Fitz-James O'Brien Once More

The Diamond Lens, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath 1932

This is the third in a series of three posts questioning the attributions of some short stories to Fitz-James O'Brien. The first was  "Removing a Story (via misattribution) from Fitz-James O'Brien's oeuvre", linked here; the second was "Taking Out another Story from the Fitz-James O'Brien Canon", linked here. 

"The Diamond Lens" is O'Brien's most famous story. It has been designated as a plagiarism twice, from two very different directions. 

The story appeared anonymously in third issue, January 1858, of the recently founded Atlantic Monthly. Immediately it was attacked, and there was an extensive correspondence about the situation in the New York press in February and March. 

The gist of the controversy is that some friends of William North claimed O'Brien had plagiarized a story by North, who (like O'Brien) had come to America in the early 1850s, after which he and O'Brien had become companions and friends. North killed himself by drinking Prussic acid on 14 November 1854, a little over three years before the publication of "The Diamond Lens." North's friends claimed vociferously that O'Brien had plagiarized an unpublished tale by North called "Dew Drop" or "Microcosmos."

On North's side, one said:

Among other things which he [North] wrote, was a delicious little fantasy called the 'Dew Drop' in which he saw a fairy-like and beautiful city; soon in this city he distinguished a house, in the front of the house a balcony, upon which the form of a beautiful girl, whom he watched until he became intoxicated with love for her. By and by, an elegant young man comes along, who is received with favor by the lovely maiden, whereupon the poor imaginary lover became so jealous that he dashed his dew drop to pieces, thus destroying his whole castle in the air at one blow. 

This story was circulated only in manuscript among a few intimate friends, and the idea has been wholly transferred to the "Diamond Lens," in which Mr. O'Brien sees everything that Mr. North saw in the "Dew Drop." It is mixed with some German diablerie, but all the touching, tender poetic beauty of the original is retained. (J.J, the New York correspondent of the New Orleans Delta, 7 February 1858, quoted in The New York Times, 26 February 1858)

O'Brien leapt to his own defense:

I assert, without any reservation whatever, that I am the sole author of the story called "The Diamond Lens," which was published in the January number of the Atlantic Monthly; that I am indebted to no one for any portion of the plot or language; and that previous to its composition I never had any knowledge, direct or indirect, of any similar story, whether by Mr. North or any other person. (quoted in The New York Times, 5 March 1858)

Then O'Brien curiously states:

I am very well aware that a story called "Microcosmos" was sent by Mr. Wm. North to the editor of a leading Magazine in this City. This tale was promptly rejected on account of its incoherence. The editor of the Magazine in question has a distinct recollection of Mr. North's story and states that it did not bear the slightest resemblance to "The Diamond Lens." (quoted in The New York Times, 5 March 1858)

And the controversy continued, but it could never come to any resolution, then or now, one hundred sixty-odd years later, for no manuscript of North's tale survives. We are left merely to wonder about the controversy. 

A more recent charge of plagiarism has also been levied against "The Diamond Lens." In The Literary Fantastic (1990), Neil Cornwell remarked on the similarities between Vladimir Odoevsky's "Sil'fida" ("The Sylph") and O'Brien's tale. His subsequent discovery of a translation, from an 1855 French edition of Odoevsky, attributed to O'Brien (and discussed in the second part of this series), heightened his suspicion into a charge of plagiarism, for Odoevsky's "Sylph" also appears in the French translation from which the other story certainly derived. 

In comparing the two stories, Cornwell wrote:

Both stories feature sylphs, observed with the naked eye in a vase of water (Odoevsky) or through a microscope in a drop of water (O'Brien). In both the sylphs are surrounded by poetic worlds of great beauty; the protagonists fall in love with their sylphs and lapse into madness when they lose contact with them. ("Piracy and Higher Realism: The Strange Case  of Fitz-James O'Brien and Vladimir Odoevsky" in Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics: Collected Essays, by Neil Cornwell, 1998, p. 157). 

Which sounds damning, but reading the two stories in succession, Odoevsky first and then O'Brien, I found the style and content extremely different in the two tales, and feel that Cornwell has centered on a few almost insignificant points of similarity. But for O'Brien's use of the word sylph (once), the stories are very different, and O'Brien grounds his sylph in alchemy in ways that Odoevsky does not. It is not (to me) plagiarism.  The worst (legitimate) charge one could make against O'Brien is that he might have used one idea from Odoevsky as a springboard for an entirely different story. 

Cornwell's own translation of "The Sylph" from the Russian into English is available in The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales: Eight Stories by Vladimir Odoevsky (1992). Try it  yourself. I think "The Diamond Lens" is the superior tale, wherever O'Brien got some of its ingredients from (North or Odoevsky or both). 

Taking Out another Story from the Fitz-James O'Brien Canon

Neil Cornwell, in his collected essays Vladimir Odoevsky and the Romantic Poetics (1998), makes it quite clear that he thinks that "Seeing the World" by Fitz-James O'Brien is a plagiarism of a story by the Russian writer Vladimir Odoevsky (1804-1869). But there are some complications in the scenario that Cornwell doesn't consider. 

The story is "Improvizator" ("The Improvisor" or "The Improvvisatore")--one of several stories in a narrative framework, in the style of Tieck's Phantasus (3 volumes, 1812-1816) and Hoffmann's The Serapion Brethren (1818), under the title Russkie nochi (Russian Nights*), originally published by Odoevsky in 1844. Cornwell traces the plagiarism not from the Russian but from a French edition of seven stories by Odoevsky in Le décameron russe (1855), translated by Pierre-Paul Douhaire. O'Brien is reported to have known French well. And "Seeing the World" is without question a translation of Odoevsky's tale.  But where does the guilt of O'Brien enter in?

"Seeing the World" was first published anonymously in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for September 1857. This was at a time when O'Brien was a frequent contributor to the magazine. "Seeing the World" is apparently attributed to O'Brien in the Index to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volumes I to L: From June, 1850, to May 1875 (1875). I have not examined this 1875 version, but I have seen the updated version,  Index to Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volumes I to LX Inclusive: From June 1850 to June 1880 (1881), where "Seeing the World" is indeed attributed to O'Brien. Unfortunately this bibliography doesn't give the reasons why any piece is attributed to any author. So how accurate might it be, for a compilation made a few decades after the publication of the story in question, and more than a decade after O'Brien's death in 1862? There are certainly reasons to question its accuracy. For example, the story discussed previously "A Dead Secret" is (correctly) not credited to O'Brien in the Index, but neither is it credited to the now-known author George Augustus Sala. The information in the Index is clearly dependent on the quality of its sources of information, which remain unknown. 

Francis Wolle in his Fitz-James O'Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties (1944) accepted the attribution of the Index, and "Seeing the World" has subsequently appeared as an O'Brien story ever since. But what happened before that attribution?  

I see three possible scenarios here. 

1) That the case is exactly as Cornwell suggested--that O'Brien plagiarized Odoevsky's story. 

2) That O'Brien might have translated the story for Harper's New Monthly Magazine, intending no deception. Anyone researching magazines of the eighteenth-century will know that translations into English of stories from foreign languages rarely have the author named, and rarely have the translator credited. And even in such respected modern resources like The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900 (1979), with attributions for originally uncredited works frequently based on publisher's archived records, there can still be serious problems, as exemplified in the writings of Henry Ferris, collected in A Night with Mephistopheles (1997), where at least two of the pieces included are translations of foreign works. The archives had listed Ferris as the contributor because he translated the works, not because he wrote them, as was mistakenly assumed by the volume's editor. 

3) That O'Brien had nothing to do with "Seeing the World" and the attribution to him is an error by the Index's original compilers.

If either scenario 2 or 3 is true, then O'Brien should not be called a plagiarist. But if the first scenario is true, then he certainly was one. Unfortunately, from the perspective of one hundred and sixty five years after the publication, we have no evidence to decide amongst the three scenarios.

In any case, "Seeing the World" should be removed from the oeuvre of Fitz-James O'Brien.

* Russian Nights was first translated into English in 1965. It was reprinted in paperback in 1997.

Removing a Story (via misattribution) from Fitz-James O'Brien's oeuvre

 A bibliographical point came up on a list-serve I'm on, and with the permission of fellow-researchers Phil Stephensen-Payne and Endre Zsoldos I recap it here. 

The story known as "A Dead Secret" appeared anonymously in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for November 1853.  Francis Wolle, in his seminal Fitz-James O'Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties (1944), noted that the story is in "one of the various styles in which O'Brien was accustomed to write, and it alone deals with the sort of material which later became a source of his strength" and he called it "the first of O'Brien's mystery stories" despite noting that the 1853 Index for Harper's New Monthly Magazine attributed only one story to O'Brien for  that year--and the story was not "A Dead Secret." So Wolle's attribution of the story to O'Brien was educated guesswork. 

"A Dead Secret" was collected in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien (two volumes, 1988), and in its one volume form, The Wondersmith and Others (Ash-Tree Press, 2008).  Salmonson clearly included the story in her collection based on Wolle's attribution.  

However, "A Dead Secret" appeared previously (and also anonymously) in the U.K. journal Household Words for 19 September 1853, when Charles Dickens was the editor, publisher, and a major contributor to it. Dickens apparently kept good records, and these were utilized by Anne Lohrli for her book Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859 conducted by Charles Dickens (1973), and she attributes the story to George Augustus Sala, a frequent contributor to the journal during that period. Lohrli notes that "Six of Sala's H.W. contributions were reprinted in whole or part in Harper's" (p. 114).    

Based on these records, "A Dead Secret" should be removed from the list of Fitz-James O'Brien's stories, and hereafter attributed to George Augustus Sala (1828-1895), an editor, journalist and fiction writer, whose most successful work was probably the novel The Seven Sons of Mammon (1862). Sala pioneered the position of travelling reporter, covering current events around the world.