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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2021
The revisions that a writer makes in a work often reveal his method of composition and thus add to our knowledge of his creative process. In an effort to increase our understanding of the creative practices of De Quincey, I have undertaken an analysis of the revisions that he made in the “Dream-Fugue.”
There are extant three different, but incomplete, versions of the “Dream-Fugue.” These are: (1) The manuscript submitted to Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, now in possession of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which contains all except a portion of the last paragraph of the first four parts of the article, is a holograph and thus shows the revisions that De Quincey made while preparing the work. (2) The article as it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1849, being printed apparently from the holograph. (3) The article as it was published in the Author's Edition in 1854, showing the revisions De Quincey made in the magazine version when he included it as part of his collected works. In addition to these versions which are of some length, we have a fragment of three paragraphs found among De Quincey's papers after his death and published in 1891 by A.H. Japp in The Posthumous Works of De Quincey. Thus, we have four documents containing all or portions of the “Dream-Fugue,” with the holograph showing the most changes and therefore being the most useful in determining the author's pattern of revision.
1 Blackwood's Magazine MSS. I wish here to express my thanks to the authorities of the National Library of Scotland for permission to consult these MSS.
2 The MS ends in the middle of the last paragraph of Part Four, immediately after the “dying trumpeter” on the bas-relief rises to his feet and sounds his proclamation. The last words of the MS are “The choir had ceased to sing. The.”
3 Blackwood's Magazine, lxvi (December 1849), 750-755.
4 Selections Grave and Gay, iv (Edinburgh, 1854), pp. 345-355.
5 London, 1891, i, 323-325.
6 “De Quincey's Sanctuary” (anon.), Times Literary Supplement (25 July 1936), p. 605.
7 The Rhythm of English Prose (Cambridge, Eng., 1930), p. 121.
8 See also Shozo Kobayashi's extensive analysis of the rhythmical qualities of the “Dream-Fugue” in The Rhythm in the Prose of Thomas De Quincey (Tokyo, 1956). It must be admitted, however, that De Quincey's interest in rhythm leads him to write passages that are perhaps too metrical. For example, “The mists, which went before her, hid the fawns that drew her. ...” comes very near to being verse.
9 Blackwood's Magazine MSS.
10 This process may be seen in more detail in the unpubl. diss. (Florida, 1956) by Leroy Phares Mixon, The Nature and Origin of Modifications in the Text of De Quincey's Writings Published in Collective Editions, passim.
11 The National Library of Scotland has a rather large collection of holographic copies of De Quincey's works. Others that I have consulted are in possession of the British Museum, the Manchester (Eng.) Central Public Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.
12 I treat De Quincey's lack of unity more at length in my unpubl. diss. (Edinburgh, 1955), An Analytical Study of the Prose Style of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 183-199.