Handful Of Letters Research Articles

Care & Custody: Past Responses to Mental Health, National Library of Medicine

<i>Care &amp; Custody: Past Responses to Mental Health</i>, National Library of Medicine

Alice Stopford Green and Vernon Lee: Salon Culture and Intellectual Exchange

Abstract Archival evidence of the connection between Alice Stopford Green (1847–1929) and Vernon Lee (1856–1935) is restricted to a handful of letters and a few scattered references in ancillary documents. Extant correspondence provides a glimpse into the conversation and concerns of these two important European intellectuals, demonstrating their nascent interest in questions of social justice. Using network theory as a lens, this essay traces the contours of this connection, initiated during a formative period for both in the fertile context of the salons and dining rooms of London in the 1880s. This connection demonstrates the importance of social networks for women writers, artists, intellectuals and activists during the fin de siècle. By exploring the limited archival remnants of this friendship, this study highlights the Irish and European dimensions of Victorian metropolitan culture. It was because of salon culture that women with strikingly different backgrounds and sensibilities could connect and explore ideas of mutual concern, with reverberations for their political positioning and activism in subsequent decades.

The Impact of a Computer-based Adult Literacy Program on Literacy and Numeracy: Evidence from India

With over 700 million illiterate adults worldwide, governments in many developing countries have implemented adult literacy programs. Typically these programs have low rates of success partly because the quality of teaching is heterogeneous. Standardization of teaching provided by computer-aided instruction might be a solution. However, there is little rigorous evidence of the effectiveness of computer-based adult literacy programs in delivering high-quality literacy and numeracy in the developing world. To fill this void in the literature, we study the impact of a computer-based adult literacy program, Tara Akshar Plus, on the literacy and numeracy skills of previously illiterate adult women in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Through a randomized control trial, we measure learning outcomes with individual-level literacy and numeracy tests and find statistically significant positive impacts of this computer-aided program on literacy and numeracy outcomes of women who undergo the TARA Akshar Plus program—relative to the control group. The effects are statistically significant but small in magnitude for women who were entirely illiterate prior to the program. The learning impacts are substantially larger for learners who knew at least a handful of letters at the beginning of the program. We compare the improvement in learning to that of another adult literacy and numeracy program. We conclude that TARA Akshar Plus is the more effective of the two, but the literacy and numeracy level achieved are not large enough to make many entirely illiterate learners become functionally literate.

SPELT FROM HOPKINS’S LEAVES: CONSIDERING ARCHIVAL ‘REMAINS’

What can be learned from three sketchbooks, a family scrapbook, a handful of letters, an essay notebook, and a few other ‘scraps, orts, and fragments’? The Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘remains’ at Balliol College, Oxford, although comparatively few, have much to teach us about his controversial practices as self-curator, the posthumous (and precarious) disposition of his poetry and papers, and the ways in which reading Hopkins is always an exercise in textual counter-point.

Revisiting the Stonor manuscripts

This article traces the publishing history of the letters and documents assembled by successive heads of the Stonor family. It starts by re-examining the texts given by C. L. Kingsford in his Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483 (1919), and its supplement of 1923. Kingsford's work remains in print in the still more unsatisfactory form published by Cambridge University Press in 1996 as Kingsford's Stonor Letters and Papers, with introduction and notes by Christine Carpenter. That volume makes no mention of the handful of letters found after Kingsford's time, which are here offered and discussed.

Resisting conformity: Anglican mission women and the schooling of girls in early nineteenth-century West Africa

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls’ schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the absence of personal accounts of African girls’ schooling from that period, this paper draws on a slim body of 71 letters written by women and girls associated with one British mission society in Sierra Leone between 1804 and 1826 to suggest a fluid and at times contradictory construction of gender and racial identity, which sits at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity that the missionaries sought to impart through girls’ schooling. The handful of letters written by African women and girls also casts doubt on the assumed subservience of black subjects to white officialdom.

Steps Toward Unraveling a Vatican Cipher of the 1930s

A handful of letters sent in the 1930s by the Berlin Nunciature to the Vatican Secretariat of State contain encrypted portions along with their clear-text versions. These Rosetta-stone-like documents enable a partial unraveling of the adopted cipher system, which has the structure of a substitution-type nomenclator. Apparently, no cipher is used more than once and different ciphers are related through an indicator. The findings are offered as a stepping stone for the benefit of future investigators.

Worldly Possessions: Nietzsche's Texts, American Readers, and the Intimacy and Itinerancy of Ideas

In 1881 Friedrich Nietzsche received his first piece of fan mail from the United States. Though only a handful of letters came to him during his lifetime, many more would follow after his death in 1900. During the early twentieth century, Nietzsche admirers from all over the country wrote to the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar for memorabilia, to ask for biographical information about him, and to explain how his philosophy influenced them. These letters reveal how a general reading audience put the German philosopher's texts and image to work in their early twentieth-century American contexts. This article analyzes how the letter writers' uses of Nietzsche resulted from the friction between the transnational traffic of his philosophy and their daily needs, the image and reality of his remoteness from their own time and place, and the immediacy of their lived experiences. The letters thus shed light on how Nietzsche's texts traversed national, cultural, and linguistic borders, while helping reconstitute them in the imaginations of his American readers.

The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West (review)

Reviewed by: The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West Nicolas S. Witschi The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West. Ed. Lawrence I. Berkove. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006. xiv + 394 pp. Cloth, $39.95 ; paper, $19.95. Beginning in the 1860s and lasting for roughly four decades, an unexpected but highly influential literary movement arose along the far-flung edge of Nevada's Great Basin desert where it meets the Sierra Nevada. Or so the story goes. Loosely defined by the inventive, often satirical writings of a motley group of journalists, memoirists, and fiction writers, this so-called Sagebrush School (first labeled as such in the 1890s) is most frequently invoked whenever the antecedents of and early influences on Samuel Clemens come under discussion. And yet relatively little is known about the actual writings of those who worked in Virginia City and its environs. Lawrence I. Berkove's new anthology admirably redresses this shortcoming, presenting for the first time in half a century an up-to-date, well-researched, and engaging collection that surveys the literary production of the place that first saw the name of Mark Twain in print. Familiar gems such as Twain's "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson" and Dan De Quille's "Solar Armor" are included. Also present are lesser-known but equally compelling pieces such as Sam Davis' "Typographical Howitzer," which imagines Twain and De Quille's launching of racks of typeset prose and poetry from a cannon to repel a group of "unlettered" marauders; Rollin M. Daggett's moving recollection in "My French Friend" of the emotional costs of the mining life; Joseph T. Goodman's charmingly evasive "That Affair at Pollard's"; and the latter author's measured and partially sympathetic telling of the tale of Conrad Wiegand, the scandal-ruined and ultimately suicidal assayer whom Twain had mercilessly skewered in appendix C of Roughing It. In an introduction that is sure to renew discussion about how one might define literary regionalism, Berkove offers a taxonomy of sagebrush literature's defining characteristics: it "tends to favor personal narrative"; it is "thoughtfully moral," even philosophical at times, and "manifests a fierce love of the Nevada experience"; and it reflects its contributors' complete mastery "of both formal and informal style," of both classical literary techniques and the more vernacular style of an emerging regionalist movement. Above all, "the Sagebrush authors did not invent the literary hoax, but they [End Page 87] did nurture it into a high art." Thus, the anthology opens with a section on "Humor and Hoaxes," which, given the familiar but hardly isolated examples of Twain and De Quille, certainly represents a central defining characteristic of late-nineteenth-century Nevada literature. This longest and most entertaining section is followed by "Short Fiction," "Memoirs," "Nonfiction," a handful of letters, and "Poetry," each with a separate introduction in which Berkove further glosses the distinguishing features of Sagebrush writing. As a whole the anthology favors a broadly introductory or survey model and thereby avoids making a more explicit entry into recent debates about literary regionalism's ideological functions and transnational contexts. Nevertheless, at the core of this book lies an assumption about the necessity of identifying the formal and thematic terms by which readers might discern and describe the literature of a specific region, an idea that is still very much worth debating. Moreover, Berkove's selection of texts affords readers the opportunity to assess the cultural impact of one of America's earliest instances of massively mechanized and dehumanizing modernization. Despite being subtitled "Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West," it could just as easily be described as a collection of literature from the new industrial blast furnace. The inclusion in the "Nonfiction" section of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's "The Pah-Utes," published in the Californian in 1882 and the anthology's only woman-authored piece, raises a question too important to ignore: are there other women writers from this place and period whose works have thus far been overlooked or are still awaiting discovery? The California Gold Rush era had legions of women contributors to local periodicals and women authors...

Sir Richard Cocks: The Political Anatomy of a Country Whig

Sir Richard Cocks (c. 1659–1726) was a rare bird among the crook-taloned specimens perching on the back benches of King William III's House of Commons. He seems to have displayed every hallmark of that declining species, the Country Whig; impeccably Whiggish, indubitably rustic, learned in Greek and Roman history and versed in contemporary neo-Harringtonian literature; profoundly tolerant and resolutely erastian in his religious inclinations, even somewhat Puritan in outlook. He supported the Revolution settlement but opposed a standing army and entertained a healthy suspicion of placemen; approved of trade but distrusted the new power of finance; assisted Quakers and inveighed against priestcraft. What is more, he was never tempted to compromise his principles with the taint of office, nor to forsake his patriotism for Treasury gold. Old Whig, radical Whig, Roman Whig, Vulgar Whig, and independent country gentleman rolled into one, he stood almost alone among his fellow M.P.s, sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. Unlike the vast majority of these parliamentary colleagues, he left posterity a detailed record of his opinions, in the form of two albums or memoranda-books, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library, a handful of letters and essays scattered through various repositories, and a clutch of publications, religious tracts and charges delivered to grand juries in his native Gloucestershire. Of those contemporaries who kept diaries or preserved their personal papers the one whose social and political profile perhaps most resembles Cocks's is the Yorkshire baronet Sir Arthur Kaye, a Country Tory rather than a Country Whig, and with an archive of parliamentary diaries, letters, and speeches, mostly dating from the 1710s, that is nowhere near as extensive. Cocks's writings offer a unique opportunity to examine some of the thought processes at work in the mind of a rank-and-file Country Whig in what might be considered the golden age of Country Whiggery at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Thomas Jefferson's Early Notebooks

JEFFERSON is an old, old subject, Merrill Peterson wrote in i960, the quest for the historical Jefferson, under the formal discipline of scholarly inquiry, is young.' Despite all that has been learned about Thomas Jefferson in the intervening years, important questions about the man and his work remain unresolved, particularly regarding his early life, for which the massive documentary record of the later years is lacking. most revealing documents that survive from his first thirty years are his early notebooks, which, along with his architectural drawings and a handful of letters, are virtually all that has come down to us in his own hand. These notebooks record a variety of information about his law practice, his accounts and daily expenditures, and his gardening ventures, but the most valuable key to the developing mind of the youngJefferson is the commonplace books in which he copied and occasionally commented on extracts from his reading. This article attempts to view these notebooks as a group of related documents and to focus on a problem that has important implications for what they tell us about Jefferson, namely, the dating of the manuscripts. Where the date is not given or clearly evident, as with the three commonplace books, most students of Jefferson have been cautious in making inferences from the material in the notebooks, and none has approached the problem more judiciously than Dumas Malone: The dates of the various entries in Uefferson's] notebooks cannot be determined with entire confidence; and, even if they could be, the works that he cited cannot be assumed to have been the source of his ideas.... It is a more important fact that he read widely and stored his mind with riches than that he abstracted particular writings. More important still was the spirit of fearless inquiry in which he pursued knowledge.2 Granting this, it is still virtually impossible to get away from the question of dating, as

A Yankee Trader in the Gold Rush Letters of Walter Gardner, 1851-1857

GOLD FEVER Of the California variety first swept the Atlantic seaboard in the closing days of 1848. It was nurtured on a few random letters, an official report by the military governor of the distant province, actual specimens of gold carried east by army and navy couriers, and the President's endorsement in his December message on the state of the Union. The fever struck hard. And three years later, as attested in these letters by Walter Longley Gardner, it was still virulent in New England. California, he was informed, had become an orderly place; merchants there were prospering; the mines were paying off better than ever; every steamer was bringing back millions in bullion; the climate was the healthiest in the world; and many returned Californians were preparing to go west again. All this, he reported, has given me the California Fever, the hardest kind, and nothing but a voyage will cure it. The handful of letters that describe his gold rush experiences begin on this note, in the form of an appeal-he was then not quite nineteenfor his mother's consent to his going. Addressed sometimes to his mother and sometimes to his father, they continue with accounts of travel on the Panama route, life and clerkship in San Francisco, and, after some years, a venture in quartz mining. In time of centennial his letters may be read chiefly for their straightforward description of the gold rush. They tell of preparations for the journey that are out of the ordinary only because of their simplicity. Even by 1852, it appears, the steamship company had not thoroughly regularized its business, and some of his intended companions missed the boat because they expected a Thursday instead of a Tuesday sailing. Traffic on the Panama route was heavy. The Central America was crowded with 430 passengers. They suffered the same seasickness, grumbled as loudly at the messes, and reveled as much over the sights of Kingston as had the original forty-niners. Paying Chagres its customary compliment-a miserable dirty hole, Gardner says little of the bongo trip up the river, but he brags moderately about his prowess as a walker the rest of the way to Panama. Most of the C411