News – Lennox Bibliography Project

State of the Project, March 2024

two puppies with party hats on in front of a tiny stuffed toy birthday cake — Photo by Sam Lion on Pexels.com

Greetings, Gentle Readers! Welcome to the Lennox Bibliography Project website’s second birthday! *blows noisemaker* I’m thrilled and amazed that I’m still working on this and that I’ve actually made progress, albeit more slowly than I would have liked. Still moving forward, though.

Again, this month has seen a ton of grading and not much in the way of progress. What it has also seen, however, is me prepping my presentation for the upcoming ASECS 2024 conference! Starting later next week (eep) I will be in Toronto, ON with a bunch of other 18th-century scholars and doing my part to further the (small-d) discourse in our field. For those in attendance who might be interested, I’ll be presenting on some of my findings thus far from the LBP.

Specifically, I’m on panel #112, Friday April 5th, from 4:30-6:00pm in the Elgin room. It’s the second of two panels from the Bibliographical Society of America, titled “Bibliography by the Numbers: Meta-Bibliography and the Study of Eighteenth-Century Book Culture.” My paper is titled (not terribly creatively) “The Travels of the Memoirs of the Duke of Sully.” Belatedly I realized I should have named it “So Many Copies: Charlotte Lennox and the Duke of Sully” but alas, inspiration came far too late. Feel free to stop by!

State of the Project, March 2023

My dog Noodle, basking in a sunbeam with his blanket.

Welcome back! It’s a bit past the middle of March, Spring has officially sprung for what it’s worth, and Noodle is back to enjoying his sunbeams and blanket in the mornings in our household library.

March saw me attending the annual American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (ASCES) meeting, held this year in St. Louis, Missouri. The conference went really well, all things considered, and I was glad to have the chance to present a bit of my own work and hear about the awesome things others are doing. I attended a fantastic play reading by the Theater and Performance Caucus, went to a lot of great panels, and in particularly the Bibliographical Society of America panel left me with a LOT to think about.

Specifically, I’m reaching the point in my spreadsheet work that I’m thinking about where the work goes from here and what format is next. At that panel, at a talk by Norbert Schürer, I learned about Heurist, an open access relational database setup designed for humanities research, hosted and overseen at the University of Sydney. I’ve started poking at it since ASECS, and I’m both overwhelmed by and excited about the possibilities. I decided to keep bringing info into my spreadsheets for now as I can manipulate it and export it to the database, which will be faster than putting it all in by hand later (I’ll likely have to do a lot of editing of records and making links, but that’s still less work than inputting everything by hand again).

Progress proceeds apace on record data entry. I’m still working on the Marquis de Sully records, but I’m now onto Map 2 (!) and halfway done with it. Onward!

Current Data Category: Memoirs of the Duke de Sully translation
# of entries in this category to date: 720
# of entries in the worksheet so far: 1272 and counting

State of the Project, August 2022

First of all, I am so very pleased to announce that I’ve received the 2022-2023 Helen F. Faust Women’s Writers Research Award from the Penn State Special Collections library. I’ll be traveling to the Eberly Family Special Collections Library next week to dig into their Charlotte Lennox holdings, starting the archival research in earnest. All my deepest thanks to the Penn State Libraries for helping fund this travel and research, and I can’t wait to see what we find!

The amusing part of all this, of course, is that — proceeding in an orderly planned fashion — I assumed next summer would be the beginning of my archival research, and I had tons of time to plan out the scope and types of data and do some trial runs on local holdings. And thus, to paraphrase the poets, does fate make fools of us all. I’m therefore doing all my data planning this week, then, and figuring out how I’m going to record it, what I want to take note of, where I want to store it, and how I’m going to eventually put it all together, as least to the extent that I can without having done it (which means it’ll absolutely change between now and later).

I’m recording the trials and tribulations of the project, by the way, not because I particularly feel they’re worthy of recording for the sake of the project, but because I want people who take on similar projects to be able to look back at this and know they aren’t alone. I believe very strongly in breaking out of the strictures of “professionalism” and the gatekeeping they enact. To be “professional” too often means to speak only of your successes, downplay your failures or challenges, and deny weakness or missteps. The parts we edit out, though, in order to achieve that seamless appearance, are where the opportunities for growth and the useful case studies for others happen to be. I’m under no illusion that this blog will be a source of fascinating reading material for a huge audience, but my hope is that for those who need it or like it, it will serve to light their own path a little, if only dimly.

Back to business. I’ve finished importing The Life of Harriot Stuart and I’ve been working on Henrietta for a while now — see previous posts about the better selling books taking far longer. I’ve also added the Henrietta maps to the website. As a note, this process of importing might take longer than one would ostensibly wish, but it’s already helped me locate some discrepancies and repeated data points, which I am correcting in the maps as well when I find them. I’ve also discovered, for anyone playing along at home, that my KMZ-to-CSV converter does not know what to do with a layer in Google Maps that has symbols in it, like ” or , or so forth. It therefore simply does not extract that layer, which means I have to go in and enter it by hand (which fortunately I can do, having the maps to hand). Things to know for the future, I suppose.

Next up: Finish Henrietta, move on to the next item on the list, travel, do archival stuff, take lots of notes and images, start creating the archive!

Cool Discovery of the Day, Issue #1

Title page of a 1758 book titled "Angellica: a Comedy in Two Acts".

As I was browsing my way through the Penn State library website to determine what they had there that I’d need to use, I ran across an electronic copy of the work whose title page is featured here: Angelica; or Quixote in Petticoats, a Comedy in Two Acts. This 1758 play was not written by Charlotte Lennox, though there’s a note at the end of the dedication noting that they took Angelica (originally Arabella) and most of the plot wholesale from The Female Quixote by “Mrs. Lenox.” Nice to give credit for that much, at least, and it speaks to the contemporary popularity of the novel that it inspired this knock-off play.

ASECS 2022!

I’ll be attending the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference, March 31-April 2 in Baltimore, MD. I’m very happy to be presenting on Saturday, April 2 at 2:00 pm. I’ll be talking about the project in the session, “Centering Marginalized Voices in DH Projects — Workshop.” I will be talking about my goals with this research as well as some of the grey areas and potential challenges involved, with the goal of perhaps getting a bit more clarity and direction on those points. I’ll also have a poster that I’ll be presenting as well for reference, which I’ll make available on this site following the conference. I hope to see you there!