Gold Hair

First publ. (without stanza numbers) in the American magazine Atlantic Monthly xiii (May 1864) 596–9, from advance proofs of DP (28 May 1864); repr. DP², 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1864 (i.e. DP); the circumstances of the Atlantic Monthly publication tell against its use as copy-text (see Appendix B,p. 571). The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. It contains substantive variants from both 1864 and AM. B.’s annotated copy of DP, recording changes to be made for DP ², is in the Beinecke Library, Yale. With one minor and one major exception, revision in subsequent eds. was mainly confined to punctuation. The minor exception concerns st. 22 which has an aberrant rhyme-scheme (abaab instead of ababa), whether by design or inadvertence is not clear: this was adjusted in DP ² (see l. 110n.). The major exception concerns the three stanzas which B. added to the poem after st. 20, also in DP ² (see ll. 100^101n.). B. rarely revised his work in response to individual readers’ comments (apart from those made by EBB.). Gold Hair is therefore a remarkable exception, if, as seems likely, B. added these stanzas in response to George Eliot’s criticism that the girl’s motives were not sufficiently clear. The story originates in W. R. Nicoll and T. J. Wise’s Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (1895) i 377; as Ohio points out, its circumstantial details are not wholly accurate, but its fundamental credibility is based on the fact that the three additional stanzas appear in pencil, in B.’s hand, at the end of the poem in Eliot’s presentation copy of DP (now in the Houghton Library, Harvard). The stanzas are not numbered; they are headed by ‘Verses to be inserted after 20.’, and the text is virtually identical with that of DP ². B. may have been the more willing to make this change because it did not involve re-paginating the volume for DP² : in DP the final stanza comes at the top of p. 34, leaving plenty of space for the new material. B.’s willingness to make himself clear anticipates the effort he made with his next major work, Ring, to answer his critics’ persistent accusations of obscurity.