Forgotten vs somewhat neglected novelists

I was recently brought up short during a re-read of Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Wimsey scans Ann Dorland's bookshelves: 'Dorothy Richardson—Virginia Woolf—E. B. C. Jones—May Sinclair—Katherine Mansfield—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they?' I think Richardson, Woolf, Sinclair and Mansfield would be familiar names to anyone with some acquaintance with women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century - but E. B. C. Jones?

In fact, Emily Beatrix Coursolles ("Topsy") Jones (1893-1966), has a remarkably substantial Wikipedia entry, which says her novels

focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the young "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties. She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals.

provides a useful biographical summary and plot outlines of the novels. She also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

I have managed to gain a sight of a few of her novels, Quiet Interior (1920), The Singing Captives (1922), and The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), well worth reading and would like to read the others.

I shall now be adding Jones to my webpage British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' along with some additional updates - I discover that there is interest being taken in Romer Wilson, and that Sarah Salt's Sense and Sensuality (1929) has lately been republished by Cutting Edge Books.

But considering these works and authors which can reasonably described as having been 'forgotten' at least for a signficant length of time, made me think of certain works and authors claimed to have been 'rediscovered' e.g. by Virago Press, but I wonder if they had ever been truly entirely lost.

There is a difference between a book which may have made a great sensation in the 1920s and then vanished, and other books which may never have gained enormous critical cred but have gone on not only being read, enjoyed and recommended, but continuing to be republished. Books which appeared in cheap reprint editions and in Penguin and later mass-market paperback formats (a substantial portion of my Winifred Holtby collection consists of the Corgi paperback editions issued, one suspects, in the wake of the success of the Yorkshire TV South Riding) - and also circulated in public libraries.

The popularity of certain works with library patrons led to the production by Cedric Chivers of Bath of New Portway Reprints, robust hardbacks specifically for libraries of works that librarians knew would be much borrowed. Paula Byrne notes in The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym that Pym was a little cheered during her years in the wilderness of publishers' lack of interest by reprints of four of her earlier books as 'Library Association reprints by Chivers of Bath'.

I surmise that there may be studies to be done on these books which are neither critically-acknowledged  'classics' nor perennially popular genre bestsellers but go on having what was perhaps a word of mouth reputation. 

Just possibly these might be what Stella Gibbons was alluding to as ' the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind'? (In My American, 1939).

 

White gloves are not a sign of good archival/library handling practice

Yesterday I engaged on a certain social media site which shall be nameless with somebody expressing horror at another person posting photos of an event he had been to involving manuscripts and, o horrors, they were handling them without white gloves. Which is absolutely right and proper, and considered the best practice across a broad swathe of libraries, archives, and manuscript collections.

Indeed, as this person went so far as to adduce the British Library as a place where one was obliged to glove up, I posted the BL's own guidelines on the subject:

Essentially, we recommend that it is preferable to handle manuscripts with clean dry hands. Wearing cotton gloves to hold or turn the pages of a book or manuscript actually reduces manual dexterity, and increases the likelihood of causing damage. Gloves also have a tendency to transfer dirt to the object being consulted, and to dislodge pigments or inks from the surface of pages.

During my own years working in research libraries as an archivist, and doing research in a range of institutions holding research materials in three continents, I can recall only one in which I was presented with a pair of - grubby, ill-fitting - white cotton gloves. While I was very grateful to have access to the correspondence between a significant cultural figure of the early twentieth century and their common-law spouse, held at a certain US educational establishment I shall not name, I had considerable qualms about the general conditions of its preservation.

I was handed a large flat box, which did not appear to be of acid-free material, containing shifting about it, loose, correspondence still in envelopes, unsorted, unfiled: rather than - as one might have hoped, removed from envelopes, flattened, attached to containing envelopes with non-corrosive clips, filed in chronological order in acid free files... It is also very difficult to extract letters in this condition while wearing manky cotton gloves. I am not saying that the situation was in the wider view fortunate, but the invigilation was sufficiently lax that I was able to take off the gloves without adverse notice, and thus removed the letters without damaging them.

The media, however, loves white gloves when showing people handling archives, manuscripts and rare volumes. I fear that this is a form of 'virtue-signalling', given some of my experiences involving media people and these precious materials (okay, the production company that wanted us to send some of a  archive over to their studio for them to film - without the kinds of pre-arrangement for insurance, supervision conditions, etc that might render such a request acceptable - was making a particularly unusual demand). White gloves demonstrate that they care: even if clean hands would be better.

There are some specific instances, as the BL guidelines indicate, when gloves are appropriate. The gloves, however, should be for preference nitrile, not cotton.

More of a question (or questions) than a comment, re literary censorship

Have just been reviewing a new study of censorship in England, review forthcoming in due course in a scholarly journal, but it mentioned, as have previous studies, without really delving into, the role of publishing in gatekeeping. This work, and earlier studies, have emphasised the 'miasmatic' effect of the haphazard operations of the distributed nature of censorship in England from the mid-nineteenth century up to the later decades of the twentieth (the acquittal of Penguin books over Lady Chatterley's Lover did not usher in a free-for all) and that this led to a degree of caution amongst publishers as to what they were prepared to take on.

What has not, as far as I know, yet been undertaken is an exploration of publishers' archives (many of which are now available in various repositories) to see how far considerations of fears of difficulties over censorship led them to engage in dialogue with authors over what was and what was not prudent to express. (Before it came to the question of the difference between publishing in hardback versus a more generally available cheap paperback, a central issue in Regina vs Penguin Books.) There may also, perhaps, be a record of this kind of process among the papers of authors themselves. What were the compromises that were negotiated to enable publication to proceed?

I have also been given to wonder about the differing levels of what was permissable in different genres. In her memoir, You May Well Ask, Naomi Mitchison described the difficulties she had in publishing a novel of contemporary political and social life, We Have Been Warned (1934), in which she found that the freedom she had been accustomed to employ in her well-received historical novels in dealing with sexual mores met with entire horror. What had caused no problem when her characters wore 'wolfskins and togas' became potential matter for prosecution when they were clad in modern dress.

One also wonders whether the crime novel had certain liberties permitted.

On the more general question of who was an appropriate audience, I do not know if any work has been done on public libraries and either attempts to get potentially controversial literature onto the shelves for rate-payers' perusal, or protests by rate-payers that public money was being spent on noxious matter. A very anecdotal hint discovered when pursuing reception of the first Kinsey Report suggests some libraries had a system of certain tendentious items being kept 'in the Librarian's office' and only produced on request, with their approval.

Historical research, while answering some questions, will always tend to open up further lines of enquiry!

Acquisition is not enough

I meant to post something about the discovery of the missing prints at the Boston Public Library last week in connection with the various comments made in press reports and blog posts about the failure of institutions with substantial document and artefact collections to have adequate collection control in the form of an inventory.

This post I came across today, Libraries and cities are terrible at keeping track of art reminded me.

A major problem seems to me to be that institutions (or their sources of funding) are far more eager to acquire things than to pay for the absolutely necessary basic task of processing them so that they can be kept track of and found when required, as well as described in a meaningful way for researchers to access. This is the invisible labour that makes a collection usable and also provides for its security. I don't think this will ever be solved until it is acknowledged that just acquiring collections, however significant in themselves, is not enough. They have to be accessible.

I suspect that there may also be an issue where one librarian or curator has been dedicated to building up a collection in some particular area but this enthusiasm has not been inherited by successors.

Another issue is that donors may not be presenting their collections to the most appropriate home. It may be very gratifying to be offered an important item or collection, but does the institution have the facilities to care for it? Is the institution a place where researchers are going to look? Would there be much greater research synergy if it were placed elsewhere? Donors should also be aware that their apparently generous gift to an institution comes with ongoing costs of appropriate storage (if not active conservation), processing, and general maintenance.

Books, manuscripts, archives, artworks and artefacts are for posterity, not just an immediate press release and a bullet point in the annual report.

O O O Shakespeherean Rag

Yet more depressing news about a major library of a major educational institution selling off rare historical items for short term profit: The Director and Trustees of the University of London’s Senate House Libraries are proposing to sell copies of the Library’s first four Shakespeare folios

This is a very disturbing trend: what next, cherry-picking over collections of archives for letters signed by Famous Names that can be flogged off as autograph letters for immense sums? That's really not what care of a collection means.

It seems particularly egregious in the above case since Sterling provided an endowment when leaving his rare book collection to Senate House. As an archivist I thoroughly concede that cataloguing, storage and general collection maintenance are not insignificant invisible costs to accepting a collection. And that potential bequeathers should probably engage in discussions with the place they're intending to leave their stuff before they write the will. But Sterling appears to have done the right things.

Nor can I imagine that these folios are somehow not a good fit with the Library overall. I have certainly come across instances of collections in places which are perhaps not the most appropriate home - where they are one-offs, isolated from related special collections. The importance of the synergy between related materials cannot be over-estimated. Thought should always be given to whether a given repository is really suitable for any particular collection. But the Sterling Library at Senate House is 'an unusually integrated resource for research on the transmission of English literary texts from the 14th century to the present day.... an acknowledged international resource in its area'. How getting rid of well-known gems of the collection will add to its reputation I cannot imagine.

The rather occasional good news about historical sources

A nice post in The National Archives blog on Documenting LGBT history across the UK - which is as much about bringing things into visibility within existing archives as generating new sources such as oral history. A bit miffed that they don't mention the Wellcome!

Not archives, but rare books: Kerala State Central Library: Rare Books Online. These look like very much the kind of things that are very difficult to find.

Though, while I'm delighted the researcher found it: Found: 500-year old wanted man warrant for Machiavelli, the Florence State Archives are pretty much the place that one would start looking, surely ! How lost was this item, or was it just a case of going through files and files of unindexed early C16th warrants? 

Project getting out more

In the past couple of weeks I managed to get to two excellent seminars at the Institute of Historical Research.

I don't think I've ever been to the Sport and Leisure History seminar before, but was tempted by Michelle Johansen's 'Good Feeling and Brotherliness: Leisure, the Suburbs and the Society of Public Librarians in London, 1895-193', which turned out to be extremely interesting and evoked a lot of fascinating questions. The cultural place of the oft-stigmatised 'suburbs' is surely overdue for historical re-evaluation, and the public librarians discussed by Johansen were pivotal figures in creating vibrant cultures of leisure and recreation both in the areas in which they were librarians and in their professional association. Their class origins were also fascinating: the kind of lower-class self-improvers for whom public libraries were intended, though with what appears to have been a significant degree of status anxiety, such as tweaking their family backgrounds a notch or two higher on the social scale.  A downside to this group, however, was that they had all achieved the pinnacle of their profession (i.e. head of a London or metropolitan borough library service) at relatively young ages (late 20s/30s) and basically had nowhere further to go - it was not a jumping-off point for other areas of librarianship - so they tended to stay there blocking opportunities for more recent incomers to the profession. I also had a slight cavil with the notion that public library users were either recreational readers or earnest self-improvers - I think it probable that those are two reasons for using libraries that could have been combined at different times and in varying proportions in the same individual.

I have more often been to the Life-cycles seminar in which last week there was a riveting paper by Hilary Marland (even though I missed the beginning due to a confusion over rooms in Senate House and nearly ended up at the Latin-American seminar by mistake), 'Managing Health, Managing Behaviour: Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920', which brought a good deal of nuance and complexity to ideas around girlhood, exercise, and health at a time of rapid social change and new roles for women. She demonstrated that while there was a good deal of concern expressed about the dangers of new forms of sport being indulged in by the adolescent girl there was also a new paradigm of the fit and healthy young female body being contrasted to the fainting wan mid-Victorian specimen and fitting in to the wider fin de siecle anxieties about national fitness. 

I thought that I had, regretfully, due to work commitments, had to miss a paper on Anna Freud's war nurseries and their influence in the Psychoanalysis and History series, but in fact that is not happening until next month.

The good news... the bad news

The good news is that the London School of Economics will be giving a home to the Women's Library although this is not necessarily the ideal solution, since it means giving up the purpose-built premises in Whitechapel and its independent existence, and some campaigners feel that the fight to keep it in its present home should continue.

However, it is not good news in any shape or form to learn of the terrible things that are happening to the Ruskin College Oxford archive, as described here by Hilda Kean on the History Workshop blog: Whose Archive? Whose History? destruction of Archives at Ruskin College, Oxford.

A petition to Stop further archive destruction at Ruskin College, Oxford

Yet more depressing news about the disposition of valuable research resources

I already mentioned the bad news about the uncertain fate of The Women's Library and the TUC Collections (and I do exhort people to go and sign the petition to save TWL.

I've also been distressed at the news that the Birmingham Medical Institute is selling off its historical collections of books and manuscripts and that the Wedgewood Collection continues to be threatened with dispersal.

And now I hear that the New York Public Library at 42nd Street is proposing, if not to get rid of its research materials, to outhouse them so that they will no longer be readily available to the researcher. I once made a flying visit from Boston to consult rare periodicals which could be found nowhere else, and was able to accomplish this within a day, a not inconsiderable advantage given the constraints on my research time and budget.

This is all very distressing and seems like a wide downgrading of the importance of actual primary research materials in a world in which it is (wrongly) assumed that everything is digitally accessible.

Shocking news

The Women’s Library is seeking a new home

On Wednesday 14 March, London Metropolitan University’s Board of Governors announced that they will be seeking a new home, custodian or sponsor of The Women’s Library’s collections.

If a new home is not found by the end of December 2012, the Library will move to opening hours of one day per week for a period of three years, with a further review at the end of that period. We will keep you informed of further developments, and we are in the process of contacting key stakeholders.
If you have any suggestions of potential custodians, or any queries, please email us: moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk

and London Met are also looking for a new home for the Trades Union Congress Library Collections (statement by Unison London Met Uni Branch.)

Some forthcoming events

Pathology Museum Seminars at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital

A unique series of seminars that promise both fascinating insights into a diverse range of topics,

and also a glimpse into a little known London museum. Housed within the grounds of St. Bartholomew’s 
Hospital at West Smithfield, the museum holds a broad range of pathological 
specimens, some of  which date from the late 1700s, and the papers programmed all speak in 
some way to this collection, as well as to each other. 

October 12th 5.30-7.00 
Documentary filmmaker and producer Phil Stein will show excerpts from and 
speak on the Making of the Elephant Man (2010)

October 19th 6.00-7.30
Professor Tili Tansey (Queen Mary) and Professor Brian Hurwitz (King College 
London) speaking on medical narratives and museum voices

November 9th 5.30-7.00
Philip Ball (University of Cambridge) and a medical artist will speak on the 
history of medical illustration and their current practice 

November 16th 5.30-7.00 
Dr Keir Waddington (Cardiff University) will speak on ‘Dying Scientifically: 
Gothic Romances and London’s Teaching Hospitals’. Dr Sam 
Alberti (The Royal College of Surgeon) and Dr Fay Bound Alberti (Queen Mary) 
will present on ‘Body Parts on Bart’s’

November 23rd 5.30-7.00
Dr Carmen Mangion and Dr Louise Hide from the Birkbeck Pain Project will 
speak on 'Rhetorics of Pain in Nineteenth-Century Convent Necrologies' be 
speaking on 'Pain and Neurosyphilis'

November 30th 5.30-7.00 
Professor Sharon Ruston (University of Salford) will speak on ‘Shelly and Davy 
and the Bart’s Medical Archive’ and Professor Iwan Rhys Morus (University of 
Aberystwyth) will present on ‘Frankenstein and Vitality’ 

December 14th 5.30-7.00
David Ross (The Army Health Unit, Camberley) will present on public health 
and the military and Professor Edgar Jones (Kings College London) will speak 
on shellshock and its representation in film

No need to book, wine and nibbles provided 

Robin Brook Centre at St.  Barts, West Smithfield, EC1M 6BQ. Closest tube stops is St. Paul's. 

Malicious Damage: The crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell

In 1962 the aspiring playwright Joe Orton and his partner and mentor 
Kenneth Halliwell, who live together in Islington, were each sentenced 
to six months imprisonment for malicious damage to Islington Public 
Library books. The offenders were found guilty of stealing and 
‘doctoring’ library book covers with images from other sources or by 
adding new text and narrative. They also removed illustrations from 
library art books to ‘wallpaper’ their bed-sit at 25 Noel Road. During imprisonment Joe Orton embarked 
upon what was to be a successful but all too brief writing career, cut 
short by his murder at the jealous hand of his partner. ‘Malicious 
Damage’ tells the story surrounding the crimes of Orton and Halliwell 
and, for the first time at Islington Museum, offers the opportunity to 
view all of the surviving doctored book covers along with other material
 reflecting the life and work of the pair. ‘Malicious Damage’ coincides 
with the publication of a new book of the same title, produced by 
Islington Library and Heritage Services and Donlon Books. 
 
 Free event at Islington Museum
 
 For more information, please call 020 7527 2837
 or email islington.museum@islington.gov.uk 

Catching up on journal literature III

Martha Vicinus, 'The Gift of Love. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001), p. 241-265: wonderful article about Mary ('Minnie') Benson, wife of Edward White Benson, eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, who picked her out to be his future wife when she was 11 and married her once she was 18. This did not work out well, although they did have six children. Her affections for other women were well beyond the conventions of Victorian romantic friendship. This article shows how remarkably flexible Victorian marital and domestic arrangements could be, and is another important contribution to the recent research on the intersections between religion and sexuality in the C19th and C20th.

Philip Howell, 'A Private Contagious Diseases Act. Prostitution and Public Space in Victorian Cambridge' Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), p. 376-402. Useful article on the policing of prostitution in Cambridge according to long-standing traditional University systems of regulation, and for, in fact, similar reasons to the actual CD Acts - the bringing together of a significant number of unattached young men in one place. The University officers tended to believe that prostitution was an unfortunate necessity, but they did not want it flaunting in the public streets and offering open temptation and tried to confine it to the working-class suburb of Barnwell. The University was indeed operating something very like the CD Acts - with medical inspections and incarceration in the 'Spinning House', but Howell points out that far from being a modernising regime this was based on practices that had been in place for a very long time. The records do mean that one can get some sense of women's trajectories in the profession - many seem to have been arrested and incarcerated only once, others had lengthy careers, most were young but not all. One thing I didn't really see addressed in this article was the way that this problem was positioned as being about the undergraduates: at a period when college dons were still required to be unmarried, or had only just been permitted to wed, were they not a significant element in the potential clientele? (and might that not have led to embarrassing encounters?)

David Trotter, 'Some Brothels. Nineteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Poetics of Space' Critical Quarterly 44 (2002), p. 25-35, a rather short article looking at prostitute rescue philanthropy and the belief that the rescue worker had to go into the brothels, and the way they describe them. How this relates to urban spaces and public/private space confusions. Idea of the descent into places represented as filthy and abject as an intiation. (More to be done here?)

Richard Hornsey, 'The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-War London', Gender, Place and Culture 9 (2002),  p. 371-38. Libraries and what they should be providing to readers; rise of the paperback; the distinction between the austere and tasteful Penguins and  books with 'alluring and tawdry jackets' - 'railway bookstalls' and the move of sex-novelettes out of the backstreet 'magazine shop' into this liminal space. The tension between the reputation and perception of Penguins and the perceptions of Lady Chatterley's Lover leading to the trial. Where and how to read. Segues to discussion of books about homosexuality. Little difference in representation as 'tortured misfits' in medical and sociological works, and 'crude generic fiction'. Libraries were fairly okay with the 'serious' texts but the others were perceived as degraded bookstall fodder (often making quite misleading come-ons with the covers!). Orton and Halliwell's defacement of library books as a kind of queering performance art - presenting the unsuspecting reader who picks up one of them from the shelves with some new set of reading practices. (?'Matter out of place?)