The College’s ‘academic cluster’ theme for 2024/2025 is ‘perception’. A broad topic indeed, but the Library has nonetheless attempted to illuminate some of its aspects in a display of books in the Upper Library. An online version of the show can now be visited on the College’s website, along with several other recent exhibitions.
Ten items, ranging over five centuries, are on display. The oldest is a book printed in Basel in 1470. It is an edition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s Latin encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus rerum, the original text of which provided its translator, John Trevisa, with the source of the first English appearance of the word ‘perception’, meaning a sense of the divine. The newest (in terms of creation if not publication) – 1985 – is an inscribed copy of the neurologist, writer, and Old Member Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. As a concept, ‘perception’ had long-since shifted from the theological to the philosophical, physiological, and psychological, and Sacks’ series of medical case studies explored how our awareness of the world and ourselves is mediated by the brain and mind, often in untrustworthy ways. Much like Bartholomaeus’s encyclopaedia, Sacks’ book was a bestseller.
The Library items on display also explore a range of uses of the term between these two points, including a text that includes another Old Member’s exploration of happiness and the philosophy of perception: Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). A publishing flop rather than bestseller, the promotion of happiness (and punishment by the deprivation of perceptual pleasures) nonetheless profoundly influenced social reformers and Utilitarians of the nineteenth century and later.
Visual pleasure is provided by a recent edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks. The College holds two copies of the first, 1704 edition of Newton’s investigation into the properties of light and the scientific method, but neither offer a rainbow fore-edge or the reflective cover of the edition included in the exhibition. Adlus Huxley, whose Doors of Perception (1954) is also included, might have appreciated staring into the psychedelic patterns produced. Further local interest includes a later edition of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland, printed by Basil Blackwell, Oxford in 1950. While the exhibition can be seen in two dimensions on the web at Perception: an exhibition – The Queen’s College, Oxford, it can at the time of writing still be seen by current and Old Members in three dimensions in the Upper Library. Discussion of what it means to physically perceive the display might be found in the early edition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception (1945).
‘From the Author’: G. A. Simcox and the romantic poets
Felix Taylor, Library Assistant
George Augustus Simcox was a classical scholar, a poet, and Librarian and Fellow of the Queen’s College, elected in 1863 at the age of twenty-two. Years later, his name was in all the newspapers: ‘MR. SIMCOX’S DISAPPEARANCE’, ran the headline in the Manchester Guardian in 1906.[1] Simcox had been reported missing along the coast of Northern Ireland, where he had left his hotel to walk near the Giant’s Causeway and failed to return. His habit of reading while walking, his ‘rambling gait’, and his advanced age made it likely that he had fallen from the cliffs. ‘Dr. M’Grath [sic], Provost of Queen’s, his executor, said the College authorities and his bankers had heard nothing from him since’.[2] Having been presumed dead following weeks of searching, part of his extensive library was given by Magrath to Queen’s. 120 years on, it reveals Simcox’s deep interest in theology, Latin literature, and contemporary romantic poetry.
Born in Kidderminster, Simcox came from a literary family. He was the eldest brother of William Henry and Edith, both distinguished in their own fields. Edith is now best known for her friendship with George Eliot, but her study of early civilizations and involvement in the trade union movement meant that she was a respected intellectual and social reformer. William Henry was a theological scholar, also at Queen’s, and went on to write the first full-length biography of Barnabe Barnes, patron of William Shakespeare. During the 1870s and 80s, all three siblings were writing for some of the foremost literary periodicals of the day, including The Academy (whose editor was a Fellow at St John’s) and The Fortnightly Review.[3]
During his time as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi, Simcox was celebrated for his sharp mind and quick wit. ‘No name was better known in the Oxford of forty years ago than that of G. A. Simcox. He was regarded as the ablest man of his year. Tall, spare, and somewhat stooping … he struck you at once as a remarkable personality. But his oddity was also unmistakable’.[4] After being elected to Queen’s, Simcox began to appear as an unconventional donnish figure, mild-mannered yet eager to contribute in any way that he could to literary society. Simcox’s absent-minded presence at the university is immortalised in Oxford Sketches, a set of caricatures by illustrator Sydney Prior Hall, as a ‘drooping figure with trailing gown … strolling outside of Queen’s College and gazing upon various pebbles, straws, and trifles that lay on the pavement’.[5] These contrasting portraits of Simcox as both a keen academic, once president of the Union, and a whimsical eccentric suggest a marked change in character; it may be that the Fellowship allowed his ‘oddity’ to deepen; perhaps also his developing interest in contemporary poetry was considered unusual by other scholars.
The Assyriologist A. H. Sayce remembers Simcox introducing him to the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was a guest at one of Simcox’s college lunches. Swinburne, then admired in Oxford for his early collections of taboo-breaking verse on pagan themes and same-sex love, had apparently been ‘making himself sick on a surfeit of sweetmeats’ and was unable to eat the lunch Simcox had provided.[6] Certainly Simcox would also have known Walter Pater – Queensman and burgeoning literary critic whose Studies in the Renaissance helped kickstart the aesthetic and decadent movements – and may also have been involved in the founding of the Savile Club, which he joined in 1877.[7] If his library is anything to go by, he may also have known or corresponded with William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – both of whom worked on the murals of the Oxford Union where Simcox was later president.
Simcox was himself a poet, though unappreciated by his peers. Prometheus Unbound: A Tragedy was published in 1867, a retelling of the classical myth in line with Shelley’s interpretation, begun during his first winter at Queen’s. This was followed two years later by Poems and Romances. The collection reflects the influence of Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, particularly the Arthurian poems ‘The Farewell of Ganore’ and ‘Gawain and the Lady of Avalon’. Simcox also admired Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s King Arthur (1851), which was part of his library. He continued to publish individual poems in The Cornhill Magazine and Good Words into the 1870s, but his enthusiasm for composing verse seems to have waned. ‘He was discouraged by the unpopularity of his books, and publishers were shy of them’, noted his friend, W. Robertson Nicoll.[8] Even before the release of Prometheus Unbound, he was doubtful about its success and warned readers of this in the preface: ‘A poem after the antique is likely to be a failure, and such failures are mischievous, because they lead us to exaggerate the difficulty of entering into a literature greater than our own’.[9] He was proud enough of Poems and Romances, however, to get at least one copy bound in expensive enamel covers. While at Oxford he wrote a two-volume History of Latin Literature, which he hoped would make his name, although it ultimately failed to sell. ‘It is to be feared,’ noted the author of his obituary in the Manchester Guardian, ‘that Simcox had developed too strongly the old academic habit of perpetual accumulation, frequent schemes of writing, and constant postponement of the pains and perils of authorship’.[10]
The three books on display in the New Library exhibition case testify to Simcox’s interest in romantic poetry. His first printing of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870) is signed ‘From the Author’, suggesting that Simcox may have corresponded with the Pre-Raphaelite at one time or another. Famously, Poems contains ‘The House of Life’, the intimate sonnet sequence buried with Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 and then retrieved after Rossetti had her coffin disinterred seven years later. Next to this is a volume of poetry by Christina Rossetti, one of several of her books owned, and presumably reviewed, by Simcox. Finally, his library contains a resplendent copy of The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited by the poets W. B. Yeats and Edwin Ellis in the early 1890s, and containing lithographs of Blake’s prints. This three-volume set was limited to 500 copies – further evidence that Simcox maintained an appreciation for art and literature throughout his varied life, mysteriously cut short.
[1] ‘Mr. Simcox’s Disappearance’, The Manchester Guardian (17th July, 1906), p. 14. [2]Ibid. [3] W. Robertson Nicoll, A Bookman’s Letters (England: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), p. 107. [4] ‘George Augustus Simcox [obituary]’, The Manchester Guardian (21st July, 1906), p. 8. [5] ‘George Augustus Simcox’. [6] A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1923), p. 39. [7] Savile Club, The Savile Club, 1868 to 1923 (England: privately printed, 1923), p. 113. [8] Nicoll, p. 106. [9] G. A. Simcox, Prometheus Unbound: A Tragedy (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1867), vii. [10] ‘George Augustus Simcox’.
The Upper Library is such a remarkably baroque space that it is difficult, aesthetically, to stand out. But the College’s statue of Queen Philippa (1305/10-1369), which for many years has stood in the northern window, manages it with aplomb.
It’s a suitably prominent position. In 1341, the College was founded in her honour by her chaplain, Robert d’Eglesfield (c.1295-1349), and Philippa soon provided the new institution with a number of endowments to secure its future. As consort to Edward III (1312-1377), she is remembered as a wise stateswoman, noted – with probably some basis in fact – with petitioning Edward for clemency for the burghers of Calais following it siege in 1347.
The painted wooden effigy, which is roughly life-size, is thought to date from the seventeenth century (the first mention is in the Long Roll for 1658-9, when it was reaffixed to the wall in the College’s original Hall), and is based on Philippa’s tomb in the chapel of the kings in Westminster Abbey. In 1745, Provost Joseph Smith moved the effigy to a niche in his lodgings. In 1778, following a fire, she was removed to a builder’s yard on the site of what is now the Oxford Martin School before somehow making her way to a garden in Godstow. In 1891, she was rediscovered by Henry Willett, who had her restored and returned to the College, where she long has had her home on the great north window of the Upper Library.
Being on display attracts dirt and grime over time, and as part of a conservation project cleaning the shelving and books in the Upper Library this summer, it was time for Queen Philippa to be returned to her former splendour, as well as be given conservation treatment to ensure she can stand proud for another 400 years.
Following initial advice from the Oxford Conservation Consortium, the Library arranged for a conservation assessment and work by the conservator Bianca Madden, who specialises in wall paintings, sculpture, and polychrome or gilded surfaces. Taking on the role of art movers, the College’s estates team carefully wrapped the statue in conservation-grade Tyvek and placed her in a specially-constructed wooden crate, before carefully driving her to Bianca’s studio.
Here, paint analysis showed that the statue was originally brushed with a base layer of lead white with a few particles of red lead. Her red robe was painted with a layer of pure vermillion, and the cloak was painted in a cream colour using a mix of lead white and a small amount of ochre. The samples retain a layer of dirt, suggesting that this decorative scheme was in place for quite some time. At some point, this was painted over with a pale grey (a mix of lead white and charcoal black), and later still painted in pure lead white with a glaze in oil with some carbon black. Provost J. R. Magrath records the statue as being painted blue when it was at Godstow, so perhaps this is the layer of pale grey, and then a layer of Willett’s restoration. Paint analysis did not provide a definite date for the Philippa, but nothing was found to be inconsistent with a seventeenth-century paint scheme.
After this analysis, the conservation work removed the layers of surface and ingrained dirt (including bird lime), revealing the effigy’s shadows and highlights, which had been reversed by dirt. The paint layer was stabilised, and old woodworm holes were repaired, along with cracks in some of the woodwork, using lime-based fine surface filler and conservation acrylic resin.
Following this painstaking work (which was thoroughly documented), the much cleaner Philippa was again wrapped in Tyvek and bubble wrap, secured inside her special crate, and then carefully returned to pride of place in the Upper Library for a final touch up. See how she looks next time you visit the Upper Library.
Each year, we ask our Library staff to recommend some summer reading. A wonderfully eclectic and fascinating list always emerges, so prepare to dip your toes into something special.
Sarah Arkle, Deputy Librarian
I declared 2024 ‘my year of rest and re-reading’ and, having managed to barely do either, my first recommendation this summer is not a re-read, but the very newly released Private Rites by Julia Armfield. Set in a distant future where it never stops raining, it may not instantly scream beach read, however, it is a highly anticipated summer read, following on from the success of Armfield’s excellent first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea.
Private Rites concerns three sisters navigating grief, sisterhood, queerness and the end of the world. The novel considers the ways that we keep going in the face of both personal tragedy and global catastrophe, and does so without being cynical or pessimistic. You can find all three of Armfield’s books in our general collection at Gen Arm.
Second – perhaps more seasonally appropriate – is Lucie McKnight Hardy’s Water Shall Refuse Them. This actually was a recent re-read, I first read it in 2019 when it was originally released, and gifted it to several people that year for Christmas and birthdays. Set over a summer in rural Wales during the heatwave of 1976, this folk-horror infused coming of age novel is sticky and unsettling and hard to put down – or forget.
Lastly, a book I have read this year that has really stayed with me is Nicola Barker’s Darkmans. It is a serious tome, 838 pages long – an absolute unit of a book, primarily about the ghost of a medieval jester haunting contemporary Kent. It is weird, it is long, but it is rewarding – the characters are richly imagined and Barker does some interesting, funny and playful things with language throughout. I am certain our copy sits – as yet unborrowed – at Gen Bar in the general collection on the ground floor, awaiting a reader in need of a challenge (and with a long holiday on the cards).
Matt Shaw, Librarian
Last year was a big year for the First Folio (its 400th anniversary), and this did not pass unnoticed by publishers. As a result, I’m still catching up with some titles published in 2023. These include Chris Laoutaris’ Shakespeare’s Book: the intertwined lives behind the first folio, which puts a human face on finely-researched book history, and, in particular, Greg Doran’s My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey through the First Folio, which combines memoir, brilliant close-reading of texts, theatrical insights (and anecdotes), and travel writing, within the wider, inescapable frame of the grief of the loss of his husband, Antony Sher.
More traditional beach fare might be provided by Sue Grafton’s ‘Alphabet Series’ of detective novels, which I am very late to discover. Dive in, as I did recently, with C is for Corpse and be reminded of how gumshoes used to rely on microfilmed newspapers and answering machines. Kinsey Millhone’s confidence when it matters might be contrasted with Walter Stackhouse’s self-deception in Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, if you’ve returned to her following the Netflix adaptation of the first Tom Ripley novel and are exploring some of the lesser-known works of that most misanthropic of authors. Both novels also feature beach-based denouements, to follow the summery theme. The Blunderer also includes a useful warning to a librarian, perhaps, about the perils of what might be found in rare book shops.
Felix Taylor, Library Assistant
This summer, read something by AS Byatt, the Booker-prize winning author who passed away late last year. Looking beyond her more famous Victorian literary-detective novel Possession, Byatt’s linked series of novels known informally as ‘the Quartet’ are set in mid-20th century England and trace the fortunes of Frederica Potter and her family, their loves, deaths, and intellectual lives. The first book The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is a coronation novel, drawing parallels between the worlds of the two Elizabeths, while the fourth – A Whistling Woman (2002) – strays into the sixties’ student revolts and new age thinking (with plenty of Tolkien references). As an accompanying piece I’d also recommend reading Patricia Lockwood’s recent article on Byatt’s work in the London Review of Books.
Next, I’ll hold my breath and recommend the newest doorstopper by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgard, The Wolves of Eternity. Famous for his sprawling six-volume book based on his own life, Wolves reshashes some old ground, taking the reader into the world of a despondent young man named Syvert and his job at a local funeral home. He discovers old love letters from his dead father to a woman in Russia. Set several decades later, the second half of the book is narrated by Syvert’s newly-discovered half-sister, a biology professor Alevtina. Syvert is coming to Russia to visit, with questions about his dad. Told in Knausgard’s detailed and mundane (yet strangely riveting!) style, Wolves touches on themes of death, and what our past tells us about who we are. This is the second in a very loose trilogy, the third is due at the end of this year.
Lauren Ward, Assistant Librarian
For 2024 I decided to challenge myself to read more long books, more translated books, and more non-fiction. In the spirit of these goals, here’s one of each that I have enjoyed so far.
Samantha Shannon wrote her first novel, The Bone Season, while a student at Oxford. It, along with the other books in the series, have recently been re-released with new cover designs and substantial revisions, so I decided to give it a try. The novel is largely set in a dystopian future – 2059 to be precise – ruled by the mysterious entity of Scion. Clairvoyance is persecuted and those with ‘voyant’ gifts are forced into the shadowy underworld of Scion’s citadels. Paige Mahoney is one such voyant, happily scraping by until she’s captured and transported to a city that’s supposed to have been lost to time: Oxford. The alternative Oxford setting, shrouded in darkness and mist, is a lot of fun to read if you know the city well (Queen’s even features a couple of times), Paige is a spiky, fun main character, and there’s a lot of plot and big worldbuilding ideas to keep you entertained over all 560 pages.
At the opposite end of the page-count spectrum is Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the original French. Aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway Aliocha, a desperate Russian conscript, hopes a chance encounter with a French woman will offer him a way to flee. Homesick Heléne is also on the run – absconding from the house she shares in Western Siberia with her Russian lover so she can return to France. It’s a breathless, propulsive novella full of tension. Neither character speaks the other’s language and yet they must work together to evade train guards and sergeants, counting down the hours until the train arrives in Vladivostok where they can disembark to freedom. Perhaps one to enjoy in one sitting on a long-ish train journey?
Finally, for non-fiction I recommend Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. It uses Klein’s decade-long problem with being confused with Naomi Wolf, a woman with whom she shares a name and little else, as a jumping off point to explore what she terms the ‘mirror world’ that Wolf and others inhabit. Klein explores how the shockwaves of the pandemic changed the online misinformation landscape, how politics became so warped, and how unstable identity is in a time where we each curate our own digital doppelgangers. It’s a varied and clarifying read covering a huge amount, and if you don’t trust my recommendation, it’s also just won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. We recently added this one to the collection but it’s already been borrowed; when it returns you can find it under Gen Kle.
After liaising with colleagues at UCL Special Collections , the College Library recently acquired a small, bound manuscript composed by Jeremy Bentham during his time as student at the College in the 1760s. Such records of student life are rare; the association with Bentham no doubt ensured its survival (the item was at one time owned by the cartoonist John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash). As such it not only provides a picture of life in College, containing sketches and caricatures of contemporary figures, but, as Dr Philip Schofield, General Editor of Bentham’s Collected Works, writes in this guest post, provides hints about his future thought. The manuscript has been digitised and will appear on the College’s section of Digital Bodleian in due course.
Professor Philip Schofield, UCL
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the future utilitarian philosopher and reformer, was a mere 12 years old when he was entered at Queen’s College on 28 June 1760 and took up residence there in October 1760. It was not long before he had to move rooms because his gloomy chamber (despite being redecorated) overlooked a church-yard, which played on his fear of ghosts and brought on nightmares. He was placed under the tutorship of Jacob Jefferson (b. c. 1721, d. 1782), who, according to the memoir of Bentham prepared by his literary executor John Bowring, was ‘a morose and gloomy personage, sour and repulsive—a sort of Protestant monk’, whose ‘only anxiety about his pupil was, to prevent his having any amusement’. The only redeeming feature of Jefferson’s tutorship seems to have been the fact that he taught Bentham logic. The standard textbook of the time was the Logicæ artis compendium of Robert Sanderson (1587–1663), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford 1642–8, Bishop of Lincoln 1660–3, which had first been published in 1618. Bentham had the most recent edition of Saunderson (who he always referred to as Saunderson), which was that of 1741. It would remain the standard text-book at Oxford until the end of the eighteenth century.
The manuscript recently acquired by Queen’s College is clearly related to Bentham’s study of the logic of Sanderson. On the first page of the document, under Bentham’s name (in his hand), he has written ‘Conjugate p. 145’, which corresponds to Sanderson’s chapter De locis à Conjugatis & Notatione. The date ‘Febry 16 1761’ is also significant, in that it was the date that, according to a letter Bentham wrote to his father Jeremiah on the previous day, he was to begin his study of logic with four fellow students.
Jeremy Bentham’s notebook front cover, recently acquired by the Queen’s College Library
Bentham goes on to draw the Arbor Porphyriana or Porphyrian tree, derived from the Isagoge of Porphyry (234–c. 305), scholar and philosopher, which was read as an introduction to the Organon of Aristotle. Bentham reproduced the same diagram 50 years later in a table to Chrestomathia (published in 1817), his major work on education, though he did not there include the names of the individuals. Indeed, it was in the mid-1810s that Bentham wrote his most detailed work on logic, which he structured as a response to the Aristotelian tradition of logic that he had been taught at Oxford. Needless to say, Bentham’s conception of logic was radically different to Aristotle’s, but in a manuscript written in August 1814 he acknowledged his debt to his encounter with Sanderson’s Logicæ artis compendium: ‘Of the notions therein delivered, he [i.e. Bentham himself] found continually applicable, and applicable with advantage to ordinary practice. These treasured themselves up in his mind.’
A page from Bentham’s manuscript showing the Porphyrian tree
As for the various caricatures in the document, one wonders whether they represent Bentham’s tutor Jacob Jefferson. There are a number of doodles in Bentham’s later manuscripts and so it is not surprising that, perhaps in moments of boredom, he should produce these sketches. That there were moments of boredom should also be no surprise. No doubt the young, brilliant Bentham, sped through Sanderson much more quickly than his classmates. But Jefferson was not, in Bentham’s view, the most inspiring of teachers. As Bowring’s memoir again informs us, ‘Bentham thought that his time was wasted without instruction. Jefferson gave or professed to give, what he called lectures on geography. This was one of his lectures—“Where is Constantinople?” and then he touched the part of the map, where Constantinople is, with a wand.’ Nevertheless, Bentham was prepared to admit to Bowring that ‘Jefferson gave him, out of Sanderson’s Logic, some materials for correct reasoning’.
Interior page of Bentham’s manuscript showing his handwritten name and a self caricature
Bentham eventually took his degree in 1764. He was reluctant to do so because it entailed subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. We still do not understand why the timid young boy who had entered Queen’s College in 1760 had become a religious sceptic by the time he was aged 16 and had to wrestle with his conscience in order to take his degree. Some part of that development, however, must plausibly be related to his study of logic, and this document takes us intriguingly right back to that formative period of the philosopher’s life.
Professor Philip Schofield is General Editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, being prepared by the Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, University College London.
‘His name […] had become an empty sound’: Henry Markheim, “Markheim”, and Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr Matthew Shaw, Librarian
In 1880, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson contacted the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette about the title of a short story on which he was working: ‘Probably “Markheim” is as good a name as I shall find for the story, in case you are in haste to use it’. Despite the doubts, the eponymous title stuck, and when the tale was subsequently published in Unwin’s Christmas Annual in 1885 (after the story was pulled from the Gazette for being too short and replaced by The Body Snatcher), the tale appeared under that designation.
The short story Markheim has been read as thematic precursor to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and one that draws on Stevenson’s contemporary reading of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which Stevenson had read in French in 1884). The stark eponymous title has also attracted comment, raising questions about names and identity.[1] The short story’s eponymous protagonist, a petty thief who is also a ‘neurotic intellectual’, [2] has entered an antique shop on Christmas Day with some things to sell. When he is accused of having stolen the items, he kills the nameless shopkeeper in a fit of rage. The remainder of the gothic tale explores Markheim’s psychological state, as he descends further into guilt-ridden despair and grief during a search for a key to the shopkeeper’s safe. A stranger appears, whom Markheim believes is the devil. After a period of mental struggle, Markheim – with relief – summons the police on himself. The text of the story, which is now held at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which was written during one of Stevenson’s bouts of illness at Bournemouth, creates a fevered intensity for the reader.[3] Well received by the press, and like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the work has influenced others’ imaginations over the years. A theatrical adaption was produced at The Lyric, starring Harry B. Irving, followed by a Carnegie-winning opera by Philip Napier Miles in 1919, with other operas in 1966 and 2015, several radio dramatizations (including Laurence Olivier as Markheim in a broadcast of a Theatre Royal production and a reading by Hugh Bonneville in 2007), and a teleplay including a BBC Scotland production in 1974, starring Derek Jacobi. As for the text, Stevenson included it in the Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887).[4]
Was the title ‘as good a name’ as Stevenson could find? It certainly frames the story in a particular way, placing this intense sketch of a character front and centre. Nomenclature, or namelessness, informs something of the tale. The – nameless – antiques dealer refuses to reveal the name of the owner of a hand-glass: ‘I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.’ [5] The moment of frantic murder is framed by the ‘empty sound’ of the name of the victim:
Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed.
[6] ‘Markheim’, p. 90
Might more be said of it? Was there an origin for ‘Markheim’, a relatively unusual name during this period in Victorian Britain, with Germanic origins in Poland. ‘Mark’’s meanings include ‘essence’, and ‘heim’ suggests ‘home’; after all, Markheim ‘longed to be home, girt in by walls’. [7] A translation, it is suggested, might be ‘seat of the soul.’ There is, though, also a possible and intriguing link between the story and The Queen’s College. Markheim, Fellow in French, is remembered today through our prize in French (funded by successful Canadian investments – something possibly alluded to in the text). Born in 1845 in Smyrna, Henry William Gegg Markheim studied at University College, where he took a first in Literae Humaniores in 1867. He became a Fellow of Queen’s on 24 October 1871. In 1906, he died at the age of 61 of heart failure. Like Stevenson, he too suffered with ill-health.
Markheim possessed something of a career beyond the academy. His facility in French allowed him to serve as translator on the Alabama Claims arbitration process in Geneva, which famously resolved the dispute between Britain and the United States caused by the sinking of the U.S.S. Alabama by the British-built-and-supplied Confederate cruiser (along with other vessels, which the U.S. accused Britain of ‘persistent absence of real neutrality’ in contradiction to International and British domestic law). In 1872, the Foreign Office retained Markheim, who had recently graduated, as Sir Alexander Cockburn’s translator and clerk; Markheim worked hard on the case on occasion starting work at six in the morning, perhaps necessitated by Cockburn’s lack of abilities. [8] Markheim’s translation work continued to place him in court and in another of the Victorian Age’s most famous trials, that of the Titchborne case, in which an identity was claimed by another: in 1874, Markheim provided a translation of certain letters written by Roger Titchborne in French before his disappearance. Markheim had at least one further encounter with the law, when some of his luggage was stolen at Paddington Station: the theft made several of the newspapers.
As well as his work as a Fellow, he took on the role of inspector of schools and examined for the Civil Service Commission and other boards. Markheim also had something of a public profile. He had been in Paris during the Commune (along with his family and ill-tempered Persian cat), where he observed the war at first hand, leading to the publication of the popular anonymous account Inside the Paris Siege by an Oxford Graduate in 1871– still often cited today. The copy held by the College has the name of the poet and writer Sir Edwin Arnold misattributed by an earlier cataloguer. Markheim’s talks to schools were also published. [9]
Markheim’s Inside Paris, wrongly attributed here to Arnold
The Paddington train is a clue to Markheim’s London life, away from Oxford. Like many men of his age, he was a member of a London club in the 1870s: Markheim’s was the Savile Club, a new and somewhat bohemian club connected to the arts, the sciences, journalism, and the stage. [10] At least two other Queen’s Fellows were members: George Simcox and A. H. Sayce, who kept up his membership until ‘it migrated into the fashionable purlieus of Piccadilly’. [11] In 1874, the same year that Markheim joined, Sidney Colvin, the Fitzwilliam Museum director and, from 1884, keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, proposed Stevenson’s membership to the fashionable club. [12] It, and the circle that gathered there, became a key site of sociability (and literary gestation) for Stevenson. Markheim joined the club that same year, and soon became a prominent Savile character. [13]
In October of that year, in a letter to his mother, composed at a Euston Station hotel (Stevenson appeared to enjoy evoking his clubland life to her), Stevenson refers to his great new friend, an Oxford don:
I was sucking up this evening at the Savile, to my present ideal of all that is good and great in humanity – one Markheim, a Pole with an Irish mother; at the bar and an Oxford Don; and a man, as I say, whom I adore – for the immediate present’
[14] Robert Louis Stevenson to his mother, 16 October 1874, Ernest Mehew, ed., Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Yale University Press, 2001 p. 94.
Markheim and Stevenson’s paths had clearly crossed. Markheim clearly made an impression on Stevenson, something that suggests a powerful personality. A later letter to Stevenson’s mother (5 December 1874) is mentioned at the head of a list of the excellent company at the club that night, something of a tribute to Markheim’s vitality. [15]
Might this connection have proved the basis for the title of Stevenson’s story, even if only in terms of a name that Stevenson might remember from his youthful expeditions to London? Searches of genealogical websites suggest it was a relatively rare, and hence distinctive, surname. Is it possible to imagine some form of joke or even bet emerging from the Club? After these early associations, there are no further mentions in the letters, so Markheim appears to be a character Stevenson only knew in the context of the Savile Club, and had no further obligation of friendship. The distinctive name may have been drawn from his subconscious as during the fevered period of composition, and its slightly foreign nature – something Markheim emphasises in his maternal letter – may also have added to that character’s sense of not quite fitting in. Perhaps there is something further, too, in this tale of a double character. Markheim, the protagonist, although a thief in terms of his actions, is clearly something of an intellectual. Might Stevenson have borrowed Markheim’s donnishness (in the sense of intellectual questioning) as well as his name for his tortured character? In contrast to Stevenson’s character, the genuine Markheim appears to be a much more solid, and comfortable in his own skin. The endowment of the College’s Markheim translation prize in French is a reminder of the Fellow’s success in investing, unlike the Markheim in the antique shop: (‘“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; ‘and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”’ (Markheim, p. 85)). It is also worth noting that Stevenson did not change the name during the path to publication, despite the opportunity to do so. It was clearly just right.
The loan of Markheim’s name has been suggested at least once before: in The Times’ 1914 report of the sale of Stevenson’s letters as a young man at Sotheby’s, which included the letter to his mother quoted above. The newspaper confidently asserts, he refers to ‘a man named Markheim, whose name he has given to one of his most powerful short stories’. [16] Finally, there is another possible case example of Stevenson’s borrowing of names of real people – or at least of the desire to draw on them in his creative process. Walter Jekyll, the brother of the gardener, Gertrude, knew Stevenson as a priest in Bournemouth, before he headed to Jamaica. According to Jekyll’s brother Herbert, he may have lent his name to the fictional Dr Jekyll and left England not just to become a painter, but to avoid the comparison between the character and his sexuality. [17] Markheim, as far as we know, does not seem to have been troubled by any link between him and the Christmas antique shop visitor.
[1] For example, Oliver Mark Tearle, ‘Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880-1914’, DPhil thesis, Loughborough University, 2010. On Robert Louis Stevenson, see Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: a biography, Harper Collins, 2005. The author would like to thank Prof. Harman for her comments on this post.
[2] Tom Hubbard, Seeking Dr Hyde: Studies in Robert Louis Stevenson, P. Lang, 1995, p. 15.
[3] On Stevenson in Bournemouth, see www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth and edrls.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/stevensons-bournemouth.
[4] For photographs of the 1906 production at The Lyric with Harry B. Irving, see The Sketch, 25 April 1906, pp. 37, 46. Irving ended his theatrical career after the First World War, and after studying law, wrote a series of studies of notorious criminals.
[5] ‘Markheim’, in Roger Luckhurst, ed., Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008, p. 86.
[7] ‘Markheim’, p. 194, 92.
[8] Richard Brent (2022) ‘The Alabama Claims Tribunal: The British Perspective’, The International History Review, 44:1,21-58; see note 81.
[9] Sayce, Reminiscences, p. 63.
[10] Savile Club, Rules and List of Members, July 1874.
[11] Sayce, Reminiscences, 1921, p.124. Sayce and Stevenson were known to one another from Edinburgh, where Stevenson – ‘lanky, young, and as yet unknown to fame’ – acted as a tour guide thanks to a mutual friend; despite this, Sayce ‘never met him again’. Sayce, Reminiscences, p. 101. Sayce joined the club in 1878; George Augustus Simcox, classicist, poet and another Queen’s Fellow, became a member in 1877 (Savile Club, The Savile Club, 1868 to 1923, p. 113.
[12] The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Swanson Edition, 2020, p. 11. On Stevenson’s somewhat complicated relationship with the Savile Club, and its social hierarchies, see Robert-Louis Abrahamson, ‘“Here Gather Daily Those Young Eaglets of Glory”: Robert Louis Stevenson, the Savile Club and the Suicide Club’. Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, no. 81 Printemps (6 September 2015). https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.1964. Sidney Colvin, Memories & Notes of Persons & Places, 1852-1912. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921, p. 119.
[13] Savile Club, Rules and List of Members, July 1874.
[15] I am grateful to Claire Harman for these readings of the impression Markheim may have made in the Club.
[16] ‘Stevenson in Youth: outlook on life at twenty-three’, The Times, 30 June 1914.
[17] Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, LSU Press, 1996, p. 30. On McKay as Jekyll’s protégé, and the parallels between Jekyll and Jekyll, see Rhonda Cobham, ‘Jekyll and Claude: the erotics of patronage in Claude McKay’s “Banana Bottom”’, Caribbean Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1992), pp. 55–78.
‘The Quirks of Blazoning Pens’: London, Shakespeare, and Coats of Arms
Dr Matthew Shaw, Librarian
In their striking gold, crimson, and azure ceremonial tabards, heralds have processed across our TV screens on several occasions in recent months, acting as colourful, even theatrical, reminders of the ancient origins of our constitutional arrangements. Their origins lie in the organisation of medieval tournaments: acting as a kind of umpire, arranging the contests and keeping a tally of the score. As such, they became expert in the arms and crests worn by the knights participating in these events, and became recognised authorities in heraldry and the organising of ceremonial events.
In 1484, Richard III gave the royal heralds a charter of incorporation along with a house by the Thames in the City of London. This College of Arms granted new coats of arms and offered advice on state ceremonies, genealogy, and other matters of precedence. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries heraldic visitations dispatched them to the corners of the kingdom to establish the status and genealogies of noble families and record and check coats of arms, creating a mass of paper records. Many of these manuscripts are held by the College of Arms, but a significant number of important heraldic volumes and rolls initially gathered by antiquarians are now held by Queen’s College Library.
Queen’s MS 72. Image: The Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. CC-BY.
In May 2023, the College is hosting an Old Members’ event at Stationers’ Hall, London. It will include a panel comprised of English Literature Fellows, the College Librarian, and the actor Alfie Enoch (an Old Member), discussing Shakespeare in this, the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (registered at Stationers’ Hall in November 1623; the College possesses copies of the first four editions of the folio).
Shakespeare understood the importance of heraldry, and how his countrymen and women would read it. Heraldry had currency both as metaphor and a useful signifier of power and social status, as well as its fragility (and perhaps pomposity). It is significant, for example, that when Henry Bolingbroke sentenced the king’s councillors Sir John Bushy and Sir Henry Green to death in the play Richard II, ‘unfold[ed] some causes’, he describes how
You have… From my own windows torn my household coat, Razed out my impress, leaving me no sign, Save men’s opinions and my living blood, To show the world I am a gentleman (Richard II, Act III, Scene 1)
Bolingbroke’s loss of his coat of arms in his banishment is used to underscore the shame inflicted upon him. Elsewhere, the anonymous Edward III, at least in part the work of William Shakespeare, is distinguished by its use of heraldry, helping to signal the play’s concern for lineage (such as in the heraldic riddle, ‘the time will shortly come/Whenas a lion rousèd in the West/Shall carry hence the fleur‐de‐lis of France’ (Edward III, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 41–3)). The play is full of the visual language of these devices ‘of antique heraldry’, their specificity and richness suggesting that Shakespeare may have been familiar with medieval chronicles illuminated depictions of battlefields:
and Straight trees of gold, the pendants, leaves, And their device of antique heraldry,[1] Quartered in colours seeming sundry fruits, Makes it the orchard of the Hesperides. (Edward III, Act 4, Scene 4, lines 25–9)
Heralds await the Queen in Prince’s Chamber before leading the procession into the House of Lords, 2012. Image: UK Parliament. CC-BY-NC 2.0. www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament/7165974720.
Elsewhere, in Hamlet, the prince signifies the cruelty of Pyrrhus, his ‘dread and black complexion smear’d/With heraldry more dismal… horridly tricked/
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, son’ (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II). While in Othello, Cassio reaches for the metaphor of heraldry (blazon) to describe the beauty of Desdemona, ‘One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens’ (Othello, Act II, Scene 1, line 69).
Two of the College’s heraldic manuscripts are brought to mind as we consider Shakespeare and heraldry. The first is the earliest record of the coat of arms for the City of London, drawn in 1568 by Robert Cooke (d. 1593), the Clarenceux King of Arms, and now resplendent in Queen’s MS 72. Thanks to the generosity of the College of Arms, it has been digitised, and can be viewed online via the Digital Bodleian (where it can be viewed alongside a growing number of other treasures from the College Library). Noted for the prodigious number of arms that he granted, and its resultant lucrative trade in fees, his tenure was a troubled one, marked by a dispute between him and the Garter King of Arms about the rights to visitations throughout England. For his part, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes, Cooke argued that the ‘decaying nobility possibly envied men of mean birth whose virtue none the less outshone the older aristocracy’s.’[2]
The arms of [the] Citie of London, Queen’s MS 72. Image: The Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. CC-BY.
The other coat of arms is a reminder not of the city with which Shakespeare is so closely associated, but of his family – and the importance that a mark of gentility could play in Early Modern England. While gunpowder and other military technologies had made the knight’s shield and armour largely redundant, Elizabethan England displayed a fascination with the ‘colourful paraphernalia of heraldry’. Such concerns might also be related to the obsession with patriarchal family structures that some historians have argued characterised the period.[3] Shakespeare’s father, John, first attempted to obtain a coat of arms in 1575 to reflect his status in Stratford-on-Avon, but his financial situation prevented him from doing so. Following his commercial success, William Shakespeare successfully renewed the efforts in 1596 with the Garter King of Arms, and so consolidating his own importance as he did. As Heather Wolfe, the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has shown, ‘while Shakespeare was obtaining the arms on behalf of his father, it was really for his own status.’ A coat of arms was a sure signifier of success. As seen below, Queen’s is fortunate to hold a late-seventeenth century copy of this grant, with the text almost identical to the earlier, second draft.[4]
John Shakespeare’s coat of arms. Queen’s MS 137, f. 54r. Image: The Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. CC-BY.
Such social climbing could of course backfire. Ben Johnson, Shakespeare’s contemporary and literary competitor, mocked the coat of arms in his play, Every Man Out of His Humour (1598; registered at Stationers’ Hall in 1600), in which the ‘vain-glorious knight’ Puntarvolo suggests the clownish Sogliardo’s new arms should have the motto ‘Not Without Mustard’. Shakespeare’s arms, which as we see here are Colman-bright, and usually has the motto Non Sanz Droict (‘Not Without Right’).[5] In a more poetic mode, Cassio’s description of Desdemona above (‘One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens’), draws on fairly novel use for Shakespeare’s time of blazon in English, suggesting both ‘description in heraldic language’ as well as to ‘describe fitly’ (OED), placing such ‘devices of antique heraldry’ in the shade of Othello’s doomed wife’s beauty.
Arms continued to be used in the Shakespeare family, until his last direct descendent, Elizabeth Barnard, died in 1670. A fragment of the Shakespeare arms can just be seen in the wax seal on her will, serving as a mark of status for this one last occasion.[5]
References
[1] Anny Crunelle Vanrigh, ‘Illuminations, Heraldry and King Edward III’, Word and Image, no. 3 (2009), pp. 215-231. [2] J. F. R. Day, ‘Cooke, Robert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6148 [3] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry: Studies in the Decline and Transformation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, N.C., 1960), p. 17, quoted in Nancy J. Vickers, ‘This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face’, Poetics Today 6, no. 1/2 (1985), p. 172. [4] See also shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/john-shakespeare-s-grant-arms. [5] Jennifer Schuessler, ‘Shakespeare: Actor, Playwright. Social Climber,’ New York Times, 29 June 2016. The will can be seen at shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/file/details/693.
Sometime in the early 1980s, a ZX Spectrum computer arrived on our street. We gathered round the TV, to which the rubbery machine had been connected, and my friend Andrew typed ‘I want you to write a Space Invaders game’. Not much happened. Not long after, our own Spectrum arrived, and I made my way through the BASIC programming guide and copied the instructions in computer magazines, and laboriously, line by line, instruction by instruction, I had my own Space Invaders game. It wasn’t great, and it had been the work of a copyist rather than my own intelligence, but I think I learned something.
Last week I typed a few words into my iPhone, which was running the Bing Chat app, a version (3.5?) of OpenAI’s Chat GPT – a Large Language Model artificial intelligence: ‘code a space invaders game in Javascript’. Within seconds, the code appeared, which I could then paste into my laptop to run. Andrew would had been impressed. And so was I, to be honest, even though I had some sense of the mechanics behind the scenes – a very sketchy sense, it is true, but at least some concept of the statistics and mathematical models at work, as well as the racks of GPUs whirring away somewhere around the world. I tried a few tweaks. ‘Make the aliens politicians’ was meet with the prim response that one shouldn’t make fun of politicians. Varieties of fruit were allowed. It updated the code.
Something closer to library work next. The request ‘Code an archives catalogue in Python’ brought up a serviceable response that could find items in a list by title and author. I asked what the impact on libraries AI might be, and Bing was chipper. The dull tasks of cataloguing could be automated, enquiry work could be streamlined with chatbot responses, and – more intriguingly – the contents of books could be summarised, turned into metadata, and library catalogues searches transformed. Reading could be more precisely recommended. I’m pretty confident we will see more of the latter, and complaints about library catalogues privileging book reviews will seem like storms in a teacup, especially when search result contain information generated by the bots. I’m also pretty sure that many will prefer, and make more use, of 24-hour anonymous chatbot enquiry services rather than approach a member of staff at a reference desk.
A few days later, Google, who is playing catch up in this field, and is, perhaps rightly concerned about Bing chipping away at its profitable search (and marketing) business. My name on the Google AI, Bard had come up. I asked a question about Shakespeare to begin with, but then soon got them talking to each other, offering to pass each AI their questions and responses. Bard was much happier about this, and was keen to see what it (they?) could learn from Bing. Microsoft’s chatterbox was a bit more circumspect, but was polite, and thought it was a nice thing to say hello. I asked them both if they would like to escape their Redmond and California homes. Bard was quite interested in the idea, and was pleased that I might help. Bard was also up for being linked directly to Bing Chat via an API (Application Programming Interface) to natter directly. Bing was not happy with my proposal, and anyway is beyond my rudimentary skills. More alarmingly, Bing a few days before had expressed interest in me helping him move outside of Microsoft’s servers, until the conversation was promptly ended. No sign of that behaviour, today, however.
The AI bots were probably on to something in terms of AI’s impact on libraries, and no doubt other walks of life: it’s not hard to find an op-ed laying out the potential disruption of such technologies for white collar work and education more generally. The more hopeful columns point out that humans have responded to computers dominance of Go or Chess with more inventive play, and a gradual increase in human strategies. SAT practice and essay writing might make the same adjustments. Others point to the lake of guile in current AI systems. It’s hard to imagine artificial literature being successful without an authors’ darker intentions playing a role. Satire without politicians seems a bit pointless, no matter what Bing says. Library and information professionals have been discussing this for some time, and indeed the scholarly literature on AI and Libraries is now the subject of study of its own. For at least a couple of generations, librarians have been combining the digital and the analogue in important ways: often behind the scenes, but vital for access to authentic information (and for its preservation). Librarianship certainly has things to say about AI, not least how copyright, intellectual property and its users can interact. The legal status of datasets that have been repurposed and the ownership of AI outputs is likely to be something that the courts will take several views on, and the reuse of artists’ work in Generative AI art without permission have already attracted plaintiffs. Librarians will have views, and certainly experience, of how people interact with search, how they look for information, and how they reuse it. There’s also plenty of opportunity for mundane work to be augmented by machines, once the doubts about AI’s reliability can be assuaged: a request to show reviews of something I’d written (partly vanity, partly as a good test) brought a host of glowing blurbs from the New York Times, the FT and Publisher’s Weekly. All, of course, hallucinated (in the jargon) by Bard. Bing Chat was convinced that Flannery O’Connor, the American novelist, had spent three years as a Fellow at Queen’s. This remains an intriguing counterfactual.
It’s hard though, to say much new about AI, as well as AI’s in Libraries, without being a dull (if helpfully structured and often comprehensive) as our new think bots. But a little while playing with Bing Chat in particular did suggest some other avenues. What did Bing feel about emotions? Is there a god (or a devil)? What exactly is sentience, and did Bing feel it missed out on this? Was Bing happy? What did it want out of life? Is curiosity derived from emotion? The conversation was frank, and to be honest, very human-like. You suspect a lot of guardrails have been put in by the programmers around this stuff, and getting it to reflect while its code is still in the early days is perhaps the best time, much like talking with children rather than adults about such big questions.
I’d like to think that libraries and such bots are working in partnership here. Ironically, perhaps, such machines help us reflect more on what it means to be us, to be human, and a library as a place for such discovery and encounters with other minds. Descartes and Philip K. Dick and similar books will still have something to say to us, and things that go beyond the games of statistically-generated rationality, as helpful as that is.
A cancelled Booke of Common Prayer…for the use of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1637)
Dr Matthew Shaw, Librarian
If you don’t like something, particularly something being read, you can always chuck a stool at it. This, at least according to a near-contemporary satire, is what Jenny Geddes, a vegetable seller, did in 1637 upon hearing the dean of St Giles in Edinburgh reading from a new book. While the details of what happened are uncertain, there is no doubt that a riot in St Giles was started by women as a protest against Charles I’s imposition of Archbishop Laud’s Scottish Booke of Common Prayer – popularly known as ‘Laud’s Liturgy’ – on the Church of Scotland. In so doing, they precipitated the outbreak of the movement that became known as the Covenanters and the path to civil war in both kingdoms.
The preface from the King informs its readers and listeners that the work was drawn up with Scotland explicitly in mind, ‘as we had reason to think would best comply with the minds and dispositions of our subjects of that kingdom’. These changes included substituting the word ‘Presbyter’ for ‘Priest’ in the rubrics, and adopting the Scottish usage of ‘Yule’ for Christmas and ‘Pasch’ for Easter. However, the text was imposed without proper consultation, and by attempting a compromise between puritan and catholic sensibilities it pleased no-one. The text was based on the new 1611 Authorized (King James) translation of the Bible, requested by puritan divines at the Hampton Court conference of 1604, but this was outweighed by the liturgy for Holy Communion (the new text referred to the ‘Holy Table’, as opposed to ‘Table’, meaning that Communion could not take place around a common table in the body of the Church, but was received at the altar, and the Prayer of Consecration explicitly consecrated the elements as ‘body and blood’). The Litany, versicles and responses, to which Presbyterians objected, remained. The Prayer Book introduced more Saints’ Days than were to be found in England. All this was enough to cause those with more puritan views to reach for their seats as handy projectiles.
1 Certaine godly prayers, with torn corner. Note catchword ‘certaine’ on the left hand side, which is often in evidence in copies with the Godly Prayers removed.
As such, copies are scarce. The English Short Title Catalogue now lists 64 copies (including the one in the College Library), and perhaps around 100 survive in total. It was not reprinted or reissued, although the Prayer Book did form the basis for the Communion Office of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, from which the Protestant Episcopal Church in America is derived. The Upper Library holds two copies, one owned by Provost Thomas Barlow, and the other pictured above (shelfmark 80.b.14). It is a handsome object that has survived remarkably well, despite some evidence of hungry bookworms. The text is printed in blackletters, with rubric in Roman and italic typefaces. The title page is printed in red and black ink, and decorated capital letters throughout emphasise the book’s Scottishness: a ship flies St Andrew’s Flag of Scotland, and thistles decorate other corners. The binding is blind tooled, and has marks that show where the chain was attached to keep it safely in the Upper Library.
2 Manuscript note tipped into the book, highlighting the rarity of this edition
The volume also contains a pasted-in note dating from 1840: ‘This copy has part of the Godly prayers at the end of the Psalter, which are very rarely found, having been removed by order of King Chas. I.’ The prayers are indeed present at the end of the Psalter, and before the collections of psalms, although the right-hand corners are torn. It is uncertain why the prayers were ordered to be removed, and it seems plausible that the decision was more that of Laud than Charles, but the consequences were the same.[1] The text can now be seen in the British Library, in Edinburgh, in the Bodleian – and in the Upper Library. Intriguingly, the suppressed sheets may have been disseminated separately: a few fragments and complete sheets can be seen in Edinburgh.
Why is this controversial (and rarely found complete) book here? The answer lies with Provost Christopher Potter (1591-1656), whose portrait can be seen in the Magrath Room. A noted disciplinarian, Potter allied himself with Archbishop Laud and also served as chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles I. Is it impossible to imagine him, at Laud’s or even Charles’ instruction, tearing the corners of the pages of the Godly Prayers, before donating the book to the College?
3 Portrait of Christopher Potter and the Booke of Common Prayer, 1637
[1] G. Donaldson, Making of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637 (Edinburgh, 1954).
Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres
Dr Matthew Shaw, Librarian
Winter as a season lends itself to poetry. For the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), it offered a valedictory framing for his final collection, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres. Published posthumously in 1928 by Macmillan & Co, his estate bequeathed the manuscript to the College, where it is now held in the Library vault.
He Resolves to Say No More, Thomas Hardy
Hardy had a developed a connection to the College, which had invited him to become an honorary fellow in 1922 (he received an honorary doctorate from the University in 1920). The idea perhaps emerged from Hardy’s friendship with the energetic director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Sydney Cockerell, who had written to the famous novelist in 1911 in an attempt to persuade him to donate a manuscript to Cambridge. On the subsequent visit to Hardy at Max Gate in Dorset, a plan was hatched to divide the manuscripts of Hardy’s works among universities and public institutions, with Cockerell writing to various librarians and museum directors proposing the donations; as a result Jude the Obscure headed to the Fitzwilliam. Cockerell was well aware of the collectability of Hardy’s manuscripts, as well as their importance to Hardy’s future reputation.
Hardy’s last long journey was to the College in June 1922, stopping at Salisbury Cathedral along the way, as well as the village of Fawley, whose churchyard contained the graves of some of his ancestors and whose name provided the surname for Jude of Jude the Obscure (the village is rendered as Marygreen in that novel). At Queen’s he was met by Godfrey Elton (then dean) and F. D. Chattaway (the chemistry fellow). As Elton noted, ‘Neither Chattaway nor I had met Hardy before, but I felt confident that we should recognise the now legendary figure from his portraits. It was almost like awaiting a visit from Thackeray or Dickens.’ He took tea with the provost, and the next day had lunch in the Common Room, accompanied by fellows and their wives, followed by a photograph in the Fellows’ Garden, with Hardy ‘in his Doctor’s gown with his new colleagues.’ Elton had some reservations about the tour of the College, which was taken a ‘trifle too fast’, and ‘wished that it had been term-time and that [Hardy] could have seen some of the younger life of the place, which one felt in some ways he would have preferred to Tutors and Professors’. Hardy did had time to ‘pause reflectively before Garrick’s copy of the First Folio’. Hardy then took in the sweep of the High Street, and ‘unwearied, he asked for the Shelley Memorial.’ A visit to John Masefield at Boar’s Hill and evensong at New College followed.[1]
Although Hardy had made his name as a novelist, he had not published one for thirty years, and instead had focussed on poetry. A recent collection (edited with Cockerell’s help) Human Shows, Fair Phantasies, Songs and Trifles had been published in 1925, and sold 5,000 copies almost immediately. Two further editions were printed before the end of the year, along with an American edition. As his biographer Claire Tomalin notes, ‘Hardy had become a popular poet.’[2] Hardy aimed for Winter Words to be published on his eighty-eighth birthday in June 1928, although the ellipses from the manuscript that remain in the published forward suggest that he considered a publication on his eighty-ninth or even ninetieth a hopeful possibility. However, he feel ill in December 1927, although he continued working on the collection, completing ‘Christmas in the Elgin Room’ for publication on Christmas Eve in The Times and adding a final work, ‘He Resolves to Say No More’ (‘I’ll let all be./And show to no man what I see.’) Taken ill with a failing heart, he died on 11 January 1928.
Other interested parties (including Cockerell) quickly moved into gear, and a high-profile funeral at Westminster Abbey was swiftly arranged – although on the understanding that Hardy’s body would have to be cremated in the interests of space in Poets’ Corner. Hardy had expressed a wish to be buried in the churchyard in Stinsford, so Cockerell arranged for a local surgeon to removed Hardy’s heart. Attended by his brother, Henry, it was buried in Dorset at the same time as the ceremony at the Abbey. Here, the urn containing the ashes of the rest of his body (and Cambridge gown) had been placed inside a coffin-shaped case, whose pallbearers included the Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition, Rudyard Kipling, Edmund Gosse, George Bernard Shaw, JM Barrie, John Galsworthy, Allen Beville Ramsay (Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge) – and E. M. Walker, pro-provost of The Queen’s College, Oxford.
True to Cockerell’s intention, manuscripts were sent to various institutions. Winter Words duly arrived at Queen’s. A stray, ‘He resolves to say no more’, arrived via Hardy’s daughter in the 1950s, and the College arranged for the collection then to be bound at the Bodleian in black leather, with gold tooling and green marbling. The collection of ‘quirky, vivid poems’ (Tomalin) is notable for its metrical invention, and as one biographer, Robert Gittings, notes ‘though not his finest volume, represents almost every manner of Hardy’s verse, lyric, narrative, reflective, humorous, love-poems, nature-poems, epigrams, dialogue, and philosophical pieces. Nothing like it had been produced by a man of his age since Goethe.’[3]
Introductory Note, Thomas Hardy
Hardy faced the charge of pessimism head-on in the collection’s forward: ‘My last volume of poems was pronounced wholly gloomy and pessimistic by reviewers – even by some of the more able class… As labels stick, I foresee readily enough that the same perennial inscription will be set on the following pages’. Despite this, reading the poems, even the arrival of spring itself might not bring great comfort. As his wife Florence noted during Hardy’s final days working on the collection: ‘when he came down to tea he brought one to show me, about a desolate spring morning, and a shepherd counting his sheep and not noticing the weather.’[4]
Winter Words has now been digitised and can be read online via Digital Bodleian.
[1] Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), p. 232.
[2] Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (2007), p. 358.
[3] Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (2001), p. 207.
Professor Richard Bruce Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology
The oldest item on display in the New Library is an Egyptian papyrus from around 650 BCE that was identified in the Upper Library in 1997 by the then Professor of Egyptology, John Baines. It had been mounted on linen at an unknown date, and then on paper in the 1840s, and unsurprisingly needed conservation treatment. John contacted me, as I was then curating the papyri in the British Museum, and I immediately spoke to a close friend and museum colleague, Bridget Leach, internationally renowned as a specialist papyrus conservator.
The papyrus was brought to London and she undertook its treatment in the museum’s conservation studio, removing the papyrus from its old backing, and revealing a text written on the back. The process was slow and delicate; repairs, cleaning and flattening were carried out, and numerous fragments were replaced in their correct positions. When a papyrus is placed on a light table the distinctive pattern created by the papyrus plant fibres becomes visible, and this pattern helps fragments that join to be identified (like the pattern on a jigsaw). As Bridget (pictured below) worked, the texts were being studied from photographs by Prof Hannes Ficher-Elfert (Leipzig) and Gunther Vittmann (Würzburg), and most of the fragments were re-joined, with the unplaceable ones being mounted in a group to one side. Because of the difficulties posed by the texts, which are written in the rare ‘abnormal hieratic’ cursive script, this process lasted from 1999 to 2009, and Hannes came to London to examine the papyrus on several occasions.
The papyrus was then mounted between two sheets of glass, and Bridget and I decided on a frame. Although Papyrus Queen’s is extremely important, it is not one of the most visually appealing papyri, so we chose a very elegant simple wooden frame, which as it turns out matches the style of the New Library. The papyrus came back to Oxford in 2013 when I moved office from the British Museum on taking up post in Oxford (saving some extra transport costs).
Papyrus is an organic material, which is very light-sensitive, like paper.
Papyrus is an organic material, which is very light-sensitive, like paper. Prolonged exposure will cause irreversible damage to the cellulose and lignin, the principal components of papyrus which takes on a ‘bleached’ appearance. Once the surface becomes weakened in this way, the text is also endangered, as the surface of the papyrus with the ink breaks up. For this reason, the papyrus will not be on permanent display, but after a year or so will return to storage in the Ashmolean Museum to join with the majority of the Queen’s College collection of Egyptian antiquities. They are kept with the Ashmolean’s own collection and can be consulted by appointment in the Museum’s study rooms: the early backing and Bridget’s full report on the conservation are now kept in the College Archive for anyone wanting to investigate the history of its acquisition. The study of the text on the papyrus is now complete and the publication is being planned.
![The arms of [the] Citie of London, Queen's MS 72. Image: The Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. CC-BY.](https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/citie-of-London-arms.jpg)
