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II - Note on Rebecca Warner’s Original Letters (1817)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

David E. Shuttleton
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
John A. Dussinger
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Substantial extracts from six of Cheyne's letters to Richardson were printed in a miscellaneous volume of Original Letters (1817) edited by Rebecca Warner, for the Bath bookseller Richard Cruttwell. Warner, described on the title page as being ‘of Beech Cottage near Bath’, was a novelist and literary editor. The substantial subscription list to her novel Herbert Lodge; a New Forest Story (Bath and London, 1808) implies that she was well-connected in the Bath area, but it has been impossible to ascertain if she had any personal contact with the descendants of Richardson or Cheyne. Her extracts display a few minor variants from the transcriptions in Laing Mss III, 356, but these are largely omissions and she certainly provides no significant additional matter. The question of her access to any originals is complicated by the fact that nineteenth-century editing methods were cavalier.Warner tends to exclude paragraphs concerning gross bodily matters such as vomits. She dates Cheyne to Richardson, 24 August 1741 as ‘14’ where the date is very clear in Richardson's copybook; alternatively, in the text of the same letter, where the copybook has ‘to a rakeish and uncontroverted <xxxxx 1 word>’, Warner has the very plausible reading ‘to a rakish or unconverted infidel’ (but then inexplicably excludes ‘short’ from the phrase ‘short episodes’ in the rest of the sentence). The letter Warner dates ‘Sept 23 1742’ (pp. 78–82), is letter LXX in the copybook where it is clearly dated Sept 5 1742. In Cheyne to Richardson, 17 September 1742, Warner has ‘Vailante’s’, where the copybook has ‘vailiants’ (which Mullet corrects to ‘Vaillant’s). It is not therefore impossible that Warner or Cruttwell (or their own copyist?) had sight of Cheyne's original letters, but it is notable that Warner reproduces the additional letter, probably by William Leake, describing Cheyne's death which is only known from Laing Mss III, 356. Although the annotations on the flyleaf indicate that by 1817 the copybook had already passed out of the novelist's family into the hands of Dr Sigmond and been sold on with his library in 1806, it is possible that it was in the hands of Cruttwell in 1817 (or that Phillips struck a publishing deal with Cruttwell).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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