Skip to main content

Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

Menu Search

Category: Irish writers

Posted on

Maria Edgeworth on Zooniverse: bringing her archives together digitally.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), an Anglo-Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, was probably the most famous and most prolific woman novelist writing in English in her time.  She was also renowned for her educational stories and pedagogical publications produced with her father; she worked closely with him and a succession of stepmothers to educate her 21 half-siblings.  As a famous writer and member of a large and eventually far-flung family, Edgeworth produced a massive quantity of correspondence over her lifetime, much of it with important writers, thinkers, and politicians of her day.  There are at least 10,000 extant sheets of Edgeworth’s correspondence held in archives and private collections around the world. 

Not only do Edgeworth’s letters contain important contexts for her novels and educational texts, they also provide key narratives of literary and historical figures (among them Sir Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney), places (including Ireland, London, and Paris), and events (such as the French invasion of Ireland, the aftermath of the Act of Union, and the great Irish famine) around the turn of the nineteenth century.  The letters also reveal Edgeworth’s own engagement in nineteenth-century scientific discourse and in questions of anti-semitism. 

Only selections of Edgeworth’s vast correspondence have been published. The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (https://mariaedgeworth.org/) seeks to remedy this gap in scholarship by creating a digital space where Edgeworth’s full correspondence is made available, searchable, and annotated through a collaborative open-access project. Jessica Richard (Wake Forest University), Robin Runia (Xavier University), Susan Egenolf (Texas A&M University), and Hilary Havens, (University of Tennessee) are the faculty co-editors; the project is supported by the digital scholarship faculty and staff at Wake Forest University, University of Tennessee, and Texas A&M.  In 2022 the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project was awarded a significant grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund its continued development.  

The vast quantity of Edgeworth letters and the length of many of the individual letters (she sometimes wrote 30-page letters!) make the digital environment ideal for this project, which includes photographic images of the letters and transcriptions that are TEI-encoded to make them fully tagged and searchable.  Visitors to the site mariaedgeworth.org will be able to search the letters by sender or recipient, subject, locations, date, etc.  We will be able to add to the digital collection over time as we receive, transcribe, and code more letters.  As the archive of letters on the site grows, it will host digital projects produced by scholars from the text data, including maps, data visualizations, word clouds, etc.  

More than 26 archives and institutions have already given us photographs of their letters, including Trinity College Dublin, King’s College Cambridge, Bibliotheque de Geneve, the University of Birmingham, the University of Reading, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, Boston College, Harvard University, Duke University, the National Library of Scotland, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, University College London, Dartmouth, Vassar, Claremont, Yale, the Bodleian, the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and many others.  We’re excited to have the participation of so many institutions in several countries. 

We loaded 200 letters onto the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse where volunteers quickly transcribed them.  We are currently piloting the coding phase of the project to build the searchability of our letters database.  We look forward to reopening the crowdsourcing platform in the future for additional transcribing.

As an example of what Edgeworth’s letters can reveal, I’ve transcribed one of the letters that Trinity College Dublin photographed for us.  I chose this letter at random from the files sent to us.  Edgeworth writes in 1840 to Lord Lansdowne, a prominent and long-serving British Whig politician who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, among other positions; the Lansdowne family of Bowood House, Wiltshire, had long been friends and correspondents of the Edgeworths.  In this letter, Edgeworth writes to compliment Lansdowne on the public approbation he bestowed (and which she read of in a newspaper or other publication) on “Father Matthews,” as she calls him.  Theobald Mathew, known as “Father Mathew,” was an Irish Catholic priest and a temperance campaigner.  He and his Catholic Total Abstinence Society enrolled hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, England, and eventually the United States, many of them poor laborers, in a pledge to abstain from alcohol.  In this letter, Edgeworth calls Mathew’s movement “the greatest and most wonderful enterprize & achievement since the time of The Crusades.”  After praising Father Mathew’s sermons and admiring the impact of temperance on the poor, Edgeworth concludes her letter by recommending to Lansdowne that since “coffee is so much in demand among the vast numbers in Ireland who have given up whiskey it would be a great encouragement to morality” to lower duties on coffee, making it more affordable.  She mentions that this idea was suggested to her by Captain Beaufort, a friend and Rear Admiral of the Royal Navy and that it might also be beneficial to “the West Indian possessions” and a stimulus to “European labor in those colonies.”

There are some tantalizing threads to untangle in this letter.  Lord Lansdowne, though a Protestant, was a champion of Catholic emancipation in Britain.  He also supported, though less vigorously, the abolition of slavery.  Father Mathew was hosted in the United States after this letter was written by prominent Catholics in the American North, including Archbishop of New York John Hughes; although Mathew had expressed opposition to slavery previously, his anti-abolitionist American hosts discouraged his involvement in abolition discourse in the US and Mathew complied, refusing to condemn slavery.  This refusal was in turn condemned by Frederick Douglass, one-time signer of Mathew’s temperance pledge.  In this context, Edgeworth’s vague allusion to “European labor” on coffee plantations is especially fascinating.  I don’t have an answer yet to exactly what she might mean by this, whether there was an effort to replace the labor of enslaved people with that of free Europeans as abolition loomed and if so whether she was aware of such.  What we see in this letter is a nexus among people and movements: politicians, military men, Catholics, Protestants, temperance, and abolition – with Maria Edgeworth at the center of it all.  As the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project grows we will follow many such threads and connections.

Dr Jessica Richard (Wake Forest University, North Carolina), joint co-ordinator of the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project.

Posted on

Rockaby, baby: digitising a recent addition to the Beckett Archive

The image of actor Billie Whitelaw, dressed almost like an Victorian widow, rocking back and forth silently in her chair, is one of the iconic visuals of the Beckett canon. The lone protagonist in the ‘spare, compact, provocative’ play Rockaby was modeled on Beckett’s maternal grandmother Annie Roe, a solitary woman in her later years, dressed head to toe in black , sitting in her room staring silently out the window.

Billie Whitelaw (1929-2014) palying the sole character in the premiere of Rockaby (MS 11592).

Continue reading “Rockaby, baby: digitising a recent addition to the Beckett Archive”
Posted on

On the back of an envelope: new manuscript of Synge’s ‘Playboy’ found hiding in plain sight

The letter and envelope, TCD MS 4424-26.167, was originally sent to John Millington Synge from Henri Lebeau, a young French writer and great admirer of Synge, who visited the west of Ireland together with the Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the spring of 1905.  The letter is postmarked 20 May 1905, so sent at the end of his trip. It is largely a personal letter with a request by Lebeau to Synge to remind him of an address and contact for lodgings while he is in London. Notably, he goes on to mention his memories of his visit to Ireland and offers his ‘impressions’ on ‘the rare qualities of heart of the Western peasants’. 

On the back of the envelope Synge has written notes on changes he intends to make to his drafts of The Playboy of the Western World.  These notes appear to be hastily written when compared to the handwriting of Synge’s personal notes elsewhere.  He uses shorthand and abbreviations such as ‘WQ + Ch’ indicating the characters Window Quinn and Christy.  Although scrappily written there is a sense of order in that he writes notes for Act 1 at the top of the envelope and works anticlockwise progressing through the play up to notes on Act 3 scene II, with lines drawn to separate notes for the differing acts and scenes from each other.  It is well documented in the TCD manuscripts website that Synge drafted many possible variations and endings for Playboy, and this document stands to how immediate some of these inspirations were captured by him.  There is a doodle in the left corner which merges into the first word of the note beginning ‘If necessary’, indicating that Synge was doodling with his pen as he developed these thoughts.  Of course, it cannot be said that Synge wrote these amendments as a direct response to Lebeau’s comments.  In my consultations with Professor Nicholas Grene at Trinity, it is estimated that Synge’s notes on the envelope are from late 1906, when Synge was well advanced on the composition of the play and used this envelope to make a quick note to point up motifs in individual scenes.

Nevertheless, the content of the letter still stands as an example of the type of representations of the Western peasant Synge was in conversation with as he was writing the play which would go on to spark riots partly due to its iconoclasm of the Western Irish peasant.

Again with help from Professor Nicholas Grene, the following is an attempt at deciphering Synge’s notes:

Top centre: ‘Work WQ’s [Widow Quin] pity into last scene of I [insertion] and keep [insertion] his deed through it to the fore’

Left below: ‘If necessary use motif of the trick she WQ. [insertion with caret mark] is playing on Pegeen keeping his [word illegible] II’

Right below: ‘If possible preserve Pegeen’s charm in end of 3.II when she pets him’.

Bottom left: ‘Work her pity very fully in same scene II but make it [illegible word underlined] the pity of reality’.

Bottom centre: ‘You have WQ. and Ch [Christy] face to face through scene with old man and they are face to face again’

A point worth noting is the address on the envelope, ‘31 Crosthwaite Park, Kingstown’.  Synge lived in a large Georgian town house in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, an area then noted for its middle- and upper-class Protestant Anglo Irish population, not unlike Synge’s own background.  In my exploration of correspondence being an influencing factor on Synge’s development of the play, this brought my attention to the importance of considering the context of the physical world from which Synge wrote the play.  Indeed, the society of Kingstown was the opposite end of the Irish societal spectrum from the Catholic, rural peasantry Synge was depicting.

While this envelope is not listed within most published notes of Synge’s writings, it is still a fascinating and revealing document on the development of one of Ireland’s most radical yet canonical plays.

Wayne Kavanagh, postgraduate student at the University of Birmingham

Posted on

Samuel Beckett: the man and his afterlives

Actor Patrick Magee (1922-1982) in Krapp’s last tape.  (MS 11314) © BBC

Today’s post, by guest author and student of English literature Grace McLoughlin, is the sixth and final one in our series revealing undergraduate students’ reactions to working directly with the Library’s world renowned Samuel Beckett literary manuscripts. Again the Library thanks Dr Julie Bates, Assistant Professor in Irish Writing, in the Department of English.

Continue reading “Samuel Beckett: the man and his afterlives”

Posted on

Writing about writing in Beckett

Beckett observes a rehearsal of Godot. (MS 11409).

Imogen McGuckin is the fifth of our guest blog authors in the  ‘Beckett afterlives’ series. All are students in the Department of English and all have kindly provided feedback on their experience of working directly with the library’s collection of Beckett literary archives. Imogen writes:

For a student of English Literature, the notebook in which Beckett penned ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ offers an invaluable opportunity to investigate the authorial process behind the novel. At first glance, I struggled to see how anything emerged from a manuscript in which almost every paragraph has been crossed out. Even the front cover exhibits the original title – ‘FANCY DEAD DYING’ later eliminated by several lines of black marker and replaced by ‘IMAGINATION MORTE IMAGINEZ. However, a flick through the pages yielded many examples of the author’s prolific writing – and doodling, both in French and English.

For me, the value of this notebook lies not in what was written, but rather in what was retained and eliminated. Beckett’s imagery, rhythm and process of composition illuminate the meaning of the final text. Following consultation of both the manuscript and the first edition, I suggest that ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ explores and experiments with the authorial creative process.

Unlike the Ussher Library – my usual library of preference, the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library allows only for you and the text. All baggage – literal and metaphorical, is deposited in a locker outside. My initial scan of Beckett’s notebook revealed that, for the most part, the left-hand pages showed disconnected lines of text and doodles, while the right-hand pages contained paragraphs of prose. For example, on page six the author writes; ‘and for how long, and for what if any purpose’, in a less italicised hand than the paragraphs opposite and partnered by a doodle of a stick-man. For the most part, Beckett’s handwriting is forward slanting – thus, the upright and vertical handwriting on page six indicated a chronological difference between the writing of this phrase, and those opposite. The author’s frustrated and questioning tone, together with his doodle, suggested Beckett was struggling creatively when he wrote on page six.

Beckett doodling. (MS 11223 p.6 ).

Further investigation of Beckett’s doodles made me wonder if, like me, Beckett was left-handed. I noticed the positioning of his drawings matched those in my own jotter. When left-handed, it is more comfortable to write on left-hand pages as those on the right involve uncomfortably resting your palm on the binding of the notebook. I briefly felt I had insight to a human side of Beckett. Sadly, while there are many references to Beckett’s cricketing prowess as a left-handed batsman, (and sometimes bowler), he was in fact right-handed.

The author’s floating lines, doodles and eventual paragraphs remained in my thoughts when I read the first edition of ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’. In the novel, Beckett’s syntax and punctuation manipulate the reader’s speed and flow. One example of this can be seen on:

‘It is possible too, experience shows, for rise and fall to stop short at any point and mark a pause, more or less long, before resuming, or reversing, the rise now fall, the fall rise’.

Here, the author’s rhythm and punctuation mirror the wording: after ‘mark a pause’ he inserts a comma, thus forcing his reader to pause. Furthermore, ‘the rise now fall, the fall rise’ causes the voice’s intonation to drop for the first half and rise on the second. The beginnings of this syllabic specificity are apparent on page eight of the manuscript, where he experiments with the words ‘… ne pas trop …’, by numbering them ‘9, 10, 11′ after their syllabic order. These then become ’11, 12, 13’ as Beckett inserts the word ‘tout’. The author’s study of syllables as seen in his notebook suggest he intended to manipulate his reader in the final version.

The central aspect of ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ is the ‘plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness’. Through this image, Beckett explores a binary of light and dark which is continued by, ‘light and heat come back, all grows white and hot together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, till the initial level is reached whence the fall began’. The rotunda through its whiteness suggests the untouched paper, while ‘the rise now fall, the fall rise’ describes the lifting and falling of the writer’s pen.

In a letter to Ethna McCarthy, Beckett described ‘the exercise-book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark’ (Fintan O’Toole, “Beckett in Love add link http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/02/beckett-in-love/). This concept of light and dark within the page forms much of Imagination’s imagery and is particularly pertinent when we consider how many lines of rejected material fill the author’s notebook. Phrases such as ‘Out of the door and down the road in the old hat & coat like after the war, no, not that again’, suggest an author struggling for new material. The refrain “not that again” appears repeatedly and indicates frustration in the author’s search for original thought. One phrase in support of this theory is “Out of the deathbed and drag it to a place to die in, that again”. The deathbed appearing in ‘Molloy’ and ‘Malone Dies’ is a frequent theme in Beckett’s prose and appears again on page thirty-three of the Imagination notebook. While Beckett’s imagery of light and dark within the rotunda mimics the rise and fall of the author’s pen, the punctuation and syllabic order manipulate his reader. As a result, my consultation of Beckett’s notebook illuminated how ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ is a text about authorial creation itself.

Imogen McGuckin