Greek Testaments and German scholars (with a few smells and bells thrown in)

A copy of the seventh edition (1874) of Alford's Greek Testament, rather handsomely bound in full leather with the arms of Christ Church gilt-stamped on both front and back boards (although the binding hasn't lasted too well; several of the boards are loose and the spines are crumbling).

Henry Alford was vicar of Wymeswold, in Leicestershire, from 1835 to 1853 (where he had the church comprehensively restored by A. N. W. Pugin), then moved to London, to the Quebec Chapel.

This is where I go off at a tangent, yet again ... Why the Quebec Chapel? Was there a community of Canadians around there? And if so, wouldn't they have been French Canadians, so why would they have had a chapel presided over by an Anglican minister?

I am (as so often) barking up entirely the wrong tree. Quebec Chapel was a chapel-of-ease to the church of St Marylebone, and so called because it stood in Quebec Street, which was named to commemorate the capture of Quebec by General Wolfe in 1759. The chapel itself was described by Edward Walford in Old and New London as 'a square, ugly edifice ... with no pretensions to ecclesiastical fitness'; it was replaced in 1911 by a building designed by Sir Walter Tapper in all the splendour of Edwardian Gothic, and is now, as the Church of the Annunciation, Marble Arch, a parish church in its own right, and determinedly Anglo-Catholic with full smells and bells. I wonder what Henry Alford, who, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'ably defended evangelicalism against ritualism', would have thought ...

Which brings me back to the Revd Mr Alford. In 1857 he was appointed Dean of Canterbury, in which post he continued until his death in 1871. He was a man of many talents, whose poetry was well-regarded and whose hymns (including the harvest hymn 'Come, ye thankful people, come') are still sung; he also (from the ODNB again) 'composed piano, organ, and vocal music, sang and played, carved in wood, painted in watercolours, and published a book on the Riviera'. He was also a distinguished biblical scholar who recognized the importance of the work being done by contemporary German theologians; his pioneering edition of the New Testament was based on the texts established by German scholars and included detailed and comprehensive linguistic notes - quite unlike previous English-language commentaries, which had been overwhelmingly homiletical.

And how does Somerville come to have a set of volumes on which the arms of Christ Church feature prominently? There are no inscriptions or bookplates of previous owners, or indications that they were a gift to Somerville - the only clue to their history is a pencilled note inside the first volume saying '4 vols 6/6/-'. So I conclude that they were bought by a Christ Church man, who had them rebound in a fine leather binding displaying his college's arms, but then he (or his heirs) sold them.

The healing power of poetry

A now rather fragile copy of John Keble's lectures on poetry (the original Latin text) in two volumes was given to the Library by Henry George Woods, President of Trinity 1887-1897. His wife, Margaret Louisa Woods, was a novelist and poet, well-known in literary circles in her day but now largely forgotten. The lectures are entitled "De poeticae vi medica" -- "On the healing power of poetry" -- and dedicated to William Wordsworth.

From the Koran to Orlando, via toy theatres

George Sale's translation of the Koran was first published in 1734, and was the first scholarly translation of the Koran into English (the only earlier English version was by Alexander Ross, chaplain to Charles I, and was a translation of a French translation). Sale was by profession a solicitor; how he came to be an Arabic scholar is unclear, and a certain amount of his knowledge probably came second-hand from French and Latin sources, but his 'Preliminary discourse' to the Koran, in which he set forth all that was known at that time about the religion of Islam, was significant enough to be translated separately into several European languages.

Somerville's copy was printed in London by Orlando Hodgson, but has no date. St Peter's has a copy which matches it exactly as to title, edition and pagination, also lacking a date but conjectured to be eighteenth century. I think it's very unlikely that Somerville's is eighteenth century, however, as the type of paper used isn't right -- it's wood-pulp rather than rag paper. A search for Orlando Hodgson as publisher in Olis gives a date range of roughly 1820-1840 (and a very distracting selection of titles: Hodgson's British naval songster ; The Whole of the dreadful confessions of Joseph Hunt, relative to the horrid murder of Mr. Weare ... ; Pretty sights in Brighton ; The life of Richard Turpin, a notorious highwayman ; The Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and London railway guide : containing a description of the Birmingham Grand junction and Manchester & Liverpool railways, and of every interesting object on either line ... ); a quick search in Google turns up a webpage which at first sight seems unpromising, as the address is www.toytheatre.net, but it proves to be some interesting nuggets about the man I'm looking for, including his marriage certificate, and the information that he's listed in the London Commercial Directory for 1843 as a bookseller and publisher but couldn't be traced thereafter, the connection with toy theatres being that his printing output included sheets for the scenery and characters to be used in the plays for toy theatres which he also published. So (to get back to the rather different subject of Sale's Koran), having discovered (again thanks to Google) that wood-pulp paper didn't come into commercial use until around the 1840s, I've put down a conjectural date of 1840ish for Somerville's copy.

One further distraction - how common was the name Orlando in early Victorian times? A quick search of the 1841 census throws up 300 results, almost all with very English-looking surnames. Could they be named after the character in Shakespeare's As you like it? I tried Lysander (from A midsummer night's dream, and also a famous Spartan general) but found only two. Was there a famous British Orlando who might account for the name's relative popularity (there were 1,284 Horatios in the 1841 census)? So I tried the Oxford DNB - only two Orlandos, both 'also known as': John Mitchell (1785-1859), army officer and writer, aka Captain Orlando Sabretache, and Louis Stanley Jast (1868-1944), aka Orlando Furioso - and a librarian. How very intriguing ... but this particular librarian is straying rather far from what she is supposed to be doing, which is cataloguing books, and had better get back to it! (Anyone else wanting further distraction is recommended to investigate how the city of Orlando, Florida, got its name ...)

Educating women

Added today: Intellectual education and its influence on the character and happiness of women, by Emily Shirreff (new edition, 1862). Which has some fascinating chapter-titles: 'Education of girls more difficult than that of boys' ; 'Value of even slight acquaintance with mathematics' ; 'Variety of pursuit desirable on many accounts for women' ; 'Promising element in the character of obstinate children' ; 'Girls should be prepared for the trials of delicate health' ; 'Danger of exciting pleasure' ; 'Frivolity not confined to the fashionable' ; 'This system encourages thoughtless marriages'. Which is undoubtedly an unrepresentative selection, and very unfair on a woman who was briefly Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, and an early champion of the view that women were quite capable of being highly educated; she gave a copy of her book on the education of women to Frances Power Cobbe, who in turn gave it to Somerville.