Traherne's Commentaries of Heaven (With Selections from the Manuscript)

• Published in: University of Toronto quarterly 1983-10, Vol.53 (1), p.1-35
• Main Author: Pritchard, Allan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0042-0247; 1712-5278
• DOI: 10.3138/utq.53.1.1

The story of the finding of the Traherne manuscripts is one of the most romantic in English literary history. The modern discovery of this uniquely ecstatic and radiant seventeenth-century poet, who had remained almost unknown because he lived inconspicuously and published little of his writing, began in the winter of 1896-7 when William Brooke picked up for a few pence two manuscripts of works in prose and verse from a barrow in an open-air London street market. The way in which these manuscripts were eventually identified as the work of Thomas Traherne and published by Bertram Dobell is too well known to need repeating. The initial discovery was followed by several others: in 1910 H.I. Bell published verse from a manuscript in the hand of Traherne's brother Philip he had found in the British Museum, and in 1964 James Osborn of Yale University acquired a manuscript of prose Select Meditations by Traherne that had unexpectedly turned up in England.