Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883)

Transcribed from the 1902 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
edited by WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT
London MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
new york: the macmillan company 1902
All rights reserved
First Edition 1895 Second Edition 1902
Of the letters which are contained in the present volume, the first eighty-five were in the possession of the late Mr. George Bentley, who took great interest in their publication in The Temple Bar Magazine , and was in correspondence with the Editor until within a short time of his death. The remainder were placed in the Editor’s hands by Mrs. Kemble in 1883, and of these some were printed in whole or in part in FitzGerald’s Letters and Literary Remains, which first appeared in 1889.
Trinity College, Cambridge, 20 th June 1895.
‘Letters . . . such as are written from wise men, are, of all the words of man, in my judgment the best.’—Bacon.
The following letters, addressed by Edward FitzGerald to his life-long friend Fanny Kemble, form an almost continuous series, from the middle of 1871 to within three weeks of his death in 1883. They are printed as nearly as possible as he wrote them, preserving his peculiarities of punctuation and his use of capital letters, although in this he is not always consistent. In writing to me in 1873 he said, ‘I love the old Capitals for Nouns.’ It has been a task of some difficulty to arrange the letters in their proper order, in consequence of many of them being either not dated at all or only imperfectly dated; but I hope I have succeeded in giving them, approximately at
least, in their true sequence. The notes which are added are mainly for the purpose of explaining allusions, and among them will be found extracts from other letters in my possession which have not been published. The references to the printed ‘Letters’ are to the separate edition in the Eversley Series, 2 vols. (Macmillans, 1894).