Notes on The Jungle, Max de Silva

Poetry from the Jungle

The Jungle
The Work of an Unknown Author

Edited by Max de Silva 2020

A Dedication

Whether or not the original text of The Jungle included a dedication

can, sadly, only be a matter of random speculation given

the passage of so many hundreds of years, but for my own part

I would like to dedicate my contribution in its publication, the Preface and

Notes, to two who have been an inspiration throughout the long and

sometime complex process of editing. They know who they are.

MM and Fion Cati.

Contents
A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding

The Jungle

An Index of Associations

The Jungle A Preface to the Work and an Explanation of its Finding

Introduction

The Jungle is a curious work, and its provenance something of a mystery that I hope this edition will go some way towards illuminating.

Many scholars, not least some of my own colleagues at the Department of English Literature at Marischial College, have commented that it is not a poem at all. Or even a reliable history.

Fortunately, as an academic specialising in old English dialects and English colonial lexicons, and not poetry (or even Literature or Colonial Studies), it is not my place to enter into such debates.

But why, you might most reasonably ask, is someone like me involved in this work at all? And what exactly is this work? The two questions are deeply intertwined.

The Jungle (and that is not its real title, as you will learn) is not an complete piece of writing. It is missing parts – how many exactly we cannot really know.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I will begin at the beginning, relatively speaking.

The Buchanan-Smith Archive

The manuscript was discovered amongst the paper of Lady Margie Buchanan-Smith, a Scottish landowner from Balerno, south of Edinburgh, who died in 1901.

Buchanan-Smith was well known in her time for her crossbreed shorthorn cattle, which later went on to produce the beef for which Scotland is now so famous. But she was also a collector of antiquarian papers, and left her considerable, albeit largely uncatalogued, library to the Montrose Library.

There it sat, still in its original boxes until 1932 when T. Jerome Mockett (later Professor Mockett) discovered the trove of documents and set about cataloguing them for the library.

The Mockett Catalogue

Many interesting first-hand accounts were revealed by Mockett’s careful cataloguing, the Diaries of Captain Graham Laurie, being probably the most famous, written as there were over the period of the later Napoleonic wars.

The Diaries capture in vivid detail what life was like for a merchant ship ferrying trade from the East and West Indies through seas swarming with French frigates. As we know, Laurie’s Diaries later went onto inspire the Hornblower novels written by C. S. Forester. Laurie would later go on to create a not inconsiderable scandal by his marriage to Coco zur Wager, the natural daughter of the French pretender, Bianca, Duchesse de Orleans-Bourbon. Scandal, it seems ran in that family for Laurie’s son, Dominic became a notable London buck and partner-in-arms of George Bryan "Beau" Brummell.

The Jungle (and I will call it that for the sake of convenience) was one of the many manuscripts for which Professor Mockett could find few details.

A Bill of Sale, still attached to the manuscript, showed that it had been bought by Buchanan-Smith from Desmond Truscott, an antiquarian bookseller then based in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket in 1884.

The Rutland Family

From that small ticket, it is possible to trace a likely provenance to the Rutland family, who had for several generations been tenants of the Langold-Gillows, the eminent eighteenth-century furniture makers who later built Leyton Park near Slackhead in the Lake District .

The Rutland’s were tenant farmers of the Leyton Park Estate.

The last of the line, Katarina Kennedy Rutland, married Rupert, the swashbuckling younger son of the watercolourist and poet Sir Simon Langold-Gillow, who famously meet his end aged 98 when out sketching Scafell Pike in a snowstorm. Katarina Kennedy Langold-Gillow (nee Rutland) was widowed early after Rupert Langold-Gillow came off the worse in a local duel. She spent the years of her widowhood living at Leyton Park, taking a particular interest in rescuing the famous Herdwick sheep breed, introduced into the area by Vikings and later immortalised by Beatrix Potter; but in her time, almost extinct. She left her own papers, which included the complete papers of the Rutland family, to the Library at Leyton Park.

The Langold-Gillow Library

When eventually, in 1854, Sir Stefan Langold-Gillow came into the baronetage, the Leyton Park Library was sold off. The new baronet, a member of Cardinal Newman’s Oxford Movement, was interested in theology and kept behind only those books and papers that related to his particular interest.

The rest – including a complete set of Audubon’s famous “The Birds of America”, with its now priceless illustrations, a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta, a hand-written copy of The Furstenberg Sonnets, the original handwritten manuscript of Ich Träume by the German romanticist, Beata von Heyl zu Herrnsheim, an unpublished section of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and, most interestingly of all, an original - if damaged - printing of one of the three Contested Quarto Editions, containing the comic play Fair Em. This play has, of course, long been attributed to Shakespeare due to a book found in the library of Charles I, in which this play was bound with two others under the title of “Shakespeare, Vol. 1." Its actual authorship is unclear - and remains much debated by scholars.

The Edinburgh Connection

Truscott’s purchase of the Library was a sensational commercial coup, on the proceeds of which he was able to build himself a large, elegant house in Edinburgh’s New Town designed by Ralph Holden, then a young architect much taken with the neo-classical styles of his day. The mansion is still standing to this day in Moray Place.

Holden would go onto to create many more famous structures in his career, the most famous of which are of course the multiple follies he built for Cosima, Duchess of Doneraile at Coningsby Park and Gabriella, Countess of Kennedy at Wyc...