Book Find: The Rives Family Writers (and Readers)

Post by UVA English Department research assistant Maggie Whalen.

In the weeks following our post on the UVA Library Collection’s many literary treasures tied to Albemarle County’s historic Rives family, UVA community members brought to our attention a few other Rives-owned and -annotated volumes worth investigating.

First: an 1853 copy of C. A. Sainte-Beuve’s Oeuvres de Boileau.

Boileau

A bookplate in Oeuvres de Boileau indicates that this text came to the UVA Library Collection through the books of William Cabell Rives.

Boileau Bookplate

The book is of interest to the Book Traces @ UVA project first for its gift inscription. The note, which appears in pencil on the book’s title page, reads: “À Mademoiselle Rives / E M / Adieu!” Below the gift-giver’s initials is a sketch of a crown.

Boileau Gift Inscrip

Of further note are the annotations, bracketing, and underscoring of the book’s contents. As its title suggests, Oeuvres de Boileau, or Works of Boileau, contains a number of works by the 17th-century French poet and literary critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. The volume’s contents are organized by genre, among them: satire, epistle, ode, epigram, and poetry.

Boileau TOC Annotated

Though marginalia crops up throughout the thick volume, its most heavily annotated sections are those for which Boileau is best known: his still-studied treatise on the rules of Classical verse L’Art poétique (1674) and his mock-heroic epics Le Lutrin (1666). Nearly every page of these two sections contains marks made by a previous reader: brackets, dots, notes in French, and translations in English.

L'Art L'Art1 L'Art3 L'Art5Annotations of Boileau’s L’Art poétique.

LutrinLutrin1Lutrin2Lutrin3Annotations of Boileau’s Le Lutrin.

To which Mademoiselle Rives did this well-marked volume belong? And by whom was it given? A look at the Rives family’s history hints at an answer.

As mentioned in our previous post, William Cabell Rives (1793-1868), a wealthy Albemarle landowner and an influential American politician, served twice as the U.S. Minister to France. In the final year of Rives’s first term, 1829-32, his wife, Judith Page Rives, gave birth to the family’s fourth child and first daughter. She was named Amélie by her godmother, then-Queen of France, Marie-Amélie. Shortly after the birth of Amélie Louise Rives, the Rives family returned to the United States. William Cabell Rives served three terms in the United States Senate before he accepted a reappointment as the Minister to France. He served his second term, 1849-1853, under France’s final monarch: Napoleon III. As in his first term, Rives was accompanied in Paris by his family. Indeed, letters preserved in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library reveal that William’s wife and three youngest children, Alfred (1830-1903), Amélie Louise (1832-1873), and Ella (1834-1892), all resided in France during his tenure as minister.

IMG_2485 IMG_2487 (1)Correspondence between Amélie Louise (Paris) and her sister-in-law, Grace (Boston).
Brown, Alexander, et al. Papers of the Rives, Sears and Rhinelander Families.

Bearing this in mind, it seems possible that this book, published in Paris in 1853, the final year of Rives’s term, might have been a parting gift (“Adieu!”) from French Queen Eugénie de Montijo (“E M,” the crown) to one of Rives’s unmarried daughters (“Mademoiselle”), Amélie Louise or Ella.

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Based on the limited biographical information available on the two sisters, it seems possible that either might have happily accepted a text on poetic technique. As discussed previously, the Riveses were a family of writers. Both of the girls’ parents, Judith Page and William Cabell Rives, were published authors. Amélie Louise, who would have been 21-years-old in 1853, dabbled in writing, penning but never publishing a number of poems and stories. 19-year-old Ella seems to have been intellectually inclined, too. In an 1851 letter from the girls’ mother to their sister-in-law, Judith describes Ella passing her time in Paris “surrounded with her grammars, dictionaries, [and] maps.”

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Correspondence between Judith Page (Paris) and her daughter-in-law, Grace (Boston).
Brown, Alexander, et al. Papers of the Rives, Sears and Rhinelander Families.

Unfortunately, records of the queen’s autograph do not confirm this loosely founded hunch and the book’s provenance remains a mystery.

Fast forward 30 years and we arrive at our next subject: The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, a ten-volume set published in London in 1879.

Set

UVA-administered bookplates reveal that the set came to the UVA Library Collection through the books of one Roberta Welford (1873-1956), a women’s rights advocate and suffragist whose papers are preserved in UVA’s Special Collections Library. Personal bookplates indicate that the set was previously owned by Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy (1863-1945), the niece of aforementioned Amélie Louise and Ella, the daughter of Alfred.

Bookplates

In our first post, we discussed at length another tome of Shakespeare owned and annotated by the second, and most famous, Amélie. That text, a hefty volume entitled The Plays of William Shakespeare, was published in London in 1823. It contains two inscriptions by Amélie, one from 1885 and another from 1890, as well as a number of marginal annotations. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, and All’s Well That Ends Well are among the plays most thoroughly marked in this previously discussed text.

Dramatic Works Plays Owner's Inscrip
The Plays of William Shakespeare. London, 1823.

Considering the substantial overlap in content between these two collections, it’s somewhat surprising that Amélie owned, let alone read and marked, both.

Dramatic Works and Plays

And yet, Amélie’s The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare is similarly rich with annotations. Of the ten volumes to the set, I was able to examine nine (volume 6 was missing) and found some degree of user modification in each.

Oddly enough, volumes 7 through 10 are the only texts that feature user inscriptions. All read: “Amélie Rives / 1881 / Castle Hill,” indicating that Amélie acquired this set four years prior to her bulkier edition of Plays.

7 Owner's Inscrip 8 Owner's Inscrip 9 Owner's Inscrip 10 Owner's Inscrip

A number of other dates crop up throughout Dramatic Works, particularly on plays’ title pages, revealing that Amélie returned to this text many times throughout her life. She records, for example, that she read Taming of the Shrew “for the first time in this edition the evening of” December 29, 1896; Love’s Labour’s Lost for the “2nd time” on the same night; and “reread” The Tempest on January 23, 1932.

1 Tempest inscrip3 Shrew title inscrip 2 Loves title inscrip

These annotations recall a note Amélie makes in her copy of Plays, in which she records that she read The Tempest, perhaps for the first time, in 1900 at her family’s estate, Castle Hill.

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The pages of Amélie’s Dramatic Works are thoroughly underscored and bracketed. Her marginal annotations frequently mention her daily life in Virginia and occasionally reference her own writings.

1 Tempest marginalia 1 Tempest marginalia2
Annotations in The Tempest. In the first image, she marginally defines “kybe” as a “chilblain.” In the second, she underscores “homely” and writes: “NB Homely used here as we Virginians use it now!!”

2 Loves annotation 2 Loves canary annotation 2 Loves date 2 Loves heavy underscore
Annotations in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In the first image, Amélie emphatically brackets and underscores a footnote about a famous bay horse named Morocco and writes: “NB Splendid subject for a poem or story!!” Second: she underscores “canary” (a popular dance in Shakespeare’s time) and writes in the margins: “NB Can this be the origin of the Negro ‘pull Cary’?” Third: a marginal note: “NB 25th Aug 1895.” Fourth: some dense underscoring.

7 annotation
Annotations in Troilus and Cressida. Amélie underscores “placket” and writes: “Modern American i.e. ‘Skirt.'”

9 Lear note Uncle
Annotations in King Lear. She responds to Shakespeare’s use of “nuncle” (defined in the footnotes as “a familiar contraction of mine uncle”), and writes in the margins: “And in Virginia we always address old Negros as ‘Uncle’ + ‘Aunt’ — 1892.”

9 Mac Prellim Remarks note
Annotations in the Preliminary Remarks to Macbeth. Amélie underlines and brackets this passage heavily. She writes extensive, barely legible, notes in the margins. At the bottom of the page, she underscores the name of the author and writes of his book of lectures: “Get at once if possible! ’92.”

On the final endpapers of several volumes, Amélie collects her favorite lines, passages, phrases, and ideas.

1 Tempest rear endleaf
On the rear endleaf of volume 1, Amélie records the following line from The Tempest: “The red plague rid you for learning me your language. Page 214.”

5 rear endleaf5 rear endleaf2
In the final pages of volume 5, Amélie records a series of “Notes” and corresponding “Page” numbers from The First Part of King Henry IV and King Henry V. One note reads: “The lady Ermengare. (Ermengare is a beautiful name.)” On the next page, Amélie transcribes an exchange between Prince Harry and Pions from The Second Part of King Henry IV. The page, however, is torn.

5 front endleaf
And for that reason, perhaps, she transcribes the passage again on the book’s front endpaper.

7 rear endleaf
On a rear endpaper in volume 7, she copies the following line from Troilus and Cressida: “‘This I presume will wake him’–Page 198.”

9 Rear Endleaf repetitions
In volume 9, she notes perceived “Repetitions of Shakespeare:” “In Hamlet, ‘Himself the primrose way of dalliance treads.’ In Macbeth, ‘that go the primrose way to the everlasting fire.'”

10 Rear Endleaf goats and monkeys10 Othello goats and monkeys
Finally, in volume 10, she writes: “Othello ‘Goats + Monkeys!’ see page 119.” On the corresponding page, Amélie has written “NB” beside the line: “You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus.–Goats, and monkeys!” At the bottom of the page, she brackets a footnote that explains the “great art” of the line.

Perhaps most intriguing among Amélie’s many annotations are those that speficially reference her writing process. In Plays, Amélie marks a line from All’s Well That Ends Well (“So there’s my riddle, One, that’s dead, is quick”), which corresponds to the title of her most famous novel (The Quick or the Dead?). In Dramatic Works, she reads the story of a legendary horse and notes that it would be a “splendid subject for a poem or story!!” Bearing these instances in mind, the endleaf lists explored above read almost like condensed catalogs of potential literary inspiration.

From Judith Page Rives’s The Living Female Writers of the South, to her daughter’s Oeuvres de Boileau, to her granddaughter’s various collections of Shakespeare’s plays, evidence of the Rives women reading with pencils in hand spans three generations and at least 80 years. Though the Rives women are remembered first and foremost as prolific writers, their active engagement with these texts reveals that they were also ambitious readers. As is demonstrated by this post and the last, the UVA Library Collection is dense with examples of the Rives family’s involvement with literature, both public and personal in nature.

 

Sources

Boileau Despréaux, Nicolas, and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Oeuvres : Avec Notes Et Imitations Des Auteurs Anciens. Paris: Furne, 1853.

Brown, Alexander, et al. Papers of the Rives, Sears and Rhinelander Families. Accession #10596, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.  

Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Hall, Fitzedward, et al. Letters of the Rives Family. .

“Nicolas Boileau”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

Papers of Roberta Wellford, Accession #6090, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Rives Family Papers Compiled by Elizabeth Langhorne, 1839-1990, #10596-d, Albert H. and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

Rives, James Childs. Reliques of the Rives (Ryves). Lynchburg, Va.: J. P. Bell Co., 1929.

Shakespeare, William, and Samuel Weller Singer. The Dramatic Works. 3rd ed. rev. London: G. Bell, 1879.

Shakespeare, William, et al. The Plays of William Shakespeare. New ed. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington; [etc., etc.], 1823.

Book Find: A Chevalier, a Soldier, and “The Female Poe”

Post by UVA English Department research assistant Maggie Whalen.

The Book Traces @ UVA team recently happened upon this 1834 edition of Maria del Occidente’s Zóphiël, or, the Bride of Seven in the UVA Library Collection.

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The book’s marbled cover is tattered and nearly detached from its contents. The condition of its interior is not much better: the pages are stained, splotchy, and brittle. That the volume appears so loved and worn, though, only adds to the intrigue of its most curious features: its previous owners’ inscriptions and insertions.

The inner cover contains a bookplate, revealing that the text came to UVA by way of one E. R. Reynolds.

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Opposite is the front endpaper, which features two inscriptions.

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The first, and fainter, reads: “With the respects of / Horace Brooks / 2 – Arty – –.”

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Below is a second inscription: “Gen. Horace Brooks, the above written, was the only son of the poet who has been styled ‘The Female Poe.’ He was appointed to West Point through the influence of Gen. LaFayette. His portrait was presented to me about two years ago. / E. R. Reynolds / Oct 27 / 99.”

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Taped opposite the book’s title page one finds the portrait of Horace Brooks to which E. R. Reynolds just alluded. The backside of the photograph is labeled “Horace Brooks.” A postage stamp and street address, “Chev – E. R. – Reynolds – / 813 Capital St / Washington / DC,” indicate that Reynolds received the portrait at his home by mail. The postal mark reveals that the portrait/postcard originated from New York.

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The portrait, which captures the profile of an elderly Brooks, was evidently taken at Quartley’s, a Baltimore photo gallery. Just above the business’s name and address is a New York return address. It reads: “If not called for return / to H. – Brooks – No – 238 –East 34th / New York City – –.” What Reynolds fails to mention in his inscription is that this portrait was “presented” to him by its subject, Horace Brooks.

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Taken together, these names, dates, and locations hint at some greater narrative. Understanding the particular significance of this volume, though, requires answering a few of the many questions its inscriptions and insertions provoke.

First: Who was this E. R. Reynolds?

Biographies of Chevalier Elmer Robert Reynolds (1846-1907) describe him as a man of diverse interests and life experiences. Reynolds spent his late teenage years fighting for the Union with the Wisconsin Light Infantry. He later studied at Columbian University (now George Washington University) in Washington, D.C. He went on to serve for some twenty years in the United States Civil Service as an examiner of pensions. Reynolds’s biographies, however, remember him chiefly for his work as an ethnologist and botanist. His studies focused primarily on American Indian antiquities in Maryland and Virginia. Titles of his scholarly writings include, for example, “Aboriginal Soapstone Quarries in the District of Columbia,” “Pre-Columbian Shell Mounds at Newburg, MD,” and “Prehistoric Remains in the Valleys of the Potomac and the Shenandoah.” His work won him recognition nationally by the Smithsonian Institution, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology, and Harvard University, as well as abroad. In 1887, King Humbert of Italy knighted him Chevalier and Knight Companion of the Royal Order of Italy.

Biographical accounts of Chevalier Reynolds, which appear in encyclopedias, anthropological society registries, and newspapers, characterize him by his public positions: as a veteran, a public servant, a celebrated scientist. Reynolds’s extracurricular interests, namely his fascination with Edgar Allan Poe, go entirely unmentioned.

A tactful search through UVA’s Special Collections Library reveals that Reynolds possessed more than a slight interest in the University’s most famous dropout. Reynolds donated a number of works by Poe and scholarly treatments of Poe to the University of Virginia, many of which are now held in Special Collections.

THE BELLSTHE BELLS INNER
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Bells. Philadelphia: Scattergood, 1872.

Several books in Reynolds’s collection of Poe, including The Bells and The Conchologist’s First Book, are bound in the same marbled paper and tagged with the same adhesive label as his copy of Zöphiél.

CONCHOLOGIST INNER CONCHOLOGIST MARBLE BACK
Poe, Edgar Allan, and Thomas Brown. The Conchologist’s First Book. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1840.

A note on the front endpaper of The Conchologist’s First Book reads: “Excessively rare.”

PYM COVER PYM INNER
Poe, Edgar Allan. Arthur Gordon Pym. London: Published by John Cunningham, Crown-court, Fleet-street, 1841. 

JOYCE EAP COVER JOYCE EAP INSCRIP
Joyce, John A. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: F.Tennyson Neely Co, 1901. 

This copy of Joyce’s Edgar Allan Poe features a presentation inscription from Reynolds to the Poe Alcove through James A. Harrison.

DEFENSE COVER DEFENSE INSCRIP INSERT
Moran, John J. A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Character and Dying Declarations of the Poet. An Official Account of His Death. Washington, D.C.: William F. Boogher, 1885.

This copy of Moran’s A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe includes a program and ticket for the author’s lecture on the life and character of Poe, as well as two distinct presentation inscriptions. The second inscription is from Reynolds to J. H. Ingram.

The Special Collections Library also contains extensive correspondence between Reynolds and various Poe scholars, including John Henry Ingram, Poe’s most famous biographer, and Charles William Kent, UVA English Professor and president of the Poe Memorial Association, of which Reynolds was a member.

INGRAM TO REYNOLDS1 INGRAM TO REYNOLDS2 INGRAM TO REYNOLDS3
John Henry Ingram’s Poe Collection, Accession #38-135, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

KENT5 KENT6
Correspondence of the Poe Memorial Association, Accession #38-406, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

That specific mention of Reynolds’s interest in Poe does not appear in his biographies (of which there are many) suggests that it was more a hobby than a serious, scholarly endeavor. He is credited, however, with contributing material to a 1902 edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by University of Virginia Professor James A. Harrison.

With this background on Reynolds in mind, we move to the next question: Why did Chevalier Reynolds care about Horace Brooks’s copy of Zóphiël?

Reynolds hints at the answer in his inscription on the book’s front endpaper. The book’s original owner, he explains, was Horace Brooks (1814-1894), the son of its author, Maria Brooks, who wrote under the pseudonym Maria del Occidente. This edition of Zöphiél was published in 1834, at which point Horace Brooks was studying at West Point (1831-1835). As Reynolds notes, Horace was appointed to West Point “through the influence of” General Lafayette, who was apparently quite taken with his mother. An account of Maria Brooks and General Lafayette’s first meeting appears in the 1916 Medford Historical Record:

Like a gallant Frenchman, Lafayette was susceptible to feminine charms, and so pleased was he with Mrs. Brooks that he was eager to befriend her, and learning that she desired for her son an appointment to a United States military academy, he procured it for her, a favor which she had been unable to attain (9).

Horace signs the book “2 – Arty –,” suggesting that it came into his possession during his service as a second lieutenant with the 2nd United States Artillery Regiment in the Second Seminole War, between 1836 and 1838.

The most striking moment in Reynolds’s note is, of course, his comment that the book’s author, Maria Brooks, had been “styled ‘The Female Poe.’

Which brings us to our next set of questions: Who was Maria Brooks? And how was she connected to Edgar Allan Poe?

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U.Va. prints and photographs file, Accession #RG-30/1/10/011, Prints0000, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Poe
Holsinger Studio Collection, ca. 1890-1938. Acession #9862, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

Maria Gowen Brooks (1794-1845) was an American poet best known for Zöphiél, a book of poems based on the story of Sara in the Book of Tobit. Brooks’s biography is marked by episodes of explosive literary productivity, a succession of tragic losses, and extensive periods of travel abroad. At the age of 13, her father died and she became the ward, and shortly thereafter the wife, of her sister’s widower, John Brooks. Indeed, at age 16, Maria wed John, who was 30 years her senior. During their tumultuous marriage, Maria began writing poetry, composing her first poem at age 19. A year later, her only son, Horace, was born. John died in 1823, at which point Maria moved to her brother’s coffee plantation in Cuba. There, she wrote Zöphiél, or, the Bride of Seven. In 1825, she published the first canto of Zöphiél, which caught the attention of English Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. In their correspondence, Southey praised Brooks’s work and gave her the pseudonym “Maria del Occidente.” In 1829, Brooks completed Zöphiél. The work was published in its entirety in London in 1831 and in Boston in 1834. Following the book’s American debut, Brooks captured the interest of another prominent literary figure, this time stateside: Edgar Allan Poe.

Throughout the 1840s, Maria Brooks’s name, and pseudonym, crops up frequently in Poe’s reviews of other female poets. Amelia Welby, he writes, “has nearly all the imagination of Maria del Occidente…” (The Works 203). Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s The Sinless Child is “undoubtedly…one of the most original of American poems—surpassed in this respect, we think, only by Maria del Occidente’s ‘Bride of Seven’” (The Works 129). Frances Sargent Osgood “has occasional passages of true imagination – but scarcely the glowing, vigorous, and sustained ideality of Mrs. Maria Brooks…” (The Works 98). Estelle Anna Lewis’s “The Broken Heart” “is more enthusiastic, more glowing, more passionate, and perhaps more abundant in that peculiar spirit of abandon which has rendered Mrs. Maria Brooks’s ‘Zophiel’ so great a favorite with the critics” (The Works 948).

Literary critic Kirsten Silva Gruesz observes that although Poe “compares nearly every woman poet about whom he wrote to Maria del Occidente,” he never devotes a separate review to her works (77). In a 2008 article, “Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle,” Gruesz quotes Thomas Ollive Mabbott, the only other critic to have previously commented upon “Poe’s apparent interest in Brooks” (95). Mabbott writes: “his references during 1848 and 1849 make me think he was studying her poetry, and had he lived, might have produced a critique upon it” (95). Poe, however, died in 1849.

(Regarding Poe’s death I feel compelled to remark: Legend has it that on his deathbed, Poe called the name “Reynolds” repeatedly. Most Poe scholars doubt the veracity of this myth, but for those who might still be wondering, our Chevalier Reynolds was only three years old at the time.)

Poe’s repeated reference to Brooks in the above-quoted reviews appear to be the most solid connection between the two poets. Indeed, I was unable to find specific mention of Brooks as “The Female Poe,” as Chevalier Reynolds indicates she had been “styled.” Although their relationship is ultimately “unknowable,” Gruesz speculates at length about possible connections between the two writers. She notes, for example, that both Brooks and Poe were included in Samuel Kettell’s 1829 anthology Specimens of American Poetry, which “the young Poe almost certainly got his hands on…as it contained the first critical notice of Tamerlane” (96). Gruesz continues: “Might not the anecdote Kettell told about Brooks—that she took the idea for a poem about a beautiful angel named Zóphiël from her reading in apocryphal literature—have echoed in Poe’s head as he imagined a similar character, Israfel, in a poem first published in 1831?” (96).

Slightly loftier, but intriguing nonetheless, is the eerie overlap in the two figures’ biographies, which Gruesz also highlights:

…a dubiously incestuous marriage involving a teenaged bride; an interest in the esoteric, the ‘curious,’ and the otherworldly; an association with a slaveholding economy; even their experience at West Point, a place that served the literary aspirations of each in different ways (95).

 

This copy of Zöphiél raises far more questions than I am able to answer. (For example: What was the nature of the relationship and correspondence between Horace Brooks and Chevalier Reynolds? How did this volume come into Reynolds’s possession? What exactly prompted Reynolds to describe Maria Brooks as “The Female Poe”? Was the “Reynolds,” for whom Poe may or may not have called before his death, related to our Chevalier?) It is nonetheless quite clear that Horace Brooks’s book, inscription, and portrait contribute to Chevalier Reynolds’s collection of materials connected, if tangentially, to his favorite author.


Sources

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 17. N.p.: A.L. Hummel, 1901. 82. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

Center of Military History. United States Army, 12 Nov. 2015. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 1. N.p.: T.Y. Crowell, 1902. Xix. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

Correspondence of the Poe Memorial Association, Accession #38-406, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Find A Grave Memorial. N.p., 16 Oct. 2010. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1 (2008): 75-110. Project MUSE. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

Holsinger Studio Collection, ca. 1890-1938. Acession #9862, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.

Interments in the Historic Congressional Cemetery. Bytes of History, 13 Aug. 2006. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

John Henry Ingram’s Poe Collection, Accession #38-135, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Joyce, John A. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: F.Tennyson Neely Co, 1901.

The Medford Historical Register. Vol. 19-20. N.p.: Society, 1916. 9-16. Print.

Moran, John J. A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Character and Dying Declarations of the Poet. An Official Account of His Death. Washington, D.C.: William F. Boogher, 1885.

The Naturalists’ Universal Directory. N.p.: Cassino, 1882. 187. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

New Century Reference Library of the World’s Most Important Knowledge:. Vol. 4. N.p.: Syndicate Pub., 1909. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Arthur Gordon Pym: Or, Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Famine: Being the Extraordinary Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, Mariner, of Nantucket, North America, During a Voyage to the South Seas, and His Various Discoveries In the Eighty-fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude. London: Published by John Cunningham, Crown-court, Fleet-street, 1841.

Poe, Edgar Allan, and Thomas Brown. The Conchologist’s First Book: a System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools, In Which the Animals, According to Cuvier, Are Given with the Shells, a Great Number of New Species Added, and the Whole Brought Up, As Accurately As Possible, to the Present Condition of the Science. 2d ed. With illus. of 215 shells, presenting a correct type of each given. Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1840.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Bells. Philadelphia: Scattergood, 1872.

Prehistoric Cultures of the Delmarva Peninsula: An Archaeological Study. Newark: U of Delaware, 1989. 65. Google Books. Google. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

“Reynolds, Elmer Robert.” Who’s Who in America. Ed. John W. Leonard. Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1906. 1480-481. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

The United States Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces. Vol. 29. N.p.: Army and Navy Journal Incorporated, 1891. 658. Google Books. Google, 18 Dec. 2013. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

U.Va. prints and photographs file, Accession #RG-30/1/10/011, Prints0000, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Wilson, Woodrow. “Reynolds, Elmer Roberts.” Harper’s Encyclopædia of United States History from 458 A. D. to 1906. By Benson Johns Lossing. N.p.: Harper & Brothers, 1907. 423. Google Books. Google. Web. 15 Feb. 2016.

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. N.p.: Stone & Kimball, 1896. Google Books. Google, 6 Mar. 2010. Web. 18 Feb. 2016.

 

Book Find: “Tis pleasant, sure, to find one’s name in print.”

Post by UVA English Department research assistant Maggie Whalen.

Book Traces @ UVA recently happened upon this 1872 edition of Mary T. Tardy’s The Living Female Writers of the South in the UVA Library Collection.

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A bookplate reveals that the text came to UVA through the books of William Cabell Rives (1793-1868).

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As the title suggests, the book contains the biographies of southern female authors alive in the 19th century. Its pages are entirely unmarked, save for a few noteworthy annotations on the three-page biography entitled “Mrs. William C. Rives.”

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Above the section’s title, a hand has left the following note:
Lord Byron says, ‘Tis pleasant, sure, to find one’s name in print.’ My surprise was quite equal to my pleasure in finding my name among those of the illustrious ladies who appear here. It is but just to say that this notice was not contributed to the volume by any member of my own family, and that the authorship is a mystery both to them and to me. JPR…. (436)
Judith Page Rives (1802-1882), wife of William C. Rives, describes the surprise and honor she feels at finding her biography in Tardy’s text. The content and tone of the note suggest that it is not entirely self-reflective, but also directed at any reader who might happen upon the book in the future.

In the biography that follows, Rives has made a few corrections to the text. She adjusts the date of France’s July Revolution from 1820 to 1830. She corrects the spelling of her daughter’s name, Amélie (chosen for her by her godmother, the Queen of France), directly in the text and then transcribes it in the margins for clarity. Finally, she changes the title incorrectly attributed to her second book from “Home and Abroad” to “Home and the World.”

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Aside from these minor adjustments, Rives does not interfere with the anonymous biographer’s account of her life, suggesting, perhaps, its accuracy. The notice describes Rives as “a faithful mother” of six and a “most useful helpmeet to her husband,” who served twice as United States Minister to France and once as a Senator from Virginia (438). She is further characterized as “a prominent and yet ever beneficent leader in society,” most notably in her native Albemarle County (438). There, she and her family resided in a vast, historic estate called Castle Hill (on the market now for $11.5 million) and mingled with the likes of Madison and Jefferson. Finally, Rives’s biographer describes her as “an author of more than ordinary ability and popularity” (438).

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“Castle Hill,” from Charles F. Gillette Photographs, 1905-1970, Accession #11083, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Among Judith Rives’s literary achievements are two books: Souvenirs of a Residence in Europe (1842) and Home and the World (1857). The biography quotes from a review contemporary to the publication of Souvenirs, saying: “This book is distinguished throughout for its moral and elevated tone. Its style, which perhaps in some instances may be rather luxuriant, is generally chaste, fluent, and graceful” (437). According to Jane Censer, author of The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, much of Rives’s work was nonfiction, based on her travels abroad and her life at Castle Hill. Censer also notes that many of the women included in Tardy’s Female Writers of the South came from “well-to-do” Southern families and published a single article, poem, or novel, often with a local printer (214). A number of these women “published so little or in such obscure journals that the modern researcher can find almost none of their printed efforts” (214). Judith Rives is certainly a slight break from the “authors” Censer describes, having published Souvenirs with a Philadelphia publishing house and Home and the World with a publisher based in London. A single copy of Rives’s Tales and Souvenirs of a Residence in Europe (below) is available in the UVA Library circulating collection. Several copies of Souvenirs and Home and the World are held in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

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Judith Rives was not the only writer in her family. In the later years of his life, her husband, William Cabell Rives, wrote biographies of John Hampden and James Madison, both of which are available in the UVA Library circulating collection. Their daughter, Amélie Louise Rives Sigourney (1832-1873) also dabbled in writing, penning but never publishing a number of poems and stories before her death.

The most notable writer among the Riveses, though, was surely Judith’s granddaughter and Amélie Rives Sigourney’s niece, Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy (1863-1945). Goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and eventual heiress of the Castle Hill estate, Amélie ran in the same circles of Albemarle society as her grandmother had. Unlike her grandmother, though, Amélie’s celebrity was not only local, but national. Amélie’s fame was due in large part to her first novel, The Quick or the Dead? (1888), which was an immediate sensation. The book, which dared to depict women as sexually aware, was “reviled by critics and clergymen across the country,” but nonetheless sold 300,000 copies (Lucey). Amélie proceeded to publish at least 24 volumes of fiction, a number of uncollected poems, and a play. According to Censer, Amélie was part of a small group of southern female authors who in their works “presented southern women who were intellectually astute and domestically skilled. Their heroines neither sought nor enjoyed belledom but instead searched for fulfilling, useful lives” (8). Amélie, in particular, experimented with gender conventions and on occasion confronted the more difficult topics of race and class (Censer 8).

The UVA Library Collection contains a number of books associated with Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy, including those written by her and others owned by her. This copy of Barbara Dering, Amélie’s 1893 sequel to The Quick or the Dead?, is thoroughly marked, featuring the inscriptions of at least two distinct owners and marginalia throughout.

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The circulating collection also contains a thick copy of Shakespeare’s plays, formerly owned and heavily annotated by Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy herself.

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Amélie inscribed the volume with her name multiple times. The first example appears on the front endpaper and reads: “Amélie L. Rives / Castle – Hill / 15th of March – 1885.” At the time of this initial inscription, Amélie was just 22-years-old, still three years from publishing The Quick or the Dead?.

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A second inscription appears on the title page of The Tempest. Here, Amélie has inscribed her name twice, first with her maiden name, “Rives,” and a second time with her married name, “Troubetzkoy.” The names are accompanied by a date: “18th June 1900.” At the time of this inscription, Amélie was 37-years-old and had published a number of novels. Though she had married the noble but impoverished Pierre Troubetzkoy four years prior to this inscription, Amélie continued to publish her literary works under her maiden name, perhaps explaining the double signature.

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Many passages of the plays that follow are bracketed, check-marked, and underscored.

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Amélie has also left several notes throughout the volume. In The Gentleman of Verona, for instance, Amélie stars and brackets several lines of text at the end of Scene I and writes at the bottom of the page: “Same idea exposed several times in Tempest by Gonzalez.”

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Later, in Much Ado About Nothing, she notes: “In Shakespeare’s time ‘ache’ was pronounced ‘H’ – AR.”

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In the margins of Taming of the Shrew, she seems to make a wry joke about husbands, marking the line: “A husband! a devil!” and writing at the bottom of the page: “The book opened here of itself just as I had said laughingly ‘O gin I had a husband!'” According to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “gin,” this exclamation might translate roughly to “If only I had a husband.”

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Perhaps the most intriguing of Amélie’s annotations appears in All’s Well That Ends Well. Here, Amélie marks an “X” beside the line: “So there’s my riddle, One, that’s dead, is quick,” and writes below: “The book also opened here just as I was trying to find another title as good as The Quick or the Dead. 23 Nov. 1888.” In this moment, we witness an intimate memorialization: Amélie marks in her copy of Shakespeare’s plays the phrase that inspired the title of her most famous literary work, published just half a year prior in April 1888.

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From Judith Rives’s humble response upon finding her name in Female Writers of the South to her granddaughter Amélie Rives’s remarks and reminiscences upon Shakespeare, it is clear that the UVA Library Collection contains an array of Rives family literary treasures, not only those printed by press but also those marked by hand.

Sources

“The Cabell Family.” Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. University of Virginia Library, n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003. Google Books. Google. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Hatch, Peter J. “The Garden and Its People.” “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. N.p.: Yale UP, 2012. 33. Google Books. Google. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Lay, K. Edward. “The Georgian Period.” The Architecture of Jefferson Country: Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 2000. 60-61. Google Books. Google. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Lucey, Donna M. “Patron’s Choice: Sex, Celebrity and Scandal in the Amélie Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy Papers.” Notes from Under Grounds. University of Virginia Library: Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, 23 Aug. 2013. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Prose, Francine. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous”. The Washington Post. Web. 30 Jul, 2006.

Rives, Amélie. Barbara Dering. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott company, 1893.

Shakespeare, William, et al. The Plays of William Shakespeare. New ed. London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington; [etc., etc.], 1823.

Tardy, Mary T. The Living Female Writers of the South. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1872.

Varon, Elizabeth R. “We Mean to Be Counted”: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. N.p.: U of North Carolina, 2000. Google Books. Google. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Weeks, Lyman Horace. “George Lockhart Rives.” Prominent Families of New York. New York: Historical, 1897. 478. Google Books. Google. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Book Find: Cowper after the Storm

Guest post by Book Traces @ UVA volunteer Jamie Rathjen

A volume of William Cowper’s poems has rested in a decades-long repose in Alderman Library, a welcome respite compared to the action it saw on the front lines in central Virginia’s Civil War campaigns. It accompanied several different members of a regiment of Virginia troops, the 12th Virginia Infantry, on their travels from the Richmond area to Fredericksburg and beyond, all the while containing within its pages Cowper’s opposition to slavery. The regiment ultimately harbored a connection to the man in whose collection the book ended up, fervently patriotic Confederate colonel and one-time UVA student William Gordon McCabe, in the form of the Pegram cousins, consisting in this context of younger William, eventually the superior of McCabe’s as the war progressed, and older Richard, a member of the 12th Virginia Infantry later made an artillery captain. It is from McCabe’s library that the Cowper volume made its way to UVA, when the library was donated by McCabe’s sons in 1924 following his death four years before.

Col. McCabe is responsible for several inscriptions in other books that he owned, including one made during the war containing a diagram of howitzer firing angles and another relating an anecdote of a conversation between his father and Edgar Allen Poe. However, he did not write in this volume of Cowper; the inscriptions fall to others.

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The earlier of the two dated and readable inscriptions was made by Pvt. Robert E. Jones on 19 June 1862 while he was “on the line at” Richmond. (It is lucky, or perhaps necessary, that Jones included his middle initial, as the regiment contained another Robert Jones.) Jones was, however, wounded at a battle variously called Fraizer’s Farm (as it appears in his records) or Glendale, northeast of Richmond in Henrico County, only 11 days later on 30 June, and ultimately died on or around 10 July. The Battle of Glendale was part of a series of six battles in seven days in the Richmond area known as the Seven Days Battles, in which the Army of Northern Virginia, led by Robert E. Lee and containing the 12th Virginia Infantry, repulsed the Union, under Gen. George McClellan, from Richmond and onto the peninsula to the east. While there were heavy casualties for both sides, the Confederates emerged successful and afterwards began a counter-attack to the north, culminating in the famous battle at Antietam in the fall.

The Seven Days Battles began on 25 June; thus, Jones would have had only six days to read Cowper from the date of his inscription to the date of the first battle, something which may help to explain the lack of annotations on the poems themselves despite Jones’ large signature in the front of the book and two Confederate flags rendered in pencil in the back.

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Of the two flags, one is rectangular and reminiscent of the Confederate “stars and bars” flag, but with extra, perhaps fanciful additions, including a “C.S.” which bears similarities with Jones’ handwriting in the front. The other is a square saltire, similar to the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag, the familiar blue cross on a red field with stars in the cross; three stars have been faintly replicated on one arm of the cross. The battle flag was often customized by regiments with an identifier and the names of battles, likely those in which the regiment participated; Col. McCabe, in an oration of his from after the war, lists upwards of thirty battles which he believes ought to have been on his battalion’s tattered flag. One or both of these flags were perhaps carried into battle by the 12th Regiment.

After Jones, the next inscription comes from the quartermaster sergeant of the 12th Regiment, Robert C. Osborne. His, while quite faded, is somewhat readable: “Robert C. Osborne, Esq.; camp near Fredericksburg; January 30, 1863.” (Photo below has been enhanced to show Osborne’s inscription.)

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The Army of Northern Virginia had spent four days successfully defending the city in mid-December 1862 and did not fight another battle until Chancellorsville in the spring, also in the immediate area. Osborne, like Jones, is short of biographical information, but appears to have survived the war, as, for lack of other evidence, his records at least do not note his death and consist mostly of ordnance forms rather than the more enlightening index cards, recording attendance at roll call, found for Jones and others. He had been the quartermaster sergeant for the regiment since November 1861 and in July 1863 was appointed captain and assistant to the divisional quartermaster. Thus, the path on which the book traveled to reach Col. McCabe was set in motion with him.

One possible path from Osborne to Col. McCabe is represented by the Pegram cousins, Richard and William. Richard Pegram was born in Petersburg on 14 February 1829 and, like William, grew up studying law. Richard originally started the war as a private in the 12th Regiment, but in April 1862 (before Jones was killed) transferred to a company of artillery, eventually being chosen to captain the company in May 1863. His company fought at the same battles as the 12th Regiment in the period between the book’s two inscriptions (the Seven Days Battles and Fredericksburg), so it is possible that he retained links with his former regiment; Pegram was originally in Company E of the 12th Regiment, formed of men from Petersburg and the surrounding area, and the same company as Robert Osborne before their respective promotions. He was also with his artillery unit throughout the crucial period from mid-1862 to early 1863 and thus was likely encamped with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia at Fredericksburg. The younger Pegram, William, was born on 29 June 1841 in Richmond. Studying in UVA’s law school at the beginning of the war, Pegram possessed increasingly greater artillery commands for all four years and made a name for himself starting in the Seven Days Battles with a combination of youth, fearless leadership, skillful command, and at times aggressive tactics that won him much praise. During the course of the war, William Pegram was promoted several times, culminating in the position of colonel of artillery in early 1865, but first gained a substantial command when he was made a captain (the same as Richard) in March 1862. At the end of the war, William possessed an entire battalion of artillery (as opposed to Richard, who remained one step below as a captain), and William McCabe was Pegram’s adjutant (essentially, a personal assistant). McCabe mentions that Pegram “never lost a gun in four years of active service;” the only time he did was when he was mortally wounded at the battle of Five Forks on 1 April 1865, a week before the end of the war, and died the next day. Twenty-one years later, at the battalion’s annual reunion, McCabe would present them their tattered battle flag on behalf of Pegram’s mother, to whom Pegram had previously given it at some point during the war.

Indeed, William McCabe seems to have made a postwar career out of the eloquence with which he remembered William Pegram in the evening of 21 May 1886. His obituary in UVA’s alumni news remembers him as a “soldier, teacher, scholar, and citizen” and “one of the most distinguished of the University’s older alumni” at his death on 1 June 1919 and despite spending less than a year (fall 1860 – spring 1861) at the University. He continued to harbor a zealous Confederate patriotism throughout his life, additionally serving as “commander” of the A. P. Hill Camp of Confederate Veterans (under whose ultimate command William Pegram and McCabe’s battalion was) as well as president of his surviving battalion. As related in a memoir of McCabe by Armistead Gordon, McCabe was also known for writing out his full wartime rank and position (“From W. Gordon McCabe, formerly Captain of Artillery, Pegram’s Battalion, A. P. Hill’s Corps, A. N. V.”) in books he gave to others from his library. However, he seems to have reserved this for the benefit of others: another book of McCabe’s in Alderman library, a biography of Thackeray, has a simple “W. Gordon McCabe, Petersburg, Virginia” as identification inside the cover. In fact, McCabe spent much of his time throughout his entire life with books, writing several of his own not about the Civil War, but rather in which he demonstrates a classical interest: a Latin reader and a work on the Gallic War. Unfortunately, he did not get to inscribe the Cowper book in his distinctive style, as it did not leave his library.

The five men behind the story of the Cowper book appear to have served in the same battles throughout the seven months between the two inscriptions. In McCabe’s speech memorializing William Pegram, he lists the battles that “should” belong on the battalion’s flag, even if they are no longer present. These include three of the Seven Days Battles: Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mill, and, most importantly, Glendale, as well as Fredericksburg. Thus, besides Robert Jones, the other four men – the Pegrams, McCabe, and Robert Osborne – were together for a period of many months. It is, however, impossible to say anything specific about the interactions of individuals in such a large army, and the four’s proximity to each other begins to disintegrate after the battle of Fredericksburg and the encampment thereafter. Richard Pegram’s battery of artillery disappears from the radar somewhat after Fredericksburg; the Virginia government’s Civil War website has it next surfacing at the battle of Swift Creek in May 1864, while a chart of the artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia from April 1863 only includes one Pegram battery, which was William’s (as both were then captains). Additionally, in spring 1863 McCabe’s records indicate that he was given special orders to report to Charleston and the command of P. G. T. Beauregard, where he stayed until the fall. However, during that time his and Pegram’s unit (of which McCabe had first been appointed acting adjutant in March 1863) was held in reserve at Gettysburg and thus remained with the Army of Northern Virginia. Thus, it is fortuitous that the book’s two inscriptions are dated when they are, as the two appear to bookend a period in which all the crucial figures involved were in close proximity. The most likely story behind the Cowper book seems to be that it simply drifted around, first in the 12th Regiment and then among the Pegrams and McCabe. The exact details are as murky as war often is itself, and the group of four’s proximity to one another was not limited to the period from June 1862 to January 1863; both Richard Pegram and McCabe, for example, are mentioned as being captured at the battle of Sayler’s Creek on 6 April 1865, a few days after William Pegram was killed. As the war was at an end only three days later, however, they were both swiftly pardoned.

The Cowper book as a whole is in an interesting mix of conditions; it has been given a protective box by the UVA library. The binding has entirely ripped in one place, creating two “halves” of the book that are more like a 30-70 split, with the smaller one lying on top of the larger one. While the back cover is intact, the front cover was hanging on by threads when I first received the book and finally fell off before I was done. The covers themselves are non-descript dark green and done in relief, the most common method of graphic design.

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The pages are actually in very good condition compared to the covers; they are not brittle and have aged well. There are, as mentioned, very few interior annotations. Of the crucial entries by Jones and Osborne on the end pages, Jones’ has not really faded while parts of Osborne’s are hardly readable at all. There are also small and mostly unreadable inscriptions on the top of the page with Jones’. A bookplate indicating that the book came to UVA from McCabe is pasted on the first end page.

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The book itself is relatively large, at 17 cm in height according to the library catalogue, and could not fit easily in a small coat pocket, for example. Ironically, its wear – outside of its existence in multiple parts – does not quite match the battlefield journey on which it embarked.

Cowper’s poems mix the sense of optimism that would have been felt earlier in the war with the anti-slavery rhetoric that ultimately won out. Cowper was known for anti-slavery poems, and titles such as “Hope,” “Ode to Peace,” “Peace after the Storm,” “The Negro’s Complaint,” and “Pity for Poor Africans” make him seem out of place on a battlefield, especially in the possession of Confederates. “Pity for Poor Africans” in particular condemns the hypocrisy of the slave trade, as Cowper uses a group of boys engaging in petty theft of apples from a farm to parody slave traders. The speaker attempts to simultaneously justify both his involvement and his sentiments of sympathy for the farmer by disconnecting himself on a personal level; “he will lose none by me, but I’ll get a few,” goes the reasoning. Such sentiments could have been repeated in the Confederate lines by attaching oneself to the tradition or perhaps the institution of slavery, or even an ill-defined Southern patriotism as McCabe did, rather than the individual slaves themselves. Indeed, some of McCabe’s reasoning is on full display in the end of his speech to the Pegram battalion association: “…that the blood shed in its [the battle flag’s] defence was not the blood of ‘traitors,’ but the blood of patriots, who died that they might transmit to their children the heritage bequeathed them by their fathers.”

Yet this was regarded as not much of a blemish on McCabe, who was hailed as “the finest type of Virginian of his generation” by Armistead Gordon in his memoir. McCabe served on UVA’s Board of Visitors from 1888-1892 and the collection of his letters and materials in Special Collections indicates that he could count among his numerous acquaintances and correspondents Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Cabot Lodge. The Cowper book appears since the first inscription never to have left the hands of Virginians and remarkably passed from a virtually anonymous private to a well-known and distinguished yet ultimately non-commissioned officer. The book itself could tell the story of the war in Virginia, with the whole state heavily traversed by both sides and McCabe and Pegram’s battalion surviving until near the bitter end.


“”Branch’s-Pegram’s Battery.” Civil War in Virginia: Walk in Their Footsteps. Commonwealth of Virginia. Web. http://www.virginiacivilwar.org/footsteps.php?regimentnumber=Pegram&&state=Virginia&branch=Light+Artillery&force=Confederate

“Colonel W. Gordan [sic] McCabe, ’61, Dies Suddenly in Richmond.” University of Virginia Alumni News 8.11 (1919): 285.

“A Guide to the William Gordon McCabe Papers, 1757-1920.” University of Virginia Special Collections. Web.

“Jones, Robert E.” Fold3. https://www.fold3.com/image/20/10252288.

“Osborne, Robert C.” Fold3. https://www.fold3.com/image/10264832

“Pegram, Richard G. (private).” Fold3. https://www.fold3.com/image/10270968

“Pegram, Richard G. (captain).” Fold3. https://www.fold3.com/image/20/13129866

“McCabe, William Gordon.” Fold3. https://www.fold3.com/image/20/74304091

“Memorials of Deceased Members: Richard G. Pegram.” Report of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association. Ed. Eugene C. Massie. Richmond: James E. Goode, 1897. 170-72.

“The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, Esq.” New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1858.

Carmichael, Peter S. Lee’s Young Artillerist: William R.J. Pegram. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 1998.

—. “The Merits of This Officer Will Not Go Unrewarded: William R. J. Pegram & The Purcell Battery in the Seven Days.” The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: Yorktown to the Seven Days. Campbell, CA: Savas Woodbury, 1995. 191-209.

Feeney, William R. “Battle of Glendale.” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 5 April 2011. Web.

Gordon, Armistead C.. “William Gordon McCabe: A Brief Memoir”. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 28.2 (1920): 193–205.

McCabe, William Gordon. “Annual Reunion of Pegram Battalion Association in the Hall of House of Delegates, Richmond, Va., May 21st, 1886.” Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2001.05.0271

Nafziger, George F. “Confederate Forces under Lee, 10 April 1865.” The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle. Combined Arms Research Library. http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15040coll6/id/665

—. “Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, 4 May 1863.” The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle. Combined Arms Research Library. http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15040coll6/id/170

—. “Confederate Artillery Organization, Army of Northern Virginia, 16 April 1863.” The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle. Combined Arms Research Library. http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15040coll6/id/160

—. “Confederate Forces, Battle of Fredericksburg, 10 January 1863.” The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle. Combined Arms Research Library. http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15040coll6/id/123

—. “Confederate Army around Richmond Virginia, 29 June 1862.” The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle. Combined Arms Research Library. http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15040coll6/id/74

Book Find: “Beautiful, Absurd, and Trashy Stuff”

Post by UVA English Department research assistant Maggie Whalen.

Book Traces @ UVA recently found this 1853 copy of Alexander Smith’s Poems in the UVA Library Collection.

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Flipping through the book’s pages, one immediately notices the abundance of notes scrawled in its margins. Indeed, more pages than not include some evidence of a previous reader’s interaction with the text.

Smith’s Poems contains four titled lyrics: “A Life-Drama,” “An Evening at Home,” “Lady Barbara,” and “To —,” as well as several untitled sonnets. First, longest, and most heavily annotated is the 150-page play “A Life-Drama.”

An initial example of marginalia pops up on the first page of this first poem. Above its title, the reader has written in pencil: “Beautiful, Absurd, and Trashy Stuff.” Below, the same hand has extended the play’s title: “A Life-Drama, or The Moon & Stars” (5).

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In the pages that follow, the same reader develops in the margins his own system of notes. He scrutinizes and satirizes Smith’s poetry, making verbal and nonverbal annotations of the text, additions and amendments to the text, and citations of literary allusions made within the text.

All of this causes a present-day reader to wonder: Who wrote these ridiculing comments? And, what was his beef with Alexander Smith?

Conveniently, the book’s title page features the inscriptions of two former owners. First is “W. Meredith,” who seems to have inscribed his name on September 2, 1853 in Philadelphia. The precise year of signing is unclear, as the final digit has been blotted out and corrected. Beneath is “Fred. W. M. Holliday,” accompanied by the date “July ’76.”

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A handwriting expert I am not, but the highly legible, looping quality of the penmanship in the book’s marginalia resembles much more closely the signature of W. Meredith than that of Fred. W. M. Holliday.

Unfortunately, the first inscription does not provide sufficient information to definitively identify W. Meredith. A number of men bearing some variation of the name “William Meredith” were alive during the 1850s. As far as I could tell, none could be linked directly to the book’s other owner, Governor Frederick William Mackey Holliday. However, there is considerable evidence suggesting that the book belonged at one point to either William Morris Meredith (1799-1873) or his son William Keppele Meredith (1838-1903), both of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

William Morris Meredith, the elder, was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer. He also served as United States Secretary of the Treasury between 1824 and 1828. The Meredith Family Papers are preserved at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Among them are some of his personal writings, including an assortment of original poetry and three of his diaries. The second of these diaries opens with an entry written on the eve of his twentieth birthday, at which point he had been practicing law for some time. He reflects:
Eighteen months have elapsed since I commenced the practice of my Profession. My profits have been small and the sincere disgust which I have always entertained for the Law has rather increased than diminished during that period. But after mature consideration, I can discover no other pursuit in which I could engage with any prospect of success. My inclinations urge me to a literary life, but that yields no expectations of an immediate support, and I feel it my duty to relieve my father as quickly as possible from so heavy and useless an encumbrance as myself.
William Morris’s love of literature is made evident also by the presence of his original verse, most of which was probably written before his legal career began. Notes on the Meredith Family Papers indicate that most of William Morris’s poems consist of “light and witty commentary on women and courting.”

William Keppele Meredith, son of the former, attended Princeton between 1851 and 1853. Plagued from childhood with cataracts and a speech impediment, William Keppele took a leave of absence from Princeton in 1852 and left school permanently in 1853. He returned to Philadelphia and spent most of his life as a “man of leisure,” save for a brief stint as a Union General’s secretary during the war. Meredith went on to become a published writer of both essays and poems. The Meredith Family Papers contains several of William’s original poems, in which he discusses “patriotism, love, adultery, religion, and philosophy.”

It seems entirely possible that either of the Merediths might have at one point owned, and annotated, this volume of Alexander Smith’s Poems. The two shared a love of literature and an affinity for writing verse. If the book was indeed signed in September 1853, 54-year-old William Morris would have been practicing law in Philadelphia and 17-year-old William Keppele would have just returned to Philadelphia from Princeton. Without access to the family’s records kept in Philadelphia or the ability to conduct a handwriting analysis, conclusions are quite difficult to draw.

Information on the book’s second owner is decidedly more distinct. Governor Frederick W. M. Holliday (1828-1899), a Virginia native, graduated Yale University in 1847. Less than a year later, he acquired degrees in philosophy, political economy, and law from the University of Virginia in 1848. Holliday proceeded to open his own law practice in Frederick County, where he was elected the Commonwealth’s Attorney for three consecutive terms beginning in 1851. An avid secessionist, he served as a captain in the Confederate Army, and was later promoted to major and lieutenant colonel. He was forced to resign his commission after he was wounded in battle and his arm was amputated. Following the war, Holliday returned to law and was elected governor of Virginia in 1878. At the end of his governorship, he retired and devoted the remainder of his life to traveling. It was Governor Holliday who ultimately donated this edition of Poems to the UVA Library Collection.

The question of connection between the Merediths and Governor Holliday might be answered by their common involvement in the practice of law or participation in the Civil War. It is also possible that the men were unknown to each other and happened upon the book independently.

Regardless of the note-taker’s identity, this volume stands out for its profusion of readerly commentary, much of which is pointed, funny, and smart. History reveals that this reader was not alone in ridiculing Alexander Smith’s Poems.

When Poems debuted in 1853, Smith was initially praised as the next great British lyricist. Following the book’s publication, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, an American literary journal, proclaimed that “A Life-Drama” had just “received a more universal and flattering welcome than was ever before awarded to an English poet” (LaPorte 421). Shortly thereafter, though, praise turned to criticism, which consisted of vicious attacks and accusations of plagiarism. Most damning was literary critic W.E. Aytoun’s 1854 review of Poems, in which labeled Smith a Spasmodic. The Spasmodics, a group of mid-19th century poets, closely imitated the Romantics and were criticized for their excessive use of natural imagery and obscure allusions. Smith resisted the title and spent the remainder of his life trying to shake his association with the group. Later in 1854, an anonymous author published a parody of Smith’s “A Life-Drama” entitled The Firmilian: A Tragedy, causing further damage to his reputation. Smith ultimately turned to writing essays, for which he received less attention but better critical reception.

Looking more closely at the notes made in this copy of Poems, and more specifically those made on “A Life-Drama,” it becomes clear that this volume is engaged in a larger historical conversation about Alexander Smith.

In “A Life-Drama,” a poet named Walter falls deeply in love with an unnamed lady. After meeting in an Italian forest, the two engage in extensive flirtation. To Walter’s dismay, though, his beloved is doomed to marry an old, wealthy man. Time passes and Walter overcomes his heartbreak, ultimately falling in love with another woman, Violet.

Some of the reader’s comments on the play come as brief quips: “Nonsense” (23), “Absurdity” (24), “What stuff and nonsense!” (35), “You sentimental old hypocrite!” (77), “Every idea in this Poem is repeated five times at least” (82), “Ain’t they a pair of wiseacres!” (86), “Unnatural” (131), and “Disgusting Affectation” (131).

The few positive comments that do appear resonate as sarcastic given the generally disgruntled tenor of the reader’s commentary. Beside several lines of bracketed verse in Scene II, for example, he writes: “Beautiful, by God!” (19) Another bracketed passage in the same scene is accompanied by the note: “Love is sometimes said to be incomprehensible” (13).

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Other notes are more long-winded. In Scene I, for example, Walter declares: “Bare, bald and tawdry, as a fingered moth / Is my poor life; but with one smile thou canst / Clothe me with kingdoms” (6). In the margins above, the reader reacts:
‘As a finger’d moth!’ A man who would finger a moth, is fit for nothing but camphor [moth repellant]. Mr. Smith says that a moth is both ‘bare and tawdry:’…. Does fingering a moth make it more bald, or more tawdry? In short, I will be very much obliged to anybody who will explain to me the meaning of that line. If Mr. Smith is so very much like a moth, he had better keep clear of camphor, and his friends had better take the necessary precautions about their clothes. (6-7)
Unfortunately, the edges of many pages were trimmed during the volume’s re-binding, so some notes, including the one transcribed above, are abbreviated.

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In Scene III, Walter speaks of “gentle pagans…whose red blood ran / Healthy and cool as milk,” to which the reader responds: “Milk, in its natural state, is warm fortunately for the physical comfort of these ‘gentle pagans’” (39).

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In Scene V, Walter declares: “My heart is weak as a great globe, all sea,” provoking the reader to write in large, angry letters: “I should like to pitch this fool into the Atlantic to convince him that his heart is a little weaker than the great globe, all sea” (74).

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In Scene VI, Walter recites following lines: “I gaz’d till my heart grew wild, / To fold her in my warm caresses, / Clasp her showers of golden tresses” (77). In the margins, the reader reacts to this sensuous description: “Old Bishop Onderdonk would have taken her by storm, in a coach full of people” (77). The reader here makes reference to the contemporary controversy surrounding Bishop Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk (1791-1861). In 1844, multiple female parishioners, including the wife of one of his fellow clergymen, accused the Episcopal Bishop of New York of sexual misconduct. The scandal remained in contention for over a decade.

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In Scene VII, Walter gazes out over the sea and remarks: “The bridegroom sea / Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride, / And in the fulness of his marriage joy, / He decorates her tawny brow with shells” (90). The reader underscores “bridegroom sea,” “the shore,” and “bride,” and then responds in a marginal note:
John and Polly have been married 40 years. To call John a bridegroom, or Polly a bride, would be apt to provoke a smile from the most rigid practicer of decorum. I therefore feel myself the less criminal in having actually laughed at the idea of bridegrooming and briding the Sea and the Shore, that have been married (man and wife) for thousands of years. (90)
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In other moments, the reader identifies Smith’s literary allusions, calling to mind contempoary accusations that he had plagiarized portions of Poems. William Shakespeare, Thomas Moore, and Fanny Kemble are each cited several times.

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The majority of the reader’s notes, however, take the form of original verse, extending and satirizing Smith’s poetry. For example, upon waking from a nap in Scene II, Walter says: “Fair lady, in my dream / Methought I was a weak and lonely bird,” at which point the reader interjects: “Caught napping by a much superior bird, / That was a bird indeed!” (15)

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Later in the same scene, as Walter speaks to his unnamed love interest he says: “His words set me on fire; I cried aloud” (25). The reader repeats this line in his note and then continues:
‘I’ll be that Poet—that immortal mind!’

He grasp’d my hand,—I look’d upon his face,—

A thought struck all the blood into his cheeks,

Like a strong buffet. His great flashing eyes

Burn’d on my own. He said, ‘Your name is Smith.’

Why am I cursed with that damning name?

Why am I not Jones, —Milligan, —McShinn,

Pips, —anything but Smith! (25)
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Throughout the entire play, the reader continues to interject, adopting the Smith’s style even as he mocks the poet and his characters. In these moments, the reader’s actions echo, or perhaps foreshadow, the anonymous author’s 1854 parody of “A Life-Drama,” The Firmilian: A Tragedy. Included below are a few further examples, which I have abstained from transcribing for the sake of space.

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A final instance worth mentioning explicitly appears on the poem’s final page. Smith’s Walter delivers the final words of the play to Violet, his second lover. The reader extends Walter’s speech, and also allows Violet a response:
Yes, Walter! I will sleep upon thy breast,

As yonder moon sleeps on the quiet river.

The stars, and he in the moon, are looking at us,

So come away, for I’m afraid of blushing. (160)
In a final jab, the reader grants Walter the last line. Ever the romantic, he replies to his love: “You look more pale than ever” (160).

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Comments like these appear also in the margins of the volume’s subsequent, shorter poems.

So rich in user intervention, so shrouded in mystery, and so embedded in the literary critical context of its time is this copy of Alexander Smith’s Poems that extensive additional research could be conducted on its history.

Sources

“Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk.” House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College. Dickinson College, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

“camphor, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2015. Web. 9 December 2015.

Executive letter books of Governor Frederick M. W. Holliday, 1878-1881. Accession 33431, State government records collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

“Introduction” Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism Ed. Denise Evans and Mary L. Onorato. Vol. 59. Gale Cengage, 1997. 5 Dec, 2015.

LaPorte, Charles, and Jason R. Rudy. “Editorial Introduction: Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics”. Victorian Poetry 42.4 (2004): 421–428. Web.

“Poems by Alexander Smith.” Bizarre: For Fireside and Wayside. Vol. 3. N.p.: Church, 1853. 121-23. Google Books. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.

Series 7, William Morris Meredith: William Meredith, Meredith Family Papers (Collection 1509), The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Smith, Alexander. Poems. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853. Print.

Book Find: French Lessons and April Fools’

Post by UVA English Department research assistant Maggie Whalen.

Book Traces @ U.Va. recently discovered this early-20th century French children’s book, Le Général Dourakine by Countess de Ségur, in the U.Va. Library Collection.

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Opening it up, one finds an inscription and other verbal annotations in a young person’s script.

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The inscription reveals that the book’s owners were Eugenia (1896-1980) and Adeline (1894-?) Davis, pictured below.

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Dabney Family Photographs, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

At the time of the book’s signing, Eugenia was 12 and Adeline was 14. The girls were the daughters of Volumnia (1868-1949) and John Staige Davis II (1872-1946), a professor in the University of Virginia School of Medicine and one of the first American practitioners of plastic surgery. The Davises are a prominent family in the history of both Charlottesville and the University. Eugenia and Adeline’s grandfather, John Staige Davis I (1824-1885), also taught in the U.Va. medical department. Their great-grandfather, John A.G. Davis (1802-1840), was among the first students to graduate U.Va., where he went on to teach law. Of note to a University audience: John A.G. Davis is also the ill-fated protagonist of a frequently cited story that claims that the murder of a U.Va. professor by a student prompted the creation of the Honor Code. Although Davis was in fact fatally shot by a student, recent research has shown that the tale of the Honor Code’s origin is apocryphal.

Below their names, one of the girls has written the schedule of their weekly French lessons (transcribed here for easier reading):

French taught by Mille. Hubbard three times a week, Monday Morning at quarter past nine, on Wednesday evening at quarter pas[t] three, and on Friday evening at the same time.

Above the bookplate on the opposite page, one of the girls has written: “Nous finions ce livre le 10 de mai,” or: “We finished this book May 10.”

A bit of digging on the history of the text itself, apparently assigned to the girls by their French tutor, reveals that Countess de Ségur was an incredibly popular French children’s author at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, the twenty books that she produced during her relatively short career, of which Le Général Dourakine was one, became the foundation of French children’s literature. The Davis sisters’ copy is a 1907 reprint by the original publisher. There are several other volumes of de Ségur’s famous collection of novels, La Bibliotheque Rose Illustrée, on the shelves of U.Va.’s Alderman library, though this seems to be the only copy owned by the Davises.

Annotations by the same hand are present on the book’s title page. Lightly penciled script reads: “Eugenia et Adeline Davis. La classe de Mille. Hubbard.” The inscription appears to have been corrected, however, by a later, heavier hand. This revision reflects the French spelling of Eugenia: “Eugénie.” The conjunction “et” is also retraced in darker pencil.

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Letters in U.Va.’s Special Collections Library reveal that the Davises corresponded at length with a certain Eugénie Hubbard, suggesting that this family friend (also a prominent figure in the contemporary Charlottesville social scene) might have been the Mademoiselle to whom the book refers.

Verbal and nonverbal marginalia can be found on many of the book’s 375 pages. Most markings take the form of paired slashes and light underscoring, perhaps demarcating reading assignments or noting important moments in the story. The occasional “E” (for Eugenia, perhaps) pops up as well. A cursive “Natasha,” the name of one of the story’s characters, also appears.

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On the final page of the tale, the date of the girls’ completion of the book, “May 10 1909,” is repeated.

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Perhaps most interesting, though, is the note on the book’s rear flyleaf:

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It reads: “April Fool. We are going to pin something on Miss Mary’s back tomorrow and get the mischief.” In this instance, the textbook seems to work as a platform for correspondence between scheming parties. One can easily imagine a young Eugenia or Adeline scribbling down this idea during a French lesson and sharing it with the her sister or perhaps another classmate.

Without any clues beyond “Miss Mary,” it is a long-shot to attempt to identify the nominated victim of the April Fools’ prank. A pair of documents available in the U.Va. Special Collections Library do, however, suggest one candidate.

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John Staige Davis Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library,
University of Virginia.

These 1908 and 1911 report cards of Adeline and Eugenia, respectively, are signed by one Mary Harrison of the Braehead School.

The Davis sisters’ copy of Le Général Dourakine was donated to the U.Va. Library Collection by John Staige Davis in 1954.

For additional examples of user-modified volumes donated by John Staige Davis and currently in U.Va.’s circulating collection, check out these links:
http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-poems-by-a-collegian/ http://www.booktraces.org/book-submission-lucile/


Sources

“Charlottesville Women Enroll in Auto School.” Richmond Times-Dispatch [Richmond] 27 June 1918: 3. Library of Virginia. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

Claire-Lise Malarte-Feldman. “La Comtesse de Ségur, a Witness of Her Time.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20.3 (1995): 135-139. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Dabney family Photographs, Accession #9852-e, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Davis, Nathaniel H. “Volumnia Hunley Davis.” Geni. N.p., 19 Nov. 2014. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

The Family Forest Descendants of Lady Joan Beaufort. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 3257. Google Books. Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

“History of Our Maryland Society for Plastic Surgeons.” History of Our Maryland Society for Plastic Surgeons. The John Staige Davis Society, 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

“John S. Davis.” Physician Price Fixing in 19th Century Virginia. University of Virginia, 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

Papers of John Staige Davis, Accession #3247, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Segur, Comtesse De. Le Général Dourakine. Paris: Hachette, 1907. Print.

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner. Men of Mark in Virginia: Ideals of American Life; a Collection of Biographies of the Leading Men in the State. Vol. 3. N.p.: Men of Mark, 1907. 109-10. Google Books. 12 June 2007. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

Book Find: A Brother’s Memorial

NOTE: this post, originally published on October 23, has been expanded on November 11 with a continuation by research assistant Maggie Whalen.

Book Traces @ U.Va. recently found this 19th-century mechanical engineering handbook in the U.Va. Library collection.

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If you open the front cover, you find a flyleaf inscription hinting at the book’s history and its meaning to the donor. The two inscriptions show that the book originally belonged to one R. B. S. Nicolson of Savannah, Georgia, who studied at the University of Virginia during the 1878-79 school term. It was later donated to the University of Virginia Library by the original owner’s brother, John Nicolson, himself a U.Va. graduate.

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But if you look deeper in the book, you find the full story. The book was published with a quire of lined paper in the back, apparently meant for engineers to take notes or do calculations. The original owner left the lined paper blank, but his brother filled a page of it with this memorial annotation (transcribed below for easier reading):

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New York City April 13th 1912.

It seems a desecration almost for me to write in this book so exclusively associated with my brother–but I am led to look into it for the first time in many, many years this Saturday night, the anniversary of his birth. He was born that memorable day, fifty one years ago, on which the Civil War between the North and the South began–fifty one years ago!! How life is slipping by!

This book is a relic of my brothers first ambitions–viz, to be a civil engineer–and of his course at the University of Virginia to this end. Instead of continuing to this goal, he went into our father’s business in Savannah in 1880, coming however to an early end. He was drowned at Tybee Island Ga. July 10th 1881.

John Nicolson

Intrigued, the Book Traces @ U.Va. team started digging.

Robert Beauregard S. Nicolson (1861-1881), the book’s original owner, was born on April 13, 1861 at White Bluff, near Savannah, GA. He was the eldest son of John Nicolson Sr. (1828-1903), a successful plumber in the Savannah region, and Matilda Hall Nicolson (1832-1893). The day of Robert’s birth marked the first military engagement of the American Civil War, as Union forces surrendered Fort Sumter to the Rebel army just up the Georgia coast.

It is not entirely clear whether John Nicolson Sr., then 34 years of age, subsequently joined the Rebel cause. However, Confederate records reveal that a “John Nicholson” (perhaps a misspelling of the family’s surname) enlisted in the 47th Volunteer Infantry, which recruited from Chatham County, where the Nicolson family resided, in 1861.

On February 14, 1866, the war had come to a close and John Nicolson Jr., author of the book’s memorial annotation, was born in Brooklyn, NY.

Older brother Robert attended the University of Virginia between 1877 and 1879, where he studied civil engineering. The 1877-1878 and 1878-1879 Catalogues of Students reveal that Robert took classes in chemistry, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, natural philosophy, and applied mathematics during his time at U.Va.. This text, Trautwine’s Pocket Book, was among the “Books of Reference” required of students in the Civil Engineering program during the 1878-1879 academic year. Robert’s time in Charlottesville was, however, cut short. In 1880, he returned to Savannah to work at his father’s recently expanded plumbing company.

On July 10, 1881, just one year after returning home, Robert drowned at Tybee Island, a popular resort destination near Savannah. A July 13 article in The Macon Telegraph and Messenger details the incident:

The particulars of the sad calamity are as follows: There was a fine surf on, and a large number of persons were in bathing, young Nicolson being out a considerable distance from the others. The tide was running out at the time, and, having ventured beyond the life line, he was rapidly carried off. Realizing his danger, he struggled manfully to regain the life post, but was unsuccessful in consequence of the undertow, and was compelled to cry for help. A young man…heard his cry and gallantly responded.

The story continues, revealing that the young man’s heroic efforts were ultimately fruitless. Robert’s body was swept out to sea and discovered the following evening, a quarter-mile down the beach from where he was last seen. Robert was buried in the Nicolson family’s plot at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

Years later, John Jr. followed his deceased brother’s path to the University of Virginia, where he studied law between 1890 and 1892. The 1891 and 1892 editions of Corks and Curls, U.Va.’s yearbook, reveal that John was a member of the Temperance Union and the Georgia Association, a center on the Law School Football Team, a brother of the Beta Chapter of Phi Theta Psi fraternity, and the Vice President and President of the Young Men’s Christian Association. In 1892, John graduated with a Bachelors of Law, returned to Savannah, and was admitted to the Georgia bar. After practicing law in Savannah for several years, John relocated to his hometown, New York City, in 1897. It is from New York that John eventually inscribed the 1912 remembrance of his brother, Robert, on what would have been his 51st birthday.

 

Sources

Corks and Curls Yearbook. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 1891. Print.

Corks and Curls Yearbook. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 1892. Print.

“Drowned in the Surf.” The Macon Telegraph and Messenger [Macon] 13 July 1881: 3. America’s Historical Newspapers. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

“Fort Sumter Surrenders.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.

Nicolson, John. Sanitary and Heating Age. New York: Sanitary and Heating, 1894. 56. Google Books. University of Michigan, 15 Apr. 2011. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

Smith, Candace. “Robert B.S. “Beaury” Nicolson.” Find A Grave. N.p., 15 July 2009. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.

Trautwine, John C. The Civil Engineer’s Pocket-book. 10th ed. Philadelphia: Claxton, 1876. Print.

United States. National Park Service. “Soldier Details: Nicholson, John.” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, 09 Nov. 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.

Who’s Who in New York City and State. N.p.: L.R. Hamersly, 1911. 704. Google Books. Harvard University, 11 Jan. 2008. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.

Book Traces Day at the University of Miami

On September 24, the Otto G. Richter Library at the University of Miami hosted a Book Traces day. The two principal investigators for Book Traces @ U.Va., Kara McClurken and Andrew Stauffer, traveled to Miami to give guest presentations on Book Traces and how the project has influenced preservation work at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. The Richter Library stacks were open all day for student searchers to hunt for “hidden treasures” in the collection.

Here is one of the highlights from an article about the event by the Miami Hurricane:

“Book Traces is a project to get students to think about the book as an object and not just a source of textual information,” said Special Collections Librarian Jay Sylvestre, who helped organize the event. “All the parts of a book, from the cover, to the illustrations, to any notes added by readers, tells us a story. Book Traces helps students find and follow that story.”

The students found numerous examples of unique copies in the Richter collection, with marginalia and other reader interventions ranging from the cheerfully comic to the touchingly tragic. It has been great for us to see the number of unique copies uncovered in the stacks during one-day Book Traces exercises at Columbia University and now Miami. It goes to show that the U.Va. collection is not unique in having numerous donated books with artifactual value.

If you are interested in hosting a Book Traces day at your library, please contact Prof. Stauffer.

Andrew Stauffer discusses Book Traces on “With Good Reason”

Professor Andrew Stauffer of the University of Virginia, one of the two co-principal investigators for Book Traces @ U.Va., recently gave an interview about the larger Book Traces project on the radio show With Good Reason. When interviewer Allison Quantz asked about the origins of the project, Stauffer explained how a class exercise in the library led to a more methodical search:

I began looking systematically through the books of poetry in Alderman Library at the University of Virginia and finding all sorts of amazing things. It was as if no one had ever looked for this before but as soon as you started looking for it, it was everywhere. People wrote in their books all the time in the nineteenth century. It was a way to keep journals, to establish reactions to reading. I mean we still write in books now, but I think the practices were different in different historical periods and we learned a lot from that.

You can listen to the interview here (it will be the first segment when you press play).

Book Find: Remembering Union Soldiers with a Gift of Poetry

Guest post by Book Traces @ U.Va. volunteer Kaye Marie Ferguson

Camp-Fire and Memorial Poems by Kate Brownlee Sherwood is a collection of poetry published in 1885 and written in dedication to those soldiers—both living and dead—who served in the Union forces during the Civil War and became members of a veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). This particular copy of the book features two inscriptions, one establishing the book as a Christmas gift from the author and another indicating the owner and recipient, J. Warren Keifer:

Gift inscription from Kate B. Sherwood

Gift inscription on the free endpaper: “Presented by the author – Christmas 1888.”

Title page with owner's inscription

Title page with owner’s inscription: “J. Warren Keifer – 12.25/88.”

Although the extent of the relationship between Keifer and Sherwood cannot be known definitively, the biography of each gives us a glimpse into a potential professional relationship, if not a friendship.

In her early career and throughout her life, Kate Brownlee Sherwood involved herself in journalism, working for several Ohio newspapers as a typesetter and leader-writer, as well as owning and serving as editor of the Canton Daily News-Democrat. Married to Congressman Isaac R. Sherwood, she was also highly active in politics and became known as the “Poetess of the Congressional Circle,” writing political and patriotic poems advocating the Union, many of which she read aloud at National Conventions for the GAR. After the Civil War, Kate Sherwood possessed one of the most outspoken voices calling for a national congress of women, and in 1883, she co-founded the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC), an organization consisting of women who supported the Union during the war. The purpose of the WRC was to work in conjunction with the GAR and assist in the promotion and management of Memorial Day (originally a day used to educate youth about patriotic nationalism).

Warren Keifer, a Republican Representative from Ohio, fought for the Union Army as Major General and served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1881-83. When not in office or serving in the armed forces, he practiced law in his hometown in Clark County, Ohio.

Sherwood and Keifer, both Ohio-born, attended several GAR and WRC National Conventions (including the one hosted in San Francisco, California, among the participants of which both were named in the San Francisco Daily Morning Call). It is likely that the two of them met at one or several of these conventions. Tucked within the pages of this copy of her patriotic poetry is Sherwood’s WRC business card:

Business card inserted into book

Business card text: “Mrs. Kate B Sherwood. Past National President Woman’s Relief Corps”

Whether Sherwood and Keifer were friends, colleagues, or simply acquaintances, this seemingly insignificant piece of paper and the inscriptions found within a book in Alderman Library’s circulating collection remind us of literature’s power to bring individuals together. Just as Sherwood’s poetry served to unite Americans in the remembrance of soldiers, the physical book itself provides evidence of human connectedness.

Sources

“Sherwood, Mrs. Kate Brownlee.” American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with Over 1,400 Portraits: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Lives and Achievements of American Women During the Nineteenth Century, Volume 2. 1897. Print.

“Women of the Woman’s Relief Corps.” Women of America: Part of the American History & Genealogy Project. The American History & Genealogy Project, 3 Feb. 2015. Web. 11 Aug. 2015.

“Keifer, Joseph Warren.” History, Art & Archives of the United States House of Representatives. United States House of Representatives, n.d. Web. 11 Aug. 2015.

Journal of the National Convention of the Woman’s Relief Corps, Auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic 7.26 (1889). Print.

“San Francisco Call Newspaper Participants 1886.” The Federation of East European Family History Societies. FEEFHS, n.d. Web. 11 Aug. 2015.

Journal of the National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic 48 (1915). Print.