In summer 2024, working on my BARS conference paper, I reread a Victorian book of art criticism by William Sharp (another name of Fiona Macleod’s – it’s a complicated story I’ve written on elsewhere). I noticed an artist referenced repeatedly. David Scott, according to Sharp, was Blake’s eccentric Scottish successor. When I looked up Scott, I realised he was the older brother of Sharp’s Pre-Raphaelite friend, William Bell Scott. Their father, the engraver Robert Scott, was one of Blake’s first Edinburgh buyers, and one of the city’s most prominent commercial engravers. I referenced the family in my paper, and in autumn, I followed up the Scott links.
What I’d assumed was a self-contained journal article idea sprawled into an expansive project. At the close of 2024, I pitched the project to BARS’ Stephen Copley Award scheme, with a focus on manuscript holdings at the British Library and the National Gallery. I was amazed to actually win an award.
A month later, I emerged from Euston station into driving rain, and was fully drenched by the short walk to the British Library. The sleek, high-ceilinged marble and exposed brick foyer was a welcome sight after such a long time away. Like many ECRs of my generation, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted my PhD studies and planned archival trips. I’d not visited an archive for six years. BARS’ funding meant I could again undertake archival study to advance my work. It was a full circle moment, starting a new project at the BL as I’d started my PhD research there years earlier.
My London Stephen Copley trip was largely focused on correspondence. The BL housed letters from Robert Scott, David Scott, and Alice Boyd (William Bell Scott’s partner, though he was also married, another story for another time). The National Gallery’s archives contained a key letter to David Scott from NG Director Charles Eastlake, and a folder of extensive correspondence from Bell Scott to NG Keeper and Secretary Ralph Nicholson Wornum.
In three days, I somehow managed to view all the necessary manuscripts in a whirlwind of activity, dashing across Bloomsbury and the West End in the rain between viewing appointments at alternate archives. Whilst waiting for my BL holdings to come through, I pored over Bell Scott’s correspondence in the basement under opulent Gallery halls. The letters started in the 1840s and continued until Wornum’s death in the 1870s, covering a period of steady career advancement for Bell Scott. The key findings, for me, were Bell Scott’s descriptions of David Scott’s exhibitions and works-in-progress, of their family life, and of his commercial book illustration work.
A major insight from this archival work was the tone change in Bell Scott’s writing about his older brother. David Scott died young in 1849. In 1840s correspondence manuscripts, Bell Scott is full of admiration for his brother, in contrast with his later critical, published Memoir. Bell Scott’s Memoir informed his brother’s posthumous reputation as a strange and unsuccessful artist. It also distanced David Scott from critical consideration of his work in a Scottish Romantic context, as it de-emphasised their Edinburgh community.
The BL holdings confirmed what Bell Scott minimised in his published writing about his family: the family’s esteem within Edinburgh art and publishing circles. Three letters from Robert Scott and David Scott to then-Home Secretary and patron of the arts Robert Peel detail the family’s connections within the Edinburgh art world, and their various projects and commissions. I will detail these findings with more specificity in an upcoming journal article.
The Stephen Copley award was crucial for getting this broader research project off the ground. As a precarious ECR, self-funding research is incredibly difficult. I’m so grateful for our community that BARS created a specific award for this crucial career stage. I’d like to thank the award committee for selecting my project and pushing it forward in ways I couldn’t have predicted. My BARS-funded archival discoveries have also led to career opportunities elsewhere. Soon after my London trip, I applied to and won a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow, to continue the thread of research started by my Stephen Copley findings. Thank you BARS for opening up the start of what promises to be a fruitful project.
Jodie Marley
Jodie Marley is an incoming Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow’s Archives and Special Collections, working on the Scott family of artist-authors in Romantic-era Edinburgh. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2023, supported by a scholarship from the University’s Centre for Regional Literature and Culture. Her forthcoming monograph, Mystic Blake, expands her PhD’s findings in greater detail. Her other publications include upcoming chapters in The Routledge Companion to William Blake (Routledge, ed. Kathryn S. Freeman) and Seán O’Casey in Context (Cambridge University Press, ed. James Moran), plus articles in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, and VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society.