Hyde Collection Catablog

I’m very pleased to announce a major milestone in our project to digitize our Samuel Johnson correspondence. All 750 Johnson letters in MS Hyde 1 have now been completed and made accessible to the scholarly community. This last section includes a number of important Johnson correspondents, including his stepdaughter Lucy Porter, his friends Henry Thrale and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the publisher William Strahan.

By far the largest single block, however, are the 232 letters from Johnson to Hester Thrale Piozzi, many of which she annotated in the course of producing her book Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Of particular interest is Johnson’s anguished letter on learning of her marriage to Gabriele Piozzi, which opens “If I interpret your letter right, you are ignominiously married, if it is yet undone, let us once talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do you no further mischief.” And yet, written sideways in the margin, an attempt at reconciliation: “I will come down if you permit it.”

As if all this weren’t news enough to gladden the heart of any Johnsonian, I can also announce that we’ve digitized letters to Johnson from several of his most important correspondents: James Boswell (1 letter), Charles Burney (2 letters), David Garrick (1 letter), Mrs. Piozzi (7 letters, including her reply to the Johnson letter quoted above), and Queeney Thrale (1 letter).

Thanks to the breathtaking efficiency of my colleague Alison Harris, the project is ahead of schedule, and we’re hoping to expand it to include several groups of Johnson letters in other Houghton collections, so stayed tuned for further updates.

The progress on the Samuel Johnson correspondence digitization project continues, with another 146 letters to 32 different correspondents now available. This batch includes such notables as Bennet Langton, Edmond Malone, Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Hannah More, and Thomas Percy. But there are two highlights that I am especially eager to point out. One is a group of 34 letters from Johnson to Hester Maria Thrale (later the Viscountess Keith), the daughter of Mrs. Piozzi, and better known as “Queeney”. Johnson’s fond relationship with her was memorably dramatized in Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney.

The other concerns the work of James Macpherson, who claimed to have discovered and translated a number of epic poems by Ossian, a third-century Gaelic bard. Johnson was extremely skeptical of the poems’ authenticity, and said as much in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Macpherson wrote to Johnson’s publisher demanding that this passage be stricken. Johnson wrote to Macpherson refusing to back down:

I received your foolish and impudent note. Whatever insult is offered me I will do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself, the law will do for me. I will not desist from detecting what I think is a cheat, from any fear of the menaces of a Ruffian.

Johnson was right to be skeptical; although Macpherson had drawn upon some genuine sources, the bulk of his “Ossianic” poetry was his own fabrication.

The Hyde Collection contains half of the surviving letters of Samuel Johnson (in fact the definitive edition of Johnson’s correspondence, edited by Bruce Redford and published by Princeton University Press in 1992, was known as “the Hyde Edition”). I’m very pleased to announce that thanks to the hard work of my colleagues Alison Harris and Susan Pyzynski, the first 60 folders (of 132) of the collection have been digitized in high-resolution color scans. This group includes letters from Johnson to Charles Burney, Thomas Cadell, Edward Cave, David Garrick, and John Hawkesworth, as well as the only surviving letter from Johnson to his wife Elizabeth. You’ll also see what surely must be the most valuable dinner invitation in the whole of Houghton Library.

The easiest way to get to the scans is to go to the finding aid for MS Hyde 1, and then look for the “Click for color digital facsimile” link under each letter. I’ll be sure to let you know as progress on the digitization project continues. Email me at overholt@fas.harvard.edu if you have any feedback on using the collection.

Remember, this week is your last chance to see the exhibit. We’ll be closed after Friday until the New Year, when I have to take it down.

The first volume of the Decline and Fall was originally planned for a run of 500 copies, but halfway through printing advance demand was such that this was increased to 1,000. Nevertheless, the entire edition sold out within a fortnight, necessitating a second edition of 1,500 copies. This too sold briskly, and the work was in its fourth edition by 1781, notwithstanding the appearance of a cheaper Dublin piracy. This receipt for the profits from the first two editions of the first volume is signed by Gibbon and the publisher, Thomas Cadell.

Gibbon was just ten years old when his mother died, after which he was largely raised by his aunt, Catherine Porten. Some sense of the bond between them can be gleaned from the gratitude that comes through in his presentation inscription on this volume, despite its 18^th century formality.

As I mentioned last time, Edward Gibbon had a very large personal library, which he kept track of with a then very modern device: the card catalog. Though most of the catalog now resides in the British Library, we’re fortunate enough to have one of his cards which, like the majority of them, is written on the blank back of a playing card, in this case an ace of diamonds. In the exhibit, I’ve propped it up in front of a mirror so that visitors can see both sides of the card.

In 1774, Gibbon was elected to The Club (also known as The Literary Club) a group founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds and consisting initially of Samuel Johnson’s circle of friends, but eventually expanding to include most of the great minds of the period. Gibbon was apparently admitted over the objections of James Boswell, who disliked him intensely. Gibbon later served as president of The Club, and in that capacity sent this letter to the great Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, informing him of his admission.

One more post still to come, hopefully before the exhibit ends!

Ken Gewertz of the Harvard University Gazette has written a very nice article about my Edward Gibbon exhibit which is now available online. Sadly you’ll have to locate a print copy to see the picture of me, or more specifically, my left hand and a bit of my favorite tie.

This week I put up my first exhibit as Assistant Curator: “Edward Gibbon: The Luminous Historian”. Christopher Jones, a professor in the Classics Department is teaching a course this semester on Gibbon, the renowned author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. You’ll have to stop by Houghton to see the full exhibit, which will be up until December 22nd, but I thought I’d share a few highlights here.

Gibbon was a passionate book collector (in fact he once compared his library to a seraglio) but it was more than just a hobby: his tremendous collection of original sources in Roman history made the Decline and Fall possible. Houghton owns several books from Gibbon’s library, but I chose to show his copy of Taylor’s Elements of the Civil Law because it bears not only his simple booklabel, but also his less common armorial bookplate.

Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the scale of Gibbon’s library is this bill from a master cabinet-maker named Bocion, who constructed the library in Gibbon’s house in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is just page one of three, and the total comes to over £700. As we’ll see in a later installment, that’s almost as much as Gibbon was paid for the first volume of the Decline and Fall.

Stay tuned for more from this exhibit.

Bloomsbury auction house is selling this amazing Rowlandson watercolor of an early 19th-century book auction on 10/24. Anybody got $40,000-60,000 to lend me?

Clearly the second-greatest work of literature whose title starts “Boswell’s Life of …”

I moved offices last week, and in the process of cleaning up and putting things away, I found a few interesting odds and ends that show how truly thorough the Hydes were as collectors.

It looks like this calendar will be right again in 2010, but don’t worry, I won’t tear off the pages.

Samuel Johnson was certainly a man who provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, during his life. Apparently he retains that power centuries later:

An art vandal who repeatedly struck at a £1.7m Joshua Reynolds portrait with a hammer has caused more than £10,000 worth of damage to the painting held at the National Portrait Gallery. Mark Paton, 44, from Ilford, east London, yesterday pleaded guilty to damaging the 18th century portrait of Samuel Johnson - one of the gallery’s most prized works - shortly before closing time on August 8.

(Via the Bibliothecary Blog and Philobiblos)

I had the pleasure of touring the Folger Shakespeare Library yesterday while I was in Washington for the ALA Annual Meeting. In addition to its world-famous Shakespeare holdings, it has an outstanding collection relating to Johnson’s lifelong Lichfield friend David Garrick. A very nice online exhibition and sampling of the Folger’s Garrick resources is available here.

A question from a patron led me to look through the iconography collection for the first time. It’s six boxes full of loose prints and photographs of Johnsonian interest, and I suspect I’ll find lots of interesting things to post here. These beer labels caught my eye right away.

After Henry Thrale’s death in 1781, Samuel Johnson (as executor of Henry’s will) and Hester Thrale sold his Anchor Brewery to the newly formed Barclay Perkins & Co., who would operate it until their 1955 merger with Courage Ltd., later Scottish & Newcastle. On a visit to England in 1950, the Hydes visited the Anchor Brewery, and later obtained these Barclay Perkins beer labels which pay tribute to the brewery’s connection with Samuel Johnson.

First of all, I’ve finished cataloging the books, as has Rick Stattler with the manuscripts, so the entirety of the collection is now findable through HOLLIS and OASIS. Secondly, I’ve been hired to stay on permanently as Assistant Curator. I’m grateful to Tom Horrocks, Associate Librarian for Collections and Acting Curator of the Hyde Collection, for giving me this opportunity, and I’m tremendously excited that I’ll get to continue to work with this wonderful collection. Now that I’m done cataloging, there will be fewer updates to the Catablog, but thanks to the Hydes’ generosity, we will continue to acquire new and interesting items for the collection, and when we do, I’ll be telling you about them here.

Although Google’s book digitization program is the one that gets most of the attention (and Harvard’s cooperation) an equally worthy project is also underway at the Internet Archive. They’ve already scanned in an impressive selection of Samuel Johnson books and related works, as well as books by James Boswell and Hester Thrale Piozzi. I especially like the fact that the scans can be either viewed in your browser through their “flip book” interface, or downloaded as a high-resolution, searchable PDFs (look for the entries that have a rotating series of thumbnail images next to them).