A bicentennial conference: Birkbeck College, University of London, July 20-21, 2017

This conference takes the bicentenary of Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves as an opportunity to reflect on the materiality of the paper archive, and processes of dispersal, scattering and recollection. We welcome proposals on the composition, publication and reception of romantic poetry, particularly those which take into account the metaphorical, material and political implications of the ‘leaf in flight’.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be emailed to sibyllineleaves2017@gmail.com by 15 October 2016.

For more information, please visit the conference’s website: https://sibyllineleaves2017.wordpress.com

Dates: 8-10 December 2016

Venue: Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
Lensfield Rd, Cambridge CB2 1EW (map)

The conference will accompany the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary exhibition COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (30 July – 30 December 2016).

This interdisciplinary conference will aim to break new ground in integrating recent advances in the art historical and technical analyses of illuminated manuscripts with research in social and intellectual history.  While Western illuminated manuscripts from the 6th to the 16th centuries will form a major focus of discussion, the conference will also include papers on Byzantine, Islamic and Pre-Columbian material.

For further information, visit http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/colour/conference

to Elizabeth Savage, a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the CMT and the Faculty of English, who has just been appointed Lecturer in Book History and Communications at the Institute of English Studies in London’s School of Advanced Studies. We wish her every success in this exciting new role.

10 November 2016 – 11 November 2016
Leslie Stephen Room, Trinity Hall

Convenors:  Dr Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge), Prof. Horst Bredekamp (Humboldt University), Dr Christopher Heuer (Clark Art Institute), Dr Pablo Schneider (Humboldt University).

This workshop is part of the Epistemic Images in Early Modernity Research Project, funded by the Cambridge-DAAD Research Hub and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The project seeks to examine how and why images came to play such a decisive role in the production of new knowledge in early modernity. It will do so by bringing together German and Anglophone scholars from art history, Bildwissenschaft, and history of science in a series of workshops to be held in Cambridge, Berlin and Williamstown.

Further details and registration available at
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26883

Two lovely news stories about non-reading this weekend. The first was about how scientists have discovered that you can use terahertz radiation (a band of radiation between microwaves and infrared) to read closed books, to a depth of nine pages. The technology is facilitated by the fact that the pages of a book trap a pocket of air that is twenty microns deep (one-fifth of the thickness of the average human hair). The bending of the rays allows you to distinguish the signals from different pages and to reconstruct the writing on them. Possible applications include: reading letters without opening the envelopes, and reading books that are too fragile to open.

The second story really relates to what literary critics call ‘distant reading’, rather than non-reading. Two intrepid book-scanners have come up with an algorithm for a bestseller. Advance press reports of what exactly the algorithm shows are rather contradictory. Having scanned 5,000 (or 20,000) books, it can pick out future bestsellers with 80% accuracy. Bestsellers address ‘topics grounded in reality, like marriage, love and crime’ rather than making up fantasy worlds. Bestsellers confine themselves to two topics, such as ‘work’ and ‘human closeness’ (or ‘children and guns’, or ‘love and vampires’–vampires being grounded in reality, I assume), each of which should take up 30% of the space. Bestsellers use the word ‘need’ more than the word ‘want’, and their characters spend their time being rather than seeming. I guess we will have to wait and read the book to make sense of this.

Meanwhile a world where unopened bestsellers are written and read by machines is approaching. We may not notice much of a difference.

EXHIBITION ON THE FERRARS OF LITTLE GIDDING IN MAGDALENE COLEGE OLD LIBRARY

SUNDAY 4th SEPTEMBER to SUNDAY 11th SEPTEMBER
(closed Monday 5th)

2pm to 5pm daily.  Open to all, free of charge.

THE FERRAR FAMILY was influential in a broad sphere of seventeenth-century life, and beyond: they were Deputies of the Virginia Trading Company – they were Founders of the Anglican Community at Little Gidding (made famous again in the twentieth-century by T S Eliot’s Four Quartets) – they were
entrusted with the posthumous publication of the work of the great metaphysical poet, George Herbert – they designed and constructed Harmonies of the Gospels – and they were collectors of prints, artworks, books and music.

THE FERRAR FAMILY PAPERS, housed at Magdalene College, provide an intriguing and illuminating window into their world.

THE EXHIBITION takes place in conjunction with the conference, The Ferrars, hosted by Magdalene English Department and the Historic Libraries of Magdalene College, to mark the completion of the project to conserve the Ferrar papers and prints.

Further information:

Dr M E J Hughes

litfest@magd.cam.ac.uk

Lecturer, Fellow and Pepys Librarian
Magdalene College

The latest issue of the Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society has an entertaining article by Liam Sims on the formation of the ‘Arc’ classification in the Cambridge University Library. ‘Arc’ is short for ‘Arcana’, and this is CUL’s equivalent of the British Library’s ‘Private Case’ or the Bodleian’s Φ [Phi] classmark — the latter apparently a clever-clever pun on the English word ‘Fie!’ This is, in short, the rude stuff — banned books; sexual psychology and physiology; books of nudes.

Sims describes how hard it is to work out where the ‘Arc’ shelfmark came from, or how anyone knew it was there–the problem books were already being grouped together in the 1880s but it wasn’t until the 1910s that readers were told about them. He also shows that Oxford and Cambridge librarians were privately sharing notes about their handling of obscene materials in letters of the late 1930s. Stephen Wright at Oxford wrote that Φ books were only given out freely to those ‘whose moral character we consider sufficiently irreproachable’, whilst ‘undergraduates and doubtful applicants’ needed to provide ‘convincing evidence of their good faith’. H. C. Stanford at Cambridge–where books were usually borrowable–said that volumes of nudes (drawn or photographed) couldn’t be lent out, as they tend ‘to return adorned … with phallic additions’. Stanford added a handwritten postscript to one of his letters, noting that the Bodleian had Lady Chatterley, but CUL didn’t; ‘but I happen to have a copy of the first edition which will, I suppose, ultimately find a home here’.

Swollen with gifts of erotica from A. E. Housman and Stephen Gaselee, a former Pepys Librarian, along with libellous books and with ‘cancelled’ misprinted books (which live a kind of shadow life, since they can never be brought out for readers), the Arc category now contains around 1200 volumes. Sims suggests that the books that were hidden away from public view may have been much consulted by ‘attractive young men’ among the librarians, some of whom went on to write Arc books themselves. He gives us a picture of one such librarian in his jacket and tie, so that we can see just how attractive he was. This is a comparatively mild form of erotica, given what the article might have offered.

As we reach the last few days of campaigning for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, a pro-remain friend reports on Facebook that she has found a torn-up ‘IN’ poster outside her front door. Coming a few days after the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, this is scary stuff.

It may be harder to read the words on a torn-up poster, but its message is all too legible. It also reveals something important about the medium: about paper, with its susceptibility to tearing, to shredding, to violence–its palpability, which is also its palpable ability to act as a metaphor for the body. If you hate this blog post, you can leave an abusive message in response to it; you can troll me or mount a cyber-attack. But you cannot convey your anger through the universal language of the tear. Ripping the page to shreds is a micro-drama that is rapidly fading from our everyday life. The power of paper turns out to be its weakness, its disposability.

There are a few moments in Shakespeare that capture these aspects of paper. Amid the utter bleakness of the ending of Troilus and Cressida, Troilus receives a letter from Cressida. We never find out what it says; Troilus dismisses the contents as ‘words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’, before tearing it up. ‘Goe wind to wind, there turn and change together’. The fluttering of the paper becomes a visual metaphor for what Troilus perceives to be his beloved’s faithlessness.

At a similar moment of trauma in Cymbeline, Imogen learns that her beloved Posthumus Leonatus wants her killed. She doesn’t yet know why this should be so, and guesses that he has met a new love; ‘Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / […] I must be ripped: To pieces with me!’ She asks her servant Pisanio to get on with the job of stabbing her, and bares her heart to make the job easier. But she finds the way to her heart barred: ‘What is here? / The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, / All turn’d to heresie?’ It turns out that she has been storing the letters inside her clothing, like a lining. In this case, she merely throws the letters away (‘Away, away / Corrupters of my faith, you shall no more / Be stomachers to my heart’). In a play that is full of images of bodily dismemberment, it matters that she doesn’t seem to rip them up, and that Pisanio refuses to rip her up. This is a play about restitution–the words will come together, and will be full of meaning once more, by the end.

Let’s hope the political sphere will see some similar restitutions in the coming days and months…

Filling in a questionnaire about digital photography–since, praise the Lord, archives and libraries are increasingly allowing visitors to take photographs of materials in their collections–I start to wax lyrical:

‘Broadly speaking, I’d say that being able to photograph has allowed me to develop my sense that the visual is as important as the verbal in written communication. I think I am quite visually responsive to text—where an older generation would just want to get at the ‘content’, my generation sees content in the physical disposition of words and their endless interactions with images.’

It’s not exactly The Who, but I think it’s true all the same: for those of us who straddle the shift from print to digital, there’s something a bit scandalous about our interest in the visual. And given the ease with which images can be shared on social media, the scandal looks set to deepen with time.

Isaac Pitman’s phonographic shorthand or ‘sound-hand’ was invented in 1837 and remains the mostly widely used system of shorthand in the world, now more commonly known as ‘Pitman Shorthand.’

Shorthand – otherwise known as stenography, brachygraphy, or tachygraphy – is a system of written signs designed to enable their user to write words down at the rate at which they are spoken. The earliest known form of shorthand is found in the ‘Tironian Notes’, developed by Marcus Tullius Tiro in order to quickly and accurately transcribe Cicero’s speeches. Later English-language systems include: Timothy Bright’s Characterie: An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character (1588), Thomas Shelton’s Short Writing (1626) (used by Samuel Pepys in his diaries), and Samuel Taylor’s 1786 system. Taylor’s system was widely used throughout the English-speaking world and the young Isaac Pitman mastered it before developing his own system.

These shorthand systems were primarily orthographic, using particular marks to indicate common clusters of letters – prefixes, suffixes, common endings, and everyday words – although they also often included marks representing vowel-sounds. Pitman’s innovation was to invent a shorthand system with a strictly phonetic basis. Phonographic shorthand transcribed sound rather than abbreviated spelling: it bypassed conventional orthography in order to give written form to the accents and inflections of pronunciation. As Pitman himself put it, phonographic shorthand was a system of writing in which the ‘very sound of every word is made VISIBLE.’

Pitman’s specific concern was to develop a system of shorthand in which audible speech – rather than just its linguistic meaning – could be perfectly reproduced from written signs. His interest in the relationship between texts and pronunciation began at a young age: coming across unknown words in Paradise Lost, he discovered that he could reconstruct their correct stress and intonation from Milton’s prosody. This interest remained with him, prompting the development and endless refinement of phonographic shorthand, and eventually leading him to establish his Phonetic Institution which was to become the headquarters of the Spelling Reform movement and the centre for its many publishing and pedagogical activities.

While there is sometimes a mismatch between Pitman’s pedagogical ambition for the system and its actual success, the development of his long-distance learning programme indicates the level of popular engagement with phonographic shorthand. Every Phonetic Institute publication advertised that ‘Any Person may receive lessons from the Author by post gratuitously. Each lesson must be enclosed in a paid letter. The pupil can write about a dozen verses from the Bible, leaving spaces between the lines for corrections.’ By 1845, Pitman was receiving 10,000 phonographic letters a year. Similarly, while the ‘Phonetic Sunday Schools’ that Pitman imagined would be central to the education of children in phonetic literacy seem never to have been established, phonographic shorthand was nevertheless used on the mission field to produce the first written records of un-transcribed languages, including Bengalee, Tongan, and Malagasy. There were also reports that the system was used to take notes in the Chinese Parliament

The extent of popular engagement with phonographic shorthand is indicated here, as is its global reach, and some of the ways it influenced literacy, engagement with educational activities, and understandings of language. Despite this, there has been very little investigation into the use of the system or its significance for how we think about writing and language more broadly in the nineteenth-century. The Rare Books Department at Cambridge University Library has an extensive collection of Phonetic Institution publications, including teaching materials, exercise books, phonotypic publications, and phonetic periodicals. Much of this material has never been studied, and many of the books still have their pages uncut. There is, I think, some very interesting work to be done here.

Pitman’s endeavour also reflects the proliferation of phonographic experiments and the growing concerns about language in the nineteenth-century. Attempts to inscribe sound in such a way that it could be reproduced took many different forms. Alexander Melville Bell, a professor of physiological phonetics at Edinburgh, developed a system of ‘Visible Speech’ in which grammalogues depicting the shapes of sound in the human mouth were used to teach the profoundly deaf correct pronunciation. His son, Alexander Graham Bell, was such an accomplished reader of ‘Visible Speech’ that his party-trick was to use ‘Visible Speech’ transcriptions to read out loud foreign texts in languages he couldn’t speak (includng Sanskrit and Gaelic) to the satisfaction of native speakers. A. G. Bell subsequently developed the telephone (patented 1875-77). Thomas Edison invented the phonograph (the precursor to the gramophone) in 1877 which made re-playable voice-recordings by tracing a vibrating needle over wax cylinders. Turning from technological experiments to linguistic research, concerns with accurately recording the sound of speech were central to nineteenth-century investigations into philology, etymology, and regional accent. They also play out in the dialect poetry of Dorset poet William Barnes, and can, I argue, be traced in Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with disembodied voices and forms of inscription (see ‘‘How you call to me, call to me’: Hardy’s Self-Remembering Syntax’, Victorian Poetry, Spring 2016).

As such, Pitman’s phonographic shorthand also offers an insight into a particular historical moment in which these questions about the relation between texts and sounds were at the forefront of technological and linguistic research. Establishing the relationship between text and sound was not only a practical problem. It also pressed philosophical questions about the nature of meaning – about the relationship between linguistic sense and sensuous form, about what writing is for and how it relates to speech, and about the kinds of sound, experience, and meaning that become available when we read.

Some of the philosophical thinking about language that attended Pitman’s innovations can be seen in his phonographic books. They show an anxiety that we might not be able to hear the difference between different categories of sound and language when all noise is inscribed as the same kind of phonographic text: in the phonographic edition of Thankful Blossom: A Romance of the Jerseys, 1779, by Bret Harte (1889), Pitman – bizarrely – leaves the cow’s moo-ing untranscribed; similarly, in Plutarch’s Lives of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar (1887), Pitman leaves all Latin names untranslated. In the ‘Exercises in Phonography’ appended to A Manual of Phonography (1845), Pitman seems to take particular delight in demonstrating how his phonographic system makes the end-rhymes of the metrical psalm visible as a sequence of paired symbols.

But these questions about the relation between text and voice also raise philosophical questions about the nature of human identity: the relationship between voice and presence, between being and knowing, between embodied life and the traces of human experience and knowledge we leave behind. Edison, with a mixture of pride and sadness, acknowledged the extent to which these phonographic experiments raise questions that intrude on and threaten the self-reflexive knowing that constitutes the sense of self: ‘The phonograph, in one sense, knows more than we do ourselves. For it will retain a perfect mechanical memory of many things which we may forget, even though we have said them’.

Anna Nickerson

An exhibition of Pitman-related materials is currently on display on the first floor lobby of the Faculty of English, 9 West Rd.