Category: English

Introducing BookMark (and A description of the island of Jamaica (1672-78))

On By Kathy AchesonIn 17th century, English, Other2 Comments

The principal objective of the Early Modern Marginalia Research Network, and especially the BookMark tool, is to reduce barriers to access to marginalia. At present, research in marginalia is limited to those with ready access to large, historic collections, or those with job security and research funds (or even better, both) that can allow for the kind of location-specific research that marginalia scholars undertake. These constraints mean that a) research topics may not accurately reflect the interests and trends of early modern studies in a broader sense because those who can do marginalia studies are a small and privileged subset of the field, and b) those who do research in marginalia work primarily on marginalia, rather than on a broader set of topics for which marginalia might produce meaningful evidence. These biases affect not just who does the work, but what kind of work gets done.  

To give an example of the opportunities that such a tool might make available, a scholar of British imperialism and the Caribbean might want to collect marginalia from all surviving copies of a work such as A description of the island of Jamaica; with the other isles and territories in America, to which the English are related, viz. Barbadoes, St. Christophers, Nievis, or Mevis, Antego, St. Vincent. Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla. Barbada, Bermudes, Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New-York, New-England, New-Found-Land. This book was issued four times between 1672 and 1678. According to the ESTC, there are more than 50 surviving copies in repositories in the UK, US, Europe, and Australia. I scanned the thumbnails of the four copies in EEBO, and there is marginalia in each one – nothing startling, signatures and ownership and gift claims, including this, in a copy now at the Bodleian: “Bibliothecae Ashmoleanae dedit Martinus Lister M. D.” This inscription means that that copy was part of a large collection of books that Martin Lister gave to the Ashmolean when it opened. But having a look at the copies outside of EEBO might yield further results. We’ve put requests for photos of any marginalia in all the surviving copies of this book in BookMark. You can search by location and see if there is a copy in a repository you might be able to visit.   

But there are other pathways to take with these tiny snips of book life from EEBO – there are other books with “Jamaica” in the title, and provenance, deaccession, and marginalia in them could create one of the many novel views available of the complex discursive and social worlds of early modern European empire, the early modern African slave trade, and the consequences of these we still live with. Heroic efforts have of course been made to collect marginalia in multiple copies of particular books. And we do collect this kind of marginalia, sometimes, some of us, but largely we depend on the goodwill of librarians to take and send photos, and therefore we are back to the value of institutional affiliation and status within the profession as part of the economy of goodwill. As Matthew Sangster, Karen Baston, and Brian Aitken write, “Digital technologies thus have the potential for allowing us to organize, reorganize, and potentially democratize knowledge by removing the constraints imposed by physical space and the manners of thinking it imposes” (Sangster, Baston, and Aitken 951). Along with Sangster, Baston, and Aitken, I assume that lowering barriers to access will support not only broader participation in marginalia research (that is, open the field beyond old white people like me), but the use of marginalia as evidence in support of diverse projects not centrally concerned with marginalia per se.  

It helps to remember what kind of scale we are talking about here. William Sherman estimated from his research that 20% of surviving early modern printed books have marginalia of some sort in them. Sherman’s sample – the 7500 volumes in the Huntington Library’s STC collection – is from a relatively modern collection, and it is certainly dependent on curatorial selection; both influence the likelihood of marginalia in the books in the collection. But it depends too what we think of as marginalia – if we broaden our attention to include anything that modifies or supplements the contents of a book – a rust stain from a pair of glasses, an interleaf, a bookplate, a hand-embellished capital, and so on – we will extend our purview considerably. One of the copies of the book about Jamaica at the Bodleian (W.I.C. 21) includes the following information in copy-specifc notes: there is a bookplate of “The Hamilton Palace Library Beckford Collection,” and an inscription to the effect that Bernard Quaritch bought the book at Sotheby’s in 1882; there is “a pencil note on Jamaica on the second free endleaf recto” which is on the map, I think, and other minor notes, possibly former shelfmarks or booksellers annotations. The book was previously owned by the West India Committee, and held at Rhodes House Library. There is a whole history embedded here in these copy-specific notes of a topic which is of great importance. There’s enough in this example to start a research project with, whether the focus is on the books or on any of the phenomena that their use and circulation are related to.  It is the aim of this project to support this kind of research and diversify who does research in marginalia and what we do with it.

Works cited

Sangster, Matthew, Karen Baston, and Brian Aitken. “Reconstructing student Reading Habits in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow: Enlightenment Systems and Digital Reconfigurations.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54(2021)4: 935-955.

H. J. Jackson: Marginalia as Intimate Contact

On By Kathy AchesonIn English, Interviews1 Comment
Gometius Pereira, Antoniana margarita. [Medina del Campo] 1554. Portion of the front flyleaf with marginalia by S. T. Coleridge.

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.