The Thomas Chandler Haliburton Symposium

Haliburton's Letters

Haliburton's Letters RICHARD A. DAVIES In Graham Greene's novel The Honorary Consul, Charley Fortnum, the honorary British Consul in Argentina, is mistakenly kidnapped by revolutionaries and is forced to pen a letter to his nearest and dearest knowing that he faces possible death. At the conclusion of his letter he says: "It's damned hard work writing letters. To think sometimes on a library shelf you see 'Collected Letters' of somebody or other. Poor bugger. Two volumes of them perhaps" (p. 214).J When I first read this remark, I thought it odd that an Honorary Consul in such a desperate plight should evoke the idea of the "Collected Letters" of "somebody or other." Havingjust completed an edition of the letters of somebody or other, I now realize the allegorical significance of the remark. Not only is writing letters "damned hard work" but so is the editing of letters. The first task is to find them. When I started the search for Haliburton letters in 1977, I knew of four groups of correspondence: 1. The extracts from Haliburton's letters to his old school friend, Judge Robert Parker of New Brunswick, included in A. Wylie Mahon's article "Sam Slick's Letters," in the Canadian Magazine for 1916, the originals of which have since disappeared. 2. The 14 letters published by V.L.O. Chittick in his 1924 study, Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"): A Study in Provincial Toryism. Most (but not all) of these letters are now at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. 3. The 54 letters, the correspondence between Haliburton and his English publisher Richard Bentley, published by W. H. Bond in 1947, representing a major portion of the large collection of Haliburton manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 1. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982,orig. pub.1973. 26 4. The eight letters to Judge Peleg Wiswall of Digby, published in the Annual Report of the Public Archives of Nova Scotia for 1946. These 76 letters constituted the corpus of Haliburton correspondence when I began. The edition I have just completed contains 240letters of which 139 are unpublished. After finding the letters the next stage is deciding how to edit them. As Wilmarth S. Lewis, the editor of Horace Walpole's correspondence, once remarked, "whatever you do will annoy those who believe you should have done the opposite."2 My editorial procedures have been guided by the arguments of G. Thomas Tanselle in his lengthy survey of editorial practices in the nineteen-sixtiesand -seventies entitled "The Editing of Historical Documents" (Studies in Bibliography, Volume XXXI [1978], 1-56). I have modelled my editorial principles on those editions that Tanselle singles out for highest praise: Gordon N. Ray's TheLetters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945) and Frederick Anderson's Mark Twain's Notebooks andJournals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Although it is true that any editor will be damned if he modernizes and damned if he does not (by those who believe he should do one or the other), I am convinced that Tanselle's argument against modernizing and in favor of a literal transcription of manuscript letters is a powerful one.3 I have therefore sought to retain the nineteenth-century personality of Haliburton's correspondence and carefully record in "A list of emendations and doubtful readings" (LEDR) all editorial decisions and difficulties with the manuscript so that readers can be aware that the text presented to them is the best in the judgement of the editor. (I found the "Textual Introduction" to the Twain edition just mentioned, particularly valuable in this regard. I have tended to follow its statement of editorial principles closely.)4 2. Editing Correspondence, ed. Alan Daniard (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1979) p. 31. 3. "The text itself, its treatment and not the literary quality of a piece of writing determines the amount of attention that must be paid to nuances of expression" (p. 46). To regularize is to modernize, says Tanselle, for there is a difference between "correcting" and "modernizing." 4. Not all the letters, of course, are based upon extant manuscripts. Some have been previously printed, e.g., in the Nova Scotian^/ournals of the House of Assembly, and the manuscript has since disappeared; others exist in copy form and the manuscripthas been lost (sometimes more than one copy exists; e.g., A.L.S. to Joseph Howe, November 15, 1835). I have not felt it to be...