31 min
Notes on The Jungle, Max de Silva Poetry from the Jungle
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- Performing Arts
The JungleThe Work of an Unknown Author
Edited by Max de Silva 2020
A Dedication
Whether or not the original text of The Jungle included a dedication
can, sadly, only be a matter of random speculation given
the passage of so many hundreds of years, but for my own part
I would like to dedicate my contribution in its publication, the Preface and
Notes, to two who have been an inspiration throughout the long and
sometime complex process of editing. They know who they are.
MM and Fion Cati.
Contents A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding
The Jungle
An Index of Associations
The Jungle A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding
Introduction
The Jungle is a curious work, and its provenance something of a mystery that I hope this edition will go some way towards illuminating.
Many scholars, not least some of my own colleagues at the Department of English Literature at Marischial College, have commented that it is not a poem at all. Or even a reliable history.
Fortunately, as an academic specialising in old English dialects and English colonial lexicons, and not poetry (or even Literature or Colonial Studies), it is not my place to enter into such debates.
But why, you might most reasonably ask, is someone like me involved in this work at all? And what exactly is this work? The two questions are deeply intertwined.
The Jungle (and that is not its real title, as you will learn) is not an complete piece of writing. It is missing parts – how many exactly we cannot really know.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I will begin at the beginning, relatively speaking.
The Buchanan-Smith Archive
The manuscript was discovered amongst the paper of Lady Margie Buchanan-Smith, a Scottish landowner from Balerno, south of Edinburgh, who died in 1901.
Buchanan-Smith was well known in her time for her crossbreed shorthorn cattle, which later went on to produce the beef for which Scotland is now so famous. But she was also a collector of antiquarian papers, and left her considerable, albeit largely uncatalogued, library to the Montrose Library.
There it sat, still in its original boxes until 1932 when T. Jerome Mockett (later Professor Mockett) discovered the trove of documents and set about cataloguing them for the library.
The Mockett Catalogue
Many interesting first-hand accounts were revealed by Mockett’s careful cataloguing, the Diaries of Captain Graham Laurie, being probably the most famous, written as there were over the period of the later Napoleonic wars.
The Diaries capture in vivid detail what life was like for a merchant ship ferrying trade from the East and West Indies through seas swarming with French frigates. As we know, Laurie’s Diaries later went onto inspire the Hornblower novels written by C. S. Forester. Laurie would later go on to create a not inconsiderable scandal by his marriage to Coco zur Wager, the natural daughter of the French pretender, Bianca, Duchesse de Orleans-Bourbon. Scandal, it seems ran in that family for Laurie’s son, Dominic became a notable London buck and partner-in-arms of George Bryan "Beau" Brummell.
The Jungle (and I will call it that for the sake of convenience) was one of the many manuscripts for which Professor Mockett could find few details.
A Bill of Sale, still attached to the manuscript, showed that it had been bought by Buchanan-Smith from Desmond Truscott, an antiquarian bookseller then based in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket in 1884.
The Rutland Family
From that small ticket, it is possible to trace a likely provenance to the Rutland family, who had for several generations been tenants of the Langold-Gillows, the eminent eighteenth-century furniture makers who later built Leyton Park near Slackhead in the Lake District .
The Rutland’s were tenant farmers of the Leyton Park Estate.
The last of the line, Katarina K
The JungleThe Work of an Unknown Author
Edited by Max de Silva 2020
A Dedication
Whether or not the original text of The Jungle included a dedication
can, sadly, only be a matter of random speculation given
the passage of so many hundreds of years, but for my own part
I would like to dedicate my contribution in its publication, the Preface and
Notes, to two who have been an inspiration throughout the long and
sometime complex process of editing. They know who they are.
MM and Fion Cati.
Contents A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding
The Jungle
An Index of Associations
The Jungle A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding
Introduction
The Jungle is a curious work, and its provenance something of a mystery that I hope this edition will go some way towards illuminating.
Many scholars, not least some of my own colleagues at the Department of English Literature at Marischial College, have commented that it is not a poem at all. Or even a reliable history.
Fortunately, as an academic specialising in old English dialects and English colonial lexicons, and not poetry (or even Literature or Colonial Studies), it is not my place to enter into such debates.
But why, you might most reasonably ask, is someone like me involved in this work at all? And what exactly is this work? The two questions are deeply intertwined.
The Jungle (and that is not its real title, as you will learn) is not an complete piece of writing. It is missing parts – how many exactly we cannot really know.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I will begin at the beginning, relatively speaking.
The Buchanan-Smith Archive
The manuscript was discovered amongst the paper of Lady Margie Buchanan-Smith, a Scottish landowner from Balerno, south of Edinburgh, who died in 1901.
Buchanan-Smith was well known in her time for her crossbreed shorthorn cattle, which later went on to produce the beef for which Scotland is now so famous. But she was also a collector of antiquarian papers, and left her considerable, albeit largely uncatalogued, library to the Montrose Library.
There it sat, still in its original boxes until 1932 when T. Jerome Mockett (later Professor Mockett) discovered the trove of documents and set about cataloguing them for the library.
The Mockett Catalogue
Many interesting first-hand accounts were revealed by Mockett’s careful cataloguing, the Diaries of Captain Graham Laurie, being probably the most famous, written as there were over the period of the later Napoleonic wars.
The Diaries capture in vivid detail what life was like for a merchant ship ferrying trade from the East and West Indies through seas swarming with French frigates. As we know, Laurie’s Diaries later went onto inspire the Hornblower novels written by C. S. Forester. Laurie would later go on to create a not inconsiderable scandal by his marriage to Coco zur Wager, the natural daughter of the French pretender, Bianca, Duchesse de Orleans-Bourbon. Scandal, it seems ran in that family for Laurie’s son, Dominic became a notable London buck and partner-in-arms of George Bryan "Beau" Brummell.
The Jungle (and I will call it that for the sake of convenience) was one of the many manuscripts for which Professor Mockett could find few details.
A Bill of Sale, still attached to the manuscript, showed that it had been bought by Buchanan-Smith from Desmond Truscott, an antiquarian bookseller then based in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket in 1884.
The Rutland Family
From that small ticket, it is possible to trace a likely provenance to the Rutland family, who had for several generations been tenants of the Langold-Gillows, the eminent eighteenth-century furniture makers who later built Leyton Park near Slackhead in the Lake District .
The Rutland’s were tenant farmers of the Leyton Park Estate.
The last of the line, Katarina K
31 min