Imogen Allen

Project title:  

Editing Lost Copy-Texts: The Prose Letters of John Donne

Project Summary:  

The first printed edition of John Donne’s letters was edited posthumously by his son, also named John Donne, in 1651: Letters to Severall Persons of Honour contains 129 letters of which only two originals in Donne’s hand are known to have been preserved. Of the others, a few had already appeared in printed editions of Donne’s Poems in the 1630s, and some are preserved in other early modern manuscript scribal copies. For most of these letters though, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour is the only textual witness we currently have of them. The edition is, however, notoriously unreliable: names of addressees have been changed, dates – in the rare cases they are given – are inaccurate, and it is rife with textual errors to the extent that, according to one biographer, the letters have ‘been flung into the book, as into a basket, and left to take care of themselves’. Despite this, much can still be gleaned from the 1651 edition: this project asks what the now-lost copy-texts of this edition were, seeing Letters to Severall Persons of Honour as a collection of textual problems and a site of clues to the networks of manuscript composition and circulation in which Donne wrote and sent his letters, out of which they escaped, and in which they were reproduced, preserved and lost. A part of early modern epistolary culture, and our literary heritage of that culture, is absence: the absence of groups of letters, for instance, points to scribal habits such as Donne’s destruction of his friend Goodere’s letters to him after Goodere died. Using manuscript evidence where it survives and reconciling the absences that are part of that evidence, this project will inform an understanding of this puzzle of a printed edition.