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…
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.
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.