LIBRARY NOTES
The note for Charles Pearman
What began as a routine task for the Cataloging Department - enhancing the record of a rare volume by Victorian canon author Thackeray - provoked excitement when two handwritten notes stuck into the book turned out to be in Thackeray's hand. The volume is a first edition of
The Four Georges (1861), and the two notes were affixed to its half-title page. One is unsigned; the other bears the initials WMT. Illustrations in a published collection of Thackeray's letters and online images confirm that Thackeray wrote both notes himself.
The notes were written in late 1855 when Thackeray was giving lectures across the United States about the first four Hanoverian kings of England. The lectures would become the book
The Four Georges. The unsigned note is on the back of a printed card that reads: "Philolexian Society/Metropolitan Theatre/Tuesday evening, December 6th 1855." It contains instructions for items to be brought to "Mr. Davis's Houston Street," and was addressed to Charles Pearman, Thackeray's valet and secretary. The second item, dated "Nov. 9/55" in another hand, is to "Mr. Grant," probably Seth Hastings Grant of the Mercantile Library of New York (now the Center for Fiction). Thackeray asks for assistance in finding material pertinent to his research on George IV, and requests two books. Also attached to a preliminary leaf of our
Four Georges copy are a book dealer's description of these notes and of the volume itself.
Neither note appears in Gordon Ray's comprehensive four-volume compilation of Thackeray's correspondence, published in 1945-46, so at first cataloging staffers thought we might be in possession of two previously unknown Thackeray letters. Those hopes were dashed when we learned that they are included in the 1994 supplement to Ray's work. That supplement's editor, Edgar Harden, reproduced them from a 1927 catalog of the Anderson Galleries, a Manhattan auction house. At the time, he stated that the whereabouts of the notes themselves was unknown; thus, we have solved a minor literary mystery by bringing their current location to light.
A bookplate says that the volume was a gift from Christian A. Zabriskie, a generous donor in the early 1950s to whom we owe several dozen items in our rare collection, mostly pertaining to English literature. The book and the letters are part of that collection; they are now cataloged and available to researchers by appointment.
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