Editor’s Note

     This book is from a manuscript that I inadvertently, but fortunately, purchased at the estate sale of an old European immigrant family without apparent descendants. The manuscript pages were mixed in with countless other papers in an interesting old trunk, which is what I wanted at the sale. As I began to discard the family memorabilia so that I could use the trunk to store my own documents, conspicuous among the myriad papers were many unnumbered sheets that were parts of this manuscript. I set the pages aside, sorted them into what might have been the intended order, then more carefully read them. Although the manuscript was from an uncertain past many years ago, the content was surprisingly still very topical. At this point I assumed the work had been long published, and I wanted to find the book, its publication date, and generally more about it. This publication assumption is consistent with periods in certain places when many hundreds of satires were published in short time spans, for example, in Britain alone over 700 poetic satires were published between 1790 and 1832.¹

     I began my research by trying to determine the identity of Chyle, the author, or “recounter,” as is said in the work.  The manuscript’s pages provided no explicit information on who Chyle might be, nor on who Aeldr, the other participant in the manuscript’s dialogue, might be, if there was such a second person. I assumed that the other papers in the trunk would provide the answers to these questions, but there was nothing even suggestive about the manuscript on any of the many hundreds of these pages.

     Subsequently I used major electronic search engines and data bases. I entered the manuscript’s title and multiple variants, such as A True History…, A Thorough Tale…, Chyle’s History…, Chyle’s Tale…, including with variant spellings of Chyle’s name, such as Chile, Chyl, Chil, and so on.  This led to nothing but repeated responses of, “The search has failed to find….” I similarly searched many world libraries and book collections with equally negative results. Considering the several names on the trunk’s papers as the possible author or authors, searches for such a work under each name also failed to find the published book in spite of a number of unfruitful leads. (The details of this research warrant a separate essay, but this is not the place for it. I’ll only note that one of the works located was of course Lucian’s, [120-180] The True History. While the work herein is much unlike Lucian’s book, it may well have some indebtedness to it, but also to many other prior authors’ works.)

     (Investigation of the dating of the paper and ink used in the manuscript were simpler. The manuscript appeared to have been recopied using paper and ink widely available in Europe in the later 1800’s. Besides the uniformity of the script, the manuscript repeatedly had marginal notations such as “From …,” identifying places from which the copying had been done. The trunk had no trace nor other reference to such an earlier manuscript.)  

     As my searching proceeded without results, I began to hope that perhaps, maybe because of so much publishing competition, that the manuscript hadn’t previously been published so that I could do so now. I don’t think I excessively biased my research by my growing personal involvement in the endeavor.

    If any reader has information about the author(s) or prior publication contrary to what I am reporting here, I and the publisher will appreciate hearing from such person(s). For fear of encouraging fraudulent claims, the various names on the personal papers in the trunk will not be published, a decision in which the publisher concurs. Anyone with legitimate knowledge about this material and its author(s) will likely know at least some of this information.

      The manuscript has been published as I found it after I had done my utmost to put it into what might have been the original intended order. I’ll confess that I bowed to commercialism and added occasional words, and at times even lines, consistent with the original material to render the book more au courant, although the subject matter of the original work is timeless. It would be obsessive to note which additions are mine, but even the cursory reader can rightly assume that material explicitly relating to the last hundred years or so was added. (For the erudite scrutinizer, I provide my humble apology.) I have also added a table of contents, “Contained in this Volume,” and have ventured to compose an Epigraph.

     I’ve inserted footnotes to identify quotations whenever that could be done and appeared helpful, a bibliographic task much simplified because most of these are from well-known satirists. As will be seen, for several apparent quotations no sources could be found, and these may well have originated with the author(s). Rare other footnotes have been added to identify other sources or elaborate certain points. But, in the spirit of the work, I have avoided superfluous scholarly indulgences that distract from reading the manuscript with its original flow and spontaneity. (Even the sparse footnotes can be too much of a distraction, so the reader may gain more by ignoring them.)

     While on a foreign trip, when I thankfully had the evolving material of this book with me putting the final touches to it, our home suffered a serious fire. Except for a few of the manuscript’s pages that I had with me to use to illustrate the book (see the frontispiece), the loss included the rest of the discovered manuscript and the few family papers from the trunk that I had kept. A treasure that had been so easily acquired wounded my heart with its disappearance; this book remains a testament to that serendipitous finding.²

      The reader will please excuse my vanity, but since one of the satiric heroes noted in this work, Rabelais, was a physician, I’ll claim physicianhood. Also, please consider that the usual proviso is added: Any errors are my own, etc.

                                                                Roy B. Lacoursiere, Physician, Editor.³

       1.  G. Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style 1789-1832, Cambridge, 1997. 

     2.  In what feels like satisfying the demands of poetic justice, I have been storing the copies of my edited manuscript in the old trunk. I am not without fear that I might die before its publication, leaving the document for a subsequent purchaser of the container!

     3. In the context of frequent references to ancient customs, history and writers, I want to note that “editor” is used here in its contemporary sense, and not in its ancient sense of the presenter of a gladiatorial show, though the meanings are related. The protagonists in the dialogue herein are not fighting but are engaged in a cooperative undertaking.