Martin Faber: The Story of a Criminal with "Confessions of a Murder"

Historical and Textual Commentary

HISTORICAL AND TEXTUAL COMMENTARY Although Simms used the “Confessions of a Murderer” as the germ for Martin Faber, differences between the two stories are so great that they are best considered separate works. The “Confessions,” it might be noted, bears approximately the same relationship to Martin Faber as “Indian Sketch” does to “Oakatibbe,” or “The Unknown Masque” to Marie de Berniere. In each case the early periodical publication is“elaborated ” upon for book publication, and a new, longer (not necessarily artistically superior) story emerges. At the time of the publication of the “Confessions of a Murderer” in 1829, perhaps no better example of the confessional horror tale had appeared in American literature. It was not until almost a century and a half after the anonymous publication of “Confessions” in the Southern Literary Gazette (SLG) of November 1829 that a copy was discovered among materials in the Kendall collection of the South Caroliniana Library. The discovery of the long-missing number of SLG substantiated Simms’s assertion that he had been falsely accused of plagiarizing F. M. Reynolds’s“Miserrimus”; a story of his own had, indeed, provided the basis for Martin Faber.1 In turn, it is possible that Simms’s inspiration for the “Confessions” can be found in still earlier issues of SLG. Nine months before the publication of the “Confessions of a Murderer,” “The Criminal, from the German of Schiller” appeared in SLG for February 1829 and was concluded in a second installment in March.2 There are striking enough resemblances in the “Confessions of a Murderer” and the SLG version of Schiller’s “The Criminal” (i.e., Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre) to suggest, very strongly, that Simms had Schiller’s story in mind and perhaps in hand when he sat down to write the “Confessions.”3 J. Wesley Thomas had earlier listed similarities between Martin Faber and Der Verbrecher without, of course, having seen the “Confessions of a Murderer.”4 Even without knowledge of Simms’s “Confessions,” Thomas astutely detected Schiller’s possible influence on Simms. The reading and editorial handling of “The Criminal” by Simms (coupled with his avowed admiration of Schiller) may well have inspired the young editor to attempt for himself a similar confessional tale of crime. But that“Confessions of a Murderer”owes something to“The Criminal” Simms-MFaber final pages:Layout 1 4/10/08 11:51 AM Page 67 is problematical, whereas the origin of Martin Faber in “Confessions of a Murderer” is indisputable. After its initial anonymous publication in 1833, Martin Faber; the Story of a Criminal was revised and expanded by Simms for inclusion as the title piece of Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal: and other Tales in 1837.5 The story was also republished, without substantive change from the first edition, as “Martin Faber, The Story of a Criminal. By the Author of the Yemassee, Pelayo the Goth, & & &” in The Romancist, and Novelist’s Library.6 Since Simms never mentions The Romancist, it is quite possible that the London publication of his story occurred without his knowledge. The revisions Simms made in Martin Faber for the 1837 edition were not always improvements: whereas a tightening of focus was the need, the changes too frequently amount to expansions rather than compressions. But he did make at least two major changes that were helpful: (1) the seemingly unaccountable shift in point of view—from first person to third person—which marred the final chapter of the 1833 version was corrected in the revised edition, giving the book a consistent first-person narrator throughout; and (2) the site for William Harding’s picture-hanging, the psychological testing of Faber, was changed from the village barbershop, in the 1833 edition, to the village art gallery in 1837. Although William P. Trent scoffs at an author who gives a “stagnated” village “an art gallery, where exhibitions are held yearly with a hundred pictures lining the wall,”7 the idea of an art gallery in a small village (capable also, it is to be remembered, of a fashionable wedding) is not so difficult to accept, perhaps, as the idea of the village’s barbershop serving as the exhibition place for paintings. The point, of course, is that Simms recognized the incongruity of having the paintings hung in the barbershop and attempted to correct the error. It is quite possible, also, to defend the sharp shift in point of view in Chapter XVIII in the 1833 text by choosing to look upon...