Fanny (Still) Expurgated

FANNY (STILL) EXPURGATED John Anthony Scott Monica Gough, ed. FannyKemble:Jouma/ of a YoungActress. Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990,xxiii + 196 pp. On 2 September 1832 Frances Anne Kemble, famous British actress, arrived in New York with her father, Charles, for a theatrical tour. She kept a record of the transatlantic voyage and the first ten months of her American experience, published in 1835 in two volumes of almost 600 pages entitled simply Journal. Composed before Kemble's marriage to Pierce Butler in 1834, the Joumal is a significant contribution to Victorian letters. In his 1835 review, Edgar Allan Poe noted the book's "sound sense," its "vivacityof style, beautiful descriptions ... forcible observations." In an age bursting with travel books, Poe praised Kemble's as "one of the most attractive (as it is the most original) ... recently published." The Joumal, too, is a valuable source for the Kemble biographer, not only for the picture that it gives of Kemble herself, but for the way in which it illuminates the history of the Shakespearian stage on both sides of the Atlantic. This Jozmzal,of course, is not to be confused with the equally important Journal of a Residence 011 a GeorgianPlantation in 1838-1839,which Kemble published twenty-eight years later. Monica Gough now offers a new edition of the Joumal to British and American readers based upon an edition published in 1835by Carey, Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia. She makes the statement on the book's dustcover that "this is the first time Fanny Kemble:Joumal of a YoungActress has been published in its original, completely unexpurgated form." How faithfully does the editor follow the 1835 Philadelphia edition which she claims to be reissuing "unexpurgated"? In fact, Gough's edition of the Joumal has been heavily abridged. Sentence structure has been changed; passages have been cut from paragraphs; pages at a time have been deleted. In principle there would be no reason to complain of this were the reader informed of it. Nowhere in the book, however, is there any notice about the abridgement and the extent of the changes that have been made. Nor do ellipses appear on the printed page. 388 John Anthony Scott The "expurgation" to which Gough refers on the cover of her edition of the Journal took place before publication. Kemble's husband, Pierce Butler, went through his wife's manuscript and deleted a portion of what she had written. He also crossed out the names of people who were mentioned; numerous dashes marked the erasure of their identity. Gough has restored these names with the help of Columbia University's copy of the Journal. She also makes the chronology considerably clearer by breaking up the manuscript into separate chapters and correcting Kemble's inaccurate dates. The people who now, for the first time, appear in Gough's book, are identified in a section at the end entitled Notes, sandwiched between Chronologyand Bibliographybut, strangely enough, not listed in the table of contents. I turned to this section with the expectation that it would include the notes that Kemble herself wrote and published in the 1835 edition. A number of these are of great length and considerable interest. To my surprise I found that not a single one of these original notes has been included; indeed, they appear nowhere in the book. Gough does not inform us of the fact that she has eliminated them. The modern reader has no way of knowing that Kemble's work has been radically abridged with respect to one of its essential elements. At the same time, it is by no means clear who has authored the notes which Gough includes, most of which are written in the first person. William Hodgkinson, for example, was an English fellow passenger of Kemble's during the Atlantic crossing of August, 1832. Hodgkinson, the notes inform us, was "the most congenial to me of all our fellow passengers. He was, I think, very fond of me .... " (201). The inescapable inference is that Kemble wrote these words herself. But almost immediately below this there is a note on Harriet St. Leger, Kemble's lifelong Irish friend. "For many...