I study books as material objects, as pieces of paper and ink. But I also attend to seemingly airy things, to virtual representations of texts. Electronic texts and digital representations are not angels. They are material objects, and I see the library fellowship year as an opportunity to think deeply about how digital resources are created, how they are made available to others, and how they are preserved. My publicly accessible web-based dissertation, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: an Electronic Edition of the National Era Version, is one result of my thinking, and a project on Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Washington D.C. during the Civil War is the next challenge, here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. My official UNL page is on the Faculty & Staff section of the CDRH site.

A Swiftian Meditation on CLIR Fellowship

[...] He will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a Treatise, that shall make a very comely Figure on a Bookseller’s shelf, there to be preserved neat and clean, for a long Eternity, adorn’d with the heraldry of its Title fairly inscribed on a Label; never to be thumb’d or greas’d by students, nor bound to everlasting Chains of Darkness in a Library: But when the Fulness of time is come, shall haply undergo the Tryal of Purgatory, in order to ascend the sky. (148)

Swift, Jonathan, A TALE of a TUB,
Eds. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1958.

Gutkelch and Smith inform us in the footnote to the word “haply” that the 1704 first edition of A TALE of a TUB has “haply” whereas the second through fifth edition have “happily.” It is a matter of some moment for Swift’s satire whether the hoped-for ascendance of the Treatise (by the rank amateur) into the status of a classic is a trial undergone happily or perhaps undergone.

My immediate future, as I ponder the place of a Library Fellow with an English Ph.D., is a similar moment when the text in print may be revised.

Before you wander off, philosophic friend, consider another variant in the fifth edition of A TALE of a TUB. William Wotton in his Observations on TALE criticized the following line from Jack as blasphemous:

“[. . .] It was ordained,” said he, “some few Days before the Creation, that my Nose and this very Post should have a Rencounter; and therefore, Providence thought fit to send us both into the World in the same Age, and to make us Country-men and Fellow-Citizens.” (192-93)

Swift was a man on the make, and he watched every word. Harriet Beecher Stowe was more careful than some critics have allowed. Words make a difference, even in popular fiction.

Welcome to my portfolio.