Generations of English students have only known Shakespeare through the Arden editions and Jane Austen via Penguin Classics. And that's precisely the way it's likely to stay if literary manuscripts continue to migrate eastwards into the archives of US university libraries.
At a recent lecture to the Royal Society of Authors, the poet laureate Andrew Motion called on the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, to reverse this trend by creating a tax exemption for manuscripts bought by British institutions. Brown ignored Motion's proposals - so for now English research grants will have to include flights to Texas or wherever.
Motion's appeal is no mere Little England demand to keep Britain for the British. While students and academics can discover the intricacies of a manuscript at second hand, Motion believes you can't beat the original for a direct connection into the heart and mind of an author.
"I can remember seeing a copy of Valerie Eliot's manuscript edition of The Wasteland as a student," he says. "It was a revelation. The poem became much more personal; I got a sense of Eliot writing it on the hoof rather than relating to it solely as a finished, polished work. Writing evolves as much from what goes wrong as from what goes right."
In short, a manuscript can describe a process: it is a pathway into the creative struggle of the writer. This month a new exhibition, Chapter & Verse - 1000 Years of English Literature, opened at the British Library; on display are the original manuscripts of many of the most celebrated pieces of literature, and a pattern that consistently emerges is the gap between the generally received interpretation and perception of the text and the impression the manuscript gives.
Take one of the highlights of the exhibition, the unique 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon (Old English) manuscript of Beowulf. "The poem is usually reproduced in three parts," says Professor Kevin Kiernan of the university of Kentucky, one of the world's leading experts on Beowulf and the man behind the new electronic edition. "In fact it's in 42 parts and when you read it section by section it appears far less digressive. The manuscript also reminds you of how much of the original is missing, and how much we have depended on other sources to fill in the gaps.
"There are many indications the poem was not copied exactly, and that the scribes ignored the line rulings to add extra lines per page. Most vellum pages have 20 lines, but some sections are 22 and some 21. The shifts in the format come abruptly: for instance, the heading of chapter 24 has gone missing and on another page of the folio you can see where the original text has been washed down and erased and re-written in a different hand. To make sense of the poem properly, you have to allow for these apparent disorders."
Side by side with the original is Seamus Heaney's prize-winning modern translation, which shows that the word processor has not killed off the literary draft. Heaney began work on his Beowulf in the mid-80s, and one can see that rather than revising the text on screen, he printed out the work in progress and annotated it by hand. It is as if he needed the physical relationship between pen and page to access the emotional connection to the poem.
Andrew Motion does not find this surprising: "I only work on the computer in the later stages of a work, as writing straight on to the screen can give you the impression a piece is finished long before it is."
Heaney's manuscripts provide insights into the battle for precision and economy. Over nearly 15 years he composed seven alternative openings before settling for one. Similarly, in each draft one can see how some words, such as thole (meaning to endure or suffer), pop in and out of the text before Heaney decides it can stay. In the end there is nothing there that shouldn't be.
The idea that the hand of an author is intimately connected to his or her manuscript is not new. The Romantics even took the idea literally: Shelley's ashes were wrapped in one of his manuscripts.
Just how closely a poet should be identified with their work can also be inferred from manuscript. In 1812, Byron "woke one morning" to find himself famous after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poem describes the travels of a jaded young man looking for fresh experiences, and commentators have speculated whether Byron and Harold were one and the same. Byron claimed Harold was fictitious, but the proofs from the end of the second canto include Byron's comments on a more egotistical, "affected" alternative for the final two lines, suggesting the poem may be closer to autobiography than the poet was willing to admit.
Elsewhere we find that Austen reworked the last chapters of Persuasion to give Ann Elliot a stronger role in getting Wentworth to declare his love, and that Wordsworth's Daffodils was a more collaborative effort than its mood would suggest; the manuscript was written out by his wife, Mary, who first began the poem: "I wandered like a lonely..."
The 20th century is equally well represented. "From the vigour and toughness of Sylvia Plath's Ariel you would expect to find a frantic and heavily worked manuscript," says Chris Fletcher, curator of manuscripts at the British Library. "In fact, it is naively and girlishly written and is decorated with a small hand-drawn flower at the bottom."
Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth is also revealing. "For one thing, the title was not his," says Fletcher. "His original title was Anthem for Dead Youth, which he changed at Siegfried Sassoon's suggestion. He worked to find the right words. 'Tenderness of mortal minds' is variously 'Tenderness of broken/simple/frail/innocent minds'."
Yet sometimes a manuscript only confuses the issue. The 1816 published version of Coleridge's Kubla Khan conflicts with the poet's note on the manuscript that "this fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of opium, taken to check a dysentry, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culborne Church, in the fall of the year, 1797". As Fletcher notes, the manuscript does not look opium-induced - it survives as a fair copy with one or two considered annotations.
Manuscripts may offer a window into their author's soul, but sometimes the glass remains opaque.
