‘annotation mapping’ and what it means: developing the gladstone catalogue as a resource for the...

© 2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 499–510, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00610.x

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLICOLiterature Compass1741-41131741-4113© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd61010.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00610.xDecember 200800499???510???The Victorians‘Annotation Mapping’ and What it Means‘Annotation Mapping’ and What it Means

‘Annotation Mapping’ and What it Means: Developing the Gladstone Catalogue as a Resource for the History of Reading

Matthew Bradley*University of Liverpool

AbstractIn 2005, the AHRC funded a project to identify and catalogue the books ownedby William Ewart Gladstone, and to produce an online database with details ofhis extensive annotations and marginalia. This essay is an examination of themethodological issues and challenges that arose over the course of the project, asit comes towards its conclusion. These were broadly of two types. The firstrelated to problems of establishing book provenance, which forced a significantrethink of the scope and function of the database, altering it from a ‘virtualrecreation’ of Gladstone’s library to an information resource for evidences of hisreading. The second related to the task of ‘mapping’ Gladstone’s annotationsthemselves, a project undertaken in a critical atmosphere where history of thebook studies in general and the history of reading in particular has been ques-tioning orthodoxies about marginalia as a more privileged form of writing, andthe use of it as evidence of the reading experience.

In 1896, William Ewart Gladstone’s project to make publicly available hisvast private collection of books got a valuable piece of publicity with abook written by the Pall Mall Gazette’s Hulda Friedrichs, called In theEvening of His Days: A Study of Mr Gladstone in Retirement, with someaccount of St Deinol’s Library and Hostel. As its title implied, this book (basedon an earlier article) was not only a survey of Gladstone’s general habits whileat his home in Hawarden Castle, North Wales, it was also a report-from-the-front on St Deiniol’s Library, the institution that Gladstone had foundedabout a mile down the road, formed out of his private collection of some30,000 books. The library and hostel had by this time been open for twoyears, and were already fulfilling Gladstone’s vision of an institution topromote ‘divine learning’, his mission statement for the entire project.Fearful of the educational consequences for the clergy if the WelshChurch were to be disestablished (at that time seen as a strong possibility),and taking his inspiration partly from Pusey House, the library foundedout of the private book collection of E. B. Pusey after his death in 1882,

500 ‘Annotation Mapping’ and What it Means

© 2009 The Author Literature Compass 6/2 (2009): 499–510, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00610.xJournal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Gladstone’s idea was to make his books of some real use, and in his ownlifetime. The majority of the volumes were on religious subjects, althoughthis is not to discount the considerable number of volumes of literature,travel writing, art, philosophy, etc., that comprised the whole of this quiteenormous collection. Not only did St Deiniol’s make a wide range of keytheological and other works available to read in a part of the countrygenerally ill-served by serious scholarly resources, but it brought clergyand scholars together in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere of residentialstudy. This it still does. According to Friedrichs though, what St Deiniol’sdefinitely was not about was Gladstone himself, a point on which shebecomes emphatic when referring to the evidence of the books’ previousownership:

The only rule concerning the contents of the books is, that none of MrGladstone’s annotations on the margins may be copied or quoted as illustratinghis views on certain questions, since such quotations might convey an altogetherwrong impression. As a matter of fact, Mr Gladstone often jots down marginalremarks when an idea occurs to him while reading, though that idea may inno way represent his views. (117)

If one can’t quite hear Gladstone dictating here, the defensive tone makesit difficult to view this passage as the thoughts of a disinterested observer.Gladstone was certainly keen to ensure that St Deiniol’s would be aninstitution apart from his own legacy, to the extent that when he signedthe administration of the Library over to a Board of Trustees in 1895 heexpressly authorized them to make any changes that might be necessaryin order to meet future circumstance, including removing it fromHawarden village or even selling the entirety of the holdings to anotherinstitution altogether.1 With regard to the books themselves, the idea wasthat as new volumes were acquired they would be catalogued and shelvedside by side with that original core of Gladstone’s books. As the numbersof the former increased so the latter would become assimilated, and theidea of St Deiniol’s Library as Gladstone’s personal book collection wouldgradually fade away.

In 2004, a joint bid was submitted to the AHRC by the Library andthe University of Liverpool for a major three-year research project thatwould, in essence, reverse this process. Not only was its aim to identifythose items personally owned by Gladstone, it also aimed to create somekind of online resource which might act as a guide to his reading andto his wide-ranging annotations. Since another part of the bid was aretrospective cataloguing programme to move the Library from an oldcard-index system to an electronic database (estimated at some 47,500 items),the idea was that a duplicate database could be created simultaneously.This second database would contain only records for books belonging toGladstone, and it would also give detailed, searchable information on hismarginalia. The estimate of the number of Gladstone’s books in the


‘Annotation Mapping’ and What it Means 501

Library had always been around 31,000, derived from an estimate madeby the first Warden G. C. Joyce of 29,000 books brought down from theCastle in Gladstone’s lifetime, and a further 2,000 following his death.2

It was anticipated that the database would contain a similar number ofrecords. The Principal Investigator on the project was Dr Juliet John, butthe main responsibility for identifying the books and compiling the data-base would fall to a postdoctoral researcher. When the bid was successfuland work began, this role was filled by Dr Mark Llewellyn (from January2006 to August 2007), and then by myself. Completion of the project isdue in January 2009.

The idea for the Gladstone catalogue, or GladCAT as it is now called,is thus seemingly founded on the belief that Gladstone’s wishes ought tobe disregarded, both in relation to the status of his own books within StDeiniol’s and to the potential significance of the annotations that he madeupon them. On the first point, there is no question that this is the case,and the re-identification of Gladstone’s books (mostly undertaken byMark Llewellyn) is a perfectly justifiable act of historical recovery, akin tonot burning Aubrey Beardsley’s pictures or publishing Nabokov’s TheOriginal of Laura. It is now complete, although the identification processin itself defined some limits to the scope of what GladCAT was going tobe. The books have been mainly identified by the traditional evidences ofownership: bookplates, dedications, signatures, marginalia, and so on: butit transpired that only approximately 9,000 items carry this sort of evidence.There is no way of telling whether this comparatively small figure is becauseJoyce’s original estimate was significantly in excess of the library’s realholdings, whether it was simply the case that Gladstone left a large percentageof his books unmarked, or a combination of both. It is also possible thatthis figure was reached by counting the number of volumes, rather than thenumber of items (Gladstone’s complete works of Walter Scott, for example,runs to twenty five volumes but is catalogued as one record). Whateverthe truth of this, there appeared to be a large number of books in theLibrary that were possibly Gladstone’s but which cannot be proved to havebeen so. St Deiniol’s does keep accession registers, but these were onlybegun in August 1897, so most of Gladstone’s books were never formallyaccessioned at all (and thus do not carry accession numbers). Unlike, say, SirHans Sloane, the seventeenth-century natural historian and physician whoseprivate book collection is currently the subject of a similar identificationproject recently begun by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History ofMedicine at UCL and the British Library, Gladstone never evolved anysustained or comprehensive system for cataloguing his books.3 Neither isa St Deiniol’s book not having an accession number a reliable indicator, asmany un-accessioned books have dates or other marks of ownership thatmake it impossible for them to have belonged to Gladstone.

One possible solution to this was that putative ownership might beestablished through cross-referencing with Gladstone’s diaries, in which he



kept a daily note of his reading. The final volume of the published diariescontains an index which, although not perfectly accurate (it was neverchecked against the St Deiniol’s Library holdings), nevertheless compileshis reading under author-title headings and cites an accompanying datereference, which would render this a relatively straightforward process.4

However, on this issue a central point about the nature of the databasedepended. Was GladCAT attempting a virtual recreation of Gladstone’sprivate library, or was it a catalogue which aimed only at detailing particularevidences of his reading, albeit still on an enormous scale?

Ultimately it was decided that the latter was the most justifiable, evenif it might at first have seemed the less ambitious, course. For one thing,St Deiniol’s does not hold Gladstone’s entire collection of books. Evenbefore considering the small number of his books that have ended up inmiscellaneous private collections, the Gladstone family retain a considerablenumber of volumes for their own use: the amount of quantitative datathat could be adduced from the library collection was thus limited in anycase. If, as Gladstone famously declared in his 1890 article ‘On Books andthe Housing of Them’, ‘a library ought . . . in some degree to correspondwith the mind of the man who forms it’ (390), then it seemed unwise toimplicitly suggest the claim of such a stark correspondence for GladCAT,built as it has been around a necessarily partial picture. For this reason, itwas considered that it would actually be a methodological mis-step toinclude books that were held at St Deiniol’s and were mentioned inGladstone’s diary, but which were otherwise devoid of any evidence ofownership. A speculative principle would be built into the database where,through inclusion, we would necessarily imply a connection betweenGladstone’s reading of a work and an item which may not even have beenGladstone’s copy, let alone the copy he read at that time. All GladCATrecords include any dates that Gladstone might give in his diary for thereading of that item, but including this for information is a very differentproposition to implicitly suggesting a link between the Library’s particularcopy of the work and Gladstone’s reading of it (the inevitable result ofincluding books in GladCAT on this basis). We were gradually movingtowards a model of the database that stressed more the activities involvedin Gladstone’s reading, rather than its completeness in terms of the acqui-sition and ownership surrounding the books he read.

It should be stressed that this is a shift of emphasis, not a wholesalechange of approach. Where books at St Deiniol’s can be shown in somepositive way to have belonged to Gladstone – even when they contain noannotations – then they are included in GladCAT, together with thedetails of what precisely this evidence is. However, the weighting of thedatabase more towards the evidences of Gladstone’s reading and lesstowards speculation as to his probable ownership of this or that book is,I think, something of a microcosm of developments in the very ‘historyof reading’ to which GladCAT increasingly aimed to contribute. As is



well known, the backbone of book history began as the examination ofbooksellers’ and publishers’ financial records, library lending figures andsuchlike data, all key evidence in the new attempt to stress the importanceof dissemination and production in our understanding of texts. As the fielddeveloped critical opinion began, in the words of Stephen Colclough, to‘become increasingly aware of the need to test the conclusions that theydraw about reading from booksellers’ ledgers, catalogues and prefaces, againstthe actual experience of historical readers’ (iv). How to re-produce this ‘actualexperience’ became an incredibly vexed question, so vexed in fact that thelegitimacy of a ‘history of reading’ remains even today a very contested issue.Anecdotal evidence about reading gathered from diaries, novels, or whatpeople wrote on the back of their cigarette packets, might not necessarilybe more reliable than publication figures or library records. Nevertheless,as with any growth, the enormous growth of interest in the history of thebook, and with it the history of reading, has involved a large amount ofinternal re-definition. An enormous variety of research currently sheltersunder the rubric ‘history of the book studies’, to the extent where it nowdescribes much more than a purely historical interest in publishing, libraryadministration, sales, circulation figures and so on. On the contrary, itencompasses much more wide-ranging and ambitious attempts to recoverdata surrounding the act of reading, but these are often accompanied bya more provisional sense of the uses to which this data can be put. WhenSteven Roger Fischer talked about reading’s ‘sense-like magic’ in 2003, hewas reflecting an increasingly organicist sense of the process (12).

An interesting parallel with GladCAT, and an illustrative example of theabove principle in action, is the Reading Experience Database (RED).Initially begun in 1996 by Simon Eliot, the RED received a substantialAHRC grant in 2005 to be re-launched as a fully functioning onlineresource in June 2007, run by the Open University and the Institute ofEnglish Studies at the University of London. RED is collecting any kindof evidence ‘recording the reading tastes, habits and experiences ofidentifiable readers from 1450 to 1945’5 to try and create a knowledge-baseto construct the processes which might be involved in the enormouslycomplicated and contested cultural act that is reading. These are mostlywhat appear to be mundane items of information: where books were read,the demographic of the people who read them, how they came by books,who they gave them to after they’d finished with them – and of coursewhat they wrote in them. With a project as staggeringly catholic as RED,the need for extreme caution in drawing general conclusion from anecdotalevidence, very local and specific items of data are very obvious. However,when dealing with the evidences of reading for an individual, particularlywhen that individual is well-known or when one is presenting informationon specific subjects or areas in the context of that individual, the problemof implying or appearing to imply unsustainable totalizing claims becomehugely magnified.



Never is this truer than in the case of annotations and marginalia,seemingly the closest thing we can get to a re-production of the ‘readingexperience’. Even from this relatively simple premise, methodologicalimplications immediately begin to surface. Whereas the identification ofGladstone’s ownership was a clear and straightforward reversal of hisoriginal intent, it was important when undertaking to create a database ofhis annotations that we did not take for granted that the same dynamicapplied. According to Friedrichs (with Gladstone close behind her) onecould tell nothing of Gladstone’s mind through his marginalia. Nevertheless,it was vital that the barely subtextual anxiety in this remark was notinterpreted so as to drive us to the other extreme, and allow GladCAT tosuggest that one could tell everything.

There had been some scholarly work in the area of Gladstone’s anno-tations prior to the AHRC project of course, but since none of it wasconducted on the same scale it did not run the same risk of implyingtotalizing psychological claims. In 1992, John Powell was one of thefirst to draw attention to the annotations as a potential resource in hisarticle ‘Small Marks and Instinctual Responses: A Study in the Uses ofGladstone’s Marginalia’ for a special issue of Nineteenth Century Prose, whichquite rightly pointed out that the voluminous amount of documentaryinformation to be found in Gladstone’s diaries and correspondence shouldnot be treated as a direct representation of his thinking. Such self-referentialevidence, he argued, could never be spontaneous, comprehensive ordisinterested. Annotations to Gladstone’s books, however, were a slightlydifferent proposition: ‘Gladstone’s marginalia, on the other hand’, he said,‘provide a rare access to his inner life by serving as small bridges betweenthe mass of consciously constructed evidence . . . and the ephemeral cluesof psychohistory’. Powell is careful to distinguish between a number ofdifferent motives for making marginal commentary; he notes, for example,that Gladstone would sometimes scan books looking for evidence tosupport a particular view before a speech or a parliamentary debate. Indeed,in this regard his article seems to dovetail with Lisa Jardine and AnthonyGrafton’s groundbreaking work on ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’(published two years earlier), which argued that methodical, scholarlyreading and annotation was conceived in the Renaissance as a means toan end: action as ‘the outcome of reading – not simply reading as active,but reading as a trigger for action’ (40). Powell’s general plea for theGladstone annotations seems to be that, although we cannot take themfor granted, the annotations are ‘about as close to representing instinctualresponses as one is likely to get from Gladstone’s pen’ (3). Marginalia is amore spontaneous, more private and therefore more privileged form ofwriting than most, but in Gladstone’s case it is to be valued not becauseit is some kind of uncomplicated mind-map (it isn’t), but because it ishistorical evidence that was part of Gladstone’s preparation for variousforms of action, both religious and political.



Whilst doing her doctoral research at St Deiniol’s almost two years lateranother historian, Ruth Clayton, found a ‘key’ to Gladstone’s marginaliawritten in the back of a volume of John Locke, in which he explained anumber of his symbols. It reads:

notice.....|special notice....NBn. [note] with approbation...+disapprobation..X, =.Special do. [ditto]..... XX, XXX.a doubt....?a reservation or qualification . . . ma.disbelief or surprise . . . !(at statement or manner of statement)

This was a major discovery, but one which further complicated therelationship between mind and marginalia. While Clayton, like Powell,was entirely scrupulous in only claiming that the key would ‘at least allowhistorians to feel more confident in studying and citing Gladstone’smarginal responses to the text with which he engaged’ (141), it wasnevertheless in the intrinsic nature of such a find, a ‘key’, to imply thatthe epistemological relationship between thought and annotation was inand of itself a relatively uncomplicated one, even if local factors mightmake drawing particular historical conclusions difficult.

Thus, within the realm of historical scholarship on Gladstone, some ofthe methodological problems involved in using the annotations as a scholarlyresource were clear, if largely untheorized. However, in 2001, and froma totally different academic standpoint, H. J. Jackson’s book Marginalia setout a very definite theory indeed. Annotations were re-characterized asdefiantly public acts, knowing and considered, with definite and veryoften hidden agendas. It was a self-consciously extreme reversal of the ideaof marginalia as the disinterested ‘key’ to their author’s thoughts (interest-ingly, the book was published in the same year as Ruth Clayton publishedon her discovery of Gladstone’s ‘key’). Jackson interpreted annotationsand marginal commentary as a complex power relation between author,annotator, and future reader. It was a significant book for the emergentarea of reading history, but it was clear that Jackson was not hugelyinterested in Gladstone’s marginalia. It did not wear its agendas on itssleeve like the marginalia of, say, Coleridge, it was not what she termed‘sociable’ (in that it was not designed to be shared with others), and it didnot fit the broad pattern of book-as-confidante (or even lover, on occasion)that made Jackson’s thesis so memorable and entertaining. Beside a noteon the enormity of the Hawarden collection, she comments merely (and,one senses, from afar) that Gladstone ‘does not seem to have been a veryforthcoming annotator’ (74). Nevertheless, the importance of Jackson’s booklay in its status as a high profile assertion that since at least some of theprocesses involved in reading must be recoverable from marginalia, it was



still worth trying to begin a history of reading on this basis. In her words,‘No doubt the experience [of reading] is ultimately unknowable . . . butnot being able to know everything about it does not mean that we canknow nothing about it’ (255).

This has been a very useful informing principle in the creation ofGladCAT. Partly responding to the mixed reception of her book, Jacksonlater argued that the potential usefulness of marginalia to the history ofreading was almost entirely dependent on what the history of reading itselfeventually turned out to be, a process that was still in delicate negotiation:

History of reading is the youngest and least developed of the offspring of thebook history movement. Why should we not leave it alone for a while, so thatwe can take up opportunities to add new kinds of data and new models ofanalysis as they present themselves? ( Jackson, ‘Marginal Frivolities’ 149)

In fact, Jackson’s earlier attitude to Gladstone’s annotations betrayed theinevitably partial nature of her own version of the history of reading, andmarginalia’s role in it. It was clear that, in such a scholarly environment,GladCAT had to avoid not only totalizing claims but also any strongagendas as to what the information was actually to be used for. The rawdata itself is, by definition, an immense resource for helping us to under-stand reading, and (it goes without saying) Gladstone’s reading, in thenineteenth century. Yet unlike similar catalogues documenting the anno-tations of public figures, most notably the John Adams project at BostonPublic Library and Melville’s Marginalia Online,6 GladCAT is not primarilya digitalization project, although it is hoped that a certain amount ofdigitalized data may become available as value-added material at an extradate. There was thus going to be an editorial process, and the form thatthe transcriptions of Gladstone’s annotations into the database were goingto take was obviously vital. Not only did we have to guard againstenshrining agendas, we had to keep in mind that the process of collatingand interpreting information on Gladstone’s reading could no more reacha definite saturation or completion point than RED’s on any or everybody’sreading. The same caution, the same openness, was required when pre-senting data pertaining to the reading habits of an individual as that of thenation. Thus the key balance to strike with GladCAT was ensuring notonly that the information held in each record was searchable and usefulin itself, but that the information contained therein was open-ended, inthat it gave room to further enrichment, nuancing of its data, leaving itas open to new approaches as possible in the future.

Each record in GladCAT contains any extra-annotative evidences ofreading, for example Gladstone’s bookplate, a signature or a dedication. Italso includes any reference from Gladstone’s diary, as previously mentioned.Following this, the beginning of each record in GladCAT always beginswith the following formula: ‘WEG’s annotations are x, and consist of:’Within this formula, there are four possible descriptors: ‘extremely light’,



‘relatively light’, ‘moderate’ and ‘extensive’. This is intended as an at-a-glanceway for users to ascertain the level of annotations present. Following thisdescriptor is a by-symbol list of the annotations themselves. The fact thatGladstone’s annotations are generally composed to a fixed scheme ofsymbols, and that he was surprisingly faithful to this format over a verylong period of time, means that these are relatively easy to insert into auniform format. Each record thus lists the page numbers on which eachsymbol appears in the individual volume or set of volumes. It was nevergoing to be possible to include line numbers for these symbols withinthe timeframe of the project, and while this would clearly have beenpreferable, their inclusion would clearly carry potential problems of itsown. The matching of a line number to an annotation mark is a relativelyinexact science, and including this information would doubtless haveencouraged researchers to draw conclusions from specific annotations withoutconsulting the books, something we were keen to avoid. Moreover, theextent to which GladCAT should take account of difference in the mani-festation of Gladstone’s symbols is a delicate balancing act between clarityand fidelity. For example, GladCAT makes a distinction between whethersymbols appear with a notice line or without, but whether a notice lineis straight or jagged has not been noted. Certainly at this stage in itsdevelopment, GladCAT cannot be considered as an electronic substitutefor consulting the physical objects themselves.

The two drawbacks to including page numbers only were that firstly itwas a very labour-intensive process, and secondly, that a very significantamount of the information stored in GladCAT would as a consequencebe numeric, and therefore not keyword-searchable. Nevertheless, it seemedto be the only way to realistically represent the balance of annotation symbolsin any given book. We were also aware that this information would atleast act as an easy route-map to the symbols, which would not only beuseful for researchers trying to assess at-a-glance the nature and extent ofGladstone’s writing in particular books, but also significantly ease anyfuture development of GladCAT (and certainly allow the amount of workinvolved in any such development to be more easily gauged). The pagenumbers are not a ‘flesh-and-blood’ representation of Gladstone’s symbolsbut they do provide a skeleton, without which the process of buildingsuch a representation cannot even begin.

Another principle of GladCAT is that as much of Gladstone’s writtenmarginalia should be present in the database as possible. With theexceptions of pamphlets, texts in foreign languages or works by Gladstonehimself (where only a brief summary is given), when Gladstone haswritten either single words or extended comments on a book, these arequoted in full, and logged not only by page number but by a small index-styleentry giving a brief sense of context. This entry, written by myself, opensthe door to the danger of enshrining those agendas dear to the sensibilitiesof the compiler, but it was felt that this was balanced out by the fact that



reproducing these remarks in isolation gave a seriously insufficient senseof them, and certainly provided an insufficient basis for keyword searching.So, to take an example at random, Gladstone noted ‘Bandiera Brothers’on p. 314 of the first volume of his copy of Justin McCarthy’s A Historyof Modern Times. The bald information here, however, would not tell theuser that Gladstone is essentially filling in a detail at this point, in referenceto a passage on the execution of men on the Continent known to Mazzini.

It was also Gladstone’s habit to write his own personal indexes to manyof the books he read. Where the lists of page numbers felt disappointinglyun-searchable, this habit of self-indexing has proved an extraordinarilyserendipitous one for the purposes of this database. It provides an importantcounterweight to the amount of numerical data, and it allows GladCAT’skeyword searches to be extremely effective without undue editorial inter-vention. These indexes encompass references to individuals, issues, and oftenmore abstract concepts, all fully keyword searchable within GladCAT. Forexample, in his copy of Mill’s Subjection of Women Gladstone has writtendown among others a reference to Madame de Stäel, to the debate aboutwomen MPs, and other notes on ‘ignorance’ or ‘chivalry’. All such indexesare also reproduced for pamphlets and foreign language texts. Heather Jacksonnoted these indexes in Marginalia as a purely functional item, ‘books inthose days rarely having a printed index’ (Marginalia 74) but as part of akeyword search over so many volumes, they become an extraordinaryresource capable of mapping Gladstone’s annotations as they reference anindividual say, or a subject (‘future punishment’) over the entire collection.Unexpected connections can constantly be made: who knew, for example,that Gladstone mentioned Don Quixote in a biography of Newman,Tennyson in a history of bookselling, or noted Swinburne’s name in a listof poets at the back of a book on St John’s Gospel. Indeed, this aspect ofthe database has huge application for all scholars of the period, outsideGladstone studies and the history of reading, again something that was notimmediately apparent in the early stages of the project.

It may seem unduly tentative to define ‘what annotation mappingmeans’ as being, in the context of creating a database of annotations,‘trying to avoid defining what annotation mapping means’. Yet with thebreaking down of orthodoxy about annotations and other evidences ofreading as uncomplicated testimony direct from the minds of readers, thehistory of reading has developed in an unusual manner, whereby naturalcaution about what constitutes reading has resulted in data collection asalmost coming to seem an end in itself. It is important to keep in mind,however, that projects such as GladCAT are not purely an exercise ininformation for information’s sake. They are designed to aid future areasand methods in research, many of which cannot be yet guessed at. Sinceits beginnings as a project to catalogue and document Gladstone’s library,as far as the history of reading is concerned GladCAT has already turnedinto a resource for, for example, studying the politics of dedicating and



sending books, the practice of sending publishers’ copies, seasonal reading(what things did Gladstone read on Christmas Day?), the groupings ordistribution of similar or dissimilar annotations, the self-revelations orotherwise of potentially public marginalia, recurrence of particular wordsover a lifetime’s voracious reading, and so on. The best way to ensure thatGladCAT is and remains a major resource for the history of reading is tokeep the information contained in it as open-ended as possible, and preparedfor the future. It is an issue that will only grow in importance as electronicresources such as GladCAT take a prominent role in research culture. Theediting and compiling of such resources need above all to remain open tothe agendas of other researchers to come.

Short Biography

After completing his doctorate in 2006, Matthew Bradley was a Lecturerat Christ Church, Oxford before being appointed to the post of postdoctoralresearcher for the University of Liverpool’s AHRC-funded project toidentify and catalogue the library of William Ewart Gladstone at St Deiniol’sLibrary, Hawarden. His research interests are the Victorian aestheticmovement, and particularly that movement’s interfaces with religion, andhe is currently turning his doctoral thesis into a book on the subject. Heis also interested in the relationship between literature and theological contextmore generally, High Church writings in the later nineteenth century, pre-Raphaelitism, decadent literature of the 1890s, the drama of Tom Stoppard,and literary motifs of apocalypse in writers such as Richard Jefferies, M.P. Shiel and H. G. Wells. He hopes to develop this latter interest into amore sustained work on the Victorians and apocalypse. Teaching interestsare across the curriculum, but particular specialities are Victorian poetryand twentieth century drama. He holds an M.A. in English from theUniversity of Dundee and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Cypress Building, Chatham Street, Liverpool, United Kingdom,L69 7ZR. Email: [email protected] As set out in Clause 18 of the unpublished foundation deed for the Library, held at St Deiniol’s.2 Pritchard 27.3 See <http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/sloaneproject.html> for details of the project.4 See Matthew.5 Described as such by R. Crone in a recent article on the project ‘The Common Reader’ 42–3.6 Information available at <http://www.archive.org/details/johnadamsBPL> and hosted at<http://www.boisestate.edu/melville/index.html> respectively.

Works Cited

Clayton, R. ‘W. E. Gladstone: An Annotation Key’. Notes and Queries 246 [n.s. 48] ( June 2001):140–3.

http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/sloaneproject.html

http://www.archive.org/details/johnadamsBPL

http://www.boisestate.edu/melville/index.html



Colclough, S. Reading Experience 1700 –1840: An Annotated Register of Sources for the History ofReading in the British Isles, History of the Book – On Demand Series. Reading, UK: Universityof Reading, 2000.

Crone, R. ‘The Common Reader’. History Today 58.1 (2008): 42–3.Darnton, R. ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’. The

Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. London: Allen Lane, 1984.215–56.

Fischer, S. R. A History of Reading. London: Reaction Books, 2003.Friedrichs, H. In the Evening of His Days: A Study of Mr Gladstone in Retirement, with some account

of St Deiniol’s Library and Hostel (London: Westminster Gazette, 1896).Gladstone, W. E. ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’. Nineteenth Century 27 (1990): 384–5.Grafton, A. and L. Jardine. ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’. Past and Present 129 (November

1990): 30–78.Jackson, H. J. ‘Marginal Frivolities: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading’.

Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading. Eds. R. Myers, M. Harris, and G. Mandelbrote.(New Castle and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2005), 137–151.

——. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001.Matthew, H. G. C., ed. The Gladstone Diaries: With Cabinets Minutes and Prime Ministerial

Correspondence. Vol. 14. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.Powell, J. ‘Small Marks and Instinctual Reponses: A Study in the Uses of Gladstone’s Marginalia’.

Nineteenth Century Prose 19 (December 1992): 1–17.Pritchard, T. W. A History of St Deiniol’s Library. Hawarden: Monad Press, 1999.

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