Weekend Bookblogging: Rare Treats Edition
Lots of bookblogging to do this week! Huzzah! *AustenBlog Cheerleading and Dance Team begins chanting “Books Are Nice! Books Are Nice!”*
First up we have a real treat: photographs of a first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice! Julie T. tells the story in an e-mail to the Editrix:
My wonderful son is visiting his girlfriend at Wesleyan University. Today they went to the school’s rare book room, and look what Jake asked to see! It’s a first edition, and please note the name inscribed in the front cover, “Harriet Gardiner.” What could be more appropriate for the owner of this book (other than, perhaps, Elizabeth Darcy)
Click on the thumbnails below for larger images:
Photos by Jake Zien
Thanks so much to Jake and Julie for sharing the images, and for allowing us to post them.
Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series at About.com’s Classic Literature blog with a really lovely entry on P&P.
Some have posited that Colin Firth and Keira Knightley (in the 1995 and 2005 Pride and Prejudice films, respectively) have done more to fuel these two decades-worth of Austen-mania than the books themselves. In all fairness, we must consider the relative positions of books and movies. The books, like Anne Eliot in Persuasion, live at home, quiet and confined, on shelves and nightstands, while their cinematic pretenders preen on red carpets and grab the headlines. Nevertheless, Emma Thompson said it best when she accepted the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay (Sense and Sensibility): “Everybody involved in the making of this film knows that we owe all our pride and all our joy to the genius of Jane Austen.” Indeed. Were it not for the genius of Austen, there would be no Darcy and Elizabeth to play.
Hear, hear!
Alert Janeite Kerry wrote to tell us that Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, currently an Academy Award-nominated film with some actors very familiar to Janeites, opens with a quotation from Northanger Abbey:
“…Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. — Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
We guess that means it’s time to induct Mr. McEwan as a Friend of Jane. 
We just purchased a copy of Atonement this week and will read it when we have a chance. We purchased it as an e-book, because a brand-spanking-new Cybook Gen3 has arrived at AustenBlog World Headquarters! We loaded it with tons of free public domain works from manybooks.net and feedbooks.com, including, of course, all of Jane Austen’s novels, some of her minor works, and two biographies, and also a couple of books that we actually paid for. Though Atonement didn’t really cost anything as we received $50 credit for books from booksonboard.com, where we purchased our Cybook. The Cybook is wonderfully portable and lovely to read–no eyestrain, easy to read in full daylight, and it’s easy to change fonts or increase font size on the fly. It’s similar to the Kindle and the Sony Reader, also very good choices for an eInk e-book reader. We’re happy to answer questions about the Cybook or e-books in comments.
Norm Geras conducted a poll at Normblog for the favorite English-language novelist–and guess who won, with a healthy lead over Charles Dickens?
Speaking of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens (and bookblogging!), Desmond Ryan has reviewed Two Histories of England–Jane Austen’s and Charles Dickens’–for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sometimes a work of history tells us more about the historian than about the people and events he or she is judging.
Since the authors of these highly opinionated surveys rank as the two greatest English novelists of the 19th century, it is both fascinating and entertaining to see what consummate masters of fiction do with the facts. In both cases, those facts never get too much in the way of a good story or a sharply honed flash of wit.
Well, that’s good to hear.
John Mullan’s new book, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, is reviewed by The Guardian. Naturally, a book about famous authors who published anonymously must include Jane Austen.
Jane Austen’s niece Anna once found a copy of Sense and Sensibility in a circulatory library. Its title page said it was by “A Lady”. The unfortunate Anna declared: “Oh that must be rubbish I am sure from the title.” Her aunt, who was standing nearby, was amused.
Austen was one of many writers in the 18th and early 19th centuries who never published a single novel under her own name (she would even hide the evidence of her work in progress when friends came to visit). Throughout this period, and in the 16th and 17th centuries too, most fiction and much verse was published anonymously or pseudonymously. The list reads like an edited history of English literature. Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, John Cleland’s pornographic Fanny Hill, the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the novels of “George Eliot”, and Alice in Wonderland by CL Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.
We cannot pass up the opportunity to point out that John Mullan will be a plenary speaker at the 2009 JASNA AGM in Philadelphia!
Once again proving that she is absolutely everywhere, Alert Janeites Allison T. and Deborah sent us an article that was on the front page of Friday’s New York Times about a principal turning around a junior high school in the Bronx that included a tantalizing mention of Jane Austen (it’s on the second page of the article).
So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.
Though as Deborah pointed out, there is no mention whether it worked, or if the young gentleman went on to read other Austen work. What a tease!
Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link to an article in the Boston Globe about several recent Austen-related books published by Christian publishing houses.
In “A Walk with Jane Austen,” published by WaterBrook, the evangelical imprint of Random House, author Lori Smith admits that some would cringe at the notion of Austen as a Christian writer.
And Ruth Perry, a literature professor and Austen scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, treasures Austen’s whispered piety. She “was a quiet Christian; Church of England practitioners were very undemonstrative in her day,” Perry said in e-mail. Austen’s letters about her father’s death in 1805 “are Christian in the way she was Christian, deeply and wholly unostentatiously believing,” Perry wrote.
So what draws Christian readers and writers to her?
“Jane’s books are Christian in that there is a solid Christian moral foundation throughout her writing, [though] they are not Christian books per se by today’s definition,” Lori Smith wrote.
We also cannot pass up the opportunity to point out that Ruth Perry will also be a plenary speaker at the 2009 JASNA AGM in Philadelphia! (We didn’t plan this, really!)
It seems appropriate to end with a great editorial from the Advocate Opinion about Jane Austen.
A generation ago, the late Southern novelist Eudora Welty openly wondered if readers of the future would treasure English author Jane Austen as much she did.
[. . .]
“What a commotion comes out of their pages!,” Welty observed of Austen’s novels. “Jane Austen loved high spirits, she had them herself, and she always rejoiced in the young. The exuberance of her youthful characters is one of the unaging delights of her work.”
Welty answered her own question about Austen’s durability when she predicted Austen’s stories would remain approachable, “today and tomorrow.”
That’s it for this week’s Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and until next time, always remember: Books Are Nice!
February 10th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
What wonderful photos of this rare volume. Thank you for posting them.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
::drool::
::considers going into library science so she can work in rare book archives::
February 10th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Someday I will be able to afford the tuition for a library science program… someday…
February 10th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Google Books has a full scan of volume 2 of the P&P first edition.
One can also download a PDF using the link at top right. So printing one’s own first edition seems easy enough (and Fedex/Kinko’s will bind it for you for a few dollars), though I suppose it’s not quite as good as the real thing.
For the complete work, the earliest available on Google seems to be this 1844 edition.
It’s also possible to make e-books of these scans (or one’s own scans), which I like because they preserve the original typography.
February 10th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Hmmm… I tried to download that pad and it came up as blank pages.
Was that first edition at Wesleyan in Connecticut by any chance?
February 10th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Make that “I tried to download that pdf…” I don’t even know how I made such an odd typo…
February 10th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Mags, I’m happy you liked my post on P&P. As for Atonement, you are in for a treat, especially because you’re a storyteller and this is a book about the power of stories. I won’t say any more except Enjoy!
February 11th, 2008 at 1:18 am
*gasp*
Is it wrong that those pictures almost made me weep?
February 11th, 2008 at 10:26 am
laania–no. And try actually holding one sometime. I started shaking.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:01 am
The book’s original owner, Harriet Gardiner… could possibly be Lady Harriet Gardiner, daughter of the Earl of Blessington. She was born in 1812, which makes her a little young to be the first owner of this edition, though.
I just checked in Gilson’s Bibliography of Jane Austen, in which are listed dozens of copies of the first ed. of P&P, their original owners & present locations, and unfortunately this copy at Wesleyan is not mentioned. Very nice binding, which looks like it could be early nineteenth century.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I’ve come up with a much more likely Harriet Gardiner, the owner whose name appears on the flyleaf of the 1st edition P&P featured above.
She could well be the Mrs. Harriet Gardiner who had an account with the booksellers Hookham and Carpenter of New Bond Street, London. She bought a copy of Mary Robinson’s novel Vacenza on February 8, 1792. In 1797 she purchased Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are; a Comedy in Five Acts. Mrs. Gardiner also bought magazines and several children’s book at the same bookshop through the 1790s. It could be the same person; if she read a novel by Mary Robinson in 1792 she could have bought P&P in 1813.
See more about Mrs. Gardiner in this article; it’s an analysis of the sales ledgers of the bookseller.
Rita J. Kurtz and Jennifer L. Womer. “The Novel as Political Marker; Women Writers and their Female Audiences in the Hookham and Carpenter Archives, 1791–1798″ Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, 13 (Winter 2004) http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc13_n02.html
February 11th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Robin, you never cease to amaze me with the stuff you turn up. Well played, sir.
All of you thinking about library school…see the neat things librarians can do?
February 11th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Hee hee. Harriet also bought a copy of Hugh Blair’s Sermons. Mr. Tilney would have approved.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Believe me, nothing I do here (either for fun or because it’s in my job description) was learned in Library School. Don’t want to discourage anyone from spending that surplus $40K, though
February 11th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Oh, library school wasn’t *that* bad!
All of you out there yearning to spend your days with great books, be sure to look at several programs prospectuses before you choose. I went to school with a wanker who constantly complained that our program didn’t offer enough museum studies course. So maybe you should found one that did, dude! Me, I do reference so I don’t spend nearly as much time with print these days. Archives and rare books are both great fun though, and there are some great programs out there. As for tuition, put your financial aid forms in early and get an assistantship while you’re there. The money isn’t great but the experience is priceless.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I really enjoyed Library School. I was the token male and 90% of students in my program were unattached females so of course that was a great responsibility for me
February 12th, 2008 at 9:13 am
For those who cannot decide whether a career change to librarianship is the way to go, I would recommend the daily Unshelved comic strip. Dewey & Tamara are my role models.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I loved library school. I went into corporate librarianship and, unfortunately, there just aren’t a whole lot of jobs out there these days. I’m currently a paralegal and I get to use my research skills more than one might think.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
“Robin, you never cease to amaze me with the stuff you turn up. Well played, sir.”
DITTO!!!!! Now please tell me that this is the most obscure thing you’ve ever dug up. 200+ year old sales ledgers from a London (?) bookseller??? How in the world did these end up saved on the internet? I think the ultimate power brokers will be the Librarians who can dredge up any bit of information for nefarious purposes. “Robin the Great” — scary, huh?
February 12th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Deb, I seriously think that this Harriet Gardiner is the right one.. her dates correspond (she died in 1824, so was probably buying novels in 1813.) As for your initial question - why was this on the web and findable via Google - because a couple of academics published a paper, analysing a bookseller’s sales ledger, in which they chose Harriet Gardiner as one of four people to track & look at their buying habits. They chose to publish their research in a free, web-based journal.. most scholarly work is not available on the web to non-subscribers.. (so, because these four readers had credit accounts at the bookstore, their purchases are trackable just like mine at Amazon!!)
The next part is interesting, though. Ten years ago, if I wished to know more about her, I’d have looked at the print copies of the Dictionary of National Biography, Burkes Peerage, etc, and MIGHT possibly have come up with more biographical details.
But, we now have the Google Book Project (Google have digitised and OCR-indexed millions of books from Oxford University, Michigan, Stanford and other libraries.) A simple Google search (using a couple of elementary tricks) brings up her obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. where I learn that she died on December 8, 1824, at the age of seventy, and that her husband was General William Gardiner, and that she was a Maid of Honour to Queen Charlotte. Now, William Gardiner had a distinguished military career, including serving with Lord Howe in the American War of Independence. He fought at the Battle of Brooklyn, an important British victory that meant that the UK was able to hold New York for the entire war. He was an Irish MP, served in the British Embassy in Warsaw, and ended his life commanding British forces in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where he died in 1806.
Harriet herself was a direct descendent of King Henry VII through her mother, Frances Leveson-Gower, so has a detailed pedigree in The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal. Harriet’s father was a baronet, so she has a pedigree on his side in Debrett’s Baronetage of England. All these sources are archived and accessible via Google. Further information is in William Gardiner’s lengthy biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which is in copyright, so not accessible online without a subscription, but I wouldn’t have known to look there without the biographical information thrown up by the Google search.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:05 am
WOW! Thank you, Robin for your research, and everyone else for your comments! I’d like to add that I also had the inexpressible joy of perusing a first edition of P&P when I visited my daughter at college in November (this was at Yale, not at Wesleyan). My husband and I went to the magnificent Beineke Rare Book LIbrary, and as we were admiring the collection, is occurred to me that they MUST have at least one JA first edition there. SO I asked, and sure enough! I asked if we could see it, and was told to fill out a form, and voila! Twenty minutes later, my husband and I were lovingly turning the pages of a first edition of P&P (yes, I had chills, and YES, I cried). In filling out the form, I had to present ID and state my reason for requesting the volumes. I said I was a member of JASNA, and that did the trick! I recommend that anyone who wishes to see a real-life JA first edition find the nearest rare book collection at a university library and inquire. I’m sure the librarians there will be just as happy to share their treasures (JA and others — here in Milwaukee the library at Marquette has the “Lord of the Rings” manuscripts!) as the helpful people at Yale and Wesleyan!
February 13th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Robin — All I can say is WOW!!!
February 13th, 2008 at 10:38 am
As Julie says, JA first editions are not all that scarce and there are hundreds in libraries around the United States. For instance, there are 51 copies of the 1813 first ed. of P&P listed as being held in libraries in the USA, and probably quite a few that are NOT listed in OCLC, the national union catalog.
Much scarcer are first US editions. OCLC lists only ten copies of the first US ed. of P&P (Phila., Carey & Lea, 1832) in American libraries. There are probably only a couple of dozen in existence in the world. The Beineke Library at Yale has a copy of the first US ed. as well as a copy of the first UK ed…. their copy of the first US ed. is signed by Joseph Ingraham, presumably the book’s original owner. Ingraham (1809-1860) was in interesting character. He was one of the most prolific and successful authors in world history, publishing several hundred books, notably his series of “dime novels of the bible.” He was an episcopalian priest, owned & operated a successful girls school in Natchez, and, like a lot of Americans before and since, died as a result of an “accidental gunshot wound.”