When is a Reprint not a Reprint?Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poetry. Ed. Frank M. Tierney and Glenn Clever. [Introd. David Sinclair] Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1988, xiii + 229pp. What is going on here? Nothing appears on its cover, its title page, or its page of publication data to inform the reader that Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poetry is a revised, second edition of Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poems, the volume edited for McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library series in 1972 by the late David Sinclair. Even in the initial "Editors' Note," where the former volume is mentioned, Sinclair is not credited with the editing. This is disingenuous scholarship, and not only because of the matter of editing: Tierney and Clever brazenly borrow Sinclair's Introduction, changing it in minor, mostly erroneous, ways (see below). They acknowledge Sinclair's authorship of it, but their remark that it "stands the test of time" (v) conceals the fact that they co-opt it, both by adding to the anthology it was written to introduce Clever's Borealis Press edition of Crawford's Hugh and Ion, a poem that Sinclair may or may not have considered worthy of collection, and by substituting Tierney's own, highly suspect, edition of Sangster's The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. (It turns out that when Tierney and Clever imply that "subsequent scholarship" made the revision and re-issue of this book necessary, they apparently mean only their own scholarship.) Because the "editors" have credited Sinclair with the Introduction only, the reader necessarily remains unsure who wrote each of the brief bio-/bibliographical notices and who edited the other poems. Only a time-consuming comparison of this book with Sinclair's can clarify matters. In so doing, it casts some grave doubts on Tierney and Clever's practices at Tecumseh Press. Although no "Editors' Note" title appears to advertize as much, the introduction to Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village is almost entirely a rewriting of Sinclair's original. One cannot know this from the new edition, but one could guess it because Tierney and Clever refer to a publication from 1988. They suggest rather awkwardly that "readers who wish to compare" two versions of this poem ought to consult an edition by Gerald Lynch. This could prove difficult, since the book did not appear in 1988 and, to my knowledge, has not appeared in the first three months of 1989. They also refer their readers to The Autobiography of Oliver Goldsmith but incorrectly date its publication at 1945, not 1943. Yet, while almost entirely a rewriting of Sinclair's introduction, theirs nevertheless does not scruple at quoting Sinclair's verbatim when they report on the text used: "The following is a reprint of the 1834 text in which some slight corrections have been made." In its new context, this statement makes it sound as though Tierney and Clever did the work, and made slight corrections of Sinclair's version ignored it — who knows? In fact, they did not do the editorial work. They borrow Sinclair's text precisely, so far as I can see, as he prepared it. Well, almost: at line 324, Tierney and Clever supply a semi-colon where there was no punctuation at all in Sinclair (it is anyone's guess whether this was done intentionally or not); and they elide the fife footnotes by Goldsmith that Sinclair included (15) in his edition. Why? The introduction to Joseph Howe's Acadia is a reprint, word for word, of Sinclair's; in fact, this might seem just, were it acknowledged, but it rather shows Sinclair in a light he does not deserve. In 1972, Sinclair posed questions about why the "remaining portions" of this "unfinished poem" were never printed. But in 1973, M.G. Parks addressed and answered those questions:
By reprinting Sinclair's introduction unchanged, Tierney and Clever do him an inexcusable injustice in 1988. Tierney and Clever do not use Sinclair's introduction to or edition of Charles Sangster's The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, but do not say so. The silly dating of the poem at 1984 is the only obvious indication that this is not Sinclair's work; otherwise, Sinclair's name is implicated in a poem that Tierney assembled. This should not have been the case, especially since Tierney can not help but know that his 1984 Tecumseh Press edition was not altogether well received. Readers of the book here under review are referred to the Tecumseh edition (45; Tierney does not mention his own original edition stanzas that did not appear in the poem's first publication in 1856. Twenty-nine stanzas longer than the version published by Sinclair (a reprint, with slight corrections, of the first edition), Tierney and Clever's poem certainly is not what Sinclair's edition made available or what his Introduction refers to. The substitution of their version of The St. Lawrence and The Saguenay produces an unbalanced anthology: it is wedged into Sinclair's very impressive uniform editorial policy of printing the earliest reliable edition of each poem. "In a recent edition of Malcolm's Katie, D.M.R. Bentley cites Sinclair's choice of text for that poem as an "honourable exception" in a long line of corrupt and incorrect editions. 2)In jettisoning Sinclair's introduction to the Sangster poem, Tierney and Clever have lost some helpful remarks that informed readers of he previous anthological appearances of portions of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. Far worse, is what they replace Sinclair's with: a downright shoddy effort, the most glaring error of which is "The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems and Lyrics (1860-1979)" (sic: all italicized), an erroneous conflation of two Sangster titles: The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Other Poems (1856) and Hesperus and Other Poems and Lyrics (1860). Also wrong, or but half correct, is their claim that "Sangster bore the cost of printing and distributing his 1856 edition" (45): publication was undertaken by way of subscription. Another heading, "Editors' Note," occurs at the end of the introduction (94) to William Kirby's The U.E. — A Tale of Upper Canada, thereby implying, not very straightforwardly, that in this case what precedes it is entirely Sinclair's introduction. It turns out that it is; as was seen above, just the opposite was the case in the introduction to Sangster, where no "Editors' Note" heading appears. Tierney and Clever's selection of portions of Kirby is identical to Sinclair's without any statement to that effect; they do, however, commit the stupid mistake of eliding from their edition the note provided by Sinclair in his (112) to identify "Ranger John," who otherwise is not identified and cannot be identified within the selection offered. Without that note (it should appear on page 125), Tierney and Clever's readers, many of whom — if the book is intended for classroom use — will not know the entire poem, baldly encounter "An aged man, of stature large and strong." Again, Sinclair's efforts have been both unacknowledged and implicitly undermined. Like the introductions to Acadia and The U.E., the one to Alexander McLachlan's The Emigrant is a direct quotation of Sinclair's. Almost: one preposition is altered, for the worse and probably unintentionally, from "Where manuscripts of other poems can be compared with printed versions. . ." (115) to "Where manuscripts from other poems can be compared with printed versions. . ." (129). The text appears the same but for some reason McLachlan's name and dates are stuck on at the end of the poem (172). No other poem in either Tierney and Clever's or Sinclair's editions benefits from such a grace note. Another, by now notorious, "Editors' Note" appears at the end of a verbatim reprinting of Sinclair's introduction of Crawford. This added note includes the information that "this edition incorporates minor changes in Malcolm's Katie in the light of recent scholarship" (174). Which recent scholarship? One would like to know. Did this scholarship appear in the pages of The Crawford Symposium volume? Did this scholarship authorize the capitalization of the verb in the poem's first line: "Max Plac'd a ring on little Katie's hand" (175)? Presumably, if Tierney and Clever know the most recent scholarship, as seems the case from their reference to an as yet unpublished edition of The Rising Village, they would have had the benefit of D.M.R. Bentley's earlier edition of Crawford's poem for the Canadian Poetry Press. That edition of 1987 places on view all the textual apparatus and discrepancies remarked upon by Sinclair. As well, it has the added virtue of being published, so why would Tierney and Clever not refer their readers to it? Furthermore, if Tierney and Clever really do avow a concern for scholarship, why would they, as they did to Sinclair's editions of Goldsmith and Kirby, elide his notes to Malcolm's Katie? How is scholarship served by this gross practice? Elsewhere in this "Editors' Note" Clever's name is mentioned in connection with the Boreal Press edition of Hugh and Ion; this is odd, since Tierney's name is not mentioned in the introduction to Sangster where his Tecumseh edition is noted. Far more of a concern than this inconsistency, however, is the reason given for the appearance of Hugh and Ion in this reprint: according to the editors, it "significantly extends the range and resonance of her [Crawford's] work and in several passages expands on themes less fully developed in Malcolm's Katie" (174). Be that as it may, this reason does not accord at all with Sinclair's reason, repeated in his reprinted Introduction, for putting the collection together in the first place: "The poems in this collection represent a special aspect of nineteenthcentury Canadian literature, for they are among the best-known [my emphasis] longer poems from the large field of early Canadian verse" (vi). How can it be argued that "a poem still in manuscript at Crawford's death" (174), to use the editors' own words, was or is "among the best-known longer poems"? On another front, Hugh and Ion is a poem whose partly urban, and, where natural, hardly necessarily Canadian setting immediately distinguishes it from the anthology of poems that it is being forced to join. If, as Sinclair thinks, Crawford and Sangster achieve the high point of his collection because they rise best "to the challenge of voicing man's reaction to the new land" (xiii), have Tierney and Clever not compromised his perspective by making such an evaluation of Crawford extend beyond Malcolm's Katie to the inferior Hugh and Ion? Apart from the dishonour of this manoeuver, it has no justification: whatever else it does, Hugh and Ion does not attempt to rise "to the challenge of voicing man's reaction to the new land." To return to the one portion of the book where Sinclair does receive credit for his work: Tierney and Clever make several changes when reprinting Sinclair's Introduction. All but one of these are mistakes. They correct his misspelling of the noun, "descendents" (xi) to "descendants" (xi), but misquote a line from Goldsmith ("flame" for "flames"), leave out necessary commas and a subordinate conjunction, point a quotation mark in the wrong direction, delete a legitimate hyphen (the deletion of which causes a lack of stylistic uniformity in Sinclair's prose), singularize a necessarily plural noun (from "The poets here all felt" [xiii] to "The poet here all felt" [xiii]), and produce a reprehensible, grade-school boner: "settlers's cabins" (xii). Not the stuff to instill confidence in an edition. And yet, these slights on Sinclair — what else can one call them? — are at odds with Tierney and Clever's vestigial emulation of his edition: they use the same typefaces, even a book of the same dimensions, and present the poems in the same order. Is it possible that their only worthwhile advance on Sinclair's edition is their numbering of every fifth line in each poem? Tierney and Clever had a good idea. Until fully edited versions of all these poems are made available for classroom use, bringing Sinclair's edition back into print would have answered a real need. With McClelland and Stewart apparently uninterested — one assumes that rights were sought — initiative was shown by Tecumseh. But it must be said: this edition has missed the opportunity by being shoddy and disingenuous —inaccurate where it tries to copy Sinclair and deficient where it tries to bring his work forward through the 1970s and 1980s. We would have benefited more from a facsimile reprint. One must stop short of indictments of dishonesty and piracy, but there is precious little reason for doing so. I trust that neither David Sinclair nor the scholar whose memory this issue of Canadian Poetry honours would have approved of this sort of "edition." Notes
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