19th Century

A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith: 19th Century Book Study

~ Annie Swafford

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While looking through the stacks of the Sojourner Truth Library, I found some marginalia traces as well as a few newspaper inserts in one of the first 5 books that I looked in (a very lucky find). The book is titled A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith. This book was written by Reverend Sydney Smith’s daughter, Lady Saba Holland, in 1855, 10 years after Sydney Smith’s death, and was published in London. Reverend Sydney Smith was a 19th century English clergyman and writer.

This book is the first of two volumes, with this volume having the title the Life & Letters of Sydney Smith.

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The marginalia trace that I found is right before the title page of the book, on the inside cover page. So when I first opened the book, I immediately hit jackpot. It’s written in fountain pen, which was the biggest indication that this is a trace from the 19th century. This is probably the signature of the original owner of this book. From inspection, it looks like it says the name “Olive B. Sarry”. It bummed me out because I spent some time trying to research the name, but I couldn’t find any clues to help me figure out who this person was.

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The other things that I found in this book were newspaper inserts that all pertained to Reverend Sydney Smith. They range from about 1945-1954. Though they’re not from the 19th century, I still thought that they were a really cool find. The first one that I found is pasted right on the title page. It’s an article called No Matter, talking about a man named Bishop Berkeley and his criticisms against Sydney Smith. I also found a couple newspaper inserts on page 448. One of them is from the Times Literary Supplement, a weekly literary review published in London.

Along with this, there were a few other little notes that I found written throughout the book. They seemed to be random numbers (or years?) written in pencil, so they might not be from the 19th century.

*Also, here’s my link to my submission to Book Traces!

Book Traces findings or lack there of.

~ Annie Swafford

I was rather upset to not find anything for the Book Traces website. I find the overall idea and assignment super fascinating and hoped to find something interesting or at least authentic in my search but I unfortunately had no luck. I spent over three hours searching the stacks for a book with some sort of writing in it. I looked all through poetry, literature, letters, history, religion and more. I really felt confident that poetry or literature would have something and spent most of my time in the PR and PS section. Overall, I was really disappointed.

I found a few books with pencils markings and writing in them but I had no way of telling when that was done for example, The Life of Sterne by Percy Fitzgerald and Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin. One book The English Poets  by T.H. Ward got me especially excited because it appeared to be marked all over with notes about the poems and inferred meanings behind certain symbols but on further examination I realized the writing was too current as on one of the final pages it was dated for a lesson plan. For a few others the writing was clearly done in ballpoint pen. I also found books that had what I thought to be markings but turned out to be printed that way like Life and Letters by Robert Browning which had what I thought was a signature but sadly wasn’t. One book tricked me because I thought it contained a handwritten letter from the late 1800s but the letter was bound into the book and was apart of the story. The closest I came to finding any sort of authentic ancient article was a receipt in a book from 2004. Everything else seemed to be a dead end.

I do not really understand how I did not find anything as I looked through a variety of books and focused on the two sections that seemed to have the most luck for other people. A section like poetry or literature would seem to have a lot of writing in it as people try to deceiver what the author is trying to say or as they make comparisons to their own life. There were also a few books that were about other languages such as Irish and Scottish books and I hoped that they would have markings about the translations or something along those lines but again nothing. In all, I enjoyed looking through the well over 50 books and wish I had found something but the appearance of the books themselves with interesting some had marble like patterns on the seems and one book had pink pages but I never found what I set out to find.

19th Century Book Study :Representative English Literature

~ Annie Swafford

Cover/ PhillipsMy DHM Book Spinebook is a copy of the Representative English Literature: From Chaucer to Tennyson, written by Henry S. Pancoast, published by Henry Holt and Company. This copy is dated at 1895, with the call number PR.85.P35.  According to the book’s title page, Pancoast was an English literature lecturer. A Google search revealed his work on other English literary study books.

Based on authorship, title, and the book’s cover (although the binding is not original, the cover seemed to be, and without the dust jacket looks as if it was originally a volume in a series) led me to believe the book was used primarily scholastically. The book’s last pages had other reference and textbooks listed for sale by the publishing company, with topics ranging from History to Psychology. It’s kind of like something from the Norton Anthology series, an aid to literary study, and work compilation arranged by topic for a lit course.

So who owned this book? Who wrote in it? The front dedication page lists Adèle Duréey’s name, written in pencil. Pencil markings throughout the book exhibit her use of it as an academic book.

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Lauren Gao’s Extra Credit: Victorian London: A bit of ee-nif ‘cant’,

~ Annie Swafford

Now the two Victorian London accents I, most likely, just insensitively appropriated and horribly butchered were of the Costermongers and London’s Cadgers (beggars). While reading around Lee Jackson’s Victorian London Dictionary, in the Words & Expressions tab, I stumbled into a short piece about the different English accents just within the city of London itself. Everything from the metropolitan elite, to the poor, or to the (actual) meat butchers themselves have surprisingly distinguished manners of pronunciation, granted, just within the radius of a city.

And we thought we had a lot of accents here in the U.S.

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Adrian Jurek Extra Credit: Victorian London – Police and Policing

~ Annie Swafford

Searching through the different terms on the Dictionary of Victorian London i came across a post about “Victorian Era Police”. This really interested me because i never really researched Victorian era law enforcement and the images that keep popping into mind are those from the Sherlock Holmes movie that came out in 2009. This article can be found under: Police; City of London Police; -duties and organization.

Since the City of London was the wealthiest business center of the world, they had their own police force that only watched the city in both day and night. The goal of the policemen was to get a high number of convictions using any means necessary. There was no checks of what the police was doing. The press, unlike today, didn’t accuse officers of corruption , or any malpractice.

One thing that interested me that, in addition to arresting criminals, officers helped out civilians by escorting old ladies to their homes , looking out for future crimes, etc. In addition to this there was a Nightwatch established which patrolled the streets from 10 P.M. to check stores, and prevent any thievery. As quoted from the author,  ALEX. INNES SHAND. , “the City police has arrived at pretty nearly the perfection of efficiency” . This is an example that you don’t need to have superior technology to be highly efficient in what you are doing. According to the chart that is found midway through the article there was 800 total officers working in London in the public sector and 99 policeman in the private sector, both a fairly large amount of officers.

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Discovering a Dedicated Wordsworth Fan

~ Annie Swafford

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In this book, published in 1908, I could immediately tell that the previous owner was very passionate about the works he/she was reading. Even in just the table of contents, we can immediately see his/her fascination with the works he/she was about to read or even re-read. I found myself wondering if the work underlined was his/her favorite, or if the check marks next to certain works meant something significant to him/her. IMG_2793

In thumbing through some of my own personal favorite Wordworth works, I found descriptive marginalia left by whomever else had enjoyed the romantic poems of Wordworth. IMG_2790The writing in this book shows that the person who had previously owned/read this book was very interested in deciphering the true meanings of the writings. IMG_2791Sometimes Wordsworths’ sonnets can be difficult to interpret, but the previous owner shows his dedication in trying to understand what he was reading. IMG_2792The stains in the book also show how invested the person mustve been in what he was reading. IMG_2794I am a huge Wordsworth fan myself, and being able to find interesting book traces in a book that I was interested in reading myself was very exciting. Though the marginalia didnt directly tell me anything about the previous owner, it reminded me alot of myself and the way i read. No matter what i am reading, i am constantly using the margins to clarify what I am reading, even if occasionally i may be wrong. This assignment also excited me with the thought that maybe someday my notes in a book may become something to marvel at.

Exploring Ideas of “The Self” in 1902

~ Annie Swafford

For this assignment, I intentionally pursued psychology books of the 19th century, curious to see how people would react to psychological perspectives of the time. Charles Horton Cooley’s “Human Nature and the Social Order” was my book of choice and had some interesting marginalia. The book was published in New York in 1902 by Charles Scribners’ Sons and describes early social psychology and sociological view points. Throughout the entire book, there is underlining of key points, but one particular chapter titled “The Social Self – Various Phases of I,” I found marginalia.

 http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-human-nature-and-the-social-order/

On page 193, the marginalia says “Cut out Cooley’s babies,” following a phrase that had been underlined. The phrase speaks to the idea of the ego of an author slipping through their written work in a way that has no connection to the work itself. The written comment, “Cut out Cooley’s babies” could be a note to the reader to remember to overlook Cooley’s own examples of personal anecdotes slipping into the text at hand. I researched Charles Horton Cooley and could not find anything about him that related specifically to babies. In the Amazon.com review of this book, Cooley is described as a pioneer of sociological views on American culture. His ideas were the catalyst for change in how sociology revolving around the self was approached pedagogically. The passage that is underlined on page 193 suggests that the reader be a critical thinker for not just content, but for the perspectives of authors writing the content.

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On page 227 in the same chapter about Various Phases of “I,” the following sentence is underlined:
Thus the passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.” The marginalia beside the underlining says “self-aggrandizement becomes moral.” This trace of a reader’s idea seems to be the summary of the sentence that resonated most with them. The concept of “self-aggrandizement” means process of promoting oneself as being powerful or important. The marginalia therefore is a synopsis of the idea that as one’s sense of self grows and becomes more attached to one’s morals, self-aggrandizement therefore becomes moral.

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Finally, on page 231, at the end of the chapter, the sentenced underlined is “The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.” This description of the self that is underlined is referring to the later idea of the self and the marginalia says “misery of old age.” This summarizes the underlined phrase concisely and quiet honestly as well.

 

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