The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
Sam George’s Afterword indulges in a spot of Gothic tourism and investigates John William Polidori’s links to St Pancras Old Church, the site of his burial, together with its associations with the group of visionary writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary and Percy Shelley.
In his essay, Ivan Phillips explores themes of vision and visibility as they are developed through The Vampyre. He examines Polidori’s distinctive concern with the imagery of eyes, and with acts of seeing (or not seeing) and being seen (or not being seen), in connection with the evolution of the modern vampire. Phillips understands these motifs through Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) as a fantastical challenge to the limits of the human. The vampire, in this sense, enters the fiction of modernity as a threat to stable assumptions about identity, experience, and being. As well as exploring tropes of vision in The Vampyre, this essay also considers other texts by Polidori, notably his medical dissertation on sleepwalking and his novel Ernestus Berchtold, written at the same time as his vampire story and published in the same year. Ultimately, Phillips argues that the work of this remarkable but neglected writer generates an anatomy of the modern vampire that is still influential today.
Harriet Fletcher argues that The Vampyre uses vampirism as a vehicle for critiquing Lord Byron’s literary celebrity, specifically by drawing out the Gothic qualities of Byronic fan culture and the mutual relationship of consumption between Byron and his readers. In doing so, Polidori reconsiders the parameters of the Gothic; by attaching celebrity to the vampire, he reshapes the image of this Gothic trope in Western culture. Fletcher identifies the early nineteenth century as the advent of modern celebrity culture due to the emergence of mass culture, within which the role of Byron and the rise of industrial print culture is paramount. She combines Gothic studies, celebrity studies, and fan studies to develop what she calls ‘a Gothic celebrity reading’ that draws inspiration from Romantic literary culture. Lord Ruthven is a model of Byron, and in turn Aubrey is a model of the Byron fan or ‘Byromaniac’.
Professor Sir Christopher Frayling meditates on the portrait of Dr John William Polidori by F. G. Gainsford and on the vulnerability displayed which manifested in his sadly unfulfilled life. Frayling expands on the composition of that portrait and on Polidori’s biography. He reminisces on the presence of the portrait as he uncovered the history of the vampire in his seminal work of the 1970s. Frayling remarks on the then invisibility of Polidori compared to the present-day recognition of his importance, in which this collection and its originary symposium (which he attended) play a part.
Sam George and Bill Hughes turn their attention to a little-known yet revelatory descendent of Polidori’s vampyre. Uriah Derick D’Arcy [Richard Varick Dey]’s The Black Vampyre, a short novella featuring the first Black vampire in literature, was published within months of the US publication of The Vampyre. There is a whole story of literary appropriation and intertextuality here which is quite crucial to D’Arcy’s text, which depicts literary production itself as vampiric. The Black Vampyre is situated in the context of slavery and the slave revolts in St Domingo (now Haiti). The text was written not long after Haiti was the first nation to abolish slavery during its revolution of 1791–1804. George and Hughes show how D’Arcy turns his satire on to contemporary society, where the members of a corrupt commercial society are now the vampires. D’Arcy very consciously plays with the theme of plagiarism that surrounded Polidori and connects it to the wider vampirism of society. The links The Black Vampyre makes between racial oppression and a vampiric, commercial society make its resurrection worthwhile.