Please note that this blog post contains historic uses of language which is outdated, offensive, and discriminatory. The language is retained in its original context and does not represent views of UCL Special Collections. We are commitment to contextualising and addressing dated and harmful languages in our collecting practice, collection documentation, teaching, and engagement activities. You can read about some of our work in this area as part of UCL’s Liberating the Collections programme here.  

 

In 1969, the USA publishing market saw “increasing numbers of reprints of old volumes by and about black Americans […] pouring off the presses,” as one review put it in the February issue of Negro Digest. Presses such as Arno Press, Negro Universities Press, Dover Publishing, and the book division of Johnson Publishing Company, the publisher of Ebony, a popular African American magazine, emerged in the 1960s to republish significant, out-of-print works of Black American history. Developed at the backdrop of the civil rights struggles and the new civil liberties – as well as disappointments – of the Black Power era, these presses positioned their work as a restorative and reparative effort to recover the work of and on Black American experience. The Crisis described this boom in reprints as a “revolution,” and an important new means of making Black American history visible and accessible.

At UCL, we hold examples of, among others, the Negro University Press (NUP) publications. An imprint of Greenwood Publishers, an educational an academic publisher which specialised in reprints, NUP produced an extensive list in its “The Black Experience in America” series. Among NUP’s most notable publications was a history of slavery in the USA, published as a 125-volume series of reprinted books which were originally published between the late 19^th c. and the 1930s. And while monographs constituted NUP’s principal specialism, the press also reprinted notable African-American periodicals, including the Crisis, and National Anti-Slavery Standard. And this is perhaps where their work proved most impactful, often recovering full periodical runs of otherwise hard to find publications.

NUP’s reprints, both books and periodicals, tended to be published as facsimile editions with no additional content or editorial interventions. In fact, facsimiles, rather than new editions, were very common among the publishers contributing to this Black publishing revival of the 1960s. The facsimile reprints were a practical choice; they made possible quick, efficient, and relatively cheap means of reproducing existing works – all important considerations for the heavily profit-driven reprints market. But this particular approach to bringing out-of-print works back into circulation also played into the contemporary desire for recovering the ‘authentic’ African American experience, here mediated through a historically significant text. And it was this desire for authenticity that was captured in and through the facsimile, a type of reproduction which “aims to invoke the virtual presence of the source, so the bond between reproduction and source is not only graphical and material but is also defined by a retrospective relationship between two points in history, the then and the now.” The sources of the reprint were typically acknowledged in all NUP volumes, further reaffirming the connection with the original.

Many of the reprint publications were aimed at academic audiences and libraries. Their arrival was made possible by significant changes in the library practice in the first half of the 20^th century, and especially the work of African-American bibliographers, including W.E.B. Du Bois, and librarians such as Dorothy Porter of the Howard University whose  transformative work on library classification systems not only placed Black writing centre stage in many collections, it also created demand for more publications by Black authors. As Laura E. Helton notes, by the early 1930s there was a growing set of the so-called New Negro Libraries in the USA which held collections on and by African Americans. But existing library classification systems lacked vocabularies for their effective description. “For librarians of ‘Negro Collections,’” Helton writes, “the marginality of blackness […] politicised every instance of numbering, naming, and filing.” According to Helton, the period roughly between 1900 to the end of World War II was “compulsively documentary,” marked by collective efforts of building collections for the study of Black history and literature, of addressing their historic lack, and developing systems for their organisation and description, that is, of “making a field.”

By the time the NUP and other reprint publishers emerged, that landscape looked very different. The larger project of the 1960s reprints was a direct consequence of the work of librarians and bibliographers like Du Bois and Porter, and a response to the transformed conditions of Black writing, reading, and research. NUP was, in fact, set up, as its 1969 catalogue explained “to be an easily accessible publishing medium for […] American Negro colleges.” It run a dedicated ‘Standing Order Plan’ to aid library acquisitions and was to be “a complete, profession publishing organisation.” That is, the press positioned itself as serious scholarly endeavour; it presented acceptable, institutionalised, now increasingly canonised Black history.

Characteristically, NUP and other reprint publishers of the period also explicitly distanced themselves from the radical, small, independent publishers of the Black Liberation Movement and the Black bookshop networks which distributed them (one example is the Detroit-based Broadside Press, whose publications we also hold in our collection). As Joshua Clark Davis explains, “for many Black Power activists, reading works by black authors represented a fundamental step in political awakening, a central prerequisite of the intellectual and ideological transformation from Negro accommodationism to radical Black Power.” And the activist Black bookshops which emerged in the 1960s USA were the place of such radical reading. They were at once places to buy books, unique information centres, and important Black public spaces for community organising, explicitly supporting causes of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.

Presses like the NUP represented crucial antiracist work always integral to cultures of Black print. But in rejecting their contemporary Black print activist networks, the reprint publishers also inevitably limited the horizon of 1960s Black prints’ radical possibilities. The politics of the reprints represented a characteristic position of the liberal centre and its narratives of diversity, inclusion, and assimilation – of one American history – rather than that of Black struggle for radical Black liberation. The reprint revolution was both transformative in making accessible and ‘legitimising’ Black history on an unprecedented scale, and at the same time, it was a means of controlling and containing the types of Black histories made available and their impacts on the American reading public.  “What if,” to borrow from Fielder and Senchyne, “print and infrastructures surrounding it might more often be constraining rather than freeing? The book form itself […] might actually be inextricable from the history of antiblack racism.”

This turn to reprints in the 1960s was not a new phenomenon. I wrote earlier in this short series of our Black History Month posts about the important role that reprinting played in popularising the abolitionist message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (and in turning the novel into an international bestseller too). And like the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reprinting African American books in the 1960s was good business. Porter, in fact, bemoaned this popularity of reprinting, which she saw as “largely characterised by white publishers’ insatiable desire for ‘putting [into circulation] everything [Black] that they could get their hands on.” The history of the reprints is, then, as Autumn Womack explains, “a question about how and why […] Black literary production gets circulated.” The reprint boom of the 1960s is a marker of the lasting history of Black publishing shaped by complex ecologies of reuse and reproduction, and tensions between constant struggle for freedom and profiteering. Simultaneously liberating and regulating, the gesture of reprinting is more than a mechanism for reproducing content; it is a complex technology long associated with radical fight for voice, representation, and visibility.

This blog post is the last instalment in the UCL Special Collections Black History Month series exploring black histories through histories of print and publishing. 

Other posts in the series:

Reprinting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Kaja Marczewska

Independent Black Publishing and UCL’s collecting practices, by Liz Lawes

 

 

 

 

Please note that this blog post contains historic uses of language, which is outdated, offensive, and discriminatory. The language is retained in its original context and does not represent views of UCL Special Collections. We are commitment to contextualising and addressing dated and harmful languages in our collecting practice, collection documentation, teaching, and engagement activities. You can read about some of our work in this area as part of UCL’s Liberating the Collections programme here.   

 

Writing for the Tribune in 1945, George Orwell described Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book.” The “good bad book,” Orwell explained, “was the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” For Orwell, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is both “unintentionally ludicrous,” “full of preposterous melodramatic incidents,” and at the same time a “deeply moving” serious representation of real-world struggles; an account of the cruelty of slavery in mid-19th c. America.  

Orwell’s exploration of “good bad books,” such as Uncle Tom, was prompted by a project of his contemporary publisher to produce reprints of minor or partly forgotten novels – “a valuable service in these bookless days,” as he put it. Interestingly, the history of Stowe’s novel is a history of 19th century reprint culture. Its unprecedented publishing success is in no small part a result of burgeoning mass market publishing, lack of international copyright regulations, and complex cultures of media production of the period. This blog, part of our short Black History Month series, explores the publication history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its significance to histories of slavery, through UCL’s Special Collections holdings.  

The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 became a major catalyst for Stowe’s antislavery writing. This new legislation required all citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners. Its impacts were felt particularly acutely in places like Cincinnati, a border city of the free state of Ohio, where Stowe’s family lived, across from the slave state of Kentucky. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while a fictional account, was an attempt to document the dichotomies of slavery and freedom Stowe witnessed. Its contribution to the abolitionist cause was notable, but its subject was only one reason for the novel’s bestselling success. It is the unique publishing ecology of the time that enabled its rapid international circulation and resulting widespread engagement with Stowe’s anti-slavery stance. Political sentiment and growing capitalist impulse came together in this unique phenomenon of the 19th c. publishing culture.  

The novel was first issued in a book form in March 1852, released as a two-volume edition by an American publisher, J.P. Jewett. That first edition followed a highly successful serialised publication in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, which printed it in 41 weekly instalments between June 1851 and April 1852. It was hugely popular as a serial and Jewett expected a major commercial success. Claire Parfait noted, in her study of the novel, that Jewett chose to have the novel stereotyped. A relatively new printing technology at the time, which only appeared in the USA in the 1820s, stereotyping relied on manufacture of stereotype plates, instead of setting type to produce books. While expensive, it enabled much faster reprints – the ready-made plates could be reused multiple times and didn’t call for additional labour needed to re-set type for new impressions of the same publication. Because it required heavy investment, stereotyping was reserved for those publications which were expected to sell well. Jewett clearly knew his market – an instant bestseller, the novel sold 10,000 copies in the first two weeks. It was thanks to this choice of printing technology that Jewett was able to meet demand and issue a second printing of 5,000 copies of the novel as soon as the first printing sold out, only two days after its publication.  

It is interesting to note how rapidly Uncle Tom’s Cabin grew to be translated, published abroad, often pirated too. The first UK edition followed the American publication very quickly; Clarke & Company, a London-based publisher, issued it in May 1852, i.e. only two months after it was originally released. And a boom for UK editions followed, with the novel selling 1,5 million copies in the first year of publication. Katie McGettigan estimates that at least eighteen different publishers issued editions of the novel in its first year on the UK market. No other book had sold as well in as short a time in the UK, and in the USA only the Bible sold more copies. At UCL’s Special Collections, we hold examples of these early UK editions of the novel.  

 

 

One of our copies, part of UCL’s Rotton Collection, is the 1852 UK edition published by Thomas Bosworth as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Negro Life in the Slave States of America, published in August that year (one of the first to follow Clarke in publishing Uncle Tom on this side of the Atlantic) (UCL Reference: Rotton 24.c.26). We also hold an illustrated edition jointly published by Clarke and Routledge under the same title, also in 1852 (Ogden STO UNC/1), as well as another Routledge edition, published later that year but this time as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; a tale of life among the lowly (i.e. using the title of the first USA edition) (Ogden STO UNC/2). The latter also includes a preface by the Earl of Carlisle (introduced as a friend of Stowe’s, although the connection was exaggerated) and a preface by Stowe herself, both included here as unique selling points. All three were, characteristically, issued by publishers known for producing American reprints for the UK market.  

A common characteristic of these international editions, in the UK and elsewhere, were claims to ‘authenticity.’  The Thomas Bosworth edition, for example, was marketed as ‘the author’s edition.’ It included an ‘Advertisement to this edition’ which notes that Stowe had “a direct interest” in its sale. The Routledge and Clarke edition was published with a notice on author’s editions which read:  

we must do ourselves the justice to announce that Mrs Stowe has a direct pecuniary interest in this extraordinary success. Our editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions;’ we are in direct negotiations with Mrs. Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award to that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.  

On the market almost instantaneously flooded by a myriad of the novel’s editions, some authorised, many what we would consider today ‘pirated copies’, a credible association with the author became an important means of ensuring better sales of the book.  Neither of these two publishers were, in fact, Stowe’s official UK publishers; seeking out other means to make their editions attractive to the reading public was an important marketing strategy. 

 

 

Publishing for children formed an important and rapidly expanding part of the publishing market in both UK and USA of the period. Stowe also saw children as the first and main audience of Uncle Tom and there is evidence of the text being read to children in many 19th c. homes. The proliferation of illustrated editions of the novel definitely helped promote it as a publication for young audiences.  In fact, our illustrated Routledge and Clarke edition includes a handwritten inscription: “Presented to Clement Hall, Sept 18th 1852 by his Mamma,” implying, perhaps a similar intended usage of the copy we hold.   

 

 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was as controversial as it was popular. The novel was criticised both for reinforcing negative stereotypes of enslaved peoples and widely denounced by advocates of slavery, spurring a unique publication ecology of counter publications too. The so-called “anti-Tom” works typically promoted pro-slavery arguments in an attempt to discredit Stowe’s depiction of the cruelty of slavery. It was in response to the growing criticism that Stowe published in 1853 a Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The work detailed the sources and corroborated facts incorporated into her otherwise fictional account of slave struggles of the period. That work proved an instant publishing success too, and was similarly reprinted widely. It also led to a growing market for related publications. UCL’s copy of the UK 1853 edition of the Key includes, for example, a pasted-in advertisement for The American Slave Code, in Theory and Practice, published by Clarke, Beeton, and Co. as a companion to the volume (Rotton 24.c.25).  

 

 

 

The boom in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin reprints was not unique to that title. The novel appeared in the UK in a complex transatlantic publishing landscape which relied on reprints rather than imports for distribution and circulation of works. Starting in the 1830s, reprints of existing titles, often in affordable editions, became popular, aimed especially at the growing middle- and working-class reading publics. Many UK publishers turned to texts published in the USA for that purpose, partly in search of new titles that had potential to sell well, and partly due to costs. The UK and USA copyright laws of the period meant that any US text published first in North America was considered public domain in the UK and so could be reprinted without incurring any additional costs. Republishing in the UK texts which proved popular abroad was a simple business decision; the publication history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a perfect example of the mid-19th publishing market logic.  

While UK reprints market of Uncle Tom was able to flourish unrestricted, the local USA regulations limited it somewhat until 1893, when copyright in the work expired, prompting a flurry of new American editions of the work in the mid-1890s. That is, it was the copyright regulation, coupled with a rapidly expanding market for fiction and affordable books, rather than a strong anti-slavery stance in the UK that made it possible for this antislavery fiction to circulate in the UK widely and without restriction.  

 

This blog post is the first instalment in the UCL Special Collection Black History Month series exploring black histories through histories of print and publishing.  

Other posts in the series:

Independent Black Publishing and UCL’s collecting practices, by Liz Lawes

The ‘reprint revolution’ and cultures of 20th c. Black publishing, by Kaja Marczewska

This guest blog post was written by Isobel Goodman, who spent six months volunteering at UCL Special Collections as part of the Liberating the Collections project.

Tasked with researching pre-1750 women writers, as part of UCL’s Liberating the Collections project, I was struck by the varied ways in which women engaged with print culture in this period. Unsurprisingly, recognised names such as Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wortley Montagu and Aphra Behn occur frequently in the catalogues, but the research also revealed several other women writers whose non-aristocratic status and lesser-known writings provided a fascinating insight into the processes at work.

*****

The political writings of author-printer Elinor James (1644-1719) were regularly published even before she inherited her husband’s printing business in 1710. Renowned for her petitions to the king and parliament, James’ work benefitted from ready access to a printing press: not only could her concerns be published promptly in response to new debates (hence avoiding any appearance of pre-meditated attack on the petitionee), but also in large quantities for maximum impact. Extant documents indicate that she penned at least 90 pamphlets and broadsides during her career, although the ephemeral nature of these items could disguise a much greater number. UCL holds a copy of Mrs James’ Vindication of the Church of England (1687), in which she defends James II’s ‘Declaration of Indulgence’ against criticism in another pamphlet published anonymously weeks earlier. Robustly countering the anti-Catholic stance of the earlier publication, James concludes “GOD Save the KING”!

The fast, cheap, ephemeral nature of pamphlet production suggests that James sought neither literary renown nor fortune from her writing. However, the conspicuous inclusion of her name in her publications, often in the title itself, demands recognition as both author and printer. Indeed, a portrait she gifted to Sion College in 1711, notably depicts James holding a lavishly bound book whilst a copy of her Vindication of the Church of England rests nearby.

*****

In the absence of owning a press, less-wealthy eighteenth century authors could fund the third-party publication of their writing through subscription i.e. half of the book price paid in advance by readers and the other half on receipt, in return for their names being listed in the publication itself. Kitchen maid, Mary Leapor (1722-46), was an unlikely candidate for a published poet, yet she successfully funded printing in this way – no doubt aided by subscribers’ curiosity of her situation. Rector’s daughter, Bridget Freemantle, and Leapor’s employers and their relations (the Jennens and Blencowes) also provided useful connections.

Following Leapor’s premature death, two years before her book appeared in print to positive reviews, novelist Samuel Richardson published a posthumous second volume of Leapor’s manuscripts (1751), of which UCL holds a copy. While less successful in attracting subscribers, the text’s woodcuts still suggest a reasonable budget. Leapor was certainly well-known during this period: an anthology ‘by eminent ladies’, published in 1755, devoted more pages to her than any other writer. Indeed, UCL’s text previously belonged to Jeremy Bentham and includes his annotations of ‘Mrs Grey’s memories of Mary Leapor’, indicating a prestigious readership of both sexes. Bentham reports that Mrs Grey introduced Leapor to Bridget Freemantle, who subsequently provided her “with pens, ink & paper & a bureau, book case & likewise books, before which she had scarcely an opportunity of coming at any books, or the means of procuring them”.

*****

In contrast, the corpus of poems, prose, petitions, biography and translations penned by Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81) remained deliberately unpublished during her lifetime. She is perhaps best known for her Memoirs of her husband, John Hutchinson – a signatory of Charles I’s death warrant who died in prison following the Restoration – which she compiled for their children between 1665 and 1671.

The Memoirs’ posthumous publication in 1806, by Hutchinson’s great-great-grandson, raises questions about the control authors ultimately had over their work. The private account was intended as “a naked undrest narrative, speaking the simple truth of him”, confirmed by careful, personal revisions of the original manuscript. Yet the heavily edited (although well-received) first publication was swiftly followed by two further editions before 1810. UCL special collections hold five four copies, ranging in date from 1808 to 1904. The original editor promoted the text to female readers as having “all the interest of a novel”, and the book’s moralistic account of the civil war impacted both historiography and popular opinion, despite no evident intent by Hutchinson to do either.

*****

The scandalous memoirs published in 1748-9 by Teresia Constantia Phillips (1709-65) were perhaps originally penned more for blackmailing former lovers than for book sales! In a self-promoting sales tactic, the imprint claims, “Such extraordinary care has been taken to intimidate the Booksellers, in order to stifle this Work, that Mrs. Phillips is obliged to publish it herself, and only at her House in Craig’s Court, Charing Cross; and to prevent Imposition, each book will be signed with her own hand”. Yet, in reality, the removal of pre-publication censorship during the 18^th century had freed publication of such material in Britain. Trade publishers, such as Mary Cooper, who would assign their own name to an imprint and sell publications anonymously on behalf of the publisher and copyright holder, further enabled publishers to print controversial works without risk to their reputation.

*****

Whether for money, renown, or politics, the women represented in UCL’s special collections employed authorship for their own purpose – albeit with varying control over the resulting publications. Literacy was expanding during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, as was the print market following the lifting of restrictions on printer numbers in 1695. Combined with women’s evident interest in matters beyond the household (despite being unable to fully participate or vote in them) the processes were in place for them to reach a wider audience than ever before, through the medium of print.

By Isobel Goodman

Bibliography

Primary sources

Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Roes and Orme by T. Bensley, 1810.

James, Elinor. Mrs James’s Vindication of the Church of England, in an Answer to a Pamphlet entituled, A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty. London: Printed for me, Elinor James, 1687.

Leapor, Mary. Poems upon Several Occasions. The second and last volume. London: Printed and sold by J. Roberts, 1751.

Muilman, Teresia Constantia. An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs Teresia Constantia Phillips. London: Printed for the Author, and sold at her house in Craig’s-Court, Charing Cross, 1748-1749.

Secondary sources

Brown, Susan, Clements, Patricia, Grundy, Isobel. “Elinor James: Writing,” Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, last accessed 03/08/2021. http://orlando.cambridge.org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/protected/svPeople?formname=r&people_tab=2&person_id=jameel&crumbtrail=on&dt_end_cal=AD&dt_end_day=27&dt_end_month=06&dt_end_year=2021&dt_start_cal=BC&dt_start_year=0612&dts_historical=0612–+BC%3A2021-07-12&dts_lives=0612–+BC%3A2021-07-12&dts_monarchs=0612–+BC%3A2021-07-12&heading=h&name_entry=Leapor%2C+Mary&subform=1&submit_type=J

Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Mayer, Robert. “Lucy Hutchinson: A Life of Writing,” The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 22(2) (2007): 313.

McDowell, Paula McDowell. “Introductory note” in Elinor James. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Printed Writings, 1641-1700: Series II, Part Three, Volume 11. Ed. Paula McDowell. London: Routledge, 2017.

Plaskitt, Emma. “Phillips [married name Muilman], Teresia Constantia (1709-1765],” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22170

Treadwell, Michael. “London Trade Publishers 1675-1750.” The Library Series 6, Vol. IV, No. 2 (1982)” 99-134.

This guest blog post was written by Sara D’Amico, who spent six months volunteering at UCL Special Collections as part of the Liberating the Collections project

We might think that women were not allowed to participate in skilled crafts: for instance, the art of book binding was foreign to them until the nineteenth century. But women have always been involved in the book trade. However, many of them have remained in the shadows and their contribution has not been acknowledged for centuries. The Liberating the Collections project aims to fix this and give the women who are represented in the rare book collections at UCL Special Collections the recognition they deserve. As a volunteer in the LTC project, I have conducted a focused search among the Castiglione and Dante Collections, to allow the women involved in the Italian book trade to come to the fore. What follows is only a brief overview of some of the most interesting people involved in the making and keeping of Italian books.

Luchina Ravani (active ca. 1532-1541)

Financial considerations often forced a printer’s widow to take over the business, as the death of a husband plunged many widows into poverty. These women would often work until their sons came of age, but in the case of Luchina Ravani, she apparently continued working even after her son took over. The State Archive in Venice holds two documents stating that Luchina was free to run “a suo conto la stamperia.” This indicates that the widow held an important position in the business and possibily had some kind of agency in deciding what to print, like the beautiful Libro del cortegiano in the Castiglione Collection. However, despite her active role, her name is never explicitly mentioned on any edition. Only her son’s name, Vittore, appears on the titlepages or the colophons, followed by a simple and anonimous “& Co.” The reasons behind this choice remain unknown, but they do raise the question: how many other women’s works are hidden behind a man’s name?

Sofia Giacomelli (1779-1819)

Book history has neglected women engravers. Wood engraving was, for almost two centuries, the most common means of illustrating printed work. This art was not usually practised by women until the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement, and yet some of them, because of their incredible talent, managed to excel in this field almost half a century prior. Geneviève Sophie Giacomelli was one of them.

Also known as Sophie Janinet and Madame Chomel, Sofia was a popular singer and an accomplished graphic artist: she even exhibited her work at the Paris Salon in 1799 and in 1800. Art magazines from all over Europe praised her work in illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divina Commedia. The Journal des arts, des sciences, et de littérature reviewed her Milton collection in 1813: “The collection of the twelve figures of Madame Giacomelli is one of the most agreeable productions that engraving has offered us for a long time. We live in a century when women have won the most distinguished rank in literature: it is enough to look at this work to discover that the field of the arts is not foreign to them either.” But most importantly, Sofia didn’t stop working on her engravings after her marriage in 1802 with musician Joseph Giacomelli, who introduced her in the world of music and singing. She was, first and foremost, an artist.

Caroline Morris (dead after 1870)

Caroline Morris was not an occasional book owner: together with her husband she formed a library of about 9,000 volumes, making her a book collector on all counts. In the nineteenth century it was not common for a woman to collect that many books and it was even less common for a woman with no titles and significant richness to do so. James Morris, Caroline’s husband, was a Professor of Languages in the Royal College of Mauritius and the UCL Calendar (1870-71) seems to suggest that he was the owner of this extensive and valuable library: apparently, he bequeathed it to his wife for the duration of her lifetime, and after her death to the College. And yet, the illustrated bookplates that can be found in the books clearly say: “Jacobus et Carolina Morris”.

As is often the case for women book owners, virtually no biographical information about Caroline is available. However, the UCL archives hold some of the Morris’s correspondence. The letters, together with the bookplates, were invaluable in proving that Caroline must have had an active role in the making of the Morris Library. Not only that, the letters from scholars like Francis William Newman and J. M. Peebles prove that she was also a reader and they help shine a light on Caroline’s interests in a great variety of subjects: from botany to music to women’s rights.

There are many women like Luchina, Sofia and Caroline who contributed to the making and preserving of some of the finest rare books in the UCL Special Collections. Their names are often overshadowed by those of their husbands but the LTC Project is finally giving them a new voice. While there is still room for more research, these first results are an indication of how many valuable resources are hidden within the UCL Special Collections and how much they can contribute to the study of the Italian book trade’s history.

References

Michelle Levy, ‘Do Women Have a Book History?’, in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2014), pp. 296-317.
Deborah Parker, ‘Women in the Book Trade in Italy, 1475-1620’, in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3 (1996), pp. 509-541.
Patricia Jeffe, Women Engravers, 1990.
Stephen S. Stratton, Woman in Relation to Musical Art, in Proceedings of the Musical Association, 9th Sess. (1882-1883), pp. 115-146.

This guest blog post was written by Dr Steph Carter, who spent six months volunteering at UCL Special Collections as part of the Liberating the Collections project

The initial phase of the ‘Liberating the Collections’ project at UCL Special Collections has begun to highlight under-represented and marginalised voices in the collections. One area of research has been women owners, contributing not only to the existing narrative of pre-1750 books in the UCL Special Collections but also to the growing scholarly interest in early modern women book owners.

Working primarily with the UCL library catalogue, 5000 provenance statements were examined for evidence of women owners and straightaway provided ample data to pursue research on the lives of these former book owners. However, research into women book owners brought to the fore the intensely acute disparity that is so common between men and women when it comes to historical documentation and searching for biographical details. Biographies of identifiable women tend to be tied into the biographies of their fathers, husbands or brothers, typically comprising little more detail than a wedding date and how many children were born. An added complication is the repeated use of the same first name through successive generations of a single family.

A Hebrew text from the 1680s includes the inscription ‘Rebecca Mocatta’ on the front endpaper. This is undoubtedly part of the surviving Mocatta Library, the majority of the collection having been destroyed by bombing in 1940. The Mocatta family were established in London by 1671 with the merchant and diamond broker Moses Mocatta. At his death in 1693, Moses identified a niece called Rebecca; his son Abraham later had a daughter also named Rebecca. Rebecca also continued to be an important female family name in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the book remained in the Mocatta family collection until at least the early 19th century as there are manuscript notes on the front flyleaves detailing information about births in the family between 1797 and 1809.

Of course, even with a family name it is not always possible to identify the correct lineage. The Countess of Warwick, Mary Rich (1624-1678), is a known author and book owner. She was addicted to plays and romances in her youth, so it is not ridiculous to assume that she is the author of the inscription ‘Mary Rich’ on the title-page of Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso – the Italian poem that is a source for Much Ado About Nothing.

However, another ascription, ‘Margarit Riche’, is also present on the title-page and an inscription on p. [186] of the main text refers to a note on the marriage of Robert and Elizabeth Riche in 1616.

These details do not match with the genealogy of the Earls of Warwick, suggesting that this book may have been owned by a completely separate family and passed down through female members of that family.

Despite the limitations of researching and identifying women book owners, the Mocatta and Rich examples contribute to a growing narrative of what the editors of Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern England describe as ‘the myriad ways in which women bought, borrowed, accessed, wrote in, made, recorded, cited, and circulated books’ (p. 4). Such research on women book owners will also contribute to a broader engagement with the UCL Special Collections.

Dr Steph Carter, Associate Researcher, Newcastle University

References

Orbell, J. (2004) ‘Mocatta family (per.1671-1957), bullion dealers and brokers’, Dictionary of National Biography Online. Available at: oxforddnb.com [Accessed on 27 July 2021].
Cambers, A. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 48-50.
Knight, L. and White, M. ‘The Bookscape’ in: Knight, L., White, M. and Sauer, E. (eds.) Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018, pp. 1-18.