Due to changes in the system relating to honorary appointments at UCL, my existing Honorary Associate Professorship will not be renewed this September. I haven't been getting a lot of email traffic at my ucl.ac.uk address, but this will be going away.
However, in more cheerful news, I have been awarded an Institute of Historical Research Non-Stipendiary Fellowship for 2025/6!
I'm not sure this is exactly a new problem caused by the electronification of catalogues and the merging of what were once discrete archive catalogues into general library ones.
I can remember going back years people doing really ghastly archive reference fail - I think possibly the worst instance was somebody's thesis which was based upon, among other things, research in papers in [repository] - no indication of What Actual Collection/s in the repository in question. I would have failed the bloody thing for that alone. Though I seem to recall this in an actual published book, though I think that if one got as far as look at the actual footnotes they were a bit more informative. (Yes, I see that I moaned about that here.)
There was the letter cited to [massive and complex collection with no specific file reference] in journal article. This had not been picked up on by peer reviewers or anyone in the editorial process.
There have been various thematic online digital projects using archival materials failing to provide details of where the originals are and the necessary contextual information - I thought I'd posted somewhere about this but maybe I am only remembering various vent-y conversations on the subject. Update: Yes, it's here: I'd failed to give it an appropriate label. I've also updated a link within the post where the originating site had changed the URL.
What seems to be getting lost is the sense of the archive collection as a discrete entity and the item as embedded in a context within it - I did manage to find this in an old post on the rise of machine cataloguing on the old Wellcome blog by a former colleague:
However, an on-line database with keyword searching means that we can no longer assume a reader starting at page one and reading (or at least skimming) the whole catalogue: instead, a hit in a search can bring them into the collection anywhere, without context.
Yet context matters in making sense of brief, one-line file descriptions. If, for example, Professor X works in cancer research funded by grants from the major charities, and then much later, in retirement, suffers from cancer herself, a file titled “Macmillan Cancer Care” will imply very different contents depending on where in her career its date places it, but a reader who comes to the record without an overview of her career, an overview of the kind set out in a catalogue’s introduction, will not be able to make the appropriate inferences.
Not that one didn't encounter some similar misapprehensions even in The Old Days.
I am feeling exercised about this at the moment because I was trying to find out some information about a collection of personal papers in an antipodean institution which I had actually consulted something like 30 years ago. And searching on the online catalogue of the institution threw up: certain files which had been digitised; publications by the person; the (presumably) original files; publications about person - no way I could find of getting an overview of the actual collection and what it consisted of and I am not sure it all matched my recollections.
I also feel - this was the subject of musings in another venue some weeks ago - that a lot is lost without the capacity to browse a catalogue. To find the things one wasn't actually looking for that are of relevance. Searching can only get one so far. And supposes that one is looking for the right thing (word, name, correct spelling, historically accurate term, etc).
It has recently been disclosed that the five letters allegedly written from James Campbell Reddie to Henry Spencer Ashbee, transcriptions of which are posted on Patrick Kearney's Scissors and Paste website, are in fact fabrications rather than genuine letters. Kearney has also copped to a fake entry (no 59) in the bibliography of the works of Maurice Dufleu.
While we have been hearing a good deal lately of the potential of AI to hallucinate works that never existed, we should not forget the human facility for fakery and hoaxing over the ages.
In some instances, it's true, naive readers have been deceived or misled by clever pastiches written as fiction - for example The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by 'Cleone Knox' and the case of the biographer of Madame de Maintenon who mistook a work which imagined
what the king's journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV
for the Sun King's actual journal. This is a literary genre that has a fairly long history.
However, there is also the endeavour to give a spurious air of authenticity to factitious productions. Some while ago I mentioned on this blog that there had been some mention on the erstwhile Histsex listserv of the 'Cremorne' series of erotic novels of the late Victorian era, about which I later received an email from the author who had written them anonymously in the 1990s. I have now been able to get a sight of a few of these volumes via the Internet Archive and they have introductions intending to give an air of authenticity by creating a backstory of the 'Cremorne Dining Society' which followed the closure of the actual pleasure gardens. This allegedly published a club magazine, a run of which had only recently turned up in a refurbished watermill near Oxford.... There are also references to private publications by the All-England Society of Priapus (!).
It's all fun and games until some scholar sets out to start researching the Cremorne Dining Society - said to include some names well-known in the sphere of Victorian erotica, e.g. Ashbee.
I would have thought that surely there was a plethora of - out of copyright - genuine Victorian smut that could have been republished. In fact I seem to recall that besides such works which may be considered to have some social historical relevance such as 'Walter's My Secret Life and The Pearl, various gems of the genre got reprinted in mass market paperback editions from the 70s onwards.
But maybe it was more a question of not so much actual authentic Victporn as a simulacrum particularly appealing to the contemporary tastes and expectations of the 1990s?
Some while ago I made a blog post about an illustrated animal-gut condom which was sold at Christies in 1992, allegedly to a Swedish collector intending to establish an erotica and pornography museum.
Imagine my glee at coming across this report: Dutch museum to display 200-year-old condom probably made from sheep’s appendix:
A 200-year-old illustrated condom will go on display with Dutch golden age masters in Amsterdam this week, after the 19th-century “luxury souvenir” became the first-ever contraceptive sheath to be added to the Rijksmuseum’s art collection.
The condom, which was probably made of a sheep’s appendix circa 1830, is thought to have come from an upmarket brothel in France, most likely in Paris. It features an erotic etching depicting a partially undressed nun pointing at the erect genitals of three clergymen, as well as the phrase Voila, mon choix (“There, that’s my choice”).
The Rijksmuseum curator Joyce Zelen said the composition of the etching deliberately alluded to the Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris.
It's very pleasing to have the item more specifically located in place and time of origin, as well as being made available in a public museum. I am also very tempted by the exhibition of which it is part, 'Safe Sex: featuring Dutch and French prints and drawings on the themes of sex work and sexual health.' (I can't find anything about this actually on the Rijksmuseum website, as at today, though masses of press reports all of which focus on the condom.)
I'm intrigued, however, that the price given for its acquisition ('Bought for €1,000 (£840) at an auction in Haarlem') seems rather lower than what it (reportedly) fetched in 1992, £3300, at that time probably the highest amount paid for a historical condom. This gives one to wonder about the various journeyings of this artefact over the past 30+ years, and the state of the antique condom market over time. In fact, another source reports the curator as remarking that 'It was a bargain... as condoms with pictures on them have been fetching much higher prices in the last 20 years'.
(I would, however, dissent from the curator's quoted comment 'It enables us to pause and look at the sexual history of the 19th century which we haven’t done much with so far'. Or maybe I am being Anglocentric, because sometimes it seems there is no end of looking at the Victorians and their sexual histories.)
