December 22, 2006
Yes, yes, I'm marking (sheesh!)
but I have also been Wiki-ing. For the greater good, don't you know. And, it is helpful to me: it gets me ferreting around where I would not be otherwise.
Here are some excellent resources I have stumbled on in the past few weeks:
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
British Fiction, 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception
British Poetry 1780-1910: a Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions, The Modern English Collection, and more, at the Electronic Text Centre (some items restricted).
British Women's Novels: A Reading List, 1775-1818
British Women Playwrights around 1800: etexts and articles about little-studied women dramatists
Meta:
Meta-meta:
December 17, 2006
Carnivalesque #22
On the table
Natalie Bennett writes about the Cooke sisters, learned women of the Renaissance, and reviews CJ Samson's Sovereign, the third Master Shardlake detective novel set in the age of Henry VIII.
Alan Baumler presents fascinating material in Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty.
Confused about tipping? Raminagrobis's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves may not help you work out the correct percentage, but it does offer some interesting etymologies.
Really stretching the limits of the "early modern": Mary Mark Ockerbloom alerts us to Diplomatic Difficulties, a new selection of texts at A Celebration of Women Writers which focuses on "women who were first-hand observers or direct participants in the diplomatic process."
Conrad H. Roth translates and comments on a poem by Ausonius about an adulterous woman who poisons her husband but then worries that the poison was not strong enough.
Mark A. Rayner presents The Lost PowerPoint Slides (Pope Leo X Edition) at the skwib.
Across the table
T. Bridges justifies a madman, specifically, William Dowsing, at The Conventicle.
Gavin Robinson discusses shock tactics during the English Civil War at Investigations of a Dog, and explodes some myths about early-modern cavalry charges.
Abu Sahajj suggests that the work of modern American intellectuals "reflects a greater self-absorption than that of 18th century imperialist scholars" in An Occidental-Muslim's Criticism of Empires and Orthodoxies.
On periodization: Longer Than I Don't Remember: Idiosyncratic Periodization for Fun and Profit by Scott Eric Kaufman (host of the most recent History Carnival).
The Long Eighteenth just finished their second collaborative reading, of The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson by Blanford Parker (the first was of Michael McKeon's The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge).
At the table
After several weeks of posts on foie gras, Carolyn Smith-Kizer posts a recipe for Goose Pye at 18thC Cuisine.
And, given the season, recipes for Marchpane.
Books, art, and book art
Jem Webster goes museum hopping and offers Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Four Figures on a Step (ca. 1655-60) for the reader's perusal.
Sharon points toward Joe Miller's Jests: or, The Wits Vade-Mecum (1739) at staggernation (also home of John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads (1888)).
Mister Aitch offers selections from A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title Pages down to the death of William Faithorne, 1691, at Giornale Nuovo. An earlier post offers images from The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord, "an absorbing history of the study, classification and illustration of plants."
More? Visit Heidelberg Schlossgarten at BibliOdyssey. And linger for images from Fasiculus Rariorum, the Comic History of Rome, and, just today, Stilt Walkers.
Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie always has lots to look at. And don't forget to check the item of the day at the 18th-Century Reading Room.
Onstage
Jem Webster posts about how Daniel O'Quinn's Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 has affected his teaching.
Tim Abbott discovers an ancestor in the circus.
And — too good! — Hieronimo imagines — and begins — a Shakespearean history cycle about the Bush family. It's funny because it's true.
My graduate course, Women Onstage in the Long Eighteenth Century, just ended. I blogged; the students blogged; and we made forays into Wikipedia. Speaking of which …
Around the web
The latest in Random Wiki-Testing at Blogging the Renaissance. Hieronimo says this is not a meme, but it looks like fun. Might I add, as a suggestion, that people who do engage in this non-meme might want to consider making some edits if they don't like what they find?
The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition at Memorabilia Antonina on or about 25 January. Want to join the carnival? Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnivalesque using the quick and painless submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the index page. And please check out the Carnivalesque site.
Thanks to all who submitted links.
December 4, 2006
Long day
driving up to Fredericton in the rain and back again in the snow, after two meetings and my final grad class (and a great class it was), and now the ever-popular Jinker Boy wants needs me to put him to bed, so I can't post at length. But two things: found an interesting blog, Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie (what it says), at Thinkery. And, on C18-L, saw a link to an article from The Observer: "Diaries reveal passions at the court of King George" by Vanessa Thorpe:
Mary Hamilton is being called 'the female Pepys' for her illuminating record of royal life at the end of the 18th century. Now a battle is being fought to save it for the nation.
I already have a soft spot for her, as I have written on the ballad "Mary Hamilton." Though this Mary Hamilton had a better end, I'm sure.
November 21, 2006
Carnivalesque
I will be hosting an early modern edition of Carnivalesque on the Dec. 16/17 weekend.
To submit nominations you can either send an email to the carnival email address or to me (jones at unbsj dot ca), or you can use the colourful submission form at Blog Carnival.
My own interests tend towards the latter part of the period and revolve around the literary, women, and the publishing industry, particularly street culture, so anything in that vein would be particularly welcome here. But please, send any and all links to posts you have read, or written yourself. What is a carnival if not abundance in motion?
October 23, 2006
Some cool links
from my students:
There is a new graphic novel version of Jane Eyre. For real, as the Jinker Boy would say. Via Andrea. According to Ann Hulbert at Slate, it's for goth girls.
And, a brief history of chocolate in 18th-century England from Brenna. It would seem that Nestle's and Cadbury's versions differ. Huh!
October 14, 2006
And have in fact done considerable marking
but wanted to make note of the excellent Reinventing the Feminine: Bluestocking Women Writers in 18thc London, the Masters project of Katelyn Ludwig (thanks to Kirstie for the link).
October 11, 2006
Old words
Koran, Hambourg, 1694
Some of these links have been hanging fire some time, and others are fresher:
On handwriting: How to Read 18th Century British-American Writing and The Manuscripts of George de Benneville and Abraham Wagner (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).
Images of books: Torah, Bible, Koran: Books of the Word Exhibit: texte en Français (also via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).
Letters: Electronic Enlightenment: "a new and exciting academic resource providing full critical editions of complete correspondences of major and minor figures of the 18th century."
Beautiful images of Ireland and cooking, in two amazing posts at BibliOdyssey.
Alchemy, the alphabet, and allegory, all at Giornale Nuovo.
Celebrating Women Writers!: "a website that lists information about and books by women authors. As part of The Celebration of Women Writers, I publish online editions of out-of-copyright books by women authors. This blog is used to announce new online editions of books being published by The Celebration of Women Writers."
Schreber's Fantastic Beasts: "In 1774 Johann Christian Dan Schreber authored a multivolume set of books entitled Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen. Focusing on mammals of the world, these books were lavishly illustrated with 755 hand-colored plates. There was a slight problem though: in most instances the artists had never seen the animals they were rendering onto paper. Explorers would return from their travels and describe the animals in question to the artists. The end result was that some of the drawings, though representing real animals, looked more like they had come from someone's nightmares." (Via Plep).
September 26, 2006
Effeminate women
[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]
Yesterday in my graduate seminar we discussed Margaret Cavendish's Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions. It was a lively discussion — they are an interested group — and at one point someone brought up the ways in which the two armies in Bell in Campo are described. "Masculine" is used to describe the army of men, while "feminine" and "effeminate" would seem to be used interchangeably to describe Lady Victoria's army of women. It is also used to insultingly refer to men who prefer to stay home rather than fight. This led to a sweeping pronouncement from me about the ways in which the definitions of words often narrow and focus over time; it would seem that at one time "effeminate" could have been used to mean more or less "feminine" without any shading — though it was also used in our contemporary sense — but now it is used pretty exclusively as a pejorative applied to gay men who are perceived as lacking in "masculine" traits. We discussed various female equivalents and unpacked the some of the meanings "Amazon" held in the period.
This is one reason, among many, that I like the 18thc: English, always in flux, is just at enough of a remove after three centuries, give or take, that it is deceptively familiar. But upon closer examination there are significant little moments of vertigo, moments which can be useful as an entrée into a discussion of, say, gender roles.
September 15, 2006
Royal Society Journals Online
[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]
Over 340 years of landmark science available for first time: "The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period" (heads up from Kevin Berland at C18-L).
September 10, 2006
It's over nine hundred pages
but I think, as they say, we can turn that into a plus. So come on down to the first book event at The Long Eighteenth.
I'm happy to report that we've confirmed Michael McKeon's participation in our first Collective Reading, for October 3-5. Carrie and I will prepare responses to post on the first and second days of discussion, and I'm hoping to get at least one or two more guest respondents for the event. Michael has graciously agreed to respond to our discussion, and is looking forward to this opportunity to discuss his new book, The Secret History of Domesticity (Johns Hopkins, 2006). Thanks once again to Kathy Alexander at JHUP for helping us set this up.
We are planning to make this a regular feature on this blog, so that we can spotlight important new books in eighteenth-century studies.
Since we still have slots available, if you'd like to be one of our guest respondents, please contact me offlist at dmazella at uh dot edu. And please continue to write in with suggestions for other books to read this year.
September 4, 2006
Coffeehouses/public sphere
[Xposted to The Long Eighteenth]
A couple of weeks ago Henry Farrell posted about Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House. Fascinating review and illuminating discussion (in more ways than one) in the comments. Quibble, and not having read the book: I think Farrell overstates when he describes "the typical academic view of the coffeehouse" "as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas's 'public sphere'." Surely anyone with a passing knowledge of the period knows that the ideals of rationality and civility were more honoured in the breach? I wonder just to what extent the Habermasian ideal has been taken literally, at least with regards to coffeehouses?
August 11, 2006
BBTI
Old news to many I am sure but I just discovered The British Book Trade Index, a project of the U of Birmingham which "aims to include brief biographical and trade details of all those who worked in the English and Welsh book trades up to 1851."
August 9, 2006
The Long Eighteenth
As in, century.
Carrie Shanafelt of 18th-Century Reading Room fame has set up a new blog, The Long Eighteenth. Here is the first post:
The Long Eighteenth has been created as a response to a desire expressed by several members of the listserv C18-L for a weblog community for the discussion of eighteenth-century scholarship and criticism across disciplinary and language boundaries. The Long Eighteenth offers contributor rights to anyone who has a desire to engage others in conversation about current issues in eighteenth-century studies.
In addition to creating a discussion space, The Long Eighteenth will provide links to websites hosting blogs or resources related to the study of the long eighteenth century, and will repost CFPs and conference information upon request. All resources and discussion at this site are understood to be available to the public.
If you would like to become a contributor, suggest a link, or respond with any comments or questions, please email me at carrieshanafelt at gmail dot com.
Go and have a gander. It is very stylish, very attractive: just a little something Carrie whipped up this afternoon. I hope anyone working on the looooong 18thc who may be reading this will consider joining up. What, after all, the the eighteenth century all about, if not conversation?
July 13, 2006
I like C.S.I. as much as the next person,
July 2, 2006
Candide by Voltaire
Reading Theo Cuffe's very good translation of Candide. Worth it for Chris Ware's cover alone.
Not sure what to make of the following information on Amazon:
Customers who bought this item also bought
• The Portable Dorothy Parker
• Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Because Candide is witty, fantastic, satiric, socially aware, and pragmatic? Or are these lists just Dada, or chicken guts?
Anyway, a deft translation and a beautiful edition. Two thumbs up, if the Inquisition and its thumbscrews don't get here first.
June 11, 2006
New listserv in town
From the Cultural Studies Collective homepage:
As combination of the Cultural Studies caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS), and other interested scholars and students, the Cultural Studies Collective is designed to foster curiosity and engaged discussion about the cultures of the long eighteenth century and early modern periods.
Cultural studies is above all characterized by its multiplicity: encompassing myriad disciplinary approaches (literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, political science), diverse cultural traditions (European, African, Asian, American, or otherwise), as well as various avenues of research (e.g. constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body; narratives of nation and community; global and/or transatlantic capitalism; genealogies of race or racism; spaces urban, rural, and diasporic, etc.) — all approached from a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including queer theory, postcolonial criticism, gender studies, and new historicism. In the case of this particular listserv, cultural studies also comprehends a range of periods spanning the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. In short, unapologetic curiosity about these various periods and cultures, in all of their heterogeneity and/or unsettling homogeneity, is key.
May 12, 2006
Street Literature Online
Following are some online sources of street literature (ballads/broadsides/chapbooks), pulled together from a discussion on C18-L begun by Fraser Easton (the first seven descriptions are his; subsequent links are from Jim Chevalier; the last three were culled from this blog):
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: an online catalogue of holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major Oxford collections, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries; the database is a complete digitization of all the ballads.
The Word on the Street — Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland: online sample of nearly 1,800 Scottish broadsides, prose and verse, ranging from 1650 to 1910 and searchable by keyword, title, or subject, from the 250,000 or so held by the National Library of Scotland.
Lilly Library Chapbook Index: searchable index of 1,900 chapbooks — not themselves online — from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the United States, which were part of the Elisabeth W. Ball collection of children's books (Indiana University).
Early Modern Center English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800 — The Pepys Ballads: an online archive of the 1,857 ballads of the Samuel Pepys collection held by Cambridge University.
An American Time Capsule: from the Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection, which comprises 28,000 primary-source items from the 17th Century to the present; over 10,000 items are presently available online in the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection.
The Elizabeth Nesbitt Room Chapbook Collection: index with colour reproductions of the chapbook covers, but not the chapbooks themselves, of over 270 English and American chapbooks (and a few Scottish chapbooks) from the years 1650-1850, held at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Scottish Chapbook Project: still under construction; participating institutions are: Glasgow University, University of Guelph, University of Indiana, and University of South Carolina.
Streetprint: Revolution and Romanticism: a wide range of types, from street ballads through chapbooks and tracts to valentines, from Britain and mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ballads and Broadsides Links on Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America.
Sixteenth Century Ballads: "a collection of ballads from before 1600, containing sheet music and lyrics, both in their original form, and in a form intelligible to a modern listener."
The Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays: approximately 250,000 volumes of American and Canadian poetry, plays, and vocal music dating from 1609 to the present day.
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing from the Michael Zinman Collection of early-American imprints.
Nineteenth-century British street ballads: a collaborative student project.
[cross-posted to Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse]
April 14, 2006
Teaching C18 words
A discussion about student malapropisms (eg. "Samuel Richardson is abscessed with sex") on C18-L prompted Kirstin Wilcox to ask for words, the meanings of which have changed over time. She offers some examples and envisions handing such a list out to students. Well, of course Jack Lynch, whom we all admire (in the contemporary sense), got there first: he posted a link to his marvellous "A Guide to Eighteenth-Century English Vocabulary" (PDF). Which I and no doubt many others will make available to students, with gratitude and of course full attribution.
March 28, 2006
There is a rather fey
thread over at C18-L which began with an announcement of the death of Addwaitya, a giant tortoise said to have "been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century." It is odd to think of a living creature's having been alive for so long, literally a contemporary of Johnson and Burney.
R.I.P., Addwaitya.
March 21, 2006
The inestimable
Jim Chevalier has for quite some time now been posting "Sundries," a "weekly miscellany," to C18-L. This newsletter is always filled with useful links to various 18thc stories and resources. Now he has decided to post it to a website (so far only posts from 2005 are up), and has started a related blog for conversation and comments. He is apparently waiting for some feedback before posting 2006, so head on over and drop him a line.
March 16, 2006
There is
a lively conversation on C18-L about Claude Rawson's review in The Times of The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 edited by John Richetti. Rawson accuses Richetti of all manner of trendiness, but his detailed description of the project has had the opposite effect on me than he probably intended: I have asked our Acquisitions Librarian to purchase a copy. Whole sections on street literature, ballads, and the like? Entire chapters on women writers? What joy!
Further reading: Terry Eagleton has an interesting review of Rawson's God, Gulliver and Genocide in the London Review of Books: "[I]t can't be easy being a meticulously scholarly, politically right-of-centre critic whose current preoccupations happen by a remarkable stroke of ill luck to coincide with those of the post-colonial theoretical trendies one abhors."
February 22, 2006
Good lord.
I say again: Good. Lord. (heads up from a white bear).
I first read Fanny Hill when I was very young, and couldn't understand a damn thing. It was a while before I worked out what battering rams and alabaster hills really were. At the time, I thought the book was vastly overrated and moved on with relief to Xavier Hollander1. Not a metaphor to be seen in any of her books. The plain talk was most welcome to someone still trying to work out what (and where) all the body parts were.
And now they've gone and made a musical. Call me old fashioned, but I like to consume my porn the traditional way: alone. Though it would appear they are being quite tasteful:
1 Fun fact: Hollander now runs a bed and breakfast.
The erotics of riding horses
GZombie posted a fascinating photograph of a piece of 18thc furniture: a chair from John Wesley's house that doubles, if one sits in it facing backwards, as a desk/reading stand. It looks wonderfully comfortable, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who covets it. GZ calls it "it an interesting artifact of both oral and literate traditions": "Sit forward, and you can talk with your guests. Sit backward, and you can read and/or write."
Go and look at the photo, then come back here.
. . . .
The first thing that strikes me about this chair is that while the sitting and chatting function is not closed to women, that is to say, ladies, the reading and writing function certainly is. Unless they sat side-saddle, which seems to be begging for a stitch in ones side. A woman sitting comfortably in this chair would be the very emblem of all that was frightening about women reading and writing, a masculinized, unsex'd female incarnate. Late 18thc misogynist, crazy person and literary critic John Polwhele invites his readers to
Survey with me, what ne'er our fathers saw,
A female band despising NATURE's law,
As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms,
And vengeance smothers all their softer charms.
I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene,
Where unsex'd woman vaunts the imperious mien;
Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart,
Invoke the Proteus of petrific art (11-18)
There are lots of other great lines in the poem, but really, you should read it yourself. Suffice it to say that it is hysterical, in both senses of the word. In essence, it divides individual late-18thc women writers into two groups based on their supposed sexual status. If Polwhele had seen this chair, he would almost certainly have envisioned Mary Wollstonecraft — his particular bête noir — sitting on it in lascivious déshabillé doing heaven knows what with her quill.
My use of French, while it may be pretentious, is also appropriate, as Polwhele associated all manner of lewdness with France. And who knows, French women may have had chairs like this in every room of their homes. But no English lady would ever have sat down on it to read or write. And so what, then, is the "message" of this chair, to the casual viewer, to women in general, and to aspiring women writers, in particular? To riff on GZ's interest in orality, what does this chair say?
February 12, 2006
The first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Papers
Please check out "A searchable feast: the first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Papers" at The Head Heeb and read the excellent posts by Jonathan and the various guest contributors. The alert reader may remember that I had intended to be among them, but obviously — no post! — have not managed to do so. For that I apologize to Jonathan and all the others. Life has intervened this month. A lot.
January 18, 2006
The Libertine
Natalie Bennett has a nice review of Laurence Dunmore's The Libertine.
I am more and more seriously thinking of a course called something like, "The Contemporary Long-18thc," in which I would show films like this one and Stage Beauty, and have students read Carolan's Farewell, Bedlam, and novels by Ross King (who was in grad. school at York at the same time I was but has gone on to fame and fortune) and Emma Donoghue.
As I'm writing this it strikes me how many of these books and films focus on the theatre. Maybe I could incorporate some contemporary material into the grad. course on women in Restoration and 18thc theatre I'm teaching next fall.
December 10, 2005
Crimes online
The Complete Newgate Calendar (London, Navarre Society Ltd., 1926) and The Love Philtre: The Case of Mary Blandy, 1751-2, both among the e-texts at the Tarlton Law Library site (via Jim Chevalier at C18-L).
Who hath not heard of Blandy's fatal fame,
Deplored her fate, and sorrowed o'er her shame?
— Henley, a poem, 1827.
The Newgate Calendar is of course an invaluable resource, and reports of the Blandy case are fascinating in their constructions of gender:
Though not a beauty — for the smallpox, that stole the bloom from the cheeks of many a sparkling belle in hoop and brocade, had set its seal upon her face — the portrait of Mary Blandy shows that she was comely. Still, it is a picture in which there is a full contrast between the light and shadows. Those fine glistening black eyes of hers — like the beam of sunshine that illumines a sombre chamber — made one forget the absence of winsome charm in her features; yet their radiance appeared to come through dark unfathomable depths rather than as the reflection of an unclouded soul. With warmth all blood may glow, with softness every heart can beat, but some, like hers, must be compelled by reciprocal power. Such, in her empty home, was not possible. Even the love and devotion of her parents gave merely a portion of their own essence. From a greedy father she acquired the sacred lust, and learnt from infancy to dream, with morbid longing, of her future dower; while her mother encouraged a hunger for vain and giddy pleasure, teaching unwittingly that these must be bought at the expense of peace, or by the sacrifice of truth. To a girl of wit and intelligence in whose heart nature had not sown the seeds of kindness, these lessons came as a crop of tares upon a fruitful soil. But, as in the case of all women, there was one hope of salvation. Indeed, since the passion of her soul cried out with imperious command that she should fulfil the destiny of her sex, the love of husband and children would have found her a strong but pliable material that could be fashioned into more gentle form. Without such influence she was one of those to whom womanhood was insufferable — a mortal shape where lay encaged one of the fiercest demons of discontent. (1-2)
Well no wonder she poisoned her father.
December 5, 2005
Is Samuel Johnson a sacred cow?
Charles McGrath implies that he is. McGrath has written a friendly review of Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary in The New York Times; friendly to the author, Henry Hitchings, and friendly to, though slighting of, Johnson. Is there no reverence any more? I mean, I ask you:
He was not an exceptionally great or original writer. He dabbled in too many forms - plays, satires, essays, prefaces - without truly excelling in any, except perhaps biography. His great gift was a largeness of spirit, with a knack for synthesis, judgement and critique.
Not truly excelling in essays? In prefaces? Satires? (I have not read his plays, I confess). But really, if he did not excel as an essayist, then no-one did, or has since.
The review displays a prurient focus on Johnson's personal life, his foibles, his illnesses, and his apparent depression, and claims that he would have been a Grubstreet hack had the commission for the Dictionary not fallen into his lap. Now how much of this is McGrath and how much Hitchings, I could not say, not having yet read the book. But my knees are jerking and my hackles are up. The discussion on C18-L should be lively.
November 28, 2005
The Gentleman Dancing-Master by William Wycherly
But we went to the Theatre to "The French Dancing Master" ... The play pleased us very well; but Lacy's part, the Dancing Master, the best in the world.
Pepys' Diary, Wednesday 21 May 1662
Hippolita (Marsha Stephanie Blake)
I have BIG PLANS for our small trip. Doesn't this look wonderful? And how often is it ever staged? Yes! And, hardly ever. And I refuse to be put off by the naysayers:
Variety calls it a "serviceable but uninspired production."
The Broadway.com review compares it to Dumb and Dumber. But in a good way.
The Village Voice says that "[t]he Pearl Theatre Company cuts a few fairly merry capers."
The New York Times says "too much of a good thing."
November 21, 2005
Pride and Prejudice
Charles Bingley (Bruce Lester), Jane Bennet (Maureen O'Sullivan), and Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) in Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Ellen Moody has posted a review of the latest film version of Austen's novel. I was predisposed, from various other reviews and blog posts I have read, to dismiss it and see it on DVD, if ever. After all, why mess with success? But Ellen has given me pause. She fully admits the faults, anachronisms, and discrepancies in the film, but nonetheless finds much of interest. I was particularly struck by the following claim:
Many comparative discourses aligning eponymous novels and their filmic adaptations are imaginary discourses. Films compare to other films. The character types found in films with the names taken from the novels are character types found in other films.
This is quite freeing. One need no longer worry about which is the most faithful rendering of the novel; instead, one might read the latest film alongside this, this, and this. (And these, if you can find them.) As well as all the other Austen adaptations, and all the adaptations of 19thc novels in general.
(Oh, and has anyone seen this?)
November 9, 2005
More olde stuffe
Images: au ras du sol, des murs, des objets ... vision brute (via Dr. Johnson's Cat).
The Making of Furniture (via Plep).
Early Stuart Libels: "a web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources" (also via Plep).
The Jane Austen Centre: "a new permanent exhibition which tells the story of Jane's Bath experience - the effect that living here had on her and her writing" (also with the Plep).
A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books: "a Library of Congress exhibition that presents for the first time all the woodcut-illustrated books purchased by Lessing J. Rosenwald at the Dyson Perrins sale, now part of the legendary Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress. These books were printed within the first century after Gutenberg mastered the art of printing with moveable type" (link mislaid; sorry. Probably Plep).
"The Illustrators of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires" by Arthur B. Evans (not via Plep; via RaShOmoN).
Two posts on Guy Fawkes, one short and one long, at Earmarks of Early Modern Culture.
Age of Enlightenment features the gothic; The Little Professor has a link rich Halloween post on Victorian horror; Laura James posts about just why we might not want to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
London links at things magazine.
Bad news for me: Mister Aitch has changed servers and my hundreds of links to Giornale Nuovo will now be dead.
Carolyn Smith-Kizer has posted a welcome seasonal recipe for Treacle Baked Beans at 18thc Cuisine. Er, advice of the day: don't blog hungry.
November 4, 2005
Reading habits
I have been thinking, off and on, about my students' reactions to publishing and writing conventions. In an odd way, the 18thc is further away from their experience than the 16th, since hardly any of them has escaped the prescription of one Shakespearean play, per year of high school (no more, no less).
[Side note: A student in my women's writing class, a mature student, told us that hers had been an "experimental year": they had been taught no Shakespeare in high school. At any point. She did not think there were any more serial killers in her year, proportionately, than in the population at large (I asked), though whether that makes the experiment a failure or a success, I'm not sure.]
At any rate, as a rule they react badly to even their limited exposure to 18thc printing and publishing conventions. I say limited because of course practically any text they come across is heavily mediated by editors and modern publishing practice. And the more junior the student, the more they complain (or the less self-conscious they are about complaining). We read Robinson Crusoe in my introduction to prose class and there was practically a rebellion because of the lack of chapters. Students who had borrowed cheesy moth-eaten editions from the public library, with chapters added (and sometimes even named!), were at risk of being mugged by the students who had shelled out for the decent edition I ordered through the bookstore. Though there is one student, bless her, who said she didn't mind the lack of chapters at all. I asked her how she decided where to stop reading, and she said, "I just read to the bottom of the page I'm on and shut the book."
Also with Robinson Crusoe: I had one student who was unable to read past "viz" until he found out what it meant. So here I am, in the strange (for an English instructor) position of telling them to read more skimmingly; to try to figure things out contextually but not to worry overmuch if something doesn't make sense, at least, as long as it doesn't seem too significant. But no, one "viz" and they stop dead.
A senior student is being driven mad by capital letters in unexpected places. I assure her she will get acclimatized, but here it is November and she is still irritated, so perhaps not. And don't get them started on long sentences.
Not sure where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm just venting about their venting.
I hope I don't sound critical or impatient, because I'm not feeling that way. I am, however, bemused. I use these opportunities to launch into discussions of changes in print technologies and conventions. And I tell them to thank their lucky stars for modern editions and then tell them about the long "s" &c. Sometimes, though, it feels as though 90% of what I teach is context.
Good thing New Criticism is long gone.
See "18th Century Ligatures and Fonts" by David Manthey.
And some further reading:
Robinson Crusoe and The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
An extremely abridged children's version. With pictures and the added bonus of a Greek translation.
According to the Guardian, "600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island" (26/9/05).
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964): "Stranded on Mars with only a monkey as a companion, an astronaut must figure out how to find oxygen, water, and food on the lifeless planet." Defoe has a writing credit, and Adam West is in it. I'm sold.
Las Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe (1954). Directed by Luis Buñuel. Holy mother!
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (TV series, 1964). Listen to the theme music.
Robinson Crusoe, the game.
And did you know? February 1 is Robinson Crusoe Day.
October 2, 2005
The 18thc Online: commonplace book or coffeehouse?
Here are the notes for the paper I gave at NEASECS this past Saturday. The audience was a mixed group of 18thc scholars from various disciplines, mainly literary studies and history. Afterwards, someone asked about how we can judge the validity of internet sources, and that led to a lively discussion about learning to use new tools to evaluate new technologies. I used the example of the ways in which individuals on the internet exposed the lies and omissions of the mainstream media right after Hurricane Katrina.
I do believe everything I said, but I also feel like a proselytizer.
Have you accepted the internet into your heart, sister?
And no, it has not escaped my notice that the following is as much a blog entry as anything else. I clicked away on the featured websites as I spoke, replicating, in a half-arsed way, your experience here, should you read on.
[cross-posted to The Valve.
There have been a significant number of extensive, university-based on-line projects, for a number of years now, projects like the U of A's Orlando Project, The Brown University Women Writers Project, and Corvey Women Writers on the Web. There are also a gratifying number of commercial electronic/online projects available, like Thompson-Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
My interest today is in more personal projects: individual labours of love that increase the common wealth: the democratic, artisanal, online 18thc. There are individual homepages and weblogs. There are of course listservs, which provided many of us with our first taste of online culture. There are electronic journals. There are also larger projects: Alan Liu and Jack Lynch's indispensable sites, while now significant concerns with funding and numbers of associates, began as individual visions. There are also an increasing number of electronic texts — online editions of books, pamphlets, and other texts — as well as electronic facsimiles. There is a whole internet out there of individuals, and in some cases classrooms, busy posting transcriptions and facsimile editions, or links pages, or weblogs that note various resources.
I couldn't say whether these sorts of activities are more prevalent among 18thc scholars; I would suspect they are, because, well, our primary materials are generally out of copyright, luckily for us. But I think — and it may be fantasy, but bear with me — that people who study our period have a particular understanding of print culture, and print culture at a time of open-ended possibility and expansion, that makes self-publication an acceptable, a desirable, option. Not self-publication in the sense of vanity publication, but in the sense of artisanal production.
The title of this talk refers to commonplace books and coffeehouses as metaphors for understanding the phenomenon of online scholarly activity in our field.
Commonplace books involve the noting, collecting and archiving of materials.
Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which 'commonplaces' or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. First usage recorded: 1578. (OED)
Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia, has this to say:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creators particular interests.... Producing a commonplace is known as commonplacing.
This congruence of two technologies, one from the Renaissance and the other from yesterday, has not escaped notice. There are a significant number of sites with the words "commonplace book" in their title or subtitle; I have identified nine with one quick search with Google. This is not to mention all the myriad blogs which fulfil similar functions: reading logs are one of the most common forms — there is even software to make it simple to offer a quick reading list, with graphics, in the sidebar of one's weblog — as well as various other collections and catalogues of information useful perhaps only to its collector, perhaps to a wider audience. Many of these are produced by individuals for their own use, much as commonplace books were, historically. But then, commonplace books were sometimes shared, and many an internet projects that may have been originally designed as a personal repository has taken on a wider life and become engaged in the wider exchange of the web. In other words, the model, or the metaphor, of the commonplace book is no longer accurate; or, at least, it no longer tells the whole story. At the risk of dreadfully mixing metaphors, the commonplace book — an essentially private phenomenon, whether shared or not — is replaced by the coffeehouse.
Coffeehouses, as we all know, became popular in the UK in the 17thc; the first coffeehouse opened in London in 1652. They were meeting places where people came together to socialize, and to do business. According to one historian,
The patrons of the coffee-houses agreed to conform to the strict rules of the establishments. According to the posted "Rules and Orders of the Coffee House," all men were equal in these establishments, and none need give his place to a "Finer" man. Anyone who swore was made to "forfeit twelve pence," and the man who began a quarrel "shall give each man a dish t'atone the sin." "Maudlin lovers" were forbidden "here in Corners to mourn," for all were expected to "be brisk, and talk, but not too much," "Sacred Things" must be excluded from conversation, and the patrons could neither "profane Scripture, nor saucily wrong Affairs of State with an irreverent tongue." In many establishments, games of chance as well as cards were prohibited, and any wager was limited to five shillings, a sum which was to "be spent In such Good Liquor as the House doth vent."
According to Markman Ellis, "In late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century England, the coffee-house was both a symbol and a site of profound cultural transformations in English society." I use them here to refer to the transformative sharing and interaction, the collaboration, of much of the internet. This comparison is hardly original to me; last year Henry Farrell wondered aloud if the internet is not like a coffeehouse, and two years ago Economist.com published "The internet in a cup," to name just two instances.
An example of the type of casual collaboration common online: I posted the bare bones of a new blog designed to collect 18thc resources. Within 24 hours Sharon Howard, a historian and post-doctoral fellow in Wales, linked from her blog to the new blog, effectively sending me new readers. Then, I received an email from her telling me two of my links weren't working. This is not quite the same as asking a friend or colleague to read a draft; she herself found my link through trackback software, visited, decided to link my fledgling blog to her well-established one, and then did me (and my potential readers) the service of checking some links and letting me know that there were problems, unasked, because of her sense, presumably, of shared project.
Another example of collaboration: the phenomenon of carnivals, such as the History Carnival and the early modern Carnivalesque, hosted periodically by one blog or another and showcasing notable posts from a variety of blogs in the preceding weeks.
I'd like to give a few brief examples of the homemade, or artisanal, internet. Sharon Howard, just mentioned, has her own site, the very useful Early Modern Resources, a clearinghouse of online resources "for researchers, teachers and students of early modern history." It is a labour of love, perhaps not as slick as some of the larger (read, the funded) sites, but certainly as trustworthy as a conscientious historian can make it. She has grouped her links into various rough areas, such as "Women, gender, sexuality" and "Crime, Law and Disorder," presumably for her own use, but also for the use of anyone else interested.
Of particular interest to me, and to many others I am sure, are the burgeoning numbers of etexts, and even facsimiles, to be found online. There are of course excellent commercial products, but those are not always affordable. And, such projects of necessity have to be aware of the marketplace. There are also freely available professional projects, like the NYPL digitalization of Anne Wagner's Friendship Album. But in the true spirit of the internet as originally conceived, many individuals edit and post their own electronic editions. Here, for example, is an edition of Curiosities of Literature by Isaac D'Israeli (6 vols., 1791-1823) (HTML; PDF), a text most of us are not likely to come across otherwise. It is posted by the pseudonymous Mister Aitch at his most excellent site, Giornale Nuovo. Mister Aitch specializes in making available beautiful images of early modern engravings.
Online facsimiles, of course, are particularly valuable to researchers, from Tristram Shandy to pamphlets like "Tawny Rachel, or The Fortune Teller." This latter was produced with Streetprint, billed as "the world's most user-friendly free software solution for showcasing, teaching, and archiving popular print and countless other kinds of collections and artifacts online." Streetprint is particularly exciting in that it makes the production of professional facsimiles within reach of everyone with a computer and a text to digitalize.
There are little gems tucked away in corners and niches all across cyberspace, like offerings. Freely given, as part of the exchange, the community, the democracy, the common wealth, of online scholars, researchers, and book lovers. Beyond national borders, beyond the walls of universities, people are taking control of the distribution of knowledge. Open access to information and the free dissemination of knowledge, have long been ideals in the online community; these scholars are applying the Open Access philosophy to texts, and academic knowledge.
Who are these people? Some are surely here at this conference. There are many public intellectuals online: the members of Crooked Timber, the influential group weblog, come immediately to mind, as well as individuals like literary scholar Michael Bérubé and historian Timothy Burke, both of whom have blogs. But there are also public scholars: people engaged in serious, legitimate scholarship who choose to share some of their resources online. Librarians are well-represented; perhaps the internet is an ideal place to pursue some of their own research interests. Some of these people are credentialed, some are not. To a refreshing extent, they are usually judged, online, by their web presence alone.
Of course, it is wise to remember caveat empore with anything one comes across. But then, that is also the case with traditionally published materials. (As a side-note, there is a timely discussion at the moment, on C18-L, about errors in both the new DBN, and the OED. Indeed, we would all lose much of our work if it were not for all the misguided books that need reviewing and all the texts that have never been properly edited.) If the established and the canonical are now vulnerable to assessment to a degree hitherto unknown, perhaps we can meet the artisanal half way. During her keynote address yesterday, Laurel Ulrich, in reference to material artifacts, said, "the notion that you can't work with it because you don't know what it is, is exaggerated." This struck me as applicable to the scores of online productions one encounters.
Of course, on the internet, one needs to bite every coin. "Standards" certainly exist, but the individual must judge whether or not a given item adheres to them. Homemade or artisanal scholarship moves the reader away from passive consumerism, from standardization, and makes us more like the active customers (and textual producers) of our period, who of necessity had to examine all goods carefully and judge each one in its non-rationalized, artisan-produced integrity (or lack thereof). In this sense, both producer and reader are empowered; both are distanced from the commodification of intellectual culture, and assert an intellectual responsibility to remake and rework that culture.
One final example: the metaphor literalized and made concrete. The summer before last, I wrote on my blog that I was going to the UK for a conference. Another blogger, an American who works on 18thc Methodist texts, emailed that he would also be there doing research, and would I like to get together? So we did, two 18th-centuryists who had not known of each other, or of each other's off-line work, until we encountered one another online. And where do you think we met? In London, across from the new British Library. In a Starbucks.
September 29, 2005
Here is
Mrs. Spectator's Coffeehouse,"a clearinghouse of online resources for researchers interested in the long 18thc." Very modest so far (though I found some nice fonts at The Scriptorium). All suggestions gratefully accepted.
Well, probably not all suggestions.
September 27, 2005
Out of the mouths ...
One of my students from the eighteenth century lit. class: "it seems as though almost all writing from this time consisted of either Religion or Small Pox… or a combination of the two." She obviously didn't read Wilmot last week.
September 18, 2005
Dildos
I am having my students read "Signior Dildo" by the Earl of Rochester, but I am nonetheless feeling too squeamish to post a link to this post on 18thc dildos at Fascinating History. So will post it here. Interesting stuff on 18thc assumptions about woman-on-woman sex: that it was "practise." Perhaps, but I imagine some women never got it right.
Update (23/9/05): Movable Type was junking all the comments to this post. Even mine!
September 17, 2005
Review of Carolan’s Farewell by Charles Foran
(Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader, Sept. 17, 2005)
I will shortly make a few measured and analytical remarks about this novel, but first, forgive some burbling: this is a beautiful, beautiful book. A book to live in for awhile. We hear much of it, as the first of the two main parts of the narrative lies with Terence Carolan, a blind composer and harper who lived between 1670 and 1738. We hear what he hears, and cannot see what he cannot. The language used to describe the input from his remaining senses is by turns exultant and earthy. Very earthy: Carolan's aging and failing body, and its baser functions, take up much of his attention as he pushes himself to finish a punishing religious pilgrimage and then the final leg of what turns out to be his last of many journeys through Ireland.
Carolan is a complex and faulty character. Neglectful of the wife and children he loves, travelling the country to sing for his supper, drinking too much and not practising his music enough, and ludicrous in his unwieldy, disobedient body, he is also intuitive, kind, a fascinating case study of the artistic process, and very, very droll. It is only Foran's skill that reconciles us to his absence through much of the book.
The second half focuses on Owen Connor, Carolan's fictitious manservant and guide, at a time when he is largely separated from his master, who lies ill. The two part structure echoes events in the plot; the first section recounts the last part of Carolan's journey, and in the second, after a long period of frustrated inactivity, Connor repeats some of that journey alone. Our attention is deflected from Carolan, who comes to various realizations of his own, to Owen, who must now answer a different set of questions. In some senses his character is the more tragic of the two, in that Carolan seems to achieve a sort of peace, while Owen never seems to be comfortable except with the master he is loosing.
If I have any criticism of Charles Foran's lovely text — one critic calls it note-perfect and that seems right — it is of the way in which his characters betray evidence of sensibilities more modern than would have been likely. Carolan "comes to terms with grief" — or at least, he would have if he existed in a contemporary setting. Owen exhibits a sense of egalitarianism that would have been unusual in 1737. But Foran, who has a steady sense of historical detail, would surely not misstep here. And in fact, instead of giving us the contemporary characters in fancy dress of lesser historical novels, he does something more subtle: he translates, transcribes, eighteenth-century sensibilities so that they exist seamlessly, apparently without effort, in an unabashedly contemporary novel. The deftness with which he accomplishes this blending is remarkable. And even if it were not, the novel rushes over any quibbles with the sheer strength of its language. The dialogue between Carolan and Owen, all the dialogue, in fact, is so clearly realized, so telling and at times so funny, it would be worth a recommendation alone. I look forward to hearing Foran read; much of this novel should be spoken aloud.
And much of it should be pondered over. Carolan is a fully realized character, but he is also emblematic of an Ireland now long passed away. Connor is equally well-drawn, and equally representative: of the struggle of the lower and working classes for a sense of self-worth in the face of the inexorable barriers of class, and in particular of the displaced Irish during the upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries. Foran's Ireland is a depopulated, shivering place that has fallen away, even while it is still beautiful. Ultimately this novel is about loss — personal, communal, national — and how individuals as well as whole peoples confront those losses. But putting it so bluntly does a disservice to the fineness of Foran's ear for language, the sure hand with which he has crafted his tale. I sit here writing this while listening to one of Carolan's airs on the internet. It is a light, balanced piece, with delicacy and humour, despite solemn undertones and an overlaying sadness. Much like this novel, in fact.
A number of Terrence Carolan's tunes are available online here and elsewhere. Charles Foran will be reading at UNBSJ on Sept. 22, and in Fredericton on Sept. 23.
Historical films
Ellen Moody, on C18-L, points toward a resource that I didn't know about: Modern History in the Movies, part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Lots of Restoration and 18th material, usefully divided into various thematic groups, though it doesn't include everything: the focus is on films that would be useful for teaching history, it seems. Which would apparently not include Albert Finney as Tom Jones. Maybe I'll put together a mega-list in my (HA!) spare time. There are flurries of discussion on C18-L every now and then, and extremely useful lists like this one: they could be consolidated.
Maybe after the holidays.
September 9, 2005
The Bastille
Jim Chevallier has put together a website on the Bastille. Particularly interesting is the way in which he counters many common assumptions. For example,
The people who stormed the Bastille wanted to free the prisoners. They wanted to get their hands on weapons and gun powder which had been stored there. In fact, they FORGOT to free the prisoners before taking the keys of the cells out to parade them through the streets. Oops.
And some of the descriptions of food served are mouth-watering. One prisoner was given
an excellent soup, a succulent slice of beef, a boiled leg of capon, dripping with fat and falling off the bone; a small plate of fried artichokes in a marinade, one of spinach, a very nice cresonne pear, fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgundy wine, and the best Moka coffee.
Though to be fair, other prisoners report that the wine was merely indifferent.
The chicken pot pie and diet cola I just bought from our campus food services are looking pretty unappealing.
August 16, 2005
For the girl who has everything
You know you want it: Action Jane (not to be confused with G.I. Jane. Action Jane could whip her butt and then give her a lecture on appropriate choices in the marriage market as she lay bleeding). "This 5-1/4" tall, hard vinyl action figure comes with a book (Pride & Prejudice) and a writing desk with removable quill pen!" Link from Catalogue Annie.
Then there is this site, Gothic Martha Stewart. Full of good, black things (link from BoingBoing).
August 11, 2005
NEASECS 2005
Mentioned awhile ago my projected attendance at the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2005 Conference. The preliminary schedule is now posted; it looks to be an interesting lot of papers. I just wish it were not so difficult to choose between competing sessions. I am to present at 9:30 in the morning. God help the audience.
July 13, 2005
New long 18thc blog
A former student of mine, now finishing her Master's degree at another institution, has begun a new blog in which, among other things, she will catalogue her research towards her planned Ph.D. project on women's coterie writing. Brand new and already some interesting links (and I don't just say that because one is to me), epistolae unde ambitus may be of use to anyone interested in things early modern/18thc.
July 8, 2005
London
London of the Mid-Seventeenth Century: engravings
London, ca. 1676: an interactive map
Seventeenth Century Spectacles: the ones you wear
Eighteenth Century London: images from the Museum of London
Cries of London Playing Cards, c.1754
Greenwood's Map of London 1827
Map of John Snow's London in 1859
Maps of London: lots of historical maps
A Gustave Doré Gallery: Images from London
London Characters and the Humorous Side of London Life
London : A pilgrimage, by Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold, 1872
John Johnson Collection Exhibition 2001: Cries, Itinerants and Services
The Osborne Collection: The Cries of London
July 4, 2005
Johnson's Dictionary
There is considerable discussion on C18-L about Johnson's Dictionary, spurred by Arthur J. Weitzman's notice of Jack Lynch's piece in the NY Times (free reg. requ.)
Mirabilis points to an interesting review of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World. And follow her links.
And who can forget the immortal Blackadder episode, with Robbie Coltrane as Johnson?:
Prince George: Ah, Dr. Johnson! Damn cold day!Dr. Johnson: Indeed it is, sir, but a very fine one, for I celebrated last night the encyclopedic implementation of my pre-meditated orchestration of demotic Anglo-Saxon.
Prince George: (nods, grinning, then speaks) Nope -- didn't catch any of that.
Dr. Johnson: Well, I simply observed, sir, that I'm felicitous, since, during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.
Prince George: Well, I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I've never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or, for that matter, been given any Norman tongue!
Edmund: I believe, sir, that the Doctor is trying to tell you that he is happy because he has finished his book. It has, apparently, taken him ten years.
Prince George: Yes, well, I'm a slow reader myself...
June 30, 2005
Old stuff
Click thumbnail for full image
Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s architectural drawings, at Giornale Nuovo (and, who knew? Mister Aitch was born in Wales, as so many interesting people are).
London Prostitution in the 1700s at Fascinating History.
Ongoing online project: Don Quixote in English, along with the original Gustave Doré illustrations.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860:
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 contains just over a hundred pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments, accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a letter, and other works of historical importance. Of the cases presented here, most took place in America and a few in Great Britain.
(this and preceding link via Plep).
Mathematicians of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries:
Available here are accounts of the lives and works of seventeenth and eighteenth century mathematicians (and some other scientists), adapted from A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball (4th Edition, 1908).
John Milton & Seventeenth-Century Culture from the collections of Thomas Cooper Library (this and preceding link also via Plep).
Book Production and Distribution, 1625-1800, by H. G. Aldis, M.A., Peterhouse, Secretary of the University Library (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in 18 Volumes). And much more. Link from GZombie, all the way from the U.K.
Sharon reminds us that the next history carnival is coming up on July 1 — tomorrow! — at Siris.
June 17, 2005
Two from the BBC
Katherine Frank alerts us to "a lively discussion programme on the Scriblerus Club with John Mullan and others" on BBC Radio 4, while Andrew Pink notes that on the Early Music Show on Radio 3, "Lucie Skeaping visits The George public house in Southwark to join a meeting of the Merrie Fellowes Catch Club. With the club's chairman, Patrick Johns, she traces its development" (available online until June 25).
(links from Frank and Pink on C18-L).
Gawd I love public broadcasting! And on that front, horrifying news from south of the border.
May 25, 2005
Novels of female education
An MA student with whom I am doing a Directed Reading course this summer has set up a blog, Familiar Letters, in which to comment on her reading of novels of female education. If the subject at all interests you, you may want to wander over and give her forty fits, as my mother would say, by leaving a comment. This is the first time I have asked a graduate student to blog. Marvellously useful tool with which to keep in touch with each other while she is reading, particularly as she and I are both leaving town at different points and won't always be able to meet regularly.
So far she has looked at Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.
May 22, 2005
Too good for 'em!!
The wonderful Sharon, who has singlehandedly done more to collect and make available early modern web resources than anyone I can think of, has posted her own transcription of
Not Punishment Enough,
FOR
Murtherers, High-way Men, and House-Breakers.
Offered to the Consideration of the Two HOUSES of PARLIAMENT.
...
LONDON, Printed for A. Baldwin in Warwick-Lane, 1701
In the note to the reader, the author writes,
... I send this Essay into the World, to set this Evil in its due light, and attempt its Cure. And if in it I have discovered more Zeal than Knowlege, yet the good end it aims at, with Candid Judges will cover abundance of faults.
She also links to William Paley's Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792) (PDF), made available by Don Herzog of Left2Right. And to the Project Gutenberg version of Hannah More's Stories for the Young, Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious, posted a few months ago, and More's Village Politics, Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers, in Great Britain, by Will Chip, A Country Carpenter [Written early in the French Revolution.].
As I said below, quite shortly we may never have to leave our desks. Which may be just as well given how rare research funding for the Humanities is becoming, in Canada at least.
May 16, 2005
18th century online
King's Landing Historical Settlement
Just heard that my proposal for the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2005 Conference - The Eighteenth Century Everyday: Remembrance and Representation (now there's a mouthful) has been accepted. This is where you come in: I proposed a presentation on the 18th century online: letting people know what's out there (etexts; databases; listservs; blogs, of course), framed by a dual model of the coffeehouse and the commonplace book. Lots of visuals. A handout with the URL of a purpose-built blog. Sooo, I will be scouring up and down for things to include, and would be most grateful for any pointers. No rush; I will no doubt beg for help sometime closer to the time.
Will anyone else be going? It should be great; it's always an interesting conference, and Fredericton is a pretty city, Autumn is lovely in New Brunswick, and we will be having "an authentic 18th-century feast" at King's Landing Historical Settlement, preceded by a "social hour" at the King's Head pub. I've been to King's Landing a few times, the last time for Thanksgiving dinner. Overheard at the next table:
Diner: Waitress, could I have some ketchup, please?
Waitress: Sir! There was no ketchup in 1855!
And that was that.
May 6, 2005
Heeere's Harriet!
Looking a little grainy, it's true; but no lady is at her best just after having dealt with the rakish despoiler of her younger sister. Let us never speak of it again.
May 5, 2005
Jessica Alba to play Elizabeth Bennet
Planning to read my book this evening instead of blogs — a novel idea — but had to pass on this tidbit: there is apparently to be a Jane Austen action figure, though if it is at all realistic I suppose we are to understand "action" loosely. She comes, one hears, with a quill pen, a tiny copy of P&P, and a writing desk, and will debut this summer (news from AustenBlog via Emily Friedman on C18-L, who wonders if this mightn't be a sign of the apocalypse).
And here is a lovely group-authored mash-up of, I kid you not, Austen and The Terminator:
The tall and handsomely dressed figure of Mr. Terminus stood a moment with an expression of resolution upon his features, as does a man contemplating a plunge from a precipice, or perhaps a proposal of marriage (the two carrying nearly equal terror to most). Then he began to relate the most astonishing tale Patience had ever heard.
"As you know, Miss Patience," he began, "I am, to a great degree, a machine; my exterior, and some portions of my interior, are made as are those of Mr. Connor and yourself, but the greater part is metal and other materials, some of which you would recognize, and others of which you and even the wise men of your universities would know nothing at all."
And there is a movie, Pride and Extreme Prejudice: "The CIA and the KGB both pursue a former operative (Brian Dennehy) who seemingly has become unstable."
Finally, there was a wonderful satiric book cover I saw some years ago, but it doesn't seem to be on the net, though I did find someone's description:
"My favorite take on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE sequels was the parody cover illustration for (the non-existent) PRIDE AND EXTREME PREJUDICE, showing an elegantly-dressed 18th-century lady holding a smoking gun--a new Bennet sister 'Dirty Harriet' who tells Lady Catherine 'I have no objection, your ladyship, to your proceeding, since, by so doing, you shall render my afternoon quite agreeable.'"
Perhaps it is the apocalypse.
April 30, 2005
Dangerous books
Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas, a blog posts, via Bitch | (S)HITLIST, about an interesting study by a grad student that suggests a correlation between reading too many romantic stories, and being passive and hence susceptible to violence in relationships. Senior academics at the student's institution are making no claims: "Susan's work is an interesting study which is sure to spark debate, but further research is required in this area." But in various guises, this is an idea that has had real legs. I am doing a reading course this summer with one of our graduate students about the novel of female education in the eighteenth century. Inappropriate reading is a recurrent theme: I'm thinking Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, in which the heroine's mind was turned by the reading of chivalric romances. An interesting preemptive defence against criticism: this is a moral novel, qualitatively different from those trashy novels. Eliza Haywood has a character, an older man, seduce a young girl by giving her ... yes, bad literature. And it works.
Bonus links:
Charlotte Ramsay Lennox
The Charlotte Lennox Page
Literary Encyclopedia: Lennox, Charlotte
The Life of Harriot Stuart by Charlotte Lennox
April 24, 2005
Ye Olde Linkes
A Variety of Ladies' Head Dresses, The New lady's magazine (1786). Click for larger image.
Ladies' headdresses at the Beinecke (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).
Sharon posts a multitude of links on crime. She writes, "Has to come around sooner or later in an election campaign." Indeed. She has also scored a copy of Hanging not punishment enough (1701) and plans to make it available. Please do!
The Gutenberg Bible held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is available on CD-ROM. G. Zombie has one. Here it is online. There are a number of other copies online: two at the British Library, which one can compare; the Göttingen Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1454); and the Keio Gutenberg Bible. Bible links from the University of Calgary. See also The Oliver Cromwell Website and The Goodspeed New Testament Manuscript Collection (both via Plep).
Libraries as fingerprints at Historiological Notes.
The fantastic architectural drawings of Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) at Giornale Nuovo.
The Opium Wars (via Plep).
Britain's 18th-c canal system being restored (via Metafilter).
Click for larger image.
April 17, 2005
Big old books
14 Fatum Subscribat Eliza / Princess Elizabeth / A blank tablet. Click to enlarge.
Minerva Britanna, or A Garden of Heroical Deuises, furnished, and adorned with Emblemes and Impresa's of sundry natures, Newly devised, moralized, and published, By HENRY PEACHAM, Mr. of Artes. (London, 1612), the "sophisticated and intriguing" emblem book posted online as a student project — how wonderful! (via Bibi).
More emblems at Giornale Nuovo: Johann Theodor de Bry and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and a reprint of Théâtre d’Amour (1620).
Johnson's Dictionary: an appreciation by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NY Times (free; reg. required). Heads up from Kevin Berland on C-18L. (See also John Carey's review, in the Times Online, of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World by Henry Hitchings, and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language edited by Jack Lynch.)
Seeing is Believing: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration: online exhibition based on 2000 exhibit at the NY Public Library (via Exclamation Mark).
Notes on the Book of the Revelation by John Nelson Darby (1876; 2nd ed.) (via Plep).
And, old but not so big: Masterpieces in Miniature: Italian MSS from the middle ages and Renaissance (also via Plep).
April 10, 2005
Two Romantic links
Elizabeth Inchbald. Click image for larger view.
The William Blake Archive has announced the publication of the electronic edition of Blake's 116 water-color illustrations to Thomas Gray's poems.
And this is marvellous: Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era: an online exhibition related to an exhibition at the NY Public Library. (Which I wil be able to see! It is on until July 30 and we will be there in June). Here are two items which relate to Life Mask, a novel on which I posted a few weeks ago: a satire on Georgiana Cavendish, and an engraving of the Ladies of Llangollen (n.b. they have a cat). And be sure to see Anne Wagner's Friendship Album: the entire album has been digitalized, and it is beautiful.
Finis. Anne Wagner album. Click image for larger view.
April 3, 2005
Those were the days
The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1836): Cover for 1828. Click for larger image.
Marking papers, still fighting a cold, hovering over at The Valve checking for comments on my comments, wondering how this ALSC issue is going to play out, particularly as I am an unregenerate race-class-gender kinda gal — but, the show must go on!
"Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books." Doesn't seem to be much online, but here are some links to photos in the media.(via BoingBoing).
Visit Giornale Nuovo for misteraitch's post about George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763):
a man of uncertain origins who came to claim that he was a native of the island of Formosa (i.e. Taiwan). So little was known about this island in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, that Psalmanazar got away with an elaborately fanciful back-story, one which he eventually expanded into a marvellously inventive book-length Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, which was published in London in 1704.
Read the post and see the novel illustrations of "Formosans" and their putative language.
A Small Gallery of Magazine Covers: covers of nineteenth-century children's magazines (lots of great illustrations, including the one above); old magazine covers from Nostalgiaville; "Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History" by Gerald Grow, Ph.D. (has some nice late 18thc and 19thc covers) (all via growabrain. Check the post for other magazine links).
The original handwritten MSS of Madame Bovary will be online next year (also via growabrain. Be sure to see his other book links).
The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film by Rebecca West. A lovely article about the century-old Italian tale and its successors (via Plep).
Ramelli's Machines: original drawings of 16thc machines (via Plep).
The rise of the English novel during the 18th century coincided with a growing pride in the landscape of Britain. As novels portrayed society, so maps and topographical views delineated the grandeur of Nature and the man–made elegance of new urban streets and squares. Town and country often provide the travelling backdrop to novels and poems, sometimes exerting such a strong a presence they almost become players in the plot.
From the British Library (via Plep).
Alexander Cruden and his concordance of the Bible (at Metafilter).
Moliere in English: translations by Timothy Mooney, online (via Plep).
Volcanoes, slugs and comets: rare scientific books at UCL (via C18-L, via Sharon).
Two posts by Sharon from some days back, Women’s history and gender history: what and why? and Alice Clark, working women’s historian. Loaded with her usual astute analysis, and links.
And, I don't usually post about ancient history, but this caught my eye: Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Plep).
from Ramelli's Machines
March 30, 2005
Ye Olde Linkes
François Houtin, Hommage à Pozzo, 1997. Click for larger image.
Read misteraitch's excellent post on how Bishop John Wilkins, in his An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), works out, among other things, how much hay Noah would have needed to stow on the Arc. Wilkins, remember, features as a character in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and at times his project of developing a "philosophical language" rivals anything in Book Three of Gulliver's Travels.
Also see misteraitch's third post on Bolognese graphic artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718).
Mark Woods posts some Laurence Sterne links:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-67)
Laurence Sterne in Cyberspace
Six Centuries of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. (via Life in the Present).
"London's Victorian Garden Cemeteries" by Catherine Richards (via Exclamation Mark). Very restful.
François Houtin's etchings. Okay, this one is cheating; he is a contemporary artist. But so eighteenth-century, no? (link from CatalogueAnnie).
Check out the Philosophical Powers: action dolls like Lethal Locke ("with Tabula Rasa: enemies' faces leave an imprint when struck") and Bashin' Bishop Berkeley (via grow-a-brain).
March 26, 2005
And I just went on South Beach
Bibi posts to a wonderful site about medieval and Renaissance food. Check out Gode Cookery, a large site with lots of links with intriguing names like A Tale of Two Tarts and Gentyll manly Cokere (from the manly Pepys).
Other tasty links:
Cressee, an Anglo-Norman recipe
Medieval and Anglo Saxon Recipes and Medieval European Recipes
Medieval Italian stew
Medieval and Renaissance Food Homepage
Recipes from Cariadoc's Miscellany
Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica: Corpus of culinary & dietetic texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800
The Medieval & Renaissance Cookery Webring Homepage
The Forme of Cury, A Roll Of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth, by Edward Lord Stafford, and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq. Illustrated with Notes, And a copious Index, or Glossary (facsimile)
The Renaissance at the Dinner Table
Sabina Welserin's cookbook (1553)
Food in Tudor England
Two fifteenth-century cookery-books
Jacobean Dinner Recipes
The Accomplisht Cook, or The Art & Mystery of Cookery (1685), and The Compleat Cook (1658): online facsimiles, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery For the Use of his Scholars?, by Ed. Kidder, 17-- (facsimile)
Lady Logie's Recipes
18th Century Cooking Equipment
Tallyrand's Culinary Fare: History of Cooking
Seeds for an 18th Century Historically Themed Garden
Jed Wentz's Favorite 18th Century recipes (Quince trifle, anyone?)
"Was death by fire common in Colonial kitchens?" (No.)
Three period restaurants at the fascinating Fortress Louisbourg, N.S. (we visited a few years back)
18thC Cuisine: a blog
Regency Collection: Recipes
Victorian Cake Recipes from Godey's Lady's Book (1860)
Update (12:19pm): Don't know how I could have forgotten to check with the unparallelled linker of things early-modern: Sharon has a great page of foodie links.
March 24, 2005
Life Mask by Emma Donoghue
Here is one description:
The bestselling author of Slammerkin turns her attention to the Beau Monde of late eighteenth-century England, turning the private drama of three celebrated Londoners into a robust, full-bodied portrait of a world, and lives, on the brink of revolution. The Honourable Mrs. Damer is a young widow of eccentric tastes, the only female sculptor of her time. The Earl of Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, is the richest man in the House of Lords-and the ugliest. Miss Eliza Farren, born a nobody, now reigns as Queen of Comedy at Drury Lane Theatre.
In a time of looming war and terrorism, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Their marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones.
A colleague lent me this novel, saying that she had enjoyed it. As she is a discriminating reader I looked forward to reading it, but when I did I was horrified to find that I was not enjoying it. The characters were flat, it was over-researched in a superficial way, and it seemed nothing more than an up-market lesbian bodice-ripper.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
But since it had been lent to me by the aforementioned colleague, I did not follow my impulse to put it aside; instead, I persevered, complaining loudly to Joe all the while. And I'm glad I kept at it, because it grew into an interesting novel. I still think it wears its historical detail heavily — there are countless instances where we are told something for no apparent reason other than, it would seem, Donoghue had come across some titbit about late 18th-century waste management or powdered wigs or the Prince of Wales and could not forebear from sharing; instances that are all the more irritating because her primary method of offering such information is to have one character or another reflect, in a self-conscious and unnatural way, on waste management, etc.& — but even though the novel is guilty many times over of this, one of the most annoying faux pas possible in a historical novel, it still manages to evoke a sense of time and place almost in spite of itself.
And an interesting evolution occurs with the characters. Initially one-dimensional, the three main characters take on a sort of evocative opacity that is much more interesting. Eliza Farren, a "virtuous actress" in the style of her better-known contemporary, Sarah Siddons, seems designed to fulfill the role of object of desire and not much else. Her insistence on maintaining her reputation — a potentially rich, and vexed, topic — is largely unexamined. However, by the end of the text this no longer seems like a fault; Donoghue addresses the issue with an almost oblique suggestiveness that surprises. Well, at least, it surprised me as I had decided, somewhat prematurely, that Donoghue was heavy-handed. The other two main characters are likewise developed in subtle and interesting ways. Derby, with whom one might sympathize for his long, frustrating courtship of Farren, has a brutal streak. The scenes in which Damer is targeted for being a "Tommy" are harrowing, and her growing self-realisation is nicely done.
Donoghue is not a stylist, but this novel has other strengths that only increase as it progresses. And it is interesting on the politics of the period, and on English responses to revolution in France. Which is more or less what my colleague told me when she lent it to me, now that I think of it.
"Derby & Joan or the platonic lovers, a farce" by Robert Dighton, 1795
Bonus links:
"A Sapphick Epistle, from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most beautiful Mrs D****" (1778). Reproduced by Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook.
Life Masks is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Fiction for 2004 (winners to be announced June 2, 2005).
"Anne Damer and Mary Berry in the Library at Little Strawberry Hill" (drawing).
March 17, 2005
Poetry coffeehouse
this evening, part of IWW@UNBSJ. It was organized by two of our fabulous local poets, Heather Craig and Susie Bowers, who both read, along with Anne Compton, Robert Moore, and several others. The idea was to read poems by women who had been influencial, ones own poems, or both. Bob read three poems about Helen of Troy, including "Helen" by H.D. and Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," then read his own poem about Helen, and another about Penelope, both from So Rarely in Our Skins. Anne read a wonderful poem, part of a group project with which she is involved: several poets were turned loose in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and asked to choose a piece of art and then write about it. Anne chose "Victoria Kynaston" by Allan Ramsay (1749), above, and wrote a lovely poem from the perspective of the sitter. It reminded me of Browning's "My Last Duchess" in some ways — the portrait of a woman, the emphasis on her as object — but with the corrective of being from the woman's point of view.
(Now that I think of it, the two poems would be powerful, taught together.)
March 7, 2005
In the stacks
Wakefield Library, 1949
I have been thinking about online learning and how the campus itself is central and how I remember Robarts Library in Toronto in vivid detail but can hardly recall most of my undergraduate classes so if my degree had been online I would have missed most of it. I remember every library I've ever been in, I think, and certainly the early ones: the bookmobile that came to the parking lot of the bank around the corner from where I grew up; the public library on Concession St. in Hamilton, Ont., where my mother, with me in tow, loudly asked for a picture book about menstruation; the huge old Public Library downtown, with its vaulted ceilings and oak; the dusty little library at Ridge School, long since demolished; TerryBerry library, where my friend Chuck told me that Bill Moore had dumped me because it cost too much in bus tickets to keep up the relationship, and I read through all of Anaïs Nin; the windowless library at Westview Senior Public where I read through all the fairy tales: The Blue Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, and all the others; the library at Westmount High, with the librarian with the laquered hair ... And more recently: the Victorianana of the main public library in Leeds; the beautiful library in Brooklyn Heights; the Bodliean; and a host of more modest libraries. We have a lovely public library in downtown Saint John, overlooking the harbour. Libraries are imbued with all we have experienced there; how can they help but be imprinted so strongly on our minds?
Library links:
Another link from the tireless Jim Chevalier, posted to C18-L: a no-frills database, Library History — The British Isles — to 1850: "information on over 27,000 libraries in the British Isles, ... based on over 1,200 published works" (though if you bookmark it, keep in mind, according to the front page, that it is due to relocate soon).
Boots Booklovers Library: 1898-1966. A couple of great photos.
Public Library History: "The history of rate supported public libraries in London 1850-1900."
"Relation of State to Public Library" by Melvil Dewey, 1898 (via The Dusty Bookshelf, a collection of articles dating from the beginning of librarianship as a profession.)
"The Order of Books": how Thomas Jefferson organized his library.
"Not only suitable, but specially attractive" by Evelyn Kerslake: "looking back on 100 years of women in libraries."
"Mudie's Select Library and the Form of Victorian Fiction" by George P. Landow. Ads for Mudie's.
Libraries Today: "a web site for those who are interested in the history of Canadian libraries and librarians, especially in the province of Ontario."
Branch Libraries in the Bronx — Photographs 1905 - 1972.
Libraries: History of the Private, Royal, Imperial, Monastic and Public Libraries: exhibition; from the ancient world to the Renaissance.
"The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria."
Arms, Crests & Monograms: Libraries and Museums.
Library Cats Map: "Click on a region to see a list of library cats!" (Previously mentioned. But you can never have too many library cats.)
And finally, visit, if you dare, the three "Ghostcams" at Willard Library in Indiana. The basementcam is particularly creepy. And it crashed Firefox twice. I'd be careful if I were you.
March 4, 2005
Something old
Frontispeice engraving from Adolph Christoph Bentz Philosophische Schau-Bühne Nurnberg, 1706.
Early Modern Carnival No. 4 is up at Philobiblon.
The Transatlantic 1790s, the project of six Grinnell College students: "This site is devoted to the literature and culture of the 1790s, primarily in Britain and the United States" (via Early Modern Notes).
The British Library asks scholars what 19thc newspapers they would like to see digitalized (also via Early Modern Notes).
The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) by John Dury at Project Gutenberg (via wood s lot). A taste:
The Schooles of the Prophets, the Universities[,] must be setled, purged and reformed with wholsom constitutions, for the education of the sonnes of the Prophets, and the government of their lives and with the soundnes and purity of spirituall learning, that they may speak the true language of Canaan, and that the gibberidge of Scholastical Divinity may be banished out of their society. (48)
Over 90 megabytes online of information on alchemy in all its facets. Divided into over 1300 sections and providing tens of thousands of pages of text, over 2000 images, over 200 complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material on alchemy.
(link from Life in the Present). Now please excuse me while I go to the kitchen and try to make some lunch money.
February 28, 2005
And speaking of archival work
CatalogueAnnie has posted a useful link: Palaeography: reading old handwriting 1500 — 1800: a practical online tutorial."
Court of Chancery: extract from Alexander Selkirk's deposition to the Examiners' Office, dated 1712.
Here is one of a number of "practice documents" posted on the site. Hey, good luck, eh?
February 27, 2005
Streetprint
The Flowers of Maiden Lane, Pub. John Pitts, London, c1818 (Click on image for more information and a typscript of the text)
Jim Chevalier just posted the following to C18-L:
... this site has a variety of 'street literature' — including ballads, newspapers, etc. — much around our period.
It also uses a tool — the Streetprint engine — especially designed for this sort of thing that might interest anyone looking to put a collection of documents on-line.
Streetprint is open source:
A collection of British street literature needed an online home, a place where students and researchers could interact with these fragile texts as though they were sitting down with the original artifacts. The technological complexity of this task soon became a problem; specialists in centuries-old popular print are rarely internet wizards.
In search of an ideal solution, our team in the CRC Studio developed the Streetprint Engine, free software that gives researchers and collectors (like YOU!) easy-to-use tools to create powerful digital archives and share them on the web.
We broadened our focus along the way, creating a system which can now showcase much more than "street print." We like to think, however, that the ideals which underlie our first collection — finding value in the popular and the importance of public circulation, among others — remain at the core of the Streetprint Engine's mission.
What a wonderful idea. And a beautiful dovetailing of the web and print culture. Of all the texts that need to be digitalized, it seems to me that ephemera is close to the top of the list. It's certainly convenient to have canonical texts online, particularly for teaching, but the various projects, large and small, that digitalize street literature and other ephemera are invaluable. The Revolution and Romanticism collection at U of A contains a broadside about William Corder that I hadn't seen, quite possibly the only copy extant, and I probably would not have visited the collection and so might never have known of it.
February 22, 2005
George Washington Gets Extreme Makeover
Jim Chevalier posted to the C-18-L listserv with a link to this story: in essence,
a team of scientists is creating a trio of action figures of [George] Washington as part of a larger [US]$95 million educational effort to reintroduce the first president to America, hoping to illustrate who he was better than those countless portraits.
Jim adds to his post:
I don't know if it ever occured to anyone to do this in Washington's lifetime, but the idea wasn't entirely unknown in our period [c18th]. When Simon-Henri Linguet was still a celebrated lawyer, in addition to the hats, etc. sold as Linguet souvenirs, there were apparently little Linguet dolls. Why not Washington dolls?
I think we Canadians are missing the boat here. How about a Sir John A. Macdonald action figure, complete with glass of gin for those two-day filibusters?
A few minutes of googling later: Good god, there already is one! And, he seems to be holding something, and it looks like a glass. That is so much more fun than wooden dentures.
Bonus link:
February 16, 2005
Asylum art
Untitled, c.1940, Ink on card, by Madge Gill. Henry Boxer Gallery
Boing Boing points towards an article about Outsider Art in France which is, as it turns out, also about Outsider Art in Britain. Or perhaps that would be "insider art," as one of the collections discussed is held at the Royal Bethlam Hospital. Yes, Bedlam. And apparently there are hundreds of pieces of art by inmates, the vast majority of which have never been displayed.
February 9, 2005
Henry Fielding's advice to bloggers?
Came across an interersting new blog via referrer stats: Pratie Place: Reflections and news, primarily from the previous millennium. Because I can't keep up. "Pratie" is Gaelic for "potato" (and I've just got used to "tatties." And I don't even like the things). Of particular interest to me is one series of posts, "Fielding's Advice to Bloggers" (#1, #2, #3):
In the first excerpt, Fielding compares an author to a publican rather than a private host, the distinction being whether or not one pays for the meal. That being the case, I am not sure that bloggers are not more like private hosts (i.e. they can serve whatever they please, however well- or ill-prepared). Though of course there is an economy of blogging, even without ads, sponsorships, etc. etc. Bloggers — some bloggers, anyway — work for hits, links, and "googlejuice." I suppose, then, that we are publicans after all. In my case, of a kind of wine bar—gin joint—ice cream parlour fusion place.
In the second, he promises to write only when he has something of interest to write about.
Oops. Zero for two.
In the last, we are warned against being "morose snarling critics." Oh, like he should talk.
January 28, 2005
The performing arts
Garrick as Richard III [inside a gourd??]
Bibi points towards a guided tour of music halls, part of a larger site about performance in the U.K. called PeoplePlay UK: Theatre History Online. Nice pages on Restoration and c18th theatre: lots of graphics and goodies.
Too much of a yawn? Perhaps you'd like to check out buffology: "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database" (via BoingBoing).
WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama.
International Theatre Resources from Artslynx.
Thai Elephant Orchestra (from Mirabilis).
January 24, 2005
Representations
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of early American imprints (via Bostonia). A lot of these items are reprints of, or are very like, texts printed in the U.K.
At the same site, another exhibit: Picturing Women explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative.
January 16, 2005
Midwives
Natalie at Phiobiblon has a couple of posts about midwifery and illegitimacy in 18thc France (in the latter post she mentions the mind-boggling possibility that upwards of 40% of infants born in France in the period were illegitimate ended up in foundling hospitals).
Attaining Legitimacy: Eighteenth-Century Man-midwives and the Rhetoric of their Texts by Candice Dahl in Gateway: an academic journal on the web.
Sites and Margins of the Public Sphere, special number of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4 (Summer 1999), has a number of great articles available through Project Muse.
Sex, Gender and the Female Body, special number of Women's Writing 11.2 (2004). Articles not free yet but will be twelve months after publication.
Childbirth, midwifery, and science: The life and work of the French royal midwife Louise Bourgeois (1563 — 1636) by Bridgette Ann Majella Sheridan (Diss., Boston College, 2002).
Sharon's bibliography, Pregnancy and Childbirth.
Books/chapters and articles about midwifery history, a bibliography at Nursing and Midwifery History UK.
The History of Women and Science, Health, and Technology: a bibliographic guide to the professions and the disciplines: Midwifery.
Martha Ballard and a Man-Midwife: a time of transition in midwifery: an interactive exploration of the famouse illustration by Isaac Cruikshank. An an annotation from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (links from Caricatures of Nurses and Midwives through history).
Ask the Quack: post and get diagnosed. Be sure to check out the literary endorsements.
Update (17/1/05) In the comments, Sharon links to Elain Hobby's "Secrets of the Female Sex: Jane Sharp, the reproductive female body, and early modern midwifery manuals." Women's Writing 8.2 (2001): 201-212.
January 14, 2005
It's payday
(Click for larger image)
and I just ordered this. For half price, my fellow dix-huitiémistes! I got very excited when I read that it was edited by William Smellie, but it was not the William Smellie I was thinking of.
Though they were both Scottish.
According to Robbie Burns,
SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;
The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;
His bristling beard just rising in its might,
’Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:
His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;
Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.
Bonus links on the first Smellie:
William Smellie, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (1754)
Of the Management of new-born Children, with the Diseases to which they are subject; A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1762)
Smellie lived for a time with William Hunter, author of Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata [The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774), and of whom I have written.
Collection of obstetrical and gynecological instruments in the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Obstetric Literature and the Changing Character of Childbirth.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Collection.
And the second:
Major Topics of the Encycopedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–1771)
Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular translated by William Smellie (8 volumes, 1781).
A Romantic Natural History Bibliography
Elegy on the death of Smellie's son (facsimile from the wonderful The Word on the Street).
"Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study."
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust. See particularly Links to printing historical resources. Also of interest: First Scottish Books.
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.
January 12, 2005
Something old
The Scrap Album: Victorian Greeting Cards, Valentines, and Scraps (via Plep).
Check for the History Carnival tomorrow.
There is a thread at C18-L about monstrous births.
Watercolours of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) (featured at Giornale Nuovo).
Misteraitch has started a new weblog at which he is reproducing the essays of Isaac D’Israeli from his Curiosities of Literature, a wide-ranging work full of excellent advice, such as the following:
AMONG the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling.
He also warns,
THE literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastation of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books.
Though Misteraitch has rescued him from such a fate.
This is quite an inspiring project. I wonder if I have anything that is otherwise unavailable; one or two things, I think. Think how much we could add to the common pool if we all followed Misteraitch's lead.
December 9, 2004
Dream Anatomy
Dream Anatomy, an online exhibit by the U.S. National Library of Medicine about the history of anatomical imagery, from 1500 to the present:
The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.
Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism. We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality, a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition.
Here is the gallery.
(Via Boing Boing).
December 7, 2004
Marking, but
I had to share. One of my first year students just wrote, of "The Gentleman's Study," "This poem is just a regurgitation of Swift's poem."
And thus do we get our little rewards.
December 6, 2004
The Thomas Gray Archive
Alexander Huber just announced, on C18-L, that the Thomas Gray Archive, a free interactive hypermedia archive, has launched a UK mirror.
December 5, 2004
Crime and punishment
More great links from Sharon, including one to a piece about murder ballads, a descriptive essay with several good links from a student of Michael Hancher's from what looks to be a great course on street literature. Of particular interest to me is the mention of two "murderous sweetheart" ballads, in one of which, "The Horrid Murder Committed by Mary Wilson," the murder was committed by a woman upon a man. Unfortunately that one is not reproduced, though the author does provide the reference. Very exciting to hear about; directly relates to a project I'm doing. But mum's the word.
Art below stairs
Claire points towards the webpage for a show, now closed, called Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants' Portraits, and Sharon, in the comments, recommends Erddig Hall, "famous for its portraits of the servants of the house from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (There is also a book, The Servants' Hall. Lots of pictures.)," while Natalie writes about Gwen John, sister of Augustus, one of whose earliest oils was of her cleaning woman, Mrs. Atkinson.
[The painting is "Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants" by William Hogarth, c 1750-5, part of the Below Stairs exhibit. I've always liked this painting: the range of ages and faces, particularly the young boy at the top; the woman in the bottom right, the only one looking at the viewer; the old man, looking away from everyone else.]
November 29, 2004
How C18th texts are rated
In a recent post, the other Miriam looked at how Victorian texts rate with librarians. Looking at the same list, I searched for C18th texts. Hooo Nelly!
Gulliver's Travels is the highest on the list, coming in at #20 (two below Garfield). Robinson Crusoe is #22, and Pilgrim's Progress is #28. Goethe's Faust is #32, just ahead of Austen's Pride and Prejudice at #33. Grimms' Fairy Tales are #49, Mozart's Don Giovanni is #87, Tom Jones is #92, Emma is #94, The Magic Flute is #107, and Boswell's Life of Johnson is #119. As Miriam found with the Victorians, heavy on the children's texts — well, texts thought of as children's texts — plus lots of music from the period, mainly from Mozart. Heavy on the Austen but no other texts by women except Shelley's Frankenstein at #44 (I did say the looong 18thc, right?). Light on the usual "heavy hitters" of the survey courses: Johnson is only represented by Boswell, and Pope's Essay on Man, at #733, is edged out by Benjamin Bunny at #730. Not much in terms of philosophy, with the exception of Rousseau, who is much in evidence. Kant with a bullet at #284, while Hobbes's Leviathan wades in at #396. Otherwise, nada.
The real question is, why does this surprise me?
November 28, 2004
17th Century British Porn to Be Auctioned
Jack Kolb on C18-L points towards the story:
The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the "quintessence of debauchery," is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month.
"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line."
"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.
"It is one of the most notorious publications in literature and makes most pornography written 300 years later seem tame."
The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.
The book, the only surviving copy, will be auctioned on December 16.
The conversation on the list has been fast and furious. Jim Chevalier offers some interesting links and quotes Richard Norton:
It should be noted that this play is not a defence of bisexuality or
libertinage in general, but of homosexuality in particular: clearly the author
and his audience had a concept of "the homosexual" in mind long before that
category was supposedly "invented" in the late nineteenth century.
Robert Dawson takes exception to the work being categorized as "The world's first known piece of printed pornography," and Rictor Norton links to Sotheby's cataloque description.
Here are the opening lines of the play:
Thus, in the Zenith of my last I reign,
I eat to swive, and swive to eat again;
Let other Monarchs, who their Scepters bear,
To Keep their subjects less in Awe than Fear,
Be Slaves to Crowns, my Nation shall be free,
My Prick only shall my Scepter be;
My Laws shall act more Pleasure then Command,
And with my Prick, I'll govern all the Land.
This sounds most promising. I echo Jim Chevalier's expressed hope that someone, somewhere, has scanned this text.
Romantic women
The British Women Romantic Poets, 1789–1832: a digital initiative of the U.C. Davis General Library (via Plep).
Not always what you might expect.
November 19, 2004
Newton
Victoria Harding posts the following to C18-L:
... the NY Public Library has an exhibition that may be of interest, The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, a version of which is available on line. A review of both the exhibition and catalogue by Anthony Grafton in the current NYRB is temporarily available free on line here [no longer, alas; now it costs $4].
The online material is good, but even more happily (for me, at least), the show, which opened on October 8, is to run through February 5, 2005. We will be down there in December, over the holidays, so I should be able to see it.
Here's hoping that the Jinker Boy doesn't knock over an astrolabe.
Bonus links:
Isaac Newton's Gravity: How a major new exhibition gets the scientist wrong: Newton biographer James Gleick's article in Slate.
David Collins, a former student, did a nice page on Newton. See in particular his version of the apple story.
Some other links from Collins.
Bio/links
The Newton Project: ambitious project to publish all his works electronically
Page o' links
Sir Isaac Newton: links, texts.
Isaac Newton's Hidden Agenda of Mysticism and Alchemy. This is an aspect of Newton played up by Neal Stephenson in Quicksilver (here is an earlier post about the novel), and it is the absense of such in the NYC Public Library exhibition that Gleick (above) criticises.
Stephenson's Newton really was a piece of work.
November 16, 2004
Hogarth
The Jones Family Conversation Piece by Hogarth, held at the National Museum & Gallery Cardiff. Long-lost ancestors, no doubt.
The Rake posted, a few days back, on William Hogarth (1697-1764), and pointed towards the very useful page about Hogarth on Artcyclopedia, a comphrehensive site that links to online resources on particular artists: "Great art online, from over 8,000 famous painters, sculptors and photographers, at art museum sites & image archives worldwide."
Bonus links:
A previous post on print culture and Hogarth.
William Hogarth's Realm, Or, an XVIII Century Artist's Magazine: nice setup, like a period newspaper.
The Site for Research on William Hogarth
HOGARTH: "Helpful Online Gateway to Art History"
November 14, 2004
UK history resource
A Vision of Britain Through Time: "A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001. Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions." There is some earlier material, however; of particular interest to me is the section on Travellers' Tales ("Journeys around Britain, from the 12th to the 19th centuries"), which includes Daniel Defoe's A Tour through England and Wales divided into circuits or journeys (here's vol. 2). Though curiously, the sections about Wales have been left out. Who on earth would leave out Wales? (Though Sharon, to whom I owe the link, allows that "there are some doubts about how many of the places in Wales [Defoe] actually visited anyway").
Anyway, other travellers supply the lack. Here is George Borrow from Wild Wales (1854):
I departed for Swansea, distant about thirteen miles. Gutter Vawr consists of one street, extending for some little way along the Swansea road, the foundry, and a number of huts and houses scattered here and there. The population is composed almost entirely of miners, the workers at the foundry, and their families. For the first two or three miles the country through which I passed did not at all prepossess me in favour of Glamorganshire: it consisted of low, sullen, peaty hills. Subsequently, however, it improved rapidly, becoming bold, wild, and pleasantly wooded. The aspect of the day improved, also, with the appearance of the country. When I first started the morning was wretched and drizzly, but in less than an hour it cleared up wonderfully, and the sun began to flash out. As I looked on the bright luminary I thought of Ab Gwilym's ode to the sun and Glamorgan, and with breast heaving and with eyes full of tears, I began to repeat parts of it, or rather of a translation made in my happy boyish years:-
Each morn, benign of countenance,
Upon Glamorgan's pennon glance!
Afternoon in beauty clear
Above my own dear bounds appear!
Bright outline of a blessed clime,
Again, though sunk, arise sublime -
etc.
This reminds me of a joke — no, don't go — I heard one old fellow telling another in a pub in Bishopston, Gower, some years back:
An English tourist is walking about the hills of Wales, comes upon a local man, and greets him:
"I say! Do you suppose that we are going to see the sun today?"
"Oh, I hope so, sir. Not for me; I've seen the sun. But for my children."
And many more in this vein. I can tell you, after a few lagers and lime my breast was heaving and my eyes were full of tears.
November 9, 2004
Abbotsford
Film planned on life of Sir Walter Scott (thanks, Ed).
Other films based on Scott's works.
Bonus links on Scott:
The Walter Scott Digital Archive at Edinburgh U Library.
The Millgate Union Catalogue of Walter Scott Correspondence.
A web guide to Sir Walter Scott from literaryhistory.com, including critical articles and links.
Sir Walter Scott on the Victorian Web.
The Literary Gothic and Scott.
The Sir Walter Scott Way a 151 kilometre cross-country walk.
Splendour of Scott Country — A Full Day Tour.
The Scott Monument virtual tour.
Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns Monuments in the Virtual Park, Central Park.
The Life of Sir Walter Scott by J.G. Lockhart (1848) (Also here).
Sir Walter Scott by Richard H. Hutton (1888).
The Life Of Sir Walter Scott by S. Fowler Wright (1932).
Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy by Andrew Lang.
Listed as a "Famous Freemason."
Links: etexts, articles.
Lotsa links, including etexts.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Female Portrait Gallery" of Scott's heroines.
Bibliography of Scottish literature.
Scott is listed on Fantastic Fiction for his ghost stories.
Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.
Why do I care? Because I wrote a chapter on Scott's Heart of Mid-Lothian and while I was doing the research I developed a real affection for the old spendthrift.
November 7, 2004
Beautiful books
Have you seen the British Libraries Turning the Pages, digitalized books that you can "read" by, well, turning the pages? They have Jane Austen's History of England (thanks, Catalogue Blog) and Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal, George III's copy, no less.
And this rather shockingly titled book, Goodbye Gutenberg, does indeed look beautiful (link via Matt Kirschenbaum, apparently no relation). Perhaps I will ask for it for the holidays, along with this, which was supposed to be on sale — according to a poster to C18-L — but no longer seems to be.
Rare Books Exhibition — The Restoration 1660-1700 (via Plep).
Albrecht Dürer woodcuts and engravings (via Plep).
November 6, 2004
And here's a parting shot
from Giornale Nuovo which brings to mind the U.S. election. And not just because most everything brings to mind the U.S. election these past couple of days (I worked it into a lecture on Pilgrim's Progress yesterday. Which I suppose is not really that much of a stretch).
October 26, 2004
Book exhibits
Plep highlights a series of wonderful virtual exhibits on the Monash University Library site (Australia): sf magazines and comics, yellowbacks (popular books from the second half of the 19th century, simply bound in boards, with highly-coloured graphics on the covers), and English Literature to 1800, including Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey & Horace, tragedies, with several other translations out of French. (London : Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1667).
October 15, 2004
Dust-free archives
Bookninja posts a link that might interest any archivists out there (and you know who you are): the British Library is planning to archive the email "of the nation's top authors and scientists," though there is the ongoing problem of technological obsolescence. The BL is appealing to the general public for access to old computers; maybe I should tell them about those two Performas in the basement.
Bookbindings at the the University of Glasgow (link from Plep) and the British Library.
Women's Travel Writing, 1830–1930 (also from Plep).
Amanda writes, "There really is an archive for everything" as she points towards the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project: Clothing found hidden in buildings: "A research project based at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton exploring instances of and the practice of concealing garments in the fabric of buildings." This is so cool! Link from Household Opera.
October 5, 2004
c18th costumes and textiles
Jim Chevallier points towards a "tiny but sumptuous" exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Luxury Textiles East and West, many items of which can be viewed online (from C18-L). Browse the Museum's 18th-century holdings.
September 25, 2004
Tristram Shandy
UK director Michael Winterbottom is planning to adapt Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to film.
I'm having trouble imagining this, but would love to see it. Maybe it will make my students feel more charitably towards the book. As long as he avoids the money shots.
(Link from Stephany at Maud's).
August 28, 2004
Travel literature
From a discussion on C18-L: Jim Chevallier offers Répertoires bibliographiques des guides et récits de voyage de Français en Grande-Bretagne et de Britanniques en France (en Français but includes some links to texts in English).
Check the C18-L archives for lots of print references.
August 27, 2004
Who, me morbid?
My Blair Witch photo of the cemetary at Bury St. Edmunds (July 2004). Click image for larger view.
Afterlife: the four seasons in Streatham Cemetery: lovely in a the opening of Six Feet Under sort of way (from web zen).
Thanatos.net: death mask gallery (from web zen).
The Body Revealed: Renaissance and Baroque Anatomical Illustration (from Plep).
Obituary Central (from Plep).
Cemetery art and photography (from Plep).
Death and Dying, part of the Victorian Dictionary (from Plep).
William Corder's death mask, the Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St. Edmunds
Illustrations
Seeing Is Believing: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration: an exhibition from the New York Public Library (2000). Nice site which allows you to look at some of the illustrations in detail (from Mirabilis).
Drolleries and two posts about Andrea Mantegnaat Giornale Nuovo.
August 16, 2004
Dangerous Liaisons
There is currently an interesting conversation on the C18 listserv about Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century at the Met. The show is apparently a series of tableaux, some of which, like the one above, are generating discussion (i.e. Just exactly how does a lady sit with a harp?).
July 25, 2004
Women on the go
Made a quick visit to the National Portrait Gallery yesterday (and did you know that there is also one in the U.S.? Most confusing for googlers) and saw Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers. Aphra Behn and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were featured, but I didn't buy the book because the exhibition was skewed towards the 19th and 20th centuries. While interesting, not my patch.
Had upscale Italian last night. That brings the tally of London meals to one Chinese, one Portuguese, one Thai, one Indian, and one Italian. Had English cooking elsewhere, mind — mainly at the conference, and with my relatives — though I did have an excellent Indian meal in Bury St. Edmunds.
This will probably be my last entry for a few days; am flying back to NYC this afternoon and will no doubt be prevented from having any keyboard time by the Jinker Boy. And quite rightly.
And, am about to eat my last pain chocolat and drink my last latte for awhile; back to low carbs. And not a moment too soon.
Yesterday's conversation with a just-woken Jinker Boy:
Me: Good morning, sweetie!
JB: Mummy.
Me: Did you have a nice sleep?
JB: [beat] Yiss.
Me: Mummy's coming home tomorrow!
JB: Why?
July 18, 2004
The British Museum
Went to the British Museum today; the last time I was there I worked in the Reading Room but only visited one exhibit, of early books. Today I spent a good few hours and saw three exhibits:
Living and dying, an exhibition that "looks at how people around the world deal with the tough realities of life, averting or confronting trouble, sorrow, need and sickness" (online tour). Not as drippy as they make it sound. The bulk of the exhibit consists of artifacts from different cultures. Cradle to Grave, an installation piece, was very cool. And moving:
Cradle to Grave explores our approach to health in Britain today. The piece incorporates a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man.
Each length contains over 14,000 drugs, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. This does not include pills we might buy over the counter, which would require about 40,000 pills each.
Sobering to see all those tiny pills laid out in neat rows, covering so much space.
I also saw Matisse to Freud: A Critic's Choice, Alexander Walker's bequest of his fabulous collection of more than 200 twentieth-century prints and drawings, including Jim Dine's "Five Paintbrushes (Sixth State)" (1973), which I particularly liked:
Finally, I saw Enlightenment,1 "a rich new exhibition using thousands of objects from the Museum's collection to show how people understood their world in the Age of Enlightenment" (online tour). The focus here is on eighteenth-century approaches to various developing branches of science. The exhibits are displayed much as they might have been at the time, in various glass-topped cases, and the refurbished King's Library is the perfect setting for showcasing an approach to artifacts rather than the artifacts themselves. An interestingly self-conscious move, as the British Museum was itself founded in 1753.
Before I left I popped my head in the former Reading Room where I spent many contented hours doing dissertation research, but was unable to stay. Of course the new library site was needed and I was relieved to hear that the BM was going to maintain the Reading Room, but in fact it is not the Reading Room any more; even though it is the actual physical space, apparently unchanged, it has become a model gesturing to its own past, no different from any other exhibit despite its much-touted function as information hub for the museum. When I was there last it was a working library; the only people there were librarians or readers. Now it is filled with the same crowds who stand in front of all the other displays. The Great Court, in which the Reading Room is centred, is grand and airy, a beautiful space. But still, I am sad.
1 Beware the pulsing icons.
July 3, 2004
What about Starbucks?
Picking up from Laura's comparision of the blogosphere to a town hall meeting, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wonders if it is perhaps more like eighteenth-century coffeehouses in its diversity. Relative diversity, for as Henry points out, the rubbing of shoulders was limited to the male bourgeoise.
Last year Brian Micklethwait reproduced an article from The Economist which links coffeehouses to the internet.
My student's page on coffeehouses.
c18th resources
Three from Early Modern Resources from a couple of weeks ago: Dynamic Directory: 18th century, Glossary of 18th Century Costume Terminology, and 18th Century English Music.
July 1, 2004
Some beautiful things
[Click illustration for larger view]
Wonderbound: centuries-old natural history books at the Smithsonian (via Plep).
A Case of Curiousities: the artist writes, "Taxidermy and assemblage inspired by 18th & 19th century French, German and Russian fairy tales, the curiosity cabinets (_wunderkammer_) of the 16th-19th centurys, Victorian grotesque taxidermy, Surrealism and a touch of the circus sideshow" (via Plep).
Jacob Cats' emblem-book, Proteus Ofte Minne-Beelden Verandert In Sinne-Beelden (1627) (at Giornale Nuovo).
Spring Surprises: Popular, Literary and Scientific Pop-up Books (via Plep).
Henry Purcell 1659-1695, "The Glory of the Temple and the Stage." With sound (via Plep).
Hamster Opera (via Mirabilis).
[Click illustration for full view]
June 27, 2004
Getting about
Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1843 (via Plep).
Visit 18th-century Italy at three Getty exhibitions.
Transportation Inventions & Events of the Enlightenment Period.
Hudson's Bay Company Digital Collection.
Digital maps of Scotland, 1560-1892.
South Sea Bubble Playing Cards, 1720.
Fantastic Voyages Quiz: "Over the years, many authors have written stories of journeys to the Moon. But which were really possible?"
June 25, 2004
Gender links
The Dominion posts a link to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test. Something for my Gender Studies class in Sept.
Check out Christine's posts at ms.musings about the HUGE class action suit against Wal-Mart.
Sarah Bakewell reviews Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (via Cup of Chicha). I will order this for our library, pronto; at first glance it seems to be an updated, indepth analysis of some of the same dynamics Gayle Tuchman and Nina Fortin looked at years ago with regards to the 19th-century, but with earlier writers.
June 23, 2004
Misc. links
[click for larger view]
"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).
The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).
SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.
Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.
American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).
Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).
Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).
June 22, 2004
Caxon, Shakespeare, and Children's lit.
Priceless Caxton book goes on show for first time. Book written by Benedictine monk in 1360 and printed by William Caxton in 1482 (via Mirabilis).
William Caxton stamps commemorating the 500th anniversary of printing in 1976.
Printing in England from William Caxton to Christopher Barker — An Exhibition: University of Glasgow, November 1976 — April 1977.
Caxton's Chaucer: compare the 1476 and 1483 editions held in the British Library.
18th and 19th Century Shakespearean Illustrations (via Plep).
Shakespeare Illustrated "explores nineteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another."
How Shakespeare Prepared Manuscripts.
Intermingling illustration and text: hyper-illuminated criticism of Shakespeare's Works.
Alice and Beyond: English Children's Books (via Plep).
The Children's Literature Web Guide.
Authors & Illustrators on the Web.
Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature.
June 20, 2004
Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner
Have just begun Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean (2003). He read here at the university last year; he was a real storyteller and looked quite the frontiersman in his fringed buckskin.
Now maybe I should stop mucking about with this blog and go and actually read.
Requisite links:
June 14, 2004
Spare the rod
Years ago I visited the Osborne Collection, when it was still on University Ave., with my 18thc women writers graduate seminar. I won't soon forget the story of the little girl who wanted the pretty coloured vase instead of sensible shoes: her mother bought her the vase, which turned out to be plain glass filled with coloured water, and she wore her too-small shoes, full of holes, all through that winter. Bet she learnt her lesson. Surprised Gorey missed it.
moleskinerie links to a wonderful website, Victorian Children's Activities: a digital collection of pieces from the Osborne Collection that showcases pop-ups, theatres, and other movable books.
June 13, 2004
RISM Music Manuscripts Database
First phase of the UK and Ireland Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) Music Manuscripts Database has been launched:
A new free-to-access database giving details of 17th- and 18th-century music manuscripts held in libraries and archives across the UK and in Dublin has just been launched by Royal Holloway, University of London. Containing details of more than 29,000 pieces of music, it is the result of a three-year project undertaken by the Music Department at Royal Holloway in collaboration with the Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) UK Trust and the British Library, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
News via Andrew Pink on the C18-Listserv.
June 12, 2004
c18th collections
The Wallace Collection of 17th and 18th-century art promises to "delight, amaze and bemuse" (via The Little Professor).
The Assembly Rooms and Museum of Costume, Bath.
The Geffrye Museum, London: the English domestic interior from 1600 to the present day.
Enlightenment, a new gallery at the British Museum.
The Grand Tour: Landscape & Veduta Paintings Venice & Rome in the 18th Century.
Ca' Rezzonico: Museum of the 18th Century, Venice.
Pretty Prints, Clever Cottons: 18th Century Fabrics.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 18th century textiles.
And, in case you thought it was all tea and country walks:
Women's Lives in the British Civil Wars (via new group blog, 17th century).
The Diary of Martha Ballard, a late eighteenth-century midwife and healer in Massachusetts (via 17th century).
An 18th Century Cipher Device Exhibit.
An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-century Paris. According to 17th century,
This is the first electronic article to be published by the American Historical Review, this is an 'enhanced' version of a presidential address in the print journal, by Robert Darnton, the distinguished cultural historian. As well as the text, it has maps and (translated) police reports corresponding to the places shown, images, songs (texts and translations, as well as performances), an online discussion, and a 'bonus' essay by Darnton.
And the everpopular The Proceedings of the Old Bailey London 1674 to 1834 (I'm sure I linked to them before, but the more links the better, I always say).
June 5, 2004
Bedlam II
Recently finished reading Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam (previously mentioned here). I enjoyed it immensely.
Am deciding about whether or not to put it on my prose narrative before 1800 course next fall. On the plus side: it's a compelling read, but more importantly, Hollingshead is giving a reading in Saint John and the class could attend. On the negative side: the reading is early in October so I will have had little time to develop a context; the students will have read Bedlam before they have read much from the period itself; and reading a contemporary novel might throw off their reading of 18th-century texts. On balance, though, I think that the chance to hear — and possibly interact with — a living, breathing author overrides other considerations. And I will have a month to set the stage.
Links:
Artist Rod Dickinson's construction of James Tilly Matthews' Air Loom
Mike Jay's The Air Loom Gang (Bantam Press, 2003)
John Haslam's Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion: Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-bursting, Lobster-cracking, and Lengthening the Brain (London: Rivingtons, 1810) (facsimile.)
Roy Porter's facsimile edition, with introduction, of Haslan's text.
June 4, 2004
Eliza Haywood
I'm working on an entry about Eliza Haywood for an encyclopedia of erotic literature.
I love Haywood. I even named my desktop computer after her, and greater love hath no woman. Her career spanned four decades, from the vogue of amatory fiction in the 1720s, of which she was a pioneer, to the novels of education of the 1740s and 50s. Some critics have described this trajectory in terms of repentance or conversion, but I prefer the argument that she was particularly adept at gauging the literary marketplace.
And, as you can see from the portrait, she was a major babe.
Some Haywood links:
A resuscitated reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood, Andrew Ball, Oxford English Dictionary.
Eliza Haywood's Feigning Femmes Fatale: Desirous and Deceptive Women in Fantomina, Love in Excess, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (PDF), Emily Kathryn Booth (MA thesis, English, East Tennessee State University, 2001).
The Fortunate Foundlings, Being the Genuine History of Colonel M — — Rs, And His Sister, Eliza Haywood (e-text).
Catherine Ingrassia's page: bibliography and chronology.
"Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century": Catherine Ingrassi.
"The Language of Feminised Sexuality: gendered voice in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and Fantomina" (PDF), Tiffany Potter, Women's Writing 10.1 (2003).
"The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s" (PDF), Sarah Prescott, Women's Writing 7.3 (2000).
Selected Bibliography: Jessica Smith and Paula Backscheider.
The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, George Frisbie Whicher (1915).
The textual architecture of Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Earla A. Wilputte, Essays in Literature (March 22, 1995).
May 27, 2004
More on Gillray
Giornale Nuovo continues the story of 18thc satirist James Gillray, begun here. A wonderful post with the combination of narrative and visuals that the Giornale does so well.
(See my earlier post for a sample drawing and some other links).
May 26, 2004
Some links
Feministing has a post about Cindy Sherman, Photographer extraordinaire, and links to some other feminist artists (Yay Guerrilla Girls!).
The Ex-Classics Web Site takes on the needful task of reproducing texts formerly influential, now out of print, such as the Newgate Calendar with its tales of crime and depravity.
Million Book Project (via Maud).
Two very funny links from Boing Boing: Donald and Mickey insinuated into various canonical works of art, and famous nudes with clothing on.
This is doing the rounds. Reminds me of those little videos of Dave Pogue on the Macworld CDs. Do those guys go to some speech school somewhere?
Common Errors in English and How to Recognize Plagiarism (both via Palimpsest).
The Power of Woe, The Power of Life. Images of women in prints from the Renaissance to the present (from Plep).
Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 now out (via Crooked Timber):
Around the world, more than a billion people's lives were ruined by extreme poverty and social injustice while governments continued to spend freely on arms.
May 24, 2004
James Gillray
Giornale Nuovo has an informative post about James Gillray (1756-1815), caricaturist. And, more is promised.
Some other links:
William Hogarth
William Hogarth and 18th-Century Print Culture
Jack Lynch's Eighteenth-Century Resources — Art
University of Wales, Lampeter Hogarth Archive, and, to round things off,
A Speedy 18th Century Corset
May 22, 2004
Gender resources
Mary Robinson's "A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination": A Hypertext Edition (via wood s lot).
African American Women Writers of the 19th-Century.
The History of Rape: A Bibliography compiled by Stefan Blaschke (via wood s lot).
E-books by Women Writers, from Louisa May Alcott to Zitkala-S.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Women and Computing.
The Center for Women and Change: Women's Resources.
"Trashing the Hallmark card mom" by Katy Read at Salon, with links to various mothers' organizations (via feministing.com).
May 19, 2004
Bedlam
I was lucky enough to be given bound proofs of Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam. Isn't it a marvellous cover? Hollingshead is coming to Saint John in the fall as part of our annual Lorenzo Society Reading Series, and I am wondering whether or not to put the novel on my "Prose Narrative Before 1800" course. It might be interesting to discuss a contemporary text that seeks to represent the period we are studying, and it would be wonderful for them to be able to attend a reading and ask questions of a real, live author.
Here is what he writes about the novel:
Bedlam is a novel based on the true story of James Tilly Matthews, an inmate of Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields in London during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although delusional, Matthews is in for political reasons, and his wife Margaret spends ten years trying to get him out. Her primary opponent, the author of an eloquent description of his condition (the first extended account of a paranoid system in English), is the author and apothecary John Haslam, a man compromised by defending an imprisonment he has been given no reason for, of a patient who he knows would be better off released. Bedlam is told in the voices of these three characters.
The British social historian Roy Porter has told this story most thoroughly in his 1988 edition of Haslam's book concerning Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810). While exercising some fictional licence, I am doing my best to be faithful to the characters, their voices, their experiences, and the times.
Homepage.
HarperCollins Interview on Bedlam.
Working the Airloom: on writing historical fiction.
Interview (Nov. 03).
Audio of Hollingshead reading from The Roaring Girl, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction.
May 7, 2004
c18th links
Mathematicians of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
Clandestine E-Texts From the Eighteenth Century.
Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England.
Eighteenth-Century England: "A Site Created by and for Literature Students at the University of Michigan."
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Jack Lynch's comprehensive Samual Johnson page.
BBC Four has a Samual Johnson prize for best non-fiction.
April 17, 2004
English Pattern Books
Plep points towards eighteenth-century English pattern books at the Met. The context is American but the books are British.
April 16, 2004
What would Richardson think?
Stephany Aulenback points towards Eric Brown's Digital Epistolary Novel, Intimacies (beware seizure-inducing intro). The plot:
Two young professionals "meet" through a mis-sent e-mail. They become "attracted" in cyber-space and tentatively agree to a "real" meeting. A brutal assault follows. The obvious suspect is the e-mail partner, but one person is unconvinced. A series of surprises and revelations follows — all delivered in digital form, all entirely possible, and all representing ways we now learn of events in our world where virtual reality constantly fights its counterpart.
Brown, "a former English professor who teaches executives how to write," says in a NYTimes interview that the plot is based on Pamela, but it sounds more like a modern-day, hyper violent Clarissa, at least from the description above. Not to mention the photograph of the mascara-stained woman on the site.
April 6, 2004
According to Bainbridge
Just finished According to Queeney (2001) by Beryl Bainbridge, a retelling of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale Piozzi. The novel is framed by a series of letters from Piozzi's daughter, Hester (Queeney) when adult, so her point of view dominates, but she is not alone: the bulk is told with a variety of shifting perspectives, though mainly Piozzi's and Johnson's. It is a cold, sad book. Piozzi is presented as selfish and violent with her children. Johnson's complicated relations with women and his physical decline are described in detail. One feels sympathy for the young Queeney, but the older Queeney of the framing letters is bitter and self-righteous. Bainbridge's writing is economical, and she rarely missteps, but I would agree with one (forgotten, sorry) reviewer who advised that only those already familiar with the Streatham circle should read the novel: in other words, that one should not judge Piozzi et al. by Bainbridge's portraits. A beautifully written but bleak, at times even macabre, set-piece, from the opening dissection to the final funeral. And remarkable for its reproduction of the turns of phrase, the modes of thought, of the period.
Addendum: Here is the Henry and Hester Thrale page of a comprehensive website about things Thrale, run by one David Thrale.
March 27, 2004
Wonder women
Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"
I would LOVE to see those issues.
Cross-posted to writingwomen.
March 16, 2004
Jonathan Swift, ahead of his time
Mirabilis links to an article in the Globe and Mail which begins, "In February 1708, Jonathan Swift assumed one identity in order to effectively assassinate another." It goes on to describe how Swift effectively skewered the career of "astrologer and rascal" John Partridge. (The bulk of the article is about contemporary identity theft, which needn't concern us. The important thing to remember is that anything interesting was invented in the eighteenth century.)
March 15, 2004
Two c18th links
from Plep:
1. Eighteenth-Century European dress at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. Lovely photographs and commentary that makes the palms itch to stroke some silk.
2. The Poems of Ossian, the hugely successful literary forgery by James Macpherson, published in 1773 as a translation of an ancient Celtic poem cycle.
February 21, 2004
Tristram Shandy; print
wood s lot links to a memorable post in maisonneuve about moveable type (the printing technology, not the weblog programme). I like the paragraph on Tristram Shandy, quoted in the referring post. I'll be teaching it next Sept., and will remember this:
The professor envies his students one thing: that this is their first reading of Tristram Shandy. The professor admits then to pitying himself and his students one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, the black, blank and marbled pages are all reproductions of the idea of the page, but never the actual page its significance begs it to be: meaning, Tristram Shandy no longer exists, and the only way to prolong its life was to transfer its significance into a simulacrum’s life.
February 9, 2004
Latest overdue reviews
Ellen Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: effeminacy and the supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Bucknell, 2003), and
Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction (Cornell, 2003).
February 4, 2004
Carrie, eat your heart out.
Here, via the amazing Plep, is a blog about shoes. All about shoes.
I visited the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto the last time I was there. They have some lovely 18thc shoes,
and I was delighted to find a magnet with a picture of them in the giftshop. (If they set up a shoe shop, they would make a killing!)
Joe and I visited the Ellis Island Museum shortly after it reopened—a few years back now—and the thing I remember most strongly is a single, tiny leather bootie, lost by someone (and where are they now?), sitting in a glass display case.
What is it about shoes?
November 26, 2003
What's that in dollars?
Students of ENGL3204: Apropos of our discussion about Frances Burney's Evelina: here is a site that links to various resources to help determine, as its title says, the "Current Value of Old Money." And here, from Dalhousie, is the site of the Bubble Project, "a collaborative and interdisciplinary research initiative on the subject of the South Sea Bubble (SSB), the 1720 English episode in what might be called the first great international financial crisis."
September 28, 2003
More on Pope
To add to the discussion of Pope mentioned below: I owe to him the title of this blog, as he was grinding his teeth about scribbling women long before Hawthorne made his famous comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d—ned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."
Pope's infamous attack on Eliza Haywood in The Dunciad
(published in 1728 and expanded in 1744)
See in the circle next, Eliza placed,
Two babes of love close clinging
To her waist.
was supplemented by a note, in case anyone missed the point: "In this game, is expos'd in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those Shameless Scribblers (for the most part of that Sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or imprudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortune of both sexes, to the ruin or disturbance, of public fame or private happiness." Haywood is offered as the prize in a urinating competition: ‘Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky,’ (II, 15.3-5). The second prize was a chamber pot. Jonathan Swift used similar language when he wrote, "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."
Alas, I cannot claim to the be first (or even the fiftieth, I am sure) to attempt to reclaim this slur and refashion it into a badge of honour, for there is Scribbling Women, a project of the Public Media Foundation which dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast in the U.S.A.; Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (1997), a book edited by Elaine Showalter; Style and the "Scribbling Women": An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Mary P. Hiatt; Domestic Goddess, a.k.a. "scribbling mobs of women," a moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction; a proposed collection called Scribbling Women: The Form of the Short Story, 1850-present; and many individual references. Clearly I cannot claim originality, though I would point out that all these other references are without exception to American women writers via the Hawthorne quote, while I of course, as an eighteenth–centuryist and a reader of British literature, prefer to be insulted by Swift and Pope.
September 23, 2003
On Pope
Here is a link to a blog entry on Alexander Pope posted on Aaron Haspel's godofthemachine.com (culling his readers to a select few since June 2002). Not a fan, but he has some insights. Not a fan of the c18th at all, I would suspect, and since Pope was such a self–conscious spokesperson of "the age" (if we can use the inclusive term for such a vital and changing period), he is damned by definition.
At any rate, my students in English 3204 just read Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" and "An Essay on Man," and may be in the mood for a little Pope–trashing. They liked the former, but he lost most of them with the latter.
July 2, 2003
Here are the two entries of my abortive blogger blog
Tuesday, July 01, 2003: An inauspicious beginning to this blog
Have posted nothing for June. Spent the time tinkering with my web site instead, and still am not happy with it.
Have not continued to read Ryman's Was; got sidetracked by Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world, which is proving very helpful in my thinking about English 3204: c18th Prose and Poetry, which I have taught for a couple of years now but am in the process of revamping. He is such a deft, persuasive writer, and Enlightenment is just the kind of intellectual history of the period to provide a useful context for students. I will not ask them to read the whole book, of course, or we would never get to the literary texts. But I plan to reproduce some passages in their kit (through CanCopy of course; all legal and aboveboard).
See Porter's obituary in The Guardian (March 5, 2002).
Monday, May 19, 2003: Reading Ryman
I've just started reading Geoff Ryman's Was. I've had it on my shelf for awhile but have been reluctant to read it; my friend Glenn told me some time ago that he found it a difficult novel to read. Ryman is coming to a sf conference in Guelph that I was thinking of going to—won't be, but that's by the by—so I decided to finally read it. Glenn was right; it is very difficult. I can't seem to read more than a few chapters at a time; not my usual practice. The novel, as far as I can tell—I'm not very far into it—is a layering of the story of an ill man in the 1980s (probably AIDS) with a retelling of the story of Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. It is the latter strain that is discomfiting; Dorothy is an unloved orphan, foisted onto her harsh Aunt and taciturn uncle in the ironically named Manhattan, Kansas. The kicker, for me, is that Auntie Em is cruel to Toto. So, small doses.
Here is an interesting article by Steffen Hantke: "There's no place like home": Geoff Ryman's Was and Turner's Myth of National Childhood."