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The American historian Herbert Baxter Adams approached his English friend and colleague Edward Freeman in 1882 with a request. Baxter was launching a new Johns Hopkins University series for historical and political studies and hoped that the eminent English historian could have written “a good send-off” for the first issue. According to Adams, Freeman’s words would have gone “a great way towards convincing Baltimore and the American public of the importance of American Institutional History.” Adams had clearly grasped the value of what is today called an allographic preface, that is, a preface which is solicited from an outsider to boost the sales and reputation of lesser-known writers, or as in Adams’s case, novel publishing ventures. A quick look at the dust jackets and front matters in fiction and non-fiction reveal the confidence which contemporary publishers and authors have on the marketing potential of such endorsements. For readers, allographic prefaces are indications that someone other than the writer has considered the text worthy of their name. To properly function as attractions, allographic prefaces should be written by authors such as Freeman who have enough established cultural capital to recommend a text, and whose names are widely recognized among different communities of readers. Considering the remunerative potential of allographic prefaces, it should not come as a surprise that they have been – and continue to be – carefully choreographed paratexts.
The French translation of Henry Charles Lea’s history about the Spanish Inquisition was published with an allographic preface by the Belgian historian Paul Fredericq in 1900. Lea was flattered by its “the warmth of its laudation” and complemented his Belgian friend for furnishing his book with such a “learned & instructive introduction.” Nonetheless, Lea was not entirely happy with what Fredericq had written. As he bore the responsibility of his book, even the translation and its paratexts, he suggested two minor omissions to the preface. First, Lea wished that Fredericq would kindly delete a reference to his admirable efforts and sacrifices as a scholar. According to Lea, he had not made any such sacrifices; he had “simply indulged in what in English we call my hobby.” Lea asked Fredericq also to remove a reference to him as a director of a publishing house. This, he explained, was no longer the case as he had handed over the business to his sons “before I commenced work on the Inquisition.” Lea was pleased with Fredericq’s historiographical introduction, but less satisfied with the image which the allographic preface produced of the author. Hence, he begged Fredericq to redraw the authorial portrait. Lea obviously understood that the prefatorial information about the author would shape readers’ expectations about and the reception of his history.
Lea was certainly right about this. But the principle did not apply only to the authors themselves as the names of the composers of the allographic prefaces could have a similar impact on readers as well. If Adams considered Freeman’s name a valuable asset for the Johns Hopkins series as it symbolized scholarliness, for others the same name provoked associations about Freeman’s political outlook. The English Historical Review published a short review of the English translation of Louis Leger’s history of Austro-Hungary in 1890. The writer noted how the translation was accompanied by a preface by Freeman. It was obvious, that in this context Freeman’s name alone gave enough clues about the political message embedded in the book. The preface itself reaffirmed these assumptions because Freeman used it for “reasserting his well-known views on the nature and prospects of the Austrian Empire,” according to the reviewer. This made the critic fear that Freeman’s “Slavonic prepossessions … may impair [the book’s] its value to many readers.” This was unfortunate because Leger had done “his best to be impartial” and managed to write what could be “the best modern guidebook to the complicated history … of the house of Habsburgs and of its heterogeneous provinces.”
Freeman was not the only historian who used allographic prefaces for spreading political propaganda. Jeri English, referring to an allographic preface by Simone de Beauvoir, has argued that “the greater the symbolic capital of the preface writer, the greater the ease with which she can use her rhetorical abilities and discursive authority to appropriate the text in question for her own purposes.” The allographic prefaces in nineteenth-century history books fit this description. As I have shown elsewhere, James Anthony Froude appropriated the allographic preface which he wrote for Mary Hickson’s Ireland in the Seventeenth Century or the Irish Massacre of 1641–2 (1884) to circulate his highly divisive views about Ireland and Irish history. Because of Froude’s name and the preface, readers immediately categorized Hickson as a unionist historian who used history to advance a particular political cause.
If Freeman lent his name to Leger’s history, what happened to Adams’s request? Well, of course he accepted the invitation! He understood the honor which an allographic preface granted him as it vouched for his established status and recognition even overseas. A cleverly designed allographic preface could profit both the writer of the preface and the book. It is obvious that while allographic prefaces are compelling book advertisements, they do not merely fulfill publishers’ and writers’ commercial aspirations. Just as all the other paratexts, allographic prefaces, too, attest to the myriad authorial intentions embedded in books. What makes them unique is the guest-status of their writers and how these guests exploit the occasion to fashion their own authorial selves or to promote their ideological causes sometimes even at the expense of the success of the book and its writer.
Sources
John Rylands Library, Manchester: Edward Augustus Freeman Papers
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Review of Louis Leger’s History of Austro-Hungary from the Earliest Times to the Year 1889. English Historical Review 5, no. 18 (1890).
Tollebeek, Jo. Writing the Inquisition in Europe and America: The Correspondence between Henry Charles Lea and Paul Fredericq (1888–1908). Brussels: Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis, 2004.
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Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
English, Jeri. “Literary Patronage: Collaboration or Rivalry? Women’s Prefaces to Women’s Texts in the 20th Century.” Women in French Studies 3 (2010).