Entries from June 2005 ↓

The student of primitive sociology, on the other hand, is called upon to digest the reports of other observers, who have not always understood the conditions which they describe, who have failed to define to themselves what they are endeavouring to make clear to others, and who make use of a terminology created for an entirely different set of conditions, as if exact definition and care in the use of terms were the last and not the first duty of the observer when he frames his report.

Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor) remarks on the difficulty of disentangling History from the same period’s Literature, and getting students to recognize primary-source context instead of pop culture-source context.

There’s also a link to an interesting Victorian Web essay which explains why so many 19th century books appear in multiple parts (at least the UK versions). I had no idea.

Seeing as how Odd Ends has mostly 19th century (and related) content seen through my own context, and as I am neither historian nor literary critic, I can only hope that I’m not contributing to Dr Burstein’s “sobs of agony.” Odd Ends gets many search engine hits during exam and paper time…

The Haunted Chamber, by “The Duchess.” This is a mid-19th century potboiler with various and sundry evil machinations.

The Duchess wrote many cheap novels. The Library of Congress does not provide her real name, yet has her dates as (1855?-1897). The American Women’s Dime Novel Project reports that “The Duchess” is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, and according to the Clonakilty Museum, she is the originator of the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Thanks to Mary Meehan for Post-Processing this text!

After this rapid glance at the history of the other physical sciences, we now return to our own, the science of language, in order to see whether it really is a science, and whether it can be brought back to the standard of the inductive sciences. We want to know whether it has passed, or is still passing, through the three phases of physical research; whether its progress has been systematic or desultory, whether its method has been appropriate or not. But before we do this, we shall, I think, have to do something else. You may have observed that I always took it for granted that the science of language, which is best known in this country by the name of comparative philology, is one of the physical sciences, and that therefore its method ought to be the same as that which has been followed with so much success in botany, geology, anatomy, and other branches of the study of nature. In the history of the physical sciences, however, we look in vain for a place assigned to comparative philology, and its very name would seem to show that it belongs to quite a different sphere of human knowledge. There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which, according to their subject-matter, are called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man. Now if we were to judge by its name, comparative philology, like classical philology, would seem to take rank, not as a physical, but as an historical science, and the proper method to be applied to it would be that which is followed in the history of art, of law, of politics, and religion. However, the title of comparative philology must not be allowed to mislead us. It is difficult to say by whom that title was invented; but all that can be said in defence of it is, that the founders of the science of language were chiefly scholars or philologists, and that they based their inquiries into the nature and laws of language on a comparison of as many facts as they could collect within their own special spheres of study. Neither in Germany, which may well be called the birthplace of this science, nor in France, where it has been cultivated with brilliant success, has that title been adopted. It will not be difficult to show that, although the science of language owes much to the classical scholar, and though in return it has proved of great use to him, yet comparative philology has really nothing whatever in common with philology in the usual meaning of the word. Philology, whether classical or oriental, whether treating of ancient or modern, of cultivated or barbarous languages, is an historical science. Language is here treated simply as a means. The classical scholar uses Greek or Latin, the oriental scholar Hebrew or Sanskrit, or any other language, as a key to an understanding of the literary monuments which by-gone ages have bequeathed to us, as a spell to raise from the tomb of time the thoughts of great men in different ages and different countries, and as a means ultimately to trace the social, moral, intellectual, and religious progress of the human race. In the same manner, if we study living languages, it is not for their own sake that we acquire grammars and vocabularies. We do so on account of their practical usefulness. We use them as letters of introduction to the best society or to the best literature of the leading nations of Europe. In comparative philology the case is totally different. In the science of language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes the sole object of scientific inquiry. Dialects which have never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. We do not want to know languages, we want to know language; what language is, how it can form a vehicle or an organ of thought; we want to know its origin, its nature, its laws; and it is only in order to arrive at that knowledge that we collect, arrange, and classify all the facts of language that are within our reach.

Is it good to create a technorati tag?

No Posts Yet! Congratulations, you’ve discovered a tag with no posts! To contribute to this tag, just make a post to your blog about periodical and include a link to this page like so:

periodical

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And when I do, is it no longer special?

Update oops! Should I have actually posted content about periodicals? Ok, here’s a list of all the periodicals I’ve been involved with at Project Gutenberg, through Distributed Proofreaders.

Found doing a Google Search:

It’s a shame to let the thoughts and humor that influenced millions of Americans go silently into the night, read only by bored graduate students who think they’re big intellectual stuff for reading something so obscure, when they’re really reading Bloom County.

I was researching “Swingin Round the Cirkle” (a collection of letters authored by “Petroleum V. Nasby”) in preparation for doing the book at DP. Nasby, a character created by abolitionist and newspaper editor David Ross Locke, is a Northern-born Southern sympathizer writing at the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His letters to the Findlay Jeffersonian and Toledo Blade were satires promoting abolition, mostly because the protagonist (and therefore his ideas) was so stupid. They were quite influential though, extremely popular, and read by all levels of (Northern) society.

The quote above was part of longer post about dialect in writing in the 19th century and how inaccessible it is to modern readers. And it is hard to read Cirkle (even harder to type it). Besides the constant use of uv for of, there’s lots of what we nowadays call “the n- word.” Locke’s use of it is idiomatic, almost to an extreme, for that period of American culture.

Unfortunately, the dialect and word usage limits Nasby’s audience today, even though the satire may still work on many levels. Perhaps when it’s been posted to Project Gutenberg, someone will modernize the language and we’ll know for sure.

The Fatal Glove: A Novel, by Clara Augusta. Clara Augusta Jones Trask (1839-1905) wrote stories and poems for magazines and for the Beadle dime novel series. She used the pseudonyms “Clara Augusta,” “Hero Strong” and “Kate Thorn.”. This story, from 1892, tells the tale of an orphaned boy-done-well, a murder, and True Love.

In addition, the book has a short story, “Constitutionally Bashful,” tacked onto the end. The author is unknown. Bashful in this case means the protagonist is unable to be in the same room, nor even speak, with females not related to him.

It’s pretty common for (cheap) books of the 1890s to have more than one work in a binding, and I’m not sure why. Is it printing efficiency? Lagniappe?

Thanks to Mary Meehan for Post-Processing this book, with all of its parts!

From the University of Michigan’s Early English Books Online Text Conversion Project, a useful list of abbreviations and other exotic diacritical symbols used in old English books.