The defining goal of academic research is to create new knowledge. In literary studies, I’ve taken it as pretty much a given that there’s very little in the way of new facts to be discovered from scratch, though there is plenty of work to be done in assembling the many facts into sensible shape to offer new insights. I really should have known better.
We’ve all read stories about long-lost treasures being discovered in an attic or at a garage sale. What I struggle to understand is how these things can be hidden inside existing library or archival collections, like the ancient Quran that a graduate student identified in the holdings of the University of Birmingham in 2015. Presumably, these things have been handled, catalogued, available on the shelf or in a reading room for years or even centuries… How has no one recognized their importance yet? I still don’t know the answer, but I found a treasure of my own in the stacks at Stanford’s library earlier this month.
With the annual NAVSA conference coming up, I buckled down to researching my paper, which will discuss a black scholar from Trinidad who wrote a book about creole language, delivered a paper on the topic to the Philological Society in London, and was subsequently elected a member of that society. It’s a fascinating story. To put it in context, I decided to look through the Transactions of the Philological Society, and as I flipped through one volume, it thudded open to reveal a handwritten letter on blue paper dated 1863. My stomach squelched; then I turned to the back of the later, and my heart started racing. The letter was signed by F.J. Furnivall, who was the second of three men to personally direct the operation of assembling the New English Dictionary (now known as the Oxford English Dictionary).
I suddenly felt as if I were inside the novel Possession, which opens with its protagonist discovering draft letters stuck into a reference book owned by a famous poet. But unlike in that scenario, it wasn’t clear at all who owned this book before Stanford. In the three weeks since my discovery, I’ve looked through more of the volumes, some of which contain informative marginalia, and one of which held two handwritten notes by the former owner, one taped in like the Furnivall letter and one loosely stuck between the pages. With the help of this evidence, I figured out who had owned these books and received a letter from Furnivall. He wasn’t especially famous – no entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, for example – but I was able to trace the faint trail of his professional life through records like those of the Philological Society. As soon as I find the time, I’ll be writing up what I found in order to share this new knowledge. In the meantime, it’s back to the conference research, which means continuing to page through the Transactions – keeping an eye out for surprises.