hands of collectors’, and clearly Collier prepared several texts accordingly. Although Dodsley was offered as ‘completed’ in 1827 without any such additions, by 1828 Prowett apparently had sufficiently recovered from the 1825–26 crash to renew this project, and a prospectus announced eight plays ‘with illustrations and notes by J. Payne Collier, Esq.’, to appear monthly, ‘the size and general appearance of the work [corresponding] with the last edition of ‘‘Dodsley’s Old Plays’’’.69 In the event, however, only five of them were published by Prowett in 1828–29, the two-part Robin Hood plays of Anthony Munday (The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, with Henry Chettle), the early Senecan tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur, and two

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68. HCR Diary, 29 January–8 February 1827. Robinson’s letter, dated 1 February, is in the Murray archives. 69. Copy bound in Dyce Collection 7561.


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comedies by Nathan Field, A Woman Is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies. Le out were William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, Henry Porter’s Two Angry Women of Abingdon, and The Valiant Welshman by ‘A. R.’, although Englishmen for My Money was rescued for Thomas White’s series. Prowett sold the five reprints singly, but a er his second and terminal failure they were reissued together by William Pickering (1833) as Five Old Plays, Forming a Supplement to the Collections of Dodsley and Others, with Collier’s name on the title, and a half-title reading ‘Old Plays | Volume XIII’. Collier later called these ‘5 as excellent Old Plays as are to be found in our language’, and remembered that the project of ‘a continuation of Dodsley’s Old Plays’ had stalled when ‘the publisher [i.e., Prowett] could not afford to go on’.70 Each play was edited for the first time, and Collier’s biographical notes on Munday, Chettle, and Field are of some value; he gave also a pioneering account of the famous virago Mary Frith (‘Moll Cutpurse’ in Amends for Ladies), and discussed Francis Bacon’s share in The Misfortunes of Arthur. W. C. Hazlitt’s texts of all five (Dodsley, 1874) are little more than reprints of Collier’s, prefaces and all. If Prowett’s supplementary booklets of 1828–29, at 2s. 6d. apiece, represented a come-down from Dodsley in twelve volumes, ‘beautifully printed upon yellow laid paper’, the last echo of the original project was yet less imposing. By 1830 Thomas White, the printer of Dodsley and the five supplementary plays, had acquired the copyright of the former (at least) from the defunct Prowett firm.71 White himself was an enthusiast of the early drama, and in 1830–31 he printed and published, in an uncharacteristically nasty small format, eighteen pre-Restoration plays from various sources, as The Old English Drama. More like Oxberry’s cheap reprints of popular plays than the antiquarian projects of Prowett or Pickering, White’s series aimed well below theirs, his ambition ‘to do by other dramatic poets what has been done by Shakespeare: viz. to publish their chief works at such a price as shall render them accessible to every class’. The plays were to appear fortnightly, stereotyped, at sixpence each, although the price rose to 9d. a er three numbers, and finally to a shilling—the last hike necessitated when demand had not ‘as yet extended to 500 copies’. During 1830 White issued seventeen numbers, with an eighteenth following in 1831, but the nineteenth (and presumably the last) play in the series, Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, was printed by Charles Frederick Pitman, of Gutter Lane, Cheapside. Vol-

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70. Notes in Collier’s copies of OMD (Folger W.b.507, p. 92) and Five Old Plays (BL 11775.bbb.5, flyleaf). 71. In a note to one of the plays in his Old English Drama (Peele’s Edward I, p. 11) White referred to himself—‘the proprietor’—as owning the copyright to Dodsley. He may also have owned the stock, and Pickering may have obtained the sheets of the Five Plays aer White’s death or retirement.


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ume titles issued by White assign the first sixteen plays to four volumes, but sets of The Old English Drama are found variously assembled, the most complete having the extra three plays inserted.72 To this unprepossessing little series Collier contributed more, perhaps, than he cared later to recall. ‘One or two plays with notes by me, & meant to follow the 5 in 8vo, were put forth by White, the printer, in 12mo’, he wrote in about 1878. ‘The only one of which I remember the title was ‘‘Englishmen for my Money’’.’ 73 Corresponding with J. O. Halliwell in 1841 about another one— Ralph Roister Doister, the comedy he had correctly attributed to Udall in 1825— he was also unsure of his role: ‘As to editing it for White’s Old English Drama, I do not think I touched it . . . but it is so long ago that I cannot remember distinctly’.74 A close look, however, at the text and notes of Ralph Roister Doister leaves no doubt of Collier’s participation, and Englishmen for My Money was of course le over from the Prowett proposal. Illustrations and textual notes in several other plays have a strong Collier ring to them, especially when compared to those clearly by White: the textual correction to Gifford in Jonson’s Volpone, i.3.57, for example (an old reading restored which is now canonical), and the further rejections of Gifford’s new readings in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and throughout The Broken Heart. The text of Lyly’s Mother Bombie in White’s version follows the first quarto (correctly),75 whereas the only prior modern edition, by Charles Dilke, followed the second, so we expect John was probably responsible for the improvement: here both the introduction and notes sound like his also. The introduction, if not the notes, to The Seven Champions of Christendom bears comparison with Collier’s account of John Kirke in his History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831). White himself credited Collier for help with Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One: ‘It has been suggested by the editor of the English Plays to read sin be at heart; and here the proprietor of this collection begs to acknowledge to have freely borrowed from that gentleman’s notes on this comedy’.76 White also employed Collier’s Dodsley text and some notes to Edward I, the Historia Histrionica, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and he helped himself to all Collier’s work on both Field plays, A Woman Is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies. In other instances White appropriated Dilke’s text and notes (Doctor Faustus, Women Beware Women), and he appears to have gone elsewhere for The Lover’s Melancholy, A Fine Companion, Epicoene, and (if this is White’s work, printed 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

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These were, besides Old Fortunatus, Lyly’s Mother Bombie and John Day’s Isle of Gulls. Notes in OMD, iv:92 (Folger W.b.507). JPC to JOH, 3 December 1841, LOA 34/13. See, e.g., line 815. The Old English Drama, iii:64.


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by Pitman) for Old Fortunatus. One specimen of the forthright manner of the printer-turned-commentator (as well as a characteristic sally at Pickering) appears as a footnote to line 8 of Peele’s Edward I, that bedevilled bad text, and bears quoting: ‘Minutes are hours’: The 4to. of 1593, reads ‘Minutes and hours’. The reverend editor [i.e., Alexander Dyce] of the beautiful edition of our author’s works, published by Mr. Pickering, still however retains the reading of the old copy! Nonsense. The proprietor of this series of our Old English Drama knowing that the text of the edit. just noticed had been, with extraordinary care, collated with the old copies, and being anxious to refer to it, was refused the loan of it at the publishers, on the ground that the notes were private property. To insure correctness the work was obtained, when, by Jupiter, it was discovered that there was scarcely a single note— most of them acknowledged certainly—which had not been filched from Dodsley’s Old Plays, the copyright of which series happens, at this moment, to belong to the parties who met with the refusal in question.77 It would be pleasant to imagine that Collier’s involvement with White proceeded from his belief in making old literature ‘accessible to every class’, as his early grumblings about Brydges’s costly reprints and his subsequent zeal for antiquarian republication might suggest. But the shabby production standards of The Old English Drama cannot have satisfied him at the time, and his part in it may have been only casual, if commissioned. Indeed he may not even have chosen to preserve his own set, as none appeared in the sale of his library a half-century later.

Punch and Judy Amid all his editorial labours of 1825–30, one diversionary work by Collier for Septimus Prowett remains his best-known, and in terms of republication the most enduring performance of his entire literary career: a small anonymous octavo titled Punch and Judy, with Illustrations Designed and Engraved by George Cruikshank, ‘accompanied by the dialogue of the puppet-show, an account of its origin, and of puppet-plays in England’. Collier’s later accounts of the gene-

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77. Ibid., iv:11. Collier indeed may have put White up to this observation—it is true that Dyce pillaged the notes in Dodsley, frequently without citation—but the language (‘by Jupiter’) is certainly not Collier’s, and he had no need to purchase a copy of Dyce’s Works of George Peele (1828–29). Dyce had given him a copy, and fieen years later Collier remembered the gesture with unfeigned affection (JPC to Dyce, 24 November 1843, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 [32]); he also praised the Peele edition in HEDP, iii:191.


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sis of this celebrated volume are substantially in agreement with Cruikshank’s.78 Both record that Prowett mooted the project to Cruikshank in the autumn of his perilous year 1827, and subsequently approached Collier to provide the text. Cruikshank says that Prowett ‘engaged’ him, and that Cruikshank himself ‘obtained the address of the Proprietor and Performer of that popular Exhibition . . . an elderly Italian, of the name of Piccini, whom I remembered from boyhood’. Collier remembers that Prowett sought him out, having obtained from the artist some ‘wonderfully comic sketches’ of incidents in the Punch-play, because Collier was known once to have composed ‘a sort of mock drama [of Punch], with the various songs’, later resurrected and ‘read to my children at Christmas’. Prowett reportedly offered to buy Collier’s juvenile work (written ‘while staying with my Uncle at Brighton . . . when a mere boy, by following the Show at Brighton from street to street’), but John dissuaded him, as ‘the Dialogue . . . was very extemporal, and the Songs quite imperfect’. Prowett then changed his design, arranging to accompany Collier and Cruikshank on a morning’s expedition to the King’s Arms in the Coal Yard, Drury Lane, where Signor Piccini lodged with his wife, his stand, and his puppets. The old showman (he was then eighty-two, one-eyed, ‘a little thick-set man, with a red humorous-looking countenance’, who ‘always carried a rum-bottle in his pocket’)79 erected his portable stage upstairs in the inn, and gave his three paying visitors a private performance. Cruikshank recalls that he himself ‘stopped it at the most interesting parts to sketch the Figures, whilst Mr. Collier noted down the dialogue’, presumably in his habitual shorthand. ‘I never had a more amusing morning’, Collier wrote fortyfive years later, recollecting the ‘dirt, darkness, and uncouthness of [Piccini’s] abode’, ‘the forbiddingness of the appearance of Mrs. P., . . . an Irishwoman, and he an Italian’, so that ‘the jumble of languages in their discourse was in itself highly entertaining’ (OMD, iv:79). Cruikshank soon completed twenty-four coloured drawings, of which twenty-three were engraved on metal for Prowett, along with four supplementary vignettes on wood.80 Collier’s task was probably more extended, although he later claimed that it took ‘no more than three weeks’, for which Prowett paid him £50 (or £100: as usual the sums vary in retrospect). First, the Punch-play itself, which is certainly a combination of Piccini’s original spoken dialogue with

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78. Cruikshank’s account, provided for the catalogue of the 1863 exhibition of his work at the Exeter Hall (London), appeared in editions of Punch and Judy from 1870 on. Collier’s published account is in OMD, iv:77–80; further details are provided by two versions in JPC Memoirs, pp. 136–37 and a three-page unnumbered ‘patch’ at the end. 79. Speaight 1990, pp. 199–200, quoting descriptions from the Literary Speculum (1821) and Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861), iii:57. 80. The originals, the last of them never used, survive in the Theatre Collection at Princeton University; they are reproduced in McPharlin 1937.


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Collier’s literary invention:81 this ‘cost me a good deal of trouble, especially as to the completion of what I may call . . . the parodical songs’, and clearly John supplied what Prowett required as appropriate. But Collier’s principal achievement for Punch and Judy was his 72-page ‘Introduction’, tracing the history of puppetry and the Punch-play from Italy in the late sixteenth century to England in the present day, with shrewd critical notes on ‘the character of Punch’ and the moral implications of the Punch-plots.82 Approaching his ostensibly lightweight subject with the same discipline and gravitas now accorded the early popular stage and traditional poetry, John treated Punch as Professor William Richardson of Glasgow had treated Falstaff, Richard III, and Hamlet—a ‘philosophical character’—and he was not shy of citing Voltaire, Pascal, and Johnson for opinion, or Ariosto, Swi , Fielding, and the Elizabethans from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Jonson and Dekker for parallels. Puppetry is of course no less intrinsically subject to such study than balladry (Percy), sport and pastimes (Strutt, Douce), or cards and card-play (Singer), and the reviewers of Punch and Judy did not make fun of its preface. ‘An extremely clever and ingenious paper’, the Literary Gazette called it (9 February 1828), and the Gentleman’s Magazine cautioned its readers ‘not [to] hazard their wisdom by ridiculing the notion of a puppet-historian, for the author has brought a whole phalanx of artillery of the greatest calibre into the field to support him’ (May 1828). Yet Collier was never the bone-dry antiquary, as hostile readers of The Poetical Decameron supposed him, and there is certainly an element of whimsy to some of the ‘artillery’ here. If not quite conscious self-parody, there are tonguein-cheek passages in the text that suggested to Paul McPharlin a ‘waggish design’ on Collier’s part ‘of tying a mock-scholarly apparatus of introduction and footnotes to the little play, as Fielding had done with The Tragedy of Tragedies’; although this, he thought, ‘was forgotten as he excavated parallel allusions in earnest’. George Speaight too believed that ‘Collier treated the whole thing, with its pompous array of footnotes and literary comparisons, as something of a satire on literary scholarship’, but that ‘what may have started as a joke became a serious study’.83 Mixed purposes may account for mixed results, for John indeed generated, in less than a month, a serious and straightforward ‘study of Punch’, but he also deliberately and unabashedly introduced fabrications. Since 1816 and Thomas Churchyard in the Critical Review his work had been pure of these (the Freebooter perhaps excepted), but now in writing for Prowett, anonymously, he

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81. George Speaight (1990, p. 186) noted that ‘I cannot help suspecting that part of it was written by Collier himself ’, but Cruikshank regarded it as ‘a faithful copy and description of the various scenes represented by this Italian’. 82. A reference to performances ‘west of the Andes’ clearly came from Robert Proctor. 83. McPharlin 1937, p. ix; Speaight 1990, p. ix.


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reverted to mischief. The two versions of Collier’s introduction (one revised for the second edition of March 1828) are salted with small literary-historical fictions—transparent and innocent jests, if we don’t really mind them, misleading canards if we do. Some may indeed survive from a ‘waggish design’ of mingling scholarship with frivolity, but others came with revision, and their nature is more difficult to assess. In the first edition of Punch and Judy (January 1828), Collier devoted more than six pages to a ballad titled ‘Punch’s Pranks’ which ‘affords evidence of the connection between the stories of Punch and Don Juan; and (like the old ballads of ‘‘King Lear and his Three Daughters’’, ‘‘The Spanish Tragedy, or the lamentable murder of Horatio and Bellimperia’’, &c.) was perhaps founded upon the performance, by one who had witnessed and was highly gratified by it’ (pp. 46– 47). Collier probably derived the idea of Punch and Don Juan from William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described (1823), to which he referred slightingly;84 but his ballad is supposed to pre-date Hone, ‘being extracted from a curious collection of comic and serious pieces of the kind, in print and manuscript, with the figures 1791, 1792, and 1793, in various parts of it, as the times, probably, when the individual who made it, obtained the copies he transcribed, or inserted in their original shape’. Footnotes pedantic to the point of absurdity are supplied, however, which might have furnished hints to the wary: a Spenserian source, coupled with ‘we regret that so pleasant an effusion should be anonymous’; a gloss on ‘his’n’ (rhymed with ‘prison’) indicating that what ‘sounds like an ignorant vulgarism . . . is, in fact, only an abbreviation, per ellipsin, of his own’ (further illustrated in the second edition with an example from Chapman); and the sly explanation that Punch’s ‘killing the devil’ at the end of the ballad is comparable to ‘cacciar il Diavolo nell’ Inferno’ in Boccaccio—a rare, if muted, excursion by John into the risqué. Four decades later Collier as much as claimed authorship of these 112 doggerel lines, writing in An Old Man’s Diary that ‘the best thing in the letter-press of the book is, I humbly think, the mock-ballad headed ‘‘Punch’s Pranks’’ ’ (OMD, iv:79). ‘Punch’s Pranks’ may have been harmless and even a transparent jeu d’esprit, but the account of a Punch-play at Margate in 1813 has caused some anguish to later puppet historians. At pp. 57–59 John inserted ‘the only printed account we ever saw of the plot of one of Punch’s exhibitions . . . which differs from the story of any of the numerous shows we have witnessed. It is given’, he declared with aplomb, ‘as a sort of theatrical criticism in a letter from a watering-place, and was published in the Morning Chronicle of 22nd September, 1813.’ What follows is nothing else but a reprint (slightly abridged, and misdated by twelve months)

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84. William Hone, Ancient Mysteries Described (1823), p. 230; Punch and Judy, p. 45.


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of Collier’s own juvenile newsletter from Margate in the Morning Chronicle for 22 September 1812, reporting an imaginary Punch-play with far-flung episodes and extravagant allegorical meanings. Its anonymity at the time—indeed in 1828 even Crabb Robinson may have forgotten its source—enabled Collier to treat the report with becoming scepticism: ‘We do not see, exactly’, he commented, ‘how the whole of such a plot could have been made out in a puppet-show, and we cannot avoid thinking, that the critic, like many others, has here found out ‘‘meanings never meant’’, and which could never have entered the head of any ordinary exhibitor.’ But ‘only supposing that the writer has a little disturbed the ordinary course of the events for his own purpose’, he concluded—one must hope he was smiling as he wrote—‘the whole is very easily explained and understood’. And indeed much of the fabrication, including the imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition, the escape with a ‘golden key’, and the ‘allegorical’ interpretations, is still repeated in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (16th ed., 1999) in a standard paragraph on Mr. Punch. George Speaight, the distinguished historian of Punch and Judy, combed the Morning Chronicle for six months either side of 22 September 1813, found nothing, and determined that the passage was no more than ‘Collier’s fanciful allegory’.85 Had he located the anonymous original he might have granted it independent authority, credible or not; as it happens, fortuitously, he was quite right. The first printing of Punch and Judy sold briskly, and for a second edition (within two months) Collier supplied many changes in the text of the dialogue, and revised several parts of his introduction. Originally he had alluded, vaguely, to ‘a manuscript’ into which ‘some amusing songs and parodies were introduced’ (p. 74), and which he had employed in eking out Signor Piccini’s oral version; now he elaborated that ‘we have been favoured [with the manuscript] by a gentleman who undertook, about the year 1796, to perform the task we have now executed, by giving the unwritten, if not strictly extempore, dialogue of ‘‘Punch and Judy’’ a permanent and tangible shape’ (2d ed., p. 91). With the authority of the 1796 manuscript (never since seen), Collier introduced a new song, several lines of dialogue, and two entirely new short scenes, none of this credited to Piccini, and probably all Collier’s invention. The introduction and the apparatus are padded out with anecdotes, notably one of Sir Francis Burdett ‘kissing Judy and the child, and soliciting Mr. Punch for his vote’, with a paragraph of dialogue supposedly taken from that performance, and with new parallels with Richard II, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. But the most provocative novelty of the second edition is a ‘Sonnet to Punch’, ‘by no less a man, if we are rightly informed, than the poet, among whose latest works it was to 85. Speaight 1954, p. 32.

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continue and vary the story of ‘‘Don Juan’’. It is highly characteristic’, Collier assures us, ‘of the author, and of the representation it celebrates with so much truth and vivacity’ (p. 84). The wretched quatorzain which follows (‘Triumphant Punch! with joy I follow thee’) can hardly have been intended to deceive with any confidence. Even John, whose low opinions of Byron we have noted, could not expect contemporaries to accept as Byron’s lines like ‘Whether thou kills’t thy wife with jolly glee’, rhymes of ‘refuse’ and ‘noose’, or the callow last couplet, ’Tis such delight To see thee cudgel his black carcase antique, For very rapture I am almost frantic! Charitably, this is parody, if not much to the point. No editor of Byron seems ever to have taken the attribution seriously, although Speaight remarks that it ‘is still quoted [as Byron’s] to this day in puppet histories’, and an 1836 translation of Punch and Judy into French proudly featured in its title ‘lord byron, Sonnet à Polichinelle’.86 Whatever his original design, Collier’s texts of 1828 preserve a strange admixture of credible scholarship and report, conscious whimsy and undeclared fiction. Once again anonymity may have seemed best, for John (he said) stipulated to Prowett that he not be ‘required to put my name to the small volume, because my materials were few and disjointed’ (OMD, iv:78); his name indeed remained off the title-page for a century, but his responsibility for the preface was an open secret from the beginning.87 And the book did sell and sell, not least because of Cruikshank’s wonderful engravings, which Prowett also issued as proofs in portfolio. Collier’s text, though sometimes curtailed—he revised no edition a er the second—remained enduringly popular too: there were seven British reprints or reissues in his own lifetime and many more new editions since. Its authority in its particular sphere was long almost unchallenged, and has been pervasive, for better or worse (witness Brewer). In a generous if rueful summing-up, George Speaight acknowledged its niche-carving importance: faults, falsehoods, and all, ‘Collier’s historical introduction has provided the basic foundation for every history of puppets in England that has been written since—including this one’.88 On 11 January 1829 John Payne Collier turned forty, a time for reflection, if he could spare it. His small rented house in Hunter Street now accommodated nine souls: John, Mary Louisa, maiden aunt Emma Pycro , and six children aged be-

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86. Speaight 1990, p. 188; McPharlin 1936, p. 386. 87. He was named in the London Weekly Review notice (9 February 1828, p. 88). 88. Speaight 1990, p. 186.


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tween one and eleven. The two boys were of school age, and John Pycro would soon be boarded with his uncle in Guernsey; but quarters were close, and Crabb Robinson was probably wise to resist Jane Collier’s plan to move him back in (HCR Correspondence, 18 May 1828). Extramural responsibilities continued for John, though Jane, now sixty, divided her time between her two daughters, and Richard Collier, the black sheep, was ‘hardly to be considered a member of the family’: separated again from his wife, as Robinson learned, ‘he keeps a mistress and has a natural child by a third woman’. Poor brother William, preparing assiduously for the bar, had his bad leg amputated ‘a er suffering a very painful operation’ in the summer of 1828, and was bed-ridden still in November.89 John too had been ill and convalescent in the winter of 1828–29,90 but his affairs, as he entered his fi h decade, seemed more hopeful than two years before. A er the low ebb of 1826–27, when he laboured on Dodsley, Jane told Robinson that ‘John’s employments . . . have increased’ and ‘have set [the family] completely at ease, so that I think there could be no anxiety in pecuniary matters’ (HCR Correspondence, 18 May 1828). Of course this was meant to reassure Robinson in his quest for dependable lodgings, but John did earn more fees from Prowett, and at some point in the late 1820s he began to review plays on a regular basis, anonymously, in both the Observer and the Morning Chronicle. Precisely when his reviewing commenced is uncertain, although Thomas Noon Talfourd sought a notice from him in February 1829; eleven years later it would occasion a crisis with the volatile William Macready.91 Most significantly, however, a er seventeen years of prevarication or resistance, and two months shy of his birthday, John made up his mind to be called to the bar. A ‘long letter’ from Jane proved decisive, and John gave ‘a short answer’ on 26 November: ‘I have determined to be called & that very much at your instance’, he wrote. ‘Whether I shall do any good is another question. If other people could be persuaded to think as well of me as you do in your maternal partiality, I should be sure of success; & if I thought better of myself I should no doubt improve my chance of it—I am going about it this morning.’ 92 On 7 February 1829, troubled with a sore throat, John was admitted to the bar alongside his recuperating younger brother. Robinson spared them no flattery: ‘I am very sure [John] will never have the perseverance necessary to success’, he pronounced, later regarding the

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89. HCR Diary, 2 April, 1 July, and 5 November 1828. 90. HCR Diary, 8 December 1828, 30 January and 1 February 1829. 91. Talfourd to JPC, 28 February 1829, FF MS 347. 92. JPC to Jane Collier, 26 November 1828, FF/K MS 604. On the same day Robinson, though sceptical of Collier’s success, recorded the effect of the female campaign: ‘His wife wrote to me to beg I would not discourage this undertaking, and his mother made the same request to me— There is no danger of my doing this’.


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call itself as ‘equally a failure to both, but from very different causes. John had talents & qualifications far superior to those of very successful men—Could he have withdrawn himself from literature and devoted himself to the necessary study he might have been anything in the law’ (HCR Reminiscences, iii:110). John took chambers for a time with his friend Charles Clark, at 2 Pump Court, Middle Temple, but his desultory legal career largely fulfilled Robinson’s augury. The admission of 1829 remained inalienable, however, and fi y-four years later his death certificate provided, under ‘occupation’, only ‘Barrister at Law’. John’s capitulation to the law, no matter how unrewarding it turned out to be, may have meant more to him than a sop to his age and circumstances. The symbolic choice he had once offered himself between art and practice was now made, and with the decade itself his ambitions for a poetical career effectively expired; there were still modest lyrics and occasional translations to come, and light or mock-antique ballads to be circulated privately or passed off for what they were not, but The Poet’s Pilgrimage and all serious verse enterprise were behind him. Still, the devotion to ‘literature’, which Robinson blamed for inhibiting John’s worldly success, remained as strong as ever, and if anything more sharply defined. At forty, Collier was now ‘the author of the Decameron’, ‘the editor of Dodsley’s Old Plays’, and, to the knowing, the anonymous historian of the puppet theatre. With the deaths of Reed, Malone, Chalmers, and finally William Gifford the old order of scholar-critics and editors may have seemed at an end, with no new cadre of dramatic specialists yet arisen to match Collier’s credentials. Singer, Brydges, and Joseph Haslewood were dabblers or dilettantes; Henry John Todd concentrated on Spenser and Milton; others—George Robinson, James Brook Pulham, Charles Wentworth Dilke—would contribute a text or two and then vanish. Only the newcomer Alexander Dyce could seem a fit rival, or perhaps worthy colleague, in reviving and reinterpreting the great parerga of Shakespearian drama and poetry, and the history of the old English stage; and Dyce was very much Collier’s junior. The time was ripe, if John could seize it, for a demonstration of mastery.


part three

The 1830s (I)

The History of English Dramatic Poetry Just when John Payne Collier began to envision his research into the ‘old’ English drama and theatre as matter for a new book is unclear, but certainly his reading and much of his writing had pointed toward such a work for over a decade. From the retrospective essays in the British Lady’s Magazine, the Critical Review, and the Edinburgh Magazine, to the ninth and tenth conversations on theatrical performance and theatre historians in The Poetical Decameron, and the commentary, play by play, in his Dodsley, Collier had published more about the early stage and its dramatists than anyone since Reed and Malone. In the preface to The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare (June 1831) he claimed that he had ‘commenced my researches nearly twenty years ago’, a figure he had stretched a little, a year earlier, in telling John Murray that his manuscript was ‘the produce of twenty years of zealous and industrious enquiry’. To William Upcott he more plausibly declared that ‘I have been engaged in the work for the last fi een years’, a figure that Upcott’s colleague and Collier’s kinsman William Maltby, librarian of the London Institution, might confirm.1 The project was at any rate specifically formulated by March 1829, when Collier spoke of ‘my projected Hist: of the Stage & Dramatic Poetry in this country’ as in progress, but ‘at present comparatively so little advanced’.2 In December Jane Collier reported to Robinson that ‘John goes on with his book, but has not offered it to any bookseller yet; he has not yet completed it’, and indeed when in February 1830 John sent his preface to Murray, with an offer of ‘specimens of the execution of any or all parts of my undertaking’, he was still far from finished.3 Examination of primary material continued virtually into the

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1. JPC to Murray, 2 February 1830, John Murray archives; JPC to Upcott, 27 August 1830, Huntington MS UP 137. 2. Undated letter to Frederic Madden, BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–8. Collier mentions in the letter that he had been introduced to Madden by Amyot ‘Thursday week’; this may have been at the meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on 26 February, when Robinson noted that Collier was present as Amyot’s guest. The first dated letter from Collier to Madden is 1 July 1829. 3. HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1829; JPC to Murray, 2 February 1830.

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proof-stage of production, and the active tasks of record-searching and writing probably occupied about two and a half years, from late 1828 (a er Punch and Judy and the last volumes of Dodsley) until early May 1831. For what HEDP embodies in three stout volumes, this is no dilatory pace of work—conducted simultaneously with full-time reporting, theatre reviewing, and whatever legal employment followed John’s call to the bar.

New Faces in the Circle: Dyce, Devonshire, and Egerton The concentrated purpose of Collier’s new project, as much as his earned reputation as ‘the editor of Dodsley’, brought him a wealth of new friends and associates. Outstanding among them, and possibly the earliest of the crop, was the young Rev. Alexander Dyce, a newcomer to London in late 1825.4 Over the next forty years the volatile relationship between Collier and Dyce would prove mutually rewarding and mutually painful; at the outset, however, it seemed easy and warm. The Scotsman, nine years Collier’s junior, shared Collier’s passion for literature and the stage, but little else in background or circumstances. Dyce’s lineage was military and colonial, his father an officer in the East India Company’s service, his mother a sister of Sir Neil Campbell, a West Indian campaigner, later Napoleon’s ‘commissioner’ at Elba, and finally governor of Sierra Leone. Both parents returned to India when Alexander was only a year old, but his upbringing by two Aberdeen aunts seems to have le him no scars. At Edinburgh High School he took more to sport and play-going than to study, but at Exeter College, Oxford (1815–19), he discovered classics and bookstalls, and in 1821 he published, at his own expense, a small volume of blank-verse translations from the Greek of Quintus Smyrnaeus.5 By now he had declined to follow his father into Indian service, and agreed instead to take holy orders (1821). Few ‘literary clergymen’ have seemed less churchly, however, and a er brief curacies in Cornwall and Suffolk, Dyce moved to London and never again troubled

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4. In the biography prefaced to his edition of Dyce’s Reminiscences (1972, p. 6), Richard J. Schrader expressed uncertainty about the date of Dyce’s arrival in London, despite John Forster’s testimony that it was 1825; writing to David Laing from Aberdeen on 7 October 1825, Dyce indicated that he would be moving to London in six weeks (EUL MS La.IV.17). 5. Dyce originally planned to translate the whole of Quintus’s supplement to the Iliad, projecting to David Laing on 24 November 1820 a book of about 300 pages. An error by Forster is perpetuated in DNB, namely that ‘shortly before he took his degree he had edited, in 1818, Jarvis’s Dictionary of the language of Shakespeare’(John Forster, ‘Alexander Dyce: A Biographical Sketch’, in South Kensington Museum, Catalogue of the Printed Books and Manuscripts Bequeathed by the Reverend Alexander Dyce [1875], p. xiv); in fact his edition of Swynfen Jervis’s Dictionary appeared in 1868.


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the pulpit. Legacies from his aunts le him comfortably off, and for the rest of his life he was able to socialize and sojourn, read, write, and collect without any hint of financial constraint.6 Indeed he seems to have subsidized most if not all of his own editorial publications, a fact that in part accounts for their handsome appearance, and their meticulous and expensive revision in proof.7 In person Dyce was imposing, a ‘gentle giant’ of six feet five inches—this is Collier’s figure, and Collier himself stood six feet tall. A dandy when young, affable and urbane, a keen diner-out (though curiously slack in reciprocal entertaining), and much given to gallantry, he numbered Fanny Haworth, Fanny Kemble, and Mary Russell Mitford among his earliest literary allies.8 In 1825 he published Specimens of the English Poetesses, which he described as the first verse anthology ‘entirely consecrated to women’, and in 1827 he saw Miss Haworth’s anonymous tales, The Pine Tree Dell, through the press. Like Crabb Robinson however, Dyce never married, and his bachelor chambers in time filled with ‘books and manuscripts . . . pictures, paintings, drawings, miniatures, antique rings, and curiosities’, all eventually bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum. His collection of English books was particularly rich in Tudor and Stuart dramatic quartos, but much less so in popular prose, minor verse, and ‘reference’, for Dyce was by no means in love with antiquarian research for its own sake. Nor was he taken with the ‘ ‘‘minora sidera’’ of literature’, as he considered them, ‘little twinkles . . . scarcely visible even in their own dark times’,

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6. In a note about Dyce possibly connected with his 1880 Memoirs, Collier said he was ‘wonderfully careful of his money and died, I think worth 17 or 18,000£’ (Houghton MS bMs Eng 1106.1); the probate figure was in fact ‘under £25,000’. 7. Forster delicately suggests this about Pickering’s early arrangements with Dyce (‘So limited the sale for [an edition of Collins, 1827] and so exacting [Dyce’s] necessary requirements in regard to printing and other points of production, that it was a liberality [on Pickering’s part] merely to share the venture’ (‘Biographical Sketch’, p. xv); but Dyce himself was quite clear about the funding of his Peele (1828–29), telling John Mitford that ‘dissatisfied with the first ed. of Peele, I reprinted it at my own expense (nearly £200)’ (24 December 1833, Dyce Collection, MS 86.Y.100 [26]). Collier in 1876 asserted that Dyce, ‘being a man with money, ran part of the risk [for his Shakespeares of 1857 and 1864] in both instances. Towards his ‘‘Beaumont & Fletcher’’ he had contributed £400, as I heard from Moxon the publisher of it. This fact has been kept quite in the back-ground, but John Forster knew it: so of other works by Dyce’ (JPC Diary, 30 March 1876). 8. On the evidence of Crabb Robinson’s diary and other contemporary memoirs Dyce rarely hosted ‘parties’; but his accommodation—at 72 Welbeck Street, Marylebone; in Gray’s Inn Square; and finally at 33 Oxford Terrace, Paddington—was never spacious. In OMD, iv:101–03, Collier reproduced a poem by Dyce accepting an invitation for a Sunday dinner, while admitting that (in Collier’s words) ‘he had recently, and I may say sulkily, regaled himself on a turkey and game sent to him by his friend Sandby, without inviting anyone to partake of them’. Dyce’s excursions into occasional verse were, incidentally, less uncommon than Collier thought (‘I never saw any rhymes by Dyce excepting in one of the ‘‘annuals’’, I entirely forget which’); there are in fact several, not much worse or much better than Collier’s.


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a predilection for which, in Sir Egerton Brydges, he lamented,9 and might also have perceived over the years in Collier. But his long run of Brydges’s Lee Priory Press reprints—the costly collector’s editions that offended Collier so much— is remarkable. So are his dozen or more John Payne Colliers, nearly all presentation copies, including the manuscript of The Poet’s Pilgrimage: like most of Dyce’s modern books, they are in impeccable original condition, as if read with gloves on. Collier, in his last bitter reflections upon his lost friend, suggested that Dyce’s bibliophily had its dark side, saying he would not return a Swi letter lent by Collier: ‘he did not want to find it . . . he is very close-fisted when once he has got anything into his hand’.10 ‘I gave Dyce several old Plays and other curious Books’, he complained elsewhere, ‘but he never gave me one book excepting such as he himself had edited’.11 Collier met Dyce well before 30 May 1827, when the younger man alluded to him as ‘a brother Editor’ with some condescension, in a nervous but impenitent letter to his crony Philip Bliss: ‘I recollect that in a hastily written letter . . . I mentioned ‘‘Edward the first’’ as being very badly edited in the new Dodsley: I do not mean at all to retract what I wrote, but wishing to be charitable toward a brother Editor, I request that you will form your own opinion of the merits of that reprint, & that what I expressed may not be quoted to its prejudice.’ 12 Their paths may have crossed earlier, at plays—Dyce had attended John Philip Kemble’s farewell performance in June 1817, and that of Sarah Siddons two years later, events John was unlikely to have missed—or at book auction sales or in booksellers’ shops. Soon enough a er settling in London, Dyce entered the charmed circle of breakfasters with Samuel Rogers,13 and met the similarly unclerical clergyman John Mitford, book collector and later editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Through Mitford he met Wordsworth, and through Rogers the young lion William Harrison Ainsworth, as well as Thomas Campbell, Edward Lytton Bulwer, and John Forster. Through either Rogers or Mitford he found Pickering and Edward Moxon, his publishers-to-be, and Collier furnished him Henry Crabb Robinson, and with that Robinson’s own personal network.14 Yet for a time John Payne Collier himself was the apple of Alexander Dyce’s roving eye: they were ‘kindred souls’ with a similarly arcane taste

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9. Dyce to William Wordsworth, 17 June 1830; printed in de Sélincourt, v:292. 10. Houghton MS bMS Eng 1106.1. 11. Collier’s annotated OMD (Houghton *65J-270), ii:3. Dyce made fun of himself on this account (and perhaps also of Collier’s expectations of him) in a charming epistolary ‘play’ sent to Collier in 1834; FF/K MS 590. 12. BL Add. MS 34,569, fols. 426–27. 13. Dyce’s best-known book is his Table Talk of Samuel Rogers. 14. HCR Diary, 6 April 1832, calling Dyce ‘an agreeable man’.


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in old English drama, and ‘I like you better than anyone in London’, Dyce wrote in April and May 1830.15 But from the very beginning of their acquaintance and friendship, rivalry bristled between Dyce and Collier, and if Dyce was already preparing an edition of George Peele, the appearance in Collier’s Dodsley of Peele’s Edward I might account for his outburst to Bliss. Not that Dyce was himself innocent of spleen: ‘He has all the spite’, once wrote John Mitford, his great friend, ‘of a school-girl who means to tell her governess that Miss Tottileplan in going upstairs, took two steps at once, for which there is a heavy punishment at Kensington Gore and the Hammersmith seminaries.’ 16 Collier certainly ‘took two steps at once’ on more than one occasion, and Dyce clearly took pleasure in informing the governess. In the first five years of their jostling, Dyce was certainly more the aggressor. He pounced on Collier’s one dubious sidelight on George Peele, probably a misunderstanding which Collier unwisely fobbed off on Malone,17 and his citations of ‘the Editor of Dodsley’ in footnotes to Peele’s Edward I (1829) were disingenuously selective, even grudging, while flowery compliments to such genteel antiquaries as Sir Egerton Brydges, H. J. Todd, John Mitford, Philip Bliss, and Nicholas Harris Nicolas festoon his pages. In Dyce’s Greene (1831) Collier was treated more graciously,18 although again Dyce drew more from Collier’s text of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay than he acknowledged, reserving one of his three footnotes to Dodsley simply to reject an unadopted emendation. And of course the Gifford-Dyce Shirley, delayed from 1827 to 1833 through the mutual diffidence of Dyce and John Murray, was a project that Collier himself had coveted, to no avail. Collier’s retaliation, if it can be viewed as such, came in footnotes of his own, somewhat subtler than Dyce’s. A favourite trick of his was to praise an authority with apparent candour, perhaps not quite for what the authority intended, and with equal ‘openness’ mitigate the praise by finding a flaw. Personal animus

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15. Dyce to JPC, 30 April and 14 May 1830, Folger MS Y.d.341 (54) and (55). 16. Letters and Reminiscences of the Rev. John Mitford, ed. Matilda C. Houstoun (1891); quoted in Schrader 1972, p. 11. The remark (ca. 1854–55) is clearly whimsical, in a context otherwise of admiring respect. 17. Dodsley, xi:5; Dyce, in his 1829 Works of Peele, i:xx, noted: ‘I feel convinced that no such poem [a dialogue between two shepherds on the return of Drake and Norris to England] ever existed.’ 18. For good reason, perhaps, as at one point Dyce seems to have intended collaborating with Collier: on 14 May 1830, however, he begged off (‘I have come to the resolution not to have any partner in the work’), explaining that ‘an association with anyone would fidget me to death, & I should be unable to fiddle faddle with it in my own peculiar Dycean style, however accommodating my coadjutor might be. . . . Don’t be offended, nor dream that I slight your assistance’; Folger MS Y.d.341 (55).


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seemed then out of the question: this is a time-honoured strategy of mildly hostile book-reviewers, as Collier well knew. In HEDP he took pains to praise all Dyce’s editions of the playwrights, but there is inevitably a sting in the tail of each compliment. Thus Webster was an ‘excellent edition’, and one illustrative parallel from it was presented as ‘apposite’—but, Collier added, ‘nothing could be easier than to multiply proofs to the same effect, were it necessary’.19 The Works of Greene, a ‘beautiful edition’ by ‘my friend the Rev. A. Dyce’ (iii:148), seemed to misdate the first part of Greene’s Mamillia by ten years (in fact the second part is ten years earlier than either Collier or Dyce realized), and while Collier ‘usually’ followed Dyce’s text ‘as furnished with scrupulous exactness’, he could not resist concluding that ‘I wish that [Dyce’s] author had been more worthy of his learned and tasteful labours’ (iii:157). Peele, too, ‘in two beautiful post 8vo. volumes’, Collier had gratefully employed (iii:191), choosing the corrected 1829 reprint; but a final footnote proposed to emend one word in David and Bethsabe, and called Dyce’s (valid) reading from the original quarto ‘almost the solitary verbal blemish of his edition’ (iii:204). Superficially all this sparring was amicable, however, and Dyce and Collier habitually exchanged presentation copies of their books, Collier resurrecting a set of The Poetical Decameron, and giving away the manuscript itself of The Poet’s Pilgrimage along with a copy of the book; Dyce reciprocated with copies of his Peele (1828–29), his Webster (1830), and his Greene (1831).20 But when John forwarded to Dyce a precious large-paper copy of his HEDP (one of only six printed) Dyce’s response was equivocal at best. ‘I found the size of your large Paper Stage History irreconcilable with the size of my trunk’, he wrote from Aberdeen, heartlessly, having le it behind in London. The ‘sunny view of the matter’, he continued, was that the book would always be valuable, but ‘now for a little shade: I think that only antiquarian readers will ever dream of perusing it, that by what is called ‘‘the general reader’’ not two pages of it could possibly

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19. HEDP, i:401–02. Collier had also briefly puffed Dyce’s Webster in the Morning Chronicle of 4 March 1830, calling it ‘a valuable addition to the dramatic literature of this century’, and remarking that its ‘four volumes . . . range precisely with Mr. Dyce’s edition of Peele’s Works, one of the most accurate books in English’. But he particularized only a misleading reference to his own Poetical Decameron: there ‘Mr Collier does little more than mention that [Academiarum examen] had been attributed to [Webster], without at all asserting the correctness of the imputation’, but ‘Mr. Dyce was resolved to have a contest, [and] he created for himself an adversary’. 20. JPC sale, lots 527, 389, and 859. Thanking Dyce for the gi of a fine-paper copy of his Skelton, Collier recalled the pleasure with which he had received Dyce’s first such offering, the Peele: ‘That is a few years ago now’ (24 November 1843, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.4 [21]). In OMD, ii:50, Collier claimed that Dyce had ‘resumed possession’ of a gi copy of Specimens of the British Poetesses, ‘which he published five years ago, before I knew him, and of which he has lately oen told me he is really much ashamed’. But in fact Collier disposed of a copy in 1854, among literary discards auctioned by Sotheby’s on 26 January (lot 1157).


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be swallowed. . . . Murray will never get back his money for it’. Collier’s reply must have offered some kind of protest, for Dyce parried with more faint praise and censure: ‘all I meant was, that its circulation must inevitably be confined to a few antiquarian readers; that it was excellent in its kind, but that I could not help thinking the style a little heavy. . . . I have in my eyes, as an opposite to yours, the very elegant but not too ornate style of Warton in his H[istory of ] E[nglish] P[oetry], which I agree with Mitford in thinking the most agreeable book (at least in modern times) of poetical criticism’.21 How wounded Collier may have been we cannot now know, but he seems to have let matters rest. Simpler and sweeter was Collier’s brief relationship with the antiquary and collector Francis Douce (1757–1834), author of Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807), a model of scholarship yoked with arcana. John approached the eccentric septuagenarian on the strength of an acquaintance with James Haywood Markland, a Roxburghe Club member and the son-in-law of Post Office reformer and book collector Sir Francis Freeling. He also dropped Thomas Amyot’s everavailable name, and Douce welcomed him, exhibited his library and cabinet of curios, and lent him, toward HEDP, several books of great value and rarity. These included the unique copy of Bale’s Temptation of Christ (HEDP, ii:239– 41), Bale’s rare autobiographical Vocacyon to the Bishoprick of Ossorie and his Interlude of Youth (ii:313–16), and Tarltons News out of Purgatory.22 In December 1830 John returned to Douce certain ‘fragments’, no less important, explaining that he had retained them while awaiting proofs from his printer ‘to which they relate, in order that I might be able to correct the proofs by the originals’.23 Among these were William Baldwin’s novella Beware the Cat, from which Collier transcribed two full pages (i:152–53), remarking that Richard Heber’s copy, the only perfect one known, was ‘of course, now inaccessible’, and the last eight leaves of the earliest known edition of Everyman (Pynson, ca. 1515, still unique). Collier took some delight in using this to refute T. F. Dibdin’s statement that ‘the existence of any play printed by Wynkyn de Worde or Pynson, must be doubtful’, and recorded its variants.24 He also printed long extracts from ‘a single leaf of an interlude’ owned by Douce, which is now known as Temperance (ii:370–71). While Collier, with Douce’s blessing, published several of Douce’s unique texts for the first time, it is clear that the old man knew very well what he owned.

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21. Dyce to JPC, 5 July and 21 August 1831, Folger MSS Y.d.6 (91) and Y.d.341 (56). The second letter is quoted by Ganzel (p. 50) with the misreading ‘factual’ for ‘poetical’. 22. Referred to without credit to Douce at iii:379 and 381; but Collier later told J. O. Halliwell that Douce had lent it him (31 October 1842, LOA 23/56). 23. 12 December 1830, Bodl. MS Douce d.29, fol. 153. 24. Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities, ed. T. F. Dibdin (1810–19), ii:565.


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In repossessing his loans in December 1830 he was no doubt mindful of the bequest he had decided upon in that year: a visit to the Bodleian Library with Isaac D’Israeli had so pleased him that he willed all his books, manuscripts, prints, and coins to Oxford, and all the works mentioned above—except the fragment of Temperance, which somehow passed into the Duke of Devonshire’s collection, and is now at the Huntington Library—remain there.25 Douce made Collier a present of his Illustrations, however, and John reciprocated in June 1831 with the published HEDP. Douce’s response to the last was characteristically gracious and generous: ‘best thanks’ for ‘an extremely valuable present, to which I had not the slightest claim; whilst yours to the pleasure and admiration of a discerning publick is very considerable. I most heartily wish every just & possible Success to your excellent work’.26 From June 1829 to October 1831 Henry Crabb Robinson remained away on an extended tour of the Continent. In his absence, Collier’s intimacy with Thomas Amyot seems to have increased, with John regularly submitting his ideas and projects to the older man for approval, and taking Amyot’s opinions rather more seriously than ‘Bourne’ had taken those of ‘Morton’ in The Poetical Decameron. Amyot kept in close touch with HEDP, and John at first planned to dedicate the work to him; in the end he singled him out as ‘unquestionably among the very first in [my] obligation’ (i:xvi) for sympathy, encouragement, and ‘for many unacknowledged suggestions’ (ii:194), some of them clearly reflecting Amyot’s superior philological learning (ii:146). ‘To him I am indebted, not only for much valuable knowledge, but for the means of information, by most serviceable introductions, and for the kindest aid throughout my undertaking. To all who are acquainted with him’, Collier concluded, perhaps remembering Amyot’s generosity toward the hoi polloi, ‘this tribute will appear quite unnecessary (i:xvi).’ The culmination of Amyot’s generosity was to re-channel John’s dedicatory intentions. ‘The Duke of Devonshire has had John introduced to him thro’ Amyott’s kindness’, wrote Jane Collier to Robinson, and ‘Mr Amyott has been kindly urging John to alter the dedication of the book from himself to the Duke’.27 John ‘resisted, the last time I heard’, she added, but he had in fact

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25. Collier is unlikely to have stolen it, as he identified it as Douce’s in HEDP. One other fragment, a sheet from G. Ellis, The Lamentation of the Lost Sheep (1605), passed from Douce to Collier, presumably as a gi, for Collier identified its source in Heber IV, lot 728: see BARB, i:149. This is now at Folger. 26. 30 June 1831, Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.14, fol. 5. Collier’s letter of thanks for the Illustrations is Bodl. MS Douce d.29, fol. 152; the book itself appeared as lot 156 in his 1884 sale. 27. HCR Correspondence, 20 June 1830. This meeting took place sometime before 16 Febru-


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already capitulated, and beneath the Devonshire arms on its second leaf HEDP is finally inscribed ‘To his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s Household . . . with Permission’.28 The relationship that Amyot had so forwarded, between Collier and William Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, would be one of the most important in Collier’s life. For the moment, acquaintance with the bibliophile ‘bachelor Duke’ meant for Collier access to an unparalleled private dramatic library, for in 1821 Devonshire had acquired en bloc the collection of John Philip Kemble, comprising some four thousand early quartos and forty volumes of playbills, and was ready and willing to build upon strength. ‘He gets John to make purchases of old plays for him’, Jane told Robinson in June, ‘spends mornings with him in his library’, and—the seductions of high life begin!—‘sends his carriage for John when there is any meeting appointed between them’. Soon Collier’s attendance on Devonshire would ripen into employment as ‘a sort of librarian’, and his infatuation with the ducal aura of Devonshire House and later of Chatsworth would fuel his hopes and his fantasies for decades; but in 1830 the availability of open-shelf privileges pleased him most. ‘I have enjoyed unrestricted access to that most valuable collection of plays commenced by the late John Philip Kemble, and continued by his Grace, until it now forms a complete English Dramatic Library’, he boasted (HEDP, i:xiv), crediting ‘his Grace’s matchless dramatic library’ as a principal influence ‘in the completion’ of HEDP (dedication). Well might Dyce envy him: ‘I am jealous’, he wrote from Aberdeen on 14 May 1830, ‘of your intimacy at Devonshire House . . . because you have a facility there of using volumes which I cannot finger.’ 29 And indeed the individual citations of Devonshire’s books in HEDP are impressive. Among early interludes Collier was able to consult and extract Godly Queen Hester (ca. 1561, unique), Robin Conscience (ca. 1565, unique fragment, but in fact a dialogue, not an interlude: STC 5366), Abraham’s Sacrifice (a transcript of the unique quarto at Bodley), and Albion Knight (unique fragment); an account of the last occupies six pages in HEDP, Collier ‘terming it a most remarkable production, without any parallel in English, and . . . rejoicing in having been the means of rescuing it, even in its imperfect state, from total oblivion’ (ii:376). Also from Devonshire’s shelves came Collier’s reading copies of the very rare Gorboduc (datable to 1570), Arden of Feversham (1599), Dekker’s Patient

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ary 1830, when the duke noted in his diary that ‘C. Greville with Mrs. Arkwright & Collier’ visited Devonshire House ‘to see my books & drawings’; Chatsworth MS 767.454. 28. The duke accepted the dedication on 7 May, saying ‘I shall be most anxious to read it, for I feel sure that if the subject can be satisfactorily treated it will be so by you’; FF/K MS 639. 29. Collier may have soon put in a word for Dyce, however, who thanked Devonshire in the preface to his edition of Greene.


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Grissel (1603), Samuel Brandon’s Virtuous Octavia (1598), and probably Fedele and Fortunio (1585, one of two copies then known, both privately held). Notices likewise appear of the duke’s 1603 Hamlet (then considered unique); his Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), which Collier had recently edited from the Garrick copy, the only other one known; his ‘Waterson’ 1592 edition of Daniel’s Delia; and finally there is an account of the remarkable Italian sketch-book of Inigo Jones (1614–15), of which Devonshire had only months before commissioned, through Collier, an elegant lithographic facsimile. These literary contributions toward HEDP were substantial indeed, as Collier avowed; but Devonshire, who was nothing if not straightforward with his largess, also gave John a present of £100 for the dedication itself—a fittingly old-fashioned gesture of patronage. Like Devonshire, Lord Francis Leveson-Gower (later styled Lord Francis Egerton; Earl of Ellesmere a er 1846) would become increasingly important to John as time passed.30 Second son of the wealthy land-holding second Marquess of Stafford (latterly Duke of Sutherland, for a few months), Leveson-Gower had cultivated poetry at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, entered parliament in 1822 eighteen days a er his twenty-second birthday, and in the same year married the daughter of Charles Greville the diarist. An articulate, dedicated liberal conservative of the Canning school, he rose quickly in government, and by the age of thirty, when Collier probably met him,31 he had already held office as a lord of the treasury, under-secretary of state for the colonies, chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and secretary at war, as well as privy councillor and privy councillor for Ireland. More in Collier’s line, he had published through Murray a translation of Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Song of the Bell (1823), and Translations from the German and Original Poems (1824). These did not excite widespread admiration at the time, but in a note to his own Fridolin (1824, p. 35) John had providently overpraised the first: ‘Perhaps it is not too much to say’, he had observed, ‘that to the celebrity that dramatic poem [Faust] thus acquired in Great Britain, we are very mainly indebted for the translation recently published by Lord F. L. Gower’. In 1829 Lord Francis inherited property estimated at £90,000 per annum from his uncle, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, and he was also the immediate heir of the Bridgewater ducal estates, including the fabulous Egerton-

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30. The nomenclature here can be confusing. On the death in 1833 of his father, the second Marquess of Stafford and first Duke of Sutherland, Leveson-Gower inherited by reversion the estates of his great-uncle, Francis Egerton, third and last Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), and at that time assumed the surname and the arms of his Egerton benefactors. In 1846 he was created first Earl of Ellesmere; his correspondence is oen signed ‘Egerton Ellesmere’. 31. In OMD Collier credits the introduction variously to Amyot and to Charles Greville, dating the latter version ‘October 29 1832’ (iv:26 and ii:79); but clearly he had met Leveson-Gower a year or two earlier.


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Bridgewater family library. By the will of his great-uncle, third and last Duke of Bridgewater, all these would descend to Lord Francis by reversion, on the death of the old Marquess of Stafford, his father. In 1830 this was three years away, and Bridgewater House and its contents were still the Marquess’s property, but Leveson-Gower supplied the key Collier sought. ‘With the liberality which belongs to his rank in life and in letters, he afforded me every facility in the inspection of many volumes of the utmost rarity’, John wrote in his preface to HEDP, and thenceforth the Bridgewater library would prove one of his richest preserves for unexamined books and uncalendared manuscripts. For the moment, however, he chose to describe just one ‘most rare play’ at length, Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), known otherwise only at the Bodleian Library and in Richard Heber’s sequestered collection, while parenthetically citing the Bridgewater copy of Sir John Oldcastle (1600; HEDP, iii:246), almost equally elusive.32

The Society of Antiquaries Tireless in his friend’s behalf, Thomas Amyot continued his introductory services, and John pursued each new entrée for all it could yield. Through Amyot came Devonshire and possibly Egerton, and (with Crabb Robinson) Collier’s publisher-to-be John Murray; also Sir Henry Ellis of the British Museum, and James Henry Markland, the editor of the Chester mysteries; and through Markland, and Amyot again, Francis Douce.33 A formidable contact indeed was Sir Robert Peel, then home secretary, who, ‘through my friend Mr. Amyot . . . gave me admission into the State Paper Office’, and obligingly ‘anticipated my purpose by ordering a collection to be made of such documents as related to the stage’ (HEDP, i:14). Collier may not yet have met this great man face to face, but he presented Peel with one of the six large-paper copies of HEDP on publication, no doubt hopeful of patronage.34 On 26 February 1829 (HCR Diary) Amyot first brought his protégé to a weekly meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, the elite if o en fussy club of literary, historical, and archaeological enthusiasts which since 1717 had promoted, sanctioned, or censured virtually all scholarly exploits in its declared orbit. Fellows (‘F.S.A.’ carried a weight of its own) enjoyed self- and mutual esteem,

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32. HEDP, iii:226. Collier collated a copy of the original quarto, presumably the Bridgewater, with the 1825 collected Marlowe (JPC sale, lot 1160; now FF). 33. Collier thanked Markland for a reference in 1831; HEDP, ii:173. 34. Peel thanked him and subsequently acknowledged two further gis, probably New Facts and New Particulars (Folger MS Y.d.341 [127–29]); but Collier seems not to have reaped any further benefits.


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although some (like Henry Crabb Robinson) seemed scarcely qualified to belong, and several meritorious antiquaries seem either to have been excluded on social grounds (trade connections, low birth) or to have spurned invitations. John Payne Collier, however, at forty, was an appropriate guest, and seventeen months later an appropriate fellow, elected on 9 December 1830, with Amyot and Douce as his sponsors. From John’s initial visit of February 1829, one meeting above all would prove fateful, and again Amyot provided the introduction. Young, sharp-witted, and sharp-tongued Frederic Madden, the rising assistant keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, was amiable and forthcoming enough to begin with; over the next forty-four years he would be friend, colleague, and critical adviser to Collier, and finally his mordant adversary. But now John lost no time in seeking access, through his acquaintance of one evening, to relevant manuscripts in the Harleian, Cotton, and supplementary collections under Madden’s care, and in tapping Madden’s palaeographical expertise.35 Other librarians, scholars, and private collectors may have entered John’s circle by way of the society. One fixture of its old guard was John Caley (1763– 1834, F.S.A. since 1786), a secretary of the ill-managed Record Commission and the Cerberus of countless historical records in the public domain. Before the dissolution of the commission in 1837 ‘applicants for historical documents had to apply at Caley’s private house, whither they were brought in bags by his footman’ (wrote Gordon Goodwin in DNB, 1886); ‘from the offices, described at the time as ‘‘dirty and dark’’, the public was rigidly excluded; the contents were kept in a state of the utmost disorder, the only clue to them being the indexes in Caley’s possession at his private house [in Exmouth Street, Spa Fields]. No access whatever was allowed to the indexes’. Caley has also been accused of removing wax seals from many of the documents in his care, perhaps temporarily, to make casts of them for his own use, but not (yet) of misappropriating the material in his charge. Collier in fact found him nothing but helpful, especially with the archives at the Chapter House, Westminster, which Collier employed extensively in HEDP. Several specimens later in Collier’s personal possession, however, seem to derive from that chaotic repository, and raise further questions of Caley’s administration. Robert Lemon II (1770–1835), son and father of distinguished public archivists, was effectively keeper of all the state papers not in Caley’s domain, and when Sir Robert Peel’s gesture of ordering for Collier ‘a collection . . . of such documents [in the State Paper Office] as related to the stage’ fell short of

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35. Two undated letters from Collier to Madden have been assigned by cataloguers to March 1829 (BL Egerton MS 2838, fols. 7–9). In the first Collier mentions that Amyot introduced him to Madden ‘Thursday week’.


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total effect, ‘my object was zealously seconded by Mr. Lemon’ (HEDP, i:xiv). Davies Gilbert (1767–1839), president since 1827 of the Royal Society, supplied John with his unpublished work on Cornish miracle plays (ii:140–41), and at least four of the Society of Antiquaries’ most distinguished collectors lent him valuable books and manuscripts. Hudson Gurney, M.P. (1775–1864), the vicepresident of the Antiquaries, ‘at the instance of my friend, Mr. Amyot’, gave John free access to the important Macro Moralities and the manuscript of The Castle of Perseverance, with its famous description of medieval staging (i:23; ii:196). Several manuscripts consulted, and one quoted extensively by Collier, ‘were in Mr. Craven Ord’s collection’ (i:20) or were ‘lately in the collection of Mr. Craven Ord’ (i:26), so that Collier may have seen them before January 1830, when Ord (1756–1832, F.S.A. 1775) sold up at auction and went abroad for his health. John Delafield Phelps lent him Robert Willis’s Mount Tabor (1639), with its eyewitness account of morality plays in sixteenth-century Gloucestershire (ii:273–75), though perhaps not Peter Beverley’s unique Ariodanto and Jenevra (1575).36 And the whimsical Joseph Haslewood passed along important data on Richard Burbage from his impressive collection (i:430) and gave Collier the use of a manuscript of six unpublished plays by William Percy (ii:351–52). Haslewood also appears to have offered the new fellow antiquary a volume of ‘Collections for the Stage’, mainly relevant to the post-Restoration; John returned it on 25 April 1831, finding with ‘some satisfaction . . . that I had nearly everything you have noted of an earlier date’, save a quotation from The Stage Player’s Complaint (1641), ‘very useful, [as] I had mistaken the date of it from never having seen the original’ (FF MS 340). This last may have furnished Collier his long footnote at ii:106, but the book is still misdated ‘during the plague of 1625’; and the Fillingham copy, the only one cited, is there described as ‘disposed of [by Longmans] to a great collector, in whose close custody it now remains’—that is, inaccessible. The ‘great collector’, in this instance, was George Daniel (1789–1864), whose celebrated library John did not penetrate until a er 28 June 1831;37 unlike Haslewood, Daniel was stingy with his treasures, and forty years on Collier damned him roundly: ‘Daniel is a great pretender, talks bad English and mispronounces it, and has no real knowledge of the inside of books, but gossips with great confidence about them and their contents. He buys books, etc., to sell again’ (OMD,

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36. At i:248 Collier described this as from the Gordonstoun sale (1816)—which we know he viewed closely—recording that ‘it was bought by Mr Phelps for £31 10s.’ But Phelps in fact bought it on behalf of Richard Heber; see Hunt 1996, p. 95. The book resurfaced in the fourth part of the Heber sale, lot 90. 37. In a letter of that date (bound in Huntington RB 106588) Collier thanked Daniel for an invitation to look over his books.


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iii:74). The far greater private library of Richard Heber was also frustratingly off-limits to John, but with other collectors his success seems remarkable. Haslewood and Phelps were original ‘Roxburghers’ (like Devonshire, Stafford, and Markland), and another Roxburghe Club member behaved with signal generosity toward John: Peregrine Towneley ‘with alacrity placed in my hands a series of Miracle-plays, long preserved in his family, older than any other manuscript of the same description in English’. The priceless Towneley manuscript of what we now call the Wakefield Plays—Collier preferred ‘Widkirk’—provided him with ninety pages of matter in HEDP, and one of its principal novelties of description; that John, a comparative stranger, was allowed to take such an artifact home speaks eloquently for the credit of his friends and sureties. Two usually cautious collectors were also open-handed with Collier, Benjamin Heywood Bright lending him the manuscript of The Play of Wit and Science, then unpublished and undescribed (HEDP, ii:342–45), and Sir Thomas Phillipps, ‘whose collection of manuscripts is well known’, attracting ‘my hearty acknowledgements’—though for just what is unclear.38 Another manuscript fanatic, William Upcott, had perhaps tried to help, and John Bowyer Nichols, the printer-antiquary and custodian of the Bowyer archives, was helpful in fact, lending the manuscript of the Chester cycle plays (ii:227–29). But Richard Heber, far and away the predominant bibliophile in Collier’s domain, proved otherwise. We do not know how hard, if at all, John tried to approach ‘the bookcormorant’ in the run-up to HEDP, but clearly he had not gained personal access to the vast Heber collections by 1831. He would later have a kind of revenge, in cataloguing (and sometimes transcribing) many of Heber’s choicest old English books; but his latter-day claims to intimacy with the library in Heber’s lifetime are certainly exaggerated, if not fictitious. Collier’s trawl of new friends in and outside the Society of Antiquaries finally gave his research for HEDP an archival direction. Before 1829 he cannot really have dealt much, if at all, with unpublished historical records and literary manuscripts; his scholarly discoveries, like that linking Udall and Ralph Roister Doister, all arose from reading old printed texts and drawing conclusions—o en shrewd, sometimes novel. But now, with a project whose daunting extent must have become clearer as he worked, Collier could not merely reread what his predecessors had known, adding a few new texts, and expect to supersede their conclusions. Malone, Steevens, and Chalmers were still the authorities, however disorganized their work may have seemed, and in seeking to place a formal History of English Dramatic Poetry alongside Thomas Warton’s

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38. Perhaps the Craven Ord manuscripts, many of which were bought by Phillipps.


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standard History of English Poetry, John would have to follow Warton’s example, and delve into records afresh. Through Frederic Madden the collections of the British Museum became increasingly accessible to John, notably the Cotton MSS in Madden’s special care (for the diary of Henry Machyn, but also for unpublished letters of John Field and Thomas Nashe, and a poem of John Heywood), the Harleian MSS (the diaries of John Manningham and Sir Humphrey Mildmay, and some royal inventories), the Royal MSS (where lurked two unpublicized masques of Ben Jonson), and the recently catalogued Lansdowne MSS, or ‘Burghley Papers’. Through Robert Peel and Robert Lemon came access to the State Paper Office, with its Blackfriars documents; through Charles Greville, access to the Privy Council Registers and the collection of printed proclamations in the Privy Council Office; and through old John Caley, access to a wealth of undescribed material at the Westminster Chapter House, including records of Henry Medwall, Thomas Wylley, and Samuel Daniel. In January 1830 Henry Ellis recommended John to the master of Dulwich College, in whose archives the Alleyn and Henslowe papers, first investigated by Edmond Malone, still remained, and John capitalized on that introduction in the spring.39 Lambeth Palace, probably approached through the Rev. George D’Oyly, made available Archbishop Laud’s correspondence (ii:36). The Society of Antiquaries itself yielded a few relevant manuscripts and broadsides, and in January 1830 John visited the Bodleian Library for the first time—examining printed books chiefly, if not exclusively, for no Bodleian manuscripts are described first-hand in HEDP. The generosity of private collectors—Towneley, Bright, Haslewood, Ord—has been mentioned, and a few booksellers—Thomas Thorpe, ‘the enterprising bookseller of Bedford-Street’ (iii:275); Thomas Rodd; and William Pickering—proved helpful too. Collier’s own private accumulation, however modest in its origins, supplied at least seven manuscripts, ranging from slight dra s of financial accounts to such literary revelations as a monologue by George Peele (i:284–88), poems by William Alabaster (ii:431–33) and Sir Geoffrey Fenton (i:xxv), and a leaf of Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris (iii:133–35). Typical of these specimens rescued from oblivion by the keen scholar-collector was a fragment of ‘what I have no doubt once formed part of Henslowe’s Diary’, which Collier ‘not very long since . . . bought at an auction’, found in the middle of a volume of old plays, ‘used as an index to keep a place’ (iii:89). Slips cut from the Dulwich manuscript had long circulated in the book world, and one might think that John—

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39. Collier asked Ellis for an introduction on 23 January (Folger MS Y.c.1055 [207]); four days later Ellis addressed the master, John Allen, saying that Collier was ‘very desirous to see the Manuscripts which formerly belonged to Philip Henslow’ (Dulwich College Library, MSS Box E28).


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so recently a reader there—would hardly have purloined such a scrap and then advertised its origin, but that sequence of events seems to be not impossible. Collier’s correspondents outside this immediate circle of antiquaries offered support of mixed value. W. Brownlow Waight of Pentonville sent him a list of ‘Old Plays up to 1700 in the library of the British Museum’, which Collier returned with thanks on 6 July 1829, asking further particulars about two entries; these would not in fact help him at all.40 William Hamper of Highgate, near Birmingham, ‘politely’ communicated extracts from rolls in the possession of Lord Stafford of Stafford Castle (i:18). And Crabb Robinson put John in touch with the distinguished German poet and Shakespearian Ludwig Tieck, who wrote in 1829 to suggest plays for a supplement to Dodsley; but while Collier was flattered by the approach he did not ‘altogether agree’ with Tieck’s opinions.41 ‘I shall buy tomorrow his book on the precursors of Shakespeare’, he told Robinson a er Christmas, with a view to being ‘on corresponding terms with such an enthusiastic lover of the old English drama’.42 But in the event he was unimpressed by Shakespeares Vorschule, devoting only one footnote (iii:148) to dismissing its character of Robert Greene; and no further exchanges between Tieck and Collier are known. With a flurry of archival research in late 1829, and a blitz of reorganizing and rewriting his notes in the light of new information, John thought his task nearly finished in February 1830. He then approached Murray with his preface, heard nothing for three weeks, and stiffly requested its return; he received Murray’s encouragement instead, and forwarded what he said was about twothirds of the text on 2 March.43 Murray offered him £100 a volume, and having now ‘very nearly completed the whole’, John found that ‘I cannot bring it within less than 3 vols 8vo of the size of the last Edit of Roscoe’s Leo X’ (21 April). On 10 May ‘two volumes, and 3/4 of the third, might be put into your printers hands tomorrow morning’, but Murray was maddeningly slow to respond. ‘You have in your hands the labours & collections of full fi een years’, John complained, ‘without the slightest acknowledgement on your part of the receipt of them. . . . [This is] not a fit state of things’ (12 August); and matters reached a flash point when Murray went off to Scotland without answering, or paying John the advance he requested, of fi y percent. Indeed seven months passed with HEDP still in proof, but much of the blame lay with Collier: it was ‘nearly ready’ on 2 May 1831, but with part of the index yet to prepare, and ‘there are four places

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40. JPC to Waight, 6 July 1829, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (202). 41. Tieck to JPC, 6 August 1829, Folger MS Y.d.341 (1); see OMD, iv:90, misdating the letter. 42. HCR Correspondence, 27 December 1829. 43. All the letters cited here are retained in the John Murray archives.


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which I must cancel, but the Printer is not in fault. Two arise from the acquisition of subsequent information—one is a place where I have altered my mind a er consideration; and the fourth is a mistake of my own.’ On 16 May Murray paid John the final £200 for his copyright, and on the evening of 6 June 1831 six copies of the finished book were in the hands of the author. But ‘the labels are all wrong, and must be changed’, he protested (7 June), vainly as it turned out. ‘The chief subject of the book is not ‘‘Annals of the Stage’’ but ‘‘the History of Dramatic Poetry’’, and therefore it was I altered the title. The sooner this is amended the better, as it tends to give buyers an inferior notion of the undertaking.’ Enough was enough for the Murrays, however, and the original cloth binding of Collier’s magnum opus is found only with the offending spine-labels. At least it was ‘out’. One thousand copies of HEDP were printed by Clowes for Murray, whose cost for them, including John’s £300, approached one pound a set. John received first six, and finally fi een copies, in addition to six special copies on ‘drawing royal paper’. He told Shoberl that he had so many obligations that he had to purchase ten more.44 Of the large-paper copies one of course went to Devonshire, another to Sir Robert Peel, one to Amyot, one—a flyer?—to the bibliophile Philip Augustus Hanrott (whose Christian names John seemed not to know), one to the sceptical Dyce, and the last John retained. Sales of the regular issue were slow, and two years later Murray still had more than 660 copies on hand; he then remaindered 625 to Thomas Tegg, at three shillings each. ‘Murray will never get back his money for it’, Dyce had knowingly assured Collier in July 1831. In December 1838 Murray’s terminal account for the publication puts his loss at £534 3s.45 The final form of HEDP, like the misleading labels themselves, betrays signs of its hectic completion. Despite ‘the labours & collections of full fi een years’, most of the physical preparation and much of the research had in fact occupied less than twenty-four months. The structure of the work is curiously tripartite, with ‘Annals of the Stage to the Restoration’ occupying the first volume and a quarter of the second; ‘The History of English Dramatic Poetry’ (which ends with Shakespeare, while the ‘Annals’ go half a century further) the next 625 pages; and ‘An Account of the Old Theatres of London’ (again, to the Restoration) the last 190. Inevitably the treatment of some plays and persons is divided or duplicated among the three disjunct treatises, and the process of incorporating new discoveries or revisions made in 1830–31, without reworking large areas of text, resulted in much unintegrated detail and many discursive foot-

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44. 4 November 1831, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (178). 45. Dyce to JPC, 5 July 1831 (Folger MS Y.d.6 [91]); Murray archives, Accounts Ledger C, p. 210.


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notes. But Collier’s object was less to provide a coherent account of a literary genre and its historical embodiment in performance than to set out clearly a mass of old and new data—biographical, bibliographical, socio-historical, and archaeological—in a manageable compass. His critical estimates of the drama as literature are neither shy nor unworthy, but the first purpose of HEDP was factual: Collier saw himself, o en all too zealously, as the castigator of past scholars’ errors and the champion of a new canon of evidence. Nor did he worry overmuch about the challenge HEDP posed to the general reader, or about the ‘style a little heavy’ that Dyce would contrast, unfavourably, with Warton’s. ‘With regard to the modes of making it public & its pretensions as a popular work, I can only say that if it be not popular I do not think it is my fault. To have treated the subject more lightly, would have been to spoil what I hope is a good book and such as ought to (& in due time will) find its way into every mans library who has any pretension to education. This has been my chief aim.’ 46 And for certain of his contemporaries Collier’s aim was fulfilled. Leigh Hunt at once gave HEDP ‘very kind & handsome notices’ in the Tatler over no fewer than six issues (nos. 241, 243–45, and 247–48, 11–20 June), for which John thanked him initially on 14 June.47 John’s letter indicates that their old acquaintance was too slight for him to count on a conventional puff—‘I re-made your acquaintance in one respect at an unlucky time . . . because many might think (I hope you do not) that I was in some degree influenced by a wish to secure a favourable critique in the Tatler’—so that Hunt’s praise was welcome indeed; equally welcome may have been his disparagement of Collier’s forerunners, ‘the Reeds and Ritsons’ with their ‘pamphlets’—compared with Collier’s ‘three thick volumes . . . full of the most conquering corrections of [his] predecessors’—of Ritson’s and Gifford’s unwarranted ‘airs’, and, best of all, of Malone, who ‘turns out to have been a lax fellow in comparison with Mr. Collier,—culpably careless in his decisions, and immoral in his dates’. Of course Hunt’s antipathy toward Gifford and Malone had political origins, but his estimate of HEDP was one John could be proud to receive: ‘a work long wanting, [which] will unquestionably take its stand above all others, as the standard book of reference upon all subjects connected with the stage history of England’. A er that, the inevitable qualifications (‘we miss . . . something more of entertainment . . . and a grappling with the spirit as well as the letter of the geniuses who founded our drama . . . and we have been mortified, in what criticism there is, to find not even an allusion to those excellent critics of later days, Messrs. Lamb and Hazlitt’) might seem tolerable.

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46. JPC to John Murray III, 7 June 1831, Murray archives. 47. BL Add. MS 38,109, fols. 79–80.


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The popular press may have offered HEDP the kind of encouragement due a fellow newspaperman,48 but other periodicals stressed, perhaps unnecessarily, the limited audience such a work must address. The Literary Gazette called it ‘a publication of vast research and great ability’, abounding with ‘solid information’—which for the earlier period ‘may not, it is true, come under the denomination of light reading’; ‘more general amusement we must . . . seek in the anecdotes and stories which increase as the narrative descends the stream of time’. These sentiments were echoed in the Gentleman’s Magazine (September– October 1831), which questioned ‘what success this excellent work will find’ in a world preoccupied with contemporary politics. ‘Quietly disposed people’, it allowed, ‘may find agreeable relief in the curious and amusing archaeologicals of these elaborate and copious volumes.’ So Jane Collier confirmed to Henry Crabb Robinson on 23 September: ‘John’s book is too much for antiquarians to be fit for the general taste, but I have heard & seen it well spoken of ’ (HCR Correspondence). J. A. Heraud, reviewing the book for Fraser’s in July 1832, admitted that ‘though we descry much undaunted enthusiasm of research, we lack, we think, much apparent sympathy with the essential attributes of the most sacred of all arts’, for a poetical critic ‘should have a heart, as well as a head’. Comparing HEDP with a contemporary pot-boiler (John Galt’s Lives of the Players) might seem gratuitous, but at least two reviewers chose to do so. The New Monthly Magazine for August 1831 found Collier a paragon of ‘learning, taste, and judgement’, who ‘has so thoroughly si ed and discussed the subject as to have le little or nothing to reward the labour of future inquirers’, but these were marginal compliments, as it turned out. The central section of Collier’s text, with its extracts and critical estimates, was ‘by far the most pleasant and profitable portion of the work’; otherwise HEDP seemed a fundamentally antiquarian work, and ‘the pleasure which the antiquary takes in the prosecution of his studies is [one] . . . into the spirit of which the fewest of mankind can enter’. By contrast Lives of the Players is ‘very agreeable and amusing’ and ‘will be, and ought to be, extensively read’. Galt’s light theatrical biographies were ideal for the country retreat or the seaside ‘during the present season’ (a reminder that Collier’s three bulky volumes trickled from the press at the onset of a torrid London summer). The reviewer for Ballantyne’s weekly Edinburgh Literary Journal, however, pairing the same works, dismissed his countryman Galt with contempt, and praised not only Collier’s ‘acute, laborious, and persevering research’ but also—uncommonly—his ‘just and critical discernment’ which had ‘enabled him to winnow

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48. Collier himself inserted anecdotal extracts from the book in more than one of his theatrical columns for the Observer.


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the chaff from the wheat—to attribute to every particle of information its due importance’ (2 and 9 July 1831). The most substantial and serious notice that HEDP elicited was that in John Murray’s own quintessentially establishmentarian Quarterly Review. Its unnamed author was Henry Hart Milman,49 who may or may not have remembered a derisive account of his own play Fazio, sixteen years earlier, by the unnamed John Payne Collier in the Critical Review. In January 1832 Milman devoted no fewer than forty dense pages to a documented summary of HEDP and its principal concerns, paying special attention to the medieval cycles, to the Ralph Roister Doister discovery, and to Collier’s account of Marlowe and his pre-Shakespearian contemporaries; but the critical evaluation was completed a page from the start: Had Mr. Collier displayed equal skill in the arrangement and distribution of his materials, as he has zeal and diligence in obtaining them, his work might have been, what it professes to be, a history of the English drama. At present . . . it is rather a series of historical dissertations than a history; it is not one, but three separate works . . . Annals of the Stage, Annals of Dramatic Poetry, and an Account of Theatres and their Appurtenances . . . a sort of historic trilogy, but without any continuous interest; with three beginnings, three middles, and three ends. . . . It might be difficult, but the increased popularity of his volumes would, we are persuaded, amply repay Mr. Collier for the trouble of recasting his whole work . . . into one consecutive narrative, with its episodes skilfully interwoven, and some of the very curious documents, particularly the accounts, withdrawn from the text (where they arrest and detain too long the common reader,) and thrown into an appendix. Unless Mr. Collier shall thus condescend to render his book more attractive, he must content himself with the praise of having made useful collections for the history of the drama, rather than of having adequately filled that chasm in our literary history of which he justly complains.50 Friends to whom John had presented copies were expectably polite, Douce gracious, even George Daniel complimentary—but in the context of requesting a favour 51—and Sir Walter Scott replied with characteristic generosity, although

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49. On 22 June 1830 Milman had asked the publisher: ‘Would your book on the Early History of the Stage, Collier, do for the Review?’; Murray archives. 50. Quarterly Review 46 (January 1832), 477–518. Incomprehensibly, Ganzel (p. 47) described this strict but judicious review as one of ‘almost unqualified commendation’. 51. Daniel to JPC, 20 October 1832 (Folger MS Y.d.341 [33]), praising HEDP and asking if Collier could give Daniel’s farce, Sworn at Highgate, a notice in the Morning Chronicle.


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John had to nudge him.52 Scott, in his last illness, took time to praise Collier’s intentions, although clearly he had not yet read the book thoroughly, and to encourage him ‘not only to republish the ‘‘Annals of the Stage’’, but to meditate a complete history of our English Dramatic Poetry’, to replace those ‘snatches of intelligence which have been gleaned together for the illustration of Shakespeare’.53 Collier treasured this letter, but it may have puzzled him slightly: what Scott urged him to attempt he might say he had done. What Scott in fact recommended, however, was ‘a general history [drawn] out of the Annals which you have collected with such uncommon diligence’, i.e., a digested, chronologically ordered history of the English drama both as literature and theatre, rather than the raw annals and itemized entries of HEDP. Independently Scott thus concurred with Milman’s later advice in the Quarterly, a journal long edited by J. G. Lockhart, Scott’s own literary apostle. We have no record of any reaction to HEDP from Lamb, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, or Coleridge.54 One gratifying response, if fi een months a er publication, came from Collier’s old comrade Barron Field, now Chief Justice of Gibraltar. Field wholeheartedly supported the design of HEDP against the quibbles of the Quarterly and others: ‘as for weaving these three volumes into a popular story for the Family Library . . . it is impossible. An antiquary’s history it is, and such it must remain. A populace [sic] history of the Stage must be le to such easy writers as my dear friend Horace Smith, who in his ‘‘Festivals and Games’’, tells us that the O. P. [i.e., Old Price] Row happened on the opening of the Covent Garden Theatre in 1792, instead of the new Covent Garden Theatre in 1809. There’s a stage-annalist for you’. Field went on to urge John to edit Shakespeare for Murray (‘omitting one half of the rubbish of Johnson & Steevens, Warburton, Malone & Reed’, and prefixing his own Annals), and offered to present him with his set of Reed’s twenty-one-volume edition ‘with MS. notes by myself, Leigh Hunt & Professor [James] Scholefield (not that there is much in any of these)’, along with other manuscript notes, that John might ‘cut them up, as they richly deserve. I shall be very happy to rid my library of this Commentatorship, which the longer I live the less I estimate, the appropriateness of which I have long doubted, and of the inaccuracy and superficiality of which, even on the part of Malone & Ritson, you have convinced me.’ 55 John’s heart must have swelled.

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52. JPC to Scott, 24 August 1824, asking if Scott had received HEDP and saying, ‘I sent it purely as a testimony of my admiration & respect’; NLS MS 3919, fol. 49. 53. Scott to JPC, 27 August 1831, Folger MS Y.d.341 (141), printed in OMD, iv:99–100, and in Grierson, xii:481–83. 54. Coleridge’s copy (now BL C.182.aa.1) is annotated by Ludwig Tieck, notably in the sections discussing Marlowe and Kyd. 55. Field to JPC, 8 September 1832, EUL MS AAF 23.


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How important a book is HEDP, in terms of literary history, scholarship, and criticism, from the perspective of one hundred and sixty years? It is easy to overstate its originality, as Collier himself did (‘we are [until now] without any history of English dramatic poetry’; i:v), and as one recent biographer puts it, extravagantly: ‘The systematic study of English drama as a genre began with [HEDP ’s] publication . . . before Collier, drama was thought to be ‘‘serious’’ literature only when it was written in verse and it was usually considered as poetry, not as drama. English drama, it was assumed, began with Shakespeare and apparently ended with him too. Collier’s book changed that.’ 56 Such a simplification ignores not only the critical range of Malone and his Shakespearian predecessors (Capell, Steevens, Farmer, and Reed above all) and the comparative judgement implicit in Langbaine and his revisers (Charles Gildon, William Oldys, David Erskine Baker), but even such specialized works as Thomas Hawkins’s Origins of the English Drama (1773),57 and the independent commentary on Jonson (by John Upton, 1749), Beaumont and Fletcher (by John Monck Mason, 1798), Massinger (Thomas Davies, 1789) and Ford (Henry Weber and his colloquists, 1811–12). Bishop Percy had discussed mysteries and moralities in his Reliques (1765), followed by Hawkins and Warton himself (who also treated Marlowe and Kyd); Collier’s way with the earlier drama was likewise smoothed by his friend J. H. Markland’s dissertation on the Chester Plays (Markland’s notes of 1818 appear in the Boswell-Malone Variorum of 1821) and by others he cites (e.g., Gilbert Davies), or deliberately does not (e.g., William Hone’s Ancient Mysteries Described, 1823). But for the study of drama as drama, and the broadening of the field to give Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries their due, Collier’s most obvious precursors—as Leigh Hunt was aware— were Lamb and, even more visibly, William Hazlitt. Hazlitt’s lectures on the ‘neglected’ dramatists of the age of Elizabeth, given at the Surrey Institution late in 1819, cover in no hasty manner fi een writers from Sackville and Norton to Jonson and Ford, and carry on to discuss nine ‘single plays’ such as John Heywood’s The Four PP, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, The Return from Parnassus, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, and George a Greene.58 His estimates may not have

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56. Ganzel, p. 43. No such claim of originality has been mooted for HEDP in the sphere of stage history. Malone’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, and of the Economy and Usages of Our Ancient Theatres (1790) occupies over four hundred pages in Boswell’s 1821 Shakespeare Variorum, consolidating more than a century of theatrical reminiscence and scholarship (Flecknoe, Wright, Downes, Steevens, Reed), and latterly George Chalmers and John Nichols had extended Malone’s survey. 57. Especially the ‘Preface’ in vol. 3. Collier annotated a copy: JPC sale, lot 419. 58. They were first published in 1820 as Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Collier may have attended the series, but is not mentioned in Robinson’s account


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influenced Collier greatly (The Spanish Tragedy, like The First Part of Jeronimo, was ‘an indifferent piece of work’, and Lyly was positively admired), but if credit is to be given for priority in taking the non-Shakespearian drama ‘seriously’, it is Hazlitt’s, not Collier’s. Nonetheless HEDP does present, for the first time, an extended and coherent overview of the drama adjacent to Shakespeare, and in that respect it is arguably the fount of a latter-day flood. It may also lay claim to many innovations, both critical and scholarly, which deserve acknowledgement. Collier’s account of the rise of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ in the sixteenth century, from traditions both native and classical, religious and courtly, had not been anticipated in any such detail as he gave. His insistence on conflating ‘mystery’ with ‘miracle’ plays, while rejecting the former term, has not proved enduring, but his distinction of both from ‘moralities’ is more clearly perceived, and stands up. Most of all, as a literary critic Collier stressed the merits and singularities (independent of Shakespeare) of Shakespeare’s most talented predecessors and contemporaries. While reminding us that Shakespeare himself was a child of his time, and must have learned from his fellows, Collier was principally concerned to allow them lives of their own, and merit other than as Shakespearian fodder, or as perpetrators of the ‘illustrations’ beloved of Shakespearian commentators. This purpose was not in itself startling by 1831—Lamb and Hazlitt having led the way, Dyce was now firmly upon it—but Collier’s old enthusiasm for the unexploited seems to have matured. His character of the dramatic work of John Lyly, for example, as ingenious and stylish but essentially inferior to that of his own imitators Greene and Lodge, is judicious, and his rejection of Malone’s idea ‘that Lyly’s plays, compared with his pamphlets, are free from these [i.e., Euphuistic] affected allusions’ cannot be disputed (iii:173). His championing of Thomas Kyd as a poet ‘of very considerable mind’, superior in many respects to Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and Peele, was audacious and innovative as well: Lamb—echoed by Hazlitt in 1819—had thought only the post-Kydian ‘additions’ to The Spanish Tragedy worth preservation as poetry; but Collier discerned the ‘force and character’ of the original blank verse, and considered Kyd’s second only to Marlowe’s ‘among the predecessors of Shakespeare’ (iii:207). His appraisal of the old play itself as ‘a very powerful performance’ seems prescient indeed, as do his enthusiasm for Marlowe and his re-estimation, play by play, of such workaday toilers as Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle. The scholarly novelties of HEDP were however what Collier piqued himself upon most, and they are numerous, if chiefly because of his access to untapped

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(Morley 1938, i:218–20). See also Garrett 1964, demonstrating Hazlitt’s use of the six-volume Dilke Old English Plays (1814–15).


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archival repositories. Perhaps the best known of them remains his discovery of the true date of Twelh Night in Manningham’s diary, whence also came gossip about Jonson, Marston, and Burbage. From other sources, public and private, Collier was able to summarize several ‘new’ texts of plays, such as Thersites, Queen Hester, Robin Conscience, Wit and Science, and Misogonus; and there are some dozen or more theatrical records of varying significance unrecorded before. If displaying these for the first time were all Collier had achieved, his work would remain permanently useful, and so in that respect it has done. But among the revelations of HEDP are at least fi een equally new fabrications or forgeries—biographical, literary, socio-historical—through which John Payne Collier escalated his mischief from whimsical journalistic hoaxing to solemn scholarly fraud. Here begins, in effect—despite abundant prefigurations—Collier’s spectacular double career as a scholar (astute, conscientious) and forger (calculating, impenitent). Given the moral outrage the latter aspect now attracts, it will require our wondering why it began when it did, and how it might strike a contemporary.

A Digression on Forgery Writers about literary fabrication and forgery tend to stress the spectacular.59 Most old accounts focus on conspicuous episodes or notorious perpetrators, o en involving a single genre or subject: racy tales of fraud, credulity, and exposure, with edifying verdicts of shame on the guilty. Moral indignation seems inevitable (‘impudent’ and ‘unscrupulous’ are the usual epithets), alongside a sometimes perfunctory curiosity about motive, although a hint of admiration for the hoaxer may intrude, especially when his offence appears victimless. More recent scholars have turned from detection and judgement to contextualizing and overview, exploring the ideological implications of this perverse but hoary activity, distinguishing and categorizing its varieties, and seeking to appreciate its artistic or technical merits, if not quite to decriminalize it.60 Long-term ‘traditions’ of textual fakery have been adduced, suggesting similarities of motive

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59. Here and hereaer we will ordinarily use ‘forgery’ to mean physical forgery (e.g., handwriting that imitates the ancient), and ‘fabrication’ to mean text or testimony that is invented, but not necessarily forged. ‘Fakery’ encompasses both activities. Ruthven (2001, pp. 34–62) also summarized recent efforts to refine or modify the terminology and typology of literary forgery, although many of the distinctions drawn by him and others remain less than helpful for the close study of material like ours. 60. Traditional studies include Chambers 1891, Farrer 1907, and, latterly, with emphasis on the psychology of crime, Cole 1955; see also the overview by Nicolas Barker in Mark Jones 1990, pp. 22–27. The new school is represented by Ian Haywood (1986), Anthony Graon (1990), Nick Groom (1993/94), Paul Baines (1999), and K. K. Ruthven (2001).


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and design over centuries, even millennia. The relationship between fakery and art, and its effect or dependence upon cultural history, now bear reconsidering: thus Robinson Crusoe may be viewed as a conventionally faked travelogue, Sigonio’s ‘Ciceronian’ Consolatio as pseudo-classical homage, and ‘Ossian’ and ‘Rowley’ as avatars (or by-products) of the Romantic movement. Broad strokes in the traditionary portrait are fashionable. Reasonable as it is to identify a tradition of literary fabrication and forgery, and to place Collier within it, too broad a pattern will not really help us with Collier himself: we cannot profitably link HEDP with the Epistles of Phalaris, the Donation of Constantine, or Mandeville’s Travels. A century is long enough to survey, and the tradition we infer from a sequence of literary events will mean little, and clarify less, if the participant himself would not recognize either the tradition or the events. For that largely biographical reason we prefer to distinguish certain categories and magnitudes of forgery/fabrication, which ‘broad stroke’ accounts need not do; we seek precedents that an acting forger/fabricator could perceive as his own historical context. Major literary inventions, for example—a long text, a mass of interrelated data—may not differ in principle from brief or scattered impostures, but there is a practical difference between them so great that the scholarly hoaxer, guilty of a sly interpolation that corrupts an old text, would probably not appreciate his affinity with the creator of ‘Ossian’, nor (what is important) have drawn his inspiration from so bold an inventor. But the names of Lauder or Steevens, or even of the irreproachable Thomas Warton (did he know), ought indeed to elicit a smile or a wince from him—by the electricity of kinship-recognition. Traditions of fakery must reflect such subtle distinctions if they are to explain subtle practitioners. Large-scale literary fabrications form a class of their own. In the early eighteenth century the great questioned literary text, well known to Collier, was certainly Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1728), a play Theobald claimed to have discovered and ‘revised and adapted’ from three earlier manuscript ‘copies’ (none now known), at least one of them somehow attributed to Shakespeare. Double Falsehood in Theobald’s modernized version ran successfully on the Drury Lane stage, and was then published as ‘written originally by William Shakespeare’; but no serious scholar in the eighteenth century quite believed that: Richard Farmer thought the old author almost certainly Shirley, and Malone nominated Massinger, while others leaned toward John Fletcher. Only Isaac Reed, among early specialists, argued that Theobald himself had composed the play from scratch, a view that Theobald’s old enemy Alexander Pope had first encouraged, and then seemingly denied; Gifford, who admired Double Falsehood, never doubted its antiquity, and remarked that ‘Pope, and his little knot of criticks (without seeing the honour they did [Theobald]), affected to


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believe [the text] his own’.61 Scholarly opinion is still very much divided,62 but Theobald’s account of his source remains hard to accept, and in Collier’s day Double Falsehood stood out as a puzzlement, with Theobald’s credibility as the pre-eminent Shakespearian authority of his own day held in question, if not in contempt. The tradition of large-scale literary fabrication, real or suspected, blossomed afresh in the 1760s with James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ and Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Rowley’. Like the Defoeian novel itself, however, whose conventional profession of veracity has le us uncertain about not a few eighteenth-century texts,63 these impostures had by Collier’s time already assumed the status of literature, and controversy over their authenticity would seem latterly pointless.64 Chatterton, at least, was admired as a poet, though his escapades as a forger and his suicide may have attracted more critical attention, then and now, than his work really merits. But another ‘marvellous boy’, William Henry Ireland, was a deliberate hoaxer with little to recommend him save his precocious ingenuity. His physical forgeries of Shakespearian papers and documents, and fragments of ‘Hamblette’ and ‘Kynge Leare’, designed to impress his bibliophile father, deceived a few credulous devotees at the outset, but most experienced literary antiquaries shrugged them off. Malone’s magisterial exposure of 1796, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers (of which Collier possessed

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61. Cf. Lounsbury 1906, p. 151; and Bertram 1965, p. 182. Pope originally attributed some questionable lines to Theobald (Bertram, p. 184n., citing a publication of 1728), but later told Aaron Hill that they were ‘of that Age’, i.e., Shakespeare’s; Pope to Hill, 9 June 1738, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), iv:102. Gifford’s remark occurs in his edition of Philip Massinger’s Plays (1805), iii:154. 62. Few, however, would concur with Haywood (1986, p. 186) that it is a ‘Shakespearian counterfeit’ like W. H. Ireland’s Vortigern; for further discussion see Seary 1990, pp. 219–20. This is not the place for a judgement of Double Falsehood: the point is that most contemporaries suspected it, and all doubted the Shakespeare attribution. At the same time, few or none dismissed it altogether. 63. While Robinson Crusoe is clearly fiction, even if based on Alexander Selkirk’s experience, many other narratives have been variously designated fiction and non-fiction over two centuries: to name a few, Defoe’s own Robert Drury’s Journal of Madagascar (1729) and the reports of Richard Castleman (1725), Matthew Bishop of Deddington (1755), Thomas Pellew or Pellow in Barbary (1751), and Thomas Anbury in America (1789). Some of the more obvious fictive works are treated by Philip Gove in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (New York, 1941); others largely in passing in Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley, 1962); but the whole range of these deserves fuller investigation. Is it at all clear, for example, whether the account of Ascension Island in the journal of a perished Dutch sailor (An Authentick Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings, 1728) is genuine? 64. The same might be said of specimens of a Welsh ‘bardic tradition’ championed as ancient by Edward Williams (‘Iolo Morganwg’), which are now recognized as his own compositions; see Prys Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 1975), esp. pp. 75–91; and (in Welsh) Ceri W. Lewis, Iolo Morganwg (Caernarvon, 1998).


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Malone’s own marked-up copy), seemed to some rival contemporaries a pompous or cocksure production, though its learning and methodology set new standards in the analysis of questioned documents; the ‘Ireland Controversy’ of 1796–99 was in fact less about Ireland’s impostures than about rivalry among strong-willed commentators.65 Malone, Ritson, Chalmers, James Boaden, and the elder Ireland, among others, traded insults by way of disputing each other’s expertise, and Charles Lamb’s friend James White published a parody of the original ‘papers and instruments’ as Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, again a book John Payne Collier possessed and knew well.66 Meanwhile Ireland compounded his audacity by fabricating (but not forging) two complete plays of Shakespeare, Vortigern (acted once, and jeered off the stage) and Henry the Second (unacted). These deceived no one, and by 1805 Ireland found it more profitable to confess and claim credit for his own youthful inventions; he spent much of the rest of his life transcribing his forgeries, as forgeries, for autograph collectors, turning the episode into an industry. A few faked inscriptions in printed books turn up still, and may cause some trouble; but ordinarily Ireland’s grandiose claims (mostly for Shakespeare), unconvincing script, and incredible orthography render him harmless. Collier was unamused, late in life, by Ireland’s scapegrace activities: ‘I do not like the man, nor his attempt at imposition’, he crisply informed a correspondent who had offered him (tongue-in-cheek?) an oil-portrait of the trickster.67 Rounding out a quartet of boy-forgers with literary ambitions are two younger contemporaries of Collier, the high-spirited Manchester youths James Crossley and William Harrison Ainsworth. Aged respectively seventeen and twelve, in 1817 they began a five-year spree of hoaxes in various British journals, publishing specimens of imaginary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems and plays in Arliss’s Magazine, the Imperial, the New Monthly, and the Edinburgh Magazine, where Collier’s dramatic essays had just been appearing. These ranged from lyrics and verse passages by ‘William Aynesworthe’, ‘Richard Clitheroe’, ‘Cheviot Ticheburn’, and ‘Thomas Hall’, to extended extracts of a tragedy, ‘The Famouse Historie of Petronius Maximus, with the Tragicall Deathe of Aetius . . . Now Attempted in Blanke Verse by W. S.’, supposedly from a printed quarto of 1619.68 Forty years later Crossley would at-

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65. The most recent account of the controversy, unsatisfactory in many respects, is Kahan 1998. There are no adequate published biographies or bibliographies of Ireland. 66. Lamb, who may have helped to write the book, was fond of giving copies away: see An Old Man’s Diary, iv:5, although Collier himself ‘cannot see the drollery and refined humour in [the Original Letters] that C. L. discovers’. 67. JPC to unknown correspondent, 18 April 1878, FF MS 325. 68. See Freeman and Freeman 1993, pp. 14–23; and Ellis 1911, ii:347–53.


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tempt to father the last of these juvenile fabrications upon Collier himself. Ainsworth turned his fictive imagination to novel-writing, with great contemporary success, and Crossley acquired a measure of fame as the true author of a Thomas Browne fake. This, the well-known ‘Fragment on Mummies’, deceived Browne’s editor Simon Wilkin in 1836, and though discredited within twenty years it has attracted the idiosyncratic admiration of several twentieth-century enthusiasts.69 None of the above examples provides a blueprint for long-term success in deception, should a forger require one, if only because they are too vulnerably extended, and subject to too many tests, aesthetic and philological. A discrete sub-tradition, that of faked old popular balladry, offered more scope. Ballads were simpler, stylistically primitive, repetitious, and, in most descended texts, already corrupt or debased, so that a new-minted example could nearly always stand up to comparison with something deemed ancient. The celebrated Scottish example Hardyknute, composed about 1719 by Sir John Bruce and/or Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, ‘passed as a genuine relic until a sufficient number of scholars developed a tact for discerning the real folk product’, and Allan Ramsay thought nothing of doubling its length in 1724, as he had earlier ‘expanded’ Christ’s Kirk on the Green.70 Only when John Pinkerton contrived an entire ‘second part’ of Hardyknute (1781), which he said he had reconstructed from ‘the memory of a lady in Lanarkshire’, was the great watchdog of scholarly fraud, Joseph Ritson, aroused.71 Ritson waged war against Pinkerton’s genteel fabrications for more than a decade, and against Bishop Percy as well, for what he perceived as textual restorations verging on fakery. Percy’s reliance in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) upon his own ‘folio manuscript’ of seventeenthcentury ballads drove Ritson to suspect more than his editorial judgement. ‘It is a very common, but at the same time, a very unreasonable practice in commentators and others’, he scathingly wrote, ‘to bid their readers see this or that scarce book, of which it is, as they well know, frequently impossible for them to procure a sight. But never was this absurdity carryed to such an extent of mockery as it is in [the Reliques]; where the learned prelate very coolly orders us to inspect a poem, only extant, as he is well assured, and has elsewhere told us, in a certain folio ms. in his own possession, which, perhaps, no one ever

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69. Geoffrey Keynes called it ‘a literary forgery which, judged purely on its own merits, could ill be spared’ (Bibliography of Browne [1924], pp. 235–36), and reprinted it in his edition of Browne’s Works (1928–31), v:459–63; an American critic, Robert M. Gay, thought it contained ‘a passage that has always seemed to me one of the greatest in English prose’ (quoted in Kane 1933, p. 274); and for Graon 1990, p. 137, the whole piece was ‘splendid’, and its fabrication seemed ‘almost to have been a rational career move’ by Crossley. 70. Friedman 1961, pp. 159 and 137–38; cf. Farrer 1907, pp. 250–67. 71. See Haywood 1986, pp. 116–17; and Bronson 1938, i:114–22 and 198–200.


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saw, and which (if it really exist) he will, for his own sake, take effectual care that no one shall see.’ 72 Ritson’s contempt for sequestered documentation, and his suspicion of what might be called ‘custodial fraud’, could apply, with some justice, to a host of Collier’s publications from HEDP forward. As it happens, Percy’s folio manuscript did exist, and Percy had taken no seriously dishonest liberties with its texts,73 but the scepticism of his adversary reflects a state of affairs in the ballad world that encouraged no blind faith. The respected Stamford antiquary Francis Peck, for instance, included in a manuscript collection of ballads dated 1735 one of ‘Robin Whood turned Hermit’, which J. C. Holt has shown is a modern invention, and Peck’s solemn commentary suggests that he himself was its author.74 Fragments of a crude satirical ballad on Sir Thomas Lucy, the deer-farming magistrate of Charlecote, near Stratford, had figured in Shakespearian literature since Rowe, but at some time before 1790 John Jordan, a wheelwright and Shakespeare enthusiast of nearby Tiddington, claimed to have discovered the manuscript of a complete version ‘in a chest of drawers, that formerly belonged to Mrs. Dorothy Tyler, of Shottery’. It seems clear that this was Jordan’s own handiwork, but Malone printed it (1790, 1821), while firmly declaring: ‘the whole is a forgery’.75 Many other less provocative ‘old’ ballads have been questioned as modern, including those in the collections of John Smith (Gaelic Antiquities, 1780), Edward Jones (Musical and Poetical Relics, 1784), and ‘Iolo Morganwg’, and even the celebrated ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ had its doubters; in the next century the great canonizer Francis James Child was not immune to mistaking a literary for a folk ballad,76 nor were his contemporaries, including Collier. Collier himself, with an affection for balladry that went back to his boyhood, would consciously imitate and (at last) fabricate popular ballads all his adult life. In that sense he inherited the tradition of Bruce, Peck, and Pinker-

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72. Remarks on the Last Edition of Shakespeare (1783), p. 167; see Bronson 1938, ii:543–53. 73. Some ballads were greatly amplified from modern versions, but Percy did not conceal this; see Groom 1999. Haywood 1986, p. 106, accused Percy of ‘dissembling’ when he stressed the folio MS as the source of the poems in Reliques, as only 45 of the 176 poems in the first edition were taken from it; but this is hardly fraud. Percy’s own long ballad, The Hermit of Warkworth (1771), may be viewed as a ‘conventional’ imitation, and there is no evidence that contemporary readers thought it ancient. 74. Holt 1989, pp. 180–84 and 200n. 75. See Chambers, WS, ii:291–95 and 380–82, with references to earlier publications of the ballad. In 1844 Collier (Shakespeare, i:xcv) mentioned its appearance in Malone, saying that the ballad ‘is evidently not genuine’, and implying, slyly, that Malone had not appreciated that fact. 76. Child no. 137 is a Collier fabrication: see A. Freeman 1993, pp. 10–12. For the nineteenthcentury ballad-inventions of Allan Cunningham (published by R. H. Cromek) and Robert Surtees (which fooled Sir Walter Scott), see H. B. Wheatley, ed., Percy’s Reliques (1886), i:xliv–xlviii.


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ton, as in his youthful jeux d’esprit (Churchyard, Punch and Judy at Margate) he may seem to have followed the literary lead of young Chatterton and W. H. Ireland, as did Ainsworth and Crossley independently. But historical fabrication or forgery is another sort of activity, and still another—again a sub-species—is editorial or commentarial fakery. Both have their own British traditions in the years before Collier, and their recognized exponents, both clever and clumsy. Perhaps the cleverest of them was unknown as such to Collier, or to all but a few of his fellows, for Charles Bertram’s audacious faking of a medieval account of Britain by one ‘Richard of Westminster’,77 replete with unrecorded or relocated Roman place names and a purportedly fourteenth-century road map, escaped widespread exposure for over a century. This extended concoction (the text ‘transcribed’ by young Bertram in Copenhagen, the map and a few lines of forged tracery submitted only as ‘rough copies’) victimized first William Stukeley and his fellows at the Society of Antiquaries (1747–56); then, as published in 1757, it took in nearly every historian of Roman Britain until 1869, when evidence of its anachronistic Latinity and derivations from late sources were finally gathered to sink it. Bertram’s DNB biographer (Henry Bradley, 1885) thought him ‘the cleverest and most successful literary impostor of modern times’, although Stuart Piggott asserted that Bertram’s success afforded ‘a startling commentary on the decay of historical studies by the middle of the eighteenth century’, it being ‘inconceivable that such a forgery could have succeeded sixty years earlier, when the palaeographical acumen of [Humfrey] Wanley and his colleagues . . . would have been brought to bear upon it’.78 Collier himself was of course no such scholar, and in reviewing J. A. Giles’s Six Old English Chronicles (1848), which piously translated Bertram alongside Ethelwerd, Asser, Gildas, and Nennius, saw no reason to suspect Richard: he complained only that his chronicle was ‘disfigured quite as much as [those] of older writers by barbarism, ignorance and credulity’, and that Giles had not reproduced the (faked) map, which was ‘still the most curious and interesting record of the kind and age in existence’.79 Bertram’s hoax may have benefited in 1757 from its recourse to Latin, as from its apparent absence of motive: no financial and little vainglorious profit, save the non-resident fellowship in the Society of Antiquaries that Stukeley procured him. Less arcane, and perhaps less seriously examined, were the literary inven-

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77. Converted, by the unwitting cooperation of William Stukeley, to the historical monk Richard of Cirencester. 78. Piggott 1985, p. 138. 79. Athenaeum, 18 March 1848, p. 290; for a further account of Bertram see Piggott 1985, pp. 126–38; and Piggott 1986. Bertram is unconsidered or overlooked by Haywood 1986 and Graon 1990.


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tions of Philip and Charles Yorke, part authors of the obviously fictitious Athenian Letters; but Philip’s spoof newsletters of the Armada era (English Mercuries Published by Authority in Queen Elizabeth’s . . . Time [1744]) gained some credence, and seemed to require formal exposure as late as 1839.80 In a climate of some uncertainty about historical ‘facts’ and the bona fides of scholars, even Gibbon was suspected of twisting evidence about the effects of Christianity on Rome, and Archibald Bower’s History of the Popes was bombarded with attacks on the historian’s veracity.81 Perhaps there was less mischief abroad than ideological opponents might wish to impute, but in antiquarian circles fabrication never seemed beyond possibility. And like historical novelties, the geographical reports of eighteenth-century travellers met with sceptical receptions: the exposure, a er initial acceptance, of a completely imaginary account of Formosa by George Psalmanazar (1704) put all eighteenth-century readers of voyages on guard. Dr. Johnson may have been whimsical to deny the news of British victory in Canada, but a host of disbelievers greeted the honest five-volume Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile by James Bruce (1790) with outright incredulity.82 As a small boy like any other John Payne Collier read his travel-fiction as fact, and came to ‘utter dismay . . . when first I found that the whole story of Robinson Crusoe was invention, and not reality . . . it really was one of the saddest days of my early life’ (JPC Diary, 31 and 27 November 1881). Editorial or commentarial fraud—the fabrication or forgery of citations and sources, alternative readings with a bogus cachet, old provenance, reports of ‘lost’ texts, and the like—is really a sub-species of literary and historical fakery, but one little studied in its own right; it is of course especially relevant to John Payne Collier. Because it is usually brief, at least item by item, and o en scattered amidst authentic testimony or text, it can be far more difficult to identify than large-scale imposture, and more likely to persist to corrupt and distort. Cumulatively, its effects may be devastating, for the multiplication of instances of false evidence through editorial descent—sometimes centuries long—cannot be spiked without tracing back (or forward, as we try to do with Collier) its o en silent transmission. For an early and still pestiferous example, we return to Double Falsehood and

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80. See Levin 1989, pp. 80 and 93–94n. Another anonymous satire in the form of a newly discovered classical text is Some Account of the Roman History of Fabius Pictor, from a Manuscript Lately Discover’d in Herculaneum (1749), which deserves further notice. 81. An out-and-out hoax of a similarly religious cast was the spurious Book of Jasher, concocted in 1751 by the maverick printer-scholar Jacob Ilive to supply a lost biblical text. It has been largely passed over in histories of forgery, but attracted believers well into the next century. 82. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell (1934), i:428; J. M. Reid, Traveller Extraordinary: The Life of James Bruce of Kinnaird (New York, 1968).


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‘Warburton’s cook’. Champions of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespearian claims for the play have suggested that one of his sources may have been a manuscript, now perished, in the collection of John Warburton, Somerset herald (1682– 1759). Warburton himself le a list of fi y-six titles, many of them now unknown in any form, and a laconic note that has piqued readers since well before Sir Walter Scott: ‘A er I had been many years Collecting these MSS Playes, through my own carlesness and the Ignorace of my S[ervant] in whose hands I had lodgd them they was unluckely burnd or put under Pye bottoms, excepting ye three which followes. J. W.’ 83 The supposed losses included plays by Shakespeare (two, one unnamed), Marlowe, Greene, Dekker, Chapman, Tourneur, Ford, Massinger, and others, and the list proved irresistible to at least one hoaxer, who in 1818 published extracts from The Noble Convert by ‘Marlowe and Fletcher’, a charred survivor of a similar incineration.84 Nowadays we all doubt Warburton’s story, and that any of the ‘lost’ plays existed in his day, but the charitable reconstruction of events by Sir Walter Greg would excuse Warburton as an absent-minded antiquary who confused notes about manuscripts with their physical embodiment, rather than a deliberate hoaxer.85 William Lauder’s Miltonic fabrications of 1747–50 were discredited almost at once, and indeed confessed to by the perpetrator, but their original publication constituted a massive commentarial fraud. In An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns (1747) Lauder strove to prove Milton a plagiarist by setting out dozens of short passages of early seventeenth-century Latin verse— attributed to Hugo Grotius, Jacob Massenius, Caspar Staphorstius, and Friedrich Taubmann, among others—which seemed to parallel quite literally lines in Paradise Lost. But what Lauder had done was to interpolate among a few genuine quotations from his avowed sources a large number of imaginary ones, deliberate Latin paraphrases of Paradise Lost, and even extracts from William Hog’s Latin translation of the epic (1690), so that Milton was effectively made to echo himself. Dr. Johnson, whose ambivalence toward Milton may have blunted

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83. See Greg 1911a; Scott referred to the incident in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). 84. Edinburgh Magazine 3 (October 1818), 318–21. We believe that the hoaxer, who (like the discoverer of Petronius Maximus) signed himself ‘T.’, was probably James Crossley; see Freeman and Freeman 1993, pp. 20–21. 85. Greg’s ‘own idea of what happened is somewhat as follows. Warburton in the course of his antiquarian researches came across a few manuscript plays and grew interested in the subject. He collected notes, probably from various sources . . . and compiled a list of the titles of such pieces as he thought it might be possible to recover in addition to those of the plays he already possessed. . . . The collection and list were then laid aside, a few manuscripts finding their way among the rest of the collector’s archaeological litter, the bulk, however, within reach of the parsimonious fingers of Betsy the baker of pies. Long aerwards her master discovered his loss, and no longer in the least remembering either the extent of his collection or the nature of his list, added in a fit of natural vexation the famous memorandum’ (1911a, pp. 258–59).


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his sceptical instincts, lent Lauder his support at the outset, and was later suspected, to his mortification, of complicity in the hoax. Lauder’s recantation (A Letter to the Rev. Mr. Douglas, 1751), in part dictated by Johnson, mitigated its penitence in an ‘Epilogue’ by suggesting that the uncritical admirers of Milton deserved such a practical joke, and a year or two later Lauder was back on the attack: Milton had borrowed or stolen from some ninety-seven authors (Delectus auctorum sacrorum Miltono facem praelucentium, 1752), and—worse—had personally caused a prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia to be inserted in Eikon Basilike, for which he had then taken Charles I harshly to task (King Charles I Vindicated . . . and Milton Himself Convicted of Forgery, 1754). Lauder was a driven man, whose motives still defy simplification, but it is worth pointing out that the initial thesis of An Essay has retained currency: Milton did read, and was influenced by, the Adamus exul of Hugo Grotius (1601), as Lauder was the first to point out. But the value of Lauder’s demonstration stops there, for of the twelve passages he ‘selected’ to show Milton’s dependence on Grotius, no fewer than ten were his own fabrications.86 William Rufus Chetwood (1688?–1766), long-term Drury Lane prompter, bookseller, and best-selling novelist, made no claims to strict historicity in the earlier details of his General History of the Stage (Dublin, 1749), a work largely concerned with the modern theatre. Here the tale about Sir William Davenant as Shakespeare’s natural son was first published, although it was no new invention; an imaginary ‘preface’ by Christopher Marlowe to The Jew of Malta, quoted in praise of the actors John Mason and Joseph Taylor, is however a bogus novelty. Edmond Malone thought (probably wrongly) that Chetwood was responsible for a manuscript history of the stage, written between 1727 and 1730 and now apparently lost, ‘full of forgeries and falsehoods of various kinds’, while George Steevens is said to have dismissed the old trouper as ‘a blockhead and a measureless and bungling liar’; but while Chetwood’s testimony has rarely been employed without caution, echoes of it—especially from The British Theatre, Containing the Lives of the English Dramatic Poets (Dublin, 1750)—have long contaminated the traditional history of the stage.87 The British Theatre seems in-

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86. A good short account is in Farrer 1907, pp. 169–74. See also Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell (1934), i:228–32; Clifford 1974; Marcuse 1978; and Baines 1999, pp. 81–102. 87. For Malone’s conjecture of 1790, see Chambers, WS, ii:257–78 and 377–78; Steevens’s oquoted slur appears in the DNB article on Chetwood (by Joseph Knight, 1887), but its source has eluded us. Steevens did however warn readers of his own annotated copy of Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691; now in BL), that William Oldys had been victimized by Chetwood’s British Theatre, ‘which abounds with a thousand false dates and forged titles’. Arthur Freeman’s extended account of Chetwood (together with the ‘Macklin’ letter and the Cibber-Shiels Lives of the Poets discussed below) is forthcoming in The Library in late 2004.


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deed to embody the first large-scale bibliographical forgery of Shakespeare, listing dozens of imaginary quartos with fanciful titles and dates, to the frustration of early collectors such as Edward Capell and David Garrick; and one specimen of Chetwood’s editorial fabrication was more ingenious, if ultimately easier to confute. In his brief life of Shakespeare (pp. 8–17, taken mostly from Rowe, and eliminated in the 1756 reworking of The British Theatre titled Dramatic Records) the compiler quoted five lines relating to Shakespeare from Robert Armin’s rare play Two Maids of Moreclacke (1609): Green [the comedian playing the Clown] answers, I prattled Poesie in my Nurses Arms, And born where late our Swan of Avon sung In Avon’s Streams, we both of us have lave’d, And both come out together The other [a country girl] takes him up short, He the sweetest Swan, & thou a cackling Goose. Alas, the eye-catching passage ‘born where late our Swan of Avon sung / In Avon’s Streams, we both of us have lave’d’ is not to be found in the original quarto or anywhere else. Other deviations from old text in The British Theatre may be innocent mistakes (Chetwood was in debtor’s gaol at the time, with no easy access to reference), but this one can hardly be other than calculated, and cynical. Six years later the aging prompter laced his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben Jonson with fabricated ‘contemporary’ verse and anecdote, which no one since has bothered to sort out and condemn, not even the Grand Inquisitor of Jonsonian commentary, William Gifford. Chetwood may also have been involved with the so-called Macklin letter of 23 April 1748, a cunningly deceptive invention which links Shakespeare, Jonson, and John Ford in the authorship of a most unlikely play, and which Schoenbaum has nominated as ‘the first Shakespearian forgery, unless one puts Theobald’s Double Falsehood in the same class’.88 Steevens, who ought to have known better, half-credited the original speculation, which appeared anonymously in the General Advertiser at the time of a Drury Lane revival, but Malone in 1790 devoted a 28-page essay to demolishing it and branding its main evidence (a supposed contemporary pamphlet, lost at sea in the 1740s) a fabrication. Doubt still lingers, however, about the fabricator, and Chetwood—whose knowledge of theatrical history and versifying ability far outmeasured those of his friend, the comedian Charles Macklin—has attracted renewed attention as the possible culprit.

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88. Schoenbaum 1991, p. 129.


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An interpolation similar to Chetwood’s ‘Swan of Avon’ passage, but more inexplicable and insidious, has long been charged to Robert Shiels (d. 1753), Samuel Johnson’s amanuensis and friend. In a brief life of Ben Jonson for The Lives of the Poets—a compilation revised for the press by Theophilus Cibber in 1753, and misattributed to ‘Mr. Cibber’ by the celebrity-seeking publishers— Shiels supposedly added a bitter, and wholly spurious, sentence to the account of Jonson by the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, Fifeshire, whom Jonson visited in 1619. Thus Drummond is made to conclude a summing-up of Jonson’s nature by contrasting his guest with Shakespeare, as ‘in his personal character the very reverse . . . as surly, ill-natured, proud, and disagreeable, as Shakespeare, with ten times his merit, was gentle, good-natured, easy, and amiable’. For this alleged fabrication—which appears nowhere in the published or unpublished texts of Drummond’s Conversations—Shiels has suffered the sort of obloquy accorded only to scoundrels like Lauder. Collier himself was well aware of the crux, and had considered its implications in some detail, though perhaps not quite so carefully nor for so long as he claimed. Thanking David Laing on 9 July 1832 for ‘the present you made me through my friend Dyce of extracts from the Hawthornden MSS. and of a complete copy of Ben Jonson’s Conversation with Drummond’, he remarked: ‘I was curious to see whether in the latter anything was contained to warrant at all Shiel’s forgery (if it were his) upon which much of the personal charges against Jonson had [sic] been founded. It is singular that long before Gifford wrote his able vindication I had marked the passage in ‘‘Cibber’s Lives of the Poets’’, and had noted that the conclusion, in words and turn of expression, was apparently very modern—I cannot assign any adequate motive on the part of the posthumous calumniator.’ 89 For once, however, all the blame is misplaced—unless Shiels’s hearty dislike of Ben Jonson is itself blameworthy—and the case is a cautionary one. For the apocryphal passage is indeed modern, as Collier was right to remark, and Shiels made no attempt to disguise that, nor to explain how Drummond would know anything at all about Shakespeare’s personal character, for the simple reason that he never intended it to be part of the quotation. A glance at the original text makes it clear that the offending last sentence is Shiels’s commentary, which runs on smoothly to the next sentences, and which only misplaced inverted commas have rendered as Drummond’s own words. Nor is even the typographical blunder the fault of poor Shiels: Theophilus Cibber, Shiels’s ‘revisor’, and their publisher, Ralph Griffiths, bear the responsibility for that. We cannot see any reason why it should be deliberate, or intended to deceive.

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89. EUL, MS La.IV.17. Gifford had first exposed the ‘interpolation’ in his 1816 edition of Jonson.


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George Steevens and Thomas Warton George Steevens (1736–1800), whose editorial achievements Collier undercut and disparaged almost as o en as he did Edmond Malone’s, may be said to have courted distrust, if not disbelief, over a long and truculent literary career; Gifford’s sobriquet, ‘the Puck of Commentators’, has stuck to him, with good reason, although Isaac D’Israeli thought ‘there was a darkness in his character many shades deeper than belonged to Puck’.90 Steevens’s hoaxes, some of which remain in debate, included the famous tombstone of King Hardicanute—a rare physical forgery 91—and the report of a certain ‘upas tree’ in Java, which poisoned all life within fi een miles;92 but most of his scholarly impostures were directed specifically toward chosen victims, notably Richard Gough, Samuel Pegge, and Peter Le Neve, his friends Dr. John Berkenhout, Bishop Percy, and Richard Heber,93 and (according to Boswell) his rival Malone.94 His modus operandi was generally to plant a canard in a newspaper or journal and await its discovery, but he may not have scrupled to imitate or forge William Cole’s handwriting in bedevilling Gough.95 Arthur Sherbo has argued that Steevens’s hoaxes ‘were intended to amuse, sometimes to vex people, and usually to expose ignorance, vanity, or scholarly credulity’, and that o en ‘Steevens deliberately le clues for those with the requisite knowledge to detect the impostures’, but that

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90. Curiosities of Literature, 2d ser. (1823), iii:37. 91. Though not executed by Steevens himself: Thomas White, the collector and dealer, admitted to carving the inscription, but Steevens made sure that Richard Gough and Samuel Pegge fell for it; see D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:49–53; and Sherbo 1990, pp. 59–60. Another specimen, called to our attention by Arnold Hunt, was directed at the book collector James Bindley: Steevens wrote to Isaac Reed on 20 February 1786 (BL Evelyn Papers, UP4, fol. 81), saying, ‘I restore your Hoddesdon’s Poems [i.e., Sion and Parnassus, 1650], and have put into the book an imitation of an aqua-fortis proof of the Head. It is insidiously stained &c so as to give it somewhat like the hue of antiquity. If Bindley can be induced to suppose it an original (which with a little management may be brought about) he will bid high for it.’ But Reed resisted the temptation, and when the book was sold aer the death of both Steevens and Reed, the fakery was identified as ‘portrait a fac-simile, Drawing, by George Steevens’—and rewarded by a good price (Reed sale, 1807, lot 6918; £1 11s. 6d. to Sancho). 92. An invention that took in Erasmus Darwin and Coleridge; Sherbo 1990, pp. 61–62. 93. See the Morning Chronicle obituary of Heber, probably written by Thomas Hill (23 December 1833): ‘Heber has oen acknowledged that Steevens would now and then play upon him a wicked and a waggish hoax; and if he happened to be found out, for he was an arrant coward, he would effect a reconciliation by presenting Heber with a rare book. We know that there are several gems at [Heber’s house in] Pimlico, which were gis from Steevens, aer an attempt at a satirical Hoax.’ 94. ‘The late Mr. Boswell told me, that Steevens frequently wrote notes on Shakespeare, purposely to mislead or entrap Malone, and obtain for himself an easy triumph in the next edition!’; D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:38. 95. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (1812), i:712n.


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might be claimed for Lauder as well. A particularly elaborate invention, which on its own constitutes literary fiction, was the outline of an eastern romance, ‘The Boke of the Soldan, Conteyninge Straunge Matters Touchynge His Lyfe & Deathe & the Wayes of Hys Courte, in Two Partes’. Steevens gave this to his friend Isaac Reed before 1780, who then noted: ‘written by George Steevens, Esq., from whom I received it. It was composed merely to impose on ‘‘a literary friend’’, and had its effect; for he was so far deceived as to its authenticity that he gave implicit credit to it, and hath himself put down the person’s name in whose possession the original books were supposed to be. I. Reed, 1780’. The ‘literary friend’ was Bishop Percy, and Sherbo maintains that Steevens’s ‘joke . . . was a private one, shared with Reed’, but Reed implies that Percy published a notice of the MS as genuine.96 From an early age Collier would have known of Steevens’s hoaxes, most likely by reading Isaac D’Israeli, the third series of whose Curiosities he reviewed for the Critical Review in 1817. Those concerning the early drama he would take care to reject, notably the fabricated letter from George Peele to ‘Henrie Marle’ about Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Edward Alleyn, and Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, ‘1600’ (when Peele was already dead), which appeared in the Theatrical Review (1763) and later in the Annual Register (1770) and John Berkenhout’s Biographia Literaria (1777).97 He would also certainly have been aware of Steevens’s lesser commentarial jests in his editions of Shakespeare, the citations of the nonexistent clergymen ‘Mr. Collins’ and ‘Richard Amner’, whose contributions are solemnly and risibly lubricious. The famous long footnote by ‘Collins’ to Troilus and Cressida, v.2.56 (‘fry, lechery, fry’), in which citations of St. Thomas Aquinas, Apicius, Suetonius, and Chaucer, followed by thirty-three literary instances of the potato as aphrodisiac, combine to show ‘how o en dark allusions might be cleared up, if commentators were diligent in their researches’, is in itself a libertarian classic, but John Payne Collier, something of a prude—in print at least—may have been unamused.98

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96. Sherbo 1990, pp. 62–63. See the note in the sale catalogue of Reed’s books (King, 2 November 1807), lot 8708, cited in part by D’Israeli, Curiosities, iii:40. Steevens’s manuscript, later in Heber’s collection (sale, Part XI, lot 1376) and still later Phillipps MS 13,553, is now Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.244, fols. 17–28; it contains not only the outline of ‘The Boke of the Soldan’ (brief summaries of the thirty-five chapters of a 68-page quarto supposedly printed by Thomas Berthelet in September 1539) but also that of ‘The Boke of the Deedes & Actes of the Gyaunt Blamarant, Sonne of the Cruelle Tyraunt Astrager Who Slewe the Soldan of Persia’ (thirty-three chapter summaries from a book supposedly printed in London in 1544). According to the manuscript, both books were in the possession of ‘W. Williams, arm[iger]’. 97. Chambers (WS, ii:379–80) leaves open the possibility of Berkenhout’s responsibility, but Sherbo (1990, p. 58) thought ‘the chances are excellent’ that Steevens wrote it, ‘planting two errors which plainly marked the letter as not authentic’. 98. See Sherbo 1990, pp. 5–6; and Sherbo 1986, pp. 58–71.


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Steevens’s irreverent manipulation of evidence, however whimsical, and his contempt for his dupes may stand in spirit behind Collier’s fabrications in HEDP, but a closer and more deceptive eighteenth-century precedent was set by a literary scholar we might never suspect: Thomas Warton. The universally respected author of the seminal History of English Poetry—the work that Collier consciously sought to extend, and that Dyce and Mitford thought HEDP fell short of matching—salted his own magnum opus with fabrications no less deliberate or deceptive (if only less numerous) than any of Collier’s, which for more than a century were taken largely as gospel. Warton’s HEP inventions fall into two main groups, the first relating to the diary of Henry Machyn, a London ‘furnisher of funerals’, which covers 1550–63, with some unique evidence of theatrical exercises at the time. This was a Cotton manuscript (Vitellius F.V), and John Strype had already copied and published much of it before it was damaged in the Cottonian Library fire of 1731; but Warton took advantage of what appeared to be incontestable lacunae by adding eight substantial passages to the text that survived. He claimed the authority of Strype’s pre-1731 transcript of the diary, subsequently lost, and credited a dead friend with providing it; but every one of the novelties has now been discredited, and it is quite clear whose fabricating hand is responsible for them.99 Collier, however, like most of his contemporaries, accepted them all, so that Warton’s accounts of lost entertainments, progresses, masques, a 1559 ‘Christmas Prince’ at St. John’s College, Oxford, and a 1556 court play, ‘Holofernes’, are trustingly canonized in HEDP.100 Warton’s second and more audacious cluster of fabrications evokes the ‘dispersed library’ of ‘my lamented friend William Collins’, the poet. Collins was said to have possessed and shown Warton ‘at Chichester, not many months before his death’, a play by John Skelton called The Nigramansir (i.e., ‘Necromancer’), ‘printed by Wynkin de Worde in a thin quarto, in the year 1504’. Warton gave an extended title (‘a morall Enterlude and a pithie written by Maister Skelton laureate and plaid before the king and other estatys at Woodstoke on Palme Sunday’) and a full précis of the action, with cast of characters and a few stage directions, accompanied by lavish footnotes.101 No such book, nor any record of such a performance, has ever surfaced again, and scholars now dismiss more or less out of hand ‘the suspiciously circumstantial account of that remarkable drama’.102 In 1831, however, Collier remained cautious, if not

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99. See Blakiston 1896. Warton also published these passages (serially amplified and accounted for in contradictory ways) in two works prior to HEP. 100. All of these are rejected by modern theatrical historians: see Chambers 1903, ii:196n.; and for ‘Christmas Prince’, Boas 1914, pp. 7–8, both crediting Blakiston. 101. History of English Poetry (1778), ii:360–63. 102. R. L. Ramsay, ed., Skelton’s Magnyfycence, EETS Extra Series, 98 (1908); cf. Chambers 1903, ii:440 (‘Almost certainly a fabrication of Warton’s’) and Paula Neuss, ed., Magnificence


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credulous, reproducing in HEDP (i:52–53) the whole of Warton’s description of The Nigramansir, and while noting Ritson’s ‘entire disbelief ’ he concluded that ‘those who are not prepared to charge Warton with deliberate and elaborate forgery must be convinced, that The Nigramansir once had existence, and probably still exists, although it has entirely disappeared’. Twelve years later Dyce only reprinted, without comment, the same descriptive passage from Warton (Skelton, i:xcix–c), but by the time of his final revision of HEDP (1879) Collier himself chose to delete the disputative conclusion of his original note. It is tempting to think that Collier at last knew or suspected that he had been hoaxed by his eminent predecessor, but more likely the words ‘deliberate and elaborate forgery’, even denied in this context, caught his eye and seemed dangerously suggestive. Also ‘in the dispersed library of the late Mr. William Collins’ Warton ‘saw a thin folio of two sheets in black letter, containing a poem in the octave stanza, entitled Fabyl’s Ghoste, printed by John Rastell in the year 1533’. A summary (HEP, iii:81–83) relates this supposed text to the Jacobean comedy The Merry Devil of Edmonton, but the two-sheet folio itself has not come to light. Another fugitive Collins volume was ‘a Collection of short comic stories in prose, printed in the black letter under the year 1570’, and ‘ ‘‘sett forth by maister Richard Edwardes mayster of her maiesties reuels’’ ’ (iii:292–95). In ‘an irresistible digression, into which the magic of Shakespeare’s name has insensibly seduced us’, Warton detailed an apparent source for the gulling of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew, which has busied Shakespeare scholars since 1781. There are many extant precedents or analogues for Shakespeare’s dramatic forepiece, but ‘Edwardes’s Jests’ of 1570 has never turned up, and Collier was one of its hapless pursuers: his discovery in 1841 of ‘The Waking Man’s Dream’ he took to be a version of one part of it. Warton’s report of William Collins’s theory of a direct source for The Tempest (iii:478) in ‘an Italian novel’ (apparently Giovanni di Fiori, Historia di Isabella et Aurelio) more likely reflects Collins’s own hazy conjectures than Warton’s Collins-credited mischief,103 and the misdating and attribution to Christopher

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(1980), p. 1n. David Fairer, the recent editor of Warton’s correspondence, prints a letter to David Garrick of 11 February 1778 in which the play is mentioned (‘I once saw another of Skelton’s Moralities shewn me by Collins the poet, entirely unknown to the literary Antiquaries. I luckily took an Account of it; for at his Death, which happened soon aer, his books were dispersed. It was called the Nigramansir (Necromancer), dull enough, but a Curiosity.’). Fairer concludes— astonishingly—that the letter ‘shows [the idea that Warton fabricated the title] to be too easy an assumption’, as if Warton were incapable of deluding his friends as well as his reading public (1995, pp. 401–03). 103. See Baine 1970 and Fairer 1995, p. 330, printing a letter to George Steevens (3 December 1773) mentioning the information he had been given by Collins.


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Marlowe of an English version of Colluthus, De Helenae raptu (iii:433; cf. STC 24296), is as likely to be an honest if careless mistake. But the ‘puritanical pamphlet without name, printed in 1569, and entitled, ‘‘The Children of the Chapel stript and whipt’’ ’, with its anti-theatrical extracts (iii:288), is certainly a canard, which served its purpose one hundred and fi y years later in bamboozling E. K. Chambers himself.104 The reception of Warton’s fictions in HEP illuminates some curiously circular attitudes toward literary fraud, linking generalized moral censure (or approval) with particular blame. Warton was not only B.A., M.A., and B.D. (Oxon) and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford (1751–90), but also the university’s Professor of Poetry (1758–68) and Camden Professor of Ancient History (1785–90), and the nation’s Poet Laureate (1785–90), albeit between the poetasters William Whitehead and Henry James Pye. His critical achievements were admired by nearly every contemporary from Warburton and Johnson in the 1750s to Gray, Percy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and countless later readers of HEP, his commentary on Spenser, and his incomplete edition of Milton. He was also a convivial smoker and quaffer, fond of taverns and the company of Oxford watermen, a prankster and practical joker par excellence. Hence when the cantankerous Joseph Ritson assailed him in 1782, in Observations on The History of English Poetry, Warton’s many friends were bound to regard Ritson’s strictures as ‘merely malignant’, and to dismiss the 116 errors with which Ritson tasked him as ‘far from inexcusable in a work compiled from notes taken under all sorts of difficulties’.105 And when Ritson questioned, almost politely, the very existence of The Nigramansir, and later hardened his accusation (‘it is utterly incredible that [Skelton’s] ‘‘The Nigramansir’’, described, in Mr. Wartons ‘‘History of English poetry’’, . . . ever existed, any more than several editions, he quotes, of

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104. ES, ii:34–35, misunderstanding Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, pp. 211–12: the imaginary book was never ‘catalogued’ as Tanner’s. This is not the moment to pursue another more literary forgery, but in recent years it has been demonstrated that Thomas Warton and his brother, Joseph, themselves wrote the poems which they published in 1748 as by their father, the Rev. Thomas Warton (ca. 1688–1745). Attributing their own verse to their schoolmaster father may have been in some respects pious, but the effect on literary history of back-dating ‘pre-romantic’ sonnets and odes cannot be discounted: Collins and Gray, for example, appear to be imitating the elder Warton, when in fact the younger Wartons were echoing Collins and Gray. And Thomas Warton compounded his fabrication of literary tradition by reporting (in his edition of Milton’s Poems upon Several Occasions (1785, revised 1791) that his father had given Alexander Pope his first taste for Milton, a claim that now seems highly unlikely: see the delightful article by Arthur H. Scouten (1987). 105. Blakiston 1896, p. 282. Warton’s carelessness sometimes verges on dyslexia: throughout HEP, for instance, he cites both ‘Gorboduc’ and ‘Gordobuc’.


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other pieces’), a closing of ranks was to be expected.106 William Herbert in 1785 had congratulated Warton on his ‘ingenious description’ of the volume, without mentioning Ritson, and in 1812 Dibdin duly repeated the entry under the productions of Wynkyn de Worde, and le open the debate: ‘Either Warton must have committed a gross mistake, or fabricated a ‘‘splendid fiction’’—or Ritson must be the boldest and most impudent of critics.’ 107 Philip Bliss a year later remained confident in a fellow Oxonian: ‘I have so frequently seen and handled volumes mentioned by Warton and denied to exist by Ritson, that I have no doubt as to the authenticity of the account.’ 108 And two decades on, Richard Heber still trusted Warton’s authority: ‘The Nigramansir . . . is now, I fear, no where to be found—though, that it existed I cannot permit myself to doubt’,109 a pious belief echoed as recently as 1970.110 Well may we ask why Warton’s critics have been so reluctant to blame him. Sidney Lee in DNB (1899) struck a familiar note, recording Blakiston’s revelations about Machyn’s diary, but so ening the inference: ‘there is unhappily reason to believe that some of the documents alleged to date from the sixteenth century were forgeries of recent years. Although a strong case has been made against Warton in the matter, his general character renders it improbable that he was himself the author of the fabrications. He was more probably the dupe of a less principled antiquary’. Blakiston, be it noted, pretty well disposed of the last possibility, and Lee apparently knew nothing of the other inventions in HEP. Clarissa Rinaker, the first modern biographer of Warton, also ignored the non-Machyn evidence, and pleaded that Warton’s good-natured carelessness would make him an ‘easy victim’ for ‘a malicious practical joker’: ‘in the absence of conclusive evidence for so grave a charge [of fabricating the diary entries], great weight must be given to the character of the accused. It must be shown that such a deception is quite in keeping with his character’, which Rinaker thought out of the question, given Warton’s zeal in prosecuting Chatterton. ‘His openminded and scholarly treatment of the facts in this matter [of the Rowley poems] . . . seems to make improbable to the point of impossibility any deliberate tampering with facts in an historical treatise’. A less credulous apologist was David Nichol Smith, for he well understood that Warton himself was

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106. Bibliographia Poetica (1802), p. 106. 107. Herbert, Typographical Antiquities (1785), i:141; Dibdin, Typographical Antiquities, ii:119, no. 164 (1812). 108. Bliss’s edition of Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1813), i:53. 109. Heber to Alexander Dyce, 25 November 1832, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.3 (108). 110. See Baine 1970. Despite the rejection of the title by all twentieth-century editors of Skelton, a modern literary historian may still be gulled: see King 1982, pp. 287–88 and 351, citing parallels from ‘Nigramansir, a lost interlude by John Skelton’, with references only to Warton.


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responsible for the impostures in HEP. ‘Let us admit at once that Warton shared in some degree the weakness of other great English scholars—George Steevens, for instance, and Payne Collier’, Smith conceded, ‘but it would be wrong to end on this note. The statements that cannot be verified are such as supply details, or round off the narrative, but do not affect conclusions; and they are embedded in great masses of honest work. In comparison with the sound matter that is first collected for us in The History of English Poetry, the doubtful matter is almost negligible.’ 111 Are these exculpatory remarks special pleading, or was Warton’s conduct qualitatively different from Lauder’s (say), or Chetwood’s, or even Collier’s? At the moralizing extreme, Lee and Rinaker seem to be arguing that (1) fabrication is dishonest and/or wicked, (2) Warton was himself honourable, and (3) therefore he cannot be personally guilty. Dibdin stands ready to consider the episode ‘splendid fiction’—if and when Warton is convicted—and Nichol Smith seeks to dismiss the mischief as proportionately insignificant. But overridingly the images of Thomas Warton as an eminent and ensconced scholar-critic, an academic patrician, and even as a companionable chap, seem a priori to shield him from obloquy, much as the ability of an educated Elizabethan offender to read out his Latin ‘neck-verse’ might save him from the gallows. No such tempering of judgement has been accorded ‘contemptible’ Lauder (his ‘character was of the meanest’—Lee, in DNB), or ‘liar’ Chetwood, or the wrongly vilified Shiels, for these were ostensibly graceless offenders, and lower-class scribblers to boot. Turning back to the gentlemen, we recall that Lord Hardwicke’s reputation has never been taxed with his Armada impostures, and that James Crossley’s fabrications earned him bouquets, not brickbats, from modern Browneians. There is no reason now to pass harsher judgement on Warton or Crossley, but only to reexamine our standards in tolerating one class of fraudster or fraud while we censure another. Let Warton himself speak of Chatterton, whose poems he exposed in HEP, ii:164: ‘It is with regret that I find myself obliged to pronounce Rowlie’s poems to be spurious. Antient remains of English poetry, unexpectedly discovered, and fortunately rescued from a long oblivion, are contemplated with a degree of fond enthusiasm: exclusive of any real or intrinsic excellence, they afford those pleasures, arising from the idea of antiquity, which deeply interest the imagination. With these pleasures we are unwilling to part. But there is a more solid satisfaction, resulting from the detection of artifice and imposture.’ And what of the perpetrator? ‘Let us add Chatterton’s inducements and qualifications for forging these poems, arising from his character, and way of living. He was an adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature,

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111. Rinaker 1916, pp. 72–73; D. N. Smith 1932, p. 97.


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full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients’ (ii, ‘Emendations and Additions’, sig. i3v– 4r). One who furnishes such a ‘character’ for another may deserve little mercy himself. But blame and pardon will not help to explain what happened to Warton, and why. Going back to the moral syllogism implied by Lee and Rinaker, may we not say instead (1) that Warton was fundamentally honourable in his works, (2) that he perpetrated a number of literary fabrications, and (3) that therefore fabrication is not, or was not in his time and in his conscience, a strictly dishonourable activity? Or at least that literary fabrication cannot have seemed so vicious in 1780 that a man of Warton’s sensitivity and perceived decency would regard it as blasting the work of a lifetime? This is not to excuse or mitigate the behaviour of eighteenth-century fakers—nor does tradition itself, or the prevalence of an activity ‘justify’ anything—but to suggest with what moral predisposition a scholar of that day might enter upon hoaxing his readers. Warton and Steevens cannot have felt deeply that what they did, when they fabricated literary evidence, was fundamentally wicked, although they did limit themselves to a more manageable corpus of deceptions than Collier did in a more vigilant century. But each could seemingly live with his conscience (as presumably could Macpherson and Bertram and the boy-forgers, especially Crossley), and of none has it been said that his actions or attitudes, apart from the one common penchant, were criminal or vicious, or even hard-hearted. Remorse is normally predicated on feeling oneself guilty, not on being accused or convicted of guilt, and none of Collier’s immediate antecedents—to the best of our knowledge—ever expressed his remorse. We shall monitor Collier’s career closely for any sign of it. The search for motivation has always inspired writers on forgery, if only to declare that some forgers’ reasons, like Iago’s, defy inquiry. As a peg in a criminal case they demand some kind of definition, the simpler the better from the prosecutor’s viewpoint. The defendant, however, to the dismay of the defence, may find them o en too complex for words—Iago, again. Simplifiers, especially those who are ‘charitable’ (i.e., they suspect and imply something nastier), have made a contradictory hash of many such cases. Lauder, for example, was said by the author of The Progress of Envy (1751) to have acted ‘from poverty’, whereas E. K. Chambers thought his forgeries ‘sprang out of the hatred of a Jacobite and Tory for the genius of the Puritan Milton’. J. A. Farrer traced the animus to a more arcane provocation, which Lauder himself provided in his confession: the reputation of the Scot Arthur Johnston as a Latin poet, dear to Lauder, had been fatally undercut by two lines in The Dunciad that magnified Milton, and ‘on this occasion it was natural not to be pleased, and my resentment seeking to discharge itself somewhere was unhappily directed against Milton. I resolved to


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attack his fame.’ Boswell, whose opinions were certainly derived from Samuel Johnson’s, preferred generalized pride: ‘to this hour [1791] it is uncertain what his principal motive was, unless it were a vain notion of his superiority, in being able, by whatever means, to deceive mankind’. And just two hundred years later a popular account refined Lauder’s own explanation in modish psychobabble: ‘a psychologist would describe Lauder as the victim of a delusional system. This mode of life allows its victim to behave quite rationally, so long as such behaviour serves to maintain an absurd and obsessive fiction. Lauder was acting as though to hit at Milton would make good every setback he himself had ever suffered’.112 Anthony Gra on’s provocative essay Forgers and Critics (1990) suggests halfa-dozen classes of motive for literary fabrication and forgery over nearly three millennia, not altogether discrete nor mutually exclusive, but worth itemizing: (1)–(2) ‘ambition or greed’; (3) ‘impulses to play jokes’; (4) ‘exuberant desires to see the past made whole again’; (5) ‘serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for particular spiritual or national traditions’; and a curious catch-all, (6) ‘hatred’.113 To these we may add (7) ‘impress my father, schoolmaster, et al.’, not really covered by (1)–(2). Numbers (4) and (5) may be qualifications of the same idea, but we can surely combine these choices to suit most of our subjects: Steevens, for example, will betray (3) and (6)—‘hatred’, or some milder form of it, for his selected victims—while W. H. Ireland calls up all but (5) and (6), and Macpherson probably resists (3), as well as (6)–(7). The point in assessing a fabricator’s motives is that combinations or admixtures are necessary, for motives or provocations are no more singular and pure than moral premises are uniform. Of course the latter affect the generation of the former: Dr. Johnson, had he forged, might have been agonizedly spurred by (3)–(5), but probably not by (1), (2), or (6); and Ritson, had he, might have eliminated (5) and added (7). John Payne Collier’s motives, which we must continue to adduce, will probably span the whole lot: from ‘jokes’ (with a touch of ‘impress my father’) for the whimsical early ones—Punch and Judy, Churchyard, Byron, and Walton—to ‘ambition’, ‘greed’, and the rest a er 1830, informing a

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112. Chambers 1891, p. 31; Farrer 1907, p. 164, quoting Lauder’s letter of confession to John Douglas, 29 December 1750; Life of Johnson, ed. Hill and Powell (1934), i:229; Newnham 1991, p. 35. 113. The first five motives are itemized on the front jacket flap; the sixth is discussed by Graon at pp. 39–40, unfortunately exemplified by an improbable case. Another interesting attempt at discriminating motives is Cole 1955, esp. chap. 3, ‘Forgers: Psychological Cases’, with its emphasis on ‘feeling[s] of inferiority, frustration and jealousy’ (p. 40) turning to ‘hatred’ (p. 49), as well as ‘love of intrigue and mischief for its own sake’ (p. 51), and desire ‘to prove some cherished theory’ when ‘concrete proof which will convince others is lacking’ (p. 55).


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half-century’s dogged proliferation. To these dedicated and sober fabrications of evidence, and indeed physical forgeries created to sustain them—the first of Collier’s serious transgressions in each category of malfeasance—we now must return.

HEDP: Questioned Data More than forty instances of fabrication and forgery in Collier’s HEDP have been suspected, since 1848, in published critiques, and a dozen more might reasonably now be proposed. Only some fi een of all these, however, are clear enough as impostures to require mention here.114 They fall into two categories: inventions pure and simple for which no documentary evidence survives, and fabrications for which evidence, in the form of physical forgeries, is cited by Collier and remains extant. In the former group belongs a substantial ‘Ballade in praise of London Prentices, and what they did at the Cock-pitt Playhouse in Drury Lane’, printed at i:402–04. This ‘circumstantial account’ of a historical riot in March 1617, when a mob invaded the Phoenix or Cockpit Theatre and attempted to pull it down, Collier gave ‘from a contemporary MS.’, unlocated, and never since seen.115 As we remarked earlier, popular balladry is an easy target for faking, as no great art went into composing the originals, and transmission o en degrades or modernizes their text. But even so the language and metrical practice of this ballad are unbelievable as early seventeenth-century (Collier had a penchant for enjambment or run-ons that no genuine old balladeer shares, and lines like ‘ ‘‘Lead, Tommy Brent, incontinent’’ ’ or ‘Within this lane of Drury’ are no more persuasive than Lord Byron’s ‘Sonnet to Punch’), and the theatrical detail is far too good to be true. Playbooks by Heywood, Middleton, Day, and ‘Tom Dekker’ are said to have been incinerated by the marauders,116 and their well-known names are followed by a sly mystification: ‘Immortall Cracke was burnt all blacke, / Which every bodie praises.’ Tempering his revelations with ostensible bewilderment, Collier footnoted the puzzling word ‘Cracke’: ‘Regard-

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114. All those suspected are discussed in A16; for a guide to interpreting our conclusions there, see page 1063. 115. See Bentley, i:161–63. 116. That playbooks and costumes were destroyed in the riot Collier may have learned from John Chamberlain’s letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, 8 March 1617. Although this was not published, to the best of our knowledge, until 1848, Collier did make use elsewhere of the Birch transcripts of Chamberlain’s letters in the British Museum (see his note in HEDP, iii:309), and John Nichols’s partial transcript of this 1617 letter (Progresses of James I [1828], p. 252) might have alerted him to its potential. If so, he deliberately omitted to cite it, despite its theatrical evidence, evidently preferring to incorporate this in his own ‘circumstantial account’.


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ing this person or play, whichever it might be, I can give no information.’ The same technique in aid of defusing suspicion—posing an enigma and pleading helpless to explain it—will recur frequently. Collier milked the Cockpit ballad for ‘evidence’ regarding the dates of John Fletcher’s play Rollo, Duke of Normandy and Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, and as the players’ wardrobe losses included ‘False Cressid’s hood, that was so good / When loving Troylus kept her’, he allowed himself to conjecture that Shakespeare’s play might have been ‘acted surreptitiously at the Cockpit’, although—the judicious sceptic again, as in Punch and Judy—‘possibly it was a different play on the same subject’. All these historical inferences, like the Cockpit ballad itself, have been dismissed long since by scholars. A more enduring imposture—or at least so we consider it—appears at ii:23–24. From Sir Henry Herbert’s memoranda we know that in November and December 1629 a troupe of French actors visited London and performed ‘a farse’ at the Blackfriars (4 November), later playing ‘a daye’ at the Red Bull (22 November) and ‘one a ernoone’ at the Fortune (14 December); on the last occasion Herbert remitted half of his twopound licensing fee ‘in respect of their ill fortune’.117 From another contemporary source (William Prynne’s Histriomastix, 1633) we learn that this company introduced actresses on the public stage, apparently for the first time: ‘some Frenchwomen, or Monsters rather in Michaelmas Terme 1629. attempted to act a French Play, at the Play-house in Black-friers: an impudent, shamefull, unwomanish, gracelesse, if not more than whorish attempt’ (Ggg3v); elsewhere (Ee4) Prynne alludes to ‘the French-women Actors, in a play not long since [sidenote: In Michael. Terme, 1629.] personated in the Blacke-friers Play-house, to which there was great resort’. Now Malone had suggested (1821 Variorum, ii:230) that Prynne’s words ‘great resort’ related to the innovation of women actors, and that ‘attempted to act’ did not imply interference or prevention; nor did he link Herbert’s compassion for the ‘ill fortune’ of the troupe with the actress experiment. But Collier trumped Malone with ‘the following extract from a private letter, written by a person of the name of Thomas Brande, which I discovered among some miscellaneous papers in the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. It does not appear to whom it was addressed, but probably to Laud while Bishop of London, and it bears date on the 8th November, fixing the very day when the female performers made their first appearance in England.’ The letter describes the French players ‘and those women’ as ‘vagrant’ and ‘expelled from their owne contrey’ (untrue, as far as we know), and their ‘attempt . . . to act a certain lascivious and unchaste comedye, in the

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117. J. Q. Adams 1917, pp. 59–60.


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French tonge at the Black-fryers. Glad I am to saye they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so as I do not thinke they will soone be ready to trie the same againe.—Whether they had licence for so doing I know not, but I do know that if they had licence, it were fit that the Master [of the Revels Collier’s brackets] be called to account for the same.’ This lively episode is certainly a nugget of theatrical history, and Collier’s ‘extract’ has been quoted, virtually unquestioned, by dozens of commentators from his day to ours, without any significant attempt to trace ‘Thomas Brande’ or his original letter.118 Suffice it to say that it does not now exist among Laud’s well-catalogued correspondence at Lambeth Palace, nor is it listed in any of the Lambeth catalogues of manuscripts. No one named Thomas Brande, selfassured enough to be ‘glad’ about a public disturbance, and to ‘know’ that the Master of the Revels should be chastised, appears in a sampling of official correspondence of the period. Some of the language of the letter (especially the fanciful ‘pippin-pelted’, which OED finds no earlier than 1835—in an allusion to this very passage) might put us on our guard; and G. E. Bentley, who surprisingly cast no doubt on the ‘Brande’ letter itself, ‘doubt[ed] if this letter applies to the Blackfriars performance’, although ‘I cannot prove that it does not’ (vi:23). Bentley’s point is that the Blackfriars audience was far more sophisticated and permissive than those of the Red Bull and the Fortune, so ‘if the French were hooted from the Blackfriars stage, how did they dare risk [the others]?’ (vi:226). It is simpler, certainly, to regard the Brande letter as unsubstantiated testimony, if not a probable fabrication; given the context (HEDP) and the provocation (Malone) one must incline to the latter. It remains possible, of course, that the Brande letter will someday turn up, and such hopes—perhaps even more forlorn—have been entertained about two very early English interludes, ‘The Triumph of Love and Beauty’ by William Cornish, and ‘The Finding of Troth’ by Henry Medwall. Collier gave an account of these (i:63–65) from ‘a singular paper folded up in [a] roll’ in the Chapter House archives, the latter being a genuine list of expenses for Revels performances at Calais and Richmond in 1514–15 (now PRO Misc.Bks.Exch., T.R. 217). Collier’s ‘singular paper’, extracted with a facsimile of the supposed signature of ‘Williame Cornysshe’, describes in atypical detail two lost plays performed before Henry VIII at Christmas 1514, Cornish’s ‘Triumph’ by the Children of the Chapel, and Medwall’s ‘Troth’ by the King’s Players. In the first ‘Venus and Bewte dyd tryumpe over al ther enemys, and tamyd a salvadge man and a lyon, that

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118. Ibid., p. 59; Bentley, i:25 and vi:23 and 225–27; Harbage 1936, p. 20; E. Howe 1992, pp. 22–23; and Orgel 1996, p. 7. A lone sceptic was Shirley Graves Thornton (1925, p. 190), who while seeming more anxious to condemn Brande as a ‘careless and prejudiced writer’ than to reject the document itself, cautioned that the letter was ‘not above suspicion’ until ‘the original is recovered’.


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was made very rare and naturall, so as the kyng was gretly plesyd therwyth, and gracyously gaf Mayster Cornysshe a ryche rewarde owt of his owne hand, to be dyvydyd with the rest of his felows’. The refrain of a duet sung by Venus and Beauty, ‘lykyd of all that harde yt’, is given next, beginning ‘Bowe you downe, and doo your dutye’. The second interlude, by Medwall (the author of Fulgens and Lucrece), was ‘so long yt was not lykyd’: ‘The foolys part was the best, but the kyng departyd befor the end to hys chambre.’ Again, this is attractive theatre history, especially as the document ‘appears to be in the hand-writing of Cornyshe himself ’, which may explain the reflections on Medwall’s effort. But while the roll from which Collier quotes royal household expenses for Christmas 1514–15 survives and is perfectly genuine, nothing more is known of the ‘singular paper’ supposed to have been ‘folded up’ with it, and Collier’s testimony has long been disbelieved.119 Recently, however, a new champion has come forward to credit the two titles as (essentially) ‘innocent until proven guilty’, an odd substitution of Anglo-American criminal court practice for scholarly policy (‘unaccepted until proven true’).120 Similarly unsubstantiated is ‘a valuable letter . . . from the Mayor and Corporation of Chester’ which ‘I found . . . among the unarranged papers of [Thomas] Cromwell in the Chapter-house, Westminster’ (i:114–16). This purports to describe a lost play, ‘King Robert of Sicily’, which is known to have been staged at Chester in 1529 (on the event itself Collier quotes Daniel King’s Vale Royal [1656]: ‘1529. The play of Robert Cicill was played at the High Crosse’), and which may be identical with, or derive from, a ‘Ludus de Kyng Robert of Cesill’ acted at Lincoln in 1453.121 But Collier’s letter (‘in part . . . destroyed by damp, so that it has no name or date . . . [and] it cannot be ascertained to what nobleman in the Court of Henry VIII it was addressed’) provides welcome details: Kynge Robart of Cicylye ‘is not newe at thys tyme, but hath bin bifore shewen, evyn as longe agoe as the reygne of his highnes most gratious father’; it ‘was penned by a godly clerke, merely for delectacion [sic: this seems a doubtful usage], and the teachynge of the people’. The plot is summarized briefly, and the writer asks his ‘Lordshyppe’ to approve a performance intended for ‘Saynt Peter’s day nexte ensewing’; otherwise ‘theis pore artifycers’ (an odd term for town players) will

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119. See Nelson 1980, p. 1n., with references to earlier studies, in particular Reed 1919. Lancashire 1984 twice lists Collier’s ‘singular paper’ as a forgery (nos. 1331 and 1795). 120. W. R. Streitberger (1986b, p. 13): ‘There is no evidence, other than the circumstantial evidence of Collier’s forgeries, that the document he quoted is a fabrication. The account of how he discovered it is perfectly plausible to anyone familiar with research in primary documents.’ See also Streitberger 1994, p. 85. 121. Chambers 1903, ii:151, credited Collier’s letter as ‘contemporary’ with the Chester event, and so called the play ‘revived’; he also observed that the letter indicates (casually) the reign of Henry VII, which began thirty-two years aer 1453.


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abandon their project. Once again Collier’s original manuscript has vanished, and the authoritative modern edition of Chester dramatic records reprints the ‘alleged letter’ only from the 1831 printed text.122 However, the irresistible detail ‘Saynt Peter’s day’ (29 June) may be fatal to its credit, for the performance at the High Cross in 1529 is also recorded in three early manuscript ‘Mayor’s Lists’ for Chester, two of which were already in the British Museum in Collier’s time (MSS Harl. 2133 and 2125; a third, Add. MS 29,777, was acquired in 1875), but which he must not have consulted, or if he did, he misunderstood. All these agree that ‘Robert of Cicell’ was performed at the High Cross (which had been ‘newe guilt with gould’: Harley 2133) in the mayoralty of Henry Radford, which began in October 1529. Daniel King did not bother to mention this in Vale Royal; hence the fabricator’s mistake. Also at the Chapter House, Collier unearthed ‘a volume of the receipts and expenditures of the Earl of Northumberland in the 17th and 18th years of the reign of Henry VIII’ (in fact 29 September 1525 through 28 September 1526), ‘in a state of melancholy mutilation from the damp to which it has been for some centuries exposed’ (i:85–87). From this he professed to have transcribed five items of expenditure, including payments to ‘Willm Peres my lordes Chaplen for makyng of an Enterlued to be playd this next Cristenmas’ (13s. 4d.), two pounds ‘to my lorde of Suffolkes players for two plays bifore my lorde’, and a shilling ‘for eggs, brede, drynke and oranges for my Lorde, into my lorde of Burgaynes chamber when theye were there a maskyng before the king’ (17 February 1526). Collier made a great point of the perishability of his source—‘In many places the damp has entirely obliterated the ink, and in others the paper is so frail, that it falls to pieces with the gentlest touch’—and gave six further entries from the manuscript simply as ‘worth preserving’, since ‘it seems impossible that the book, in its present state, should exist long’. These involve ‘my lord’ in tilting at Eltham, purchasing a ‘Valentyne’ from a goldsmith in London, paying a friar and a priest for requiem masses, and discharging the yearly salaries of five, and then six more ‘trompetts’. Collier’s account of the parlous condition of the manuscript may long have shielded it (and him) from critical cross-checking, and it was not until 1980 that Ian Lancashire re-examined it, and questioned the majority of the HEDP extracts (indeed, he dismissed them as ‘at times ludicrous’).123 The 1525–26 accounts (now PRO E.36.2210, pp. 241–57, and in fact rather distressed from old damp)124 are in fact exclusively for major

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122. Clopper 1979, p. 533. Glynne Wickham (iii:56–57) wanted to believe the letter genuine, in spite of its ‘suspicious’ characteristics; David Mills (1998, p. 128) did not. 123. Lancashire 1980, p. 13n. 124. They have been trimmed around the text and inlaid since 1830, and parts of some leaves are still brittle, but the section discussed by Collier is to all appearances consecutive and complete, with no evidence of loss of pages or significant portions of pages.


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receipts and outlays in the management of the Earl’s extensive estates (rents, annuities, yearly and half-yearly salaries), and never for small household items like ‘eggs, brede, drynke and oranges’, ‘my lords drynking a er the Tylte’ (2d.) or ‘my lordes breakfast’.125 Exactly three of the eleven extracts printed by Collier are now found in the Northumberland manuscript, namely those for the salary of the trumpeters (two, both dated 7 October 1527 by Collier, though in fact they are for 11 May and 6 July 1526, pp. 250 and 256), and a twenty-pound quarterly fee ‘paid to Mr. More chauncellor of the Dewchey’ on 11 May (not 26 April, as Collier has it). The remaining eight are simply not in the manuscript, which as it stands provides no evidence whatever of theatrical activity (‘trompetts’ don’t count) in the household of the Earl of Northumberland in 1526–27.126 And of course the inferences about William Peeris’s dramatic career (i:87–88) are by extension groundless. A much lesser (putative) fabrication, of no really perverse effect, but a warning of others to come, is at iii:236. The Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissel, a collaboration (we know from Henslowe’s diary) between Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton, was thought by Collier to have been initiated by Chettle, while Dekker and Haughton ‘at a subsequent period, may have made additions to it, for the sake of giving it variety and novelty, and rendering it more popular when it was revived’. As casual evidence toward this hypothesis Collier mentions a copy of the 1603 quarto ‘sold not long since’, ‘on the titlepage of [which] . . . was written, in a contemporary hand, ‘‘By H. Chetill’’, as if he alone were the writer of it’. Now in fact Patient Grissel (1603) is a very rare book, and today just four copies are known to survive, none of which has, or seems ever to have had Chettle’s name ‘in a contemporary hand’ on its title.127 What then did Collier mean to signal in 1831 as a copy ‘sold not long since’? 125. This sort of petty-cash expense is probably covered by bulk payments to agents or servants-in-charge, unspecified save as ‘by his papers’ (i.e. vouchers) or ‘in my booke’ (i.e. another account book, but not this one: for this is a ‘cofferer’s book’, a key to the whole financial operation of Northumberland’s estates). 126. Seven of the presumed spurious dates of Collier’s extracts are not matched at all by transactions in the text, but there is a genuine entry for 31 October 1525 that does not include any payment to ‘Willm Peres’ for ‘an Enterlued’; neither Peres nor any of the other named recipients in the eight suspect entries (Jasper Horsey, Mr. Carewe, Bonett, Yerd, Parker) appears elsewhere in the accounts. 127. The Samuel Ireland–Roxburghe–George III copy (in the King’s Library of the British Museum, but unknown to Collier in 1841, when he edited the play for the Shakespeare Society); the Kalbfleish-White-Folger copy, its early provenance unknown; the imperfect Kemble copy (with its title in quasi-facsimile by George Steevens), then in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire; and the Heber copy, acquired by him at the Inglis ‘Old Plays’ sale in 1826 for thirteen guineas. When Devonshire purchased the Heber copy in 1834 (sale, part II, lot 4376), he made a present of his defective quarto to Collier, and this is now at the University of Texas, in the Pforzheimer Collection of early English literature (no. 181).


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Unless one has vanished (and at a value of some thirteen guineas that would be surprising), it was probably the Inglis copy sold in 1826, then inaccessible to Collier in Heber’s collection. But when Devonshire later acquired it, and Collier subsequently edited the play (from that very copy, the only complete one he knew), it clearly did not bear the ‘H. Chetill’ inscription. This manuscript note he now (1841) fathered on ‘one of the remaining copies of the play’, having already stated that only the Bodleian (sic, for the British Museum) among public libraries held a copy, that Devonshire’s was the only ‘complete’ copy in private hands, and that Devonshire’s defective duplicate was now on Collier’s own shelves. Where the ‘H. Chetill’ copy came from or went to he would not specify, and although this is a minor invention, an invention it does seem to be. In Collier’s own day the secrecy of private collections provided some cover for a claim of this sort; a er a century and a half the redistribution of rarities and the intensity of bibliographical pursuit of books like Patient Grissel render ‘escapees’ more improbable. The six instances above are all of suspect texts for which there apparently exist no physical originals to examine and assess. For the nine that follow, the manuscript originals cited by Collier do survive, and may be judged by criteria other than, and in addition to, the literary and historical standards we have heretofore applied. Opinions about the ‘genuineness’ of old documents may sometimes be more impressionistic than scientific, but they can be debated scientifically, and in some cases the physical characteristics of an anachronistic piece of writing prove it, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be a forgery. Here we will touch only on the more obvious examples of what seem to be fabrication-cumforgery, not on the forensic means of challenging their physical embodiment.128 At i:231, Collier published ‘an old satirical epigram . . . copied on the flyleaf of a book, published a few years before the expulsion of the actors from London into the Liberties [i.e., 1575]’. Six trimeter triplets, headed ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’, lament the driving forth of ‘eche poor plaier . . . From Troynovaunts olde cittie’, mentioning specially ‘Wilson and Jacke Lane’, and suggesting that the authorities wish that ‘Not one shall play the foole / But they’—which is ‘the cause & reason, / At every tyme & season, / are worse then treason’. Collier identifies ‘Wilson’ with Robert Wilson, a celebrated comedian and later a playwright, and moots that ‘Jack Lane may either be a different performer, or John Laneham [another well-known actor], with his name abridged for the sake of the rhyme’. Not much credit has attached to this bit of doggerel, and even Collier for128. ‘Scientific demonstration’ of forgery—that mirage of conclusiveness beloved of the press, the law courts, and detective fiction—is mercifully no part of our programme, largely because it has rarely, if ever, seemed necessary. Traditional techniques of judging ink, paper, and penmanship are discussed in a later section; see also pages 207–10 and Appendix I.


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bore to reprint it in later notices of Robert Wilson (Five Old Plays, Memoirs of Actors, etc.), while most stage historians (e.g., Chambers) simply ignore it. The principal exception has been F. G. Fleay (1890, pp. 49–50), who convinced himself that Collier had not understood the text of the poem (which Fleay himself had, emending it accordingly), and argued from this that Collier’s ignorance proved him guiltless: ‘this want of insight into the real state of the case . . . convinces me that in this instance (unlike so many others) Mr. Collier has given us a genuine old ballad’. Fleay made no converts, however, and as Collier did not identify or locate his source, ‘The Fooles of the Cittie’ would normally remain a fabrication suspect. But the book does exist: it is Abraham Fleming’s handbook for letter-writers, A Panoply of Epistles (1576), a copy now in the Folger Library, with the poem on the verso of ¶6, facing πA1. An old owner’s name has been largely erased from the title-page, leaving an initial ‘J’ which resembles that of Collier in his own signature. The hand of the poem imitates the generic Elizabethan ‘secretary’, but by no means skilfully, and perhaps for that reason—or because of the slightly jarring date of the imprint—the volume was jettisoned at some later date, without attention being called to the embellishment. It does not figure in the Collier or Frederic Ouvry sales of 1882–84, but at Folger the verses were rediscovered, and judged by Giles Dawson to be in ‘J. P. Collier’s forging hand’ (note in volume). Their resurfacing suggests that not all Collier’s uncited sources need be imaginary: perhaps some were laboriously prepared as physical specimens, deemed unsafe to bear scrutiny, and suppressed. Also from Collier’s personal collection, but this time confidently noted as such, came ‘an enumeration, as early as the year 1516, under the title of ‘‘Garments for Players’’’, quoted in full at i:80–82. This interesting inventory of comparatively luxurious clothing is certainly for dramatic use (‘xv pleyers garments of silke, olde’, ‘cappes of divers fassions for players . . . xviii of satten & sarcenet’, etc.), and Collier pointed to two items that ‘tend to show that the performances for which they were used were Miracle-plays, or at least pieces in which certain scriptural characters were mixed up with the allegorical impersonations of Morals’. One was ‘a long garment of cloth of golde and tynsell, for the Prophete upon Palme Sonday’, with ‘a capp of grene tynsell to the same’, and the second was ‘a littill gowne for a woman, the virgin, of cloth of silver’. But in the latter entry ‘the words ‘‘the virgin’’ are interlined in the original copy with a different ink, if not by a different hand, to that by which the rest of the inventory was made out: another word seems to have followed, perhaps ‘‘Mary’’, but the paper is extremely rotten, and precisely in this place it is defective’ (i:81n.). Now Collier’s costume inventory survives, along with many other theatrical manuscripts and scraps that he sold to his nephew by marriage, Frederic Ouvry (BL MS Egerton 2623; Ouvry sale, lot 530), and is a perfectly genuine sixteenth-


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century document, torn at the foot and slightly stained at the top, but certainly not ‘rotten’. We have no reason to question the main body of the text, nor (with a few minor misreadings) Collier’s transcript; but the interlineation ‘the Virgin’ and the thinning of the paper beyond it—by abrasion, not rot—are suspicious. The ink and the hand are ‘different’, as Collier disarmingly states, but jarringly so, and the subsequent weak spot looks more like an erasure than a natural flaw. More to the point, the handwriting of the main document is unmistakably that of the mid-sixteenth century, and the improbably early date Collier assigns to it stems from an inscription at the head, ‘Ao. VII. Henr. VIII.’ (as he transcribed it). This inscription, which again looks modern to us, is in fact interrupted by a small paper repair, so that it now reads ‘Ao. VII. he[n] [blank] iij.’: the absence of the ‘V’ or ‘v’ in what supposedly once was ‘Viij’ or ‘viij’ may have been caused by damage and paper replacement, or (more likely) was a deliberate omission, meant to ‘date’ the inscription prior to the not-very-ancient paper-mend. If the affixed date is discounted, the handwriting and the contents of the list of ‘Garments for Players’ point to about 1550 and probably to the Revels Office, for which such inventories were made and preserved in multiple copies, and which used the term ‘players garments’ as a specific wardrobe category.129 The gown and cap ‘for the Prophete upon Palme Sonday’ might seem inappropriate for the Revels costumers, but ‘the Prophete’ is in fact not a personification in a formal religious play, but a traditional figure in church-door pageantry, o en played by boy singers, and a Revels inventory of 1547 does include ‘j Gowne of Tawny Tilsent [i.e., tinsel] newe for a Boye to pley the profett’, along with ‘a prophettes cappe of Tilsent’, just like that on Collier’s list.130 The distinction between new clothing and ‘olde’ is likewise common to the ‘1516’ inventory and many Revels accounts, but what would never figure in any Revels wardrobe would be a costume for the Virgin Mary. And that detail, interlined and palaeographically suspect, is the only one linking Collier’s inventory with parochial or municipal rather than court entertainments. The document in Egerton 2633 has apparently been fraudulently altered and dated.131 The manufacture of the two (supposed) forgeries above need not have been surreptitious, as both were additions to privately owned objects, a book and a manuscript leaf; and the same is probably true of the most audacious of all

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129. Cf. Feuillerat 1914, pp. ix, 193. 130. Ibid., p. 14. See Chambers 1903, ii:5; and the costumes recorded in Lancashire 1984, nos. 59 and 1407: ‘Children with hired playing garments and six pair of gloves played the prophets on Palm Sunday [in Southwark, 1555]’; Lancashire no. 1407. 131. Lancashire 1984, no. 956, compounded the error by listing this as of A.D. 1491–92 (apparently by misreading 7 Henry VIII as 7 Henry VII), and misrepresents ‘iii garments of damask & satten for women, olde’ (cf. ‘xv pleyers garments of silke, olde’) as ‘garments for . . . three old women’.


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the HEDP impostures, housed though it soon came to be in a public institution. At i:227–28, Collier prints a petition from the inhabitants of the Blackfriars Precinct to the Privy Council, objecting to the Burbages’ project of converting certain rooms there into an indoor theatre, because of the commotion, ‘annoyance and trouble’, and ‘general inconvenience’.132 This genuine document Collier carelessly misdated 1576 (it is in fact November 1596), confusing the ‘first’ and ‘second’ Blackfriars Theatres, but by i:297 he had corrected himself— without, however, amending his earlier description—causing thereby no end of confusion among later scholars striving to cope with what followed. For Collier then described and transcribed (i:297–300) ‘a much more curious paper—a counter petition by the Lord Chamberlain’s players, entreating that they might be permitted to continue their work upon the theatre, in order to render it more commodious, and that their performances there might not be interrupted’. The ‘more curious paper’, found ‘appended’ to the residents’ petition, was said to be ‘not . . . the original, but a copy, without the signatures, and it contains, at the commencement, an enumeration of the principal actors who were parties to it’. These eight petitioners included Richard Burbage, John Heminge, William Kempe, William Sly, and of course William Shakespeare, whose name came fi h in the list, ‘seven years anterior to the date of any other authentic record, which contains the name of our great dramatist’, and so the record ‘may warrant various conjectures as to the rank he held in the company in 1596, as a poet and as a player’. Collier implicitly claimed credit for unearthing the document, which ‘has, perhaps, never seen the light from the moment it was presented, until it was very recently discovered’. In subsequent years the authenticity of the players’ petition would be hotly disputed, as indeed would that of the residents’ petition itself, which went temporarily missing, but resurfaced in 1869. The players’ petition remained in the State Paper Office where Collier claimed he had found it, and was examined by believers and sceptics alike over the next several decades (an acrimonious investigation which we shall relate in its place), until five prominent ‘experts’ declared it a forgery in 1860. As we shall see, their grounds were largely orthographical and palaeographical, but as Collier had claimed it only as a contemporary ‘copy’, and the handwriting is not the worst of secretary imitations, debate might still rage had not the forger made one understandable, but fatal, mistake. This ‘1596’ document asserts that ‘in the summer season your Petitioners are able to playe at their new built house on the Bankside calde the Globe’, while ‘in the winter they are compelled to come to the Blackfriers’. In 1831 no theatrical

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132. SPD cclx, no. 116; modern transcripts in Chambers, ES, iv:319–20; and Irwin Smith 1984, document 22.


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scholar would have questioned the first detail, for Malone had argued persuasively in 1796 (Inquiry, pp. 86–87) that a bond dated 22 December 1593, between Richard Burbage and the builder Peter Street, related specifically to work on the Globe, and so dated its first construction. ‘This may fix the building of the Globe Theatre to the year 1594’, wrote Malone, ‘and probably it was opened in that or the following year’, a belief that Collier himself repeated at iii:296. But unfortunately for the forger of the players’ petition, Malone was mistaken, and the Globe Theatre could not have been built until a er December 1598, as James Orchard Halliwell conclusively demonstrated in 1874.133 Thus the allusion to the Globe in a document of ‘1596’ proves the latter an out-and-out fake. That Collier himself faked it remains, strictly speaking, unproven, but the ‘experts’ of 1860 are vindicated. Forging the players’ petition, as somebody must have done prior to 1831, was a considerable performance, as writing out twenty-two long lines of text on blank seventeenth-century paper would require both patience and privacy— homework, certainly—whereas smuggling the finished product into the loose files of the State Paper Office would never have been difficult. Less time and less cover were available, on the other hand, for the pen-and-ink adulteration of three manuscripts already in the British Museum and at Dulwich College. We have already noted in passing that Thomas Warton gra ed fictitious episodes onto the diary of the mid-sixteenth-century undertaker Henry Machyn, which passed scrutiny for over a century as passages destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731; Warton did not of course risk making physical forgeries to back up his inventions. But the source of Collier’s disclosure at i:180, of ‘the earliest instance of a subject from the Roman history being brought upon the stage’, is indeed physical, if in only one word. Machyn gives a glowing account of a grand masque performed somewhere in London on 1 February 1562, with a hundred and fi y masquers ‘gorgyously be sene’ and two hundred trumpeters, drummers, and torchbearers, ‘and so’ (i.e., a erwards) ‘to the cowrt, & dyvers goodly men of armes in gylt harnes, & Julyus Sesar [smudged]’. In the manuscript as it now survives the smudged ‘Sesar’ is followed by ‘played’—as if to explain what was meant to be written—in a different ink, and a strikingly different hand, whose letter-forms are eccentric indeed.134 Without ‘played’ one would tend to

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133. Illustrations of the Life of Shakespeare . . . Part the First, pp. 25–27 and 43. Malone himself came to realize this, annotating his copy of the book: ‘The Globe was not built till a later period 1599’ (BL C.45.e.23, owned by Collier before 1841, but unappreciated by him); Malone credited a ‘paper in Hist. of Stage marked G. T.’ for the correction. The discrepancy does not appear to have been appreciated by anyone earlier than Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1913, p. 176); ten years later Chambers relegated the information to a note, saying the players’ petition ‘could not be genuine in substance, since it refers to the Globe, which did not exist in 1596’ (ES, ii:508n). 134. The ‘p’ is crossed as if for the abbreviation ‘per’, and the ‘a’ takes the form of Greek alpha.


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think ‘Julyus Sesar’ simply one of the masquers, but with the addition in place Collier permitted himself to posit a ‘historical play . . . acted at court, called Julius Caesar’, the first English work of its kind, staged two weeks a er Gorboduc (which itself is the first English ‘regular’ tragedy). Collier’s transcript of this passage, ‘played’ and all, is unusually faulty, and several of his mistranscriptions were corrected by John Gough Nichols, in his still-standard Diary of Henry Machyn (Camden Society, 1848): there Nichols remarked that ‘The word played has been added in another hand, and though resembling the old, may be an addition and not contemporary’ (p. 276). John Payne Collier was the treasurer of the Camden Society and a good friend of Nichols, who made no further imputations, nor any reference to HEDP. A little more complicated, but no less suspicious, is the record, taken also from Machyn, of ‘a play called Jube the Sane, performed at the marriage of Lord Strange to the daughter of the Earl of Cumberland . . . in the reign of Edward VI’ (i:146). The curious title has been duly registered in Harbage, Schoenbaum, and Wagonheim’s Annals of English Drama, under 1549, as ‘lost’; Collier conjectured that ‘perhaps [the play] was scriptural, on the story of Job’, and the Annals offers ‘Job the Saint?’ as a possible gloss on ‘Jube the Sane’. All this proceeds from Machyn’s report of the entertainment following the wedding, which included (in Nichols’s transcription) ‘a grett dener’, a ‘tornay on horsbake with swordes’ and finally ‘a er soper Jube the cane, a play, with torch-lyght and cressett-lyghtes . . . and a maske, and a bankett’. As Nichols pointed out in 1848, however, ‘Jube the cane’ was not a stage-play, but ‘Juego de Canas [i.e., cañas], or tilting with canes, a sport introduced by the Spaniards’ (p. 82, the date of 7 February 1554/5 misprinted as 12 February); elsewhere he noticed Stow’s version of the term in a description of the same event, ‘a goodly pastime of Juga cana by cresset lyght’, and Ian Lancashire has subsequently relegated Collier’s apparent misreading to ‘Doubtful Records’, without suggesting that any mischief was intended. But a look at the original manuscript reveals that ‘a play’ (following ‘Jube the cane’, the ‘c’ of which may have been altered in ink to make ‘sane’ a plausible reading) is interlined above the mysterious sporting term, which readers before Nichols, like Collier, simply did not understand.135 What is more, we can easily compare ‘a play’ with the provocative ‘played’ a er ‘Julyus Sesar’, and find that they closely resemble each other, especially in the use of the otherwise unusual (or incredible) ‘alpha’ for ‘a’. Nichols, for whatever reason, did

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135. John Stow, The Summarie of English Chronicles (1566), cited by J. G. Nichols, The Diary of Henry Machyn (1848), p. 343; Lancashire 1984, no. 1806. Strype, who listed all the other aspects of the entertainment, le out ‘Jube the cane’ between the ‘soper’ and the ‘mask’, presumably from incomprehension; but if ‘a play’ had been visible to him in 1721 it is hard to believe he would not have included it; see Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822), iii/1:332.


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not signal ‘a play’ as an insertion, and what may have looked like an innocent error seems now more like a deliberate forgery, founded in and tripped up by philological ignorance. Collier gained access to Machyn’s diary through the good offices of his new friend Frederic Madden, who had only recently completed reassembling its partly burnt fragments.136 Another much less explored diary in Madden’s care —a Harleian manuscript—was that of Sir Humphrey Mildmay (1592–1666?), an Essex landowner with a penchant for London pleasures, including the theatre. Collier was the first to abstract and publish Mildmay’s records of playhouse attendance, along with some of his more licentious escapades, but only one Mildmay entry in HEDP is seriously suspect.137 Collier printed two payments of 31 May and 4 December 1633 ‘To Mr. Shakespere, his man Jo’ and ‘To Jo, att Mr. Shakespers’ for ‘one per of spurres with bosses’ and ‘one per of spurres’, remarking that these were ‘particularly curious, in connexion with the family and name of Shakespeare’. ‘There are many notes in the margin of this account book’, he continued (which is true: Mildmay added details of many expenses, e.g., ‘my wife’), ‘and opposite the first of these [Shakespeare] entries are placed these remarkable words, ‘‘No player now’’; as if the Shakespere here mentioned had once been a player, or at least had had some connexion with players’. He went on to identify ‘Mr. Shakespere’ as the royal bit-maker John Shakespeare (cf. Chambers, WS, ii:370), who was dead by 1637, and who may have been related to the playwright. ‘No player now’ does appear in the margin of Mildmay’s account-book (fol. 180), a side-note unlike any other in the manuscript, and in a hand different from Mildmay’s—not glaringly, but certainly. E. K. Chambers dismissed it in 1930 (‘This seems to me a clear forgery’; WS, ii:387), and G. E. Bentley described it as in ‘a modern hand, slightly disguised’ (ii:674). The last three instances of fabrication-cum-forgery to be considered here all appear in one manuscript, the celebrated ‘diary’ of accounts, inventories, contracts and performances (1592–1609) compiled by Philip Henslowe, rival to the Burbages as theatrical entrepreneur.138 One of the great primary sources for the history of Elizabethan drama, it was bequeathed by Henslowe’s son-in-law Edward Alleyn to Dulwich College, and first systematically quarried by Edmond Malone. Malone borrowed it from the college and kept it for nearly three decades, during which he published extracts from it relevant to his history of the

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136. Madden Diary, 2 December 1829: ‘Finished the arrangement of Vitell.F.5, a labor the compiler of the Cotton Catalogue [David Casley] confessed himself unequal to.’ 137. HEDP, ii:41–42. See Bentley, ii:673–81, for all the theatrical records, ‘about one third of them’ noticed by Collier; and the general selection in Ralph 1947. 138. Our principal discussion of the diary is in Part Five.


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stage, and also had prepared for his use a literal transcript of part of the text, as Henslowe’s handwriting and orthography are notoriously irregular, and the diary by no means easy to follow. A er Malone’s death in 1812 the diary was returned to Dulwich, where Collier, through the introduction he procured from Sir Henry Ellis, examined it in 1830. He made abundant use of Henslowe in HEDP, rarely failing to point out in his own extracts what Malone had overlooked or omitted to publish, and many of the diary entries saw print for the first time in 1831. Several, however, are highly suspect. At i:307 appear three Henslowe payments (‘It is to be remarked, that Malone published none of them’), relating to the scandalous lost play The Isle of Dogs, whose performance led to the restraint (briefly) of all playing in London in 1597, and perhaps to the imprisonment of Ben Jonson. The first (14 May 1597) advances ‘twentye shellinges more’ to Thomas Nashe ‘for the Iylle of Dogges, which he is wrytinge for the companey’; the second (23 August) finds Nashe ‘nowe att this tyme in the flete for wrytinge of the Eylle of Dogges’, and lends him ten shillings, ‘to be payde agen to me wen he cann’—a most uncharacteristic act of generosity from tightfisted Henslowe; and the third (27 August) rewards a messenger from the Revels Office ‘for newes of the restraynt beyng recaled by the lordes of the Queenes Cownsell’. These three entries, which incidentally provide the only evidence that Nashe was ever imprisoned over the affair, appear precisely as Collier has transcribed them, on folios 29r and 33r–v of the diary itself, in an ink that G. F. Warner (1881) thought ‘plainly doctored to give it a fictitious appearance of age’, and in a hand that scholars since Warner (e.g., Greg 1904–08, McKerrow 1910, and Chambers, ES) unite in condemning as modern. Greg called the third entry ‘the most clumsy forgery in the volume’ (i:xli), and it really looks nothing like Henslowe at all. At iii:101, Collier noticed ‘the name of Webster . . . interlined in different ink’ over a record of buying cloth for ‘a cloek, for the Gwise’. Henslowe’s title ‘the Gwise’ (i.e., Duke of Guise, the villain of St. Bartholomew’s Day) very possibly relates to Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris or some later adaptation, but in 1623 John Webster named ‘Guise’ among his own tragedies, and the interlineation on folio 94r, if genuine, would provide a surprisingly early date (November 1601) for that lost play. Indeed it would be the earliest record of Webster’s literary career, but it has been universally condemned. Warner in 1881 called it ‘a spurious modern addition’, and noted (p. xlii) that ‘it seems to have been the result of a second attempt, for below the line are unmistakable traces of an erasure, so carefully made and smoothed over as scarcely to be detected except from the thinness of the paper’ (we may recall the erasure a er ‘Virgin’ in Collier’s costume inventory); and Greg pointed out that the name ‘Webster’—indeed written small, but quite legible—does not appear in Malone’s transcript of ca. 1790, which faith-


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fully renders the rest of the text (1904–08, i:xlii). R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, the modern editors of Henslowe, add that the caret-mark over which ‘Webster’ is written, as well as the interlined word itself, ‘both seem to be modern forgeries’ (1961, p. 183). Finally, the more substantial entry—four lines—recording a payment of twenty shillings to Thomas Dekker on 20 December 1597 ‘for adycyons to Fosstus . . . and fyve shellinges more for a prolog to Marloes Tamburlan’ (HEDP, iii:113; Henslowe, fol. 19v) is likewise missing from Malone’s transcript, although its content would strongly attract any student of the drama. Rather superfluously, Collier cited this testimony as ‘decisive’ in attributing Tamburlaine to Christopher Marlowe, a considerable exercise in HEDP (iii:112–26), which more than one reviewer singled out for special praise: even without the spurious evidence Collier’s case was convincing, and Marlowe’s authorship of Tamburlaine has rarely been questioned. That the entry in Henslowe is an out-and-out forgery has been even less subject to doubt, but only since 1876, when Clement Ingleby first took it to task. Collier himself would later republish it, and by implication defend it, while distancing himself from the question of ‘corruptions’ in the text of the diary. In 1831 Henslowe’s novelties, like all the impostures above, enjoyed the trust of a comparatively uncritical, or not hypercritical, audience. Why would anyone invent such arcana? Why would anyone risk his reputation for a pittance? And by the same token, why should anyone trouble to check?

Evidence

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How certain can we be that the suspect examples above are indeed fabrications, when there is no known physical form of them, or fabrications-cum-forgery when there is? And how certain can we be that John Payne Collier was responsible for any or all of them? The first group of six, each published by Collier for the first time, and now untraceable to any documentary source, we have condemned because they sound anachronistic, because they sound ‘too good to be true’, because Collier’s cited originals fail to provide support for them as promised, and because some of their historical details appear to be contradicted by other trustworthy sources. These are all critical criteria familiar to Collier and his contemporaries, for whom Edmond Malone’s Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796) served as a textbook on forgery and its detection. In dealing with William Henry Ireland’s faked Shakespearian letters and documents, Malone was usually addressing physical forgery as well as fictitious text, but his principles of testing apply equally to text known only from transcript or report. Malone’s principal tests for genuineness are (1) ‘Orthography’


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(pp. 31–74), (2) ‘Language and Phraseology’ (pp. 74–82), and (3) ‘incongruous circumstances’ (i.e., historical contradictions, incorrect conventional forms, etc.; pp. 82–103); for physical evidence he could add handwriting (pp. 103–16) and paper (pp. 310–13—watermarks he particularized, and the size and sources of old paper he considered)—but not, notably, ink (yet unstudied) or pens (quill-pens were still common, and the new metal nibs were not known to leave tell-tale traces). Ireland’s jejeune impostures made no extravagant demands on the skills of Malone, on any of these counts—An Inquiry virtually ignores his full-length play Vortigern, fabricated without any physical ‘original’—but the aroused scholar applied his clear legal mind to spelling out his criteria of judgement, and thirty years later there was still nothing better for an investigator (or a forger) to start with. Long a er Malone’s death the investigator of allegedly ancient materials would look for violations of Malone’s principles of authenticity; the forger would seek to avoid them. ‘Orthography’ was perhaps the weakest of Malone’s touchstones, though young Ireland’s eccentricities—double terminal ‘d’s, ‘n’s, and ‘t’s, grotesquely elongated spellings—were indeed silly enough to be condemned on that ground alone; but apologists like Samuel Ireland and George Chalmers were o en able to point to genuine instances of spellings, and indeed of usage and terminology, that Malone said could not exist. Elizabethan orthography, as Malone certainly knew from his Henslowe, could be madly chaotic, and while a scholar steeped in the period might think himself certain that some spellings were all but impossible, better tests were of ‘language and phraseology’, that is, misuse of terms, modern meanings (Malone concentrated on ‘pretty’, ‘ourself ’, and ‘amuse’), or the introduction of anachronistic words and conventional phrases. Finally, Malone’s ‘incongruous circumstances’ were the best index of fraud, especially in revealing contradictions of dates, places, and forms of personal address, like ‘Deare Willem’ from the Earl of Southampton to Shakespeare. To avoid instant detection, he further suggested, the ‘fabricator’ (i.e., W. H. Ireland) of a breadand-butter exchange between Shakespeare and Southampton must deliberately omit any mention of the specific ‘bounty’ involved, because ‘some inquisitive researcher, like myself, [might] happen to be possessed of documents that ascertained this bounty to have been very different from the sum fixed upon’ (Inquiry, pp. 168–69). The fabricator of the 1529 Chester ‘Robert of Cecill’ letter would have been well advised by Malone’s hint to avoid mentioning ‘St. Peter’s Day’, but on the whole the suspect extracts in HEDP avoid orthographic blunders and obvious neologisms. But early ‘language and phraseology’, taken in their larger sense to include poetical conventions (rhyme, internal rhyme, metre, fashions of imagery, and rhetorical argument) are much more difficult to imitate, arising


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as they do from a contemporary writer’s real immersion in his own language and literary cra . Hence the awkwardness in the Cockpit ballad, about which Malone might have insisted, impressionistically, that ‘the proofs of fraud are so numerous, that they produce conviction on the first view’ (Inquiry, p. 171). He was claiming ‘the orthography, the phraseology, and hand-writing’ in aid of his rejection of two spurious letters; we may be restricted to ‘phraseology’ alone in some of the above, but our conviction, in the examples provided, is firm and considered—for now. If any of the missing evidence turns up—Thomas Brande’s letter, a fugitive quarto of Patient Grissel, shreds of a missing leaf from the Northumberland cofferer’s accounts—we would obviously need to assess each instance anew. Likewise if any corroborating report is found—Henry Medwall’s Finding of Troth elsewhere witnessed, indictments of Johnny Cory and Tommy Brent for rioting in Drury Lane—even the undocumented records of other events would deserve new respect. But until such new testimony emerges, the highly suspect entries must be judged fabrications; Occam’s razor (they are vs. they are not—which is less unlikely?) will prevail. And as to Collier’s personal responsibility for these, considered one by one on individual demerits, we must remember that no one but Collier ever professed to have seen the evidence for what he reported and published, before or a er HEDP. With the nine or so fabrications-cum-forgery we are on surer grounds, at least as regards their genuineness. A physical forgery that may be impugned as neatly as the Blackfriars players’ petition, for referring to events two years in the future, leaves us in no doubt about its fraudulence. The ‘Fooles of the Cittie’ verses are sufficiently unbelievable, as contemporary composition and script, to condemn an already dubious text. If the Machyn, Mildmay, and Henslowe diary insertions did not now exist, we would be sceptical of the records Collier printed; but as they do exist and as they are physically unconvincing, we can be virtually sure that their substance is spurious. What we cannot quite stipulate is that Collier himself forged all these ‘originals’ with his own practised hand. In subsequent chapters we will encounter a range of disclaimers and defenses, braced with arguments about opportunity, capacity, motives, and common sense. Was the British Museum Reading Room sufficiently unsupervised? 139 Could anyone forge so much, undetected, at Dulwich? Was not much of this work beyond Collier’s learning and skills? And (again and again) what stood he to gain at such terrible, repeated risk? Hence alternative scenarios have arisen, of unknown forgers at work in the stacks, leaving a trail of false evidence for Collier to stumble upon in good time. These last have been, of necessity,

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139. From 1829 to 1838 the Museum Reading Room, accommodating 120 readers, was located at the south end of the King’s Library; both printed books and manuscripts were consulted there, and only very valuable works were restricted to use within the departments themselves.


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favourites of Collier’s apologists, and even Collier himself sometimes allowed that an unscrupulous, mischief-making predecessor (Steevens? Malone?) might have taken him in. Each instance of falsification laid to Collier can be disputed at some level, and each charge against him must stand on its individual merits. But there are no substantial examples of such scholarly man-traps still in place and unsprung a er Collier’s trawl of his source libraries and archives, and again we have virtually perfect coincidence between opportunity and disclosure—the now-discredited literary novelties in HEDP, and the faked documents or manuscript additions to documents in public institutions first reported by Collier. The case against both aspects of imposture in HEDP, unsubstantiated fabrications and fabrications related to forgeries, seems formidable, even closed. Doubt shed on the veracity of so many passages in HEDP has inevitably overflowed onto others, and dozens more of Collier’s representations have been periodically challenged. Most of them are blameless; several do involve innocent mistakes, like the misdating of the construction of the Globe Theatre (iii: 296–98), based upon Malone’s faulty arguments, although this will also have led, elsewhere, to the telling error in the forged Blackfriars players’ petition. Thomas Warton’s fabricated account of The Nigromansir, recommended (i:52– 53) to ‘those who are not prepared to charge Warton with deliberate and elaborate forgery’, is not Collier’s fault, nor is the misattribution of A Godly Exhortation and Fruitful Admonition to Parents (1584), by ‘R. G.’ (STC 11503), ‘probably’ to Robert Greene, any worse than a bad guess (iii:149: Collier had never seen the book itself, which is actually by Richard Greenham). At iii:384, Collier accepted as genuine a printed playbill for The Humorous Lieutenant (1663) which is in fact a quasi-facsimile of ca. 1820, probably intended as a keepsake rather than a saleable fake, by the actor-publisher William Oxberry. The playbill was exposed as spurious as early as 1854, and Collier himself admitted as much in 1879; but such is the contagion of suspicion that he has since been charged with manufacturing it.140 There has never been a shred of evidence that Collier attempted typographic forgery of any kind, although his optimistic description of this playbill (as ‘sold among the books of the late Mr. Bindley’, with no given location) does suppress the fact that he himself owned a copy of it, very likely James Bindley’s.141 In the 1950s Sydney Race, an indefatigable correspondent of Notes and Queries, challenged the authenticity of at least fourteen more of Collier’s docu-

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140. See QD A16.53. Collier also discussed the playbill in his theatrical column for the Observer on 3 July 1831. 141. It is pasted to p. 262 of his unpublished manuscript continuation of HEDP, Harvard Theatre Collection MS 13.


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ments, questioning the very existence of ten that certainly now exist, and the authenticity of others that had been in place for a century before HEDP. Race’s irresponsible hit-and-run tactics, though extreme to the point of tediousness, prefigure or typify much dismissal of Collier’s testimony by lazy or paranoid scholars. George F. Warner’s reasonable but too-famous warning in DNB (‘none of his statements or quotations can be trusted without verifying, and no volume or document that has passed through his hands can be too carefully scrutinized’) has led others to cast casual doubt on statements in HEDP and elsewhere ad libitum, as a matter of common consent, without taking a reasoned stand on each one—a degree of scepticism which is necessary, if literary history is to be served. Among the traditionally questioned articles in HEDP is ‘a MS. poem, in blank verse . . . fallen into my hands’—‘a speech supposed to be delivered by a Hermit to the Queen, on her first arrival at Theobalds’ in 1591, when she was welcomed by Lord Burghley with an entertainment in several movements (i:284–88). This has long been subjected to doubt among Peele scholars (Collier identified the signatory ‘G. P.’ with George Peele, and wrongly asserted that the handwriting matched Peele’s), but the manuscript itself, and its text, seem quite genuine.142 At ii:431–33 a long note about Spenser and William Alabaster, the Catholic poet, quotes from a manuscript which ‘I have . . . containing seventeen original sonnets, entitled Divine Meditations, by Mr. Alabaster’, in addition to ‘sermons by Dr. Donne, Dr. King, &c., &c.’ The very existence of this collection was once questioned by Donne’s editors, and the portion of the manuscript devoted to Alabaster has apparently gone missing, but again there is no good cause to reject Collier’s account of it (see QD A16.36 for a complicated history of borrowing, mishandling, and loss). A holograph annotation by Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels under Elizabeth and James I, has been undeservedly suspected, and another one cited by Collier at Bridgewater House (i:374) has drawn fire, but its text was published eighteen years before HEDP by William Beloe. More difficult to disentangle from analogous dubia are two further references to Henslowe’s diary at iii:106 and i:335. Collier mentioned among the names of Henslowe’s payees a er 1597 ‘Robert Lee’ and ‘ Hawkins’, and Greg could find neither, and thought them inventions. But ‘Robarte Lee’ does turn up on folio 44v, selling ‘a boocke’ —that is, playbook—and ‘Hawkins’ may be a pardonable misreading of one of Henslowe’s many versions of ‘Haughton’, that is, William Haughton. The most persistent crux in all Henslowe, however, is the interlineation on folio 64v (HEDP, i:335) of ‘mr mastone’ over ‘lent unto mr maxton the new poete in earneste of a booke’. Collier transcribed this as ‘Mr. Marstone’, and theorized 142. For further discussion of this and the following cases, see A16 below.

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that the correction was added ‘when the old manager was better informed, that the name was not Maxton, as he had first written it’, but rather [John] Marston, and that Henslowe’s payment ‘very possibly’ concerned the ‘booke’ of Marston’s tragicomedy The Malcontent. Greg initially dismissed ‘mastone’ as an interlined forgery like ‘Webster’, and assumed that Collier had deliberately mistranscribed it; but unlike ‘Webster’ (and Dekker and Marlowe, for that matter), the interpolation is found in Malone’s transcript, and Greg later came around to it. Foakes and Rickert regard it as both genuine and in Henslowe’s own hand, and Collier’s perception that ‘the new poet’ of 1599 was not ‘maxton’ but indeed Marston has been widely accepted. The interlineation itself, for the time being, seems to be safe; it may also have inspired the trying-out of ‘Webster’ some thirty leaves later. And it is not unlikely that some data like this, based on physical evidence still in dispute, will be re-impugned on reinvestigation—less unlikely, perhaps, than that much will be reinstated.

Devonshire and ‘A Sort of Librarian’ William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790–1858), was probably the most important figure—apart from family, and the familial Henry Crabb Robinson—in John Payne Collier’s life. Born a year a er John to great wealth and a tradition of public service, the ‘bachelor Duke’ is best known for his cultivation of cultural resources—books, paintings, sculpture, Chatsworth House, and its gardens and grounds. He was a tireless traveller, diplomat, collector, and host, a pioneer Russophile, an intimate of kings, politicians, artists, and writers (Byron and Thackeray) and glamorous women (Princess Lieven, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Caroline Norton).143 Among Devonshire’s special graces were his unsnobbish respect for talented service, and his willingness to patronize it on a personal basis. Joseph Paxton, his miracle-working head gardener at Chatsworth, remained in Devonshire’s life-long employ even a er a knighthood and national celebrity, and Collier, always wary of condescension and prickly about credit, never in thirty years’ acquaintance with the duke, or in recollections some fi een years later, spoke of him without deference and respect. For his part Devonshire appears genuinely to have liked John, as he clearly appreciated Collier’s help with his library. Familiarity had its limits, however, and the single-minded scholar could seem gauche and exasperating at times, even ‘simple and vulgar’, ‘over-anxious’, or wearisome with his ‘incessant talking’; their relationship was certainly never as equal, intellectually or socially, as Collier depicts it in his Old Man’s Diary (1871–72). But it was probably Devonshire’s intention, and surely to Devonshire’s credit, that Collier sensed little of that. 143. See Lees-Milne 1991.


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Over the long term the duke’s principal importance to John lay in his bookowning, his book-buying, and his occasional ventures into publishing, but in 1830–32 he seemed to hold out chances of political patronage as well. Politics, however, were never a passion with John, despite a lifetime of knowledgeable parliamentary reporting, and opinionizing in print. These were heady days of reform, with the English electorate by 1831 felt to be in a mood closer to overt rebellion than at any time since the mid-seventeenth century; and during the legislative commotion surrounding the three votes on the First Reform Bill John’s newspaper duties intensified.144 Charles Greville wrote famously that in March 1831 nothing was ‘talked of, thought of, dreamt of, but Reform . . . from morning till night, in the streets, in the clubs, and in private houses’;145 but this is precisely when John Murray was dilatory, Collier thought, in marshalling HEDP through the press, and there is scarcely a word about this civil crisis in OMD or in Collier’s extant letters and reminiscences. Despite his liberal background and radical contacts, his old scrape with the Commons hardly reflected political convictions, nor had Criticisms on the Bar taken an overtly partisan stance: while we may imagine that Collier’s position on Catholic emancipation and on West Indian slavery (to name two issues that Devonshire cared deeply about) were liberal, like Devonshire’s, we have no direct evidence of this, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that such matters were not central to John’s thinking. A dozen years later Crabb Robinson said as much: ‘the truth is that Collier so exclusively devotes himself to Shakespeare, that he is indifferent to everything going on in the present day however important its political bearings and is equally regardless of religious controversies’ (HCR Diary, 26 October 1844). To the extent that he cared about party politics, however—and it would be absurd to suggest that he was indifferent to the social issues themselves at this date—his creed was compatible with Devonshire’s, and his advancement need not have worried the duke. But Devonshire’s involvement in government, at its zenith in 1826–30, declined in the years following the death of George IV, and although he served William IV faithfully as Lord Chamberlain in the critical period 1830–32, illness and his own disinclination to participate in Sir Robert Peel’s Tory government effectively terminated his official career in 1834. With that his influence— as far as Collier’s office-seeking ambitions were concerned—also lapsed.

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We have already mentioned John’s first encounters with Devonshire, his use of some of the rare plays at Devonshire House for HEDP, and his subsequent dedication of that work to the duke. By May 1830 Collier’s visits to 144. Jane Collier, writing to Robinson on 23 September 1831 (two days aer the third reading of the Reform Bill passed), said, ‘He has been so engaged with his business in the Commons, that he has yet nothing else on the stocks’; HCR Correspondence. 145. The Greville Memoirs, ed. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (1935), ii:125.


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Devonshire’s London residences had become regular (‘Collier so useful about my plays’, Devonshire noted at Chiswick House on 3 May, and ‘very busy with Collier & my plays’ at Devonshire House, 30 June).146 An invitation to Chatsworth soon followed. John arrived there on the evening of Friday, 8 October, and remained for the week.147 Other guests included the high-spirited young water-colourist George Cattermole, and Collier may have felt awkward: on Sunday, the duke found his company trying (‘I was le alone with Collier. He is very well in London, but here it’s impossible, he is so simple and vulgar’), and although the next day ‘Mr Collier becomes a shade better as he gets at his ease’, nonetheless ‘I could never submit to his society, poor man’. On the following Tuesday the duke was bitten by a mastiff and worried about rabies; he drove out to his ancient seat Hardwick Hall, taking Collier for lunch, and thought him ‘much better today, or perhaps my gratitude to him for incessant talking which diverted my thoughts may have made him seem so. He had no suspicion of my state of mind.’ John’s state of mind, on the other hand, cannot have benefited from having le his luckless brother William terminally ill back in London. William died on 9 October, one day into the visit to Chatsworth. Did John learn of this there? We assume that he returned to London with the duke on Friday, 15 October, and ten days later he ‘came cataloguing’ once more to Devonshire House.148 Collier’s attendance on Devonshire continued over the autumn and winter, not always to the satisfaction of the latter. ‘Collier writing as usual in my library’, the duke grumbled on 18 February 1831, ‘a vulgar, clever, not intelligent man’. And three weeks later: ‘Bother with Collier who is over anxious’.149 But in happier moments Devonshire presented the scholar with £100 in November 1830, presumably in appreciation for the dedication of his HEDP, and just before Christmas set him two new literary tasks: ‘I gave Collier the Chiswick papers

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146. Sixth Duke’s diary, Chatsworth MS 767.454. 147. The dates in Devonshire’s diary are off by one day during this period, and we have adjusted them to conform to the fact that Sunday (when ‘I went to Church’) fell on 10 October in 1830. 148. Collier’s own description of what was clearly his first visit to Chatsworth (and perhaps only, until the mid-1840s) is in OMD, i:94–101, where it is dated June 1832. According to him he arrived on Saturday evening, went to church with the duke and others on Sunday, and le (with Devonshire) on Friday, sleeping en route to London. His description of ‘another’ visit—he called it his second—to Chatsworth in ‘Sept. 1832’ (OMD, ii:47–52) is undoubtedly based on the same 1830 trip, and is probably a more truthful version of it, for instead of the grand guests mentioned in the first entry, Collier said there were only a few people in the house (conforming to Devonshire’s account), and he specifically mentioned a drive to Hardwick Hall, where he and the duke lunched. Collier gave a description of yet ‘another’ visit in OMD, iv:62, dating it to November 1833, but included few details; we have found nothing to corroborate his account. 149. Chatsworth MS 767.455.


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to settle and my Inigo Jones memoranda book’ (23 December 1830). The latter, a charming small sketchbook kept by the architect and scene-designer during his second Italian tour (1612–15), was described by Collier in HEDP as ‘full of spirited and elaborate drawings in pen and ink, from pictures and statues . . . a most remarkable and highly valuable relic’ (i:392–93). Although the idea of publishing a lithographic facsimile may have been Collier’s (OMD, ii:110–11), it was the duke who communicated his specific instructions on 10 January 1831: ‘I wish to have Inigo Jones’ Sketch book engraved on stone for £50’, he informed Collier, with ‘an additional leaf a er the titlepage imitated from my handwriting and presenting the copy to each person—we will arrange this when I come to town’. The stones were to be destroyed a er taking off ‘a very few copies . . . 50—or 100’.150 Collier duly oversaw Devonshire’s project, which was a good deal more demanding than either might have anticipated. Jones’s sketches were ‘very free in style and were drawn in an ink which varied in tone’, Michael Twyman has noted, and ‘the task of reproducing such work must have been a formidable one’.151 Despite the technical difficulties, the high standards that Devonshire’s commission implied were met, and the result is a conspicuous success. To print the facsimile Collier employed George Edward Madeley, of 3 Wellington Street, Strand—an address shared with Sotheby’s auction rooms—and ‘carefully watched its progress through the hands of the lithographer’.152 Mercifully the duke’s idea of a leaf ‘imitated from my handwriting’ was abandoned—Devonshire’s handwriting is difficult, to say the least—and copies of the facsimile are normally inscribed in ink in the duke’s name as gi s, but in Collier’s more readable holograph. The 128-page book was bound up in vellum, with green silk ties, in close imitation of the original manuscript. There is no letterpress, and Collier’s name nowhere appears in it, but he took pride in the finished product, which was ready by Christmas 1831. Devonshire initially refused to yield a copy to the ‘musty’ Society of Antiquaries, and when Collier finally elicited one (uninscribed) he told Amyot that he ‘should like in some way or other to be connected with the transaction as I had the pleasant trouble of getting up the fac-simile’, a claim he repeated in the society’s Archaeologia. His pride seems now not misplaced, for as Twyman remarks, the volume ‘has to be seen as an astonishing production for its period’.153 By mid-January 1831 Collier considered his services to Devonshire as nearly

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150. Folger MS Y.d.6 (43). 151. Twyman 1990, p. 204. 152. ‘Sketch-Book of Inigo Jones’, Archaeologia 24 (1832), 354–56; reprinted in John Martin, Privately Printed Books (1834), pp. 291–93 (and second edition [1854], pp. 409–12). 153. JPC to Amyot, 19 December 1831, BL Add. MS 37,907, fols. 203–04; Twyman 1990, p. 208.


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formalized. ‘I have been acting lately, while he has been in London, as his private secretary, arranging his papers &c.’, he wrote to Robinson (18 January 1831)— these latter presumably ‘the Chiswick papers’. And hope of political advancement, even of escape from the drudgery of the daily press, swelled in him: ‘I am upon such terms that if he should happen to have (as Lord Chamberlain) anything to give away, I do not stand a bad chance of obtaining it.’ As Lord Chamberlain, one office that Devonshire oversaw was that of Licenser or Examiner of Plays, a powerful and moderately profitable position, with a lifetime term of appointment: the Licenser read and censored all new plays, operas, and entertainments intended for the public stage, imposing his own standards of decency and civil order upon each submission, and exacting a set fee from each applicant. He had no such responsibility for old drama revived—absurdly, the bawdiest restoration comedy could freely be staged at the two London ‘Theatres Royal’, while any novelty might be blue-pencilled into extinction—but his personal sensibilities could dictate in considerable measure the course of contemporary theatre. John Larpent, the Methodist Licenser who had died in 1824, imposed an effective ban on political and religious controversy in new plays during nearly a half century; and his successor, George Colman the younger, proved even more strict about stage language.154 Colman’s regime was no doubt something of an embarrassment to the liberal Devonshire, but his post was secure, and Collier’s hopes for it—the most appropriate preferment that the duke might one day offer— would depend on Colman’s resignation, incapacity, or death. Incapacity seemed possible when in August 1831 the gouty incumbent went abroad for his health, and Devonshire appointed John to replace him pro tempore. Jane Collier told Robinson that ‘should anything happen’ to Colman ‘I dare say John would have his place’. It was worth, she thought, no more than £400 per annum, and ‘he must give up reporting’, but ‘he would have more time for writing, which I hope would turn to account’ (HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1831). John served as Colman’s substitute for two months (‘without emolument’ he declared at the time),155 but Colman returned in October and resumed his duties.

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154. See Ganzel 1961. Colman’s fanatical squeamishness, especially rich in a writer earlier notorious for lewd comic verse, led to suppressing ‘all reference to the deity, every form of prayer or hymn, and even such modified forms of apostrophe as ‘‘O Lord!’’ and ‘‘demmee’’’ (DNB, 1887); he even struck out words like ‘heaven’ and ‘providence’, and once famously refused to permit a character to refer to his beloved as ‘an angel’. 155. Report of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature (1832), p. 30: ‘it was very little trouble for me, and quite in the way of my own pursuits at that time’. One application to him survives in a letter from Richard Brinsley Peake, asking Collier to read a sketch by Thomas John Dibdin and ‘forward the license immediately, as we wish, if possible, to perform it on Thursday evening’; 6 September 1831, bound in Harvard Theatre Collection TS 940.6, iv:60.


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Collier’s short stint in office, along with his reputation as historian and reviewer, led to a summons in June 1832 from a new parliamentary body, the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature. Formed under the direction of Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton), the rising ‘silver-fork’ novelist and reforming M.P., this committee meant to address the ‘wretched’ state of a contemporary theatre languishing between restrictive literary constraint, inadequate copyright protection for aspiring playwrights, and an effective monopoly on serious production at just two London theatres. Collier testified twice, mainly in favour of abolishing the exclusivity of the Theatres Royal (their productions were prohibitively costly, their vast playhouses o en hard to see in or hear in) and legitimizing the smaller, more intimate venues; Colman, who followed John onto the stand, remained firmly committed to the traditional monopoly. On the matter of censorship Collier was no libertine, calling for the drama to be kept as ‘wholesome’ as food, and thereby implicitly endorsing the Licenser’s office he coveted, and the Licenser’s moral authority. When one later witness declared that even political matter might be tolerated in plays, the committee was provoked into clearing the room, and John seemed even more shocked than the members. ‘Some expectation was felt that the Committee would order the evidence . . . expunged’, he reported in the Chronicle the next day, ‘but those who wished it (and none wished it more than the true friends of the Minor Theatres [i.e., Collier himself ]) were disappointed’.156 Despite this 1831–32 flirtation with office and officialdom, Collier’s dream of a sinecure went the way of his other dashed hopes.157 Colman was not to be hurried or shaken, even by a desperate offer from Collier that if he would resign the office in Collier’s favour, John would turn over to him ‘every farthing of the income the place produced, while he lived’. The old man refused, though he acknowledged that John was ‘quite right in asking’. Collier tells the tale of his interview with no sense of animus toward Colman, whose mysterious refusal (‘I give you no reason’) was firmly approved by his ‘lady’, the aging actress Mrs. Gibbs. It may have been somehow political; Colman was ‘such a staunch old Tory’, Devonshire warned his protégé, ‘that he would grant nothing to a Whig Lord Chamberlain’ (OMD, i:71–73). A er this failure, Devonshire’s influence itself slipped away, the duke resigning as Lord Chamberlain in December

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156. Ganzel gave a good account of this episode in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, pp. 51–54; see also Ganzel 1961. Collier testified on 15 and 18 June (Report, pp. 21–36 and 41–42). Thirteen letters from Collier to Devonshire give a running account of the proceedings (21 June–2 August 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence). 157. Thirty years later Collier would claim that for ‘professional reasons’ he had in 1832 ‘declined the office of stipendiary magistrate’ (preface to The Works of Edmund Spenser, pp. vi–vii), and this story is repeated in the 1865 and subsequent editions of the biographical dictionary Men of the Time. We have found no evidence to confirm it.


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1834. Colman died less than two years later, and the new Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Conyngham, appointed Charles Kemble. Henry Crabb Robinson admired John’s ‘unexpected fortitude’ on learning the news, and reflected that it need not have ended so: ‘Lady Blessington remarked that had the duke thought proper to say to the Marquis: My Librarian has lived for years in the expectation of this place, will you give it him, if it fall vacant during your time, there can be no doubt he would have readily given the place to Collier. But delicacy would not permit the D. to ask the favor’.158 Apart from the licensing fiasco, the relationship of John with ‘his Duke’ (as Jane Collier called Devonshire) remained literary, working, and guardedly social. No further invitations to Chatsworth ensued, but in February 1832 Devonshire and the Earl of Mulgrave sponsored Collier for membership in the newly formed Garrick Club. John became its twel h member, and the affiliation would mean much to him over many decades.159 And on 14 February 1832 Devonshire recorded in his diary that he had ‘appointed Collier to be a sort of librarian with 100 a year’.160 ‘I have received a letter from Messrs Snows in which they tell me that they have been instructed to pay me £100 a year from Christmas last’, John wrote a week later, in half-hearted protest. ‘If the first paper was ill-merited’—i.e., Devonshire’s gi to him of £100 for HEDP—‘this is positively unmerited: if every body is to be paid so liberally who deserves so scantily, your Grace must have many other claimants of the same kind.’ Reassured, he accepted what he could hardly afford to forgo, although ‘long ago I resolved not to accept anything more of your Grace in the way of a pecuniary gi ’—for ‘ ‘‘oaths are straws’’ and as has been o en remarked ‘‘every man has his price’’ ’.161 John’s light duties, really an extension of his unsalaried practice for the previous two years, included recommending purchases (Devonshire ‘gets John to make purchases of old plays for him’, Jane had written to Robinson in June

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158. HCR Reminiscences, iv:128 (written 1853). In February 1840 Kemble resigned the post in favour of his son. 159. Collier thanked Devonshire for the ‘useful honour’ of the proposal on 27 February (Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence). There are constant references to attendance at club dinners in OMD. Canon Richard Barham, one of the original members, described Collier in a manuscript register of his colleagues as ‘Librarian to the Duke of Devonshire; author of a history of the early English stage, and dramatic critic to the Observer and Morning Chronicle newspapers’ (Barham 1896, p. 19); in the club’s own Rules and Regulations . . . with a List of the Members, 1833 (1834) he figures as ‘Collier, John Payne, Esq. F.S.A. Barrister’. Collier also belonged to a second London club, the Literary Union, founded by Thomas Campbell in 1829; it was dissolved in 1834 and reconstituted as the Clarence Club. 160. Chatsworth MS 767.456; the figure was originally entered as ‘200’, but altered. 161. JPC to Devonshire, 21 and 27 February 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence.


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1830) and organizing the library at Devonshire House. In that capacity he had earlier tried to interest the duke in a large collection of modern manuscript plays (1737–1823) retained by John Larpent, the Licenser before Colman, which Collier and Thomas Amyot had purchased from Larpent’s widow in 1830—avowedly for £180, although how the outlay was shared is uncertain. This was clearly a joint speculation at the time, even if later Collier represented it as made ‘with a view to the Continuation of his History of the Stage’.162 Devonshire lukewarmly considered buying the collection in July 1830—whether before or a er Collier and Amyot acquired it is not clear—but declined it in January 1831.163 He had already supplied John with ‘two lists, one of the printed plays wanted, and one of the imperfect copies in my possession’, adding that ‘I think I must exclude MS plays—it would be endless’,164 wherea er additions to the dramatic library came in apace: one surviving memorandum in Devonshire’s private account book (July 1832) includes £50 to Collier for ‘current purchases’ and another is specifically marked ‘towards plays’ (£50, November 1832), and with the Heber dispersal of 1834–36 many more followed. Another £50 went to ‘Mr. Collier for plays’ on 12 May 1834, and £250 in five payments between 21 May 1835 and 30 June 1836, possibly all this toward ‘great acquisitions’ at the Heber sales, including ‘the lost edition of the Spanish Tragedy’, for which the duke particularly thanked his agent in September 1834.165 Collier’s activity on behalf of his new patron no doubt gave him vicarious pleasure (and some useful leverage with booksellers and auctioneers), but we have not attempted to work out details of his day-to-day purchases. One early and major transaction, however, deserves special notice, both as exemplifying Collier’s zeal in extending the Devonshire collections, and as a bibliophile’s tangled tale of its own.

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162. Madden Diary, 4 March 1850, recording Collier’s proposal that the British Museum purchase the collection for the price paid by Collier and Amyot. 163. On 4 July 1830 he agreed that Collier should look at the plays and give him an opinion of them, although ‘I suppose that most of them must be in my possession and I do not care about the MS notes and anecdotes much’ (FF/K MS 650); on 10 January 1831 he declined to purchase the plays (Folger MS Y.d.6 (43)). Collier’s own account of the transaction in OMD, i:49–50, is entered under the date 11 March 1832 and records that he and Amyot paid £400 for the plays, which they were ‘hardly worth’. 164. Devonshire to JPC, 16 March 1830, FF/K MS 648. 165. Chatsworth MS 767.458, diary entry for 21 June 1834; and Devonshire to JPC, 1 September 1834, FF/K MS 658. The ‘lost edition’ was almost certainly the 1603 edition with expanded text, now known in two copies. In Heber II (June 1834), lot 3222, it lacked its title-page, and bore the autograph of the essayist Owen Feltham. Now in the Huntington Library, it sports a title from the previous edition (1602), which has led to its description by most editors as ‘1602–1603’; but as the title was clearly supplied—by Collier?—aer June 1834, that ‘double date’ (W. W. Greg’s term in the Malone Society reprint of the 1602 edition [Oxford, 1949]) can be dispensed with.


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The Troublesome Affair of Kynge Johan Kynge Johan, a bitterly political two-part verse-play of about 1539 by the Protestant firebrand John Bale, has o en been described as the earliest surviving specimen of a great literary genre, the English history play (i.e., one dramatizing post-mythological English history, like Shakespeare’s Plantagenet cycle and his own King John); it also marks a watershed between the traditional fi eenthcentury morality play, with abstract virtues and vices struggling to dominate an allegorical action, and its typical Elizabethan successor, offering personalized characters in a recognizable historical context.166 Kynge Johan is now signalled principally for its ‘importance’, and certainly more studied than read; but before 1832 it was no more than a title. ‘Pro Ioanne Anglorum rege’ is the fi eenth in a list of twenty-two vernacular ‘comoedias . . . in idiomate materno’ that Bale listed among his own writings in his Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum . . . summarium (1548); in HEDP (ii:238, silently following Baker’s Biographia Dramatica) Collier rendered this as ‘Of King John of England’, one of the lost miscellaneous plays with ‘curious titles’. In January 1832 Frederic Madden, visiting the collector Dawson Turner at Yarmouth, was shown a manuscript belonging to an unnamed friend of Turner’s, which he identified as ‘a Morality, called King John, written at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign’, and he recorded his intention to ‘write to Mr Collier about it’ (Madden Diary, 25 January 1832). Turner’s friend, who had lent the manuscript to him for an opinion six years earlier, was William Stevenson Fitch of Ipswich, a self-taught Suffolk antiquary, and—in an era of light-fingered amateurs—a remarkably brazen rogue. The early provenance of Kynge Johan does not really concern us here, but as Fitch cheerfully acknowledged to Turner (who informed Madden and Collier), it had not long since been removed from the chest or storehouse of the Corporation of Ipswich: Fitch asserted that the archival custodians considered it ‘useless lumber’ and gave it away ‘to the late Mr Seekamp, one of our Magistrates . . . with a large quantity of loose papers’.167 Initially Madden thought to borrow the manuscript, or to purchase it cheaply on behalf of Viscount Clive (later second Earl of Powis), as a prospective Roxburghe Club publication—Clive had asked him to nominate one. Fitch, whose sense of literary importance and cash-value could be erratic (he virtually gave away the entire haul of Elizabethan broadside ballads now known as ‘Britwell’ and ‘Huth’), was on this occasion aware of market potential, and the particu-

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166. Modern estimates of the place of Kynge Johan in the evolution of English drama are summed up in Barry B. Adams 1969, pp. 55–65. 167. See J. I. Freeman 1997; Kynge Johan is discussed at pp. 100–09, and a few details are corrected here.


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lar cachet of unpublished material: ‘I should have no objection to Lord Clive or Mr Madden having the loan of it’, he wrote to Turner, but he would just as soon sell. ‘I do not think Ten Pounds would be an extravagant price for it unless I prove it to be in the Autograph of Bale’—he had long suspected Bale’s authorship, and was now ‘more than ever convinced’ of it—in which case ‘it would be Cheap at double that price’.168 Turner communicated the gist of Fitch’s letter to Madden, without naming a price, and suggested that Madden ‘make him an offer either for Lord Clive or the Museum’; but although Madden consulted with both Collier and the learned bookseller Thomas Rodd, and satisfied himself that Bale was certainly the author, he balked at buying the original. ‘When I mentioned it to you as desirable to be printed for the Roxburghe Club, I did so with the impression that the gentleman to whom it belonged set no particular value on it’, he complained, adding, ‘I doubt whether Lord Clive will spend more than he can help in his volume’. Furthermore (and incomprehensibly, save that the provenance may have seemed too dodgy for a public institution), ‘The Museum does not purchase such articles’. Still, he advised Turner that ‘the second hand in your MS. is that of Bale himself ’, and that Collier, to whom he had mentioned it, thought it worth at least £20.169 Indeed the availability of Kynge Johan clearly excited the new ducal librarian, and whatever qualms Madden may have expressed about the Ipswich Corporation chest provenance did not put him off. Collier told Devonshire about the manuscript on 13 February, and twelve days later wrote to Madden that the duke would willingly buy it, if Lord Clive should decline. Unseen, he could not judge its worth, but ‘you mentioned £15 to me, and as some guide to you, with my strong interest on the subject, I do not think I should scruple to give twice that sum for the relic but not more’. Meanwhile, Fitch was lowering his own sights: ‘Regarding the Morality, if any one were to offer me 5 Pounds for it, I should not hesitate about taking it’, he told Turner; ‘why I mentioned the Sum of £10 was because Collectors of these articles are generally Men of Fortune, and if they keep a Hobby they generally pay well for riding them’.170 But Turner was too shrewd a businessman or too good a friend to let Fitch—deeply in his debt— surrender to panic, and he forced Madden to re-open the matter. ‘You say nothing more of the Bale’s Morality. Has the possessor changed his mind, or does he still feel a wish to dispose of it?’ Madden wrote, a month later, and apparently

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168. Fitch to Turner, 3 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (30). 169. Turner to Madden, 6 February 1832, BL Egerton MS 2839, fols. 16–17; Madden to Turner, 21 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (51). 170. JPC to Devonshire, 13 February 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence; JPC to Madden, 25 February 1832, BL Egerton MS 2839, fols. 32–33; Fitch to Turner, 27 February, TCC O.14.8 (55).


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received no satisfactory reply, for on 30 June Collier himself was obliged to approach Turner directly. Representing himself as ‘the author of the Annals of the Stage and History of Dramatic Poetry’, and leaving Devonshire and his wealth out of it, he was ‘anxious, should the price at all come within the means with which I am furnished, to obtain a MS. Play by Bale’.171 Turner’s swi answer must have come as a shock, for the price demanded was now £50, and Collier wrote back that this was ‘certainly far above both my expectations and my means’, and that ‘I shall relinquish all hopes of obtaining it’, albeit with regret. He reminded Turner that his offer had been a blind one, taking the condition, the size, and even the contents of the manuscript ‘upon trust’. ‘My conjecture was that £20 would be the utmost I should be required to give, and I certainly could not afford more than £30’, he protested, although later he would confirm what Turner suspected, who the true purchaser was to have been.172 Turner prudently backed down, and on 19 July John applied to his duke for that sum (‘I need not say now that I have not always £30 to spare by me, and I know it is not your Grace’s wish that I should be in advance’), whereupon the manuscript was dispatched to Hunter Street.173 Fitch was delighted, telling Turner that ‘the price is really six times more than I calculated upon and indeed I must add considerably more than I could conscienciously [sic] have asked for it’.174 The transaction appeared now to be complete, but Fitch, whose anonymity Turner had protected throughout the negotiations, had one trick up his sleeve. Collier had indeed made the purchase ‘upon trust’ regarding condition and completeness, and when six years later he came to edit the play he was aware of ‘some confusion or omission’ prior to the beginning of the second part; he then conjectured that ‘one of the additions made by Bale, and intended by him to separate the two parts of the drama, has been irrecoverably lost’.175 Modern scholarship has established that in fact four leaves were missing from the manuscript that Collier received. Two of these are still unknown, but in 1847 the other

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171. Madden to Turner, 20 March 1832, and JPC to Turner, 30 June, TCC O.14.8 (65) and (138). 172. JPC to Turner, 11 July 1832, TCC O.14.9 (18). 173. JPC to Devonshire, 19 July 1832, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence; Devonshire accounts, May–July 1832 (noting a total payment to Collier of £80, of which £30 was for the play and the remainder for ‘current purchases’). Collier had received the MS by 23 July (‘a greater curiosity of the kind I have never had the good fortune to see’), when he urged Devonshire to publish it, perhaps for the Roxburghe Club: ‘I shall never forgive your Grace (pardon the expression) if you do not consent to print this play—if for more general circulation than among the Members of the Roxburghe Club, so much the better—but certainly for that. I should like to see it done under your Grace’s especial eye and care; and how happy, not to say proud, I should be to associate my knowledge on the subject, your Grace can imagine’; Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence. 174. Fitch to Turner, 1 August 1832, TCC O.14.9 (38). 175. Kynge Johan, A Play in Two Parts, ed. J Payne Collier (1838), pp. 68 and xi.


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two came to light, still in the possession of the wily marchand amateur. Perhaps despite his £30 windfall Fitch deemed them a fair levy from such a ‘Man of Fortune’ as Devonshire, although he had told Turner at the outset that ‘if [the play] is worth printing, have it done so entirely. I hate mutilated things’. Perhaps— but this seems less likely—they had come adri earlier and been somehow misplaced, and, as they contain passages apparently cancelled, seemed a harmless souvenir. At any rate, Fitch deliberately retained them, and with characteristic cheek bound them into a copy of Collier’s 1838 edition, ‘to make his book more valuable’, as he is said to have boasted.176 In 1845 he showed his enriched volume to a visitor, James Brook Pulham of Woodbridge, a friend of John Constable and an India House colleague of Charles Lamb. Pulham, whom we have encountered before as the editor of an occasional old play, advised Fitch to cede the two leaves to Devonshire, and Fitch let him take them away, but proposed to demand a copy of Claude le Lorrain’s Liber veritatis in exchange.177 Uncomfortable about this, and uncertain of his legal position, Pulham did nothing for two years, and only when Fitch asked for the material back did he call on Madden at the British Museum for advice. Madden thought the whole business ‘a piece of rascality’, reserving his contempt mostly for Fitch (‘A pretty sort of scoundrel this Mr Fitch must be! His name should be Filch’), while Collier registered ‘my opinion, I do not say belief . . . that [Pulham] & Mr Fitch are in concert to lay the Duke of D. under an obligation’ or that ‘each [is] endeavouring now to make the Duke think he is indebted to them for rescuing the missing MS’.178 Alerted by Madden, a er some protracted negotiations Collier apparently procured the extruded leaves from Pulham or Fitch without compensation. On 1 January 1848 Madden recorded in his diary Collier’s success ‘in obtaining out of the hands of Mr Fitch of Ipswich, the two leaves of Bale’s Play of Kyng John, so shamefully abstracted from the MS’. But this serpentine progress has a last twist or two, by no means altogether creditable to the duke’s vigilant librarian. Collier indeed passed along what he had recovered, assuring Madden in January 1848 that the two missing leaves ‘were now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, united to the MS.’, but soon borrowed them back—perhaps toward a new edition of Kynge Johan or some kind of supplementary appendix.179 And far from remaining ‘united to

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176. Fitch to Turner, 3 February 1832, TCC O.14.8 (30); Madden Diary, 18 February 1847, reporting J. B. Pulham’s account. 177. A fashionable and expensive collection of prints, then costing upwards of £40. 178. Madden Diary, 18 February 1847; JPC to Madden, 26 February, BL Egerton MS 2844, fols. 213–14. 179. On 24 January, writing from Brighton, the duke apologized for not having sent them already: ‘they are locked up in my drawer in London and cannot be got at till I go there . . . as soon as I can you shall have the leaves’; Folger MS Y.d.6 (49).


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the MS.’, the leaves languished apart: for whatever his intentions in 1848 nothing further was published, and Collier never returned them. Devonshire cannot have pressed his librarian, and a er his death in 1858 the seventh duke would have been unaware of the loan—if by now John regarded it as a loan, not a gi . The two leaves were found among Collier’s own books and papers in 1883, and restored by his son John Pycro Collier to the seventh duke in July 1884.180 On a wrapper that then contained both, John Payne Collier had written, in his very late hand (1870s–80s): ‘The M.S. Copy of the Play which I bought for the Duke of Devonshire many years ago was deficient of these ensuing leaves which I have recently obtained from a Mr Pulman [sic] who was a friend of Mr Fitch. In fact they ought to have formed part of the Dukes MS, from which they had been abstracted before I bought it.’ Such memoranda were o en added by Collier to his own books and manuscripts in his last years, as he became fearful that his heirs would not recognize their significance. In this instance—although there is no indication whatever that the Dukes of Devonshire should expect their return—his notes ensured that the fugitive leaves rejoined their matrix, if over a half-century late.181 The death of William Field Collier in October 1830 diminished the extended Collier and Pycro households for the first time since John Dyer’s passing. William had married in 1829, however, and now le a widow and an infant daughter;182 all three had lodged with the Pycro sisters in Putney, and during William’s terminal illness John, Mary Louisa, and two of their daughters stayed there as well to help care for him, John in particular being needed to li and carry his brother.183 Meanwhile John’s two sons were boarding with their schoolmaster uncle George Proctor in Guernsey, but when the Proctors moved to Brighton in October the boys, now twelve and ten, transferred to the new King’s College School in the Strand, as day students living at home.184 Jane Collier too paid her regular visits, though sometimes she felt insufficiently cosseted: Mary Louisa ‘has lately assumed a pertness to me not at all agreeable’, and John ‘cares little for me & she cares less. Parents are fonder of their children than 180. See J. I. Freeman 1997, p. 109. 181. They remain together as Huntington Library HM 3. Most of the text of the two additional leaves was marked for deletion by Bale, and it can be safely assumed that this was also true of any text on the other two missing leaves, possibly retained by Fitch, but still unlocated. 182. Jane Collier objected strongly to William’s marriage to Emily Caroline Phillips, but was reconciled by 27 December 1829, when she told Robinson that the couple were living at Putney on an income of £600 per annum. Their daughter, Emily Frances, was born 19 May 1830. 183. Jane Collier to HCR, 21–26 September 1830 and 16 January 1831. The cause of death was a brain tumour, diagnosed in mid-1830. 184. A remark in one of Amyot’s letters (13 September 1831, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 39–40) suggests that he may have helped secure them places.


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children of their parents’, she observed, mingling wisdom with petulance; ‘not that John does not love me, but he is deficient in those minor attentions that amount to much when put together’.185 ‘Heaven be praised’, John himself had told Robinson at the very same time, ‘I, who am the poorest of the set [of relations], have no prospect of any more brats’; and Robinson, whose return from two years on the continent coincided with that of the two Collier boys, chose not to crowd himself in at the small Hunter Street house. Robinson was no sooner back than he was lending more money, this time to Robert Proctor, an initial £150 on 21 October, with a promise of £350 more ‘which John Collier has, when he repays it, which I understand he means to do soon’. Indeed John cleared his long-standing debt by disposing of the old woollen mill at Witney, his legacy from his paternal grandparents seven years earlier. Jane told Henry that the sale made £800,186 and with Murray’s last £200 for HEDP (May 1831) and the new Devonshire honorarium (February 1832), John’s circumstances would appear to have eased.187 The Morning Chronicle was now paying him over ten guineas a week,188 and he was increasingly busy with play-reviewing for other newspapers, ‘especially those published Sunday’ (JPC Memoirs, p. 140). In February or March 1833 the family abandoned 23 Hunter Street, a er seven years’ rental, and moved a few blocks westward to 25 Euston Square.189 On 6 April John hosted a house-warming dinner for Robinson, Amyot, Dyce, John Hamilton Reynolds, and the playwright James Sheridan Knowles; Robinson found it ‘a very agreeable a ernoon’, with the talk ‘literary and desultory’, including gossip of Thomas Holcro and a scandalous article on Hazlitt’s last hours. Reynolds, re-encountered a er a falling-out many years past, ‘seemed to-day an agreeable man’, and Dyce, met for the first time, likewise—although later Robinson would consider him ‘by no means good natured . . . a critic, and too apt, as critics o en are, to treat bad taste as bad morals’. Knowles, who had a new play in rehearsal with prologue and epilogue by Charles Lamb, began ‘very flat and poorly—he said he was ill’, but was soon ‘roused by brandy and water, and then he became rather noisy’.190 But all was not well with Collier in the counting-house, new expenses as ever 185. Jane Collier to HCR, 16 January 1831, HCR Correspondence. 186. HCR Correspondence, 23 September 1831; John owned Robinson £350. 187. At least enough for the family to spend six weeks at Brighton in September and October 1832; see Alexander Dyce to John Mitford, 29 October 1832, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (21). 188. Or so John would recall in 1880; Memoirs, p. 145. 189. Both houses have since been pulled down. The new London and Birmingham Railway was extended to Euston in mid-1835; Philip Hardwick’s grand station was completed in 1839, at about the time the Colliers moved to South Kensington. 190. HCR Diary, 6 April 1833; see Morley 1938, i:424–25, also quoting from HCR’s Reminiscences, iii:426.


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running ahead of his income. The cost of the Euston Square move cannot have been inconsiderable, and keeping pace with his wealthy new friends might well have tasked a journalist’s purse. The yearly subscription to the Garrick Club alone was £6 6s., even if, as Robinson thought, Devonshire himself ‘will no doubt provide for him on the first occasion [i.e., the entrance fee of ten guineas]’ (HCR Diary, 19 February 1832), but the cost of rare books no doubt loomed largest. Later John claimed to have shared the cost of Larpent’s play-scripts (£180) with Amyot, and we have seen that he at least coveted the manuscript of Kynge Johan for himself. His principal spending would have been directly with dealers like Rodd and Thorpe, but he was no stranger to the salerooms of Evans and Sotheby. Remarkably enough for an underpaid invalid, William Field Collier had assembled a collection of antiquarian books, mainly Spanish, and at his posthumous sale (Sotheby, 15 April 1831) John purchased 61 of the 254 lots for £19 5s. 6d., about thirty percent of the total, and more than family piety demanded.191 At the Caldecott and Haslewood sales in 1833 John represented Devonshire on some major items, but also spent at least £12 on his own account. And like all truly ‘bit’ bibliophiles he was reluctant to part with any of his books in this period, unless by exchange, gi , or the odd extrusion of an out-of-field curiosity. Moreover, if the pattern of his future dispersals held true at this early date, he drove anything but a hard bargain and would have been horrified to be thought a deliberate profiteer. Financing such habits, while supporting a family of eight, made short work of the 1830–31 windfalls. Robinson soon learned from the Proctors that John had ‘borrowed of Miss [Emma] Pycro all her ready money’, and, worse, he had ‘anticipated all he should receive from his mother’.192 Jane Collier indeed was now very ill, bedridden at the Percival Street home of Robert and Mary Proctor since at least April 1833. London’s terrible cholera year, in which young William Godwin had perished (‘the first person I ever knew who has fallen’, wrote Robinson in September), had found John convalescent with another ‘quinzy’ in February and Mary Louisa ‘very ill’ from mid-December to the end of January 1833;193 but Jane’s affliction was dropsy. She died at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, 20 October, with John at her side: ‘The only person at whose Death I was present was that of my dear Mother. . . . I heard the last rattles in her dear throat and I alone was present watching for her death’; ‘she slipt out of life & did not move a finger, or distort a muscle of her countenance’, he wrote to her most loyal friend.194 At 191. The three-day sale was advertised as the property of ‘W. F. Collier, Esq., Barrister, deceased, to which is added another valuable collection’; William’s books accounted only for the first day. 192. HCR Diary, 31 October 1833; he repeated the latter charge on 4 November. 193. HCR Diary, 19 February and 16 December 1832, and 30 January 1833. 194. JPC Diary, 11 November 1881; JPC to HCR, 15 October 1833, HCR Correspondence.


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her burial in Bunhill Fields six days later the Rev. William Madge read to ten men—sons John and Richard, sons-in-law George and Robert Proctor, and relations and friends William Field, ‘Field the apothecary’, Edward Jones, Samuel De Zoete, one of the Pycro s, and Henry Crabb Robinson.195 ‘No one else will ever feel for me the friendship she did’, Robinson wrote in his diary (22 October), and to Dorothy Wordsworth he described his loss as ‘the severest . . . I have sustained for many years’ (HCR Correspondence, 24 October). ‘She was neither the handsomest nor the cleverest woman I have ever known’, he later summed up; ‘she was by no means a blue stocking but she was altogether most loveable. With great beauty in her youth, a handsome fortune and nearly all the external advantages of life, she was above all other qualities most remarkable for a happy temper’. Not so John Dyer, who ‘with many good qualities had a trying temper’ and was ‘repeatedly unfortunate in business’, and whose ‘vanity was a source of calamity’. ‘Late in life’, Robinson concluded—and you can hear his heart crack—‘she lost to a great degree the early attachment to her husband’ (HCR Reminiscences, iii:341). Jane’s simple will, proved on 6 November, divided her worth equally among her four living children and her infant granddaughter, taking into account prior ‘presents of unequal amount’.196 Richard, the most desperate legatee, received £830, and John £900. Dewey Ganzel (p. 57) thought such a sum ‘a boon which financed, among other things, a spate of scholarly publications, pamphlets, and several drama reprints’ in 1835–37, but Robert Proctor told Robinson on 29 November 1834 that ‘John has [already] spent as well what he had from his grandfather [i.e., the Witney mill] and his mother’ (HCR Diary). Jane’s bequest was in effect the last trace of the old Collier-Payne wealth that John Payne Collier would know, and Jane’s death also cut his last link with family scrutiny—John Dyer’s silent disapprobation, Jane’s unthinking support. In the future John’s income would depend entirely on his own wits and performance, and his reputation upon friends and readers of his own making.

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195. Jones was Joshua Collier’s son-in-law; his own son would marry John Payne’s daughter Henrietta in 1860. Samuel De Zoete was an old friend, and joined the extended family in 1849 when his daughter married John Payne’s eldest son. 196. PRO PROB 11/1823, with estate valued at £3,000; the executors were John Payne, Robinson, and Robert Proctor.


part four

The 1830s (II)

Literature—essays and reviews and some periodical verse, as well as book-length critical and editorial projects—by now constituted for John both a calling and a necessary resource, supplementary to the chores of newspaper journalism, the more welcome Devonshire ‘librarianship’, and whatever small fees he could command from his fledgling practice of law. In December 1831 he submitted to Fraser’s Magazine a ‘Christmas Interlude’ in verse, ‘written upon the plan of our old English shews’. This was allegedly ‘prepared for representation, and is to be performed, at the house of a nobleman in Dorsetshire [sic] on Jany. 6th next’; but Fraser’s, pressed to find space for it no later than in its January number, declined it.1 With Colburn and Bentley’s New Monthly Magazine Collier fared better, placing five articles in the first six months of 1832. Edward Lytton Bulwer, the novelist and reformer now doubling as editor of the NMM, accepted what his predecessor Thomas Campbell had turned down long since, a two-part account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poesie giocose (the so-called rime piacevole or burlesche), with illustrative translations. Titled ‘Italian Humorous Poetry’ and signed ‘C. R.’, the articles appeared in January and March, a striking reminder of John’s self-taught expertise in a field other than English.2 His facile commentary on ‘a class of poems, of which comparatively little is known in this country’, surrounds specimen translations of Francesco Coppetta (who may have inspired Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’), Firenzuola, Grazzini, Burchiello, Bertini, Salvetti, Della Casa, and Gigli in part one; and Murtola, Marino, Berni, Mauro, and Pignotti in the sequel. Bulwer waxed even more enthusiastic about articles on John Philip Kemble 1. JPC to ‘The Editor of Frazer’s [sic] Magazine’, 3 December 1831, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (124). This may refer to ‘The Contention of the Seasons’, intended for performance at Chatsworth, but abandoned because of ‘the want of two female performers, who could sing’ (OMD, ii:114–15, with one specimen song). Ganzel’s reference (p. 55) to an offer of the interlude to the Quarterly Review for its January 1833 number appears to be an error. 2. Bulwer politely asked Collier’s permission to delay the second from February to March, because of an editorial ‘inconvenience’ (Bulwer to JPC, 2 January 1832, Folger MS Y.d.6 (167)). Collier identified himself as the author in a letter to Devonshire (27 February 1832, Chatsworth, uncalendared correspondence of the sixth Duke of Devonshire).

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and David Garrick as playwrights, which appeared in the numbers for February and June. These were based almost entirely on material in the Larpent manuscript collection purchased by Collier and Amyot, and contained unashamed puffs for its resale, now that Devonshire had declined it (‘it is out of the question for anybody to pretend to write a history of theatres, actors, and authors, during that period [i.e., 1737–1824], without resort to these authorities’, etc.). Amyot, who probably served as John’s conduit to Bulwer and the NMM, reassured him that publishing extracts from the Kemble and Garrick papers would not harm their chances of selling the originals: ‘So far from thinking that you are depreciating our property, I am of opinion that you are enhancing their value by advertizing them’. Bulwer for his part told John that his ‘Poetical and Literary Character of the Late John Philip Kemble’ seemed ‘capital—& as the Booksellers say ‘‘quite the thing’’ ’; and the Garrick essay (‘New Facts Regarding Garrick and His Writings’) appeared in June, praised by Amyot as ‘better even than the Kemble one’.3 Indeed the latter offered a provocative estimate of the actor, as more original in terms of his cra than Shakespeare in his: Garrick was sui generis ‘the inventor of an entirely new style of acting’, one based on ‘nature’, whereas ‘our great poet had many models before him, which at first he was content to follow, and which, subsequently, he only improved’. The last assertion was by now a trademark of Collier’s historical criticism, intended perhaps more to exalt the obscure than to diminish the great. Although most of the ‘new facts’ consist of new Garrick text, Collier could not resist a codicilliary disclosure, four unpublished lines from Sheridan’s ‘Monody on the Death of Garrick’ (1779), which ‘were judiciously omitted in the recitation as weakening the effect of the composition’. However, ‘recollecting that they are the production of such a man as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and that they relate to such a man as David Garrick, they are worth preserving’, Collier maintained; the rough dra itself belonged to the Duke of Devonshire, ‘with some few other MSS. . . . bound up in his Grace’s marvellously perfect collections of printed English dramatic productions’. In fact the source was also a Larpent manuscript, namely the scribal text submitted by Sheridan’s father Thomas to the Lord Chamberlain’s office on 10 March 1779. Perhaps Collier and Amyot gave or sold it to Devonshire as a foretaste of the Larpent offer—to no effect, as it turned out; it is now reunited at the Huntington Library, via the Kemble-Devonshire plays, with the rest of the Larpent manuscripts.4 3. Amyot to JPC, 14 February 1832, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 54–55; and Bulwer to JPC, Folger MS Y.d.6 (167), pencil date 2 January 1832. Other letters from Amyot about Larpent or the NMM articles are contained in the same BL volume (15 March 1831, fols. 37–38, and 13 September 1831, fols. 39–40) and in Add. MS 37,907 (December 1831, fols. 207–08, with the remark that Bulwer ‘also approves, you will see, of the Kemble article as far as he has gone in it’). 4. Cecil Price, ed., Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Oxford, 1973), ii:453 and


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Finally, also in June, came a two-page notice of ‘A New Life of Milton’, ostensibly a review of the Rev. John Mitford’s edition of Milton’s Poetical Works for William Pickering’s ‘Aldine Poets’. Bulwer had found this less than compellingly topical—he held it over from January—and in fact John was mainly concerned to re-float an old and improbable attribution of The Six-Fold Politician (1609, by ‘I. M.’) to Milton’s father; to reclaim the ‘J. M. S.’ lines on Shakespeare in the 1632 Folio for Milton (‘infinitely too good for Jasper Mayne, to whom Malone, in his guess-work, would assign them’); and to call attention to a document in the Chapter House subsidizing an amanuensis for Sir Henry Wotton (‘to show what may possibly be discovered in such places’). Mitford himself was accorded ritual praise for his thoroughness, immediately undercut by qualifications about ‘vain learning’ (i.e., superfluous commentary), unfamiliarity with London archival repositories (‘we believe [he] resides in Suffolk’), and his estimate of Milton’s place in the history of ‘undramatic’ blank verse. Collier did insert an allusion to ‘the very careful and able Lives of Pope and Shakespeare’ by Dyce, in the same Aldine series, but his professed uncertainty about Mitford’s circumstances was at least disingenuous—for by now the two men were well acquainted.5 Mitford (1781–1859), a dedicated classicist, naturalist, bibliophile, and editor of English poets, had ingratiated himself with Jane Payne Collier well before January 1832, when he wrote at length and delightfully to her about her own gi of bulbs, plants, and ‘little Guernsey worms’, discussing Gilbert White’s Selborne and Wilson’s American Ornithology, and recounting an exchange with John in the pit of the Adelphi Theatre ‘when we parted last’. John (‘poor dear Soul! he is a good Creature’) had shaken Mitford’s hand ‘in his affectionate manner . . . tipping an orange into my hand at the same time’—and begged him ‘don’t forget your theological studies’. ‘I heard him say in a low voice to Mrs Collier [i.e., Mary Louisa]—‘‘I could wish him not to lose sight of the Concordance, for he is not very strong in Divinity’’ ’, added Mitford, concluding with a whimsical account of his efforts to pursue a course of theology, although ‘surely Collier did not mean to involve me in such inextricable Metaphysics’.6 For his part, John wrote of Mitford that ‘I do not believe there is a particle of envy in the composition of his mind’ (OMD, i:57), and in 1835 he was loyal enough to reject from

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461. Collier himself failed to observe that this license-seeking manuscript omits the last twenty lines as finally published, leading him to the false claim that ‘in the printed editions’ the ‘Monody’ ends with the line ‘And to his worth—’tis all you can—be just’. No printed edition ends there. 5. ‘A New Life of Milton’, NMM, 2d ser., 34 (June 1832), 581–82. 6. Mitford to Jane Collier, 9 January 1832, FF/K MS 617. Dyce wrote teasingly to Mitford: ‘I don’t know what your success may be among the younger part of the fair sex, but among the old ladies you carry all before you. You have positively thrown a spell over Mrs Collier, senior: There was never such a man as Mr Mitford! When she got to the end of your letter, she was quite vexed there was no more of it!’; 1 February 1832, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (16).


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George Daniel a presentation copy of The Modern Dunciad inscribed with a scurrilous reference to his friend.7 And presumably Mitford remained oblivious of the authorship of the NMM notice—or found the cavils against his Aldine Milton tolerable—for he dedicated his subsequent three-volume Poetical Works of Jonathan Swi ‘To John Payne Collier, Esq. of the Middle Temple . . . with those feelings of esteem which his virtues and talents justly command’.8 Payment for his literary work was by now more important than ever to Collier: by February 1835, when it was clear that Devonshire could not or would not provide him a government sinecure, he asked Shoberl for piece-work, noting that ‘if I can add (however triflingly) to my income in any proper way I am ready to undertake the labour’. Still, ‘I will undertake nothing to which I think myself absolutely unequal’, and he declined what Shoberl had already suggested (‘I do not feel myself competent to the subjects mentioned by you’), preferring ‘matters of taste & criticism’.9 Fourteen months earlier he had felt confident enough to refuse mean terms from William Pickering for contributions to the ‘re-generated’ Gentleman’s Magazine, just then beginning a new series under the editorship of John Mitford. ‘While the New Monthly will pay me 12 guineas a sheet I cannot write even for you for £5’, he protested, outlining enticingly what he would have provided, if properly rewarded;10 a year later, however, it was John’s turn to swallow his pride and approach Pickering, proposing a new series of essays without raising the issue of fees. Meanwhile, modest but steady work at two kinds of reviewing helped to sustain him. John’s semi-acknowledged position as dramatic reviewer for the Observer, a weekly newspaper owned by the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle, William Clement, brought him a little pay, a little recreation, and more than a little power; he seems rarely if ever to have abused the last, although a few skir-

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7. According to Dyce, Daniel had written in Collier’s copy that his book had ‘been abused by a Scotch Professor [i.e., John Wilson] & By an English Parson, his equal in tippling and blackguardism’, and Collier had returned it, protesting that ‘he could not in his conscience retain it with such an allusion to Mr M. who was an intimate acquaintance of his’; undated letter to Mitford, assigned by cataloguers to 1835, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (30). 8. First edition, 1833–34; inscription dated from Benhall (Suffolk), 10 October 1833. It is just conceivable, if unlikely, that John wrote his notice of Mitford’s Milton before meeting him in person, as Bulwer referred to having ‘the Milton’ in hand on 2 January 1832; but if so he made no effort to alter it between January and June. 9. JPC to Shoberl, 13 February 1835, BoPL MS Ch.H.3.63. The work referred to was undoubtedly reviewing for the Foreign Quarterly Review, which Shoberl edited from March 1835 to January 1838, but we have not found any published notices attributable to Collier. 10. JPC to Pickering, 19 December 1833, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (153). Cyrus Redding, a longstanding contributor to the NMM, confirms the standard rate of twelve guineas for a sheet of sixteen pages; Fiy Years’ Recollections (1858), ii:222.


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mishes with authors and performers were inevitable. Other periodicals may also have engaged him on an ad hoc basis, but as theatrical notices were normally unsigned, even with initials, just which and how many were Collier’s will remain speculative.11 Similarly, book reviews in the periodical press seldom bear signatures, and while John probably turned out his share, we can be certain about only a handful. The use of the anonymous review to settle old and new scores was time-honoured, of course, and some of Collier’s must have combined personal satisfaction with profit: in June 1833, for instance, he offered to review for John Murray’s Quarterly Review the massive and somewhat inchoate compilation of the Rev. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (10 vols., Bath, 1833), in ‘an amusing & not uninstructive article of about 20 or 30 pages without quoting much & scarcely anything from Mr Genest’. Collier stressed his credentials (‘I am as well acquainted with the subject as any man & I have made very extensive & original collections on the subject’), but the Quarterly Review declined (Collier in fact never breached its high-Tory pages), and his long unsigned review appeared instead in the Athenaeum for 19 October. Although Collier knew very well who the author was— ‘Mr Genest of Bath, who does not put his name to it’, he had informed Murray— he chose now to profess ignorance: ‘The author (whoever he may be) has given us no preface’, ‘the work is anonymous’.12 In publishing a vast quantity of theatrical record in a form even more undigested than Collier’s in HEDP, Genest had not really pre-empted a continuation of the latter, but John must have felt that any ongoing project to do so was now compromised. How many extended accounts of the old English stage could the reading public absorb? ‘Collier on Genest’ fairly bristles with resentment of a workable subject spoilt by mechanical presentation (save for chronology, ‘there is no attempt at arrangement’), superfluous detail (‘four volumes out of the ten might have contained every syllable that was worth remembering, either for information or amusement’) and repetitions of ‘what everyone knows’ (plotsummaries, contents of anthologies, critiques of non-theatrical drama—‘a more remarkable instance of waste of time and paper we never remember’). Genest is chided for his ignorance of early-theatre scholarship a er Chalmers and Malone

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11. A. W. Ashby’s examination suggested to him that Collier was reviewing for the Observer as early as the 1820s, continuing perhaps until he le London in 1850 (Ashby papers). Some items obviously his include a laudatory review of Lord Egerton’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (performed at Bridgewater House on 27 May 1831; ‘Theatricals in High Life’, 29 May 1831) and his Catherine of Cleves (20 November 1831), and others that embody references to the Larpent plays or HEDP, Devonshire’s collecting, etc. Collier also contributed theatrical notes to the Morning Chronicle, including in 1829 a review of Richard Butler’s Follies of Fashion (OMD, i:20, and note in Folger W.b.504). 12. JPC to Murray, 28 June 1833, John Murray archives.


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(he had clearly not read or acknowledged HEDP), for his ‘liberal notions’ (‘anecdotes, incidents, or observations, which savour of that indecorum for which theatres . . . have been remarkable’), and—rather unfairly, in a work devoted to the period a er 1660—for ‘concentrat[ing] all he has to say about Marlow, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood, Dekker, Shirley, and their numerous and admirable contemporaries, in the twenty-fi h part of a single volume!’ Genest had ‘evidently visited London at intervals, and cursorily gone over the collections in the British Museum’, Collier lo ily allowed, but he appeared to be unaware of ‘some of the most important sources of dramatic intelligence, such as the collection of plays from the earliest date, belonging to the Duke of Devonshire’. Surely it was disingenuous of Collier to add that Devonshire’s books and playbills, ‘by the courtesy of his Grace, have been always accessible’ to researchers; Dyce might disagree, and in any event Genest’s chosen period was not Devonshire’s strength. But Collier would not even allow him his choice (‘we could well have spared all that he supplies a er the year 1800, which would have saved us and him more than the whole of his two last volumes’). Faint praise was granted ‘the most useful portion of his work’, the calendar of known parts played by each eminent actor and actress over a hundred and seventy years. ‘In executing this task he has generally been very faithful’, but ‘it is a piece of drudgery few would have undertaken’. Some readers of HEDP said as much about that laborious work, and Genest’s Some Account is not, a er all, enlivened by fictions. Modern students will hardly seek out Genest for a coherent account of the post-Restoration stage (Collier’s ‘unreadable’ is harshly correct), but it remains a laborious, serviceable, and comprehensive work, and above all ‘trustworthy’.13 The reviewer’s fine scorn was at least partly that of a rival. John Payne Collier never met John Genest—a sixty-six-year-old invalid clergyman, dwelling at Bath, who died in 1839 ‘a er nine years of great suffering’—and no repercussions followed his contemptuous article.14 But Alexander Dyce suffered provocations less meekly, and a notice in the Literary Gazette for 12 January 1833 of his long-promised Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley enraged him. This was the project le incomplete on William Gifford’s death, for which Amyot and Robinson had unsuccessfully recommended Collier; six years a er Dyce had won out it was finally published in six octavo volumes. To John Murray, their common publisher, Dyce complained of the ‘unfair critique’,

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13. Joseph Knight, DNB (1889). 14. Genest in fact convinced himself that his friend the Rev. Edward Mangin of Bath was the culprit, and nothing Mangin could do—including the procurement of a letter from Charles Dilke, affirming that the reviewer was ‘resident in London’—could dissuade him. Mangin has le a MS account of the misunderstanding (FF MS 739), which caused a considerable stir in Bath literary society in 1833–34, and le Mangin furious with his doubters.


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which he assumed was by Collier; at some later date he told Murray that ‘I wrote an angry letter’ to Collier about it, which has seemingly perished.15 Collier (for it surely was he) devoted most of his praise to the ‘critical acumen, good taste, and instinctive as well as acquired knowledge of the subject’ of William Gifford alone. Gifford’s first achievement had been, he wrote glowingly, ‘to clear away the rubbish by which former editors had obscured and encumbered their author’—and he would have done the same for Shakespeare had he lived to edit his works—while dealing with bewildering copy-texts (‘we know of no old plays worse printed than those of Shirley’) that sometimes ‘involve the sense in almost impenetrable obscurity’: here the first editor was said to have exhibited ‘almost miraculous . . . acuteness in penetrating the mystery of the author’s meaning’, and his ‘proposed alterations of the deformed and distorted text are like the unexpected sun-light breaking in upon darkness’. Collier’s estimate of Gifford’s scholarship had oscillated wildly since 1818, but with the opportunity to score (again anonymously) on a living rival the scapegoat of 1826–30 became an icon of editorial passion and grace. ‘In one particular’, namely, a penchant for overvaluing his authors, ‘Mr. Dyce is the very opposite of his deceased coadjutor’: Dyce ‘seems never to have been warmed into admiration by any of the many striking scenes and beautiful passages of the dramatist of whose works he was speaking’, and although such coolness ensured that ‘the reader will proceed to the perusal of the plays with a mind quite unbiased by any preliminary and partial criticism’, it let down both Shirley and his readers. Lesser flaws were meticulously enumerated: Dyce had mistaken the date of Kirkman’s ‘Drolls’ by some eleven years; he had called Shirley and Heywood (with thirty-two and twenty-three extant plays respectively) the most prolific of dramatists, overlooking Shakespeare himself, with his canonical thirtysix; and—unforgivably—‘in vol. vi. p. 132, he has copied one of his longest notes, without the slightest acknowledgement, from Mr. Collier’s History of Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 203, a work to which he has elsewhere been indebted’. Furthermore, Dyce’s comparison of The Cardinal to Webster’s Duchess of Malfi was anticipated ‘some years ago by writers in the Critical Review and in the London Magazine’, namely, Collier’s own five articles on Shirley (never cited by Dyce) of 1816–17 and 1820. The last particulars, if nothing else, would certainly have confirmed Dyce’s suspicions, in spite of the reviewer’s overall approbation: ‘We look upon this edition of Shirley as a model, in many respects, of the manner in which the writings of our old dramatists ought to be explained and illustrated’. In one of his letters

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15. The undated Dyce letters (John Murray archives) are docketed ‘5 January 1833’ and ‘1833’— the first in error, as the review appeared on 12 January and Dyce refers to ‘today’s Literary Gazette’.


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to Murray Dyce parried three of the shrewdest attacks, though not very persuasively, reducing Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays to thirty,16 pooh-poohing the error in the date of Kirkman (‘I merely gave the date of the edition I possessed: what matters it to the readers of Shirley, when Kirkman’s Collection was first published?’), and insisting that his footnote at vi:132 owed nothing directly to HEDP. The last point is moot, and both scholars may have reached the same unremarkable conclusion independently, but Collier certainly published it first.17 Perhaps in response to Dyce’s complaints, John did moderate some of his reflections in a ‘Second Notice’ of Shirley for the Literary Gazette two weeks later, offering ‘to do more justice than, from want of space, we were able to do in our preceding number, to the editorial labours of Mr. Dyce, who has already established his reputation in this department by his editions of the works of Robert Greene, George Peele, and John Webster’ (26 January 1833, pp. 54–56). But his thrust was still far from complimentary to the co-editor, and he concluded by emending, quite absurdly, a stanza in Narcissus that had ‘puzzled Mr. Dyce’. Of course this ticklish review was no more than part of the Collier-Dyce flyting, another episode of which had erupted in the Literary Gazette only six months before (see below), and if other specialist reviewing contributed significantly to John’s income we have not unearthed it. One project of 1832 might have been profitable, but it quickly proved abortive. Thomas Campbell, the celebrated poet of The Pleasures of Hope and Gertrude of Wyoming, had begun a new biography of Mrs. Siddons, for which the great actress herself had furnished him documentary materials. According to Collier twenty-two years later, Campbell, ‘knowing, as he did, that I was in possession of many particulars of the career of Mrs. Siddons and of her family’—from the Larpent collection, he later explained—‘applied to me to lend him assistance in his undertaking’. This came down to ‘two propositions: either that I should sell my materials to him or that I should myself, under his inspection, interweave them with his manuscript. For various reasons, I was much averse to the first proposition,—and the second went off mainly on a question of authorship. He told me that he expected 400£ for the copyright, if the book were published with his name, and he was very willing to mention me in the Preface as a contributor to it. This course I declined; and I never saw the work again till a er it was printed’ (Athe-

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16. By calling two (Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI ) ‘certainly spurious’ and declaring that four (2 and 3 Henry VI, Pericles, and Taming of the Shrew) ‘contain only a few touches from the great poet’s hand’. 17. In a concluding paragraph Collier added ‘as a trifle to the biographical notice’ the news that ‘there is reason to believe that one of [Shirley’s] sons became an actor aer the Restoration, and was a member of the king’s company when they began their performances at Drury Lane in 1663’. This speculation is repeated in the MS continuation of HEDP.


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naeum, 29 July 1854, p. 944). Much later John adjusted his story: Campbell had offered him a quarter of his fee, and he had at first ‘rather reluctantly’ agreed to the arrangement, but on visiting Duke Street and viewing the ‘vast masses, of unarranged materials . . . all confused and undigested’, realized that his task was virtually to do ‘all the work’. At which point ‘I at once civilly declined’, and ‘the matter was thus broken off . . . without any ill-will on either part, for I a erwards saw Campbell several times during the progress of his undertaking, and never refused to give him hints as he proceeded’ (OMD, i:43, iii:2–3). In fact the negotiations dragged on for three months, on the evidence of four letters from Campbell that John himself carefully preserved.18 In July 1832 Campbell seemed mainly concerned about whether both names were to appear on the title page (‘can we both be supposed to speak at the same time?’ he asked) and about possible conflicts of ‘appreciation’ (Campbell ‘cannot compromise’); he insisted that Collier not advertise his involvement until the book was complete, and then only ‘in the event of our joint names appearing’. They nonetheless reached some kind of preliminary arrangement, for on 26 July Campbell was ‘happy to agree to any manner of announcement . . . which you may think fit, confident that you will not . . . place me in the light of transferring to you the whole onus of responsibility of the work’. Five days later the deal seemed to be struck, but on 31 October the poet acknowledged its breakdown: he regretted that John felt himself ‘in a cle stick with regard to our proposition’ (which nevertheless did not seem to imply financial differences), and confessed that he could not envisage ‘any more than yourself the chance of our junction’.19 What went amiss is impossible to say, but on an earlier occasion it had been John who proffered his literary talents to Campbell, not Campbell who sought them, in a lengthy submission of projects in 1823 to the New Monthly Magazine—of which nothing had come. And John’s personal opinion of the great man was already jaundiced in 1829, when he characterized him to Robinson as ‘a dandy in person and mind’, and ‘in terror lest he should knock down the cardhouse temple of his fame’.20 In later years he retailed several memories of Campbell drunk and obstreperous, making a fool of himself in the company of poets and critics, and it is certainly more than possible that the 1832 Siddons episode influenced such recollections (OMD, ii:18–19 and iii:67–69). Remarkably, Alex-

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18. Folger MS Y.d.341 (15–18), the first undated and the others dated 26 and 31 July and 31 October 1832. 19. By then Collier had already told Devonshire that the project had ‘cooled off’; letter of 13 October, Chatsworth uncalendared correspondence. 20. HCR Correspondence, 25 December 1829. This bears an uncanny (or perhaps not) resemblance to Walter Scott’s famous observation that Campbell ‘is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts before him’; J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837), iv:93.


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ander Dyce in 1844 remembered another version of Campbell’s struggle to complete the Life of Mrs. Siddons: because of his ‘very slight acquaintance with stagehistory’, Dyce averred, Campbell offered him one-half the publisher’s royalty ‘if I would become his coadjutor’, and Dyce ‘refused the money, but promised him all the assistance in my power’ (Literary Gazette, 22 June 1844, p. 401). Rather as Collier claimed he had done, Dyce provided Campbell with suggestions and notes, although later he found the book ‘crammed with mistakes of every possible description’, and largely devoid of his painstaking notulae. Campbell may well have dangled a prospect of co-authorship at more than one literary handyman before settling down to produce what he had already been paid for, unsatisfactory though it would be.

The Books of Richard Heber As a publishing scholar with both specialist and popularizing ambitions, John Payne Collier’s forte had long been novelty of information, and such novelty depended above all on its sources. At the outset of his career a personally acquired or borrowed rare volume might serve, but by HEDP the importance of untapped institutional archives dwarfed the odd reading discovery, while the private resources of antiquarian friends continued to give Collier an edge on some less well-placed rivals. Loans from Douce, Bright, Towneley, and Haslewood had enlivened his HEDP text; Devonshire’s library had proved enduringly fertile; the Larpent manuscripts yielded a few publishable nuggets; and soon the Earl of Ellesmere’s collections at Bridgewater House would provide a host of new revelations, genuine as well as suppositious. Some indication of the avidity with which John sought out fresh facts, and what hazards could attend the competition for priority, may be seen in an episode of mid-1832. David Laing of Edinburgh (1793–1878), a second-generation bookseller and literary antiquary, had sent Collier through their common friend Dyce what must have been a proof or pre-print of his ‘Extracts from Conversations between Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson in the year 1619’, read before the Scottish Society of Antiquaries on 9 January 1832. Collier thanked him for it on Monday 9 July, but on the preceding Thursday he had already forwarded to William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette—albeit anonymously—a choice sample of it ‘about Ben Jonson & young Raleigh’.21 Over the week-end, however, he seems to have learned (prob-

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21. JPC to Laing, EUL MS La.IV.17. This relates to the famous anecdote about Jonson as ‘governor’ of Walter Ralegh’s high-spirited son, when young Walter carted him dead-drunk through a French town in 1613 as ‘a more Lively image of ye Crucifix then any they had’ (Herford and Simpson, i:140). Gifford, relying on a version in Aubrey that misdates the episode, declared it apocryphal, but Drummond’s report vindicates it completely. Laing unearthed the Drummond


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ably from Dyce) that ‘the book from which I quoted is not yet published by the Ant: Soc: of Edinb., although it has been sent to me; and it would be most unfair to anticipate any part of its contents’. Writing hastily to Jerdan he ‘rejoiced that it did not appear on Saturday [7 July] as I must have got into a terrible scrape . . . therefore, if you please, put my anonymous letter into the fire’.22 Later Collier and Laing became good friends, and indeed worked closely together on the 1842 Shakespeare Society edition of Drummond’s Conversations; but at this date they had not yet met. What potential embarrassment Collier skirted may well have been more Dyce’s fault than his own, as indeed it was Dyce’s original indiscretion(s) that set off the sequence, but Dyce could be cutting indeed about his friend’s print-seeking propensities: ‘Don’t mention [a story about a regimental mutiny] to any one’, he warned Mitford in October 1832: ‘if I had told Collier, it would have been in The Chronicle ere now’. And again, regarding his payment from Murray for the Shirley edition (£52 10s.), ‘Collier is dying to know what sum I received, but I shall not tell him, & request that you will not mention it’.23 Some of these tweaks may remind us of the tattling schoolgirl in Dyce, but their thrust is familiar enough. A few years later the Garrick Club Committee rebuked its founding ‘twel h member’ for publishing in the Chronicle an account of a testimonial club dinner given for Charles Kemble, a clear breach of privilege. Collier’s co-culprit at the time was

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text and prepared it for publication with the rest of his ‘Extracts’, showing Dyce his discoveries before 8 August 1831, when Dyce wrote to Collier that the Jonson-Ralegh anecdote was ‘a positive fact’, which ‘I shall use in my Life of [Jonson] for the Aldines’: ‘I have got this from unpublished Drummond M.SS.’, he explained, sending also the text of a Drummond sonnet ‘you may not give . . . by any channel to the press’ (Folger MS Y.d.341 [56]). Nor did Collier disobey at the time, but in the Literary Gazette for 5 May 1832, p. 284, there appeared an ‘Extract from a Letter from a Correspondent at Edinburgh’, which gave the gist of the story. Further correspondence (12 May and 19 May, the latter from one ‘D. A.’, who claimed to have seen the Drummond MSS ‘many years since’ in the Advocates’ Library) led to a protest from Dyce (19 May, published 26 May) about ‘your correspondent from Edinburgh . . . and the gentleman who signs himself D. A.’, believed to be ‘one and the same person’: Dyce clearly knew how the leak came about, and derided the ‘imperfect recollection’ of ‘your correspondent, [who] was fortunate enough to peruse [the MS] many years before it was found’. Writing to Laing on 12 June, Dyce was relieved that Laing had seen this reply, for the indiscreet Edinburgh correspondent was in fact ‘a friend of mine’, who ‘had heard me mention the Raleigh story &c., and as every thing turns to print now a days . . . immediately wrote a garbled account of the circumstances to Jerdan, pretending that he had seen the Drummond M.S.S.’ 22. JPC to Jerdan, 9 July 1832, EUL MS Gen. 1730.c/23. Laing’s ‘Extracts’ were published in Archaeologia Scotica 4, part 2 (1833). What exactly Collier intended to add in July to the published exchange is unclear, as is the very existence of the ‘Correspondent at Edinburgh’—but Dyce may have blabbed to more than one confidant. ‘D. A.’, it may be observed, is ‘A. D.’ reversed. 23. Dyce to Mitford, 29 October 1832 and 5 February 1833, Victoria and Albert Museum, MS 86.Y.100 (21) and (22).


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again William Jerdan of the gossipy Gazette, who resigned from the club over the reprimand.24 Casting about in the 1830s for ‘scoops’ of all kinds, John sought access to unexplored private collections with the network of recommendations now at his command. Some, like George Daniel’s and B. H. Bright’s, seemed initially promising, but yielded him little. The Aladdin’s cave of them all, however, had long been Richard Heber’s library of early English poetry, drama, and popular literature, an incomparable assembly of printed rariora, though part only of a vast accumulation of 150,000 volumes (plus pamphlets and manuscripts) shelved in eight houses at home and abroad. Heber’s favourite English books lay mostly in London, at his Pimlico residence or in a kind of repository in York Street, Westminster; and the collector had dealt generously with scholars and editors, at least those he personally knew. Understandably, however, he denied unsupervised access to his treasures, and his own absence from England between July 1825 and July 1831 le would-be applicants frustrated indeed. Collier was certainly one such—witness his remark in HEDP that a copy of Baldwin’s Beware the Cat had been ‘bought by Mr. Heber, and is of course, now inaccessible’— although in mid-1833 he appears to have borrowed a few rare Skelton volumes, and in later years he laid claim, improbably, to some intimacy with the library during Heber’s lifetime. The sudden death of Richard Heber on 4 October 1833 set off a chorus of anticipation among rival collectors (‘What is to become of the books?’ were Earl Spencer’s first words on hearing the news), and the quest for the collector’s misplaced will, discovered eventually by Thomas Frognall Dibdin behind books on a high shelf in Pimlico, has become part of bibliophile folklore.25 No special provision for the library was included, and, faced with crippling encumbrances on the family lands, his executrix and life-heir chose to sell off what she could—all the books—aware though she must have been that prices were down, and that for decades Heber himself had virtually ‘made the market’ in some areas of collecting. Rejecting a grand plan for dispersal by categories, offered by Dibdin, who considered himself and Heber’s library equally betrayed, the heir chose to sell off the stock helter-skelter, largely according to where it currently lay. The books from the Pimlico house (and presumably those shelved in York Street) were offered in eight multi-day sales (‘Parts’ I–VIII) between 10 April

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24. See Ashby’s account in Bodl. MS Eng.misc.d.1455, p. 169 (source untraced). The dinner took place on 10 January 1837; on 23 January Egerton responded evasively to Collier’s request for details of his own speech on the occasion; FF MS 751. 25. Spencer to Dibdin, 6 October 1833, Houghton MS Eng 1171.1 (4). On the will, see Dibdin, Reminiscences (1836), i:445–45; this was, however, not the only copy (see Hunt 1996, p. 107). Dr. Hunt has kindly shared his research on Heber, Dibdin, and others with us.


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1834 and 29 February 1836, while the books that Heber kept at Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, formed Parts IX and X (April–May 1836), and a specialist sale of manuscripts from both sources (Part XI) took place between Parts VII and VIII, on 10–19 February 1836. Le overs from Pimlico and the ‘Books from Holland’ constituted Parts XII and XIII (1836–37); and there were three further sales of books housed abroad, during 1835–36, in Paris and Ghent.26 Three London auctioneers shared the Augean task: Messrs. Sotheby and Son, R. H. Evans, and the newish firm of Benjamin Wheatley; Payne and Foss, the legendary rare-booksellers of 81 Pall Mall, were engaged to prepare the lengthy catalogues,27 William Nicol of the Shakespeare Press to print them, and Sotheby’s to lead off the selling. Haste, chaotic sequencing, and indiscriminate lotting-up may partly explain what ensued. Part I, 7,486 lots of books from the Pimlico house, took place from 10 April to 9 May 1834, beginning just three months a er the discovery of the will, and from the start prices were alarmingly low: Sotheby’s took in only £5,615, an average of 15s. per lot. Part II (5 June to 3 July) included most of Heber’s old English drama, with no fewer than fortyeight Shakespeare quartos; but despite a prefatory harangue (‘so complete an assemblage of plays . . . was never before brought to the hammer’) the average for 6,590 lots rose to only 18s.28 Matters did not improve with Part III (10 November): 5,055 lots of mostly continental books sank to just over 8s. on average, and for Part IV the strategy and the venue were changed. Robert Harding Evans, the urbane and literate specialist book auctioneer of Pall Mall, stepped in for Sotheby’s, and he or John Thomas Payne (whose initials are affixed to the preface) brought in John Payne Collier to help.29

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26. See De Ricci 1930, p. 103; Munby 1962, pp. 89–90; and Hunt 2001. 27. Dibdin, Reminiscences, ii:939, commending (perhaps with a trace of irony) their ‘celerity of dispatch’; at p. 897 he notes: ‘To a lover of bokes, there must necessarily be no place like London; and in London, no place like No. 81, Pall Mall.’ They had already collaborated with Evans, as cataloguers, in the distinguished Sykes (1824) and Guilford (1828 and following) sales. 28. Dibdin’s statistics, at i:366 of his Reminiscences, agree with those in marked sets of the catalogues prepared by Payne and Foss aer the completion of the Heber sales (examples in the British Library and Bodley); neither Dibdin nor the auctioneers, however, seemed to count in add-lots (which we have done for Part IV; see below). At first Dibdin attributed the results to presentation and impatience in the midst of a book-price slump (blamed on cholera and Reform in his Bibliophobia, 1832); but on subsequent reflection other causes suggested themselves: the condition of some books, the shabby bindings, multiplication of copies, even of rarities (Reminiscences, ii:840), to say nothing of their unmanageable bulk, the strain on the individual credit of active buyers, and the economic climate itself: ‘Book property is becoming very ticklish’, the apostle himself had confessed to Lord Spencer on 13 January (BL Althorp G.337). Just what these cheaply sold volumes of 1834 had cost their late owner is impossible to estimate closely, but by the end of the Heber dispersal it would appear that only between a third and a half of his cash outlay, over forty years of bullish connoisseurship, had been recovered. 29. Evans, himself something of an antiquary, was the son of a more distinguished bookseller-


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‘Heber Part IV’ was to be the most memorable of the sales in the greatest dispersal of books of its time (and perhaps any time), and it was hoped that the catalogue would be worthy of its unparalleled contents.30 From Pimlico the old English drama may have already been skimmed, but the early poetry and the ‘popular’ English prose, alongside romances, ballads and broadsides, and residual plays, remained in breathtaking abundance. Even the barest list of the principal books could not fail to arrest, but Evans and Payne rightly appreciated that some kind of descriptive apparatus, especially for the more unusual of the works, must be furnished, if high prices for the minora sidera were to be expected. For such a task Collier, with his appetite for discovery and taste for the arcane, was an inspired bookseller’s choice—if he himself did not proffer his services. For it seems that Collier had already provided Sotheby or Payne with a few lines of trenchant advice: the majority of Heber’s best plays, in Part II, had been listed so mechanically and so carelessly that selling-points were overlooked, editions misdescribed, bibliographies misused, and even contemporary inscriptions—for which Heber had paid dearly—were ignored in the laconic entries. Among the preliminaries, however, are two pages of ‘Corrections and Additions’ (pp. xi–xii), clearly not by the compiler of the main text (‘2972* The Note is not correct . . . 3807 The note is incorrect’); and from their language, their citations of Collier and Dyce only among critics (and of Devonshire’s library among the few locations for copies), their opinions, and even their tell-tale mistakes, these are almost certainly Collier’s work. He remains unacknowledged, in the usual manner of sale catalogues, but there would have been no reason for him to boast of his assistance. Nor was Collier’s participation in Heber Part IV advertised, initially, by the auctioneer, nor by Collier himself at the time;31 only a reissue of the sheets of the catalogue, published later in the year by Edward Lumley of Chancery Lane, gives him away. This was re-titled A Catalogue of Heber’s Collection of Early English Poetry, and presented as a kind of bookman’s vade mecum (the saleroom schedule omitted, a named price-list added), ‘with notices, by J. Payne Collier

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antiquary, Thomas Evans, whose principal compilation, Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative (4 vols., 1784; revised and enlarged by his son, 1810), was well known to Collier. 30. Dibdin’s praise (Reminiscences, i:366) is deserved: ‘Of all these ‘‘parts’’ . . . the fourth is doubtless the most attractive—both from the character of the books (chiefly poetry) and the copiousness of their description’, although elsewhere (ii:717) he congratulated himself, undeservingly, on having ‘more or less noticed’ every rarity in one of his own earlier books. 31. There is no correspondence on the subject—save a deliberate obfuscation in a letter to Laing about Heber’s manuscripts (‘I have looked over Heber’s MSS’, he wrote on 14 July 1835, EUL MS La.IV.17, adding hastily: ‘I mean that I did so some time ago’, suggesting that it was in Heber’s lifetime)—and no mention of the sale in Collier’s late memoirs or diaries.


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Esq.’, and so Collier’s name has been linked with Heber Part IV ever since. It would be surprising, however, if Collier encouraged or even knew in advance of the byline: puffing an auction was not, a er all, a gentleman’s employment, especially when the effect might be to raise prices against friends and patrons. One cannot imagine Thomas Park, Thomas Hill, George Daniel, or Dyce, for all their hob-nobbing with booksellers, so formally assisting a book auctioneer; even Dibdin, had he gone on to ‘categorize’ Heber’s collection, might have been chary of lending his hyperboles to the sale.32 In later years, indeed, Collier would minimize his own contribution to the catalogue of Part IV, especially when taxed with making copies of some rare and subsequently unavailable texts. A correspondent of Notes and Queries who asserted in 1864 that ‘the fourth portion of the Heber Catalogue was compiled by Mr. John Payne Collier’ drew an immediate denial from Collier: ‘In no sense of the words did I compile the fourth portion of the Heber Catalogue; I contributed to it some notes on the rarer English books only, a few of which notes I had drawn up, in substance, some years before’.33 And indeed it is unlikely that he participated in the drudgery of transcribing short-titles, or even of describing condition and completeness, or bindings, or indicating traditional references. But the informative notes, those embodying historical, biographical, or bibliographical detail, or critical judgement, number nearly 550 in Part IV, affecting about a tenth of the titles,34 and of these Collier (we think) supplied about three hundred—certainly more than half of the total, and by far the most significant portion.35 Ranging from a phrase or two to nearly a page in length, his commentary is characterized by easy command of literary and theatrical history, rhetoric, and versification; familiarity with jests, drolleries, plays, and playwrights; a special interest in Italian poetry and burlesque, Spenserian echoes, plagiarism, and imitation; and a particular delight in re-attributing or re-dating individual works. Printing history and early presswork concern him, and he displays his close acquaintance with the private collections of Perry, Douce (lots 728, 3031),

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32. He had, however, contributed initialled descriptions to the earlier Alchorne sale, and perhaps helped with the Merly library catalogue (both 1813); W. A. Jackson 1965, pp. 27–28. 33. B. S., ‘Daniel’s Black-Letter Ballads’, 3 September 1864, p. 192; Collier, ‘Daniel’s BlackLetter Ballads’, 10 September 1864, p. 215. 34. Including books lotted up with others, unnamed historical tracts, and volumes of boundup pamphlets, chapbooks, ballads, and other broadsides, there were over 5,000 ‘titles’ in Part IV, divided into 3,077 lots (3,067 numbered, 9 ‘starred’ extras, and one additional undescribed lot at the end); by contrast, Part II had offered only about 160 notes for 6,590 lots. 35. Note by note, only internal evidence will suggest which are Collier’s, but about 275 seem ‘very likely’, and about 60 ‘likely’; others are either too slight to judge, or are specifically attributed elsewhere (mostly to Heber himself, whose meticulous notes made the task easy), are ‘out-of-field’ for Collier, contradict his known opinions, or recite errors he would scarcely have made.


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Devonshire (145, 534, 1806), Egerton, and, inevitably, with his own shelves and the institutional holdings of the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries. As ever, he could not resist scoring off rival bibliographers, Ritson above all, but Herbert and Dibdin egregiously, Steevens (lots 2869–70), Malone (372), and most expectably Dyce, whose editions of Peele, Greene, and Webster are repeatedly—and very politely—revealed as deficient. Collier’s own publications went largely uncited,36 but the shortcomings of modern reprints like E. V. Utterson’s, Brydges’s, and Haslewood’s, Park’s Heliconia (lots 110, 163, 2446), and the Auchinleck Press were exposed whenever occasion arose: from a bookseller’s viewpoint, of course, this kind of scholarly sniping might enhance the price of the mistranscribed originals. Less useful, perhaps, but visible in about ten of the notes, is a gratuitous (and heavy-handed) jocularity, which reminds us that Collier was now a regular in the slightly raffish club world of London.37 Collier’s Heber IV notes concentrate, as he himself later pointed out, on the ‘rarer’ books in the sale, chiefly those of the minor poets between 1570 and 1630, and the semi-literary parerga of popular prose: Churchyard, Gascoigne, Googe, and Breton; Lodge, Nashe, Greene, and Dekker (as pamphleteers, not dramatists); quirky favourites like Samuel Rowlands, William Goddard, Thomas Jordan, and some of the vast run of John Taylor; Michael Drayton at length; and dozens of odd poems and tracts by such out-of-the-way figures as Thomas Fenne, George Ellis, Henry Lok, Samuel Sheppard, Thomas Feylde, Francis Sabie, Richard Niccols, William Warren, Thomas Lovell, Henry Parrot, and Thomas Beedome and his aptly named plagiarist Henry Bold. John did not put much effort into the ‘greats’ like Spenser and Milton, who could take care of themselves, although Donne might have gained from some bibliographical attention: three copies of his rare Anniversaries (‘An Anatomy of the World’) are all but lost under the name of the deceased addressee, Elizabeth Drury, and fetched a pittance (lots 668–70).38 Nor did he treat any but a few of the earlier books, so that Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, and Langland were outside his orbit, as were Hawes, Lindsay, and (surprisingly) Skelton; and with the exception of two

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36. There were few opportunities; but he did cite The Poetical Decameron in lot 744, and Heber himself referred to it in his MS note in lot 1494. 37. See condescending notes to verse by Anne Dowriche (lot 583) and the author of Eliza’s Babes (1652, lot 688), and to an early sixteenth-century dialogue, Man and Woman (lot 1406). Other mild jokes appear at lots 81, 105, 1300, 1370, 1615, 1808, and 2452, on editorial delicacy (‘Dr. Dibdin . . . prints the word ‘‘horse’’, for one of a much less innocent meaning’), on large families in straitened circumstances (at the end of Lodowick Lloyd’s Hilaria, ‘having nothing else to give, he makes a present to King James of his ten children, as well as his books’), and on plagiarism and slapdash bookmaking. 38. Apparently no one appreciated that lot 203, the second edition of Anne Bradstreet’s Poems, was printed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1678. Nine shillings seems cheap.


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titles by Drayton and Samuel Daniel, volumes in folio format—perhaps because usually the least perishably rare—were le alone. More curiously, the residual drama from Pimlico reached its sale-point virtually untouched by the resident expert: despite the dispersal in Part II, there remained no fewer than 178 lots of early, and o en very valuable plays, masques, and pageants, but in Part IV little attempt to describe them was made, save as ‘rare’, ‘very rare’, ‘very beautiful’, or ‘imperfect’. One signal exception, lot 2024, the pseudo-Shakespearian Taming of a Shrew (1594), prompted a half-page note arguing its right to be considered ‘the first idea of his play’ or ‘the first draught of his Comedy’, but this was simply reprinted literatim from the Inglis catalogue of 1826, when Heber had bought it for £21. Evans reckoned A Shrew to be the prospective star lot of the whole of Part IV, and Payne singled it out in his preface, reporting that it had disappeared a er one citation by Pope, ‘until Mr. Collier procured the use of it [from Heber] for his ‘‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’’ ’. Would not Collier himself have found something to add to the Inglis description? Perhaps so, but perhaps not to the advantage of the vendor, for his own conviction was that Shakespeare’s version ‘was acted about 1602’ (HEDP, iii:98), and that this was by no means a ‘first draught’, but an anonymous source for The Shrew. Nonetheless the InglisHeber quarto remained seriously desirable, ‘unquestionably of the highest literary interest and curiosity in a Shakespearian library’, as the auctioneers put it, and Collier may have had another reason for withholding his commentary: in the event, Devonshire—or Devonshire’s librarian, bidding discreetly through Rodd—paid £94 for it, the second-highest price of the session.39 Many of the books Collier chose to annotate were old friends from The Poetical Decameron and the magazine retrospectives, but many more would have been new to him now. A few discoveries were almost inevitable, though in neither number nor nature outstanding: that ‘Lustie Humfrey’, the ‘King of the Tobacconists’ and dedicatee of Thomas Nashe’s satirical Lenten Stuffe (1599), was in fact Henry King, a catchpenny pamphleteer, appears to have been news (lot 1205), as may have been the survival beyond 1570 of John Heywood, the venerable poet and paterfamilas, ‘a fact stated by no other authority’ than one Lemeke Avale (lot 43). One Shakespeare allusion (lot 3033, Peter Woodhouse) is probably fresh, though another is simply proverbial (1399, Middleton’s Black Book).40 Most of the seemingly new attributions of authorship had however been anticipated, if only by Collier himself, although the annotator piqued himself on one novelty, that Edward Gosynhill wrote (and later ‘replied to’) the 39. It was exceeded only by Heber’s set of forty-two Roxburghe Club books (lot 2438, £120). Rodd also bought Webster’s unique Monuments of Honour for Devonshire (lot 1638), as Collier revealed in New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare (1836), p. 29. 40. See Munro 1932, i:145 and ii:463, wrongly crediting the discovery of the first to Grosart (1877) and rightly dismissing the second.


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mid-sixteenth-century misogynistic verse tract The School House of Women (lot 790).41 Perhaps more important were the revelations of unnoted verse by Michael Drayton (2463: fully endorsed by J. W. Hebel), Thomas Churchyard (two new stanzas), and ‘a long poem by George Whetstone, hitherto unknown, and one of the very best specimens of his authorship’. Both the Churchyard and the Whetstone stem from one remarkable volume, Richard Edwards’s famous miscellany The Paradise of Dainty Devises, but survive only in the second printing, of 1578. To this enlarged and corrected edition, which he believed ‘probably unique’, Collier devoted a long enthusiastic note, and the auctioneers cooperated by separating the lot (726) from the run of other editions of The Paradise (1776–80). Despite its imperfections—two or three leaves missing at the end, and four in the middle—the book fetched the strong price of £7 at the sale, and from Collier himself. Without his passionate advocacy it might well have been his for ten shillings. When his curiosity or his pedantry was aroused, John indeed proved a formidable puffer of books, and undoubtedly a blessing to the vendor. Few if any old auction catalogues (and certainly none of Evans’s) can match notes like Collier’s on Henry Fitz-Geffrey, Certain Elegies (1618, lot 723), signalling allusions to ‘Dekker, Parrot, Taylor, Davies, Rowlands, Breton . . . Goddard, Webster, Peachum, Wither, &c.’, as well as a dialogue that sheds light on the Blackfriars Theatre ‘just a er the death of Shakespeare’, and a ‘character of John Webster, under the name of Websterio’. Pasquils Jests (1604, lot 1794) were ‘selected from various sources, English and foreign. Not a few are from Domenichi’s Collection of Italian Facetie, motti e burle, others from Sir J. Harington’s Epigrams, turned into prose, one from Bishop Latimer’s Sermons, and one from Peele’s Jests, with some considerable alterations to avoid easy detection’. John Tatham’s Ostella (1650, lot 2658) has selling-points galore: ‘The Ode to Col. Lovelace on his being in Holland has not been quoted. It must have been written before his Marriage. The Prologue on the removal of the Red Bull Players to the Cockpit has not been hitherto noticed, and on the next page (111) is a mention of a play called ‘‘The Whisperer, or what you please’’, of which this is the only record and that unknown to all the compilers of dramatic lists.’ Bibliographical nuance or close reading might also have served the salesmen: the quarto first edition of Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, lot 2467) exhibited ‘in41. Collier returned to the ‘Gosynhill flyting’ in BARB, i:325–26, making the same point in greater detail, as if ‘never yet’ given in print. Clearly, Gosynhill himself did ‘claim’ The School House in his own contradictory Praise of All Women, as Collier pointed out, but his authorship has been challenged by Beatrice White (1931); Harold Stein (1934) regarded the de-attribution as one of ‘complete finality’, but W. A. Jackson in the Pforzheimer Catalogue (1940), ii:401 ff., found it ‘not wholly convincing’, and took Gosynhill’s claim more or less at face value. STC 12104.5 retains Collier’s attribution, noting ‘authorship disputed’.


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numerable’ variations from the 1598 folio text, which ‘gives the quarto a peculiar value independent of its mere scarcity’, while for Nicholas Breton’s Small Handful of Fragrant Flowers (1575, lot 110), the presence of ‘at least 160’ errors in Thomas Park’s Heliconia reprint could not but exalt the original. And while it was not strictly profitable to point out, of R. L.’s sonnet-sequence Diella (1596, lot 1329), that Ritson had mistaken one of its prose sources, correcting the old bibliographer’s count of twenty-eight sonnets (‘there are thirty-eight of them’) did offer potential purchasers more for their money.42 All in all, Collier’s notes, even those ‘drawn up, in substance, some years before’, make Heber IV what it is: among auctioneers’ catalogues of its era, the most enduringly informative and—even today—the most frequently cited.43

William Henry Miller The sale of Heber Part IV, held between 8 December and Christmas Eve 1834, may have seemed to the vendors an improvement upon Parts I–III, but the collector’s acquisitive audacity again proved greater than that of his peers and successors. A total of £7,248 10s. 6d. was raised, or a per-lot average of £2 7s., but many prize items went cheap: Narcissus Luttrell’s five-volume collection of poetical broadsides (1678–88, lot 2486), for which Heber had paid £231 at the Bindley sale ten years earlier, fetched but £79 16s.; and the magnificent series of sixteenth-century ballads, purchased privately from George Daniel through Thorpe in 1832 for £273 10s.,44 was split up into ten more manageable lots, but made only £122 17s. 6d. in total. Individual high-spots from early sales (Steevens, Reed, Roxburghe, Brand, J. B. Inglis, White Knights) mostly kept up their values, but those from the bullish 1820s (Perry, Boswell, Bindley, Sykes, Dent, and Jadis) took a beating, sometimes of fi y percent.45 42. This is not to say that Collier’s bibliography is beyond reproach: Malone’s copy of FitzGeffrey’s Certain Elegies was just what he claimed, a reissue, not a new edition, as Collier insisted; the long argument about precedence of editions for Samuel Rowlands, Humours Ordinary (lot 2420), sounds persuasive but is wrong. The biographical note on Richard Robinson’s son, the player (2412), is a careless confusion that Collier would not repeat, nor would he have been likely to re-assert that T. B.’s A New Dialogue between the Angel of God and the Shepherds was ‘in fact a miracle-play, and ought to be included in dramatic lists’. 43. Aer Part IV a low-key Part V was auctioned by Benjamin Wheatley, and Evans returned for Parts VI–VIII and the concurrent Part XI (manuscripts). Part VIII (February–March 1836) contains material that may have been excluded from Part IV by accident or design, and a number of lots seem to bear Collier’s notes: we estimate fieen to twenty. And Collier certainly worked on the English literary manuscripts in Part XI, where some sixty notes are very much in his manner: see C4. 44. For the earlier history of these, see J. I. Freeman 1997, pp. 72–77. 45. The Payne and Foss marked sets indicate that 1,786 lots for which Heber’s cost was known (£5,749 5s. 6d.) made £4,519 10s.


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One problem above all had already become apparent: not only was Heber himself out of the game, but his principal competitors, who helped set his costs, had been falling away at a pace. The enthusiasts Joseph Haslewood and Thomas Caldecott died in 1833, and Douce just a er Heber in 1834; Francis Freeling had two years to live and collect, and George Hibbert three, but they, like the wide-ranging Thomas Jolley, the more finical and less affluent Philip Bliss, or the fastidious Thomas Grenville, would not covet enough of the rare English poetry to support the whole session.46 More hope was offered by such as George Daniel (who would not, however, buy back his own ballads at half-price), and by the obscure but omnivorous B. H. Bright, but it is really to only one man that the books of Part IV owed their market survival. William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and Britwell Court (Buckinghamshire), hard-line Tory M.P. for Newcastle-under-Lyme, was the unforeseen hero. He was Collier’s age—to the month—and had quietly accumulated voyages and travels, and English and Scottish literature, since at least 1816.47 In the space of two weeks in December 1834, however, he became a major collector of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury poetry, acquiring through Thomas Thorpe no fewer than 718 of the 3,077 lots in Heber Part IV, and virtually sweeping the Elizabethan and Stuart minor lights among the verse there. Miller seems earlier to have been discouraged by the price of old English plays, and chose poetry as his domain; hence his activity in Heber Parts I–III would not have prepared anyone for his performance in Part IV. For while his outlay was by no means enormous—the 718 lots from Thorpe came in at £1,294 13s. 6d., plus commission 48—the single-minded, meticulously-prepared pursuit of the Heber poetry, with particular attention to what was unlikely to recur on the market, le little, among the conspicuous rarities, for others.49 His costliest lots were mainly texts of the mid-sixteenth 46. Bliss did covet more than he could afford: see his note in his own copy of Heber Part V (now Houghton), which records that out of sixty lots bid on, ‘I purchased one lot only, for one shilling’; quoted in Walsh 1965, p. 507. 47. He was active in the Gordon of Gordonstoun sale, and in the same year Heber referred to him as ‘generally very polite in accommodating me, when we clash as is sometimes the case, in voyages and travels’; Heber to John Delafield Phelps, 30 March 1816, bound in Folger Z997 G67 Cage. 48. Only forty-nine cost £10 or more, and nineteen cost the minimum bid of a shilling; Miller’s careful tally of old sales-records ensured that he rarely overpaid, and indeed he seems to have le behind some appropriate lots on principle, as exorbitant. But over the next decade Miller did pursue and recover much of what had eluded him, notably Collier’s own purchases. 49. Miller’s marked set of the Heber catalogues (FF) reveals an astonishing level of pre-sale preparation. His famous concern for size of copies (in sixteenths of an inch: he was widely known for this foible as ‘Measure Miller’) led him to record measurements and other details of condition, completeness, etc., for hundreds of books he did not buy, as well as those that he did; he reminded himself of earlier prices for these and comparable copies, and occasionally suggested quite sophisticated bibliographical points untreated in the catalogue.


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century, unique or nearly unique, although he paid his highest price (£31 10s.) for a poetical miscellany of 1593, The Phoenix Nest by S. R., with contributions by Peele, Lodge, Watson, and others. This had been lovingly endorsed by Collier (‘in the reprint in Heliconia, vol. 2, there are several hundred errors . . . and six stanzas entirely omitted’), and indeed Miller seemed responsive to Collier’s hyperbole, paying over the odds for some of the most written-up articles in the sale—such as John Tatham’s Ostella (lot 2658, £2 11s.) and Thomas Lovell’s Dialogue between Custom and Verity (1354, £10). He did not shrink from high prices for Gascoigne, Googe, and Lindsay, nor from John Taylor’s fashionably expensive light verse, but with hindsight Miller’s shrewdest purchase was that of the Daniel-Heber ballads. Leaving aside two lots (386, of which the per-item cost of three, one of them defective, exceeded all others; and 388, unattractive and ‘passed’, but later acquired), he obtained seventy-eight mostly unique specimens of sixteenth-century popular verse for £116 11s. 6d. For Collier, looking on in his dual capacity of saleroom consultant and (unfunded) rival collector, the emergence of so determined a new power must have prompted mixed feelings. The Heber rarities were dispersed, but not scattered, and although Collier’s brief access to them had now passed, if Miller were minded to cooperate in the future, what might not be worked out? The alternative—another dark sequestration, like Heber’s, of unapproachable text—was a grim one, and what Miller would never have known at the time is that Collier had already anticipated that mischance. Miller’s coup at Heber Part IV, and in subsequent sales, has been viewed by some historians of book collecting as providential, in keeping intact a nucleus of rarities first assembled by Heber, which in the Britwell Court sales of 1916– 27 would largely pass—as if roused from a ninety-year sleep—to the Huntington Library. But one wonders if anyone in 1834 could have predicted how long a reader might have to wait to consult Lovell, or Constable’s Diana, or Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror once again. For what Heber had done more or less by neglect, Miller and his heirs did by design, to remove from circulation a considerable body of old English literature, and effectively to render it ‘lost’. Why this should have been so remains mysterious: despite his eccentricities, Miller was a moderately sociable bibliophile, a member of the Roxburghe, Bannatyne, and Maitland Clubs, and a firm friend of his Edinburgh countryman, the booksellerantiquary David Laing.50 He was willing to lend books to Philip Bliss, Henry

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50. In 1849 an Abbotsford Club reprint of Sire Degarre (Heber IV, lot 556), probably edited by Laing, was published ‘as a pleasing memorial of [Miller’s] devoted attachment to our Early Poetical Literature’ (Goudie 1913, p. 189); and in 1865 Laing’s reprint of a book by Stephen Hawes derived in part from a Britwell Court original. Miller’s cousin and heir, Samuel Christie-Miller, also allowed Laing to use his copy of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays in 1853 for the Shakespeare


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Jadis, and Bolton Corney, and to supply collations from his books for Thorpe, Rodd, and John Delafield Phelps; and at the time of Heber VIII (March 1836) he reminded himself ‘to bring up Hinds Eliosto [John Hind, Eliosto libidinoso, 1606, a volume described in detail in BARB, i:388–91] for Mr Collier’.51 But subsequent efforts by Collier and his associates to borrow books or to elicit information from Miller appear to have met a brick wall. In March 1841, for instance, Thomas Amyot, having written twice to Miller with no reply, regretted that there was ‘no chance’ of obtaining a transcript of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays; this episode led a reviewer in the Athenaeum to stigmatize ‘the possessor’ as one who, ‘not satisfied with the rarity of the original, determined on keeping the contents sacred to himself ’, and Collier himself to refer to him as ‘an individual who, for some unexplained reason, is unwilling that the work should be republished’.52 This ongoing rebuff may have something to do with Collier’s unsanctioned publication of nineteen ‘Heber Ballads’ in 1840, but Miller was no more forthcoming to others, even to Dyce, with whom he maintained cordial relations.53 He was ‘known to be a very strange sort of person’, Madden reported (Diary, 24 October 1836), and even a er his death in 1848 the Britwell Court library remained ‘practically inaccessible to scholars’ and hence all but unknown to them.54 His principal heir, Samuel Christie-Miller, did finally allow David Laing to transcribe Lodge’s Defence and Collier to use Drayton’s Idea’s

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Society reprint. In his biography of Laing (p. 270), Gilbert Goudie implied that the archive of Laing correspondence now in the Edinburgh University Library included 294 letters from members of the Miller family (1816–77), but these seem never to have been part of the EUL collection. 51. Among Miller’s pencilled memoranda on the pastedowns of his Heber catalogues appear ‘The book Dr Bliss borrowed’ (Part VI); ‘To leave book at Rodds for Mr Jadis’ (Part VII); ‘Bring Necessary Doctrine 4to from Britwell for Mr Thorpe’ (Part VI); ‘To look at T. A.’s Massacre of Money—To collate for Rodd’ (VIII); and ‘To collate—Barksdales Nympha Libethris for Mr Phelps’ (VII). Corney thanked Miller for his assistance on 4 July 1844; FF MS 13. 52. Amyot to JPC, 15 March 1841, Folger MS Y.d.341 (3); Peter Cunningham, Athenaeum, 5 June 1841, pp. 436–36, reviewing the Shakespeare Society reprints of Gosson’s School of Abuse and Heywood’s Apology for Actors; JPC in Shakespeare Society Papers 2 (1845), 159. Collier wrote to Laing on 28 January 1852 that Miller ‘told me that he had [Lodge’s Defence], & promised to lend it to me—but he never did’, and eleven years later he remarked that ‘I despair of being able to get at any of Miller’s books, but I can do without them’; JPC to Laing, 5 February 1863; both EUL MS La.IV.17. 53. Dyce to Miller, 23 and 30 May 1845, FF MSS 35 and 36. Dibdin, a fellow ‘Roxburgher’, seems never to have seen Miller’s treasures, but admired them by report: ‘Thorpe’s account of your English poetry astounds me’, he wrote to Miller on 5 January 1841; FF MS 28. 54. De Ricci 1930, p. 110. In 1898, for example, John S. Farmer reprinted William Goddard’s Satirical Dialogue (1615) from what he believed was the unique original at the British Museum, and recorded Goddard’s other two books of verse as (1) ‘only to be found in the Bodleian’, and (2) known from the Worcester College and Bridgewater copies. In fact all three titles—all from Heber—were at Britwell Court, and now Huntington.


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Mirror for an 1856 Roxburghe Club publication; on two occasions a catalogue of the books was begun, but while Christie-Miller was hospitable enough to fellow collectors and to at least one bibliographer,55 meaningful scholarly and editorial access to the Heber-Miller and other Britwell rarities began only with their dispersal in 1916–27. John Payne Collier himself was by no means an inactive bystander at Heber Part IV. With his mother’s bequest but four weeks in hand—plus whatever, if anything, Evans and Payne paid him for his notes—he spent £115 10s. on 44 lots, and no doubt bid on a great many more.56 Among these at £7 apiece were the imperfect Paradise of Dainty Devices, which he had puffed to his cost, and Henry Fitz-Geffrey’s Certain Elegies, the subject of another encomium. Eighteen lots came in at £1 or less (including Shelley’s The Cenci, 1819, for 5s.), but two well-advertised mid-sixteenth-century poems by the printer Robert Copland made £16 17s. between them, and two very rare tracts thought to be—and now known to be, though Collier was doubtful about one—by Thomas Middleton cost £10 3s.57 His dearest purchase was the unique 1608 Cobbler of Canterbury, at twelve guineas; in his own catalogue Miller had crossed through ‘fine copy’.58 William Goddard’s rare Mastiff Whelp and Richard Johnson’s Nine Worthies of London (1592) were £5 5s. each, Covent Garden Drollery (1672) £3 12s., and the unique Pasquil’s Jests, again masterfully ‘noted’, a stiff £4 6s.: indeed Collier’s average outlay on 44 lots was higher than Miller’s on 718, and certainly he outbid (and underbid) Miller on several occasions. Miller does not o en indicate a rival buyer in his own catalogue, but ‘Collier’ appears beside seventeen lotnumbers, and as usual, Miller’s curiosity was anything but idle. Nine of these, totalling £46 17s. on the hammer, turned up later at Britwell Court, and as Miller and Collier were hardly on corresponding term in the 1840s,59 it seems likely that the exchange came near the time of the sale itself. Collier ceded both the ex-

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55. See Barker 1977, p. 302, regarding a visit from the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford in 1887. Twenty years earlier W. C. Hazlitt acknowledged his ‘uniform and untiring liberality’ in supplying descriptions of rare books—if not the books themselves; Handbook, p. xii. 56. The printed price list credits ‘Collier’ with forty-three, but the marked file copy shows that he also bought lot 510, The Cobbler of Canterbury, which is assigned (‘ditto’) to the purchaser of lot 509, one Cotton. 57. In his edition of Middleton (1840, dedicated to Collier) Dyce assigned both Father Hubbard’s Tales and The Black Book ‘with little hesitation’ to Middleton. Collier wrote in the margin of his copy: ‘These were mine & I gave Dyce transcripts of both’ (i:xviii; FF). 58. Heber had paid £18 for it at the Graon sale in 1815; Miller bid only £4, as the headlines were ‘cut into’. 59. In 1844 Beriah Botfield procured for Miller a copy of Collier’s reprint of Gaulfrido and Barnardo, stipulating that ‘you will be indebted to him in the sum of nine shillings’, and suggesting ‘a Post Office order’; Botfield to Miller, 19 April 1844, FF MS 7.


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pensive Coplands, The Hye Way to the Spittell Hous and Jyl of Brentford’s Testament, Dekker’s Villanies Discovered (£3 11s.), Greene’s Ciceronis Amor, and Goddard’s Mastiff Whelp—Miller by now having acquired both of Goddard’s other satirical rarities, and clearly having been outbid at £5 5s. for this one. Johnson’s Nine Worthies (£5 5s.), Francis Lenton’s rare Inns of Court Anagrammatist (£4), a scarce Skelton (lot 2357, £4 10s.), and John Taylor’s Late Weary Merry Voyage (£1 16s.) rounded out the transaction, which reduced Collier’s extravagance by about forty percent, or more, if he made Miller give him a turnover profit. What John kept, for his trouble and risk, would provide fodder for future editions, like that of the 1578 Paradise of Dainty Devices, and for future adumbrations: Tomasso Garzoni’s Hospital for Incurable Fools (1600, lot 1140) is a title that appears in Frederic Ouvry’s collection inscribed ‘in a contemporary handwriting at the back of title . . . ‘‘Tho. Nashe had some hand in this translation and it was the last he did as I heare. P. W.’’ ’ 60 The Middleton pamphlets clearly were favourites with Collier, like the over-dear Covent Garden Drollery (1672), the unique Pasquills Jests (1604) and The History of George Lord Fauconbridge (1605), Samuel Rowlands’s Greene’s Ghost (1602, £1 7s.), and the Inglis copy of Nathan Field’s A Woman Is a Weathercock (1612, £1 18s.; £3 13s. 6d. in 1826). He may have resisted Miller’s overtures for lot 2630, the Roxburghe-Sykes copy of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1586, £3 3s.; more recently £1,200 in the Arthur Houghton sale, 1980), for Miller ticked it, as he did the slightly imperfect but attractive poem Loves Complaints (1597, £3 4s.), which Collier was to treat as unique in BARB, i:494–96 (STC 16857). But one of the most interesting books cost John only ten shillings, despite another of his own cataloguing disclosures. Lot 1415, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, completed by Chapman (1629), is a late edition, but ‘the MS. notes in this copy . . . are very remarkable . . . . In them we are told that [Marlowe] was an Atheist; that he was stabbed at about thirty, swearing; that he had a friend at Dover, whom he made an Atheist, but who was obliged to recant, &c. At the back of the title-page is a Latin Epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood, by Marlow, which has never been printed.’ Saleroom response was tepid, however—and indeed contemporary annotation, unless firmly attributed, added little to most prices in Heber’s dispersal—so that Collier came away with the book very cheap. He mentioned it in passing in his Bridgewater Catalogue of 1837, where the ‘particulars of Marlow’ are said to be ‘in the hand-writing of Gabriel Harvey’,

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60. Ouvry sale, lot 702, now at University College, London (Ogden A 585). McKerrow, though discounting the attribution, thought that the inscription—which is not mentioned in the Heber catalogue—seemed genuine (1958, v:140), but apparently did not realize Collier’s connection with Ouvry. The hand employed is similar to that seen in some of the forged documents from Bridgewater House.


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although by 1844, when he first published the Latin verse-epitaph (Shakespeare, i:xliv) he had dropped that unlikely claim; a full transcript of the biographical particulars appeared later, in BARB, i:523–24. Meanwhile Dyce had reprinted the poem in his edition of Marlowe (1850, iii:308), and Edward F. Rimbault— a good friend of Collier—had identified the source as ex-Heber, and enquired ‘In whose possession is the copy?’ and ‘Has the Rev. Alex. Dyce made use of the MS. notes?’, without eliciting a published reply.61 And C. M. Ingleby in 1861 set off a witch-hunt by going back to the Bridgewater description, with its bad guess about Gabriel Harvey, demanding: ‘Where is this copy? Does it really exist? If so, whoever has it now should at once submit the writing to a palaeographic scrutiny’.62 By now in fact the volume may have belonged to Collier’s nephew by marriage, Frederic Ouvry, at whose sale (1882, lot 1031) it was again described as ‘Gabriel Harvey’s copy’, a claim Collier had re-perpetuated in 1869.63 The bibliographer W. C. Hazlitt then paid just £1 1s. for it, and by 1885 it had passed to Col. W. F. Prideaux of Calcutta, who confirmed its existence in Notes and Queries in April 1885 (pp. 305–06) and again in July 1910 (p. 24). It next appeared in Prideaux’s own sale (14 February 1917), where it fetched £26 to Dobell, but it has since dropped from sight, and this disappearance has of course compounded suspicion among sceptics of Collier’s reports. Already in 1885 (and without seeing the originals) A. H. Bullen had described the manuscript notes as ‘questionable’, whereas the Manwood epitaph ‘has every appearance of being genuine’ (Works of Marlowe, iii:309 and i:xii–xiii), and although Prideaux pointed out mildly that they were all in the same hand, later editors found it simpler to discount the epitaph as well. C. F. Tucker Brooke omitted it from his 1910 Oxford Works ‘because the evidence in favour of [its] authenticity seems inadequate’, and it is not even mentioned in L. C. Martin’s edition of the Poems (1931). In 1935, however, Mark Eccles demonstrated that the manuscript material in the missing quarto closely matched that in two commonplace books of Henry Oxinden (1608–70), a Kentish minor poet, diarist, and early collector of English plays, and it now seems obvious that the Heber-Collier copy of Hero and Leander

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61. N&Q, 9 March 1850, p. 302. One must assume that Collier replied personally, or that someone pointed out to Rimbault that in 1844 the book was clearly described as ‘in our [i.e., Collier’s] possession’. 62. A Complete View, p. 314; Ingleby in May 1885 (N&Q, p. 352) said he ‘merely suggested a doubt’, and only about the hand’s being Harvey’s, but he was disingenuous to claim that he ‘had a right’ to suspect something ‘with the disappearance of a book and a MS. mentioned by Mr. Collier’; the article had not in fact disappeared, and Ingleby had no reason to suppose that it had. 63. In the Athenaeum of 4 September 1869: ‘I have in my hands the very copy of [Hero and Leander] which belonged to Gabriel Harvey, with notes personal as well as critical.’


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was originally Oxinden’s too.64 Oxinden’s testimony is credible enough for its period, and the Manwood epitaph has been completely rehabilitated;65 indeed it is now considered the only surviving specimen of Marlowe’s Latin poetry— no minor ‘novelty’ even in 1834. Only Collier’s bad name, as Eccles appreciated, cast doubt on what seemed otherwise straightforward, and in this instance an accumulating presumption of fakery has proved grossly misplaced. Despite his trawl of rare books, it could be said that John’s principal acquisition from the Heber dispersal was free access, for the first time, to the famously unbrowsable library. On New Year’s Eve 1834 he wrote to Pickering, proposing a series of six articles on Heber’s books for the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘if you will give me £15’. ‘All the English poetry went through my hands’, he declared, ‘and much that is curious I extracted & abstracted’, adding in a postscript: ‘one way or the other, do not let this matter go further’.66 In the event only two such pieces appeared, both about Heber’s English facetiae (prose and verse: B175), and projected sequels ‘Upon Old Poets & Poetry’, ‘Upon Romances’, and two ‘Upon Heber’s Ballads’ (here Collier confided that ‘I have copies of all the most curious’) proved unrealized. That all this material was copied or ‘extracted & abstracted’ during the run-up to auction would seem from this letter implicit, but in later years Collier hotly denied it. ‘B. S.’, the correspondent of Notes and Queries (1864) who alleged that Heber IV was compiled by John, went on to state that ‘while the [Daniel-Heber] ballads were in his keeping he took or had a transcript made of them, and published twenty-five of them in the first volume of the Percy Society publications’. Collier gave him the lie: As to the statement that, while the Ballads were in my keeping, I took or had a transcript made, that is a mistake also. I copied them, with

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64. See Eccles 1935, copied with inadequate citation by Bakeless 1942, i:116 ff. and ii:161–63; on Oxinden’s collection see Hingley 1998. Both Eccles and Bakeless describe the trail as going cold with Dobell. It is however possible that the book passed to H. F. House, a retired Indian civil servant and collector and student of early English drama, who was at the time Dobell’s best customer (and commissioner) for such material. House died suddenly in April 1923, and his fine library was catalogued by Dobell for Sotheby’s (sale, 21 January 1924), though Hero and Leander does not appear. But a feature of House’s will that gained some notoriety at the time was that all his own writings, including his annotations in books—‘his priceless collection of Shakespeare editions with his M.S. notes’ ( Justice of the Peace, 9 January 1923, p. 639)—had to be burned, a condition that legal counsel upheld and his sister and heir reluctantly obeyed: see M. H. Spielmann’s letter to The Times (21 April 1923) and articles in the Bookman’s Journal for May and October 1923. Can Hero and Leander have somehow been included in the incineration, either by accident or because House had annotated it further? 65. E.g., Fredson Bowers, ed., Complete Works of Marlowe (Cambridge, 1973), ii:534–35 and 540. 66. Bodl. MS Autogr.d.4, fol. 38.


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Mr. Heber’s express permission, before his death, and I have still in my hands my own transcripts of some of them, made in an interleaved copy of Ritson’s Bibliographia Poetica,67 which, at his request, I carried to his house in order that he might see what manuscript additions I had made to it. He knew my zeal upon the subject, and pleased, perhaps, with my industry, he produced his Ballads, and gave me leave to transcribe a few of them on the spot. He a erwards lent me many curious books, of which I will specify only two, Soothern’s Poems, 1584, and Jyl of Brentford’s Testament.68 This history of friendship with Heber, and of familiarity with his library in his lifetime, Collier repeated again and again, when accounting for his use of a very rare book. Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594), which in 1850 ‘has disappeared from sight, and we fear . . . that it is now many thousand miles from the country to which it properly belongs’, Collier could extract because Heber ‘kindly lent it to me before his death’.69 Lodge’s Phyllis, like other rarities ‘actually in my possession for only a few hours’, was ‘kindly lent to me by the late Mr. Heber, near the commencement of my bibliographical studies’; and Wilkins’s prose version of Pericles (1608) ‘went through my hands (by the favour of the late Mr. Heber) many years ago’.70 And the Percy Society edition (1843) of A Proper New Boke of Armony of Byrdes was made possible only because ‘before his death [Heber] gave us permission to copy it, with a view to a reimpression: his notion was, that the value of the original copy of a tract was not lessened by its being rendered accessible, but he was influenced, besides, by higher and better motives than mere pecuniary considerations’. ‘Into whose hands it devolved on the dispersal of Mr. Heber’s library we are not informed’, Collier sniffed, but ‘we have good reason to know that [Heber] felt none of that literary dog-in-the-mangerism, which interferes with the employment of others of what of the possessor cannot himself enjoy’.71

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67. Presumably lot 922 in Collier’s 1884 sale, ‘interleaved to 4to size, with extensive MS. additions and notes by J. P. Collier’; £3 to B. F. Stevens but untraced by us. 68. N&Q, 3 September 1864, p. 192; the ballads were sold as lots 377 and 380–88. John Southern’s Pandora (1584) is described in BARB, ii:367–70, from ‘the only perfect copy . . . belonging to Heber, which we have used’: in the sale (lot 2609) Miller paid £12 for it. Copland’s Jyl of Brentford’s Testament (lot 517), analysed in BARB, i:152–55, from an uncited copy, came also to Britwell Court, but at the Heber sale Collier himself bought it. 69. Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 34 (September 1850), 262–65. The unique perfect copy, now at Huntington, was then still at Britwell Court. 70. Athenaeum, 23 March 1867, pp. 387–88, and 28 March 1857, pp. 406–07. 71. The Harmony of Birds (1841), p. vii. For once the buyer was not Miller, but Sir William Bolland, Dibdin’s ‘Hortensius’; Miller bought it at Bolland’s sale, and it is still unique at Huntington (STC 3368.2).


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Collier’s debt to the Heber collections did not stop with Drayton, Lodge’s Phyllis, Wilkins’s Pericles, and the Armony of Byrdes. Both of the extant copies of Lodge’s Defence of Stage Plays had been Heber’s, ‘and during his lifetime he lent me one of them, from which, with his leave, I made some extracts’. When Miller refused access to one original (Collier and his friends believed, mistakenly, that he possessed both of them; in fact one had gone to Bodley), those extracts appeared in the Shakespeare Society’s Papers (2 [1845], 156–65). Two unique poetical tracts, The Pain and Sorrow of Evil Marriage (ca. 1530) and Charles Bansley’s The Pride and Abuse of Women (ca. 1550), went from Heber Part IV to Britwell Court, but Collier reprinted them both (without indicating the whereabouts of the originals) for the Percy Society, in 1840 and 1841. In 1844 he added A Dialogue between the Common Secretary and Jealousy, professing not to have followed the Heber copy, but another one ‘in the hands of a gentleman, who has liberally allowed it to be reprinted’; in fact only the Heber-Britwell-British Library copy is now known. Similarly, Copland’s Complaint of Them That Been Too Late Married, which Collier reprinted in 1863, was clearly from Heber’s unique copy, although Collier implied it was not.72 And as late as 1865 articles in BARB display ‘extracts and abstracts’ of Heber uniques, like Thomas Feylde’s Controversy between a Lover and a Jay, and the manuscript of William Basse’s Polyhymnia (Heber Part XI, lot 70), which ‘was lent to us nearly forty years ago by its then owner, Mr. Heber’ (i:55). The greatest levy upon Heber’s unrepublished poetry, however, involved the sixteenth-century broadside ballads that Miller had swept. ‘I have copies of all the most curious’, Collier told Pickering—certainly more than ‘a few’ transcribed while Heber looked on; and for the Percy Society in 1840 he published no fewer than nineteen. Only one of these is identified as ‘in the Collection of the late Mr. Heber’, but the text of nearly a quarter of Miller’s purchases was now effectively in the public domain.73 Was all or any of this wholesale reprinting activity undertaken with the implicit blessing, as Collier insisted, of Heber himself? It is hard to believe so, and equally hard to accept Collier’s version of their lifetime relationship—with its friendly exchanges, easy visiting terms, access to the ballads in situ at Pimlico,

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72. In correspondence, however, he virtually admitted it, telling Laing that ‘my transcript of ‘‘Too Late’’ was made 30 years ago’; 8 January 1863, EUL MS La.IV.17. 73. Collier’s first use of a Heber-Britwell ballad was actually five years earlier, when he published six lines of ‘A Mournful Ditty’ (Heber IV, lot 382, quoting half the relevant text) in his New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835, p. 37n.). ‘The original’, he wrote, ‘was in the collection of Mr. Heber, one of the last acts of whose life was to copy it out for me. I have since compared it with the original.’ He quoted the Shakespeare allusion again in his Shakespeare (1844; i:cxciv). The original is STC 7589, reproduced in Herbert L. Collmann, Ballads and Broadsides . . . Now in the Library at Britwell Court (1912), no. 45.


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and casual loans of pet rarities.74 To begin with, Heber’s own vexed later career would scarcely have allowed Collier time to cultivate such a footing: from July 1825 to July 1831 the collector was abroad, and at his return he confronted a sexual scandal that le him ostracized by many of his old friends (see Hunt 1993). Even Dyce, to whom Heber was unfailingly generous, primly told Collier that ‘into society he can never again be admitted—I mean, even if he were guiltless, which his returning leads one to suppose: there will always be ‘‘a something’’ about him, which people can’t easily forget’.75 Could Collier have been profitably acquainted with Heber before July 1825, ‘near the commencement of my bibliographical studies’? Although he sketched Heber’s face at the Gordon sale (1816), Collier by 1831 had been unable to penetrate his collections (Beware the Cat was ‘of course unavailable’; HEDP), and Heber’s name does not appear among those thanked for help. In the preface to Heber IV, J. T. Payne makes an elaborate point about Heber’s unique Taming of a Shrew having ‘disappeared’ a er a citation by Alexander Pope, ‘until Mr. Collier procured the use of it for his ‘‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’’ ’. Payne does not say that Heber provided that use, however, and the relevant passage in HEDP suggests only that Collier glanced at it prior to the Inglis sale in 1826.76 Negative evidence like this accumulates in HEDP: if Collier really knew Heber’s library well, why did he not copy this title more accurately, especially when such a point was to be made of it? Why did he not realize that Peter Beverley’s Ariodanto and Jenevra belonged to Heber, and not to John Delafield Phelps (i:248)? Why was he unaware of Heber’s Dido, by Marlowe and Nashe (iii:226)? No correspondence between Collier and Heber appears to survive, nor any copies of Collier’s books presented to Heber; and there are no records of any meeting between them in the diary or correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, a fellow member, with Amyot and Heber, of the Athenaeum Club. A er

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74. Dibdin, a close enough friend of Heber, records very specifically that neither he ‘nor anyone else’ had ever been admitted to Heber’s private chambers in his lifetime, ‘so choked, so suffocated with books’ (Reminiscences, pp. 434–47). Belief in Collier’s claims has led one recent commentator to contend, absurdly, that Collier ‘carried the keys of Heber’s house and library in his pocket’ (Cummings 1989, p. 147). 75. Dyce to JPC, 21 August 1831, Folger MS Y.d.341 (56). A month later, however, Dyce had resumed contact with Heber, and ‘nearly made up my mind that such an obliging gentleman could not be guilty of any thing atrocious’ (see Hunt 1993, p. 206); and in November Heber provided Dyce with ‘sundry small editions of portions of Skelton prior to 1568 . . . rare & costly, [which] may assist in completing your bibliographical notice’ (Heber to Dyce, 25 November 1832, Dyce Collection, MS 26.E.3 [108]). 76. The title, ‘given . . . at length, because it was unknown to Malone, Steevens, and the rest of the modern commentators’ (iii:77), betrays the haste of the transcriber, because only part of the imprint actually follows the 1594 quarto. The orthography of the rest matches the 1607 quarto, as rendered by Steevens et al.


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July 1831 there is but one independent indication of a contact, in a letter from Dyce, in Aberdeen, to Collier, less than three weeks before Heber’s death. ‘The works [by Skelton] which you mention Heber lent you, are doubtless very curious’, Dyce wrote admiringly (or perhaps ironically),77 and Collier would have been rash to claim such intimacy, if untrue, to an inquisitive common friend. By 1865 and BARB, Heber was coupled with Miller as private collectors whose ‘liberality’ Collier acknowledged (i:x), but there are no references whatever to him in OMD, and in the manuscript memoirs he is mentioned only as a ‘bookcormorant’ whom John sometimes managed to outbid. On the positive side, Heber was conspicuously willing to lend books to ingrates, including Richard Porson, who returned one volume, formerly ‘quite spotless’, and now ‘perfectly beastly’, and Campbell, who ‘used to send back to me my precious little tomes, tumbled loose into a dirty bag, and when I took them out, I had to brush off the bits of straw that were sticking to them’.78 And the subsequent history of two rare English books does imply some interaction between collector and scholar before Heber’s death: Henry Constable’s Diana (1592), sold as ‘probably unique’ in Heber Part IV, lot 513 (= BritwellHuntington), apparently belonged to Collier in 1831 (Dyce, Greene, i:xxxvii); and the otherwise unknown pamphlet by William Rowley, A Search for Money (1609), was apparently Heber’s, from the Isaac Reed sale. Rowley’s Search did not however appear among Heber’s books sold at auction, and Collier, who reprinted it for the Percy Society in 1840, later explained that ‘Heber parted with it for a rarity he more valued’.79 Perhaps some kind of trade, presumably weighted in favour of Constable’s poem, took place between gentlemen; at any rate, two irreplaceable books changed hands. But whatever Collier’s relations with Heber (alive) may have been, his accumulation of material for reprints and abstracts must have come in part—or indeed in large part—from the auctioneers’ working atelier. Evans and Payne gained from Collier a star sale-catalogue, and Collier took back a wealth of old text as his hire.

The Bridgewater House Library: New Facts, New Particulars By the beginning of 1835 Collier’s acquaintance with Lord Francis LevesonGower (now styled Lord Francis Egerton) had blossomed into friendship. Eger-

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77. Dyce to JPC, 18 September 1833, Folger MS Y.d.341 (57). 78. Alexander Dyce, quoting Heber; see Schrader 1972, pp. 166 and 193. 79. BARB, ii:300–02. In 1840 Collier distinguished the copy ‘we have employed’ from that formerly in Reed’s collection, but twenty-five years later said that the two were the same. In January 1861 he sold the book to J. O. Halliwell, and it went with other Halliwell books to the British Museum the following year.


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ton, who before 1831 had provided John with limited access to the Bridgewater House library of his father, the Marquess of Stafford, had inherited the house and the books, pictures, and family archives in 1833,80 and at once assumed philanthropic trusteeships in Oxford, London, and Aberdeen: these in addition to his considerable responsibilities in Parliament and at Whitehall, and his own literary ambitions. The last had been flattered by Collier in 1824 (Faust) and in 1831 (‘Lord Francis Leveson-Gower is himself a poet . . . [with a high] rank in life and in letters’), and would be again in 1836;81 although in old age John remarked, bitterly, that Egerton ‘was a man of no originality of mind, or real independence of character’ (JPC Diary, 19 March 1879). What brought Egerton and Collier closer in 1835 was certainly not their poetical affinity, however, but rare books and a mass of old manuscripts, known to few. Egerton was no antiquary of his uncle’s field-working stamp, but he took a keen interest in his collections, and encouraged research based upon them, with a strong sense of cultural responsibility. The Bridgewater library in particular he sought to restore, following an earlier, and ill-advised, extrusion of sixteenthand seventeenth-century ‘duplicates’, so that Collier was commissioned to buy back whatever appeared on the market, and to help build ‘a separate library, especially devoted to the illustration of Shakespeare and our early Stage’ (BARB, i:viii). Needless to say, John found these duties ‘most agreeable’, and took special pride in recovering for ‘that gi ed, enlightened, and liberal nobleman . . . the finest copy of the Sonnets of Shakespeare (4to., 1609) that has ever been seen’;82 other such relics, mostly those marked by John Egerton, first Earl of Bridgewater (1579–1649), were systematically repossessed regardless of price, and John concluded (in 1865, even a er a crisis of loyalty in an unrelated affair) that ‘there never, perhaps, existed a more confiding or bountiful patron’. Now, in 1835, clearly in a position of trust and respect, and perhaps more caressed by Egerton than by Devonshire, John made free with the Egerton books, and began what

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80. By the will of his grand-uncle, the third and last Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), these reverted to Francis, instead of his elder brother, George (d. 1861). There was more than enough money to go around, Francis having in 1829 inherited £90,000 per annum from his childless uncle, Francis Henry, eighth and last Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829, the family historian and the donor of his own ‘Egerton Manuscripts’ to the British Museum); while George, the principal heir of their father, Stafford (known as ‘the Leviathan of Wealth’), succeeded to his father’s titles as Baron Gower (1826), Earl Gower, third Marquess of Stafford, and second Duke of Sutherland (1833). Second son Francis had to wait until 1846 for a title (first Earl of Ellesmere). For a popular account of the family, see Falk 1942. 81. Collier wrote notices in the Observer of Egerton’s Hernani and Catherine of Cleves (1831) and a review in the Carlton Chronicle of Egerton’s translation of Michael Beer’s Paria (1836). 82. BARB, i:vii–viii. This is the Chalmers-Ellesmere-Huntington copy; Collier paid £105 for it in Part II of the Chalmers sale (1842).


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would be a formidably descriptive account of the early English rarities, the tall quarto Bridgewater Catalogue of 1837. But the first returns of his intimacy with a new library resource came once more from its manuscripts, the Egerton family archives and retained papers of state. In particular those of Sir Thomas Egerton, first Baron Ellesmere (1540?–1617), Solicitor General, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, Lord High Chancellor to James I, would attract the dramatic historian. New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare, a fi y-six-page booklet presented as ‘a Letter to Thomas Amyot, Esq., F.R.S. . . . from J. Payne Collier, F.S.A.’, confronted the world of scholarship with no fewer than twenty-one new, or newly interpreted, documents of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, relating to Shakespeare’s career, milieu, and contemporaries among actors, playwrights, and poets. Nine of these, among them virtually all of the most glamorous novelties, came, or were said to have come, from the Bridgewater House archives. The less striking ones might be expected there: a legal opinion of 1580 (p. 9), submitted by Chief Justices Sir Christopher Wray and Sir James Dyer, held ‘in favour of the claim of the City [of London] magistrates’ against theatrical performances in the Blackfriars precinct, and was passed on to Sir Thomas Egerton. Collier only summarized this document, as well as a similar opinion of Sir Henry Montagu in July 1608, docketed by Egerton, for the resolution appears to have been that ‘the Citie of London hath not any jurisdiction within the Blacke Fryars, but that it is a place exempted from it’ (pp. 20–21). These two papers shed some light—but not much—on the activity of James Burbage’s pre-Shakespearian players in 1580, and the resumption of use of the great indoor theatre in Blackfriars by the King’s Men of Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in August 1608. The genuineness of the first has been questioned, but both remain credible. Four further Blackfriars-related documents from the Bridgewater library, however, do not. A certificate dated November 1589, with a list of sixteen early sharers in James Burbage’s company, contains Shakespeare’s name—the earliest physical record of his theatrical activity, by a full seven years—and ‘seems to me to give a sufficient contradiction to the idle story of Shakespeare having commenced his career by holding horses at the playhouse door’ (pp. 10–11). A ‘minute and curious account’ of 1608, ‘showing the precise interest of all the principal persons connected with the Company’, including Shakespeare himself, reveals Shakespeare to be worth more than £1,400, by virtue of his share of the whole, and ‘the Wardrobe and properties’ which were ‘exclusively his’ (pp. 21–25). A warrant of James I, dated 4 January 1609/10, appoints Shakespeare and three others (Robert Daborne, Nathaniel Field, and Edward Kirkham) ‘to provide and bring upp a convenient nomber of Children who shall be called the children of her Maiesties Revells . . . and them


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to instruct and exercise in the quality of playing Tragedies Comedies &c. . . . within the Blacke fryers in our Citie of London or els where within our realme of England’ (pp. 41 ff.). And finally, an amazing epistle (marked ‘Copia vera’, so that the handwriting is not represented as that of the signatory, one ‘H. S.’) pleads with Egerton ‘to be good to the poore players of the Black Fryers’ in their struggle with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City, describing ‘two of the chiefe of the companie’ as Richard Burbage (‘our English Roscius, one who fitteth the action to the word and the word to the action most admirably’), and William Shakespeare (‘my especiall friende, till of late an actor . . . and writer of some of our best English playes, which as your Lordship knoweth were most singularly liked of Quene Elizabeth’). Burbage and Shakespeare ‘are both of one countie, and indeede almost of one towne’, and ‘bothe are right famous in their qualityes . . . both maried and of good reputation’. Collier thought it obvious that Egerton’s correspondent H. S. was Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton, and called attention to his evident familiarity with Hamlet, iii.2 (‘Suit the action to the word’, etc.), ‘which contains in one short sentence the whole art and mystery of dramatic personation’ (pp. 31–34). The last discovery seemed indeed almost too good to be true, as a contemporary review in the Athenaeum remarked—without going further—and these four documents, professedly found among the Egerton muniments, were the first of all Collier’s impositions to attract widespread suspicion. There was more Bridgewater House material detailed in New Facts, however: the autograph manuscript of Ben Jonson’s Expostulation with Inigo Jones (pp. 49–50),83 and a letter of Samuel Daniel to Egerton on his own Civil Wars (pp. 52–53);84 both of these are perfectly genuine, but a second letter from Daniel to Egerton (pp. 48– 49), mentioning ‘M. Draiton, my good friend’ and ‘one who is the authour of playes now daylie presented on the public stages of London’ (i.e., Shakespeare), is not. Eleven years passed, a er the publication of New Facts, before independent scholars—Joseph Hunter and J. O. Halliwell, and later N. E. S. A. Hamilton and Frederic Madden—finally began to examine the Bridgewater documents published or cited by Collier, and their assessment was almost unanimous. Today the four key Blackfriars papers and the ‘Shakespearian’ Daniel letter are universally regarded as fakes—and not very skilful ones. Once more we may ask—though the question may seem increasingly rhetorical—whether John could have been taken in by a mischievous interloper,

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83. The poem had been published by Peter Whalley, from a transcript, in 1756, and Collier cited the autograph manuscript principally to score off Gifford’s edition of Jonson; Collier’s contentions here seem quite correct. 84. This had been published by Sir Francis Egerton in 1798 (The Life of Thomas Egerton, Lord Chancellor of England, p. 57), but has nonetheless attracted suspicion (see QD A22.15).


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a forger with access to Bridgewater House or the family seat at Ashridge Park, whose sport was to intercalate the Egerton archives with spuria, le there for a future victim to happen upon. Collier’s much later account of finding the manuscripts is unfalteringly circumstantial: The moment I discovered them and had hastily read them over, I carried them to the Earl of Ellesmere (then Lord Francis Leveson Gower) and read them to him. At his Lordship’s instance I copied them, and le both originals and copies with his Lordship. Going again to Bridgewater House (I think it must have been on the very next day, for I was all eagerness to pursue my search) I overtook his Lordship about to enter the door, having just alighted from his horse. He told me that he had seen Mr. Murray, the publisher, who offered to give me £50 or £100 (I believe the smaller to have been the sum) if I would put the documents into shape and write an introduction to them. I declined the proposal at once, saying that I could not consent to make money out of his Lordship’s property. Lord Ellesmere appeared a little surprised at my hyper-squeamishness, and replied, with his habitual generosity, that the documents were as much mine as his, for though I had found them in his house, but for me, they might never have been discovered till doomsday.85 Collier cannot have been conscious, we suppose, of the irony inherent in the last declaration. Ellesmere was by now (1860) dead, as were Murray, the former Bridgewater librarian H. J. Todd (‘with whom I once conversed about the papers’, having found in one relevant manuscript ‘part of the direction of a letter [to him] . . . between the leaves to keep the place’), and the learned bookseller Thomas Rodd: ‘From Bridgewater House I took all the papers, originals and transcripts, to Rodd’s . . . where we examined them carefully’. He exhibited the H. S. letter (he said) at a meeting of the Council of the Shakespeare Society in 1843 or 1844, and returned all the originals to Egerton ‘a er 1845’ (Reply to Hamilton, p. 43). With Rodd in 1835, John agreed to commission a small edition of New Facts ‘at my own expense’, of which ‘only a few [copies] were passed over Rodd’s counter to his customers’ 86—Murray’s alleged offer of £50 having been spurned. The finished product was available early in June, and page-for-page it constitutes the most densely corrupt publication of Collier’s entire career: of twentyone manuscripts cited or quoted, only nine now appear to be extant and hon-

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85. Reply to Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s ‘Inquiry’ into the Imputed Shakespeare Forgeries (1860), p. 35; for Egerton’s own 1842 account of Collier’s ‘discovery’, see below, pages 434–35. 86. Reply to Hamilton, p. 36. This claim is not strictly true; on the limitation and sale of the book, see A22.


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est. Four of the latter came from Bridgewater House, one from the Cottonian MSS—discovered long since by Samuel Ayscough 87—one from Devonshire’s Inigo Jones sketchbook, one from the Chapter House, Westminster,88 and two from Collier’s own shelves, obtained since HEDP.89 The twelve suspects include the five physical forgeries at Bridgewater House and portions of two fabricated and forged ballads that appear for the first time (pp. 18–20 and 34–35), from a volume ‘collected, as I apprehend, in the time of the Protectorate’. The five remaining novelties, for which no source or location is given in New Facts, have never been seen since their report in 1835, and posterity has judged them to be fabrications: a Privy Council order of 23 December 1579 concerning Leicester’s Men at the Blackfriars Theatre; a 1605 memorandum naming William Kempe and Robert Armin as players there; a verse-epitaph on Richard Burbage by Thomas Middleton ‘which I found in a MS. miscellany of poetry belonging to the late Mr. Heber’; and two manuscripts ‘in my possession’. These last are ‘an original survey of some part of the [Whitefriars] precinct’, with a paragraph regarding the ruinous condition of the Theatre, and ‘a MS. in the hand-writing of the Poet [Samuel Daniel] of the Fi h Book of his Civil Wars’, from which is quoted a stanza ‘le out’ of the 1609 edition—but indeed printed, with no significant variation from Collier’s text, in the 1602 folio. Although two ballad forgeries and five non-Shakespearian fabrications pad out the diversity of mischief in New Facts, it was the five forged Bridgewater documents that gave the booklet its modest éclat. Henry Crabb Robinson accepted a copy from John on 28 June, describing its contents as ‘documents about Shakespeare from Lord Francis Egerton’s muniments’, and the reviewers of course concentrated upon the immediately Shakespearian data. John Mitford praised New Facts for the Gentleman’s Magazine in September, questioning nothing; the Mirror of Literature (4 July) found it ‘throughout a delightful piece of epistolary writing’, the novelties ‘of a most authentic kind, and of considerable importance’; and the Athenaeum a ‘labour of love, for which [Collier] is deserving the best thanks of the public’, with results ‘fortunate almost beyond

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87. It had been published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1792 (vol. 62, p. 412). Collier wrote that the document ‘did not come to my hands until some time aer’ the writing of HEDP, and while he added to Ayscough’s account the Museum pressmark, he did not credit the discoverer (New Facts, pp. 7–8). His unacknowledged use of GM articles includes also the BurbageHamlet episode in Ratsey’s Ghost (1605), detailed here at pp. 30–31 and earlier in HEDP, i:333, which he had clearly lied from GM vol. 92 (September 1822), pp. 204–06, a notice by Joseph Haslewood (‘Eu. Hood’) of the unique copy at Althorp. 88. Shakespeare’s contract with Hercules Underhill, now in the PRO and reproduced in Schoenbaum 1981, plate 23, without citing Collier. 89. See QD A22.4 and A22.9.


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hope, and certainly beyond all reasonable expectation’.90 To this chorus of approval John responded, in six months, with a sequel of similar diffidence and design, New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare, in a Letter to the Rev. A. Dyce (‘in the press’ by 30 December 1835, issued in January 1836). New Particulars multiplies the biographical and historical revelations of New Facts, and again draws on Bridgewater documents, but its substance is more literary than before, and its sources, or alleged sources, more varied. The major novelty this time was quite genuine, for Collier had come upon the theatregoing diary of the Elizabethan physician and astrologer Simon Forman, whose summaries of three plays as performed at the Globe Theatre in 1611 remain ‘the only eyewitness accounts preserved of Shakespeare on the professional stage in his own lifetime’.91 The manuscript of Forman’s little ‘Bocke of Plaies’ probably first attracted the attention of antiquaries in 1832, for it was then that William Henry Black, cataloguing the Ashmolean manuscripts at Bodley, ‘made a transcript of this curious article . . . for my friend J. P. Collier, which he designed to print’, and then that Joseph Hunter asserted that he learned of it from ‘my friend Dr. Bliss, to whom everything of this kind at Oxford is perfectly familiar’.92 But Collier, to whom certainly belongs the priority in printing and discussing Forman’s notes, may have been painting the lily in his version of their rediscovery: ‘six or seven years ago’, he wrote (p. 6), ‘I heard of the existence, in the Bodleian Library, of a Manuscript containing notes on the performance of some of Shakespeare’s plays, . . . [which] would have been a great prize to me’, but ‘the fact is, that I was accidentally put upon a wrong scent’, and found nothing. For the eventual find he did credit ‘a gentleman of my acquaintance, of peculiar acquirements’, namely, W. H. Black, who ‘instantly forwarded a copy . . . to me’, yet he could not resist registering his own vaguely anticipatory claims. So much for Black’s generosity. Collier’s brief analysis of the Forman reports was in fact both ingenious and persuasive. He readily appreciated that Forman’s ‘Richard 2’ was not Shake-

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90. 13 June 1835, pp. 443–45. At one point the reviewer all but ominously opened the matter of the H. S. letter as ‘a copy . . . is it a contemporary, or a modern copy?’—something which with ‘other questions, we should feel bound to ask, if we were examining the question as one of evidence; but Mr. Collier’s name is our trust and security’. 91. Schoenbaum 1981, p. 3. Cymbeline is not specifically linked with the Globe, and the performance is dated (in error?) ‘1610’, but it seems likely that all—plus a non-Shakespearian Richard II —were Globe productions of the spring of 1611. Forman’s summaries also raise ‘many problems’, and their evidence has oen been undeservedly impugned, as Forman’s life and character have undergone hostile scrutiny; but few now seriously question their authenticity (see QD A24.1). 92. Schoenbaum 1981, p. 19, quoting Black’s marginalia in the Ashmolean Catalogue; Joseph Hunter, New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845), i:413. Collier privately named Black as his source in 1846 (letter to J. O. Halliwell, 12 March, LOA 24/24).


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speare’s play, and he reconstructed the lost rival version in a way modern Shakespearians cannot much improve. Fleshing out his portrait of Forman, he found a relevant letter at Bridgewater House (subsequently questioned, but quite genuine), and quoted eight lines of silly doggerel from ‘a MS. in the possession of the late Mr. Heber’ (p. 8), which have never resurfaced, and may be considered highly suspect. A manuscript of ‘the whole proceedings by and against the Earls of Essex and Southampton’ (pp. 12–13), belonging to ‘Mr. Rodd, of Newport Street’—the publisher, once again—cannot be imaginary; and two slight poems by Thomas Dekker ‘in my possession’ (pp. 46–47), though challenged in our century by a French scholar who thought them ‘perdues’, have survived and seem both authentic and autograph. Nothing is wrong with the Bridgewater manuscript of Middleton’s play A Game at Chess (p. 49); and a letter from the Earl of Pembroke to Viscount Mandeville (pp. 49–50, now BL Egerton MS 2623, fol. 23), about the controversial production, is likewise physically beyond suspicion, although Collier’s account of its whereabouts raised grave doubts in the witch-hunting 1860s: ‘preserved in the State Paper Office’ it was not, at least then, although ‘discovered there only recently’ may have a grain of truth in it. One of the most provocative among the attributional novelties of New Particulars has experienced its own modern revival, in which the scholarship of Collier’s era has been ignored, to the embarrassment of the revivalists. Among the Bridgewater manuscripts (and now at the Huntington Library) is a masque by John Marston, written for production before Lord and Lady Huntingdon and the Dowager Countess of Derby, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, probably in the summer of 1607. H. J. Todd had published extracts in his edition of Milton (1801) and noticed, but not transcribed, ‘a loose sheet . . . on which are written fourteen stanzas of six and four verses, each stanza being appropriated to a different Lady, and exhibiting a complimentary address to Lady Derby’.93 Nor did Todd record an apparent signature with initials at the bottom of the leaf, which Collier and many others would find highly suggestive. ‘It is subscribed W. Sh. as I read it’, Collier declared (pp. 61–62), with a great show of circumspection, ‘but there is a slight indentation of the last stroke of the letter h, which gives it something of the appearance of a k’. This irregularity, however, ‘I take . . . to have been produced by a trifling want of firmness in the hand that held the pen’, and ‘the main body of the production seems to me to bear a resemblance to the writing of Shakespeare, as we have it in the only extant specimens, although the signature [sic] is different’.94 ‘Supposing the signature to be W. Sk.’, he speculated, ‘there is no known author of the time to whom such

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93. Milton, ed. Todd (1801), v:154. The notice by J. B. Nichols in Progresses of James I (1828), ii:145–52, is simply a reprint. 94. Sir Thomas More had not yet been mooted as partly in Shakespeare’s autograph.


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an abbreviation can apply’, and only one contemporary poet other than Shakespeare whose initials were W. S., namely, Wentworth Smith. ‘The versification is certainly that of a practised writer, and it possesses as much merit as can well belong to a piece of the kind’—a sort of parlour-game of poetical fortunes bestowed on each lady—so that Shakespeare’s authorship cannot be dismissed out of hand: ‘I see no reason for disbelieving it to be his’, he concluded, though admitting to ‘some hesitation in assigning [it] to Shakespeare’, for indeed ‘we really know so little about him that it is almost impossible to arrive at what even approaches certainty upon any point’. Repeated and explicit cautions (Shakespeare ‘appears from early life to have devoted himself to the theatre only’ and is unknown to have written such strictly occasional verse), along with the disarmingly inconclusive report of ‘W. Sh.’ versus ‘W. Sk.’, might alert us to a confidence-trick familiar from Punch and Judy and HEDP—the setting-up of one’s own fictitious evidence, to (all but) knock it down with sceptical severity, leaving it for the reader to decide. The poem, which Collier printed for the first time, is indeed ‘certainly worth preserving . . . whether [it] be or be not Shakespeare’s’, and is clearly authentic, but the presence of a signature overlooked by Todd thirty years earlier may seem suspect, to say the least. In this instance, however, Collier was a faithful, if wishful, reporter: he could hardly have realized that ‘W. Sk.’ was no slip of the pen, and that a ‘known author of the time’ very neatly fills out the initials. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who supplied Collier with a useful reference to Thorpe’s Custumale Roffense (p. 13n.), received a copy of New Particulars ‘with the Author’s best thanks’, and beside Collier’s words (‘Supposing the signature to be W. Sk. there is no known author’, p. 62) jotted in pencil ‘Sr Wm Skipwith’; and thereby the flyer on Shakespeare effectively perished—or should have, long since. Skipwith, a Leicestershire worthy, a friend and near-neighbour of the Derbys, was well known as a specialist in this kind of verse-making (‘fit and acute epigrams, posies, mottoes and devices [and] impresses’, itemized Thomas Fuller in 1622), and modern scholarship has come to regard the Derby verses as almost certainly his.95 Hunter pointed this out to Sir Frederic Madden before mid-June 1837, when Collier thought it well to back down (‘upon this matter, I dare say that Mr Hunter is quite right, as he usually is . . . I said in the ‘‘New Particulars’’ that the ‘‘W. Sh.’’ did not look unlike ‘‘W. Sk.’’—this puzzled me a little’);96 Madden published a note on the subject in his Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere (1838, p. 17), stating that ‘Mr. Hunter clearly proves . . . that the

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95. For discussion see James Knowles 1992. 96. JPC to Madden, 19 June 1837, BL Egerton MS 1841, fols. 172–173. Collier defended his ignorance of Skipwith (‘The lines may be [his], but at all events, they are the first by him (that I am aware of) ever printed’), but Hunter gave examples in New Illustrations, ii:336–37.


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author is not William Shakspere but Sir William Skipwith’, and Hunter made the same point on his own in New Illustrations of Shakespeare (1845), graciously calling attention to Collier’s ‘great fairness’ in describing the tell-tale letter-forms (i:75–76). Quite sensibly Collier never therea er adverted to the Ashby Castle posies— his optimistic attribution having been, a er all, an honest mistake—but one hundred and fi y years on they were news once again. Peter Levi, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, resurrected the claim in 1988, and headlines in the British and American daily press on and about 23 April vied for priority in proclaiming the ‘discovery’. The lackluster text was republished in a bijou edition, marred however by risible mistranscriptions throughout, such as the incomprehensible ‘But those that I gave lost mine own’ for the perfectly legible ‘But since that I have lost myne oune’. Levi’s publishers were not shy in trumpetting their coup (Lord Stockton of Macmillans described the booklet as ‘the literary event of the decade’), but neither they nor Levi seemed to be aware of Collier’s and Hunter’s definitive discussion.97 The 1988 episode may remind us that Collier’s yearning for novelties, even those anticipated in print by his predecessors, has its parallels in our own time. Had these been all the ‘particulars’ Collier presented to Dyce in 1836, his sixty-eight pages would shrink to about forty-seven.98 But there are two more forgeries and a fabrication to fatten the booklet, one of the former—the last of the Bridgewater intercalations—again ‘found’ among the Egerton papers (pp. 57–59). This is a record of expenses incurred by Sir Thomas in July and August 1602, ‘in entertaining Queen Elizabeth and her Court for three days at Harefield’, and includes a payment of £10 ‘to Burbidge’s players for Othello’; twice signed ‘Arth. Maynwaringe’ and docketed ‘Maynwaringes account’, it survives among

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97. Levi’s preface stated that ‘at the last moment’ he had learned that Collier had ‘attributed [our] manuscript to Shakespeare’, but chose only to cloak his oversight by defending, quite gratuitously, its unquestioned authenticity: ‘these few poems [i.e., all those relating to the Marston masque] were beyond [Collier’s] capacity, and too subtle for him’, and Collier neither ‘wrote nor interfered with the poems’—as if anyone had raised that possibility. In correspondence with Arthur Freeman, Levi later asserted that he had known about Collier’s priority ‘for a year or two’ and had credited Collier ‘both verbally & in print’. But no such specific acknowledgement appears in the 1988 edition, and given the plethora of misreadings in Levi’s text—all of them more or less correct in Collier’s version—it is hard to believe that Levi consulted New Particulars at all. See Arthur Freeman 1988 for an account of the episode. 98. We can leave as ‘problematic’ the report on pp. 66–67 of eighteen lines from a commonplace book in the University of Hamburg Library, ‘subscribed W. S. and . . . dated 1606’, communicated by ‘the late English Professor at the University of Heidelberg’. The verses also appear, without ‘W. S.’, in John Dowland’s First Book of Songs or Airs (1597) and in England’s Helicon (1600), and were later edited by Collier in Lyrical Poems Selected from Musical Publications (1844), without mention of any Hamburg manuscript.


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records of household outlay compiled by Egerton’s agents over a few midsummer weeks. Although Queen Elizabeth did indeed visit Harefield for three days, and was lavishly entertained there, as the Egerton accounts and other records confirm,99 the leaf with the payment to Burbage (and to ‘Mr. Lyllyes man which brought the Lottery-boxe to Harefield’, and ‘for Lotterye gui es’) is transparently bogus. Its ‘indisputable’ record of Othello’s being acted at Harefield in 1602 enabled Collier to dismiss Malone’s conjecture of its date (1604) and to place it at least two years earlier than all other evidence suggests; the less circumstantial invention of a ‘Lottery-boxe’ and ‘lotterye gui es’ he revived with circular effect in his account of the Ashby posy-production: ‘it seems to have been a species of lottery, and possibly the very one the box for which, we have seen, was brought to Harefield by ‘‘Mr. Lyllye’s man’’ . . . when the company of actors to which Shakespeare belonged played one of his own dramas. The connexion, therefore, between our great Poet and Harefield is obvious’ (p. 63). Incidentally, ‘Mr. Lyllyes man’ provided R. W. Bond with evidence (he thought) to attribute the genuine Harefield Entertainment of 1602 to the court poet and playwright John Lyly.100 One of the more enduring of Collier’s biographical fabrications—for it recurs in many of his own works, and in many others of the nineteenth century— first appears at pp. 27–34 of New Particulars, a list in verse of twenty roles played by Richard Burbage during his stellar career. The anonymous and now famous ‘Elegy on Burbage’, first published by Joseph Haslewood in 1825 and curiously misquoted by Collier in HEDP (i:430), had listed four of the great actor’s chief parts, as characters who ‘have now forever died’ with their creator on the stage: young Hamlet, ould Hieronymoe Kind Lear, the greued Moore, and more beside. Collier, to whom Haslewood had voluntarily communicated two manuscript versions of the ‘Elegy’,101 now claimed to have ‘met with a third copy . . . in which

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99. For the event, see Chambers, ES, iv:67–68; and Jean Wilson 1986. The two lines with which Collier claimed the ‘Othello’ leaf was headed (‘31o. July et 1o. et 2o. Augusti 1602’, etc.) actually head a discrete account of foodstuffs purchased for the visit; see Collier’s Egerton Papers (1840), p. 340. 100. Chambers, ES, iv:68. The entertainment is in fact the work of Sir John Davies; see Robert Krueger’s edition of the Poems (Oxford, 1975), pp. 207–16 and 409–11. 101. Joel H. Kaplan (1986) has shown that Haslewood provided Collier with a collation of two MS texts (which Collier formally acknowledged in HEDP), neither of them reading ‘creuel Moore’ or ‘King Lear’, as HEDP renders the lines (see the references in QD A24.4). The former misreading had allowed Collier to wonder if Burbage’s part might have been Aaron in Titus Andronicus and not Othello (New Facts, p. 24), although in HEDP he settled ‘probably’ on Othello, and now claimed in New Particulars (p. 27) that ‘some time aer the publication of my book, the late Mr. Heber [again!] showed me a MS. of the same Elegy in his possession, which decided the point,


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the list of characters is enlarged from four to no fewer than twenty’, including nine more Shakespearian leads, and seven in plays by Marlowe, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, and Webster. He quoted twenty-one couplets, whose roughness (he remarked, deprecatingly) may owe something to transmission: ‘Bad as these verses must have been originally, they certainly have been made worse by time. The MS., from which I copied them, was written at the latter end of the reign of Charles I., and, besides omissions, errors had no doubt crept in from frequent transcriptions’ (p. 31). No manuscript version of the Burbage elegy containing these unlikely additions has ever turned up, and the consensus of modern scholarship regards them as Collier’s invention. In New Facts Collier had published two extracts from ‘a volume of MS. ballads . . . collected, as I apprehend, in the time of the Protectorate’, one titled ‘Tarlton’s Jigge of the Horse-loade of Fooles’, the other ‘The Tragedie of Othello the Moore’. From the latter he gave only the concluding two stanzas; he would have offered the whole, ‘as well as some others connected with Shakespeare’s productions . . . but it would lead me too far from my present purpose, and I shall reserve them’ (p. 35). Now, however, he took the space to print ‘Othello’ at large, and gave a list of the ballads in the volume, thirty in number, with brief remarks on their text (pp. 44–57). ‘I apprehend that most . . . were copied from printed originals, many of which are now lost, while others are yet preserved in public and private collections’, he observed, hoping ‘some day or other to be able to venture upon the expense of printing the volume entire’. ‘At present’, however, ‘I find so few who take an interest in such productions, or indeed in any productions that are at all antiquarian, that I cannot afford to incur the risk.’ And he deliberately held back the second of the ballads ‘intimately connected with Shakespeare’, with which he had already teased readers in New Facts: ‘The Enchanted Island, subscribed R. G., possibly Robert Greene, and on the same tale as Shakespeare’s Tempest’. This tantalizing volume, with fourteen of its items ‘not printed’ and most of the others ‘imperfectly printed’ or ‘with many additions’ or ‘in many respects different from any known copies’, was to provide many surprises for Collier’s audience, and for his trusting fellow editors. It was purchased by the British Museum at Collier’s posthumous sale, and it is one of the three or four truly large-scale forgeries associated with his name. Surprisingly, the ‘Protectorate Manuscript’—as we may call it, to avoid confusion with other ballad collections

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for there ‘‘the grieved Moor’’, and not ‘‘the cruel Moor’’, was spoken of ’. This was a particularly ungrateful snub of Haslewood, both of whose manuscripts had properly read ‘greued’; ‘creuel’ probably began as a mistake on Collier’s part, but was now elevated to a variant.


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once in Collier’s possession—has attracted minimal study, and an account of it may be desirable.

The Protectorate Manuscript In terms strictly of physical extent—and hence susceptibility to extended scrutiny—the two most ambitious forgeries to surface in Collier’s career are of popular ballads.102 The second and larger, to be discussed later, is the so-called Hall Commonplace Book, with its freight of eighty-three poems spanning 163 pages; the earlier, effectively the trial balloon, is Collier’s ‘Protectorate Manuscript’. Although announced in 1835 and partly calendared in 1836, it received no fuller description by Collier until 1858, in a footnote to the second edition of his multivolume Shakespeare,103 and not until 1884, when the British Museum acquired it, had anyone but its owner had the opportunity to consult it in extenso.104 Yet as an artifact it was painstakingly concocted, and clearly designed to impress any independent witness, at least one of moderate expertise. British Library Add. MS 32,380 was lot 214 in Collier’s sale, described laconically as ‘Ballads, &c. MS. Common-place Book filled with a Collection of Old Ballads, a Diary, Extracts, &c., vellum, Sæc. XVII ’, together with ‘Transcripts and descriptive particulars of the Ballads, in the handwriting of J. P. Collier’ (now Add. MS 32,381). The materializing of this long-sequestered treasure may have surprised some scholars with equally long memories, for except in his 1858 footnote Collier had never described its eccentric appearance. It is primarily, as he then noted, an untitled manuscript of the famous Eikon Basilike of Charles I (published before 13 February 1649), a small quarto measuring 184 × 140 mm, whose available blank pages have been filled up with thirty ostensibly sixteenthand seventeenth-century popular ballads.105 The prose text began a er three

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102. To avoid cumbersome qualifications we will treat the ballad-text of the Protectorate Manuscript as a forgery conceived and executed by Collier himself, although there is a remote chance that someone else (before 1835) perpetrated it as an elaborate hoax. He, she, or they would have required a remarkable knowledge of literary and theatrical history, as well as a particular intimacy with unedited broadside ballads in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, and been simultaneously undesiring of fame and dedicated—for no visible profit or motive—to gulling one man. Conspiracy theorists may start here. 103. ‘The MS. . . . is written in a small 4to. volume, which also includes a copy of the Ikon Basilike: the Ikon Basilike fills one side of each page, and various ballads . . . are written on the other side of the page’ (Shakespeare [1858], vi:8). 104. There is some ambiguity in the original announcement of the manuscript in New Facts, p. 17 (‘I have now before me’, etc.), so that by 1886 H. H. Furness assumed it to have been part of the Bridgewater House MSS adverted to on p. 6 of that work (New Variorum Othello, p. 398), as others may also have done. Clearly, it never was. 105. This is a very curious text in itself, though in no way suspect as a contemporary arti-


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blank leaves (or so we must assume, for the British Museum rebound Collier’s ‘vellum’ in institutional three-quarter calf over cloth boards), with Eikon Basilike occupying folios 4–130, written on the rectos only. The original scribe then skipped three leaves, and finished his task with a three-page meditation headed ‘Of Gods first purpose toward his reasonable creatures’, again written only on the rectos of folios 134–36,106 and le the last seventeen leaves of his book blank (137–53). No indications of provenance before 1835 remain here, or anywhere else in the volume. The wealth of blank paper tempted more than one subsequent owner, however, and a late seventeenth-century scribbler turned over the book and began from the back with an idiosyncratic meditation on James 1:14.107 This was aborted in mid-sentence a er three consecutive pages (i.e., fols. 153v, 153r, and 152v), leaving the rest of the available space for the ballad-copyist to employ. This third text sorts oddly with its pious fellows, and the copying hand seems equally odd: while it clearly must post-date the mid-century italic of the Eikon scribe, and the even later text hand of the incomplete meditation, it follows the same generic mock-Tudor secretary script we have seen in the Blackfriars petition and in other documents purporting to date from the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. By Collier’s numbering in New Particulars (pp. 45–48), ballads 1–25 occupy the versos from folio 151 all the way back to the beginning of the book, whereupon the volume was turned over again, and on the rectos of folios 1–3 (le as blanks by the scribe of the Eikon) appear nos. 26–27. Finally, the balladscribe went forward to the blank rectos of folios 137–52 and filled these with items 28–30. All but three blank rectos (fols. 131–33, between the Eikon and ‘Of God’s first purpose’) were now put to use, and the Protectorate Manuscript was complete, in 170 pages.

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fact. Eikon Basilike was first published within two weeks of the death of King Charles, so that no pre-publication manuscript tradition seems possible, and with at least thirty-five editions widely available by the end of 1649, there was hardly any compelling need to hand-copy it; nor is this manuscript handsome or elaborate enough to suggest a labour of Royalist piety. Edward Maunde Thompson, who first described Add. MS 32,380 in 1885, collated the text and thought it ‘a copy from [the first] edition, probably made by some Royalist admirer who did not anticipate the rapid succession of editions of the king’s book, and who therefore went to the trouble of transcribing it in default of securing the printed text’—which is about as far as one can go. The original MS, autograph or not, is famously lost, giving rise to the controversy over its authorship; and only one other (partial) MS copy is listed by Falconer Madan, A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike (Oxford, 1950), p. 114n. Hence it is somewhat odd that Collier did not consider it any more useful than as a host for his forgeries, but he may not have appreciated how unusual it was. By 1884 the auctioneers of his library had no inkling of the prose text (‘MS. Common-place book’), and Maunde Thompson in 1885 appears to have regarded his identification of the Eikon as a discovery. 106. The Museum’s pencilled foliation, which we follow, omits one leaf torn out aer fol. 32 (probably a deliberate mutilation by Collier). 107. The hand is new, and we would guess ca. 1680–1700.


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One technical fillip, however, remained, and suggests that the finished product was intended at first for display: two leaves were deliberately mutilated, sacrificing text of the forgeries as well as of the Eikon, and one more was removed altogether. Thus the manuscript was made to exhibit realistic wear and tear, and the fabrications themselves to seem less neatly conceived than they might: the missing folio 33 of the Eikon need never have contained any ballad-text on its verso, but Collier was enabled to remark that his no. 19, ‘A New Ballad of a Pennyworth of Wit, and the Answer’, ‘is imperfect’. Leaf 48, with the text of ‘The Cruel Uncle’ on its verso, is torn diagonally down the page—twenty lines of the text itself have clearly been interrupted—and Collier reproduced, literatim, only the fragmentary remainder in his own so-called transcript of the ballads. But a similar trick at folio 130, where a quarter-page mutilation affects nine lines of no. 5, ‘The Girl Worth Gold, by Chettle’, may have seemed an unbearable loss to the forger-poet, for he undid the effect in his transcript, preserving its text in full and indicating with outward brackets what was now missing. Had he ever published the ballad, he might then have explained the damage to the original as subsequent to his transcript, or more likely have offered the nine lines as conjecturally reconstructed; but in this instance the mutilation seems at cross-purposes with its follow-up.108 Collier described his manuscript in New Particulars as an assembly ‘collected, as I conjecture, about the date of the Protectorate, when old broadsides were becoming scarce, and new ones far from abundant, as the Puritans set their faces against anything like popular amusements’;109 he supposed that ‘most of those in the volume were copied from printed originals, many of which are now lost’ (p. 44). Indeed, fourteen of the thirty are based directly upon printed sources well known to John, and another has a manuscript source.110 Five are by Thomas Deloney, the dean of Elizabethan balladeers, and are to be found in Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1619, 1626, etc.) and Strange Histories (1607), both available in the Bridgewater House library, as well as in modern compilations by Ambrose Philips (1723–25), Thomas Percy (1765), Thomas Evans (1777), and others. ‘The Fight of Flodden’ (Collier’s no. 2) offers ‘additions’ to the version in Jack of Newbury, where ‘The Weaver’s Song’ is said to be ‘printed imperfectly’

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108. It is possible that the post-forgery mutilations reflect blunders in the forged text, or that the damage to ‘The Cruel Uncle’ was deliberate, as the transcript suggests, and that to ‘The Girl Worth Gold’ was an aerthought. But of course the complete manuscript was never published, and had it been, these contradictions might easily have been reconciled. 109. Collier’s point about Commonwealth suppression is valid; see Rollins 1923, pp. 21 ff. 110. ‘The Green Willow’, by ‘J. H.’, is a somewhat modernized version of a song by John Heywood; Collier’s source was a manuscript owned by B. H. Bright, which he used during the writing of HEDP (now BL Add. MS 15,233). His transcript in original spelling is BL Add. MS 38,813, fols. 5–6; cf. B192.


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(no. 7, with four stanzas added by Collier); from Strange Histories we have ‘King Henry’s Children drowned at Sea’ (no. 24), ‘The Courage of Kentishmen’ (no. 30), and the ubiquitous ‘Fair Rosamund’s Overthrow’ (no. 10, ‘materially differing in every stanza from the printed copy’). Collier was to reprint the last three in 1841, from the unique Bridgewater quarto (see A40), and his copy of Evans’s Old Ballads (second edition, 4 vols., 1784), which gives very defective texts of these and six other ballads out of Strange Histories, is collated against the original and corrected by Collier in pencil throughout.111 Three more ballads are variants of those in Percy’s Reliques—‘Jeptha and his Daughter’ (no. 3, ‘not imperfect’), ‘Mary Ambree’ (no. 15, ‘a different version, with many additions’), and ‘The King and the Beggermaid’ (no. 28, ‘with important differences’)—and a fourth, ‘The Cruel Uncle’ (no. 17), is a version ‘with many variations’ of the traditional ‘Children in the Wood’. Another four of the ballads in the Protectorate Manuscript derive from printed broadsides in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, all unique specimens, although a reprint of one (also unique) was in Heber’s collection. ‘How to wive well, by Lewis Evans’ (no. 9) follows Lemon’s no. 45 (Catalogue of a Collection of Printed Broadsides in the Possession of the Society of Antiquaries, 1886), and ‘A Maid that would marry a Serving-man, by Thomas Elmley [sic, for Emley]’, Lemon no. 19; Collier was to reprint both these texts from their broadside originals in his first Percy Society collection, Old Ballads, in 1841 (pp. 37–41 and 21–25). Number 26, a ‘Dialogue between Queen Elizabeth and England, by W. Birche’, described as ‘only the conclusion of a ballad printed soon a er Elizabeth came to the throne’, is in fact the last two stanzas of Lemon no. 47, ‘A Songe betwene the Quenes Maiestie and Englande’, by William Birche (1564), copied almost word for word. And no. 6, ‘The Lark and her Family, by A. Bower, twice printed before 1590’, is probably a copy from the unique broadside headed ‘A worthy Mirrour, wherin ye may marke, | An excellent Discourse of a breeding Larke’ (Lemon no. 59, now dated 1577?), signed in type ‘Finis. Arthur Bour.’ Collier’s mistaken conversion of ‘Bour.’ to ‘Bower’ indicates that in 1836 he did not yet appreciate what Ritson had pointed out in 1802 (Bibliotheca Poetica, p. 137), that ‘Arthur Bour.’ is simply a short form of Arthur Bourcher or Bourchier, the contributor of a poem to The Paradise of Dainty Devices, and of commendatory verse to Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586). Somewhat puzzlingly, when John came to reprint this poem too in Old Ballads he employed the text of the second edition of 1589, from Heber’s unique exemplar, now in William Miller’s close keeping, instead of the readily available first printing.112 But for the Pro-

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111. Evans, Old Ballads, i:34–39, 48–53, 62–67, 77–80, 257–69, and 277–84; Collier’s copy is FF. 112. His note there (p. 92) further misleads us, by implying that his source was another copy of 1589, and stating that Heber’s was an ‘earlier impression’; see QD A32.2.


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tectorate Manuscript he must also have looked over the latter, for ‘Arthur Bour.’ appears only there, not in Heber’s dated reprint.113 Finally, no. 21, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, by T. K., ( forsan Thomas Kyd)’, is listed as ‘printed, but in many respects different from any known copies’; this is the sole more or less genuine ballad relating to a contemporary play. Collier could have taken his text from either of the two extant Roxburghe broadsides (ca. 1620), had he gained access to the originals,114 or more effortlessly from Thomas Evans’s compilation of 1784 (iii:184–92). Nowhere but in Collier’s manuscript, however, are the tendentious initials ‘T. K.’ to be found; indeed even the play itself, in twelve quartos between 1592 and 1633, remained unascribed. That Thomas Kyd did write the tragedy we now know, from evidence internal and external; but no instance of a dramatist’s composing a catchpenny ballad on his own play is recorded, or has seemed worth conjecturing. Collier’s imagination clearly now was aroused by the notion of narrative ballads relating to individual plays, much as ballads relating to theatrical history had tempted his pen in HEDP: seven of the sixteen unpublished pieces in the Protectorate Manuscript are ‘on the same story’ or ‘[follow] very closely’ the plots of extant or lost plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Ben Jonson, and others. Genuine ballads like these are in fact very uncommon, even in late printings, and their relationship to extant or lost plays is not always obvious.115 Some may be sources of plays, direct or indirect, or traditional analogues—like Robin Hood episodes, or ‘The Children in the Wood’, or old tales like ‘Jill of Brentford’ or ‘Gernutus the Jew’;116 and some may have been intended independently to

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113. By the time he was preparing his own ‘modern transcript’ of the Protectorate Manuscript for publication, Collier was aware of Ritson’s identification of ‘Bour.’ with Bourchier, ‘which may be the fact’, and, making a virtue of necessity, treated the erroneous ‘Bower’ of his manuscript merely as contrary evidence: ‘[the spelling] ‘‘Arthur Bower’’ does not seem to support the conjecture’; BL Add. MS 32,381, fol. 19. 114. See Arthur Freeman 1967, pp. 135–36; STC 23012 now regards the two Roxburghe exemplars as identical. 115. Nor has the study of them, distinguished from other genres, been at all comprehensive: Rollins’s Analytical Index discusses only a few in terms of the plays they may or may not mirror, sometimes presenting guesswork as fact; e.g., the 1596 ‘Newe Ballad of Romeo and Juliett’ (no. 2321, lost) ‘was suggested by Shakespeare’s tragedy’, and the 1594 ‘Storye of Tamburlayne the Greate’ (no. 2529, also lost) is ‘summarized from Marlowe’s tragedy’. No special attention has been devoted by modern ballad historians to examples with ‘play-plots’, and historians of the drama and of theatrical conditions have for the most part considered each specimen outside of its generic context. The fullest account of ballads interacting with performance, C. R. Baskervill’s masterly The Elizabethan Jig (1929), does not cover the narrative broadsides at all. 116. Ballads of ‘The Children in the Wood’, for example, no doubt lie behind one plot of Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (ca. 1594–1601); the Thomas Merry murder-ballads of 1594 probably supplied the detail of his second, as they may also have done for a lost play by Day and Haughton, recorded by Henslowe in 1599. ‘Gillian of Bramford’ (Rollins no. 960) may relate to


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exploit newsworthy or sensational events.117 Others seem linked to plays only by coincidence or casual allusion.118 But the most interesting ones, in theatrical terms, are those that appear to summarize, in easy diction and tunefully memorable rhyme, the action of plays on the stage—perhaps as a cheap alternative to two hours’ attendance, or perhaps, if hawked outside the playhouse, as a crib for the slow-witted, or an enticement to the hesitant. They might simply attest to the popularity of a play, in season or between runs, but might also preserve Henslowe’s lost Friar Fox and Gillian of Branford, but the anecdotes are hoary; Robin Hood is a quagmire of rival literary and oral traditions. ‘A New Song, Shewing the Crueltie of Gernutus a Jew, Who Would Have a Pound of Flesh’ (ca. 1620; STC 11796.5) certainly relates to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and may have capitalized upon the latter’s popularity, but in all likelihood it represents an independent narrative tradition, as does ‘The Frolicksome Duke, or the Tinker’s Good Fortune’, a version of the induction to The Taming of the Shrew (Percy, i:238 ff.). The early ballads on Troilus and Cressida (Rollins no. 595 [1581] and 1124) may relate to a pre-Shakespearian version of the play, but they seem non-dramatic. 117. Many of the relevant sensational broadsides are now known only from entries in SR, but in the nature of news-mongering they probably preceded their playhouse equivalents: three or four ballads on Page of Plymouth certainly precede the lost play by Jonson and Dekker (1599), and those on Luke Hutton, ‘the black dog of Newgate’ (1595), anticipate another project for Henslowe by Day, Hathway and Smith (1602/03). The Miseries of Enforced Marriage by George Wilkins (1607) and The Yorkshire Tragedy by ‘W. S.’ (1608), as well as a lost play by Chapman (Sibley no. 182), all treat the violent story of Walter Calverley of Calverley, Yorkshire, and a lost ballad of 1605 may have suggested these plots; but on this occasion there is an extant prose tract, generally accepted as the source of at least the first two plays. Two decades later, a pamphlet, two ballads, and two lost plays vied to exploit a murder in Whitechapel, and surviving records of an intricate libel action allowed C. J. Sisson to reconstruct the rival attempts (‘Keep the Widow Waking’; Sisson 1936, pp. 80–124): here the balladeers and dramatists were neck-and-neck. But William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) clearly depended, for one of its two plots, upon the popular ballad of Young Bateman, entered in 1603 and re-entered in 1624, though its text is known only from a later impression (Bentley, v:1045). Other instances could probably be adduced, although interplay between ballad and dramatization may not always be demonstrable; see Bentley, and Marshburn 1971. 118. The most recent editor of John Day (Robin Jeffs [1963], p. xiv) argued that The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, Day’s earliest surviving comedy, ‘does not closely follow the Blind Beggar ballads’ (i.e., Rollins nos. 210–11). Some titles of lost ballads evoke the titles or substance of plays: ‘The Devell of Downgate and His Sonne’ (Rollins no. 569) was entered by Edward White on 5 August 1596 alongside his ‘Newe Ballad of Romeo and Juliett’, and Sir Henry Herbert licensed a play of this title in October 1623. Katharine Lee Bates (1917, p. 140) suggested that ‘The Prowde Mayde of Plymouthe’ (entered 1595; Rollins no. 2215) ‘may possibly have suggested Bess Bridges’, the heroine of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, and at least here we have a rival for Collier’s own fabricated ballad ‘The Girl Worth Gold’. A ballad titled ‘The Widdow of Watling street’ (Rollins nos. 2957–58: ent. 1596, 1624) might appear to relate to the Shakespeare-apocrypha play The Puritan Widow (1606), the title-page of which reads ‘The Puritane | or | The Widdow | of Watling-street’, but whose headlines are ‘The Puritan Widow’ or ‘The Puritaine Widdow’. The plot of the ballad has no place at all in the play, however: did the publisher of the latter simply tack on ‘of Watling-street’ to capitalize on a familiar, mildly salacious history?


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evidence of lost or variant text, cuts made in performance, or unindicated but traditional details of actors’ stage-business. These play-ballads—broadside narratives of what could be taken in at the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playhouse—are what appealed to the dramatic historian, and perhaps to the collector, in Collier. Original specimens, he would have learned early, are frustratingly elusive: no more than a handful survive, even by way of notice in contemporary records. ‘The Spanish Tragedy, Containing the Lamentable Murders of Horatio and Bellimperia’ (note the stress on sensational crime) is a worthy example, twenty-eight six-line stanzas ‘to the tune of Queene Dido’ (Simpson 1966, pp. 587–89), divided as usual into two parts. Presented as a monologue by Hieronymo (or his ghost, for by the penultimate stanza he has killed himself), it even provides one small gloss on the action of the play—at least as perceived by a contemporary 119—and Collier may have found it irresistible as a pattern. Similar to this is ‘The Complaint and Lamentation of Mistress Arden of Feversham’, also edited from the Roxburghe original by Thomas Evans for Old Ballads: the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Feversham (ca. 1592) had been revived and reprinted in 1633, and the ballad, once thought to be a source of the play, clearly is a post-theatrical invention, ‘entirely dependent on one of the [two] earlier editions of the play’.120 Its forty-eight four-line stanzas are in two ‘parts’, to the familiar melody of ‘Fortune my Foe’, a stately tune traditionally suited to grim narratives. Marlowe’s plays seem to have inspired three ballads, only one of which has survived, in a comparatively late text. On 16 May 1594, just one day before Nicholas Ling and Thomas Millington procured a license to print ‘the famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta’, their rival John Danter obtained one for ‘a ballad entituled the murtherous life and terrible death of the riche jew of Malta’ (Rollins no. 1844). The timing can hardly have been coincidental, but neither the play as then printed nor the broadside survives. Neither does Danter’s submission of 6 November 1594, ‘the storye of Tamburlayne the great’ (Rollins no. 2529), nor ‘a ballad of the life and deathe of Doctor Ffaustus the great Cunngerer’, entered first on 28 February 1589 by Richard Jones (Rollins no. 1498). This last, however, is probably related to a Faust ballad entered in 1624 and 1675 (Rollins nos. 615, 1336), which has come down in several late seventeenthcentury printings, again to the tune of ‘Fortune, my Foe’.121 Shakespeare too had his balladic parasites, Danter once more registering both the play of Titus Andronicus and (for an additional 6d.) ‘the ballad thereof ’ on 6 February 1594 (Arber ii:644), while Edward White entered ‘A newe ballad of Romeo and 119. See Arthur Freeman 1967, p. 96n. 120. M. L. Wine, ed., Arden of Feversham (1973), p. xxxviii; ballad text at pp. 164–70. 121. See Goldstein 1961.

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Juliett’ on 6 August 1596. The Titus ballad was re-entered in 1624, 1656, and 1675, and survives in broadsheets of ca. 1625 and ca. 1628 (it must be distinguished from the independent late seventeenth-century ‘Lamentable Ballad’, also reprinted by Geoffrey Bullough at vi:71–76); like the Arden, Faustus, and Spanish Tragedy ballads, Titus Andronicus is presented as a monologue from the grave by the dead protagonist—inevitably, once again, ‘to the Tune of, Fortune my Foe’. Collier himself took an odd view of the lost ‘Romeo and Juliett’, suggesting that the entry ‘may possibly have been [for] the tragedy . . . though called only a ballad’;122 there seems no doubt whatever in this instance that the ‘ballad’ was a ballad indeed. These constitute, to the best of our knowledge, all the genuine evidence— four extant texts, three records of what probably were others—for the genre of narrative ballads based upon early plays, which Collier was so to exploit in the Protectorate Manuscript and in subsequent publications.123 It may seem much more limited than usually described, for every specimen relates to a play first staged in a single decade (ca. 1588–97), and records of what may be similar (lost) ballads on later plays are so sparse as to suggest no thriving tradition.124 And the much later versified summaries of Shakespeare’s plays by the actor and ‘City Poet’ Thomas Jordan, which Collier extracted in New Particulars while affecting to disparage them as ‘abundantly bad’ and ‘sad doggerel’, are essentially literary recapitulations, with no sign of having been circulated in broadside form.125 The near-tripling of the corpus of extant play-ballads may come as a surprise then, for Collier produced in his ‘Commonwealth’ compilation no fewer than seven

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122. Shakespeare (1842–44), vi:370–71. 123. Richard Levin, in a recent article (2000) on the ‘pairing’ of ballads with other publications in SR, has suggested three more candidates, all registered by John Danter in 1594–95: ‘Bellin Duns Confession’, ‘a knacke howe to knowe an honest man from a knave’, and ‘the madd merye pranckes of Long Megg of Westminster’. If these ballad-titles (all lost) indeed reflect contemporary plays, they might well suggest, as Levin proposed (p. 67), ‘some kind of arrangement between Danter and Henslowe or the players’—albeit not a long-standing one. A fourth justpossible title, conceivably relating to The Taming of a/the Shrew, is ‘the coolinge of curst Kate’, entered to Thomas Gosson and Joseph Hunt on 16 October 1594. 124. Apart from a few mentioned above as perhaps tangential (e.g., The Blind Beggar), we note only a flurry of lost ballads that may relate to Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass in 1629; Bentley (iii:83) felt that these ‘seem to indicate efforts to capitalize on the success of the play’. 125. New Particulars, pp. 36–44; Collier reprinted the entire volume in which these appeared, with a more flattering introduction, in 1866. Hyder Rollins (1923, p. 14) describes Jordan’s ballads in A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (1664) as ‘mere summaries of the Merchant of Venice, Philaster, and other popular dramas [including The Winter’s Tale and Much Ado]’. The same may probably be said of Richard Johnson’s third-person ‘Lamentable Song of the Death of King Leir and his Three Daughters’, in his Golden Garland of Princely Pleasures (STC 14674, unique at BL). Collier mistook this for a reprint of Johnson’s ubiquitous Crown Garland (BARB, ii:172); cf. Percy, i:231 ff.; and Chambers, WS, i:469.


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new texts, two relating to Shakespeare, three to Heywood, one ‘probably’ to the lost play on Page of Plymouth, and one to the Tudor comedy of Tom Tyler and His Wife. ‘The Tragedie of Othello the Moore’, a third-person ballad in 204 lines (which bears an uncanny metrical and stylistic resemblance to Collier’s translation of Fridolin) is Collier’s no. 8 in the Protectorate Manuscript, ‘anonymous, but following Shakespeare’s tragedy very closely. Not printed’. It was ‘founded upon the play in consequence of its popularity, and not the play upon it’, Collier declared (truthfully enough), and in the manuscript ‘the word ‘‘Finis’’ was originally followed by the name of the author, which has been erased so as to leave no trace’ (New Particulars, pp. 48 and 57). Although he had once thought Thomas Jordan a plausible candidate, ‘on reconsideration . . . I cannot help thinking that it is much too good, and somewhat too old, for him’ (p. 57). Unlike any of the play-ballads hitherto known, ‘Othello the Moore’ concludes with observations on performance, specifically praising ‘Dicke Burbidge, that most famous man’, who ‘with this same part [i.e., of Othello] his course began, / And kept it manie a yeare’. Collier permitted himself to puzzle over ‘his course began’, and its implications about Burbage’s career, concluding—with his usual judiciousness— that this was ‘a mere guess, and not a happy one’. Item no. 12 is ‘The Enchanted [later ‘Inchanted’] Island, subscribed R. G., possibly Robert Greene, and on the same tale as Shakespeare’s Tempest’, another third-person narrative similar in length to ‘Othello’; this too would be deemed ‘posterior’ to the play, and the flyer on ‘R. G.’ would be abandoned by 1839. Less noteworthy plays inspired no less lengthy play-ballads: no. 5 is ‘The Girl worth Gold, by [Henry] Chettle; on the same story as Heywood’s play, The Fair Maid of the West’; no. 14 is ‘The London ’Prentice’s Tragedy, by Thomas Heywood, probably the foundation of some unknown play’; and no. 20 is ‘The Cripple of Cheapside, by T. Dekker’, of which ‘the story is similar to Heywood’s play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange’. In the last instance the attribution may have been an a erthought, as ‘T. Dekker’ appears in the manuscript in a different ink from the rest, and not at all in Collier’s ‘modern’ transcript. A ballad on the Page of Plymouth affair, ‘Mrs. Page’s Lamentation and good Night, by Horton’ (no. 18), is perhaps to be linked with ‘a play, now lost, regarding the murder she committed’, namely, the Henslowe commission of 1599 to Dekker and Ben Jonson; and ‘Tom Tiler and his Wife’ (no. 23) addresses ‘the same story as the old play first published in 1578, and again in 1661’. The five non-Shakespearian play-ballads of the Protectorate Manuscript, though laboriously conceived and not unconvincing in diction, were never printed by Collier or anyone else. Two other theatrical-gossipy ballads, however, found their way into print more than once: no. 11, ‘Tarlton’s Jig of the Horse-load


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of Fools; no doubt as written and sung by him originally at the Curtain Theatre, prior to 1588’; and no. 22, ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, an audaciously piquant account of the career of Christopher Marlowe, ‘probably written and printed [sic] soon a er the poet’s death in 1593’. Unpublished remain no. 1, ‘The Wiltshire Tragedy, by T. Deloney, relating to a murder committed by Lord Stourton’ (cf. Marshburn 1971, pp. 23–30); no. 16, ‘The Fair Maiden from Scotland, by Shawe’; no. 19, ‘A new Ballad of a Pennyworth of Wit’, and its (deliberately imperfect) ‘Answer’; and no. 25, ‘The Mad Maiden’, which likewise ‘seems imperfect’. Finally, there are two spurious ballads on Robin Hood, a great favourite with Collier, who in about 1832 also presented the Duke of Devonshire with a ballad of ‘Robin Hood’s Leap’—although this was a jeu d’esprit with no claim to antiquity.126 ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ (no. 4), ‘a very spirited ballad, and not printed’, has been canonized by Francis J. Child and taken seriously by modern authorities, and no. 29, ‘Robinhood and the Tanner’s Daughter, by T. Fleming’, has enjoyed some printed currency as well. Collier’s use of his Protectorate Manuscript in the 1830s and a erwards was atypically selective, and as a result only a few of its thirty ballad texts have undergone long-term scrutiny. At first he seemed ambitious of publishing the entire compilation (New Particulars, p. 45), and with that probably in mind he produced a ‘transcript’, in modern spelling, of twenty-four of the ballads, and at some latter date wrote brief introductions to at least the first six, now preserved mostly in the form of small slips.127 The transcript itself may reflect a form of the project earlier than the forgery, however, for ‘The Inchanted Island’ is altogether absent, and parts of the text seem to antedate that in the Protectorate Manuscript, or derive from earlier dra s of its contents.128 Certain variants arrest us: the attribution of no. 20, ‘The Cripple of Cheapside’, to ‘T. Dekker’ is missing

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126. Written sometime aer Collier’s visit to Chatsworth, and published in his Athenaeum review of J. M. Gutch, Robin Hood (1847). 127. BL Add. MS 32,381. The ballads included were nos. 1–11, 13–24, and 27 from the New Particulars list. 128. E.g., in stanza 19 of ‘Mrs. Page’s Lamentation’, the transcript reads: ‘my hate to him was aye so firmly seated’, with ‘firmly’ corrected to ‘deeply’—and ‘deeply’ (which seems impossible to misread as ‘firmly’) is the reading of the MS itself. Other interlineations or minor corrections in the transcript in nos. 3, 13, 14, and 17 also point to a modern text preceding the ‘antiqued’ text of the MS; but the evidence of the (deliberate) mutilations is double-edged: the transcript clearly precedes the loss of parts of nine lines in no. 5, ‘The Girl worth Gold’, where the torn-away words are recorded and subsequently bracketed in Collier’s holograph; but it as clearly follows the tear to fol. 48 in no. 17, ‘The Cruel Uncle’, where the text of the transcript gives precisely the text of the damaged MS—which one could never predict before ripping off half the leaf. Simultaneous or alternating compilation of transcript and manuscript seems indicated.


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from the transcript but present in the manuscript (in new ink; an a erthought?) and in the New Particulars list; while the name of the author of ‘Othello the Moore’, ‘erased so as to leave no trace’ in the manuscript (New Particulars, p. 57), is plain and clear in the transcript: ‘Anth. M.’, that is, Anthony Munday. Never in subsequent publications (1835, 1844, 1858) of his ballad ‘Othello’ did Collier see fit to record this plausible by-line; perhaps it seemed simply too risky. No general publication of the Protectorate Manuscript ensued, although as late as 1867 Collier was still being solicited for texts of the announced titles or an edition of the celebrated whole. Individual play-ballads, however, began to appear in print, with ‘Othello the Moore’ in 1836 (New Particulars) and ‘The Inchanted Island’ in 1839 (Farther Particulars). Both Shakespearian analogues, put forward with calculatedly modest claims, convinced or at least failed to provoke the suspicions of Collier’s contemporaries, and Collier reprinted them in the second edition of his Shakespeare (1858). He there continued to so -pedal the evidence about Burbage’s career in ‘Othello’ (‘it is evident that the writer spoke at random’), and he returned to a speculation, all but dismissed in Farther Particulars (p. 56), that Robert Gomersall (‘R. G.’) ‘may have written what is not much in his style, but what would do no discredit to him or any other versifyer of that day’. ‘Tarlton’s Jig of the Horse-load of Fools’, a dismally lame skit that Collier helpfully asserted ‘contains so much satirical drollery, and presents such curious pictures of the manners of the time’ (New Facts, p. 19), advanced from extracts— eight stanzas in New Facts, four of them repeated in Collier’s first Shakespeare (1844)—to a solemn full text of thirty-six stanzas in James Orchard Halliwell’s Shakespeare Society volume on Tarlton. Halliwell took his text from a transcript provided by Collier in November 1843, with leading remarks: ‘It is certainly one of the most remarkable and clever relics in our language’, the perpetrator brazenly told his young friend, ‘unlike anything hitherto known or seen’.129 John went on two months later to point out that ‘Goose son, as we call him’ in stanza 7 was an allusion to the playwright turned puritan Stephen Gosson, and shared his ‘opinion’ that the fools introduced by Tarlton to his audience were ‘probably puppets suitably dressed’.130 A sly further allusion to ‘the familie of Love’ in stanza 8, le unexplained by Collier, may just have escaped Halliwell, who did not accord it a note.131 He did seem however to have appreciated how excruciat-

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129. Tarlton’s Jests, and News out of Purgatory, with Notes, and Some Account of the Life of Tarlton (Shakespeare Society, 1844), pp. xx–xxvi; the entire jig was reprinted in a review of the book in the Athenaeum. 130. JPC to JOH, 22 November 1843 and 31 January 1844, LOA 20/45 and 17/84; Tarlton’s Jests, p. xx. 131. Collier meant—and perhaps meant to be ‘discovered’ by someone else—a reference to the


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ing the performance might seem to the modern reader, who ‘must recollect that none of the recorded witticisms of [Tarlton’s] times are very brilliant’ (Tarlton’s Jests, p. xxvi). Some of the diction of ‘Tarlton’s Jig’ defies credibility (the quack doctor in stanza 19, for instance, ‘makes dying quite a pleasure’, and the poet of stanza 15 got ‘the redd carrott nose . . . with drinking sacke and canarie / At the Hat or the Rose’), but like the Shakespearian play-ballads this piece makes relatively slight claims on literary history. Rather more daring is ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’ (no relation to Tourneur’s play), which in twenty-four quatrains recounts the career and death of one ‘Wormal’ (anagram!), his creatures Faustus and ‘blaspheming Tambolin’, and his dissipated ‘friend, once gay and greene’ (Robert Greene). Wormal is stabbed to death ‘through the eye and braine’ by a rival in lust (Collier followed Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements), and a hitherto unknown detail of his early life has him breaking a leg ‘upon the Curtaine stage . . . in one lewd scene’. Again Collier printed only an extract of this ballad in New Particulars, four stanzas (pp. 47–48), enlarged to six in the introduction to his Shakespeare (1844, i:cxii–cxiii), and le the embarrassing task of publishing the whole to a gullible contemporary. On this occasion it was none other than Alexander Dyce, who credited the broken-leg story in his Marlowe (1850, i:vi), and gave the entire ballad, with notes, ‘from a manuscript copy in the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier’(iii:349–52). Collier’s two Robin Hood ballads complete the half-dozen to have been printed from the Protectorate Manuscript, once again by a grateful acquaintance and dupe. In 1847 John Mathew Gutch published his ambitious collection of Robin Hood records and texts (A Lytell Geste of Robin Hode, with Other Ancient and Modern Ballads and Songs Relating to this Celebrated Yeoman, 2 vols.), and recorded his gratitude to Collier, who had supplied transcripts of the two novelties ‘with that kindness and liberality which this gentleman always extends to those who apply to him for assistance in the elucidation or extension of literary pursuits’. Gutch was thus ‘enabled to add, very unexpectedly, two more ballads to the Robin Hood cycle’, and found his informant’s liberality ‘doubly gratifying’.132 He reprinted Collier’s description of the manuscript from New Particulars, mentioning the publication of ‘Othello’ alone (he seemed unaware of ‘The Inchanted Island’), and devoted ten pages to ‘Robin Hood and the Tan-

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Anabaptist sect founded by Hendrik Niclaes in the Netherlands, but mainly prevalent in England from the 1550s onward. 132. Gutch, ii:344. Gutch’s Lytell Geste was originally proposed as a Percy Society publication in 1841, while Collier was still active in the administration of the society; see the reports of the first and second annual meetings, 1841–42.


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ner’s Daughter’ and ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’.133 F. W. Fairholt, a Percy Society stalwart, supplied each ballad with an attractive vignette. Only six ballads published meant twenty-four unrealized opportunities, a circumstance (as far as we know) unique up to this point in Collier’s fabricating and forging career. He did in fact allude casually to no. 5, ‘The Girl worth Gold’, in his edition of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West (Shakespeare Society, 1850, p. ix), and his friend Barron Field mentioned no. 20, ‘The Cripple of Cheapside, by T. Dekker’, in his introduction to the quasi-Heywood Fair Maid of the Exchange (Shakespeare Society, 1845, p. ix), but only from Collier’s citation in New Particulars. More significant, perhaps, were the occasions on which Collier and his coterie did not refer to ballads in the Protectorate Manuscript, when such a reference would have seemed highly appropriate. In his Percy Society Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies (1841), Collier published Lewis Evans’s ‘How to Wive Well’ and Thomas Emley’s ‘A Maid that Would Marry with a Serving Man’ from unique broadsides in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, without mentioning the ‘variant’ versions of each in his manuscript (nos. 9, 13); and his edition of Thomas Deloney’s Strange Histories (Percy Society, 1841) includes texts of three ballads (nos. 10, 24, and 30) of which again he possessed ‘variants’, again buried in silence. Nor did his fellow Percy Society editor William Chappell cite no. 26, ‘The King and the Beggermaid, by Richard Johnson . . . with important differences’, in his edition of the poem in Johnson’s Crown Garland (1842, pp. 45–49, 83). And while the Bridgewater Catalogue (discussed below) fairly bristles with references to Collier’s own manuscripts, we find at pp. 104– 07 no word about all his provocative Deloneys, five of them ‘variants’ and one ‘not printed’; nor are they mentioned in BARB (1865, i:212–17), which elsewhere recycles many early impostures. Collier’s 1848 Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, where many of the forged ballads in his later (and more deceptive) Hall Commonplace Book are printed as illustrations of selected entries, records the submission in 1562/63 by Thomas Colwell of ‘Tom Tyler’ among various ‘ballattes’ (p. 74), and duly discusses the extant play of Tom Tyler and His Wife—but not no. 23 in the Protectorate Manuscript, ‘Tom Tiler and his Wife . . . the same story as the old play’. These omissions can hardly have been accidental, and a reluctance to circulate the majority of the inventions must lie behind them—at least a er Collier abandoned his project of publishing the whole spurious volume. His cau-

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133. Lytell Geste, ii:345–55. Collier’s own critical applause for this ballad, in his transcript, is worth marvelling at: ‘In subject & stile it is quite as good as any of those included by Ritson in his elaborate assemblage, and better than most of them’; BL Add. MS 32,381, fol. 11.


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tion was probably wise, for so voluminous an assembly would certainly have attracted more critical attention than six texts in five different books, spaced out over fourteen years. Even in 1867, when Collier’s loyal friend William Thoms asked if he might purchase the manuscript, or print the unpublished ballads in Notes and Queries ‘upon terms which might be arranged between us’, the owner-author was quick to recoil, and the matter was dropped. Indeed, had Collier ever published the Protectorate Manuscript in its entirety, he could have counted on trouble from Frederic Madden, who called it (in his copy of New Facts), ‘a remarkable volume that ought to be looked at very critically’.134 Collier’s discretion, and his prudence in giving out only transcripts to applicants, was to some extent rewarded by trust, for the murmurs of doubt over the Bridgewater documents (beginning in the 1840s) never spread to the ballads until the exposure of other forgeries inspired a more widespread inquiry. Although Halliwell, for one, was by 1853 already suspicious that ‘some remarkable ballads are compositions of comparatively recent date’—this in the context of flatly calling the Bridgewater Shakespearian manuscripts ‘modern forgeries’—he had allowed ‘The Inchanted Island’ a two-page summary in his folio Shakespeare, endorsing it as ‘the oldest piece, in English, indisputably formed either on [George Turberville’s prose version in Tragical Tales (1587)], or on the play [i.e., The Tempest]’.135 Thirteen years later, however, in volume 15 of his Shakespeare (1865), the ballad of ‘Othello the Moore’ went unmentioned. In between had come N. E. S. A. Hamilton’s sceptical appraisal both of ‘The Inchanted Island’ and of the manuscript volume itself (unseen by Hamilton, who expressed ‘grave doubts’ about the script on the basis of Halliwell’s facsimile of five lines), and his invitation to Collier to do ‘good service to the cause of truth and literature, by bringing the volume in question before a competent tribunal’.136 Collier frustrated his adversaries by refusing anyone a sight of the Protectorate Manuscript. In 1876, again without access to the ‘original’, Clement Ingleby

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134. Folger PR2951 C64 As. Col., p. 18. ‘I should not be surprised if the MS. of Ballads should prove to be a forgery altogether!’ he wrote in his diary, 25 October 1859. 135. Halliwell, Shakespeare, i:312–13, printed earlier in 1853 than Curiosities of Modern Shaksperian Criticism, from which the passage on ‘some remarkable ballads’ is quoted (p. 20). Halliwell’s account of the ballad is perhaps double-edged, however, and one might even think some parts of it tongue-in-cheek had he not given it so much solemn attention. He provided a woodengraved facsimile of the title and first stanza, remarking that ‘the date of the volume may possibly be ascertained from the accompanying facsimile, the tracing of which was very kindly sent me by the owner’. Can this be ironic? He went on to observe that ‘the diction seems to belong to a somewhat recent period’, but pointed out that ‘ballads were frequently modernized in the process of transcription’. This is an oddly ambiguous estimate, clearly reflecting some ambivalence. 136. Hamilton, pp. 103–04.


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persuasively discredited the two Shakespeare play-ballads on grounds of language and style, cleverly noting the similarity between ‘Othello the Moore’ and Collier’s translation of Schiller’s Fridolin, which had just been reprinted in 1875; but once more this was less than a firm proof of forgery.137 Only upon Collier’s death was a physical examination of the Protectorate Manuscript made possible, and Edward Maunde Thompson, the palaeographer now best remembered for his studies of Shakespeare’s autograph and The Book of Sir Thomas More, pronounced a judgement upon the handwriting that has never since been questioned: ‘not a line of it, I will venture to say, was penned before the nineteenth century. . . . The writing is by a modern hand imitating an older style . . . it is, I repeat, by a modern nineteenth-century hand, imitating one of the seventeenth century’. And though refraining from naming the perpetrator, Maunde Thompson concluded that the writing ‘is of the same cast, and undoubtedly by the same hand, as certain fabricated documents and entries, professing to be of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, and connected with the history of Shakspere and the English stage, which have been interpolated among the MSS. at Bridgewater House and Dulwich College’.138 All the contents of the Protectorate Manuscript have by now been repudiated, although some of the impostures survived a long time. ‘Othello the Moore’ was still being reprinted as ‘written possibly about 1625’ in 1886, a year a er Maunde Thompson’s dismissal; and ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’, having victimized Dyce in 1850, drew from A. H. Bullen in 1885 a discreditation (‘I have little hesitation in pronouncing the ballad to be a forgery’) but also a full reprint.139 ‘Tarlton’s Jig’ should fool nobody, having been knocked on the head by Hyder E. Rollins in 1920 (‘clearly fabricated to fit an erroneous idea of what a jig actually was’); yet F. G. Fleay still thought it credible in 1891, and although Baskervill appreciated in 1929 the ‘strong probability’ that this was a Collier forgery, he nonetheless devoted a paragraph to its substance.140 Strangest of scholarly reactions, however, was that of F. J. Child, in his magisterial English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), to the Robin Hood fabrications. Child, a long-

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137. ‘The first line of [the eleventh] stanza might have been suggested by the second of Retsch’s outlines to Schiller’s Fridolin’ (Ingleby 1876, p. 313). Collier’s American loyalist, H. H. Furness, credulously reprinting ‘Othello the Moore’ in his New Variorum Othello (1886), took a whimsical view of Ingleby’s internal-evidence arguments: ‘That a scholar so eminent and a critic so keen should, with apparent gravity, give us this hypothetical pluperfect subjunctive might have been, aer whetting our appetites for a downright perfect indicative was, lay beyond my comprehension, till my eye caught the date of the Number of The Academy—the First of April!’ (p. 402). 138. Thompson 1885, p. 170. 139. Bullen, Works of Marlowe, i:xiv; iii:303–07. Bullen’s endearing character of Collier, ‘who did so much to enlighten scholars, and so much to perplex them’ (i:xiv), might serve as an epitaph. 140. Rollins 1920b, pp. 220–21; Fleay 1891, i:163 and ii:258; Baskervill 1929, pp. 103–04.


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term correspondent of Collier and the unacknowledged source of much that is worthy in Collier’s Spenser (1862), held no illusions about Add. MS 32,380; ‘the forged manuscript formerly in the possession of J. Payne Collier, containing thirty ballads alleged to be of the early part of the seventeenth century’, he rightly described it in no. 168, ‘Flodden Field’); and he dismissed by deliberate omission ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’s Daughter, by T. Fleming’, which Gutch had first printed. But ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ somehow bemused him: even though Maunde Thompson had assured him that ‘all the ballads are in a nineteenth century hand’ (Child, iii:170n.), Child found ‘no particular reason for regarding this particular piece as spurious’, and though the literary quality was low, ‘[I] accept it for the present as perhaps a copy of a broadside, or a copy of a copy’ (no. 137). A little window like Child’s ‘for the present’ could lull his successors into trust, and the pre-eminent student of Robin Hood in our time, J. C. Holt, devoted respectful transcription and analysis to ‘Robin Hood and the Pedlars’ (‘a splendid story . . . which the pedlars as packmen with ballads in their packs, must in all probability have helped to spread’) as recently as 1989.141

The Bridgewater Catalogue Collier’s principal enterprise in behalf of Lord Francis Egerton, and still one of the best-known of his books, was an imposing Catalogue Bibliographical and Critical of 280 printed books housed at Bridgewater House. Unsurprisingly, he restricted his selection (‘a small portion only’ of the library) to early English literature, ‘a department which, though less understood than some others, has of late years attracted much attention, both in this and in foreign countries’. The family hoard, rich in dedication or presentation copies to Sir Thomas Egerton (1540–1617) and his son John (1579–1646), with ‘not a few’ unique volumes among them, supplied most of the inspiration; the lavish catalogue, commissioned and published in quarto by ‘the present possessor’, gave Collier scope for extended description whenever he chose. The concise puffs of Heber IV and the conversational squibs of The Poetical Decameron swelled to essay-length sketches of pet authors and texts—little short of a periodical piece, in some instances—eked out with extracts, facsimiles of inscriptions and woodcuts, and notices of other extant copies, o en Collier’s own. Old favourites like Daniel and Drayton, Lodge, Nashe, Riche, Dekker, Samuel Rowlands, and John Taylor the Water Poet were plentifully represented at Bridgewater House, and there were opportunities in cataloguing works by Chapman or Churchyard or Parrot or Sir John Davies to air new discoveries or to reiterate points buried in HEDP.

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141. Holt 1989, pp. 168–69, 182; cf. Arthur Freeman 1993, pp. 10–12.


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The Heber catalogue, for example, had failed to identify Donne as the author of An Anatomy of the World, but now Collier knew better (pp. 9–10); the inscription in the Heber Locrine, overlooked in Collier’s corrigenda to Part II, was now clearly, and correctly, attributed to Sir George Buc (p. 41). In a 1639 edition of Munday’s romance Palmerin of England Collier found a commendatory poem by John Webster, rightly identified it as ‘the earliest production of that distinguished dramatist’ (Palmerin having first appeared in 1602), and published the twelve-line text, which had been ‘unnoticed by bibliographers’ (pp. 205–06). Indeed Dyce had missed it in his Webster (1830), a fact that Collier gallantly (and for once) omitted to signal. The Bridgewater Catalogue (as it is usually cited) formed the basis of Collier’s later Bibliographical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865), which reprints every entry with little or no revision; hence its descriptions have come into widespread currency, o en independent of the Bridgewater copies, nearly all of which are now in the Huntington Library. There are mercifully few ‘questioned data’ here, although sceptics might concentrate their fire on the reports of material away from Bridgewater House, much of it— though not so indicated—in the possession of the bibliographer himself. For John seized the chance to record, in this imposing cuckoo’s nest, such treasures of his own as Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe, 1595 (imperfect, but still one of three copies known, pp. 108–09); Love’s Complaints, 1597 (ex-Heber, pp. 174– 75); the 1629 Hero and Leander with its ‘particulars of Marlow’ (also ex-Heber, p. 190); and the manuscript of Thomas Lodge’s ‘The Poor Mans Comfort’ (sic, p. 170), which he had owned since at least 1820, and perhaps since 1816.142 The unique and heavily extracted ‘black-letter ballad by W. Turner’ (dated 1662, yet ‘written in the reign of James I’), mentioning the actor John Shanke and four pre-Restoration London playhouses, could very well raise eyebrows, especially as its title is given here as The Common Cries of London Town, and in the revised HEDP (1879) as Turner’s Dish of Stuff, but it is also genuine, and also from Collier’s collection.143 Father Hubburds Tales (1604), another plum from Heber Part IV, served for comparison, at some length, with the Bridgewater copy of The Ant and the Nightingale (1604), which Collier convinced himself was an abridged second edition, under a new title, of his own prize (pp. 199–200). The

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142. Collier mentioned the manuscript in The Poetical Decameron, calling it ‘The Poore Mans Legacie’ (the correct title is ‘The Poore Mans Talentt’), and saying that he had purchased it at the Duke of Norfolk’s sales (1816–17); if so, it was not named in Evans’s catalogues. The manuscript is now in the Folger Library; Collier’s claim that the covering letter is in Lodge’s autograph has been rejected, but this was probably an (optimistic) honest mistake all along (see QD A3.1). 143. It passed from Collier to Frederic Ouvry and remains unique, teste Wing. The two titles are for parts I and II.


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Ant is in fact the earlier of the two versions, as Dyce, to whom John gave a transcript, demonstrated in 1840 (Middleton, v:549); but the additions in Father Hubburd are indeed the most interesting part of the text. Collier’s other Middleton rarity, The Black Book (1604), rated a mention (p. 200), as did his 1604 Pasquill’s Jests (p. 227) and the satires of William Goddard (pp. 194, 226), although the last had presumably by now passed to William Henry Miller, and no great fuss was made over it. What excited suspicion, however, or may yet deserve it, were descriptions of seven other items, only one of which was demonstrably in Collier’s possession. Most of these must be genuine, like the Derby masque by John Marston (pp. 192–93; now Huntington MS EL 34 B9), the letter of Sir Francis Bryan (p. 298, ‘preserved’, but not at Bridgewater House), and the six lines of laborious verse by William Lithgow penned in the Egerton copy of his 1623 Painful Peregrination (pp. 168–69).144 All are illustrated in the Bridgewater Catalogue with woodengraved facsimiles of their holograph text—we may recall Collier’s insistence to John Murray on such work for HEDP—and we can appreciate, from the process, that the engraver required tracings of the originals, or the originals themselves: nearly all of them, to the best of our knowledge, came from material at Bridgewater House or in Collier’s personal possession. Thus the presentation copy of Chapman’s Homer Prince of Poets (the first twelve books of the Iliad, 1609?), with its ten-line inscription to Sir Henry Cro s reproduced at p. 53, has provoked some curiosity, if not disbelief, for the volume itself has proved hard to locate.145 An ‘extant letter’ of the courtier-poet Sir Edward Dyer (envoi, p. 294) is not immediately to be found, but is not otherwise suspect; and an inscription by the drab-age poet George Turberville facsimiled ‘from the title-page of a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Works, fol. 1557, which had once belonged to him’ (p. 262), was unavailable to W. W. Greg in 1932. Greg conceded, however, that ‘it seems to be in the same hand’ as another acknowledged Turberville autograph.146 He may have overlooked (for he does not mention) Collier’s own later profession of doubt, as expressed in BARB (ii:453), where the inscription is described as ‘in the handwriting of a George Turbervyle’, with a note that ‘Turberville . . . is not an uncommon name in the west of England’.147 144. The last looks at first highly suspicious, but it matches almost precisely the embellishment in the British Library copy of the same book (1045.b.28), so that the ‘new point in [Lithgow’s] history’ adduced by Collier, and still in 1865 awaiting use ‘by a highly competent authority in Scotland’ (BARB, i:464), ought to be taken seriously. 145. The book had appeared at auction in 1834, however, and the style and appearance of the inscription remain heavily in its favour. Collier owned it himself; see QD A27a.2 for further discussion. 146. Greg 1932, no. 98, recorded only from the Bridgewater Catalogue tracing. Collier inserted the title-page itself in his extra-illustrated 1879 HEDP, and it is now Folger MS X.d.459 (16). 147. A different sort of challenge emerges at p. 63, from a note on the Bridgewater copy of


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There remains one serious problem, itself a new sort of forgery. Collier’s casual attributions of works signed with initials (like ‘W. S.’ for Shakespeare, otherwise Skipwith) were for the most part presented as speculative. But in the Bridgewater Catalogue the case for another trio of works commands some scrutiny, as it was more aggressively made. In HEDP (iii:151–53) John had described and extracted a unique black-letter poem at Bridgewater House, The Debate between Pride and Lowliness by ‘F. T.’ (1577?), from which, as he rightly observed, Robert Greene took more than a few hints toward his prose satire, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). Collier overstated his case against Greene somewhat in 1831 (A Quip was, ‘in a great degree, a plagiarism from [the] older poem’), and in ensuing notices of The Debate went even further: Greene was ‘a mere plagiary, having borrowed the whole design, much of the execution, and some of the very words of [the poem]’ (Bridgewater Catalogue, p. 313), and finally, ‘a more wholesale or barefaced piece of plagiarism is not, perhaps, to be pointed out in our literature’.148 Commentators on Greene have reacted against so dismissive a characterization of A Quip, which is a er all amusing and lively, while The Debate is comparatively tedious,149 but Collier was bent here on magnifying his own novelty (‘this unique and excellent poem’), not on doing justice to Greene. Although anonymity is always unappealing, he did not hazard a guess about ‘F. T.’ in HEDP; six years later, however, the attribution was there for the making: ‘on the title-page . . . beside the printed F. T., are the initials F. Th. Thomas Churchyard’s Good Will (1604): Collier mentions in passing ‘another piece by Churchyard, dated, like the present, 1604’, as the old versifier’s penultimate publication, A Blessed Balm to Search and Salve Sedition. This description, repeated in BARB, i:139–40, corresponds to no listing in today’s STC, and sceptics might accuse Collier of an invention. But in fact A Blessed Balm (1604) was recorded by William Oldys as among the Harleian pamphlets, together with another now-unknown pamphlet, A Paean Triumphal (1603), both with ‘written by Thomas Churchyard, Esq.’ on their title-pages (Harleian Miscellany [1813], x:461; Oldys’s no. 526); and although neither pamphlet may now be extant, Oldys’s description of the first was echoed by Ritson (Bibliotheca Poetica [1802], p. 168), by Bliss (twice, Athenae Oxoniensis [1813] and Bibliographical Miscellanies [1813], p. 45), by Lowndes (1857), and by Hazlitt (1867). A. G. Chester (1937, p. 182) dismissed all the records from Ritson onward as ‘sufficiently precise to prove the existence of [both] books’, but not to attribute them to Thomas Churchyard. Yet Oldys’s original description, which Chester apparently never consulted, leaves no doubt that both effusions were Churchyard’s (Oldys quotes an autobiographical passage in the preface to A Blessed Balm), and although they are now ‘lost’, their eighteenth-century reports—from which Collier’s notice obviously derives—remain honest. 148. The Debate between Pride and Lowliness, ed. Collier (Shakespeare Society, 1841), p. vi. The accusation is reiterated in BARB, ii:427–32; in Collier’s edition of A Quip (1867); and in the revised HEDP (1879, ii:525–28). It is echoed by Charles Hindley in his own reprint of A Quip (1871) and in The Old Book Collector’s Miscellany (1873). 149. Edwin H. Miller (1953) thought that ‘Collier’s statements must be drastically qualified’, but still conceded (in a bewildering mock calculation) that ‘forty percent of Greene’s tract is directly attributable to his predecessor’s poem’; i.e., in the 92 pages of Grosart’s edition of A Quip (Works of Greene, 1881–86) there are parallels on ‘only’ 36 pages.


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in the hand-writing of Francis Thynne, the antiquary and herald; and there is no doubt that the volume was his property, and little doubt that it was [of ] his authorship’ (p. 311). Now it is just possible that in 1831 Collier did not connect the entry ‘F. Th.’ with Thynne—a notable legal-literary worthy well treated by Bliss in his Athenae Oxoniensis—and came only later to compare its hand with that of a dedicatory manuscript by Thynne in the Bridgewater archives (reproduced, p. 312); but the inscription did pass unrecorded in HEDP, and scholars have long doubted its authenticity. W. C. Hazlitt in 1867 noted that ‘the [MS] appears to be in a modern hand, attempting an imitation of old writing’, and F. J. Furnivall in 1875 did ‘not doubt that it is a modern forgery’.150 Having established with ‘little doubt’ that The Debate was Thynne’s work, Collier rashly endowed his new poet with two more Bridgewater books: a ‘clever and entertaining production’ called News from the North (1585), ‘collected and gathered by T. F. Student’ (pp. 217–19); and an anonymous Pleasant Dialogue or Disputation between the Cap and the Head (1575). His arguments were lighthearted indeed, with ‘Student’ supposedly referring to Thynne’s place at Lincoln’s Inn, and the signatory initials described, arbitrarily, as ‘reversed’. The Cap and the Head, on no external evidence whatever, was characterized simply as ‘very much in Thynne’s manner’—a manner established only by the two prior attributions. By 1841 Collier would attribute News from the North to Thynne ‘without any hesitation’, while a ‘strong similarity of style’ still linked The Cap and the Head to his putative oeuvre; and in 1865 a new, firm attribution joined them: ‘We feel so confident from the initials F. T., and still more from the style and character of this production’, he wrote, ‘that we have not hesitated to put it under his name’ (BARB, ii:432–33), claiming for Thynne a humorous dialogue on worldly misfortunes, clumsily titled The Case Is Altered. How? Ask Dalio and Millo (1604). None of these increasingly interdependent attributions has convinced posterity, and they remain characteristic examples of Collier’s lifelong enthusiasm for pinning names to initials. But if the title-page inscription ‘F. Th.’ on the Bridgewater Debate is indeed Collier’s physical forgery, it is also the first of a new breed, inspired perhaps by such genuine scribbles as Sir George Buc’s on George a Green and Locrine. These will always be brief—unassuming in style, slight in content, and quick and easy to produce—and inevitably controversial: nightmares, no less, for latter-day investigators to approve or condemn. Simultaneously with his work on the Heber books and the Bridgewater archives and library, Collier pursued several independent projects. Chief among

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150. Hazlitt, Handbook, p. 607; Francis Thynne, Animadversions upon . . . Chaucer, ed. G. H. Kingsley, rev. F. J. Furnivall (EETS, 1875), p. cxxvii. Furnivall went on to say that ‘the imitator was no doubt the forger of the other notorious Bridgewater-Library documents’.


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them, extending his claims on the English drama both forward and backward, were a continuation of HEDP to about 1723, and a series of private editions of pre-Elizabethan scriptural plays. Collier’s history of the late Commonwealth and Restoration stage, which survives in two manuscript dra s, one of them more or less final but still fairly rough in appearance, has never been published.151 Some of his notes toward it are on paper watermarked 1830, and one stray insertion is dated 10 March 1840, but if John ever initiated plans to print it with Murray or anyone else, we are unaware of them: earlier we speculated that the publication in 1833 of John Genest’s ten-volume Account of the English Stage . . . 1660 to 1830 in effect pre-empted the modest market for such a chronology. It is not our primary task to identify pitfalls in an unpublished work, but had this ‘Continuation’ appeared in its time, a number of fabrications would be added to those we discuss: Hazleton Spencer in 1927 showed that at least two of the theatrical poems of the 1660s offered here have been revised between dra s, in a manner betraying their authorship—a reminder of the incautious Churchyard fabrication of 1816—and other statements and reports, including a repetition of the Shirley father/son canard, are rendered highly implausible by contemporary evidence. A ‘dra agreement in my hands’ between Thomas Killigrew and three actors is described in two contradictory ways, and has never been seen, while ‘some wretched doggerels [on Nan Marshall] . . . which I detected upon a loose piece of paper . . . at Bridgewater House’ are likewise unlikely and lost, as is a ballad of 1671 ‘in my possession . . . shewing how one Tim Twiford, a player of the King’s company was carried to the Marshalsea, for money he owed to his Laundress, and what he did there’; this last is described by Collier as ‘one of the most disgusting productions in point of grossness ever written’, and represented only by its innocuous conclusion. We have noted, but not sought to authenticate or discredit, indifferent verses on Thomas Betterton (‘the original is in my possession . . . [and] not ill written’), on King Charles and Moll Davies (‘which I met with among a quantity of unexplored M.S.S. at Bridgewater House’), on Nell Gwynn (‘among the miscellaneous manuscripts belonging to the family of the Duke of Sutherland’, which ‘I found’), on Aphra Behn (‘from my M.S.’), and on William Mountfort, the actor-playwright (‘the original is in my possession’).

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151. Collier’s incomplete manuscript was lot 299 in his 1884 sale, probably ending then, as now, in mid-sentence. It is today in the Harvard Theatre Collection (MS Thr 13; bequest of Evert Jansen Wendell, 1918). There is one fairly finished section, which is duplicated in part by a dra that ends with text concerning events of autumn 1663; some portions of this have been cut out and pasted to the later version. Both MSS are written on the rectos only of unwatermarked bifolia, with notes and other additions on pasted-on slips. The pillaged dra is paginated 1–105 (some pages are missing), and the fair copy—which is itself mutilated in parts—is paginated 1–471, again with some pages missing.


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Collier’s copy of The Stage-Beaux Tossed in a Blanket, corrected and annotated (‘judging from a comparison of hand-writing’) by its target, the arch-enemy of the stage Jeremy Collier, has not subsequently turned up, but may of course have embodied a genuine commentary optimistically ascribed. In 1835–36 Collier edited and had privately printed, by the younger Frederick Shoberl, four English plays of the fourteenth and fi eenth centuries, and one earlier dialogue. His choice fell upon hitherto unpublished texts, mostly from manuscripts noticed in HEDP, and he imposed the label ‘miracle plays’ upon all of them, as he had done four years before, deliberately parting terminological ways with his predecessors Warton, Percy, Thomas Hawkins, and Malone.152 The first, issued in January 1835, was The Harrowing of Hell from BL Harl. MS 2253, not really a play at all, but a mid-thirteenth-century dialogue he had known at least since March 1829, when he asked Frederic Madden for some palaeographical help with it.153 This was followed in the same month by The Betrothal of Mary from the Coventry or N-town cycle (Collier called it The Marriage of the Virgin), again based on a British Museum manuscript, Cotton Vespasian D. VIII; and by 5 March he had added, from the great Wakefield manuscript lent him by Peregrine Towneley, the Secunda Pastorum or ‘Second Shepherds’ Play’, which he titled The Adoration of the Shepherds. In November–December he issued The Advent of Antichrist, employing the Duke of Devonshire’s manuscript of the Chester mystery cycle, and finally, in April 1836, the so-called ‘Dublin’ Abraham and Isaac (Collier’s The Sacrifice of Abraham), a mid-fi eenthcentury Northampton play whose original, in Archbishop Ussher’s library at Dublin, was transcribed for Collier by David Laing, and checked by the Trinity College librarian James H. Todd. To the last text Collier adjoined a general title (Five Miracle Plays, or Scriptural Dramas), a brief introduction, and a four-page glossary, so that the few possessors of sets of the five could now bind them together. The significance and usefulness of this five-part exercise is open to debate. True, each text was set in print for the first time, and the publication of one of them, the Secunda Pastorum—probably the best-known, today, of all cycle plays —was something of a literary event. But the context of the cycles is wanting, and for that of Secunda Pastorum a full edition of the thirty-two-part Towneley Manuscript was already well under way: James Gordon produced this for the 152. HEDP, ii:123–24. Collier’s use of ‘miracle’ (rather than ‘mystery’) as a generic term for early English religious drama—not simply for the corpus of saints’ plays—retained currency as late as A. W. Pollard’s anthology of 1890; but now we would probably revert to ‘mysteries’ for four of them, and ‘dialogue’ (or ‘estrif ’ or ‘débat’, as in Chambers 1903, i:81) for the fih. 153. JPC to Madden, BL MS Egerton 2838, fol. 9. In HEDP Collier called this the ‘oldest MS. of a Miracle-play in English’; there are in fact several other more obviously dramatic versions of The Harrowing, all a century or more later than the dialogue Collier prints.


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Surtees Society in 1836, only months a er Collier’s private edition of the star piece. James Orchard Halliwell and Thomas Wright would provide the same for the entire Ludus Coventriae and the Chester cycle within five and ten years respectively, and David Laing knew of a second manuscript of The Harrowing of Hell in Scotland, which he edited at once, and obligingly printed off in a format uniform with Collier’s, ‘so that both might be bound together’.154 Nor was Collier’s editorial expertise with such early material quite what it might have been: Madden, offended by the ‘many errors’ in The Harrowing of Hell, sent him a long list of corrigenda, and was further outraged when Collier pertly defended himself. ‘I can easily forgive a man’s carelessness’, Madden fumed, ‘but when a man adds ignorance and obstinacy to it—I cannot forgive it. . . . It is really disheartening to find men like Collier so self-opinionated as not to acknowledge a mistake & feel obliged to the man who has in the most friendly manner, pointed it out’ (Madden Diary, 24 January 1835). The Keeper’s principal point was that Collier had badly misdated the Harleian manuscript, and that Laing’s parallel edition of the Auchinleck manuscript compounded the offence by repeating Collier’s opinion, with the ‘false assertion, that the Auchinleck MS. was the more ancient’. ‘I feel quite angry, & quite sick of pseudo-antiquaries!’ he complained on 21 November; ‘It is of no use wasting one’s time and knowledge upon blockheads, who neither appreciate the information given, or have candor enough to make use of it.’ Madden’s habitual, o en near-hysterical intolerance of error or contradiction should not altogether blast Collier’s achievement in Five Miracle Plays; but their texts, uncharacteristically archaic for Collier, indeed betray ignorance of both matter and script. All might still be excused had their publication effected what Collier told Amyot and the Society of Antiquaries he desired to do, namely ‘make apparent to those not conversant with a subject which has occupied so much of my attention’ the value and importance of ‘that singular & neglected department of our literature’.155 The manner of publication, however, raises doubts of its own. Collier chose, for the first time in his life, to emulate the exclusive programmes of Egerton Brydges, Haslewood, Utterson, and their like— he who had as a young man bitterly complained about the cost and artificial scarcity of the Lee Priory Press publications and Dibdin’s luxurious volumes— limiting each of the five separata to ‘only twenty-five Copies printed’, and therefore the assembled Five Miracle Plays to no more, and inevitably somewhat 154. See the preface to Laing’s edition, from the Auchinleck Manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh. On 23 November 1835 Collier thanked Laing for twenty-three copies, saying, ‘I have been sending about copies of it to such of my friends as had before received my impression from the Harleian MS.’; EUL MS La.IV.17. 155. JPC to Amyot, in a letter presenting the first play to the Society of Antiquaries, 5 January 1835, bound in the society’s copy, Cab.Lib.F.


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fewer, than the initial press-runs. It is true that he seems never to have sold copies—as he had the Bridgewater House booklets, through Rodd—and that he paid for his whim, perhaps from the last of Jane Collier’s legacy: ‘a trifling expence’, he told Amyot at first, although he terminated the series, reluctantly, for not being ‘a little richer’.156 Yet his stingy circulation of his labours could hardly have been expected to influence the general public or elicit other than private response. No reviews of any of the individua or of the 1836 collection are known to us, and Thomas Amyot quite rightly reproved his friend for his petulant ‘reproach’ of April 1836. ‘Only twenty-five copies of each of the Dramas have been printed’, Collier had written in a two-page Introduction printed with The Sacrifice of Abraham, and even this very limited impression has been found more than equal to the demand in this country, from any interest taken in the important and curious subject. The Editor will, therefore, have it in his power to comply with the wishes of several foreign universities, especially in Germany, where the origin and progress of English Dramatic Poetry is considered an inquiry worthy of zealous, learned, and accurate investigation. ‘I don’t like querulousness in general’, Amyot replied, declaring this particular specimen quite uncalled for. What proof have you that in this Country there is no ‘demand’ for copies of a work privately printed? Had they been published for sale, & the publick had not bought them, the remark might have been called for. But in this case how can it be ascertained? Are parties who may be anxious to possess Copies to beg you to supply them? Surely you would think them impudent Beggars, more especially if they were Strangers to you, the Impression being known to be so limited! Even your Friends may not like to ask for them, thinking that you would give them Copies, if you wished, or found it convenient to do so. I think I could name at a breath at least twenty five Collectors, & Book Antiquaries, who would be delighted beyond measure to divide your twenty five Copies among them. They would each say ‘try me’, if they dared! You surely underrate the value of your own labours, & the estimation in which they are held by those who have the good luck to benefit by them! 157

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156. JPC to Amyot, 4 August 1836, PML MA 3428. Clearly, copies went to the Society of Antiquaries, Dyce, Amyot, Madden, Egerton, and Devonshire; Collier still had copies of all five to give Halliwell in January 1840. Only one copy of the assembly was listed in Collier’s 1884 sale (lot 507, now British Library). 157. Amyot to JPC, 6 August 1836, BL Add. MS 33,963, fols. 47–48.


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Just why Collier passed up a chance of publishing his collection for a readership wider than friends and fellow clubmen remains puzzling, although of course he may have explored the possibility and found no encouragement: Amyot’s ‘Collectors, & Book Antiquaries’ may not have been, a er all, his idea of an audience. But in 1859 he described Five Miracle Plays to a correspondent as ‘really the most valuable of my privately printed books’ 158—was ‘valuable’ an unintentional ambiguity? One of his despairing concessions to ‘foreign universities’ may have reached an appropriate reader, however, by 1838. The obscure William Marriott of Basel (‘Ph. Dr.’) in that year published the first anthology (saving Collier’s own private assembly) of English mystery or scriptural plays, A Collection of English Miracle-Plays or Mysteries . . . to Which Is Prefixed an Historical View of this Description of Plays (Basel, 1838).159 He complimented Collier above all others on pioneering the study of such drama (‘though his remarks are unfortunately too much scattered in his excellent work’), and apparently copied his text of the Chester Antichrist from Collier’s. But lamenting the scarcity of Philip Bliss’s Bibliographical Memoranda (1816), published in one hundred copies, he expressed a complaint that a younger John Payne might have shared: ‘it is much to be regretted that this custom of reprinting only a very limited number of scarce books, oen only twenty-five [our italics], prevails so generally, as it tends to make these works excessively expensive, and very difficult to procure’ (p. lxiii). Lesser endeavours in the mid-1830s included a paper on Sir Francis Bryan, the sixteenth-century poet and courtier, delivered to the Society of Antiquaries on 10 December 1835 and published in Archaeologia the following year. This short essay, which cogently explained a passage in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s satire ‘How to Use the Court’ as relating to Sir Francis Bryan and his first marriage, was John’s first contribution to the society’s ultra-respectable journal. None of Bryan’s biographers, Collier asserted, was aware of his early marriage to the wealthy but superannuated widow of John Fortescue, evidence for which was ‘contained in an original document in my hands’, a pleading of 1526 against Bryan in Chancery.160 Neither the document nor Collier’s inference about Wyatt’s allusion has ever been questioned (see Hyder Rollins’s edition of Tottel’s Miscellany [1965], ii:220), for nothing in the former seems suspiciously

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158. JPC to W. Wardlaw Reid, 22 June 1859, Folger MS Y.c.1055 (164). 159. He is mentioned, with no detail, by J. O. Halliwell in his Coventry Mysteries (Shakespeare Society, 1841). 160. The document was part of the Ouvry sale, lot 1082, and is now item 8 in BL Egerton MS 2603. Collier’s rendering of the claimant’s surname is correct; the British Museum cataloguer mistranscribed ‘ffiloll’ as ‘Scholl’.


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provocative. But Bryan’s marriage to the widow Fortescue was not quite a discovery: it had been known from another contemporary source since the publication in 1778 of Philip Morant’s magisterial History of Essex (ii:117). Reviews there were no doubt many, though as ever anonymous and ephemeral. A severe account of the Bodleian catalogue of Edmond Malone’s books in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1836 upset Philip Bliss, who ‘conjectures [it] to be written by Collier’, Madden reported on 9 May—and indeed Collier’s autograph dra of the review survives (Folger MS W.b.67 [17–33]). Collier questioned, quite rightly, several principles of presentation (no alphabetical record of titles by initialized authors, no note of what is in verse, no consistency in listing printers and publishers), objected to the awkward format (folio) of the catalogue, and the long delay (twenty years) in its preparation, and aired an embarrassing number of attributional howlers; Bliss ‘accused him of acting very unfairly, since previous to the Catalogue’s being printed off, Dr Bandinel had corresponded with Mr C. on the subject, and had offered to add any corrections he might take the trouble to point out’ (Madden Diary, 9 May). But of course Malone was a favourite target for John, and if scoring off the Oxford cataloguer meant scoring off the donor-collector (‘it is very possible that too much reliance has sometimes been placed upon the information contained in the MS. notes inserted in the volumes’), he might well have relished the opportunity. A similarly harsh ‘retrospective review’ of Thomas Park’s Heliconia (1815), itemizing his errors in reprinting The Phoenix Nest (1593) and supplying the six original stanzas omitted by Park, appeared two years later in the same magazine (September 1838). Collier had first mentioned these editorial lapses in Heber IV, but now gave them in merciless detail, this time over his initials, ‘J. P. C.’ More positive were brief notices in the Morning Chronicle of two poems by Leigh Hunt, although Collier professed to take no pride in such work: ‘I am ashamed always of my newspaper criticism’, he told Hunt in September 1837, ‘but many are fathered upon me for which I am not responsible. The clauses respecting bastardy in the new Poor Laws [i.e., that mothers were principally responsible for maintaining children born out of wedlock] are of no use to me. I am obliged o en to keep other peoples illegitimates’.161 Such anonymous notices in the Chronicle and the Observer were essentially puffs, although an element of criticism might enter in: Hunt’s poem ‘Blue Stocking Revels’, for example, was ‘playful’, ‘graceful’, ‘familiar and sprightly’, ‘but we cannot help lamenting that a man of Leigh Hunt’s real and admitted genius for poetry of the best kind should

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161. JPC to Hunt, 3 September [1837], BL Add. MS 38,524, fols. 151–52; see also Collier’s letter of 16 July, Add. MS 31,109, fols. 178–79.


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have employed his time—we must out with it, in spite of all reproach—upon persons and works in some instances, we think, unworthy of his pen’ (Morning Chronicle, 7 July 1837). They were also clearly space fillers between news and other commentary or advertisements, and subject to being cut when challenged by text more emergent—so that early editions, now perished, may have contained what surviving runs do not preserve. On 17 August 1840, for example, Crabb Robinson recorded ‘a very puff by Collier’ in the Chronicle of his laborious Exposure of Misrepresentations Contained in the Preface to the Correspondence of William Wilberforce, ‘tolerably well done, indeed very well done as a puff—a little fault would have been an improvement’, but this is not to be found in extant file-copies consulted by us. Collier may also have carried out his intention of writing for one of Frederick Shoberl’s periodicals, for on 5 March 1835 he promised, ‘You shall have the Theatrical Article on Monday’; but we have not identified this in print.162 But undoubtedly the most curious venue for his literary journalism in the mid-1830s was the Carlton Chronicle, a hard-line Tory weekly of 1836–37 that aspired to unite ‘sound Conservative doctrines’ in politics with ‘fair critical opinion’ in literature, like the legendary Anti-Jacobin of 1798–1810. At least two pieces by Collier appear in its short-lived run: an obsequious review of Lord Francis Egerton’s translation of Beer’s Paria (13 August 1836),163 and an extended (anonymous) article ‘On the Rime Burlesche, or Piacevole of the Italians’ (12 November 1836), which essentially recycled the NMM article of January 1832. Collier did add one fresh verse-translation, from Giovanni Mauro’s ‘In lode delle menzogne’, and revised most of the others, notably the whimsical couplets of Giovanni della Casa ‘on the subject of names’—which may have seemed newly relevant to the anonymous and ageing translator: ‘His name was Giovanni, or John, which in Italy has even a more common sound and more vulgar application than in England’, wrote Collier, ‘where it is certainly common and vulgar enough. The bishop [i.e., Della Casa] seems to have been of the opinion of Socrates, as cited by Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (we have lost the particular reference), that it was a serious duty on the part of parents to give their children well-sounding names.’ John Payne at forty-seven, the son of John Dyer and grandson of the apothecary John, renders ‘John’ Della Casa of the sixteenth century as follows:

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162. FF MS 239. An article headed ‘Present State of Theatricals in France and England’ appeared in vol. 15 of the Foreign Quarterly Review (July 1835, pp. 266–88), but does not sound as if it was written by Collier; neither does he appear to be the author of a discussion of several volumes of ‘outlines’ designed and engraved by Moritz Retzsch (ibid., vol. 18 [October 1837], pp. 63–88). 163. Collier acknowledges this in a note written on a letter from Egerton dated 19 December 1836, Folger MS Y.d.6 (100).


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If I were younger by some twenty years, I would be re-baptized, beyond a doubt, To change a name which every where one hears. My business I can hardly go about, In fact I cannot any where be seen, But five or six at least will bawl it out, And when I turn, it is not I they mean. ’Tis quite a nuisance to have such a name, And a disgrace too, and has always been, Nightmen and scavengers have just the same, Link boys and chimney-sweepers, shoeblacks, too; And though ’tis mine, yet how am I to blame? I’d rather be a German, or a Jew, Esteeming it by far a less disgrace: I should rejoice to be Bartholomew, Matthew, or Simon with a hatchet-face, Or any thing but what I am, in short. John, John, John, John! how cruel is thy case! Those who baptize us, really, should not sport With children’s future peace in such a way, But be discreet and choose their names from court. All ye that love me truly, never say My name is John, or by it to me speak: Oh, call me any name but that, I pray! Some may insist ’tis taken from the Greek, Latin, or Hebrew: I their pains commend, But what avails the etymon to seek, When ’tis a name that must all ears offend? And no man willingly, methinks, would choose To have it own’d by relative or friend. Abridgement makes it worse: whiche’er you use, Johnny or John, or Jacky, or plain Jack, It matters not; and well may all abuse What only fits this world’s poor drudge or hack.164

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164. The NMM text (which may go back to the early 1820s) is now considerably altered and improved, and the incipit (‘If I were younger by some twenty years’) takes on a more personal significance. The final four lines, with their strikingly appropriate conclusion, had read (1832): ‘You can’t abridge it; and whiche’er you use, / Whether you make it Johnny or plain Jack, / ’Tis only worse; and well may all abuse / What only fits some miserable hack.’ Another, very different anonymous rendition of Della Casa’s verses appeared in Leigh Hunt’s Monthly Repository in August 1837, pp. 152–53.


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‘Poor Drudge or Hack’ Indeed Collier’s newspaper responsibilities had increased and diversified since the Reform Bill and HEDP. Under the laissez-faire proprietorship of William Clement the Morning Chronicle had lost ground to its rival dailies for more than a decade, until its circulation in 1834 was estimated (admittedly by a hostile witness) at not more than eight hundred. In the spring of that year Clement, who had paid Perry’s executors £42,000 for the paper, disposed of it for £16,500 to a consortium headed by John Easthope, a successful stockbroker and rising Whig politician. Easthope proved a conspicuously hands-on proprietor, with every intention of restoring the Chronicle to its liberal ascendancy under Perry, and he soon shook up the business as well as the staff. Some £10,000 was expended by 1838 on machinery and workspace,165 and in January 1835 a thriceweekly ‘branch paper’, the Evening Chronicle, was established: The Times and the Morning Herald already had similar ‘sisters’.166 While Easthope retained dour John Black as chief editor through ten uneasy years, he worried about keeping reporters ‘up to the mark’, and hired a number of new faces, mostly with literary credentials, to work with, or challenge the veterans.167 Among the earliest recruits were Charles Mackay, later a best-selling poet and author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions; 168 and Thomas Beard, a self-effacing young journalist, who in November 1834 brought in his friend Charles Dickens to join him, at five guineas a week, among the cadre of twelve parliamentary reporters. Dickens had served his apprenticeship in the gallery in 1831, with his uncle John Barrow’s weekly Mirror of Parliament, but this was his first taste of an ‘annual engagement’, and his first stint with a daily newspaper.169 A contemporary admirer declared that within a few months at the Chronicle Dickens was ‘universally reputed to be the rapidest and most accurate shorthand-writer in the gallery’ (Ackroyd 1990, p. 157), but mythopoeia may be at work here, and the opinion

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165. So says James Grant, in The Great Metropolis (1838), pp. 42–43, and the conditions certainly needed improving: in November 1832 an article on ‘Newspaper Reporting’ in the Metropolitan (vol. 5, pp. 178–80) described the parliamentary reporters’ workroom at the Chronicle as particularly malodorous, with a ‘pestiferous stench . . . which exceeds that of a dissecting room’, made up of ‘the effluvia of a steam engine, a gasometer, and the two furnaces belonging to them . . . the only window by which [the reporters] are ventilated, or receive direct light, opens over an uncovered drain’. 166. The Evening Mail and the Evening Herald. Other evening papers were the Sun, True Sun, Globe, and Courier (all Whig or Liberal) and the Tory Standard; see Charles Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections (1877), i:78; and Bourne 1887, ii:95–96. 167. See Bostick 1979, p. 52. 168. Mackay’s memoirs of the Chronicle in this period (Forty Years’ Recollections and Through the Long Day [1887]) are informative but somewhat undependable in terms of sequence and date. 169. See Ackroyd 1990, p. 159, quoting a ‘bitter’ reflection of Charles’s father.


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of the old hands, like Collier, has not been recorded. At about the same time (autumn 1834) Easthope engaged George Hogarth of Edinburgh, a reputable music critic and composer, to head up the theatrical and musical department of the Chronicle, and by January 1835 had installed him as editor of the new ‘Evening’ edition, with a brief to print ‘original . . . articles of a political or literary character’.170 Hogarth sought contributions—commissioned above and beyond the Chronicle’s stipend—from Dickens as ‘Boz’, and the two became friends; Beard, ‘who always ran in harness with Mr. Dickens whenever there was special or extraordinary work’, remained intimate; and when in April 1836 Dickens married George Hogarth’s daughter Catherine (and, some would say, his daughter Georgina as well), Beard served as best man.171 Collier of course knew his gallery fellows, and remained useful to Dickens a er the novelist parted ways with Easthope late in 1836. What he thought of Hogarth, however, in his ‘theatrical and musical’ capacity, or Hogarth of him, remains unknown, and that is a pity. The internal organization of the Chronicle, traditionally flexible, turned almost chaotic under Easthope’s early proprietorship, when abrupt changes in the working hierarchy reflected, or seemed to do, his own turbulent personality. In particular the post of ‘sub-editor’, the effective manager of the paper in its nightly production, rotated among a number of candidates, none obviously qualified. This was a ‘place of great trust and responsibility’, as Thomas Noon Talfourd described it, whose occupant ‘had the power of ruining [the newspaper] irretrievably if he thought fit’; such a man should be at the office (a printer deposed) ‘early in the a ernoon, at the latest seven in the evening, and the earliest time he should go away was two or three o’clock in the morning’.172 John Hill Powell, in whose civil action against Black and the Chronicle these testimonies emerged, was among the parliamentary reporters of 1833, advancing to co-sub-editor by December 1834. From April to September 1835 he served as sub-editor on his own, but was then abruptly discharged on grounds of ‘misconduct’—in effect irregular and untimely attendance, particularly on Sunday nights, when he had to be fetched from Goodwin’s oyster shop in a state ‘as if he had been aboard a steamboat and enjoying himself ’, and required soda-water to ‘bring him round’. A Court of Common Pleas jury awarded Powell £147 (fourteen weeks’ salary) in damages for breach of engagement, but his place as sub-editor was taken by Hogarth, who had also shared with him the co-editorship of the Evening Chronicle at its inception. Hogarth in

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170. Mackay, Forty Years’ Recollections, i:78, misdating this to the summer of 1837. 171. See ibid., p. 82; Walter Dexter, ed., Charles Dickens to His Oldest Friend (1932); and Ackroyd 1990, pp. 153–54. 172. From the report of the action of John Hill Powell against John Black in the Court of Common Pleas, 9 July 1836 (The Times, 11 July); see also Carlton 1948.


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turn was ‘displaced under somewhat mysterious circumstances’, Mackay recollected, ‘which I was never able to understand’,173 and returned to his specialities of music and drama, later following Dickens to the Daily News. Another Scot, Thomas Fraser—subsequently ninth and last Laird of Eskdale, Inverness—took over the vexed post in September 1836, and held it for about a year before transferring to Paris as the Chronicle’s long-term correspondent there.174 Charles Mackay, Fraser’s assistant throughout his term, replaced him in the autumn of 1837, supposedly beating out Thackeray for the job (so he said fi y years later, which seems impossible). But Mackay was still only twenty-two years of age, and by October the chairs changed again. On 16 October 1837 Crabb Robinson called on Collier at the Chronicle office, and recorded in his diary that John ‘is become now Sub-editor to the Chron: and writes a good title. This is an advance in his situation. Perhaps he may one day succeed to Black.’ That Collier was now the successor to Mackay, Fraser, Hogarth, and Powell, the fi h sub-editor in two fraught years at the Chronicle, seems indicated, although Robinson’s terminology may be imprecise.175 John had described his own improved circumstances in a letter to his friend two weeks earlier, as ‘another partial change in my situation at the M. C. office’, without mentioning the title or its traditional executive responsibilities: ‘They have found out that I can write a little, & in a style not very usual in the paper, & accordingly my business is daily (when a fit subject offers) to give them something of my penmanship. You are aware that these matters are never talked of out of the office, & excepting to yourself (and more generally & again vocally to Amyot) I have mentioned the matter to nobody but my wife. . . . Do not think I make a needless fuss or secret about this matter, but at the office they are very particular in keeping their secrets’ (HCR Correspondence, 2 October 1837). Perhaps by mid-October John’s promotion to sub-editor was confirmed, but clearly what ‘they’—Easthope and Black—now required of him was his ‘penmanship’, not his administrative presence till two or three o’clock every morning.176 Indeed the fiery proprietor had already made political use of his man, taking Collier to Brighton to canvass with him in March 1837, when Robinson reported that ‘J. P. C. . . . is in favour’ with

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173. Through the Long Day, i:56. 174. Dickens, Letters, i:166n. 175. On 27 September 1836, while visiting Ramsgate, Robinson had walked with ‘Mr. Jones’ (very likely Edward Jones, the husband of one of Joshua Collier’s daughters), who ‘tells me that John C: is made Sub-editor of the Chronicle & as this must add to his income I rejoice at it’. Either Collier’s appointment was very temporary indeed—this was at the time when Hogarth gave way to Fraser—or Jones was confused. 176. In fact Collier wrote to Amyot on 2 October that while ‘I have more writing to do and more responsibility to incur . . . I get home at rather better hours than formerly’; Bodl. MS Eng.lett.d.219, fols. 57–58.


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‘his Master Easthope’; and by October ‘Easthope has so much friendship for J. P. C. that he has supplied means for apprenticing William [now aged sixteen] to be a civil engineer’, while John Pycro , aged eighteen, was engaged to ‘go into the gallery’ at about the same time, on a respectable £100 yearly (HCR Diary, 12 March and 26 October 1837). John Payne’s new politicization, campaigning for Easthope and turning out leading articles (unsigned) for the Chronicle—he later estimated that in two years he wrote ‘from 400 to 500 columns’ of these 177—did cause him concern on a social front. ‘My position is an odd one’, he told Robinson in November, ‘writing as I do for the M. C. (though under some trammels which ‘‘cramp my genius’’) and going in & out of such a high Tory’s house as Lord Francis Egerton’. Courageously, he made a clean breast of his activity to Egerton, admitting that ‘I was now politically connected with the M. C.’, and to his gratification Egerton did not seem to mind: indeed ‘it has made him rather more cordial than before’ (HCR Correspondence, 22 November 1837). John’s salary rose to £450 per annum, or eight guineas a week;178 and what with John Pycro ’s contributions, Devonshire’s stipend, and Egerton’s ad hoc largess, the Collier family income for once seemed almost satisfactory to Robinson, who kept a close watch on such matters.179 But as suddenly as he rose in the Chronicle hierarchy and pay-scale, John fell again, as mysteriously as Hogarth had done, and perhaps the victim of the same sort of proprietary caprice. At the outset of his advancement he had worried about Easthope’s volatile patronage: ‘I foresee that I shall have no easy task of it’, he confided to Robinson; ‘I wish to Heaven he would either not think for himself or think better. Besides, he is very opinionated’ (HCR Correspondence, 22 November 1837). Despite Easthope’s early gestures of friendship toward Collier’s family, the task evidently proved impossible, Robinson noting in June 1839 that John ‘has not maintained his political post on the Chronicle as triumphantly as I could have wished’ (HCR Diary, 30 June); and in 1846 Collier told John Walter that ‘Sir John Easthope [made a baronet in 1841] . . . dislikes me for controlling his ungovernable temper’.180 In fact Collier’s role as sub-editor (if 177. JPC to John Walter II, 3 September 1846, Walter Papers 300, TN