The room is quiet, thoughts alone
People its mute tranquility;
The yoke put off, the long task done,—
I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled.
(“The Teacher’s Monologue”)
Warm is the parlour atmosphere,
Serene the lamp’s soft light;
The vivid embers, red and clear,
Proclaim a frosty night.
Books, varied, on the table lie,
Three children o’er them bend,
And all, with curious, eager eye,
The turning leaf attend.
(“Gilbert”)
And if you search the English Poetry Database for the words join and choir and invisible together you will retrieve sixty-four nineteenth-century efforts by such fixtures of the poetasters’ pantheon as Atherstone, Bickersteth, Caswall, Coutts-Nevill, Mant, Smedly, and Mary Tighe (and Byron and Keats and Coleridge, too)—but you won’t pull up George Eliot’s
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence
or any other poetry she wrote. (I found two instances of “rubbish-heap” in Eliot’s 488-page Collected Poems, edited by Lucien Jenkins, but discovered no lumber.)
Finally, if you want to read about “hope’s delusive mine” in Samuel Johnson’s verses on the death of Dr. Levet, your hopes will be dashed; in fact if you browse for any “S. Johnson” in the database’s name index you will browse in vain. (You will find “L. Johnson,” “R. Johnson,” and “W. Johnson,” though.) Still, the actual texts of Johnson’s two best poems, “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” are hidden within, retrievable not by poet’s name but by title or search-word, since they were republished in Dodsley’s Collection of 1763, one of the compendia that Chadwyck-Healey’s editors (rightly) shipped off to the Philippines for keypunching.1 Dodsley’s Collection fortunately also happens to contain one version of Richard Bentley’s only poem (he isn’t listed in the name index, either), a poem itemizing the tribulations of the scholar:
He lives inglorious, or in want,
To college and old books confin’d;
Instead of learn’d he’s call’d pedant,
Dunces advanc’d, he’s left behind.
Samuel Johnson could recite Bentley’s poem from memory, as H. W Garrod reminds us in Scholarship: Its Meaning and Value, before he (Garrod, that is) goes on to praise A. E. Housman (a Bentley worshipper himself) as a “great scholar and, as I shall always think, a great poet,” which is a remarkably generous assessment, since Houseman had, in a preface to his edition of Manilius,1 viciously dismissed Garrod’s earlier Manilian emendations as “singularly cheap and shallow” and judged Garrod’s apparatus criticus “often defective and sometimes visibly so.”
Housman would probably say similarly rude things about the holes, minor and major, in the English Poetry Database (no Jonathan Swift at all, anywhere?2) since Housman spent most of his life absorbed in “those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure,” and was intolerant of grand schemes and mechanized shortcuts. Moreover, his own 1896 volume, A Shropshire Lad, is missing from the disks, possibly for copyright reasons, a fact that would have nettled him, although he would have pretended not to care.
But we, on the other hand, shouldn’t say rude things. This database may be, as John Sutherland pointed out in the London Review of Books (vol. 16, no. 11, 9 June 1994), the most significant development in literary scholarship since xerography. And even Sutherland’s high praise is insufficient. The EPFTD, as some refer to it, is a mind-manuring marvel, and we are lucky that a lot is left out (provided that no university libraries, tempted by its aura of comprehensiveness, “withdraw”—which is to say, get rid of—the unelectrified source books themselves); we don’t want every corner of poetry lit with the same even, bright light, for such a uniformity would interfere with what Housman himself called the “hide-and-seek” of learning. The god of scholars, Housman pointed out in his “Introductory Lecture,” “planted in us the desire to find out what is concealed, and stored the universe with hidden things that we might delight ourselves in discovering them.” And the fact is that Chadwyck-Healey’s demiurgic project comes so much closer than anything else in paper or plastic to the unattainable om of total inclusion (containing, by my estimate, several thousand times more poetry than Great Poetry Classics, itself a fine shovelware CD-ROM published by World Library, Inc.) that hunter-gatherers of all predilections can pretend, some of the time, when it calms their research anxieties to do so, that no obscurity of consequence will be left unfingered. After all, the disks hold (on top of hymns before 1800, and nursery rhymes) many verse translations from other languages into English, if they were published before 1800—a very useful subcategory for the lumber-struck.
1Gower’s translation offers a bonus lumber earlier that is almost as inspiring:
Hemm’d round with learning’s musty scrolls,
Her ponderous volumes, dusty rolls,
Which to the ceiling’s vault arise,
Above the reach of studious eyes,
Where revelling worms peruse the store
Of wisdom’s antiquated lore,—
With glasses, tools of alchemy,
Cases and bottles, whole and crack’d,
Hereditary lumber, pack’d.
This is the world, the world, for me!
1Not every passage quoted herein will actually contain the word; that would be obsessive.
2Cf. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus linguae Romanae & Britannicae, 1565.
1Both Locke’s and Bunyan’s dark rooms may owe something to a sermon by John Donne delivered on Christmas Day, 1624: “God does not furnish a roome, and leave it darke; he sets up lights in it; his first care was, that his benefits should be seene; he made light first, and then creatures, to be seene by that light.…”
1Juvenile wood is wood near the pith of the tree; it has a “larger longitudinal hygrocoefficient of expansion than mature wood,” writes Larson, who is concerned that the expansion-habits of juvenile wood will lead to “an increase in the frequency and severity in spatial deformation of wood subjected to hygrothermal gradients.”
1Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Swift,” described the Athenian Society as “a knot of obscure men.” They were Samuel Wesley (whom we will meet again later), Daniel Defoe, and the publisher John Dunton, among others; they published Swift’s flattering “Ode” in their Athenian Gazette, vol. 5, supplement, 1692. Dunton wrote that Swift’s “Ode” was “an ingenious poem” (See John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Colin Clair, p. 122), but Pat Rogers (Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 604) reports that Joseph Horrell’s harsh verdict—that this is Swift’s “worst poem by odds”—is “shared by many critics.”
1There is no lumber in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The word resurfaces in Swift’s “The Progress of Poetry,” written c. 1719 but not published until the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1728), which was edited by Pope: “To raise the lumber from the earth.” Pat Rogers subjoins a note to this line: “lumber one of Pope’s favourite terms of opprobrium.”
1See the WELL’s “Info” Conference (“A Conference About Communication Systems, Communities, and Tools for the Information Age”), Topic 641 (“Internet Encyclopedia”), Response 15 (Oct. 26, 1993): “Your hyperencyclopedia software (or ‘siftware’) would direct you toward a basic article on spiders, analogous to the FAQ files placed in many newsgroups.” The WELL is an electronic conferencing system: (415) 332-8410; http://www.well.com.
2Inspired by Kent Hieatt’s numerical analysis of Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (Short Time’s Endless Monument, 1960), a sophomore in college, in 1975, wrote a paper on the numerical structure of Book I of The Faery Queen, in which he pointed out that the word seven appears for the first time in the poem on line seven, stanza 17, Canto vii o
f Spenser’s poem (“For seven great heads out of his body grew”), and appears in precisely the same context (a mention of the seven-headed beast that carries the Whore of Babylon) as surrounds the word seven in Revelations chapter 17, verse 7. Without Osgood’s concordance to Spenser (1915) and several concordances to the Bible open before him, the student would never have noticed this further tiny instance of Spenserian numerology. And it was so incredibly easy, too, once I (for it was I) had decided what to look up: “Index-learning,” Pope himself pointed out, reworking some earlier snideries of Charles Boyle and Dean Swift,
turns no student pale,
Yet holds the Eel of science by the Tail.
1Soberingly, the editors of the concordance write that “this optical scanning proved to be the phase of the project that caused the most problems and it seemed for a time that we had traded a tedious but straightforward task [i.e., manual text-entry] for an exasperatingly complicated one.… But these difficulties were related to the fact that the technique of direct optical scanning, the claims of computer and data processing houses to the contrary, is still in the developmental stage. Our experience with this method makes us feel that for most purposes literary scholars had best regard it as in the realm of the possible as contrasted with the practical.”
1Reproduced in Lectures on Literature, p. 137.
2There is an ode to Walter Scott in there, by one Horatio Smith, that mentions the “minstrel’s lay” and “lordly Marmion,” and there is even the text of an entire anthology that Scott edited, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. There are 227 poems by William Bell Scott, a painter in the circle of Rossetti. But Sir Walter’s own poetry, which, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in a review of the Lay in 1805, “has manifested a degree of genius which cannot be overlooked,” was overlooked.
1It was set to music several times and in song form sold tens of thousands of copies.
2“During almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose,” says George Saintsbury, in A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. I couldn’t find any lumber in Thackeray’s poems, but I did find a good poem about a garret, called “The Garret” Here are two middle stanzas:
Yes; ’tis a garret—let him know’t who will—
There was my bed—full hard it was and small;
My table there—and I decipher still
Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.
Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away,
Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch how many a day,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
And see my little Jessy, first of all;
She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes:
Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl
Across the narrow casement, curtain-wise;
Now by the bed her petticoat glides down,
And when did woman look the worse in none?
I have heard since who paid for many a gown,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
See Thackeray’s Ballads and Tales, Scribners, 1904, pp. 103–4.
1It is a comfort to know, though, that two hundred and ninety of Palgrave’s own poems are on these disks. Reading the poetry of people famous for their anthologies is a melancholy but instructive task.
1Optical scanning isn’t feasible for old typefaces and foxed paper, and even when the material is in a modern edition and hence legible to scanning software, the raw output still demands, just as it did for the disillusioned Pope concordancers in the seventies, a considerable amount of labor-intensive “markup”—to distinguish things like titles, epigraphs, footnotes, and side-notes from text, for instance, and stanza breaks from page breaks—not to mention the inevitable manual fiddling afterward to fix small errors, like dashes that were read as hyphens.
1Manilius being the Roman astrological poet who gave Johnson the tag he applied to Cowley and the rest of the Metaphysicals, discordia concors (not to be confused with Horace’s concordia discors, or Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum): you can find the Manilian reference in a footnote to the life of Cowley in G. Birkbeck Hill’s 1905 edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, a lovely example of old-fashioned scholarship, or you can search the Saturnian rings of the Latin CD-ROM published by the Packard Humanities Institute and Silver Mountain Software, which takes about five minutes.
2No Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome? Only one of Daniel Defoe’s poems? Nothing by Lewis Theobald?
Chapter One
OVERSEAS DISPOSAL
from DOUBLE FOLD
The British Library’s newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane—possibly mistaking the library complex for an aircraft-manufacturing plant—dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however, was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick-thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum’s crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility.
Bombs spared the American papers, but recent managerial policy has not—most were sold off in a blind auction in the fall of 1999. One of the library’s treasures was a seventy-year run, in about eight hundred volumes, of Joseph Pulitzer’s exuberantly polychromatic newspaper, the New York World. Pulitzer discovered that illustrations sold the news; in the 1890s, he began printing four-color Sunday supplements and splash-panel cartoons. The more maps, murder-scene diagrams, ultra-wide front-page political cartoons, fashion sketches, needlepoint patterns, children’s puzzles, and comics that Pulitzer published, the higher the World’s sales climbed; by the mid-nineties, its circulation was the largest of any paper in the country. William Randolph Hearst moved to New York in 1895 and copied Pulitzer’s innovations and poached his staff, and the war between the two men created modern privacy-probing, muckraking, glamour-smitten journalism. A million people a day once read Pulitzer’s World; now an original set is a good deal rarer than a Shakespeare First Folio or the Gutenberg Bible.
Besides the World, the British Library also possessed one of the last sweeping runs of the sumptuous Chicago Tribune—about 1,300 volumes, reaching from 1888 to 1958, complete with bonus four-color art supplements on heavy stock from the 1890s (“This Paper is Not Complete Without the Color Illustration” says the box on the masthead); extravagant layouts of illustrated fiction; elaborately hand-lettered ornamental headlines; and decades of page-one political cartoons by John T. McCutcheon. The British Library owned, as well, an enormous set of the San Francisco Chronicle (one of perhaps two that are left, the second owned by the Chronicle Publishing Company itself and inaccessible to scholars), which in its heyday was filled with gorgeously drippy art-nouveau graphics. And the library owned a monster accumulation of what one could argue is the best newspaper in U.S. history, the New York Herald Tribune, along with its two tributaries, Horace Greeley’s anti-slavery Tribune and James Gordon Bennett’s initially pro-slavery Herald. The Herald Tribune set carries all the way through to 1966, when the paper itself died—it, too, may be the last surviving long run anywhere. And there was a goodly stretch of The New York Times on the British Library’s shelves (1915 through 1958), with Al Hirschfeld drawings and hundreds of luminously fine-grained, sepia-tinted “Rotogravure Picture Sections” bound in place.
All these newspapers have been very well cared for over the years—the volumes I was allowed to examine in September 1999 were in lovely shape. The pictorial sections, but for their unfamiliar turn-of-the-century artwork, looked and felt as if they had peeled off a Hoe cylinder press day before yesterday.
But then, wood-pulp newspapers of fifty and a hundr
ed years ago are, contrary to incessant library propaganda, often surprisingly well preserved. Everyone knows that newsprint, if left in the sun, quickly turns yellow and brittle (a connective wood ingredient called lignin, which newsprint contains in abundance, reacts with sunlight), but rolls of microfilm—and floppies and DVDs—don’t do well in the sun, either; so far, many of the old volumes seem to be doing a better job of holding their original images than the miniature plastic reproductions of them that libraries have seen fit to put in their places over the years. Binding is very important. The stitching together of fifteen (or thirty or sixty) single issues of a paper into one large, heavy book does much to keep the sheets sound; the margins often become brown and flaky, since moist, warm air reacts with the acidic compounds in the paper and weakens it, and the binding glues can stop working; but a little deeper inside the flatland of the tightly closed folio, the sheer weight of the text-block squeezes out most of the air. The effect is roughly equivalent to vacuum-sealing the inner expanses of the pages: the paper suffers much less impairment as a result.
Many librarians, however, have managed to convince themselves, and us, that if a newspaper was printed after 1870 or so, it will inevitably self-destruct or “turn to dust” any minute, soon, in a matter of a few years—1870 being the all-important date after which, in American newsprint mills, papermaking pulps consisting of cooked rags gradually began to give way to pulps made of stone-ground wood. But “soon” is a meaningless word in the context of a substance with a life as long as that of the printed page—indeed, it is a word that allows for all sorts of abuses. Early on, fledgling microfilm companies fed the fear of impermanence with confident mispredictions. Charles Z. Case, an executive at Recordak, Kodak’s microfilm subsidiary, wrote in 1936: “Since the adoption of wood-sulphite paper for newspaper printing, a newspaper file has had a life of from 5 to 40 years depending on the quality of the paper, the conditions of storage, and the degree of use.” Had Case’s forecast held true, the volume of the Chicago Tribune for July 1911 that lies open before me as I type (to an influenza-inspired illustrated section on “A New Theory of Baby Rearing”) would have expired at least half a century ago. Thomas Martin, chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress in the thirties, agreed with the Recordak salesman: “Old wood-pulp files which have only a few years’ duration remaining in them should be photographed on film as soon as satisfactory results can be obtained. In such cases we really have no choice but to make or take film copies, the original will soon crumble into dust.”
Vintage Baker Page 13