What is the Rosenbach Manuscript?

The Rosenbach Manuscript is a complete handwritten draft of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is around 800 pages long—most of those pages are loose sheets of paper, but there are also two notebooks containing the drafts of the “Ithaca” and “Penelope” episodes. While each of the 18 chapters of the MS has a different story, it is perhaps most easily understood as a draft of the novel written out by Joyce for the use of his typists. The first chapter was written out while Joyce was staying in Locarno, Swizerland in November of 1917. The last chapters were prepared in the fall of 1921, within months of the book’s publication.

What is a manuscript, anyway?

One of the difficulties of saying anything definitive about the Rosenbach Mansucript lies in the ambiguity of the word “manuscript.” It can mean something written by hand, or it can mean an author’s final version of a text (possibly typed or word-processed) before it is altered by other people (typists, editors, proofreaders, etc.). A manuscript handwritten by its author is called an “autograph manuscript.” The Rosenbach Manuscript is an certainly a manuscript in the first sense, an autograph manuscript, but its relationship to the final version of the text is tricky.

Why is the Rosenbach Manuscript important?

As the only complete version of the novel in Joyce’s own hand, the manuscript by definition is not subject to the typographical or printing errors that plagued the novel at every subsequent stage of composition. It gives an accurate idea what Joyce wanted the text of each chapter of Ulysses to be, without interference, at the moment (and a very early moment at that) each was written. Earlier versions of individual chapters or chapter fragments exist, but there is no earlier version of the full novel. The final version of the novel is quite different from the manuscript version, because Joyce added material whenever he got a chance. When Hans Walter Gabler prepared his “corrected” Ulysses in the late 70’s and early 80’s, he used the Rosenbach Manuscript as a starting point.

When (and why) did Dr. Rosenbach buy the manuscript?

Dr. Rosenbach bought the manuscript of Ulysses at an auction of the personal library of John Quinn, a New York lawyer and patron of Modernist artists (both literary and visual). Quinn himself bought the manuscript directly from Joyce. The auction took place in January of 1924, at a time when Ulysses was not available in the United States. Dr. Rosenbach bought it for $1,975—slightly more than what Quinn paid for it, though Joyce and his friends in Paris thought it was an insultingly low price. The purchase was an unusual one for Rosenbach, who did not specialize in modern literature. Shortly after buying the manuscript, Rosenbach told his friend Mitchell Kennerley that he bought it for his own collection, and while the company at one point offered it to a buyer for $3,000, it was never actively put up for sale.

Why is the manuscript controversial?

With the publication of a high-quality facsimile of the manuscript in the late 70’s, scholars all over the world were able to study it and compare it to other draft material, including a few earlier drafts in notebooks, and later typescripts, printer’s proofs, etc. These comparisons led to a puzzling result: for eight of the novel’s eighteen chapters, the manuscript does not seem to be the immediate source for the typescript. This has led some scholars to speculate that the actual working drafts for these chapters are lost, and that Joyce hastily copied out early drafts of these chapters in order to have a complete, clean manuscript that could be sold. More recently, others have theorized that there might be a missing typescript that would have been made from the Rosenbach Manuscript, and from which existing typescripts would have been made.

What other Joyce items are in the Rosenbach collection?

The other Joyce holdings at the Rosenbach include impressive editions of all of Joyce’s works, including four copies of the rare first edition of Ulysses. (One of these copies is the doctor’s own, smuggled from Paris). The Rosenbach also has a few loose manuscript items, such as an early letter from Joyce written on stationery from Wisdom Hely’s shop (mentioned in Ulysses) and signed “Stephen Dedalus,” some corrected proof pages, and a corrected errata sheet for an early edition.