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SHAKESPEARE’S ‘LADY EDITORS’
The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar
and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men – most of them
white and financially privileged – ensconced themselves in private
and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out ‘their’ versions of
Shakespeare’s text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes, monu-
ments to their author’s greatness and their own reputations.
What if this is not the whole story?
A bold, revisionist, and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial
history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy
women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came
to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated
until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that
taking these women’s work seriously can transform our understand-
ing of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise,
and of how we read Shakespeare in history.
. completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge
in . She is a co-editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
revised edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as well as an active
theatre practitioner.
SHAKESPEARE’S
‘LADY EDITORS’
A New History of the Shakespearean Text
MOLLY G. YARN
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA
Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia
–, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India
Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/
: ./
© Molly G. Yarn
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
: Yarn, Molly G., author.
: Shakespeare’s ‘lady editors’ : a new history of the Shakespearean text / Molly G. Yarn.
: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
: (print) | (ebook) |
(hardback) | (paperback) | (epub)
: : Shakespeare, William, -–Criticism, Textual. | Drama–Editing–History. |
Women editors–History. | Women editors–Great Britain–Biography. | Women editors–United
States–Biography. | Shakespeare, William, -–Bibliography. | BISAC: LITERARY
CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
: . (print) | (ebook) | ./–dc
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
---- Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For Lisa and Douglas Yarn,
insightful critics and editors,
and even better parents.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time – or, rather we who
read it are no longer the same interpreters.
–George Eliot
Contents
List of Figures page x
Acknowledgements xii
A Note on Citations xv
List of Abbreviations xvi
Prologue: The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’: Recovering Women Editors
of Shakespeare
‘It Is My Lady’s Hand’: Female Collaborators and Ambiguous
Literary Labour
Sidenote: On Women Editing Not-Shakespeare (or Not Editing)
‘Give Ear, Sir, to My Sister’: Women Editors and Scholarly
Networks in America
Sidenote: A Primer on Early Student Editions of Shakespeare
‘This Story the World May Read in Me’: Biography
and Bibliography
‘We Few, We Happy Few’: Women and the New
Bibliography
Epilogue
Appendices
Works Cited
Index
ix
Figures
. From the title page of Arthur Conan Doyle’s copy of
Warne’s Shakespeare text page
. Advertisement identifying Mrs Valentine as ‘the editor
of the Chandos Classics’ from an issue of The
Bookman
. Contract of Indenture between Laura Valentine and
Frederick Warne
. Laura Jewry Valentine’s occupation as shown in the
UK Census
. From Emma Gollancz’s entry in the UK Census
. Relationships orbiting the New Shakspere Society
. Jane Lee
. June entry of Katharine Lee Bates’s five-year diary
. First page of the ‘Textual Notes’ section of Bates’s
edition of The Merchant of Venice ()
. Advertisement for the Tudor Shakespeare in Wylie’s
The Winter’s Tale ()
. Sales figures of volumes in the Tudor Shakespeare series
before and after the relaunch
. Title page of The Tempest, edited by Frederick Boas,
revised by Katharine Lee Bates ()
S.a An edition of Macbeth, edited by Evelyn Smith
( printing) with multiple users
S.b The Merchant of Venice (), edited by Katharine
Lee Bates, with signatures showing that it was owned
by the Swending siblings of Salinas, California
S.c, d The Merchant of Venice (Bates, ), owned by Eleanor
and Maurice Millard
S. Antony and Cleopatra (edited by Nora Ratcliff, ),
marked for performance
x
List of Figures xi
S. Marginalia in the Millards’ copy of The Merchant of Venice
(Bates, )
S. A page from the questions section of the Swendings’ copy
of The Merchant of Venice
S. One of the Millards recorded the overall goal that ‘each
pupil be able to take his or her own part in this play’,
demonstrating both knowledge and ‘good reading’
S. The same Millard wrote down an assignment asking the
students to outline Shylock’s argument in Act IV, Scene ,
of Merchant
S. Macbeth (edited by Evelyn Smith) with extensive marginalia
by an unknown annotator
S. An unknown student used the inner back cover of their
copy of Cymbeline to take notes
S. A Millard sibling immortalised a bit of doggerel verse on
her edition’s flyleaf
S. An overview of the proposed relationship between narrative
adaptations, expurgated editions, student editions, and
modern critical editions
. ‘It’s time I got out of this place’, a suffrage poster designed
by Emily Harding Andrews and printed by the Artists’
Suffrage League ()
. Agnes and Rose Weekes’s Census form
. Grace Trenery in the Kingston Gleaner ()
Acknowledgements
Given that this is a book about the unacknowledged labour of making
books, I feel both a great desire and an acute pressure to properly acknowl-
edge everyone who made this particular book possible.
It seems only right to first thank my editor, Emily Hockley, as well as
Rachel Blaifeder, George Paul Laver, Bethany Johnson, Dhivyabharathi
Elavazhagan, Stephanie Sakson, and the whole team at Cambridge
University Press for your trust and support.
My dissertation supervisor, Jason Scott-Warren, welcomed my project
to Cambridge and helped me shape it into the book that it is, reading
countless drafts and asking big questions. Jason, thank you for your
patience and your faith in my work. Hester Lees-Jeffries served as my
faculty advisor and my emotional rock. Hester, I promise I’ll talk about
performance in the next project. Andrew Zurcher and Sonia Massai
examined my dissertation and were the first people (other than my
mother) to insist that ‘This is a book!’
Over the past five years, many people have offered feedback, encour-
agement, and the occasional helping hand or editorial eye, including Ruth
Abbott, Brandi K. Adams, Virginia Anderson, Jonathan Bate, Claire M. L.
Bourne, Erin Capistrano, Hilary Clare, Ian De Jong, Mark Dudgeon,
Megan Heffernan, Adam G. Hooks, John Jowett, Sawyer Kemp, Laura
Kolb, Raphael Lyne, Tara L. Lyons, Laurie Maguire, Gordon McMullan,
Kirk Melnikoff, Dianne Mitchell, Andrew Murphy, Margaux Nair, Kate
Ozment, Aaron T. Pratt, Eric Rasmussen, Elizabeth Riordan, Ann
Thompson, Valerie Wayne, Nadine Weiss, Susannah Williams, and
Henry Woudhuysen. Nicholas Flower kindly spoke to me about his
mother, Margaret. My writing accountability groups kept me on track
and cheered me on. I received crucial suggestions and feedback from my
anonymous Press readers. The staff of the Arden Shakespeare and
Methuen Drama at Bloomsbury Publishing, led by the redoubtable
xii
Acknowledgements xiii
Margaret Bartley, took me behind the curtain to see what it really takes to
publish an edition of Shakespeare.
I’ve been lucky enough to have friends on several continents providing
both emotional and material support throughout this process. Thanks
particularly to Katie Weiller, Ben and Kate Samuels, Margaux and Rishi
Nair (and Harini and Rohit), and Rina and Jason Fox for hosting me
during US research trips. In Cambridge, Tom Littler, Anastasia Bruce-
Jones, Nadine Weiss, Kim Alexander, and Zak Ghazi-Torbati had faith
when I didn’t. Thanks to them and to my many Cambridge theatre
friends, particularly my fellow Marlowe Society committee members,
who provided me with many distractions, for better or for worse.
I am immensely grateful to the staff at the following libraries, special
collections, and archives, who have assisted me both in person and via
email: the University of Reading, the University of Chicago, the British
Library, Wellesley College, Hunter College, Columbia University, the
New York Public Library, Harvard University’s Houghton Library,
King’s College London, Trinity College Cambridge, King’s College
Cambridge, St John’s College Cambridge, Newnham College
Cambridge, Somerville College Oxford, Smith College, the Senate
House, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Queen Mary
University of London, the British Academy, the Kislak Center at the
University of Pennsylvania, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the
University of Virginia, the Boston Public Library, the University of
Liverpool, the National Archives of the UK, the Kingston Gleaner, the
University of Iowa, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas in Austin. Particular thanks to the staff at my ‘home’ libraries: the
Cambridge University Library, the English Faculty Library, and the Lucy
Cavendish College Library. At Cambridge, Lucy Cavendish College and
the Faculty of English have both provided much-appreciated funding for
travel and conferences and been sources of collegiality and support. I am
also grateful to the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research
Center for their award of the Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship,
which funded my work in their archives, and to the staff for their assistance
and welcome during my visits. On a far broader scale, this book would not
exist without large-scale digitisation of archives and library catalogues, so
to all the unnamed people involved in those immense tasks: thank you.
Several chapters in this book contain material that has been previously
published in other forms. Many thanks to the Arden Shakespeare, an
imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, for allowing me to use sections
of ‘Katharine Lee Bates and Women’s Editions of Shakespeare for
xiv Acknowledgements
Students’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the
Book in Early Modern England (London, ), pp. –. William
Caldwell was kind enough to allow me to use material from ‘“All the
Youth of England Are on Fire (for Shakespeare)”: A Review of Evelyn
Smith’s Henry V’, published in issue . of The Hare: A Journal of
Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theatre ().
Most of all, thank you to my family, especially my parents. You know
what you did.
A Note on Citations
In order to emphasise the editor’s role as author of the paratextual
materials and mediator of the text, all editions are cited in a format that
names both William Shakespeare and the editor as authors.
xv
Abbreviations
Arden Arden Shakespeare, First Series (–)
Arden Arden Shakespeare, Second Series (–)
Arden Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (–)
BL British Library
CUL Cambridge University Library
DNB Dictionary of National Biography (–)
EETS Early English Text Society
NSS New Shakespeare Society
ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (since ).
A distinction is drawn between the old DNB and the modern
ODNB because although the original process of producing the
Dictionary of National Biography and its initial supplements is
discussed within the text, all references come from the revised
version and its updates, from onwards.
OED Oxford English Dictionary
xvi
Prologue
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
In , publishers Frederick Warne & Co. released an edition of The
Works of William Shakespeare in their Chandos Classics series. The Chandos
Classics was an inexpensive home library series, initially priced from one
shilling and sixpence to two shillings, depending on the cover. Affordable
editions of classic literature, particularly Shakespeare’s plays, were a lucra-
tive market around the mid-century, and many publishers invested in
creating impressive texts. Charles Knight, Cassell & Co., and George
Routledge all published strikingly elaborate, reasonably priced, illustrated
editions of the complete works. Unlike its competitors, the Chandos
Shakespeare was not illustrated, making it fairly forgettable in comparison.
Even so, Warne claimed that their Shakespeare edition eventually sold over
, copies. Stephen Greenblatt has recounted the story of explorer
H. M. Stanley burning a copy of Shakespeare’s plays in Africa in order to
protect his notes – that copy was a Chandos edition. James Joyce owned a
copy of the Chandos Shakespeare, as did Arthur Conan Doyle.
Also unlike its competitors, the Chandos Shakespeare did not identify
its editor, even though its advertising particularly described it as ‘a well
edited Edition’, superior to other inexpensive Shakespeares ‘in size of Page,
Quality of Paper, Easy Reading, and General Completeness’. The Preface
of the and editions explained that
this Edition of Shakspeare has been carefully prepared from the earliest and
more modern Editions. Where Commentators have differed as to the sense
of obscure or doubtful passages, we have selected those readings which we
believed to be most Shakspearian and best suited to a popular Edition.
Neither edition named an editor. Warne reused the original text multiple
times for variations such as the ‘Albion Edition’, the ‘Universal Edition’,
and the ‘Victorian Edition’. By the late s, those editions were appear-
ing with revised prefaces. The Preface of the ‘Universal Edition’
expanded upon the editorial principles employed:
Prologue
The First Folio and the Quartos have been used for the Edition; and fidelity
to the original text has been preserved as much as possible. In fact, the
emendations are few in number, and only made when absolutely required.
No new readings have been attempted, as it is believed by the editor that
the ever-increasing knowledge of Elizabethan literature – and of Shakspeare
especially – has removed former obscurities, and much that perplexed the
old commentators is clear and intelligible to the modern reader; new
readings generally rather injure than improve the text.
The editions released in the s also provide the first indication of the
editor’s presence – the title pages and prefaces name ‘the editor of the
Chandos Classics’ (Figure .).
Finally, in December of , after almost thirty years in print, adver-
tisements began to appear describing someone as the editor of the Chandos
Classics, and thus, obliquely, the Chandos Shakespeare, for the first time
(Figure .). William Jaggard deemed this identification certain enough to
include in his expansive Shakespeare Bibliography without the ques-
tion mark with which he marked unconfirmed attributions. The editor’s
name was Mrs Valentine.
Figure . From the title page of Arthur Conan Doyle’s copy of Warne’s Shakespeare
text, printed in the ‘Imperial Poets’ series, c. . Image used by permission of the
Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin
Figure . Advertisement identifying Mrs Valentine as ‘the editor of the Chandos
Classics’ from an issue of The Bookman (vol. , no. , p. ).
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
In , Mr. Wm. H. Peet wrote to Notes and Queries with information
gathered from W. Fruing Warne (the original Warne’s son) about Mrs
Valentine:
Her full maiden name was Laura Belinda Jewry, her father being Admiral
Jewry, and the place of her birth is supposed to have been the Victory. At an
early age she became connected with the family of Lord Elphinstone, and
spent some years of her maiden life in India. She married when young the
Rev. R. Valentine, a clergyman of the Church of England, but he died
within twelve months.
Peet’s claims seem to be a mixture of truths and slight exaggerations.
Valentine was born in in Portsea, Hampshire. Her father was
Lieutenant Henry Jewry, who commanded the HMS Grecian from
. Valentine’s exact date of birth is unknown, but the Grecian was
purchased by the Royal Navy on November , so if she was born
earlier in the year, it is possible that her father was assigned to the Victory at
that time. The legendary HMS Victory was moored in Portsmouth
Harbour beginning in , after which she served as ‘a residence, flagship
and tender providing accommodation’. In Valentine’s novel The Cup
and the Lip (), the heroine goes to live with her uncle, the captain of
the Victory, and his family, who live aboard the ship itself. She describes
family life aboard the ship, including an incident where the children hide
in nooks and crannies to frighten visitors. A review of her book Sea Fights
from Sluys to Navarino describes her as ‘a descendant of five generations of
seamen, a lady who passed part of her childhood on board the “Victory”’.
So it seems likely that even if she was not born on the Victory, as Peet
believed, Valentine lived on board the ship for a time during her child-
hood. The connection to Lord Elphinstone also appears to be a distortion
of the facts. The census shows Valentine, then still Laura Jewry,
working as a governess for the family of Eliza Arthur, who lived on the
Royal Crescent in Bath. Eliza Arthur’s husband was George Arthur,
formerly lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land and Upper Canada.
The Arthurs had returned from Canada around – and, apparently,
hired Laura Valentine to teach their numerous children. In , the East
India Company appointed George Arthur governor of Bombay, a post
later held by Lord Elphinstone. Valentine may have moved with them to
India, where the Arthurs remained until .
Valentine’s first book was The Ransom, a novel published in , the
same year that the Arthurs returned from India. The census lists her
profession as ‘Authoress’. In , she married the Reverend Richard
Prologue
Valentine, only to be widowed a year later. The case files of the Royal
Literary Fund provide a deeper insight into this period of her life.
Established in to assist writers experiencing financial difficulties,
the Fund’s files, lodged at the British Library, contain thousands of letters
and documents about authors, well-known and forgotten, and their
spouses and children. Valentine applied to the Fund for support after
her husband’s death. Several of the letters provided by friends in support of
her request imply that he died of a fever contracted during his ministry.
Valentine’s letter reveals that at the time of his death, she was pregnant
with their first child. Six weeks later, she delivered a stillborn baby. ‘It may
be very long – if I ever have strength again – before I can return to my pen
for support,’ she writes. ‘My heart is well nigh broken and my head
confused and troubled.’ One letter of support, written by Lady
Cornwallis, president of the Ladies Committee that steered the Adult
Orphan Institution, explains that Valentine had donated the proceeds of
her novel The Vassal to the charity several years before, possibly worsening
her situation after her husband’s death. The Fund provided her with
several grants over the next eighteen months.
At some point during the next decade, Valentine did pick up her pen
once more, and she completed and published several novels. After that
initial period of bereavement and desperation, she moved to Battersea to
live with her older sister, Mary, and their widowed mother. The
Census described her occupation as ‘Clergyman W[idow] and author
of Tales, childrens books, Periodical articles’. In Notes and Queries, Peet
explains that following her husband’s death
Mrs. Valentine . . . joined the staff of Messrs. Warne & Co., the well-
known publishers, and rendered them very valuable service. She was
practically the sole editor of ‘The Chandos Classics,’ and in the course of
what may be called her ‘business life’ was on terms of friendship with many
well-known literary people.
As with the previous biographical details, Peet’s claims must be taken
with a grain of salt, but the in-house history of Warne, written for their
centennial in , confirms that she was ‘Frederick Warne’s editress in
the early days and in fact the only female member of his staff at that
time’. Warne’s own obituary in The Athenaeum described her as the
firm’s ‘literary advisor’. And when Valentine died in , a note in
The Athenaeum explained that she ‘had acted as editor and confidential
adviser on literary matters to Messrs. F. Warne & Co. since the founda-
tion of the firm’.
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
A letter from Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, to
Valentine in , responding to a request that Evans contribute some-
thing to a Warne publication, shows that Valentine already had a position
at the firm two years after its founding. Figure ., which shows a
contract between Warne and Valentine signed in , confirms that
Valentine’s involvement dated back to the firm’s inception in . In
exchange for a yearly increasing salary and due to ‘her regard for the said
Frederick Warne and for other good considerations’, this contract gave
Warne the rights to all published or unpublished ‘books and portions of
books and works and literary productions of whatever nature or kind . . .
written or edited’ by Valentine between April and December
. If she began working for Warne in , Valentine could easily
have been involved in the preparation of the Chandos Shakespeare, first
published in , and the contract indicates that she was editing some-
thing during that ten-year period.
Although this proves that Valentine could have edited the Chandos
Shakespeare, definitive proof has not yet emerged that she did. The only
Shakespeare-related work bearing Valentine’s name was the illustrated
Shakespearian Tales in Verse (), an attractive volume containing verse
retellings of The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice, and
The Taming of the Shrew. Gender may very well have been a factor in the
decision not to identify Laura Valentine as the editor of the Chandos
Shakespeare. Valentine wrote and edited prolifically for Warne, but her
name was associated with domestic genres such as novels and children’s
books. Perhaps her authorial persona did not match the Chandos Classics
brand that Warne wanted to develop. It was still unusual at the time for a
woman to edit this kind of book; one reviewer simply assumed that the ‘L.
Valentine’ who edited Milton’s works for the Chandos Classics in the
s was a ‘Mr’ rather than a ‘Mrs’. Anonymous and pseudonymous
publishing were common elements of Valentine’s career – many of her
books were published under the pseudonym ‘Aunt Louisa’, a name
inspired by Warne’s wife, Louisa.
Between this loss of name and the complete abdication of copyright that
she agreed to in her contract, Valentine’s authorial and editorial identity
seems, in part, to have been annexed by the Warne firm and Warne
himself. None of the early books of the Chandos Classics has a named
editor; perhaps they were edited by multiple people at the publishing
house, or perhaps Valentine was not involved with the Chandos Classics
at all in the early years. Although incontrovertible proof has not survived,
enough of Peet’s claims have some basis in truth to justify our taking
Prologue
Figure . Contract of Indenture between Laura Valentine and Frederick Warne. Frederick
Warne Archive. Image used by permission of the University of Reading, Special Collections
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
seriously the claim that Laura Valentine was indeed ‘practically the sole
editor of the Chandos Classics’, and that in the course of those duties, she
edited The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, making her only the
second woman to do so, in the wake of Mary Cowden Clarke’s
edition (Figure .). Laura Valentine’s story proves that the Shakespearean
editorial tradition, as it is currently known, remains fundamentally incom-
plete. All of the information needed to connect Valentine with the
Chandos Shakespeare was in place, but the connection has simply not
been made before now. This book will explore possible reasons for that
neglect, while also filling in some of the lacunae in editorial history.
Figure . Laura Jewry Valentine’s occupation as shown in the UK Census. PRO
RG ///. Image used by permission of The National Archives of the UK
Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’ examines women editors as a group and a
cultural phenomenon, rather than as isolated and exceptional individuals.
Women such as Mary Cowden Clarke, Teena Rochfort Smith, Charlotte
Porter, and Helen Clarke have received attention in several excellent but
closely delimited article-length studies. However, no attempt has pre-
viously been made to comprehensively identify and study these women
and the editions they produced as a driving force in the way the
Shakespearean text has been shaped and transmitted. At the outset of
this project, I knew of about twenty women editors who had at least been
identified by name, although most were still unstudied; I hoped to find
another ten or so. Instead, I found almost seventy, more than doubling
my initial estimate.
This book draws on material from twenty-eight different university
and library archives in the UK and the US, as well as the records of
government agencies in both countries. It weaves together material from
letters, diaries, ledgers, contracts, census documents, published reports,
reviews, advertisements, wills, life records, and even novels to create as
detailed an account as possible of the lives and work of female editors,
placing them alongside over editions of the plays, ranging from the
eighteenth century to the present day, some edited by men, but most by
women. The majority of this material has never been published or
discussed in print, and it represents an enormous body of unique and
original documentary evidence relating both to the Shakespeare text and
Prologue
to the lives and work of scholarly women during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
The Lady Editors builds on the work of a number of scholars, but its
largest methodological debts are owed primarily to two books: Shakespeare
in Print, by Andrew Murphy, and Women Reading Shakespeare,
–, by Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts. Murphy’s study,
which surveys the history of Shakespeare publishing from the early
modern period to the present day, in addition to being a major work
in its own right, opened up vast areas of enquiry for future scholarship.
His rejection of the teleological impulse underlying previous accounts of
editorial history, and his insistence on including ‘derivative’, forgotten
texts in the new narrative, are critical elements of the theory that
underpins this book. In Women Reading Shakespeare, Thompson and
Roberts persuasively demonstrated that women’s work on Shakespeare
could be taken seriously, both as part of the wider history of Shakespeare
criticism and as a freestanding genre.
Ann Thompson, Sasha Roberts, Gail Marshall, Laurie Maguire, and
Jeanne Addison Roberts have produced excellent work on individual
women editors including Mary Cowden Clarke, Alice Walker, Teena
Rochfort Smith, Charlotte Endymion Porter, and Helen Archibald
Clarke. By placing these individual editors within the larger context of
a female editorial tradition, this book takes the next logical step in the field
that they established, a step suggested by Henry Woudhuysen in a brief
piece on women editors. The concept of the social text, articulated by
theorists such Jerome McGann, D. F. McKenzie, David Greetham, and
Joseph Grigely, is crucial to this project, as are the studies of textual and
book history carried out by scholars such as Sonia Massai, Helen Smith,
Margreta de Grazia, Gabriel Egan, and Leah Marcus. Although not
directly addressed here, given its more contemporary focus, work on
feminist editing by Ann Thompson, Laurie Maguire, Valerie Wayne,
and Suzanne Gossett has also contributed to my thinking.
Given the vast scope of this new material covered, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady
Editors’ is wide-ranging; however, rather than presenting a comprehensive
fait accompli, it is intended to open up new avenues of enquiry that can
build on this research. I am particularly aware, for example, that this
account excludes performance texts – texts abridged for classroom or
student performance, or texts reflecting real historical performances (either
published or in prompt-book form) – and I hope that this book will inspire
or contribute to future research on women’s involvement in that textual
genre. In an ideological sense, this appeal to future collaboration and
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
cooperation reflects a central concern of Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’ –
replacing the narrowly defined, male-coded image of the solitary
Shakespeare editor with an understanding of the editorial role that takes
into account a wider network of contributors and shaping forces.
Gender is a social construct too complex to be contained within the
simplistic male/female binary; however, over the centuries, that binary has
crept into editorial discourse, infecting it with misogyny and suppressing
diversity in the field, as discussed in the section entitled ‘Gendered Labour,
Gendered Text’ in Chapter . Following the lead of the Women in Book
History Bibliography, I ‘define “woman” as a constructionist, not an essen-
tialist, identity’. To the best of my knowledge, the editors discussed in
this book all identified as women, but I recognise the difficulty of making
that determination, particularly for historical figures unable to speak
for themselves.
Chapter lays out the theoretical concerns at hand, particularly issues
of gendered labour and gendered texts, introducing the concept of the
domestic text and exploring how the established language, conventions,
and assumptions surrounding the editorial task conspire to exclude
women from Shakespearean editorial history. By profiling the women
editors who functioned within the network of the New Shakspere
Society, Chapter digs deeper into issues of gendered labour, focusing
on how male-female collaborations can both empower and marginalise
women editors. Chapter moves across the Atlantic to examine a very
different network – the community of women editors centred around the
American women’s colleges. Chapter considers both the advantages and
the dangers of studying editorial work through a biographical lens. In it,
I present three case studies, each focused on a single editor, laying out my
research process and the challenges I found along the way. Chapter
investigates how the rise of the New Bibliography disadvantaged women
editors, demonstrating how women’s success remained dependent on male
mentorship and male-centred networks. The book also includes two brief
“sidebars” and appendices. The first sidenote, following Chapter , dis-
cusses women who edited authors other than Shakespeare, or who carried
out textual work other than editing. The second sidenote, which follows
Chapter , introduces the material forms and uses of student editions of
Shakespeare and proposes some approaches to developing a critical frame-
work for the study of this neglected textual genre. Appendix A offers brief
biographies of the sixty-nine women editors who produced editions prior
to ; Appendix B is a list of all editions prepared by women up to the
present day.
Prologue
But first, a note on the book’s title: the naming of things is important,
and I have thought extensively about the terms I use to refer to textual
editors who happen to identify as women. This question arose during
the earliest days of this project – one reader of the initial proposal
expressed the concern that ‘editrix’ could be seen as flippant or insulting.
‘Female editors’ has always felt unwieldy to me, although I use it at
times. Ultimately, I chose to rely primarily on the term ‘women editors’,
although admittedly that also grates when used in the singular – ‘woman
editor’. Having made this compromise, however, I still wanted to find a
way to use my personal favourite description – ‘lady editor’. Appealing
to the ear in both singular and plural forms, I enjoy this moniker for its
irreverence, and I hope to reclaim it from its often-derogatory past use.
In , for example, a particularly critical anonymous reviewer of
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s illustrated edition of the plays
blamed ‘the numberless alterations, mutilations, corruptions, or what-
ever we may choose to call them’ on Mary Cowden Clarke and wished
that ‘the lady editor had refrained from thus tampering with our great
poet’s language’.
Interestingly, gendered, nuanced uses of the title of ‘editor’ are not
exclusive to the English literary tradition. In China, poet and courtesan
Xue Tao (c. – CE) so impressed a governor of the Tang Dynasty
that he requested that she be appointed his jiaoshu, or editor, an official
position. Although she never received the appointment, she was known
thereafter as nü jiaoshu – ‘female editor/collator/reviser of books’. Nü
jiaoshu later became a euphemism for a courtesan.
As Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts have detailed, Charles Cowden
Clarke actively defended his wife’s intellectual achievements, disclaiming
any credit in her solo work and praising the value of her contributions to
their joint projects. Mary Cowden Clarke was significantly more likely to
recognise Charles’s contributions to her work than he was; in her edi-
tion of the plays, while taking pride in the thought that she was (to her
knowledge) ‘the first of his female subjects who has been selected to edit
his works’, she proudly credited Charles with preparing the glossary, even
though ‘his own unwillingness to diminish the Editor’s credit for the
whole work would fain have made him forbid this acknowledgment’.
And while their language and intentions are far from modern, the Cowden
Clarkes did anticipate modern feminist editors in pointing out the value of
gender diversity in editing, noting in the preface to the same edition that so
peeved the anonymous reviewer that
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
for one who is so universal-minded as Shakespeare, we think it will be
conceded that there may be peculiar advantage in having a man and woman
as his joint editors. While the man-editor uses his masculine judgment as to
what expressions are fittest to be expunged from a chastened edition of
Shakespeare, the woman-editor is not without her use in bringing feminine
discernment as an aid and exponent to some of his passages. It is, perhaps,
good and befitting that Shakespeare, who is not so much a man as human –
containing in himself the best parts of woman’s as well as man’s nature –
should have a woman to assist in editing and analysing him.
The framework of this claim is certainly antiquated, but the intention
behind it is clearly recognisable – an assertion that every editor brings their
own experiences to bear on the editorial task. This book takes up and
advances that argument in ways which the Cowden Clarkes probably never
imagined, but the subversive seeds of their point are present in the work of
every woman editor, no matter how conservative or regressive her work
seems to the modern eye. Therefore, in honour of Mary Cowden Clarke
and all other ‘lady editors’, known and unknown, and in defiance of their
misogynistic critics, I dub this book Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’.
***
And, for the record, in its original Latin form, ‘editor’ is a masculine noun.
The Latin word editor, however, comes from the verb edo (edo, edare, edidi,
editus), which includes among its many meanings ‘to bear, to beget, to give
birth to’. Just something to consider.
Notes
Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in
England, – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ); Richard D. Altick, ‘From
Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics
–’, Studies in Bibliography, (), –; Terry I. Seymour,
‘Great Books by the Millions: J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library’, in The
Culture of the Publisher’s Series, vol. II: Nationalisms and the National Canon,
ed. John Spiers (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, ),
pp. –.
Marvin Spevack, ‘What Price Shakespeare?: James Orchard Halliwell-
Phillipps and the Shilling Shakespeares of the s’, The Papers of the
Bibliographical Society of America, . (), –; Alan R. Young,
‘John Dicks’s Illustrated Edition of “Shakspere for the Millions”’, The
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, . (), –; Alan
Prologue
R. Young, Steam-Driven Shakespeare, or Making Good Books Cheap: Five
Victorian Illustrated Editions (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, );
Stuart Sillars, ‘Reading Illustrated Editions: Methodology and the Limits of
Interpretation’, Shakespeare Survey, (), –.
Arthur King and A. F. Stuart, The House of Warne: One Hundred Years of
Publishing (London: Frederick Warne & Co., ), pp. –.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, ),
pp. –.
These copies are now held at the Ransom Centre. Joyce’s copy was part of his
library in Trieste; Conan Doyle’s copy was a wedding gift from George Edalji, a
man who had been convicted of a crime of which Conan Doyle believed him
innocent. Conan Doyle had campaigned for Edalji to receive a pardon, which
was granted a few months before Conan Doyle’s wedding – thus the gift. I am
grateful to Aaron T. Pratt for obtaining images of these books on my behalf.
‘Advertisement’, The Athenaeum (London, June ), p. .
William Shakespeare and Laura Jewry Valentine, The Works of William
Shakspeare, Chandos Classics (London: Frederick Warne & Co., );
William Shakespeare and Laura Jewry Valentine, The Works of William
Shakspeare. Life, Glossary, &c. (London: Frederick Warne & Co., ).
William Shakespeare and Laura Jewry Valentine, The Works of William
Shakspeare, ‘Universal’ Edition (London: Frederick Warne and Co., ).
Shakespeare and Valentine, Works of Shakspeare (Universal); William
Shakespeare and Laura Jewry Valentine, The Works of William Shakspeare,
‘Victorian’ Edition (London: Frederick Warne and Co., ). Other Warne
publications explicitly attributed to ‘the Editor of the Chandos Classics’
include editions of Milton, Horace, and Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott.
William Jaggard, Shakespeare Bibliography, reprint (London: Dawsons of Pall
Mall, ). This William Jaggard was obviously not the printer of the
first folio, although he did claim to be a descendant.
Wm. H. Peet, ‘Laura Jewry, Afterwards Mrs. R. Valentine’, Notes and Queries,
s-XII. (), -a.
James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur, The Naval Chronicle: Volume ,
July–December : Containing a General and Biographical History of the
Royal Navy of the United Kingdom with a Variety of Original Papers on
Nautical Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .
‘History | HMS Victory’, www.hms-victory.com/history.
Laura Jewry Valentine, The Cup and the Lip: A Novel, vols (London: T. C.
Newby, ), I, p. . The Cup and the Lip also employs Shakespearean
epigraphs at the start of each chapter.
‘History and Biography’, ed. John Chapman, Westminster Review, ., no.
(), –.
‘ England Census – Laura Jewry’, National Archives of the UK, PRO
HO ////; www.ancestry.com.
The Mystery of Mrs Valentine
A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Arthur, Sir George, First Baronet (–)’, in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),
doi.org/./ref:odnb/.
‘ England Census – Laura Jewry’, National Archives of the UK, PRO
HO /, Folio , Page ; www.ancestry.com.
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (London:
Routledge, ), p. .
Laura Belinda Charlotte Valentine, ‘Letter to the Committee of the Literary
Fund’, June , British Library, Western Manuscripts, Royal Literary
Fund, Case Files s–s, Loan RLF //.
Lady Cornwallis, ‘Letter to Thomas Cautley Newby’, June , British
Library, Western Manuscripts, Royal Literary Fund, Case Files s–s,
Loan RLF //. The Adult Orphans Institution, now the Princess
Helena College, was founded in to educate the orphaned daughters of
military or churchmen as governesses. ‘History | The Princess Helena
College’, www.princesshelenacollege.co.uk/History.
‘ England Census – Laura B. C. Valentine’, National Archives of the UK,
PRO RG /, Folio , Page ; www.ancestry.com.
Peet, ‘Laura Jewry’.
King and Stuart, The House of Warne, p. .
‘Mr. Frederick Warne’, The Athenaeum, November , p. .
‘Literary Gossip’, The Athenaeum, December , p. .
Mary Ann Evans, ‘Letter to Mrs. R. Valentine’, July , Special
Collections, the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, MsL E va.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Riordan for obtaining photos of this letter for me.
‘Indenture between Laura Belinda Charlotte Valentine and Frederick Warne,
Armand William Duret and Edward James Dodd’, , Frederick Warne
Archive, University of Reading Special Collections, Ledger, p. .
Laura Jewry Valentine, Shakespearian Tales in Verse, Illustrated (London:
F. Warne & Co., ).
‘Poetry and Verse’, The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts,
August , .
Enumerated and cited below.
Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of
Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, );
Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare,
–: An Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).
Ann Thompson, ‘Teena Rochfort Smith, Frederick Furnivall, and the New
Shakspere Society’s Four-Text Edition of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly,
(), –; Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke:
Marriage, Gender and the Victorian Woman Critic of Shakespeare’, in
Victorian Shakespeare, vol. II: Literature and Culture, ed. Gail Marshall and
Adrian Poole (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –; Gail
Marshall and Ann Thompson, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke’, in Jameson, Cowden
Prologue
Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, ed. Gail Marshall, Great Shakespeareans (London:
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, ), VII, pp. –; Laurie E. Maguire,
‘How Many Children Had Alice Walker?’, in Printing and Parenting in Early
Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, ),
pp. –; Jeanne Addison Roberts, ‘Women Edit Shakespeare’,
Shakespeare Survey, (), –.
H. R. Woudhuysen, ‘Some Women Editors of Shakespeare: A Preliminary
Sketch’, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Performance and Reception, ed.
Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan
(London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, ), pp. – (p. ).
With thanks to Cait Coker and Kate Ozment. ‘Our Mission’, in Women in
Book History Bibliography, www.womensbookhistory.org/our-mission.
Quoted in Thompson and Roberts, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke’, pp. –.
Victor Cunrui Xiong, Historical Dictionary of Medieval China (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, ), p. .
Lily Xiao Hong Lee and Sue Wiles, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women:
Tang through Ming, – (New York: Routledge, ), p. .
Thompson and Roberts, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke’, pp. –.
William Shakespeare and Mary Cowden Clarke, Shakespeare’s Works. Edited,
with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text, by M. Cowden Clarke (New York:
D. Appleton & Co., ), p. vii.
William Shakespeare, Mary Cowden Clarke, and Charles Cowden Clarke,
The Plays of Shakespeare, Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare, vols (London:
Cassell & Co., ), III, p. xiv.
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
Recovering Women Editors of Shakespeare
Gary Taylor once began an article with a cut-and-dried statement of the
problem that he wished to highlight: ‘Women may read Shakespeare, but
men edit him. So it has been from the beginning, and so it remains.’ But
this story is far more complex, and far more consequential, than it has
seemed. Between and , at least sixty-nine women in the United
Kingdom and the United States edited Shakespeare. Their output of over
editions – some of single plays, some of complete works, with many
others falling somewhere in between – does not square with the generally
held understanding, as laid out by Taylor, that women have never edited
Shakespeare in significant numbers. Taylor’s misapprehensions are under-
standable; the gender imbalance in editing has always been significant, and
it was particularly egregious by the last quarter of the twentieth century. So
how did the number of women editors decrease so significantly during the
twentieth century, and why were most women editors of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries excluded from the editorial record?
The first element of the answer involves the assessment of nineteenth-
century editors by modern critics. The current conception of the scholarly
editor’s role developed during the twentieth century as part of an
immensely influential academic movement: the New Bibliography.
Setting aside modern opinions on the validity of its principles, the New
Bibliography fundamentally changed how scholars thought about textual
studies and editing, formalising new methods of analytical bibliography
and instituting a new focus on the search for ‘ideal copy’ that reflected the
author’s intentions, as interpreted by the editors. Because of the depth of
that influence, there is a tendency when considering editors who worked
prior to the New Bibliography to judge them against what are now
considered the basic tenets of scholarly editing. Those who displayed
recognisably ‘modern’ practices in their work earn plaudits, while those
who now seem outdated are chided, mocked, or ignored. Discussing
editorial intervention in the Shakespearean text prior to Rowe’s edition
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
of , Sonia Massai notes that although the topic has not been entirely
neglected, previous work has focused on ‘exceptional examples which can
best be understood as precursors of the editorial tradition associated with
eighteenth-century editors’, a trend which she attributes to ‘a teleological
desire which foregrounds familiar (and therefore properly editorial) strate-
gies at the expense of . . . much wider and more representative textual
practices’. Massai’s work attempts to fill the gap between early modern
printing house practices and the dawn of ‘modern’ editing in the eigh-
teenth century; however, the paradigm shift between nineteenth-century
and current editorial practice is also profound, and Massai’s point transfers
neatly across to this later context. Nineteenth-century editors were not
presciently operating according to principles still decades away from artic-
ulation, and although they worked between two eras of intense and
influential editorial work, the nineteenth century was by no means a fallow
period in editorial history. Paul Salzman has recently called into question
past judgements of nineteenth-century editorial work, and this book
echoes his claims that this era of the Shakespearean editorial tradition
deserves greater consideration. Demanding proleptic modernity from
nineteenth-century editors results in an unjustified elision of a large span
of important editorial activity.
So, appropriating Massai’s phrasing, what does it mean to be ‘properly
editorial’? Does one particular element of the editorial process, taken on its
own, make the person doing it an editor? Or is it a confluence of tasks that
cumulatively earns one the title? Must one prepare the text and write the
notes/commentary and compose the introduction to be called an editor?
Taylor writes critically of the problematic paradigm he sees as the root of
the gender imbalance in editing:
Textual scholars generally believe that textual scholarship is the most
important activity of academic humanism: it constructs the foundation
upon which all other literary interpretation is built. Textual scholars – by
recovering, editing, and publishing classical texts – made possible the
Renaissance itself. Within this value system, editing is work, criticism is
play; editing is primary, criticism is parasitic. This value system can easily
overlay another: men work, men are primary; women are idle, parasitic,
secondary. The paucity of female editors reflects and reinforces the sexist
myth that men do the scientific problem-solving, while women indulge in
various forms of ‘appreciation’: men make, women interpret.
While Taylor’s article undoubtedly arises from good intentions, it rests on
shaky historical grounds, and his language and conclusions reinforce the
gendered division of labour that he wants to critique. To fully parse the
Recovering Women Editors of Shakespeare
complex factors at play here, consider the word ‘work’ in two senses: work,
as in the labour involved in producing something, and work, as in the
thing produced. Work-as-process and work-as-product, both verb and
noun. In both senses, work can be gendered – gendered labour and the
gendered text. Although these concepts are inextricably linked, considering
them separately enables a better understanding of their interplay.
Taylor’s critique of the textual/critical binary relies on assumptions
about gendered labour. He describes Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne
Barton, who wrote introductions to plays but did not perform the work
of collation/emendation, as playing the part of ‘“the good hostess,” intro-
ducing readers to editors. The man does the work, and the woman takes
care of the social arrangements.’ Taylor’s assessment that it is unfair that
women were allowed to do only part of the job, and not the most
important part at that, is problematic on two fronts. First, it reinforces
the paradigm according to which the traditional textual work of collation
and emendation is the most serious and important element of editing – the
editing is the ‘work’, and the introduction is the ‘play’; therefore, the
‘social arrangements’ are the less important element. Second, it completely
disregards historical context. Inchbald did not select or prepare the texts
used for British Theatre, but like Johnson or Pope during the previous
century, her name was a major selling point, and her critical introductions
distinguished the series from its competitors. Anne Barton wrote the
introductions to the comedies for the edition of The Riverside
Shakespeare, the text of which was prepared by G. Blakemore Evans;
however, Barton was only one of six scholars who wrote critical introduc-
tions or essays for the volume. The other five were men, but Taylor singles
out only Barton as an underappreciated ‘hostess’.
A significant aspect of recent feminist thought involves reappraising the
value of the emotional/social labour more often taken on by women,
bringing it up to par in importance with more traditional (male-oriented)
work. Viewed through this new lens, the traditionally ‘social’ elements of
editorial work take on new significance. If the writer of the introduction is
indeed the hostess for the rest of the edition, we should also remember that
women have, throughout history, exerted significant political and cultural
power through the role of hostess – establishing literary salons, setting the
tone for political gatherings, bestowing financial or political patronage.
A well-placed, canny woman has often been able to influence events via her
‘social’ privileges. Take, for example, the case of a woman who seems to
have been chosen very specifically to perform those ‘hostess’ tasks for a
particular play. Between and , New York publisher George
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
D. Sproul produced the Renaissance Shakespeare under Sidney Lee’s
general editorship. Lee wrote the general introduction and annotations,
while authors and scholars such as Edmund Gosse, Algernon Charles
Swinburne, and Henry James wrote introductions for individual plays.
The list of editors was a who’s who of the fin de siècle literary world, and
all the names were male except for one – Alice Meynell.
Essayist and poet Meynell, a well-known suffragist, wrote the introduc-
tion for The Taming of the Shrew for the Renaissance series. Meynell was
the only woman to write an introduction in this series, and she wrote on
arguably the most gender-problematic play in the Shakespeare canon.
Meynell derides critics who attempt to analyse Shrew seriously, singling
out Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines for its
unfortunate attempts to understand and explain Katharine’s character.
Any attempt to delve too deep into Shrew reveals the appalling truth of the
situation, she explains:
Granting [Cowden Clarke], then, that the heroine of a tender story, a
sentimental shrew honestly in need of love and a respectable master, is
appropriately to be tamed by famine, cold, ignominy, insolence, and
violence, to what end are these rigours practised in the play? To what end
but to make of her a hypocrite – her husband the while happy to have her
so? For a woman who feigns, under menace, to see a young maid where an
old man stands, or a sun where the moon shines, is no other. Katharine
does this for fear of the repetition of outrage – more famine, more cold,
more contempt, at the hands of the strong man: the strong man of her
girlish dreams, quotha!
Attacking the ‘feminine’ Shakespeare of the previous generation, charac-
terised by the sentimental character criticism of writers like Cowden
Clarke, Anna Jameson, and Helena Faucit, Meynell offers a particular
approach to the play, priming the reader to approach it from a specific
angle. Sidney Lee clearly selected well-known, established literary figures to
write the introductions for this series, and both Lee and many readers
would likely have been aware of Meynell’s social, political, and intellectual
leanings, which formed a major part of her public identity. An advertise-
ment for Lee’s later Caxton Edition, which used the same introductions,
stresses that, thanks to their varied backgrounds, ‘every school of thought
and critical temper is represented among the contributors’, and, of the
forty-one contributors, Meynell was one of only twenty whose portraits
were included in the advertisement, signalling her market appeal and name
recognition. As the writer of the introduction, does she qualify as an
editor? In the old paradigm, which distinguishes social/frivolous/female
Recovering Women Editors of Shakespeare
labour from real/serious/male labour, she would not. But in cases like this,
where the writer of the introduction seems to have been selected specifi-
cally for the play in question, the shaping influence of the introduction and
its inextricability from the overall edition become obvious. Meynell’s
authorship of that editorial element is crucial to the edition as a whole.
She should not be considered ‘less than’ general editor Sidney Lee.
Returning to the question of why women’s contributions to editing
have been neglected, a second part of the answer lies in the creation of a
hierarchy of editions that occurs, in part, as a consequence of the pro-
cedures used for collation. Collation is the process by which textual
variants are recorded and reported. Although collation protocols differ
between series, the basic procedure involves comparing every iteration of
a text and noting all the variations. Collation is recorded and explained
through textual notes. Modern textual notes emphasise the originator of a
textual emendation or conjecture, as is consistent with our overwhelming
concern with intellectual property, a preoccupation dating back to the
proprietary attitudes established by the Tonson publishing cartel in the
eighteenth century. Margreta de Grazia describes textual notes as ‘a
format for attribution, registering critical as opposed to literary property’.
In notes, the abbreviation ‘subst.’ means that another edition ‘substan-
tially’ used the same conjecture for the basis of an emendation, with only
minor differences not affecting the overall sense of the emendation. The
all-important ‘this edn’ marks an original emendation. If an edition is not
considered to be textually ‘significant’ or original, it is not generally
included in collation, and therefore does not appear in textual notes.
An editor of Shakespeare must be strategic in choosing which editions to
collate because she is limited by the realities of time, space, publishing
practice, and human endurance. As Leah Marcus has said, ‘Ars longa, vita
brevis: there is only so much primary textual investigation that any given
scholar can be expected to accomplish.’ According to one estimate,
producing an edition of a play in the Arden series already requires the
collation of between forty-five and ninety texts. In the Handbook for the
New Variorum Shakespeare, probably the most critically and textually
expansive editions of Shakespeare ever produced, Richard Knowles writes
that ‘in general, editions should not be fully collated unless they are of real
importance to our understanding of the text and its history’. One could
argue that ‘real importance’ is a subjective criterion – indeed, the
Handbook goes on to say that each variorum editor must make these
judgements for herself. The point is reinforced by Philip Gaskell in his
classic work on editing: ‘Neither can there be any rules governing the
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
extent to which textual annotation should be carried out. Important
variants, no doubt, should be annotated, but only the editor can decide
which of the variants are important.’
Recent studies have shown, however, that editing is a conservative
practice, with each edition being substantially and often surreptitiously
shaped by the editions that preceded it. It is a rare editor who, embarking
on the arduous process of textual collation, will not look to previous
editions to see what their predecessors considered important. In doing
so, however, they risk the creation of a self-perpetuating system of exclu-
sions, shaped by generations of subjective judgements of the kind that
Knowles and Gaskell describe. Comparably, when Taylor writes that
‘[between and ] women have been responsible for important
editions of a few plays . . . and less important editions of a few more’, his
criteria for measuring ‘importance’ are likely influenced by the judgements
of past editors. I currently know of twenty-two unique editions of As You
Like It edited by women and published before . This makes it the
largest data set in my research. In the recent Arden edition of the play,
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’s Cassell edition is the only woman-
edited, pre- text collated. The same is true for the most recent New
Cambridge and Oxford editions. Knowles’s Variorum edition, which
breaks texts down into three categories based on frequency of use, includes
no women in the ‘most used’ category, has only the Cowden Clarkes’
Cassell edition in the middle category (texts which are ‘occasionally quoted
in the textual notes and in the appendix or their notes quoted in the
commentary’), and in the final category (never quoted in textual notes, but
cited for critical material) lists editions by Katharine Lee Bates, Charlotte
Endymion Porter and Helen Archibald Clarke, Martha Hale Shackford,
Cecily Boas, and Isabel J. Bisson. This accounts for fewer than half of the
women-edited editions I am aware of, even if we exclude dramatically
expurgated editions from the final count. So which editions make the cut?
And how do the criteria of selection relate to the exclusion of women from
the editorial tradition?
Women and the Domestic Text
That question brings us to a discussion of gendered work-as-product. This
book makes extensive use of the label ‘domestic text’ to describe a subset of
Shakespeare editions intended for women, children, and working-class
readers that is often left out of the editorial record. Although no word
perfectly encompasses the elements of this somewhat disparate grouping,
Women and the Domestic Text
‘domestic’ emerged as the most effective option during my research.
‘Domestic’ offers a slightly more neutral characterisation than options such
as ‘feminine’ or ‘low’, and as Georgianna Ziegler has pointed out, ‘home
was the major location where most people first experienced Shakespeare’s
plays and poetry’. This quote from an article in Fraser’s Magazine
demonstrates how the three audiences could be combined into one
domestic image:
Book-love is a home-feeling – a sweet bond of family union – and a never-
failing source of domestic enjoyment. It sheds a charm on the quiet fireside,
unlocks the hidden sympathies of human hearts, beguiles the weary hours
of sickness or solitude, and unites kindred spirits in a sweet companionship
of sentiment and idea. It sheds a gentle and humanising influence over its
votaries, and woos even sorrow itself into a temporary forgetfulness. Book-
love is the good angel that keeps watch by the poor man’s hearth, and
hallows it; saving him from the temptations that lurk beyond its charmed
circle; giving him new thoughts and noble aspirations, and lifting him, as it
were, from the mere mechanical drudgery of his every-day occupation. The
wife blesses it, as she sits smiling and sewing, alternately listening to her
husband’s voice, or hushing the child upon her knee. She blesses it for
keeping him near her, and making him cheerful, and manly, and kind-
hearted, – albeit understanding little of what he reads, and reverencing it for
that reason all the more in him.
Here, the poor man, the wife, and the chattering child join together to reap
the benefits of literature. Distinctions between target audiences were
important factors in the development of Shakespeare editions in the nine-
teenth century, and modern critics have found various linkages among
these three groups. Erica Hateley has pointed out that the genre of
children’s literature, particularly children’s Shakespeare, has a ‘history of
conflating “ladies” and “youths” as an implied audience’, while Mary
Hammond notes that when publishing inexpensive texts for working-class
readers, ‘publishers tended . . . to assume a patriarchal, teacherly role’, and
that ‘the protection of these “innocent” readers [young students, women,
and the self-educated] was very much a nineteenth century trope’. Janet
Bottoms has linked publications for women, children, and the working
classes as three of the major strands in the development of methods of
teaching the plays and of Shakespeare’s place in the curriculum.
The sizeable and lucrative market for commercially produced domestic
Shakespeare is best known for its products aimed at children. Georgianna
Ziegler has traced the market for children’s Shakespeare back to the s,
revealing a rich history that encompassed excerpt books and expurgated
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
editions as well as chapbooks, paper dolls, and toy theatres. During the
nineteenth century, influenced by changing educational philosophies and
the growth of mass literacy, publishing companies began investing exten-
sively in these products. In , two books appeared that would deeply
influence the world of Shakespeare publishing, both originating largely
with female creators – Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
and Henrietta Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare. Although Mary wrote the
majority of the Tales, the original imprints listed Charles Lamb as the sole
author, thereby avoiding any negative publicity that might derive from
Mary’s well-known psychotic episode, during which she killed their
mother. The anonymous Bowdler edition, originally published in a small
batch by a Bath publisher, did not achieve popularity until Henrietta’s
brother Thomas convinced a London publisher to re-release it in an
expanded form under his name. Although Thomas has therefore received
most of the credit (and the blame) for the Family Shakespeare, the idea
originated with Henrietta, and many of her edits survive in the re-released
edition and its subsequent revised printings. These two books exemplify
the tradition of nineteenth-century domestic Shakespeare.
Both books grew out of the impulse to make the works of Shakespeare
available to those who could not previously access or understand them. The
Lambs’ Tales focused on the combined market of women and children,
particularly female children; by the second edition, the ‘Advertisement’
section described them as ‘not so precisely adapted for the amusement of
mere children, as for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies
advancing to the state of womanhood’. Bottoms suggests that even during
composition, ‘the Lambs’ dual aim caused them to substitute simple
plotlines for children but to focus their stories on the women whenever
possible’. Both the Tales and The Family Shakespeare frame themselves in
relation to a male authority controlling access to Shakespeare. The Lambs
suggest that after a girl read the Tales to get a sense of the story, her brother,
having access to the complete Shakespeare, could
read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear) some
passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of
the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that the
beautiful extracts, the select passages they may choose to give their sisters, in
this way will be much better relished and understood.
The introduction to the Bowdler text explains that the edition is intended
to replicate the mediated transmission methods of the Bowdlers’ child-
hood, in which a discriminating father exercised his good taste while
Women and the Domestic Text
reading Shakespeare aloud to the family, avoiding any immodest material
that might provoke ‘blushes’. Both introductions therefore acknowledge
the incompleteness of the text offered, and the necessity of a qualified
mediator to dispense a sanctioned, sanitised version of Shakespeare.
As a result of that perceived necessity, the spectre of expurgation haunts
domestic editions, making them easily dismissed, criticised, or mocked.
Expurgated texts violate editorial norms by insisting on the visibility of the
editor’s intervention in the ‘authorial’ text. They refuse to allow the reader
to indulge in the fantasy of direct, unmediated access to the author. This
issue has been described by Sonia Massai and Jonathan Bate in relation to
adaptation:
The figure of the author is still very powerful, and the further a text departs
from the author’s holograph, the more marginal and negligible it becomes
to the critic’s attention. Editing is particularly affected by this prejudice, in
that the editor’s task is generally identified with the recovery of a partially
lost original: a transcendental drive leads editors to try and fill the gap left
by the disappearance of the natural author at the center of his work.
The most famous expurgator of Shakespeare was a woman, and she
(unintentionally) gave her name to the practice of expurgation on moral
grounds. Henrietta Bowdler was the first woman to bowdlerise
Shakespeare, and she was by no means the last. In her initial edition of
the Family Shakespeare, published in , Bowdler employed both aes-
thetic and moral judgement in her expurgations, cutting parts of the text
that she found uninteresting in addition to those that were, one might say,
too interesting.
So as ‘innocent’ populations gained increased access to Shakespeare,
cultural gatekeepers responded by making judgements regarding which
parts of Shakespeare were safe and appropriate for the new readers, and
even what elements they were most likely to enjoy. Access to printed
Shakespeare was no longer contingent on parental approval – school
boards and teachers now shared that responsibility. A working-class
reader could acquire an inexpensive ‘shilling Shakespeare’ of their own.
The images presented by the Lambs and Bowdlers of a male relative
mediating contact for girls still existed, but a new social context also
emerged: reading in a classroom with other children, overseen by a
teacher. New approaches involved some trial and error, as demonstrated
by a professor at Queen’s College, London, in the s, whose student
later recalled that
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
[we were] reading the sleep-walking scene in Macbeth when the Professor
held up his hand: ‘Ladies, before proceeding further we will turn to the next
page. We will count one, two, three lines from the top. We will count one,
two words in this line. We will erase or cross out the second word and
substitute the word “thou”. This line will then read “Out thou spot. Out
I say.”’
The more efficient solution to this problem was to remove offending
words prior to printing, and the popularity of expurgation as a defensive
position meant that most domestic editions suffered from a lack of textual
‘wholeness’ that some found troubling. Some objected out of a desire to
protect the sanctity of the Shakespeare text, accusing expurgators of
‘mutilating’ or even ‘castrating’ the text, removing from it the things that
made it male. One reviewer of the Cowden Clarkes’ expurgated Cassell
edition wondered, ‘if we begin to rewrite Shakespeare, where is the
operation to end?’
Given that Bowdler’s edition was far from the most extreme example
of expurgated female-edited Shakespeare in the nineteenth century,
certain aspects of this concern are understandable. Feeling that Bowdler
had been overly conservative in her cutting, Rosa Baughan prepared her
own version of the text. The resulting Shakespeare’s Plays Abridged and
Revised for the Use of Girls, published in two volumes by T. J. Allman in
and , retains only the bare minimum of Shakespeare.
Volume , containing the ‘Tragedies and Historical Plays’, is a meagre,
insubstantial book. Hamlet occupies only fifteen pages; Baughan dis-
penses with Romeo and Juliet in just nine. She writes in her introduc-
tion that her initial intention was to publish a book of selections from
Shakespeare in the style of the popular nineteenth-century excerpt books,
the most famous of which was William Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespeare.
Baughan recognised that, had she executed her plan, ‘one of the greatest
charms of Shakespeare – the fitness of the sentiment in the mouth of the
speaker – would be entirely lost’, so she chose instead to produce a
severely expurgated edition. She admitted that comedy was the primary
victim of her expurgation, comedic scenes being where ‘the greatest
freedom of expression is to be found’, but Baughan believed that the
humour would be ‘the quality least appreciable by the class of readers for
whom I have laboured’. In other words, the girls wouldn’t get the
jokes anyway.
As for prose adaptations, the Lambs themselves recognised the dangers
of offering an incomplete Shakespeare to someone experiencing the plays
for the first time, expressing the wish in their Preface that
Women and the Domestic Text
if [the Tales] be fortunately so done as to prove delightful to any of the
young readers it is hoped that no worse effect will result than to make them
wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at
full length (such a wish will be neither peevish nor irrational).
Others criticised editors and adaptors who admitted to the missing ele-
ments, and thus highlighted their existence. One review of the Lambs’
Tales complained about ‘the language of the preface, where girls are told
that there are parts in Shakespeare improper for them to read at one age,
though they may be allowed to read them at another. This only serves as a
stimulus to juvenile curiosity, which requires a bridle rather than a spur.’
In poet Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare reading group, the men suggested
that they go through all the copies of the plays and mark out anything
‘questionable’. The women rejected this idea, informing the men that they
did not want those ‘questionable’ things emphasised, and that they would
read everything. Dickinson herself haughtily told them that ‘there’s noth-
ing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don’t want to know it’.
New strategies evolved to counter both concerns. One solution was to
use the Lambs’ Tales, or similar prose versions, in concert with expurgated
texts or extracts in order to offer narrative contexts to students without
access to the full text. Leah Price has described expurgations and
abridgements as ‘photographic negatives’, explaining that ‘each retains
what the other discards’. Seen in this light, a pairing of the two could
be seen as creating the complete picture. An example of this dual approach
is Mary Atkinson Maurice’s Readings from the Plays of Shakespeare, in
Illustration of His Characters (), in which Maurice’s own prose narra-
tives were paired with expurgated texts. This volume has, until now, been
tentatively identified as being edited by the Winkworth sisters. This
attribution is incorrect, and the mistake demonstrates how challenging
ascription can be when working on women authors with limited bodies of
known work. The title page says only that the book was ‘Edited by the
Author of “Aids to Developement [sic];” “Memorials of Two Sisters;”
“Mothers and Governesses;” &c. &c.’ Although there is a book entitled
Memorials of Two Sisters () about the Winkworth sisters, the dates do
not allow for the same author to have edited Readings () and written
Mothers and Governesses (). The elder Winkworth sister would have
been only twenty-one at that time. The author of the other two books, as
well as a different book called Memorials of Two Sisters (), was
education reformer Mary Atkinson Maurice.
Maurice represents an interesting link to the larger world of education,
for both girls and the working class. A lifelong teacher, Maurice ran her
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
own schools in Southampton and Reading before moving to London,
where she became deeply involved with Queen’s College, London (an
institution pioneering education for girls), and the Governesses’
Benevolent Institution. Both were early examples of the push for better
education for girls in general, and more extensive preparation and support
for women teachers specifically. Maurice’s brother, Frederick Denison
Maurice, served as the first principal of Queen’s College and went on to
found the Working Men’s College as part of a group that also included
Frederick Furnivall. In the introduction to Readings, Maurice described
previous efforts to avoid ‘indelicacy’ in Shakespeare as leading to publica-
tions that ‘give no more notion of the magnificent whole, than a few
pebbles picked from the sea-shore, or a bottle filled with salt water, would
convey to one who had never seen it, an idea of the grand and boundless
ocean’. Bundling expurgated texts with prose stories offered a way to
allow the reader a better idea of ‘the magnificent whole’ without
sacrificing propriety.
Gendered Text, Gendered Labour
Despite some objections, expurgation proved to be a particularly persistent
feature of student and domestic editions well into the twentieth century,
and the association between expurgation and castration exemplifies the
troubled intersection between the gendered text and gendered labour. In
a Western context, ‘domestic’ is almost inevitably a word with gendered
connotations, and the inclination to gender texts, like the inclination to
gender types of labour – that is, critical/feminine versus textual/masculine –
is problematic. Editing as a discipline, and the theory surrounding it, is
steeped in deeply gendered concepts. The language used to describe texts
themselves often betrays its inherent biases. The binary foundations of
many New Bibliographical concepts – good/bad, fair/foul – lend them-
selves to gendered readings. Leah Marcus points out that in Alfred Hart’s
formulation,
[t]he ‘bad’ quartos are gendered as feminine – they are lax and chatty
rather than rigorously formed and poetic, reminding ‘us of the vulgar
gossiping of the immortal Sairey Gamp or the chattering irrelevancy of the
inane Mrs. Nickleby’. Worse yet, they are sexually suspect – a prostitution
of the ‘true’ text.
Criticising the eroticization and sexual violation inherent in Fredson
Bowers’s famous desire to ‘strip the veil of print from the text’,
Gendered Text, Gendered Labour
Holderness, Loughrey, and Murphy characterise ‘that virtually all-male
club the New Bibliographers’ as a group that ‘evidently cherished beneath
their respectable tweed jackets a perverse desire to ravish the printed text in
order to release the perfect female body enclosed within it’. In the
Textual Companion to the Oxford Shakespeare, Gary Taylor called editors
the ‘pimps of discourse’ and equated the text with a diseased female
prostitute. In , Chaucer editor E. Talbot Donaldson embarked on
a particularly fraught envisioning of the editorial task. It is worth quoting
in full in order to demonstrate how far flights of rhetorical cleverness can
lead critics into blatant sexism. Like a woman, no text is perfect in its
natural state, says Donaldson:
after careful analysis of the textual situation and long thought about the
meaning, the editor, not unlike a bachelor choosing a bride, selects Line
Form A for his text. For a time he lives in virtuous serenity, pleased with his
decision. A year or more passes, and then one day it comes to him, like a
bolt from the blue, that he should, of course, have chosen Line Form B; in
short, he married the wrong girl. She is attractive, she is plausible, she has
her points, but he just can’t live with her; he lies awake at nights enumer-
ating her faults, which seem considerable when she is compared with her
rejected rival, who now appears infinitely preferable. So the editor (who is
the least reliable of all possible husbands) obtains a divorce – an enormously
expensive one, since it forces him to change his apparatus and also to worry
endlessly whether other decisions he has made have not depended on this
one (and, as in matrimony, he will find that they have), so that they will
have to be changed, too. His marriage with Line Form B is now
consecrated, and he settles down to live happily ever after. Then after a
year or so, Wife B begins to prove incompatible in a different and even
more annoying way than Wife A; and it occurs to him that if he could find
someone who had the best characteristics of both A and B, without their
objectionable traits, he could be truly happy. The editor is uniquely
privileged to be able to bring this dream-girl into existence by amalgamating
A and B, which he does, and then weds this AxB after another expensive
divorce. But the chances are that by now he is less illusioned about the
excellence of his judgment in choosing wives, and while he likes his third
one basically, he is prepared to expect that as time passes he may want to
make a few changes in her. And at what time in his life will he be ready to
say that he is fully and permanently satisfied with his choice? Never, until
he stops thinking entirely.
So even after the editor engages in the Pygmalion fantasy of conflation to
create his ‘dream-girl’, only death can bring an end to his search for the
perfect woman/text. These examples support editor Ann Thompson’s
assertion that ‘the typical rhetorical stance of the male editor is aloof,
‘We Have Lost Our Labour’
patronising and overtly or covertly misogynistic’ and that ‘editors are
frequently more sexist than the text’. In , Laurie Maguire and
Emma Smith reflected on the continued use of gendered metaphors in
textual studies, concluding that the trope continues to have ‘a dispiriting
longevity’.
Ultimately, all of these rhetorical conceits require the critic to ascribe
humanity to the text. Laurie Maguire has discussed the persistent tendency
to anthropomorphise texts, to ‘present [them] as abused (orphaned, aban-
doned, mistreated) or nurtured (adopted, bandaged, patronized)’. By
anthropomorphising texts, Maguire suggests, we create a dynamic in
which ‘texts, like human beings, have parents, become orphans, seek
guardians’. The deeply rooted perceptions of sexual dimorphism in the
traditional Western world view mean that when something is characterised
as ‘human’, possessing parents and able to reproduce, it is often assigned a
binary gender identity. In his Lacanian reading of editorial authority,
Clayton Delery recognises that the gender binary inflects the author/
text/editor/reader relationship, but he is too quick to elide author with
book, and to label them both as symbolically male. As seen in Hart’s,
Bowers’s, Donaldson’s, and Taylor’s formulations, and as explored by
Wendy Wall, the text, particularly the imperfect or ‘corrupted’ text, is
often portrayed as female. Not only that, but female touch itself could be
depicted as corrupting, as seen in the review of Charles and Mary Cowden
Clarke’s edition in which the reviewer blamed ‘the lady editor’ for the
text’s ‘alterations, mutilations, [and] corruptions’.
For a male-authored book to be purely male, it would have to be an
inviolable object, entirely closed to outside influences; however, as Robert
Darnton has pointed out, a book is part of a larger communications
circuit, or communications web, in Helen Smith’s more nuanced anal-
ogy. The boundaries of a book are less brick walls than semi-permeable
membranes, open to osmotic transfer between the book itself and its
surroundings. In Smith’s words, ‘the gender of the text can only be the
result of the numerous sexed encounters and acts which constitute its
making and reception’. The symbolic genders of all actors in the web
affect the symbolic gender of the book. Delery suggests that student
editions are ‘most phallic and most dependent upon traditional notions
of patriarchal authority’ because they most entirely veil their textual
castration (imperfection); however, when placed within Smith’s web, the
‘feminine’ nature of the intended student audience exerts sway over the
process of making the book and the gender of the eventual product.
Furthermore, Delery’s analysis implies that the author and editor are
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arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the land. The Shawnees, as well as
the Aborigines of whom they formed part, held a tradition of their
transatlantic origin. It is but a few years ago that they ceased to offer
animal sacrifices to render thanks to the Great Spirit for their happy
arrival in America. The Shawnees and their neighbours the
Delawares were alternately friends and enemies. They frequently
made war on each other, and retreated to the west in consequence
of the invasion of the whites. The present Shawnees are as much
civilized as the Chactas; they are perhaps less rudely attired; with
the exception of rings, earrings, and brooches of their own
manufacturing, they care little for the ornaments by which other
Indians set so much store. Their features are peculiar; their nose has
a Grecian cut not devoid of beauty; their hair is short to the neck and
parted in the front; the men wear moustaches; the women are rather
good looking, and notwithstanding the dark colour of their
complexion their cheeks show signs of robust health. Some of the
most renowned of American chiefs are found among the Shawnees.
The present actual population is 1,500.”
And now, having so long endured the trying climate of North
America, let us turn to a warmer country—to one of the warmest and
quaintest—to Abyssinia. Not the least quaint of its features is the fact
that there are more churches there than in any other country; and,
though it is very mountainous, and consequently the view much
obstructed, it is very seldom you see less than five or six; and, if you
are on a commanding ground, five times that number. Every
Abyssinian that dies thinks he has atoned for all his wickedness, if
he leaves a fund to build a church, or has built one in his lifetime.
The king builds many. Wherever a victory is gained, there a church is
erected in the very field—and that before the bodies of the slain are
buried. Formerly this was only the case when the enemy was Pagan
or Infidel; now the same is observable when the victories are over
Christians. The situation of a church is always chosen near running
water, for the convenience of their purifications and ablutions, in
which they strictly observe the Levitical law. They are always placed
on the top of some beautiful round hill, which is surrounded entirely
with rows of the oxycedrus, or Virgin cedar, which grows here in
great beauty and perfection, and is called Arz. Nothing adds so
much to the beauty of the country as these churches, and the
plantations about them. In the middle of this plantation of cedars is
interspersed, at proper distances, a number of those beautiful trees
called Cuffo, which grow very high, and are all extremely
picturesque.
The churches are all round, with thatched roofs; their summits are
perfect cones; the outside is surrounded by a number of wooden
pillars, which are nothing else than the trunks of the cedar-tree, and
are placed to support the edifice, about eight feet of the roof
projecting beyond the wall of the church, which forms an agreeable
walk or colonnade around it in hot weather or in rain. The inside of
the church is in several divisions, according as is prescribed by the
law of Moses. The first is a circle somewhat wider than the inner
one; here the congregation sit and pray. Within this is a square, and
that square is divided by a veil or curtain, in which is another very
small division answering to the holy of holies. This is so narrow, that
none but the priests can go into it. You are barefooted, whenever
you enter the church, and, if barefooted, you may go through every
part of it, if you have any such curiosity, provided you are pure, that
is, have not had connexion with woman for twenty-four hours before,
or touched carrion or dead bodies (a curious assemblage of ideas),
for in that case you are not to go within the precincts, or outer
circumference, of the church, but stand and say your prayers at an
awful distance among the cedars.
Every person, of both sexes, under Jewish disqualifications, is
obliged to observe this distance; and this is always a place belonging
to the church, where, except in Lent, you see the greatest part of the
congregation; but this is left to your own conscience; and, if there
was either great inconvenience in the one situation, or great
satisfaction in the other, the case would be otherwise.
On your first entering the church, you put off your shoes: but you
must leave a servant there with them, or else they will be stolen, if
good for anything, by the priests and monks, before you come out of
the church. At entering you kiss the threshold and the two door-
posts, go in and say what prayer you please; that finished you come
out again, and your duty is over. The churches are full of pictures,
painted on parchment, and nailed upon the walls a little less slovenly
than you see paltry prints in beggarly country ale-houses. There has
been always a sort of painting known among the scribes, a daubing
much inferior to the worst of our sign-painters. Sometimes, for a
particular church, they get a number of pictures of saints, on skins of
parchment, ready finished from Cairo, in a style very little superior to
these performances of their own. They are placed like a frieze, and
hung in the upper part of the wall. St. George is generally there with
his dragon, and St. Demetrius fighting a lion. There is no choice in
their saints; they are both of the Old and New Testament, and those
that might be dispensed with from both. There is St. Pontius Pilate
and his wife; there is St. Balaam and his ass; Samson and his
jawbone; and so of the rest. But the thing that surprised Mr. Bruce
most was a kind of square miniature upon the head-piece or mitre of
the priest, administering the sacrament at Adowa, representing
Pharaoh on a white horse plunging in the Red Sea, with many guns
and pistols swimming upon the surface of it around him.
Nothing embossed, or in relief, ever appears in any of their
churches; all this would be reckoned idolatry, so much so that they
do not wear a cross, as has been represented, on the top of the ball
of the sendick or standard, because it casts a shade; but there is no
doubt that pictures have been used in their churches from the very
earliest ages of Christianity.
The primate or patriarch of the Abyssinian Church is styled
Abuna. The first of these prelates mentioned in history is Tecla
Haimanout, who distinguished himself by the restoration of the royal
family, and the regulations which he made both in church and state.
A wise ordinance was then enacted that the Abyssinians should not
have it in their power to raise one of their own countrymen to the
dignity of Abuna. As this dignitary of the church very seldom
understands the language of the country, he has no share in the
government. His chief employment is in ordinations, which ceremony
is thus performed:—A number of men and children present
themselves at a distance, and there stand from humility, not daring to
approach him. He then asks who these are, and they tell him that
they wish to be deacons. On this he makes two or three signs with a
small cross in his hand, and blows with his mouth twice or thrice
upon them, saying, “Let them be deacons.” Mr. Bruce once saw the
whole army of Begemder, when just returned from shedding the
blood of 10,000 men, made deacons by the Abuna, who stood about
a quarter of a mile distant from them.
The Abyssinians neither eat nor drink with strangers, though they
have no reason for this; and it is now a mere prejudice, because the
old occasion for this regulation is lost. They break, or purify,
however, every vessel a stranger of any kind shall have eaten or
drunk out of. The custom, then, is copied from the Egyptians; and
they have preserved it, though the Egyptian reason does no longer
hold.
The Egyptians made no account of the mother what her state
was; if the father was free, the child followed the condition of the
father. This is strictly so in Abyssinia. The king’s child by a negro-
slave, bought with money, or taken in war, is as near in succeeding
to the crown as any one of twenty children that he has older than
that one, and born of the noblest women of the country.
In Abyssinia, once every year they baptize all grown people, or
adults. Mr. Bruce here relates what he himself saw on the spot, and
what is nothing more than the celebration of our Saviour’s baptism:
—“The small river, running between the town of Adowa and the
church, had been dammed up for several days; the stream was
scanty, so that it scarcely overflowed. It was in places three feet
deep, in some perhaps four, or little more. Three large tents were
pitched the morning before the feast of the Epiphany; one on the
north for the priests to repose in during the intervals of the service,
and, besides this, one to communicate in: on the south there was a
third tent for the monks and priests of another church to rest
themselves in their turn. About twelve o’clock at night the monks and
priests met together, and began their prayers and psalms at the
water-side, one party relieving each other. At dawn of day, the
governor, Welleta Michael, came thither, with some soldiers, to raise
men for Ras Michael, then on his march against Waragna Fasil, and
sat down on a small hill by the water-side, the troops all skirmishing
on foot and on horseback around them.
“As soon as the sun began to appear, three large crosses of wood
were carried by three priests dressed in their sacerdotal vestments,
and who, coming to the side of the river, dipped the cross into the
water, and all this time the firing, skirmishing, and praying, went on
together. The priests with their crosses returned, one of their number
before them carrying something less than an English quart of water
in a silver cup or chalice; when they were about fifty yards from
Welleta Michael, that general stood up, and the priest took as much
water as he could hold in his hands, and sprinkled it upon his head
holding the cup at the same time to Welleta Michael’s mouth to taste;
after which the priest received it back again, saying at the same
time, “Gzier y’barak,” which is simply, “May God bless you.” Each of
the three crosses was then brought forward to Welleta Michael, and
he kissed them. The ceremony of sprinkling the water was then
repeated to all the great men in the tent, all cleanly dressed as in
gala. Some of them, not contented with aspersion, received it in the
palms of their hands joined, and drank it there; more water was
brought for those that had not partaken of the first; and after the
whole of the governor’s company was sprinkled, the crosses
returned to the river, their bearers singing hallelujahs, and the
skirmishing and firing continuing.”
Mr. Bruce observed, that, a very little time after the governor had
been sprinkled, two horses and two mules, belonging to Ras Michael
and Ozoro Esther, came and were washed. Afterwards the soldiers
went in and bathed their horses and guns; those who had wounds
bathed them also. Heaps of platters and pots, that had been used by
Mahometans or Jews, were brought thither likewise to be purified;
and thus the whole ended.
The men in Egypt neither bought nor sold; the same is the case in
Abyssinia to this day. It is infamy for a man to go to market to buy
any thing. He cannot carry water or bake bread; but he must wash
the clothes belonging to both sexes; and, in this function, the women
cannot help him. In Abyssinia the men carried their burdens on their
heads, the women on their shoulders: and this difference, we are
told, obtained in Egypt. It is plain that this buying in the public market
by women must have ended whenever jealousy or sequestration of
that sex began. For this reason it ended early in Egypt; but, for the
opposite reason, it subsists in Abyssinia to this day. It was a sort of
impiety in Egypt to eat a calf; and the reason was plain, they
worshipped the cow. In Abyssinia, to this day, no man eats veal,
although every one very willingly eats beef. The Egyptian reason no
longer subsists, as in the former case, but the prejudice remains,
though they have forgotten their reason.
The Abyssinians eat no wild or water-fowl, not even the goose,
which was a great delicacy in Egypt. The reason of this is, that, upon
their conversion to Judaism, they were forced to relinquish their
ancient municipal customs, as far as they were contrary to the
Mosaical law, and the animals in their country not corresponding in
form, kind, or name with those mentioned in the Septuagint, or
original Hebrew, it has followed that there are many of each class
that know not whether they are clean or not, and a wonderful
confusion and uncertainty has followed through ignorance or
mistake, being unwilling to violate the law in any one instance,
though not understanding it.
Among the Gallas of Abyssinia, the Kalijas (magicians) and the
Lubas (priests) reign supreme. It is the business of the latter to
determine whether any impending war will be successful, and for this
purpose the entrails of a goat are consulted. With his long hair
streaming wildly, a bright copper circlet decorating his brow, and with
a sonorous bell, which he beats to enjoin the silence and attention of
the assembled multitude, he plunges his naked arm into the bowels
of the freshly-slaughtered animal, and withdrawing part of the
intestines, according to their colour declares the prospects of the
savage army. In such matters, however, the Kalijas never interferes.
His business is to cast out from sick men the evil spirits that torment
them. There are eighty-eight evil spirits, say the Kalijas, divided into
two bands of forty-three each and ruled and directed by a chief. The
Kalijas is untiring in his efforts to hunt out this formidable army of
eighty-eight. He goes about with a bell in one hand and a whip in the
other, and with a festoon of dried goat’s entrails about his neck. Sent
for by a patient he rubs him well with grease, smokes him with
aromatic herbs, cries out at the top of his voice, rings his bell with a
deafening din, and then lays into the sick person with the whipthong.
If all these powerful remedies fail to drive out the Sao or evil spirit,
why, the Kalijas resignedly takes his fee and goes away, leaving the
victory to the doughty soldier of the eighty six.
In debating on the ills the Abyssinian is heir to the Bouda and Zar
must not be forgotten, since they occupy a most prominent place in
the catalogue of evils which torture the brown-skinned children of the
sun. Of the two the Bouda, or sorcerer, as the word signifies, is the
most dreaded. His powers in the black art are reported to be of a
most varied character. At one time he will enslave the objects of his
malice, at another he will subject them to nameless tortures, and not
unfrequently his vengeance will even compass their death. Like the
genii and egrets of the Arabian Nights the Bouda invariably selects
those possessed of youth and talent, beauty and wit, on whom to
work his evil deeds.
A variety of charms have been invented to counteract the Bouda’s
power, but the most potent are the amulets written by the pious
deleteras and worn round the neck. The dread of the sorcerer has
introduced a whole tribe of exorcists who pretend both to be able to
conjure the evil spirit and also to detect his whereabout; and these
are accordingly held in great awe by the people. Their traffic
resembles that of the highwayman; with this difference only—that the
one in bold and unblushing language calls on his victim to stand and
deliver, the other stealthily creeps into the midst of a troop of
soldiers, or amongst a convivial party of friends, and pronounces the
mystical word Bouda. The uncouth appearance and sepulchral voice
of the exorcist everywhere produce the deepest sensation, and
young and old, men and women, gladly part with some article to get
rid of his hated and feared presence. If, as sometimes happens, one
or two less superstitious individuals object to these wicked exactions,
the exorcist has a right to compel every one present to smell an
abominable concoction of foul herbs and decayed bones which he
carries in his pouch; those who unflinchingly inhale the offensive
scent are declared innocent, but those who have not such strong
olfactory nerves are declared Boudas and shunned as allies of the
evil one.
“During the rainy season,” says Mr. Stern, the most recent of
Abyssinian travellers, “when the weather, like the mind, is cheerless
and dull, the Boudas, as if in mockery of the universal gloom,
celebrate their saturnalia. In our small settlement at Gaffat the
monotony of our existence was constantly diversified by a Bouda
scene. Towards the close of August, when every tree and shrub
began to sprout and blossom, the disease degenerated into a
regular epidemic; and in the course of an evening two, three, and not
unfrequently every hut occupied by the natives would ring with that
familiar household cry. A heavy thunderstorm by some mysterious
process seemed invariably to predispose the people to the Bouda’s
torturing influence.
“I remember one day about the end of August we had a most
tremendous tempest: it commenced a little after mid-day and lasted
till nearly five o’clock. During its continuance the air was completely
darkened, except when the lightning’s blaze flashed athwart the sky
and relieved for a few seconds the almost midnight gloom. No
human voice could be heard amidst the thunder’s deafening crash
and the torrent’s impetuous rage.
“The noise and tumult of the striving elements had scarcely
subsided when one of the servants, a stout, robust, and masculine
woman, began to exhibit the Bouda symptoms. She had been
complaining the whole noon of langour, faintness, and utter
incapacity for all physical exertion. About sunset her lethargy
increased, and she gradually sank into a state of apparent
unconsciousness. Her fellow servants who were familiar with the
cause of her complaint at once pronounced her to be possessed. To
outwit the conjuror I thought it advisable to try the effect of strong
liquid ammonia on the nerves of the evil one. The place being dark,
faggots were ignited; and in their bright flickering light we beheld a
mass of dark figures squatted on the wet floor around a rigid and
apparently dead woman. I instantly applied my bottle to her nose; but
although the potent smell made all near raise a cry of terror, it
produced no more effect on the passive and insensible patient than if
it had been clear water.
“The owner of Gaffat, an amateur exorcist, almost by instinct, as if
anticipating something wrong in that part of his dominion occupied
by the Franks, made his appearance in the very nick of time, and no
sooner had the bloated and hideous fellow hobbled into the hut, than
the possessed woman, as if struck by a magnetic wire, burst into
loud fits of laughter and the paroxysms of a maniac.
“Half-a-dozen stalwart fellows caught hold of her, but frenzy
imparted vigour to her frame which even the united strength of these
athletics was barely sufficient to keep under control. She tried to bite,
kick, and tear every one within reach; and when she found herself
foiled in all these mischievous attempts she convulsively grasped the
unpaved wet floor and, in imitation of the hyæna, gave forth the most
discordant sounds. Manacled and shackled with leather thongs, she
was now partly dragged, and partly carried, to an open grassy spot;
and there in the presence of a considerable number of people the
conjuror, in a business-like manner, began his exorcising art.
A Woman under the Influence of Bouda.
“The poor sufferer, as if conscious of the dreaded old man’s
presence struggled frantically to escape his performance; but the
latter disregarding her entreaties and lamentations, her fits of
unnatural gaiety and bursts of thrilling anguish, with one hand laid an
amulet on her heaving bosom, whilst with the other he made her
smell a rag in which the root of a strong-scented plant, a bone of a
hyæna, and some other abominable unguents, were bound up. The
mad rage of the possessed woman being instantly hushed by this
operation, the conjuror addressed himself to the Bouda, and in
language unfit for polite ears, requested him to give him his name.
The Bouda, speaking through the medium of the possessed, replied:
“‘Hailu Miriam.’
“‘Where do you reside?’
“‘In Damot.’
“‘What is the name of your father and confessor?’
“‘My father’s name is Negouseye, and my Abadre’s, Oubie.’
“‘Why did you come to this district?’
“‘I took possession of this person on the plain of Wadela, where I
met her on the road from Magdala.’
“‘How many persons have you already killed?
“‘Six.’
“‘I command thee, in the name of the blessed Trinity, the twelve
apostles, and the three hundred and eighteen bishops at the council
of Nicæa, to leave this woman and never more to molest her.’
“The Bouda did not feel disposed to obey the conjuror; but on
being threatened with a repast of glowing coals, he became docile,
and in a sulky voice promised to obey the request.
“Still anxious, however, to delay his exit, he demanded something
to eat; and to my utter disgust his taste was as coarse as the
torments inflicted on the young woman were ungallant. Filth and dirt
of the most revolting description, together with an admixture of water,
were the choice delicacies he selected for his supper. This strange
fare, which the most niggardly hospitality could not refuse, several
persons hastened to prepare; and when all was ready, and the
earthen dish had been hidden in the centre of a leafy shrub, the
conjuror called to the Bouda, ‘As thy father did, so do thou.’ These
words had scarcely escaped the lips of the exorcist when the
possessed person leapt up and, crawling on all fours, sought the
dainty repast, which she lapped up with a sickening avidity and
greediness. She now laid hold of a stone which three strong men
could scarcely lift, and raising it aloft in the air, whirled it round her
head, and then fell senseless to the ground. In half an hour she
recovered, but was quite unconscious of what had transpired.
“Next in importance to the Bouda is the Zar. This malady is
exclusively confined to unmarried women, and has the peculiar
feature, that during the violence of the paroxysm it prompts the
patient to imitate the sharp discordant growl of the leopard. I
recollect that the first time I saw a case of this description it gave me
a shock that made my blood run cold. The sufferer was a handsome,
gay and lively girl of fifteen. In the morning she was engaged, as
usual, with her work, when a quarrel ensued between her and the
other domestics. The fierce dispute, though of a trifling character,
roused the passions of the fiery Ethiopian to such a pitch that it
brought on an hysterical affection. Her companions cried out, ‘She is
possessed;’ and certainly her ghastly smile, nervous tremor, wild
stare, and unnatural howl, justified the notion. To expel the Zar, a
conjuror, as in the Bouda complaint, was formerly considered
indispensable; but, by dint of perseverance, the medical faculty of
the country, to their infinite satisfaction, have at length made the
discovery that a sound application of the whip is quite as potent an
antidote against this evil as the necromancer’s spell.”
Turning from Abyssinia to Dahomey we find, as might be
expected from all that one hears of that most sanguinary spot on
earth, that religion is at a very low ebb. Leopards and snakes are the
chief gods worshipped by the Dahomans, and surely the mantle of
these deities must have descended to their worshippers, who
possess all the cunning of the one and the bloodthirstiness of the
other. Besides these, the Dahoman worships thunder and lightning,
and sundry meaningless wooden images. The sacrifices are various.
If of a bullock it is thus performed: the priests and priestesses (the
highest of the land, for the Dahoman proverb has it that the poor are
never priests) assemble within a ring in a public square, a band of
discordant music attends, and, after arranging the emblems of their
religion and the articles carried in religious processions, such as
banners, spears, tripods, and vessels holding bones, skulls,
congealed blood, and other barbarous trophies, they dance, sing,
and drink until sufficiently excited. The animals are next produced
and decapitated by the male priests with large chopper knives. The
altars are washed with the blood caught in basins; the rest is taken
round by the priests and priestesses, who strike the lintel and two
side posts of all the houses of the devotees with the blood that is in
the basin. The turkey buzzards swarm in the neighbourhood, and
with the familiarity of their nature gorge on the mangled carcass as it
is cut in pieces. The meat is next cooked and distributed among the
priests, portions being set aside to feed the spirits of the departed
and the fetishes. After the sacrifice the priesthood again commence
dancing, singing, and drinking, men, women, and children grovelling
in the dirt, every now and then receiving the touch and blessing of
these enthusiasts. Among the priesthood are members of the royal
family, wives and children. The mysteries are secret, and the
revelation of them is punished with death. Although different fetishes
are as common as the changes of language in Central Africa, there
is a perfect understanding between all fetish people. The priests of
the worship of the leopard, the snake, and the shark, are initiated
into the same obscure forms. Private sacrifices of fowls, ducks, and
even goats, are very common, and performed in a similar manner:
the heads are taken off by the priests, and the altars washed with the
blood, and the lintels and sides of the door posts are sprinkled; the
body of the animal or bird is eaten or exposed for the sacred turkey
buzzards to devour. The temples are extremely numerous, each
having one altar of clay. There is no worship within these temples,
but small offerings are daily given by devotees and removed by the
priests.
Sickness is prevalent among the blacks, small-pox and fever
being unattended, except by bad practitioners in medicine. And here
let me remark that, after teachers of the Gospel and promoters of
education, there is no study that would so well ensure a good
reception in Africa as that of medicine. The doctor is always
welcome, and, as in most barbarous countries, all white men were
supposed to be doctors. If an African sickens, he makes a sacrifice
first, a small one of some palm oil food. Dozens of plates of this
mixture are to be seen outside the town, and the turkey buzzards
horribly gorged, scarcely able to fly from them. If the gods are not
propitiated, owls, ducks, goats, and bullocks are sacrificed; and if the
invalid be a man of rank, he prays the king to permit him to sacrifice
one or more slaves, paying a fee for each. Should he recover, he in
his grateful joy liberates one or more slaves, bullocks, goats, fowls,
etc., giving them for ever, to the fetish, and henceforward they are
fed by the fetish-men. But should he die, he invites with his last
breath his principal wives to join him in the next world, and according
to his rank, his majesty permits a portion of his slaves to be
sacrificed on the tomb.
Should any one by design or accident—the former is scarcely
likely—hurt either a leopard or snake fetish, he is a ruined man. But
a very few years ago a cruel and lingering death was the penalty; but
Dahoman princes of modern times are more tender-hearted than
their predecessors, and are content with visiting the culprit with a
thorough scorching. Mr. Duncan instances such a case:
Punishment for Killing Fetish Snakes.
“May 1st.—Punishment was inflicted for accidentally killing two
fetish snakes, while clearing some rubbish in the French fort. This is
one of the most absurd as well as savage customs I ever witnessed
or heard of. Still it is not so bad as it was in the reign of the
preceding King of Dahomey, when the law declared the head of the
unfortunate individual forfeited for killing one of these reptiles, even
by accident. The present king has reduced the capital punishment to
that about to be described. On this occasion three individuals were
sentenced as guilty of the murder of the fetish snakes. A small house
is thereupon made for each individual, composed of dry faggots for
walls, and it is thatched with dry grass. The fetish-men then
assemble, and fully describe the enormity of the crime committed.
Each individual is then smeared over, or rather has a quantity of
palm-oil and yeast poured over him, and then a bushel basket is
placed on each of their heads. In this basket are placed small
calabashes, filled to the brim, so that the slightest motion of the body
spills both the oil and the yeast, which runs through the bottom of the
basket on to the head. Each individual carries a dog and a kid, as
well as two fowls, all fastened together, across his shoulders. The
culprits were then marched slowly round their newly-prepared
houses, the fetish-men haranguing them all the time. Each individual
is then brought to the door of his house, which is not more than four
feet high. He is then freed from his burthen, and compelled to crawl
into his house on his belly, for the door is only eighteen inches high.
He is then shut into this small space with the dog, kid, and two fowls.
The house is then fired, and the poor wretch is allowed to make his
escape through the flames to the nearest running water. During his
journey there he is pelted with sticks and clods by the assembled
mob; but if the culprit has any friends, they generally contrive to get
nearest to him during his race to the water, and assist him, as well as
hinder the mob in their endeavours to injure him. When they reach
the water they plunge themselves headlong into it, and are then
considered to be cleansed of all the sin or crime of the snake-
murder. After the lapse of thirteen days, “custom” or holiday is held
here for the deceased snakes.
“The superstitions of the Bonny People are very extraordinary.
Whatever animal or other thing they consider sacred they term a
“jewjew,” and most common and apparently the principal of these
jewjews is the guana, a reptile which in their country obtains a very
large size. Several which I saw exceeded three feet and a half in
length, and in their appearance were particularly disgusting, being of
an unvaried dirty tawny hue. Those which live in the towns are very
tame, and several as I passed through the narrow alleys approached
and amused themselves in licking the blacking from my shoes. The
masses of filth scraped and deposited in corners appeared to be
their favourite haunts when no pools were near. There they were
observed watching the flies carousing and darting at them their long
slender tongues with extraordinary quickness and dexterity. For
these, as well as snakes, which are likewise jewjews, small spaces
are enclosed and diminutive huts erected in various parts near the
sea and in the interior of the country. To kill either is considered by
the natives as a capital offence and punished with death; yet towards
whites so offending they do not resort to such a severe measure, but
merely content themselves by strongly censuring them for their
profane conduct. When, however, a very flagrant instance occurs,
and the white man is not individually known by those of the natives
witnessing the act, it is likely that in the first transport of their anger
he may be made to atone for his offence with his life; for though the
whites themselves are termed jewjews, this, in all probability, is
merely a nominal title confered as a compliment.”
The king of Bonny, though often invited, will never venture on
board a man-of-war, but sometimes visits the merchant vessels,
proceeding from the shore in a war canoe in great form, but as he
approaches he always keeps aloof till the compliment of a heavy
salute is paid him. He then goes close to the ship’s side and breaks
a new-laid hen’s egg against it, after which he ascends the deck fully
persuaded that by the performance of this ceremony he has fortified
himself against any act of treachery. For other reasons, or perhaps
none that he can explain, he likewise takes with him a number of
feathers and his father’s arm bone, which, on sitting down to dinner,
he places on the table beside his plate. He also has at the same time
a young chicken dangling by one leg (the other being cut off) from
his neck.
The bar of the river Bonny has sometimes proved fatal to vessels
resorting thither, and being therefore injurious to the trade of the
place, the inhabitants, considering it as an evil deity, endeavour to
conciliate its good will by sacrificing at times a human victim upon it.
The last ceremony of this sort took place not a very long time before
our arrival. The handsomest and finest lad that could be procured
was chosen for the purpose, and for several months before the
period fixed for the close of his existence he was lodged with the
king, who on account of his mild demeanour and pleasing qualities
soon entertained a great affection for him, yet, swayed by
superstitious fanaticism, he made no attempt to save him, but on the
contrary regarded the fate to which the unfortunate lad was destined
as the greatest honour that could be conferred upon him. From the
time that he was chosen to propitiate by his death the forbearance of
the bar he was considered as a sacred person; whatever he
touched, even while casually passing along, was thenceforth his,
and therefore when he appeared abroad the inhabitants fled before
him to save the apparel which they had on or any articles which at
the time they might be carrying. Unconscious, as it was affirmed, of
the fate intended for him, he was conveyed in a large canoe to the
bar and there persuaded to jump overboard to bathe, while those
who took him out immediately turned their backs upon him and
paddled away with the utmost haste, heedless of the cries of the
wretched victim, at whom, pursuant to their stern superstition, not
even a look was allowed to be cast back.
In Abo, says Mr. Bakie, every man and every woman of any
consequence keeps as “dju-dju,” or jewjew, the lower jaw of a pig, or,
until they can procure this, a piece of wood fashioned like one. This
is preserved in their huts, and produced only when worshipped or
when sacrifices are made to it, which are at certain times, at intervals
of from ten days to three weeks. The particular days are determined
by the dju-dju, with palm wine and touching it with a kola-nut; they
speak to it and ask it to be good and propitious towards them. It is
named Agba, meaning pig, or Agba-Ezhi, pig’s jaw; but when as dju-
dju, it is also termed Ofum, or “my image.” People also select
particular trees near their huts, or if there are none in the
neighbourhood, they transplant one; these they worship, and call
Tuhukum, or “my God.” They hang on these, bits of white baff
(calico) as signs of a dju-dju tree, and as offerings to the deity. No
one ever touches these, and if they rot off they are replaced. Little
wooden images are also used, and are styled Ofo Tuhuku, “talk and
pray.” When a man is suspected of falsehood, one of these is placed
in his right hand, and he is made to swear by it, and if he does so
falsely, it is believed that some evil will speedily befall him.
Sacrifices, principally of fowls, are made to these latter as to the
former. At Abo one large tree is held as dju-dju for the whole district;
it is covered with offerings, and there is an annual festival in honour
of it, when sacrifices of fowls, sheep, goats, and bullocks are made.
When a man goes to Aro to consult Tshuku he is received by some
of the priests outside of the town, near a small stream. Here he
makes an offering; after which a fowl is killed, and if it appears
unpropitious, a quantity of a red dye, probably camwood, is spilt into
the water, which the priest tells the people is blood, and on this the
votary is hurried off by the priests and is seen no more, it being given
out that Tshuku has been displeased, and has taken him. The result
of this preliminary ceremony is determined in general by the amount
of the present given to the priests; and those who are reported to
have been carried off by Tshuku are usually sold as slaves. Formerly
they were commonly sent by canoes to Old Kalabar, and disposed of
there. One of Mr. Bakie’e informants met upwards of twenty such
unfortunates in Cuba, and another had also fallen in with several at
Sierra Leone. If, however, the omen be pronounced to be favourable,
the pilgrim is permitted to draw near to the shrine, and after various
rites have been gone through, the question, whatever it may be, is
propounded of course through the priests, and by them also the
reply is given. A yellow powder is given to the devotee, who rubs it
round his eyes. Little wooden images are also issued as tokens of a
person having actually consulted the sacred oracle, and these are
known as Ofo Tshuku, and are afterwards kept as dju-dju. A person
who has been at Aro, after returning to his home is reckoned dju-dju,
or sacred, for seven days, during which period he must stay in his
house, and people dread to approach him. The shrine of Tshuku is
said to be situated nearly in the centre of the town, and the
inhabitants of Aro are often styled Omo Tshuku, or “God’s children.”
Mondzo is a bad or evil spirit in this country. The worst of evil
spirits is named Kamallo, possibly equivalent with Satan. His name
is frequently bestowed on children, and in some parts of Igbo,
especially in Isuama, Kamallo is worshipped. No images are made,
but a hut is set apart in which are kept bones, pieces of iron, etc., as
sacred. Persons make enquiries of this spirit, if they wish to commit
any wicked action, such as murder, when they bring presents of
cowries and cloth to propitiate this evil being and render him
favourable to their designs. If the individual intended as the victim
suspects anything, or gets a hint of his adversary’s proceedings, he
also comes to worship, bringing with him, if possible, more valuable
offerings to try to avert the impending danger, and this is called Erise
nao, or “I cut on both sides.” In Isuama, if a man is sick, the doctor
often tells the friends to consult an evil spirit called Igwikalla, and he
is also worshipped by persons wishing to injure others. His supposed
abode is generally in a bush, which has been well cleared all round;
but occasionally huts are dedicated to him, and priests execute his
decrees.
Among savages who have no conception of the existence of a
Supreme Being must be enumerated the “Sambos,” a race of
Indians residing on the shores of the Mosquito River. The only
person who is dreaded as a priestess, or “medicine-woman,” is the
Sukia. This woman possesses more power than the king or chiefs.
Her orders, even though of the most brutal and inhuman kind (as
often they are), are never disputed nor neglected. When Mr. Bard
visited the Sambos he saw a Sukia, whom he describes as a person
hideous and disgusting in the extreme. “Her hair was long and
matted, and her shrivelled skin appeared to adhere like that of a
mummy to her bones; for she was emaciated to the last degree. The
nails of her fingers were long and black, and caused her hands to
look like the claws of some unclean bird. Her eyes were bloodshot,
but bright and intense, and were constantly fixed upon me, like those
of some wild beast of prey.” These women, before they assume the
office, wander away into the forest and live for a considerable time,
without arms or clothing of any kind as a defence against the wild
beasts and still wilder elements of the tropics. It is during their
residence in the woods that they become initiated into the mysteries
of nature, and doubtless obtain their antidotes for serpent charming
and other wonderful performances for which they are so famous,
such as standing in the midst of flames uninjured. The author of
“Waikna” gives a very interesting and amusing account of one of
these ceremonies as witnessed by him. “The Sukia made her
appearance alone, carrying a long thick wand of bamboo, and with
no dress except the ule tourno. She was only inferior to her sister of
Sandy Bay in ugliness, and stalked into the house like a spectre,
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