Book Repairs Part 2

Posted
17th November 2024
in blog, blogsNnews, Collection, Literature

As we mentioned in Part 1 of this blog, for the past three years we have been able to repair some of the most interesting titles in the book collection thanks to generous sponsorship by Friends and volunteers. Over the course of the two blogs we are showing before and after photos of the repairs from the 2024 repair programme, together with information about the books and their reason for being in our collection.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell) (1816 – 1855)

Published by Smith Elder 1880

Based on Charlotte’s own experiences in Brussels in 1842-43, Villette centres around Lucy Snowe, a young woman who, after a period of upheaval and sorrow, travels from England to the fictional town of Villette to take up a teaching post at a boarding school, where she encounters both friendship and conflict. It was published in January 1853 in three volumes and, according to Charlotte’s wishes, the book was delayed so that it didn’t coincide with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth.

The connection with Elizabeth and Charlotte is well known. Elizabeth writes specifically about Villette in several letters. In one, to their mutual friend Lady Kay Shuttleworth, she writes: ‘I believe it to be a very correct account of one part of her life…I recognised incidents of which she had told me as connected with that visit to Brussels…there can be no doubt that the book is wonderfully clever; that it reveals depths in her mind, aye, and in her heart too which I doubt if any one has fathomed’.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)

Translated into verse by L.C. Wright, 1854 4^th ed. Bohn Illustrated Library

The Divine Comedy is considered to be the greatest literary work in the Italian language. His epic narrative poem is significant in that rather than write in Latin, which was traditional at the time, Dante wrote in what was to become modern Italian.

Elizabeth undoubtedly read Dante and refers to his works in correspondence with her American friend, the academic Charles Eliot Norton who wrote about and translated the works of Dante. In one letter she writes to thank him for a ‘delicious’ copy of his book On the Original Portraits of Dante which she describes ‘is a pleasure to open’. In her first novel, Mary Barton, she writes: ‘Whole families went through a gradual starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.’

A Dark Night’s Work And Other Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)

Published Smith, Elder 1890

A Dark Night’s Work was selected because this is the only copy we have in the collection that can be shown to visitors to the House..

This novella was first serialised in nine parts in Charles Dickens’ periodical, All the Year Round and was published as a book in 1863. It was Dickens himself who inserted the word ‘Dark’ into the original title much to Elizabeth’s annoyance, but which he believed would boost the sensational appeal to his readers. She later declared that ‘she would never publish with Smith again’ after the publisher retained the word in the title of the volume edition. It is not a gothic tale and is neither shocking or scary! Elizabeth’s aim is not to frighten the reader, but to explore the consequences of a crime, and the subsequent moral dilemmas faced by the characters. She wrote the story at the same time whilst researching and writing Sylvia’s Lovers during an intensely active period of her life. For one critic, A Dark Night’s Work…’ include a mature literary awareness seamlessly engrossed into the ongoing relevance of the narrative: her craftsmanship invites a consideration of wider perspectives and associations in which muted tragedy and moral fable run together’.

Household Words: A Weekly Journal conducted by Charles Dickens, Volume 1, 1850

Household Words was a weekly periodical begun by Dickens in March 1850 with the aim of ‘the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition’. After giving much thought to the title, Dickens finally settles upon Household Words, from Shakespeare’s Henry V and the King’s Saint Crispin speech –‘familiar in their mouths as household words’.

We have an incomplete set of bound editions of Household Words: Volume 1 is significant in that it includes the first part of Lizzie Leigh – a short story written by Elizabeth. Dickens had written to her inviting her to contribute to the periodical: ‘there is no living writer whose aid I would desire to enlist, in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton’. She demurred at first, feeling torn between the duties of home life and writing, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer! In true characteristic fashion he responded that he was ‘not at all afraid of the interruptions necessary to your domestic life, and I think you will be far less sensible of them in writing short stories than in writing a long one’.

Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford (1787 – 1855)

Published by George Whitaker 1824

Our Village was a series of literary sketches of the provincial life and society of a fictional village near Reading, Berkshire. It was published in book form in 1824 having first appeared in a popular periodical, The Lady’s Magazine.

Our Village is based upon Mary’s life in the village of Three Mile Cross and we know the Gaskells borrowed Our Village, volumes 1-5 from The Portico Library, Manchester in September and October 1858. According to Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth’s biographer, she certainly would have read Mitford as a student at Avonbank. Should we ask did reading Our Village inspire her to write one of her most beloved works, Cranford?