Tom Moore and the Edinburgh Review of Christabel

Extract

Several years ago I published an article drawing attention to a forgotten statement by the nineteenth-century bibliographer T. F. Dibdin to the effect that Thomas Moore and not, as has often been supposed, Hazlitt or Jeffrey wrote the much disputed review of Coleridge's Christabel that appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816 (xxvii, 58-67). Dibdin's phrasing suggested that he might have known the truth from a good source. Testing his ascription in the light of other evidence, I concluded that he was almost certainly right though as far as was known otherwise Moore had not acknowledged the article and might very well even have denied it. It now appears that in effect Moore did deny it, and the question therefore should be reviewed.

How seriously one takes a writer's disavowal of an anonymous publication obviously depends upon the writer and the circumstances. Some authors must be believed without question; from others—Scott is the prime nineteenth-century example—a denial is somewhat less than final. His fellow-Scotsman Jeffrey, on the other hand, though as editor of the Edinburgh Review he had constantly to do with anonymous writing, avoided the alternatives of betrayal or prevarication by a consistent policy of silence; when he did speak out, even inveterate enemies scarcely questioned his word. The difference may be less a matter of ethical standards than of the author's conception of the privilege attached to anonymity, which can sometimes be preserved only by evasion or deception. Thomas Moore leaves us in no uncertainty about his position. “For my own part, I think every possible trick fair with that animal ferae naturae, the Public,” he wrote to the poet Rogers in 1814. This was his justification for a tangle of misstatements and secrecy into which he had been driven by a complex of worry and hope over the reception of Lalla Rookh. It applied equally to his anonymous writing, which he was often disposed to deny when its success was doubtful. “Though I shall of course deny the trifles I am now doing, yet, if they are liked, I shall be sure to get the credit of them,” he wrote in a letter of 1813. “Of course” is the telling phrase in this confession. At one time or another, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, he denied his authorship of the Intercepted Letters, Little Man and Little Soul, Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, A Vision: by the Author of Christabel, and at least one contribution to the Edinburgh Review; he also once planned to pass off an air of his own composing as a “national” air. These denials happen to have survived in his own written records. Others have probably gone unrecorded, for his concealments were many.