Like the novel itself, the epigraph of The Great Gatsby has achieved mythic status.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
        If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
        I must have you!”
              - Thomas Parke D’Invilliers

Who was Thomas Parke D’Invilliers? First appearing in This Side of Paradise, he is the poet-companion of Amory Blaine and carried the epithet “that awful highbrow.” Here, on the title page of Fitzgerald’s third novel, D’Invilliers provides paratextual poetry. Custom expects real authors to provide epigraphs. His signed epigraph reverses what we understood him to be when we first met him.

According to the general editor of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition, Professor James L.W. West III “… several times during his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald received queries from people who wanted to quote that epigraph. They wanted to know who T. P. D’Invilliers was, so they could seek permission. But I have never seen, am not aware of, any document in which Fitzgerald says that T.P. D’Invilliers is a fictional character, and that he wrote that epigraph himself.”

A recent gift of a presentation copy of The Great Gatsby provides documentary evidence of what has long been assumed regarding Fitzgerald’s authorship of the epigraph. Moreover, this copy has an added attraction. The presentation inscription is the autograph original of a Fitzgerald poem.

“From Scott Fitzgerald / (Of doom a herald) / To Horace McCoy / (no harbinger of joy)
Hollywood 1939”

Horace McCoy was a novelist and near contemporary of Fitzgerald. McCoy is best known for his novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935).

The gift is a legacy to the Library from the Lawrence D. Stewart Living Trust. Prof. Stewart purchased the book in an California bookstore and published his findings in 1957 —- Lawrence D. Stewart, “Scott Fitzgerald D’Invilliers,” American Literature, XXIX (May 1957), 212-213. [Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2922109.] His article did not reproduce the signed title page nor the autograph presentation.

Wrapped in paper and tucked in the protective case of Tong Jian Zong Lei (通鉴总类), a Chinese history book, were four aging black-and-white photographs. With frayed edges and small stained spots, the pictures have nonetheless retained their sharpness, allowing us to see what a skilled photographer had captured through his curious lens one century ago in the hometown of Confucius. Fading handwriting on the back of each photo provided precious clues to their content and provenance.

The history book, compiled by SHEN Shu of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and printed in 1363 during the late Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), is part of the private Scheide Library collection housed in Firestone Library at Princeton University. The photos, according to notes on the back, were taken by a physician named Charles H. Lyon and presented to John Hinsdale Scheide (1875-1942, Princeton class of 1896) by Mrs. Lyon in January 1937.

1. Duke KONG Lingyi (photographed between 1900 and 1918)

The first photo is a portrait of a round-faced Chinese man in the official robe and headwear of the Qing Dynasty. If the ink note scratched on the back, “a descendant of Confucius,” is reliable, the subject of the photo is KONG Lingyi (孔令贻, 1872-1919). As a seventy-sixth generation descendant of Confucius in the male line of descent, Kong inherited the title “Duke Confucius” (衍圣公) from his father at age five. The note also indicates that Dr. Lyon, the photographer, is the “physician to the subject.” It is unclear how often Kong had sought Dr. Lyon’s medical expertise, but interacting with Westerners from afar and posing for photographs would not have been out of place for Duke Kong. European ambassadors and colonial administrators had paid visits to the Confucius Temple in Qufu (曲阜), Shandong Province, and had photos taken with the Duke, who lived in the Kong family mansion adjacent to the temple complex, as generations of the sage’s offspring had done. In a photo held at the National Archives in London, a slightly younger-looking Kong is seen with Reginald Johnston (1874-1938), a Scottish colonial officer who had escorted a portrait of King Edward VII to Confucius’s hometown (and who later became famous for having tutored China’s last emperor, Puyi).

What is remarkable about the portrait taken by Dr. Lyon is that it is a half-body shot of the Duke. During the late Qing dynasty, when cameras were still a novelty to the Chinese, it was taboo to photograph less than a full-body shot of a person, because it was deemed bad luck to have the subject missing arms, legs, or other body parts in photos. Was Kong informed of the outcome of his photo, and was he comfortable about it? As a physician, did Dr. Lyon hold any power of persuasion over Kong, assuring him of the harmlessness of a partial-body picture? At any rate, Lyon’s photograph offers a rare close-up view of the second-to-last Duke Confucius in Chinese history.

2. Queli, an arch outside the east wall of Confucius Temple

3. Statue of Confucius	4. Stone dragon pillars

Three other photos were taken in and outside the Confucius Temple, where ritual ceremonies were performed every year to worship the sage. Photo no. 2 shows an arch named Que li (阙里), which stood outside the east wall of the temple. Confucius was believed to have started his teaching career in this neighborhood, hence the location of the temple. Photo no. 3 is a front view of the statue of Confucius in Da cheng dian (大成殿, meaning “the Hall of Great Achievements”), which was the architectural center of the temple complex. The statue was inaugurated in 1730 (the eighth year in the reign of Emperor Yongzheng), replacing an earlier one destroyed in a fire in 1724. The fourth photo focuses on the porch of the hall, which is guarded by limestone pillars carved with dragons riding clouds.

Lyon would never know that he had captured the image of vanishing cultural relics. In 1966, twenty years after Lyon died at age 72 in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out in China, followed closely by the “Destruction of Four Olds” campaign. Confucius’s legacy was a prime target among the “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” to be condemned and eradicated from Chinese society, ostensibly to make room for a brand new world. Hundreds of Red Guards swept into the temple, mansion, and cemetery of Confucius in November 1966, smashing up statues, stone tablets, monuments, and numerous other antiquities. The tombs of Confucius and KONG Lingyi, who died in 1919—one year after Dr. Lyon left China—were both leveled. The Hall of Great Achievements was stripped of statues of Confucius and sixteen of his most famed followers, except for a broken head left among the ruins. The Internet is not short of violent images showing Red Guards in fervent action in Qufu. Online photos revealed that, before being reduced to debris, the 236-year-old statue of Confucius had been disfigured and disgraced by the “revolutionists” who had plastered strips of paper with blasphemous slogans all over it.

With the same determined pursuit for visual clarity with which he had taken Duke Kong’s portrait, Lyon had positioned his lens straight in front of the sage’s statue, taking in the exquisite latticed boards and a pair of lively-looking dragons about to untangle their bodies from the columns. Lyon’s photo is not the only one of the Confucius statue that was no more. However, compared with what we have found in print and digitized resources, his shot is clearly the one that best allows us a belated gaze into the (now ruined) entire shrine from a satisfactory angle.

MAO Zedong’s death in 1976 brought about the end of the Cultural Revolution. In spring 1983, barely five years after DENG Xiaoping had assumed leadership of China and introduced reforms, the government allocated 480,000 RMB (roughly equivalent to 560,000 USD today) for restoring all seventeen statues in the Hall of Great Achievements. Striving for faithful replication in shape, size, and detail, sculptors started their extensive preparation work by collecting information from written records, images, videos, and oral interviews with local residents. (Regretfully, the project team was not aware of Lyon’s superb shot.)

5. Face of the statue of Confucius (photographed between 1900 and 1918)

According to the restoration team, the only deliberate point of departure from the original statue was the sage’s facial expression. Launched in 1984, the new statue of Confucius gently smiles down at his worshippers. Local residents were reportedly happy with the reinstated, amicable-looking Confucius, commenting that they used to find his old statue “really scary” (Gong and Wang 62). Such a hearty welcome almost made the silver lining of the massive loss from the “Four Olds” campaign. However, with the aid of Lyon’s photo record, might the jury still be out on whether the old statue truly presented a forbidding expression?

We do not know much about Dr. Lyon and his family or about the couple’s relationship with John H. Scheide. Lyon was born in China to a missionary family possibly from Wooster, Ohio. He graduated with an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1898, and, as a member of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, went to the Philippine Islands in 1900. By 1902 he had become a medical missionary in Jining (济宁), Shandong Province, working as the chief physician of the Rose Bachman Memorial Hospital for Men, which was operated by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. More than a century later, that hospital, now called the Jining First People’s Hospital, is still in business (and accepting patients of both genders). Lyon married Edna P. van Schoick in Shanghai on Dec. 19, 1902. The two met when Lyon visited Edna’s father, Dr. Isaac Lanning van Schoick, who had returned from a mission in China to his home in Hightstown, New Jersey (“Going to China” 9). Indeed, one of the places in which Dr. Van Schoick had been stationed was Jining, to which Edna was perhaps no stranger.

Lyon’s hospital was approximately 35 miles west of Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. An excursion to Qufu on the back of a horse or donkey along the rural mud road could take several uncomfortable hours, longer if by sedan chair. With a healthy dose of curiosity and determination and the cool-headedness of a physician, Lyon helped preserve the image of what would be demolished by unprecedented political fervor.

One might question the appropriateness of a missionary visiting the temple of Confucius, who, after all, had been treated as a demigod in China. At a formal level, Western missionaries had studied the compatibility and divergence of Confucianism and Christianity, seeking understandings that would, they hoped, aid their evangelical work with the Chinese. On a personal level, anecdotal stories and individual cases suggest that missionaries might have considered the philosophy of Confucius with varying degrees of open-mindedness. Some may even have been influenced by long-term exposure to the ideas of the very people whom they had traveled across the ocean to convert. An especially “quirky” missionary of such a kind can be found in the film The Keys of the Kingdom (1944). Father Francis Chisholm (played by Gregory Peck) returns to his Scottish hometown church after having served the greater half of his life in China. He is heard giving sermons like “The good Christian is a good man, but I have found that the Confucianist usually has a better sense of humor.”

The digitized photos and their catalog record can be found by searching “Temple of Confucius in Qufu” (call number 3.1.19) in the library catalog.

Acknowledgment:

We would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania Archives and the Philadelphia Free Library for offering generous and timely assistance in locating Charles H. Lyon’s biographical information for us. The East Asian Library of Princeton University kindly created a detailed bibliographical description of the photos.

Time line:

Selected Bibliography:

❧ In 1825, London publisher John J. Stockdale issued the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson.

It was a sensation. Her story was how she worked her way as a courtesan from want to luxury. When her fortunes declined, she told all, naming Dukes, Earls, and other well-born with whom she had liaisons.

Stockdale published the Memoirs in parts. The back wrapper of some parts listed the names of aristocrats slated for coverage in the next. For £200 one could purchase removal of his name.

Fragment of back wrapper of part 3 naming those appearing or about to appear in the Memoirs

Stockdale claimed that, within a year, he had published more than 30 editions. Ink machined onto paper begat money.

He, however, was sued in court, more than once. His rivals ripped him off with pirate editions. Meanwhile, Harriette Wilson became rich and famous.

Readers were enthralled or incensed. Sir Walter Scott said “H.W. beats [the memoirs] of Con Philips and Anne Bellamy and all former demi-reps out and out.” “Push any man into the streets in his dressing gown and nightcap and he will be laughed at,” said the London Magazine (1825). The Duke of Wellington, who refused to pay, famously said “publish and be damned.”

Words describing Harriette seem today to be arcane and recherché : ci-devant, semptress, demi-mondaine, demi-rep (abbrev. for demy-reputation), hataera, cocotte, créature, dame de compagnie, femme entretenue, … the list goes on. It was a strain for others to express her liminal world.

Yet her narrative is direct and beguiling. She begins:

‘I will not say how, or why, at the age of fifteen, I became the mistress of the Earl of Craven. Whether it was love, or the severity of my father, the depravity of my own heart, or the winning arts of the noble lord, which induced me to leave my paternal roof and place myself under his protection, does not now much signify ; or, if it does, I am not in the humour to gratify curiosity in this matter.”

In the end, though, we are left with many questions: Is her narrative credible? If it is not credible, then what is it? What prompted her to break the rules and openly name those who could be considered ‘the profligate of the aristocracy’? Is the book libelous?* Could it be protected by copyright?* (*These questions were subjects of court cases at the time.) Was it a promoter of vice? Could it be regarded as prophylactic against vice? Was it just plain blackmail? Or, as one critic has asked recently, can it be regarded as the end of the epistolary novel? These are only a sampling of queries.

During the spring of 2012, Princeton acquired a Harriette Wilson collection, which does answer some questions concretely and may provide answers for many others. It is a collection of virtually all the editions of her Memoirs published during her lifetime (she died in 1845). Among other questions, these will allow us to answer the question as to what authentic editions looked like and how piracies appeared physically. Added to these editions are translations as well as some wonderful popular broadside précises of her Memoirs, together with a number of contemporary illustrations both serious and in the classic British satiric tradition, some companion works (e.g. Confessions … Written … in Contradiction to the Fables of Harriette Wilson by Julia Johnstone, also a courtesan, part rival, and niece of Harriette), and, finally, editions of Harriette’s novels published after the Memoirs. The novels include London Tigers and Paris Lions. (1825), Clara Gazul, Or, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense (1830), and Lies (1830) (only copy recorded; more later on that.)

The collection was put together by Stephen Weissman (Ximenes Rare Books, Kempsford, Gloucestershire). The books are rare in the market; it took him several decades to assemble the collection. A list of the holdings of the collection is available. The list includes Mr Weissman’s bibliographical descriptions of the various editions issued by Stockdale and his rivals, William Benbow, Edward Thomas, Thomas Douglas, Edward Duncombe, and others.

As of March 15, 2013, all books have been catalogued and are accessible via the main catalog. The prints are in the process of being catalogued.

A recent acquisition, this catalog describes the East India Company’s tea sales in March of 1785 - a year of great changes for the British tea trade. This sale was among the first to follow the Commutation Act of 1784. For years, and specifically over the last decade to help finance the war against America, taxes on tea had been continuously raised until they reached an exorbitant 119%. As a result, the high tax fostered widespread tea smuggling as well as unreliable quality. Introduced by William Pitt the Younger, the Commutation Act reduced the tax on tea to 12.5% thereby effectively ending the tea smuggling and establishing a monopoly on tea importing for the struggling East India Company.

Catalogs were produced before the quarterly sales for buyers to review the available tea and its condition. This catalog from the second March sale of 1785 features Hyson and Souchong tea. A key in the front of the catalog decodes the symbols next to the tea lots from various ships that had returned from China. Quality ranges from “musty and mouldy” to “superfine”. Additional symbols noted the leaf size, smells and other conditions such as “woody” or “smoakey”. Space was available on the right side of the lot listings to be filled in with manuscript annotations detailing the ultimate price and buyer. (Princeton’s copy is completely filled in, presumably by “J. Williams” whose signature is on the back cover and whose initials are on the front cover.)

The Gilder Lehrman Institute recently launched a new educational website:

“Liberty and the American Revolution Selections from the Collection of Sid Lapidus, Princeton University”

According to GLI’s associate director of education: “In addition to highlighting documents from the Sid Lapidus Collection the interactive includes:
• Lesson plans by Rosanne Lichatin (NJ), Nathan McAlister (KS), and Anthony Napoli (NY)
• Videos featuring: Nicole Eustance, Gordon Wood, John Shovlin, and David Armitage.
• Links to the catalog entries on Princeton’s website, Common Core units, DBQs appropriate for the AP/IB Level, and a selected bibliography for those who would like to explore the topics further.”

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/liberty

Loren Faust. Anatomia Statuae Danielis. Kurtze und eigentliche erklerung der grossen Bildnis des Propheten Danielis, Darin ein historischerausszug der vier Monarchien / und aller ihrer HeuptRegenten / auff die glieder des Bildnis / ober eines menschlichen leibes gerichtet / und sonderlich vom angang und fortpflantzung des Reichs Jesu Christi / ordentlich mit gemisser jahr rechnung bereichnet. Beneben Christlicher erinnerung und erklerung der Genealogien, und Fürstlichen Stammbaums der hochlöblichen Herzogen zu Sachsen etc. Als zu einem Extract und Memorial solcher ganzen historien / neben etlichen zugerichten Tafeln / mit lust und nuss zugebrauchen. Aus allen fürnembsten und bewertisten Chronicis und gelerter leut schriften mit trememsleis zusammen gezogen - Durch - Laurentium Faustum, Pfarrern unter der Meisnichen Thumbpropstey / zu Schirmenitz. Anno Christi M.D. LXXXVI (1586). Colophon: Leipzig / Bey Johann Steinmann M.D. LXXXV (1585). 8°. [28]+404+[8] pages. With four folded plates. Call number: 2009-1746N. Digital scans of the other plates listed at http://goo.gl/U9zzH

In 1882, on the ‘Academie Presse’ at West Point, there was printed the first authorized edition of Mark Twain’s satiric Elizabethan ribald confection [1601] Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors. In the following decades, the saucy text became steady meat for bibliophiles eager to consume privately printed editions. During the 1920s, each annum averaged about two editions. A bibliography published in 1939 lists 44 privately printed editions, and, according to one expert, “there had undoubtedly been many more.”

Recently, among the ‘many more,’ a twin pair of editions have become better known. The two are the work of a member of Princeton’s class of 1912, Eugene V. Connett III. Prior to founding his own imprint, The Derrydale Press, Connett did commission design and book production for well-heeled Eastern bibliophiles like himself.

For some years, it’s been known that Connett produced in 1925 a 100 copy edition of 1601. [Title page illustrated above.] This edition is well described in the standard bibliography of the Derrydale Press, compiled by Henry Siegel and Isaac Oelgart. [It’s entry A on page 34.] Furthermore, Connett also produced in 1925 a 30 copy edition, less typographically complex than the 100 copy edition.

Even though Connett’s involvement with these productions is known, it was always a mystery as to who commissioned him. The 100 copy edition clearly states “printed for H.D.W.”

Who was “H.D.W.”?

We now have an answer. In the course of preparing a bookseller’s color-printed catalogue of the Derrydale Press, Princeton Class of 1983 member Henry Wessells discovered who “H.D.W.” was. He did so by following up a note written by Connett and tucked into a copy of 1601 that appeared in a New England auction a number of years ago. This direct evidence from Connett, Wessells learned, is also confirmed by circumstantial evidence found in the Derrydale Papers.

“H.D.W.” was Henry Devereux Whiton (1871-1930). H.D.W, according to Wessells, “was an industrialist with interests in the sulfur industry, a sportsman, and a philanthropist. During the 1920s he lived in Long Island and was a member of the Piping Rock Club and the Bellport Yacht Club. No doubt it it was through such associations that he came to know Connett.” Whiton’s obituary published in the New York Times, November 1, 1930, mentions many achievements but is totally silent on his paying for an edition of 1601. This comes as no surprise, for in 1906 its very author, Mark Twain, wrote “I hasten to assure you that it is not printed in my published writings.”

❧ [Mark Twain] [1601] Being a fireside conversation in ye tyme of ye goode Queene Bess Done into a privately emprynted booke, 1926. Call number: (EX) 3679.7.386.12. Gift of Eugene V. Connett III, Class of 1912

❧ With thanks to Henry Wessells for providing many details.