An image from the manuscript of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Sing Song’, the subject of Mina Gorji’s paper at the History of Material Texts seminar on Thursday. It’s an anthology of nursery rhymes, charming and faintly macabre in equal measure, as in this ceremonious poem for a dead thrush, and illustrated in faint pencil-sketches by the author. You can view the whole book here.

Material media can go down as well as up. This week we learnt about the demise of a British newspaper–The Independent–that is ‘going online’, having proved unsustainable in print. This is meant to be the future but it feels like a vanishing, the discipline of rectilinear newsprint disappearing in the sprawl of the digital interface. Reading a newspaper online is a video game in which you have to zap the pop-up ad before it flickers into hideous life.

Meanwhile as paper recedes, vellum has been saved as the medium on which English laws will be written, reversing a threatened cost-cutting move to ‘higher-quality archival paper’. Many have been surprised to learn that we are still writing our laws on the skins of dead calves. Perhaps the laws will be better now that this is widely known?

A backwater lay-by off the M5, Junction 24, three days before Christmas. A covert exchange of an unknown document, protected only by an iPad case, occurs between man, whippet and young woman. Shady as it may seem, this is not the stuff of reconnaissance but curation. This nineteenth-century commonplace book replete with beautiful illustrations, kindly donated by John and Caroline Robinson, now lies in situ on the first floor of the English Faculty, at the heart of the inaugural exhibition of the Centre for Material Texts. The exhibition, curated by myself and my MPhil colleagues on Dr Ruth Abbott’s Writers’ Notebooks course, focuses on commonplace books and the ways in which they acted as repositories for the recording of daily life in the nineteenth century. From passages of the Bible to Byron, musings on God to sketches of the family dogs, the commonplace book offered a powerful collective storehouse for the miscellanies and medleys of material that amassed at the center of communal family life.

The unconventional method through which our exhibition materials were acquired proves apropos, given the unusual conditions under which the birth of our interest in commonplace books occurred. In another intrepid motorway adventure: a six hour, 250-mile minibus journey (nobly helmed by Ruth Abbott) with eight complete strangers, our group’s first weekend in Cambridge, was in fact spent in Grasmere, Cumbria working at the Wordsworth Trust. Guided by Ruth and curator Jeff Cowton we spent a full two days nestled in the archive, immersed in manuscripts and the materials which made them. It was a weekend stuffed with stuff. We created Thomas Bewick prints on a nineteenth-century printing press. We learned how to bind books on a sewing frame. Quills were carved and inks were made. Paste was pressed from pulp into paper (with the aid of a craftsman’s deckle and an improvised flattening dance on top of it). In a flurry of high spirits, fumbling with spirit-levels, our exhibition on the Wordsworth family commonplace books was installed.

Like the chain lines and watermarks we spent the days studying in manuscripts, through curatorial collaboration we had impressed a profound mark on each other. The silence, sky and space of the Lakes and our collective academic endeavour had bound us together as tightly as the spines of the nineteenth-century treasures that lay on the archive’s shelves. What was particularly pertinent in creating this exhibition, born into being from deeply felt fellow-feeling from all parties, was that it chronicles and encourages the communal sharing of thought. The addition of our modern commonplace book to the display invites exhibition-goers to participate in shared forms of notetaking, to add their scraps and fragments of experience, their inmost thoughts, their favourite quotations and aid the creation of a beautiful, diverse collective text.

Speaking to other students who have visited Grasmere, at a recent meeting with the Wordsworth Trust at London’s Brigham Young Institute, I further realised the true powerful potential of the material. Through awe-filled eyes, each sentence suffused with a quasi-religious fervour, they recounted the moment they were allowed to see a first edition of Lyrical Ballads and handle Dorothy Wordsworth’s real notebooks. In fact, the Wordsworth Trust’s website proudly proclaims ‘Visit the Wordsworth Museum to see Dorothy’s actual notebooks’. This is something our group reflected upon as we sat around Wordsworth’s ‘actual’ fire in Dove Cottage, reading his poems, souls stirred by the transcendent beauty of breathing life back into words where they were first brought into being. In curating this exhibition, in Grasmere and in Cambridge, and through Ruth Abbott’s phenomenal notebooks course we have relearnt the overwhelming magic of the material, the ability to encounter and interact with the ‘actual’. It is in this kind of engagement with ‘actual’ manuscripts, notebooks and papers that ‘with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things’.

Through our immersion in the material practices from which texts develop, we learnt to cultivate a fresh appreciation for the ways in which literature is embodied and presented. The afterlives of the work we have done with these exhibitions, and the study of notebooks and manuscripts in general, like Wordsworth’s River Duddon, flow on endlessly. From future PhD projects to the reinstallation of the commonplace book exhibition in Cambridge ‘Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;/The Form remains, the Function never dies’. We hope that in this latest reimagining of our display, we encourage others to see the beautiful potential in collective interaction with note-taking practices. In doing so, our work continues ‘to live, and act, and serve the future hour’.

Megan Beech, MPhil Modern and Contemporary Literature

Megan is a performance poet and created these two short poetry films in response to her experiences at the Wordsworth Trust and studying notebooks on Dr Ruth Abbott’s course:

Trust Wordsworth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BAv_9Mg5s

‘O! This is Our Tale Too!’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3UP_obyUTI

Early sea pilots’ books were “books you kept on the bridge of your ship”, according to T.A. Birrell. He writes in his 1986 Panizzi Lectures on English Monarchs and their Books that one of the most intact surviving examples of the genre was owned by Prince Henry, most likely because it was never taken on board to be “soaked with the rain and the spray”. The Prince’s copy of Pierre Garcie’s Le Grand Routier (1607, Rouen) probably owes its acquisition to the navigator Edward Wright, who was the prince’s mathematics tutor and later librarian.

Le Grand Routier was just one in a series of “sea rutters” whose origins can be found in early fifteenth-century manuscripts. ‘Rutter’ was the English name for a book of sailing directions, derived from the French routier, route-book. The equivalent expression in Portuguese was roteiro; in Spanish derrota; in Italian portalano (port-book); in Dutch leeskaart (reading chart); in German, Seebuch (sea-book). Although Portuguese manuscript roteiros existed in the early fifteenth century, they were treated as top-secret documents, and it is likely that the first printed book of sailing directions, an Italian portalano published in Venice by Bernadino Rizo in 1490 derived from a compilation of French manuscript route-books. One example of an early manuscript rutter, copied between 1461 and 1465 by the scribe William Ebesham, survives in BL MS Lansdowne 285, a manuscript better known as Sir John Paston’s “grete booke”.

The route-book written by Pierre Garcie (1430?-1503?), which was later reprinted in the edition owned by Prince Henry, was the first to focus on the physical features of the coast, comprehensively describing the appearance of the coasts and the sea-bed of western France, Spain, and Portugal. Most importantly, Garcie illustrated his route-book with 59 woodcuts, made by Enguilbert de Marnef, which gave seamen an impression of coastal outlines. Birrell describes each woodcut as “a heavy, crude, black silhouette: you stared at the printed page and imprinted the silhouette on your visual memory, and then looked up from the book, into the rain and the fog, trying to find a coastal outline that would fit”.

 These woodcuts were made as early as 1484, but did not change significantly until the seventeenth century. Their crudeness did not detract from their imitation of important coastal features which the seaman in unfamiliar waters could recognise even through miserable weather. As D.W. Waters writes in The Rutters of the Sea (1962), the woodcuts “made prominent with simplicity what the anxious shipmaster sought”, when he perceived a coast “looming up suddenly over a darkening sea, or frowning over spume-swept waters through the gloom of leaden skies”.

Coasts in a 1671 route-book: The safeguard of sailers, or, Great rutter, p. 143, from EEBO.

By the later seventeenth century, printed rutters had established finer detail in illustrating coasts, though their use on board, as reference volumes with illustrations to be compared and held up to unfamiliar coastal views, remained the same. Few printed rutters survive, so Prince Henry’s well-preserved 1607 copy of Le Grand Routier is worth a browse; it has been digitised on Google Books here.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5 pm

4 February–Kate Kennedy (Oxford), ‘Appealing for Release: Ivor Gurney’s ‘mad’ asylum letters’

Venue: Milstein Seminar Room, CUL

18 February–Mina Gorji (Cambridge), ‘Lyric and Ephemera: Rossetti’s Sing-Song’

Venue: S-R24, Faculty of English

3 March–James Mussell (Leeds), ‘Moving Things: Replication, Mediation, and Serialisation in Charles Dickens’s Mugby Junction‘

Venue: S-R24, Faculty of English

We’re very excited about the arrival of our CMT display cases on the first floor of the English Faculty… Our first exhibition, of nineteenth-century commonplace books, is now in situ. Please come along to eat cake, talk material texts and celebrate the new arrivals on Monday, 26 January, from 10.15-11.15 am.

Compilation, Composition, and Commonplace Books

Now in situ in the first-floor of the English Faculty, 9 West Rd.

An exhibition compiled and curated by MPhil students from Ruth Abbott’s ‘Writers’ Notebooks: Literature, Scholarship, and the Organization of Knowledge, 1800-1900’ course.

Commonplace books became popular during the seventeenth century, acting as repositories for aphoristic, literary and philosophical quotations, as well as more clerical forms of note-taking. By the nineteenth century, commonplacing came to be recognised as a valuable aid to literary composition, particularly among autodidact authors and poets like George Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Our exhibit focuses on the use of commonplace books by ordinary middle-class families in the nineteenth century, how they chronicled and contributed to an everyday engagement with literature, theology, poetry and domestic activity. From the Bible to Byron, musings on God to sketches of the family dogs, the commonplace book offered a powerful collective storehouse for the miscellanies and medleys of material that amassed at the center of communal family life in the nineteenth century. Through this exhibition we hope to celebrate this pursuit, and we encourage all exhibition-goers to contribute to our very own commonplace book.

Please come along to eat cake and celebrate the arrival of our beautiful new display cases on the first-floor landing on Monday, 26 January, from 10.15-11.15 am.

Congratulations to CMT member Sarah Howe, whose dazzling poetic collection Loop of Jade is winning prize after prize–yesterday it took the T.S. Eliot, the first debut ever to do so. As a taste of its riches, here is a particularly material-textual poem, which takes its curious title from Borges:

(n) That from a long way off look like flies

More a midge really, flower-pressed: pent
in this hinged spread of my undergrad
Shakespeare. Down the page, a grey smudge
tinged with a rusty penumbra, like blood–
mine or its? Two sheer wings, stilled mid-word,
trace out a glyph in a strange alphabet.

At empathy’s darkening pane we see
our own reflected face: how, if that fly
had a father and mother? On the heath, Lear
assumes all ragged madmen share
ungrateful daughters. The way my father,
In his affable moods, always thinks you
want a gin and tonic too. I wonder
if I should scrape her off with a tissue.

Professor Anthony Grafton, ‘Writing and reading history in Renaissance England: some Cambridge examples’

Tuesday 26 January: ‘John Caius: history as argument’
Wednesday 27 January: ‘Matthew Parker: history as archive’
Thursday 28 January: ‘Adam Winthrop: history as resource’

Talks start at 17:00 in the McCrum Lecture Theatre on Bene’t Street. Free admission.
The final lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Some material/textual history seminars coming up in Cambridge this term:

Modern Cultural History seminar

20 January, 5 pm, Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius
Jessica Hope (University of Cambridge), ‘Picture Magazines and Visual Literacies in Britain
and the U.S. in the 1930s’

Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar

27 January, 5.15 pm, Trinity Hall, Lecture Theatre
Greg Salazar (Selwyn), ‘Ecclesiastical Licensing, Religious Censorship, and the Regulation of Consensus in Early Stuart England’