Digital Miscellanies Index

Digital Miscellanies

Led by Dr Abigail Williams, in collaboration with Dr Adam Rounce and Professor Michael Suarez SJ, this three-year Leverhulme-funded project will create a freely available online database of the contents of the 1000 poetic miscellanies published over the course of the eighteenth century. Study of poetry in the eighteenth century, and especially in relation to the reception of poets, and poetic movements, has always been based on the use of a few standard sources of measurement of popularity, neglect and quantitities of publication. But such studies substantially ignore a significant body of poetic collections. These collections, named miscellanies, were usually gathered around a theme - whether topical, geographical, or irreverent. In his influential New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984), Professor Roger Lonsdale asserted that ‘we still know very little’ about ‘the landscape of eighteenth-century poetry’ because of our ignorance of the innumerable poetic miscellanies of the period. Twenty-five years later, we do not know much more about the specific contents of these miscellanies, and so their significance remains untapped. Poetic miscellanies represent a particularly important and popular mediation of poetry in the eighteenth century, since they represent one of the most visible points of contact between the shaping of the literary canon, and the commercial demands of print culture. Yet they remain little used or studied because of their bewildering number and variety: at the most conservative estimate, there were a thousand published between 1700-1800, yet the contents of most of these are relatively unknown and unexamined.

The Digital Miscellanies Index will produce a database of these collections, and the development of the project, along with other related resources, can be seen on the Digital Miscellanies blog.

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Miscellanies and eighteenth century print culture

Critical trends of the last thirty or so years have seen a huge rise in interest in non-canonical, little-known, yet often highly important areas of poetry. Miscellanies are a key to understanding the heterogeneity of the poetry of the period. Many poems in this period were published individually, but went on to enjoy an afterlife in the miscellany culture of the period. Scholarship concerned with poetic reception still relies largely upon the same handful of anthologies and miscellanies for evidence of popularity of individual poems or authors, particularly with regard to well-known collections like Robert Dodsley’s six volume Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748-1758) or Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719).. It is clearly impossible to map the development of the literary canon and the changing nature of eighteenth-century poetics using such a tiny sample as an index of popular taste. This database will, where possible, record every poem in every surviving miscellany in the eighteenth century (of which there are almost a thousand). In doing so it will enable researchers for the first time to ask very precise questions about texts, readers, and publishers, and to use that information to map the often unpredictable shape of eighteenth century poetic culture. It will also enable them to analyse with some precision the traffic between commerce and culture.Simply put, this database of eighteenth-century poetic miscellanies will enable researchers to know, with greater bibliographical precision and scope than ever before, who was reading what, when and how.

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The Harding Collection

The contents of the database will be based on a comprehensive bibliography of eighteenth-century poetic miscellanies compiled by Professor Michael F. Suarez SJ. Most of the miscellanies in the bibliography are contained within the Bodleian Library’s Harding collection, which contains the most significant but largely neglected group of miscellanies in the world. The information from the Harding collection miscellanies will be combined with data from the copies of all the miscellanies in the bibliography in other libraries, such as the British Library, and Cambridge University Library.

The Index will be hosted by the Bodleian’s Centre for the Study of the Book, and will also involve a public concert, radio programme, conference and exhibition based on material from the miscellanies.

Walter Harding: the collector of collections

Walter Newton Henry Harding was born in south London in 1883. At the age of four, he and his immediate family emigrated to America, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. Their family home, a suburban timber-framed house in Chicago, was to become the library and repository of Harding’s remarkable collection of printed music, verse, and drama. At the time of his death, in December 1973, each room was lined with ordered and catalogued books, the basement effectively an underground stack.

Walter Harding was not an academic or book dealer. He worked as a ragtime pianist, making much of his living from performing at Masonic events. He seems to have become involved in collecting through his interest in the words to songs he knew or performed. Music led him to verse, then drama, to sheet valentines and on to opera. His success as a book collector was partly due to the unfashionability of the material he was collecting: ephemeral, popular publications with little commercial value in the mid twentieth century.

Harding decided to give his collection to the Bodleian two decades before he died. He had never been to the library, and had not returned to England since his early childhood. His gift seems to have been motivated in part by a sense of nostalgia for a past England, a world that he had known only through the books he had collected, and partly by a sense, post-war, of the destruction of European culture. The collection, one of the largest within the library, arrived in 1975, by air, weighing 22 tonnes.

A large proportion of the miscellanies contained within the Digital Miscellanies Index come from Harding’s collection of songbooks within the Bodleian. Harding had composed his own, handwritten record of their contents, a first line card-index occupying some 48,000 cards, on which he had recorded titles, first lines, and tunes of all the songs within his collection. He published an article on his collection, ‘British Song Books and Kindred Subjects,’ Book Collector 11 (Winter 1962), 448-59.

Bibliography

Anon, ‘Organist dies at 90 leaving Fortune in Rare Sheet Music’ New York Times, 14 December 1973, p.34

Geil, Jean, ‘American Sheet Music in the Walter N.H. Harding Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University’, Notes, 34.4 (1978), 805-14

Harding, Walter N.H., ‘British Song Books and Kindred Subjects,’ Book Collector 11 (1962), 448-59

Hyatt King, A, Some British Collectors of Music, c. 1600-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 82-83

Hunter, D, ‘The publication and dating of an early 18th century English songbook’, Bodleian Library Record, 11 (1984) 231-40.

Solheim, Helene Elizabeth, ‘Walter N.H. Harding and the Harding Drama Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford’, unpublished Phd diss, University of Washington, 1985.

Turner, Michael L., ‘Who Was Walter Harding? Some Preliminary Notes on his English Antecedents, Part One’, Bodleian Library Record, 15 (1996), 422-454.

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People

Dr Abigail Williams: Principal Investigator

Abigail Williams is Lord White Fellow and Tutor in English at St Peter's College, Oxford, and a lecturer in the English Faculty.

She is the author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture (OUP, hardback, 2005, paperback, 2009), and is currently completing an edition of Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella for Cambridge University Press. She is particularly interested in the role of the excerpt within miscellanies, and the role of miscellanies as a form of reception history. Along with Dr Kate Rumbold (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) she is planning a symposium on the use of the textual extract in eighteenth-century culture.

Dr Jennifer Batt: Postdoctoral Project Co-ordinator

Jenny finished her D. Phil on the agricultural labourer turned court poet Stephen Duck in 2008. She has taught English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries at a range of Oxford colleges and at the University of Birmingham. She is currently turning her D. Phil into a monograph, and working on articles emerging from the Miscellanies Index on Samuel Croxall’s poem ‘The Midsummer Wish’, and the topical miscellany The Windsor Medley.

Stephen Bernard: Research Assistant

Stephen read English at Brasenose College, Oxford (first, Gibbs Prize for English). In 2005 he was awarded the Senior Scholarship there and continued to read for an M.St. (distinction and commendation) and a D.Phil. (completed Michaelmas Term, 2009), which is an edition of the correspondences of Jacob Tonson the elder and his nephew, Jacob Tonson the younger. In 2007 Stephen won the Review of English Studies English essay prize for his work on Defoe, Jacob and Pope. Together with John McTague and Claudine van Hensbergen, Stephen is a co-editor of a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (Summer 2010) on letters in the long eighteenth century. He has published in Notes and Queries and elsewhere and is currently working on an edition of the letters of Sir John Vanbrugh.

John Mctague: Research Assistant

John completed his first degree and masters at Mansfield College, Oxford, before moving to St Catherine's College, Oxford, in the second year of DPhil study. His thesis, completed in 2010, is on the representation of British politics from c. 1678-1720, focussing on the ways hoaxes and scandals like the Bickerstaff papers or Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters expose and exploit the fictionality of the political settlement, and exploring the uses and misuses of partisan historiography. Together with Stephen Bernard and Claudine van Hensbergen he is a co-editor of a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (Spring 2010) on letters in the long eighteenth century. John likes cake, cycling, and year-round beer gardens.

Chris Salamone: Research Assistant

Chris is a fourth-year doctoral student at Oxford University, Mansfield College. He is currently writing up a thesis, supervised by Katharine Duncan-Jones and Emma Smith, entitled: ‘Authors, Apparitions, and Rhetorical Shadows: The Literary Ghosts of Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature’. The thesis examines how early modern writers and printers associated the figure of the ghost and the notion of haunting metaphorically with various facets of literary production, such as representation, textual reproduction, authorship, reading and dramatic performance. His research interests, largely focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, include; the supernatural; early modern drama; Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, particularly Nashe and Greene; the literary culture of the 1590’s; book history; literary theory; reception and literary reputation; perceptions/construction of authorial identity.

Claudine van Hensbergen: Research Assistant

Claudine is a graduate of King’s College, London, and holds a Masters in English Literature 1550-1780 from the University of Oxford. She is in the final stages of completing a doctoral thesis at Oxford entitled, “Performative Fictions: The Courtesan’s Literary and Cultural Narrative in England, 1660-1730.” Her research interests centre upon the power of fictions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the position of women as both the subject and producer of literary texts, the interplay of fiction and biography, and literature’s relationship to the broader Arts. Claudine has published articles on Aphra Behn and eighteenth-century letters. As her postdoctoral project, she is producing a critical edition of Aphra Behn’s commonplace book, Astrea’s Booke of Songs and Satyrs.