Hemingway Delivers First Rand Lecture at Wilson Library

Paintings at the British Institution as discussed in Professor's Hemingway's illustrated lecture.
The British Institution (exterior and interior shown)  discussed in Professor Hemingway’s illustrated lecture.

Wilson Library is pleased to be the venue this week for the UNC Art Department’s 2016 Bettie Allison Rand Lectures, “British Landscape Painting in the Age of Revolution.” On Monday evening, Andrew Hemingway, Professor Emeritus, University College London, delivered the first lecture—”Naturalistic Landscape Painting and the Decline of Deference”—to an audience of eighty. Hemingway discussed naturalistic landscape painting in Britain as it contrasted with the concept of the picturesque and as a product that reflected a scientific approach and changes in the larger economy, social relations, and patronage.

Andrew Hemingway and Daniel Sherman
Professor Hemingway and lecture series organizer Professor Daniel Sherman

It was a nuanced beginning to the topic and challenged simplistic ideas of Romantic expression as well as naturalism. Tonight the series continues with the second of the four lectures, “The Artisanal Worldview in the Painting of John Crome.”

Before the lecture, there was an opening reception, and attendees had the opportunity to see the complementary exhibition in the Saltarelli Exhibit Room, Lyric Impressions: Wordsworth in the Long Nineteenth Century. The catalog for the exhibition, just printed, was available for purchase at the event. It is on sale locally at the Bull’s Head Bookshop and will be distributed far and wide by UNC Press.

Lyric Impressions catalog is now available
The catalog for Lyric Impressions is now available

 

Salute to St. Patrick’s Day

"St. Patrick's Flag Day ..." London: Johnson, Riddle & Co. | Gray A-99
“St. Patrick’s Flag Day…” London: Johnson, Riddle & Co. | Gray A-99

This World War I-era poster by the Irish Women’s Association calls for the recognition of Irish regiments and their prisoners of war during St. Patrick’s Flag Day (an alternate name for the holiday) on March 17th, 1917. An Irish soldier stands in front of a large shamrock emblem, flanked on each side by the names of the four historical provinces of Ireland: Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.

The year 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a major uprising against British rule that took place in various locations throughout Ireland. The event heightened tensions between Britain and Ireland, which would only worsen until the Irish War of Independence erupted just three years later, in January 1919. The poster above was created in the period between the uprising and the beginning of the war.

In the early 20th century, Ireland was governed by home rule, meaning that it was self-governed, but still under the ultimate authority of British rule. The arrangement is clearly demonstrated by RBC’s poster, which was presented by the Irish Women’s Association, an organization based at Kensington Palace in London. This poster represents a short-lived transitional period for Ireland, while also commemorating an important Irish holiday and calling to attention the plight of Irish soldiers.

This poster is part of the Rare Book Collection’s Bowman Gray Collection of World War I and II Graphic Materials, of particular interest as we pass through the centenary of World War I (1914-1918).

Big, Bigger, Biggest: Wordsworth’s Poetical Works

In the preface to his influential 1879 selected edition of Wordsworth, poet and critic Matthew Arnold set about to do two things for Wordsworth’s legacy. Firstly, he hoped to divide the “really first-rate work” that Wordsworth had produced between the years of 1798 and 1808 from the “mass of inferior work” that clogged and obstructed true appreciation of Wordsworth’s genius. His second aim was to divest the arrangement of Wordsworth’s poems from the idiosyncratic “scheme of mental physiology” that Wordsworth had invented for his 1815 Poems, an arrangement that had been adhered to by Wordsworth’s publishers in all subsequent collected editions of his works.

Arnold’s new arrangement grouped poems together by their form—ballads with ballads, odes with odes, etc. Just a few years later, in 1882, editor William Knight would propose yet another arrangement: chronological. Knight’s Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, unlike Arnold’s selective edition, is expansively comprehensive, running to eleven volumes. In the preface to his edition, Knight writes that he adopted chronology to show “the growth of [Wordsworth’s] mind, the progressive development of his imaginative power”—echoing the subtitle of the Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind.

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One of the 10 large paper copies printed on Whatman’s Handmade Paper, showing Knight’s textual footnotes. | PR5820 .E82 1882b v.1 c. 3

Knight also acknowledges just how difficult chronological arrangement is for a poet like Wordsworth, who wrote over the course of many decades and revised frequently. Moreover, Wordsworth’s revisions, claims Knight, were not always for the better, and the discerning reader might prefer an earlier state of the text. To ameliorate these issues, Knight included copious footnotes, mapping out the textual history of each poem. He devoted the last three volumes of the set to a detailed biography, which also included several pieces of writing by Wordsworth that had never before been in print. In short, Knight dressed Wordsworth within a scholarly apparatus.

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Size comparison of the largest, large, and standard issues of Knight’s Poetical Works. | PR5850 .E82 1882b v. 1 c. 3, PR5850 .E82 1882b v. 1 c. 2, PR5850 .E82 v. 1
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PR5850 .E82 1882b v. 1 c. 1
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Frontispiece depicting Wordsworth House, Cockermouth | PR5850 .E82 1882b v. 1 c. 2

Knight’s Poetical Works was issued in three sizes: a “standard” edition standing 23 cm tall, a large paper edition of 27.5 cm, and a largest paper edition of 29 cm. The median large paper edition can additionally be divided into two issues: one with a limitation statement marking it as one of 115 copies “on Large paper,” and a second with a limitation statement specifying one of 25 copies on “Imperial octavo laid paper.” Knight’s edition is further dressed up by a different engraved frontispiece in each volume. In the large and largest paper copies, the frontispieces are printed on fine china paper adhered to heavier stock.

These luxe touches, like Knight’s footnotes and biographical volumes, acknowledge Wordsworth’s position by the 1880s as one of England’s premier poets—a status that, even ten years prior, was not taken for granted.

The Deserted Cottage

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Wiliam Wordsworth, The Deserted Cottage (London and New York: George Routledge & Co., 1859) | PR5858 .A1 1859 c.3

The textual history of Wordsworth’s Excursion, intended as a first installment of his planned magnum opus The Recluse, is astonishingly complicated. The texts that became The Excursion were composed over many years, with portions drafted as early as 1797. These poetic fragments would continue to grow as Wordsworth’s conception of the poem changed over the course of almost twenty years. Furthermore, portions of what would eventually become books 1 and 2, “The Wanderer” and “The Solitary,” had been sometimes referred to under the varying titles “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar.”

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Routledge’s edition contains illustrations by several well-known Victorian book illustrators, including Birket Foster and John Gilbert. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 3

The Excursion first appeared to the public eye in 1814 in a handsome quarto edition, and went through several more editions during his lifetime. Wordsworth continued to revise the poem even after publication, as was his habit throughout his career. “The Wanderer” and “The Solitary” received substantial revisions in 1845, and the newly revised text would see publication, first in a posthumous collected edition by his authorized publisher, Moxon, in 1849 and then in a stand-alone edition in 1857.

 

 

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Routledge issued The Deserted Cottage in several binding styles and colors. The RBC holds seven copies of the work, each in a distinct binding. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 6

 

This already complicated history of revision, before and after publication, is further confused by the appearance in 1859 of a volume titled The Deserted Cottage, produced under the imprint of George Routledge and Company. This curious book represented itself in the preface as the fulfillment of a wish by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to see “the first two books of The Excursion … published separately,” though Wordsworth himself seems never to have used the title The Deserted Cottage in reference to the first two books of The Excursion nor did he ever conceive of bringing them into publication separately from the whole.

 

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This dark but vibrant blue was a popular cloth color for Victorian publisher’s bindings. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 4

Routledge reproduces the text of the 1814 Excursion, which had come out of copyright in 1858. However, that text was issued before the extensive revisions incorporated in Moxon’s 1857 edition of The Excursion. Whether readers noticed or minded the missing revisions in the text is unknown. Packaged in an array of attractive colors of decorative cloth, and additionally offered in leather with gauffered edges and marbled endpapers, The Deserted Cottage was marketed by Routledge like a gift or prize book. The copies in the RBC’s Wordsworth Collection speak to this history: several contain contemporary gift inscriptions.

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This inscription indicates the book was given as a school prize during the Christmas season. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 3