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Oliver Madox-Brown’s the Black Swan and Gabriel Denver : a critical edition

University of British Columbia

The text of Oliver Madox—Brown’s only published novel, Gabriel Denver, presents a fascinating textual problem. Madox—Brown, the son of the painter Ford Madox Brown, composed the novel sometime during the winter he turned seventeen, 1871—72. During the following year, the young author was browbeaten by Smith, Elder’s principal reader, William Smith Williams, into making extensive and radical revisions before the work would be published in 1873. In 1874, Madox—Brown died, and in 1876 his brothers—in—law, William Michael Rossetti and Franz Hueffer, published what they said was the original version of Gabriel Denver, a tale they called The Black Swan. Manuscript fragments of each version survive, but they are far from finished copy. The challenge, then, is to assign some meaning to the concept of “final authorial intention” when each of the primary sources is either not intentional, not authorial, or not final. I decided to reproduce the text at two different stages of its history: just before Williams first read the tale, and after it had been revised to his satisfaction. My copy—text for the former was Rossetti’s and Hueffer’s The Black Swan, and for the latter, the 1873 Gabriel Denver. I have emended errata in both, and in The Black Swan have removed what were clearly editorial intrusions on Rossetti’s and Hueffer’s part; all these modifications are recorded either in the textual or in the editorial apparatus. Each edited text is accompanied by an apparatus listing variants in wording with the corresponding MS fragments, and changes in wording within the MSS themselves. The two texts do more than present a bibliographical conundrum. They also highlight the similarities and differences in values between the Pre—Raphaelite circle and mainstream Victorian society. Furthermore, though neither work is by any means a literary masterpiece, The Black Swan has an artistic integrity that is completely undermined by the revisions Williams insisted be made in Gabriel Denver in order to minimize its ardent Romanticism. Together, the two tales dramatically illustrate the constraints under which Victorian writers struggled as they saw their works into print.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-06-04

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8792

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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