Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1873): the Tauchnitz Edition, with author's
corrections (Yale copy)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Production Description
Document Title: Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Publisher: Bernhard Tauchnitz
City of publication: Leipzig
Date of publication: 1873 November 15 (late November or early December)
Pagination: [i]-[xxviii], [1]-[284]
Collation: [A]
8, B
6, 1-17
8, 18
6
Provenance
Current Location: Yale U. Library
Catalog Number: Tinker Collection 1817
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Copyright: Reproduced with permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University.
page images | transcript
Scholarly Commentary
Introduction
This copy of the Tauchnitz edition was given to William Sharp by DGR in January 1880, according to the inscription on the title page. It contains a number of interesting textual corrections and additions. These were inserted into the volume sometime after its printing in 1873. DGR's manuscript note on page xxviii shows that he borrowed the book back from Sharp in 1881 as he was preparing his two new volumes of poetry printed that year, and hence that some of the changes almost certainly must have come in at that time. That note contains a list of the textual alterations (by page number reference) but it is incomplete. The book should be compared with the set of proof pages (now in the library of the Delaware Art Museum) on which DGR entered corrections that he intended for the 1881 Poems. A New Edition . DGR used those corrected pages as his copy text for the printing of the latter volume.
Not all of the manuscript changes that DGR makes in this text were in fact incorporated into the 1881 texts that were dispersed into the two volumes of Poems. A New Edition and Ballads and Sonnets . He evidently rethought and rejected some.
The most notable of the textual changes are the extensive additions to “Sister Helen” and a fair copy of the “Introductory Sonnet”. Sharp discusses the “Sister Helen” alternations in his study of DGR (see Sharp, 357-361). Both of these are quite late. He finished drafting the “Introductory Sonnet” around 6 February 1880, and around the middle of March of that year he was working on the major new additions to “Sister Helen” (see DGR's letters to Watts-Dunton of 6 February and to Jane Morris of ca. 18 March, Fredeman, Correspondence 80.40 and 94).
DGR used his notes and corrections in this book to prepare copy text for both of his 1881 volumes. In particular, he transferred these corrections (and added some others) into the set of pages (now at Delaware) that he tore from a copy of the book and used as printer's copy for the 1881 Poems. A New Edition .