It’s Here!

By Sarah | Published:
The cover of the monograph, "Tennyson's Notebook Glossary and Rhyme Lists" by Sarah Weaver. Image of a page from Tennyson's notebooks.
My monograph is finally in hand.

My monograph from the Tennyson Society is finally out! It arrived as a stressful personal week was already taking a turn for the better, and what a gift.

The project grew out of a question posed by my supervisor during my PhD first-year review: “Why don’t you look more into the contents of the glossary?” From there, it expanded into many, many hours of deciphering handwriting from facsimiles and cross-referencing scraps of quotations. A satisfying breakthrough could come in the form of a single letter’s difference in spelling.

All work – academic or otherwise – has its moments of tedium and trudging, and this project both provoked excitement at clue-hunting in fields of indisputably original research and the feeling that I’d gotten lost in the weeds. Sometimes Google literally returned zero results for my searches, which I didn’t think was even possible. Even when we were on the brink of sending the work to the printers, the complexity of the layout became a major obstacle as it confounded the PDF rendering. Thankfully, my day job grants me access to professional-level tools that enabled me to fix the issues over the course of a very long weekend. And now at long last, the work is out there for other researchers to use. Hurrah!

Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Story of Henry Kemble

By Sarah | Published:

One of my favorite Victorians is John Mitchell Kemble, a friend of Tennyson’s and Thackeray’s who was a pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon (Old English). When I was writing my dissertation on Tennyson’s interest in the history of the English language, Kemble frequently threatened to take over because he was so – well, boisterous is the best word for it. Ever since then, I’ve had an ongoing fascination with Mr. J.M. Kemble, Esq. When I get a little free time or need a change of pace from my other work, I do a little research on his life, and it never fails to entertain.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the subject of my study is so entertaining, because he came from a huge family of famous actors (and producers and singers). I could spend twelve lifetimes trying to learn everything about them, though I’d rather not. For perspective, one biography of John’s sister Fanny weighs in at just shy of 500 pages. Consequently, I try to restrict my research to the one man, who seems to be everywhere in the historical record, having been both remarkable in his own right and friends with many other remarkable people. A couple weeks ago, for example, I picked up a slim little history of the University of Cambridge, hoping to find out what tuition cost in the 1820s and ’30s. Instead, I found a reference to Kemble being among those who had advocated for the elimination of religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge in an 1834 petition to Parliament.

Admittedly, this is part of the fun of research: it branches out sideways and offers new insights when you’re not looking for them. Likewise, despite my best intentions to remain focused on one particular Kemble, I recently happened upon the story of John’s little brother Henry, and my jaw remained on the floor for much of the day. His life was certainly dramatic; it reads like a novel. I don’t know whether I’ll have any use for this story in my future research, but it was so incredible that I had to share it somewhere. So here goes.

Henry may have been the only Kemble not to at least dabble in theater. Whether through rebellion or natural disinterest, he was resolved not to follow in the path that so much of his family had trodden. His mother refused to let him join the navy, but his sister eventually bought him a place in the army, where he enjoyed a stable enough career. At least he looked good in his uniform; in fact, he looked good in anything. Henry was extremely handsome all his life, and he combined his attractiveness with the family boldness. While visiting his brother John at Cambridge, he met various scholars, one of whom noted in his diary that Henry was “a young ignorant strange impudent soldier.”

It proved to be a winning combination for one woman in particular; in the early 1840s, Henry worked his way into the heart of Mary Ann Thackeray. She was out of his league by the standards of social class and intellect, if not appearance. Mary Ann’s father was the provost of King’s College, Cambridge and chaplain to four successive kings and queens, including Victoria. He was also a wealthy man. Nevertheless, his daughter was born into a house full of death.

Mary Ann’s mother was the provost’s second wife, the first having died without bearing children. While in labor, she was cared for by a well-known obstetrician with a well-known blot on his record. Three months earlier, Sir Richard Croft (no relation to the fictional Tomb Raider family, I assume) had attended the heir to the throne as she struggled to give birth. Although he followed the established medical procedures of the day, the child was stillborn when it finally came, and Princess Charlotte died a few hours later (incidentally clearing the way for her cousin Victoria to eventually be crowned). As Mary Ann Thackeray’s mother struggled to bring her into the world, it must have felt as if history were repeating itself. Haunted by the previous tragedy, Sir Richard shot himself in the house before Mary Ann even arrived. Her mother didn’t survive the process, either.

After that grim beginning, however, Mary Ann had a happy enough life growing up amongst scholars and spires. By her mid-twenties, she had befriended several of the Kembles, and when their handsome soldier brother proposed, she accepted. But her father wasn’t having any of it. He was sure that Henry was only after her – or rather, his – money. If Mary Ann went ahead with the marriage, her father declared, she would never see a penny of it.

Henry – who definitely found his fiancée’s wealth her most important feature – was willing to take the risk; he figured that once the union was complete, his father-in-law would relent and reinstate the inheritance. Unsure what to do, Mary Ann asked advice of her friend and potential sister-in-law, Fanny Kemble (of the 500-page biography). As Henry’s sister, you would think Fanny would have been in favor of the marriage, but she knew him too well to advise it. “If your father does relent and you are well off,” she admitted, “he will make you a kindly enough husband, so long as all goes well. But if he should not, and you were to be poor, your lot would be miserable … [H]e would visit upon you his disappointment and discontent.” (More than a hint of potential domestic violence, there…)

Despite this warning, Mary Ann decided to go through with it. Fortunately for her – but not her heart – Henry had decided by then that it was too big a gamble. He broke it off and went back to the army. Mary Ann eventually reconciled with her father and inherited his money, at which point Henry had the nerve to propose again. The object if his rather shallow affections still loved him, but she was wise enough to reject his offer. She never married.

What more can be wanted from this dramatic tale? How about a little insanity? Henry was confined in a private asylum by 1854, when W.M. Thackeray (the novelist cousin) reported: “Henry Kemble is better off than some imbeciles. … [H]e fancies himself staying at a gentleman’s country seat: and is happy.” When, as a child, he had been asked what profession he wanted to pursue, he’d replied that his goal was to “be a gentleman and wear leather breeches.” As a 45-year-old mental patient, he believed himself to be living a version of that dream. Oh, and somewhere in there he fathered two children from an unknown mother.

Remember how I said that Henry’s story read like a novel? Well, after Mary Ann had died, Fanny told the whole tale to her friend Henry James, the novelist. He took it as the model for Washington Square.

Note: Almost all of the facts I describe are taken from the following article:
Dickins, Bruce. “The Story of ‘Washington Square’.” The Times Literary Supplement, 13 Oct. 1961, p. 690. The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/ tinyurl/8oLSC6. Accessed 17 Jan. 2019.

My Day Job

By Sarah | Published:

I’m an independent scholar. Although this is a growing demographic in the parched land of academia, people still ask me what that means when they see the phrase on my conference name tag. At its simplest, it means that the money I use to buy my groceries, tea mugs, and airplane tickets to visit friends and libraries in England arrives in my bank account in exchange for work I do that is NOT researching nineteenth-century literature/history/culture. I do that research for fun, the way some people take up woodworking or mountain biking. Instead of Comic-Con, I go to Victorian studies conferences. There are as many paths to and through the wilderness of independent scholarship as there are people doing it, and mine has certainly been a meandering one, with a recent opportunity blossoming out of a dormant bulb.

My new office

A little more than ten years ago, I was looking to get out of a job where I wasn’t happy, and I put in a few months as an assistant at a publisher of linguistics books. That relatively short stint led to an ongoing professional relationship that has continued in dribs and drabs and fits and starts ever since. Sometimes maintaining that connection has meant copy editing a manuscript; sometimes it has meant reorganizing a small warehouse of books (free weightlifting!). Starting now, it means taking over as the Managing Editor. In the course of much professional soul searching in recent years, I’ve realized that it’s very important to me to be always learning something new at my job. I certainly have a lot to learn in my new role, and that’s one of many reasons I’m excited about it. Another reason is that it will enable me to continue my work as an independent scholar, so watch this space for more tales from the stacks!

A shock in the stacks

By Sarah | Published:

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.

Shoveling sand & celebrating

By Sarah | Published:

MS Eng 95210, Houghton Library, Harvard University

 

Last year, I watched a documentary that depicted one scholar’s efforts to determine exactly how much of his ear Van Gogh cut off. That may not seem like a lot with which to fill an hour, but it was the most accurate portrayal of the research process I’ve ever seen. It can take a long time to pin down something concretely. I mean, I love it when Indiana Jones uses the buried map room to find the location of the Ark of the Covenant, but he (and his helpers) had to dig up a lot of the desert first – and that was after the other experts dug up a lot of desert in the wrong place, because they didn’t have all the information. Working with archival material can be a similar slog, but if you’re lucky and/or stubborn enough, the dawn will hit your medallion just right, and things will start to glow. Fortunately, my father informs me I’ve been stubborn since the day I was born and refused to oblige the doctor by breathing on command.

Given the enormous fame of Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, you might be surprised to learn that his handwritten documents are only now becoming digitized and made available through the Cambridge University Library, thanks to the efforts of Phyllis Weliver and Ewan Jones, among others. Just a few years ago, when I was researching a glossary of Old and Middle English words that Tennyson had made in one of his notebooks, I had to transcribe that glossary from a facsimile edition published in the early ’80s. Indeed, one of my indelible memories from Cambridge is of late nights perched on the top floor of my college library, peering at photocopies of the facsimile to decipher the text, with help from my trusty Anglo-Saxon dictionary. The porters would come by to turn off the lights on their nightly rounds, see me, and ask me to switch them off on my way out.

I’m proud to announce that the effort was not wasted. What started as a practical means to an end – proving Tennyson’s interest in historical forms of English – grew into a full-fledged research project of its own after graduation. And after many more hours of squinting and cross-referencing, I had my medallion ready for the dawn. Later this year, the Tennyson Society will publish a monograph containing my transcriptions of both the glossary and handwritten lists of rhyming words (see photo), together with the insights I have drawn from them. If you’re eager for a sneak peek, a summary of my findings appeared in the 50th anniversary issue of the Tennyson Research Bulletin last year. I had to shovel a lot of sand to get here, and I’m very pleased to be able to share the results.

Mummy peas in Tennyson’s garden?

By Sarah | Published:

Earlier this year, I suggested that “Victorian laughter” would be a good theme for a conference. This was partly because the adjective “Victorian” is often synonymous with an austere lack of humor — “we are not amused,” etc. — despite the evidence that the people of nineteenth-century Britain enjoyed a laugh as much as anyone in history. Burlesques, nonsense literature — Gilbert & Sullivan, for heaven’s sake! whose shows still make us chuckle in 2017.

The other reason I liked this theme was that I thought it would be healthy to acknowledge that part of what draws many of us to studying the Victorians is that sometimes they could be so darn weird. To research them is to navigate a field full of rabbit holes, down which lies a world that can seem as alien as Wonderland. Take, for example, mummy seeds.

Recently, I’ve been working on a conference paper about Tennyson writing history plays after the manner of Shakespeare. Several were put on by Henry Irving, the most famous actor/producer of the period, with help from his assistant and business manager, Bram Stoker. Yes, that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Stoker visited Tennyson on several occasions to hash out details of contracts and revisions. Reading his memoir the other day, I came across this provocative sentence:

“In [his] garden Tennyson pointed out to us some blue flowering pea which had been reared from seed found in the hand of a mummy.” (vol. I, p. 215)

No explanation followed this rather gothic assertion. How… Where… What…? I couldn’t begin to fathom how such a thing as seeds from a mummy’s hand could have ended up in Tennyson’s garden, or how Stoker could have found it unnecessary to expand on that anecdote.

It turns out that Tennyson was but one of many, many people to believe that grains recovered from Egyptian tombs could grow new plants. (They can’t.) The section on Mummy Peas in this document offers some tantalizing suggestions for how Tennyson may have come to think he had a mummy pea plant in his garden. I’d still love to know how he acquired it, though. Did he buy a seed packet from an unscrupulous trader? Did someone present the plant to him as a gift? I’ll be keeping my eyes open any time I’m working with Tennyson documents, but we may never know.

This was a fascinating rabbit hole to fall down for an afternoon. If I’m honest, the curiosity that drove me to find out more partly stemmed (no pun intended) from a desire to know whether it was at all possible that seeds from a mummy’s hand could have sprouted millennia later. How cool would that have been? So in this case at least, I don’t have much right to laugh at the Victorians. I kind of want it to be true, too.

Can you rhyme “eyes” and “fantasies”?

By Sarah | Published:

Being a member of a Cambridge college has many perks, not least of which is exposure to the English choral tradition, which is alive and well in many a college chapel. In fact, it may be thanks to the evensongs of Trinity Hall that I came to think more deeply about the potential effects of archaic rhyme in poetry. (Incidentally, the re-introduction of evensong into Anglican churches was controversial in the nineteenth century: it seemed a bit too Catholic to some. Nevertheless, it proved popular.)

The closing hymn was often a translation of one originally written in Latin, “Te lucis ante terminum” (“To thee before the ending of the day”). The English version in Trinity Hall’s hymn books consists of rhyming couplets beginning, “Before the ending of the day | Creator of the world we pray.” Paired with a simple chant-based melody, the rhymes create a sense of stability. The overall effect is fitting for a work that asks for protection through the night. There is one exception for modern listeners/singers, however: the beginning of the second stanza.

“From all ill dreams defend our eyes, | From nightly fears and fantasies.”

I long assumed that this now-jarring rhyme was an artifact of the Elizabethan era whence (I thought) it originated. But the translation, it turns out, dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. Translator J.M. Neale (a Cambridge man himself) published his version around 1851 as part of the Hymnal Noted. This volume reflected high-church preferences, including a return to plainsong (chanting in unison). Could this love of the past be the reason Neale employed a rhyme that worked rather better for Chaucer than for us?

Well actually, my current research has revealed that nineteenth-century poets regularly used words ending in the sounds “eyes” and “eese” as rhymes. Even a rhyming dictionary of the period was forced to acknowledge, “There is no fixed rule on this subject.” So Neale wasn’t unusual in rhyming “eyes” with “fantasies.” Nevertheless, the effect can be useful to a writer with nostalgic tastes.

Like the marginalia I described in my last post, these two lines reflect a bigger story. They are a product of counter-currents, namely the shifting of pronunciation and the preservation of older forms in poetic practice.

Minute marginalia with a big story

By Sarah | Published:

Kemble Anglo-Saxon correction

The photo above has a story that exemplifies what bibliographical detective work can reveal.

First, I must introduce you to John Mitchell Kemble, one of my favorite Victorians. He was one of the first modern scholars of Old English — he produced the first British edition of Beowulf — and he did a lot to bring good practices to translation and interpretation. He also didn’t mince words when he thought other scholars had blundered. This, as you can imagine, didn’t do much for his career.

Kemble was effusive in talking to his friends about his latest enthusiasm, be it a fad diet or a poetic edda. Many of his friends were fellow members of a secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles, whose membership included the poet Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam (the subject of Tennyson’s masterpiece In Memoriam).

In 1833, Kemble published a pamphlet entitled On English Præterites and sent it to various friends. But to his great frustration, there was a typo. Kemble must have ranted about this error with his usual passion, because Hallam wrote back assuring his friend that he would “cheerfully […] make with pencil or pen that important alteration of swylce for swylke on which the destinies of mankind may be reasonably supposed to depend.” The question is, did Hallam actually follow through?

By great good fortune, Professor Simon Keynes of Trinity College Cambridge (Kemble’s, Hallam’s, and Tennyson’s old college) owns the copy of this pamphlet that Kemble sent to Hallam. And indeed someone has made a correction in the margin! But if you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice that Hallam was slightly confused. In the printed text, Kemble was correcting an earlier scholar’s transcription of an Old English manuscript from swyke to swylce (k –> lc). However, the printers goofed and swapped the y and the l in the printed correction, thereby introducing a new error. It must have been maddening for the meticulous Kemble. I can’t tell you for sure whose handwriting adds the additional change, but my guess is Kemble did it himself before he mailed it off.

This marginal correction — five strokes of someone’s pen — reveals a story of Victorian Anglo-Saxonism, academic enthusiasm, and recognizable personality quirks.