Manuscript Notations and Cultural Memory

Abstract

Manuscript Notations and Cultural Memory Michael Edson (bio) Historians using manuscript notes to reconstruct reading practices from the past have traditionally focused on single annotators with marginalia in many volumes. Think of William Sherman's work on John Dee, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton's on Gabriel Harvey, or Heather Jackson's on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.1 Such studies have advanced substantially our understandings of reading, and we would not wish them away. But they point to dissonant trends. Where literary studies continues to shun single authors (at least as the subjects for new monographs) and to question the privileging of an author's biography as the key to interpretation, studies of single annotators still dominate histories of reading. Known marginaliaists, often wealthy and male, disproportionately define the field. And while undertakings such as Book Traces (University of Virginia) and The Reading Experience Database (The Open University) have enlarged awareness of marginalia by readers about whom often little is known, both projects are, at least currently, too miscellaneous to permit comparisons across many annotated copies—comparisons promising broad insights into collective reading practices at certain times.2 In response to these patterns in print and digital scholarship, I would like to propose another method of doing the history of reading: comparing [End Page 171] manuscript notations across many, if not all, surviving copies of single titles. This labor-intensive, comparative analysis has been done occasionally in the past, but largely, again, in terms of the intentions and biographies of authors and identifiable annotators.3 By contrast, I will show what possibilities emerge through the study of marginal notes by large numbers of readers without traceable lives or intentions. To illustrate, I will analyze the handwritten notations by the mainly anonymous readers of the roughly ninety extant copies of Lady Anne Hamilton's 1807 satire, The Epics of the Ton; Or, The Glories of the Great World: A Poem. Leaving behind a larger-than-usual number of annotated copies, Epics of the Ton is a perfect subject for a comparative analysis of marginalia. Part of a larger project, the analysis to follow will raise questions that our current methods and priorities are unable to answer. My suggestions here model one possible approach beyond the single-annotator study, revealing manuscript notation to be a potentially rich source for studying cultural memory, which is to say, for studying what was foremost in the minds of readers at certain times and how it got there. This approach also requires that we see satire like Hamilton's as a kind of literacy game, with the goal being above all to assign names to the satiric targets. Unable to offer individualizing accounts for the names left by the many unknown readers of Epics of the Ton, scholars must seek out larger, social explanations for patterns in notation, including partisan identities and competing information sources. Published anonymously, Hamilton's Epics of the Ton decries gambling and illicit sex in London high society. In part a defense of Caroline, Princess of Wales, for whom Hamilton (1766–1846) was for a time a lady in waiting, and in part a gossipy satire on philandering Regency elites, Epics of the Ton exploits the media-driven clamor for celebrity scandal in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.4 The division into two gendered sections, titled the Male Book and the Female Book, makes Epics of the Ton unique among satires. The work ridicules seventeen men and twenty-five women, mainly aristocrat-politicians and society hostesses, who are identified in the Table of Contents and the section headers only by initials: D—of B—, V—C—, etc. (fig. 1).5 Additional blanks throughout the poem and its footnotes invite readers to put names to the textual clues, in effect doing the work Hamilton begs of her muse: "From next year's Lethe, and oblivion drear, / Come save the deeds" of the London beau monde.6 Reacting to the poem's "lust [for] personal defamation," the poet Anna Seward wrote that she wished Epics of the Ton would suffer a "total famine of readers."7 Yet feast, not famine, better describes the poem's brief, intense popularity, as it saw three editions, all...