Header Image: Gometius Pereira, Antoniana margarita. [Medina del Campo] 1554. Portion of the front flyleaf with marginalia by S. T. Coleridge. Reproduced from the copy at Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Shelfmark: Crewe 148.31 ) and retrieved from the Supplement to Marginalia in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Accessed August 17, 2023.

Our first interview features H. J. Jackson, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, who has worked extensively on marginalia. Professor Jackson edited volumes three through six of the marginalia of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1992-2001) and wrote Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001) and Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (2005), all of which are foundational to modern research in the field. (The Editor’s first experience of marginalia as a scholarly topic was as a research assistant to the Coleridge Project, working with the late Rea Wilmshurst under the supervision of Professor Jackson.)

Editor: What got you interested in marginalia?  

HJJ: The answers to all of your questions depend on your definition of “marginalia.” I’ll take the word—a neuter plural noun, as I keep insisting, pedant that I am. The noun comes from the Latin adjective marginalis/is/e, whence the neuter singular noun marginale “a thing in the margin” and its plural marginalia “things in the margin.” So I take the English adoption “marginalia” to refer properly to stuff in the margins of books, whether manuscript or printed, but especially to any handwritten notes added to books by their owners or readers.   

I first got interested in the subject when I took over the editing of marginalia by S. T. Coleridge from George Whalley, the Canadian scholar who spent years on these minor writings of a major author but became too ill to continue his work beyond the first two of six volumes. Coleridge was known in his own day as a particularly adept practitioner of this form of note-making: his friend Charles Lamb defended it as Coleridge’s way of adding value to the books that he borrowed from friends and returned “enriched” with his commentary. It was in 1819 that Coleridge brought the word “marginalia” over from scholarly Latin to the vocabulary of English speakers, by way of a magazine article. Knowing him and the context in which he did it, I believe that he was writing tongue in cheek, making mild fun of his own scholarly pretensions. Like the mock heroic, it was aggrandizing in order to highlight pettiness, but in the process it did to a certain extent aggrandize the petty.  

Editor: What do you find most interesting or powerful about marginalia?  

HJJ: As I worked slowly on Coleridge’s marginalia I became interested in the broader context, historical and social, of the genre. A modern example of witty though rude notes in a university library book tipped me over the edge and I wrote an article about it. At the same time, as library catalogues went digital and it became possible to trawl through the catalogues of rare-book collections for books tagged as containing “ms notes,” a treasure-trove of materials opened up. My first book, a general survey entitled Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale UP, 2001) was well received but did not lead to the deeper historical studies that I had been hoping for, so I wrote another, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (2005) as an example of what the practices of ordinary, generally anonymous readers might reveal about a given period. The early modern age had already been under scrutiny by scholars in book history, but the long eighteenth century and later had not. Of course, that is no longer the case.  

What strikes me as most powerful about readers’ notes of the past is their social function. A note is always implicitly addressed to someone—sometimes to the imagined author of the book, sometimes to a friend with whom the book will be shared, sometimes to future generations of readers, since the book is likely to outlive us all. A touching example may be found in the books that passed between courting couples, when they were in a phase of sounding one another out, trying to ascertain or to shape one another’s thoughts and tastes. And that is what I foresee for the future, readers by whatever technology is available making intimate contact with other readers through the medium of texts.  

Editor: Are you working on any marginalia now?  

HJJ:  My most recent work on marginalia has added to the collection of Coleridge’s marginalia and is available in the Supplement to Marginalia in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, hosted on the website of the E.J. Pratt Library at Victoria University (University of Toronto). As an example, I have re-edited Coleridge’s marginalia from Robert Southey’s copy of Gometius Pereira’s Antoniana Margarita (1554). This book was one of the “lost books” to which Coleridge was known to have added marginalia; the marginalia in this work were transcribed by Sara Hutchinson (Wordsworth’s sister-in-law) and that transcription was the basis for the entry on the work in the Collected Works (Vol. 12:4), published in 1998. The first image here shows part of the edited text of Hutchinson’s transcription as it appeared in that volume. The text of the marginalia follows the original Latin next to which it appears and a translation of the Latin into English.  

Image 1: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 12, Part 4: Marginalia: Pamphlets to Shakespeare. Ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley. Princeton UP, 1998. 94.

The next image is of the newly discovered original to this marginalia, in Coleridge’s hand in Southey’s copy of the book. These marginalia are substantively identical to Hutchinson’s transcription but have incidental differences such as capitalization and the use of ‘and’ rather than the ampersand.  

Image 2: Gometius Pereira, Antoniana margarita. [Medina del Campo] 1554, with marginalia by S. T. Coleridge. Reproduced from the copy at Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Shelfmark: Crewe 148.31 ) and retrieved from the Supplement to Marginalia in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University in the University of Toronto on August 22, 2023. 

The edited version of the newly discovered marginalia is published in a pdf on the Supplement website. It maintains the style of the marginalia as published in the Collected Works, beginning with the Latin original, followed by a translation and the marginalia, set within an apparatus that includes headnote, textual notes, and footnotes and uses contrasting colours to separate components.  

Image 3: Excerpt from edited marginalia by S. T. Coleridge from Robert Southey’s copy of Gometius Pereira, Antoniana margarita.  [Medina del Campo] 1554. Retrieved from the Supplement to Marginalia in the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University in the University of Toronto on August 22, 2023. libraryvicu.utoronto.ca/pereira_antoniana_margarita.pdf. 

We hope to continue supplementing the printed volumes digitally, as new examples of Coleridge’s marginalia surface. We will continue to use the same format for the presentation of the marginalia as the printed editions had, although digital technology allows us to include photographs of all, rather than some, of the original marginalia.  

Editor: Do you write in your own books?  

HJJ: As to writing in books myself, I have tangible proof of how and when I started, in a badly battered copy of The Three Musketeers with my seven-year-old signature in ink on the flyleaf and all too many paperbacks from university days with pencil notes either taken in class or written in preparation for class discussion. That habit (but I dislike the word “habit” which implies “bad”) carried over to my time as an instructor. Part of the case I make on behalf of marginalia is that historically they were not surreptitious or impulsive. They were deliberate. Readers didn’t write in every book they touched but made notes selectively and purposefully. After seeing what Coleridge and some of his contemporaries did, I decided that what was most useful for me was endpapers on which I could take notes from the text or make observations about it and retrieve those notes without having to turn all the pages. And that’s what I do to this day—in pencil. And that’s what I recommend to readers just starting out as marginalizers, that they should be aware of different models and pick whatever meets the needs of the moment.