by Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Northwestern University 2004-2005 Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
I have spent the last several days trying to catch Crooks at the Newberry Library. The Crooks were a prominent family in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island. Catherine Crook was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and Son of Liberty, in a city besieged by the British early in the American Revolutionary War. Sometime before the outbreak of that war, she married an Englishman, Charles Dudley, who was Commissioner of Customs. I have been working recently to find out as much as I can about this family. (The exact date of that marriage is one of the pieces of information I am trying to locate.)
I first came across the Crooks and Dudleys while doing research on my dissertation, on transatlantic family letters in the Age of Revolution, in the Newport Historical Society. They form a case study in a larger project on letters between family members who ended up on different sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. The manuscript correspondence between Catherine and Charles Dudley during and after the Revolutionary War captured my attention immediately. Catherine Crook's father was a Son of Liberty who was apparently a leader of a riot against the Stamp Act in 1765. Her husband was an Englishman beaten up, threatened, and ultimately driven out of Rhode Island by Patriots. This was not an easy situation for Catherine, but things were to grow only more complicated.
During the Revolutionary War, Charles and Catherine moved to England, where they had two children. After the Revolution, Catherine returned to Newport with the two children, while Charles stayed in London to win compensation from the British government. They corresponded over the 1780s, growing ever more frustrated by the distance separating them. Catherine wanted her husband home in Rhode Island; Charles wanted the independence that would come from financial restitution. How did they cope with this clash of interests, their own longings, and the complications of their world? How did this family, like many others upon whom my project concentrates, negotiate issues of conflict, distance, and revolution in their letters?
The Newberry has more than one source to help me answer such questions. This richness of resources is part of what makes the Newberry such a wonderful place to work. My own project deals with the Dudleys, but also all kinds of other individuals, from other Anglophone colonies in North America and the West Indies, and from Britain itself. The breadth of the Newberry's collection means that I can learn more about all of these places, a rare treat. For this case study, for instance, there are rare texts that provide context for the political debates in which Catherine's husband and father both were embroiled. One such text is an original copy of Martin Howard's A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax to his Friend in Rhode-Island, a pamphlet published in Newport in defense of the Stamp Act in 1765. This is only one of an entire collection of original American Revolutionary pamphlets owned by the Newberry. There are also books, like The Complete Letter-Writer from 1761, which give me greater insight into the ideals for letter writing that informed family correspondence in this era.
An abundance of useful secondary literature also helps, and these are far from the only resources. A reference librarian, Katie McMahon, has cheerfully joined me in searching out genealogical information on the Crooks and Dudleys, helping to flesh out the limited information I had from their letters. Like Katie, other staff here have gone out of their way to offer assistance and references, as well as their skills in organizing seminars and conferences. The people who work at the Newberry are fantastic. They, along with other fellows, have provided extraordinarily useful insights and information in seminars and discussions, on these and other topics, as well as a stimulating intellectual environment in which to work. Altogether, the range of resources both material and personal makes the Newberry an ideal location in which to catch Crooks and others from a Revolutionary age.
Originally printed in Origins: Newsletter of the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History Volume XVII, No. 2, Spring 2005.
by Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania
...There are many kinds of literary research, and some make scarcely any use of libraries. That is not surprising. Sidney argued that literature is situated between history and philosophy, and archives have had radically different importance in the latter disciplines. There is no reason why historical perspectives should have a monopoly. But one of the hidden scandals of the literary profession is how infrequently those of us who work at the historical end of the spectrum turn for advice to the experts in the field: the librarians who handle an extraordinary variety of books as part of their daily business. While there is increasing public access to a wide range of primary resources through the Internet (1), electronic texts, for all their virtues, bypass the crucial interaction between academics and librarians. The scarcity of that interaction is perhaps attributable to academics' fears that their ignorance will be humiliatingly revealed. If my experiences are anything to go by, the fears are fully justified. But the rewards of such an interaction far outweigh the humiliations. It is time that literary historians and librarians undertook the collaborative projects that, drawing on a range of skills and knowledges, have long been central to the sciences and social sciences.
1.) A fine example of a Web site that gives public access to a rich collection of facsimiles is the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, initiated by Rebecca Bushnell and Michael Ryan. It can be found on the home page of the University of Pennsylvania Library (http://www.library.upenn.edu/). On the same page, under "E-Resources," then "E-Books," then "Online Books Page," there are links to several hundred online books, some in facsimile form.
Excerpt taken from "The Library and Material Texts," published by the Modern Language Association of America, 2004.