UBC RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in Different Parts of Europe is the title of this collection of letters at UBC's Rare Books and Special Collections library. Its call number is DA501.M7A28 1763 and it is held in the library's vault.
Binding and Publication Information
The book is hardbound with half leather binding on the spine and corners. The front and back covers are marbled boards. The spine has gold tooling, the title of the work and the date are both embossed into the spine. The title reads Lady Mary’s Letters and it is set on a red rectangular spine label. The endpages are regular paper pasted down and the front cover has the book plate sticker detailing Dr. H. R. MacMillan as the donor.
The book is hardbound with half leather binding on the spine and corners. The front and back covers are marbled boards. The spine has gold tooling, the title of the work and the date are both embossed into the spine. The title reads Lady Mary’s Letters and it is set on a red rectangular spine label. The endpages are regular paper pasted down and the front cover has the book plate sticker detailing Dr. H. R. MacMillan as the donor.
The book’s pages are gathered. By allowing the book to fall open you can see the gatherings. The headband (which links the sections together) has glue on it which indicates that the binding has been strongly reinforced. This is also evident from the fact that the book does not fall open when left released on its spine.
This book may have been rebound from its original binding into this half leather custom binding. There are a few indications that may be able to prove that the book is not in its original binding. First of all, the frontspieces of each volume includes MDCCLXII (1763) as the date of publication. Each of the cover pages has the same date on it and each one lists the volume number after the edition number (e.g.: The Second Edition, Volume II). However, there is a fourth volume added on. The title page is formatted differently than the other frontspieces (although the typesetting appears to be the same). At the bottom of the page, the date recorded is MDCCLXVII: 1767. This means that this is one of the 1767 editions that mentioned in the Grundy source (more info on this page).
An argument can be made that the fourth volume was added to the original 1763 binding at a later date(which may also explain the tightness of the binding) but I’m not sure if this is the case. The pages of the first few volumes have been cut raggedly. If the 1767 volume was just added in, then that would be the only set of pages that has to be cut down in order to fit in with the rest. Because there is evidence of cutting too close to the edge throughout the whole book, I think it would be fair to say that all the volumes were rebound into a custom binding. The smoking gun lies in one very important detail: the spine says “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” even though all the frontspieces have the dashes used to obfuscate her name. Even the 1767 frontspiece says “Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—…”, thus this book may have even been rebound even later than 1767. |
Typesetting
Although the image may not clearly show this, the backs of some of the pages are raised due to the pressure from the impressions of the type. I felt this by running my hand across the back of the pages with one side of text. This indicates that relief printing was used, because in relief printing, the type is raised and when it is pressed onto a paper, the pressure can leave behind little dents where each letter is. |
Additions to the text:
- A Preface: Mary Astell wrote the preface for Lady Mary in 1724 and Lady Mary included it in her manuscript copy that she left with Benjamin Sowden (~1761) (Grundy).
- Fourth Edition
- Some poems after the final letter; a poem by Pope about Lady Mary.
- “A Summary of the Contents of the Letters in these four Volumes”, also added on 1767. Each letter is listed along with details such as where it was written and the topics of that letter. You can see this on p. 280 of the digitized copy of the letters.
Epistolary Conventions—The (em)Dash
The use of dashes instead of names in literature was used for a number of reasons. John Barth describes the reasons behind the usage in his postmodernist book Lost in the Funhouse (Potter, Feb. 25):
“…Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means.” (Barth, 1968, p. 73).
On the previous page, I mentioned how the epistolary novel was sold posing as something it was not. For example The Lady’s Packet Broke Open was sold as if it was a collection of letters of an aristocratic lady. To enhance the allusion of reality, epistolary novels would blank out names of the aristocrats. This stemmed from 17th century practices of literary political critique wherein the author would have to obscure names in order to avoid being accused of libel (Potter, Feb. 25). Lady Mary’s Letters don’t really seem that they would need to pose as a work they are not, we know for a fact that she did travel. That means that the names were probably blanked out to avoid criticisms and accusations. However, they would have been more interesting to read because of the implications of scandal that were related to the usage of dashes in the epistolary genre. One of Lady Mary’s earlier letters points to one of the dangers of having your name associated with your work (especially if one is woman). She writes to Mrs. Hewett (“nee Betenson, one of Lady Mary's early correspondents, whose husband was Surveyor-General of Her Majesty's Woods and Forests” (symonds, 14) about the author of a book called The New Atalantis. Seeing that its full title is Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes, From The New Atalantis, it is already obvious that this author is popular and probably in trouble.
" But do you know what has happened to the unfortunate authoress ? People are offended at the liberty she used in her memoirs, and she is taken into custody. Miserable is the fate of writers ! If they are agreeable they are offensive, and if dull they starve.”
Lady Mary’s place in society was not so precarious as to have been harmed by the publication of the names in her letters, especially because the letters are not intimate correspondences but details of the place Lady Mary is exploring. However, perhaps it was a precautionary step that everyone took because that had become the norm when publishing letter collections.
All the photos on this page were taken by Fatima Hamado, with the permission of the RBSC Library at UBC to be used for research purposes only.