Page:Scrapbook of a Historian - Frances Fuller Victor.djvu/4

328 "History is truth, not fiction, and Hubert Howe Bancroft's unquenchable desire not to have the truth told if his pocket would suffer thereby is known here, if not in New York. Some of the matter that appeared under his name was accurate, but the fiction is so much in evidence that the whole work has been rendered valueless. Much of the honest writing in these volumes was done by Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, a gentlewoman who declined to lie for profit."

In one of her own statements in the scrapbook, Mrs. Victor does not go so far:

"The second volume on Oregon was made up more from matter in the Bancroft library and newspaper files, and is not quite the perfect work I would have made it if I had prepared for it as I did for the first volume. Its errors, however, are not numerous or important. It happened that sometimes when Mr. Bancroft was reading manuscript he altered what I had said to make it suit some opinion of his own, or for some other reason."

This is confirmed in more detail in a letter she wrote to Judge Matthew P. Deady on November 3, 1886, one of a number of complaining references to her Bancroft employment to be found in the Deady correspondence in the manuscript collections of the Oregon Historical Society:

". . . I labored under the disadvantage of having my ms. [Bancroft's History of Oregon] reduced by another—Mr. B[ancroft] performing this editorial work. As he did not always take in the value of certain matter, and as my ms. overrun terribly, he slashed in the wrong places often, and I knew nothing of it until it came before me in the galleys and could be changed but slightly afterwards. But considering all things, I do believe the history is more nearly correct than any original history you can point to before the Bancroft series was begun ..."

This scrapbook sketch cannot go fully into the Victor-Bancroft controversy, which would require, and might well have, a paper by itself. To the extent that her objections were to the editing, the modern reader cannot escape the significant evidence of his own judgment that no book published under Mrs. Victor's own name is so good as the two-volume history of Oregon in the Bancroft series. Lack of credit, small pay, all the research toil, eleven years of her gifted prime as a hired hand—these, without a high degree of actual Bancroft blame, would have been cause enough for the petulance of her sad, later years