T. J. WISE AT THE TURNBULL

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, 1 May 1975, Page 4

T. J. WISE AT THE TURNBULL

W. B. Todd

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mrs Todd and I arrived, as some of you know, just several days ago, and it was indeed a fine introduction both to Wellington and especially to the Turnbull Library to discover on the plane coming down from Auckland the NAC' Airline Review featuring the Turnbull Library. I picked up one dog-eared copy and Professor McKenzie arrived at my hotel Monday evening with another copy, both of which perhaps I should leave here as mementoes to be ensconced somewhere in the Library shelves, if they are not already there. I rather suspect it is unnecessary to discourse at any length on T. J. Wise beyond some few generalisations by way of reminder. Having done that I then thought I should certainly indicate what impressions I have now of the immense library here, more especially as it relates to Wise. It must be understood in this part of my talk that I am speaking of an infinitesimal part of the library, a library at the time of Mr Turnbull’s death ranging beyond 50,000 volumes, of which 50,000 I have been concerned with only fewer than two score books. Thirdly I thought I might consider with you at some greater length, since you would be less familiar with the topic, the John Henry Wrenn Library at Austin, Texas. There are as I now know, certain peculiar affiliations between our holdings in Texas of Wise and your holdings here (I use the term ‘affiliation’ both in its bibliographical sense and in its wider context).

Mr Taylor, your former librarian, visited us in 1960 at the University of Texas, and I still distinctly remember his appearance there. With all the attractions that we had to offer him he indicated to me right off that he wanted to see only one thing—the John Henry Wrenn Library. Thus in effect I am returning Mr Taylor’s visit, somewhat belatedly, but better late than never.

As for Wise, here is a man of such eminence that he is recorded for all time and posterity in the Dictionary of National Biography, recorded there, in the eliptical phraseology which introduces every biographical sketch therein, as a book collector, bibliographer, editor and forger. Since that account was written for the DNB one must add to those several designations vandal and thief. I will expatiate a little further on these other aspects of his career, more especially as they relate, not to your library, fortunately, but certainly to the British Museum and certainly also again to the Wrenn Library at Texas. We must also recall that, while he is now known as forger, and more recently as vandal and thief, at least in the ’2os Wise was the foremost bibliophile in the United Kingdom—indeed anywhere; he was the supreme bibliographical pontiff on all matters whatsoever. He had an air of infallibility about

him, and according to reports of those who knew him he was a very egotistic, arrogant man, though of obscure origins, a self-made man who wrought out his own career until it crumbled in 1934. His career was in bibliography and in publishing endless arrays of books, catalogues and bibliographies. For this he was recognised in the ’2os in various ways. He was made an honorary fellow of Worcester College, he received an honorary MA at Oxford, and he was elected to Membership in the Roxburghe Club, the first, foremost and most prestigious bibliophilic club anywhere.

Thus when Wise was in his mid seventies, in 1934, there came upon the world of learning at large this sudden shock, this devastating shock, in the publication 2nd July of that year of Messrs Carter & Pollard’s Enquiry into the nature of certain 19th century pamphlets. Carter & Pollard I would remind you, in 1934 were young men—Pollard just out of Oxford, Carter just out of Cambridge, both in their mid twenties and they, here in this book, dared to question the whole validity of Wise’s expertise, and to bring into ruination his entire career. They did not, as you will remember, choose to accuse him directly. They also took the precautions further of asking their Counsel, Mr Lyell, if there was anything in the book that was libellous, and were advised on strict legal authority that every leaf in the book, every page, was indeed libellous, but that they should go ahead and publish it in any case. And so, in this crisis, Wise blustered for a while but then was advised on medical advice to say nothing further, lapsed into silence and died three years later. Whether his death may be attributed, as sometimes alleged, to the publication of the Enquiry, I cannot say. At any rate there were indications at the time of issue that Wise would in due course publish a statement; and it was rumoured that this publication would be issued in the States because the Libel Laws there were less rigorous than they are in the U.K. However, upon legal advice Wise suppressed that statement and, so it was thought, this was destroyed. Yet by the strangest combination of circumstances the statement was not destroyed. It was discovered some several years back and we now have that along with everything else at the University of Texas — almost everything, that is, pertaining to Wise. Since then this with other curious documents has been published by our Humanities Research Centre.*

Now as to what may be discovered here. Mr Turnbull you will remember from Dr McCormick’s article in your Library Record started collecting books in the U.K. in the late 1880 s; and according to Mr Lawlor, one of the friends of your library, he spent some five hundred

pounds on what later turned out to be forgeries. These acquisitions of course at the time of purchase were accepted as absolutely authentic, and so by pure chance or mischance Mr Turnbull was able to acquire what I hope I can demonstrate to be a more representative collection indeed, though not an absolutely complete one. In my present state of ignorance, I have no knowledge whatsoever as to whether Turnbull, who was ten years Wise’s junior, ever personally met Wise. As far as I am aware, there is no correspondence which would indicate this, and the books themselves, insofar as I am cognisant of their provenance, do not indicate it. Mr Turnbull did acquire his books, at least the Wiseian books, over a relatively short period, the first one in 1907 the last one in 1913.

Now these forgeries, some 22 or 23 of them, were acquired from such well known firms as Walter Spencer, the Maggs Brothers and, most interestingly of all, Herbert Gorfin. Gorfin, then a bookseller, was in earlier days Wise’s factotum and indeed Wise’s confidant, you might say, whereby he could release his piracies, forgeries and private printings to the market at large. Bookseller Gorfin also supplied Spencer and the Maggs Brothers with these choice delicacies, most especially, the choicest one of all, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, which Gorfin handled only on commission. Practically all the other ones Gorfin had in stock, but Wise was conscious of the great value of this one little booklet and Gorfin, if he needed one, had to apply to Wise directly. So indirectly then Turnbull had access to Wise only through Gorfin or through the other booksellers that I have mentioned.

The books themselves when acquired were either already bound or bound at Mr Turnbull’s direction. The chief binder I discovered for the Turnbull-Wise books was Zaehnsdorf, secondly the well known firm of Riviere, third an establishment I had not heard of before, Jones & Evans, who bound your books, then Sangorski and Sutcliffe, who bound several others. Within an hour or two after my arrival here at the Library, though, I was distracted from these questions of provenance by something else which occupied some 4 or 5 hours of my attention, and even now I have not quite unravelled the complexities of this. I am referring here to the various Turnbull Coats of Arms. There are, I discover, just within the narrow span of the Wiseian area, no fewer than five different coats of arms on these books and within them some 4 different Turnbull plates, one of them in two different states; and beyond those four Turnbull plates there are 3 different Turnbull Library plates. This, of course, is quite tangential to the real matter at hand, which is not Arms or plates, but what lies beyond all that. Still, just this morning Mrs Scott found for me a letter from Wise to Percival Watts Rule, this dated 9 September 1931 when Wise, then in possession

of a book plate that Watts Rule had sent him, reciprocated the courtesy by sending on to Watts Rule a plate of his own, and of this he says “It is the only plate I have or ever did have, I believe in ‘One Name One Plate’ ”. Not so for Turnbull, as I have already suggested.

In looking over Mr Turnbull’s Wiseian books, I began to think of other collectors, some of whom were intimately connected with Wise, some like Turnbull, not so directly connected, and one at least not connected at all, and I was trying to assess Mr Turnbull’s relative position among these nine collectors who are known to me. As any such comparison may be useful, I might well relate what this signifies to me. The prime collector of all forgeries and counterfeits and the private printings is, of course, Mr Wise himself, who however upon the publication of the Carter-Pollard Enquiry, saw to it that most of the damaging incriminating evidence was removed from his Library, a library which as you know several years after his death in 1937 went to the British Museum. The collector who at least in an arithmetic sense ranks next to Wise must be John Henry Wrenn, a Chicago banker who died in 1910 and whose collection in 1918 came to the University of Texas. Over a good many years Wise saw to it that Wrenn gained possession of every one of the forgeries save only one, and all at a very good price. Wise at one time indicated to a friend of his that Mr Wrenn was worth at least one thousand pounds a year to him. Wrenn then knew Wise personally, was utterly reliant upon Wise’s expertise and the Wrenn library in a very real sense can be described as Wise's creation, second only to Wise’s own library.

There are 3 other persons, close friends of Wise, who also are found with a number of these forgeries. Next in rank would be a person almost entirely unknown to the scholarly world, one Walter Brindley Slater of the firm of Oldwinkle & Slater, Silversmiths. Slater was born the same year as Wise, 1859, and lived for many years just a block and a half away from Wise at Hampstead Heath. It was Slater who, as I know from the surviving correspondence, constantly vetted, proof read, practically all of Wise’s catalogues and bibliographies. The letters which passed back and forth between them are couched in the most affectionate terms —‘My Dear Boy’—‘My Dear Tommy’ and other such language which borders almost upon the unnatural, yet Slater as I say remained an enigma; he never published anything save a short note at one time in Notes & Queries, when in response to a query as to how many private printings Wise had put out, he provided a full account over his initials ‘W.B.S.’ I did not come upon this report until I had issued my own list in the Centenary Studies and then found that Slater was amazingly accurate. He had every title right, he had every date right, indeed he had one private printing that I knew nothing about. So all this

indicates that Slater had a most intimate knowledge of all of Wise’s activities. Moreover, and most significant I think, Slater was secretary of the Browning Society some several years before Wise became secretary of the Shelley Society, and thus, before Wise, had prior access to the firm of Richard Clay and Son, the firm which produced practically all of these forgeries. I understand that Messrs Carter & Pollard were of the opinion in 1934 that Slater was dead; but he was not dead at all, he was very much alive but very quiet, and after 1934 suddenly left London and took up residence in Bath where he remained another 10 years, dying in 1944. His books then came up for auction the following year, in 1945, and then lo and behold it was discovered that Mr Walter Brindley Slater had almost as many forgeries as John Henry Wrenn, some fifty-nine, including two proof copies of the forgeries. Hence it has always been my conjecture that, if there are co-conspirators with Wise in the manufacture of these forgeries, Slater I think must be held to some extent complicit. I have broached his name on every occasion, I do it now, but every time I mention it to Carter and Pollard they simply pooh pooh the whole idea. It seems they have enough to do without bringing in some new individual, particularly one who has no evidence behind him. Slater appointed Wise executor of his Will, Wise appointed Slater executor of his Will: still another indication of the close affinity between these two men. So we have Wise, then Wrenn, then Slater, and next again on a purely numerical basis, one must count Harry Buxton Forman, now known to be involved in forgeries. Forman had 41 of the forgeries. Sir Edmund Gosse was at one time, or more than once, accused of being a conspirator. Chiefly these accusations came from Miss Fannie Ratchford, former Curator of Rare Books at Texas, but that accusation has never been substantiated. I don’t think it can be. Gosse had only half as many forgeries as Forman, and all of Gosse’s forgeries were outright gifts to him, as far as we know, from Wise himself. Thus we have, you might say, this first tier of collectors, Wrenn, Slater, Forman, and Gosse in that descending order, all of whom knew Wise personally.

Then there is another group of three gentlemen. First among them, I would think, would be Oliver Brett, later Viscount Esher, who had a considerable number of forgeries and who was vastly annoyed when the Enquiry came out in ’34. It was Esher who more than once wrote to the Times Literary Supplement demanding an explanation of Wise. How many books Esher had I have no way of telling, at least as yet, but apparently he did have a large supply. It must also be remarked that F. R. Halsey had a very extensive collection of 19th century literature, again of an unknown number, though I suppose a count could be taken because I believe all of them went to the Huntington

Library. A third would certainly be Mr Turnbull, who has by my count as of today, 22 forgeries and 7 piracies, together with various private printings. These three gentlemen then, Viscount Esher, Halsey, and Turnbull, are to me a separate group. I have no evidence that any one of them knew Wise, but they all had substantial holdings, and they had all collected these books, along with the others I have mentioned, before the great exposure in 1934.

Standing apart from all these is one other collector who must not go unmentioned, and this is the late Sir Maurice Pariser, a Councilman of Manchester, who I suppose knew nothing about Wise until the year 1934, but upon the publication of the Enquiry in that year, then and there decided he would collect nothing but Wise; such therefore was his passsion from 1934 onwards, and it was a passion that knew no bounds. I visited Sir Maurice several times in Manchester, and was always much impressed as he showed me one thing or another. One time he pulled out no fewer than 8 copies of Wise’s catalogue of Swinburne—eight because each copy was inscribed to a different person, and so he was there in effect collecting signatures. Sir Maurice suffered several severe heart attacks in late 1966 and early 1967, so severe that he most reluctantly decided that he would have to stop collecting Wise and to put all of his books up for auction at Sotheby’s as he did in that great sale of December 4th and sth of 1967. It was my good fortune again to attend that sale along with Sir Maurice and Lady Pariser and it was a magnificent show indeed. Sotheby’s, and John Carter particularly, who as you know is now adviser and associate in the firm, issued a very handsome catalogue for this two-day event, along with other Memorabilia. Sir Maurice had practically all the forgeries, all the piracies, all the private printings, many of them in multiple copies, plus something like 4,000 letters back and forth to Wise from various individuals. All that correspondence and all of the more ‘desirable’ printings were seized by Texas in further demonstration of its intent to remain forever the principal depository of all bibliographical chicanery. Well now, what does Mr Turnbull have? As I have intimated already he falls short of a complete collection but I must compliment his success. If any individual set out now or at any time in retrospect, knowing all the facts as we now know them, to assemble those forgeries or piracies which would illustrate one facet or another of Wise’s malevolent career, one could hardly do better than what Mr Turnbull has done—and done almost by sheer chance, for I was astonished to find that every different variety is represented here by at least one specimen. Proceeding more or less in chronological order, I perhaps ought to start with Wise’s own little pamphlet—it’s the one legitimate and only legitimate publication of the 401 publications that he ever

issued—his own little Verses which was printed and issued just about Christmas time in 1882. There are seven known; I should say there were seven until I came here, now there are 8, known copies of this, each of them representing a separate and distinct state, or issue. Thereafter for some several years Wise was engaged in other private printings, including a facsimile of Browning’s Pauline. In 1887, however, one comes to a critical date, marking the issue of his first piracy, an issue of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems and Sonnets with an imprint reading ‘Philadelphia 1887’. The date is right, but the place is wrong; it is London, not ‘Philadelphia’. Thus Mr Turnbull acquired, quite accidentally, the original three landmarks, Wise’s first book, his first facsimile, and his first piracy.

Having gone that far with a piracy it’s a short step for Wise to forgery, and that was taken in the next year, 1888. At this time, as wc now know, he issued under false dates, three fakes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave, George Eliot’s Brother and Sister and Swinburne’s Cleopatra, and Turnbull has them all. Now I will say nothing further about the Swinburne Cleopatra, but something needs to be said about the other two. Of the Runaway Slave you have 2 different states as Carter & Pollard describe them, or more exactly two separate and distinct impressions of which the earlier has the imprint ‘Chapman & Hall 1849’ and the later has ‘Edward Moxon 1849’, this because Wise, or Wise & Forman & Slater realised at the last moment that Moxon indeed was the publisher of that time for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and not Chapman & Hall. Well, beyond all that, there is something very mysterious about this earlier impression, for it is interleaved with thinner paper proofs, all marked in the same several hands as those observed in the proofs at Texas. Here obviously is a TurnbullWrenn ‘affiliation’ that demands further study. Again in 1888 Wise, or Wise and others issued this forgery by Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, the Brother and Sister pamphlet, the imprint year reading 1869. This is worth some attention because, though it is, like the other, a created forgery (that is, it is pre-dated from what had always been recognised as the first edition), this along with some others of Wise’s manufacture has the distinction of being counterfeited by someone else. The counterfeit of this forgery we know was done somewhere in the States because of the American type and the peculiar ornaments on the wrapper.

So much then for the first year, 1888. There are several other items which I shall very briefly bring to your attention. Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur enjoys a special distinction because it bears the earliest date to which Wise assigned a forgery, the date 1842, though it was not manufactured until 1896. Mr Turnbull acquired this from Maggs

Brothers in 1913 for £65, a good price for those days. Another for which he paid eight guineas, is a forgery of Swinburne’s Dead Love, bearing the date 1864 though actually manufactured in 1890. Maggs probablygot this from Gorfin because there is enclosed an entry from a Gorfin catalogue on Dead Love warning purchasers, in Wise’s language, of a counterfeit of this ‘first edition’, this done as we now know right in London.

Beyond any of those, and the stellar exhibit in any collection of Wise, must of course always be the famous or infamous forgery of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, here imprinted ‘Reading 1847’ (London, 1893). I certainly will not go into the romantic tale which was devised to lend some authenticity to this publication. I would remark though in the Carter-Pollard census of Sonnets I do not recognise Mr Turnbull’s copy at all. They do record 17 copies actually located as of 1934, and give descriptions of several others but I can’t relate any of those accounts to this particular binding. The provenance of the Turnbull copy thus remains a matter for conjecture.

In conclusion perhaps I may now comment on certain peculiar distinctions which the Wrenn collection alone enjoys. Many of you I know are quite aware of another discovery, not in 1934 now but in 1959 when Mr David Foxon, then Assistant Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, announced that there had been stolen from the British Museum a number of leaves subsequently found in Mr Wise’s copies of certain 17th century plays. If some of the leaves were discovered in Wise’s copies there was of course an immediate suspicion that other stolen leaves not traced would be found in Wrenn copies, and this turned out lamentably to be the case. The calculation finally was that there were 202 leaves ripped out of British Museum plays at one time or another and that 89 of the 202 are now in Wise’s copies of those plays, and the great irony of course is that Wise’s collection is now back in the British Museum; so they have recovered their leaves but they are in the wrong place and it is not easy to extract the leaves because they are all bound up by Riviere, just as the Wrenn copies are, and you would destroy the book to remove them once again. Hence there are 89 leaves then in Wise’s copies and I regret to say 75 others in Wrenn copies now at Texas. You can imagine the great moral issue in 1959, and again and again in one journal after another the question was raised ‘What does the University of Texas intend to do about this deplorable situation?’ Well, various schemes were advanced, all rather tedious to relate, and the end result is that we have supplied photostats of the purloined leaves, which the British Museum has now inserted in the original copies. We have finally still another consideration in the Wrenn Library and

that is that over the many years Wise sold Wrenn copies good and bad of one thing and another it was his unvarying practice whenever he had a worthless tract, poem, what have you, some anonymous piece or piece by some obscure writer, to assign that piece to a well known person — ‘this is by Daniel Defoe, very rare’, ‘this is by Samuel Johnson’, ‘Alexander Pope’, always putting a big name on to a rather insignificant item, and thus of course charging 3 or 4 times what the item was worth. Wrenn accepted all of these on Wise’s sayso, never questioning anything Wise sent him, and Wise, knowing this, would send sometimes an anonymous piece labelled as by author ‘A’ and two years later send him the same piece now labelled as by author ‘B’. Wrenn never put 2 and 2 or should I say one and one together—he never made out cards, much less title cards—and so the continuing deception went entirely unnoticed. This practice was known generally later on, because as I remarked a little while ago Wise sponsored the issuance of the Wrenn Library catalogue in 1920 and thus we have for all the world to see these false descriptions, and I was repeatedly urged, particularly by Mr Pollard, to get to work on this business and find out just how far ranging it went. This I did and discovered that, making all allowances for Wise as far as one possibly could, there are no fewer than 869 books in the Wrenn Library that are falsely attributed, or something approaching one-sixth of the total. So no matter how you look at the Wrenn collection, whether for forgeries or for stolen leaves, or for misnamed copies, we have them all and we have them to such a vast extent that although I knew hardly anything about Wise when I came to Texas in 1958 I now estimate that if I did nothing but Wiseian work from here on now, it would take me all the rest of my declining years to fully appreciate his handiwork. I thank you.

In response to a question about the link between Maurice Buxton Forman and Wise Professor Todd reminded his audience that in 1934, immediately after the exposure, Forman was hovering about Wise, shielding him against rude questioning by distinguished visitors. As Pollard now says, they did interrogate Maurice Buxton Forman, particularly to discover if they could, if indeed his father Harry was involved; and as it is now reported, Maurice broke down in tears. He knew in some measure how far his father had been involved, but Maurice himself certainly could have had nothing to do with the forgeries. Like Gorfin he was much too young. When Fannie Ratchford tried to accuse Gorfin, along with Gosse, of being a conspirator, she forgot that he was only eight years old at the time these forgeries were being prepared in 1888 through 1906. Maurice Buxton Forman I think would also be hardly out of knee pants at the time the dirty

work was being done. But the Carter-Pollard version of the story is that Maurice must have known about his father because he wept when they questioned him. It wasn’t convenient for them to say that in 1934 when they were fixing all the blame on Wise and wouldn’t listen to Wise’s statements that Harry Buxton Forman was the man in charge. . . .

Mr C. R. H. Taylor, in proposing a vote of thanks to Professor Todd recalled his meeting with T. J. Wise during the critical months of 1934. A little earlier when Mr Taylor had been at the University of Michigan Library School, great excitement had been caused by the publication of the Carter and Pollard disclosures. The Librarian of the William L. Clements Library had returned from London bursting with the excitement of this monumental scandal and spoke to the Library School students about the investigations. Mr Taylor recalled the number of titles in the Turnbull collection which were now under a cloud and when he reached London shortly afterwards arranged an invitation for Mrs Taylor and himself to afternoon tea.

As Mr Taylor recalled the occasion, ‘Wise was completely apprehensive that I had come to accost him ... to accuse him, and he had invited Maurice Buxton Forman along to support him. Well he raised the question, he defended himself before anybody mentioned the matter at all, to my great embarrassment, and up to this point I had the feeling that Wise was not guilty. I had written to my father steadily all this year that we were away, and on re-reading copies of his letters and my letters to him earlier today I was surprised how very virtuous I was regarding Wise, until I met him. But after that and in view of the mood of the whole meeting when Buxton Forman was literally as Professor Todd has said, hovering at my back and at the back of Wise all through the session, it was pretty patent that all was not well. So we came away with some unhappiness I think, a little disillusionment, deflated, having met a great man, and we found that he appeared to have feet of clay after all.’

* Professor Todd has subsequently given to the Turnbull Library his edition of these papers, titled Suppressed Commentaries on the Wiseian Forgeries.