less Savoy vanished into memory. In his mid-twenties, Beardsley died early in 1898. Experimental, bookish magazines and miscellanies were not new in Britain. In the era of George III, Samuel Johnson had published The Rambler (1750–1752), largely written by himself. Even earlier, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele had produced the coffee-house reading staple, The Spectator (1711–1715). The early Victorian little magazine, combining images, poems and prose, is hardly more than The Germ (1850), the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s ephemeral experiment remembered for the Rossettis. The sturdier mid-Victorian successor The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–1892), Claes writes, was “programmatic” in contents “because its editors wished it to be read as the official organ of the Century Guild.” Others, fiscally frail, emerged, like The Dome (1897–1900) and The Dial (1889–1897). Claes describes all thirteen, but recognizes that the unique pen-and-ink personality of Aubrey Beardsley overshadowed his brief life and established the pages he generated in pen and prose as naming an era. A striking, substantial appendix of illustrations, mostly drawn from the extensive Mark Samuel Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library, concludes the Claes accounts, from The Germ to The Quest, Evergreen, Pageant, Parade and The Dome to seven from The Yellow Book and four from The Savoy.

Going to Find Stanley:Imperial Narratives, Shilling Shockers, and Three Men in a Boat William J. Scheick For over a century Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889) has remained a popular book. This satirical account of a holiday misadventure on the Thames has never gone out of print in England; and in America, where countless copies were pirated during the end of the nineteenth century, the work has enjoyed a long period of availability. Translations of this humorous work have appeared in twenty-seven languages. Such a sensational publishing phenomenon did not escape the attention of the press in Jerome's day. However, Stanley Reynold muses, half-sincerely, that even after a century "no one has been able to properly explain the appeal of the book."1 No one, to recast Reynold's observation, has seriously considered the possibility that the immense popularity of Jerome's best-known work possibly derives from more than its comic set pieces. There are several reasons for this oversight. Unfortunately, not much of a case can be made for Jerome's collective literary output, despite its ample size. Most of the plays Jerome wrote were often acutely dismissed by reviewers for a lack of substance and originality.2 Critical reaction to his more thought-provoking efforts, such as the autobiographical bildungsroman Paul Kelver (1902), was barely more positive. Such a negative consensus, not just during his lifetime but also long afterwards, has fostered the general sense that Three Men in a Boat has somehow inexplicably endured in spite of its author's manifest literary insignificance. Accounts of the journalistic genesis of this book have also discouraged close attention to it. The belief that Jerome initially planned to write a straightforward travel guide to the Thames has reinforced the [End Page 403] impression that whatever has been achieved in the finished work was more the result of accident than of design. In fact, a prominent 1927 obituary typically claimed that deft editorial intervention accounted for the book's success—that Jerome actually wrote the travelogue he claimed to have originally planned but that his editor deleted most of the documentary content while preserving the comic material.3 Jerome himself had a hand in this mistaken impression: I decided to write the "humorous relief" first … after which, in sober frame of mind, I could tackle the scenery and history. I never got there. It seemed to be all "humorous relief." By grim determination I succeeded, before the end, in writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to each chapter, and F. W. Robinson, who was publishing the book serially in Home Chimes, promptly slung them out, the most of them.4 Robinson probably did excise some of the submitted text, especially the ineptly embedded matter Jerome candidly identified as such. Contrary to the obituary, however, Jerome does not say that he actually composed a travelogue. "Scenery and history," he writes, were added "by grim determination" and then awkwardly worked into the extant humorous narrative. Moreover, such phrases as "grim determination" and "slabs of history" invite his readers to wonder how seriously they should take this account of the book's origins. What can we ascertain about Jerome's original intention? The prelude to his amusing report of Robinson's editing reads: "I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I was a humorist. I never have been sure about it. In the Middle Ages, I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or hanged."5 Doubtless this particular comment contributed to the obituary writer's conflation of authorial intention and Jerome's actual textual execution. But attention to Jerome's comic tone in this passage is as important to observe as it is in what follows concerning editorial excisions. The tone of Jerome's comment undercuts the trustworthiness of his remark; the tone elicits skepticism about veracity in this instance. There is, as well, this contravening fact, which readers in 1889 readily knew: Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a collection of magazine pieces eventually praised in the London Times as one of...

Nay, may I, Lord, believe it? Shall my Skeg Be ray'd in thy White Robes? My thatcht old Cribb (Immortal Purss hung on a mortall Peg,) Wilt thou with fair'st array in heaven rig? I'm but a jumble of gross Elements A Snaile Horn where an Evill Spirit tents. A Dirt ball dresst in milk white Lawn, and deckt In Tissue tagd with gold, or Ermins flush, That mocks the Starrs, and sets them in a fret To se[e] themselves out shone thus. Oh they blush. Wonders stand gastard here. But yet my Lord, This is but faint to what thou dost afford. I'm but a Ball of dirt. Wilt thou adorn Mee with thy Web wove in thy Loom Divine The Whitest Web in Glory, that the morn Nay, that all Angell glory, doth ore shine? They ware no such. This whitest Lawn most fine Is onely worn, my Lord, by thee and thine. This Saye's no flurr of Wit, nor new Coin'd Shape Of frollick Fancie in a Rampant Brain. It's juyce Divine bled from the Choicest Grape That ever Zions Vineyarde did mentain. Such Mortall bits immortalliz'de shall ware More glorious robes, than glorious Angells bare. Their Web is wealthy, wove of Wealthy Silke Well wrought indeed, its all brancht Taffity. But this thy Web more white by far than milke Spun on thy Wheele twine of thy Deity Wove in thy Web, Fulld in thy mill by hand Makes them in all their bravery seem tand, This Web is wrought by best, and noblest Art That heaven doth afford of twine most choice All brancht, and richly flowerd in every part With all the sparkling flowers of Paradise To be thy Ware alone, who hast no peere And Robes for glorious Saints to thee most deare. Wilt thou, my Lord, dress my poore wither'd Stump In this rich web whose whiteness doth excell The Snow, though 'tis most black? And shall my Lump Of Clay ware more than e're on Angells fell? What shall my bit of Dirt be deckt so fine That shall Angelick glory all out shine? Shall things run thus? Then Lord, my tumberill Unload of all its Dung, and make it cleane. And load it with thy wealthi'st Grace untill Its Wheeles do crack, or Axletree complain. I fain would have it cart thy harvest in, Before its loosed from its Axlepin. Then screw my Strings up to thy tune that I May load thy Glory with my Songs of praise. Make me thy Shalm, thy praise my Songs, whereby My mean Shoshannim may thy Michtams raise. And when my Clay ball's in thy White robes dresst My tune perfume thy praise shall with the best. Drawn from Revelation 3:5, the epigraph of Edward Taylor's "Meditation 1.46" (1692) anticipates that the white garment of redemption--the robe of flesh Christ donned to save humanity--will serve as the dominant image in the poem. Much of the imagery in this meditation (Stanford 74-76) is in fact devoted to the varieties, production and decoration of cloth. Less certain, however, is the identity of the narrator who is fixated on this redemptive raiment. It is the poet who speaks, of course, but through what performative persona? Similar to the voices heard in other poems comprising the first series of Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, the bumbling narrator in the reverently playful "Meditation 1.46" is effectively a theatrical character who reveals himself to us through dramatic monologue. Applying an English cultural practice he had observed firsthand both in his homeland and New England, Taylor fashions a speaker whose vocabulary indicates his social rank. A cluster of words in the first stanza suggests the narrator's position at the low end of the seventeenth-century English social scale. This cluster includes "Skeg," "Cribb," "Purss," "rig," "Horn" and probably "Peg." In Taylor's day these words had different meanings depending on their distinctive use within various social strata. Considered singly, each of their specific connotations in the monologue does not reveal much more about the speaker than a certain uncultivated awkwardness in self-expression. …

Floral Images from Childhood William J. Scheick (bio) Now and then I wonder: do I understand plants better than people? I garden, write about flora, and photograph flowers—the last coming close to an agreeable obsession. The result, both in the garden and in commercial publications, should be ample satisfaction. Yet sometimes, I find, digging into the nature of my plant love is as compulsive as cultivating actual dirt beds or wedging into tangled undergrowth to capture an image of a wildflower. The reason why, I find, is as elusive as a perfect garden or a flawless snapshot. Fervidly apply horticultural or photographic principles, and still the upshot amounts to an experiment always subtly imperfect in one way or another. My life-answers are like that—as ever burgeoning and unpredictable as the plants attended while I kneel by my garden border, or sit at my keyboard, or crouch behind my camera. Where did my floral infatuation begin? There was no Eden-like origin for me, no lost world of green youth trailing clouds of glory in a bucolic setting. I was born and raised on a crowded, urbanized edge of Newark, New Jersey, where little of nature as such figured in our lives. My parents' home consisted of five rooms on the second floor of a shingled house with a small, thinly grassed, and shrubless hill of dirt serving as a front lawn. A narrow, stone-covered driveway, the only space between us and our neighbor's house, led to a detached garage in the rear. Between our house and that garage there was a little patch of earth where a few tall bushes provided a left-side barrier along the edge of our other neighbor's driveway. Two hundred fifty square feet hardly seem conducive to developing a passion for plants. And yet this undersized plot invigorated that passion. There was, however, a memorable incident before we moved to this house from the rented flat on Nye Avenue. On the day of my kindergarten graduation in June 1947, I had received a two-foot-high Rose of Sharon as a school gift. I begged my father to plant it in the landlord's yard. When later [End Page 1] that summer it bore several radiant mauve blossoms, I was so enchanted that every morning as soon as I could I ran outside to check on them. I remember that indescribable delight, a kind of love at first sight, as if my heart had literally swollen with elation. A bright color picture of that Rose of Sharon, as clear in resolution as the day I mentally photographed it, is permanently albumed in my mind. There, I suppose, is where my preoccupation with flowers must have taken root, though I had no inkling at the time of anything germinating within. There, too, began a lifelong habit of viewing flowers with a painterly and photographic eye. Unattractive distracting details have always been edited out, even as my first childhood photo shows nothing of the house mere inches from the young Rose of Sharon. My floral memories are all carefully cropped, zoomed for close detail, and highly textured. Scale is irrelevant. From the outset, this snapshot model has defined how I see, remember, and imagine flowers. A second and especially treasured memorial image depicts a scene from that 250-square-foot backyard at my second home. It is nearly spring, the sun is shining in the icy air, the ground is white with glazed snow as starred candle flames blaze along arched ribs of a small yellow-flowered forsythia. A moment of pure diversion for a six-year-old suffused with feeling. No thought, no latent metaphor about a phoenix life force—just an unnamable beauty so complete. All the surrounding clutter that was certainly also literally present—including the garage with peeling paint and warped doors—have been f-stopped out of the picture. Another memorial image is set later that spring in the same location—spears of pussy willow. I would gently bend these skinny stems so my younger sister could pet their fuzzy catkins. I possess a picture of the pussy willow's slender limbs thrusting these furry marvels...

no end punctuation, and then the last line, “Mean mean mean to be free” (72-73). Here, Hayden suggests the ghost-story train on the sabre track will continue to ride, each night, until the people who still need it are free. But in Hayden’s poem, the loss of individual identity to gain a sense of shared destiny is the price of the ticket. Meaning is found by becoming the ghost in the machine, but it is a machine of one’s own making, not the machinery of the dominant culture’s history.