Patrick Spedding

Meissner's Translation of The Invisible Spy

2012-01-16T07:36:00.020+11:00

Until this morning August Gottlieb Meissner did not have a Wikipedia page—in English anyway. So I have created one by translating the German Wikipedia page (see here). Anyone who is able to improve on my feeble efforts, please do so.

If you look at the Wikipedia page I have created you will see why I thought it worth adding: Meissner translated Eliza Haywood's The Invisible Spy as Der Unsichtbare Kundschafter in 1791 and 1794.

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood I dated this translation to 1756, a particularly stupid—and embarrassing—goof on my part because Meissner was three at the time! To be fair to my younger self, I repeated the dating of this translation to 1756 by Wilhelm Heinsius (in 1812), Karl Goedeke (1916) and Mary Bell Price and Lawrence Marsden Price (1934), but since I give the date of birth and the date of publication on the same line I really have no excuse. As I said, embarrassing.

[1791/94 edition, vol. 1]

If we pass over the ghost of Ab.69.8 (the not-first edition), there appear to have been five editions of Der Unsichtbare Kundschafter: 1791/1794, 1795, 1800, 1812 and 1814. Of these I now have four (see image at top). The one I don't have is one of the few works I have not seen (Ab.69.12; the 1812 edition),** so I am pretty keen on finding a copy. I was only able to locate a single copy of this edition, but the same was true of the 1800 edition and—well—here it is, so I may get lucky!

[1791/94 edition, vol. 2]

When you put these four editions side by side, the most striking thing about them is their illustrations. Each edition has a vignette on the title-page to both volumes, and it is the same illustration in each edition. But each differs from the others in terms of the frontispieces.

[1800 edition, vol. 1]

The 1795 edition (Ab.69.10) has no frontispieces, while the 1791/1794, 1800 and 1814 editions (Ab.69.9, Ab.69.11 and Ab.69.13) each have frontispieces unique to themselves. I have not had a chance to scan these images properly, or to take better photos, but, as you can see, some of these illustrations are stunning!

[1800 edition, vol. 2]

I particularly like the ones in the 1814 edition from Meißner's Sämmtliche Werke (two copies of which are now available on Google Books, see the frontispieces below; on Google Books here and here; see also my updated list of Haywood Facsimile Texts and Downloadable pdfs here).

[1814 edition, vol. 1]

[1814 edition, vol. 2]

**In fact, it is a work I had to create a special category for in my Bibliography, because the librarian responsible for protecting it took his job so very seriously that he refused to divulge anything at all about it. I sent a series of emails to him, his colleagues and his superiors and then to random staff members at the university concerned. Nothing. He would promise to respond in emails copied to others, but I never got a word out of him. I believe the technical term for someone like this is a bibliotaph.

Leave and Clayton's Leave

2011-12-24T08:14:00.010+11:00

I have been on leave for four weeks. Before I went on leave I put in place an email notice that would alert people to the fact that I was on leave in the hope that they would let me … well, leave. Enjoy my holidays in peace and not expect me to answer my email immediately.

It didn't stop the flood of email, and it hasn't stopped everyone from expecting a reply to their email while I am on leave (i.e., expecting me to return to work). And some of the tasks I have been asked to perform are not simple ones, but time-consuming and tedious tasks. My leave could easily turn into Clayton's leave: "the holiday you have when you're not having a holiday."

Well, in the news today there is a story about Volkswagen blocking after-hours e-mails, which is described here as "a growing complaint in the workplace":

Volkswagen says it took steps to have its Blackberry servers stop sending e-mails to some of its off-duty employees who had complained. The company stops sending messages 30 minutes after the end of employees' shifts and resumes 30 minutes before the next shift starts, the BBC reported.

[…]

Volkswagen is not alone in hearing from employees who feel their employer is infringing on their personal time with after-hours e-mails, the BBC said.

"It's bad for the individual worker's performance being online and available 24-7," said Will Hutton, chairman of the Big Innovation Center at The Work Foundation. "You do need downtime, you do need periods in which you can actually reflect on something without needing instantaneously to give a reaction.

"Secondly, it has a poor impact on an individual's well-being. I think that one has to patrol quite carefully the borderline between work and non-work.

"So I can see why some firms are taking this action, the problem is that a universal response is impossible ... but certainly we should have the capacity to be opted out of it rather than be opted in."

The funny thing is, Monash is keen for its employees to take leave, partly because of the financial burden of carrying accumulated leave, but also because they recognise the benefit in terms of staff well-being. In fact, I have received a number of emails in the last few weeks telling me how good it would be for me to take the leave that I am on.

In fact, Monash are so insistent that you take your leave and not accumulate it that they will schedule you for leave whether you choose to take it or not. So, if you keep working through the period they have chosen for you, you simply lose the leave.

Of course, you can't take leave during the teaching period (26 weeks per year), or the exam period (eight weeks), or immediately before semester (six weeks), so there really is only about eight to ten weeks a year in which you can take leave. Which is now. So almost everyone is on leave at this time of year.

Which makes it even more strange/weird/bizarre/annoying/whatever that I (and other staff) continue to receive email demanding action at this time of year, while I/we/they are on leave. It is the sort of thing, you'd think, that the unions here would want action on.

So, starting today (which is when my new year starts) I am going to make renewed efforts to disentangle my work and personal email accounts, contacts etc, with the intention (this is sounding perilously close to a New Year's Resolution [and, therefore, doomed to failure]) of only reading and answering work email while I am at work.

Which will mean that, when I go on leave next time I won't have to work so hard to stay on leave—though I will face an even longer email backlog when I return from leave.

**And I realise that posting on my academic blog during my break may seem like work, but I ain't paid for it and I certainly get no credit for it (see here), so this is a hobby, not work!

Dutch Translation of The Female Spectator

2011-12-07T08:52:00.015+11:00

An essay by Finny Bottinga published in the same year as my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, but not seen by me until this morning (!), discusses a Dutch translation of The Female Spectator—a translation missing from my Bibliography. Rats. But kudos to Bottinga.

The essay is "Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator and its Dutch translation De Engelsche Spectatrice, in I Have Heard About You: Foreign Women's Writing Crossing the Dutch Border: From Sappho to Selma Lagerlöf, ed. Suzanna van Dijk (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004), 217–24. (Now available online here, but no copy of this collection of essays is held in Australia, so I guess I can be forgiven for missing it.)

The identification of this translation was likely first made by Bottinga in her Masters thesis: Tea-Tables and Coffee-Houses: The Position of Eighteenth-Century Women in the Spectator, the Female Spectator and in the Dutch translations of these periodicals: A comparative study (MA thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden 1996).

There appears to have been two editions of the translation (see here and here), the main details of which are

De Engelsche spectatrice of Britsche leermeesteresse der zeeden. Na den vyfden druk uit het Engelsch vertaalt (Te Amsterdam: by Jacobus Kok, in de Binne-Bantemerstraat, 1762-63), 4 vols [No.1 (1762)–no.17 (1763)]. Held EuNA [OK 62-9576-9578; OK 93-53 (dl III)].

De Engelsche spectatrice of Britsche leermeesteresse der zeeden. Na den vyfden druk uit het Engelsch vertaalt (Te Amsterdam: by Jacobus Kok, in de Lange Niesel, 1775), 2 vols. Held EuNA [OK 93-54-55].

The Bijzondere Collecties of the EuNA (Library of the University of Amsterdam) descriptions are not clear enough for me to distinguish issues and editions, but I will obviously have to take a visit of Amsterdam soon.

Eliza Haywood Played By Emma Thompson

2011-11-22T11:37:00.008+11:00

According to Myheritage.com's facial recognition system, the celebrity who looks most like Eliza Haywood is Emma Thompson. So, when the story of Haywood's like is turned into a film, we know who we need to get to play the part!

As you can the fit is only 63%, but the likeness is striking. It would be even more striking if Emma were to put on a few kilos, which would make her face a little less angular. Here are a few more images that help to show the likeness.

The History of Miss Leonora Meadowson

2011-11-10T07:22:00.054+11:00

Haywood's The History of Miss Leonora Meadowson is a fascinating and curious work for many reasons. I invested an enormous amount of time in searching for a copy—or, indeed, any trace—of Leonora Meadowson; and when I did find a copy at the Fales library in New York it was one of the major milestones in my Haywood research. My first conference paper (at the 1999 BSANZ Conference), and my first published article, were also on "Eliza Haywood's last ('lost') work."

After my 1999 article the discoveries continued, when I realised that Leonora Meadowson was a revision of Cleomelia, making it one of a tiny number of examples of Haywood revising one of her works, and it was one of the key pieces of evidence tying the death(?) of Haywood's daughter-in-law to 2 Cowley Street in Westminster in 1788.

Since my Bibliography was printed in 2004 I have continued to search for references to this work in particular. Every time a new resource becomes available I use it to trawl for something I might have missed, but so far my finds have hardly been noteworthy.

On ECCO I found two bookseller's catalogues which contained copies of Leonora Meadowson. These are: Sael's Catalogue for 1792 (London: G. Sael, Bookseller, at the English Library, Newcastle Street, Strand, [1792]), 120 (no. 3284), "History of Miss Leonora Meadowson, 2 vols. h[alf]. b[ound]. new, 3s 6d" and Lackington, Allen, & Co.'s Catalogue, vol. 1 [Michaelmas 1798–99] (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., Booksellers, Temple of the Muses, Finsbury-Square, [1798]), 116 (no. 4512): "Leonora Meadowson, a Novel, 2 vols. new, half bound 3s 4d 1788".

On the Burney newspaper text-base I found only one new advertisement, in The World, 11 July 1788, issue 479, from five months after the release of the book (see below). And on Google Books I found another bookseller's catalogue and advertisement. The catalogue is A Catalogue of Books in John Harding's Circulating Library, in the Market-Place, Abingdon, Berkshire ([Abingdon: John Harding], 1804), 37 (no. 617–18): "Leonora Meadowson, 2 vols. 5s." (the price being the replacement cost, as set out in clause IV of the terms of subscription); the advertisement appears in The British Mercury; Or, Annals of History, Politics…, 4:10 (3 March 1788): 318 "New Books … Leonora Meadowson. A Novel, 2 vol. Pr. 5s."

The geographical spread of these last two finds is interesting, particularly The British Mercury, which was edited by Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz in Hamburg. The British Mercury contained a digest of political and literary news from England and information about works available in Hamburg.

* * * * *

My recent discovery of a copy of Leonora Meadowson in another circulating library is much more important than the above—because the circulating library in question was in New York and it is possible that the unique Fale's copy of Leonora Meadowson is the same copy as that recorded as being held in Louis Alexis Hocquet de Caritat's Circulating Library in an 1804 catalogue.

In 1940 George Gates Raddin, the owner of one of only two surviving copies of this 1804 catalogue, published an annotated Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat's Circulating Library. He then published a series of studies of Caritat in very limited editions. Two of these studies are: The New York of Hocquet Caritat and his Associates, 1797–1817 and Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene. I have the checklist in front of me, and have put in loan requests for the other two studies.

According to Raddin's An Early New York Library of Fiction: With a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat's Circulating Library, no. 1 City hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1940), 66, Haywood was reasonably well-represented in Caritat's Circulating Library. The following five works are listed:

[1] Ab.68.4 The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, New ed. (1769) [Raddin locates a copy at MBU, but it does not appear on their online catalogue.]

[2] Ab.35.2 The History of Miss Leonora Meadowson

[3] Ab.69.6 The Invisible Spy, New ed. (1773).

[4] Aa.3.3 Secret Histories, Novel and Poems, 4th ed. (1742)—although "Caritat lists a 1-vol. ed." suggesting the set was incomplete.

[5] Ab.70.1 The Wife (1756).

Raddin was unable to locate a copy of Leonora Meadowson, so he quotes the entry from the 1804 catalogue in full ("History of Miss LENORA MEADOWSON, a novel, 2 vols"). What is not clear is if Leonora Meadowson appeared in any of the earlier Caritat catalogues. Of these there were at least two in English, the three being:

[1799] The Feast of Reason and the Flow of the Soul. A New Explanatory Catalogue of H. Caritat's General & Increasing Circulating Library (New York: M. L. & W. A. Davis, 1799) [ESTC: W27154; two copies (MWA, NN)].

[1803] A Catalogue of the Library of H. Caritat's Literary Room, New-York (New York: Isaac Collins & Son, 1803).

[1804] Explanatory Catalogue of H. Caritat's Circulating Library; no.I. City Hotel, Broad-Way, New-York (New York: G. & R. Waite, 1804).

Unfortunately, the nearest copy of an original of any of these is 7800 miles according to WorldCat! All of these are available online in the Early American imprints database, but not to me, so I am going to have to ask a colleague to look at them for me to establish when Caritat might have acquired his copy of Leonora Meadowson.

As for when he disposed of it: in 1804 Caritat sold the library to Isaac Riley, who soon after went bankrupt. What happened after that isn't clear. Yet. I hope to find out more about the fate of Caritat's books from Raddin's two histories. But presumably the library was sold, piecemeal. And, having been sold, it looks like this copy of Leonora Meadowson stayed put in New York until about 1970 when it was (mis)catalogued at the Fales library.

Of course, the Fales copy may not be the Caritat copy—in fact, the lovely condition of the Fale's copy argues against it—but so few copies of Leonora Meadowson are recorded that it is even more improbable that two copies made it to New York in the 1790s.

T. L. on Memoirs of Utopia in 1757

2011-11-09T10:53:00.002+11:00

The following note and editorial addition, concerning Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, appears in The Critical Review; Or, Annals of Literature 4 (November 1757): 272.

To the Author of the Critical Review.

SIR,
  LAST winter a book called Modern Lovers was published, pr. 3 s. but in fact was only part of The Memoirs of Utopia. This month the same publisher has exhibited a book called Prostitutes of Quality, which is likewise extracted from Memoirs of Utopia, and yesterday a book was published, called Memoirs of B— Tracey, which in fact is only a part of an absence book, called A History of the Human Heart, which is not fit to be read by the public.

Nov. 26, 1757.
      Your obedient servant,
            T. L.

N. B. The authors of The Critical Review are obliged to T. L. for the above letter; and should be obliged to him for the same sort of information hereafter; for they would heartily join him in detecting such notorious and infamous impositions on the public.

* * * * *

The works mentioned are:

[1] Modern Lovers; Or, The Adventures of Cupid, the God of Love: A Novel (London: Printed for J. Cooke, at the King’s-Arms, in Great-Turnstile, Holbourn, 1756); ESTC: t66385.

[2] Prostitutes of Quality; Or, Adultery á-la-mode. Being Authentic and Genuine Memoirs of Several Persons of the Highest Quality (London: Printed for J. Cooke, and J. Coote, opposite Devereux-Court, in the Strand, 1757); ESTC: t46030.

[3] Memoirs of B— Tracey [aka The Notorious Libertine; Or, The Adventures of B----- Tracey] (London: Printed for J. King, in Great Turnstile, Holborn, [1757]); ESTC: t118902.

[4] A History of the Human Heart; Or, The Adventures of a Young Gentleman (London: Printed for J. Freeman, 1749); ESTC: n17696.

Neither Modern Lovers nor Prostitutes of Quality is, in fact, "only part of The Memoirs of Utopia"—as a search of the three texts makes clear—and the two later works are not related to each other either. And if Memoirs of B— Tracey is "in fact is only a part of" A History of the Human Heart, it is a very large part, the former being 214 pages compared to the latter's 314—but it looks like "T. L." missed the mark here too.

What is interesting, however, is to see someone identifying all of these works to each other and as "not fit to be read by the public"! That is, The Memoirs of Utopia = Authentic and Genuine Memoirs of Lovers, Prostitutes and Notorious Libertines = porn.

I really haven't a clue what "an absence book" is, unless this is Latinate pun with Ab- and Sense: Ab- being a prefix meaning "off, away, from" and, therefore, absence could be synonymous with something like "senseless." But this is a stretch. If there is an accepted meaning of this word/phrase, I am not familiar with, and neither are the editors of the OED.

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

2011-11-04T07:45:00.007+11:00

The title-page of Eliza Haywood's Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1725) claims that the work was "Translated from the French," though her "Introduction" says nothing of it being a translation. When I drafted my entry on this title I suggested that it was "more likely that Haywood wrote an original work that relied heavily on French materials." It looks like I was wrong about this.

Mary Helen McMurran has identified Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots as another translation of Pierre Le Pesant, Sieur de Boisguillebert, Marie Stuart, Reyne d’Escosse. Nouvelle Historique (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1675). I say another because James Freebairn’s translation of this work was proposed in June 1724 and issued "for the Author" in Edinburgh in 1725. That is, Haywood and Freebairn’s translations were competitors.

McMurran makes her case well and does an excellent job of comparing the two translations in The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 2010). Although I am disappointed that I "missed" this identification, I only missed it in the sense that I ought to have recognised the similarities of the Haywood and Freebairn’s translations, no scholar previous to 2004 having made the identification. That is, McMurran deserves full credit for making the attribution and will have it in the second edition of my Bibliography!

It is particularly pleasing to see work being done on Haywood's translations and the translation of works by Haywood into European languages. (I have mentioned before that Melbourne's Aleksondra Hultquist is doing important work on Haywood's La Belle Assemblee; see here.) No doubt, as this type of scholarship develops, more of Haywood's sources will be revealed but we will also get a much clearer idea of Haywood's creative input into her translations—as we do in McMurran's section on Haywood (82–90).

Cazotte's The Devil in Love

2011-10-31T05:37:00.043+11:00

Halloween seems like a good time to do a post on Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, Nouvelle Espagnole (Naples, 1772), which I am considering including in my Dark Hero unit next time it runs. There have been a few recent editions, one of which has just been reissued, so there should be no difficulty getting the text.

There were four separate translations of this work into English during the high Romantic period. These are:

[1] Alvarez, Or, Irresistible Seduction; A Spanish Tale (London: W. Richardson, 1791). ¶ “When I was five-and-twenty years old, I was a captain in the the King of Naples’ guards: we lived very sociably among ourselves …”

[2] The Devil in Love, Translated from the French (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793). ¶ “At five and twenty I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples, and lived in gay society …”

[3] The Enamoured Spirit (London: Lee and Hurst, Bell, Millar and J. Wright, 1798). ¶ “At the age of five-and-twenty I was Captain in the Guards of His Majesty the King of Naples, and kept constant company with my brother officers”

[4] Biondetta, or the Enamoured Spirit (London: J. Miller, 1810). ¶ “At the age of five and twenty I was a captain in the guards of the King of Naples.”

Most of these editions are quite rare. According to ESTC, there are only two copies of both no. 1 and 3, and four copies of no. 2. I found nine copies of no. 4 (including my own copy) on COPAC and WorldCat: at L, O; CaSRU; MH-H, CtY, DLC, PSt, ViU.

In addition to these four translations between 1791 and 1810, there have been three modern editions, two of which are new translations:

[5] The Devil in Love (London: Heinemann; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925). Limited edition (UK: 75 copies; US: 365 copies) ¶ Reprints translation no. 2.

[6] The Devil in Love, translated by Judith Landry (Dedalus, 1991; 2nd ed. 2011). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a captain of the king's Guards at Naples; we kept our own company much of the time …”

[7] The Devil in Love. Followed by Jacques Cazotte: His Life, Trial, Prophecies, and Revelations by Gerard de Nerval, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Marsilio, 1993). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples. We lived much of our time …”

Unlike the English, the French have been producing beautifully-illustrated editions of Le diable amoureux since the start (the first edition is illustrated). I will have to get myself a copy of the poetic adaptation by "Gerard de Nerval" [Gérard Labrunie]:

Le diable amoureux, roman fantastique par J. Cazotte, Précédé de sa vie, de son procès, et de ses prophéties et révélations par Gerard de Nerval. Illustré de 200 dessins par Edouard de Beaumont (Paris, Léon Canivet, 1845).

The Beaumont illustrations were reprinted in 1871 by H. Plon and copies of that reprint are fairly common. But there are some stunning private-press editions from the twentieth century that I would like to get too, with illustrations by Paul-Émile Bécat (1936), Maurice Leroy (1946), André Michel (1950), Michel Jamar (1960), Jean Traynier (1966) and—undoubtedly—others.

According to Joseph Andriano, the most reliable edition of the French text is in Romanciers du XVIIIe siecle, edited by Etiemble et Marguerite du Cheyron, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1965), 303–78. However, there are two other modern editions of the French text: those edited by Max Milner (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979) and Georges Décote (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).

* * * * *

As for why I would consider this novel for the Dark Hero unit … well, I was persuaded to do so by the chapter in Andriano's Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (1993), 10, which mounts a strong argument for The Devil in Love as the first conte fantastique: the first fantasy.

Nothing quite like Cazotte's work had appeared before, even though its temptation plot, with its prototype in the life of St. Anthony, was familiar to all Catholics. The text seems a curious hybrid of several popular genres of the time—contes licencieux, contes morales, contes defees—but it has long had the reputation of being the first of a new genre—le conte fantastique, not only in Todorov's narrow sense of reader hesitation but in a broader one: Cazotte simply added the mimetic techniques of realism, already apparent in some fabliaux and contes, to the marvelous. The result was an exquisitely ambiguous work in which a fairly ordinary young man is confronted with both the supernatural and the perfectly natural "realistic" problem of choosing a mate. Le Diable amoureux may also be considered Gothic in that term's broadest sense. It has the trappings—ruins, diabolism, sexual pursuit—and it gives a little frisson.
With elements of all these genres Le Diable amoureux had something to please almost everyone: humor, light titillation, periodic chills, and moral messages. Only a thoroughly ambiguous work could provide such conflicting needs.

Publicity for BSRE, Paul and I (at Monash)

2011-10-30T06:57:00.010+11:00

There was some welcome publicity at Monash for Paul Watt and I following the publication of our Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period. There were two articles, issued a few weeks apart, under the same name (but slightly different in content) issued in Monash's Latest News and Monash Memo.

The two stories are Frisky songsters uncovered (21 September 2011) and Frisky songsters uncovered (5 October 2011). The Memo article was ccompanied by a bio piece under the title Getting to know ... Patrick Spedding. There was a similar profile of Paul done last year under the title 60 seconds with … Dr Paul Watt (14 April 2010).

Hunting around for the above links, I found the URL for an article about my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood which appeared five year's ago in Monash Memo: Haywood bibliography wins modern language award (29 November 2006). This page would appear every time I used Google to check something on my Monash profile page, but it disappeared a few years ago and I assumed the page had been taken down.

Editing, A Quixotic Academic Activity

2011-10-29T05:25:00.039+11:00

I have been asked to expand on my comment (here) that "the actual editing of primary texts does not count as academic activity in any way in the eyes of government bean-counters." I am happy to oblige (but NB my caveat at the foot of this post). I mentioned this in my blog entry on Haywood's The City Widow as one of the reasons not to publish The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood with an academic or commercial publisher.

The monitoring of academic activity has become ubiquitous in universities worldwide. In Australia the branch of the federal government that manages the higher education sector is the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR). Every year DIISR demands an account of research activity via the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC). (DIISR also monitors student numbers, undergraduate and postgraduate teaching etc.)

I did the HERDC for a couple of years when I was a postgraduate, and I have been filling in forms for the HERDC for as long as I have been publishing—though the acronym keeps changing. I preferred DEST—The Department of Education, Science and Training—which was easier to pronounce and actually contained the word "Education," implying the government is not ashamed of everything it does outside of the sciences in schools, colleges and universities.

Anyway, the current DIISR HERDC categories define what can and cannot be claimed as academic activity. The four "DEST-able" categories are defined as

A1 Books - Authored Research (Commercial Publisher)
B1 Book Chapters - Commercial Publisher
C1 Journal Article - Refereed Scholarly Journal
E1 Conference Publication - Full Paper Refereed

There are also many non-DEST-able categories (now non-DIISR-able categories. DIISR-able sounds like "miserable" I guess). These include

A2 Books - Authored Other (Non-Commercial Publisher)
A3 Book Editorship & Edited Compilation (claimed by editor/s)
A4 Book Revision or New Edition

with a similar alphanumeric series for Major Reviews (D), Audio Visual Recording (F), Computer Software (G), Refereed Design (H), Patents (I), Original Creative Work (J), Research Reports (K), Theses (L), Performances (M), Expert Commentary (N) and "Other Publication Categories" (O).

So, "editing of primary texts does not count as" an A1 (Authored Research, Commercial Publisher), which is set aside for monographs like my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. (Though, an A1 excludes many types of reference works, such as enumerative bibliographies, dictionaries and encyclopedias; which is why colleagues in other schools disputed whether my 840-page Bibliography actually counted as "research activity." It was only when I challenged them to read the 65,744 words in my 2,093 footnotes to judge for themselves whether the text was actually "research" that they "let it pass"!)

If I had published my Bibliography with Lulu, it would have been an A2 (Non-Commercial Publisher). Interestingly (where "interestingly" means "disgustingly"), my esteemed colleague Brian McMullin, who has published many important works in the prestigious Harvard Library Bulletin, had an A1 application for his Title-Labels in British Books dismissed, though it was issued with an ISBN as well as an ISSN, on the basis that Harvard Library was not a commercial publisher. And this because the did not have an internet page that solicited manuscripts of all sorts for publication—unlike Harvard University Press.

If I were to published the second edition of my Bibliography with Pickering & Chatto, it would be an A4 (Book Revision or New Edition). Of course I won't do that—and I will dance naked down the street when the copyright returns to me in 2014—but if I were to do it, it would be an A4. I will get to A3s in a minute.

But, to be clear, only an A1 would be counted for the current DIISR HERDC and, until recently, this meant that only an A1 would shake the money tree. (The exact funding mechanism is way too complicated to explain here.) In recent times, however, we have had RQF (Research Quality Framework) and ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia). Both the RQF, which was modelled on the British RAE, and ERA (Son of RQF), are metrics-based assessments that take in broader research activity.

I have vented before on the rank stupidity, the cretinous imbecility, of crudely applying a misconceived journal ranking and bibliometric/citation-count model on research activity in the humanities, so I won't do it again here (ERA: Damned Lies and Bibliometrics; Evidence of Impact, A Decade Later; Script & Print Indexed by Scopus). But it is with enormous pleasure that I can say that a courageous colleague of mine in English (she is in the next office to me), helped topple the idol by investigating the ranking of a few journals with a well-applied Freedom of Information application. Well done Anna! (see Kim Carr bows to rank rebellion over journal rankings).

Despite complains and the occasional victory, the monitoring of academic activity will continue. And, in fact, a wider view of what constitutes academic activity is a good thing. Far better to have A1–4 than just A1. Which brings me to A3 and the editing of primary texts. The four "DEST-able" categories bring money, but the cumulative impact of all the non-DEST-able categories, is to bring money too, just not as directly or clearly. The amount each of the big four publication categories bring is fairly well known, in round terms; but if our ERA/RQf profile diminishes, so does our funding. So, universities are now keen to record everything.

What this means for an individual like me is that, after years of having my editorial activity completely and utterly ignored and invisible, the university and the Federal Government might now be modestly, grudgingly, interest, or prepared to record my academic activity in the not-very-great hope that it might make a modest impact (somewhat like a drop of pigeon shit adds to the height of Nelson's Column).

And by editorial activity I am talking about all the things that are required for one to publish a five-volume collection of facsimile texts with annotations and introductions by leading scholars in the field (Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part I and Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part II) or a five-volume collection of transcribed and edited texts with annotations and introductions by leading scholars in the field (Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period).

That is, seeing the need, and examining the competition, for a work; selecting the contents and drafting a formal proposal; negotiating with the press to take on the project and persuading a group of busy scholars to spend the time reading and annotating a series of texts and to write an introduction, and navigating all the legal, technical and intellectual challenges involved in seeing such a project to publication: from advising editors on stylistic matters through to vetting advertising copy.

When ECBE I (2002) and ECBE II (2004) were published, I was told that edited collections of texts "do not count" (as academic activity). At all. There is no form for them and no place for the data in any database. By way of consolation, I was informed that there were many things that academics did that did not count, and that the DEST collection (as it was then) selective, the assumption being that, if a section/school/faculty/university was strong in its A1s, B1s, C1s and E1s, then they would also be doing all these other things too, and would be remunerated as they ought to be, though they were selective in the information they collected and the types of activity they were interested in. I did not find this terribly persuasive then and it has been increasingly obvious since that this is hogwash.

The universities put pressure on staff to perform academic activity that "counts"—that is visible to DIISR. As the same consoling staff member explained some years later in the lead up to the imposition of RQF, universities had become so fixated on what "counts" under the DEST system that the system had to be changed. He predicted that the same thing would occur with the RQF and that, in time, it would also have to be changed for the same reason: that like mice in an cage, the universities will keep pressing the money pedal until they starve. (Some would argue that they do this because they are starving already.)

When Senator Carr ditched the journal ranking element of ERA he did so because journal ranking "was focusing ill-informed, undesirable behaviour in the management of research." Quite right. The announcement was unexpected and exquisitely timed. I'll refrain from quoting the internal Monash email in question, but not one week earlier all staff received a missive advising them not to publish in C-ranked journals (despite many outstanding academic journals being—inexplicably, contentiously—ranked C). As Anna explained

Journal rankings were being instrumentalised, being taken into our performance management assessments, and you have to cite your journal rankings in grant applications to the ARC. If you have three articles in C-ranked journals it is automatically considered not to be research of the same quality as if they were in A-ranked journals and that has career implications.

It is still the case that all academic staff are required to have accrued a certain number of DEST/DIISR points per calendar year (a C1 is worth 1 point, an A1 is 5 points) and the number of DEST/DIISR points a staff member has is entered into their workload equation to determine how much teaching they must do.**

So, if a staff member was foolish enough to spent two years hammering away in their role as general editor of a five volume collection of edited texts—a collection that might be instrumental in opening up an entire field of research, which may redefine a discipline—they would be in danger of being disciplined in their performance management for failure to perform and drowning in teaching, because such a labour would not reduce their workload by the smallest measurable fractional of an EFSTU (equivalent full time student units) or EFTSL (equivalent full-time student load).

So, beside the indignity of having a core activity in literary studies disregarded in the definition of academic activity, these two instruments (performance management and workload) guarantee that staff are aware that the "editing of primary texts" is basically a hobby, like maintaining a blog. Or knitting.

With the advent of ERA (Son of RQF) universities now do give a pinch of goat-shit about this hobby and I have been torturing the professional staff with this puzzler: how do we classify my hobby, sorry, my publications? Which brings us back to A3, which may comprise any of the following:

• edited books, including revised or new editions of edited books which are substantially different from the preceding book, and editorship of major reference works; these may be edited books, monographs or short series of volumes consisting of contributions from a number of authors

• editorship of a scholarly or professional journal controlled by an editorial board with its contributions subject to peer review.

• edited volumes of conference proceedings in which one or more staff members are identified as having editorial responsibility for the proceedings.

It appears that this will work, though some of the DEST-trained old guard are (naturally) unsure, and want to see footnotes and bibliographies—physical manifestations of intellectual labour.

(On a happy side-note, this A3 definition also seems to cover my three years as editor of an academic journal: Script and Print.)

The eligibility criteria for an A3 also explains that

• edited books may be either from commercial or non commercial publishers

And so, if I were to edit The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood, despite the fact that such a quixotic undertaking would have a negative impact on my performance management and my workload, there is no incentive to seek a commercial or an academic/commercial publisher.

* * * * *

**Regarding workload equations: administrators pretend that staff spend 40% of their time on teaching, 40% on research and 20% on admin. Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that this is a fantasy with school-wide average of a 140% workload: "research" includes honours, masters and doctoral supervision. In fact, it is largely made up of this alone. Obviously, patently, self-evidently, honours, masters and doctoral supervision is not research. At all. It is teaching, teaching about research, facilitating the publication of research by someone else, but it isn't research.

The maximum number of points that can be counted as research based on publications (i.e., actual research, not teaching, but measured with only DEST-able publications) is five of forty points (for me, the numbers are higher for Professors etc). What this really means is five of fifty-six points or 11.2% when the school-wide workload average of 140% is taken into account. And note, that to get these five points one would have to publish a book (an A1) every year.

Also note, that the difference between doing the academic equivalent of treading water or undertaking a full triathlon—pounding out a book every year—is four points, and the average workload overload is the equivalent of sixteen points (four times this difference). So you can see what I mean when I say pretend: the four points are so utterly insignificant in this scheme as to be beneath comment. So, under the present workload model there is no incentive to undertake genuine research and, in as much as there is any incentive at all, it is only to do DEST-able research.

(Of course, in this post I am only talking about workload and publications-counting: bean-counting. If anyone were to actually push out a monograph a year they would be carried around the campus on the shoulders of an admiring crowd. And my colleagues have greeted the various collections I have edited with the recognition they deserved. Likewise, my various publications have been recognised in my appointment as co-director of the Centre for the Book and, indeed, were acknowledged in my ARC success and my Monash appointment. But when deciding what to do as an academic and considering the lack of incentive to seek out a commercial publisher for The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood …)

ECCO-TCP and the Future of Junk OCR

2011-10-28T07:09:00.008+11:00

More than two years ago I predicted (here) that the clean texts generated by ECCO-TCP (Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership) would eclipse the sort of junk OCR texts generated by the mass low-resolution scanning of books (Google Books) and high-resolution scanning of microfilms (ECCO, EEBO, Burney etc). Sadly, it looks like I was wrong!

Mandell is undoubtedly right: proprietary but junk OCR of the variety that has been thus far generated by mass microfilm scanning projects is doomed. Only clean, open-access texts will be used, copied, swapped and survive the myriad hardware and software changes of the coming decades; changes that will inevitable consign ECCO to an even dingier corner of the library than that presently inhabited by microcard readers.

Last month, Rebecca Welzenbach (the TCP Outreach Librarian) gave a conference paper under the title "Making the most of free, unrestricted texts–a first look at the promise of the Text Creation Partnership" (available in pdf here). Welzenbach explains that "ECCO-TCP simply never took off in the same way that EEBO‐TCP did. We could not garner enough support from partner libraries to keep it going, and so in 2009, we had to call it to a halt."

The funding model for ECCO-TCP (like EEBO-TCP) was for [1] database owners to grant use of page images; which were [2] "manually keyboarded" and encoded. This work was paid for by partner-libraries who [3] gained immediate access to the text, but could not distribute the same for five years so that the publishers could [4] sell access to non-partner libraries during that time.

According to Welzenbach only "a small number" of partner-libraries signed up, Gale wasn't able to sell the texts, and so almost nobody had access to them. By mid-2010 the ECCO-TCP was wound up and over two thousand texts were released to the hoi polloi.

There are various ways of gaining access to these files (listed here). I tried and gave up on a few sites (including 18thConnect, the first site mentioned by Welzenbach), but I can strongly recommend The ARTFL Project website hosted by the University of Chicago (here).

If you search the ECCO-TCP text files for "Eliza Haywood" for example you get a list of 41 results, giving a snippet of text with a series of links offering you links to the page, paragraph, SubSect[ion] and Section; this is followed by a "Results Bibliography" that links to each text. Follow the link to an item in the bibliography and you get an index page for that text allowing you to browse the text.

The quality of the transcripts is quite high (some punctuation marks are missed and lines, and occasionally words, are broken that ought to run on), so it is very disappointing that there are no Haywood texts.

Returning to my rash prediction: was I right to predict that high-quality texts like these will triumph over the junk OCR offered by Google Books (for free) and ECCO (for a fee)? I am still inclined to think so, though this particular funding model failed.

ECCO is a lot larger than EEBO and there is (frankly) a lot more chaff in it, or the chaff is less interesting than that from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also, although the texts selected seem to be representative, they are also, for the most part, a rather predictable and less interesting lot of texts than they could have been.** So, it is possible that ECCO-TCP failed to find a market (and partners) simply because the text selection was dull and uninspiring.

**Not only are there no Haywood texts, there appears to be little early prose fiction, and few or no "secret histories," novels, or romances. The fact that 12 of the 41 results in my Haywood search are from Richard Savage and Alexander Pope alone is consistent with a similar search of eighteenth-century texts on Google Books.

Also, although EEBO-TCP has been successful, I personally think the publication model is faulty: getting big bucks from big institutions is always going to be difficult, particularly at present. And the bigger the contribution demanded, the more elitist the project becomes, the more sparsely populated the ECCO-TCP user-space is bound to be.

Personally, I prefer a wiki-style publishing model and I'd think it would be more successful with a project like this. That is, ECCO needs to create an interface that allows all subscribers/registered users to edit and correct the raw OCR, transcribed and beta texts. The amount of editorial work that people are prepared to do for free is astonishing, and a project of the size of the ECCO-TCP needs to harness the skills of tens of thousands of users to ever be completed.

Obviously, ECCO would benefit from having corrected texts to search and if the texts (and the opportunity to correct them) were only accessible to ECCO users it could not diminish their subscriber base. In fact, the more the access fees were reduced, and the subscriber base increased, the faster the editing of texts would proceed, to the benefit of everyone involved.

Of course, a similar course of action is open to Google Books, who would benefit from advertising revenue, though Google would need a lot more policing of edits (like there is on Wikipedia) given the difficulty of limiting access to users with the necessary level of education/literacy and/or to prevent malicious edits, spamming, flaming etc.

Eliza Haywood's Reputation before the 20C

2011-10-27T08:21:00.018+11:00

When I was preparing my lecture on Eliza Haywood for Anna Poletti's unit on Writing women, I decided to use Google Books to survey Haywood's reputation and representation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What I found was pretty much what I expected to find, but it is interesting.

Results of a search for “Eliza Haywood” in works 1700–1800 (excluding works by Haywood): 40 hits

Main references (30 = 75%)
In works by Alexander Pope: 19 refs = 47.5% (very prominent: 11 of the first 13 hits)
In works by Richard Savage: 7 refs = 17.5% (quite prominent: 7 of the central hits)
Reviews in The Monthly Review: 3 refs = 7.5% (prominent: 3 of the first 14 hits)
Fielding's Memoirs of Grub Street: 1 refs = 2.5%

Passing/incidental references (10 = 25%)
Walpole’s work on engravers: 2 refs = 5%
In the BM Cat. of MS: 2 refs = 5%
In bookseller’s catalogues: 6 refs = 15% (not very prominent, among the last hits)

Basically, Pope and Savage's bile (In The Dunciad, An Author to be Lett and The Authors of the Town) constitutes most of Haywood's reputation and representation in the 18th century. (If we add eighteenth century work first published in the nineteenth century, we can add Swift to this herd of swine [i.e., sexist pigs].)

Of course, if you look harder (under "Mrs Haywood" for example) you can find discenting voices or, at least, other voices. For example …

[1758]. Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta, 2 vols. (London, 1758): 36:

"Well," said Mrs. Eccles, "how do you like my books? are they not prettily chosen?"
  "I assure you," replied she, taking down one, "you chose very well when you chose this; for it is one of the most exquisite pieces of humour in our language."
  "I knew you would approve of my taste," said Mrs. Eccles, "but what have you got?—O! the Adventures of Joseph Andrews—Yes; that is a very pretty book, to be sure!—but there is Mrs. Haywood's Novels, did you ever read them?—Oh! they are the finest love-sick, passionate stories; I assure you, you'll like them vastly: pray, take a volume of Haywood upon my recommendation."
  "Excuse me," said Henrietta, "I am very well satisfied with what I have; I have read this book three times already, and yet I assure you, I shall begin it again with as much eagerness and delight as I did at first.

* * * * *

In the nineteenth century, the criticism is only slightly more varied, and that largely due to the increasing number of female writers and critics whose opinions were published. The eight quotes below are representative, rather than exhaustive.

[1810]. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” (1810):

Mrs. Haywood was a very prolific genius: her earlier novels are in the style of Mrs. Behn's, and Pope has chastised her in his Dunciad without mercy or delicacy; but her later works are by no means void of merit. She wrote The Invisible Spy and Betsy Thoughtless, and was the author of the Female Spectator. But till the middle of the last century, theatrical productions and poetry made a far greater part of polite reading than novels, which had attained neither to elegance nor discrimination of character.

[1811]. Memoirs of the life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, edited by Robert James Mackintosh (1835), 2.105 (22 June 1811):

Female genius always revives Mrs. Barbauld's generous mind. Her remarks on Mrs. Inchbald are excellent; what she says of Madame D'Arblay is excellent; and one sentence, contrasting the rapture of a first success with the languor and disappointment of more advanced years, is beautiful and affecting. Her own remarks are plain, short, and sensible, but have the painful appearance of flowing from a dispirited mind, and present a melancholy contrast with the works of her youth and enthusiasm. She informs me that Mrs. Haywood was the authoress of 'Betsy Thoughtless,' one of the favourites of my youth. She displeases me, by classing the 'Man of Feeling' with a book by Pratt, an imitator of Sterne ….

[1815]. Sir Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, 2nd ed. (1815), 10.312 fn:

British Critic, Vol. XII. p. 5:8.—Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, Written by Mrs. Eliza Haywood, 1732, in 4 vols. and third edition. Unless there was some omission, or a subsequent reprint with addition, it seems doubtful which story of this disgraceful detailer of lascivious passion, rapes, adultery, and murder, is referred to.

[1819]. Catherine Hutton, Oakwood Hall (1819), 93–94:

"How came this to find a place in your collection?"
"Indiana Danby! my dear," said Mrs. Oakwood, "is a novel of the middle ages. The shining light of the ancients, such as Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and perhaps Mrs. Haywood, was set; and that of the moderns, such as Dr. Moore, Holcroft, Godwin, Miss Burney, and Miss Edgeworth, not yet risen."

[1844]. Charles Whitehead, Richard Savage: A Romance of Real Life (1844), ch. 15 fn.

Eliza Haywood, although now nearly forgotten, attained during her life-time to an enviable celebrity. Pope, in his Dunciad, has heaped terrible infamy upon her head. Her plays I have not seen; but I have looked into her novels of which "The History of Betsy Thoughtless " and "Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy " are the most considerable. They possess no common degree of merit, but are altogether unfit for modern perusal.

[1848]. Thomas Wright, England Under the House of Hanover: Its History and Condition During the Reigns of the Three Georges (1848), 1.91.

It is clear, indeed, that the national taste had become as vulgar as the national manners, and as corrupt as the principles of a large majority of the public men of that period. The works which received the greatest encouragement were scandalous memoirs, secret history surreptitiously obtained and sent forth under fictitious names, (such as the books which came the pens of Eliza Haywood, Mrs. Manley, and other equally shameless female writers, and from the press of Edmund Curll,) and ill-disguised obscenity.

[1857]. Lord Dover and Peter Cunnigham, note, in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, edited by Peter Cunnigham (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 1.251 fn:

Eliza Haywood, a voluminous writer of indifferent novels; of which the best known is one called "Betsy Thoughtless." She was also authoress of a work entitled "The Female Spectator." Mrs. Heywood was born in 1693, and died in 1756.— Dover. She figures indecently enough in the "Dunciad," B. ii.—Cunnigham.

[1864]. Dr. John Doran, “Their Majesties' Servants”: Annals of the English Stage (1864), 1.344:

The "Fair Captive" was an adaptation by Mrs. Haywood, a lady who began by writing as loosely as Aphra Behn, concluded by writing as decorously as Mrs. Chapone, and left charge to her executors, in 1756, to give no aid to any biography of her that might be attempted, on the ground that the least said was the soonest mended.

So, Haywood was a "disgraceful," "shameless," "vulgar" and "voluminous writer of indifferent novels" which detail "lascivious passion, rapes, adultery, and murder" and are, as a consequence, "altogether unfit for modern perusal" and "now nearly forgotten." Haywood herself "figures indecently" in the Dunciad—a phrase that elides Haywood's representation and her own putative indecency—and that "the least said" about her, the better.

Alternatively, we have "a very prolific genius" who "attained during her life-time to an enviable celebrity," and whose "works are by no means void of merit." Indeed, she is, "perhaps," one of the "shining light[s] of" eighteenth-century literature. Her "Betsy Thoughtless " and "Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy" are the most considerable" of her novels and the first of these was "one of the favourites of [the] youth" of Sir James Mackintosh.

Although it is possible to create the second, positive, picture from the same evidence, it is clear from the full quotes above that such a positive portrait is not representative. It is necessary to largely ignore the qualifications offered, and much of the faint praise is offered in double-negative ("by no means void of merit") whereas the criticism is often unqualified and is stated positively.

The City Widow: Or, Love in a Butt

2011-10-25T11:23:00.032+11:00

Although the dedication of Ab.44 The City Widow is signed ‘Eliz. Haywood’ it was not identified as being by Haywood in any work of reference until 1972, and it wasn't included in any list of Haywood's works until 1991. It is yet to attract any interest and it remains, basically, invisible (a search on the MLA International Bibliography found no articles that refer to it!).

The invisibility of The City Widow is partly because it is an extremely rare work: there are no copies in the UK, and it was only when the National Union Catalog reached ‘Haywood’ in 1972 that scholars could easily locate the two copies held in the US, at the Clark and Newberry libraries. (To these two can now be added a third, my own [above].)

However, the Clark copy of the first issue has been available on microfilm since the mid-80s and a scan of this microfilm has been available online to much of the academic community for at least five years. So, what gives?

It seems likely that, until The City Widow is widely available in edited form, it will remain invisible for some time. And the chance of it being edited for a commercial publisher at present seems slim. Certainly, it is highly unlikely (i.e., there is no chance) that Pickering and Chatto will extend their collection of Selected Works of Eliza Haywood and I do not know of any other press which is likely to take on such a large editorial project.

(That said, two of Haywood's shorter works will appear in the Chawton House Library series and it is possible that other works, not previously edited, will appear like this over time. However, given that this is the first editorial undertaking in a decade, it will be a very long time—if ever—that Haywood's complete corpus will appear in this haphazard way.)

Since it became clear (by about 2004) that Pickering and Chatto were not interested in extending their Selected Works I have given quite a bit of thought, off and on, to the idea of editing the Complete Works of Eliza Haywood myself, or trying to coordinate the editing of Haywood's complete works.

Clearly, a large project such as this would take many years to complete, even if a number of scholars collaborated on it. Then again, many of the volumes would also be very short and many of the shortest volumes would be the most interesting (at least, from my point of view). Depending on how the project were set up, and how widely the volumes were sold, I'd expect such a project would have quite an rapid impact at graduate level, helping to encourage the study of many of the works by Haywood that remain invisible.

Pickering and Chatto only abandoned the Selected Works of Eliza Haywood for commercial reasons: if they thought they could spin money out of such a project, they would be onto it at once, so it seems unlikely that any other commercial publisher would be any more interested, which leaves only three avenues: a subsidised project, issued by a commercial publisher (I am not sure who—which funding body—would have the funds to subsidise such a large undertaking), a non-commercial academic press (I am not sure any of these survive) or a non-commercial, non-academic press like Lulu.

At present, I prefer Lulu. And, if this were a collaborative undertaking, pursued by Haywood scholars with the intention of making reliable and approachable texts available to students, the fact that Lulu allows the printing of cheap paperbacks (for students) and sturdy hardbacks (for libraries) would have to count in its favour.

And given, as I have discovered recently, that the actual editing of primary texts does not count as academic activity in any way in the eyes of government bean-counters, there is no incentive to seek a commercial publisher, who would only water-down academic standards in editing, restrict circulation for commercial reasons, and be empowered to almost indefinitely limit future access by their control of the copyright.

As for where to start with The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood: to a certain extent the exact title would not matter with a project like this, but the early emphasis would have to be on texts like The City Widow which have, so far, escaped attention merely because they are rare. There are quite a few works by Haywood that are either not available in any form or which are just as rare (such as Ab.24 The Fatal Fondness and Ab.40 The Perplex'd Dutchess). After this would be all other works that are not yet edited and bringing up the rear, works that are available in edited form like Fantomina.

* * * * *

Since I have been thinking of editing The Complete Works of Eliza Haywood for at least a decade, I have long been been collecting and transcribing texts. And now that I have a copy of The City Widow I am in a position to edit it—one of the most pressing cases—as I would like to see all the Haywood texts edited, against a copy of the original. Below is a sample of the text. Any volunteers to edit it?

The Dedication:

To Mrs. Burscoe, Relict of Mr. John Burscoe, Vintner.

Madam,

As diamonds are illustrated by their foils, so virtue appears most bright when compar’d with vice. Your perfections are, indeed, brightly conspicuous of themselves, but when we see an opposite character, in a person of much the same circumstances, they are shown in more true, as |4| well as in more amiable colours. It is in justice therefore to your merit, I lay this little History at your feet, it being impossible to consider the faults of my Widow, without applauding the excellent conduct You have maintain’d, since the death of your justly lamented Spouse. The visible contrast between you, renders this Piece an offering fit for You, and for you alone, and will, I hope, engage a favourable acceptance from her who is,

  With all due Admiration,
    Madam,
      Your humble, and most obedient Servant,
        Eliz. Haywood.

The City Widow: Or, Love in a Butt

Bacchus and Cupid have always been the most intimate of all the Gods, and never fail to assist each other’s Designs. Hymen has a thousand times endeavour’d to breed a difference between then; but they not only rejected his insinuations, but likewise, at last, drove him intirely out of their Society. As soon as he approaches, the amorous and jovial Deities quit their place, and leave him to the reproachful complaints |6| of his unhappy devotees. Bacchalia, who, for many a long year, had languish’d beneath his chains, being happily deliver’d of the burthen, those friendly powers resolv’d to take into their mutual protection; and accordingly inspir’d her with the nicest relish of those pleasures, Love and Wine afford. She now indulg’d herself in rich Tokay, Frontignac and Hermitage, whose generous influence, renewing that vigour the approaches of age had somewhat impair’d, the bounteous God, of tender languishments, presented her with a swain, who wanted no requisite to gratify her amorous fires. He was tall, his limbs admirably proportion’d, his complexion sanguine, had very regular features, and eyes, that bespoke his inclinations of the warmest nature. She no sooner saw him, than she became passionately charm’d with him; but now alas! the malice of Hymen began to show itself, and he was resolv’d to be reveng’d on his Antagonist Deities, in the person of their favourite Bacchalia. He inspir’d the breast of Sylvander, for so the lovely youth was call’d, with desires vastly different from those she was possess’d of. He burn’d, indeed, he rag’d, he long’d for the enjoyment of Bacchalia, but all his wishes tended |7| to marriage, nor had a thought of obtaining her, but by being her husband. He made his addresses, therefore, in the most distant and honourable fashion; testifying by all his words and actions, that his passion was accompany’d with the extreamest respect and veneration; but these note being the qualities she desir’d in him, she set her whole wit at work to embolden him to a more familiar behaviour.

James Parmentier Portrait of Eliza Haywood

2011-10-05T16:12:00.048+11:00

The James Parmentier portrait of Eliza Haywood—engraved by George Vertue—was first published 12 August 1723 as a frontispiece to the "Fifth" edition of Ab.1.5a Love in Excess. The advertisement begins: "This Day is publish’d, (With the Author’s Effigies curiously engraven by Mr. Vertue) …" The Parmentier portrait was next issued—with the same description—as a frontispiece to the Aa.3.0 Secret Histories, Novels and Poems on 23 December 1724, and was reissued in the "Second," "Third" and "Fourth" edition of this collection in 1725, 1732 and 1742.

There were two issues of the first of these five editions, but no copy of the first is known. Of the second (in Aa.2.1 The Works) only one of the thirteen copies listed on ESTC definitely has the portrait (CSmH [357090]), but I am yet to confirm whether or not the National Trust copy recently added to ESTC (ex libris Margaret Luttrell [Dunster Castle]) has the portrait. No copy of the second edition of this portrait is known (from the first edition of SHNP), because no copy of this set has been recorded, but there are thirty-five copies known of the remaining editions. These are listed at the end of this post.

* * * * *

The James Parmentier portrait of Eliza Haywood is described by Alexander Pope thus:

  Fair as before her works she stands confess'd,
  In flow'r'd brocade by bounteous Kirkall dress’d.
  Pearls on her neck, and roses in her hair,
  And her fore-buttocks to the navel bare.

152. Kirkall, the Name of a Graver. This Lady’s Works were printed in four Volumes duod. with her picture thus dressed up, before them.

The features mentioned (a low-cut brocade dress and a rose in her hair) make it clear that Pope had seen the Vertue engraving, or the Parmentier painting on which it is based, before he penned these lines. And, though he mistakes the name of the engraver, it is possible that he records details of the Parmentier portrait (the pearl necklace) which were not included in the Vertue engraving. Of course, Pope may have been just "accessorising his verbal picture with a blazon-tradition cliché befitting his satirical mode," as Janine Barchas claims here.)

Barchas continues:

The beauty spot under Haywood’s right eye; the flower tucked behind her ear; the brazen, direct gaze; the dramatically plunging neckline; the ruffled informality of what appears to be a dressing gown; and the unfastened locks of hair arranged suggestively over both shoulders—all these visual clues make abundantly clear to an Augustan audience that the nature of the accompanying writing is amatory in nature. Like the epistolary conceit of the later novel, the engraving's cameo conceit (the likeness is framed as a private miniature on ivory and pinned to a background with a ribbon) licenses and enhances the intimate nature of the portrait. The result works as clever advertisement. In coarse language, it is a pin-up of the "Great Arbitress of Passion," promising another sensational bodice-ripper to the potential customer.

As this interpretation suggests, and Pope’s description of the plate in The Dunciad (1729) makes clear, Vertue’s image of Haywood is indebted more to the déshabillé portraits of the lovers of swaggering Restoration rakes than to the frontispiece portraits of estimable writers such as Homer, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Vertue’s Haywood is more Nell Gwyn than Katherine Philips.

* * * * *

A question that I raised in my Bibliography, which is increasingly interesting me, is when and where was the portrait issued, how many times the plate was recut (how many versions of the portrait are there), and where are the surviving copies of this portrait. When I sat down to write my "Appendix L: Portraits of Eliza Haywood" I only had access to two, very poor, copies of the portrait, which were on microfilm (the 1725 and 1742 portraits, below).

Nothing much has improved in ten years. There were no clear copies of Haywood's portrait readily available online until I posted them on this blog this week. Ironically, I obtained the high resolution images I have posted above from online sources, but the images were in inaccessible places, and invisible to search engines. Hopefully, they will now be readily discovered and widely used.

* * * * *

In addition to copies of the portrait that survive in the five editions listed above and below, there are likely to be a number of copies which have been separated from one of these editions. One such is at the National Portrait Gallery in London (here).

The NPG copy survives in a Grangerised set of the eight volumes of The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis, 2 vols. (1889) and The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay 1778–1840, 6 vols (1904). These two works have been expanded with "approximately 2,700 engraved portraits and topographical views, plus other reproductions, drawings and some manuscript material" (inflating them to an amazing "25 folio volumes"!). The Haywood portrait—a copy of which I have ordered—is in vol. 1, pt. 1.

It is quite likely there are more to be located in Grangerised sets like these. If for no other reason, Mark Noble and James Granger encouraged it by including an entry for Haywood in their A Biographical History of England, from the Revolution to the End of George I's Reign (1806), 3.311 (Class 9 [Class 8 below is a typo]: "Men of Genius and Learning" here).

* * * * *

Nine copies of the third edition (in the 2nd ed. of SHNP): L [12612.ee.8]; O [Harding M 238; Vet. A4 f.159]; CtY-S [Ik.H336.C725b], DLC [PR3506.H94.A68 1725], IU [v.1–2 only], NNHuC, NNU-F [Brit.], PU [Singer-Mend.823.H339].

Eleven copies of the fourth edition (in the 3rd ed. of SHNP): L [12612.ee.11], Olmh [823.59 65]; CaOHM [B14525–28], FU [823.5.H427s 1732], ICN [Case Y 1565.H32], IaU [PR3506 .H94 1732], IU [Nickell x823 H33S1732], MNS [825 H329s 1732], MnU [Wilson 824H33 I], NhD [825 H33 M], NIC [Rare Books PR3506.H94 A72 1732].

Fifteen copies of the fifth edition (in the 4th ed. of SHNP): L [12614.c.13], BRG [BC823.69], REu [Reserve 823.59 HaY], LEu; CaBVaS [PR 3506 H94 A1 1742 v.1–4], CLU-C [*PR3506.H94A1 1742], CtY-S [Ik H336 C725d], DLC [RB 35], ICU [PR3506. H91 1724], IU [x823 H33S], MdBJ-P [823 H427S c. 1, -v.2], MH [15493.16.29.5], MiU, MnU [824.H33 I]; EuGG [8 FAB IX, 1080].

From this it appears that there are only two libraries in the world where it is possible to compare three editions of this portrait (L and IU) and three where it is possible to compare two editions (CtY-S, DLC and O). There are twenty-one copies in the US, nine in the UK, two in Canada and one in Europe. And none in Australia. Yet.

Eliza Haywood's Fantomina (1725)

2011-10-04T14:43:00.066+11:00

[the 1st edition (1725)]

Fantomina is one of Haywood's most interesting works and, as Aleksondra Hultquist comments, is coming to be one of her best known works. It was published three times in the eighteenth-century in the high-profile collection Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (1724, 1732, 1742) and is presently available in many forms.

(Since I am giving a lecture about Haywood and Fantomina this week I went looking for a copy of the text to re-read. To my inexpressible joy I discovered that I had copies of all three eighteenth-century editions! This post is illustrated with a few pictures I took of these three books. Of course, Monash students have access to digital versions of these three eighteenth-century editions via ECCO here.)

Before 2004—when my Bibliography was published—Fantomina had been reprinted many times: in facsimile (once) in anthologies (four/five times), on CD-Rom (once) and online (three times: once to subscribers and twice open-access on the internet). The relevant entries in my Bibliography are:

[Be.3]. Masquerade Novels of Eliza Haywood. Introduction by Mary Anne Schofield (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1986). Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, v.412. [ISBN: 0-8201-1412-X]. Reproduces ICN copy.

[Ba.2]. Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730: An Anthology, edited by Paula R. Backscheider and John Richetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [ISBN: 0-19-871136-0].

[Ba.8]. Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, edited by Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery and Anna C. Patchias (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 41–72 [partly available here]

[Bb.2]. "Fantomina: Or Love in a Maze," in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Second Edition, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996), 206–24.

[Bb.3.1]. "Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze," in British Literature, 1640–1789: An Anthology, edited by Robert DeMaria Jr (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 786–803.

[Bb.3.2]. "Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze." in British Literature, 1640–1789: An Anthology, Second Edition, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 602–16.

[Bh.2]. Eighteenth Century Fiction: A Full-Text Database of English Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1780, edited by Doctors Judith Hawley, Tom Keymer and John Mullan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1996). One CD-ROM.

[Bi.1]. http://lion.chadwyck.com/. Access available to subscribers only.

[Bj.1]. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/fantomina.html. Edited by Jack Lynch. [available online here]

[Bj.2]. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/haywood/fantomina.html. Edited by Laura Dziuban and Mary Mark Ockerbloom. [available online here]

* * * * *

[the 2nd edition (1732)—despite what the title-page says!]

Since 2004 Fantomina has appeared in more anthologies (twice) and freely on the internet (once). The relevant details are

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joseph Laurence Black (2006): 514–28 (partly available here and the 2011 edition here)

The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, edited by David Damrosch and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (2006): 3081–92 (details here).

The one new online edition, edited by Alok Yadav, is an annotated pdf version.

There have also been two translations of Fantomina (see pictures at the end of this post). The first is in a collection of three works translated into Spanish by Tamara Gil Somoza from the Backscheider and Richetti collection Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730 (1996). The title of this collection is Mujeres de principios. Tres novelas cortas de autoras inglesas de los siglos XVII y XVIII (Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 2008) [available from Amazon here].

The second translation is into Galician(!), along with The British Recluse. The details of this translation are: A dama solitaria e Fantomina de Eliza Haywood, translation by M. Fe González Fernández (Santiago de Compostela: Sotelo Blanco y Xunta de Galicia, 2010). [NB, in the Wikipedia List of languages by number of native speakers Galacian is in position 147 of 152 languages, with 3–4 million speakers] The introduction to this edition is by the very generous Jorge Figueroa Dorrego, who very kindly sent me a copy when I contacted him about this translation.

(Of the print editions, Monash has Ba.2, Ba.8, Bb.2, Bb.3.1 and Bh.2—which is now part of Bi.1 i.e., online. What became of the CD-ROMs is anyone's guess.)

Only three of the print editions appear to be still available. For Amazon listings see here, here and here. But, because the text is online, it is also available as a print-on-demand "edition" from a number of printer-publishers.

* * * * *

In terms of online criticism, there is some interesting informal criticism, amateur and student comment on blogs here, here, here, here and here.

Only one of the twelve articles listed on Google Scholar is freely available online and it is Andrea K. Gill, "Objectifying Men: Gulliver’s Travels, Fantomina, and the Dildo in Eighteenth-Century Literature," Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 2:1 (2011), Article 11, available here but there is also Juliette Merritt, "Peepers, Picts, and Female Masquerade: Performances of the Female Gaze in Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze, in Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators (2004), 45–72 (partly available here) and Melbourne's own Haywood expert, Aleksondra Hultquist, has a section on Fantomina too: "Fantomina and the Role, within the Role, within the Role" in Equal Ardor: Female Desire, Amatory Fiction, and the Recasting of the Novel, 1680–1760 (2008), 94–104. (partly available here).

Wikipedia has reasonable entries for Haywood and Fantomina. For links to online criticism of Haywood's work and discussion of her works, contemporary biographical accounts etc, see all the links I collect on my main Haywood page here.

* * * * *

[the 3rd edition (1742)]

Probably because Fantomina was not separately published in the eighteenth-century, there is practically no mention of the work in print before 1915 when modern Haywood criticism begins. A search of Google Books produces nothing.

ECCO searches produce a few references to copies listed in circulating library catalogues (it is in the Crane-Court Circulating Library catalogue of 1748, Palmer and Merrick's Circulating Library catalogue of 1795 and Earle's Circulating Library catalogue of 1799).

There are also four copies listed in auction catalogues. A few of these auction catalogue name collectors, but they are a fairly unreliable guide to actual ownership since booksellers combined collections and salted named collections with their own stock. With this warning in mind, it is still interesting to see copies of Haywood's Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems and, therefore, of Fantomina in the following catalogues:

Bibliotheca Elegans: A Catalogue of the Large and Valuable libraries of Horsemandon Turner … Peter Dobree … and of the Rev. Mr. White (1754), 112 (no. 3297) [1742 ed.]

A Catalogue of a Large Collection of Useful and Valuable Books … with several other Libraries and Parcels of Books, All Lately Purchased (1762), 87 (no. 2380) [1725 ed.]

A Catalogue of above seven thousand volumes … including the libraries of her Grace the Dutchess of Dorset (1769), 58 (no. 1418) [1725 ed.]

A Catalogue of the Magnificent and Celebrated Library of Maffei Pinelli, Late of Venice (1789), 22 (no. 630) [1725 ed.].

* * * * *

[from left to right: my copies of the 1742, 1725 and 1732 editions
of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, vol. 3]

About a dozen copies of each of the eighteenth-century editions of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems survive, a few less of the 1732 edition and a few more of the 1742 edition. So, until the 70s there were few places you could read this text. In 1970 an edition of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems appeared in The Library of English Literature microfilm collection (film no. 21503–504)—but very few libraries had it, and none of them in Australia. In 1978 this collection appeared on microfilm again, in Early British Fiction: Pre-1750 (No. 274)—which a few libraries did buy, including only Monash and The University of WA in Australia. So, access was not considerably widened since the number of libraries that had a microfilm was not many more than those that had an eighteenth-century copy!

By the mid-80s this had changed somewhat. The Eighteenth Century microfilm series began in 1982—and Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems appeared almost immediately (on film 232). Much more important, considering how irksome it is to read anything on microfilm, was the Scholars’ Press facsimiles reprint of 1986. Like the Early British Fiction and Eighteenth Century microfilm editions, these facsimiles were bought by only a small number of institutions (two in Australia, Melbourne and Sydney Universities), but unlike the microfilms, they were easily obtained on inter-library loan and photocopied.

So it is not really a coincidence that a series of ground-breaking studies of women's writing began to appear in the mid-80s, just as it became possible for more than a tiny number of privileged scholars to read works like Fantomina. After a decade of increased access and growing interest a number of editors were prompted to include this work in collections of texts aimed at university students: three appeared in 1996 alone and—in the same year—the first digital version of the text was published. Since then there has been a fairly steady stream of new editions, print and digital and it is probably safe to say that from 1996—certainly for the last decade—there has been no significant barrier to obtaining a copy of the text. With increased awareness of, and exposure to, the text, there has been more discussion of it in scholarly journals, which has made it easier to teach, further multiplying readers, interest etc. The recent spate of blog entries and online discussion can only fuel further interest.

Of course, this development is very pleasing to feminist literary scholars. But the scholarship on Haywood's works is still in its infancy. Only a very small number of her works have attracted the sort of editorial and critical attention Fantomina has received. The vast majority of her works have not been edited at all and are not available in student editions—some are not available in any form—monographs on Haywood can still be carried in one hand, and there has not been a biography for almost a century.

But how can it be otherwise? It can take two or three years for each editorial and research project to be completed and for criticism to appear. (Or, as in my case almost a decade!) This means that the scholarly wheels have only turned three or four times since 1996. Still, it seems likely, as Haywood scholarship continues to mature and diversify, that Fantomina will still continue to attract a large share of the attention and that it will remain one of her best known works.

[A Spanish translation of Fantomina published in 1996]

[A Galician translation of Fantomina published in 2010]

18C Readers of Eliza Haywood in New York

2011-09-27T08:11:00.081+10:00

New York City's oldest library (the New York Society Library [NNYSL], founded 1754) has digitized and transcribed its earliest surviving borrowing ledger, which documents the reading history of its members from July 1789 to April 1792.

The five hundred or so NNYSL members whose reading habits are represented in these circulation records include physicians, members of the clergy, lawyers, and merchants, and a number of women. Among the notable readers are familiar figures like George Washington, but biographical information is available for many of the borrowers.

Since borrowing records like these are both extremely rare and extremely interesting I took a close look at this resource as soon as I read about it on the SHARP list (the information was reposted by Ellen Garvey from "H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online" on 18 September).

In 1995 I wrote in my essay "Measuring the Success of Haywood's Female Spectator (1744–46):

Although it is clear that [The Female Spectator] was in many public libraries we do not have borrowing records from these libraries. We know [that it was in ten circulating libraries and a number of research collections] … However, we do not know if the copies of The Female Spectator that these libraries contained were ever read and, if so, by whom. Only in the case of the Harboro Library, Pennsylvania, is this sort of information available. From 1762 to 1774 The Female Spectator actually surpassed Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in circulation (and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless was almost as popular). It would be extremely interesting to know if this borrowing pattern was typical.

The NNYSL charging ledger—ledgers actually, but the later ledgers are not yet available—is the first real opportunity Haywood scholars have had to test this question.** This post can only scratch the surface, but future posts and (I think) an article will explain just how important this information is to Haywood scholars.

Although the NNYSL ledger is searchable by borrower name, book (i.e., author/title), or keyword, the "book" list is not organised alphabetically under each author's name, and the keyword search is not a reliable guide to authors included. This is because both the short author/title which you can browse, and the more detailed descriptions which you can search, are taken directly from the original 1789 catalogue. (A pdf of the 1789 catalogue is available here; see below for the other pre-1850 catalogues.)

As is typical of eighteenth-century catalogues, some books appear under an author's name, followed by a short descriptive title (such as, "Arbuthnot (John) on coins"), others appear under a short descriptive title only (such as, "Antiquities of Scotland") and a few appear under a short descriptive title followed by an author's name ("Antient Measures, by Bishop Hooper").

All items are listed under the first letter used (either from the author's name or the title), in sections organised by the size of the book (large to small: folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo): but only in very rough alphabetical order ("Antient Parliaments of France, by Boulainvilleriers" comes after "Aubrey's miscellanies on fatality, omens, dreams …").

Since the author's name is most frequently omitted from works of fiction, it is not surprising that Haywood's name does not appear anywhere in this catalogue. Which means that, if you search for Eliza Haywood you will find nothing. But a search of the "books" list (the individual titles) reveals three works by Haywood were held by the New York Society Library. These are:

[Ab.57] Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743) 21 borrowers.
[Ab.60] The Female Spectator (1744–46) 24 borrowers.
[Ab.67] The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) 22 borrowers.

Also present are many other well-known novels and periodicals. This is hardly surprising, though the relative popularity of the titles in the following list (indicative, but not exhaustive) is:

Novels: Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality (46 borrowers); Frances Burney's Evelina (60 borrowers) and Cecilia (47 borrowers); Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (10 borrowers); Henry Fielding's Amelia (only two borrowers) [but the twelve volumes of his Works had 77 borrowers]; Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (27 borrowers); Charles Johnstone's Chrysal; Or, The Adventures of a Guinea (23 borrowers); Samuel Richardson's Pamela (17 borrowers), and Sir Charles Grandison (26 borrowers).

Periodicals: Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's The Spectator (20 borrowers); Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (30 borrowers); John Hawkesworth's The Adventurer (20 borrowers); Samuel Johnson's The Rambler (12 borrowers) and The Idler (13 borrowers); Henry Mackenzie's The Lounger (25 borrowers); Richard Steele's The Tatler (11 borrowers); Richard Steele's The Guardian (7 borrowers); George Coleman and Bonnell Thornton's The Connoisseur (19 borrowers).

What this preliminary survey suggests is that Haywood's Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman and Betsy Thoughtless were quite popular at the end of the eighteenth century—more popular than many novels that have been the focus of more sustained critical attention, such as Richardson's Pamela and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Also, Haywood's Female Spectator was even more popular—more popular than almost all other periodicals, including almost all of those that have been the focus of sustained critical attention such as The Spectator and The Rambler.

* * * * *

** In 2005 the Harboro Library records were only available to me third hand. Chester T. Hallenbeck published a transcript of the Loan-Book in his "A Colonial Reading List" in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1932, details of which were used by Mary Summer Benson in her Women in Eighteenth-Century America in 1935. Only Benson's volume was available to me in 2005.

The NNYSL catalogues are not easy to find on the nysoclib.org site. After considerable digging I found a directory for library catalogues here, which contains links to searchable pdfs of the 1758, 1761, 1773, 1789, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1800, 1825 and 1850 catalogues. All but one of these catalogues have been online since July 2009. Links to individual pages of the borrowing ledger are here.

Burton and Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1967)

2011-07-21T13:57:00.009+10:00

Last night I watched the 1967 film adaptation of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I wasn't very impressed. The lame special effects and studio sets are mostly dated without being cheesy-fun (as they are in some Hammer and low-budget films.)

Also, neither of the lead actors were really at their best. Burton was simply unconvincing at the start and by the time his performance improved, particularly in his depiction of Faust's growing world weariness and desperation, the constant presence of Elizabeth Taylor had become so distracting and aggravating that it was hard to enjoy the rest.

I must say I have never really understood the appeal of Elizabeth Taylor. She plays about a dozen different parts in the film, including Helen of Troy, constantly popping up like a jack in the box. In fact, just about every woman turn out to be Taylor. It would take someone of extraordinary beauty and charisma to carry this off, and Taylor doesn't.

Also, there was simply no chemistry between Burton and Taylor, who had been married for four years when the film was made and simply appear bored with each other.

I was surprised by how much of Marlowe's text was retained, and how little of the text was changed. Although, when changes were made they were rarely for the better. The scene depicting the Seven Deadly Sins was simply deadly boring (and it omitted one of the sins: lechery); the Pope scene came after the Emperor scene instead of before it, which is neither here nor there, but neither scene offered the light relief it ought to have had.

The highlights? Faust's study (above picture) and Mephistopheles as a black cat (but them I am fond of black cats).

* * * * *

BTW: While looking for the above photo I happened on this list of ten Demonic Pact films—of which, I have only watched five (marked *). I don't think I could watch another Nicholas Cage film (marked †) but I will hunt out the other four.

The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Ghost Rider (2007)†
Shortcut To Happiness (2004)
Bedazzled (2000)*
Deal Of A Lifetime (1999)
The Devil's Advocate (1997)*
Angel Heart (1987)*
Spawn (1997)*
Doctor Faustus (1967)*
Damn Yankees (1958)

Macmillan's New Cranford Series and Illustrated Standard Novels

2011-07-07T12:34:00.003+10:00

[Twelve Illustrated Standard Novels listed on a bookmark (dated 10 September 1895) found in my copy of Gryll Grange (1896)]

Below is a complete list of Macmillan’s "New Cranford Series" (1890–96) and "Illustrated Standard Novels" (1895–1901). I compiled a draft of this list at least three years ago (the oldest version of the file) or, more likely, nine years ago (when I bought my copy of no. 35: Thomas Love Peacock's Gryll Grange). I have since updated it by trawling the internet for any reference to the series: there are surprisingly few. In the end I compiled it from original advertisements in Macmillan publications (as here, here and here).

John Chidley, Discovering Book Collecting (1998), 95, describes the Cranford Series thus:

The Cranford series is the name given, in retrospect, to a number of distinctive reprints of classic tales by Macmillan, who commissioned some fine artists to illustrate them. They are recognisable by the dark green cloth bindings with gilt edges, which have full and rich gilt pictorial blocking on the covers and spine. The first in the series are two Washington Irving titles, Old Christmas (1875) and Bracebridge Hall (1876), both illustrated by Randolph Caldecott, although the volume which gave its name to the series, Cranford, illustrated by Hugh Thomson, was not published until 1891.

This appears mostly right. It appears that Macmillan, aware of the popularity of some of its illustrated classics, began advertising volumes as "uniform with" previous titles that had been successful. The name that stuck was Cranford (thus, "Cranford Series") but The Vicar of Wakefield appears to have been even more commonly mentioned in advertisements in the mid-1890s.

So, for example, in New Outlook: A Family Paper 48 (16 December 1893): 1151, Macmillan advertised under the heading "New Illustrated Books for the Holiday Season." the following:

"Our Village … illustrations by Hugh Thomson, Crown 8vo cloth gilt, or edges uncut … Also an Edition du Luxe, limited, super royal 8vo, hand-made paper, uniform with 'Cranford'"

"Coaching Days and Coaching Ways … illustrations by Herbert Railton and Hugh Thomson. Uniform with 'Cranford,' 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Old Christmas,' and 'Bracebridge Hall.' Crown 8vo ornamental cloth gilt, gilt edges, or uncut, with paper label … Also an Edition du Luxe, limited, super royal 8vo, hand-made paper, uniform with 'Cranford'"

"The Humorous Poems of Thomas Hood" illustrations by Charles E. Brock. Crown 8vo, cloth gilt or edges uncut … Also an Edition du Luxe, limited, hand-made paper, Just Ready" etc.

As you can see, some are listed as uniform with Cranford and other publications, some are not, though they are clearly identical in binding options. Two years later, in The Publishers Weekly 48 (December 1895): 151, Macmillan advertised under the heading "Cranford Series.—New Volumes." as follows:

Marmontel's Moral Tales, Selected by George Saintsbury and illustrated by Chris Hammond, in 12mo "cloth extra, gilt edges … Uniform with 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Cranford' etc"

Mary Russell Mitford's Country Stories, Illustrated by George Morrow in Crown 8vo "cloth, gilt edges … Uniform with 'Our Village' in the same Series"

The Spectator in London illustrated by Ralf Cleaver "Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt edges … Uniform with 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Cranford' and other volumes in the same Series" etc.

Again, some are listed as "uniform with" Cranford and other publications, but now the other publications are called a "series." Compiling a complete list of these Cranford-like volumes (which might be called the original Cranford series) would be time consuming, requiring a trawl through all Macmillan advertisements that use the phrase "Uniform with" in connection with either Cranford or The Vicar of Wakefield, or a volume that was elsewhere advertised as "Uniform with …"

* * * * *

Rather than do that, what I have done is compile a list of all the titles that are advertised as belonging to the much-more-clearly-defined "New Cranford Series" (1890–96) and the "Illustrated Standard Novels" series (1895–1901).

There are sixteen titles in the "New Cranford Series"—mostly published between 1892–94 [1890(1); 1891(1); 1892(3); 1893(5); 1894(3); 1895(1); 1896(2)] and there are forty titles in the "Illustrated Standard Novels" series—mostly published between 1895–97 [1895(12); 1896(13); 1897(10); 1898(1); 1899(0); 1900(3); 1901(1)].

I am most familiar with the "Illustrated Standard Novels" series, particularly with the Thomas Love Peacock volumes. I was a serious collector of Thomas Love Peacock for a long time with the intention of compiling a complete bibliography of his works, including all reprints up to 2000. Since I could not afford the first (and some of the earliest) editions of his works, I sought copies of all of the nineteenth-century reprints in original bindings and all of the early twentieth-century reprints in dust wrappers. (I also bought later editions, but I did not have to try hard to do that!) My enthusiasm to do another bibliography waned in the end and I have not updated either my 125-item shelf list, or my draft SOHO-style Bibliography since 2007.

At some stage prior to buying my copy of Peacock's Gryll Grange and, in the midst of my enthusiasm for collecting bibliographical information concerning all of the Peacock reprints, I noted that, according to Eric Quayle, The Collector’s Book of Books (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 112, all of the volumes in "the Cranford Series" first appeared in dust wrappers. So, I went looking and, eventually, found one of the Macmillan Illustrated Standard Novels editions of Peacock: the copy of Gryll Grange that illustrates my previous post.

I also collected information, and examples of, all of the different bindings that appeared on the Macmillan set of Peacock's works: there are at least three, and possibly four, of these. (I will post photos of these—and other bindings I can find good images of—later.) These bindings are:

[A] UK edition: red cloth blind stamped with a floriated M pattern, untrimmed edges. All copies with surviving dustwrappers are bound thus. [See first image above; advertised in 1906 as "ornamental cloth binding, 2s 6d"]

[B] UK edition: blue cloth with a gilt peacock pattern, gilt edges. [Advertised in 1906 as "cloth elegant, gilt edges (Peacock edition), 3s 6d"]

[C] US edition: grey/blue cloth blind stamped with a floriated M pattern, trimmed edges. I have only one volume bound thus.

[D] large paper and limited editions: I have seen copies described by booksellers as "large-paper" in editions limited to 200 to 250 copies—the "Editions du Luxe" in the 1893 advertisement quoted above. But, not having seen one, I am not sure of the actual appearance and size of the binding.

Francis Edwin Murray, A Bibliography of Austin Dobson (1900), 26–27 (item XV) [= a volume in "The New Cranford Series"] records eight printings/binding combinations for Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1890), which appear to represent the three binding possibilities advertised (so closely do they match that I suspect the description is based on advertisements alone):

[A] no. 2. green cloth/untrimmed edges; ditto 5 (1891: 2nd ed.); ditto no. 7 (1892: reprint); ditto no. 8 (1892: reprint)

[B] no. 1. green cloth/gilt edges; ditto no. 4 (1891: 2nd ed.); ditto no. 6 (1892: reprint)

[D] no. 3. red cloth/untrimmed edges; Murray describes his no. 3 as "large paper. Imp. 8vo. Hand-made paper. Red buckram, paper label, edges untrimmed."

* * * * *

There is practically nothing in the way of scholarship on this series. But, it appears that the series is discussed in—though I have not seen—Michael Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based On His Own Collection, vol. 2 (1969), 140ff [no. 3750], who cites Thomas Balston, “Illustrated Series of the Nineties,” Book-Collector’s Quarterly 3 [Part IX] (January–March 1933) and 4 [Part XIV] (April–June 1934). References to the five known wrappers are from G. Thomas Tanselle, "A List of Examples, 1891–1900, of British and American Publishers' Printed Book- Jackets, Boxes, and other Detachable Coverings" in "Book-Jackets of the 1890s," Studies in Bibliography 58 (2007–8 [issued 2010]), pp. 224–304.

* * * * *

New Cranford Series (1892–96)
16 titles (listed alphabetically, by Author)

1. Joseph Addison et al., Days with Sir Roger de Coverley (1892), illus. by Hugh Thomson.

2. Austin Dobson, Coridon’s Song and Other Verses from Various Sources (1894) Introduction by Austen Dobson, illus. By Hugh Thomson.

3. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, With a Preface by Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1891), illus. Hugh Thomson.

4. Oliver Goldsmith, Vicar of Wakefield (1890), Preface by Austen Dobson, illus. Hugh Thompson.

5. Bothers Grimm, Household Stories, trs. Lucy Crane (1893), illus. Walter Crane.

6. Thomas Hood, Humerous Poems (1893), Preface by Alfred Ainger, illus. by C. E. Brock.

7. Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall (1892), illus. by Randolph Caldecott.

8. Washington Irving, Old Christmas (1892), illus. by Randolph Caldecott.

9. Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1893), Introduction by George H. Boughton, illus. by George H. Boughton.

10. Washington Irving, The Alhambra (1896), Introduction by E. R. Pennell, illus. J. Pennell.

11. Joseph Jacobs, ed., The Fables of Æsop (1894), illus. R. Heighway.

12. Joseph Jacobs, ed., The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox (1895), illus. W. Frank Calderon.

13. Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (1893), illus. by Hugh Thomson.

14. R. B. Sheridan, The School for Scandal and The Rivals (1896), Introduction by A. Birrell, illus. by Edmund J. Sullivan.

15. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1894), Introduction by Sir Henry Craik, illus. C. E. Brock.

16. W. Outram Tristram, Coaching Days and Coaching Ways (1893), illus. Herbert Railton and Hugh Thomson.

* * * * *

[Sixteen Illustrated Standard Novels—"issued monthly"—listed on Gryll Grange (1896)]

Macmillan’s Illustrated Standard Novels (1895–1901)
40 titles (in alphabetical order, by Author)

1. Jane Austen, Emma (1896), Introduction by Austin Dobson, illus. Hugh Thompson. [Tanselle 86.94 (UCLA)]

2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1897), Introduction by Austin Dobson, illus. Hugh Thompson.

3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1897), Introduction by Austin Dobson, illus. Hugh Thompson.

4. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1895), Introduction by Austen Dobson, illus. Charles E. Brock.

5. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1896), Introduction by Austin Dobson, illus. Hugh Thompson.

6. George Borrow, Lavengro, The Scholar, The Gipsy, The Priest (1896), Introduction by Augustine Birrell, illus. J. Sullivan.

7. J. Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (1900), illus. H. M. Brock.

8. J. Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1898), Introduction by Mowbray Morris, illus. H. M. Brock.

9. J. Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder; Or, The Inland Sea (1900), illus. C. E. Brock.

10. J. Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1901), illus. H. M. Brock.

11. J. Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (1900), illus. C. E. Brock.

12. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, Or, The Two Nations (1895), Introduction by H. D. Trail, illus. E. Pegram.

13. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1896), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Chris Hammond

14. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and The Absentee (1895), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Chris Hammond.

15. Maria Edgeworth, Helen (1896), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Chris Hammond

16. Maria Edgeworth, Ormond (1895), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Carl Schloesser.

17. Maria Edgeworth, Parent’s Assistant; Or, Stories for Children (1897), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Chris Hammond.

18. Maria Edgeworth, Popular Tales (1895), Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illus. Chris Hammond.

19. John Galt, The Annals of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees (1895), Introduction by Alfred Ainger, illus. Charles E. Brock.

20. Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1896), 2 vols., illus. C. E. Brock. [Tanselle 86.95 (Godburn)]

21. Samuel Lover, Handy Andy (1896), Introduction by Charles Whibley, ills. H. M. Brock.

22. Captain Marryat, Frank Mildmay; Or, The Naval Officer (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by H. R. Millar.

23. Captain Marryat, Jacob Faithful (1895), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by Henry M. Brock.

24. Captain Marryat, Japhet in Search of Father (1895), Introduction by David Hannay, Illusrated by H. M. Brock.

25. Captain Marryat, The King’s Own (1896), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by F. H. Townsend.

26. Captain Marryat, Masterman Ready; Or, The Wreck of the Pacific. Written for Young People (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by Fred Pegram.

27. Captain Marryat, Midshipman Easy (1896), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by Fred Pegram.

28. Captain Marryat, Newton Forster, Or, The Merchant Service (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by E. Sullivan.

29. Captain Marryat, Peter Simple (1895), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. By J. Ayton Symington.

30. Captain Marryat, The Phantom Ship (1896), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by H. R. Millar.

31. Captain Marryat, The Pirate and the Three Cutters (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by Edmund J. Sullivan.

32. Captain Marryat, Poor Jack (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by Fred Pegram.

33. Captain Marryat, The Snarleyyow (1897), Introduction by David Hannay, illus. by H. R. Millar.

34. James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1895), Introduction by the Hon. George Curzon, illus. H. R. Millar.

35. Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange (1896), Introduction by George Sainsbury, illus. F. H. Townsend. [Tanselle 96.88 (Spedding)]

36. Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey (1896), Introduction by George Sainsbury, illus. F. H. Townsend. [Tanselle 96.89 (UCLA)]

37. Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle (1895), Introduction by George Sainsbury, illus. F. H. Townsend.

38. Thomas Love Peacock, Melincourt (1896), Introduction by George Sainsbury, illus. F. H. Townsend. [Tanselle 96.90 (UCLA)]

39. Thomas Love Peacock, The Misfortunes of Elphin and Rhododaphne (1897), Introduction by George Sainsbury, illus. F. H. Townsend.

40. Michael Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log (1895), Introduction by Mowbrey Morris, illus. J. Ayton Symington.

Nineteenth-Century Dust Jackets

2011-07-06T09:37:00.012+10:00

My copy of Script & Print arrived while I was neck-deep in marking last week, so I have only just started to read it. The first piece I looked at was Keith Maslen's review of volume 58 of Studies in Bibliography, which sent me off in search of the second part of G. Thomas Tanselle's study of "Book-Jackets of the 1890s."

Now that I am no longer editor of Script & Print I miss out on receiving, gratis, the latest issue of Studies in Bibliography, The Library, PBSA and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, and I haven't either got around to joining all these societies so that I can receive their journals, or got into the habit of browsing the latest issues as they arrive at Monash. (Something I will now no longer be able to do since the library has decided to discontinue print subscriptions of journals we have electronic access too. Grrr.) Anyway, since I wasn't sent Studies in Bibliography 58, I hadn't realised what I had missed out on in this issue (or "volume" I guess).

"Book-Jackets of the 1890s" is, like everything else by Tanselle, thorough and, although his list is likely to be quickly superseded, it is as complete a list as scholars and collectors can hope for now. I was prompted by Tanselle's first article—and the plans he announced in it to publish a list of dust jackets from the 1890s (the present article)—to contact him about the one nineteenth-century wrapper I have (more of which anon).

Not long afterward I heard from Mark R. Godburn concerning his plans to write a book under the title Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History—which prompted me to commission from him an article on the subject for Script & Print. In due course, Godburn's article appeared in Script & Print and this article and my nineteenth-century wrapper are both referenced in Tanselle's latest article. In the course of discussions concerning his proposed article Godburn requested some photos of my nineteenth-century wrapper, a few of which he published on his site. When he moved sites to his present blog these images were lost so I thought I'd repost them here with updated information from Tanselle's article.

* * * * *

(G. Thomas Tanselle, "A List of Examples, 1891–1900, of British and American Publishers' Printed Book- Jackets, Boxes, and other Detachable Coverings" in "Book-Jackets of the 1890s," Studies in Bibliography 58 (2007–8 [issued 2010]), pp. 224–304, item 96.88:

Macmillan (London). Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange, ill. F. H. Townsend and introduction by George Saintsbury. Jacket reproduces illustration on p. 173. [Collection of Patrick Spedding, 2007.]

What is not mentioned here is that this is a volume from Macmillan's "Illustrated Standard Novels" series, which is known in the trade as the "Cranford Series." [For a list of titles in this series, see my next post.]

I included the bookmark that was in the book when I purchased it. The list of titles on the bookmark matches that on the wrapper: suggesting the bookmark was picked up at the time of purchase, placed in the volume, and never moved.

[front cover and front of book mark]

[front cover of book and wrapper side-by-side]

[front cover of wrapper and illustration it duplicates side-by-side (the volume in the fore-ground is another from the same series)]

[rear cover and verso of book mark]

Mis Betsy Tatless: Paris or Munich?

2011-07-04T14:38:00.010+10:00

It is possible that the entries in my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood for the French translation of Ab.67 The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless are going to have to be as extensively revised as those for the French translation(s) of Ab.60 The Female Spectator. (Regarding which, Ab.60.11 and Ab.60.13 have been corrected and Ab.60.11A and Ab.60.11B have been added.)

As you can see, thanks to the Internet Archive, the following entry in Book-Prices Current 28 (1914), 240, lists a copy of L’Etourdie, ou Histoire de Mis Betsy Tatless with a Munich imprint, dated 1754. According to BPC, this copy sold at Sotheby on 11 December 1913 to Carrington for £3.00.

However, a bit more digging reveals that, what appears to be the same set, sold a year earlier (on 28 April 1912) to Harrison for £12.00—four times the price! According to the record in Book Auction Records 10 (1913), 334, the imprint was Paris not Munich, though BPC and BAR agree on the date. Unfortunately, the set has since disappeared so it is not clear which auction record is correct.

The only other authority is George Frisbie Whicher who records this set in an addendum to his bibliography of Haywood as a Paris printing, but Whicher was an American scholar, who wasn't much interested in translations, so it is unlikely that he either examined the set (which was in London) or sought extra information about it. That is, Whicher's evidence appears to be of no value. (See Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915), 185, No.21[ix].)

In my Bibliography I list this lost Barry set under Ab.67.11, the Paris edition of 1754 (on Whicher's authority, not having seen either auction record). I also record a "La Haye" edition of 1754 and Berlin editions of 1755 and 1756, among others. The Paris edition is quite common, but the other three are genuinely rare (there being only two, four and five copies known). So it is certainly possible that the lost Barry set had a Munich imprint (as Ab.67.13 and Ab.67.14 had a Berlin imprint) but—on the basis of surviving copies—it seems more likely that it was a Paris edition.

Some weight is given to this presumption from what we know of the du Barry collection. This particular copy was bound in red morocco for Madame du Barry (1743–93), mistress of Louis XV, with her arms stamped in gold on the covers. We are particularly well-informed concerning Madame du Barry's book collecting. Andrew Lang writes [Andrew Lang, The Library (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881), 116–18]:

Among the most interesting bibliophiles of the eighteenth century is Madame Du Barry. In 1771, this notorious beauty could scarcely read or write. She had rooms, however, in the Chateau de Versailles, thanks to the kindness of a monarch who admired those native qualities which education may polish, but which it can never confer.

At Versailles, Madame Du Barry heard of the literary genius of Madame de Pompadour. The Pompadour was a person of taste. Her large library of some four thousand works of the lightest sort of light literature was bound by Biziaux. Mr. Toovey possesses the Brantome of this dame galante. Madame herself had published etchings by her own fair hands; and to hear of these things excited the emulation of Madame Du Barry. She might not be clever, but she could have a library like another, if libraries were in fashion.

One day Madame Du Barry astonished the Court by announcing that her collection of books would presently arrive at Versailles. Meantime she took counsel with a bookseller, who bought up examples of all the cheap 'remainders,' as they are called in the trade, that he could lay his hands upon. The whole assortment, about one thousand volumes in all, was hastily bound in rose morocco, elegantly gilt, and stamped with the arms of the noble house of Du Barry.

The bill which Madame Du Barry owed her enterprising agent is still in existence. The thousand volumes cost about three francs each; the binding (extremely cheap) came to nearly as much. The amusing thing is that the bookseller, in the catalogue which he sent with the improvised library, marked the books which Madame Du Barry possessed before her large order was so punctually executed. There were two Memoires de Du Barry, an old newspaper, two or three plays, and L'Historie Amoureuse de Pierre le Long.

Louis XV. observed with pride that, though Madame Pompadour had possessed a larger library, that of Madame Du Barry was the better selected. Thanks to her new collection, the lady learned to read with fluency, but she never overcame the difficulties of spelling.

If the du Barry collection was put together in a hurry, in Paris, it seems more likely that the bookseller concerned would have obtained a Parisian edition than one from Munich.

As for "The bill which Madame Du Barry owed her enterprising agent" being "still in existence"—I can only hope that this is still the case one hundred and thirty years later. If it is, it may be possible to resolve the question: (known) Paris edition or (otherwise unknown) Munich edition?

More on Eliza Heywood (d. 1879)

2011-05-26T21:10:00.006+10:00

I have previously mentioned Mrs Edward Caryl Fleetwood née Heywood aka Eliza Heywood (see here). Well, having happened upon a review of her first publication [Ca.9.1 Ermangarde] I thought I'd tidy up the OCR and post it here in case anyone is curious about this other Eliza Haywood/Heywood. If I find any other reviews in future, I will post them here too.

* * * * *

Ermangarde, a Tale of the twelfth century. Royalist Lyrics; and other poems. By Eliza Heywood, Cheltenham, 1837.

If there be nothing else curious in the poem of Ermangarde, the story at least is of an uncommon kind. The scene is the Rhine:—one of the turretted crags is assailed by a robber chieftain, one of that fierce band whose depredations led to the formation of the Hanseatic league (at least we presume so, for the narrative is not very clear upon that point): the castle is burned, and its master perishes in the affray; but an infant son is saved, aud he lives to go to the wars himself, and become a count of the empire:—he falls in love with Ermangarde, the daughter of his patron; they exchange vows, and he goes to the Holy Land;—but in a few months she learns that he has proved unfaithful, and married a Jewish girl, under very dishonourable circumstances, that he died in battle, and bequeathed his wife and son to her care. This rather extraordinary legateeship Ermangarde discharges with exemplary kindness.

A year and a half elapse, during which time the wife and son reside with the ill-treated lady; when the forsworn knight suddenly appears. The report of his death was erroneous, and he has returned to thank the good Ermangarde for her bounty to his wife. Some time passes away very pleasnntly, all three living together as happily as possible: but at last the wife becomes jealous, (not, we suspect, before she had good cause), and Ermangarde pines sadly, and at last dies in the act of saying her prayers before her father's tomb.

Such is the tale, the versification of which is in all respects worthy of the singular incidents it records. We looked through the volume for the Royalist Lyrics, announced in the title-page, but could not find them. We perceive, however, that Eliza Heywood, who, of course must know more about the matter than the governments of Fiance and England, recognizes Don Carlos as King of Spain, and that she is strongly opposed to the Irish Municipal Corporation Bill. These are the principal points of interest in this lady's volume— as to the verses they como for the most part within the description of that happy species of composition, called "nonsense verses."

Court Magazine, and Monthly Critic 10:4 (April 1837): 194 (see here).

Harvard College Library Borrowing Records

2011-05-11T15:04:00.016+10:00

There has been a fascinating discussion on Exlibris-List this last week under the provocative title of "Happy birthday to us, we will now violate your privacy."

The original post (by Christine Karatnytsky) was prompted by a New York Public Library blog postings featuring a small selection of call slips (A History of the Library as Seen Through Notable Researchers).

Since many contributors to the Exlibris-List have written, studied or read studies based on library borrowing records the reaction to this blog post has been mixed, but largely supportive of the NYPL. Others were outraged and argued that the library had no right to retain or publish these call slips.

Personally, I am closer to Edward Levin's position: "there's a world of difference between a scholarly research project and a gratuitous 'books of the celebrities' blog post." And, while I wouldn't want to see the records destroyed, as some contributors would, this sort of populist celebrity-scholar reporting hardly justifies what is perilously close to invasion of privacy.

* * * * *

One contribution in particular caught my eye. Christian Dupont explains that the Harvard College Library charging records between 1762 and 1896 have been digitised and are now available online! This resource is a part of the Harvard collection of resources Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History (under "Using Libraries").

If you click on this link you will find 179 records for individual library account books etc. It takes a while to get the hang of the navigation software, particularly to get the images to appear large enough to read the manuscript entries (which are often cramped). But, flipping through a few volumes and leaves you will find some evidence of "light" reading among the law texts, medical dictionaries and other utilitarian books.

It would take a dedicated researcher to index the books that appear in these manuscript records against a College library catalogue to shine some light on borrowings from the library in the eighteenth-century. Without such an index it would take an even more dedicated Haywood scholar, a hugely dedicated Haywood scholar, to trawl all 179 volumes on the off-chance that a student recorded their borrowing of The Female Spectator. It would be nice if some one were so dedicated, but the chances seem low.

But, if someone were to index these records—and others like them—it wouldn't just be me and other Haywood scholars lining up to pat them on the back: a generation of scholars and PhD students would benefit from it.

Collecting Eighteenth Century Literature

2011-04-13T07:18:00.038+10:00

Over lunch yesterday I read Carl Spadoni's Collecting Eighteenth-Century English Novels in the Twenty-First Century, which was published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction in 2002 (vol. 14, no. 3). Carl gets a mention in the Acknowledgements to my Bibliography for the help he offered me during my lightning tour of North America in the summer of 1995.

He begins with an amusing anecdote about an novel by Elizabeth Blower that he was offered, which McMaster didn't have. He uses it is a way of introducing the subject of the astonishing rarity of eighteenth-century novels in general, and particularly the works of "minor" writers.

As a rare book librarian, he is particularly interested in what this means to librarians in terms of collection development: the need to move beyond high-spot collecting to preserve works which—despite microfilms, scanning projects etc—remain on the brink of annihilation. But also, the need to collect writers in depth. As a modest collector of eighteenth-century literature, particularly women writers, and one particular writer in depth (Haywood obviously), this was music to my ears!

Carl reminds his readers that McMaster's holdings in the eighteenth century "particularly with respect to novels, was, and continues to be, strong, the largest of its kind in Canada and one of the best in North America": similar to Monash in fact. The ESTC code-finder I mentioned in my last post provides a count of ESTC records as well as providing ESTC codes. A search for Australian libraries reveals that the top ten institutions (those with more than one thousand ESTC items) are:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) 7511
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7452
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4837
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4060
5. State Library of SA (SSL) 2873
6. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2597
7. University of Melbourne (VU) 2294
8. State Library of NSW, Rare Books (NSL-RB) 1199
9. Private collection, SA (PC-S) 1171
10. State Library of NSW (NSL) 1008

Of course, if you combine NSL with NSL-M etc you get a slightly different top ten:

1. University of Sydney Library (NU) [combined] 7515
2. National Library of Australia (ANL) 7452
3. Monash University (VMoU) 4837
4. State Library of Victoria (VSL) 4060
5. University of Melbourne [combined] 2900
6. State Library of SA (SSL) 2873
7. University of Adelaide (SUA) 2597
8. State Library of NSW (NSL) [combined] 2478
9. Private collection, SA 1171
10. University of Queensland 979

One third of the 303 Australian ESTC codes are recorded as holding nothing (!), a further one third have five or fewer listings, only about one tenth have one hundred or more works. Number 9 is a private collection in South Australia, which is certainly impressive, but it puts all institutional libraries with fewer than one thousand items in the shade (sorry QU: you're out).

* * * * *

Returning to Carl's article, although these ESTC holdings include all pre-1800 books, you can see that the Monash holdings are "strong" and one of the largest of its kind in Australia. So his reflections on collection development seem particularly apt. I will quote them as length:

As James Raven has rightly pointed out, the dominance of best-selling authors "inevitably introduces distortion into the history of the early period of the 'rise of the novel.''' Practically all discussion about collecting eighteenth-century novels focuses on the works of major authors … Competition for first editions of this kind will always be fierce … [but] a research library with an eighteenth-century collection will want to own not just first editions of major novelists but necessarily later editions as well. Scholars have learned the hard lesson that not all texts of a work are the same and even within an edition there are often textual variants. … While it may not be possible in practical terms to collect all major novelists in depth, certainly an attempt should be made to collect a few major authors in this way so that editions, issues, and reprintings of an author's works are housed in one institution.

Research libraries such as McMaster University … have a responsibility to collect these treasured resources before they disappear altogether from the antiquarian market. Under ordinary circumstances, and especially with an eye on budgetary constraints, one might be inclined to take a more measured approach to collecting eighteenth-century fiction so that one eventually acquires a collection representative of a variety of different narrative techniques … Indeed, one could push the point further by arguing that only the best novels from each sub-type should be collected … But this approach overlooks the dire fact that to a great extent we are in a race against time with diminishing resources to build collections.

Unless a library already has a core collection of good eighteenth-century novels and is prepared to add to it vigilantly on an individual basis, it would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to build a great collection of this kind. While it is certainly true that there is still an abundance of good eighteenth-century books for sale, works of fiction appear much less frequently in antiquarian catalogues in comparison to other genres of literature such as poetry and drama. Antiquarian dealers are increasingly aware of the scarcity of eighteenth-century novels. In their catalogue descriptions they not only provide commentary about the novelist and the work, they also state the number of known copies available and where they are located. Scarcity itself has driven up all prices regardless of the stature of the author or the merit of the novel.

So, any library not already in the top half-dozen in Australia for this sort of material can probably forget building a great collection, and those that are in the top half-dozen need to "add to it vigilantly" now while the relative "abundance of good eighteenth-century books" persists.

* * * * *

As a collector, what stands out for me is that, since "practically all discussion about collecting eighteenth-century novels" focused on the works of major, male authors, there was an opportunity (until 2002 and to a much more limited extent now) to build a collection on a few major authors in depth, while collecting other, minor, works "before they disappear altogether from the antiquarian market".

In the last week I have received a few catalogues and found another online that have hammered home the "Time is—time was—time's past"-message. Bauman Rare Books have a handful of Shakespeare Quartos (including a 1639 Henry IV Part 1 for $185,000). Among the items listed is a book that I put on a wants list in 1984: the $20,000 price tag suggests that "time's past" (i.e., it is time to accept that I will never be able to afford) Cornelius Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy of 1655.

Bauman's cater to high-point collectors with deep pockets. They regularly have works from the eighteenth century, but these are mostly books of historical importance, rather than high-point eighteenth-century literature. However, they do have quite a bit of high-point seventeenth-century literature. Clearly, we have not quite reached the point where eighteenth-century literature in general is rare, and the high-point items are impossibly rare, as we have for seventeenth-century literature (almost all seventeenth-century books, let alone one in decent/complete condition, are quite rare). This rarity is a necessary pre-condition for the inventive prices—$20,000 for Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy—that Bauman's specialise in. After all, they can only really get away with this such prices when they are the only dealers carrying the books they are selling

Although Bauman's do not deal much in eighteenth-century literature, others do, and the stellar prices they ask are clearly not that far away. And a perfect example of this is a set of Haywood's Invisible Spy that has been circulating among dealers for four years!

The set turned up in March 2007 at Gorringes, an auction house in Lewes, East Sussex. The estimate was £150–200; I bid £420, but it went for £700 to James Burmester; who listed it in his Catalogue 75 in July 2009 for £1750. It was bought by David Brass Rare Books, who listed it at US$8,500. It hasn't sold. After all, it isn't rare and it isn't particularly important to a Haywood collector, let alone a collector of eighteenth-century literature. Betsy Thoughtless is important, though common; Love in Excess is important and rare as hen's teeth. But Invisible Spy?

I am not sure whether the under-bidder at Gorringes was also a dealer, but I do know that the value (the price at which a copy will actually sell to a collector/library) is less than the £700 paid by James. Most likely, it is £420, the amount I offered, since I suspect I was and remain the only collector in the market. I subsequently got a copy for USD125—one 68th of the price David Brass is asking.

The importance of David Brass's inventive price is that it is an indication that major authors of the eighteenth century are beginning to attract the attention of speculative dealers. Carl's message, that "time is" for those libraries and collectors who have already made a start on eighteenth-century literature to add to their collections "vigilantly" now while they can. Once Bauman-prices rule, we can give up and start on something else.

**A final note: another way of arranging the top ten is by state: ACT (14,967), Victoria (11,797), SA (6641), NSW (2478), QLD (979). Who'd have thought that NSW was so far behind the rest of Australia?!

Colonial Bias and Changing ESTC Codes

2011-04-04T10:46:00.020+10:00

When I compiled my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood I used ESTC codes for America and the UK, but rejected the ESTC codes for Europe and Australasia.

The UK and US ESTC codes are based on codes established in each country. Australia had long had its own library codes which were in universal use and which were utterly unlike the ESTC codes (Monash University is VMoU in Oz, and MELmu on ESTC).

To have a fresh set of overseas-invented codes foisted upon us rankled. Like Such is Life I am by "temper democratic" and by "bias, offensively Australian"—and I'd be damned before I would let anyone get away with pushing around the colonials!

Likewise, I thought it was pretty outrageous, that ESTC—which was supposed to a co-operative international union catalogue of 18C books—should respect North American tradition to the point of duplication, but impose new codes on libraries everywhere else. (There are four cases in my Bibliography where the same ESTC library code is used by two separate institutions in the US and UK: C, Ct, L and O.)

Also, although ESTC differentiated locations in their listings (UK, US, Other) they did not do so in their codes. So, it is not immediately clear that a code is for a library in Germany or Australia: they are both exist in the sub-class "Other": not-British and not-American. (An exception was made for Canada—which has the country prefix "Ca"; an exception that makes the omission for other countries more obvioius!)

So, what I did in my Bibliography was use Australasian library codes prefixed by "Au"; and created a set of European codes that identified each European country with its own prefix "Eu" and then separated the countries with codes that identified France (with an "F"), Germany (with a "G") etc.

* * * * *

I was reminded of all of this very recently when I was working through the proofs of an article I have finished for Script & Print on "The Publication of Teresia Constantia Phillips’s Apology (1748–49)." Through force of habit, I had used EuGG for the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany (EuGG = Europe, Germany, Göttingen). But the ESTC code is (or was) GOT.

Shef Rogers pointed out to me the following web page on ESTC Contributing Libraries: Library Codes, where it explains that ESTC are going to adopt at least part of my plan!

For libraries in other parts of the world the ESTC has … changed to a new region code ‘e’, for continental Europe (those libraries were previously included in region ‘o’) … For Australia, the Australian National Library has already created a standard list of codes, and in the next few months the traditional ESTC codes for approximately 88 contributing libraries will be changed to comply with this list, with the region code ‘o’ and Australian country code ‘Au’ as added prefixes.

Of course, the Australian National Library has not created a standard list of codes, it is simply being asked to provide a standard list of codes, a list that was available to the editors of ESTC decades ago if they had had the slightest interest in adopting local codes. They didn't.

Note also that Australian (not Asian and Australasian) libraries remain lumbered with the opprobrious region code "o"—for Other. It can hardly be a coincidence that "o" follows both "b" (for the British Isles) and "n" (for North America). (And now "e" for Europe—better late than never, eh?)

And do I have to point out that "o" is not a region code at all? But if "a" or "au" had been used (Asia and Australasia are regions, and Australia is a continent, so there would be some justification for using it too) these library codes would appear before UK and US libraries. Instead, Australian libraries are to be kept at a safe distance. Segregated. At the back of the bus.

This page explains that

eventually all ESTC contributing libraries will have standardized codes either created by a national library or drawn from the USMARC lists.

Excellent. Again with the "better late than never." However, "No change to present coding is contemplated" for the 56 libraries of New Zealand, or for the 16 libraries of India, "which lacks a country prefix." Make of that what you will.

* * * * *

BTW: among the 25 libraries which have changed codes for other reasons, that are listed on the ESTC Contributing Libraries: Library Codes page, are three that were used in my Bibliography which I will update for the second edition in 2014. These are

Yale University, Lewis Walpole Library [code changed from CtY-Walpole to CtY-LW]

Brooklyn Public Library [code changed from NB to NBPu]

University of Rhode Island Library [code changed from RU to RUn]

I will also be dropping Minneapolis Public Library (MnM), because this library no longer exists, and the only Haywood item held by this library has been sold with the rest of the collection. And I will be adding some more European codes, as I have explained in various posts on recent new finds.

Secret Sex Poems of the Eighteenth Century

2011-04-03T08:30:00.012+10:00

The BBC published an article in February reporting the discovery that Rochester wrote bawdy verse—and that the bawdy verse in The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon was what made the collection popular in the eighteenth century. When the article was re-posted on the 18th Century Interdisciplinary Discussion List, the response was "So what?"

As Rik Myslewski quipped recently "In other news, Pope Benedict XVI has been revealed to be a Roman Catholic, and a common ursus americanus was discovered relieving himself in a shady copse."

With a title like Secret sex poems 'key to 18th Century book's success' you'd expect fatuous twaddle and—despite the fact that this is the BBC, and not The Daily Mail—fatuous twaddle is what you get.

But, despite the BBC, there is a genuine story here.

* * * * *

In my database of eighteenth-century erotica I include eighteen editions (to 1801) of The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscomon, And Dorset: Also those of the Dukes of Devonshire, And Buckinghamshire to which are added, The Cabinet of Love, And several other Poems On diverse Subjects.

This collection changed from edition to edition, ranging from three poems (1714), to thirteen (1735). The thirteen titles in the 1735 collection are: “The Discovery,” “Arbor Vitae” [two cantos], “Dildoides,” “The Delights of Venus,” “Lord Rochester against his Whore-Pipe,” “An Interlude,” “A Panegyrick upon Cundums,” “Satire on a Whore,” “Advice to the Kind Ladies,” “Mrs Knight’s Advice,” “The Insatiable,” “A Drinking Song” and “The Anniversary.”

The Cabinet of Love has been of intermittent scholarly interest since at least 1927 when many of the poems were listed in Johannes Prinz, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, His Life and Writings With His Lordship’s Private Correspondence, Various Other Documents, And a Bibliography of His Works and of The Literature on Him (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1927).

Dr Claudine van Hensbergen may indeed be "the first" attribute "the success of The Works" to the bawdy poems, as the BBC article states. It is a bold claim, but I am inclined to agree. Certainly the collection with the bawdy poems was popular, at least as popular as the version of The Works of the Earls of… without The Cabinet.

When I started researching this collection I assumed—as others have—that this anthology was the clandestine edition of The Works Of the Earls of… and that the version without The Cabinet of Love was the edition openly published and advertised. This suggests that the bulk of the market for The Works of the Earls of… was satisfied by the legitimate edition lacking The Cabinet of Love, and that only a few brave/debauched souls would want the clandestine edition with The Cabinet of Love. What I found is that the two versions seems to have been equally successful and they were both openly advertised, or at least, advertised equally as often.

Dr van Hensbergen is also quoted as claiming that "the circulation of The Cabinet alongside The Works of the Earl of Rochester helped cement his scandalous reputation"—which also seems possible from my research.

Obviously, Rochester would have his scandalous reputation without The Cabinet of Love. No question. But almost all of his eighteenth-century readers encountered his works beside those Roscomon, Dorset, Devonshire, and Buckinghamshire, and roughly half of his eighteenth-century readers also encountered his works beside those in The Cabinet of Love—even though the poems in The Cabinet of Love were clearly not attributed to him, or any of the other named Dukes. These other works provide the context: naughty Rochester, poet of the naughty times of the naughty Charles II. If you read Rochester, you are a naughty, naughty boy.

Of course it is stupid to claim "The success of … was down to pornographic poems hidden in the book"—the poems weren't hidden, and they were far from being the sole attraction of the collection. But, to be fair, that is likely the work of the breathless—and anonymous—BBC writer, not Dr van Hensbergen. The same breathless—and anonymous—BBC writer who added "depth" (and a photo) to their article with the observation that "In [the] 2004 film The Libertine, the notorious Earl … was played by Johnny Depp."

Arranging Books by Colour

2011-04-03T07:51:00.003+10:00

I had a good friend who organised her books by colour—and she had a lot of them—in strict spectrum-style. It took a while, but was very impressive. (It helped that many of them were had been bought at library sales and so they were bound in a range of strong, solid colours.) This video reminded me of her Sandy Bay library.

Strahov Library vs Faust House in Prague

2011-04-02T09:23:00.027+11:00

The Strahov Library in Prague—the library in the Strahov Monastery—is #402 of 645 things to do in Prague according to Lonely Planet online, which tells you more about the Lonely Planet demographic than it does about the Strahov Library. However, when I was in Prague I didn't go there either. It being a Monastery library and all, housed in the Theological Hall, I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for the trip.**

Now, thanks to the "World's Largest indoor Photo," I don't need to return to Prague to see it and neither do you! You can

See the inside of an 18th century library in Prague in 360 degrees. Read the titles on the books and enjoy the trompe l'oeil painting on the ceiling

You can do this thanks to a forty Gigapixel photo hosted here. (For the record, a gigapixel is one billion pixels. Forty gigapixels is 40,000 x 1 megapixel.) Here is a pan-and-scan tour.

* * * * *

**The first place I visited was the house Dr. John Dee stayed in when he was in Prague in the late 16C (photo below). This is the Faust House (Faustuv dum), a gothic house on the corner of Charles Square which is still closed to the public. Apparently, the Faust House rates even lower among tourists than both the Strahov Library and Jindrisska Tower (#544/645), which is the second place I visited and which is described as not on the regular tourist circuit (!)

The house was bought in 1590 by Dee's long-time companion Edward Kelly, but Dee probably spent more time in the castle dungeon than he did in this house. Kelly certainly did! The house was rebuilt in the 1720s and all that remains of the original gothic building is the lower floor and basement (which is all that I photographed when I visited). It is suitably grim. (See here for more on the Mysterious Faust House.)

When I was looking for something online about this house I was reminded of another Dee landmark in Prague: the house of Dr. Tadeáš Hájek that once stood in the NW corner of Bethlehem Square (Betlémské náměstí). Unfortunately, I no longer have the guide book that directed my steps to the Faust House, which also mentioned Hájek's "The House at the Green Mounds" (Dům u zelených hájků). But according to what I could find online (here) historic house no. 253 was destroyed in 1837, and in 1896 no. 252 was also destroyed. These two buildings, combined, formed Hájek's house.

Fortunately, tourists can still visit the castle dungeon and the Mihulka Powder Tower which had, when I was there, a fabulous exhibition about Dee, Kelly and Rudolf II's passion for alchemy. No photos were allowed, and there were attendants everywhere, and it was dark, and I had an old-style manual SLR camera—making it hard to hide, focus and hold still, while discreetly taking a photo—and so this was the best I could do!

Editions of Doctor Faustus

2011-03-13T16:38:00.011+11:00

Now that the three copies of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus have arrived that I ordered a few weeks back I thought I'd do a post on them, and on all of the other editions that I have. As you can see, there are ten of them! (Just ignore Tydeman's Doctor Faustus: Text and Performance for now.) I will add a few details about each of them as I go through them.

Top row, from left:

[1] The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, edited by Frederick S. Boas (London: Methuen and Co., 1932). From The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe series.

[2] Marlowe, Tragical history of Doctor Faustus Greene, Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. Adolphus William Ward, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). ¶ Amazing introduction, excellent notes and contextualising primary material, obviously the criticism and bibliography are very dated; based on the A text, sensibly edited (except, apparently, it is silently bowdlerised!).

[3] Marlowe, The Plays and Poems (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., [1905]). Simpkin's Thin Paper Classics series. I only have this because I love these thin-paper editions.

Middle row, from left:

[4] Doctor Faustus: A 1604-version edition, ed. Michael Keefer (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1991).

[5] Doctor Faustus: The A-text, ed. David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1985).

[6] Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (1962; rpr. London: Methuen, 1965). Revels Plays series.

[*] William Tydeman, Doctor Faustus: Text and Performance (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1984).

Bottom row, from left:

[7] Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (1995; rpr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[8] Doctor Faustus [Based on the A Text], ed. Roma Gill, rev. Ros King (2nd ed. 1989; rpr. London: Methuen, 2008). New Mermaids Series

[9] Doctor Faustus: A-and B-texts (1604, 1616), David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (1993; rpr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Revels Plays series.

[10] Doctor Faustus: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Scott Kastan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). ¶ Excellent on criticism, a useful bibliography; text and notes sensible; brief introduction.

I have been looking at the newbies (bottom row) in order to select a text for my Dark Hero course, but I have been progressively re-examining the others too. The only one that I haven't had a very close look at is the new Revels Plays edition [9], but it would have to be a lot more impressive than both the old Revels Plays edition [6] and the World's Classics edition edited by the same editors [7], in order to come close to the front-runner for my Dark Hero course: the Norton Critical Edition [10].

I prefer the text and introduction to the Ormerod and Wortham edition, though the actual notes to the text are not as extensive as most other editions. I also like the fact that the notes are on facing pages to the text. It is disappointing that more publishers do not adopt this approach, but the reason might be that it does limit what you can say. (Ward [2] has one hundred pages of notes on top of almost two hundred pages of Introduction and there are many places in the new Revels Plays edition [9] where the notes cover more of the page than the text. So, the convenient layout clearly wouldn't have worked for these editors.)

As I said, the Norton Critical Edition is front-runner. The introduction is very brief—a few pages—and the note on the editing of the text is spartan. Both are sensible and workmanlike, as is the editing. The value of this edition is in the convenience of having a sensible, if not ground-breaking version of the A and B texts, with all that ancillary material, including quite a few very important articles.

Any student with this book in hand, has enough to understand the academic debates about the play and could write a well-researched essay. With the best of the other editions, a student might come to understand most of the points of academic debate from one point of view (the view if the editor), and most of the textual issues, but they would have to go and find the articles which are in the Norton edition in order to get a more rounded understanding of the academic debates.

Still, the Norton edition lacks an account of religion and renaissance magic to match either the Ward [2] or Ormerod and Wortham [5] editions. But if, as I hope, some will students will really take to the play, perhaps they will also go looking for other editions until they find one that provides this sort of detail. (Don't tell me if you think I'm living in fantasy land.)

Wearing out an eBook

2011-03-08T09:19:00.005+11:00

Don't you hate it when you wear out an eBook, or when someone tries to palm off a worn out ebook file on you? And I don't mean when you drop the reader into the bath and the annihilation of your e-library flashes before your eyes.

No, I mean when the electronic-book file itself gets all tattered and torn, with pages you can't open without one of those rubber thumb things, or when the pages are so underlined and covered in comments that you can't read them any more, or when pages are missing, and when the book has that smell that ebooks get when someone has left them with their burger or their fish-and-chips. In short, when the file reaches that point when a conscientious electronic-book distributor would retire and replace it.

No? You don't? Well, HarperCollins have been worrying about this and have decided that—in order to avoid these problems, and in order to demonstrate the vast superiority of ebooks to actual books—their eBooks will be "available to one customer at a time until the total number of permitted checkouts is reached." They have determined "the total number of permitted checkouts" that "library ebook vendors will be able to circulate" is 26. That is right, 26, after that the license expires and a bright, shiny new electronic-book file must be purchased.

Josh Marwell, President, Sales for HarperCollins, told [Library Journal] that the 26 circulation limit was arrived at after considering a number of factors, including the average lifespan of a print book, and wear and tear on circulating copies

Of course, this announcement has no implications whatsoever for those who have been snapping up e-texts from "the sparkling digital pond" that Nicholson Baker talked about in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001). No, no, it is not a warning that replacing hard copy books or journals with digital files and then ditching the originals (individually or collectively) may not be a great idea. Because it is obvious that no other publisher of ebooks will follow suit or extend their duty-of-care in this way.

For (a lot) more on this, see here.

It is my fault that all the local bookshops are folding

2011-02-26T15:12:00.023+11:00

It is true. And I feel guilty about it. As an out-of-the-book-cupboard bibliophile it is only right that I should make this public confession.

I have been buying about three hundred books every year for at least the last two decades. Some years more, some less. In some years the money I spent was pretty close to my annual income, the money that I lived off coming from buying and selling more books. And living off apples that grew in the back yard of the house I lived in.

When I started collecting books, many of the books I bought were new. But it doesn't take long before you have all the ones that you want—at least, all the ones that you want that are available new at your local bookshops. So I came to rely on local second-hand bookshops, which have a much, much wider range than new bookshops. They also have older books obviously, and I liked old books, just for being old.

When I started travelling interstate, I started hunting out and visiting bookshops, which I would trawl on massive book-buying binges. Then I started buying from the catalogues from these bookshops, and others I heard of, but could never visit. Then catalogues from overseas. Then I joined societies like the Early English Text Society and the Malone Society, so I could get my hands on reprints of obscure titles I would never find or afford second-hand.

And then, may the techno-gods be praised, the internet was born! Tim Berners-Lee might have invented the World Wide Web in March 1989, but I first used a computer with internet access in the early 1990s—using Telnet and then Eudora for email. The first web browser didn't come into existence until 1993 either. Imagine, I had been using a Mac since 1987, but had to wait six or seven years before it was any more useful to me than a typewriter.

In 1996 AbeBooks.com started. Apparently, it went live and "immediately began to transform the world’s used book business by making hard-to-find books easy to locate and purchase." It wasn't the only search-engine for books. BookFinder.com was launched in 1997 and Alibris was founded in 1997. So, by the end of 1997, online bookselling was everywhere.

Looking back over my journal of purchases, in 1996 I bought 225 books, but only three from overseas. In the following years the number slowly but steadily increased: 3, 8, 21, 15, 28, 36 etc. And since I was working at a large antiquarian bookshop and most of my money was spend at the shop I worked, this last figure represents a very significant proportion of the money I was spending on books outside of the shop.

And now, and for the last few years, almost all my book spending is overseas. And the books that I am buying locally tend to be less and less significant: these days it is pretty much only sci fi pulps with pretty covers. Stuff I could easily do without. Some are almost pity-purchases and nostalgic book-tourism.

Obviously, some of this change is the result of my increasing specialisation as a collector, but I have only been able to specialise as a collector because it has been possible to do so by buying from overseas dealers. After all, it wouldn't have mattered how many shops I visited in Australia, I would never have found a single book by Haywood. As so I have only been able to buy as many works by Haywood because I was able to buy from overseas dealers.

All of which means that, every time a local second-hand bookshop goes broke, or shuts its doors to go online only, I feel guilty. There was a time when my money was propping up these local bookshops, and there was a time when there were a lot of local bookshops for me to spread my money around. Now, there are few shops and those which are still open aren't getting any help from me.

And this is true of new books too. I probably buy more new books now than I have for years, decades even. Once I started lecturing I found that I needed a lot more new books—highly specialised academic titles which are not in any local bookshop—ones I could not simply wait to turn up at a good price. Books that I wouldn't find, even in academic bookshops like the old Oxford and Cambridge Bookshop in Sydney (now Abbeys). Some of these books I am still picking up second hand, but increasingly I am buying them new from Book Depository and Fishpond.

(For a while there, I was relying on Amazon, but their postage rates have become more and more painful—especially since there is no discount for multiple titles. Partly, I assume, because the whole system is automated. Now, it is Book Depository—which is post free—or, if I am in a hurry and they have it in stock, Fishpond.)

Not surprisingly, Book Depository was one of the sites mentioned recently as the reason why A&R and Boarders have gone belly-up. These big bookshops cannot compete with online sellers either on range or price—not by a long shot. And, for a specialist collector like me, places like A&R and Boarders had nothing to offer in terms of knowledge and advice either. Of course, I thought they were surviving on bestsellers and general-interest readers. It looks like they weren't! It looks like they needed me. Rats!

So, every other day a parcel arrived from overseas and every other day another local bookshop closed. And, once again, it was my fault and I feel guilty about it. But I won''t be changing my book-buying habits any time soon. Sorry.

Robert Burns Day, somewhat delayed

2011-02-23T08:31:00.011+11:00

I was saving this up for Robert Burns Day (January 25), but forgot to post it. Better late than never I guess. (More silliness here.)

The Secret Life of Books: Eliza's Betsy Thoughtless

2011-02-21T17:42:00.023+11:00

Not Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, but Eliza St. Aubyn's rather battered copy of Ab.67.5 Betsy Thoughtless, 3rd ed. (1762). Eliza who? Let me explain.

Elizabeth Wingfield, daughter of William Wingfield of Durham, County Durham, married, on 4 June 1756, Sir John St. Aubyn, fourth baronet (1726–72). Elizabeth had six children; 1. Elizabeth (1757), 2. John (1758), 3. Catherine (1760), 4. Robert (1761?), 5. Anne (1762), 6. Dorothy (1769). When her husband died, her eldest son, then 14yr old, inherited the baronetcy. Elizabeth remained her son's guardian until he turned 21 on 17 May 1779. Three and a half years later, on 5 October 1782, she married John Baker of Orsett, Essex. She died fourteen years later on 28 August 1796 at Orsett, Essex.

According to Wikipedia, the Baker estate at Orsett centred on the eighteenth-century Orsett Hall. In 1827, the house and estate passed from the Baker family to a nephew, William Wingfield (one of the children of a brother of Elizabeth's), who changed his name to Wingfield-Baker. The estate was inherited by his son, Richard Baker Wingfield-Baker and in turn by his son, Digby Wingfield-Baker.

In 1884 the estate was inherited by Thomas Whitmore as a "debt of honour." (Apparently, it was won in a game of cards.) The house was then passed on to Colonel Sir Francis Whitmore (1872–1962) in 1907. By this time the hall was described as "an uninhabitable shell, without light, water or sanitation"—not optimal conditions for people or books. The Colonel refurbished it—and Orsett Hall was the Whitmore family home for more than fifty years. The estate next passed to Sir John Whitmore who decided to sell up the estate six years later (in 1968).

The Hall then passed into that twilight world of "conference centre, hotel and wedding venue" before being burnt to the ground—the result of a kitchen fire. (Which was caused by "wooden beams, exposed for several years to heat from a grill, often for as long as 16 hours a day," which had turned the beams into charcoal—a great fire-starter.)

* * * * *

So, what of all of this. Well, this set of Betsy Thoughtless must have been bought and signed by "Eliza St. Aubyn" between 1762 (when they were published) and 1782 (when "Dame Elizabeth St. Aubyn, Clowance, widow of Sir John St. Aubyn, bt. decd., guardian of Sir John St. Aubyn, infant under 21," remarried), most likely they were bought new between 1762 and 1768 when a new edition of Betsy Thoughtless was published. She must then have taken them to Orsett Hall, where they remained until at least 1962, more likely 1968.

During their two hundred years (give-or-take) at Orsett Hall, this set of Betsy Thoughtless passed down with whatever remained of Eliza St. Aubyn's library, and the library of her descendants until Digby Wingfield-Baker (aka Dingbat Wit-less-barking-mad) lost it (the Hall and the library) in a game of cards! The aptly named Whitmore family then restored the Hall (and the library it would seem, the Colonel pasted his bookplates into Eliza's Betsy Thoughtless) and passed the baton on until this family descended into imbecility as well (the final Whitmore used the grounds for go-cart and car racing and as a landing-strip his plane, before cashing in the Hall and the library).

* * * * *

I have mentioned that this set of Betsy Thoughtless is rather battered. Actually it has suffered at the hands of an biblioclastic egomaniac. Because, someone—probably someone after 1968 (though it could have been the witless Whitmore who flogged off the Orsett Hall library)—has torn out all the title-pages, and at least one or two leaves either side, in their rush and impatient haste to destroy the evidence of their ownership. That is, having first scrawled their name into this set, they then tore their name out of the set, by grabbing a fist-full of pages and heaving. I am imaging them sitting cross-legged and probably cross-eyed and dribbling with a pile of centuries-old books on one side and a pile of title-pages, frontispieces and contents leaves on the other.

* * * * *

But to return to Eliza St. Aubyn. This member of the aristocracy bought her copy of Betsy Thoughtless six years after Eliza Haywood died, so she may not be representative of her original audience, but she is close to being a contemporary. And, although I haven't been able to discover when Eliza St. Aubyn was born, it must have been about 1740, and so she certainly grew up in Haywood's world.

I have long been interested in Haywood's readers. We really don't know that much about them. In 1891 Edmund Gosse claimed that "Eliza was read by servants in the kitchen, by seamstresses, by basket-women, [and] by ’prentices of all sorts" and that Haywood’s novels were "very cheap"—all of which is pretty-much hogwash. In 1915 George Frisbie Whicher suggested "that no one of scanty means could have afforded Mrs. Haywood’s slender octavos at the price of one to three shillings" and in 1966 Robert Day agreed, concluding that this audience "would most naturally come by novels like Mrs. Haywood’s when they were discarded by the gentry, rather than by purchase."

The argument over the social and financial status of Haywood’s readers can only really be answered by a survey of the price of her books (which I examined in "Appendix I" of my Bibliography), through reception studies of individual titles (which I undertook for The Female Spectator in 2006), and through provenance research (such as I do here on this blog—inconclusively here, more conclusively here and here). The problem with provenance research is, as I said before, that it can end up focused on the few well-known or famous owners of not-so-ordinary books for the simple reason that we can rarely identify genuinely “ordinary” owners of books.

I am only able to trace Eliza Wingfield/St. Aubyn/Baker's set of Betsy Thoughtless thought two hundred years because (1) she recorded her name in the books, (2) her name was sufficiently unusual that I could easily identify her, and (3) because she was married to a member of the aristocracy, (4) her estate remained intact for two centuries, and (5) a late descendant also recorded his name in the books and (6) his name was sufficiently unusual that I could easily identify him.

Also, we can probably find out a good more deal about Eliza St. Aubyn because her first husband and her son fill out the record of baronets and MPs, and the St. Aubyn family were the sort of affluent patrons who tend to be recorded in archives, paintings, memorials and so on. (If this post wasn't already hugely long I would rehearse some of this information about Eliza, but this might have to wait for another day.)

Of course, it is possible that Haywood was largely read by well-known and affluent people, in which case a record of her readers will be a record of her well-known and affluent contemporaries. But we will only know if this is he case by investigating the provenance of as many copies of her works as possible, something—it appears—I am doomed to do.

Dark Hero Texts

2011-02-13T11:35:00.022+11:00

I chose the editions—and some of the texts—for my new course, The Dark Hero [ATS2914/ATS3914] on the KISS-principle (i.e., keep it simple). So, they are all from the OUP World's Classics series. The upshot is, as you can see, that they make a very neat and pretty display.

The only problem is, I am already reconsidering this decision because Doctor Faustus and Other Plays (front text above) isn't very good. No doubt I am biased. I wanted to use Doctor Faustus: The A-text, ed. David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham (University of Western Australia Press, 1985), which is an excellent edition, but it is out of print.

Having re-read the play in the Ormerod and Wortham edition yesterday, I turned to the World's Classics edition this morning to see how it compared, and it compared poorly. I chose this edition, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, because it contains both the A- and B-text versions of the play, which promised to be great for comparison, and other plays by Marlowe, which might encourage students to read others plays by Marlowe.

The problems is, the editors are pretty cavalier with the text, modernising, moving chunks around and imposing a 5-Act structure on both versions of the play, though there is no textual authority for doing so in any quarto. (See, the "Note on the Text," p. xxv and xxvii (here)). The introduction, to the life and times of Marlowe is wildly inadequate for a student, with gaping omissions, and the introduction to the plays in Marlowe's canon is brief and very uneven (excellent on Tamburlaine I and II, pretty good on The Jew of Malta and Faustus and pretty pathetic on Edward II).

And so, I have now ordered the New Mermaids edition (here), Norton Critical Edition (here) and the Revels Plays, New edition (here). The last of these is edited by Bevington and Rasmussen, but there is supposed to be a substantial introduction in this edition.

These three student editions of Doctor Faustus are all in the same price range as the World's Classics edition, though you get a lot fewer pages for your money. I am hoping that at least one of them is at least as good at the Ormerod and Wortham edition, demonstrating more respect for the text and including an introduction that compensates for the absence of Marlowe's other plays. We'll see …

Cui bono?

2011-02-12T08:07:00.010+11:00

My colleague in English at Monash, Dr Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario, asks in her blog (here): "Should academics blog?" and what is "the importance of - and drawbacks of - having an online presence"? I am not a big fan of questions including the word "should" but I liked some of her answers (they bring together information relating to your research, help communicate with students, and exert some control over your online presence), but I was particularly struck by this comment: "my blog … helps me to think about what I'm doing and what it means in terms of the wider community."

It set me thinking: cui bono? (To whose benefit, or for the benefit of whom, does his blog operate?).

On my Script and Print blog (here) I explain that "Blog is the contraction universally used for weblog, a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order"—but my understanding is that early blogs were made up of links and summaries of online content, combined with journal or diary content, which acted as an aide-mémoire to remind the blogger of where they had been online and what they had found interesting: like a reading journal. That is, a log of web activity, like a beefed up session history on your web-browser.

Obviously, blogs have evolved, but for me this is still a major function of academic blogs. They bring together material that relates to your research, specifically the material you want to share. And this is where it gets interesting. Because many academics hold their positions and get promotions based on their publications. And for the most part, you only get published when you can convince an editor that you have something new to say. So, if you have discovered a previously unknown Shakespeare play, you wouldn't blog about it. You would make damn sure you wrote an article and had it published in high-profile peer-reviewed journal before you casually mentioned it in a blog-post.

And this is where Rebecca's second point comes in: you share material you think will be of use to your students, to other students and other academics. For the most part this constitutes casual reviews of what you are reading, thought relating to doing research and teaching, information on resources for research and teaching, or thoughts on and information about research topics you have either already published on, or do not intend to publish on. Oh, and griping about administrivia. (See below.)

Rebecca's third point was that a blog helps you exert some control over your online presence. Maintaining a blog is pretty liberating when your institutional web presence is heavily mediated and restrictive, and when you have to battle to have the smallest changes made to any information relating to you or the course you run.

Unfortunately, Monash does not encourage blogging; in fact it is not too much to say that they are obstructionist: they do as much as possible to discourage staff from establish a Monash blog, and they do as little as possible to publicise blogs maintained by staff elsewhere. The blogs that they do allow—and there were very few until quite recently—have to be approved. The application for contains an endless series of questions and warnings such as

Purpose of the blog (Mandatory field)
Intended/target audience (Mandatory field)
Intended no. of bloggers (Mandatory field)
Frequency of updates (Mandatory field)
Duration of blog (Mandatory field)

A series of moderators have to be approved ("staff member who is in charge of watching and approving blog content"), fees paid ("initial setup cost of $100 and an ongoing yearly fee for technical maintenance of $70"), and waivers signed ("ensure that the blog adheres complies with relevant ITS policies, state and government laws, statutes and guidelines as outlined in the Blog guidelines")

These guidelines were extraordinary. Each faculty has a distinct colour palette "and a modified sub-brand" which must be used. Images must have the following characteristics:

1. Strong, single images—not a collage.
2. Natural light and open space.
3. Incorporate people—not clip art.
4. Convey confidence and optimism—no negative imagery.
5. Natural images—no coloured lighting, contouring and coloured backgrounds.
6. Represent the university's key attributes—international, influential, innovative, engaged, substantial, dynamic, broad, accessible and full of integrity.

Oh, and they must be approved by the Marketing Division.

In earlier versions of this document it is specified that photos are to be taken "with a long lens that allows the foreground and the background to appear blurred—the main subject matter (the people) should be sharp or in focus." Photographers are also told to "avoid cliche compositions and images that are overly posed."

So, of course, what you actually get is a series of predictable and near-identical images of carefully posed groups of happy, aesthetically-pleasing students—representative of the desired cultural diversity—in well-lit open spaces with muted fore- and back-grounds: which is, of course, corporate clip art and very, very clichéd.

Not surprisingly, few individuals either want to or are capable of complying with these restrictions, so the few sites and blogs actually undertaken by my colleagues are elsewhere: on Blogger, Wordpress etc.

Elsewhere, apparently, universities have realised that they benefit from having all the academic creativity, and the diversity of opinion and self-representation, available under their umbrella. Which brings me to Rebecca's fourth point: "my blog … helps me to think about what I'm doing and what it means in terms of the wider community."

A blog is a way of communicating with the wider community, of articulating what you are doing as an academic in an interesting and accessible way, of engaging with, and in, ever-changing international intellectual debates. It helps present and prospective students understand your position on these debates and helps model how we expect our own students to engage in intellectual debate. In keeps you in touch with others, and others in touch with you.

It is hard to see how a university can be international, influential, engaged, dynamic and accessible without embracing the sort of communication facilitated by blogs like Rebecca's and—I hope—mine.

Eliza Haywood Biography, Texts, Links etc

2011-02-09T13:02:00.023+11:00

[The 1725 portrait of Haywood by James Parmentier
as it appears on a recent work of scholarship]

[For Eliza Haywood Texts, Links etc, and criticism of the same, see here; for a discussion of the portraits of Haywood, see here. For William Hatchett links see here.]

The Wikipedia entry is here.

Ruth Facer's Chawton House biography here.

George Frisbie Whicher's The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915) is downloadable here.

Contemporary Biographical notices of Haywood

1747: [John Mottley], "Mrs. Eliza Heywood" in "A Compleat List of All the English Dramatic Poets, and all the plays ever Printed …", in Thomas Whincop, Scanderbeg, or Love and Liberty. A Tragedy (London: W. Reeve, 1747), 246.

1752: William Rufus Chetwood, Mrs. Eliza Heywood in A General History of the Stage (1749); repr. as The British Theatre (London, 1752), 171. [See below for the text.]
¶ This bibliographical part of this text reappears here in Theatrical records: or, an account of English dramatic authors, and their works (London, 1756), 114; also here in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber … With an Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, 4th ed (London, 1756), 282.

1764: David Erskine Baker, "Mrs. Eliza Heywood" in The Companion to the Play House, 2 vols. (London, 1764), v.2, Q1r, col.1-Q1v, col.2.
¶ This text reappears here in Biographica Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Play House … brought down to the End of November 1811 … by Stephen Jones, 3 vols. (London, 1812), 1.319-21.

* * * * *

The two most important of the early biographical accounts are those by Chetwood (1749) and Baker (1764)—for whom Hatchett was the likely source.

The first of these is not online so I included the transcript here. See, William Rufus Chetwood General History of the Stage (Dublin, 1749), 57 note b:

Mrs. Haywood has made herself eminent to the polite World by her writings; she is still alive. Her numerous Novels will be ever esteem'd by Lovers of that Sort of Amusement. She is likewise Authoress of three Dramatic Pieces … As the pen is her chief means of Subsistence, the World may find many Books of her Writing, tho' none have met with more Success than her Novels, more particularly her Love in Excess, &c. Her Dramatic Works have all died in their first visiting the World, being exhibited in very sickly Seasons for Poetry. Mr. Pope has taken her for his Goddess of Dulness in his Dunciad; but she need not blush in such good Company.

[Last updated 9 November 2011]

A Long Time Before Gutenberg

2011-02-09T09:52:00.013+11:00

Gutenberg is credited with being the first European to use movable type in printing, and the first person (anywhere) to establish a printing press using movable type. This achievement is dated to 1439.

But the first book printed using movable metal type is thought to be the 백운화상초록불조직지심체요절 (aka Jikji Simche Yojeol), a Korean work that dates to July 1377. This is an anthology of the teachings of the the most revered Buddhist monks. The full title translates as The Monk Baegun's Anthology of the Great Priests' Teachings on Identification of the Buddha’s Spirit by the Practice of Seon. The work was in two volumes. The surviving copy, held by the National Library of France, contains only 38 sheets of the second volume.

* * * * *

On 1 September 2010, a Korean academic announced that he had found the world's oldest movable metal print, which predates the Jikji Simche Yojeol. According to this story in The Chosun Ilbo [Daily News from Korea] the newly found letters "are possibly 138 years older."

Prof. Nam Kwon-heui of Kyungpook National University said, "After analyzing around 100 movable metal letters that were in the private collection of a Korean, we have confirmed that 12 of them were made in the early 13th century."

The owner of the movable type was quoted as saying he bought them around 10 years ago and was told they were discovered during Japan's occupation of Korea and that a Japanese collector smuggled them out of Korea after World War II.

The only other movable metal type presumed to date back to the Koryo Kingdom is in the National Museum of Korea and the Kaesong Museum of History, which have one sample each. The type used to print the "Jikji" has yet to be discovered.

Another article, by Claire Lee in The Korea Herald, quotes Nam:

"I have confirmed that these blocks are from the 13th century Goryeo Kingdom period, and had been used for the printing of Nammyeongcheonhwasangsongjeungdoga (Sermons of Buddhist Priest Nam Myeongcheon)," Nam said.

A copy of the same sermons printed using wooden blocks from the Goryeo Kingdom period, designated a national treasure, is currently owned by Samseong Museum of Publishing. Nam, after about three years of extensive research, confirmed that the newly found blocks and the print of the treasure match with one another. “I’d like to call the blocks ‘Jeungdoga-Ja,’ naming them after the treasure,” Nam said.

As Lee goes on to explain:

If the newly found relics are confirmed to be the world’s oldest movable metal type, they will rewrite history. However, researchers at the National Museum of Korea said it is difficult to confirm the year of origin of metal relics because of their lack of carbon substance which is crucial for the carbon dating process.

“It would possible to find which era they were from if the types were made out of wood,” she said under condition of anonimity. “But metals are diffirent and they are easily affected by rust as well.”

* * * * *

Obviously, dating is an issue here. In The Korea Herald Nam is quoted as dating the type to "the 13th century" and in the The Chosun Ilbo it is claimed that they are from the "early 13th century." But the statement elsewhere in The Chosun Ilbo, that the "letters are possibly 138 years older," is clearly a kick at Gutenberg. These 138 years would date the type to the year 1239—exactly two centuries before Gutenberg's 1439. A bit too neat.

The bottom line is: movable metal printing type from anywhere in the 13th century is pretty amazing, and even if the type dates to 1299, this is still a long time before Gutenberg's 1439.

ERA: Damned Lies and Bibliometrics

2011-02-01T08:31:00.005+11:00

The Australian has a series of articles on the ERA report that was released yesterday. The titles tell the story Most unis below par on research, Scattergun sector needs some diversity, Elite eight head uni research ratings, No link between discovery and teaching, Uni research report a blow to big-noters etc.

The first of these articles is the most useful one because of the chart it includes, with the ERA results. The second one starts: "The release of the Excellence in Research for Australia report yesterday will give a few university bosses cause for introspection."

Not just university bosses. And this is why. The same article continues

While talk of teaching-only universities gets silenced as soon as it's raised (the teaching-research nexus is sacrosanct to the idea of a university), there is definitely a rising swell of voices suggesting the ERA results will be used to compel institutions into focusing their research efforts.

That is, if you are research active and you have the misfortune to be in an institution that has not performed well in your broad area of research, Canberra or your own administrators may decide that it is pointless you continuing to do research. You should just give up on research and only do teaching.

Of course, your broad area of research may not have performed well in the ERA exersize because the ERA has been so poorly conceived, so poorly adapted to your particular broad area of research, that it has utterly failed to take an accurate measure of the performance of that area.

Julie Hare writes (in Uni research report a blow to big-noters)

… performance in the arts, humanities and social sciences was overall pretty dismal. One reason may be the amount of research funding these areas attract … Another reason may be that because the HASS disciplines were subject to peer review: human judgment can tend to be harsher than the clear, crisp picture thrown up by bibliometrics, publications and the like.

Another way to put this is, one reason is the amount of research funding these areas are allocated (which is determined by Canberra), another reason is that no allowance has been made for the fact that the peer review process is faulty/biased/poorly conceived/poorly executed.

As for "the clear, crisp picture thrown up by bibliometrics"—hardly. Bibliometrics offers a distorted and incomplete picture, based on a fundamentally flawed logic. So, no …

Undoubtedly, for the first time we have a clear picture of not just where research activity is, but how good it is..

… we don't. And this post is an example of why:

Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters is wrong. Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters is misconceived. Don't, under any circumstances read Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters.

Right, that is three times that I have mentioned the author and title: according to the present practice of bibliometrics, this is identical in value to me writing

Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters is a work of unsurpassed genius. Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters will remain the foundation-stone for thinking in this area forever. What would we do without Julie Hare's Uni research report a blow to big-noters?

Which is another three citations of the author and title.

Only a poorly-programmed computer thinks that these two paragraphs are identical: and only a poorly-informed administrator (or reporter) thinks that these citation-counts can tell you anything about reasearch excellence.

Which is why it is unfortunate that …

Innovation Minister Kim Carr said the results of the evaluation … would inform government about resource allocation and would be a key measure of performance in funding agreements with universities.

[UPDATE 20 May 2011: Check out this very amusing response to journal ranking madness: increase your journal's ranking by rejecting everything!]

A Work of Creative Non-Fiction

2011-01-23T15:57:00.015+11:00

Promoted by its creator as "a heart-breaking work of staggering silliness" this video is a response to So, You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities.

Part of this dialogue is worth transcribing:

Prof. Sawyer (Louise): Over the past four and a half years I have also designed, written and maintained a substantive work of creative non-fiction, a blog which has hundreds of readers. I want to be promoted.

Mr. Chairperson (Daryl): I have read your blog Louise. It is charming. But it is self-published on the non-peer-reviewed internet. Perhaps I should have been more specific. The standard for promotion in this department is two peer-reviewed scholarly books. In print. On paper. With hyperbolic blurbs by leading scholars in the field.

Louise: As I said, my blog is a work of creative non-fiction. It may not be a conventional work of scholarship but it raises vital question about how we read, write, and think in the 21st century. If I were to print it out it would be hundreds of pages long. I want to be promoted.

Daryl: We did not hire you to be a creative writer. You are a professor of literature.

Louise: Traditional academic publishing is dying. The humanities are in peril. You should be grateful for any effort to communicate what we do to a broader audience. However, Daryl, I am also teaching and publishing scholarly work in this field. I want to be promoted.

Daryl: Your blog is written in the voice dead cat. You make fart jokes and drink in an imaginary pub. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously?

And so it goes … Jonathan Swift gets a mention … strangling with a bow tie … bureaucratic make-work … anthrophobic trees. It has it all.

A French Review of The Female Spectator

2011-01-22T15:33:00.008+11:00

The following review of Haywood’s Female Spectator appears in the Mercure de France (April 1751): 150–51.

This review is very slightly later than the reviews quoted in my Bibliography (482–83), the information is the same (that the translation was revised) and the assessments are also much the same (both good and bad).

Still, it is always useful to find evidence that establishes that these are consensus views, so I have transcribed the review and translated it (with the generous assistance, once again, of Prof. Wallace Kirsop).

* * * * *

La Spectatrice, ouvrage traduit de l’Anglois. A Paris, chez Rollin, fils, Bauche, fils, & Pissot. Deux vol. in-12. 1751.
Si on jugeoit de cette nouveauté, par la Traduction qui en parut l’année derniere en Hollande, on s’en formeroit une idée injuste. Cette Traduction a été remaniée à Paris par un homme d’esprit & de goût: nous l’avons lûe avec plaisir, & nous croyons que nos Lecteurs nous sçaurons [sic] gré de la leur avoir fait connoître. Ce n’est pas un ouvrage de la force du Spectateur, mais ce n’est pas un ouvrage sans mérite: il roule presqu’entierement sur l’amour & sur les femmes. Mademoiselle Hayvood [sic], qu’on en croit Auteur, respecte la Religion & les moeurs. Cette remarque ne doit pas paroître inutile dans le siécle où nous sommes.

[The Spectator, a work translated from English … Two volumes in 12mo. 1751.]
If one were to judge of this new publication, by the translation of it that appeared last year in Holland, one would form an unjust idea of it. This translation was revised in Paris by a man of wit and taste: we have read it with pleasure; we believe that our readers will be grateful to us for having made it known to them. This is not a work of the force of the Spectator, but this is not a work without merit: it turns almost entirely on love and women. Miss Hayvood [sic], who is believed to be the author of it, respects religion and morality. This remark should not appear useless in the century we are in.

Eliza Haywood Tattoo

2011-01-21T16:42:00.002+11:00

Yes, that subject line is correct. See here. What can I say, except amazing!

Literary Tattoos Again

2011-01-21T15:30:00.023+11:00

Back in June 2008 I did a post—on my Script & Print blog—titled Literary Tattoos: Writing on the Body.

Literary tattoos are in the news again and, once again, it is The Guardian who is behind all the fuss. Benedicte Page's recent article entry was prompted by "A US publisher [who] is offering free books to anyone who brands themselves in tribute to one of their books. (See here for the full story.)"

Shirley Dent's Written on the Body: Literary Tattoos—the article that prompted my previous blog entry—is much more interesting, as are the links she provides. (See A (Not So) Complete History of Literary Tattoos and Literary Tattoos for People who Love Books. To these I can add Written on the Body: The Art of Tattoo Storytelling, a Flickr group (Tattoos of Words Only) and Margot Mifflin's A Blank Human Canvas.)

Looking back at this first article I am struck by this response to a previous (rather jaded) comment:

"As with all tatoos, what seems cool and deep at 25 will be embarrassing at 35 and just a dull blue splodge by 45."

*yawn*

With such wilful ignorance carved deep into your character, who needs a tattoo?

And I am struck by this response partly because the only thing of note in the more recent article in The Guardian is the feedback. Particularly this:

if you do foolishly Google Harry Potter tattoos as I did, do yourself a favour and keep the brain bleach on standby...

which, of course, is a challenge. One I should have resisted. But didn't.

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" and "mischief managed" are popular—understandably—and so are dark marks, but the popularity of "Expecto Patronum!" is amazing. And the portrait tattoos are simply disturbing!

And then there was this one …

Has anyone else been brave enough to Google Twilight tattoos?

which—having not resisted the Harry Potter teaser, I should definitely have resisted!

Anyway, below are some more of the images I previously culled from various sites—including a few Harry Potter quotes.

The Ladies (in the) Library

2011-01-13T14:12:00.014+11:00

This is one of my favourite illustrations to Haywood's La Belle Assemblee (i.e., Ab.16 BA). It is the frontispiece to volume three, which was first published in 1731.

This is the frontispiece to The Ladies Library, Vol. I. Written by a Lady. Published by Sir Richard. Steele, 3rd ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1722). It is a re-cutting of the same frontispiece illustration from the first edition of 1714—seventeen years before it was used in BA.

See any similarities? Other than the fact that they are practically identical?

When I was compiling my (endless) entry for BA it did occur to me to wonder whether the illustrations to Haywood's BA were taken from the French work that it is a (partial) translation of, but I had too many other things to check to find out. I still haven't found out. One day I will buy a copy of Madeleine Angélique Poisson de Gomez’s Les Journées Amusantes (Paris: G. Saugrain, 1722–31) and compare them. Meanwhile, I think I have established where this illustration comes from.

Google Books and the National Library of Malta

2011-01-05T08:58:00.036+11:00

I started 2011 by doing one of my regular internet searches for all things Haywood. This time, by checking Google Books for references to some of the more obscure European translations of Haywood's works. I have to do this regularly, as Google puts fresh material online all the time.

The last two posts contain the first fruits of these labours. I found an etext of Der übernatürliche Philosoph (Berlin, 1742), and decided to create a page of links to works not by Haywood, but which had been attributed to her, so that I would have somewhere to keep it (here). I also found a review of Jemmy et Sophie, ou les Méprises de l’Amour, and decided it deserved translation and a page of its own (here).

I have also located a short review of La Spectatrice (text and translation here) and a long review of Die Zuschauerin (see here for an earlier post of my copy of this book), which I am going to have to get someone else to help me translate (both are beyond my limited abilities). Once done, I will publish these translations here too.

* * * * *

These are finds are both interesting and useful, but the real find was this book, held at the Bodleian library and scanned by them for Google Books: Cesare Vassallo, Catalogo dei libri esistenti nella pubblica biblioteca di Malta (Valletta, Malta: 1843).

Malta is an amazing place. As Wikipedia explains: It is one of the world's smallest and most densely populated countries; it's strategic importance led to a sequence of colonisers including the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Fatimids, Sicilians, Knights of St John, French and the British!

The National Library of Malta was established in 1776; Malta officially became a part of the British Empire in 1814 and achieved its independence in 1964. (For more details about the library's history, see here.) Cesare Vassallo's Catalogo appeared, then, early in the period of British rule.

Vassallo was the librarian of the public library and "an enthusiastic antiquary" "possessing both zeal and knowledge." Having discovered that the National Library of Malta contains two very rare, and one quite rare, Eliza Haywood translations I contacted the library for more information and discovered that Ms Maroma Camilleri, Senior Assistant Librarian, possesses the same enthusiasm, zeal and knowledge as Vassallo.

The library does not have an online computer catalogue—they have limited resources and have wisely been spending their money on fire-proof doors and other safety equipment instead—but Ms Camilleri was able to supply call numbers and other details very quickly indeed. (In fact, as of August 2010, the library has no director and desperately needs funds for the restoration its early books—a situation that is covered in this article.)

Anyway, as the result of finding this 1844 catalogue, and with Ms Camilleri's assistance, I have been able to double the known copies of La Spettatrice (1753), a translation from the French into Italian of the first six books of The Female Spectator; increase from three to four the number of copies known of Memorie d’un Giovane Nobile Sventurato (1745), a translation into Italian of the first volume of Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman; and add a twelfth location for the third French edition of La Spectatrice (1751), the French translation of The Female Spectator.

I have also added another library, and another country to the coverage of my Bibliography, which means that one day—when I am preparing the second edition—I will have ~~an excuse~~ a reason to visit this beautiful library and fascinating country.

* * * * *

There is a lot that I could say about Google Books and online text bases right now. Positive and negative. I have stuck with the positive today. Because the Bodleian holds and Google Books has scanned and posted online Vassallo's 1844 catalogue—a book it never occurred to me to look into and, if it had occurred to me, I wouldn't have been able to look in without visiting Sydney (the only copy in Oz)—I have discovered that the National Library of Malta hold three important Haywood items.

It is not clear how long it will be before the National Library of Malta is able to completely catalogue its collection, and when those electronic catalogue records will become available online. Until they do, this 167 year old book is the only window into the collection for overseas researches like me. This window was not provided by the National Library of Malta, or by a philanthropic organisation, but by that monomaniacal monolith, Google.

Vassallo's Catalogo was dumped onto the internet—I am guessing—without the slightest idea (on the part of either Google or the Bodleian library) that they were producing a defacto online catalogue to the early printed books at the National Library of Malta. And—in all likelihood—the National Library of Malta were unaware that Google/Bodleian library was about to perform this service for them. But I am sure that the queries sent to the library, like those I sent, will have alerted them to this fact pretty quickly.

And, I can't resist a final, if somewhat clichéd reflection on what Cesare Vassallo would have made of this. He clearly intended his guide to publicise the collections of the National Library of Malta, of which he was, rightly, proud. No doubt, he wanted to make scholars (such as those consulting his Catalogo in the Bodleian library at Oxford) aware of the riches of this overlooked collection. Surely he would be pleased then that, after 167 years, this guide is still serving this purpose! How many works of scholarship have a shelf life that long?!

Jemmy et Sophie, 1797

2011-01-03T10:19:00.008+11:00

Haywood's The History of Jenny and Jemmy Jessamy (1753) was translated into French by "L. M***" and published by Chez Maradan in 1797.

A short review of this edition appeared in the Journal typographique et bibliographique on 12 June 1797. I wasn't able to see this review when I was researching my Bibliography, but it is now on Google Books (here) so I thought I would transcribe and translate it. (And if anyone cares to improve on this translation I would be very much obliged!)

Journal typographique et bibliographique no. 32 (24 Prairial an 6 [12 June 1797]), 260–61:

Jemmy et Sophie, ou les Méprises de l’Amour; trad. de l'anglais, par L. M***. Très-jolie fig. (An 6). Prix, 3 fr. et 4 francs par la poste. Paris, Maradan, libraire, rue du Cimetière-André-des-Arcs.

Cette jolie production sort des presses du cit. Crapelet. Nous dirons de cet artiste, que son nom nous suffira pour faire l'éloge de l'exécution typographique, comme l'a si bien dit le Journal de Paris. Nous regrettons de ne pas connoitre l'artiste qui a gravé les caractères. Cependant nous pensons qu'ils ont été fondus par le cit. Lyon, rue St.-Jacques, ou gravés et fondus par le cit. Gando. Nous annoncerons de ce typographe une très-jolie édition des Voyages de Levaillant, dans notre prochain Numéro.

[This pretty production leaves the presses of citizen Crapelet. We will say “this artist,” that this description will be enough to praise the typographical execution, as the Journal de Paris said so well. We regret that we not discover the artist who engraved the characters. However, we think that they were forged by citizen Lyon, St. Jacques Street, or engraved and forged by citizen Gando. We will announce a very-pretty edition of the Voyages of Le Vaillant from this typographer, in our next Number.]

Not-Haywood Texts, Links etc

2011-01-03T08:29:00.007+11:00

This page is where I will put all the links to texts that are NOT by Haywood, but which have been attributed to Haywood over the years. These are the ones that appear in Section C of my Bibliography. For works that are actually by Haywood, see this page.

Facsimile Texts and Downloadable pdfs

Below are links to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of works attributed to Eliza Haywood that are on Google Books, The Internet Archive, etc. This list is by no means complete, but I'll add items as I find them.

Ca.18.2a The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, 2nd ed. (1720). [O copy]

Ca.18.2a The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell, 2nd ed. (1720). [MiU copy]

Ca.18.2c The Supernatural Philosopher [i.e. The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell] (1728).

Ca.18.3 The Supernatural Philosopher [i.e. The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell] trs. as Der übernatürliche Philosoph (Berlin, 1742)

[last updated 3 January 2011]

What You Miss Online: text-bases vs microfilms

2010-12-16T07:38:00.034+11:00

I have been working on an article on An Apology For The Conduct of Mrs Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748). Phillips (aka Con Phillips) does not have a Wikipedia page (shame on Wikipedia) but you will find a few details about her here.

My article is an account of the publication of Phillips's Apology. It was published in parts. Eighteen of them over the course of a few years. I mention this because, one aspect of my research has been trying to uncover newspaper advertisements for each Number. I started, of course, with the Burney Newspaper database.

It took a while to find a few advertisements, but once I was on the right track I refined, varied and repeated my search in a way that has rapidly become familiar to literary scholars. Below is the text of a typical advertisement (from Old England, 9 April 1748):

On Monday next will be published,
(Price One Shilling)
The First Number of

AN APOLOGY for the Conduct of Mrs TERESIA CONSTANTIA PHILLIPS; more particularly that Part of it which relates to her Marriage with an Eminent Dutch Merchant: The Whole authenticated by faithful Copies of his Letters, and of the Settlement which he made upon her to Induce her to suffer (without any real Opposition on her Part) a Sentence to be Pronounced against their Marriage; together with such other Original Papers, filed in the Cause, as are necessary to illustrate that remarkable Story.

Were ye, ye Fair, but cautious whom ye trust,
Did ye but know how seldom Fools are just,
So many of your sex would not in vain.
Of broken Vows, and faithless Men, complain;
Of all the various Wretches Love has made,
How few have been by Men on Sense betray’d?
Rowe’s Fair Penitent.

To be had at her House in Craig’s Court, Charing Cross; where all Booksellers may be supplied, with the usual Allowances; and to prevent Imposition, each Book will be signed with her own Hand.

N.B. Whoever presumes to pirate this, or any of the following Numbers, will be prosecuted with the utmost Rigor of the Law, being duly enter’d at Stationers Hall.

No. II. will be publish’d on Monday the 25th Instant.

It is amazing how few advertisements you find if you search for "Teresia Constantia Phillips" or "Apology for the Conduct"—none in fact. This is because the Burney database search-engine doesn't cope well with caps. So you have to search for words not in caps. Or in italic, that also doesn't work well either. Oh, or words that start with a lower-case s, or contain a medial s (that is, a long-esse, the one that looks like an "f"). Or multi-word searches. Otherwise it is great!

Keeping this in mind, and—as I said—refining, varying and repeating my search, I found sixty-six advertisements using these seven search terms

Mrs Phillips = 26
Teresia = 11
Apology = 11
Phillips's Apology = 7
Fair Penitent = 7
Dutch Merchant = 3
Metzotinto = 1

Of course, I used other terms too, but didn't find anything that had not already been discovered using the above terms. That is, other searches only threw up duplicates. I was pretty happy with what I found, and was able to write the first draft of my article on the basis of these advertisements.

But, having satisfied myself that this was all I was going to find on the Burney database, I then turned to the microfilm series on which the Burney database is founded. It is time-consuming and—frankly—unpleasant work, but by searching for advertisements in just a single newspaper title I found a further fifty-four advertisements. Important advertisements, which added enormously to my article. (Including the advertisements for a Dutch translation of Phillip's Apology!)

Which is the reason for the title to this post. And this warning: if you rely on text-bases like EEBO, ECCO, and Burney, you will almost certainly miss at least half of the material you are looking for. I say this confidently because the microfilm search I conducted could be expanded to other newspapers to discover even more material.

And this is why, tedious as it is, it is still necessary to search the microfilms that text-bases like the Burney Newspaper database are generated from. And it is also why, expensive and seemingly redundant as they are, it is still necessary for genuine research libraries to buy and keep the microfilms that these text-bases are generated from!

The Byronic Heroine

2010-12-15T09:54:00.007+11:00

I finished reading Atara Stein's The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television last night. And, well, I have to say I was very disappointed in the book. So disappointed I went looking for other reviews and—having not found one—wrote my own for Amazon (here and below). I wanted to be able to direct my students to a recent account of some pop-culture Byronic Heroes, but I am going to have to keep searching.

The main problem with this book is probably the inability of essentialist feminism to deal with characters who disrupt gender stereotypes, but the most obvious problem is the fact that Stein is never clear about who is responsible for either the characters and actions or responses she is making observations about.

Stein tends not to talk about authorial or directorial intention, she criticises characters and plots as if they came into being independent of authors, publishers, producers, studios etc and there is no discussion of genre expectations in cinema even, though the book is about genre expectation in literature. Stein also tends to be silent about reader/viewer response, though the essentialist arguments she quotes depend on this.

If a female character uses violence to protect herself, is she necessarily masculinised/de-feminised? If a character is briefly depicted in her underwear, is she necessarily feminised/sexualised/weakened? The critics quoted here believe, yes necessarily, and that the female character briefly depicted in her underwear is thereby shown to be vulnerable: that a (male) viewer cannot help but have a sexual response to this depiction, and that his response re-inscribes the character's position as object/victim of the viewing male.

The possibility is not considered that a female viewer may have a sexual response, a male may not have one, or that such a response from either a male or a female does not necessarily inscribe the character in a position as object/victim, that the fictional female concerned may be indifferent—in her fictional universe—to the response of others, seeks, welcomes or is empowered by the response or is perfectly capable of defending herself from any form of unwanted attention or aggression. In the context, some of these are even more implausible than the arguments that Stein presents, but the fact is that only one possibility is considered.

If we are not talking about the character's fictional universe, then the argument must be articulated that briefly depicting a female in her underwear cannot help but lead to a sexual response in viewing males, and that this response re-inscribes the position of all real women as object/victim. Again, the possibility is not considered that a female cinema-goer may be indifferent to the response of others, seeks, welcomes or is empowered by the response, or is perfectly capable of defending herself from any form of unwanted attention or aggression.

When I read this sort of criticism I find myself wanting to ask the writer: how is a fictional female to protect herself—as a female and in a way that does not inscribe her in a position as either object/victim or masculinised/de-feminised? In fact, how is a powerful fictional female to be depicted at all?

And how can any sort of feminist criticism value the male response (assumed to be sexual, and assumed to be violent and predatory) over the female one? Do a few seconds of (hetro-male) "fan service" negate the overwhelming Grrl-power message of a film? In the case of the Alien franchise, a Grrl-power message that was enthusiastically embraced and has subsequently reappeared many times over. Is the ultimate argument, that the good these film do over-balanced by the evil that they perpetrate?

Stein's answer seems to be yes, the good is over-balanced. Which brings me to Stein's broader argument: that escapist cinema makes film-viewers into drones who are more obedient and accepting of their lot, that escapist cinema drains our collective bile. That the portrayal of characters like Ripley is intended to re-inscribe conventional gender roles and keep women passive/weakened.

The problem is, this argument really only works if you can establish that characters like Ripley are either intended to be, or are perceived to be, unappealing, or that their fate is either intended to be, or are perceived to be, an object lesson in how not to behave. Since neither the intentions of the film-makers (broadly considered) nor the response of the film goers (broadly considered) are considered at all then Stein's argument simply cannot be successful. She does not even articulated her argument this clearly.

* * * * *

My Amazon review:

First up: this book is *full* of typos, outrageous ones, ones that every text-editing program (like Word) would pick up. This suggests that nobody at SIUP was paying any attention when this book went to press … which may explain how this book got published at all in its present form.

I am intensely interested in this topic, so I found the first couple of chapters useful, even though I disagreed with many of the arguments and claims.

However, I was simply bored by the sections on The Crow and Anne Rice’s vampires, and bored to tears by the sections on Neil Gailmon's Dream and Star Trek's Q. The chapters on these characters do not have a clear over-arching argument and there is no over-view of the characters and plot-lines, just an endless series of observations, some of which are contradictory, some of which are implausible or wrong-headed, and many of which are simply repetitive.

The wost section is undoubtedly the one I was most interested in -- the one I bought the book for -- on the Byronic Heroine. Stein wants to mount a feminist argument against the Terminator and Alien films, but seems unsure how to do it, so she simply attacks the film from every direction and quotes -- approvingly -- some of the asinine arguments I have ever read.

The nadir is reached on pages 199 and 200 where Sarah Connor, from the Terminator films, is criticised because she "emulat[s] her culture's icon of heroic behaviour: the violent male outlaw …. It does not occur to her to adopt a creed of nonviolence." (199) [Well, *that* would be a short action film!] And when Ellen Ripley, from the Alien films, returns to her hyper-sleep-bed-thing at the end of one film, we are informed that this brief glimpse of her in her underwear:

[1] re-feminises her;
[2] makes her “a vulnerable sex object”;
[3] and therefore “a potential victim for men”; a potential realised in the mind of one critic
[4] who fantasises “sexual violence can bring the uppity Ripley down” and therefore concludes
[5] that the scene is intended as “a warning to female viewers.”

That’s right: simply show that you have legs and you inscribe yourself as an inevitable rape victim. Apparently this message is so loud and clear that the simple act of showing Ripley’s legs drowns out the you-go-girl message implicit in depicting a woman who has saved herself (and human kind) by single-handedly annihilating a nest of the most terrifying aliens ever imagined.

Oh, and note that these two films are related (thematically?) to Catherine from Wuthering Heights and Eustacia from The Return of the Native. I believe the phrase is “drawing a long bow.”

Whatever merit some of these arguments have—and as a card-carrying feminist I do agree with some of the observations on inscribing gender—it annoys me to see such sloppy thinking, contradictory, implausible or wrong-headed arguments, masquerading as “feminism.”

I will not be recommending this book to my students.

Evidence of Impact, A Decade Later

2010-11-18T15:36:00.005+11:00

Way back in August of 2000 (four years before I finished my PhD!) I contributed to a discussion on the C18-List prompted by an exchange between Ellen Moody and Betty Rizzo about whether Frances Burney ought to be called Fanny Burney today. To me, this is a simple feminist argument. We don't use familiar names for male writers (Billy Shakespeare anyone?), so why should we do so for female writers?

As one contributor observed "Questions on the meaning of Fanny in the 18th c. are central." So I passed a few of the posts onto my cousin James Lambert, a lexicographer with an encyclopedic knowledge of sexual slang. He replied at some length, but those who wanted to believe that Fanny had an obscene meaning in the eighteenth century remained unconvinced. The debate shifted to Fanny Hill (is the name a pun?), and the true believers cited more dubious scholarship.

Eventually, the debate wearied the list and it died out. James and I went away, read the articles mentioned, remained skeptical and—some months later—said so. But the debate was over. Nobody who believed that Fanny was an obscene pun in the eighteenth century was interested in debating the subject online.

Early in the debate, John Dussinger had asked: "Won't some brilliant person on this list write an essay on the use of 'Fanny' in our long period?" This seemed like an excellent idea, so James and I decided that is what we would do. The only problem was, we were both rather busy so … *cough* … it was March 2007 before I started working on my part of the article and March 2008 before the first draft of the article was ready for submission.

We sent it to Studies in Philology who sent it off for refereeing and in October 2010 they graciously accepted the article, agreeing to publish it in their first number of 2011. We have just sent off the final galley edits and, all going well, our article will be printed just over a decade after John posed his challenge.

When I was attempting to answer John's question, I realised that we needed to consult the original songbooks that provide the earliest evidence for the obscene use of the word Fanny (in the early nineteenth century). I was unable to do so because I do not live in London (the songbooks are in the British Library) and they have never been published in full.

So, I suggested to a colleague in musicology that we should propose to Pickering and Chatto a full edition of these bawdy songbooks. Pickering and Chatto were delighted with the idea, the proposal was accepted, work is now underway and this four-volume edited collection will be published in the first half of 2011.

* * * * *

A few months ago I filled in the final report for my ARC grant. I held off on doing this for as long as possible, because the central questions in that report concern "Research Outputs" and "Evidence of Impact." The only "Impact" that the ARC is interested in is the impact of your research on others, and so the "Evidence" and "Outputs" that the ARC are interested in take the form of published books, articles, chapters, reviews and citations of the same etc.

The ARC are not interested in anything that has been researched, written, submitted, or even accepted, only items that have been printed or are being printed now. All of which is well and good in its way, but you are supposed to submit this report on your global impact immediately, on the day your money stops!

When it can take a decade—as here—between the prompt for an article and its publication, and when it can take three years between the submission of an article and it being printed, there seems little chance that an ARC final report, submitted on the day your funding stops, will capture even a fraction of your "Research outputs" and, as for "Evidence of Impact," it could be years again before any of the arguments we have presented gain any traction.

Which is why questions like these seem so stupid. It is also why filling in reports, and answering questions like these, is so disheartening. I am terribly sorry, I only managed to get half a dozen conference papers presented, three articles published, an exhibition and an international conference organised, but according to the citation indexes compiled a day or two after these articles were published: nope, no impact.

This is also why, no doubt, it seems like anyone whose speech is not peppered with "affectless references to DEST points, citation indices, ERA rankings, ARC applications …" is either a failure or a radical who belongs to one of the "secretive cells of idealistic academics" that Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan have written about here.

Haywood Bibliography Note 6

2010-11-17T06:28:00.008+11:00

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood I explain that Ab.59 The Fortunate Foundlings (1744) was translated into French under the title Les Heureux Orphelins (1754) and then was translated back into English under the title The Happy Orphans in 1758. Throughout the nineteenth century, this translation was published under the title Edwin and Lucy; Or, The Happy Orphans.

Since The Happy Orphans is only distantly related to The Fortunate Foundlings I did not list editions of it in the main sequence of my Bibliography. Instead, I listed them in Appendix D (entries Ed.59.12a–Ed.59.16).

Almost all editions are uncommon, so it is not surprising that I have seen only two for sale in the last decade. The one (illustrated here) which I bought is unrecorded and has been added to my revised Bibliography. The one I didn't buy—a copy of Ed.59.12a, mistakenly attributed to Edward Kimber—is still available for £2000 here.

Since my copy of Ed.59.17 is both unique and pretty, I am including a few pictures of it here, as well as adding a corrected entry for Appendix D to my Haywood Bibliography, Addenda and Corrigenda page.

The Faust Tradition

2010-11-13T14:51:00.011+11:00

Study Guides, Essays and Notes

Faust. This site has it all: sections on the Legend of Faust, Books, Music, Theatre, Art, Film, Games …

See also Cummings study guide

Prose Faust Texts, Chapbooks etc. in English

The history of the damnable life, and deserved death of Dr. John Faustus. Newly printed, and in convenient places, impertinent matter amended, according to the true copy, printed at Frankford; and translated into English, by P.R. gent. (London: Printed by C. Brown; for M. Hotham, at the Black Boy on London-bridge, and sold by the booksellers, [ca. 1700]) in Early English Prose Romances, edited by William John Thoms (London: Nattali and Bond, 1858), vol. 1, 151–300. [Wing H2156]

The Second Report of Doctor Iohn Faustus, containing his appearances, and the deedes of Wagner. VVritten by an English gentleman student in VVittenberg an Vniuersity of Germany in Saxony. Published for the delight of all those which desire nouelties by a frend of the same gentleman. (London: Printed by Abell Ieffes, for Cuthbert Burby, and are to be sold at the middle shop at Saint Mildreds Church by the stockes, 1594) in Early English Prose Romances, edited by William John Thoms (London: Nattali and Bond, 1858), vol. 1, 302–414. [STC 10715]

The History of Dr. John Faustus: Shewing how he sold himself to the devil, … Also, strange things done by him, and his servant Mephistopholes. With an account how the devil came for him, and tore him to pieces (Derby: Printed in the year, 1787)

History of DR. FAUSTUS Shewing His wicked Life and horrid Death, and how he sold himself to the devil, to have power for 24 years to do what he pleased, also many strange things done by him with the assistance of MEPHISTOPHELES. With an account how the Devil came for him at the end of 24 years, and tore him to pieces (n.d. [18C?]) in Amusing Prose Chap-Books, Chiefly of Last Century, edited by Robert Hays (London: Hamilton Adams, 1889), 286–98.

Marlowe's Faustus

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, [A1, the 1604 quarto text] edited by Alexander Dyce (London, mid-19C).

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of D. Faustus [A text] ed. Hilary Binda (2010?)

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, [B1, the 1616 quarto text] edited by Alexander Dyce (London, mid-19C).

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus [B text] ed. Hilary Binda (2010?)

Goethe's Faustus

Faust, in the original metres, Translated by Bayard Taylor (pre-1878).

Faust Parts I & II (2003). A complete translation by A. S. Kline, with line numbers, and full stage directions.

Other European Faust texts

Historia vnd Geschicht Doctor Johannis Faustj des Zauberers An edition in German (with a translation into English) by Prof. Harry Haile, University of Illinois, based on the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript (1580s).

Das Volksbuch von Dr. Faust (um 1580)

How much for five used Condoms?

2010-11-12T17:13:00.007+11:00

I will leave it up to you to decide how much emphasis you read into my title, and where you place the emphasis: whether you read it as a loud and incredulous rhetorical question—or a polite enquiry—concerning the price, or whether it is a disgusted response to the fact that it is five used condoms that sold, but the answer is the same: 2000 Euros or A$2750 for five condoms. That is 400 Euros or A$550 each.

On 9 November 2010 the Palais Dorotheum auctioned off the following lot

Lot No. 131: Five c. 1900 air bladder Condoms in original cardboard box with maker’s label. Size (of box!) c. 26 x 6 cm. Estimate EUR 300,- to 500

As I said, the realized price was 2000 Euros. The sale, which appeared under the heading of "Antique Scientific Instruments, Models and Globes" [actually, "historische wissenschaftliche instrumente und globen"], attracted a good deal of attention. (See here and here.) Enough, in fact, for me to hear about it before 9 November. I did consider bidding a fraction about the range, but knew I would be wasting my time. It is a consolation that I was right.

The condoms would have been useful as an example of the longevity of "skins" (condoms made from fish, sheep or pig gut) and of the longevity of the practice of cleaning and reusing them (a common practice in the eighteenth century). As such, it would have made a nice illustration in the book I am planning on this subject. Oh well.

Thankfully—as you can see—the Palais Dorotheum have supplied a very high resolution image. From this and the commentary online it appears that the former owner of these five condoms kept a careful tally of how many times he used each one. And it looks like they were only supposed to be reused ten times! Lovely. (The image below is slightly larger than life-size.)

University, a vocational charnel house?

2010-11-11T08:54:00.005+11:00

Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan have written an amusing piece for The Australian under the title Invasion of Aca-zombies (as in, invasion of the Academic Zombies).

UNIVERSITIES are increasingly populated by the undead: a listless population of academics, managers, administrators and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum … Academic zombie speech is peppered with affectless references to DEST points, citation indices, ERA rankings, ARC applications, esteem factors, FoR codes, AUQA reviews and the like. […]

The most curious aspect of this zombie plague, though, is … the pockets of resistance it fails to quash. A tutorial here, textbook marginalia there, crack squads of indomitable postgrads, secretive cells of idealistic academics and even the odd public intellectual: all scattered signs that intelligent life persists. Occasionally it is necessary, as in Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead, to pass as undead to survive.

Of course, I like to think of myself as belonging to one of the secretive cells of idealistic academics in this vocational charnel house. So, I am probably a zombie and deluded.

300-Year-Old Stash of Erotica Found

2010-10-26T14:58:00.010+11:00

On an auspicious day in April this year The Daily Mail published—with no by-line—a story under the heading 'I pray lovely creature, comply!' 300-year-old stash of erotica found hidden in Lake District manor house.

The Daily Mail is a "middle market tabloid newspaper" according to Wikipedia. It should be remembered that this is "middle" in relation to Fleet Street-norms, so it is about as sophisticated as Melbourne's Waverley Leader and as prurient as FHM.

The story runs as follows:

A secret hoard of lewd pamphlets written to titillate the common man more than 300 years ago have been discovered in a manor house. Known as Chapbooks the bodice-ripping yarns were found hidden in the library of Townend House at Troutbeck in the Lake District. The pamphlets had been shoved behind a collection of straightforward books, presumably to hide them.

Chapbooks - the name derives from 'chapmen' the door-to-door peddlers who sold this type of literature - told racy tales of amorous advances, love and marriage. The pamphlets were printed on cheap paper so thin that hardly any have survived the ravages of time.

Townend House was owned by a landowning farming family, the Brownes, whose literary collection has been passed to the National Trust. Emma Wright, who is the Trust custodian at Townend said:

'The Browne book collection goes back through the centuries and proves that rural people had a strong interest in literature. However, as we have gone slowly through the library we have found hidden away these Chapbooks. They contain rather saucy even rude tales which were found to be rather amusing by their 18th century readers.'

One tale is called The Crafty Chambermaid's Garland and details the story of a young woman who tricks a man into marrying her. Written in 1770 it states: 'The Merchant he softly crept into the room. And on the bedside he sat himself down. Her knees through the counterpane he did embrace. Did Bess in the pillow did hide her sweet face. He stript (sic) of his clothes and leaped into bed saying now lovely creature for thy maidenhead. She strug led (sic) and strove and seemed to be shy. He said divine beauty I pray now comply.'

The National Trust has put some of the steamy pages with their illustrations onto digital photo frames with MP3 recordings also available for visitors. Mrs Wright added:

'The Chapbooks have really caught the imagination. The Brownes were obviously far from straight-laced.'

Since the distribution of erotica in the eighteenth-century is central to my present research, I contacted Emma Wright, the Townend House Custodian. She informs me "that these books were catalogued in 2004" and—showing great restraint—adds

The Daily Mail article is somewhat inaccurate in respect of the "discovery" of the chapbooks—they have not been found hiding behind the other books (although that would make a good story!). They are very much part of the collection and have in several cases been rebound by a family member and are shelved along with everything else in our library.

So, not a "secret hoard"; not "shoved behind a collection of straightforward books"; and not "found" or "discovered"! To this I would add not erotic, but perhaps The Daily Mail staff are made of more "combustible material" than I am!**

If—without this colourful tale—you are still interested in looking over the list of the Browne family chapbooks, you can do so via Copac. Select "National Trust" from the pull-down list next to Library, and then type in "Townend chapbooks" as a Keyword.

If you do this search, as I have, you should then get a list of 49 records, ranging from 1700 to ca. 1820. The crafty chamber-maid's garland is one of the oldest, one of only eight that are dated to before ca. 1800; it is also one of the few that can be described as racy or erotic, along with The London 'prentice; or, The wanton mistress (1795?) and The maid's lamentation (1800?).

As such, this collection is of little use to me as an example of the distribution of erotica in the eighteenth-century. But it is an excellent example of wild exaggeration, hyperbole, unsubstantiated claims, misleading information etc. It is also a good example of why we need to always check our sources!

* * * * *

**The phrase comes from Boswell and Johnson. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769 (17 March 1768) writes:

We seemed hearty and easy. Only I, whose combustible, or rather inflammable, soul is always taking fire, was uneasy at having left Mary, a pretty, lively little girl whom accident had thrown in my way a few days before.

Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787), under 1777, ætat 68 records:

I asked whether Prior's Poems were to be printed entire: Johnson said they were. I mentioned Lord Hailes's censure of Prior, in his Preface to a collection of Sacred Poems, by various hands, published by him at Edinburgh a great many years ago, where he mentions, "those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious authour." Johnson. Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness. If Lord Hailes thinks there is, he must be more combustible than other people." I instanced the tale of "Paulo Purganti and his Wife." Johnson. "Sir, there is nothing there, but that his wife wanted to be kissed, when poor Paulo was out of pocket. No, Sir, Prior is a lady's book. No lady is ashamed to have it standing in her library."

German review of The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood from 1916

2010-10-23T10:52:00.004+11:00

I found the following review when hunting up early references to some of the works Haywood published at The Sign of Fame. My German is not up to translating it, but from what I can read Wilhelm Paterna was suitably impressed with Whicher's The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood; and had nothing to add beyond this fact.

However, just in case anyone is overcome with the desire to translate the review I thought I would do what I could to clean up the OCR, number the paragraphs, and reproduce the text here. Corrections would also be welcome.

The full reference to the review is:

Wilhelm Paterna, [review of George Frisbie Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915)], Beiblatt zur Anglia 27:10 (October 1916): 280–85.

* * * * *

The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, by George Frisbie Wicher. New York, 1915. Columbia University Press.—210 SS.

[¶1] Das buch will nicht einer vergessenen autorin zu dem ihr vorenthaltenen platz verhelfen, sondern nur—aus der überzeugung heraus, daß auch das kleinste glied einer entwicklung von bedeutung ist—kommende bearbeiter der englischen literaturgeschichte mit einem ausführlichen und zuverlässigen bericht über ihr leben und wirken versehen. Dabei wird gleichzeitig, oder vielmehr: nebenbei, die aufmerksamkeit darauf gelenkt, wie sie das werk ihres Zeitgenossen Defoe ergänzt und das schaffen einer Miss Burney und Miss Austen vorbereitet.—

[¶2] Autobiographie war leider unter den wenigen formen der schriftstellerei, die Mrs. Haywood nicht versuchte, und so können wir, da auch frühe berichte über sie fehlen, wenig von ihrem leben sagen. Die spärlichen angaben, die uns die Biographia Dramatica bieten, sind nahezu alles, was wir mit Sicherheit wissen. Immerhin gelingt es dem autor, durch fleißiges forschen und kombinieren verschiedener tatsachen die mitteilungen um eine ganze anzahl von daten zu vermehren, [281] die wenigstens sehr wahrscheinlich sind; ohne daß dabei allerdings ergebnisse von besonderem interesse zutage träten.

[¶3] Bemerkenswert hingegen ist das material. das der verf. auf grund eingehenden Studiums der umfangreichen werke zu- sammenträgt:

[¶4] Die “Short Romances of Passion” stehen durchaus unter dem einfluß der französischen romanzen. Daneben bemerken wir, häufig unausgeglichen, die Wirkung der italienischen “novelle” und der “Exemplary Novels” des Cervantes, seltener orientalische züge, die durch französische vermittlung gegangen sind. Der Vorwurf der kurzen geschieht en ist: abschreckendstes laster neben engelgleicher Unschuld. Die personell sind nichts als ein notwendiges übel—ohne träger der leidenschafteil, die geschildert werden sollen, geht es ja schlechterdings nicht—ohne jegliche Individualität; die frauen: entzückendes nichts, tote Vollkommenheit; die männer: beiden der liebe, aber nicht des krieges. was im gegensatz zur französischen und englischen heldenromanze zu beachten ist. Die szene liegt in der regel angeblich in einem romanischen land. das dem damaligen leser das dorado der leidenschaften war. tatsächlich aber in einer unwirklichen weit der phantasie. Die technik gleicht der schlechter bühnenstücke jener zeit. Wohl begegnen wir einigem geschick im schürzen des knotens. aber die feineren mittel der Verzögerung, täuschung usw. und der lösung der Verwicklung sind noch nicht bekannt. Die handlung ist traditionell: der rücksichtslose leidenschaftliche mann verfolgt das unschuldige weib. Es wird betrogen und stirbt unverzüglich oder erleidet wenigstens den lebendigen tod im kloster. Doch ist zu erwähnen, daß “The British Recluse”, “The Double Marriage” und “The City Jilt” bereits einen realistischen zug zeigen, indem sie auf diesen hoch dramatischen schluß verzichten und die heldin resigniert, von der weit zurückgezogen, ihren lebensabend verbringen lassen. Auch zeigen sich schon spuren des motivierens und analysierens der leidenschaften in “Idalia”, “The Fatal Secret”, “The Mercenary Lover” und besonders in “The Life of Madam de Villesache”.—Bei aller Unwahrheit der leidenschaft, wie sie diese romanzen bieten, war es doch wichtig für die entwicklung der englischen prosaerzählung, daß neben Defoe, bei dem die liebe als treibende kraft keine rolle spielt, eine [282] Zeitgenossin stand, die sie stark betonte und damit den Vorrat an motiven für die nachfolger bedeutungsvoll ergänzte.

[¶5] Die Untersuchung der “Duncan Campbell Pamphlets” weist “The Spy upon the Conjurer” und “The Dumb Projector” als sichere beitrage der Mrs. Haywood nach, während “The Secret Momoirs [sic, for Memoirs]” sehr wahrscheinlich in journalistischer voraussieht des beim tode Campbeils wiedererwachenden interesses von Defoe im voraus begonnen waren, dann aber von unserer autorin vervollständigt und auch wohl überarbeitet wurden. Über Defoes und Bonds teilhaberschaft finden sich gute bemerkungen, docli sind die Untersuchungen nicht umfassend und tiefgehend genug, um Sicherheit und klarheit zu geben. Wahrscheinlich liegt es aber auch garnicht in der absieht des kapitels, die Verfasserschaft der Duncan-Campbell- literatur endgültig festzustellen.

[¶6] Wie die “Short Romances of Passion”, so schuf Mrs. Haywood auch ihre “Secret Histories” und “Scandal Novels” nach französischem Vorbild. Seit mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts wurde der büchermarkt in Frankreich mit einer flut von erzählungen überschwemmt, die nicht mit politischen, religiösen und derartigen motiven, sondern mit liebe und intrigue die gesamte Weltgeschichte neu zu erklären vorgaben. Erreicht wurde diese gattung aber eigentlich nur durch "Mary Stuart", allenfalls auch durch “A Letter from H— G—g Esq.”, eine geschiente, die noch nachträglich für den liebenswürdigen aber unbedeutenden helden von 1745 Propaganda machte. Dafür ging jedoch eine um so größere zahl von echten “Scandal Novels” aus der fleißigen feder hervor. Sie waren durch Vermittlung des “New Atlantis” der Mrs. Manley nach den französischen “romans ä clef” gebildet und verdienen mehr beachtung, als ihnen bisher geschenkt ist. Denn die skandal-geschichten zwangen den dichter—was dem romanzier noch gänzlich fremd war—zur beobachtung und wiedergäbe des natürlichen lebens, wenngleich sie auch, wie parodie und burleske, nicht direkt zur Schöpfung von Charakteren führten.—Erfolgreiche betrachtungen widmet der verf. der Identifizierung der verschiedenen persönlichkeiten. So ist es z. b. interessant zu hören, daß Ochihatau in “Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo”, ein Zerrbild des ministers Walpole ist, während sich die beste geschichte dieser art: “Secret History [283] of the Prescnt intrigues of the Court of Carimania”, das einzige werk, das nach einem größern zusammenhängenden plan geschaffen wurde, eine Verunglimpfung Georgs II und des lustigen lebens darstellt, das er als Prince of Wales geführt.

[¶7] Die Vorliebe der Verleger für werke von der band der Airs. Haywood ließ Pope nicht ruhen, ihnen seinen dank abzustatten, und so finden wir in der “Dunciad”, von aufläge zu aufläge Avechselnd. den jeweiligen sünder am pranger. Doch auch die autorin selbst traf der beißendste spott. Als grund, wahrscheinlich sogar nur als vorwand für die entzündung seines nasses, dienten Pope dabei die “Memoirs of Lilliput”, die zeilen gegen ihn enthielten und der Airs. Haywood zugeschrieben wurden, die aber, wie der verf. zeigt, nach inhalt und stil garnicht von ihr stammen können. Sie entgegnete nichts, wurde aber in den streit verwickelt. Ein neuer angriff war die folge, und hinfort verschwand der name Haywood, einst die beste reklame, vom titelblatt ihrer werke, die, wohl nicht zum wenigsten infolge dieser Schmähungen, einen gemäßigteren, moralisierenden Charakter annahmen.

[¶8] Die werke der reifezeit tragen fast ausschließlich die form von briefen oder periodischen essays und haben didaktischen inhalt, der durch kleine romantische erzählungen gemildert wird. Die briefform war ein erbe aus den zeiten der Gombreville, La Calprenede und Scudery, die handschreiben zu den verschiedensten zwecken einzuschieben liebten. Airs. Haywood jedoch benützt sie ausschließlich als mittel zur Steigerung des lebhaften effektes. Die glänzenden möglichkeiten, die in der fortführung einer geschiente durch hin und wider gewechselte briefe lag, erkannte sie selbst nach Veröffentlichung der Pamela und Clarissa noch nicht, wenngleich hie und da eine Verwicklung schon zufällig durch einige briefe hindurchgeht.—Auf dem gebiet des essays folgte sie Addison, ohne ihn jedoch auch nur entfernt zu erreichen. Und ihre “Conduct Books” gar waren inhaltlich mehr als bescheiden, wenn auch z. b. “A Present for a Servant Maid”, das sicherlich ein handbuch für mögliche Pamelas sein sollte, zahlreiche leser fand.

[¶9] Die letzte periode ist wenig einheitlich, man könnte sie allenfalls als die der “Domestic Novel" bezeichnen. Die dichterin hat sich innerlich von ihren ursprünglichen Vorbildern [284] abgewandt und in leben und literatur reiche erfahrungen ge- sammelt, allein es fehlt ihr das rechte gefäß, sie zu fassen.—An der findlingsliteratur , die infolge der errichtung eines Foundling Hospital in ihrer zeit blühte, beteiligte sie sich mit “Fortunate Foundlings”, einem buch, das zum erstenmal zeigt, daß sie sensationelles nicht nur um seiner selbst willen erzählen kann, sondern gelernt hat, es einzuordnen und für die hauptverwicklung auszunützen. “Life's Progress through the Passioins” zeigt ernstliches bemühen im psychologischen durchdringen der materie und den ehrlichen willen, das leben streng realistisch zu schildern. Und “The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” endlich, enthält die besten Charaktere, die Mrs Haywood schuf, die umfangreichste Verwicklung, und kommt dem wirklichen leben entschieden am nächsten.

[¶10] So können wir am werk dieser vielseitigen Schriftstellerin den Übergang von “Parthenissa” zu “Pamela” auß beste verfolgen.

[¶11] Wir sind dem verf. für die Untersuchung zweifellos zu grolsem dank verpflichtet. Eine ausführliche, zuverlässige arbeit über Mrs. Haywood war ein bedürfnis, wenn man die, infolge der schweren zugänglichkeit der werke stets auf einer auswahl beruhenden, vielfach verschiedenen und somit sicherlich z. t. falschen bilder der Schriftstellerin in den bisherigen darst eilungen sah. Und diese arbeit hat der verf. uns geschenkt. Mit größtem eifer und mit geschick hat er alles nur erreichbare über das leben zusammengetragen. Die umfangreichen werke sind unermüdlich durchgearbeitet und das material ist zu überzeugenden glücklichen resultaten vereinigt. Die darstellung ist durchweg klar und übersichtlich und durch gut gewählte belege und Inhaltsangaben wertvoller gemacht. Die mit großem fleils am Schlüsse des buches aufgestellte liste der werke der Mrs. Haywood ist vielfach vom verf. auf grund eigner nachprüfung oder forschung ergänzt und berichtigt und darf wohl auf Sicherheit und ziemliche Vollständigkeit anspruch machen. Ein zuverlässiger index erhöht die brauchbarkeit der arbeit.—Schade ist nur, daß sich der verf. bescheidet, künftigen darstellern der englischen literaturgeschichte material zu liefern. Seit wir eine so vorbildliche arbeit über den englischen roman haben, wie die “Englische Romankunst des 18. Jahrh.” von Dibelius, sollte [285] man meinen, würde es sich jeder forscher, der einzelarbeit auf diesem gebiete leistet, zur ehre anrechnen, seine Untersuchung diesem werke anzugleichen. Hätte sich Wicher Dibelius zum muster genommen, so würde er sicherlich sein augenmerk noch auf mancherlei gerichtet haben, das ihm so entgangen, würde er zweifellos noch bedeutend mehr an wertvollen ergebnissen zutage gefördert haben. Und wenn man die Untersuchung von diesem gesichtspunkt aus ansieht, merkt man doch mit bedauern, daß manches fehlt.

Hamburg. Wilhelm Paterna

The Dark Hero, Books, Links etc

2010-10-21T06:37:00.005+11:00

This page will be my dumping ground for links and comments as I trawl the net in preparation for my Dark Hero course. A proper web-log = blog!

This page on the The Norton Anthology of English Literature site was my inspiration for the course. Or, at least, it was the one that suggested to me that I might be able to establish a course that focusses on the "Satanic and Byronic Hero": that there were sufficient resources to do it and that it could be justified in academic terms. (Although, I decided it would be best to use the term "Dark Hero" rather than "Satanic Hero": there is no point frightening the horses, is there?) This is how the page begins …

Not until the age of the American and French Revolutions, more than a century after Milton wrote Paradise Lost, did readers begin to sympathize with Satan in the war between Heaven and Hell, admiring him as the archrebel who had taken on no less an antagonist than Omnipotence itself, and even declaring him the true hero of the poem.

* * * * *

This site by Brouke M. Rose-Carpenter for a fifth-year unit (LITR 5535: American Romanticism) at University of Houston-Clear Lake seems like a great starting point.

I like this list of Byronic characteristics:

1. A rebel
2. Does not possess the usual “heroic virtues”
3. Dark Qualities
4. Larger than life
i. Intellectual capacity
ii. Self respect
iii. Hypersensitivity
5. Moody by nature
6. Struggles with integrity
7. Distaste for social institutions and social norms
8. Exiled, outcast, or outlaw
9. Cynical
10. Loner
11. Passionate about a particular issue
12. Emotional
13. Rebels against life itself
14. Arrogant
15. Confident
16. Troubled past
17. Often characterized by some unknown sexual crime
18. Extremely conscious of himself
19. A figure of repulsion, as well as fascination

I also liked the list of Byronic characters she has collected

Cain, Genesis
Odysseus
Romeo, Romeo and Juliet
Satan, Paradise lost
The Flying Dutchman
The Wondering Jew
Rochester, Jane Eyre
Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights
Conrad, The Corsair
Childe Harold
Giaour, The Gaiour
Manfred Astarte,
Ancient Mariner, Rhyme to the Ancient Mariner
George Vavasor, Can you forgive her?
T.J. Swift, Stranger in her Bed

Bruce Wayne, Batman
Gabriel Van Helsing, Van Helsing
Corbin Dallas, The Fifth Element
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean
Professor Snape, Harry Potter’s
Hell boy, Hellboy
William Wallace, Brave heart
John Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Any character, X-men
Shrek, Shrek’s
Ranger, The Stephanie Plum series
Lucivar, Saetan, and Daemon, The Black Jewels Trilogy and Dreams Made Flesh

Better still, the Byronic heroine

Nikita, La femme Nikita
Xena, Xena: The Warrior Princess
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider
Jane Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Surreal, The Black Jewels Trilogy, & Dreams Made Flesh
Domino Harvey, Domino
Le-lo, The Fifth Element

I don't think that Le-lo is a Byronic heroine, and both Lara Croft and Jane Smith seem to be simply action heroes. Still, it is a start.

* * * * *

As for books: it looks like this is the best recent coverage of the Byronic hero-type, although after only six years the focus on Angel and the absence of more recent figures makes the book seem a little dated.

Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television (2004) is a must. Unfortunately, it is not held at Monash (*sigh*) and so I will have to order it … but it looks good on Google books.

* * * * *

Most of the links on this page (The Faust Tradition from Marlowe to Mann) are dead, but I expect most are still somewhere online, so I will try to recreate the live links here soon.

A Chapbook History of Dr. Faustus

2010-10-19T19:54:00.006+11:00

This chapbook History of Dr. Faustus was published in Glasgow in the 1840s. It was published as a part of a series, along with such classics as The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, The History of Jack and The Bean-Stalk,, The History of Beauty and the Beast, History of Jack the Giant Killer, The Story of Blue Beard and about 150 others. As you can see above, this is number 119. If I wasn't paying off two rather pricey Haywood items, I would buy either this large collection, or this smaller one.

The full title is:

History of DR. FAUSTUS Shewing His wicked Life and horrid Death, and how he sold himself to the devil, to have power for 24 years to do what he pleased, also many strange things done by him with the assistance of MEPHISTOPHELES. With an account how the Devil came for him at the end of 24 years, and tore him to pieces.

The full text appears in Amusing Prose Chap-Books, Chiefly of Last Century edited by Robert Hays (London: Hamilton Adams, 1889), 286–98. But I read it in John Ashton, Chap-books of the Eighteenth Century with facsimiles, notes, and introduction (London, Chatto and Windus, 1882), which—in typical fashion—has been scanned by Google Books but is not available online. I have given the first three chapters below.

I bought this little chapbook as a prompt to get me started on my reading for the new course I am preparing on the Dark Hero—not that you need an excuse to buy a chapbook like this. The course will start with Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" and will probably end with Byron's "Cain".

In fact, most of the texts in between simply track a path between these two key texts. I am considering spending more than one week on Faustus. I wanted to read the play as soon as I heard about it, and loved it as soon as I read it, but I also loved the Faustbook and the chapbook version that I have read in Ashton, so I am tempted to include these too. All I have to do is come up with an excuse to include them…

* * * * *

Chapter I. Dr. Faustus’ birth and education, with an account of his falling from the Scriptures.

Dr. John Faustus was born in Germany. His father was a poor labouring man, not able to bring up his son John; but he had a brother in the same country, who was a very rich man, but had never a child, and took a great fancy to his cousin, and he resolved to make a scholar of him; and in order thereunto, put him to the Latin school, where he took his learning extraordinary well. Afterwards he put him to the University to study divinity; but Faustus could in no ways fancy that employment; wherefore he betook himself to the studying of that which his inclination is most for, viz., necromancy and conjuration, and in a little time few or none could outstrip him in the art. He also studied divinity, of which he was made Doctor; but within a short time fell into such deep fancies and cogitations that he resolved to throw the Scriptures from him, and betake himself wholly to the studying of necromancy and conjuration, charms and soothsaying, witchcraft, and the like.

Chapter II. How Dr. Faustus conjured up the Devil, making him appear at his own house.

Faustus, whose mind was to study conjuration, the which he followed night and day, he took the wings of an eagle, and endeavoured to fly over the world, to see and know all the secrets of heaven and earth; so that in a short time he attained power to command the Devil to appear before him when he pleased. One day as Dr. Faustus was walking in a wood near to Wurtemberg, in Germany, he having a friend with him who was desirous to know of the doctor’s art, he desired him to let him see if he could then and there bring Mephistopheles before him; all which the doctor immediately did, and the devil upon the first call made such a noise in the wood as if heaven and earth would have come together; then the devil made such a roaring as if the wood had been full of wild beasts. The doctor made a circle for the devil, the which circle the devil ran round, making a noise as if ten thousand wagons had been running upon paved stones. After this it thundered and lightened, as if the whole world had been on fire. Faustus and his friend, amazed at this noise, and the devil’s long tarrying, thought to leave his circle; whereupon he made him such music, the like was never heard in the world. This so ravished Faustus that he began again to conjure Mephistopheles in the name of the prince of the devils to appear in his own likeness; whereupon in an instant hung over his head a mighty dragon. Faustus calls again after his former manner, after which there was a cry in the wood as if hell had opened, and all the tormented souls had been there. Faustus, in the meanwhile, asked the devil many questions, and commanded him to show many diabolical tricks.

Chapter III, How Mephistopheles came to Dr. Faustus’ house, and what happened between them.

Faustus commanded the spirit to meet him at his house byten of the clock the next day. At the hour appointed he came into his chamber asking Faustus what he would have. Faustus told him it was his will and pleasure to conjure him to be obedient to him in all points of those articles, viz.: —

First, That the spirit should serve him in all things he asked, from that time till his death.

Secondly, Whatsoever he would have, he should bring him.

Thirdly, Whatsoever he desired to know, he should tell him.

The spirit answered him and said he had no such power of himself, until he had acquainted his prince that ruled over him. “For,” said he, “we have rulers over us that send us out, and command us home when they please; and we can act no further than our power is, which we receive from Lucifer, who, you know, for his pride, was thrust out of heaven. But,” saith the spirit, “I am not to tell you any more except you make yourself over to us.”

Whereupon Faustus said, “I will have my request? but yet I will not be damned with you.” Then said the spirit, “You must not, nor shall not have your desire, and yet thou art mine, and all the world cannot save thee out of my hands.” Then said Faustus, “Get thee hence, and I conjure thee that thou come to me at night.” The spirit then vanished. Faustus then began to consider how he might obtain his desire, and not give his soul to the devil.

And while Faustus was in these his devilish cogitations night drew on, and this hellish spirit appeared to Faustus, acquainting him that now he had got orders from his prince to be obedient to him, and to do for him whatsoever he desired, provided he would promise to be his, and withal to acquaint him first what he would have of him? Faustus replied that his desire was to become a spirit, and that Mephistopheles should be always at his command; that whatsoever he called for him, he shall appear invisible to all men, and that he should appear in what shape he pleased, to which the spirit answered that all his desires should be granted if he would sign those articles he should wish or ask for. Whereupon Dr. Faustus withdrew and stabbed his wrist, receiving the blood in a small saucer, which cooled so fast, as if it forewarned him of the hellish act he was going to commit; nevertheless he put it over embers to warm it, and wrote as follows: —

“I, John Faustus, approved doctor of divinity, with my own baud do acknowledge and testify myself to become a servant to Lucifer, Prince of Septentrional and Oriental, and to him I freely and voluntarily give both soul; in consideration for the space of twenty-four years, if I be served in all things which I shall require, or which is reasonable by him to be allowed; at the expiration of which time from the date ensuing, I give to him all power to do with me at his pleasure; to rule to retch and carry me where he pleases body and soul. Hereupon I defy God and Christ, and the hosts of angels and good spirits, all living creatures that bear his shape, or on whom his image is imprinted; and to the better strengthening the validity of this covenant and firm agreement between us, I have writ it with my blood, and subscribe my name to it, calling all the powers and infernal potentates to witness it is my true intent and meaning. JOHN FAUSTUS.”

David Foxon: Magician

2010-10-15T22:16:00.002+11:00

I really shouldn't laugh and throw stones—I am sure my mother wouldn't approve—but this amused me enormously. Barter Books have Foxon's English Verse for sale for £86 (a good price—though it has been listed for at least six months now). Here is the description:

David Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750. A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions. 2 volume set (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); VG: in very good condition with dustwrappers and brown slipcase. Wrappers slightly edgeworn with sm. tear to dustwrapper of vol. II at base of spine. Contents VG. Fascinating book uncovering the secrets of the magician's world. Many illustrations showing how such tricks and illusions are done.

Yes, you read that right: Foxon's English Verse uncovers "the secrets of the magician's world" and shows "how such tricks and illusions are done." Who knew? I'll have to have another look at my copy!

A New Wikipedia Entry on Ned Ward

2010-10-13T14:26:00.007+11:00

At the start of this year the Wikipedia entry on Ned Ward (here) was useless. Which was particularly annoying to me because I wanted to include at least an excerpt of Ward's The London Spy on my eighteenth-century survey course at Monash, and the library resources on Ward were thin (to say the least: they had no edition at all of The London Spy in the general collection).

The entry on Ward was a particularly good example of just how insubstantial the public-domain resources are for students (or scholars) who stray beyond the confines of typical survey-course authors of the period, such as Swift, Johnson, Fielding etc.

And, unlike Aaron Hill's afterpiece The Walking Statue; Or, the Devil in the Wine Cellar (1710)—which I have described elsewhere as "one of those relatively minor eighteenth-century works, by a relatively minor eighteenth-century writer"—The London Spy is constantly being quoted, and is known by every student of the eighteenth-century. Nevertheless, it's author "hardly casts a shadow on the internet."

In order to do something about this, and to give my more experienced and talented students a more useful assessment task than they were accustomed to, I asked them to produce a replacement Wikipedia entry on Ned Ward. Which they did, and did extremely well.

And so today—somewhat belatedly—I uploaded Annie Blachly's entry on Ned Ward. It is a vast improvement on the existing entry. I hope it survives its editorial scrutiny (not all rewrites do), prompts many edits, corrections and additions. Thanks Annie!

[UPDATE 13 November 2010. As of yesterday the "stub tag" was removed from the Wikipedia entry on Ned Ward. It is now a fully fledged, fair dinkum entry. Which means it survived its editorial scrutiny!]

The Era of Gin, Sex and Brutality

2010-09-04T18:30:00.005+10:00

The inimitable James Holledge is responsible for Those Crazy Tom Jones Days: Astonishing Vitality and Depravity in an Era of Gin, Sex and Brutality (London: Horwitz Publications, 1965).

(And my peripatetic cousin, who shares a first name with the said author, is responsible for me having a copy. In fact, he is responsible for me having quite a few Hollege/Horwitz Publications or, rather, quite a few more than I would otherwise have.* This book cost him $2.50; you can buy a copy here for $40.00.)

Since this book is [1] awesome and [2] has the honour of being the first added to my shelves since moving (I have been doing quite a bit weeding) I thought I should do a post on it.

If I had received this book any earlier it certainly would have featured in my collection of pulps on eighteenth-century topics at the Monash Lewd and Scandalous Books exhibition (see my post here)—which would be a third reason to do a post.

A fourth is the subject matter … but do I really need an excuse. Doesn't the shout on this book offer all the justification needed?

What was the world of Tom Jones really like?

It was an age of wit, elegance and brutality, of astonishing wealth and miserable poverty. Francis Chartris was the vilest of seducers and Jonathon Wild was King of Thieves. Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu experimented with smallpox immunisation and was kept prisoner for years in an Italian palace by a sex-mad nobleman.

Those Tom Jones Days recreates the outstanding characters of the age in all their astonishing vitality and depravity.

Don't you want to study the eighteenth-century now?

BTW: I suspect that this shout has been tampered with. I would bet … well, I would bet this book … that it read "Francis Chartris was the Rape Master General and Jonathon Wild was King of Thieves …" (As Wikipedia reports, "The Rape Master General" is the title that was given to Chartris). The epithets would balance better, and it would be in keeping with the breathless—and tasteless—tone of the shout. Perhaps, amazingly, "Rape Master General" was a bridge too far for Horwitz!

* He has a great eye for pulp and he is indirectly responsible for me giving in to the urge to collect it. It is a slippery slope and I caution everyone against it. At some point he gave me one Dennis Wheatley paperback: now have twenty of them …

Not every month of the year

2010-08-16T16:04:00.007+10:00

In my last post I quoted a comment made by Peter Opie in his Accession Diaries

It took me some time before I realised that 'rare books are common.' I probably acquire an item or two which is unique, or almost unique, every month of the year.

Opie may have acquired a unique item every month of the year, but I certainly don't. So today's arrival is the cause for some celebration. It is my seventh unique Haywood item in sixteen years of collecting.

This rather battered and unattractive book is a German translation of twelve (of the 24) books of Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator (1744–46). As you can see from the following part-title, books 1–6 of this translation (Die Zuschauerin) were published in 1747 and Books 7–12 in 1748.

Each of the twelve Books had the imprint "Frankfurt und Leipzig"; through the general title gives the credit to Johann Wilhelm Schmidt in Hanover and Göttingen. Possibly the "Frankfurt und Leipzig" refers to the famous book fairs, at which this book was sold.

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood this translation appeared as Ab.60.14. I use the past tense because, as you can see, the unique copy illustrated here, now in my hands, and soon to go into a box, is dated 1753.

Consequently, the three copies that I located of Ab.60.14 are now listed under Ab.60.14a: First German edition, first issue, and this new arrival is listed under Ab.60.14b: First German edition, second issue. *NEW*

As well as being rather battered and unattractive, this copy is missing the final leaf and, unlike the first issue (as I must now call it), it has no frontispiece and foreword. Whether it ever had them is likely to remain a mystery, at least until I can find another copy.

But I can't really complain about the condition, or the price: in my (very limited) experience, when unique items come your way, they rarely do so in copies on crisp, creamy paper, with wide margins, bound in crimson leather, with gilt edges and decoration: they tend to look exactly like this: like they only just survived, like it was a battle to survive.

In my mind books like this seem like the lone soldiers we see so often in films, the ones who stumble out of the mud and smoke of battle, with clothes torn, hair awry, smeared in muck, bandaged, limping, looking at the corpses on all sides with glassy eyes, only to collapse from exhaustion in front of the camera.

This is the sort of book that makes you feel virtuous for taking it in, for protecting it, rather than proud of it's beauty and value.

And on that rather melodramatic note, it is into the moving box for Die Zuschauerin!

Peter Opie on Book Collecting

2010-08-04T19:37:00.007+10:00

Iona and Peter Opie collected children's books, mostly eighteenth-century books. Peter Opie died in 1982, the Opie collection went to the Bodleian Library in 1988; Iona, seemingly immortal, still maintains their large collection of historic toys and games. In 1989 OUP published a volume of essays, celebrating the collection: Children and their Books.

This books has sat on my shelf undisturbed for five years. When I was packing my children's books today—I am moving, and write this surrounded by 102 large cartons, all but a few of them full of books—I decided to put this aside for a closer look. What particularly caught my attention were two essays: "Selections from the Accession Diaries of Peter Opie" by Clive Hurst and "Collecting Children's Books: Self-Indulgence and Scholarship" by Brian Alderson.

Well, I'd like to see more of the Accession Diaries of Peter Opie! Here's why:

25 May 1965: Twenty years seems a long time when one is looking ahead. It even seems a long period when one is looking at it in a history book. It has not seemed a long time to me while I have been living it. When a historian of collecting comes to look at this period he will remark on how circumstances have changed [but] … The feel of collecting has scarcely altered. When I began collecting chapbooks at 2/6 each, they were expensive trophies I could scarcely afford … Collectors items have, I suspect, always been expensive. Possibly because no collector worthy of the name limits himself merely to items that he can afford.

Damn straight. But, contrarily,

11 June 1980: A collector does not need to live dangerously. The secret of success lies I think more in keeping on and on and on rather than in spending beyond his means. Given that he keeps his eyes open, given that he has taste, judgement, discrimination… and given that he has a third eye which is always fixed on his target, success is simply the natural result of the amount of reading, the amount of thought, and the number of years he is willing to devote to his objective. He needs endurance, plus courage in an emergency. If I had had a little more courage when something splendid was suddenly offered me my collection would now be superb.

Of course, the Opie collection was superb, but he is right in other respects. We might alter the language a little today: success was "simply the natural result of the amount of reading" a collector did only in an era of printed catalogues. Now it is "simply the natural result of the amount of searching" we do on the internet. But, either way, success lies more in "keeping on and on and on" rather than in spending beyond one's means.

On the same date as the first quote above, appear two other interesting observations:

It took me some time before I realised that 'rare books are common.' I probably acquire an item or two which is unique, or almost unique, every month of the year.

but …

It has always seemed to me incredible that one can be an ordinary person, with no official standing, and can go into a shop and come out again having bought something unique.

I have few unique items, but many are genuinely rare, and yet it has also, always seemed incredible to me that such rare works are so easily and so cheaply purchased. I marvel at it daily. The internet is the collector's greatest gift.

(I can't resist an example. Yesterday, my copy of the following work arrived: An Interesting Narrative of the Travels of James Bruce, Esq. into Abyssinia, to Discover the Source of the Nile. Abridged from the Original Work. The Second Edition. By Samuel Shaw, Esq. (London: Printed for the Editor; and Sold by all the Booksellers in Town and Country, 1790).

Now, James Bruce, Esq was an amazing man, a six foot four Scottish traveller who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile. Only yesterday, at an English Department seminar, Dr Paul Tankard (visiting from the University of Otago) gave a vivid account of Bruce, who was twice interviewed by James Boswell.

Anyway, the copy that I bought was in its original marbled boards, uncut. It is a trade binding, so it is not particularly pretty now. The paper spine is gone, the page-edges are dark, there are one or two stains; however, ESTC lists only one copy of this edition (under t223024) and yet it cost me £4.99 on eBay.)

4 February 1965: [Re: institutional collections] … after the original impetus of their founder their collections may tend just to come about, & they cannot know all the purposes to which their collection will be put. The collections of the Institution almost inevitably lag behind those in the dedicated private collection in any special field in discrimination, in detail, in condition, in novelty, & in love.

I think this related to Peter's observation about "keeping on and on and on"; it takes that maniacal glint in the eye to keep developing a collection, as well as the narrow focus on the actual use of a collection. An institution can rarely maintain such a narrow focus, and so they develop haphazardly ("tend just to come about").

The following two quotes go together, though they are slightly contradictory to my mind.

11 May 1968: Each copy of a book that has been standing around for 200 years or so is liable to vary from other copies, even of the same printing, and to have acquired its own characteristics. Its binding may vary from other copies, its condition certainly does; in addition it may carry the label of its original bookseller, surprisingly often it may still have its original price marked in it. It may bear an inscription by its original owner or donor, there may be comments in it written in a contemporary hand; it may be possible to trace its change of ownership over the years … It is always good to be reminded that the history of a book does not end with its being written and being published, but with it being read, and a catalogue of actual copies can show more vividly than can any general bibliography or history, the story of its readership.

22 November 1973: We are most interested in those books & objects which have been the most popular, or are the most ordinary, or are the most typical of their period. We prefer the trivial to the pretentious, the ephemeral to the monumental.

As Brian Alderson says, many of the books collected by the Opies were not just pretty acquisitions, they were "an artifact whose significance could only be realized by placing it alongside as many equivalent works as possible." Some of the significance of these normal, commonplace books might be realized by placing them alongside as many equivalent works as possible, but each is, indeed, unique as an artifact.

18 November 1967: On the flimsy blue-paper covers of these periodicals, or on tipped in pages which the binder removes before binding, were contemporary advertisements of many of the books I have in this room [i.e., 18C children's books]

This passage appears in a section where Peter Opies describes a large collection of eighteenth-century magazines he acquired in their original wrappers. I have recently bought just four issues of The Microcosm of 1787 [ESTC: p2566]—the only eighteenth-century magazines I have ever seen in original wrappers. These I would like to see "alongside as many equivalent works as possible" precisely for the reason mentioned, to see what sort of information an original reader got to see, which is missing from the bound runs, and the digitised versions that are based on them.

5 November 1970: … had I done so [visited a local bookshop] I know I would now possess that book, the earliest edn of the fairy tales in this country, and, in the mysterious way that ownership has, my voice would have had that much more authority.

This amused me enormously. Ah, the authority that book ownership gives one … in our dreams.

More on Modern Characters (1753)

2010-07-18T12:37:00.007+10:00

In 2004, I rejected the attribution of Modern Characters (1753) to Eliza Haywood. I still do reject the attribution, but thanks to Google Books and the Internet Archive—once again—new information has come to light.

In my Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, under Ca.32 I said that "This novel is attributed to Haywood on the authority of a note in a Pickering & Chatto catalogue of 1934" which, in turn, credited the attribution to the writer and book collector James Crossley (1800–83).

The Pickering & Chatto catalogue of 1934 reads:

James Crossley, author and antiquarian, and a celebrated authority on old books, said that this was one of the scarcest and least known of the works of Mrs. Eliza Haywood. It has never been reprinted. It is not included amongst the list of her works given by Mr. G. F. Whicher in "The Life and Romances of Mrs. Haywood."

Since I was unable to find an earlier record of the attribution I suggested that this 1934 entry could have been "the first time the claim had been made in print"; certainly it was the authority for Andrew Block’s attribution of 1939, which has since been widely repeated. It turns out I was wrong, though I was on the right track. I said:

Crossley may have been indebted for the attribution to the misinterpretation of a note in the John Thomas Hope copy of Ab.60.7 The Female Spectator, which attributes authorship to Haywood and cites advertisements for it in ‘Modern Characters, 1753., vol. ii’.

Thanks to Google Books I can now see that the attribution has been in print since 1865, but I was right about the source being John Thomas Hope (d. 1854) of Netley Hall, Shrewsbury.

What I have found (here) is an entry in a Catalogue of a Collection of Early Newspapers and Essayists, Formed by the Late John Thomas Hope, Esq., and Presented to the Bodleian Library by the late Frederick William Hope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865), 80 (no. 290):

290. Modern Characters; Illustrated by Histories in Real Life, and address’d to the Polite World. 1753; 12mo.
Apparently by the contributors to the Female Spectator.

And "the contributors to the Female Spectator" are identified elsewhere (p. 72, no. 255) as being "By Mrs. Eliza Haywood."

* * * * *

Another happy discovery on Google Books and the Internet Archive concerns the fate of James Crossley's library. This is one of the avenues that I pursued in order to discover more about this attribution. In 2004, I stated in a footnote:

P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, who dedicate a chapter to Crossley, mention the sale of his library in July 1884 and June 1885. The writer has not been able to determine whether this title was in Crossley’s library and whether his attribution of it to Haywood is recorded in the catalogue of his library or in his own copy of the books. Furbank and Owens (1988), pp.75–82.

I was not "able to determine whether this title was in Crossley’s library" because nobody in Australia had a copy of either of the sale catalogues of his library (Manchester, 12-19 May 1884; London, 11-20 June 1885) and it was a big ask—on top of all the other requests I was pestering librarians with—to go through an auction catalogue looking for this sort of information for me. After all, many auction catalogues are not arranged in a way that makes it easy to find a particular title. And so, even if I had asked, I could never be really sure that whoever I asked didn't miss the information I was after.

So, I put this search on my list of "things to do" next time I was overseas and wrote the footnote I have just quoted.

You might have guessed by now that Crossley’s library catalogue is now on Google Books, which means I have been able to search it myself, and word-search it with a higher-confidence than I would have ever had if I had quickly visually scanning the whole catalogue.

If this is what you've guessed you are both right and wrong. Yes, the catalogue(s) are on Google Books, there are six or seven copies of each of them in fact, but due to the utterly idiotic and irrational restrictions that Google place on the texts they has scanned—out of fear of infringing copyright—not one of these 1884 or 1885 catalogues are available to be viewed in Australia!

(Insert rant about Google being incapable of—or uninterested in—discovering the period that copyright covers in Australia, or Europe or anywhere else—other than the US—for that matter.)

As I might have mentioned before, I have become fairly adept at the use of free proxy servers to confuse Google into thinking that I am in the States (rather than in that mystery-world, Australia) and so in October 2009 I was able to view these catalogues and search for Eliza Haywood and Modern Characters.

What I discovered was exactly what I was looking for, hidden in a lot of twenty-three volumes of the second London sale of Crossley's library. Sotheby Wilkinson and Hodge … Catalogue of the Second Portion of the Library of Rare Books and Important Manuscripts of the Late James Crossley Esq. F.S.A. … (London: 11-20 June 1885), 154 (lot no. 1583):

1583 … —Haywood (Mrs.) Modern Characters: Illustrated by Histories in Real Life, 2 vol. 1583—

What I also discovered, however, was that Crossley also had (p. 126, lots 1290, 1291), a mixed set of Secret Histories, Novels and Poems (1725–42), The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727), and A Spy on the Conjurer (1724).

Here is the evidence I was seeking, that Crossley had, in fact, attributed Modern Characters to Haywood, and that this attribution was published in the catalogue of his library in 1885. This 1885 catalogue pre-dates the 1934 Pickering & Chatto catalogue that I claimed was "the first time the [attribution] had been made in print." But, as we now know, it actually post-dates the John Thomas Hope Catalogue of 1865. Oh well. At least we know now.

* * * * *

When I went looking for the London and Manchester catalogues this morning I discovered that it is now no longer possible to view almost all of the Crossley catalogues on Google Books, even using a proxy server—even though this was possible as recently as last October. It seems that Google Books have actually increased their levels of paranoia and fear about copyright litigation.

As a consequence, it took me a very long time to discover—that is, after a very long and frustrating search I discovered—that the Manchester catalogue is now available via the Internet Archive (here; where it can be downloaded in pdf) and that there is only one London catalogue that can now be viewed on Google Books (here; thanks to bypasstheweb.com I was able to view and download this catalogue).

One final word on free proxy servers, which every antipodean scholar should be familiar with. A proxy server "acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers." Servers (i.e. Google) are pretty quick to get wise to the fact that another server (bypasstheweb.com) is acting as a proxy, and so proxy servers like bypasstheweb.com tend to get blocked pretty quickly.

This is why I cannot recommend a single proxy server. Instead, try here, which keeps an updated list of proxy servers in different countries. You might have to try a few before you find one that works (i.e., that allows you to view the page).

On The Book Show with Caroline Breashears

2010-07-13T15:15:00.005+10:00

Caroline Breashears (right) and I were interviewed this morning by Ramona Koval for the ABC Bookshow (you can download the show here). The interview was a lot of fun: Ramona was very gentle with us, Sarah L'Estrange (the Producer of the show) had everything organised in advance, and it was great to finally get to meet Caroline.

I should have met Caroline this time last year at the BSANZ conference in Brisbane, but I was stuck in Melbourne with an attack of catarrh and so my paper on "The Lost Erotica of James West" was delivered by Prof. Pat Buckridge instead. Those—like me—who missed Caroline's paper, on "Paratextual Strategies in Con Phillip's Apology" at the Brisbane conference should soon be able to read it in Script & Print.

I hope that the interview encourages people who heard the show, and who are interested in the subject of Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books, to come along to at least one of the two free public lectures (details below) which we will be running as a part of the 2010 BSANZ conference at The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at The State Library of Victoria.

Professor Jenny Hocking, Angela Wren’s Lost Watch: Power Without Glory, Criminal Libel and Hidden Histories [4:00–5:30PM, Thursday 15 July 2010]

Kevin Patrick, A Design for Depravity: Horror Comics and the Challenge of Censorship in Australia, 1950–1986 [7:00–8:30PM, Friday 16 July 2010]

2010 BSANZ/CftB Conference in the News

2010-07-11T11:49:00.006+10:00

Jane Sullivan's lead article "Censorship and Sensibility" appeared in Saturday's A2 section of The Age. It was certainly an eye-catching cover story, in which "Jane Sullivan probes the sometimes secret history of book banning in Australia." For those who missed it, Fairfax have the text here and Exit International (!) have it here.

Mentioned in the article is the Monash Rare Books exhibition, the BSANZ/CftB conference, and the public keynote papers by Professor Jenny Hocking ("Angela Wren’s Lost Watch: Power Without Glory, Criminal Libel and Hidden Histories") and Kevin Patrick ("A Design for Depravity: Horror Comics and the Challenge of Censorship in Australia, 1950-1986").

* * * * *

The only mention of non-Australian material in the article is a side-bar snippet on the Essay on Woman:

A notorious case in 18th century England. John Wilkes's pornographic parody of Pope's Essay on Man was written only for his rakish mates in the Hellfire Club and a tiny private edition was printed off a press in his own house.

His enemies in Parliament bribed the printers to give them a page and he was hauled up before his peers. He fled for his life to France, and in his absence was found guilty of obscene and seditious libel and declared an outlaw.

No original version of the poem survives and even copies are very rare, says Dr Patrick Spedding, associate director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University.

Indeed. The J. C. Hotten 1871 (private press) edition in the Monash Rare Books exhibition—the only copy in Australia—was probably the best and the most accurate edition of An Essay on Woman between 1763 and 2001 when Arthur H. Cash published his Reconstruction and Historical Essay on the poem.

The Dark Hero: Demonic, Deranged and Cursed

2010-07-11T09:37:00.010+10:00

On Thursday I was told that my new unit, The Dark Hero: Demonic, Deranged and Cursed, has been approved to run next year at Monash. It has a new Arts-faculty-wide unit code: ATS2914/ATS3914.

I have wanted to run a course like this for a very long time. One of my favourite honours courses at the University of Tasmania was The Byronic Hero, but the particular type of Byronic-Hero stories that have always attracted my attention are the ones with a supernatural element: Marlow's Faustus, Milton's Satan, Beckford's Vathek, Byron's Cain.

When I was a teenager I lived on a constant diet of fantasy and horror stories, books on witchcraft and the occult, and Hammer Horror films, so I ended up reading Stoker's Dracula and Goethe's Faust as soon as I had enough of my own money to buy them.

From memory, both were second-hand copies from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult series, which were pretty common, and cheap, in op-shops, garage sales and book exchanges at the time.

I had quite a few "Library of the Occult" volumes at one stage, before I went to university and decided I was far too mature for that sort of thing. And, since I always needed more book-money, I decided to sell the lot. I don't remember what I spent the money on, but it is a decision I soon, and have long, regretted!

I recently started buying replacement copies of some of the paperbacks that I sold then, but the books are a lot harder to find and a lot more expensive now. (Which reminds me of that saying "no man is rich enough to buy back his past.") The images below are taken from one such recent—nostalgic—purchase; appropriate, yes?

* * * * *

The type of "Dark Hero" that my new course focusses on is everywhere in modern fiction, film and TV: David Boreanaz as Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel (1999–2004), Johnny Depp as Dean Corso (The Ninth Gate (1999), the whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), Heath Ledger as The Dark Knight (2008) and Ian Somerhalder as Damon Salvatore (The Vampire Diaries (2010), but you could include almost every supernatural romance and romantic vampire hero in this list.

But the focus of my unit is on the ur-texts, the Dark Heroes of the Early Modern, Modern and Romantic periods. The synopsis runs as follows:

The unit is designed to introduce students to the development of the Dark or Satanic Hero in a range of major English texts selected to illustrate the tremendous impact and popularity of this powerful figure in the Romantic Period. Writers such as Marlow, Milton, Beckford, Lewis and Byron created defiant heroes who embody radical individualism, self-sufficiency and ambition, but who are isolated, gloomy and dissatisfied by their revolt against God, government and society. Special attention will be given to the relationship between the Dark and Byronic Heroes in the nineteenth century and the survival and transformation of this figure in the vampires and villains of contemporary culture.

I haven't decided on the final text list yet. There are a few I haven't read that I am considering, like Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or The Moor (1806) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); there is also a lot of poetry to choose from, apart from Byron's “Manfred” (1816–17) and “Cain” (1822), like Bürger’s “Lenore” (1773); Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth” (1797); Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Christabel” (1797–1800), and Keats' “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819). Narrowing down the list will be a real challenge. But fun. Lots of fun.

Lewd and Scandalous Books Exhibition II

2010-07-03T13:55:00.008+10:00

The exhibition was being set up on friday, so I dropped in to take a look (and a few photos). I have added a few comments to each picture.

[This is the focal- and starting-point of the exhibition, the satirical engraving "The Court Gossops" which depicts a library of erotica. The engraving contains an ale glass identical to the one sitting in front of the frame (see here).]

[The exhibition is organised—largely—chronologically, so on this side we have Classical and European erotica.]

[One of the gorgeous illustrated editions of Ovid.]

[One of two editions of Nicolas Chorier's Satyra Sodatica (ca. 1660), the foundational work of European erotic literature.]

[This is edition of Diderot's Bijoux indiscrets has had the passage in (very poor) English translated into French by its original owner]

[This is on the other side of the cabinet: Restoration satires, focussing on the master Rochester (that is his portrait at the back). The edition of Rochester at the front includes a great illustration to Butler's "Dildoides."]

[As well as a number of 18C editions of Merryland, Monash has this private press reprint from the late 19C and the promotional leaflet for this edition! Just the sort of thing to warm the heart of a bibliographer.]

[Here are three of the large anatomical atlases in the exhibition. In the 18C—as well as the 19C and 20C—the anatomical accuracy, size and beauty of these engravings have resulted in them being treasured and used for all the "wrong" reasons. In Merryland Stretser calls them "bawdy prints" and jokingly refers his reader to them if they want a "Map of Merryland."]

[The two volumes at the top of this photo are extra-illustrated accounts of Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, who famously went to a masquerade ball in the character of Iphigenia, a costume that simply required her to take most of her clothes off. Such was her beauty and social standing that engravings of her "in" costume sold like hot-cakes.]

[This is the final case, which brings us back to lady Vane, the subject of "The Court Gossops."]

[UPDATE 13 July 2010: the exhibition has now gone live; you will find a blurb about the exhibition, a "virtual exhibition" (full of photos) and you can download the catalogue here]

That Celebrated Novel, Love in Excess

2010-07-03T06:49:00.007+10:00

Having finally got myself a decent copy of Haywood's first work—Love in Excess—I had another look a my entry for this novel in my Bibliography. Looking at what I had written concerning the book's popularity, likely print run, the location of surviving copies, etc, I was once-again struck by how few copies survive today of this once-popular work. (A total of about twenty sets and odd parts survive out of perhaps six thousand copies.) I started wondering how quickly Love in Excess became a rare book.

[Ab.1.4a Love in Excess (1722)]

So I did a Google search, and then an ECCO search, for references to copies of Love in Excess that had been sold in the eighteenth century and found quite a respectable number of copies turning up before 1800, suggesting that it may have been in the nineteenth century that most copies of this book disappeared.

* * * * *

Of the thirty-eight catalogues that appear on ECCO a few had particularly interesting entries. In A Catalogue of the Library of the Rev. John Pitts … (20 January 1794), 290, for instance, the following entry appears:

9373 Mrs. Haywood's Love in Excess, Morocco, gilt leaves, and ruled with red lines, 5s — — — 1722

(This is Ab. 1.4a.) A very similar entry appears in A Catalogue of an Extensive and Valuable Collection of Books; Containing Many Recent Purchases of Rare and Valuable articles … (12 January 1795), 287:

9106 Mrs. Haywood's Love in Excess, Morocco, gilt leaves, and ruled, 5s — — — 1722

Both catalogues are by the same booksellers (Benjamin and John White) and so it seems that, although the Rev. John Pitts appears to have valued Haywood's Love in Excess very highly indeed—going to the expense to have such an elaborate, beautiful and costly binding, put on a copy of the "Fourth Edition" of the novel—Messrs. White nevertheless struggled to find anyone who shared his enthusiasm in the 1790s.

A much earlier catalogue suggests why, and possibly when, the Rev. Pitts thought so highly of the novel. In A Catalogue of the Library of the Ingenious Mr. Delpfuch (1738), 17, Olive Payne gave the following description:

467 Secret Histories Novels and Poems, with that Celebrated Novel, Love in Excess, written by the Ingenious Mrs. Haywood, 4 Vol. compleat, gilt, &c. 10s 6d—— 1732

As you can see, I do like that phrase: "that Celebrated Novel." One final, notable, catalogue entry appears in A Catalogue of Books the Library of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Sheridan (1739), 34,

729 Love in Excess, or the fatal Enquiry Dublin 1724

This is my Ab.1.6, a very rare volume. It did not—and still does not—appear on ESTC, though I found a copy at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

The remainder of the catalogues are interesting primarily for their titles, which may or may not reflect the actual owners of the copies of Love in Excess listed, since it was as common to "salt" catalogues in the eighteenth century as it was in the twentieth. But even if the named collectors were not the original owners of these books, it does suggest that Love in Excess could pass in such collections.

Here are five of the first ten examples: Bibliotheca Antiquaria & Politica: Being a Catalogue of the Library of a Very Great Statesman Deceased (1723), A Catalogue of the Libraries of Edward Marshall Esq; And of a Very Eminent Prelate Lately Deceased (1724), Catalogus librorum in omni genere literaturæ præstantium: Being a Catalogue of the Library of the Late Learned Samuel Gibbes Esq. (1726); A Catalogue of the Libraries of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Brathwaite, D. D. Late Warden of Winchester-College, and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. And His Late Nephew, Tho. Brathwaite, Surgeon and Anatomist (1731), A Catalogue of the Library of Sir John Darnall, Knight, Serjeant at Law, Late Judge of the Marshalsea-Court, Deceased (1736) etc.

Here we have a "Very Great Statesman," a "Very Eminent Prelate," "the Reverend and Learned … Vice-Chancellor of Oxford," a "Learned" esquire, a "Surgeon and Anatomist" and a "Serjeant at Law." Not exactly the swooning, light-headed maids that have been popularly supposed to be the readers of novels concerning love, especially in excess.

Lewd and Scandalous Books Exhibition

2010-06-30T14:57:00.006+10:00

During the break at Monash University, between first and second semester, I have been putting together an exhibition under the title "Lewd and Scandalous Books." It is a huge amount of work curating an exhibition, much more than I expected, and it wouldn't have been possible if it were not for the tireless effort, patience etc of Stephen Herrin who deserves a title much more grand than "Rare Books Assistant Librarian." ("The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand's Silver Jubilee Prize winner" is another of his handles. Not very snappy, but eminently respectible. See here.)

So, what have I done with Stephen's help? I have had to select hundreds of texts, texts that both develop the exhibition theme and also look good; group them and arrange them in a sequence that fits the available display cases, and makes the most of the size and visibility of each cases while maintaining that sequence; then edit the book descriptions and write the gnomic catalogue text (for hard copy and online catalogues, which use different text) and an Introduction; I have also written a few promotional spiels for the exhibition (see one below) and now I must prepare a short speech for the launch. (I have also had to part with a number of items that I would rather have kept, so that they could appear in the exhibition, on the catalogue and posters etc.) The invitations have now started circulating and the hard-copy catalogue will be printed next week. It is all, almost, done.

* * * * *

The exhibition launch will be the opening event for the 2010 BSANZ Conference in Melbourne, To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books. (See my blog entry here.) I first proposed the exhibition theme (hurriedly, and on the phone) to Rare Books Librarian Richard Overell when I was putting together my ARC proposal in late 2005 (for 2006). He quickly agreed.

What I had in mind then, and what has now—amazingly—come to pass, is that I organise a BSANZ conference on the theme of my ARC research ("The Dissemination and Control of Clandestine Writing in England 1695–1774") and a matching exhibition of material at Monash (to be launched at the event) as a way of publicising my research and getting feedback on it. (Since I am given to grand planning, I also considered the possibility of encouraging Pam Pryde at the Baillieu Library, Melbourne University, and Des Cowley at the State Library to undertake similarly themed exhibitions.) Those familiar with ARC research fellowship applications will recognise that this sort of thing goes under "E6: Communication of Results."

Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful with my 2005 application, but I tweaked and repeated it after another year of teaching—including the proposal for a conference and an exhibition—and was successful. From 2007–9, while I conducted research on eighteenth-century erotica I tried to make sure that the conference and exhibition(s) that I had proposed would actually occur. In 2007, when I suggested to Pam a complementary exhibition on banned books in Australia for the 2010 conference, she thought it was a long way away, but a great idea (Three years later Melbourne University has a terrific exhibition on this subject. See here). So, despite a few hiccups, and after much sweet-talking (and the occasional application of a rhetorical mallet), almost all my ducks have lined up: ARC, Conference, Monash and Baillieu Library exhibitions. Nice.

The missing duck in this row is my own paper on eighteenth-century erotica that I intended to deliver at the Melbourne conference. The reason for this omission is the realisation—which dawned on me mid-2009—that there is no way on earth I could spend my first year writing and teaching full time, help organise an international conference, curate an exhibition and retain my sanity. So I dropped my paper. I will have ample opportunities to speak on my subject afterward and I can sit back and listen at the conference itself. The papers by Assoc. Prof. Caroline Breashears, Nathan Garvey and Aleksondra Hultquist (among many others) should be a real treat.

And, on the subject of our international conference, this I have only helped to organise. I may have chosen the theme, the artwork, designed the poster and got things moving with the BSANZ and the exhibitions—so some may mistakenly believe that I did a lot more—but the heavy organisational lifting in 2010 has been done by Simone Murray. I knew the theme would be popular, and the response to the first poster was great, but it is largely as the result of Simone's work that the conference is on track to be the largest and best publicised BSANZ conference for many years.

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Lewd and Scandalous Books

Although the Rare Books Collection at Monash University does not specialise in the collection of erotica, it is a testament to the breadth and quality of the collection that Dr Patrick Spedding has been able to put together an exhibition that so fully illuminates the erotic book trade. The exhibition focusses on "Lewd and Scandalous Books" from the eighteenth century, and the reprints of these works—many banned for hundreds of years—throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

With the exception of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, many of the books Spedding has chosen are likely to be unfamiliar to visitors. And, although many of the topics, tropes and themes are familiar—the sex-scandals and vice of the rich and famous—these works are also likely to have lost some of their sting in a world where the public figures are no longer known and when three or four keystrokes can unleash a flood of pornographic images. It is almost inevitable, then, that many of the books exhibited will seem a little tame and restrained, even quaint and cute, to our eyes.

But this exhibition contains rare literary and visual material that has been restricted and suppressed and which circulated for more than two centuries only in tiny numbers in privately printed and clandestine editions. And, liberal as we undoubtedly are today, much of it still has the power shock. Even the most worldly among us would hesitate to quote the purple passages of Catullus, Rochester or Wilkes in public and nobody would place an unexpurgated edition of the works of these authors on the shelves of a high-school library.

The Exhibition launch 14 July 2010, 5PM

Drinks and nibbles provided

Speakers:
• Welcome to the Conference by Prof. Lynette Russell, Monash University Acting Dean of Arts
• Welcome to the University Library by Cathrine Harboe-Ree, Monash University Librarian
• Exhibition opening by Dr Patrick Spedding, Assoc. Director, Centre for the Book, Monash University

Rare Books Collection at Monash University (here)
BSANZ Conference website (here)

[UPDATE 16 July 2010: the exhibition has now gone live; you will find a blurb about the exhibition, a "virtual exhibition" (full of photos) and you can download the catalogue here]

Eliza Haywood at Primston(?)

2010-06-13T15:02:00.008+10:00

I have written before about the popularity and social reach of Eliza Haywood's work, and about the use of provenance research in uncovering details concerning her readers and the availability of her works. Of course, this all depends on our ability to read an inscription and to make sense of it. To identify people and places, which is not always easy.

Here is a case in point: a four volume set of Ab.16.17 La Belle Assemblée, 5th ed. (1743) in a late eighteenth-century half-vellum binding. The covers are worn, particularly the paper-covered parts of the boards, the title-lables have been lost, but the lovely gilt decoration to the spine is still visible, as you can see.

Internally, each volume is foxed and worn. The original engraved frontispieces have been trimmed to the edge of the plate and then mounted on clean pages and bound in, suggesting that the set was not exactly pretty when bound in the late eighteenth-century.

But, when this binding was executed, each volume was given an inscription: the same inscription in each volume. These inscriptions are clearest in volumes 2 and 3.

My reading of this inscription is

Steward's Room
at
Primston

I am not really sure about the "m" in Primston, and I can't find any example of Primston as a place name (though, it could also be the name of a house or estate). There are three ascenders between the "i" and the "s" but the third looks a little different from the first two, so it could be "nc": that is "Princston."

In fact, I pretty-well convinced myself it was Princeton after I discovered that Princeton's University Steward in the late eighteenth century was quite a likely candidate for keeping a small collection of books for students. As you can see here

The ostensible task of the Steward was to maintain the college dining hall but other duties included collecting bills, tuition, fees, and room and pew rents. The Steward also sold textbooks, cleaned chimneys, guarded the belfry and bell-rope, hired and fired servants and purchased college furniture. Originally, the Steward's quarters were in the basement of Nassau Hall, along with the kitchen and dining rooms, known collectively as the refectory.

When I raised this possibility with Stephen Ferguson, Curator of Rare Books at Princeton University Library, he was skeptical. As he pointed out in an email

The town was always understood to be one of a series [of towns] partly along the King’s Highway, with King’s Town to the north (Kingston) of “Prince’s town” and “Queen’s Town” a bit to the west of “Prince’s Town.”

Also, local self-nomenclature at the time often referred to the college as “Nassau Hall” or “Princeton College.” It was not usual practice to refer to use the town’s name as co-extensive with the college. That usual came in the mid to later part of the 19th century, I think.

If "Primston" isn't Princeton, the only remaining avenue of research is via the vendor. The vendor certainly was helpful and so I now know that the set was purchased at the auction house D.M. Nesbits in Southsea, Portsmouth. Whether the trail ends there remains to be seen …