Note on the Text

The Centuries of Meditations survive in one manuscript, Traherne’s own, and in one early printing, Bertram Dobell’s, with no second version by the author, no copy in another hand and no printing before 1908. The text of any edition rests on those two witnesses and on the relation between them.

This edition takes as its copy-text, the text it follows, Dobell’s first edition (London, published by the editor, 1908), the only complete printing in the public domain, which was issued in June 1908 and reissued in December. Dobell set out to make the book easy for modern readers without departing from the original, as he put it, “in any essential point”, and so he modernised Traherne’s spelling and changed his punctuation a good deal. He also cut back Traherne’s many capitals, though he kept a good number of them, above all on the book’s great words, Love, Soul, Eternity and Felicity, with GOD and WORLD sometimes in full capitals. The verb forms, such as containeth and shew, he left as Traherne wrote them, and he printed the four lines of the Inscription in the manuscript’s spelling. This edition keeps his modern surface throughout.

Dobell’s choices went beyond spelling, for he left out most of the passages Traherne had cancelled, recording a few important ones in his notes. He left a blank where Traherne left one, supplied a word in brackets where the sense seemed to need it, and added a short body of notes, mostly references to Scripture. Of the words themselves he wrote that he had kept “strictly to the author’s text”, and in intention he did. But the manuscript is written in very small characters and much revised, and an editor working from it alone, the first to attempt it, was bound to make many small errors. He made them.

The text was prepared from the electronic transcription of Dobell’s edition made by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which was first corrected against a scan of the 1908 printing. That transcription had about 130 slips of its own, none of them Dobell’s. It dropped words and, in one place, a whole line (I.67), read “too” for “no” (I.28), repeated a clause, and set the Greek of II.82 in Latin letters, and all of these were put right from the printed page. Dobell’s italics, which mostly mark quotations from Scripture, come from that transcription, but his footnotes are not reproduced, and most of what they say is carried into this edition’s notes.

Dobell’s text was then collated, or compared word by word, in full against Traherne’s manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS Eng. th. e. 50), a notebook of 91 leaves, read in the library’s digital images. Every meditation was read against the page, and every difference was checked a second time before it was adopted, and the corrections that resulted, about 275 of them, are all listed in the Textual Notes at the back of the book. About half are misreadings of single words. The rest restore words and clauses Dobell left out, remove or bracket words he added, put back Traherne’s word order, undo Dobell’s quiet regularising of his grammar, and mark the words Traherne struck through.

A few examples show what changed. Where Dobell read that God’s essence is the Light of things, Traherne wrote “His essence also is the Sight of Things” (II.84), a different and bolder claim. Twice Dobell printed a thousand where the manuscript has the figure 10000. At II.25 his eye slipped from one occurrence of a phrase to the next, and a whole sentence dropped out, “That being Love to you He hath done the best of all possible things”. Elsewhere Dobell smoothed Traherne’s grammar, so that Traherne’s was became were in the child’s memory of the city (III.3), and his singular verb after “the Father and the Son” became plural (I.98). And the dust of the streets at I.25 turns out to have been precious to the infant’s eyes, not merely pleasing.

Words that Traherne struck through but Dobell printed are kept here and set struck through, like this, so that the reader can watch him revise, and where Traherne wrote a replacement above the line that Dobell missed, the replacement follows the struck word. Struck words that Dobell himself left out are not restored. One whole meditation, I.80, is cancelled in the manuscript by a large cross drawn from its first line to its last, and it is printed in plain type with a note, as Dobell printed it. Words in square brackets, in eight places, were supplied by Dobell for the sense and are not in the manuscript, and the italics too are his.

At II.21 Traherne wrote of “the wise man in the Book of” and never filled in the name of the book, and at II.52 Dobell could not read a word after “We shall infinitely more delight”, in a sentence squeezed between the lines. Both gaps are shown by a dash. In the Second Century the manuscript passes from 87 to 89 without a gap, so nothing is missing at II.88, and Dobell’s bracketed note is kept there so that references agree with his numbering. Between II.83 and II.84 stand four short lines in a smaller hand, beginning “Space perfects its stature”, a jotting beside the number 84 rather than part of either meditation. Dobell printed them as a footnote with two lines transposed, and they are printed here after II.83 in the manuscript’s order. Where the manuscript could not be read with confidence, Dobell’s reading has been kept, and corrections that are probable rather than certain are marked as such in the Textual Notes.

The notes are this edition’s own, and they begin with Scripture, identifying quotations and echoes in the Authorised Version, and with the Prayer Book, whose words are everywhere in the prayers. They name the philosophers, Fathers and other writers Traherne quotes, answers or silently uses, and they call a likeness a likeness when it is not a proven source. They explain people, places and stories, gloss obsolete words and older senses, translate every Latin and Greek phrase, and say where the manuscript matters to a reader. They refer to the Key Words, and they never reveal what a later meditation says.