While conducting inventory on the Marguerite Hicks Collection, we discovered a manuscript book from the nineteenth century. The spine-label reads, “Sketchbook of Fashion,” and a bookseller’s mark on the inside front board grants authorship to the nineteenth-century author Catherine Gore, who published a novel with the same name. I was drawn to the book and wanted to understand its history. What was it? Where did it come from? And how did it make its way into the Hicks Collection? Hicks' collection focuses on literature by and about women, so the attributed authorship to Gore would explain why Hicks would have wanted it. However, because authorship was attributed to Gore by the bookseller, the first step in understanding this manuscript was verifying that Gore was indeed the author. A cursory glance through the Hicks Collection manuscript and Gore’s The Sketchbook of Fashion revealed the two were not the same. Gore was still a possible author though, so the investigation into verifying authorship began with studying the manuscript itself for any clues it might hold.
The manuscript is broken up into about twenty one short stories or sketches, each varying in subject and uniquely titled. The only piece to break the theme of sketches is entitled “The Cockney University” and appears to be a criticism of the institution. The beginning of each new section begins with a title and an epigraph before the author begins the story. The author is also very diligent about writing on one side of the page, usually only adding something to the back of the page to signify the page number or to indicate the end of a section by re-writing the title; occasionally there is a quickly scribbled note or something that has been crossed out. Out of all the sections, there is only one story, “Dermot and Mary: A Simple Irish Tale of the Olden Times,” that is written on both sides of the page. The most important clue that the manuscript holds in understanding its origins, however, lies at the end of most of the sketches—a signature that would not be deciphered until later in the research. This signature paired with the titles of the sketches not matching with any of Gore’s published works led to her being ruled out as a possible author for the manuscript.
The mystery of this manuscript’s authorship led me down the path of research on manuscripts and the various ways in which they were used from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Margaret Ezell talks extensively of manuscripts and their purpose post-1450, explaining that while the printing press was revolutionary, it is limiting for scholars to view manuscripts as works authors longed to be put into print, because this assumption can ignore the intent of the author in creating the manuscript, and overlooks the complexities of manuscript versus print culture (2014, 90). While some authors may have shared their manuscripts with friends, family, or other members of the author’s community in order to get feedback before being published, others preferred having manuscripts in circulation as opposed to circulating print copies (Ezell 2015, 377-379). While we cannot know the intentions of the Hicks Collection’s manuscript author, acknowledging the complexities of manuscript publication and circulation aided in my research into this book, teaching me what to look for in the book itself as a means to rule out what the book was not.
Manuscript anthologies and miscellanies, or common-place books, were popular among early modern readers and writers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, consisting of books that were filled with original pieces by the author themselves, or their friends and family, or of quotes by more famous authors that the owner transcribed (Ezell 2014, 97). Ezell offers a variety of examples of families creating anthologies together as well, such as the Aston family Tixall Papers (2015, 379). From this point in the research I was able to determine that the Hicks Collection manuscript does not fit with the description of a common-place book, or an anthology comprised of pieces written over a period of time with variations in handwriting and ink (Ezell 2015, 379). The various page sizes of the Hicks Collection manuscript, where there is a section of pages folded to fit within the confines of the binding and match the sizing of the other pages, shows that it was likely written over a longer stretch of time, using various sources of paper. This, along with the ink variations that characterize common-place books makes the manuscript something existing between these two genres: sketches written on loose sheets, and later bound together.
The manuscript appears to be a series of unpublished works—searching titles in HathiTrust and GoogleBooks garnered no results. Therefore, it is likely not a transcription of another author’s published work. The consistency in handwriting and the same signature found throughout the manuscript point to single authorship, so friends or family as contributors is unlikely. I was left wondering whether or not the manuscript was circulating among the author’s community or whether it was just a part of their personal library. Nineteenth-century writers, such as poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, created manuscript copies of their works to share with friends and family, so the practice would not have been unknown for the Hicks Collection manuscript’s author (Ezell 2014, 98). However, the misattribution to Catherine Gore caused me to hesitate over this answer. Though there is no evidence to say when the manuscript was put into its current binding, it is unlikely that the author themselves would misattribute their own work. This is instead likely evidence of quick research by a bookseller.
There are no edits made by anyone else’s hand, though the author him/herself seems to be adding notes and paragraphs to the stories—so it does not seem to be a copy circulating in search of feedback.
Once deciphered, the signature that kept appearing at the end of most of the sketches pointed to the supposed author being “The Hermit in London,” an alias connected to Felix Macdonagh, who published a novel with the same name in 1820. Macdonagh experienced financial troubles for a large portion of his career. Letters starting in 1825, written to the Committee of the Literary Fund, detail Macdonagh’s continuous financial struggles, and from here I came to the theory that these works in the manuscript were unpublished simply because the author could not afford to have his work put into print (Macdonagh n.d.). There are no dates written inside the manuscript that could give a more accurate time frame of when the works were written, or when they were compiled into their current binding, so deciding if these pieces were written before or after Macdonagh published his other works, and his subsequent financial issues, is not something that can be determined with absolute certainty.
It seems fairly easy to say that the manuscript was written with an intention to be published by Macdonagh, because he was a published author, but that assumption can dismiss manuscript culture and pushes away an entire sub-sect of literature that holds a lot of historical relevance. Ezell makes it a point in her research to frame manuscripts through a lens that is distanced from print. The idea of private and public publications, and the impact print has on the way in which manuscripts are viewed by modern audiences comes in the form of readers believing that every published piece of work is unfinished, and was written with the express intent of one day being made into a print copy, but for many that was not the case (Ezell 2015, 390). The exact history of the Hicks Collection manuscript may never be known in its entirety, so there is no way to positively say that these works were left over pieces by Macdonagh that he could not afford to publish, but it is a theory that would make sense.
Despite the many unknown answers we have to what exactly this manuscript is, what we do know is that it adds value to Hicks’ Collection in a very different way than Hicks’ other collected works. The manuscript shows Hicks’ dedication to growing her collection in spite of her failing eyesight and the vigor with which she purchased each piece in hopes of amassing a formidable collection of literature by and about women. The mistaken attribution going to Catherine Gore led to Hicks buying the manuscript in the first place, but without its purchase it is hard to say where it would be or if the mistaken authorship would have been noticed and studied the way it is now. The next step in learning about this manuscript would come in the form of doing heavy research into Macdonagh’s life and work. Looking into the watermarks on the pages and studying the binding to see if there is any way to trace it back to where it was made might also aid in understanding how the pages landed into a supposed Gore binding. However, tracking down the bookseller in the hopes of finding any record of the manuscript might be the thing that helps unfold this mystery and move research forward.
Ezell, Margaret J.M. “The Social Author: Manuscript Culture, Writers and Readers” In The Broadview Reader in Book History, edited by Michelle Levy, Tom Mole, 377-394. Toronto, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2015.
Ezell, Margaret J. M. “Handwriting and the Book.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Leslie Howsam, 90–106. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. doi:10.1017/CCO9781139152242.008.
MacDonagh, Felix. Felix MacDonagh. n.d. MS Archives of the Royal Literary Fund: Archives of the Royal Literary Fund 542. World Microfilms. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/AJKqw7. Accessed 28 June 2019.
