Who wrote that?

This post isn't about book binding. It's just about an interesting book.

Among my father's old volumes is this one:

Dodsley's Collection of Poems in Six Volumes by Several Hands  Vol 6  1758

The volume is intriguing because of amendments made to the text of certain poems. Could they have been made by the author of the poems?

The writing on the page opposite the title page reads:

“This copy must have belonged to John Hoadly for his poems in the Collection are corrected in his own hand - see pp. 148 & 157 in this volume. On p 157 one stanza is substituted for another.”

In addition, there was an old postcard tucked into the book and protruding from the top, which said:

“Archbishop Hoadly’s volume - with his corrections”

There are actually corrections and annotations on pp 148, 150-1, 153-4, 157-8. On p 157, as claimed, a stanza has been replaced by a piece of paper stuck over it.

By the look of the page under the paper flap, this was done because so much erasing of previous annotations had been done to the page that the paper was damaged to the extent there was a hole in it.

Many of the poems in this book are unattributed, including the ones on the pages with the handwritten amendments. These particular ones are:

• "Vacation” on pp 148-154
• “To a Lady very handsome, but too fond of Dress” on pp 155-156
• “Anacreon Ode III” on pp 157-158

By searching the Internet I discovered that these poems were not written by John Hoadly, but by John Hall-Stevenson. All three appear in a collection of his poems:

The works of John Hall-Stevenson, Esq. Containing, Crazy tales. Fables for grown gentlemen. Lyric epistles. Pastoral cordial. Pastoral puke. Macarony fables. Lyric consolations. Moral tales. Monkish epitaphs. &c. &c. &c. Corrected and enlarged. With several original poems, now first printed, and explanatory notes. In three volumes.

London: printed by J. Nichols, for J. Debrett, and T. Beckett, 1795.

(This collection is in three volumes and these particular poems are in volume 1.)

 
John Hall-Stevenson (1718–1785), in his youth known as John Hall, was an English country gentleman and writer. Sydney Lee, a prolific biographer from Victorian times, was very scathing about Hall-Stevenson, describing him as a poetaster - an inferior poet, especially one with "unwarranted pretensions to artistic value". (Lee's biography of Hall-Stevenson can be viewed here.)

He was the one-time owner of Skelton Castle in Yorkshire, which he inherited in a run-down state after his uncle, an avowed Jacobite, fled the country.  He was a great friend of Laurence Sterne, and is memorialised as "Eugenius" in Sterne's novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy".

Two of the listed poems have amendments: "Vacation" and “Anacreon Ode III”, the latter being most extensive. Page 157 is the most interesting. As described, a complete new stanza has been pasted in:

In compassion, I straight struck a light with all speed,
Let him in, and behold a child, little indeed,
A mere chit, with a bow & with arrows equipp’d,
On his shoulders had wings, & the rain from them dripp’d.

There is crossed-out text at the bottom of the page:

With a bit of work it is possible to make out most of the text, which turns out to be another version of the replacement stanza:

I was mov’d with compassion, I soon struck a light,
And immediately open’d the door, when(?) --(?)ght
Stood a Boy with a bow and with arrows equipp’d,
And his shoulders had wings, & the rain from them(?) dripp’d.

I assume the writer rejected this in favour of the pasted version. Given the damage to the page, the writer was clearly unhappy about the original text and reworked it many times before he was satisfied with it.

So, what is the conclusion? I think it's highly unlikely that anyone other than the author of the poems would have gone to the trouble of making such revisions/corrections to poems that were not their own. Why would they? And if it wasn't the author who amended them, why choose those particular poems in the book and no others? The idea of anyone other that the author doing this makes little sense, so I'm very much inclined to believe that this is indeed the work of Hall-Stevenson himself.

Going back to Hoadly, if he didn't author the poems or amend them, what is his connection? John Hoadly (1711–1776) was an English cleric, known as a poet and dramatist. However, there was another John Hoadly (1678–1746)  who was an archbishop in Ireland, and was also the younger John's uncle. The note written in the book claiming authorship must surely be referring to John Hoadly the poet, but the postcard is referring to the older man. It's likely someone just mixed them up. We know that both these claims are false: John Hoadly didn't author the poems, so very likely didn't amend them; Archbishop Hoadly couldn't have owned the book as he had died before it was published.

It would be nice if I'd been able to find some connection between Hoadly and Hall-Stevenson to explain Hoadly's possible ownership of the book, but I can't. Hall-Stevenson's friend Laurence Sterne was a cleric, so it's conceivable that Hoadly knew Sterne through "work", and hence Hall-Stevenson. But that is pure speculation; perhaps the whole Hoadly connection was just a mistake caused by the mis-attribution of the poems, and should be dismissed.

 UPDATE August 2019

While trawling the Internet (unsuccessfully) for samples of Hall-Stevenson's handwriting, I came across a website belonging to the Skelton History Group which included information about Skelton Castle. Through them I was able to contact the current owner of the castle and descendent of Hall-Stevenson, Anthony Wharton. I was in luck; he was intrigued by my story of the book and kindly agreed to find some examples of Hall-Stevenson's handwriting in his castle vaults (not many people can say that!) that were then sent to me.

Verse from Mr Wharton with margin notes

 
My initial reaction was disappointment, as the hand that wrote the few verses he sent was clearly not the same as that in my book. But when I examined the margin comments on the pages (above), eureka! - this writing did match that in my book, and pretty perfectly.

Comparison of writing from Mr Wharton (top) and mine (below). Note particularly the similarity in the "w".

Mr Wharton agreed that they matched, and said he was only "fairly" sure the verses he sent to me were by Hall-Stevenson. I think the evidence suggests that they were not. I was suspicious that these verses may not have been his; their subject and style did not match those of his published, and they do not appear in his collected works of 1795. The three verses that were sent to me were all very pro-Jacobite in tone and subject, and not Hall-Stevenson's style. We know that he inherited the castle from his mother, who in turn had inherited it from her brother Lawson Trotter, a Jacobite supporter who was forced to flee the country after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Some of the Trotter family therefore had strong Jacobite sympathies, and the verses could have been penned by one of them.

I'm now as sure as I can be that the handwriting in my book does belong to Hall-Stevenson himself. I can't think anyone else can credibly link handwriting in his notebooks from the Skelton castle vaults with alterations to his poems in the Dodsley book. One could also reasonably assume that the book must have belonged to him at some time - you wouldn't do this to someone else's book, would you? Mr Wharton told me that many pages had been extracted from the notebooks that contained the handwriting samples, and believes them to have been given to Dodsley for publication. I think it reasonable to imagine that Hall-Stevenson acquired a copy of the book in which his verses appear, perhaps Dodsley even provided him with a complimentary copy, and that this is the book that I now have.


Mr Wharton has invited me to the castle if I'm ever passing to view the notebooks. I may well do that!