10 September 2024
Moving Texts and Individuals between New England and England in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
Weiao Xing (PhD in History, University of Cambridge, 2023, @WeiaoX) is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Global Encounters Platform and Institute of Modern History, University of Tübingen in Germany. He works on cultural and literary history in early modern English-Indigenous and French-Indigenous encounters and was a 2022 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
Among the items I consulted at the British Library as an Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow was a 215-folio manuscript entitled ‘State papers of John Thurloe, Secretary of State, 1650–1658’ (Add MS4156).1 Its compiler, John Thurloe, made use of his intelligence network across Europe, playing a pivotal role in domestic politics and foreign affairs during the Interregnum (1649–1660).2 Within the manuscript, on its second folio, rests a copy of a letter that has traversed the Atlantic. Dated 2 October 1651, the original letter was sent from Oliver Cromwell to John Cotton, the esteemed pastor of the Boston church in New England. ‘I receaued yours a few days sithence’ [sic], as Cromwell commenced his letter in a continuing dialogue, the circulation of texts intertwined political and religious circumstances in England and New England.
This letter concisely conveyed the prevailing political situation in England. Just one month prior to its writing, the Battle of Worcester, a major event at the end of the English Civil War (1642–1651), witnessed the Parliamentarians defeating a predominantly Scottish Royalist force led by Charles II. In his letter, Cromwell celebrated this victory with Cotton – when Charles II and his ‘malignant party’ invaded England, ‘the Lord rained upon them such snares’.3 Moreover, Cromwell earnestly sought religious support from Cotton, emphasising the need for prayers ‘as much as ever’ given the recent successes, or ‘such mercies’ in his own words. This letter affirms Cotton’s interest in English politics and his significance among Puritans in England during the Interregnum.4
The transatlantic movement of texts and individuals unveils intricate connections within the political and religious realms of England and New England. In the summer of 1651, five Massachusetts ministers, including John Cotton, corresponded with their fellow ministers in England.5 They defended the embargo placed by the colony’s General Court on a theological book entitled The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption […], authored by William Pynchon, one of the founding figures of the colony.6 Pynchon had managed to publish and sell his book in London in 1650 while residing in the colony. At the British Library, a copy of this work, annotated with ‘June 2d’, is under the shelf-marked E.606.(3.). It was acquired from ‘Thomason Tracts’, a collection of imprints dated from 1640 to 1661, curated by the London-based bookseller George Thomason (c. 1602–1666). The provenance of this copy suggests that Pynchon’s work, albeit heretical in New England, entered the intellectual spheres amid the political upheaval in England. Facing religious tensions and sanctions, Pynchon relocated to England in 1652 and continued publishing books that reflected his theological views. Pynchon to some extent maintained his ‘New England’ identity; he identified himself as ‘late of New England’ in his The Meritorious Price reprinted in 1655.7
Between the 1640s and the 1660s, a convergence of political, religious, and economic motives prompted numerous English settlers in New England to return home. While this statement articulated by William Sachse in 1948 holds merit, it does not fully alter the prevalent presumption of seventeenth-century transatlantic migrations as one-way journeys from Europe to the Americas.8 Many returnees from New England embarked on careers in England while maintaining their transatlantic connections. Sir George Downing exemplifies this pattern. As an ambassador in the Hague from 1657 to 1665, he facilitated England’s acquisition of New Amsterdam from Dutch settlers – in 1642, he had previously graduated from Harvard College in its inaugural graduate cohort.9 The tapestry of transatlantic migration is also woven from ordinary lives. In the prologue of her monograph Pilgrims, Susan Moore zooms in on Susanna Bell (d. 1672), an English merchant’s wife who crossed the Atlantic twice. Bell’s testimony, published in London upon her death, encapsulates her experiences, rhetoric, and mentalities.10
Within the British Library’s holdings, a myriad of manuscripts unfolds stories of texts and individuals crossing the Atlantic. Egerton MS 2519, for instance, encompasses correspondence and papers of Samuel Desborough (or Disbrowe), who assumed the role of the Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland from 1657 onwards.11 Desborough, after setting off for New England in 1639 and settling in Guilford, New Haven, returned to England in 1650 amid the Civil War before relocating to Scotland.12 In this manuscript, on folios 10 and 11, a letter dated 1654 from Guilford by William Leete appears (see Fig. 1).13 Leete, who would later become the governor of New Haven and Connecticut colonies, shared recent affairs in New England with Desborough, particularly his operation of Desborough’s colonial estate and several settlers who returned to England. This letter epitomises multiple connections between New England and England, ranging from personal careers and businesses to colonial affairs. As Moore suggests, it underscores the ‘delicate relation’ between those who remained in the settlements and those who returned to England.14 Additionally, as the letter tells, Desborough had addressed Cromwell, expressing his concern about potential threats from the Dutch on the settlement. Therefore, such transatlantic movements of texts and individuals repositioned overseas affairs of New England within the scope of domestic and European politics.
For the New Englanders who made the voyage back to England during the mid-seventeenth century, their ‘American’ identities were ill-defined as they ‘returned’ to their careers and lives in England, but many maintained connections with the settlements. Their experiences, in both New England and England, contribute to our comprehension of their engagement in and perceptions of transatlantic travels, mobility, Puritanism, colonisation, and English politics.
Notes
1. John Thurloe, ‘State Papers of John Thurloe, Secretary of State, 1650–1658 (Especially 1654–1655)’ (1658), Add MS 4156, British Library, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_4156.
2. Timothy Venning, ‘Thurloe, John (Bap. 1616, d. 1668)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27405.
3. In his letter, Cromwell enclosed a short narrative (possibly available on 26 September), see C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., ‘Table of Acts: 1651’, in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/lxxxii-lxxxvii.
4. John Cotton, The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Sargent Bush (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 458–61.
5. Cotton, 454–58.
6. William Pynchon, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, Iustification, &c. Cleering It from Some Common Errors (London: Printed by J.M. for George Whittington, and James Moxon, and are to be sold at the blue Anchor in Corn-hill neer the Royall Exchange, 1650); Michael P. Winship, ‘Contesting Control of Orthodoxy among the Godly: William Pynchon Reexamined’, The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997): 795–822.
7. William Pynchon, A Farther Discussion of That Great Point in Divinity the Sufferings of Christ (The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption [...]) (London: Printed for the Author, and are to bee sold at the Signe of the three Lyons in Corn-hill, over against the Conduit, 1655).
8. William L. Sachse, ‘The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640–1660’, The American Historical Review 53, no. 2 (1948): 1640–1660.
9. Jonathan Scott, ‘Downing, Sir George, First Baronet (1623–1684)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7981.
10. Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers & the Call of Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–15; Susanna Bell, The Legacy of a Dying Mother to Her Mourning Children Being the Experiences of Mrs. Susanna Bell, Who Died March 13, 1672 (London: Printed and are to be sold by John Hancock, Senior and Junior at the three Bibles in Popes-Head Alley in Cornhill, 1673).
11. Samuel Desborough, ‘Correspondence and Papers of Samuel Disbrowe, or Desborough, of Elsworth, Co. Cambridge, Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, 1651/2–1660’ (1660), Egerton MS 2519, British Library, http://searcharchives.bl.uk/permalink/f/1r5koim/IAMS032-001983482.
12. Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 90–91.
13. Bruce P. Stark, ‘Leete, Williamunlocked (1613–16 April 1683)’, in American National Biography, 2000, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0100511.
14. Hardman Moore, Abandoning America, 91.
27 September 2023
On the Trail of the Contemporary Singing Voice
Diane Hughes is a Professor in Vocal Studies and Music at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and was a 2022 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
My research as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow was undertaken at the British Library during April to May, 2023. I arrived with a long list of sources to examine - recordings, historical references, and a range of interviews. I am passionate about music and singing. The aim of my current project is to document the evolution of the contemporary singing voice and its intersection with, and the influences of, American and British popular singing. This includes the conceptualisation and contexts of contemporary singing that centre around questions of voice and identity and sociocultural perspectives of song and of singing. It also involves diverse perspectives of contemporary voice and related technologies.
At the British Library, I discovered and listened to first-hand accounts related to crooning and orchestrated singing, along with more contemporary types of singing.1 This furthered my understanding of the historical significance of the musical arranger, of different recording technologies, and of various creative intents and interests. As recording technologies adapted to enable singers to be isolated from surrounding musicians, or in recording sound booths, more nuanced styles of singing emerged.2 Such nuanced audibility is often attributed to the communicative capabilities of “the microphone”, however, my research identified that this equally related to artistic objectives and to modes of audience engagement.
Several reflective accounts by touring and established singers, and by musical arrangers, provided detailed information on specific career trajectories.3 These accounts also contained commentary on changing musical styles, vocal delivery and on individual artistry. They assisted in contributing to a timeline of why and where transition points in contemporary singing occurred–broadly involving the strident sounds of vaudeville, the smoother crooning styles, the resonant singing of orchestrated standards, the personally expressive singer-songwriters, the stylistic influenced revival of skiffle, the innovative vocalisms of jazz, and the contemporary characteristics of rock ‘n’ roll, rock, and pop. I found it exciting to further explore these transitions through “captured” singing in broadcasts and recordings, through to singing in “live” performances.
During my research, I uncovered several unexpected sources. These related to mid-20th century definitions of popular music,4 and pedagogical publications on contemporary singing.5 In 1950, a renowned pedagogue of her time, Miriam Spier, offered aspiring singers the salient advice to use “the best artists as your guides, analyze and experiment; do not merely imitate”.6 This exploratory approach is still relevant today and has much to do with the evolutionary nature of contemporary singing styles and sounds. Other sources alluded to the progression and succession of popular styles, where rock ‘n’ roll/rock was hypothesised as having “the characteristics of a temporary craze”7 or where the development of contemporary jazz singing followed an exploration of vocal sounds and words.8 Many sources referenced the popularity of singing in relation to individual or communal listening and, as such, the value of singing clearly extended beyond the performer to their audience.
The evolution of the jazz and popular singing voice in Britain and the USA is complex and multilayered. Each is highly influenced by creativity, technologies, sounds, styles, and people, and will adapt and evolve as vocal exploration continues.
My sincere thanks to the Eccles Centre at the British Library for the opportunity to conduct this research and to the librarians at the Sound Archive for their assistance during my visit.
References
1. Stan Britt Collection. Sound and Moving Image Catalogue. This is a collection of interviews with a range of jazz and popular music performers undertaken by Stan Britt during the latter part of the 20th century.
2. See, for example, Peggy Lee interviewed by Stan Britt (23/07/1977). Stan Britt Collection. Sound and Moving Image Catalogue. C1645/238.
3. Stan Britt Collection.
4. Peter Gammond and Peter Clayton, A Guide to Popular Music. London: Phoenix House, 1960. British Library shelfmark: General Reference Collection 2737.c.3. Music Collections REF M.R.Ref. 781.63.
5. Frank Sinatra in collaboration with John Quinlan, (c1946), Tips on Popular Singing. For the British Empire (excluding Canada and Australasia) and the whole of Europe, the property of Peter Maurice Music Co. Limited. Music Collections VOC/1946/SINATRA; Miriam Spier, (1950), The Why and How of Popular Singing: A Modern Guide for Vocalists. New York: Edward. B. Marks Music Corporation, [1950]. British Library shelfmark: General Reference Collection 7889.b.43.
6. Spier, p.41
7. Gammond and Clayton, p.177.
8. Norma Winstone [interview] (1994). Oral History of Jazz in Britain. C122/206-C122/207.
26 July 2023
Spiritualism, Creatively Reimagined
Lesley Finn is a writer and artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, and was a 2022 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
A library is an excellent place to connect with the dead. After all, many of its books, papers, and artifacts were made by those no longer living. But what about really connecting with the dead?
I came to the British Library to research Spiritualism, a religious movement with the core precept that the soul survives physical death, and that the living can communicate with the spirit world those souls inhabit. As a writer working on ghost stories and a visual artist working with text and book arts, I was fascinated by the drama of Spiritualism’s séances, the concepts explored by the movement, and the possibilities of visually interpreting its archival material. Much of what I write and make is concerned with how relationships endure barriers of material, time, and distance, and Spiritualism offers a unique way to think through this concern.
One distance that Spiritualism bridged was the Atlantic Ocean. Though the religion originated in the United States in the 1840s, it came to Great Britain soon after, and many of the movement’s notable practitioners crossed back and forth on visits. Transatlantic exchange shaped this spirituality—one that has been marginalised in the historical imagination as occult and other, though it was a popular religion for nearly a century, replete with churches and published hymnals.
At the same time that households across the US and Britain were establishing practices to communicate with the dead, the technology of the telegraph, another practice of communicating across space and time, spread in usage. The telegraph, a mechanism that relied on magnetic fields and electricity to transmit words from one person to another, had much conceptual overlap with the séance, which communicated disincarnate messages from the dead through the magnetic field and electricity of the human body, specifically that of a spiritual medium. This parallel was embraced by Spiritualists of the time, who called the séance a spiritual telegraph, and titled a periodical that circulated in the US in the 1850s with the same name.
The majority of Spiritualism’s history in the US and Britain takes paper form: in addition to periodicals like The Spiritual Telegraph, there are books published by The Spiritualist Press and other houses, along with photographed and written documentation of séances by groups like The Ghost Club (British Library Add MS 52258-52273) or by investigators (more on that later). The British Library contains a noteworthy addition to this history: the Dan Zerdin archive, which contains a rare 1934 recording of what was at the time considered the world’s largest séance. The Zerdin recording offers a first-hand, unfiltered experience of the historical Spiritualist movement.
With support from the Eccles Centre, I launched a project to study the archive and transcribe the recorded spirit messages from the séance into another form: telegrams. My idea was to take this documentation from an understudied religious movement and creatively reimagine it, with the goal of disrupting fixed narratives of “archives we are inclined to overlook,” to quote historian Tina Campt. Dominant culture is quick to dismiss the veracity of these spiritual communications, but what happens when we see them in a material form accepted by dominant culture? Perhaps changing the material encounter with an archive can shift our thinking and cultivate space for alternative accounts of experience.
I came to the work not knowing what I would find, expecting to be a bit disturbed. After all, years of watching horror films had taught me to be afraid of voices from the beyond. But what I found was a recording that documented a gathering of people working toward the common end of love, understanding, and community. Joyful messages rise above the static of the record. Fight the good fight. You’ll have all the help you want. Bless you. The 564 people in the London audience laugh and gasp, as do the 36 people participating in the séance on Aeolian Hall’s stage. At one point unexplainable piano chords drift through the recording; the sound is soothing, not haunting.
If contemporary attitudes towards séances and mediums are shaped by fear and othering, the same is true of past attitudes. The shadow of skepticism looms large in the history of Spiritualism, and I glimpsed it often in my research. In the catalogue listing of the Zerdin archive, for example, spirit voices are noted with the grammatical equivalent of a raised eyebrow, the scare quote. In contrast, the Zerdin archive includes a document that lists the people in spirit who communicated through the medium as attendees alongside the living, no distinction whatsoever.
I wonder about these subtle frames of doubt, how they shape our encounter with the archive. I repeatedly saw scare quotes in my research into other mediums, especially with the American medium who went by the name of Margery. In the decade before the Aeolian Hall séance, Margery visited London and became the subject of an extensive investigation by the Society for Psychical Research. Malcolm Bird, an American parapsychologist, authored a portion of the investigation’s outcomes, including the book “Margery”. Seeing her name on the cover and title page in quotation marks—regardless of how Bird or the publishers intended to use them—primes the reader to approach the material through the lens of doubt.
It's hard not to see the skepticism of Spiritualist experience as tethered to gender. Male mediums existed but women were the majority. Male mediums were investigated, but the archives are not filled with that documentation; instead we have accounts of vaginal searches that preceded Margery’s sittings, of photos of her in various restraints that would test her validity. Let’s not forget this was a religion, a belief system. Imagine an archive documenting Catholic mass, the priests required to prove transubstantiation as empirical, scientific fact!
The desire for proof is understandable, but can be limiting and misguiding, especially in the case of connecting with the dead. By rejecting an aim to falsify Spiritualist practices, we might create room for observation and insight that opens rather than shuts down possibility. British Library holding C1080/21 offers a practical tip.1 Here the medium of the Aeolian Hall séance, Florence Perriman, is asked to describe what it felt like to channel spirit voices. Her reply: “It’s a peculiar sensation at the back of my neck. It seemed to come both from the back of my neck and from the throat—can you imagine a tooth being drawn? Well, it’s just as though something was being drawn out of the back of my neck.” Being alive to sensation, to the peculiar, to our own processes of drawing out—Perriman’s note on communing with the dead sounds like research advice to live by.
References:
Interview with Florence Perriman. 1934?. British Library, Sound and Moving Image shelfmark: C1080/21.
28 June 2023
On my desk: Celebrating the Faculty of Humanities of the University of East Anglia
The Americas team is fortunate to work with some fascinating items that cross our desks for a variety of reasons from exhibition loans to Reader queries. Through the On my desk blog series, we ask the team 3 questions which will give you an insight into the work of curators and cataloguers at the Library and a behind the scenes peek at some of the items in the collections. Today’s post features Hannah Graves, one of the Curators of North American Published Collections (post-1850).
What is the item?
There is no one item on my desk today. Rather, I have looked through the British Library’s catalogue to bring together publications by staff within the Faculty of Humanities of the University of East Anglia (UEA) focused on the Americas.
Why is it on your desk?
I am new to both the Americas team and the process of making acquisitions for the library. We receive regular lists of titles to consider for purchase. When looking through the spreadsheets for selection prepared by our colleagues, the sheer volume of titles published every year can be overwhelming. It is easy to forget that each individual monograph is a bit miraculous. Reflective of a lifetime’s work, these titles are often researched and written while juggling numerous competing professional demands. So today, the team wishes to celebrate all the staff of UEA, but especially those who have helped advance our understanding of the history and cultures of the Americas. We are grateful for their invaluable contributions, which enrich the British Library’s collection and the Americas research community as a whole.
Why is it interesting?
The research portal on UEA’s website allows you to begin to appreciate the scale of contributions made by the academics and creative practitioners within the Faculty of Humanities. Each of the titles I have called up are, of course, interesting in their own right. However, it is when you see them assembled you begin to appreciate the value of a strong faculty. We often perceive researching and writing as solitary pursuits, but academic work is highly collaborative, shaped by predecessors and peers. It is an interesting exercise to gather on my desk some of the work produced by colleagues within the same institution. It crystallises the major contributions of UEA staff in shaping the Americas research community.
Naturally, this is only a slim and subjective selection of some of the items the British Library holds as printed books. Many more titles are held electronically. I would encourage you to use the UEA portal for yourself to find the next article or book for your reading room basket. Or, you could start with some of the following:
- Frederik Byrn Køhler, ed., Chicago: a literary history (2021) held at YC.2022.a.8030
- Thomas Ruys Smith, Deep water: the Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain (2020) held at YD.2020.a.98
- Tessa McWatt, Shame on me: an anatomy of race and belonging (2019) held at YK.2020.A.1784
- Rebecca Fraser, The Mayflower generation: the Winslow family and the fight for the new world (2017) held at YC.2018.a.11495
- Jos Smith, The new nature writing: rethinking the literature of place (2017) held at YC.2017.a.5592
- Tim Snelson, Phantom ladies: Hollywood horror and the home front (2015) held at YC.2016.a.7045
- Malcolm McLaughlin, The long, hot summer of 1967: urban rebellion in America (2014) held at YC.2014.a.4894
- Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Rebecca Tillett, eds., Indigenous bodies: reviewing, relocating, reclaiming (2013) held at YC.2014.a.653
- Rachel Potter, Obscene modernism: literary censorship and experiment, 1900-1940 (2013) held at YC.2015.a.877
- Una Marson, Selected poems, ed. Alison Donnell (2011) held at YC.2012.a.3527
- Alison Donnell, Twentieth-century Caribbean literature: critical moments in Anglophone literary history (2006) held at YC.2006.a.4763
- Steven Hooper, Pacific encounters: art & divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (2006) held at YD.2010.b.1173
- Nick Selby, Poetics of loss in the Cantos of Ezra Pound: from modernism to fascism (2005) held at YC.2007.a.6115
18 May 2023
Tracked Changes: Looking for Migrant Editors in Publishing Archives
Ben Fried was a 2022 Eccles Visiting Fellow at the British Library; he recently completed his PhD at Cornell University and is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London, where he is working on 'Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures, 1967-1989.'
I came to the British Library in search of publishing archives—the records of how books come into the world and reach their readers. As an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow, I was beginning a new project on 'migrant editors,' on the postwar immigrants to London who created and reinvented the capital’s literary institutions. How did migrant-led publishing houses and magazines develop through the decades of decolonization and shape later twentieth-century fiction, both British and more broadly Anglophone? I was hungry to understand the extent to which these editors harnessed and redirected London’s cultural and commercial power. I wanted to learn how their own hybrid identities influenced the writers they cultivated and the works they released. I knew the answers lay in letters, memos, pleas for money, and the margins of manuscripts.
And so I spent my month sifting through three archives in particular: the Virago Press records,1 Carmen Callil’s personal archive,2 and the files of Granta magazine (which are still being catalogued).
The famed feminist Virago Press was founded in 1973 by the Australian Callil and later led by a Canadian, Lennie Goodings. Sitting in both the Manuscripts and Maps Reading Room, I opened folder after folder of author correspondence, business plans, reader reports, all of them illustrating the fates of individual works and the larger sweep of an upstart publisher’s progress. Callil died just a few months ago, in October 2022, and her courage (not to mention her crackling wit and energy) is everywhere apparent in these archives. The picture they paint is not a solitary portrait, however, but a scene of collective literary labour, illuminated by the sparks that fly off creative relationships. Callil was a necessary node in a much wider network of readers, professional and lay, mobilizing to bring women’s stories to the centre of literary life.
Take, for instance, the folders devoted to Angela Carter, perhaps the most emblematic of Virago’s contemporary authors.3 They reveal a Carter who was as important a reader to Virago as she was a writer. You can track not only the agonizingly slow development of Carter’s Sadeian Woman (1978)—a study of the Marquis de Sade and 'the culturally determined nature of women'4—but her backstage interventions on other writers’ behalf. She submitted reports on manuscripts; she connected aspiring authors to an ambitious publisher. She acted as a go-between, and practically a second editor, for her former student Pat Barker, passing along Barker’s first novel with twelve pages of luminously insightful notes. On 8 January 1981, Callil replied that 'I’m deeply grateful to you for getting the book to me; I’ve offered for it and asked at the same time that they will let me work with her incorporating your alterations and suggestions.'5 Barker’s revised Union Street was published in 1982 and quickly became one of Virago’s biggest sellers, proof that a press famous for reprinting forgotten classics could also launch startlingly original fiction.
Granta was similarly electrified by a fresh arrival’s energy. A venerable undergraduate magazine at Cambridge which ran out of steam in the 1970s, it was relaunched by the American graduate student Bill Buford in 1979. Initially a channel for American literary influence—its first issue purveyed 'New American Writing' and its third proclaimed 'The End of the English Novel'—it became over the course of the 1980s a much broader magazine for writing in English, one that has exhilarated generations of writers and readers. The Granta records open a window onto the alchemical process of bringing an issue together. Along with his co-founders Peter de Bolla and Jonathan Levi, Buford began by working his academic connections and wielding his university’s clout, coaxing established authors to contribute and letting would-be writers down gently, hustling for grant money and blowing past unpaid bills. Given such ingredients and such results, it’s rather fitting that Buford followed up his celebrated editorial career with an equally ravenous second act as a cooking-mad writer.
One of the most famous of all Granta issues—the Spring 1983 number devoted to 'The Best of Young British Novelists'—shows how vision and opportunism, readerly recognition and marketing flair, could combine in the editorial act. Buford neither initiated nor chose this list of promising young writers. Rather, the 'Best of British' began as a promotional ploy by the Book Marketing Council. But Buford and Granta seized the potential of the list as an issue-shaping, generation-defining, audience-enticing format.6 They built on the Council’s own marketing push, selected excerpts from each author’s work, and made the list palpable to the reading public. Buford’s textual suggestions were not universally welcome. William Boyd embraced the idea of shifting a story’s pronouns, while Maggie Gee 'rejected every one of the [editor’s] 47 emendations.'7 Nevertheless, the magazine reaped the reward. Its cachet as a cultural arbiter immeasurably enhanced, Granta has returned to the format every ten years to anoint a new cohort (its latest 'Best of Young British Novelists' issue dropped just weeks ago).
I think of editors like Callil and Buford as readers with power—the power to select, revise, and reject. Editorial reading can be a generous force, releasing the creativity of others and realizing the potential in the text. By the same token, it may also be damaging, turning the tap off as well as on. Insofar as they can be recovered in archives such as those held by the British Library, the editor’s contributions tell us a great deal about writers, readers, and publishing institutions—about where and how power and creativity intersect.
Notes
1. Add MS 88904.
2. Add MS 889178.
3. In the 1970s and 80s, Virago was primarily known for reprint publishing: recovering and reissuing the works of neglected women writers. The Virago Modern Classics series, with its beloved green spines, introduced a generation to the books of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith, Christina Stead, Rosamond Lehmann, and many, many others. See D-M Withers, Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021).
4. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (London: Virago 1978), 1.
5. Add MS 88904/1/60.
6. See Myles Oldershaw, “Granta and the Advent of the Contemporary,” Journal of Modern Literature 43.1 (Fall 2019), pp. 150-168.
7. Deposit 11183 L. in 44.
04 April 2023
Why Research is Good for the Artist's Soul
Bobby C. Martin was a 2021 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
I am not a researcher in any traditional sense of the word. I am a visual artist—my practice consists of primarily painting and printmaking. So even applying for an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship was an act of stepping outside my comfort zone. When I received word that I had been accepted, it made me realize even more that I had no idea what I was getting into. My non-art faculty colleagues in the U.S. (researchers all) were so impressed that I was going to be able to spend several weeks in London at the British Library doing research. All the while, I was battling imposter syndrome—was I even going to be allowed in the building? What was I supposed to do when I got there? How does one go about doing ‘real’ research? Are there YouTube videos for that?
I can now report that all my fears and doubts were totally unfounded. The Eccles Centre staff were incredibly helpful and generous with their time and knowledge and the Library’s Maps team went out of its way both to make space for my untrained questions and to make the collection as accessible as possible. The process of requesting materials was fairly painless to learn and actually became wonderfully exciting as I stumbled upon many items that were well beyond what I had expected or even knew existed. I actually started getting into this whole ‘research’ thing! The time spent in the various Reading Rooms—touching, smelling, experiencing historic maps and materials—allowed me the opportunity to deeply explore items that have already made a tangible difference in the way I approach my art practice.
I came to the Library (I thought) to research the Library’s map collections, specifically maps related to the Southeastern United States. Georgia and Alabama were part of my Mvskoke tribe’s ancestral homelands. Ultimately, I found much more than maps—books, hand-written journals and photographs that helped flesh out my research in ways I hadn’t anticipated. These materials have already found their way into my current work, and informed a large mural project I recently completed that drew from much of the material I discovered during my fellowship.
While I might have been able find the material I needed for this large history mural project online, the research experience of being in the presence of the actual documents themselves deeply informed every design decision I made, and the resulting installation is a work that would not have been as rich and personally satisfying otherwise.
So does my experience as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow make me an official ‘researcher’? I don’t rightly know the answer, but I do know that it was a game-changer for the way I approach my art practice going forward. I have a new appreciation both for the wealth of material that is available to anyone with a British Library Reader Pass and its accessibility for even the most unskilled of researchers. I appreciate the desire of the Library staff to share their amazing storehouse with all comers. I have a new-found interest in going down rabbit trails that lead to the most unexpected of discoveries that then find their way into my work. Poring over (and enjoying the smell of) centuries-old documents and hand-engraved maps brings me a real (if unexpected) joy. If this is what research is all about, then I am most pleased to call myself a researcher. Thank you to the Eccles Centre and the British Library for the opportunity!
To see images of new work and the mural project that was informed and influenced by my British Library research, please visit my Instagram page @bobbycartist.
23 February 2023
Transatlantic Mormon Connections and Historical Fiction
Naomi Krüger is a senior lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire and author of the novel May; she was a 2021 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
My current research project is a historical novel set in 1842 in two very different cities: Nauvoo, Illinois and Preston, Lancashire. These places, though geographically distant, are linked by the arrival of Mormonism and its turbulent growth, movement, and ongoing legacy.
Growing up as a Mormon in Preston, I was acutely aware of this history. I regularly heard stories about the missionaries who crossed the Atlantic, arriving in England in 1837 and travelling straight from Liverpool to Preston due to a family connection. I was told of their astonishing success in baptising converts, finding an unexpectedly warm welcome in Lancashire, the Ribble Valley and beyond. Subsequently, there were thousands of baptisms, and these new members were very quickly encouraged to emigrate and join with the American Saints in Nauvoo – a growing city on the banks on the Mississippi. By 1844 over four thousand British converts had made this journey, making them a significant minority in a city that was about to face new challenges after the death of the founding prophet Joseph Smith.
While I was proud of living somewhere that had such historical significance, I also became aware that my access to stories of these early converts in Lancashire was circumscribed. In the official narratives found in lesson manuals and church histories, these people usually became nameless, swallowed into a wider mass of emigrants, and later assimilated into the ideal image of hardy pioneers who made the trek west to Utah. In this oversimplified narrative, Preston is Babylon - a place of smoke, corruption and exploitation - and Nauvoo is Zion - the land of promise, a place of hope, community, and righteousness. Missionaries are unfailingly heroic, intelligent, and filled with power. Converts, on the other hand, are poor, humble, and self-sacrificing.
As a writer and researcher, I am eager to move beyond this. What about the converts who stayed in Preston because they couldn’t afford to go, or wouldn’t make the sacrifice? What about those who lost their faith part-way through the journey or found that Zion was not exactly what they expected when they got there? What would it have felt like to be a missionary who began to doubt? How did the social, economic, and religious conditions of Preston at that time, intersect with the desire so many people had to start a new life elsewhere?
My novel-in-progress follows a herbal physician converted to Mormonism and trying to establish himself in Nauvoo. He finds hope and spiritual sustenance there but is also drawn into a web of secrets, rituals, and unspoken rules. When he is challenged by the charismatic prophet to sacrifice his growing medical practice, travel to England, and persuade the converts in Lancashire to emigrate back to Zion, he discovers a town divided. Preston is still reeling from the aftermath of a massacre of striking millworkers and simultaneously preparing for a lavish, once-every-twenty-year celebration of civic pride. As he grapples with cultural differences, and his unsuccessful attempts to convert a woman still bitter after being left behind by a family member who has previously emigrated, disturbing dreams of Nauvoo begin to disrupt his present calling and his still fragile faith is put under increasing amounts of pressure.
The Eccles Centre's Mormon Americana bibliographic guide has been an invaluable tool for me as I explore these questions and develop my fictional world. From primary sources like pamphlets, hymnbooks, and scriptures, to a wealth of secondary texts that detail the challenges of life in Nauvoo as a frontier city, I have been able to gather important context - details that will not only inform my world-building, but even, in some cases, change the actions and decisions that my characters make.
Seeing illustrated plans of the Nauvoo temple during my research, for example, sparked new curiosity about ritual baptisms that has led to the development of an important subplot in the novel.
Reading letters written by women in Nauvoo discussing death and doctrine alongside recipes and household tips has enabled me to create a more detailed and textured picture of life in an unfamiliar place and time.
Handling a well-loved British hymnbook covered in the owner’s urgent annotations reminded me of the importance of honouring sacred experiences of faith as much as I seek to complicate them.
The challenge of writing historical fiction is to negotiate a balance between research and imagination, the needs of a story alongside the demands of historical evidence. I am still in the middle of this complex process, but I have no doubt that the notes and images I have gathered from my time as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow will continue to find their way into the creative work in unexpected and transformative ways.
14 February 2023
Writer's Award winner Philip Clark on the Sounds of New York City: Part II
In this second installment of a series of blogs, Philip Clark shares his experience of being a 2022 Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer's Award winner.1 The Writer's Award offers £20,000, a year's residency at the British Library to develop a forthcoming book, and the opportunity to showcase work at Hay Festival events in the UK and Latin America. Philip’s book – Sound and the City – will be a history of the sound of New York City and an investigation into what makes New York City sound like New York City.
For a few months at the end of last year, I communed daily with Dutch colonials of the mid-1600s. In various roles, taking various responsibilities, the likes of Peter Stuyvesant, Adriaen van der Donck, Peter Minuit, Willem Kieft and Cryn Fredericks established the city of New Amsterdam which, by 1664, had become the English colonial city of New York.
Having already taken the deepest of dives into 1920s New York, through the work of the composer Edgard Varèse and the novelist John Dos Passos, I decided that my book Sound and the City – my history of the sound of New York City – needed to flip the chronology on its head. The 1930s will follow, but later, and in the meantime I engineered a flashback to the beginnings of recordable time itself, and to the Ice Age. In the span of this history, the appearance of Dutch colonials a mere three-and-a-half centuries ago feels relatively contemporary. When they turn up, their interactions with the Indigenous People, who had populated that coast for centuries, pivots the story into something more like countable time, a reassuringly familiar turnaround of years, decades and centuries again after thinking about time in units of hundreds of thousands of years.
My subject is sound. Music-writers are often called upon to speculate about where music might be heading next, although writing this section of my book made me realise that second-guessing the root sounds of the deep past is no easy matter either. How do you ‘hear’ sounds of which no recorded example exists? Listening in to the modern-day city is normally a good starting point, and one afternoon last summer I took an ‘A’ train from Penn Station in midtown Manhattan to where the line terminates at Inwood 207th Street.
A fifteen-minute walk later, I found myself in deserted woodland, the trilling of sirens cutting through from downtown the only clue I was still in New York City. I’d come to Inwood Hill Park because this park, perched on the far northern tip of Manhattan, has preserved something of its prehistory. This is where you come to look at New York’s oldest rock formations; to trace how the imperceptible tread of glaciers scooped out what would become the landmass of New York. Inwood was the place Native Americans gravitated towards over centuries, its caves and bountiful ecosystem providing shelter and sustenance aplenty.
Although probably a wishful-thinking myth, Inwood Hill Park is also purportedly where, in 1626, Native Americans sold the island of Manhattan to the Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit for 60 guilders. More likely, this meeting actually took place farther downtown, where Peter Minuit Plaza stands today, near Battery Park. But numerous mythologies all converge around the inlet of the park where the meeting was said to take place. This was where the British explorer Henry Hudson supposedly dropped anchor in September 1609, having made landfall a couple of weeks earlier at Sandy Hook. A tulip tree started growing there a century later and, as a commemorative plaque makes clear, the tree, 280 years old when it died in 1932, represented the last living link with the Native Americans who had lived here. In a city that became celebrated for high-rise structures, the tulip tree was a pioneer. Towering over the park, its height reportedly equivalent to a seventeen-storey building, it resonated as a marker of a past that had moved beyond collective memory – a potent symbol in a city that was otherwise engaged in relentlessly inventing its future.
Almost as soon as I arrived in the park, though, a shock. The 4G on my iPhone fizzled out, then Google maps froze, and I was rudderless. In an area of the park now called ‘The Cove’, the slug-like progression of glacial erosion spooned out the innards of the earth and the glacial potholes that resulted – some 50,000 years old – look bracingly abstract to me, like sculptures by Henry Moore or Seymour Lipton thwacked into the earth. They also look unmistakably like disembowelled speakers, I thought, with their cones ripped out, but still receptible to sound. My awareness that darkness was about to fall kept me moving, pushing through the woods, using paths trampled into the ground over centuries, with a covering of tulip trees above my head. I followed the reassuring rumble of cars and, more through good luck than canny navigation, found myself staring at the Henry Hudson Bridge, which crosses the river into the Bronx. At that precise moment my iPhone pinged back to life and I located my position. I was looking across at Spuyten Duvvil Creek – where the Hudson River meets the Harlem River Ship Canal – and the rock formations I could see, which I discovered subsequently are called Fordham Gneiss, are a billion years old.
A few weeks later, back in the relative safety of the Rare Books and Music Reading Room at the British Library, I searched for sources that might help explain my afternoon in Inwood Hill Park. This has been the rhythm of writing this book so far; intense field trips followed by equally intense research binges at the Library. Unpicking the mythologies surrounding the tulip tree took hours of poring over old newspapers and contemporary reports. Mythology should never be dismissed lightly. What mythologies tell us about a city’s sense of its own history is intriguing in itself. But chipping away the layers of folklore to reveal what actually happened was important too.
Something else that needed to be chipped away at: those ancient rock formations scattered around Inwood Hill Park. One great pleasure of British Library research is the ease with which you can slip outside your own area of expertise, and, in Rare Books and Music, I began a fingertip search through geological and flora-&-fauna reports relating to the park. My examination of New York’s oldest rock formations was about determining how nature created this giant resonating chamber later called New York City, where all sorts of sounds would happen. Slipstreams of sound ricocheting around the city is central to my obsession, and examining how geological activity established this field of play gave my book its roots.
The moment the colonials arrive, primary sources bounce into life. Adriaen van der Donck’s A Description of the New Netherlands (1641), Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New-York: Formerly Called New-Netherlands (1670) and Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter’s Journal of a Voyage to New York (1679-1680) are all fantastically vibrant accounts of the emerging city of New Amsterdam and the surrounding wilderness. Colonial fascination with the possibilities of this new world against the reality of what had been there before, the presence of Indigenous people in particular, leaves a bitter aftertaste. Dutch colonialism was ultimately responsible for – through landgrab and brutal repression – the decline of Indigenous Peoples. One needs to be aware of this wider historical context using this material and read with caution, but there were little clues in each journal – a sound here, a sound there – that allowed me to build a soundscape.
A few basics became crystallised; the distinction between the ‘downtown’ of the New Amsterdam, the huburb around the fort, and the streets that fanned out around it, against the bucolic peace of the bouwerie farms beyond the city walls, where the East Village and Chinatown sit now. Jaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter – a pair of visiting priests – took the same trip to Inwood Hill Park I did nearly 350 years later. Fortified by supplies of peaches from the local orchard, they tackled the churning “eddies and whirpools” of Spuyten Duvvil Creek in a hired canoe (which they complained was over-priced). My discovery, sitting in a reading room on Euston Road, that they saw the same rock formations which had filled me with awe: “two ridges of very high rocks, with a considerable space between them, displaying themselves majestically, and inviting all men to acknowledge in them the majesty, grandeur, power and glory of their creator”, sent shivers down my spine. Shaking hands across history with fellow travellers. Who, I note, had no need for 4G.
Notes
1. Philip Clark's first Writer's Award blog may be found here.
Americas and Oceania Collections blog recent posts
- Moving Texts and Individuals between New England and England in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
- On the Trail of the Contemporary Singing Voice
- Spiritualism, Creatively Reimagined
- On my desk: Celebrating the Faculty of Humanities of the University of East Anglia
- Tracked Changes: Looking for Migrant Editors in Publishing Archives
- Why Research is Good for the Artist's Soul
- Transatlantic Mormon Connections and Historical Fiction
- Writer's Award winner Philip Clark on the Sounds of New York City: Part II
- Outernational: Researching Black music and its transatlantic connections
- The World According to Monty Wedd: Philatelic Comics, Cartoons and Caricatures
Archives
Tags
- Official Publications
- #AnimalTales
- #EcclesFellows
- 1812
- Africa
- American Revolution
- Americas
- Animal Tales
- Arctic
- Artists' Books
- Australasia
- Australia
- Beats
- Bibliography
- Black & Asian Britain
- Business
- Canada
- Captain Cook
- Caribbean
- Civil War
- Classics
- Collections
- Comics-Unmasked
- Conferences
- Contemporary Britain
- Curation
- Current Affairs
- Decolonising
- Digital scholarship
- Digitisation project
- East Asia
- Eccles Centre
- Eccles Fellows
- Eccles Photographs
- Eccles Writer in Residence
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Endangered languages
- eResources
- Events
- Exhibitions
- Fashion
- Film
- Fine Press
- Food and Drink
- Franklin Fridays
- Geography
- Government publications
- Guides
- Haiti
- Hemingway
- History
- Humanities
- International
- Latin America
- Law
- Legal deposit
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Manuscripts
- Maps
- Medieval history
- Mexico
- Middle East
- Modern history
- Museums
- Music
- New Zealand
- Newsroom
- North America
- Oceania
- Oil
- Online resources
- Pacific Islands
- Philatelic
- Photography
- Poetry
- Polar
- Politics
- Publishing
- Rare books
- Religion
- Research
- Research collaboration
- Romance languages
- Russian Revolution
- Science
- Slavonic
- Social Sciences
- sound and vision
- South Asia
- South East Asia
- Sports
- Television
- Travel
- Unfinished Business
- USA
- Visual Arts
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
- West Africa
- Women's histories
- World War One
- Writing