Finding Louisa

Following on from finding that one of Louisa Crow’s stories was republished in the New York Times, I thought I’d do a very simple search of Trove, Papers Past NZ, and Welsh Newspapers Online to see if her stories were also being republished elsewhere.

As I said, it’s strange how someone who, while a popular hack novelist of her time, seems to have completely dropped out of the canon of nineteenth century novelists.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable in her writing serial stories for magazines, quite a few of her peers did the same thing, only to have their serials republished as a three decker. Dickens did the same, as did Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

And newspapers, especially the weekly papers, and papers in rural areas liked to have a serialised novel, if only to attract repeat purchases of the paper. The social historian David Kerr Cameron has recorded the importance of the Friday or Saturday paper in rural Scotland in the nineteenth century, where often the weekly newspaper was the only reading matter in a croft, other than a Bible.

The literary historian Katherine Bode has investigated a similar phenomenon in rural Australia, and has uncovered lost novels which only appear to have been published as newspaper serials.

So, to the search.

Trove and PapersPast NZ differentiate between newspapers and magazines. In both cases I searched for the occurrences of the string Louisa Crow - this reliably brought up mentions of her. Searching for Mrs L Crow did not improve the results, suggesting that she was principally known as Louisa Crow.

A search of Welsh Newspapers online shows frequent mentions in book reviews and in advertising for new books and issues of the Quiver suggesting some popularity. She does not appear to be credited for any serialised novels - I’m not sure why - it could be that she simply wasn’t particularly popular in English speaking Wales.

As a sanity check I later reran the search on the SLV's copy of Gale NewVault, and both her stories and poems seem to have been syndicated to a wide range of English, Scottish and Irish newspapers, which suggests that perhaps the results from Welsh Newspapers Online are an anomaly.

On the other hand a search of Trove shows that her stories were reprinted in various country newspapers of the time in Australia and she was thought worthy of mention in various booksellers adverts, and strangely one of her stories was reprinted in the Presbyterian calendar of 1893 - a church annual magazine.

As in Wales, she seems to have been less popular in New Zealand, with very few hits in Papers Past. As in the case of Wales I can only wave my hands, I don’t know enough about nineteenth century newspaper publishing in New Zealand to speculate meaningfully.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, Louisa Crow was well enough known to be mentioned in the Times of London of 01 January 1896 in their list of significant personages who had died in the previous year, as well as earning a couple of obituaries in literary periodicals of the time.

However, as I’ve said, she seems to have almost completely dropped out of the literary canon since her death, which I guess simply shows just how fleeting fame can be...

Mrs Crow continues to confuse

 Yesterday, up at the Athenaeum, I had some fun tracing Louisa Crow, a nineteenth century female novelist.

We hold a copy of one of her novels, yet the novel is not listed in either the British Library or National Library of Scotland catalogues.

Normally I use Google to search, but given the paucity of information about Mrs Crow, I thought to rerun the search using both Bing and Yandex, to see if they turned up anything else.

As is sometimes the case Yandex produced some search results that surprised me:

Firstly a link to the  New York Times of August 12 1866, which features a short story, Hazeley Mill, by Louisa Crow. (It also features a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, exalted company indeed for someone usually considered a Victorian hack novelist.)

Secondly, a link to an 1866 illustration held by Aberystwyth University for a story Hazeley Mill in Once a Week magazine, a magazine Louisa Crow published in.But was it really Louisa Crow?

Well the Hathi Trust archive of Once a Week  from 1866 includes Louisa Crow's story, so I am guessing that in the way of nineteenth century newspapers, the Times republished the story, and indeed it does credit it as coming from Once a Week.

The dates fit, meaning I think we can be confident that the story is by "our" Louisa Crow, even if it does not appear in the usual lists of her short stories on Victorian literature and Victorian studies sites.

It's interesting how someone who obviously had some sort of reputation can almost totally disappear from literary history...

Louisa, you have led me a merry dance...

 Up at the Athenaeum today I had a good day's cataloguing, mostly of Victorian lady novelists.

That has its own challenges, like those books published by "the Author of Lord Halifax's Nose" - I made that up, but it's uncomfortably close to the truth, or authors who publish books under their maiden name, get married, and then publish under their married name.

Annoying, but there's so much in the way of Victorian literary studies out there it's relatively easy to run them down - quite often there are name authority files out there, if you can find them.

I find that the National Library of Scotland is a bit better than the British Library in publishing name authorities, but working between the two of them you can usually identify both the author and the edition.

In fact it's quite amazing I can do this sat at the end of a wireless nbn connection in an old wooden building on the far side of the planet - fifteen or twenty years ago this simply wouldn't have been possible, or if it was, it would have been a hell of a lot more slog.

So I was feeling quietly confident when I came across a book published in 1873 by a Mrs L Crow - A Twisted Link, published by Tinsley brothers in London.

Only one problem - it's not in either the NLS or BL catalogues. It's not in the Library of Congress either.

Google books wasn't much help either, other than showing that the book was listed in various nineteenth century public library and mechanics institute catalogues that had been digitised.

Clearly I wasn't delusional, I had the book on my desk, and however short its print run it had been picked up by other libraries at the time.

from the GWR Mechanics Institute Catalogue 1888

Montrose Public Library 1896

But who was Mrs L Crow?

Well I ended up searching wikipedia for pages containing the phrase 'A Twisted Link' and found that her full name was Louisa Elizabeth Crow and that her maiden name was Fenn.

There's also an entry for her on victorianresearch.org.

So, back I went to both the NLS and the BL to search for "Louisa Crow".

That turned up various of her other novels, but not 'A Twisted Link'.

Searching for Louisa Fenn OR Crow didn't improve matters one jot.

Google Books was a little better and provided a stub entry, but nowhere seems to hold a copy.

By 1873, legal deposit in England was firmly in place and publishers were prosecuted for failing to comply with the legal deposit regulations, so I can only guess that someone at Tinsley Brothers stuffed up and didn't send out the legal deposit copies...

So, how's the facebook thing going?

 Almost three years ago, at the end of the pandemic I made the decision to abandon social media.

I closed my accounts, deleted my profiles and did the digital equivalent of going to live in a hut in the bush, with only an old manual typewriter for company.

Sure, I still blogged, and I did keep my mastodon account, but for all intents and purposes I had walked out the door.

I did this because, post pandemic, I felt I was spending too much time on social media and it was time for a break.

And it worked.

And then, a few months ago I rejoined facebook.

Quite consciously and deliberately as part of my work with the historic book collection at the Athenaeum.

In its early days, the Athenaeum was clearly buying second hand books from large commercial circulating libraries as Mullen's in Melbourne and Mudies in London, and, while I have no proof I'm fairly certain that they were buying them from second hand book dealers who imported their stock from England.

This makes perfect sense - books were expensive in the Victorian England of the 1860s and 70s, and doubly so in Australia, where the lack of local publishers meant they were almost all imported from England, although a few were imported from the United States.

Some of the books I presume were sourced from England had stickers suggesting they were the property of smaller local circulating libraries, quite often in coastal resorts where the middle classes of Victorian England would spend their summers, either in improving pursuits such as rockpooling as in this satirical illustration from Punch in the 1860s

or indeed reading frivolous novels, or perhaps both or indeed something else entirely. 

Often the only way of tracking down information on these circulating libraries was to contact local history groups to ask if anyone knew anything about a particular circulating library.

A lot of these groups don't have a web page or a contact email, instead they have a facebook page, and the only practical way to contact them was via Facebook, which meant my getting myself a Facebook account (again - as I'd deleted my old account and all my contacts).

So, I did.

And as a means of initiating contact with these local history groups it has worked well.

While the dread facebook algorithm does tend to show you the same material over and over again, and does operate on the 'if you liked that, try this' model it has not come up with any inappropriate content after the first week or so when it had a predilection to suggest various mad right wing flag waving groups.

Likewise, this time around it has not come up with any really silly friend suggestions - one of the things that I used to dislike about facebook first time around were the spurious friend requests from somewhat over endowed young women, all of whom seemed to live in West Texas.

So far, everything all seems above board, and while there are way too many adverts for my taste, everything seems reasonably innocuous.

In fact the one time I saw an advert I felt was sailing close to the wind as regards advocating violence and complained about it, the helpdesk wrote back to say that other people had already complained about it and the advert had been removed and the account banned.

So, basically it's ok. I did worry initially that it was a bit of a swamp, but this time, perhaps not as much as I feared ...

The things one finds in old books ...

 Despite still feeling a bit raw after Lucy's passing, I had my usual Friday morning cataloguing session at the Athenaeum.

Nothing of great interest, some 1940s and fifties bodice rippers, and quite a bit of Dickens.

Some of the Dickens editions are quite old, one is a Chapman and Hall edition of Little Dorrit dating to 1861, and others look to be equally old, and form part of the same series, but have irritatingly lost their title pages.

Others date from the 1930s and seem to have been bought deliberately to replace earlier copies which have worn out beyond repair.

However, the old editions were still in use until the closure of the Athenaeum as a library in the early 1970s

An old Melbourne tram ticket used as a bookmark, and we can date it to sometime between 1966 when Australia abandoned the old British £sd system for the rather more prosaic dollars and cents we use today, and 1972 when the Athenaeum ceased to function as the village library.

Another nice little example of using ephemera to date when an item was last used ...

Swapping out my old Thinkpad for an Acer Travelmate

 Last week, Ausnet left the Athenaeum in the dark (literally) while they carried out preventative maintenance in advance of winter.

Up till then I'd used my old Thinkpad, the one I'd used to document both Lake View  and part of Dow's pharmacy for the National Trust.

As I'd feared, the Thinkpad's battery is not what it was, and I ended up swapping over to an Acer Travelmate I'd originally bought as a second machine for J.

Last week's power shenanigans convinced me to try shifting to using the Travelmate full time for my cataloguing work.

As you'd suspect, it coped comfortably with this morning's cataloguing session, leaving me with just over half a battery's worth of power when I shut down.

I thought the smaller screen might be a problem, but in practice it turned out not to be.

It's going to be the Travelmate for cataloguing work until further notice...

Prayer and hymn books

 Today I started work creating stub catalogue entries for those prayer books and hymn books we decided to record and save.

Needless to say they are all very similar. Most were printed by James Nisbet,  a major publisher of hymn books and prayer books in the nineteenth century.

Interestingly, as well as the short hand annotation on the fly leaf, it's worth noting that this particular book was printed by the Australian publisher George Robertson, who also published Australian editions of yellow backs and other English novels.

Bible, hymn books and prayer books were in steady demand in the nineteenth century and it was probably well worth George Robertson's time to enter into agreement to produce Australian reprints of the standard editions.

James Nisbet, was one of these irritating Victorian publishers who didn't put publication dates or other identifying information on their books. Perhaps they thought that the word of the Lord was immutable and you didn't need to distinguish between printings and editions.

It's particularly annoying in the case of some of the early books, however some of the early books have dates

as in the case of this bible printed by Eyre and Spotiswood for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1856.

Gratifyingly, someone has added 'Stanley Sunday School 1863' to the fly leaf. 

1863 is quite an important date in the history of Stanley as it's when the Athenaeum was founded and Stanley was changing from a rough and ready goldminers' camp to a more permanent settlement.

We know that the Sunday School used the Athenaeum building in the early days of the settlement. It's got to be remembered that even though the state school (No 550) dates from 1858 as part of the early national School system, education was not compulsory until 1872, and Sunday Schools, besides religious education, often provided basic education in reading, writing, and arithmetic for children who did not attend school full time as they were needed on the farm or were employed as 'picky boys' helping to sort ore from general spoil and tailings.