{"id":916,"date":"2015-10-19T20:15:46","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T20:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=916"},"modified":"2015-10-20T15:03:44","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T15:03:44","slug":"archive-spotlight-new-william-godwin-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=916","title":{"rendered":"Archive Spotlight: New William Godwin Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Evert Jan van Leeuwen, of Leiden University<\/a>, has written the following report for us on a new discovery he’s made in the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian<\/a>.\u00a0 We’re very happy to publish short notes like this relating to discoveries that might be of interest to the Romantic Studies community – if you’d be interested in contributing a piece on archival findings, please get in touch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

— — — —<\/p>\n

Unknown Manuscript Note Identified in the William Godwin Papers of the Abinger Collection, at the Bodleian Library<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In consulting the online catalogue of the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian Library, on Thursday 15 October 2015, I was able to identify the source of a piece of manuscript in William Godwin\u2019s papers catalogued as \u201cunknown.\u201d\u00a0 It concerns the following item, the pages of which can be viewed online here<\/a> and here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Shelfmark: MS. Abinger c. 39
\n\u2022 Former shelfmark: Dep. b. 229\/4(a)
\n\u2022 Fol(s).: 90r (and 90v)
\n\u2022 Document type: copy, in the hand of William Godwin, and Mary Jane Godwin
\n\u2022 Contents: ?Extract from an unknown work, beginning ‘The head is a house built for reason…’<\/p>\n

The \u201cunknown work\u201d is The Guls Horne-Booke<\/em> (1609) by Thomas Dekker, which Godwin read on the 5th and 6th of February 1813, according to William Godwin\u2019s Diary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dr. B.C. Barker-Benfield, of the Department for Special Collections & Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, explains that \u201cthe leaf is transcribed in the hand of an amanuensis, probably Mary Jane Godwin, but with corrections certainly in William Godwin\u2019s hand.\u201d\u00a0 It contains the extended \u201chead is a house\u201d metaphor from Chapter 3 of Dekker\u2019s text (pp.14-15 of the 1609 text, available as a digital file via EEBO).\u00a0 It is transcribed almost verbatim, with only minor differences in punctuation and a small phrase missing on fol. 90v that appears between \u201cFrenchman\u201d and \u201cnor\u201d in the 1609 text: \u201cthat pluckes up all by [y] rootes\u201d (15).\u00a0 Dr. Barker-Benfield points out that \u201cthe watermark of this leaf is the lower half of Britannia, a very common pattern, with no visible date.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dekker\u2019s pamphlet is a burlesque of the conduct literature circulating in early seventeenth-century fashionable society.\u00a0 One wonders what drew the aging philosopher to The Guls Horne-Booke<\/em>.\u00a0 Godwin\u2019s young admirer Edward Bulwer Lytton would become famous for his satirical portraits of high-society beaux and belles; Godwin, by contrast, holds the reputation for being a serious (even gloomy) psychological and political novelist of purpose.<\/p>\n

In 1817, Godwin published Mandeville, a Tale of the Seventeenth-Century in England<\/em>.\u00a0 Reading Dekker may have been part of his research towards writing this work of fiction.\u00a0 What I am currently researching is to what extent Dekker\u2019s extended \u201chead is a house\u201d metaphor functions as a governing literary motif in Mandeville<\/em>.\u00a0 The narrator-protagonist Charles Mandeville reflects at the outset that \u201cit is\u2026necessary that I should here describe the most remarkable features of [my uncle\u2019s] residence\u201d because \u201cthey insensibly incorporated themselves as it were with the substance of my mind; and my character, such as it was afterwards displayed, owed much of its peculiarity to the impressions I here received\u201d (23).\u00a0 Audley Mandeville\u2019s coastal residence is a full-blown Gothic mansion \u201cin a woful [sic] state of dilapidation\u201d (24).\u00a0 In the course of the novel, Charles Mandeville\u2019s mind becomes as isolated and ruinous as his uncle\u2019s home.\u00a0 Godwin was clearly struck by Dekker\u2019s extended \u201chead is a house\u201d metaphor and his appropriation of this figure of speech suggests that he was developing a Gothic motif that the American poet, critic and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe (who read Mandeville<\/em>) would perfect in \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher\u201d (1839).\u00a0 In this tale, the house and the mind of its proprietor are indeed one; they fall down together.<\/p>\n

I will present a working paper on this thesis at the January 2016 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference and plan to publish a finished essay in the course of the year.\u00a0 I would like to thank Dr. Barker-Benfield for encouraging me to publish a note on the identification of Godwin\u2019s transcription of Dekker\u2019s text.\u00a0 The online catalogue entry will shortly be corrected in the light of the identification.<\/p>\n

Dr Evert Jan van Leeuwen <\/em>
\nLeiden University, the Netherlands<\/em>
\ne.j.van.leeuwen@hum.leidenuniv.nl<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Evert Jan van Leeuwen, of Leiden University, has written the following report for us on a new discovery he’s made in the Abinger Collection at the Bodleian.\u00a0 We’re very… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":920,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions\/920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}