TRANSCRIPTS FROM UNPRINTED ROWLEY MANUSCRIPTS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume VIII, 1 November 1951, Page 31

TRANSCRIPTS FROM UNPRINTED ROWLEY MANUSCRIPTS

E. Schwimmer

Professor Gordon, in his notes (Turnbull Library Record No. 4, p. 8/9) on ‘An unrecorded copy of Chatterton’, says he had not found any record of the publication of the manuscript ‘description of Cannynge’s person’. I find this is not an un/ published piece, but occurs in the 1803 edition of Southey and Cottle: Volume 111, page 345. The letters transcribed are five in number, and only the first, quoted by Professor Gordon, can be claimed to have any wide interest. This is the letter from Mr Tho. Cary to Mr Geo. Catcott, dated 1776, printed in Southey, Volume 111, page 481. The other four letters are merely amusing as monuments of human stupidity and even malice; the people who wrote them had no facts, and Southey left them out of his edition because of this reason. One of these suggests that Chatterton’s only achievement was spoiling Rowley by playfully altering him; the others are mere expressions of sympathy and admiration for Catcott.

This entire number of the Record has been set in Poliphilus type so that readers may judge of the quality of a modern style of a fifteenth century type/face. It is generally acknowledged that the most beautifully/printed book of that century was the Hypneratomacbia Polypbili or ‘Strife of Love in a Dream’, printed by Aldus Manutius at Venice in 1499. A copy, from which the accompanying illustration has been taken, is in the library, and one cannot but appreciate the character of the type and printing, coupled to the appropriateness of the woodcuts. This much/praised volume has been studied by printers and artists down the centuries, and has been the inspiration of more than one modern design of type.