Edited by David Latham, York University

The choice of copy-text is the last edition overseen by Morris, but with its misprints corrected. In the case of Poems by the Way, the Kelmscott edition is the first book edition and the Reeves and Turner trade edition is the second and final edition, and thus it serves as the copy-text. The distinction is difficult to verify, because the Kelmscott edition was published in October 1891 after typesetting was completed on 24 September and the printed pages were then sewn and bound for the publication date of 20 October.¹ The Reeves and Turner edition was published in December after being typeset in October or November, presumably from the Kelmscott sheets. Moreover, the eccentricities of the Kelmscott Press — setting whole words in upper-case font, identifying italicized words with red-coloured roman font, and shortening line lengths and eliminating stanza divisions to fit lines around the large decorative initials — render the beautifully designed Kelmscott edition less practical as a copy-text than the Reeves and Turner edition.

Although the two 1891 editions are nearly identical, with nothing more than the occasional accidentals of typesetting as variants, there is evidence that suggests the sheets of the Kelmscott edition were indeed used for setting the Reeves and Turner edition. See, for example, the first two stanzas of “The Son’s Sorrow”: three sources of text suggest that the Reeves and Turner edition incorrectly prints the first five lines as one stanza instead of two, and that the design of the page for the Kelmscott edition is responsible for the error. As was his customary practice with the design of his Kelmscott editions of poetry, Morris would arrange lines to the right side of his decorative initial without indicating a stanza division between the lines.² Hence, the first five lines of “The Son’s Sorrow” appear in the Kelmscott edition as one stanza (see fig. 1), and the Reeves and Turner edition mistakenly replicates that single stanza (fig. 2). The three-line stanza that concludes the poem (fig. 3), as well as the opening two stanzas of both Morris’s manuscript (fig. 4; at the Huntington Library) and his calligraphic “A Book of Verse” (fig. 5; at the Victoria and Albert Museum), indicate the correct structure of the poem is a series of couplets enclosed by an opening and closing triplet formed by a third-line refrain.

Such misprints as this incorrect stanza division in the Reeves and Turner edition are often repeated in May Morris’s edition of The Collected Works of William Morris, volume 9. The misprints are corrected and noted as variants from the Reeves and Turner copy-text in our Archive edition after collations with earlier iterations of the poems: in a sample of his manuscripts; in his earlier books, including The Life and Death of Jason (1867), “A Book of Verse” (1870), Chants for Socialists (1885), Alfred Linnell Killed in Trafalgar Square, November 20, 1887. A Death Song (1887), and the Kelmscott edition of Poems by the Way (October 1891); in his publications of the poems in periodicals, including The Academy, The Athenaeum, The Commonweal, The English Illustrated Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Humane Review, Justice, Scribner’s Monthly, Time, and To-Day; and in the woven words of his Morris & Co. tapestries. 

The typographical conventions of publishers, such as printing the first word fully in upper-case to signify the start of a new poem or the start of a new section, are not cited here as textual variants. Nor are most of the manuscript variants cited. The manuscripts have been carefully consulted with a sample cited as textual variants (see the three manuscripts whose variants are collated for the opening poem, “From the Upland to the Sea”). Most of the manuscript variants are not cited because they are not as informative as some readers would expect. My edition of Tales Omitted from The Earthly Paradise (2014) reveals that what were considered to be Morris’s first drafts are actually later copies. Morris would work on a few lines scribbled on scraps of paper and in pocket notebooks before transcribing them on the usual long, blue 34-lined folios preserved now in library collections. Only a few of these scraps survive, one being the verso of a small, folded sheet of letterhead stationery, another the back of an envelope, both in pencil, both heavily revised.

However, the Huntington Library manuscripts for the whole Poems by the Way are included here as a separate file for the bound volume in what appears to be a collection organized according to the order of the poems Morris selected for the two editions of 1891 (for the Kelmscott edition in October and the Reeves and Turner edition in December). It was bound either by Charles Fairfax Murray or by May Morris. In another bound volume of manuscripts, this one in the British Library, May Morris has pencilled a note in the margin of a song sung by Orpheus in “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice,” a tale Morris had intended for The Earthly Paradise. Her note reads: “From CFM’s printer’s <copy> M.S. of Poems by the Way From the Upland to the Sea” (British Library, BL Add/ MS. 45308; c4 69; noted in our Archive edition as the last textual variant for “From the Upland to the Sea”). Morris appears to have extracted the untitled Orpheus song when he was selecting poems for his new book, and May Morris years later returned the folio to its location in “The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice” when she was preparing that tale for publication in volume 24, the last volume of her father’s Collected Works (1915), four years after she had edited Poems by the Way for volume 9 (1911). Each of these manuscripts are Morris’s transcriptions of an earlier draft.

The reader can open the Huntington Library Manuscript file (HM 6427), included here in our Archive edition, to view manuscripts for each poem. But the reader will see that these manuscripts are Morris’s efforts to produce readable copies of his poems, intended to be fair copies, but which Morris could not help continuing to polish. These are the manuscripts gathered together to organize the sequence of the poems and then to provide copies for the typesetters. The pencilled instructions for the typesetters appear to be for the Kelmscott edition in 1891; or, like the manuscript in the British Library for “From the Upland to the Sea” (c4 69), some of the instructions could be for May Morris’s Collected Works edition in 1911.

Readers interested in moving beyond the relatively polished stage of these Huntington Library manuscripts, to reach back to earlier stages of Morris’s composition, can consult my Tales Omitted from The Earthly Paradise edition (2014) included here in the William Morris Archive. It collates the manuscripts for the first prologue and four omitted tales of The Earthly Paradise. Its introduction, in addition to my article on Morris’s method of composition — “‘A Matter of Craftsmanship’: Morris’s Manuscripts,” The Journal of the William Morris Society, 6 (Summer 1985): 2-11 — provides a detailed discussion of Morris’s manuscripts and how the collation and analysis of their revisions enable a reconstruction of the stages of his method of composition. Dispelling the myth of Morris as a hasty scribbler, his textual revisions reveal the profound insights of a careful craftsman at work

Notes

1. As the Kelmscott colophon states:
   HERE endeth Poems by the Way, written by William Morris, and printed by him at the Kelmscott Press, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, in the County of Middlesex; and finished on the 24th day of September of the year 1891.
   Sold by Reeves & Turner, 196, Strand, London.
2. See, for a second example, “The Folk-Mote by the River” (117-20), wherein the Kelmscott edition ignores the stanza division between two couplets because it is preserving the design of the lines arranged around the decorative initial; following the sheets of the Kelmscott edition, the Reeves and Turner edition carelessly misprints the two couplets as one quatrain. We correct the misprint, and note it as a variant from our copy-text.
        For a third example, see “Agnes and the Hill-Man,” wherein the Kelmscott edition prints the opening quatrain and couplet as a six-line stanza to accommodate the design of the decorative initial, and again, because the design of the Kelmscott page obscures the stanza structure, the Reeves and Turner edition carelessly misprints the two stanzas as one.