Small 8vo. Stitched as issued, in a quarter brown morocco and cloth slipcase. Bookplates of Harry Buxton Forman and John Whipple Frothingham. Faint pencil note to title page.

First edition, a partial-forgery by Harry Buxton Forman. In 1870 Richard Herne Shepherd had produced two unauthorized Tennyson pamphlets, The Lover’s Tale and eighteen uncollected Poems reproduced from periodicals. The Lover’s Tale was suppressed, but when Buxton Forman took over Shepherd’s remaining stock in 1892 he found a cache of Poems. By the simple device of overprinting the first recto (blank except for the word Poems) with additional text, he produced a new title page and created The new Timon. In his “A Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson” (London, 1908, vol. II., pp. 20-21), Wise claims that, along with Shepherd’s edition of The Lover’s Tale [since forged by Wise], this pamphlet possesses ‘more interest and importance to collectors and students of the writings of Alfred Tennyson than can usually be claimed for any pirated book. It was in [these] pages that many of Tennyson’s suppressed verses were first gathered together’. Barker and Collins (A Sequel to an Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, 1983, London, pp. 252-257) comment that, as well as creating a rarity, this forgery served to further ‘a campaign of confusion designed to transfer attention and blame from the forgers to Richard Herne Shepherd’.

‘The new Timon and the Poets,’ which first appeared in Punch, Feb. 28, 1846, is Tennyson’s bitter reply to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s satirical poem ‘The New Timon,’ describing him ‘School-miss Alfred’ who would ‘Chaunt, “I’m aweary” in infectious strain’ and ‘patch with frippery every tinsel line’, his poetry ‘a jingling medley of purloined conceits / Out-babying Wordsworth and out glittering Keats’. Tennyson returns the charges, characterizing Bulwer-Lytton as the ‘padded man – that wears the stays – / Who kill’d the girls and thrill’s the boys / With dandy pathos [as a novelist]’, but ‘once you tried the Muses too; / You fail’d, Sir.’ ‘You talk of tinsel! why we see / The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks’. The other minor, occasional, and patriotic poems collected here were not exactly suppressed but had not yet been acknowledged by Tennyson in his collected works.

The present copy is Buxton Forman’s second, recorded by Barker and Collins as B (4). It appears he was cautious about the dispersal of this forgery – all known copies except Wise’s own ‘emerged after his death, the majority from the nine or more bought from the Forman estate by Quaritch, probably in 1920’ (Barker and Collins).

See also W. D. Paden, “Tennyson’s The Lover’s Tale, R. H. Shepherd and T. J. Wise”, in Studies in Bibliography, XVIII (1965), pp.111-145.

Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.

The New Timon and the poets

The New Timon and the poets

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