Jenny (fair copy, non-holograph, Fitzwilliam Museum)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Production Description

Document Title: Jenny
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of composition: 1869 (probably sometime after 1869, perhaps many years later)
Type of Manuscript: fair copy in unknown hand
Note: The manuscript is a copy of the copy DGR made from the manuscript he had exhumed from his wife's coffin in 1869.
Scribe: unknown

Provenance

Current Location: Fitzwilliam Museum
Note: The bound volume containing this manuscript, as well as other manuscript documents of the poem, was given to the museum by Charles Fairfax Murray in 1905.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

Collating this non-autograph copy with the Delaware Manuscript, the Fitzwilliam holograph , and the first printing in the Exhumation Proofs shows that this copy was made from the text that DGR had buried in the coffin with his wife's body in 1861. The note at the head of this manuscript indicates that this copy is a copy of a copy, and a copy that was probably made sometime after 1869 when the original copy of the exhumed manuscript was made—possibly even after DGR's death.

This text (and the holograph from which this text derives) antecedes (and differs markedly from) the Fitzwilliam holograph. As for the latter, it too shows numerous major differences from the Exhumation Proof texts, and thus suggests that DGR prepared yet another copy for the printer in October 1869.

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: 3-1848.fizms.rad.xml
Copyright: © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge