Ashley 3847 (with a copy of “At Last” and fragments of “The White Ship”)

This is one of three manuscripts of the sonnet “At Last” that DGR made. The earliest was the Fitzwilliam manuscript, which may have been written as early as 1869. The date of this manuscript is uncertain (see below). The third manuscript is the fair copy housed with the group of so-called Kelmscott Love Sonnets, which DGR copied out in 1874 for Jane Morris. The sonnet was not published by DGR or WMR.

The manuscript is a single leaf with the sonnet on one side and some fragments from The White Ship on the other under the heading “The Wreck of the White Ship”. The latter suggests that the transcript of the sonnet would be late, perhaps 1880 or 1881. But the corrections in the manuscript show that the text must date from before the text we see in the manuscript of the poem gathered with the group of Kelmscott Love Sonnets, so called, which DGR copied out in 1874 for Jane Morris. In any case, the corrections to the sonnet are not evidence of a draft manuscript but of revisions to a fair copy. Whether this copy was made in 1869, 1871, or in 1880-1881, is uncertain, but it probably belongs to the last of those dates. The textual cancellations thus probably represent DGR's late (but subsequently rejected) revisions, with the received readings showing the text returning to its initial state.

The sonnet was not published by DGR or WMR. This was the copy used by Oswald Doughty when he (first) published it in A Romantic Victorian, 398.