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.
I have pieced it together using as much of the original research carried out many years ago by my old friend and tutor, Max de Silva. Max died long before he was able to reach any conclusions about the work or complete his ground-breaking research. But his labours were instrumental in rescuing a series of otherwise obscure and curious scraps of manuscript that might otherwise have passed into oblivion.
Many scholars, not least some of my Max de Silva’s older 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.
Max, as an academic specialising in old English dialects and English colonial lexicons, and not poetry (or even Literature or Colonial Studies), wisely decided that it was not his place to enter such debates. And nor shall I.
But what, you might most reasonably ask, is this work?
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.
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 Wag, the natural daughter of the French pretender, Archibald, Duc de Orleans-Bourbon who had married the redoubtable Spanish Infanta, Bianca, a lady known for knowing which way up was grand. 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, whilst his brother, Cuthbert, or Bertie as he was more commonly known, was, of course, to go down in history as the famous great fixer for James Stuart, the Military Governor who captured Colombo and Galle in 1796-7, aided by the Burger secret agent, Nestor.
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 & LANGOLD-GILLOW LIBRARY
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.
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.
EDINBURGH & THE ROBERT KNOX 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 Wycombe Cross.
Buchanan-Smith was a regular customer of Truscott’s – a buyer of his more obscure and no doubt much cheaper documents, amongst them several items from the Leyton Park Library.
But if all this traces the provenance of the manuscript back, with reasonable certainty, to the Leyton Park Library, it does not explain how it first came to be gathered amongst the Rutland papers.
For the connection of Rutland to Knox, we have to go back to December 1680 when a scion of the family, Archibald Rutland, returned to his family’s farm in Slack...
