“You’ll hear no more from me,
If critics prove unkind;
My next in simple prose must be;
Unless I favour find.”
This will perhaps suffice as a specimen of the productions of Moxon’s muse, though the first lines in the volume, a “Sonnet to a Nightingale,” are inviting. They had been the cause of much pleasantry among the author’s friends, as having been penned by one who had never heard the song of the bird to which they were addressed, and the internal evidence upon this point is indubitably strong; the sonnet perhaps, to state it in proportion, is to Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale,” as the owl’s screeching “too-whit” to “Sweet quired Philomela.”
By this time, however, Moxon, in spite of his bad poetry, had made a wide reputation as a poetical publisher, and from his establishment was issued, not only all that was most valuable of contemporary poetical literature, but with true catholic taste, the works of our older dramatic poets, edited for the most part by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. By degrees, too, Moxon was enabled to add to his catalogue the works of many of the poets who had shed a lustre upon the two first decades of this century, especially the works of Keats, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt.
In 1839 he brought out Mrs. Shelley’s edition of her husband’s poems—the first “complete edition” that had been published. In the following year a bookseller in the Strand named Hetherington was indicted for selling a work entitled “Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of all Denominations,” and was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, as having published in this volume sundry “libels” against the Old Testament. While the trial was pending, Hetherington commissioned a servant of his, named Holt, to purchase copies of “Shelley’s Poems” from the publisher, and from the retail dealers, and then obtained a similar indictment against Moxon. The celebrated trial the “Queen v. Moxon” was of course the result. The prosecution relied chiefly upon certain passages in “Queen Mab,” more especially in the notes, and these were read in order to prove the charge of blasphemy. Mr. Serjeant Talfourd was engaged for the defence. “I am called,” he commenced, “from the bar in which I usually practise, to defend from the odious charge of blasphemy one with whom I have been acquainted for many years—one whom I have always believed incapable of wilful offence towards God or towards man—one who was introduced to me in early days, by the dearest of my friends who has gone before—by Charles Lamb—to whom the wife of the defendant was an adopted daughter.” After a magnificent oration in which he asked, with a fitting indignation, “if the publisher of any penny blasphemy is to have the right of prescribing to us legally that such and such pages are to be torn from the treasured volumes of our choicest literature,” he left in the hands of the jury “the cause of genius—the cause of learning—the cause of history—the cause of thought,” and concluded by a tribute to Moxon’s character—“beginning his career under the auspices of Rogers, the eldest of a great age of poets, and blessed with the continued support of that excellent person, who never broke by one unworthy line the charm of moral grace which pervades his works, he has been associated with Lamb, whose kindness ennobled all sects, all parties, all classes, and whose genius shed new and pleasant lights on daily life; with Southey, the pure and childlike in heart; with Coleridge, in the light of whose Christian philosophy the indicted poems would assume their true character, as mournful, yet salutary, specimens of powers developed imperfectly in this world; and with Wordsworth, whose works, so long neglected and scorned, but so long silently nurturing tastes for the lofty and the pure, it has been Mr. Moxon’s privilege to diffuse largely throughout this and other lands, and with them the sympathies which link the human heart to nature and to God, and all classes of mankind to each other.” Lord Denman, before whom the case was tried, instructed the jury, in his summing up, to administer the law as it undoubtedly stood, though he himself was of opinion that the best and most effectual method of acting in regard to such doctrines was to refute them by argument and reasoning rather than by persecution. The jury accordingly returned a verdict of guilty, unaccompanied by any observation whatsoever. The illegal passages were eliminated for a time; and thus the matter ended. The trial took place in June, 1841, at a time when Moxon was in great sorrow for the loss of his eldest son, and much sympathy was exhibited towards him.
Shelley’s name, however, was designed to be associated with further publishing vexations. In 1852, Moxon issued a volume entitled “Letters of P. B. Shelley,” with an introductory essay by Mr. Robert Browning. The usual presentation copies were sent to the papers, the “Letters” were generally noticed as being essentially characteristic, but the discretion shown in printing them was much questioned. Naturally Mr. Browning’s essay attracted a large share of attention, though consisting of but forty-four pages, for it is his only acknowledged prose work (why, by the way, has it never been reprinted?). He describes Shelley as a man “true, simple-hearted, and brave; and because what he acted corresponded to what he knew, so I call him a man of religious mind, because every audacious negative cast up by him against the Divinity was interpreted with a mood of reverence and adoration.” An early copy of the volume was sent to Mr. Tennyson, and Mr. Palgrave, who was then paying him a visit, turned over its pages until he came to a passage in a letter which he at once recognised (with a most dutiful and filial remembrance), as a portion of an article upon “Florence,” which Sir Francis Palgrave had contributed to the Quarterly Review. He immediately communicated with his father, who, after comparing the printed letter with the printed article, wrote to Moxon and informed him that this letter was cribbed bodily from the Quarterly Review. Moxon replied that the original was in Shelley’s handwriting and that it bore, moreover, the proper dated postmark. Even the experts pronounced the letters genuine, and the detectives were then set to work—the book having, of course, been immediately withdrawn from publication. The MSS., which had been bought at public auction, were traced to Mr. White, a bookseller in Pall Mall. He alleged that in 1848, two women began to bring him letters of Byron’s for sale, at first in driblets and impelled by poverty, they then offered him other letters by Shelley, and books with Byron’s autograph and MS. notes. His suspicions were aroused, he followed them home, and insisted upon seeing the real owner of the letters. This person was introduced to him as Mr. G. Byron, a son of the poet, and thus he thought the mystery satisfactorily explained. He then sold the letters relating more purely to family matters to Shelley’s relatives; Murray became the eventual purchaser of Byron’s, and Moxon of Shelley’s letters—and Murray, who only had his volume in the press, at once stopped it. The letters are now believed to have been the forgeries by G. Byron, and are indeed indexed under his name in the British Museum Catalogue. The system upon which he had obtained money for them appears to have been very extensive and well organised, and as some few were probably genuine, and others based upon a substratum of truth, the difficulty of judging those which in various ways have got into print, was extreme. Altogether, this is one of the most notable literary forgeries of modern times.
To return, however, to Moxon, we find that in 1835, conjointly with Longman, he published Wordsworth’s “Yarrow Revisited,” and shortly after this the poet transferred all his works from the Messrs. Longman, and we believe that Moxon purchased the copyrights of the past poems for the sum of one thousand pounds.
Mr. Browning’s earlier volumes, like Mr. Tennyson’s “Lyrical Poems,” had been published by Effingham Wilson, but in 1840 Moxon issued “Sordello.” This was followed by “Bells and Pomegranates,” published in numbers between 1842 and 1845, and by a “Blot in the Scutcheon,” (acted at Drury Lane in 1843), and which, though unsuccessful on the stage, was in the opinion of Charles Dickens “the finest poem of the century.” In 1848, however, Mr. Browning removed his works to the care of Messrs. Chapman and Hall.
Among the other authors whose productions were issued by Moxon somewhere at this period, and whom we cannot do more than mention, were Talfourd, Monkton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Tom Hood, Barry Cornwall (Proctor), Sheridan Knowles (who was by turn an usher, a journalist, a dramatic poet, and a dissenting minister), Quillinan (whose works Landor wittily, though unjustly, described as Quillinanities), Mr. Browning (for a brief period only), Haydn, and Dana.
Mr. Tennyson had been silent for ten years, had been maturing his talents, been mourning for the death of his friend Hallam, and probably during the whole of this time not a thousand copies of his poems had been sold. But he was already acknowledged as one of our greatest living poets by a small and ardent band of admirers, and in 1842 he was induced to break his long silence and publish an edition of his poems in two volumes, of which the second was composed entirely of new pieces, and in the first some were new, and many had been re-written. By this time his success was publicly and generally acknowledged, and fresh editions were called for in 1843, 1845, 1847, and from that date in still more rapid succession. The beauty and purity of his poems attracted royal favour, and in 1846 he received a pension from the crown, and this unfortunately gave offence to some rivals in the divine art, and Lord Lytton in the “New Timon” attacked “Schoolmiss Alfred.” To this Mr. Tennyson replied by a poem published in Punch (February, 1846), which may be summed up in the two words, “Thou bandbox.” In 1843, Wordsworth, in a letter to Reed, says, “I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets (sic), and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed, in the strongest terms, his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances.” Again, in 1848, Mr. Emerson, in describing a visit to Wordsworth, says, “Tennyson, he thinks, a right poetic genius, though with some affectation. He had thought an elder brother of Tennyson at first the better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one.”
When Wordsworth died in 1850, the laureateship was offered to Mr. Rogers, and the letter conveying the offer was written by Prince Albert. The poet, however, was now eighty-seven years of age, and he felt that his years and his wealth should prevent him from interfering with the claims of younger and poorer men, and he generously felt impelled to decline the honour, which was then conferred upon Mr. Tennyson, who received, as he says so beautifully, in reference to Wordsworth, the