Recreation: Book Collecting

REVIEWS 447 RECREATION: BOOK COLLECTING! N. J. ENDICOTT Miss Fannie E. Ratchford's edition of these letters by a great but now notorious book-collector begins with a hundred.cpage introduction entitled "A Further Inquiry into the Guilt of Certain Nineteenth-Century Forgers." This, as she -says, owes a "tremendous debt" to Carter and Pollard; An Enquiry into the Nature oj Ce"rtain Nineteenth Century Pamp'hlets (1934), and must, indeed, be read with it. Carter and Pollard convicted, though they did not name, Thomas J. Wise as the forger of some fifty "_first editions" of the nineteenth century.' The calculated understatemen't of their Enquiry was not caused by timidity 01' a fear of the law of libel. It was due to the authors' rigid determination to keep within the field of positive evidence, and this cumulatively made their book all the more dramatically effective. But Miss Ratchford, before she has proven anything, recklessly speaks of the "Wise-Farman-Gosse workshop" for "making-up" books, and soon develops this workshop into a -'Inational scandal"'o( forgery. The actual new evidence she presents, it seems to me, leaves vVise as a master-forger, and the bookseller and former cle~k, Herbert Godin, as a not too scnlpulous export channel. Sir Edmund Gosse comes out in all probability morally inn6cent but with his bibliographical reputation (such as it was) slightly damaged, and his reputation for anecdotal accuracy not' much worse than that of others 'against whom might be urged initial deception fortified by vanity and the lapse of years. Buxton Forman) on the other hand, seems mosf certainly in volved. What, very briefly, is the evidence? In the case of Buxton Forman there, is, first of aU, the fact of his possession 'of thirty-two of the forgeries, plus eleven duplicates. There are, also a' number of possibly suspicious elements in his literary connection' with Wise. There is Miss Ratchford's mistaken and misleading argument that he would certainly have recognized minute characteristics of a particular font of type. But the crucial document , exasperatingly for her, remains seen but not usable in the library of an American ·book-collector. As 1\Ilr. Carter remarks in an important review article in the Atlantic Monthly (February, 1945): I'Miss Ratchford cannot play the ace because Mr. Pforzheimer has it and has no more allowed her to use it than anyone else; but she knows it is there, and if she can only refer to it in a sad and tantalizing footnote, that freedom enables her to ruff and finesse with a freedom which she may be thought to' have exercised too enthusiastically.J) Nevertheless the evidence seems to be there) and grantil1g the simplicity and similarity of Wise's methods, , guilt on one occasion suggests at least accessory guilt throughout. Miss Ratchford's case against Sir Edmund Gosse begins, again; with his possession of twenty fo~geries and his long bibliographical association lLetters oj T1Jomas j. Wise to John Henry Wrenn: A Further Inquiry into the Guill oJ Certain Nineteenth-Century Forgers. Edited by FANNIE E. RATCHFORD. New York: ' Alfred A. Knopf. 1944. Pp. xiv, 590. ($7.50) 448 THE UNIVERSITY OF 'TORONTO QUARTERLY with Wise. It rests also on his contradictory accounts of the circumstances ' re~ponsible for the (forged) 1847 Sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and ,?n a single word in proof-correction. Miss Ratchford's arguments cannot here be discussed, 'but certain observations may be made.2 In the first place Miss Ratchford assumes that Gosse was much more accurate than his work shows him to have been. Also she deduces too freely: on page 84, for instance, she states that he "did in all probability" see a certain book; on page 85 this becomes "it is incredible that he did not" see it; and this soon leads to "he made no effort ·to correct so momentous an error." The really striking discrepancies in his accounts of 1894 and 1927, on which I have already commented, she justifiably emphasizes, but allows only for 'guilty complicity. Finally there is the supposed proof-correction. The initial clue to this identification ca~e from a handwriting picture deep in ,Miss Ratchford's unconscious...