Manuscripts: On Access and Representation

Last Friday (28 January) Abigail Williams was invited on the Radio 4 Today show to talk about her work on the manuscripts of Jonathan Swift’s Letters to Stella. After a brief word on the use of spectrography to analyze cancelled text, Williams was quickly diverted by Evan Davies into pondering the Swift’s unusual relationship with the two young women who feature in the letters and the “little language” he invented to address. The item on the Today programme was certainly, I thought, pleasing: it would help bring manuscripts to the attention. But was it a missed opportunity?

I can imagine it certainly isn’t simple to talk about manuscripts on the radio. It isn’t simple to talk about manuscripts tout court.How do you represent them? How do you engage people and make them understand them? On occasion in walk into the John Ritblat Gallery at the British Library took look at some of their treasures on exhibit: Sidney’s Arcadia, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or the opening section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a manuscript that I know very well.It’s a fantastic sight to see all those wonderful documents there together. Somehow, though, the sight is also bewildering, as I press my nose against the glass of the display cabinet in a vain attempt to get closer to the materials. It is clear that a manuscript is very unlike a painting or a sculpture in an art museum. Every man or woman in the street can walk into the Tate or the National Gallery to see paintings by great artists like Picasso or Rogier van der Weyden; but when they come to the BL asking to see the working copy of Keats’s Hyperion , they are politely turned away.

Libraries and public repositories increasingly turn to the digital medium to facilitate access to the rare and valuable materials in their care. The BL has Turning the Pages, showcasing among others the illustrated fair copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and a notebook by William Blake. The Bodleian Library has recently launched their Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts, which virtually reunites all extant Austen manuscripts held in Oxford, London and New York. And still running at the National Library of Ireland after 4 ½ years is a ground-breaking exhibition on the life and work of W.B. Yeats, where the artefacts on display are supported by digital facsimiles on near-by computer screens which allow the visitor to browse, zoom, consult transcriptions and access further information. The aims and intended audiences (not the mention the underlying technologies that support them) are, however, in each case different.

The Dove Cottage and Wordsworth Museum (who have their own Digital Wordsworth: From Goslar to Grasmere is organizing a conference on “Innovative Interpretation of Manuscripts” at the Jerwood Centreon 3-4 March. The key issue for discussion is (and I quote from the conference brief) that "[t]oo often manuscripts are displayed as flat and passive conveyors of text, supplemented by transcriptions and long explanations used to illustrate points, but not interesting in themselves”. A group of specialists, including Louise Boyle, Jeff Cowton, Luca Crispi, Nat Edwards, Philip Martin, Steve Martin, David McClay, David McKitterick, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Tracy Wilkinson and myself, will be talking about diverse ways manuscripts can be interpreted and made to come to live, how they can be investigated and made to inspire and incite from the stories they have to tell.