THE CUSTODY OF THE LOWICK NOTEBOOKS

By the editor.

I. What was left

When the Rev. Edward Casaubon died in the early part of 1831 he left, in the library of Lowick Manor, fifty-nine notebooks in quarto, a sixtieth volume of contents lettered A, and a table of the whole work in the form of a Synoptical Tabulation. The notebooks are in his hand, with some pages in other hands: an amanuensis at Rome, and his wife's, for a few pages near the end. The volume of contents was made to be read aloud. On one night in the last year of his life it was: his wife read it with a pencil, and made a cross at each head at which he said "mark," and the crosses stop where the night stopped.¹

He had said what the sifting was for. It was to give "adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each of the theses enumerated" in his introduction. It was the first step in turning thirty years of collection into the book he had announced; and it was not completed. The heads that were crossed, up to the end of the thirty-fourth notebook, are marked × in this edition. One head, the second excursus on Crete, he passed over, and it is marked ∅. Beyond the point where he closed the volume nothing was ever sifted, and the heads there are marked ○. For those heads the selection of testimony is the editor's, and the editor's notes say so.²

This essay is an account of what happened to the papers between that night and the present edition. It follows the objects, which are reproduced in the Traces, and it says only what they show.

II. Lowick, 1831–1835

In June 1831 Mrs. Casaubon opened the shutters of the library and ranged the notebooks in sequence. She sealed the Tabulation in an envelope and wrote on the inside of the flap a note to her husband, and put the envelope in her desk. The note is given in Trace I. It was not opened again by anyone until 1962.³

In or about June 1832 she married Mr. Ladislaw, and by the terms of the codicil forfeited the property. The archive divided. The notebooks and the volume of contents stayed with the estate; the Tabulation went with her desk. From that day the papers were in two places and the people who held one did not know of the other.

In 1833 Dr. Spanning, a friend of Mr. Casaubon and the only person on record who admired the work, borrowed the notebooks. His receipt, for "fifty-nine volumes of notes in quarto and one volume of contents lettered A," is the earliest document that gives the count of the notebooks, and the count is the one they now have (Trace II). He printed a Prospectus for publishing the Key by subscription (Trace III). It names a model, the Dissertationes in Librum Jobi of Samuel Wesley, which was printed after its author's death, in 1735 and 1736, from a manuscript that he had worked at for many years.

The comparison is worth a paragraph, because it shows what Spanning did not see. Wesley's book was a commentary on a single book of Scripture. It had a text to answer to, and the text set limits: the commentary ended where Job ended. Casaubon's learning was in the service of a thesis, and a thesis has no end but its own proof. The one work could be finished by its author's death and the other could not.⁴ The Prospectus asked for subscriptions to a book that no one had written, and no volume followed it. Spanning died in 1835 and the notebooks went back to Lowick.

III. The vicarage, 1835–1851

The Rev. Camden Farebrother, who had had the Lowick living from Mrs. Casaubon in 1831, took the notebooks into his keeping on their return from Spanning's executors. He labelled the shelves (Trace IV). The slips are in one hand, they number the volumes from 1 to 59, and they give no reason for the keeping. For sixteen years the notebooks stood in a country vicarage, and nothing is known to have been done with them.

In 1851 Farebrother wrote to the editor of the Westminster Review offering them. We have only his draft (Trace V). It says that there are fifty-nine volumes, that they have been at the vicarage since 1835, and nothing about what they contain. It makes no claim for them.

IV. The Strand, 1851–1854

The parcel went to 142 Strand, where John Chapman, the proprietor of the Westminster Review, kept his house and his business. Marian Evans had come to board there in September 1851, to act as assistant editor, and she stayed until October 1853, when she moved to Cambridge Street and left off her editorial work. In July 1854 her translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity was published, with the imprint of 8 King William Street, to which Chapman had moved by then. The parcel was at the Strand through the period of her residence and went with Chapman in his move; the edition does not give the date of the move more exactly than 1854. After the translation appeared it was returned to Lowick.

That is all the documents say about the parcel in London. They do not say that she opened it. The only evidence that she did is a label (Trace VI): a printed Strand label, gummed to the string of a parcel, on which someone has written "Miss Evans" in pencil. The hand is not identified. The edition does not say that it is hers, or Chapman's; the label shows that the parcel was addressed to her, or was thought of as hers, or was set aside for her, and a pencil mark can carry any of the three.⁵

It is the whole of the case, and it was enough for the essayist of 1953, who argued in print that Miss Evans had read the notebooks at Chapman's. The argument rests on three things: the thesis of the Key, which is the one thing in the notebooks that a reader could not miss; the heads of the Tabulation; and the long excursus on Crete. The essayist could account for the novel's knowledge of those. The essayist could not account for its knowledge of the Tabulation, which was sealed in a desk in Warwickshire throughout, and which the essayist did not know to exist.⁶

V. The Bodleian, 1868–1883

Farebrother died in 1868. His executors sold the notebooks, and the Bodleian Library accessioned them in that year, stamping each volume inside its front board (Trace VII). They were not catalogued. When cataloguing reached them, in 1883, they were referred to the Rector of Lincoln College and returned in the same year "without remark" (Trace VIII). The slip is a printed form, completed by a clerk; it does not say why they were referred.

The Rector of Lincoln was Mark Pattison, who had held that office since 1861. He wrote nothing on the slip and the Library's records contain nothing in his hand about the notebooks. His book Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614 had come out in 1875, and it has been taken by some as a reply. The edition does not say to whom or to what.⁷

The notebooks were shelved, as a series of their own, near the Pattison papers and not among them. A series near another series is only that. The proximity is the one that cataloguing made, and it was made after the volumes had been referred.

VI. Brasenose and Warwickshire

In the later part of the century the papers of a Brasenose man named Carp came to the College archives (Trace IX). They contain three drafts of a review; a reply, unsent; and a letter from Casaubon, with a leaf on which a dedication has been cancelled. The review is the recension of the Biblical Cosmology, which is printed in these papers. It was never signed, and the Key's own Appendix does not name its writer, though Casaubon believed he knew him. The bundle is the only strand of the custody that is not about the notebooks, and it is the only place in it where the Key's author is seen being answered, as it were, by someone he did not choose.

In 1938 the papers of Mr. and Mrs. Ladislaw were deposited at Warwickshire County Record Office with the Brooke of Tipton estate papers. Among them was an envelope, sealed. When the deposit was listed, in 1962, the seal was broken, and the archivist's typed note records what was inside: a bundle of sheets in tables, and a leaf of writing, which was copied into the list (Trace X). The note does not name Middlemarch. The leaf is the one the novel quotes. It reads as the novel gives it, to the letter.

It was nine years after the essay of 1953, and no one had predicted it. The essayist's argument had needed the Tabulation to be unavailable to Miss Evans and found the novel using it. The envelope removed that difficulty and put another in its place. Either the Ladislaws told her what the envelope held, or she wrote what she guessed, and the record office proved her right in every word. The edition does not choose. It has no evidence that settles the question, and a choice made without evidence would be an invention.

VII. This edition

In 2026 the Tabulation and the notebooks were brought to the same table for the first time since June 1831. In the boxes of the notebooks there was a Strand label with a pencilled name on it, which had been kept in them since no one now knows when. The edition has used the Tabulation to number the heads and to mark each of them as it was marked on the night of the sifting; it has used the notebooks to supply, under each head, the testimony that Casaubon had gathered; and where the sifting stopped, it has made the selection itself and says so.

It has not completed what he began, and it makes no claim to. The fourth Book of the Key promises a conclusion that its author did not write, and the edition leaves the place blank with a note. The Key as printed here is not a book that can be used for the purpose he intended, and neither is anything else that could be made of those papers.

VIII. The answer

Dorothea Casaubon's note, which lay for a hundred and thirty-one years in a sealed envelope, is the epigraph of this edition. It says, "I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in—Dorothea?"

She was right. The Key, as Casaubon conceived it, could not be used by anyone. Its method was to find in every name the name of another and in every cult the cult of its predecessor, and its end was a single origin of which the whole had been a decline; and a method of that kind has no check on it, since the sorting that tests a theory is carried out by the theory. She saw that, with such instruction as she had and not at all more than she needed. When she put the Tabulation away she did not abandon a duty to her husband. She declined to put her own hand to a work whose centre she thought to be false, and she was entitled to decline. Nothing in these papers makes her wrong, and the edition does not pretend that anything does.

It does not follow that the notebooks are worthless, and that is the only thing in her note that this edition has to answer. They hold, in the quotations that they preserve, a great deal of what the ancient world said about its own gods: from Scripture, from Josephus, from Lucian, from Philo of Byblos, from Plutarch, from the Stoics and the Alexandrians. That testimony is not his theory. It was there before the theory and it is there under it, and it can be read with the theory taken off. The novel in which Mr. Casaubon's labour is described draws the same line. In the forty-eighth chapter, where it gives Dorothea's judgment of the Key, it says that a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth breathing, as the quest of gold prepared the body of chemistry for its soul; and it faults his theory for never being tested against anything that could contradict it.⁸ It rejects the method and leaves the subject standing.

What she could not use, a reader can. The notebooks are printed for that, and the Key beside them for the sake of comparison, so that anyone who wishes may see where a thesis went beyond its witnesses and where it did not. Dorothea could not work hopelessly at what she had no belief in. A reader who has no belief in the Key is in the position she was in, and is not asked to take her place.