Mr. Sludge, “the Medium”

First publ. DP, 28 May 1864; repr. DP², 1868, 1880, 1888. The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. It is much less clean than other MSS in the volume, with numerous cancelled readings and evidence of drafting; nevertheless it is not the first draft, since there is clear evidence that it was copied from an earlier version (e.g. B. originally wrote l. 69 immediately after l. 67, then interpolated l. 68; this does not make sense except as a copying error). There are, moreover, some indications in the MS that the poem might have been revised by B. at a very late stage. The title page has been pasted onto another page; the bottom right-hand corner of the original page is visible, with the words ‘2000 to follow’ written in pencil. (There are 1689 lines in the last three poems in the volume.) There are numbers at top right and bottom right of alternate pages; the numbers at bottom right, beginning with ‘92’, indicate the position of the page in the MS volume, and those at top right its position within Mr Sludge. For the most part these sequences coincide, but there are some pages of the MS where they are out of phase. The page with ‘95’ at bottom right, for instance (ll. 111–34) comes where there should be a page without numbers, and some indecipherable writing is visible near the binding, suggesting that it might have been taken from a different draft. There are similar disruptions of the sequences at ‘104’ (ll. 481–502) and ‘113’ (ll. 845–68). On the first of these pages, someone — presumably the compositor — has written ‘193’ and drawn a line to the space between ll. 481 and 482; on the second, there are similar markings, with the number ‘209’. In both cases, these marginal numbers correspond to the page numbers in 1864. Finally, most of the paragraph breaks are indicated in the poem by means of a single line drawn across the page, but in some sections — such as ‘105’ — B. has indicated a new paragraph by leaving a space on the page. Taken as a whole, these features suggest that B. removed Mr Sludge from the MS volume and substituted a revised version while DP was in production. Additional evidence to support this hypothesis is provided by B.’s letter of 11 Mar. 1864 to his American publisher James T. Fields; see Appendix B, pp. 571–2.