Autograph Manuscript of Katherine Philips's Poetry

Language: English

Context and purpose

This manuscript is an autograph collection of fair copies of Katherine Philips's poetry, with her corrections. It compiles 55 poems or fragments of poems, plus two titles. It is commonly referred to both as Philips's autograph manuscript and as the Tutin manuscript, after its last owner prior to its acquisition by the National Library of Wales. The period of Philips's transcription dates from the 1650s: the earliest datable piece is from 1650, while the latest is 1658. However, one poem (item 19) is dated 1652 both here and in the Rosania manuscript (NLW MS 776B, item 17), but 1662 in the Dering manuscript (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Pre-1700 MS 151, item 12). This autograph manuscript is textually closely related to the Dering and Clarke (Worcester College, Oxford, Clarke MS 6.13) manuscripts, and the unauthorised 1664 print edition.

Philips's hand is informal italic. She almost always indicates the conclusion of a poem with a single flourish underneath the final line. In addition, she has a tendency to insert apostrophes before the 's' at the end of plural words and present-tense verbs. Accordingly, in addition to the modernisation of spelling adopted as policy by the Perdita Project, this description has modernised use of the apostrophe in order to facilitate searching.

The manuscript is arranged in a complex manner. The reader begins with Philips's poems transcribed on the recto leaves. The verso leaves of the first 12 pages are comprised of later additions in Hands B and C (see 'Hands' in the physical description section). From p. 13 on, the reader continues with Philips's poems running consecutively on the recto leaves, the versos blank, until the middle of the manuscript, when the verso leaves are occupied by another sequence of Philips's poems transcribed from the back, upside down. The two sequences overlap up to p. 135, when the recto transcription stops. From this point, the remaining autograph poems are transcribed upside down, on the verso leaves, running consecutively from the back. Thus, 37 poems (and two titles) are transcribed by Philips, to be read forwards from the front of the volume, and 18 poems by Philips are to be read from the back of the manuscript, when viewed upside down. This manuscript description is arranged according to the most obvious chronological order of the manuscript: it follows the first sequence of 37 poems and titles through to its conclusion; then it jumps to the end of the manuscript, following the second sequence of 18 poems from the back. The manuscript contents, therefore, concludes at p. 102, in the middle of the manuscript.

The manuscript was later used by at least four others, only two of whom-Thomas George Kidd (1770-1850), whose signature appears twice; and William Hall (1748-1825)-have been identified. The secondary hand of the manuscript, William Hall, made use of some of its blank pages to transcribe six poems, a book inventory, three Latin anagrams, and other miscellanea. These texts are interspersed throughout the manuscript. Another hand, Hand D, has transcribed a short prayer in the middle of the manuscript. Finally, a later owner, Hand C, has provided some biographical and bibliographical notes on Orinda at the beginning of the manuscript; at least one page of this survey has been torn out.

The manuscript as it has survived is defective. The last four leaves are torn. There are a large number of stubs (for which see 'Extent', in the physical description section) scattered throughout, indicating that a number of pages have been torn out. In one case, the pages have been discovered elsewhere: the autograph text of Philips's 'A Sea Voyage from Tenby to Bristol', currently held at the Library of the University of Kentucky, has been proved to have originated from this manuscript. It was initially located between what are now pp. 87/88 and 89/90. This discovery has led Hageman and Sununu - following the order of the related Dering and Clarke manuscripts - to suggest that 'A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda' may also have been originally transcribed and located at this point in the manuscript: see Elizabeth Hageman and Andrea Sununu, "New Manuscript Texts of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda", English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 4, 174-216, 1993.

The manuscript was clearly paginated at a very late date, as the pagination ignores all stubs.