Thursday, June 25, 2015

Adventures in Professionalization: Library Research at the Folger

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did some research at the Folger Shakespeare Library this month. In addition to learning many interesting facts and foibles about Elizabeth Inchbald, whose papers are owned by the Folger, I also had my first experience in traveling to a specialized library.
The Folger Shakespeare Library:
from the outside, it looks like an Italian Fascist masterpiece, ha ha.
Well, that is not exactly true…I traveled to the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto while working on my MA thesis on Margaret Atwood. That, however, was eight years ago, and did not involve getting a reader card—or tea and cookies at 3pm every day!

In any case, it has been a long time since I traveled to a library or archive to do specialized research, and my experience at the Folger was extremely positive. Of course, there are always various discomforts that attend such research: uncomfortable chairs and tables too high for typing comfortably on a laptop; only using pencils; freezer-level A/C, etc. On the other hand, the Folger has many aspects specific to itself that made it a particularly pleasant scholarly experience. 

As mentioned before, the Folger readers and staff have the option of tea, coffee and cookies at 3pm every day. Most folks go to the afternoon tea break, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for meeting the other readers at the library. You never know who you will run into! I had the pleasure of meeting, among many others, Jack Lynch from Rutgers, whom I already follow on Twitter but had never had the opportunity of meeting in person, as well as Lara Dodds, from Mississippi State and on whose roundtable I will be speaking at the MLA in January! It’s a small world in academia, as usual.

The beautiful reading room.
Aside from tea and cookies, the Folger reader room is beautiful and inspiring. Part of it looks like the library of an Elizabethan gentleman, complete with lots of dark wood, shelves of hardbound books, and leather-and-wood chairs that look like they are right out of a museum. There are busts of Shakespeare, stained-glass windows, and decorative motifs that would not look out of place in a Gothic church.

The librarians are very helpful, and although the website says that it can take up to 90 minutes to fetch rare materials, I never had to wait more than a half hour. I suppose it helps that I was there in summer and not during the school year. Still, I found the library fairly easy to use, quiet, and pleasant to work in.


My research itself was interesting, too, although I didn’t know how much useful information I would find. Doing archival research is very much a situation in which you don’t know what you might find or how useful it might be. For now, I think I’ve gotten what I need for my book project, but it’s comforting to know that I can return to the Folger whenever I’m in town again and take another look.
Going to the Folger is a great excuse to visit one of my favorite cities!

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Other People's Lives: The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald

"The Muse" herself
I spent last week in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s reading room, doing some research on eighteenth-century actress/playwright/novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, known to her friends as “The Muse.”

Although I discussed her first novel A Simple Story in my dissertation, I had not done a lot of biographical research on Inchbald herself, so my trip to the Folger was enlightening. The Folger holds nearly all of Inchbald’s papers, including her pocketbook diaries, letters, and the many volumes of plays that she wrote remarks for, which established her as one of the first, if not the first female theater critic.

Lucky for me, all of Inchbald’s diaries have been transcribed by Ben P. Roberson and were published by Pickering and Chatto in 2007. I say that is lucky, because Inchbald’s handwriting is atrocious and her diaries were actually just datebooks that she used to keep track of expenditures and write down cryptic notes for herself.

A typical entry reads like this one from Monday, 3 June 1780:

My Cousin here Packing my great Box, she dined and drank tea with me and went with me to the House_Playd in Beggars opera at the hay Market. came home before the Pantomine with Mr. and Mrs. Edwin_Looked beautifully_Mr. Colman told me of some parts_was very happy.

One of her pocketbook diaries.
Photo by Ula Klein courtesy of
the Folger Shakespeare Library.
All of these notes would be squeezed into a tiny box approximately an inch high and three inches wide (see below). Although I used the printed version of her diary for my research, I did get my hands on the actual diaries while I was at the Folger. I’m glad I did, too, because the printed version doesn’t quite give you an idea of what these little pocketbooks looked like (<<<).

In the introduction to the diary, Roberson explains that Inchbald’s handwriting was quite messy, she often diluted her ink to save money, and she was indifferent to issues of capitalization and punctuation. It’s one thing to read those facts, and quite another to page (carefully!) through the diary yourself and admire Inchbald’s cramped handwriting and the life it reflects (and to reflect on the monumental achievement of Roberson as the transcriber of these diaries!).
A small fragment of the diary where Inchbald mentions her role as Bellario in the play Philaster.
It was the first role she played in London, and it was a travesty role (she was dressed "en homme").
Photo by Ula Klein by courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Although I try not to treat the objects left behind by historical persons like saints' relics, it’s hard not to feel a thrill when you hold in your hands the little diary, 200+ years old, that this women from the past used to record her thoughts, feelings, meetings and even the weather. There is something fascinating about seeing how fastidious Inchbald was about recording the weather: “a fine day”; “a Wetesh day”; “a fine but Windy day,” etc. Nearly every day has a record of the weather.

Similarly, nearly every day has a record of how she felt (whether well or poorly or ill) and what she played or saw at the theater that day. Her journal is not just useful for those who would like to study her and her life; it is a brilliant, if undetailed, record of the London theater world of the late eighteenth century.

Of course, the diary is also a wonderful testament to Inchbald’s perseverance as a playwright and writer. The diaries from 1780 and 1781 often include mentions of her writing or working on specific plays. Unfortunately the diary from 1791, the year that A Simple Story was published, does not exist—or at least we don’t have it in a library. It was, however, fascinating to see her mention working on the first half of the novel in the fall of 1780.

I also quite enjoyed the fact that, it seems, it took Inchbald a decade to get through Richardson’s Clarissa(!). She mentions Sunday, March 19, 1780 that she “Read some of Clarissa Harlow in Bed.” It is not until Saturday, June 15, 1793, however, that she records in her diary, “finished reading Clarissa Harlowe.” 

Somehow, that is heartening.