Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Scoping a Twenty-First-Century Digital Book History Resource

Abstract

There is a growing awareness of the potential capacity of publishing archives to provide an accurate and forensic level of detail to all aspects of the writing, production, sales and reception of books and texts. This level and range of detail which archival sources can supply often means a greater accuracy, nuance, and clarity can be provided to the publishing story, to the benefit of not only book and publishing history, but wider bib­liographic, biographic, and historic studies. Whilst a significant amount of research in these areas has been undertaken with publishing archives, it has had restricted impact and exposure due to the limited access and avail­ability of the print and digital formats in which it has appeared. However, current developments in digital presentation and platforms offers the op­portunity to unite current print and digital resources in a more unified way, whilst also providing a basis to significantly expand with new research and materials. This more unified approach broadens the interdisciplinary appeal and usefulness of publishing archive resources making them relevant and useable to a modern research community and audience. This paper will use Lord Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A Roumant (1812) as an example of what publishing resources are available for constructing a detailed publishing and literary history and how the scale and type of ma­terials requires a twenty-first-century solution to maximize the potential and use.