The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium

The First Clockmakers

The First Clockmakers BRUCE NESBITT think it is well known that contemporary texts of the first series of Haliburton's Clockmaker are probably corrupt. But in saying this, I am not wholly on the side of editorial followers of Gibbon in his Decline and Fall, for whom corruption was the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. Editorial liberty is quite another matter, especially concerning a work which—uniquely in Canadian literature—has remained in print for nearly 150 years. I intend to be both ruthlesslyliteral and distractingly relativist in my three aims to investigate the status of the very first version of The Clockmaker, in its newspaper form; to explore the earliest transmission of the text through the hands of various editors; and to offer some conclusions about a future authoritative version of The Clockmaker. My major problem is the law of evidence. Haliburton spent twenty-seven years on the Bench in Nova Scotia, including fifteen years on the colony's Supreme Court; whatever the strength of his unreported judgements, his Shades would undoubtedly assent to section six of the current Canada Evidence Act: ' 'A witnesswho is unable to speak may give his evidence in any other manner in which he can make it intelligible." That, presumably, is why I am here today: to represent him, and to attempt to reconstruct his intentions. I The majority of sketches in the first series of The Clockmaker—some 43,000 words, slightly over 60 per cent—originallyappeared astwentyone "Recollections of Nova Scotia" in TheNovascotian from Wednesday, September 23, 1835 to Thursday, February 11, 1836. That so fewcritics of Haliburton have gone back directly to the files ofJoseph Howe's weekly Halifax newspaper may be a comment on the scarcity of copies; so far as I know, no complete run of either the Wednesday or the Thursday I 94 edition of the paper exists in any single Canadian city. (The Novascotian was published on Wednesdays "for the Country" and on Thursdays "for the Town"; the latter, cited here, is obviously preferable for textual reasons.) The standard microfilm of the files for the period includes a mix of editions, and is difficult to follow because of lightly inked, misaligned , or dropped type, particularly at the beginning and end of column lines in the originals. For reasons of convenience alone I hope that my forthcoming edition of Recollections of Nova Scotia will be useful; a large part of the argument in this first section of my exploration is based on work for that edition.1 Yet the very existence of an accessible text of the earliest published version of The Clockmaker brings to light an otherwise inconspicuous difficulty, rather in the manner familiar to physicists of sub-atomic particles , through which the process of observation alters the properties of the object observed. Howe gave a hint of the issue as early as December 17, 1835, when the thirteenth sketch appeared, as he proudly noted that " TheClockmaker, we are happy to find, has become a universal favourite": Several of these letters have been republished in the Yarmouth Herald, the Boston Courier, and other American and Colonial papers—and we are happy to have it in our power to announce, that there is a goodly supply of Nos. in reserve; and that we shall have the means of keeping our readers merry, not only through the Christmas holidays, but till the very heart of this abominable winter is broken, though the snow should come ten feet deep.2 From this we can assume that TheNovascotian had a certain circulation in New England, anticipating Sam Slick's popularity in the United States (not to mention Haliburton's carefully guarding the American publishing rights to his later books). Howe's reference to "a goodly supply" of further sketches, however, appears in retrospect somewhat odd. We know that the version he eventually published separately as a book would include thirty-three sketches, but if he had all thirty-three in hand in mid-December, the last would not appear in the paper until May 4, 1836 at the earliest. Whatever we might think about Halifax winters, ten feet of snow in early May does seem a bit excessive. On the other hand, if he were referring only to the balance of the twenty-one sketches, the last of which was actually published on February 11, 1836, his comment makes more sense. Is it possible that Haliburton initially intended his twenty-one Novascotian sketches to form a complete series, to which...