Poems. Slipcased with 8775.
1865 Manuscript of Her First Book
With an Extra-Illustrated Copy of the 13th Edition
Thaxter, Celia. Poems. August, 1865.
8vo.; manuscript; grey cloth.
Boxed together with:
Thaxter, Celia. Poems. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1885.
12mo.; with a black and white photograph of Thaxter pasted on the verso of the Contents page, signed and dated by Thaxter and faintly offset onto next page; torn at bottom of pages 179-180; a.e.g; brown cloth; spine stamped in gilt and black. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Thaxter’s bound manuscript of thirty-one of her poems, signed by her on the first blank: Celia Thaxter/August. 1865. Together with a copy of the thirteenth edition, a copy which Thaxter herself illuminated with 28 fine miniature watercolors of plants, animals, ocean life and vignettes related to the poems. Signed by the recipient on the first blank, Marianne Brimmer/Boston 1885. Illustrated for her by Mrs. Thaxter.
The manuscript, which preceded the first edition by seven years, comprises the first eighty-one pages of this journal of unlined leaves (the balance, 56 pages, are blank); the first half were transcribed by Thaxter, the second, by her brother, Oscar Laighton. Of these thirty-one poems Thaxter or Laighton has ascribed dates to twelve of them; two of the dated poems were published in magazines: “Courage” ran in the April 1870 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and “Yellowbird” was printed in Merry’s Museum for December, 1868. Pasted to the final leaf is a quote by Carlyle in Thaxter’s hand: “‘The wealth of a man is in the number of things that he loves and blesses, that he is loved and blessed by’ Carlyle – Sartor Resartus.”
The manuscript was apparently rebound for Thaxter’s granddaughter, Rosamond, in the 1960s, an event that wrought havoc with Thaxter’s original order. On the final two leaves of the manuscript, Laighton has written out an “Index,” which lists the titles of the poems according to the order that Thaxter intended; she even emends the order of the last two titles. However, in the rebinding process, several leaves were incorrectly bound-in, thus disturbing the order of the poems and their continuity within the book; in some instances, a poem ends abruptly because stanzas that continued onto multiple leaves were bound in between later pages.
According to the Index, “Remembrance” is supposed to be the first poem; in fact, it follows the first page of a poem titled “A Summer Day,” whose concluding pages are bound in after the fourth poem titled, “The Minute Guns.” “A Summer Day,” is supposed to be the fifth poem in the volume, which could be accomplished by removing the first leaf and placing it after the conclusion of “The Minute Guns.” Also misbound is “The Spaniards Graves at the Isles of Shoals;” the final page of this poem is bound incorrectly after “Sorrow,” which is the poem that follows it in the volume.
Thaxter corrected parts of several poems that Laighton had transcribed. In “Before Sunrise,” Laighton had accidentally omitted the tenth stanza; Thaxter notes the omission at the end of the ninth stanza and includes the missing stanza at the conclusion of the poem on the next page. She has also corrected spelling errors in Laighton’s transcription – changing “climed” to “climbed.” Further alterations were made prior to publication: the last line of stanza ten in the autograph version reads, “The same delight that bears my soul away,” but was published “The same delight that sweeps my soul away.” The poem “Regret” was originally titled “Mary,” which Thaxter has crossed out and emended. She also toyed with alternate beginnings of this poem; she includes two versions of the first line, both of which are present here: “And she is dead, you tell me! Gone away” was changed to “Softly Death touched her and she passed away.” In his transcription of “Rockweeds,” Laighton neglected to include the first five stanzas, which appear in the published versi
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