The WPHP Monthly Mercury

In 1803, Mary Hays published the six-volume work Female Biography, a substantial work of scholarship that relied on more than one hundred sources to write biographies about more than 300 hundred women. But how did Hays, a Dissenting writer of moderate means, access all of those books?

To find out, we invited Dr. Timothy Whelan to talk all things Mary Hays, but especially her literary environs, which included relationships with Dissenting booksellers, connections with the Godwin circle, a number of the biggest and most successful circulating libraries of the time, including the Minerva Press and Hookham’s, and residences across London that were never more than a five-minute walk from a library or a bookshop. And we meander through London itself, where Dr. Whelan tracked more than just where Hays’ likely found her sources for her History: he mapped Hays’ residences, the residences of her large extended family, the booksellers and circulating libraries around her locations, Dissenting booksellers, and the chapels of Dissenters in London—a variety of networks that, as it turns out, are far more interwoven than one could have anticipated without the help of Dr. Whelan’s seven-by-seven foot map.

Dr. Timothy Whelan is a Professor of English at Georgia Southern University. He works in the area of women’s studies and at the intersection of religion and literature in the lives of British and American Nonconformist women writers between 1650 and 1850, with a particular focus on various Romantic writers, both men and women, and their interaction with religious Dissent. He was the general editor for Pickering and Chatto’s eight-volume collection of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–1840, and some of his recent publications include an article in Publishing History called, “Mary Lewis and her Family of Printers and Booksellers, 1 Paternoster Row, 1749-1812” and an article in Women’s Writing called “Room[s] of her Own”: Libraries and Residences in the Later Career of Mary Hays, 1814–1828.” To learn more about his work on Mary Hays, you can visit his website https://www.maryhayslifewritingscorrespondence.com, and to learn more about his work on Non-Conformist women, including booksellers, visit his website https://www.nonconformistwomenwriters1650-1850.com/.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/95

In Episode 7 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “The Business of Gossip,” hosts Kate and Kandice follow the highly successful Henry Colburn, leading publisher of fiction in the early nineteenth century, across his three main business addresses in London—and in so doing, explore how the publisher prompted, encouraged, and engaged with gossip. 

The subject of much gossip himself, Colburn’s origins are unknown (although rumoured to be noble), his less-savoury business practices are disparaged by his partners (with good reason), and his reputation, even into scholarship until very recently, is extremely poor. Drawing on research from John Sutherland and Veronica Melnyk, this episode explores the timeline of Colburn’s 47-year career and how, exactly, certain narratives about him were established, and have since been corrected. 

Featuring such authors as Sydney, Lady Morgan, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and such publishers and book trades members as Saunders and Otley, and Richard Bentley, we traipse through the landscape of Colburn’s publishing practice as it moved through London (and, briefly, Windsor), sharing what each new address wrought or signified for the publisher and what such considerations of business and gossip might tell us about the role of gossip in the book trades more generally. 

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, we've posted a blog post with links, resources, and suggestions for further reading on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/93

Why hasn’t the third edition of Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife been digitized? Why doesn’t GoogleBooks group the different volumes of multi-volume works together in a single catalogue record? And, what do authors and pandas have in common? We bemoan the limitations of our various sources on a monthly basis, but this month we’re digging into why they exist in the first place—especially why digitization can be so uneven.

In Episode 6 of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “The Ecology of Databases,” co-hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by Lawrence Evalyn to learn more about the issue of uneven digitization. In addition to giving us the hard numbers about which titles appear in the ESTC, ECCO, The Text Creation Partnership, and HathiTrust, Lawrence puts forward his "charismatic megafauna" theory of authorship, shares moon prophecies and invitations to meetings about waterway management, and details the searching strategies he used during the WPHP Summer Readathon. 

Lawrence Evalyn is currently a "pre-doc postdoc," both a Ph.D Candidate and a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with the Digital Humanities Network and the Data Sciences Institute. His dissertation, "Database Representations of English literature, 1789-99," measures and historicizes uneven digitization in four resources to examine how digital infrastructure shapes eighteenth-century studies, especially the study of women's writing. His collaborative digital humanities publications include "One Loveheart At A Time," an article on emoji in Digital Humanities Quarterly. He holds a Masters in English from the University of Victoria, where his M.A. essay, supervised by Robert Miles, looked for large-scale trends in late eighteenth century Gothic novels.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/91 

In last October's episode, “Of Monks and Mountains!!!” Kate and Kandice each read a gothic novel found in the WPHP, and it was so much fun that we simply had to do it again. For Season 2, Episode 5, “The Witching Hour”, we read books about witches — almost every book that mentions witches in the title in the WPHP, in fact! (There are only five.)

But within that small sample, we found a full spectrum of representations of witches and witchcraft, from the fantastical (and silly) woodland witches in Alethea Lewis’s The Nuns of the Desert (1805), to Joanna Baillie’s spine-tingling play, Witchcraft (1836), which is set against the backdrop of the Scottish witch hunt—and everything in between.

Join us for the fifth episode of Season 2, “The Witching Hour,” to learn more about why we only found five titles, what those titles told us about the role of witchcraft in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural imagination, and (most importantly) which title we awarded the coveted label of “bonkers.” But be warned—recording this episode gave Kate nightmares.

If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/89 

In 1794, Ann Lemoine’s husband, Henry, who was an author and publisher, went to debtor’s prison—this led to their separation, and the following year, Ann Lemoine began her own publishing business in White Rose Court in London. Between 1795 and the early 1820s, it is estimated that Ann Lemoine published, printed, and sold more than 400 titles, and explored new and inventive ways of packaging and reselling the cheap print she was known for publishing: chapbooks.

In this episode, hosts Kate and Kandice are joined by WPHP Research Assistant Sara Penn, who undertook entering the many titles Lemoine produced into the database and has become our resident Lemoine expert. We share some of Sara’s conversation with Dr. Roy Bearden-White, explore the history of the chapbook — including the difficulties of defining the term itself — and the significance of cheap print, the challenges of including it in the database, and chat about the labour involved in working with female publishers, printers, or booksellers, or forms of print that are lacking in bibliographical sources.

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/88 

Throughout the month of August, we’ve been sharing Spotlights on the WPHP site as part of the “Around the World with Six Women” Spotlight Series on travel writing. In this month’s episode, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren are joined by the authors of the Spotlight Series, who share what they have learned during their vicarious journeys through France, Italy, Germany, India, Chile, Rome, China, the Red Sea, and the Scottish Highlands. Along the route we touch on the stakes of travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in terms of British imperialism and colonial forces, and how considering these stakes can help us contextualize the genre. Our conversation also prompted us to consider the stakes of our own travel, now that the world is opening up and travel is once again becoming a possibility.

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/84 

In 2016, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner shared data from her project, The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, with the WPHP — in particular, the Virtual International Authority Files she and her team had attached to their person records. This month, she joins us to chat all things Stainforth, databases, and cataloguing, including the kinds of data her team has been working with and collecting, the project decisions that have had to be made along the way, the hidden and not-so-hidden gems the Stainforth catalogue contains, and the many commonalities our projects share in their efforts to recover women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stainforth on!

You can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/80

Welcome back! In the first episode of Season 2 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren delve into the publication history of Frances Burney’s first two (and most popular) novels,  Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782). Although both were regularly reprinted well into the nineteenth century, we recently realised that the WPHP was missing the post-1800 editions of these works (although it did already hold all of the editions of her two far less popular novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) — thank goodness!). In this episode, we explore why these titles were missing and our subsequent task: creating an as-comprehensive-as-we-can-make-it bibliography of Frances Burney’s novels up to 1836. 

As always, you can find more resources and information about this episode, including a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, on the WPHP site: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/76

As we get ready to launch the second season later this week, WPHP Primary Investigator Michelle Levy reviews some of the highlights from our first season.

In the final episode of Season One of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren celebrate Women’s History Month by interviewing Dr. Kate Ozment about the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writer, Delarivier Manley. Famous for her scandalous semi-autobiographical ‘secret histories,’ which satirized important Whigs in Queen Anne’s courts, Manley inspires us to consider the relationship between eighteenth-century women and history, and how they—and we!—capture, create, and record it (and sometimes make things up along the way).