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!
