Centuries of Meditations

Things You May Not Know

Nobody knows who lettered the manuscript with Henry Vaughan’s name. The catalogues record the lettering on the spine but not who added it or when. William T. Brooke, the hymn scholar who found the book, concluded from its subject and feeling that it must be Vaughan’s, a guess the manuscript scholar Peter Beal calls “not unreasonable”. Whether the label led to that mistake or was added to record it cannot now be said.

The single barrow in Farringdon Road is a legend of the book trade. The story of two unknown manuscripts found together on one street barrow for a few pence became, in Beal’s words, “one of the legends of bookselling”, and it rests on Dobell’s telling. Brooke’s own account, written around October 1910 and found much later by the scholar Hilton Kelliher, is less tidy, for it has him buying the two books on different occasions, one in Farringdon Road and one in Whitechapel.

As late as 1945 the Dobell family still gave leave to quote the book. Bertram Dobell’s sons, Percy and Arthur, carried on his business after his death in 1914, and their firm went on reprinting the Centuries for decades, with printings in 1927, 1934 and 1950 among others. The shop outlived its founder. When Aldous Huxley quoted Traherne again and again in The Perennial Philosophy, his acknowledgements duly thanked “P. J. and A. E. Dobell”. A copy of their 1934 printing, digitised from the University of Toronto’s collections, is the annotated copy of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye.

The meditation that speaks most directly to the friend is the one Traherne cancelled. I.80 addresses her as his excellent friend, imagines the two of them loving each other across the miles, and gives her advice for the place where she lives and the company she keeps. Traherne then drew his pen across all of it. Dobell printed it with a footnote saying that the author seemed to intend it to be left out, so that the most personal page of the First Century is one its author meant to remove.

Another Traherne manuscript was saved from a burning rubbish tip. Around 1967 a manuscript volume was rescued, already partly scorched, from a burning rubbish tip in Lancashire, at Wigan by the Traherne Association’s account. It proved to be Commentaries of Heaven, Traherne’s unfinished encyclopedia of the Christian life, running alphabetically from “Abhorrence” to “Bastard”, and it was identified as his only in 1981.

Finzi’s Dies Natalis was meant to be first heard in Traherne’s own city. Gerald Finzi’s cantata was to have its premiere at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in September 1939. War intervened. The festival was cancelled, and the work was first performed instead at the Wigmore Hall in London on 26 January 1940, with the soprano Elsie Suddaby.

A setting of the unfinished Fifth Century won a Grammy. The Fifth Century by the English composer Gavin Bryars, first performed in 2014, sets V.3-10 for choir and saxophone quartet. The recording by the choir The Crossing and the PRISM Quartet, conducted by Donald Nally, won the award for Best Choral Performance at the sixtieth Grammy Awards on 28 January 2018, an unlikely honour for the page on which the book breaks off.

A psychedelic folk band sang the First Century. In 1968 the Incredible String Band released “Douglas Traherne Harding”, a song by Mike Heron written for the philosopher Douglas Harding, on the album Wee Tam and the Big Huge. It ends with lines from I.29, the meditation on the sea flowing in the veins.

The Church of England and the Episcopal Church remember him on different days. The Church of England keeps 10 October, the day of his burial at Teddington in 1674, as a commemoration of “Thomas Traherne, Poet, Spiritual Writer”, sharing the day with Paulinus of York. The Episcopal Church in the United States keeps 27 September, the day on which, lying sick in Lady Bridgeman’s house, he made a spoken will. That date is often given as the day he died, but he was dead by 3 October and the exact day is unknown.

Hereford Cathedral has two Traherne windows, not four. The glass that the stained-glass artist Tom Denny made in 2007 for the Audley Chapel is sometimes described as four windows, but there are two, each of two lights. The error is easily made. They show Traherne beside the river Wye flowing towards Eden, the city of Hereford with its townsfolk and swallows, a man running through the wheat towards the hill of Credenhill, and the Crucifixion on a living, tree-like cross.