Sutherland, Kathryn. Why Modern Manuscripts Matter

Abstract

Why Modern Manuscripts Matter makes a strong case for the preservation of manuscripts and authorial ephemera, not just for the reasons that we already know, but for future uses that we have not yet even begun to imagine. As Sutherland carefully illustrates, the history of manuscript scholarship already includes many surprising turns and revaluations of materials that were previously thought unimportant. The Introduction and Chapter 1 provide a clearly written, useful overview of the past and current state of modern manuscript studies and preservation for readers seeking background knowledge on this field. Chapter 2 discusses Samuel Johnson’s prescient understanding of the commercial potential of the writing life. Johnson’s constructed authorial persona played into the public’s fascination with celebrity authors and increased the importance of material objects owned or made by them. Collectors began to value written drafts as ‘an expression of a self’ (p. 83). Chapter 3 provides an overview of how the two-hundred-year-old mania for collecting celebrity autographs and other ephemera, including human hair and jewellery, often divorces these materials so completely from their original contexts that they lose much of their significance. However, Sutherland argues that these items – even very mundane artifacts such as paper pins and clips – can regain meaning when properly catalogued and displayed, and therefore should not be overlooked by professional archivists. Chapter 4 explores what Frances Burney’s manuscript archive reveals about her writing practices, particularly her tendency to regard previously published texts as endless works in progress. In Chapter 5, Sutherland argues that Sir Walter Scott’s manuscripts trouble our assumptions about manuscript authenticity and authority. Sutherland describes Scott’s archive as evidence of a highly collaborative and staged process in which no single draft of a work can stand as most authoritative. Chapter 6 suggests that Jane Austen’s manuscripts demonstrate stronger links to Romantic ideals about fragmentary writing than has usually been assumed and that this underlying experimental feature of her work, in turn, influenced the Modernists. In these case studies of Burney, Scott and Austen, Sutherland convincingly shows that examining their manuscript archives provides us with a stronger understanding of their writing habits and innovations.