Details
COWPER, William. Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper written by himself and never before published ... with an appendix containing some of Cowper's religious letters, London: for R. Edwards, 1816, 8°, FIRST EDITION, WILLIAM BECKFORD'S COPY, with 2-page tipped-in pencil note in his hand continued on verso of engraved frontispiece portrait of the poet, near contemporary dark blue straight-grained half morocco, spine with raised bands lettered and dated in gilt, g.e.
Provenance
With 60 lines of notes in Beckford's hand; a further pencil note to front free endpaper stating: "Bought at the Beckford Sale 1882. Beckford's M. S. Notes"; and armorial bookplate of Robert, Marquis of Crewe. Beckford's notes, which are cross-referenced to specific pages of text, are fascinating in that they reveal his own obsession with sensuality and the inevitability of damnation. He is firmly convinced of Cowper's madness: "he [Cowper] had most evidently a tendency to mental derangement which no combination of circumstances however favourable no system of education however provident could have wholly counteracted -- In plain English he was mad constitutionally not religiously [as] our pious publisher would have us believe ...." Most of the notes take the form of transcriptions of salient passages, changed from the first to the third person. Cowper's confession (p. 62) that he "was sincerely sorry that I had not seized every opportunity of giving scope to my wicked appetites, and even envied those, who being departed to their own place before me, had the consolation to reflect, that they had well earned their miserable inheritance, by indulging their sensuality without restraint," is transcribed by Beckford as: "Being sincerely sorry that he had not seized every opportunity of giving scope to his wicked appetites & even envying those gone before him ...." Cowper's comment on a night's sleep in which "I dreamed that the sweetest boy I ever saw came dancing up to my bedside; he seemed just out of the leading strings, yet I took particular note of the firmness and steadiness of his tread" becomes "dreaming of the sweetest boy ever seen who just seemed out of his leading strings." Most striking perhaps is Beckford's final notes which is a paraphrase of a passage on p. 38 where Cowper writes: "Behold into what extremities a good sort of man may fall! Such was I, in the estimation of those who knew me best: A decent outside is all a good-natured world requires. Thus equipped, though all within be rank atheism, rottenness of heart, and rebellion against the blessedness of God, we are said to be good enough; and if we are damned, alas! who shall be saved!" Beckford's paraphrase is: "Good as well as bad sort of Men all in a fair way of being damned -- without hope without remission & for ever & ever says the Devil -- AMEN."