ABSTRACT

First publ. in Britain by Smith, Elder, 18 Dec. 1871, and in the United States by James R.Osgood & Co. in 1872, in a volume also containing Ffine at the Fair and Hervé Riel; repr. 1888. The MS used as printer’s copy is at Balliol College, Oxford: it was probably copied from a rough draft, but contains significant evidence of running revision and some drafting, with many interpolated lines: see below for a more detailed description. The American text (1872) was set from advance proofs, even though it was published well after the first English edition. A letter of 28 Mar. 1872 from James R. Osgood to B. may offer an explanation: Osgood refers to confusion over payment for Balaustion, and advises B. that proof sheets should be posted ‘at least four weeks before publication’ to ensure simultaneous publication in Britain and the United States (transcript at Wellesley College). 1872 gives some insight into the state of the proofs in the period shortly before publication. There are only six substantive verbal variants (see l. 605n.) but a host of variants in punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, affecting 729 lines (just over a third of the poem). Some of these variants (e.g. American spellings) were introduced by the printers, but it is clear that B. made many changes in punctuation after the despatch of the proofs to America. The issue of capitalization is harder to interpret: where upper-case forms appear in both MS and 1871, it seems likely that their conversion to lower-case in 1872 was done by the printers, unless we assume that B. changed all these forms in the proofs sent to America, and then changed them back again; however, there are puzzling inconsistencies in 1872, which retains some capitalizations and even introduces a handful of its own.