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.

Of Vincent Stuckey Lean (with contribution from a satyrical puppy)

Slight change of modus operandi - instead of retiring to the stacks to catalogue in the post-lunch sopor of the early afternoon, I am buzzing over in the post-elevenses rush of caffeine and glucose!

Today's subject: four volumes (in five parts) of proverbs, folklore and superstitions collected by Vincent Stuckey Lean and published posthumously in 1902-4. Now, Mr Lean seems to have been A Good Thing, especially from a librarian's point of view, as he left a bequest of £50,000 to build a new public library for Bristol. However, as a folklorist he doesn't seem to have made his mark: he doesn't appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, nor does he have his own Wikipedia entry - possibly because his method of compilation seems to have been to sit in the British Museum reading through everything from Chaucer onwards, rather than working 'in the field'. He therefore proffers such gems as the following, under 'Oxford' in his section on 'Local Proverbs': 'They hold scholars to be as it were Bl' Oxford men - unnecessary guts that study only to grow hungry', from Thomas May's The life of a satyrical puppy, called Nim, who worrieth all those satyrists he knowes, and barkes at the rest, published in 1657 (it being a joke at the time to refer to Oxford as Blocksford, as in blockhead).

And now, as lunchtime approaches, I too grow hungry - and I've spent so long trying to find out about Mr Lean that I don't have time to catalogue the books!

A bit of heraldic cant

Today's subject: a set of the works of William Paley, D.D., with armorial bookplates of Samuel Tombs. Whose arms are: on a field sable, three tombs. Not the most inspired or wittiest instance, perhaps, but nevertheless an example of "canting arms", in which the the images used refer, in an allusive or punning way, to the name of the bearer. Who Samuel Tombs was, other than probably the inhabitant of The Hollies, Droitwich, I have failed to establish. Much more fruitful, and even more tangential, is investigation of the etymology and ramificating meanings of the word cant, from French chant to thieves' cant to ski boot canting ...

From a Cardinal to Quakers (via Uganda and chocolate)

I have progressed to Theology, and works by John Henry Newman, given by some of Somerville's early benefactors -- Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Henry Nettleship, a classical scholar and Fellow of Lincoln, and J. (John) Theodore Dodd, a lawyer who was particularly concerned with poor relief -- and from the bequest of Alice Burnet, who read Modern Languages (French) at Somerville 1928-1932 and ended up as Warden of Mary Stuart Hall, Makerere College (now University), in Uganda. Next on the shelf is The Soul, her Sorrows and her Aspirations, by Francis William Newman, John Henry's younger brother; this was given to the College by Margery Fry and bears her bookplate, on which is written "From the library of J. S. Fry, 1913" -- presumably Joseph Storrs Fry (1826-1913), her father's elder brother and head of the family chocolate firm from 1886, who was a devout and active Quaker.

The perils of a new system

After a hiatus of several months, due to it being too cold in the depths of winter to sit around cataloguing in the stacks and to the arrival of a bequest of a large number of music scores which, for the benefit of our music students, it seemed more urgent to get catalogued and in circulation, I returned to the stacks and to the exactitudes of antiquarian cataloguing. Today's first subject: a 1697 copy of the French translation of Descartes's Principia philosophiae. Since my last visit, Oxford has changed its Library Management System, which is the software running all its cataloguing, circulation and other library services, to Aleph, which means getting to grips with a whole new way of doing things -- took me about half an hour to work out how to get a superscript o (as in 8º for octavo). After two hours of careful cataloguing, I hit Save -- only to be told that I don't have permission to save antiquarian records! (Fortunately, I can save records locally, onto my computer, even when I can't save them on the Oxford system.) So I've sent off a polite request to the powers-that-be for antiquarian permissions, and live in hopes that I shall be deemed worthy!