Idle hands: active research?

 

 

 

A second day dawns without the car!

     A false alarm with an early morning call from a private number, but my cautious ¡Hola! was enough to make them ring off immediately!  So, a second day without recourse to the gym.  And no, even though I did sleep-rest-in until after my usual rising time of 5.45 am I find that I am now generally incapable of lying-in with any degree of comfort.  So I got up.

     I did make myself a morning cup of tea and prepare my museli and then settled down to read:

 

 

This is a reprint of the tract that Huxley found to act as the basis of Mr Bodiham’s sermon in his first published novel Crome Yellow.  Huxley wrote that he had lifted the inspiration for the sermon that he gave the character from a tract that he found, and I am going to find out just how much was inspiration and how much was straightforward copying. 

     What sparked my interest in this sermon and the Rev E H Horne who wrote it was a footnote inserted into later editions of Crome Yellow that acknowledged the debt that owed to Horne.

     An idle thought about the origin of the footnote grew into a search that has prompted me to try to find out when and why the footnote was added, and to find out a little more about the historical Horne. 

     This has involved contacting a variety of individuals and institutions ranging from the Library of Lambeth Palace to The Bodleian, taking in the British Museum, the British Library, the archive of a foundry, an evangelical library in Catalonia, the university of Reading and various antiquarian booksellers, and others – all of which was possible using my computer and emails.

     I have been astonished at just how helpful people have been and how much time and effort they are prepared to make for a stranger pursuing an odd line of micro-research!

     I have also discovered that there is a limit to what you can actually do in certain circumstances, before you reach a digital paywall and the gates come clanging down. 

     What I should be doing is looking around Castelldefels and Barcelona to find a University with access to various websites that are closed to me, but as a private researcher I do not know how I can gain access.

     One thing that I can do is search through the list of local libraries and find out which ones are open to the general reader.  I remember the revelation while researching the painter Dalmau, to find a wealth of relevant volumes in the art library in MNAC.  There must be other institutions with open access around and I must make a real effort to find them.

     Another quest!

 

It's all in the definition. Possibly.

  

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.

     For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.

     I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote.  The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow.  The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.

     Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve.  Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.

     We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older.  Researching the others was easy – I have books on them.  But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.

     So the search began.  American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.

     Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.

     As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching.  Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.

     Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.

     I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells.  My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.

     Self-indulgence personified!

     And, you never know, there might be some answers.

     Eventually!