The Desire of Wages

Chapter 3 - The Bookmaker

by Dirk Anderson

In August 1897 the readers of the Review and Herald opened their paper to an article on royalties by the co-editor, G. C. Tenney. Rumors were flying about Ellen White’s income, and Tenney set out to put the faithful at ease. Along the way he gave them a guarantee about how her books were made:

How they are written is the wonder, but we know that word by word her own pen traces those volumes. She does not write by dictation, but with her own hands; and in those writings no changes more than those of a verbal nature are made by the copyist and editor.¹

That same month, on the other side of the world in Cooranbong, Australia, the woman who was actually building The Desire of Ages sat down to report to W. C. White on her progress. “The work of writing is going forward,” Marian Davis wrote, “but for the most part a little behind the work of editing, so that a second or third revision of chapters is required.”²

What? The editing was ahead of the writing. The book was being edited before the prophet had finished writing it, and then edited again, and again. While SDAs in America were being told that every word came from White’s own pen, her bookmaker was already on the third revision.

“I Am Not a Scholar”

White never pretended, in private, that she could produce a book by herself. In 1873 she wrote in her diary: “I am not a scholar. I cannot prepare my own writings for the press. Until I can do this I shall write no more.”³ She kept writing, of course. What changed was that she found people who could prepare her writings for the press. The most important of them was Marian Davis, a quiet, devoted woman who worked for White for many years and whose name appears nowhere in the books she built.

White herself gave the job its name. In 1900, defending herself against Fannie Bolton’s charge that her assistants wrote her books, she described Davis’s role:

My copyists you have seen. They do not change my language. It stands as I write it. Marian’s work is of a different order altogether. She is my book-maker. . . . She takes my articles which are published in the papers, and pastes them in blank books. She also has a copy of all the letters I write. In preparing a chapter for a book, Marian remembers that I have written something on that special point, which may make the matter more forcible. She begins to search for this, and if when she finds it, she sees that it will make the chapter more clear, she adds it.⁴

Scissors, paste and blank books. That is how White herself said her books were made. Not by sitting down with the Gospels and writing a life of Christ from beginning to end, but by an assistant who clipped old articles, copied old letters, and stitched the pieces together into chapters.

“From All Possible Sources”

In that 1900 letter White insisted that the books were “gathered from all my writings.” Five years earlier, while the life of Christ was actually being assembled, she had described Davis’s method a little differently. Writing to Dr. J. H. Kellogg in 1895, she said:

Marian greedily grasps every letter I write to others in order to find sentences that she can use in the Life of Christ. She has been collecting everything that has a bearing on Christ’s lessons to His disciples, from all possible sources.⁵

“From all possible sources.” Did she mean all sources of her own writings (book, articles, letters)? Or was it an unintended acknowledgement that Marian was delving into sources outside of White's writings?

Davis was not only clipping White’s old articles. She was choosing the books that would be used to copy material from other authors. As early as 1887, W. C. White sent an order for library books from “a list of books prepared by Sister Davis,” and the order included “Hanna’s Life of Christ,” Geikie’s Hours with the Bible, Edersheim on the temple and Jewish social life, and “Andrew’s Life of Our Lord, a good harmony of the Gospels.”⁶ In December 1894 the Echo office in Melbourne sent Davis a copy of Frederic Farrar’s Life of Christ.⁷ And when the book was finished, Davis admitted where its outline came from: “In the order of chapters we followed Andrew’s Harmony, as given in his life of Christ.”⁸

Hanna, Geikie, Edersheim, Farrar and Andrews. Remember those names. In Part Two of this book we will find their words in The Desire of Ages.

“Not One-Fiftieth”

So how much of her time did White actually spend on the book? She answered that herself. In July 1896, as the first part of the manuscript was about to go to America, she wrote to a wealthy supporter: “I have employed workers to prepare this book, especially Sister Davis, and this has cost me three thousand dollars. . . . I have devoted little time to these books.”⁹ She was too busy with the more important tasks of a prophet such as buying land for SDA schools and purchasing buildings for sanitariums.

Davis put it more bluntly. In March 1897, when the publisher wanted White to stop and write more parables, Davis objected that it would pull her away from the big book: “It is altogether safe to say that not one-twentieth of her time is given to book work. I might almost say, not one-fiftieth.”¹⁰

One-fiftieth. Two percent. And what White did write did not arrive in order. “No part of a book ought to be put in type until the book is completed,” Davis warned the publisher. “Especially is this true of Sr. White’s books, since she does not write systematically, and at any stage we are likely to get fresh points on any part of the book, or matter that necessitates rearrangement.”¹¹ White wrote fragments. Davis decided where they went.

Davis even suggested what White should write about. In 1893 White complained, “Marian specifies chapters and subjects for me to write upon that I do not see really need to be written upon.”¹² The bookmaker was drawing up the outline and sending the prophet her assignments.

By September 1897 White was worn out. “Not another book will I ever consent to work as this Desire of Nations has been worked,” she wrote.¹³ At the end of December she announced with relief, “My part is done now.”¹⁴ But the book was nowhere near done. Davis would spend most of 1898 editing it, retitling it, illustrating it and seeing it through the press.

“The Editor of the Manuscript”

Writing to the Pacific Press, Davis called herself “The Editor of the manuscript.”¹⁵ She acted like one. We have already seen her rewriting chapter openings because too many began “as if the book were the diary of an itinerant minister.” She also renamed the chapters. The artist working on the book was reportedly “almost wild over the changes that have been made in the chapter headings.” Many of Davis’s new titles are still in the book today:¹⁶

In August 1898, with the book in the hands of the printers, Davis wrote to the wife of the publishing house manager about the illustrations. She ruled out certain pictures (“To use these would be little less than sacrilege”), asked for a new chapter heading, and offered to pay for one redrawing herself as “a birthday gift for Sr. White.” Then she explained why she, and not the author, was writing:

Perhaps you will wonder why I write about these matters myself, instead of leaving to Sr. White. She has been so feeble, and has been so burdened that we try to save her all needless anxiety. . . . I have spent too many years’ work on this book to have anything go wrong.¹⁷

And she added a request: “please don’t let it be mentioned in letters to W. C. W., for Sr. White usually reads all his letters.”¹⁸

Think about what that means. In the final months before The Desire of Ages went to the public, the person making the decisions about it was not the prophet. White was “so feeble” that her staff shielded her from the details. The woman who had “spent too many years’ work on this book” was running it, and was arranging things so that the author would not find out.

Wages for the Worker, Royalties for the Name

White paid for all this work, and she said so. “I have to pay my workers to prepare the books that I get before the public,” she wrote in 1897.¹⁹ The three thousand dollars she spent on “workers” for the life of Christ bought her a finished manuscript. The workers received wages. The royalties, every copy, for the rest of her life, went to the name on the title page.

When the General Conference finally sent a researcher, Dr. Fred Veltman, to study how the book was written, he searched for White’s own handwritten chapters and found none: “not even a secretarial copy of a single DA chapter as typed from an Ellen White handscript.”²⁰ His conclusion was unavoidable:

We should credit Marian Davis with the literary style and construction of the final DA text insofar as the beauty and clarity of expression, the syntactical, structural composition of the sentences, and the arrangement of the chapter content.²¹

The beauty of expression. The construction of the sentences. The arrangement of the chapters. Take away those, and what is left of the “wonder” that Tenney promised his readers?

“Word by Word”?

Return to Tenney's extraordinary guarantee: “word by word her own pen traces those volumes,” with no changes beyond those of a verbal nature. Now compare that public assurance with the private record. White admitted that she devoted little time to the books. Davis said that not one-twentieth of White's time went into book work—perhaps not even one-fiftieth. White did not write systematically. Davis supplied subjects and chapters, searched through old articles and letters, selected outside books, followed Andrews' harmony for the chapter sequence, rewrote openings, retitled chapters, and managed the production. When the book was nearing publication, Davis was making decisions on illustrations and chapter headings while White was too feeble to be bothered with the details. And Davis had spent too many years on the book to let anything go wrong.

That is not a copyist correcting punctuation. That is not an editor making a few verbal adjustments. That is a bookmaker building a book. The distinction is enormous, because the SDA public was being sold an entirely different picture: a prophet sitting down with her own pen, writing the life of Christ word by word, with assistants doing little more than tidying up the manuscript. The correspondence exposes that picture for what it was—a carefully maintained fiction.

Tenney may have believed every word he wrote. But belief does not make a false assurance true. While he was telling readers that White's own hand traced every word, Marian Davis was telling the publisher that the book was being assembled, rearranged, and repeatedly revised. And the General Conference's own researcher, Fred Veltman, ultimately credited Davis with the literary style, construction, clarity, sentence composition, and arrangement of the finished text. The very qualities that made The Desire of Ages a celebrated literary work were, in substantial measure, the work of the woman whose name never appeared on its cover.

So who made The Desire of Ages? White supplied material, ideas, and passages—some of them already copied from other writers. But Marian Davis turned that material into the book the world came to know. She was not merely polishing the prophet's manuscript. She was shaping the chapters, constructing the narrative, and bringing the whole enterprise to the finish line. The public got Ellen White's name. The publisher got a finished book. And the woman who spent years making it happen got a salary, not the credit.

Marian Davis was not the only hired hand behind the prophet's literary empire. The next chapter introduces the others—and shows just how much of this supposedly solitary prophetic work depended on people whose names the readers were never meant to know.