Digital Miscellanies Index Conference, 17 September 2013

We are excited to announce A Miscellany of Miscellanies: Popular poetic collections and the eighteenth century canon, a conference taking place on 17 September 2013 at St Peter's College, Oxford. Marking the launch of the Digital Miscellanies Index, the conference will showcase the latest miscellanies research.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers on eighteenth-century miscellanies and miscellany culture. Please provide the title and a 250-word abstract of your proposed paper; your name; institutional affiliation where applicable; email address; and a brief (100 words) biography. Send your proposal as an attachment to miscellanies@spc.ox.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of proposals is 28 March 2013.



There will be a conference fee of £20 which will cover lunch, coffee, and tea. The conference and database launch will be followed by ‘The Chearful Companion’, an evening of eighteenth-century music, readings, refreshments and craft. The cost of this event will be an additional £15.

All enquiries should be addressed to the Conference Coordinators, Abigail Williams and Jennifer Batt, at miscellanies@spc.ox.ac.uk.

Books and their covers

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, the proverbial warning about judging books by their covers dates from the first half of the twentieth century, but as a couple of miscellanies that we've recently been working on show, it's a piece of advice that eighteenth century book-buyers might have been grateful for.

Browsers picking up a copy of The Muse's Mirrour (1783), for example, would have thought they'd be getting a collection of works by the century's most significant authors, the title page boasting pieces by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Gray, David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, Edward Young, Samuel Johnson, Charles Churchill, together with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More, and many others.



But it seems likely that any purchaser tempted by such a title page could only have felt cheated on getting the book home and settling down to read it. The two volume collection does include verse by (most of) this dazzling array of authors but those pieces are typically short, fragmentary, and inconsequential. Instead of the panopoly of literary talent that readers might have expected, this collection is actually dominated by verse attributed variously to 'Capt. Thompson', 'E. Thompson', 'E. T.' and 'Capt. E. T--n'. Edward Thompson was a naval officer and poet, contributor to the London Magazine and Westminster Magazine, and author of a two-volume account of life in the navy, Sailor's Letters (1766). Thompson's a very interesting figure, but in the opinion of the booksellers Debrett, Richardson and Urquhart, not sufficiently interesting to generate sales. So, though Capt. Thompson's name is mentioned on the title page, it does get rather lost amongst the hordes of better-known authors who crowd around him, and no reader picking up the collection and judging it on its title page could have expected to have found it so dominated by the sailor's work.

There's a further piece of deception on this title page. The collection is announced as the 'second edition', from which, potential purchasers might be expected to conclude they'd be getting a tried and tested work, one which had proved so popular that its first edition had sold out and a reprint been demanded. On closer inspection, however, it appears that this is not at all the case. This collection is not a reprint of the first edition of The Muse's Mirrour: it is a reissue of that first edition with a new title page. The first edition, published in 1778, had not sold out: five years later, as a way of getting rid of unsold stock, a new title page had been printed and the old book repackaged as a new one. Misleading customers by repackaging old books in this way and claiming that books were new editions when they were nothing of the sort was a fairly common procedure used by booksellers for trying to get rid of stock that hadn't sold.

The title page of a different miscellany, The British Poets (1777), misled readers in yet another way. This also boasted works by a stellar array of poets, but unlike The Muse's Mirrour, the miscellany did actually make good on this promise, delivering Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Swift's Baucis and Philemon, Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, and Gray's Elegy on a Country Churchyard alongside popular verse from Thomson, Prior, Shenstone and others. No, where the title page of this miscellany is misleading is in the imprint - the bit of text on the titlepage that informs readers who published the book and where they could buy it from. The title page of The British Poets declares that it is 'sold by B. Lintot, A. Millar, R. Tonson, D. Midwinter, and M. Cooper', and at first glance, such an imprint is impressive: Lintot, Millar, Tonson, Midwinter and Cooper are all major eighteenth century publishers and booksellers. But on closer inspection, this imprint becomes impossible: by 1777 Lintot, Millar, Tonson, Midwinter and Cooper were all dead - and in some cases, had been dead for several decades.

Why such a curious imprint? It may simply have been a bid for prestige, designed to align the collection with illustrious publishing firms. But a more intriguing suggestion is that might be a reaction to the change in copyright law that took place in 1774 which did away with the notion of perpetual copyright,wresting the control of major literary works from the hands of these establishment figures and enabling an explosion of cheap reprints. In previous years, with the exception of pirated editions, the only place to buy the works of Milton, Swift, Pope, Thomson et al had been from those booksellers who owned the copyright of their works, and who had fiercely fought to retain that monopoly: now, however, the market was opened up, and once the statutory period of copyright had expired these booksellers were no longer the only ones with the legal right to publish them. The improbable imprint declaring The British Poets to be available from Lintot, Millar, Tonson, Midwinter and Cooper might be intended as a sly dig at the waning power of establishment booksellers. But whatever the motivation for this curious imprint, it must have proved a puzzle for eighteenth century readers: if they wanted to get hold of a copy of this book, where on earth were they to buy it?

Digital.humanities@Oxford Summer School 2012

Thanks to a bursary from the John Fell OUP fund, this summer I had the opportunity to join researchers from across the humanities - and from across the world - at the Digital.humanities@Oxford Summer School. This intensive week-long course held at Merton College, OUCS, and OERC was split into several strands: you could gain a general introduction to digital humanities, focus on digital editing, or learn about linked data.

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

Because we're interested in exploring ways that the DMI project might link up with other, comparable projects, the summer school seemed a great opportunity to find out more about linked data and how our project might make use of the semantic web - a way of constructing and presenting data that makes it machine-readable and enables it to be shared and reused.

My main goal for the week was to gain a sufficient introduction to the semantic web and its challenges and potential to enable me to participate more effectively in discussions with developers about the future of our project and the course, taught by Kevin Page, John Pybus and Alexander Dutton, provided me with an excellent grounding in the basics.

The week was was part theoretical, part practical, with mornings spent in the classroom coming to terms with the mysteries of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and triples, predicates, ontologies and 303 redirects, learning to read turtle and how to construct SPARQL queries, and seeing how projects such as Claros use the semantic web. Afternoons were spent at the keyboard at OUCS, exploring linked data datasets and tools and trying to turn theory into practice. The most satisfying moment was constructing, by myself, a SPARQL query which returned (pretty much) what I was hoping for, but overall the course provided a great introduction to the semantic web, giving me a basic understanding of its concepts and terminology and the confidence to read more about it.

At DHOXSS, however, the taught courses are only part of the story, and there was also a tremendously rich array of lectures and talks to choose from. Crowdsourcing was one theme that recurred in several lectures, and I was interested to hear about projects which engage the brain power of the crowd, such as What's the score at the Bodleian? (transcribing 19thc musical scores), What's on the menu? (transcribing historic menus), and Digitalkoot (transcribing Finnish newspapers by playing a game involving moles), as well as projects that appeal to the crowd for finance, like Sprint for Shakespeare's bid to preserve and digitize the Bodleian's copy of the Shakespeare first folio.

An opportunity to meet DHers, gain new perspectives and learn about new projects, the summer school was an exhausting, inspiring week, and thanks must go to James Cummings, Sebastian Rahtz et al for organizing it, and the Fell fund for the bursary which enabled my attendance. The dates for next year's school have recently been announced, and for anyone who's interested in the digital humanities, I can't recommend it enough.

Featured Miscellany: The Poetical Calendar

By Kathleen Lawton Trask, University of Oxford

The Poetical Calendar. Containing a Collection of Scarce and Valuable Pieces of Poetry by the Most Eminent Hands. Edited by Francis Fawkes, M.A. and William Woty. In Twelve Volumes. 1763.


Just as miscellanies introduced their eighteenth-century readers to new poems, today they are a rich source for researchers to find not just poems that were not published elsewhere, but also poets who had been overlooked. The Poetical Calendar, a miscellany published in monthly installments in 1763, was the source for several poems in Roger Lonsdale’s important work Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, which introduced scholars to female poets whose work had long been neglected.

Intended as a “supplement” to Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1758), The Poetical Calendar was published in monthly installments between January and December 1763. Poets William Woty (institutional readers may see his ODNB entry for more information) and Francis Fawkes (ODNB entry) edited the collection, and contributed many poems themselves. The collection went into a second edition the same year it first appeared, suggesting that this miscellany enjoyed some popularity.

Woty and Fawkes used the month of each installment’s publication as a theme for the installment, including poems that relate to that month in the poems collected. Not only does Volume IV (April) contain pastorals and spring-themed poems such as “April. An Ode,” and “Stanzas on the Spring,” but also poems like “Some Lines Occasioned by a Series of Theological Enquiries” and William Pattison’s “Abelard to Eloisa” that may be thematically linked to the Lenten and Easter seasons.




Among Lonsdale’s discoveries in the June volume was Mehetabel Wright ODNB). Wright was the sister of John Wesley (ODNB) and Charles Wesley (ODNB), the founders of Methodism. Wright rebelled against her strict upbringing and ran away from home twice as a young woman. Ultimately, she returned home pregnant and was forced to marry a man her family chose for her (Lonsdale, p. 110).

Wright endured a deeply unhappy marriage and developed a distinctive, strident poetic voice in her writing, particularly about marriage. One of her best-known poems, ‘Wedlock: A Satire’ begins, ‘Thou tyrant, whom I will not name / whom heaven and hell alike disclaim,’ (Lonsdale, p. 114).

The Poetical Calendar shows Wright in a different mode; it contains three poems about the deaths of loved ones, including the tender, tragic ‘A Mother’s Soliloquy Over Her Dying Infant.’ Two other poems in the Poetical Calendar for June prefigure Wright’s own death: ‘A Farewell to the World’ and ‘An Epitaph on Herself.’ The poems in this installment of the Calendar offer us a glimpse into the details of Wright’s life and how she reacted to the tragedies of her adult life.

You can listen to a reading of Wright’s ‘Wedlock:A Satire’ on YouTube:




Kathleen Lawton Trask, University of Oxford

What was the X factor of the 18C?

This Saturday we are getting topical, with a talk and concert on Sporting Songs at the Lufthansa Festival in London. Here is a piece about it from today's Guardian How do we know what know what ordinary people performed and sang at home in an era before TV, iPods, recorded music, and public concerts? In the early eighteenth century, readers and musicians had to make their own fun, and they did that through miscellanies, ballads and songbooks – cheap compilations of verse and music designed for home consumption and performance. Sport, smut and political scandal were staple ingredients in these collections, and in a collaboration with folk/early music duo Alva (Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin) I’ve been testing how far the popular sporting culture of the eighteenth century speaks to that of the twenty-first, in a programme of sporting music for the Lufthansa Festival on 19th May. The repertoire has mostly come from broadside ballads and popular song collections in the vaults of the Bodleian library in Oxford – it’s ironic that music that was once everywhere is now only found in the darkened rooms of a rare book collection. It’s survived thanks to the efforts an extraordinary eccentric collector called Walter Harding a self-taught Chicagoan ragtime pianist, son of an East-End bricklayer, who fell in love with the popular music of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and collected 22 tonnes of it in his suburban townhouse. He left it to the Bodleian in the early 1970s and there it sits, largely unknown and unperformed. But within the yellowing pages and cheap, cracked calfskin bindings of these thousands of volumes we’ve found a whole world of cheering, jeering would be sportmen and spectators. There are songs and ballads that cover modern sports (boxing, cricket, football, fencing, horseracing) but also more offbeat pleasures (bull coursing, cockfighting). We chose pieces that seemed to tell different stories about the age – then, as now, sport is a way of talking about pretty much everything that matters. There’s a preoccupation with national prowess, with what it means to be an Englishman, but also with the dangers of ambition, of success that comes at too high a price. There’s also a good dose of match-fixing, hubristic disaster, and some human tragedy (involving custard). Alva are performing the songs very simply, either unaccompanied, or with just voice and fiddle, as they would have been sung by professional ballad singers in the taverns and on the streets, or by amateurs to entertain friends. But exactly how they were delivered is part of their lost history: the tune is rarely printed, sometimes named, but often not even mentioned, and we’ve had to find tunes to fit them, based on metre and feel and what’s appropriate to their subject. The 18C ballad singer had a massive inbuilt database of tunes, and would have known instantly what to sing to, but we’ve had to use more guesswork. And the relationship between tune and story isn’t obvious either – most of the songs are stories with a tune, but the tune can constrain the delivery. How much should we use gesture and acting? Will the violin get in the way of the delivery of the words? It’s also tricky presenting this noisy, interactive populist repertoire in the formal setting of a modern concert space. Eighteenth century audiences must have had much longer attention spans : many of the ballads have needed a good prune and the odd word change to make sense for a modern audience. But some things never change. The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, and the modern Olympics have their analogies in the eighteenth century popular taste for musical and sporting competitions. We like to follow the rough narrative they provide, to get involved by taking sides, cheering, voting for, or betting on our favourites. Today we cheer and vote in our millions as another hopeless contestant (David) spectacularly fails to make the semi-final of the X Factor, and is pitilessly gonged off by Simon Cowell (Goliath): ‘The audience bayed like the crowds at the Coliseum. ‘Off, off, off!’ they roared. It was all tremendous fun’ (Daily Mail, Feb 2012). If we get some baying and cheering instead of a polite clap we’ll know it worked.

How Samuel Richardson read bawdy verse

By looking at the poems that were published in miscellanies across the course of the eighteenth century, we can start to get an idea of the different ways a particular poet was thought of in the century and which of their poems were most widely circulated, of how frequently those poems were correctly attributed, and what kinds of company they were keeping in the miscellanies in which they appeared.

I considered these possibilities, briefly, at a roundtable on 'Poetry and the Archive' at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, a week or so ago. The example I used was the late seventeenth-early eighteenth century poet Matthew Prior. Though seldom studied today, Prior was a major figure in his day, and our database reveals how his verse continued to circulate throughout the eighteenth century. So far, we've got over 250 poems (or parts of poems) in the database attributed to Prior; between them, these appear more than 950 times across a range of miscellanies.

The poems that were most frequently reprinted give an insight into how Prior's eighteenth century reputation might have been constructed. While his ambitious panegyric 'Ode in imitation of Horace's second ode from book three' has a considerable dissemination, appearing 14 times so far, it is his bawdy, comic verse that seems to have had the widest circulation. 'Hans Carvel' has shown up 19 times so far, while 'The Ladle' appears 15 times. These comic verses appeared - sometimes anonymously, but sometimes with attribution to Prior - in collections ranging from A collection of poems (1701) and Poetical miscellanies: the fifth part (1705) to The muse in a good humour (1744), The agreeable medley (1748) and Tales to kill time (1757).

With this in mind it was interesting, then, to come across intriguing references to Prior's work in Michael E. Connaughton's essay on 'Richardson's Familiar Quotations: Clarissa and Bysshe's Art of English Poetry' [1]. The essay is an attempt to understand how the novelist Samuel Richardson (author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison) engaged with literary texts. Richardson's novels contain many quotations from verse and drama, which, as Connaughton shows, are taken not from their original sources in Shakespeare or Dryden, but rather are copied from Edward Bysshe's useful compendium of poetic excerpts, The Art of English Poetry (first printed 1702). One group of quotations, however, puzzle Connaughton: a set of references to Prior's 'The Ladle' and 'Hans Carvel'. The bawdy comic tone of these verses is not really in keeping with Richardson's rather moralistic approach to literature, and Connaughton writes:

It is most interesting, of course, that Richardson, regardless of his disapproval, knows Prior well enough to make a rather obscure allusions [sic] to his work...one could speculate endlessly about the circumstances under which Richardson became familiar with a poet so out of keeping with his own temperament...(192)

Thanks to the Digital Miscellanies Index, I think it is no longer necessary to 'speculate endlessly' about how Richardson became so familiar with these verses. 'Hans Carvel' and 'The Ladle' had been widely circulated in a range of miscellanies for almost 50 years. These poems were not, as Connaughton hints, obscure texts. They were two of Prior's most well known, and most frequently reprinted poems, and Richardson could have encountered them in a broad range of miscellanies.

By making available information about the circulation of an author's works, the Digital Miscellanies Index will help us understand how eighteenth century readers and writers understood the literary landscape, meaning that apparently unusual connections between authors as different as Richardson and Prior are perhaps no longer as puzzling as they once were.

[1] Philological Quarterly, 60:2 (Spring 1981) 183-195.

Listen In: Harding on Radio 3

Our favourite book collector, Walter N. Harding will get his twenty minutes of 21C fame in a short programme I am presenting on BBC Radio 3 at 8.10pm on Tuesday 7th February. The Guardian Guide is touting it as 'pick of the day'.

There's a link to the programme here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bmlk6

And here is the programme summary:

Abigail Williams uncovers the lost story of Walter Harding, a British-born Chicagoan ragtime pianist who amassed the world's largest collection of popular songbooks and then left them to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

In 1974 Walter Harding's gift of his extensive collection of music, drama and poetry was the largest donation ever made to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is all the more remarkable because Walter Newton Henry Harding was not an academic, a book dealer or a millionaire bibliophile, but the son of a bricklayer from the East End of London who emigrated to Chicago in the 1900s.

Harding earned his living playing ragtime music - despite having had no formal musical education. His ability to collect on such a scale, despite modest means, was due to a lack of scholarly interest in popular music at the time, and also to the flood of books on the American market during the Great Depression.

Gradually, Harding assembled the world's largest collection of popular songbooks and miscellanies in a modest townhouse in a shabby suburb of Chicago. By the time he died, the house contained some 30,000 rare books.

The story of Harding's collection is one of obsession, and of a passionate desire to reconnect with the past through its music and writing.

Abigail Williams tells this largely unknown story with the help of members of the Bodleian Library and those who knew Harding himself, as well as with readings from the correspondence between Harding and the Bodleian, and the journalistic coverage that accompanied this extraordinary bequest.