Property

 

Reading Thomas Traherne (ca. 1637-1674), astonished both at what I read and that, in fact, I am reading him at all. His masterpiece ‘Centuries of Meditations’ was only found, in manuscript form, in a London street-barrow in 1896. The single manuscript of his ‘Commentaries of Heaven’ was rescued from burning in a Lancashire rubbish tip about 1967, donated to the Library of the University of Toronto after a scholar identified it as Traherne, then bought for U$110,000 by the British Library in 1984. There is now The Oxford Traherne project, a scholarly enterprise that intends to publish the first tranche of 15 volumes in 2024, even as everyone expects more manuscripts to show up. Traherne’s radical theology centres on the purpose of life being what he calls felicity, or as we would say happiness. He writes copiously about our end being felicity, to a very religious woman living in Herefordshire, by name Mrs. Susanna Hopton née Harvey (1627-1709), someone who was at different times an Anglican, a Roman Catholic, and a friend of Nonjurors, such was the turbulence of social change. When she presented one of Thomas’s manuscripts for publication after his death, Susanna overlooked to mention its author, with the result the book was published under her name, not his. Traherne’s main message is that love is all and worldly things are just so many tennis balls. C.S. Lewis wrote that ‘Centuries of Meditations’ is “almost the most beautiful book in the English language.” This obscure but ultimately felicitous course of events was on my mind while reading about Filippo Bernardini (born ca. 1993). He is the person working for Simon & Schuster London who has been accused of creating multiple fake internet domains and misleading email addresses in order to secure unpublished manuscripts from well-known authors, defrauding by impersonation. Why anyone would indulge in such a phishing scam remains to be seen; doubtless Filippo has his own story, which may further test credulity now that he’s under arrest and has to have his own official version. So many tennis balls. “The safeguarding of our authors’ intellectual property is of primary importance,” the publisher’s spokesperson said. That Thomas Traherne’s writing was his property seems not to have been of much meaning to him, his family, or friends. His brother Philip rewrote many of the poems after Thomas’s death, in a style more fitting of emerging tastes in verse. Mrs. Hopton, the person being addressed in ‘Centuries of Meditations’, treated them as good handouts for her spiritual reading circle, but seems to have taken the matter no further. Libraries in all likelihood hold more of Thomas Traherne in their property, awaiting the day when an unsigned manuscript surfaces.