Hiawatha's Annotating

Matthew Demakos

The Carrollian - Issue 10 (Autumn 2002), pages 10-56

This annotated paper on 'Hiawatha's Photographing' presents the three printed variations of the poem - as published in The Train, Phantasmagoria, and Rhyme? and Reason? - along with the manuscript version (mentioned, published, and discussed here for the first time) in a side-by-side layout that highlights the numerous emendations between them.
 
The annotations cover a wide range of topics, concentrating heavily on the collodion process, citing manuals from the 1800s, proving, for example, that Carroll's exposure times have been greatly romanticised and that Carroll did use a headrest, a device to keep sitters steady, at one point in his career.
 
Other annotations show that Carroll was not the first to connect Longfellow's poem with photography, that Carroll was parodying the 'Picture Writing' chapter in The Song of Hiawatha, and that Carroll alluded to the word "damn" despite his published comments about the use of the term.
 
The introduction asserts that Frost's illustrations were greatly influenced by the Aesthetic Movement and the painted backdrops found in cartes-de-visite portraiture at the time.
 
The piece includes a reproduction of the first page of the manuscript; a contemporary illustration of the headrest, being the very model that Carroll once used; a contemporary camera to illustrate the comparison between it and the 'complicated figure / In the Second Book of Euclid'; a carte-de-visite of a general that closely matches the illustration of the poem's father; and Hogarth's The Distressed Poet to complement the discussion on the possible Bohemian aspect to the lines beginning 'Like a poet seeing visions….'

See the following related pieces:
 
'Hiawatha's Supplementing',  The Carrollian - Issue 11 (Spring 2003), pages 31-35.
 
'Hiawatha's Supplementing - II',  The Carrollian - Issue 12 (Autumn 2003), page 59.