James Harrington's Oceana.

In 1964, Mr Peter Laslett drew attention to a discovery of some importance to Harrington scholars. Professor Gilbert Gilchrist, according to Laslett's report, had found ‘a manuscript version of an early part of Oceana… which may have been written well before the book appeared in 1656; indeed before the Commonwealth began’. The manuscript lay in the British Museum. Since Gilchrist's original discovery – really rediscovery, for the staff of the museum had indexed the manuscript under ‘Harrington’ – two more manuscript versions of Oceana have been unearthed, one of them in the British Museum, the other in the Bodleian. All three manuscripts are very much the same, and all seem candidates for Laslett's description as manuscript versions of Oceana written well before the publication of Harrington's printed book in 1656. Unfortunately Mr Laslett's understandable optimism is almost certainly misplaced, for the manuscripts seem much more likely to have been subsequent extracts from Oceana, taken probably in the 1690s. So much for our hopes of observing Harrington's mind working at early drafts of Oceana. But something, too, is gained. The striking differences which gave Laslett his grounds for thinking Gilchrist's manuscript to be an early version of Oceana turn out, in fact, to represent a fascinating exercise in late seventeenth-century domestication of Harrington by his interpreters. The manuscripts show how Harrington, a supporter of revolution, was made a conservative.

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The World All before Them: Milton and the Rising Glory of America

Stavely¹

1991

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James Harrington's Oceana.

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Das Recht als das Grundrecht der Verfassung: Locke und Montesquieu

Das Recht als das Grundrecht der Verfassung: Locke und Montesquieu

The Manuscript Versions of Harrington's Oceana

The World All before Them: Milton and the Rising Glory of America

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