Nineteenth-century Books Research Articles

The Slovenian Linguistic Atlas as a source for diachronic lexicon studies (expressions for parts of the body and diseases from nineteenth-century books on folk medicine)

This article compares the dialect expressions for parts of the body and diseases in the new Slovenian Linguistic Atlas and the vocabulary connected with folk medicine in three nineteenth-century books on folk medicine from three dialect areas (the Rovte–Poljane, Styria–Lower Sava, and Carinthia–Jaun Valley areas) in order to present the extent to which and how the dialect atlas can be used as an authoritative source for defining the areal usage of lexemes, identifying or reconstructing the pronunciation of standardized forms, defining the usage of standard expressions with different roots, and semantically defining the historical expressions used in folk medicine.

The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (review)

Reviewed by: The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield Katrin Völkner The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century. Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 286. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571134875. The display of contempt for commercially successful literature and its readers has enjoyed a long tradition among writers and literary critics. Jonathan Franzen’s dismay at seeing Oprah’s book club logo on his novel’s cover is not dissimilar to Theodor Fontane’s denigration of his immensely popular colleague E. Marlitt as writing for the “Strickstrumpf-Madame in Sachsen und Thüringen.” At about the same time Fontane made his condescending comments about Marlitt, a young Emma Goldman enjoyed reading Marlitt’s novels for her German class in Königsberg, as one of the articles in The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century tells us (198). The somewhat jarring image of the multilingual future anarchist leader as a reader of mass-produced romantic fiction wonderfully illustrates one of The German Bestseller’s main goals: to complicate our notion of bestsellers by taking a closer look at them as literary products and cultural commodities. As Charlotte Woodford, one of the volume’s editors along with Benedict Schofield, states in the introduction, an emphasis on works that were widely read and enjoyed, affords the opportunity “to explore the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market” (1). The texts the authors of this volume analyze did not simply sell well but they were widely read and enjoyed, and all had what Michael Minden calls “the aura of popular success” (Michael Minden, “Bestseller Lists and Literary Value in the Twentieth Century,” Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung [2007], 169). As a result, the volume gathers articles on canonized and noncanonized texts and we thus find a look into the melodramatic elements of Buddenbrooks alongside a careful analysis of Josefine Mutzenbacher. Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, a faux autobiographical text that has become a pornographic classic. A special focus of the overall project is to examine the “literariness of works sometimes dismissed as merely popular” (14). Woodford’s introduction gives a compact overview of the development of the literary marketplace in the nineteenth century and reminds us of the importance of periodicals and lending libraries as sources of reading material even in an age when mass production made book ownership more widespread. Many of the articles in the book use Alberto Martino’s research on lending libraries as a way to gage which books were actually read in addition to using sales numbers as an indicator of a book’s popularity. A workshop on “The Tradition of the Bestseller” inspired the essays in this book and the contributions are organized into three categories: “The Aesthetics of Success and Failure,” “Short Fiction,” and “Imagination and Identification.” While the decision behind this particular categorization of the different articles remains a bit [End Page 664] unclear to this reader, all contributions complement each other nicely and present a broad spectrum of authors and popular works in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. With its emphasis on both aesthetic categories and material conditions, the volume intersects with and contributes to a growing body of work in nineteenth century book history in German Studies as represented by such scholars as Kit Belgum and Lynne Tatlock whose work on the Gartenlaube and transatlantic cultural transfer of popular fiction has advanced our understanding of the literary marketplace in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through exploring “bestseller” as a literary genre, the volume can go beyond traditional hierarchies and integrate “high” and “low” culture equally into its analysis and look at commonalities. Perhaps not surprisingly, one category that serves as an important interpretative tool for analyzing bestsellers is “melodrama.” Ernest Schonfield takes a look at how Buddenbrooks, one of “the few novels around 1900 to have achieved both critical acclaim and widespread popularity” (95), employs melodramatic registers and identifies them as one of the reasons the novel appealed to different audiences. In his article on Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Benedict Schofield also sees the melodramatic...

E is for Elephant: Jungle Animals in Late Nineteenth-Century British Picture Books

E is for Elephant: Jungle Animals in Late Nineteenth-Century British Picture Books

The Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth

TO READ DOROTHY WORDSWORTH AS AN EXPERIMENTAL WRITER, WE must investigate how nineteenth-century books of daily writing function as sites of intertextual and generic experimentation. As text objects that imitate public forms while serving private functions, such books facilitate cross-genre and cross-textual conversation, collaboration, and invention. Examining the generic and formal innovations particular to nineteenth-century books of daily writing facilitates two broader literary-historical interventions. First, investigating the history of homemade and handwritten books provides an alternative origin story for modern experimental poetry that dramatizes the overlapping public and private spheres represented by its literal and theoretical materiality. (We can think here, for example, of the late modernist mimeograph revolution, in which books of poetry were given limited print runs and sent directly to their intended audience, or of the poststructuralist turn to the materiality of print and language foundational to Language poetry.) Second, such a project provides a fresh perspective from which to approach the experience of reading. should pause for a moment to define this term, archival reading, which am using to indicate a particular type of textual criticism focused, not on process and product, but rather on the experience of encountering an text. When transcribed and removed from the archive, Dorothy Wordsworth's poems, journals, and travel writings fit neatly into the conventional genre categories of Romantic women's However, when read in their original, material contexts, the texts engage in cross-genre innovations and intertextual experiments. Writing about Emily Dickinson's processes of composition, Alexandra Socarides explains, I am talking about her actual, literal, and physical methods and processes of writing ... [i]n doing so, draw attention to the text in a historically-specific scene of writing. (1) In the pages that follow, focus on the physical forms of Dorothy Wordsworth's manuscripts in order to draw attention to the texts in a scene of material encounter. do so not to privilege the position of the literary critic but rather to accomplish two goals--to facilitate a reading of Dorothy Wordsworth as an experimental author writing in the literal and figurative margins of a literary history that she is working to construct, and to open up a conversation about how reading the experimental Dorothy Wordsworth might enrich our understanding of the Romantic inheritance. In the service of these broader arguments, this essay motivates a reading of one particular homemade book, Dorothy Wordsworth's commonplace chapbook, a circumscribed collection of poetic consolations that occurs within Wordsworth's commonplace book. The commonplace chapbook is but one small-scale example of the inventive that make up Dorothy Wordsworth's corpus, which ranges from the hand-sewn books of her travel writings, to the artful composition of her journals, to the extensive transcriptions of her brother's poetry, to the poems that cluster and fragment and fill out and break off across her journals, notebooks, albums, and commonplace book. These writings are at once public and private, communal and directed, occasional and lyrical, written for a reader and indifferent to her presence. Following Felicity Nussbaum, we might conceptualize these works as borderline genres connected to immediate social relationships as well as to trans-historical, projected understandings of Wordsworth's position in relation to literary fame. (2) To sift through Dorothy Wordsworth's literary output is to encounter writings that transcend, ironize, and imitate print culture in order to create hybrid texts and experiences of reading. In addition to contributing to a broader understanding of nineteenth-century literary experiments, working through the commonplace chapbook facilitates a more localized argument, namely, that we must attend to Dorothy Wordsworth's manipulation of published and quotidian forms and of the materiality of text more generally, if we are to understand her as an early experimental writer. …

Toward a Computational Analysis of Victorian Poetics

The large-scale digitization of nineteenth-century books and periodicals now makes possible a more comprehensive exploration of the cultural history of victorian texts and their interrelated bibliographic, visual, and linguistic codes. This essay argues that computational analysis can help us move beyond human limitations of vision, memory, and attention in examining this new archive. Digital reading can help us to discover texts we do not already know and to resituate those we think we already know, thus producing new research questions and new kinds of evidence.

Banish the Books: Horatio Alger, Jr., the Censors, the Libraries, and the Readers, 1870–1910

This study of a late nineteenth century book banning episode focuses on juvenile author Horatio Alger, Jr., and on the relationship between advocacy rhetoric and verifiable outcomes. By investigating user behavior as associated with library holdings and loan transactions the effectiveness of the campaign can be ascertained. A survey of public library book catalogs reveals that the number of Alger holdings stayed remarkably stable during the period. Muncie, Indiana’s database of loan transactions confirms Alger as the most frequently borrowed author. Censorship activity, while drawing public attention, failed to significantly alter either library holdings or children’s reading patterns.

Synthesis and fading of eighteenth-century Prussian blue pigments: a combined study by spectroscopic and diffractive techniques using laboratory and synchrotron radiation sources

Prussian blue, a hydrated iron(III) hexacyanoferrate(II) complex, is a synthetic pigment discovered in Berlin in 1704. Because of both its highly intense color and its low cost, Prussian blue was widely used as a pigment in paintings until the 1970s. The early preparative methods were rapidly recognized as a contributory factor in the fading of the pigment, a fading already known by the mid-eighteenth century. Herein two typical eighteenth-century empirical recipes have been reproduced and the resulting pigment analyzed to better understand the reasons for this fading. X-ray absorption and Mössbauer spectroscopy indicated that the early syntheses lead to Prussian blue together with variable amounts of an undesirable iron(III) product. Pair distribution functional analysis confirmed the presence of nanocrystalline ferrihydrite, Fe10O14(OH)2, and also identified the presence of alumina hydrate, Al10O14(OH)2, with a particle size of ∼15 Å. Paint layers prepared from these pigments subjected to accelerated light exposure showed a tendency to turn green, a tendency that was often reported in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books. The presence of particles of hydrous iron(III) oxides was also observed in a genuine eighteenth-century Prussian blue sample obtained from a polychrome sculpture.

Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth from New Guinea and Central Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth from New Guinea and Central Africa Dan Taulapapa McMullin Second Skins: Painted Barkcloth from New Guinea and Central Africa. Fowler Museum at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). 1 April-26 August 2012. Gallery information available at http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/ UCLA Fowler Museum's Second Skins exhibition of painted barkcloth by indigenous women artists is a comparison of contemporary works by the Ömie Artists, a collective from New Guinea whose work first received international attention from museums in Australia, with modern twentieth century works largely from the 1970s by unnamed Mbuti artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on loan from American collections. Curators Roy Hamilton and Gemma Rodrigues bring together a beautiful collection of two quite different aesthetics that utilize the inner bark of trees on which to paint designs and images for wearing as cloth and for display as art. Ömie artist Lila Warrimou (Misaso), whose Christian name precedes her tribal name in parentheses, is a paramount chief of the Ömie women. Her works, including "Mina and Suja at Mount Obo" (2010) and "The Story of the Lost Boy and Ninivo the Bird of Paradise of Mount Ömie" (2010), utilize aspects of traditional male tattoo in abstract but signifying patterns, painted through visual narratives from Ömie polytheistic traditions. The result gives the urban viewer insight into the relationship Ömie have with their mountainous rain-forest environment. That the transposition of tattoos and their spells from skin to cloth, like the transposition of Christian names for pagan names, might speak of interreligious pressures is displayed without remark. More purely abstract works by Ömie artists like Felicity Oviro (I'dit)'s "Garosigor'e" (2005), with its columns of dot-in-circle soru'e (tattoo) patterns in transposed positive and negative colors, and Nerry Kemo (Namuno)'s "Obohutaigue (2005)," with its winding geometricals, have a deeply playful wit, referencing light and shadow through minimal gestures. The beautiful and vital work of Dapeni Jonevari (Mokokari), chief of the Ematé Clan women—such as "Butötudë" (2005), based on the spiderweb; "Mahudan'e" (2005), based on pigs' tusks; and "Savane Dëgirane" (2006), based on the hip bones of frogs—are abstractions whose indices are natural forms but whose meaning arrives through a personal visual language of their own. It should be said as well that these works are communally painted, as documented in the photographs of Drusilla Modjeska, where elder women artists draw in the main designs, and younger women artists fill in colors. One can guess at conversations and narratives one can only hear or see through the paintings. At the Second Skins exhibition, I was reminded of how ephemeral indigenous cultures can become. I grew up learning barkcloth painting in the Smoa Islands from my great-grandmother and grandmother, as a small boy collecting red-brown dyes from trees in the Lealataua rain forest that then covered Tutuila Island, a way of life in American Smoa that colonialism crowded out. In Second Skins there is a curatorial note that [End Page 206] the state of barkcloth painting by Mbuti today is in question because of the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Recently a leader of the Mbuti testified before the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concerning their oppression by neighbors who treat the Mbuti, also known as Pygmies, as animals to the point of the cannibalization of the Mbuti. In comparing the visual material cultures of Ömie and Mbuti, the exhibition of a new video edit of twentieth-century media by the late American photographer and filmmaker William F Wheeler made the Mbuti works in vitrines (glass museum cases) seem more contemporary; and the central staging in the Ömie room of a vitrine with a large nineteenth-century book open to an engraving of a bird of paradise framed those works to seem nostalgic and romantic. Such framing engages a peaceful paternalism, which crowds out any political and religious reference from the artworks and their display and marginalizes indigenous works such as these from the landscape of contemporary art. As work by women artists, in their aesthetics, I think the Ömie and Mbuti works can...

PUBLISHING AND PERISHING IN CLASSICS: E. H. BARKER AND THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOOK TRADES

PUBLISHING AND PERISHING IN CLASSICS: E. H. BARKER AND THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOOK TRADES Get access DAVID MCKITTERICK DAVID MCKITTERICK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 56, Issue Supplement_101, January 2013, Pages 7–33, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2013.tb02523.x Published: 06 February 2014

Poetry, Romanticism, and the Practice of Nineteenth-Century Books

Upon a poet's page I wrote Of old two letters of her name; Part seemed she of the effulgent thought Whence that high singer's rapture came. –When now I turn the leaf, the same Immortal light illume...

King Sam and I

The first of the nineteenth-century books about Washington, D.C., that I read at the start of my dissertation research, John Forney's Anecdotes of Public Men (1873), included this description of one of the capital's residents: What a delicious volume that famous man of the world, Sam Ward, who is every body's friend, from black John who drives his hack to the jolly Senator who eats his dinners and drinks his wine—from the lady who accepts his bouquet to the prattling child who hungers for his French candies—what a jewel of a book he could make of the good things he has heard at his thousand “noctes ambrosianae!”

Representing Home Life Abroad: British Domestic Life in Early-Nineteenth-Century India

This article considers nineteenth-century book illustrations depicting the domestic lives of expatriate Britons in India. Intended to fulfil a range of functions and aimed at a variety of audiences, these images attempted to deal with tensions inherent in the colonial position. The persistence of Britishness among the British in India was therefore an important factor in their depiction here, yet they were also portrayed as something more than simply a transplanted community. Instead, their relocation and their adoption of hybrid lifestyles are shown to have shaped them in significant ways, in books by artists and writers who adopted diverse strategies in order to negotiate this colonial hybridity.

Reading Baby Books: Medicine, Marketing, Money and the Lives of American Infants

This article examines American baby books from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century. Baby books are ephemeral publications—formatted with one or more printed pages for recording developmental, health, and social information about infants and often including personal observations, artifacts such as photographs or palm prints, medical and other prescriptive advice, and advertisements. For historians they serve as records of the changing social and cultural worlds of infancy, offering insights into the interplay of childrearing practices and larger social movements.Baby books are a significant historical source both challenging and supporting current historiography, and they illustrate how medical, market and cultural forces shaped the ways babies were cared for and in turn how their won behavior shaped family lives. A typology of baby books includes the lavishly illustrated keepsake books of the late nineteenth century, commercial and public health books of the twentieth century, and on-line records of the present day. Themes that emerge over time include those of scientific medicine and infant psychology, religion and consumerism. The article relies on secondary literature and on archival sources including the collections of the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library as well as privately held baby books.

Three Nineteenth-Century Law Book Lists: Burmese Legal History from the Inside

Through an investigation of three Burmese law book lists by Maungdaung Sayadaw, Tha Dwe, and Kyaw Htun this article seeks to construct a narrative history of legal traditions. By breaking each list into smaller units and comparing the results a common core of Burmese legal history emerges. The lists, shed light on who the typical authors of a dhammathat were while items that appear on some, but not all, of the lists help indicate controversies that were still matters of live debate during the nineteenth century.

Selling the Book Trade: the International Distribution of Nineteenth-Century Book Auction Catalogues from the Southern Netherlands

During the nineteenth century book auction catalogues from the Southern Netherlands found their way all over Europe. Due to a series of historical events the local market for manuscripts and rare books came to be well known to foreign collectors. Ghent proved to be the most book-loving city in Belgium. A large majority of book auction catalogues originated there and were made available to the European public from Paris to St Petersburg and from London to Naples. This article illustrates the phenomenon in detail by reference to some facts and figures.

John Clare's Career, "Keats's Publisher," and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Book Trade

I. Interconnections THE RECENT COMPLETION OF THE NINE-VOLUME OXFORD ENGLISH TEXTS edition of Clare s poetry provides the most richly detailed portrait possible of Clare the solitary writer-at-work, producing his poems over six decades. The Oxford edition rejects the published poems in favor of their manuscript versions, ignoring the emendations that Clare solicited from his editor, John Taylor, and the editorial interventions of others. (1) Shifting attention away from skirmishes over editing the poems to Clare's and Taylor's financial and professional interdependence in the literary marketplace, this essay pursues instead the Clare who appeared in print--the poet his contemporaries knew, and to whom they responded. Our focus, then, is the public poet represented in the four collections he published, in his periodical writings, and in the critical reviews that re-presented his poems to a buying readership. Because print was the public medium of Clare's private ambitions, it remains the key to understanding the contemporary reception of the poet and his poems. Unlike Clare in composition, Clare in print is not a solitary figure; the presentation of his poems should be understood principally as a series of collaborative efforts by the poet and his publishers--most importantly, Taylor and his business partner, James Hessey. It is a critical commonplace that Clare was unfortunate because he strove to become a successful poet in a decade that was unpropitious for the careers of fledgling writers of verse. There has been little close scrutiny, however, of the economic climate in which he and Taylor operated, nor has there been a sustained interpretation of the Clare-Taylor publishing relationship in light of the difficulties they faced. We attempt to do both. Moreover, because critical considerations of Taylor's agency have overwhelmingly focused on his role as the editor of Clare's verses, there has, until now, been almost no analysis of the Taylor-and-Hessey bookselling business and its effect on the performance of Clare's poetry in the market. Repeated--and often perfunctory--gestures toward both the publishing climate of the 1820s and Taylor's role as editor-publisher have beguiled students of Clare into thinking they already know all there is to know about this crucial phase of his career. We undertake a re-examination of the salient facts in view of fresh and more detailed evidence. Clare's literary persona as peasant poet has received significant critical attention. Reinterpreting the Clare-Taylor relationship principally in terms of the business of books highlights instead Clare's active efforts to operate as one agent among others in a literary market that he studied carefully and read as best he could. Although the careers of Taylor and Clare have been amply considered, they have not been read as mutually interdependent, as we contend they ought to be. (2) By aligning Clare with Taylor and Hessey in a cooperative (and sometimes contentious) attempt to direct the public course of his poetic career, we seek to demonstrate that Clare and his publishers chose to make a mutual investment in each other's fortunes as a key to their common success in an unpredictable literary marketplace. This decision had far-reaching consequences for both parties. Our analysis principally emphasizes the early stages of their collaboration to bring Clare's poetry into public view, the period in which the first two volumes--Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821)--appeared in quick succession. Clare's reception by the reading public was largely determined by the image projected in these first two collections; by the time his third, The Shepherd's Calendar, appeared in 1827, both Clare's high hopes and the partnership of Taylor and Hessey had dissolved. These early years had a profound effect on what was to follow, in the unfolding of the choices made by Clare and his publishers as they introduced him to readers and critics, and sought to shape the reading public's responses to his work. …

‘Such a Splendid Tale’: The Late Nineteenth-Century World of a Young Female Reader

There is little evidence for the impact of literature on young female readers in the late nineteenth century. Most studies focus upon the content of nineteenth-century books and magazines, highlighting female readers' acceptance or rejection of contemporary discourses on femininity and domesticity. This paper uses evidence from the unpublished diary of one young woman to emphasize the importance of reading as an activity in its familial and social, rather than literary and intellectual, context. We argue that some young women had access to books from a wide range of genres, but that reading was often relatively uncritical and apparent ‘messages' were not internalized. For many, the significance of reading lay in its flexibility, fitting easily into a domestic routine, and in the opportunities for privacy, independence and narrative absorption offered by the activity itself.

Marketing gender and nationalism: Blessington's gems of beauty/l’écrin and the mid-century book trade

This article considers Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington's careful and savvy marketing of her poetry series Gems of Beauty (1836-40) as products in a literary trade. The article focuses on the 1836 issue of Gems, placing that text in the context of Blessington's other annual giftbooks, most specifically the 1835 Flowers of Loveliness that Blessington developed for Ackermann & Co. In addition to examining the type of woman that Blessington's poems create, the article also considers how the poetry, physical characteristics of the volume, and its illustrations create a unified product that was marketed to the public. Ultimately, the article addresses the versions of gender and nationalism that the volumes depict and their place in the nineteenth-century women's book market.

Mechanical Fingerprints and the Technology of Nineteenth-Century American Erotica

The increasingly complex production patterns undertaken by nineteenthcentury book publishers have left behind a bewildering maze of details for historians to analyse. Yet for those willing to undertake technical analysis, small bits of evidence can offer valuable information about the social and financial arrangements surrounding the upsurge of American-made erotica during that century. Books, like other material artefacts, reveal evidence of the processes by which they have been created. The Adams power press, the most prominent American-designed book press during much of the nineteenth century, left distinctive indentations on sheets conveyed through it for printing. Using as examples two publications by William Berry that were associated closely with networks that supplied obscene books across the country, this paper details a method for identifying gripper marks still present on both illicit and mainstream books and newspapers. Studying the production details of Life in Boston and The Countess can expand our understanding of how intellectual content, technological development, and gendered occupational patterns intersected in nineteenth-century American publishing.'

The Oxford Movement. Nineteenth-century books and pamphlets in Canterbury Cathedral library. Compiled by Brian Hogben and Jonathan Harrison (introduction Canon Michael Chandler). (Canterbury Sources, 1.) Pp. xxi+73 incl. frontispiece and 3 ills. Canterbury: Canterbury Sources, 1999. £8 (paper) plus £1 post and packing from Canterbury Sources, Canterbury Cathedral Library, The Precincts, Canterbury CT1 2EH. 0950 13922 X

The Oxford Movement. Nineteenth-century books and pamphlets in Canterbury Cathedral library. Compiled by Brian Hogben and Jonathan Harrison (introduction Canon Michael Chandler). (Canterbury Sources, 1.) Pp. xxi+73 incl. frontispiece and 3 ills. Canterbury: Canterbury Sources, 1999. £8 (paper) plus £1 post and packing from Canterbury Sources, Canterbury Cathedral Library, The Precincts, Canterbury CT1 2EH. 0950 13922 X - Volume 53 Issue 2