‘The Reproducer to the Reader’

In November 1844, Samuel Naylor published his Reynard the Fox: A Renowned Apologue of the Middle Age, Reproduced in Rhyme. The book was beautifully produced, much reviewed and generally very well received. In June 1846, however, a cruelly negative review appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review, one that Naylor answered in 1847 in a separately printed Postscript. A.L. Willoughby, the only scholar to have written about Naylor and his translation, was unable to locate a copy of the Postscript and knew nothing about its contents. No subsequent notice has been made of the Postscript, a copy of which I have now discovered, and which I describe and analyze in this article. The Postscript, entitled “The Reproducer to the Reader” consists of a long critical and imaginative dialogue between the author and a spectral Reynard, thus providing a hitherto unknown and unusual literary incarnation of this character.