Encyclopaedic visions: scientific dictionaries and enlightenment culture [Review Symposium]

In the preface to this impressive book, Richard Yeo quotes David Brewster’s words to the co-editor of his eighteen-volume Edinburgh Encyclopaedia as a warning to himself to make his task manageable. In so doing, he restricts his primary purpose to revealing and analysing “the assumptions behind the encyclopaedic project” and to considering “how these influenced coverage and format”. What he explicitly eschews — with eyes no doubt to Robert Darnton’s publishing history of the Encyclopédie — is the task of giving a “publishing history or a study of readership”. Yeo nevertheless expresses a hope that his study will be a useful contribution to the “significant intersection between history of science and the history of the book” (p. xvi). That hope is well founded, and he makes the case repeatedly for the importance of taking seriously the practices of authorship, readership, and publishing. Yet there are significant respects in which his primary purpose would have been more fully accomplished had he paid more attention to these issues

The Jameson Raid (1758) as a Focus for Historical Inquiry

Each year the Adams County Historical Society receives inquiries either in person or by mail from persons asking for information about a young woman who with the rest of her family was seized and carried off from their home in what is now Adams county during the French and Indian War. She was the only member of that family who was not slaughtered as the raiding party and its captives moved into the western part of Pennsylvania. The subsequent life of this woman among the Indians was deemed of sufficient historical importance that she was chosen to be among some 13,000 well-known Americans who were included in the prestigious Dictionary of American Biography, a reference work of twenty volumes published between 1928 and 1937, and still being updated today. The volume containing her sketch, the tenth, was published in 1933. [excerpt

Medieval property investors, ca. 1300-1500

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to profit. Careful analysis of the data provides evidence of group purchases, multiple transactions and investors buying outside of their own locality. The identification of these ‘investors’ and their buying behaviours, set within the context of the English medieval economy, contributes to the early commercialisation debate

“To ‘leave my name in life’s visit’”: The Intersection of Age and Gender in the Literary Afterlife of Anna Seward

Anna Seward (1742-1809) made detailed plans toward her posthumous legacy in the last decades of her life through the compilation and editing of her poetical works and letter books, as well as the negotiations for their publication. In having her life’s work and correspondence published after her death, Seward challenged societal and literary expectations already subverted by publishing in advanced age and asserted the value of her own production and, by extension, her literary authority, at the end of her career. While this is a known claim, this article aims to go further and examine this material and its reception from the perspective of age studies in order to ascertain what roles gender and old age played in both Seward’s self-presentation in this compilation and in the failure of her act of self-canonization. For this purpose, this article investigates the intersection of gender, marital status, and old age (the triple-layered “old maidism”) in eighteenth-century perceptions of age and aging, and questions how that intersection affected her work’s editorial process and its reception. To do so, the article addresses Walter Scott’s and Archibald Constable’s—her editor and publisher, respectively—treatments of the material and of the detailed instructions Seward left them in her will. Finally, it assesses the reception of the posthumously published works in three periodicals of the time: The Critical Review, the British Review and London Critical Journal, and The Monthly Review

Digital Critical Editing, Digital Text Analysis, and Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

This thesis considers why critical editions have not established themselves in the digital medium to the same extent as documentary editions and offers some potential ways to remedy this. The written thesis is accompanied by a digital critical edition of Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which acts as an example of and case study for the arguments set forth in the written thesis. This edition can be accessed at app.melmoththewanderer.com or at https://pacific-harbor-2932.herokuapp.com/. Documentary editions have found a secure position in the digital medium because they have a solid pre-digital theoretical foundation in the work of Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie; digital documentary editions have also become part of the narrative of the rise of the digital humanities. Digital critical editions, however, have neither of these advantages. Editors must instead work to create digital critical editions that can not be easily achieved in the medium of print. This thesis proposes two potential ways that this can be done. Firstly, digital critical editions can benefit by being designed as usable editions that aid users in accessing the different parts of the text. This involves a slight reconception of the critical edition in the digital medium where the job of the editor is not the establishment of a single, stable text but is the establishment of multiple views of the text. Secondly, digital critical editions will also benefit from increased interaction with the field of digital text analysis. This can be achieved in a number of ways: by making the edition’s data available in multiple formats for analysis, by topic modelling a corpus of texts contemporary to the edition’s text and making visualisations of those topic models available to the user in the edition’s paratexts as a novel way of contextualising the edition text, and finally by allowing users to interrogate the results of those topic models while they browse the core text of the edition

Political trials and the suppression of popular radicalism in England, 1799-1820

This chapter examines the decision-making process between the Home Office and the government’s law officers in prosecuting individuals for sedition and treason in the period 1799–1820. The term state trial suggests a more centralised and government-led repression of popular radicalism than the process was in practice. Provincial reformers also faced the complex layers of their local justice system, which was more loyalist, committed to stamping out political radicalism. The trial of the “Thirty Eight” Manchester radicals in June 1812 demonstrates the mutable definitions of treason, sedition and processes of justice in the theatre of the court.Peer reviewe

The Scientific, the Literary, and the Popular: Commerce and the Reimagining of the Scientific Journal in Britain, 1813–25

As scientists question the recent dominance of the scientific journal, the varied richness of its past offers useful materials for reflection. This paper examines four innovative journals founded and run by leading publishers and men of science in the 1810s and 1820s, which contributed to a significant reimagining of the form. Relying on a new distinction between the ‘literary’ and the ‘scientific’ to define their market, those who produced the journals intended to maximize their readership and profits by making them to some extent ‘popular’. While these attempts ended in commercial failure, not least because of the rapidly diversifying periodical market in which they operated, their history makes clear the important role that commerce has played both in defining the purposes and audiences of scientific journals and in the conceptualization of the scientific project. It also informs the ongoing debate concerning how the multiple audiences for science can be addressed in ways that are commercially and practically viable