- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1949 : October]
-
-
- Date
- October 1949
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
North Carolina historical review [1949 : October]
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A LETTER FROM THE MUSES: THE PUBLICATION
AND CRITICAL RECEPTION OF JAMES M. LEGARE’S
“ORTA-UNDIS, AND OTHER POEMS” (1848)
By Curtis Carroll Davis
I
Thomas Powell, as the novelist Charles Dickens would have
been delighted to testify, was an embezzler and forger in particu¬
lar and a complete scoundrel in general.1 But in the New York City
of 1849 this Englishman — a whole ocean away from England —
was identified as a jovial man-about-town, creator of that recent
literary success, The Living Authors of England, a crony of news¬
paper and magazine editors, and altogether (from the viewpoint
of, say, an ambitious and still struggling American writer) a
person to cultivate. Such a viewpoint was held by the twenty-
six-year-old South Carolina poet, James Mathewes Legare. From
Aiken, on November 16th, 1849, Legare mailed Powell a lengthy
screed cram-full of literary opinions and comment. He had
done so, said the poet, to tell Powell how much he admired his
Living Authors, to advise him that “I have a letter of introduc¬
tion to present from one of the Muses,” and to assure him that
the present, accompanying epistle was “written with the single
end of begging your acceptance of the small vol (of my poems)
I will forward by the same mail.”2
This small volume — 102 pages in length and containing 30
pieces of verse — was Orta-Undis [“Sprung from Water”], and
Other Poems. By February, 1848, :i the book was off the presses
1 See Wilfred Partington, “Should a Biographer Tell?” The Atlantic Monthly, CLXXX
(August, 1947), 56-63. This Dickens authority presents new data on the Dickens-Powell
agitation, which resulted in Dickens’ completely exposing Powell's perfidy in England, but
apparently had little effect on the hackwriter’s popularity in this country.
- Legare’s letter, in the Griswold Collection of the Boston Public Library, was published for
the first time in the present writer’s “Poet, Painter and Inventor: Some Letters by James
Mathewes Legare, 1823-1859," The North Carolina Historical Review, XXI (July, 1944),
218-220. In this article, which also contains a summary of the poet's career, a printer’s
garble erroneously states (217, n. 4) that the Powell letter had previously appeared in R. W.
Griswold. Correspondence, ed. W. M. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass., 1898).
3 Cost-books of Ticknor & Fields, in manuscript at the Houghton Library, Harvard Univer¬
sity. The writer is indebted to Miss Carolyn Jakeman, of the Library, for forwarding him
a typescript copy of the Legare entry, and to Professor Warren S. Tryon, of Boston Univer¬
sity, for glossing it, in advance of its publication in his and William Charvat’s edition of
The Cost Books of Ticknor and Fields and Their Predecessors, 3S32-1858 (New York: The
Bibliographical Society of America, 1949), 114. Without knowledge of the Charvat-Tryon
project, the present writer had come upon the Legare items in the Ticknor & Fields cost¬
and letter-books independently, and he is most grateful to Professor Tryon for the benefit of
his editorial explanations of the publishing data (Tryon to the writer, February 20, 1948).
[417]
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