Anne M. Thell is an Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Her books include Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature (2017; 2020) and the Broadview edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020). Her interests include the history of aesthetics; the history of science and philosophy; early prose fiction; and early women writers. She is now at work on a new monograph on Cavendish and time, while also co-editing, with Lara Dodds, the 21st-Century Oxford Authors edition of Cavendish’s complete works.
Editor: What got you interested in marginalia?
AT: Hm, that’s a good question… I remember being intrigued by this kind of thing when I took an early graduate course in research methods; the instructor was a rare books specialist and got us all pretty jazzed up about book history and all that we might glean from early texts beyond what’s printed on the page.
But I think the first time I realized marginalia’s real value and thrill occurred when I was doing some dissertation work on seventeenth-century voyage literature. This led me to Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), printed by Richard Chiswell (printer to the Royal Society). Fascinatingly, Chiswell provided Knox with a special copy of this work that featured blank, interleaved pages where the author could make notes and additions for an intended second edition (which, despite Knox’s lifelong dedication to this project, never came to fruition). This copy also features copious annotations by Robert Hooke, who had been assisting Knox in expanding and organizing his text so as to suit scientific interests. It was lost for centuries, but is now held at the Anthropology Library at the British Museum (Item M10836). (Knox also owned a second interleaved copy where he inserted his autobiographical notes; see MS Rawl Qc. 15 at the Bodleian Library.)
When I learned all this, I headed straight to the Anthropology Library and found the annotated copy; it is bursting at the seams—quite literally—with not only Knox’s intended insertions, but also, overlaid onto these, Hooke’s extensive emendations (comments, questions, corrections), scrawled across every page. Even the conclusion—Knox’s final statement of authorship—is covered in Hooke’s black ink, with only Knox’s name left unchanged. I remember paging through this rarest of texts for days, enthralled by the vibrant, agonistic exchange that played out across its pages, and more broadly by the sudden access I had gained—to Knox, to Hooke, to history itself. The text became a living thing, and its engagement with readers vivid, visible, haptic… I felt like I had hit a vein straight into the past. I was also beguiled by Hooke’s critical posture, his mode of reading (bold, energetic, confident, at times even intrusive). This was an intimacy that I hadn’t experienced before.
Now I’ve been lucky enough to have more of these encounters, although the joy of discovery doesn’t wear off. I’ll admit that I like angry or frustrated marginal comments best; you can feel the caustic energy as readers scribble across the text, correcting, belittling, undermining. It’s a wonderfully material exchange between two minds. A great example of this antagonistic reading relationship is one copy of George Anson’s Voyage (1748)—a synthetic, triumphalist account of a disastrous voyage—now held at the British Library (BL 10025.f.8), which is subsumed in James Naish’s bold, black ink. A highly knowledgeable seaman and former supercargo to the EIC, Naish explodes Anson’s (rather brittle) authority, his rationale and decision-making processes, and more broadly the polished, “official” account of this particular voyage.
Editor: Do you remember your first marginalia?
AT: Yes, I think it was Knox’s Historical Relation, as I mention above. But another early encounter was a hand-corrected copy of Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), now held in the British Library. This was years ago, as I was working on my first book. After spending so much time with Cavendish—countless hours reading and re-reading, trying to wrangle with her complicated prose, writing endlessly on her work—holding a 1666 text that she likely held, 350 years later… it was another one of those magical moments of feeling history.
Editor: What do you find most interesting or powerful about marginalia?
AT: I think most people would agree that marginalia is exciting because it provides access to unmediated responses from early readers, whether they are doodling in the margins (a moment of reverie), carefully signing and dating their books (moments of jealous possession), or inscribing comments between lines (moments of genuine engagement). Marginalia creates a sense of intimacy: Handwriting—ink on paper, where you can not only see but also feel the impressions of the words on the page—provides a haptic encounter with another person whose physical presence has otherwise vanished. It materially entangles two people across centuries in a way that is startlingly sensual (and also in the only way possible). I love this about archival work.
Editor: What marginalia are you working on now?
AT: At the moment, most of my work with rare books is editorial. I’ve been working with Cavendish for some time; previously, with my Broadview edition of Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020), I had been working with a British Library copy that was hand-corrected (although there were only minor changes). Now, Lara Dodds and I are expanding this work as we embark on a new compendium of her work for OUP; we’ll be comparing extant copies, incorporating errata pages and hand-written changes, etc. But this is probably not the most exciting answer!
Beyond Cavendish, I’ve just finished a piece on Anson’s Voyage that includes a short section on Naish’s obliteration of Anson’s textual authority. And this coming winter, I’ll be diving back into British archives, where all of my marginalia encounters tend to start, very accidentally. I will notice something, check if it’s been catalogued, try to figure out the derivation of the text, etc., and then I end up on a sleuthing mission that is nearly always productive…
Editor: What do you see as the future of marginalia studies?
AT: Well, the future is probably in fantastic resources like this database, where we can more easily locate, compare, and organize marginalia, sharing resources and thus cutting down research time substantially. This will also allow us to create a broader, comparative rubric across larger data sets (so what kinds of texts tend to register what kinds of responses and when). This means more scholars can work on these materials, with or without funding or travel or extensive time in archives. So this is of course fantastic for opening up this type of research and broadening interest in the field.
Broadly speaking, I also think the ‘new material’ turn in literary studies—with the renewed focus on material conditions, on texts as physical objects, and on human embeddedness in or commingling with the material world—lends itself pretty directly to the study of marginalia, as we continue to map out relationships between texts and people, past and present.
Although I should also say that I don’t think first-hand encounters—powerful, multi-sensory, temporally thrilling—will ever lose their hold on us. These encounters can be hard to predict and hugely productive, opening all kinds of avenues of inquiry one could never plan or expect. But the key difference is how easy these discoveries will be to share.
Editor: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
AT: I will take a cue from Swift and conclude with a something that undermines my own authority: I think the feeling of not knowing what a marginal note or scrawl means is in itself important. I have countless times found scribbles or symbols that must mean something to the writer, but am completely baffled when it comes to figuring out what that meaning is (I’m also not great with early handwriting!). But being suspended in a state of befuddlement isn’t a bad thing. In fact, reading, re-reading, and not understanding, remaining engaged but uncertain—not knowing—is itself is a critical posture that’s good for us all. It keeps us searching.