The Gourary Töpffer Manuscript of Monsieur Jabot: A Question of Authenticity. With the Dating and Distribution of Rodolphe Töpffer's First Published Picture Story, and the World's First Modern Comic Strip

Abstract The purpose of this essay is dual and makes for a two-part division: the first, after a physical description, argues for the authenticity, genesis and dating of the Gourary manuscript album of drawings for Monsieur Jabot. The existence of this manuscript, which I believe to be by the hand of Rodolphe Topffer, is scarcely known, and its authenticity has been questioned. This first part describes the circumstances and rationale of its making, the intricacies of dating, the delay in distribution, and the very slight (with one or two more significant) improvements made in the printed version of 1833-1835. This latter represents Topffer's first essay in autolithography of a sequence of humorous drawings, an histoire en images, Topffer's invention within the controversial genre of caricature. The second part, in a connected account, uses the newly published correspondence to establish and confirm the chronology of the various stages of production of Jabot :1 redrawing (in the Gourary manuscript), transfer to lithographic paper, printing (1833-1834), and, finally, a long-delayed distribution through the author's peculiar private system de proche en proche ['gradually, by degrees']. I explain the delay and the changes made during production, and document the private distribution through friends from October 1835. The whole story has to be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle in which some pieces are inevitably missing. Monsieur Jabot, the social upstart, erupted in 1835 into a social arena the unfathomable future horizons of which he and his creator could never have foreseen. After much absurd behaviour and even absurder accidents, this low-class rentier married well; and his million-fold progeny would eventually circle and populate the globe. Monsieur Jabot is, simply, the first modern comic strip or, better, graphic novel. It was executed (drawn and written, printed, sold) by a modest schoolmaster of Geneva, who would be astonished by his modest but very real and immediate success. This has, cumulatively, insured immortality to one who expected to be remembered, if at all, as a miscellaneous writer and educator in 'little' Geneva, the greatest of the smaller European towns. With a growing reputation in more respectable professions than caricature, he was hesitant to publish what he had invented, in the first place, merely to amuse the boys of his school; even the applause from Goethe for the first sketches two or three years before was not, at first, sufficient to overcome his reticence. This much was known to Topffer scholars; the discovery now of a hitherto unrecognised autograph manuscript for Jabot helps to explain and qualify this reticence, and the otherwise unaccountable delay in publication, which involved the author in some remarkable distribution procedures. The birth of the new medium was attended by a strange and in some ways complicated labour. I. The Gourary Manuscript: Provenance and Physical Description. Watermark. Handwriting. Changes Made between this Manuscript and Final Printing. The New Lithographic Process. Dating. A Controversial Genre. The Fart Suppressed. Changes in Pages 27 and 28 The Gourary Jabot Manuscript: Provenance and Physical Description The album was bought by Madame Marianne Gourary, a bibliophile of New York, in 1980.2 She had it rebound in modern stiff boards covered in marbled paper with leather at the spine and corners. The original binding was unfortunately discarded by the binder. The album, along with her entire priceless Topffer collection, was given by Mrs. Gourary in December 2006 to myself. Apart from my lifelong interest in the figure I have deemed, in the title of a recent monograph, the Father of the Comic Strip, I hereby declare a very personal interest in establishing the album's authenticity. It is at present on long-term loan to the Bibliotheque de Geneve, and may be consulted in the Rare Books Room there; its ultimate destination should, in my opinion, be - along with other Topffer drawings given me by Mrs. …