The “dedication” of T. E. Lawrence’s THE MINT

Successive published editions of T.E. Lawrence’s fly-on-the-wall account of service in the ranks of the Royal Air Force in the 1920s, titled The Mint, have all included, after the title page, what appears to be a dedication of the text to the editor and writer Edward Garnett.

When preparing our edition of ‘The Mint’ and Later Writings About Service Life we went back to the manuscript that Lawrence presented to Edward Garnett in 1928. This is now in the Houghton Library at Harvard.

What we saw does not tally with what has been published. The text that has repeatedly been printed as the book’s dedication is quite clearly an inscription presenting the manuscript (as a physical object) to Garnett. It is written inside the front cover (the usual place for a gift inscription) and not after the title page (the usual place for the dedication of a text).

It reads:

–

To Edward Garnett

You dreamed I came one night, with this book, crying “Here’s a masterpiece. Burn it”

Well: as you please.

–

No edition of The Mint was published in Lawrence’s lifetime, so he was unable to comment on the posthumous elevation of his gift-inscription to the status of dedication. He would probably have laughed.