Commissioned, designed, printed, and hand-coloured by different women, the Cuala Press print, College Green, shows a lively scene in Dublin’s city centre. A traffic policeman stands in a moment of contemplation, as trams and cars trundle along the street, and people hurry on the pavements. Its distorted drone-like perspective allows the artist, Hilda Roberts, to bring together visually the familiar sculptures of Henry Grattan, created by John Henry Foley (1876), Thomas Moore by Christopher Moore (1857), and the pediment sculpture of Fidelity carved by Edward and John Smyth (1809) situated high on James Gandon’s House of Lords. Orientated as they are, the viewer can imagine they are in conversation with each other. The streetscape hasn’t changed much in the almost hundred years since this print was first produced. The public toilets beside the Moore statue are no longer extant but are immortalised by Joyce in Ulysses, ‘He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters’. A satirical reference to Moore’s ode to the formation of Wicklow’s Avoca River, ‘The Meeting of the Waters’.
Douglas Hyde, The Love Songs of Connaught, Dublin: Dun Emer Press, 1904.
As already discussed in this blog series, Dun Emer Press (1902-1908) and Cuala Press (1908-1946) books were renowned for both their content, contemporary literature, and their arts and crafts aesthetic. The Press differentiated itself from other private letterpress publishers by printing new material by important writers of the Irish literary revival. Most British private presses, to minimise costs and avoid paying fees to living writers, invariably issued out of copyright classic texts. From the start, Cuala’s production values were praised for their elementary design and execution, ‘a fine clearness is the prime trait in the hand-printed volumes of Miss Elizabeth Yeats’, they used an eighteenth century (c. 1725) Caslon ‘fashioned … Old-Face type, and it is with this that Miss Yeats works exclusively.’ In setting up her Press, Elizabeth Yeats was advised by printer, private press publisher, and powerhouse of the English Arts and Crafts Private Press Movement, Emery Walker. Due to Walker’s co-directorship of the Doves Press and his role as an advisor to William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, the Dun Emer and Cuala Press may be viewed as a key development within this revival of bespoke publishing.
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.
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).
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
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’. 
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.