Editing Shadows

Since its first publication in 1806, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson has been praised for its sensitive political analysis and its literary excellence. However, both these features are editorial constructions which conceal aspects of the text’s revolutionary energy and smooth over its syntactical rough edges. The beginnings of this process may be viewed in the manuscript annotations of Hutchinson’s nephew, the text’s early custodian, whose response to the growing tide of anti-regicide literature was to conceal his aunt’s republican writings from public view. The main responsibility for reshaping Hutchinson’s prose and injecting a Whiggish flavour into the text was Julius Hutchinson the younger, the text’s first editor. His work formed the basis of all nineteenth-century editions, but eventually led to a bifurcation in Hutchinson scholarship between those who emphasized the text’s feminine literary qualities, and those who questioned its authority as a historical record.