As scholars have noted for more than a half century now, the eponymous Bowdler of “bowdlerization” and its derivatives is rightfully Henrietta Maria Bowdler (1750-1830), not her brother Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). The unrevised entry in the OED continues to credit Thomas as the etymological source for “bowdlerize”—“To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive; to castrate”—by citing his 1818 edition of a collection of Shakespeare’s works, marketed for its omission of words and expressions that could not be read aloud with propriety in a family setting. But the first edition of the Bowdler Family Shakespeare, published anonymously in four volumes in Bath in 1807 and containing twenty plays, was the work of his sister Henrietta Maria.[1] Anonymous publication was not unusual at the time, especially for women, and the omission of Henrietta Maria’s name from the 1818 and subsequent editions likely reflects her own sense of public propriety rather than brotherly suppression. In recent years, scholars have also started to recuperate Henrietta Maria and Thomas as editors and popularizers, pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays had long been subject to varying degrees of “bowdlerization” avant la lettre, and that the Bowdlers were not alone in revising texts to create new readerships for Shakespeare in the nineteenth century: Charles and Mary Lamb’s immensely popular Tales from Shakespeare also first appeared in 1807.[2]
This copy of Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Glasgow, 1768) features Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s beautifully hand-painted book label, dated 1786. The label appears on the verso of the second front flyleaf, facing the title-page of volume 1. The chain surround and lettering are painted in watercolor with a dark green shading a lighter green, overlaid with delicate black highlighting and every detail meticulously bordered with gilt. Whatever her attitude to the texts of these plays, Henrietta Maria Bowdler treasured her books. The two-volume set remains in its original half-leather binding with marbled paper and decorated spine, and features no markings in the text itself.
The only additional provenance information in the set is an inscription on the verso of the final rear flyleaf in volume 1: “Charles Brecknell Bought Miss Waseys sale October 17 / 1877.” Charles Brecknell eludes identification, but “Miss Wasey” likely refers to Mary Wasey (d.1880) of Priors Court, Chieveley, Berkshire: in the 1850s, Miss Wasey founded a school, “Miss Wasey’s Chapel School” or “Miss Wasey’s Voluntary,” in Curridge, in the parish of Chievely. The school remains in operation, as Curridge County Primary. The inscription could refer to a sale held at the school, or to a sale of books owned by Miss Wasey.
The edition itself represents an effort to popularize select plays of Beaumont and Fletcher for a later eighteenth-century readership: it was preceded in the century only by a seven-volume Works (1711) and a scholarly ten-volume Works (1750). Charles Lamb would include selections from three plays by Beaumont and Fletcher in his influential follow-up to Tales from Shakespeare: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets: who lived about the time of Shakespeare (1808). Henrietta Maria Bowdler’s edition of Shakespeare reveals a shrewd understanding of the language and idiom of early modern drama, and this volume likely represents one of the means by which she gained that knowledge.
Source: Private collection. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] Evidence includes acknowledgements of her responsibility in letters circulated among family and family friends: see Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (New York: Atheneum 1969), 60-86. Many online library catalogues also continue to credit Thomas as the editor of the 1807 Family Shakespeare. Thomas added sixteen plays in his 1818 edition and revised the twenty plays Henrietta Maria had edited in 1807; this complete edition became a best-seller. See also the ODNB entries for Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Thomas Bowdler, both by M. Clare Loughlin-Chow.
[2] See e.g. Colin Franklin, “The Bowdlers and Their Family Shakespeare,” The Book Collector 49.2 (2000), 227-43; Adam H. Kitzes, “The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare,” JEMCS 13.2 (2013), 43-68; Molly G. Yarn, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022), esp. 22-23, 29, 228.
This post adds another physical book owned by Katherine Blount to her ever-expanding library list and also reveals a manuscript that demonstrates her reading practices in action. Previous posts by Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell have brought the total number of books inscribed by Katherine Blount to twelve, but additional discoveries by Martine van Elk and Sarah Lindenbaum have expanded that list further to 40 titles. As research by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell outlines, Katherine Blount was the daughter of James Butler and Grace Caldecott of Amberley Castle in Sussex. Born in 1676, she married Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 2nd Baronet in 1695.[1] When I started researching the miscellany of Katherine Butler (St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14) around 2010, I proposed a few branches of the Butler family to which she might have belonged, including the Butlers of Amberley Castle, but I wasn’t certain.[2] Now that I have compared Katherine Butler’s signature and handwriting to those of the printed books identified in the other posts, I can confidently say that the Katherine Butler who inscribed a manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall in 1693 and who used the blank pages in that same manuscript to compile a miscellany from 1696 onwards is the same person as Katherine Blount. I can also confirm that the marginal notes written in the book described by Floate (Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History) and the identifications of characters in the manuscript key and the text of the book described by Poole (Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary) are indeed in Blount’s hand. But readers of this post can judge for themselves.
The manuscript collection of sermons by John Donne and Joseph Hall
A manuscript collection of five sermons (four by John Donne and one by Joseph Hall), now St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, is inscribed “Katherine Butler Given me by my Father May 1693” (fol. 1r). The donor of this manuscript was James Butler of Amberley Castle, who died on 11 July 1696.
Fig. 1. Katherine Butler’s inscription from 1693, fol. 1r.
The sermons were transcribed by Knightley Chetwode in 1625 and 1626 or shortly thereafter. [3]
Fig. 2. The title page of the sermons, fol. 2r.
Exactly how this early seventeenth-century sermon collection came into the hands of James Butler and what occasion prompted him to give it as a gift to his daughter, Katherine, in 1693 are unclear.
Katherine Blount’s manuscript miscellany in verse and prose
Butler signed her name only once in St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, two years before her marriage in 1695, after which she would have signed her married name of Blount. But she was already Katherine Blount in 1696 when she began using the blank pages of the sermon manuscript to create her own miscellany. On fol. 178r, after the sermons, she wrote the heading “1696” and began a collection of verse extracts, and sometimes complete poems, ending at fol. 195v.
Fig. 3. The first page of the verse section of the miscellany, fol. 178r.
Facing that first page of poetry is an inscription on fol. 177v in which she explains her motivations for her selections: “The reason why I wrote severall of these following Verses, was not that I thought them all good, but the subjects was – what, I had occasion to make vse of.”
Fig. 4. The inscription on fol. 177v.
Blount does indeed make use of her chosen poems and extracts, consistently identifying them by theme or title, and favoring topics like friendship, virtue, and the importance of moderation, among others. Her “subjects” were not narrowly moralistic, however. As we can see from fol. 181r, she transcribes all of Abraham Cowley’s poem “Drinking” (which ends with the rousing couplet, “Should every Creature drink but I / Why, Men of Morals, tell me why?”).
Fig. 5. A sample page from the verse section, fol. 181r.
At the bottom of this page she includes two passages from different plays by John Dryden that disparage the state of marriage; it is a “Curse of Life,” “Loves nauseous cure,” and “but ye Pleasure of a Day.”[4]
Blount also began writing a second section of her manuscript in the year 1696. She took the manuscript and turned it upside down, making a new first page from the end of the volume and beginning a section of prose, which runs from fols. 276v, reversed to 230v, reversed. In the image below, you can see that she has headed this section, “A Common Place Book 1696.” Though I have called her manuscript a miscellany (since it is primarily a collection of miscellaneous extracts in verse and prose), it could equally be called a commonplace book, as she has labeled the prose section, since it is largely organized thematically.
Fig. 6. The first page of the prose section of the miscellany, fol. 276v, rev.
It is this heading that convinced me that Katherine Butler was Katherine Blount since, though the main hand of the miscellany is messier than any of the inscriptions in her printed books, the upper case “B” looks very similar to all of the “B”s each time she signs “Blount.” The upper case “P” looks similar to that in the word “Pope” in the inscription in O’Donnell’s post. And the date “1696” on both pages in the St. Paul’s manuscript replicates the number forms in all of her dates on her printed books. Blount died in 1753, and so she may have continued writing in this manuscript well into the eighteenth century. The final item in the verse section can be dated to 1719, though a later edition is possible, while one of the final items in the prose section in Blount’s hand appears to have been taken from a book published in 1736.[5]
More books from Katherine Blount’s library?
Not only does Blount identify many of her chosen passages by topic, but at several points in her manuscript she has written authors’ names, works, and page numbers beside passages, and many of those transcribed passages match specific editions.[6] Here is a list of works in which her transcriptions and page numbers match known editions; these are volumes she is likely to have consulted—and perhaps owned—from the verse section of the manuscript, rearranged into alphabetical order:
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. Tryphon,in Four New Plays (1670) or Six Plays (1694)[7]
Brome, Alexander. Songs and Other Poems (1668)
Charron, Pierre. Of Wisdome, Three Books, translated by George Stanhope (1697)
Cowley, Abraham. Works (any edition between 1668 and 1693)[8]
Denham, John. Poems and Translations (1668, 1671, or 1684)
Dryden, John. An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer (1691)[9]
Dryden, John. Aureng-zebe, A Tragedy (1685)
Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1687)[10]
Dryden, John. The Hind and the Panther. A Poem (1687)[11]
Dryden, John. The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1686 or 1692)
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, three volumes, translated by Charles Cotton (1685-86)[12]
Norris, John. A Collection of Miscellanies (1687 or 1692)
Philips, Katherine. Poems (1667, 1669, or 1678)
Plutarch’s Morals Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, vols. 1 and 2 (1691 or 1694)[13]
Reynolds, Edward. A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1656)
Suckling, John. Works (1676)
Tuke, Samuel. The Adventures of Five Houres: A Tragi-Comedy (1671)
Waller, Edmund. Poems (1694)
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Poems on Several Occasions (1680 or 1685)
In the prose section, Blount lists two page references tied to works that match the following printed texts:
Marana, Giovanni Paolo. The First Volume of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1691, 1692, 1693, or 1694) or the eight-volume edition (1694)
Sprat, Thomas. The History of the Royal-Society (1667, 1702, 1722, or 1734)
Interestingly, one of the books described in Lindenbaum’s post, Reynolds’ A Treatise of the Passions (1656), is in the above list. It was the first book that Blount used in the verse portion of the miscellany. She inscribed the Reynolds book on July 10, 1696, and I wonder if then or shortly thereafter she wrote the heading “1696” in the St. Paul’s manuscript and began transcribing. Visible in the marginal notes beside the second entry in figure 3, above, you can see the note “Reynolds saith in his Tre: of ye Pa: & Faulties of ye Soul Page ye 228.” This short passage on grief (the only passage in prose in the verse section of the manuscript) is indeed from p. 228 in Reynolds’ book. But Reynolds’ treatise is also the source for the rest of the passages on this first page, those she has attributed to Ovid, Lucretius, and Euripides; of three on the following page (fol. 178v), which she has attributed to The Iliad, Ovid, and Homer; and of one on fol. 186v, which she has attributed to “A Greek Poet,” which Reynolds identifies as Euripides. In these seven passages (which appear in Reynolds, pp. 228, 179, 122, 89, 284, 297-98, and 265), Blount obscures Reynolds as the source and instead highlights his own marginal references to classical authors and their works, no doubt capitalizing on the cultural cachet of these ancient sources.[14]
As Lindenbaum and Van Elk have discovered, Blount owned books written by Ben Jonson (The Works, 1692, which she purchased in 1699), Edmund Waller (The Works, 1729, which was given to her by the editor in 1730), and Francis Bacon (The Essays or Counsels, 1673, which she inscribed in 1697). Though extracts or complete works by each writer appear in Blount’s miscellany, those precise editions were not her source. A marginal note indicates that the eight-line passage from Jonson’s translation of Horace’s De Arte Poetica appeared “In a Translation of Hor:” (fol. 187v). This suggests that Blount’s source was The Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyres, and Epistles Rendered in English Verse by Several Persons, which included Jonson’s translation in the editions of 1666 and 1671. There are four extracts from Waller, from The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (fol. 178v), “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (fol. 179r), “A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (fol. 179r), and “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace” (fol. 180v). Two of the four extracts have page numbers beside them, and these line up with Waller’s Poems of 1694 but do not match the 1729 edition.[15] Since Blount began compiling her manuscript in 1696, and since the Waller extracts appear near the beginning (fols. 178v, 179r, and 180v), the Waller edition she received in 1730 is not her source. Finally, the Bacon item she includes in full, “The Character of Queen Elizabeth” (fols. 257v, rev.-247v, rev.), is the English translation that was first printed in the 1696 edition of The Essays or Counsels; the 1673 edition she owned does not include that work.[16] Blount might have used editions from 1696, 1701, 1706, or 1718, all of which included the version she transcribed.
Blount’s sources are even more plentiful than the above list since many more rhyming couplets, prose and verse extracts, and complete poems and prose works appear in her miscellany, only sometimes identified by author. Though the exact works and editions are not always clear, in addition to those already mentioned she includes passages or complete works from the following authors in her compilation: Edward Baynard, Thomas Browne, Colley Cibber, John Cleveland, Jeremy Collier, Thomas Creech, William Davenant, John Donne, Richard Fanshawe, Charles Gildon, Matthew Morgan, John Oldham, John Philips, Samuel Pufendorf, Charles Sedley, Jeremy Taylor, William Walsh, and John Webster.[17]
Katherine Blount’s miscellany gives us a rich opportunity to see one woman from the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century engaging with her reading material. It is likely that more books owned by Blount from the above lists will surface, so let’s all keep our antennae out.
Source: St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14. Photos by Graham Lacdao, St. Paul’s Cathedral, reproduced with permission.
Works Cited
Booker, John M. L., ed. The Clough and Butler Archives: A Catalogue. West Sussex County Council, 1965.
Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland. 4 vols, London, 1836-38.
Burke, Victoria E. “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips.” Women’s Writing, vol. 24, no. 3, 2017, pp. 280-97. Special issue: Katherine Philips: Form and Reception, edited by Marie-Louise Coolahan and Gillian Wright. Reprinted in Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts, edited by Coolahan and Wright, Routledge, 2018, pp. 151-68.
Burke, Victoria E. “‘The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place’ in Katherine Butler’s Late Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany.” Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 183-99.
Potter, George R., and Evelyn M. Simpson. “General Introductions: II. On the Manuscripts.” The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., edited by Potter and Simpson, University of California Press, 1962, vol. 1, pp. 33-45.
Van Koughnet, Jane C. E. A History of Tyttenhanger. London, 1895.
[1] See sources by Van Koughnet, Crook and Henning, and others in the posts by Lindenbaum and O’Donnell.
[2] This research culminated in an article on Butler’s manuscript miscellany, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place” (2014). See note 6, in which I used John Burke’s Commoners, vol. 3, p. 517, to suggest her possible link with the Butlers of Amberley Castle; I used the birth and death dates from Booker, The Clough and Butler Archives, pedigree facing p. x.
[3] For a description of St. Paul’s Cathedral Library MS 52 D.14, see Potter and Simpson, vol. 1, pp. 41-42. For editions of the four Donne sermons in this manuscript, see The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne Project website: https://donnesermons.web.ox.ac.uk/st-pauls-cathedral-library-ms-52d14
[4] The first passage is from Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards; the 1687 edition matches Blount’s marginal reference of p. 88 (the reason for the cross-reference to p. 67 on the right of the passage is unclear). The second passage is from Dryden’s Aureng-zebe, a Tragedy, and Blount’s page reference of 46 matches the 1685 edition of that play.
[5] The final item in the verse section, the first 13 lines from the verse prologue of Dr Edward Baynard’s Health: A Poem, must be from the 1719 edition (the first to include the verse prologue) or later editions. An item from the later pages of the prose section in Blount’s hand (fol. 259r, rev.) appears to have been extracted from The Counsels of Wisdom, Or a Collection of Such Maxims of Solomon as are Most Necessary for the Prudent Conduct of Life … by Monseigneur Fouquet …, vol. 1 (1736), p. 28. While two seventeenth-century volumes with similar titles from 1680 and 1683 contain the passage, Blount’s wording matches the 1736 edition.
[6] My thanks to Shane Hawkins, who matched many of the references to digitized copies of books in Early English Books Online (EEBO), which catalogues books printed from 1475-1700, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO).
[7] Though Orrery’s Two New Tragedies (1669) also contains this extract on the page listed by Blount (p. 45), she later quotes (without a page reference) from Orrery’s Mustapha, a play which appears in the 1670 and 1694 volumes but not the 1669. It is thus more likely that she used the 1670 or 1694 edition for the extracts from both plays.
[8] Blount’s page numbers line up with the editions of 1668, 1669, 1672, 1674, 1678, 1680, 1681, 1684, 1688, and 1693. Though the page numbers also match Cowley’s Poems (1656), she later quotes (without a page reference) from a work that does not appear in the 1656 edition, making it more likely that all of her Cowley quotations come from an edition of his Works.
[9] Blount’s page number matches the 1691 edition of An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock-Astrologer, but also the version of the play found in the three-volume 1695 collection of Dryden’s works. Only one other Dryden work in this list fits the pagination in the three-volume 1695 edition (The Hind and Panther); since none of Blount’s page numbers for Aureng-zebe, The Conquest of Granada, or The Indian Emperor match the three-volume edition, it is not likely the source for her Dryden extracts. A final play by Dryden, All for Love, or, The World Well Lost a Tragedy, is quoted by Blount, but her edition is uncertain since the Prologue from which she quotes is unpaginated in all editions (1678, 1692, 1696, and the three-volume 1695 edition of Dryden’s works).
[10] The quotation appears on pp. 87-88 in the 1678 edition, but the only edition in which it appears on p. 88 (Blount’s reference) is the 1687 edition.
[11] Blount must have extracted from one of the three editions Jacob Tonson printed in 1687, since her reference of p. 14 lines up with those editions only (not with the other two editions printed in 1687, by James Watson and by Andrew Crook and Samuel Helsham, whose pagination is different).
[12] Though Blount gives a page reference for only one of her eleven quotations from this source (p. 327 from vol. 1), the quotations come from all three volumes.
[13] Blount quotes nine times from volume 1 or 2 of this work, but only gives a page number once (p. 37), which matches volume 1 of the 1691 and 1694 editions.
[14] For a discussion of Blount’s use of classical sources in her miscellany see Burke, “The disagreeable Figure of a Common-Place,” pp. 193-94. Blount also obscures Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1703) as the source of thirty classical quotations.
[15] The page reference given by Blount for the extract from “Of Divine Love. Six Cantos” (p. 281) matches both the 1694 and 1705 editions, but the page reference for The Maid’s Tragedy Altered (p. 10) matches the edition of the play first printed in 1690, and then in the Poems of 1694, but not the 1705 edition, suggesting that Blount likely used the 1694 edition for her Waller extracts.
[16] Two different English translations were printed earlier in the century: one in 1651 in The Felicity of Queen Elizabeth: and Her Times (pp. 1-42) and one in 1657 in the collection Resuscitatio (pp. 181-93). This latter translation by William Rawley was praised as superior in Baconiana, or, Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (1679), pp. 52-53, by “T. T.” The Latin text seems first to have been printed, also by Rawley, in the Latin collection entitled Opuscula varia posthuma (1658), pp. 175-94.
[17] Later material that may be in a different hand includes a sermon by John Scott, letters by John Tillotson and James Radcliffe, and “Mrs Cowlings Thoughts upon Time.” (The last may be the Mrs. Couling referred to by Van Koughnet as a friend of Blount’s sister, Grace: p. 68). For additional work on Blount’s reading material and strategies see the two articles (and forthcoming work) by Burke.
When we uncover a long-forgotten woman’s inscription in an old book, our tendency is to celebrate. After all, each new name has the potential to enrich our understanding of women’s reading and their intellectual, devotional, political, and recreational lives in the early modern period. The beautifully wrought signature of Dulcibella Kent, dated 1734, on the title page of a 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Workes is a perfect example. Our attention is drawn by the unusual first name (derived from dulce, Latin for sweet) and the florid handwriting, which is offset by the stately engraved title page.
Yet this “sweet” reader conceals a dark reality.
Dulcibella Kent was born in 1711 to Susanna Chafe and prosperous London merchant Charles Kent. Three daughters would outlive the Kents, Dulcibella and her older sisters Susanna (b. 1705) and Charlotte (b. 1707). Dulcibella was baptized on 17 April and her father died at forty-nine on 14 April, 1716, so on or around her fifth birthday, followed by her mother on 16 February, 1718. It is not clear who took charge of the not-quite-seven-year-old Dulcibella and her sisters, the eldest of whom was only thirteen at the time. It must have been a sad and frightening period in the girls’ lives.
Although it could not have made up for the loss of their parents, the girls were handsomely provided for in Kent’s will and his estate was placed in trust for them. Emily J. Climenson’s The History of Shiplake, Oxon. (1894) describes Kent as a “rich merchant who owned property in several counties, also important estates in Jamaica.” The anodyne phrase “also important estates in Jamaica” disguises the sinister truth: these estates were built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Says Professor Trevor Burnard for The Guardian:
Jamaica in the 18th century was described by Charles Leslie as a “constant mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches”. It contributed greatly to the wealth of individuals thousands of miles away, such as William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London and the owner of well over 1,000 enslaved people, whose statue still graces Guildhall in London. But more significantly, it enriched Britain by filling the coffers of the Treasury with money from taxes levied on sugar and rum. Britain was the greatest slave trader in the Atlantic world during the 18th century, sending nearly 1 million captive Africans to Jamaica between 1655 and 1807, resulting in a population of enslaved people barely over 300,000, due to horrific mortality rates. Black people suffered greatly for white people’s enjoyment of sweet things.
The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery is unequivocal, calling Charles Kent a “slave-trader, shown as deceased co-owner with Col. Richard Thompson (q.v.) of Morant estate from 1740 until 1832.” The Morant estate, located in St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey, Jamaica, now Saint Thomas Parish, produced rum, molasses, corn—and sugar. Dulce indeed.
While she may have been ignorant of how her father’s fortune was made when she was a young orphan, by the time she inscribed her copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes in 1734 as a woman in her early twenties, she could not have been in doubt. She was listed as a joint owner of the estate from her father’s death in 1716 to 1793, the year of her own death. In her will, she bequeathed the Jamaica estates to her son Edward Dodwell.
Dulcibella did not marry until 1744 when she was in her early thirties, older than the average marrying age of 25 or 26 for women at the time. Although she was by no means an old maid then, her disquietingly acquired wealth would have enabled her to delay marriage if she wished. She lived with her husband Henry Dodwell in Golden Square, a well-to-do area of Soho boasting several foreign diplomats as residents.
So what does this background tell us about Dulcibella’s ownership of the Jonson volume? The book was already old when she acquired it, almost 120 years old. A trimmed inscription about one-third of the way down on the engraved title page reads “Wm. An[…?]” or perhaps “Wm. Aw[…?].” We don’t know if it was given as a gift, taken from the family library, or if she acquired it secondhand. Either way, her ability to leisurely browse the book’s over 1000 pages was made possible by her station in life, which was directly supported by enslaved Africans.
The issue of Britain’s role in the Jamaican slave trade is not a thing of the past. In an essay for The Guardian in late March 2023, Jamaican journalist and activist Barbara Blake-Hannah tackled the question of how Britain—”a country whose role in the enslavement of millions of Africans over three centuries, and the subsequent monopoly of their ruling systems and economies, is the basis of its global strength and leadership”—should make amends to the country and the descendants of the people it so cruelly exploited. Ultimately, she finds the idea of cash reparations unrealistic. Instead, she proposes “the total relief of all Jamaica’s debt to the UK, plus the lifting of UK visa restrictions for Jamaican descendants of enslaved people, with unlimited access to the ’empire’s’ educational and economic opportunities, which were built on the labour of my enslaved ancestors.”
In the meantime, it would behoove white people to remember Trevor Burnard’s words:
Black people suffered greatly for white people’s enjoyment of sweet things.
Source: Dulcibella Kent’s copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes was sold at auction by Swann Galleries in 2023. Images are used with permission.
“Dulcibella Dodwell (née Kent): Profile & Legacies Summary.” Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL Department of History 2023. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146650587
“Morant: Jamaica | St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey.” Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL Department of History 2023. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/estate/view/2224
Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. 12th series, vol. V: January–December, 1919 (London: The Times Publishing Company), p. 185. https://books.google.com/books?id=_nIEAAAAYAAJ
Today’s book will make its appearance in the forthcoming Spring 2023 Focus on Women sale by Swann Galleries, who have generously allowed it to be previewed here.
Printed in Oxford, The Tragoedy of Rollo is attributed to John Fletcher, although its true authorship has been the subject of scholarly debate. It first appeared in print in 1639 as The Bloody Brother, its text was from a different quarto. John E. Curran, Jr. attributes the play to Fletcher, Philip Massinger, “and probably some others,” while the English Short Title Catalogue suggests that it was probably written by Fletcher and Ben Jonson, then revised by Massinger. Similarly, R. Garnett argued in 1905 that Act IV, Scene II was penned by Jonson. Although the play was included in the Second Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher (1679), Fletcher’s frequent collaborator did not participate in its writing. Others have proposed that George Chapman was one of its writers, or that Fletcher merely revised the play.
Whatever the truth, we can be sure that the playbook’s owners were more focused on plot than author. The titular character is based on the real-life Rollo, a Viking and the first ruler of Normandy. Rollo’s descendants were known as the Normans, who of course famously conquered England in 1066. Fletcher (and / or whoever else wrote the play) gives Rollo a fictional brother, Otto, with whom he wrestles for control of the kingdom. After a brief reconciliation between the two gives way to suspicion and tension, Rollo murders Otto in front of their mother and has several of Otto’s supporters killed. Rollo is ultimately killed by Hamond, captain of his guard, after ordering the execution of Hamond’s brother Allan, and his kinsman Lord Aubrey ascends to the dukedom.
The recto of the first blank leaf is signed “Grace Jefferson’s Book 1696” along the upper edge. Beneath it, later owner Thomas Pennington has tried four different versions of his signature, the first dated 1710. The book later belonged to the Legh family of Norbury Booths Hall, whose armorial bookplate on the front pastedown is dated 1826. The book may have entered the family’s library during Peter Legh’s lifetime, as he lived until 1857. It was owned most recently by collector Kenneth Rapaport.
Like so many women who inscribed books, Grace Jefferson is unidentified, but demonstrates seventeenth-century women’s interest in drama.
Source: Book to be offered for sale by Swann Auction Galleries in Spring 2023. Images used with permission.
Title page from the 1651 edition at the Huntington LibraryFrontispiece from the 1651 edition at the Huntington Library
Appearing in eight editions (plus additional issues) between 1621 and 1676, seven of them in folio, Robert Burton’s expansive and erudite Anatomy of Melancholy was a seventeenth-century publishing phenomenon. A copy of the 1651 edition of Burton’s Anatomy, held by the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island (shelfmark PR 2223.A1 1651), is the first to appear on the EMFBO site.[1] Furthermore, the evidence here of early modern female book ownership is but one of this book’s several interesting features—including the only known manuscript copy of Katherine Philips’ song “Pompey’s Ghost” in a seventeenth-century printed book or made by a seventeenth-century woman.
The Redwood copy is in a modern binding and lacks the frontispiece and title-page, but it retains two original flyleaves and the half-title that precedes the now missing frontispiece.[2] The earliest provenance appears on the recto of the second of the two flyleaves, where Pleasant Rawlins has enthusiastically inscribed her full name four times: “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book”; “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book Aprill the 1 day 16**” [second line of inscription obliterated and date trimmed]; “Pleasant Rawlins her book / Aprill ye 1 day 1672” [entire inscription obliterated]; and, at the bottom of the page, “Pleasant Rawlins her book.”
Second flyleaf recto (top)Second flyleaf recto (middle)
She subsequently re-inscribed her name in an accomplished calligraphic hand on the recto of the first flyleaf, the inscription oriented vertically on the page: “Mrs Pleasant Biker / her booke / Aprill Idus Mensis pridie [the day before the Ides of April, i.e. April 12] Anno Domine 1676.”
First flyleaf recto
The obliterations of the two dated “Rawlins” entries look likely to be by Rawlins herself, possibly prompted by her addition of the re-dated inscription under her married name. The same hand has obliterated two instances of the name “John” on the “Rawlins” inscription page, in the same ink and probably at the same time as the other obliterations. On the top left of the “Biker” page, also oriented vertically, is another inscription, probably not by Rawlins/Biker but still early and possibly missing some text due to paper repairs. Difficult to decipher, it reads like a quotation but remains untraced: “[?Jan*** pa**] / I shall Endeavour for the future / To have \no/ constant indareance between us / by Letter.”
Pleasant Rawlins and Mrs Pleasant Biker are the same person: Pleasant Rawlins, daughter of William and Katherine Rawlins, was baptised in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldgate in London on February 1, 1652. She married Samuel Biker (d.1685) at some point between April 1672 (the date of her “Rawlins” inscription) and 1674, the year her daughter Pleasant Biker (d.1696) was baptised, also in St Botolph Without Aldgate, on August 30. Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker died in early 1685, the same year as her husband, and was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on January 12 of that year, at the age of thirty-two.[3]
Pleasant Rawlins was a young woman of twenty when she first inscribed her copy of Burton’s Anatomy. The Latin in her 1676 inscription as well as her practised use of Italic and calligraphic hands, not to mention her ownership of a work like Burton’s Anatomy, suggests a certain level of education. In addition, the thirty-line poem she has copied in the book, beginning on the “Rawlins” inscription page (in the same hand and ink as her signature at the bottom of the page) and continuing onto the facing verso of the preceding flyleaf, suggests a fashionably current literary sensibility. Beginning “From lasting and unclouded Day,” the poem is an extract, often known as “Pompey’s Ghost,” from Katherine Philips’s play Pompey, her translation of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy La mort de Pompeé. “Pompey’s Ghost” is one of the newly written songs Philips innovatively added to the translated play.
From lasting and unclouded Day, From joys refin’d above allay And from a Spring without decay. I come by Cynthia’s borrow’d bems To visit my Cornelia’s Drems, And give them yet sublimer Thems.
Second flyleaf recto
[first flyleaf verso, oriented vertically]
Behold the Man thou love’dst before Pure streams have wash’d away his Gore And Pompey now shall bleed no more. By Death my Glory I resume, For ’twould have been a harsher doom T’ outlive the Liberty of Rome. By me her doubtfull fortune try’d Falling, bequeaths my Fame this Pride I for it lived and with it Dy’d. Nor shall my Vengeance bee withstood Nor unattempted, with a Flood off Roman and Egitptian blood. Cesar himselfe it shall pursue his days shall troubled bee & few And hee shall dye by treason too. hee by severity Divine shallbee an offring att my shrine As I was his hee must bee mine Thy stormy life Ile regrett noe more For Fate shall waft the soone ashore [And to thy Pompey the restore] There none a Guilty Crowne shall weare nor Cesar bee Dictator there nor shall Cornelia shed one teare
First flyleaf verso
Rawlins has omitted from Philips’ original the penultimate three-line stanza, probably for reasons of space: working around some pen trials already on the page, she changed hands halfway through the first line of the sixth stanza from her elegant italic to a more cramped secretary, squeezing stanzas six and seven onto the lower half of the left side, then squeezing stanzas eight and nine onto the lower half of the right side (in stanza nine, the final line has been trimmed in rebinding and the final words of the first two lines are covered by a paper repair), then adding the final stanza in an empty space above, breaking up lines to make it fit. The omitted stanza reads, in Philips’ original, “Where past the fears of sad removes / We’l entertain our spotless Loves, / In beauteous, and Immortal Groves.” Rawlins has bracketed stanzas eight and nine, adding an unfortunately illegible (and possibly trimmed) word in the margin (?*eib*).
Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker and her husband Samuel both died in 1685, in London: Samuel was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on February 21, about six weeks after his wife. At some point that same year, the next owner of this copy of Burton’s Anatomy bought it in a location a world away: an inscription across the top of the book’s half-title reads, “Benjamin Newberry Ejus Liber Bought att / Port Royall In Jamaica 1685.” This is probably Benjamin Newberry (c.1653-1711), of Newport, Rhode Island.
Half-title
The Newberrys were a prominent merchant family in Newport and would likely have had trade dealings in Jamaica; the Newport connection could also explain the current presence of the book in the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. The same page features one additional later signature, the (untraced) “Robert Morton / 1828.” If this copy of Burton remained in the possession of the Rawlins/Biker family until the deaths of Pleasant and then Samuel in early 1685, it soon made its way into the hands of somebody with an entrepreneurial sense of the potential transatlantic market for used books. While other copies of Burton’s Anatomy are documented in America in the seventeenth century, including at least one owned by a woman,[8] this book may represent the earliest text by Katherine Philips to make its way across the Atlantic.
Source: Redwood Library & Athenaeum, call number PR 2223.A1 1651. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] I would like to thank Michelle Farias, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, for drawing this book to my attention during a visit there in January 2022, and Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Hageman for their comments on early versions of this note.
[2] Because the title-page is missing, the holding library has catalogued the copy on the basis of its colophon, dated 1651 (sig. 4A4r). The same colophon appears in the 1652 re-issue, which differs only in its re-dated title-page: the copy may therefore represent the 1652 re-issue (Wing B6182) rather than the 1651 edition (Wing B6181).
[3] The genealogical data presented here all derives from records found in ancestrylibrary.com. This Pleasant Rawlins is not to be confused with her niece, also Pleasant Rawlins (b.1684), who was the teenaged victim of a notorious 1702 case of heiress abduction and forced marriage regarded as a source for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: see Beth Swan, “Clarissa Harlowe, Pleasant Rawlins, and Eighteenth-Century Discourses of Law,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001), 71-93.
[4] Long ‘s’ and initial ‘ff’ regularized, abbreviations silently expanded, and a false start on one stanza omitted.
[5] Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 182.
[6] Salzman, 187-90; Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM), PsK 575-77; John Cunningham, “Songs Lost and Found: Katherine Philips’s ‘Pompey’s Ghost’,” Music and Letters, advance article 20 May 2022.
[7] The Folger Union First Line Index of English Verse lists five manuscript copies; CELM adds two, one now lost (PsK 578-80); Cunningham, incorporating ongoing research by Nathan Tinker, adds seven more, all copied in the USA in the eighteenth century (20-23). For a study of manuscript copying of other work by Philips by early modern women, see Victoria E. Burke, “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips,” Women’s Writing 24.3 (2017), 280-97.
[8] Charles Heventhal Jr., “Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ in Early America,” PBSA 63.3 (1969), 157-75. Heventhal notes that a copy of the 1632 edition is described in the 1870 catalogue of the Thomas Prince library as signed “Sarah Standish” (159-60). Prince bequeathed his library to Boston’s Old South Church in 1758, and this could be any one of several Sarah Standishes who lived in the New England settlements between the mid-seventeenth century and the date of Prince’s death. The Prince library is currently held by the Boston Public Library, but this copy of Burton’s Anatomy seems no longer to be present in the collection.
While most of our posts involve single books or evidence of book ownership in the form of marginalia and signatures, another key area of provenance research is in the form of inventories and book lists. The fascinating database and journal series Private Libraries of Renaissance England have showcased a number of key women for whom the content of larger libraries are known. These lists, whether they are based on inventories or wills, help us determine not only what women read, but also, as Edith Snook notes, how they wanted to present themselves. Indeed, in her essay on the private library of Elizabeth Isham, Snook calls the booklist a form of life writing or “ego document,” a source that can tell us something about women’s senses of identity, particularly for noble women whose profile was of necessity at least to some degree public.
In his chapter in the collection Women’s Bookscapes, Joseph Black predicted that “Unpublished early modern booklists will … continue to turn up” (219). A few months ago, I was delighted to receive a message from Tim Couzens, who offered to share with us and our readers two lists of books that he has found in the papers of Lady Dorothy Long housed at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. Though he will be editing and publishing these lists more fully soon, we get here an advance look at the contents. The lists were evidently drawn up to facilitate their placement in the household, as they are books to be put on “the high shelf,” some of them grouped among the “little books to be put on the high shelf.” Whether the “high shelf” indicates that they needed to be placed out of reach or were stored where they were not readily accessible is unclear.
Lady Dorothy Long, née Leche (c. 1620-1710) was married in around 1640 to Sir James Long, second Baronet (1617-1692), a politician. The couple lived in their estate at Draycot, Wiltshire. Sir James had fought on the side of the royalists in the Civil Wars, but nonetheless, according to biographer John Aubrey, befriended Oliver Cromwell through his interests in hawking, a lifelong passion. Aubrey lists James Long under “amici” (friends) in his Brief Lives.
In their edition of Elizabeth Isham’s autobiographical writings, Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow mention Lady Long (“Dolly”)’s correspondence with Isham’s brother and contrast her style with that of the more sober Isham: “[Long’s] letters employ the banter of a royalist coterie, complete with nicknames and a (mocking) reference to their ‘Academy’, in a style reminiscent of the more familiar and accomplished works of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips. Lady Long does display an interest in literature, particularly the salacious Ovid, but she mocks the Countess of Dysart’s serious study of Donne.” Long donated to the Ashmolean, and their Book of Benefactors describes her in much different terms, as “the pride and joy of her family and her sex … [She] showed a deep interest in primitive religions and antiquities. Her piety and great good will to this University led her to give a carved ivory crosier [head] which had belonged to Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, to this museum to be placed with the other treasures.”
Given these contrasting descriptions, it is fascinating to think, with Snook, of the two lists of books that belonged to Long as a form of life writing to counter the narratives of royalist eccentricity and piety.
Here is Tim Couzen’s transcription, along with his preliminary identifications of the books in brackets:
Little books to put ith highe Shelf. [15 July 1704, from content]
Narrative oth Fire at London [An Historical narrative of the Great and Terrible Fire of London, Sept 2nd1666. Gideon Harvey. This may be an original of the book published more generally by W. Nicoll in 1769.]
Epitome of Husbandry [The Epitome of the Art of Husbandry: comprising all necessary directions for the Improvement of it. Etc, by J.B. Gent (Joseph Blagrave), 1675.]
Flatmans Poems [Dr. Thomas Flatman (1635–1688) Fellow of the Royal Society, Poet and miniature painter. Probably Poems and Songs (1674).]
Counr Manners Legacy tos Son. [Counsellor Manners, His Last legacy to His Son: etc. Probably the first edition, published in 1673, by Josiah Dare.]
Dr Gouge Domestick dutys [Of Domesticall Duties, eight treatises etc. by William Gouge, 1622.]
Pasquin risen from ye Dead [London, 1674.]
Nat: Culverwel on ye Light of Nature [Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651), An elegant and learned discourse of the Light of Nature, 1652.]
The History of Joseph &c: [Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Probably the 1700 edition.]
Theopanila Broms Poems [William Sales’s Theophania (London, 1655) and Alexander Brome’s Poems.]
G [Gaius] Velleius Paterculus [Roman Historian (c 19BC – c AD31). There are several early editions.]
Evagoros. [Evagoros. [Two possible identifications: Paul Salzman has suggested this is Evagoras, a Romance by L.L. Gent (London, 1677). A second possibility is the Greek oration by Isocrates on the King of Salamis (Unknown edition). Given the mixture of romances, for Dorothy Long’s own use, and text books from her grandson, James, it is not possible to be certain, but the former seems much more likely.]
Bookes to put into ye High Shelfe ye 15o July 1704.
The Countise Montgomerys Urania [romance by Mary Wroth (1587–1653), dedicated to Countess of Montgomery; the book was first published in 1621.]
Orlando Furiosa: Abraham Cowleys workes [Two separate books. The first is Orlando Furioso, an Italian epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto (1516–1532), presumably in an early, but un-named translation. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), was an English poet, with 14 printings of his works published between 1668 and 1721.]
Mrs Phillipes’s Verses. orinda. [Katherine Philips (1631/32–1664), known as “The Matchless Orinda,” was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters. After her death, in 1667, an authorized edition of her poetry was printed entitled Poems by the Most Deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, which included her translations of Pompee and Horace.]
Scarrons Comicall Romance [Paul Scarron (1610–1660) was a French dramatist and novelist. The Roman Comique was reworked by a number of English authors.]
The Lusiad. or Portingales His: a Poem [The Lusiads is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luis vaz de Camoes (c1524/5–1580) and first published in 1572. The date and author of the early translation is not stated.]
The warres of Justinian [The history of the warres of the Emperour Justinian in eight books: etc. Written in Greek by Procopius etc. Englished by Sir Henry Holcroft (1586–1650). Published in 1653.]
Micrographia. By Rob: Hooke [Likely to be a first edition (1665) directly from the author. The book is listed in the 1846 Draycot House contents catalogue.]
The Civell warrs of Spain [Joseph Black has identified this as Prudencio de Sandoval, The Civil Wars of Spain (published in multiple editions from 1652 to 1662) This book is also listed in the 1795 Draycot House Inventory.]
Phillipe De Comines. [An early translation from French of the Memoirs of Philippe de Commines. The usual publication date for Volume 2 is 1712.]
Cornelius Tacitus Tacitus Arriana. [The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus: The description of Germanie. Translated by Richard Greenway and Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622). Published London, 1640; Ariana is a romance by Jean Desmarets, Sieur de Saint Sorlin, originally translated in 1636.]
Of Goverment of obeydiense by Jo: Hall. [Of Government and obedience as the stand directed and determined in Scripture and reason, four books by John Hall of Richmond. London, 1654.]
Cass[andra?] Sanders on Memory &c. [The title is obscured by the fold; the first book is Cassandra the fam’d romance: the whole work: in five parts / written originally in French: now elegantly rendred into English by a person of quality. Cassandra is a translation of a romance novel by Gaultier de Coste La Calprenède, translated in 1652. Possible second work is unidentified.]
Pasquil risen from ye Dead to put higher [see above.]
Standly’s 7: wise Men &c. [Thomas Stanley (1625–1678) was an English Author and translator. The History of Philosophy, 3 volumes published in 1655, 1656, and 1660, includes the seven wise men (sages) of Greece.]
A larg print of Cardinall Richeleis House [Probably the Chateau de Richelieu, south of Chinon, Touraine, rather than the Palais Royal in Paris.]
Nero Ceazar. & ye warr of Jugurth &c: [Two separate books. The first title is possibly Nero Caesar, or Monarchy Depraved. An Historical Work, by Edmund Bolton (published 1627). The second is an early English translation of Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus). The Warre of Jugurth is by Thomas Heywood, 1608.]
The collection of books is, as Tim Couzens notes in his email to me, largely associated with her schooling of her grandsons, Sir Giles and Sir James Long (later 5th Baronet), before they went on to tutors and governors and to Oxford. But many women’s collections included works of history and politics, whether or not they used them to educate their children.
Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips, Folger Shakespeare Library, P2035.
Readers of this blog will be particularly interested to see both Mary Wroth’s Urania and Katherine Philips’s Poems in the listing, and, compared with other such inventories, there are surprisingly few devotional books. Though Margaret Cavendish is missing, the presence of Philips certainly shows, much like the romance texts, an affiliation with royalist culture. Links between different books are evident: Thomas Flatman, author of a book of poems listed here, had written a dedicatory poem for Philip’s collection, and as it happens, another copy of Philips’s poems we have featured on this site (housed by the Folger Shakespeare library) was owned by Hannah Flatman, Thomas Flatman’s wife.
Generally, Long’s inventories reveal her political affiliations, her investment in learning (or teaching the boys in her family), and a wide range of interests in romance, history, philosophy, and poetry, with only minor concerns with household management and domestic advice so commonly found in women’s inventories and little in books of devotion that normally dominate such libraries. Perhaps those books were placed on the lower shelves.
We want to thank Tim for providing us with transcriptions and pictures of the two lists of books owned by Lady Dorothy Long and Sara Morrison and Anabel Loyd for permission to reproduce both the transcription and images.
Source: Wiltshire and Swindon History Center 2943B/1/35. Draft letters and notes by Lady Dorothy Long [No description] (1686-1704). 35 documents.
Further Reading
Joseph L. Black, “Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project.” Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 214–229.
Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, “Introduction to the Online Edition.” Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiographical Writings. Center for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, 2015. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/researchcurrent/isham/texts/.
Tim Couzens, Hand of Fate: The History of the Longs, Wellesleys and the Draycot Estate in Wiltshire. ELSP, 2001.
PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Ed. Joseph L. Black et al. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://plre.folger.edu/
Private Libraries in Renaissance England vols. 8-9 (2014–16).
Edith Snook, “Elizabeth Isham’s ‘own Bookes’: Property, Propriety, and the Self as Library.” Women.’’ Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 77–93.
Title page of the Fourth Folio of Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1685), up for auction at Christie’s as part of the Theodore B. Baum sale in September 2021.
But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.
Shakespeare, The Tempest (5.1.59-66)
You are what you read—at least, that’s how I have always understood the feeling of dissolving into a book. Books absorb us into their pages: we feel our edges blur and disappear. The world goes away, until reality breaks the charm and we resurface and reappear among the living.
Except when we don’t. Sometimes, those who are forgotten by history live on only in the books they left behind, fathoms beneath our memory of the past. That is exactly what happened to Charlotte Rowe (1718-1739), daughter of Nicholas Rowe, England’s fourth Poet Laureate and the first editor of Shakespeare’s works. Charlotte Rowe was swallowed by a book. In fact, she disappeared into the Fourth Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1685).
Rowe’s signature on recto of the frontispiece leaf. The shadow of the intaglio portrait of Shakespeare on the verso is visible to the keen eye.
Charlotte is concealed by Shakespeare both historically and literally. If there’s a place one would least expect to find her name inscribed, it’s in Poets’ Corner, the most iconic pilgrimage site for lovers of English literature—yet there she is. Anyone who explores Westminster Abbey in London will soon find themselves in an alcove in the south transept crammed with tombs and memorials to some of the greatest English writers. In this part of the cathedral, there’s hardly an inch of space that isn’t carved with famous names. A visitor can’t take so much as a step without trodding on Charles Dickens or coming nose to nose with Geoffrey Chaucer. Even after the inscriptions had carpeted the stone floor and climbed up the marble walls, names began appearing in the stained-glass windows too. Poet’ Corner is one of the most magical places a passionate reader can find herself. The stone itself is alive, and one of its most electrifying features is an elaborate monument to Shakespeare.
The monument to Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Drawn in by the sheer prominence of Shakespeare’s statue, most visitors don’t notice what sits just a few feet away. Next door is the tomb of Nicholas Rowe, which includes a memorial to his daughter, Charlotte.
The most prominent figures in the Rowe monument are a bust of Rowe and a symbolic statue of a mourning woman holding an open book. A carving of Charlotte in profile in a round frame hovers diffidently in the background. Even though it sits directly within view, it would easily escape the casual observer’s notice.
This only surviving portrait of Charlotte reflects the apparent position of many women. They hover in the background, metaphorically and spatially. Where their names survive, they play second fiddle to men’s names and achievements. And, too often, we can barely get a clear enough view of them to put a face to the name. The tiny glimpse we get of Charlotte raises more questions than answers.
Charlotte was born in 1718, the same year her father died. She never knew him personally, yet she owned a copy of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio. Nicholas Rowe based his 1709 edition of Shakespeare primarily on the Fourth Folio which, at the time, was the most recently published version of the plays. It was also highly inaccurate, containing substantially different texts to those published in Shakespeare’s time and the First Folio (1623). Modern editors, who regard Shakespeare’s language as almost sacred, aim to recover it as accurately as possible. Today, the Fourth Folio’s differences are damning.
But that’s not how many of Rowe’s contemporaries would have seen it. From the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, writers and editors often took a liberty that would horrify Bardolaters today: they rewrote Shakespeare. Unthinkable though it seems to us, it wasn’t uncommon for Shakespeareans to take it upon themselves to ‘improve’ the plays. Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate before Rowe, was put off by the unbearably tragic ending of King Lear—so he simply rewrote the play to give it a happy ending. In fact, it was Tate’s version, in which Lear and his beloved daughter Cordelia survive, and not Shakespeare’s original which ends in both characters’ deaths, that was performed on the English stage from 1681 until the mid-nineteenth century. For more than a hundred years, Shakespeare’s King Lear wasn’t Shakespeare’s King Lear!
In some ways, Rowe was ahead of his time. He pioneered many editorial features of Shakespeare’s plays that we take for granted: he divided the plays into five acts each, added stage directions, and included a Dramatis Personae, or list of characters, at the beginning of each play. He also claimed that he had compared “several Editions” to reproduce as nearly as possible “the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts.” In reality, his edition shows that he simply followed the Fourth Folio, and even included several plays incorrectly attributed to Shakespeare. But, in a time of Tates who freely abridged Shakespeare’s works, it was the thought that counted. Rowe was the first to express a desire to recover the author’s own versions—and Shakespeare’s original words have been pearls which editors have sought ever since.
That the daughter whom Rowe never met owned a copy of the Fourth Folio raises some unanswerable questions. Was this inscribed book her father’s copy, perhaps inherited after his death? Did Charlotte long to know more about the father she would never meet? And how might such a desire have driven her interest in Shakespeare? How would she have read a play like King Lear, in which death thwarts a reunion between a father and daughter? And is there a copy of Rowe’s 1709 six-volume edition with his daughter’s signature still waiting to be found—or have these volumes been drowned in the tides of time if they ever existed at all?
On these questions, Charlotte’s copy of the Fourth Folio is as silent as the grave. The book contains no further substantial annotations beyond her signature. Charlotte herself died at the age of twenty-one, giving birth to a daughter, Charlotte Fane (1739-1762), who would die, in her turn, at the age of twenty-three. The bare skeleton of these facts survives to tantalize us with truths we many never conjure from the pages of books. Charlotte’s Fourth Folio whispers,
Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
The Tempest (1.2.474–479)
So Shakespeare seemed to Rowe—so Rowe might have seemed to Charlotte. So Charlotte appears to us.
The best historical writing makes the past and its inhabitants come alive. But what are we to do with those individuals who have undergone a sea change into something strange and elusive? Many women’s histories exist but remain undiscovered—but even more have been reduced to flickers and flashes, as indistinct as water is in water. In the face of large-scale social inequity and subsequent historical neglect, women have disappeared into the books they owned and read. As a result, rare books are some of the most evocative places we can look for and attempt to discover them. When we do so, whether as historians or curious readers, we seek the pearls of great price that humankind has unwisely thrown away: the books and people time’s tempests have submerged.
Many heartfelt thanks go to Rhiannon Knol for showing me this book and, as ever, to the members of the Books and Manuscripts Division at Christie’s, for their warm and wonderful support.
Source: Book offered for sale by Christie’s, September 14, 2021. All images reproduced with permission.
This set of Ben Jonson’s Workes includes a first volume printed in 1616 and a second volume printed in 1640. The first volume shows an interesting instance of use of an older manuscript as endpaper.
Pen trials appear on the flyleaf of the volume and a bookplate has been pasted onto the endpaper. The bookplate belonged to John Stackhouse, possibly the botanist, whose bookplate is in a collection in the British Museum.
For our purposes the second volume is even more interesting. The title page, which shows the book was printed for Richard Meighen, has several inscriptions on it that show women’s interest in displaying their ownership.
A “William Owen Esq” has signed the book twice, once around the word “Viz.” and his name appears again twice times before the list of plays, as if appropriating each title as his. At the very top of the page, a relative has written “Madm Elizabeth Owen her book.” The same name appears between the lines immediately below, and perhaps she is also the person who has copied the date, 1640, and the word “Printed” at the bottom of the page. The positioning of the “her book” phrase at the very top seems designed to override all other claims to ownership below.
Still, the name Elizabeth appears three more times on the page, twice crossed out, as is made visible by RetroReveal.
Although it is difficult to read the last name or other words that have been crossed out and we cannot tell whether these are by the same woman, it is clear that the female owner or owners of the volume wanted to mark their ownership on the title page. Title pages can, as in this instance, become spaces for competing marks and pen trials, as we have seen before on this blog.
Source: book offered for sale by Whitmore Rare Books, July 2021. Images reproduced with permission.
Liam Sims (Rare Books Specialist, Cambridge University Library)
Fig. 1. Title page with inscription by Nathaniel Dalton.
Earlier this year I spent some time examining the Shakespeare folios at Cambridge University Library, on behalf of the Shakespeare Census, edited by Adam Hooks and Zachary Lesser. The First Folio of 1623 has long been the recipient of attention, from collectors and academics alike. But the later folios (1632, 1663/4 and 1685) have not – until now – been as well studied.
Until the end of the nineteenth century Cambridge University Library had only the fourth folio of 1685, which arrived in the Library in 1715 with the vast library (30,000 volumes) of John Moore, Bishop of Ely. The collection had been purchased by King George I for the huge sum of £6450 and presented to Cambridge. But in 1894 copies of all four folios arrived on our shelves. In this group the second folio of 1632 (shelfmark SSS.10.7) is particularly interesting when it comes to provenance, chiefly for the inscription of a woman – Anne Browne – made in the late seventeenth century. This appears on the blank recto of the “To the Reader” leaf along with half a dozen other inscriptions, some dated and others not. These include “Samuel Sampson 1673,” and undated “Charles Sampson” and “William Watts his book 1693.” Who Anne Browne actually was is hard to say. She may have to remain simply as one of a number of untraceable names associated with this copy.
Fig. 2. Anne Browne’s inscription (upper right) on recto of ‘To the reader’ leaf.
One of its early owners (whether Anne or not is impossible for me to say) read the text extremely closely and made amendments to it (I hesitate to use the word corrections as I’m not sure they are). For example, in The Winter’s Tale (p. 281) the printed text “I appointed him to murther you,” by Camillo, is amended to “I am appointed by him to murther you.” The four folios give slightly different renderings of this passage: the first “I am appointed him to murther you” and the third and fourth “I appointed him to murder you.” Another example occurs in Henry IV, Part 1, when on p. 70 the phrase “Supposition, all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes” is amended to begin with the word “Suspicion.” One final example comes in the form of a description of action on the stage in Henry VI, Part 3 (p. 151): next to the line “I marry Sir, now lookes he like a King” is added in the margin “She put’s on his Head a paper-crown.” It would be hard to imagine anyone sitting though a performance of Shakespeare with a folio on their lap, but perhaps such an addition was made mid-performance. I am no scholar of Shakespeare reception and leave it to others to mull this over.
Fig. 3. Annotation to margin of Henry VI, Part 3 (p. 151).
Later, the book was in Oxford: a Nathaniel Dalton, who matriculated at Queen’s College Oxford in 1772, has boldly inscribed the title page (see fig. 1 above). It may have been Dalton who commissioned the volume’s current binding of full scarlet morocco, gilt, by John Mackenzie of Westminster (executed between 1817 and 1850). It was acquired in this binding by Samuel Sandars (1837–94), a Cambridge student in the 1850s and friend of Cambridge University Librarians Henry Bradshaw and Francis Jenkinson. It came to the Library in 1894, upon his death, as part of his collection of about 1500 volumes of early English books and fine bindings. A rich assemblage, it continues to give up secrets about its contents and will do so long into the future.
Source: Cambridge University Library, shelf mark SSS.10.7. Images reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
In early January 2021, rare-book librarian Jane Siegel discovered a previously untraced play owned by early woman reader Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Sharpe’s play was printed only once in 1640 and the ESTC records a little over two dozen surviving copies. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama indicates that the play was first performed in 1639 by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, who put on many of the plays that Frances Wolfreston owned in print: Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, Shackerley Marmion’s The Antiquary, Thomas Nabbes’ Covent Garden, Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller, and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, among others.
Little scholarship has been done on this relatively minor and obscure play and its even obscurer author, whom Matteo A. Pangallo calls a “nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer” (23). The Noble Stranger seems to have been Sharpe’s only printed play. The dramatis personae includes the King of Naples, the princess, and Honorio, the eponymous stranger.
In contrast to many of her playbooks, this is one that Wolfreston did not annotate. However, she did sign it in a favored location on the caption title page and in her customary way: “frances wolfreston her bouk.”
The book was first sold in 1856 as lot 361 of the now famous single-day Sotheby’s auction of the Wolferstan* family library. The lot contained two other minor plays, Henry Shirley’s The Martyr’d Souldier (1638), now at the Huntington, and an English translation of an Italian work by Guidubaldo Bonarelli, Filli di Sciro, or, Phillis of Scyros (1655), untraced. In contrast to the Shakespeare plays appearing a few lots before them, which sold for between £1 (two damaged copies of Richard the Third and Richard the Second) and £13 13s (the complete copy of Richard the Second now at the Harry Ransom Center), these three lesser known plays were purchased by bookseller Joseph Lilly for just a single shilling.
Siegel notes that Wolfreston’s copy of The Noble Stranger entered Columbia University’s collections as an anonymous gift some forty years after the Sotheby’s sale in October 1895. She goes on to say:
In the Report of the Librarian [George H. Baker] for the Academic Year ending June 30, 1895, on page 192, “There have been added to the library, through Prof. Geo. E. Woodberry [professor of Comparative Literature], from a sum of money put at his disposal by a gentleman, 1169 volumes. These books bear a bookplate with the words “Ex dono Amici Litterarum.” They are largely works in English drama, and in criticism and literary history.” [T]he accession register listings of other parts of this gift on the pages around The Noble Stranger include a number of other 17th century plays acquired at the same time.
At least one other signed book from Frances Wolfreston’s library now resides at Columbia University, Robert Mead’s play The Combat of Love and Friendship (1653), which Wolfreston deemed “a uery prity one, all of loue 3 copells of louers.”
*Wolferstan is the spelling adopted by Wolfreston’s eldest son Francis and used to this day by her descendants.
Source: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, B823 Sh25. Images taken by Jane Siegel and reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Matteo A. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
I collect eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions, an outgrowth of my scholarship in this area, which in turn originated from my work as editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. I recently acquired a 1747 reprint of the 1743-44 Oxford Shakespeare, a relationship that the former’s title page explicitly proclaims, albeit without the sumptuous typefaces and magnificent illustrations by Francis Hayman and Hubert Gravelot in the latter. Sir Thomas Hanmer’s name appears nowhere in the six volumes of the original or the nine of the reissue, but scholarly consensus decreed that he composed the preface preceding Alexander Pope’s and the Rowe biography of the playwright in the first tome. A second, corrected Hanmer edition appeared in 1745, and a third in 1770-71.
In my group of nine, each except the first includes the handwritten name of its two probable owners, El[i]z[abeth] Philips and Maria Goodford Jun[io]r, the first in quill pen, the second likely in nineteenth-century steel fountain ink. In each signature, Philips commemorates her date of possession as 1756. Goodford simply identifies as herself. In every instance, someone has crossed out Elizabeth’s name. There are no other annotations in the set: no significant passages marked out, no underlining, no starred lines or words.
Who were these women? The most recent seller of the set spells Elizabeth’s surname as Philips, but in some of her signatures, she seems to have spelled it Phelips, which would be an unusual, but not unheard of, variation. Philips, Phelps, and Phelips might have similar origins. Though Junior and Senior are traditionally male appendages, so to speak, some women named after their mothers adopted them in the nineteenth century, which might account for Maria’s form of self-identification. An intriguing ancestry.com search revealed that an Elizabeth Philips in the late eighteenth century had a sister named Maria, who in turn married a Goodford. However, the dates do not match up well enough to make a sibling relationship probable.
That the otherwise unknown Philips and Goodford owned this pocket-sized reprint set of the Hanmer Shakespeare accords perfectly with what scholarship has uncovered over the last fifty years about English women’s readership in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many notable studies, such as those by Fiona Richie, have tended to concentrate on recognizable figures such as the Enlightenment actresses, critics, and playgoers who left the Shakespeare-imbued traces of themselves that a scholar would be delighted to unearth, analyze, and bring to light in print. [1] Yet a rise in the literacy rate from 25% to 40% among European women between 1714 and 1750 allows for the possibility that those who were not Elizabeth Pepys, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Montagu, or Sarah Siddons read the plays and poetry, as well. [2]
As most students of mid-eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions know, negotiating the relationships and rivalries between Pope, William Warburton, Lewis Theobald and Sir Thomas can be formidable. Accounting for their squabbles to an audience unfamiliar with them can only be more so, and inadvisable here as a result. However, the publishing history of the 1747 Hanmer reprint is less complex, and significant for my present task.
The “Tonson cartel” considered itself the owner of the Shakespeare copyright throughout the century and guarded what it believed to be its proprietary interest in publishing the works. Warburton had been preparing his edition of the plays and signed over his rights to Jacob Tonson III in January of that year, a deal brokered in part by the publishers of his theological works, John and Paul Knapton, sub-proprietors of the family business that Jacob had inherited. The expensive nine-guinea Oxford edition was not under the firm’s purview but would prove to outsell Warburton’s less pricey eighteen-shilling publication. [3] Hence John Osborn, a London publisher, saw his opportunity, defied the status quo, and issued the more affordable nine-volume reprint delineated here that belonged to Philips and Goodford, variously described as duodecimo or octodecimo, but in any case, a small size. Predictably, the monopolists “threatened, prosecuted, and tried every other artifice, to intimidate him from printing Shakespear.” However, “Mr. Osborne having calmly answered, That, if they talked any more to him in that Style, he would print a Dozen of Books which they had such pretended Rights.” As a result, “They immediately, and justly took the Alarm, and were glad to take the half of the Impression off his Hands, at the Price he was pleased to put upon it, besides allowing him, as it is said, an annual Pension, which he enjoys to this Day, to buy him off from reprinting upon them.” [4] In other words, the Knaptons bought out Osborne’s copies and reissued them under their own names along with the Tonsons, thus re-cementing the monopoly, which could now boast of an inexpensive version for sale of the Hanmer production that had so eluded them.
Traditional textual editors, unlike most book historians today, have not often concerned themselves with material labeled “paratextual”—introductions, annotations, typefaces—though such divisions have become less distinct. As Georg Stanitzek drolly observed, these things “mean that no text ever has a truly paratext-free moment.” [5] Sociological theories of book production usefully attempt to account for other factors involved, e.g., the influence of stationers, printers, publishers, or how fluid these categories were three centuries ago; market forces; and, of course, the person identified as the editor and what he actually did. These are things worth considering, since they probably influenced the creation of the material text in ways we have yet to discover. Why did an editor make a choice to emend, or not? What did he think he was doing? If there was a theory behind what he did, did he always follow it?
Did contemporary readers care about such things? This economic competition in Shakespeare publishing doubtless favored the consumer. It shows there was a market for an affordable edition of the playwright who was becoming the National Poet some two decades before the Garrick Jubilee of 1769, such as the Osborne reprint of Hanmer’s edition. The books were small, designed for one hand if necessary, yet clearly printed in legible type, unencumbered with engravings and explanatory notes of warring commentators. Margins were large enough to allow for annotations, passages that could be marked out to be recalled or memorized. The 1747 set was one that women such as Philips and, later, Goodford could buy, keep, inscribe with their names, resell, and enjoy.
[1] See Richie’s Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014).
[2] Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women—Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800-1867 (Oxford, 2007).
[3] A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English Literature, v. 5, The Drama to 1642, pt. 1 (Cambridge, 1910), 303.
[4] Respectively, Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, Humbly Submitted to the Consideration of the Public (London: Printed for Alexander Donaldson, 1764), 20; and Considerations on the Nature and Origin of Literary Property (Edinburgh: Printed by Alexander Donaldson, 1767), 13-14.
[5] Georg Stanitzek. “Texts and Paratexts in Media,” Critical Inquiry 32 (1995): 30; 27-42.
Source: books privately owned. Photos by M. L. Stapleton, reproduced with permission.
Giles Dawson, “Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare,” Studies in Bibliography 2 (1949-50): 35-48.
Donald W. Nichol, “Warburton (Not!) on Copyright: Clearing up the Misattribution of An Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Literary Property (1762),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12 (1996): 171-82.
We have seen several examples of female book ownership of plays lately, but this is a particularly interesting one, of the 1632 Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works. The wonderfully useful Shakespeare Census has located 53 copies of pre-1800 Shakespeare works owned by a woman and currently housed in libraries all over the world. But occasionally an example ends up for sale and thereafter possibly in private ownership.
This copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio has a lovely binding and multiple ownership inscriptions.
A closer look at the title page, which I enhanced with Adobe Lightroom, reveals at least one female owner, Joanna White, who appears to be the person who has not only written her name, but also copied the title of the play that begins next to the page, The Winter’s Tale. The other name, Richard Carrington, seems to be written in a different hand than the one that wrote and practiced the title of the play. If it is Joanna, she might be marking a particular fondness for Shakespeare’s late romance.
Potential other female scribblings can be seen on the page, with some upside down (something we see frequently in early modern books). It is possible that one reads “mery” or Mary, a name we also see below Joanna White’s signature in the image above.
The bookseller has a blog and short video on their website, allowing us to see the book in more detail (including another page of pen trials with male names). This copy of the Folio was on the market earlier this year.
Source: book for sale on 26 February 2020 by Peter Harrington. Images reproduced with permission.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 