British Library Journal (volume 20, number 2, autumn 1994)

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New light on Malta during the Peace of Amiens, 1801-1803
(1994-11)
Allen, D. F.
SIR Charles William Pasley (1780-1861) is remembered today as a general in the British Army who earned distinction as a military engineer, writing manuals about field fortification, telegraphy, sapping, mining, pontooning, and how best to explode gunpowder under water for the salvage of wrecks. Pasley's distinction was recognized beyond the army by his election in 1816 as a Fellow of the Royal Society, by his appointment in 1841 as Inspector General of Railways and by the award in 1844 of an honorary D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. Less well known are the sympathetic impressions of Malta which he had formed between 1801 and 1804, when he was far from being a pillar of the Establishment but merely a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant from Minorca, recently posted to the Malta garrison. Lieutenant Pasley's unpublished journal and letters from Malta are buried in his personal papers which were bequeathed to the British Museum in the 1930s by his descendants. Pasley's comments on Malta now merit rehearsal for two reasons above all. First because they relate to that uneasy period of the Peace of Amiens, by which Britain had promised to hand back the Maltesse islands to the Order of St John, expelled by Bonaparte in 1798. Young Pasley's journal and letters from Malta are interesting secondly because at that stage in his career he enjoyed few social advantages and was correspondingly open to the customs of the Maltese. Pasley had been born a bastard in Scotland, from where the Dumfries schoolmaster and his own energy and ability as well as the patronage of his better born Malcolm cousins had propelled him into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In short, Pasley was a philosophical and literary Scottish soldier, curious about the distinctive history and folklore of Malta. And his professional interest in military fortification took renewed inspiration from the bastions of Valletta.
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William Trumbull and art collecting in Jacobean England
(1994-11)
Howarth, David
THIS article is concerned with some of the papers of William Trumbull the Elder in the British Library, which relate to the visual arts in Jacobean England. As was suggested by Sonia Anderson and Leonard Forster in a recent issue of this journal, the Trumbull archive is remarkably rich for the cultural historian, and many scattered references in it reveal the catholicity of those collectors in England with whom Trumbull dealt from Brussels. The acquisition of Italian art by the early Stuarts is a well-rehearsed story, but Trumbull's correspondents provide the earliest evidence we have to suggest that Jacobeans were drawn not only to contemporary Dutch portraits by Miereveld and Honthorst, but to early Renaissance German artists; even, indeed, to the great painters of the vanished Burgundian court which had melted away a century before Trumbull came to live among its monuments.
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Recent acquisitions: manuscripts: eighteenth-century papers
(1994-11)
Black, Jeremy
THIS article seeks to draw attention to three valuable collections recently acquired by the British Library. Each contains correspondence that throws much light on a prominent individual, in the first case William Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, in the other two George III. Taking these collections in chronological order the earliest is Add. MS. 71170, purchased at Christie's on 7 May 1993. This consists of letters addressed to Francis Ayscough, Dean of Bristol, and Clerk of the Closet to Frederick, Prince of Wales. Ayscough (1700-63) was an able Whig who owed his advancement to the Lytteltons and Pitts. The volume includes a letter from Thomas Pitt of 1755, an anonymous account of the Lords debates over Byng in 1757, and ten letters from William Pitt. They reveal him in a more intimate light than he usually offered and are herewith printed. The first was sent on 15 November 1730 from Boconnoc, the Pitt estate in Cornwall. This anonymous letter is not described as by Pitt in the provisional catalogue entry, which mentions only nine of his letters, but Pitt was indeed at Boconnoc that month, 'more and more out of temper with the remoteness of this cursed hiding place'.
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Some drafts by Richard Steele for The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian
(1994-11)
Lindsay, Alexander
WITH the transfer of the Blenheim Papers to the British Library in 1978, a large body of Sir Richard Steele's letters and literary manuscripts became more easily available for examination by scholars. They are now bound as Add. MSS. 61686-61688, most of the literary material being gathered in the last of these three volumes. The staff of the Department of Manuscripts took evident pains to relate Steele's drafts and memoranda to published works when preparing the Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: The Blenheim Papers, 3 vols. (London, 1985), and several useful identifications were made. Nevertheless a large proportion of the drafts have remained unidentified. The present paper will discuss seven fragments in Steele's autograph, all from Add. MS. 61688, which can be shown to relate to the three most important periodicals with which he was involved, The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian. Two can be claimed with reasonable certainty to be drafts of particular papers, two possibly so; it is suggested that another is an unpublished essay intended for The Tatler; and two fragments shed light on that old but still interesting question, the nature and extent of Steele's collaboration with Addison.
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Public relations, Panizzi-style
(1994-11)
McCrimmon, Barbara
IN a collection of letters by and to Sir Anthony Panizzi, chiefly relating to the history of the British Museum, assembled and recently presented by the author to the British Library (Add. MSS. 70839-70854), are two letters written by Sir Anthony to the Irish essayist and politician John Wilson Croker in 1852 that are revealing of the way publicity about the British Museum Library was handled in the mid-nineteenth century. They also reveal Panizzi's attitude towards the problems he faced and his relationship to a prominent political figure of the day.
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Jaspar Gryffyth and his books
(1994-11)
Ovenden, Richard
THE great collectors of manuscripts in Britain during the century following the dissolution of the monasteries, men such as Parker, Dee, Cotton, and Lumley, were figures, by and large, of some standing in church or state, with the means and opportunity to amass large numbers of manuscript books and other documents from the medieval collections. Humbler persons could however establish collections of some importance, and they were often formed in the provinces, away from the major trading areas such as London, Oxford and Cambridge. A study of these individuals can supply valuable insights into the way in which larger collections were created. Likewise these modest collectors often engaged in antiquarian research and writing in a small but significant way. Jaspar Gryffyth was just such an individual. He lived at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: although very little evidence of his life has survived in contemporary records we do have his Commonplace Book and some correspondence, and can trace details of his book-collecting activities. Printed below in the Appendix are three lists. The first is of manuscripts which he offered to loan to, or perhaps exchange with, Sir Robert Cotton; the other two of manuscripts and printed books associated with him in some way and of his annotations in his copy of Bale. Before these lists are discussed, it is necessary to provide some account of his life and background.
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The Kubla Khan manuscript and its first collector
(1994-11)
Kelliher, Hilton
COLERIDGE'S Kubla Khan, Or, A Vision in a Dream, first printed with Christabel and The Pains of-Sleep in 1816, has long been regarded as one of the great literary icons of the Romantic movement. Coleridge's famous account of its conception in the summer or autumn of 1797 - the lonely Exmoor farmhouse, the effects of an 'anodyne', and the poetical reverie interrupted by the arrival of 'a person on business from Porlock' -contributed in no small measure to the hypnotic sway that it has always exercised over the imagination of its readers. Awe and wonderment were, if anything, only increased by the researches of J. L. Lowes and others into its sources, which proved to have stretched far beyond the simple sentence in 'Purchas his Pilgrimage' that was allegedly the immediate inspiration. Yet these fifty-four verses were, the author later insisted, merely 'A Fragment' rescued from a broken trance in which images, rising up before him 'as things', had shaped themselves into a poem of two or three hundred lines. Some scholars have been sceptical, seeing in Coleridge's insistence on the dream-origins of the poem a mere fiction masking his inability to complete it, though this line of argument is nowadays little regarded.
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British Library Journal (volume 20, number 2, autumn 1994)

British Library Journal (volume 20, number 2, autumn 1994)

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