Accession number
PML 195795
Creator
Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900.
Credit line
Purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund, 2012.
Notes
Corrected proof sheets for approximately the first 22 pages of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale, "The fisherman and his soul", printed by Chiswick Press and dated "26 May [18]9]". "The fisherman and his soul" was first published in A house of pomegranates (London : Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891), a collection of four fairy tales, two of which ("The fisherman and his soul" and "The star-child") had not appeared previously in the periodical press.
Description
1 item (2 sheets) ; 411 x 535 mm
Inscriptions/Markings
Ink stamp of the Chiswick Press, dated "26 May 91", on margin of first sheet; proofreader's marks in pencil, and "Osgood's Tales" written in ink in the upper left-hand corner of both sheets, all in unidentified hands.
Provenance
Portion of bookplate of Richard Le Gallienne tipped onto margin of first sheet; purchased in 2012.
Summary
Two sheets printed on one side only in two impositions, with the unpaged text printed in 8 numbered columns (4 columns per sheet), with numbered section breaks. The present proof sheets represent approximately the first 22 pages of the published text of Wilde's tale and contain nearly 175 holograph revisions, additions, corrections, and annotations. Almost all of them appear to be in Wilde's hand and include changes in punctuation, capitalization, orthography, and the addition of text, ranging from phrases to three complete sentences. In approximately 75 places Wilde calls for an upper-case initial letter of a word by underlining the word's first letter and writing "cap" with a circle around it in the margin. Wilde has also corrected punctuation, usually by the addition of a comma or a full-stop, in more than 30 places in the text. Wilde's more substantive revisions to the tale include his addition of, or changes to, 11 phrases, the insertion of a section-break between Sections III and IV, as well as the addition of 3 complete sentences, two of which run to nearly 15 words each.
Classification
Catalog link
Department