ABSTRACT
This draft is written in pencil on ff. 52v rev. and 53r rev. of Nbk 10. The attempts at the first three lines are heavily cancelled; thereafter the writing becomes more fluent despite a few further cancellations, though it lacks finish here and there. While S. did not develop the poem beyond the state of an unpolished draft, the dramatic final line could well have carried the comic narrative as far as he wished it to go and certainly makes a striking conclusion. A hastily pencilled note on the immediately preceding page (f 52r rev.) seems likely to relate to PB3 rather than to these lines: ‘To say that I am in earnest——Many people wd. think it a better joke than any in the poem.’ S. expressed a variant on this sentiment in a letter of 15 December 1819 to Charles Ollier apropos of PB3: ‘perhaps no one will believe in anything in the shape of a joke from me’ (L ii 164). On this basis the present draft may tentatively be dated to the period late October-mid-December 1819. This would be consistent with the range of dates within which S. worked in the nbk, Spring 1819–Spring 1820 (MYRS iv pp. xxxii–xxxiv). Stuart Curran (see ‘Published in’ below) argued instead for a date of composition in Spring 1820 on two grounds: the position of the lines amidst the draft of A Vision of the Sea (no. 321) which was finished in April of the latter year, and the occurrence of the word syllabubs (see l. 4 below and note) in l. 303 of LMG (no. 325) which was written in late June 1820. Neither reason is ‘wholly conclusive’, as Curran recognised. Mary Quinn (MYRS iv 186) considers that A Vision of the Sea was ‘almost certainly’ written after Sucking hydras. Altogether the late October to mid-December 1819 period seems best to fit the evidence.
