Lesley Finn is a writer and artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, and was a 2022 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library. 

A library is an excellent place to connect with the dead. After all, many of its books, papers, and artifacts were made by those no longer living. But what about really connecting with the dead?

I came to the British Library to research Spiritualism, a religious movement with the core precept that the soul survives physical death, and that the living can communicate with the spirit world those souls inhabit. As a writer working on ghost stories and a visual artist working with text and book arts, I was fascinated by the drama of Spiritualism’s séances, the concepts explored by the movement, and the possibilities of visually interpreting its archival material. Much of what I write and make is concerned with how relationships endure barriers of material, time, and distance, and Spiritualism offers a unique way to think through this concern.

One distance that Spiritualism bridged was the Atlantic Ocean. Though the religion originated in the United States in the 1840s, it came to Great Britain soon after, and many of the movement’s notable practitioners crossed back and forth on visits. Transatlantic exchange shaped this spirituality—one that has been marginalised in the historical imagination as occult and other, though it was a popular religion for nearly a century, replete with churches and published hymnals.

Image 1: H.A. Kersey and S.M. Kersey, The Spiritual Songster (1924). British Library shelfmark: Music Collections E.1636.a.

At the same time that households across the US and Britain were establishing practices to communicate with the dead, the technology of the telegraph, another practice of communicating across space and time, spread in usage. The telegraph, a mechanism that relied on magnetic fields and electricity to transmit words from one person to another, had much conceptual overlap with the séance, which communicated disincarnate messages from the dead through the magnetic field and electricity of the human body, specifically that of a spiritual medium. This parallel was embraced by Spiritualists of the time, who called the séance a spiritual telegraph, and titled a periodical that circulated in the US in the 1850s with the same name.

The majority of Spiritualism’s history in the US and Britain takes paper form: in addition to periodicals like The Spiritual Telegraph, there are books published by The Spiritualist Press and other houses, along with photographed and written documentation of séances by groups like The Ghost Club (British Library Add MS 52258-52273) or by investigators (more on that later). The British Library contains a noteworthy addition to this history: the Dan Zerdin archive, which contains a rare 1934 recording of what was at the time considered the world’s largest séance. The Zerdin recording offers a first-hand, unfiltered experience of the historical Spiritualist movement.

With support from the Eccles Centre, I launched a project to study the archive and transcribe the recorded spirit messages from the séance into another form: telegrams. My idea was to take this documentation from an understudied religious movement and creatively reimagine it, with the goal of disrupting fixed narratives of “archives we are inclined to overlook,” to quote historian Tina Campt. Dominant culture is quick to dismiss the veracity of these spiritual communications, but what happens when we see them in a material form accepted by dominant culture? Perhaps changing the material encounter with an archive can shift our thinking and cultivate space for alternative accounts of experience.

Image 2: Lesley Finn, Tonight is the Beginning (2023) [sourced from BL 1LL0000819, 1LL0000817, and 1LS0000673].

I came to the work not knowing what I would find, expecting to be a bit disturbed. After all, years of watching horror films had taught me to be afraid of voices from the beyond. But what I found was a recording that documented a gathering of people working toward the common end of love, understanding, and community. Joyful messages rise above the static of the record. Fight the good fight. You’ll have all the help you want. Bless you. The 564 people in the London audience laugh and gasp, as do the 36 people participating in the séance on Aeolian Hall’s stage. At one point unexplainable piano chords drift through the recording; the sound is soothing, not haunting.

If contemporary attitudes towards séances and mediums are shaped by fear and othering, the same is true of past attitudes. The shadow of skepticism looms large in the history of Spiritualism, and I glimpsed it often in my research. In the catalogue listing of the Zerdin archive, for example, spirit voices are noted with the grammatical equivalent of a raised eyebrow, the scare quote. In contrast, the Zerdin archive includes a document that lists the people in spirit who communicated through the medium as attendees alongside the living, no distinction whatsoever.

Image 3: Screenshot of British Library Sound and Moving Image Catalogue entries for Dan Zerdin collection.

I wonder about these subtle frames of doubt, how they shape our encounter with the archive. I repeatedly saw scare quotes in my research into other mediums, especially with the American medium who went by the name of Margery. In the decade before the Aeolian Hall séance, Margery visited London and became the subject of an extensive investigation by the Society for Psychical Research. Malcolm Bird, an American parapsychologist, authored a portion of the investigation’s outcomes, including the book “Margery”. Seeing her name on the cover and title page in quotation marks—regardless of how Bird or the publishers intended to use them—primes the reader to approach the material through the lens of doubt.

Image 4: J. Malcolm Bird, "Margery," the Medium. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., [1925]. British Library shelfmark: General Reference Collction 08632.ee.4.

It's hard not to see the skepticism of Spiritualist experience as tethered to gender. Male mediums existed but women were the majority. Male mediums were investigated, but the archives are not filled with that documentation; instead we have accounts of vaginal searches that preceded Margery’s sittings, of photos of her in various restraints that would test her validity. Let’s not forget this was a religion, a belief system. Imagine an archive documenting Catholic mass, the priests required to prove transubstantiation as empirical, scientific fact!

The desire for proof is understandable, but can be limiting and misguiding, especially in the case of connecting with the dead. By rejecting an aim to falsify Spiritualist practices, we might create room for observation and insight that opens rather than shuts down possibility. British Library holding C1080/21 offers a practical tip.¹ Here the medium of the Aeolian Hall séance, Florence Perriman, is asked to describe what it felt like to channel spirit voices. Her reply: “It’s a peculiar sensation at the back of my neck. It seemed to come both from the back of my neck and from the throat—can you imagine a tooth being drawn? Well, it’s just as though something was being drawn out of the back of my neck.” Being alive to sensation, to the peculiar, to our own processes of drawing out—Perriman’s note on communing with the dead sounds like research advice to live by.

References:
Interview with Florence Perriman. 1934?. British Library, Sound and Moving Image shelfmark: C1080/21. 

The Americas team is fortunate to work with some fascinating items that cross our desks for a variety of reasons from exhibition loans to Reader queries. Through the On my desk blog series, we ask the team 3 questions which will give you an insight into the work of curators and cataloguers at the Library and a behind the scenes peek at some of the items in the collections. Today’s post features Hannah Graves, one of the Curators of North American Published Collections (post-1850).

A selection of publications by UEA staff

What is the item?

There is no one item on my desk today. Rather, I have looked through the British Library’s catalogue to bring together publications by staff within the Faculty of Humanities of the University of East Anglia (UEA) focused on the Americas.

Why is it on your desk?

I am new to both the Americas team and the process of making acquisitions for the library. We receive regular lists of titles to consider for purchase. When looking through the spreadsheets for selection prepared by our colleagues, the sheer volume of titles published every year can be overwhelming. It is easy to forget that each individual monograph is a bit miraculous. Reflective of a lifetime’s work, these titles are often researched and written while juggling numerous competing professional demands. So today, the team wishes to celebrate all the staff of UEA, but especially those who have helped advance our understanding of the history and cultures of the Americas. We are grateful for their invaluable contributions, which enrich the British Library’s collection and the Americas research community as a whole.

A closer look at some UEA staff titles

Why is it interesting?

The research portal on UEA’s website allows you to begin to appreciate the scale of contributions made by the academics and creative practitioners within the Faculty of Humanities. Each of the titles I have called up are, of course, interesting in their own right. However, it is when you see them assembled you begin to appreciate the value of a strong faculty. We often perceive researching and writing as solitary pursuits, but academic work is highly collaborative, shaped by predecessors and peers. It is an interesting exercise to gather on my desk some of the work produced by colleagues within the same institution. It crystallises the major contributions of UEA staff in shaping the Americas research community.

Naturally, this is only a slim and subjective selection of some of the items the British Library holds as printed books. Many more titles are held electronically. I would encourage you to use the UEA portal for yourself to find the next article or book for your reading room basket. Or, you could start with some of the following:

• Frederik Byrn Køhler, ed., Chicago: a literary history (2021) held at YC.2022.a.8030
• Thomas Ruys Smith, Deep water: the Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain (2020) held at YD.2020.a.98
• Tessa McWatt, Shame on me: an anatomy of race and belonging (2019) held at YK.2020.A.1784
• Rebecca Fraser, The Mayflower generation: the Winslow family and the fight for the new world (2017) held at YC.2018.a.11495
• Jos Smith, The new nature writing: rethinking the literature of place (2017) held at YC.2017.a.5592
• Tim Snelson, Phantom ladies: Hollywood horror and the home front (2015) held at YC.2016.a.7045
• Malcolm McLaughlin, The long, hot summer of 1967: urban rebellion in America (2014) held at YC.2014.a.4894
• Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Rebecca Tillett, eds., Indigenous bodies: reviewing, relocating, reclaiming (2013) held at YC.2014.a.653
• Rachel Potter, Obscene modernism: literary censorship and experiment, 1900-1940 (2013) held at YC.2015.a.877
• Una Marson, Selected poems, ed. Alison Donnell (2011) held at YC.2012.a.3527
• Alison Donnell, Twentieth-century Caribbean literature: critical moments in Anglophone literary history (2006) held at YC.2006.a.4763
• Steven Hooper, Pacific encounters: art & divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860 (2006) held at YD.2010.b.1173
• Nick Selby, Poetics of loss in the Cantos of Ezra Pound: from modernism to fascism (2005) held at YC.2007.a.6115

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio is Professor of Art at Wellesley College, USA; she was a 2020 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.  

In early 2020 I received word that I had been awarded an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship. I was thrilled, but knew I couldn’t take it any time soon. Travel was all but impossible, the British Library was closed, and my research, on a book project tentatively entitled At Home Abroad: Anne Whitney and American Women Artists in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy, was necessarily stalled. My book is predicated on the fact that, in the late nineteenth century, increasingly regular and affordable steamships and railways brought Americans to and around Europe, and these journeys had a profound influence on how Americans understood, created, and lived with art. Many of these travelers were aspiring women artists seeking freedom from social constrictions as well as the training and contact with art that they could not get at home.

As 2020 turned to 2021, the pandemic continued but vaccines arrived. Refocusing on this project, I realized my book was really two books. A planned chapter on the American artist, author, and philanthropist Esther Frances Alexander (1837-1917), better known as Francesca, the name given to her by John Ruskin, seemed out of place with my other case studies. I decided to turn that chapter into a monograph, now under contract with Lund Humphries with the working title The Art and Life of Francesca Alexander. This is what I researched when I finally took up my Fellowship in spring 2022.

Though not well known today, Francesca Alexander was a celebrity in her time and her story is a compelling narrative at the intersection of art, literature, and history, set in pre-Civil War United States, pre- and post-Risorgimento Italy, and Victorian England. She had no formal training, but her artistic style was indebted to the Renaissance, and to the summers she spent in the Italian countryside. Although she made a number of paintings, her preferred medium was pen and ink. She sold her work, gave it away, and occasionally took commissions, never seeking out an audience but relying on those who came to her. Unusually for an Anglo-American in Italy, she engaged with a large number of Italians during her long residence there, from 1853 to her death in 1917. She and her parents supported Italian independence and they knew prominent figures like the politician Gino Capponi and General Giuseppe Garibaldi; they enjoyed formal balls at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. But the Alexanders were also close to many Italians from the lower social classes who lived in Florence and the surrounding countryside, as well as further afield in the Apennines and the Veneto region, where they spent their summers. Francesca employed these Italians as models, and transcribed and translated their songs and stories. She was deeply charitable and devoted much of her time, as well as the money she earned from selling her art and other funds she solicited from wealthy friends, to assist them.

Her fame resonated on both sides of the Atlantic. American artists, including Thomas Ball, Henry Roderick Newman, and Joseph Lindon Smith, and English artists, including William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, and George Frederick Watts, praised her work and American poets James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier wrote poems about her. This fame only increased after she and her mother (her father had died in 1880) met John Ruskin during his final visit to Florence in 1882. They began a lengthy correspondence; Ruskin shepherded three of Francesca’s manuscripts to publication and celebrated her in his lectures, even comparing her nature studies to those by Leonardo da Vinci.

My analysis of Francesca Alexander establishes her place in artistic and intellectual circles in Florence as well as the United States and England, demonstrating her wide network and contemporary appeal. In addition to Francesca’s own art, publications, and correspondence, my sources include unpublished letters and diaries by her contemporaries and references in guidebooks, magazines, and newspapers. In fact, some of the most valuable resources, for both of my book projects, are the British Library’s collection of Anglo-American newspapers published in Europe. These newspapers were available via subscription for English-language speakers on an extended residence abroad, as well as in hotels, banks, and reading rooms for more itinerant travelers. They provided a wealth of gossip and advertisements with information on the available goods and services that made life in Italy much like life at home. They also regularly published the names and addresses of Anglo-American residents and travelers to facilitate socializing. The Alexanders appeared only infrequently in these lists, and only after they moved to an apartment in the Hotel Bonciani near the church of Santa Maria Novella [see Fig. 1, below].

Fig. 1: Detail from Italian Gazette, 26 January 1895, p. 12. British Library shelfmark: MFM.MF845.

But people knew how to find them; after the Alexanders met Ruskin, and he began to publish her work, she became a true celebrity, a sight to be seen like Florence’s churches and museums. Newspaper articles and advertisements provided updates on her publications and shared information – sometimes erroneously – about her life [Fig. 2, below].

Fig. 2: Detail from 'Letter from Florence' in Roman News: A Weekly Review of Politics, Archaeology, Fine Arts, Literature and Society, 28 March 1883, p. 4.  British Library Shelfmark: NEWS3415.

Francesca’s most popular book, the one referred to in the article in Fig. 2, was her Roadside Songs of Tuscany (1884-5), a compilation of songs and poems known primarily through oral tradition, which she compiled, translated, and illustrated. Ruskin purchased the manuscript from Francesca with great excitement, believing it had the potential to educate readers about Italy and Italians – patronizing as he was about both, and critical about Catholicism – and he was charmed by what he considered Francesca’s innocence and truth to nature. Nevertheless, [see Fig. 3, below], he made considerable editorial interventions before publishing this manuscript, first in ten installments and then in book form. Yet Francesca did not mind these interventions; indeed, her interest in these publications was limited to the funds they brought in to help her with her charitable endeavors.

Fig. 3: Page proofs with notes by John Ruskin from Francesca Alexander, Roadside Songs of Tuscany. Orpington: George Allen, 1884-85. British Library shelfmark: C.66.g.2. See pp.24-25 for this image.

Francesca spent the rest of her life in Florence and although her later years were difficult – she was increasingly blind and became essentially housebound – many of her friends and admirers continued to visit until her death of bronchial pneumonia at age 79 on 20 January 1917. The next day a notice appeared, in Italian, in the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, announcing her death and inviting friends to attend services at her home and then at the Allori cemetery on 23 January [see Fig. 4, below].

Fig. 4: Death notice in La Nazione (Florence), 22 January 1917. British Library shelfmark: MFM.MF836.

A second notice, this time in English, was printed in the 23 January edition with the same information. The bilingual announcements, which would have alerted Italians and Anglo-Americans to her death, indicate Francesca’s unusual position in both communities. Her many years in Florence, and her artistic and charitable activities, provide an excellent example of an American woman leading a rewarding life in Italy during this era.

 

**CALL FOR PAPERS: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 4 AUGUST 2023**

 

Call for papers for a one-day symposium for academics, creatives, activists and community-based researchers to share research, ideas and reflections on the Grenada Revolution.

The British Library | Friday 27 October 2023

In 1979, Grenada became the first and so far only revolutionary socialist nation in the history of the English-speaking world. The Revolution arguably began with the emergence of the New Jewel Movement in 1973, initially a coalition and coalescing of diverse radical Black energies, and ended dramatically and violently with the USA’s invasion of the island ten years later.

This one day symposium, co-organised by Black Cultural Archives and the British Library, invites researchers from across academic disciplines, creative practices, and other forms of knowledge making to present new thinking about the Grenada revolution, its origins and its aftermath.

A selection of British Library collection items on the Grenada Revolution:

• Maurice Bishop, One Caribbean: two speeches (Stoneleigh: Britain-Grenada Friendship Society, [1982?]). YD.2008.a.6793
• Maurice Bishop Chris Searle, Grenada: education is a must (London : Education Committee of the British-Grenadian Friendship Society, 1981). Document Supply 83/00073
• Maurice Bishop, Maurice Bishop speaks: the Grenada revolution 1979-83 (New York: Pathfinder, 1983). YC.1987.a.6465
• Brian Meeks, Caribbean revolutions and revolutionary theory: an assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan Caribbean, 1993). Document Supply 93/04335
• Chris Searle, Grenada: the struggle against destabilization (London: Writers and Readers Publishing, [1984]). Document Supply 96/33780
• Address by Cde. Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of the people's revolutionary government at the opening of the Caribbean Conference of Intellectual Workers, [at] the National Convention Centre, Grand Anse, St. George's, Grenada, November 20th, 1982. (Grenada : [Caribbean Conference of Intellectual Workers], 1982). YA.2003.a.38123

Themes for presentations might include:
- The place of the Grenada Revolution in longer and wider histories of Caribbean and socialist revolutionary movements
- The Revolution in this history of Black political thought
- Grenada and Black Power in the Caribbean
- The transnational entanglements and legacies of the Grenada Revolution
- Literature, music, film and visual art
- The invasion of Grenada and US imperialism
- The Grenadian diaspora in the aftermath of Revolution
- Memory and memorialisation

Contributors will be invited to give a 15 minute presentation based on original research or new ways of understanding the Grenada Revolution, and there will be ample opportunity for shared discussion and reflection. Presentations can be delivered online or in person.

If you have any questions please email [email protected].

If you would like to participate in the symposium, please email a 250 word proposal of your presentation, together with a CV, to [email protected], with 'Grenada Revolution Symposium' in the subject line. Please indicate in your email if you would like to present in person or online.

 

Ben Fried was a 2022 Eccles Visiting Fellow at the British Library; he recently completed his PhD at Cornell University and is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London, where he is working on 'Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures, 1967-1989.'

I came to the British Library in search of publishing archives—the records of how books come into the world and reach their readers. As an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow, I was beginning a new project on 'migrant editors,' on the postwar immigrants to London who created and reinvented the capital’s literary institutions. How did migrant-led publishing houses and magazines develop through the decades of decolonization and shape later twentieth-century fiction, both British and more broadly Anglophone? I was hungry to understand the extent to which these editors harnessed and redirected London’s cultural and commercial power. I wanted to learn how their own hybrid identities influenced the writers they cultivated and the works they released. I knew the answers lay in letters, memos, pleas for money, and the margins of manuscripts.

And so I spent my month sifting through three archives in particular: the Virago Press records,¹ Carmen Callil’s personal archive,² and the files of Granta magazine (which are still being catalogued).

Promotional pin badge for Virago Press; part of the Virago Press Archive (Add MS 88904).

The famed feminist Virago Press was founded in 1973 by the Australian Callil and later led by a Canadian, Lennie Goodings. Sitting in both the Manuscripts and Maps Reading Room, I opened folder after folder of author correspondence, business plans, reader reports, all of them illustrating the fates of individual works and the larger sweep of an upstart publisher’s progress. Callil died just a few months ago, in October 2022, and her courage (not to mention her crackling wit and energy) is everywhere apparent in these archives. The picture they paint is not a solitary portrait, however, but a scene of collective literary labour, illuminated by the sparks that fly off creative relationships. Callil was a necessary node in a much wider network of readers, professional and lay, mobilizing to bring women’s stories to the centre of literary life.

Take, for instance, the folders devoted to Angela Carter, perhaps the most emblematic of Virago’s contemporary authors.³ They reveal a Carter who was as important a reader to Virago as she was a writer. You can track not only the agonizingly slow development of Carter’s Sadeian Woman (1978)—a study of the Marquis de Sade and 'the culturally determined nature of women'⁴—but her backstage interventions on other writers’ behalf. She submitted reports on manuscripts; she connected aspiring authors to an ambitious publisher. She acted as a go-between, and practically a second editor, for her former student Pat Barker, passing along Barker’s first novel with twelve pages of luminously insightful notes. On 8 January 1981, Callil replied that 'I’m deeply grateful to you for getting the book to me; I’ve offered for it and asked at the same time that they will let me work with her incorporating your alterations and suggestions.'⁵ Barker’s revised Union Street was published in 1982 and quickly became one of Virago’s biggest sellers, proof that a press famous for reprinting forgotten classics could also launch startlingly original fiction.

Granta was similarly electrified by a fresh arrival’s energy. A venerable undergraduate magazine at Cambridge which ran out of steam in the 1970s, it was relaunched by the American graduate student Bill Buford in 1979. Initially a channel for American literary influence—its first issue purveyed 'New American Writing' and its third proclaimed 'The End of the English Novel'—it became over the course of the 1980s a much broader magazine for writing in English, one that has exhilarated generations of writers and readers. The Granta records open a window onto the alchemical process of bringing an issue together. Along with his co-founders Peter de Bolla and Jonathan Levi, Buford began by working his academic connections and wielding his university’s clout, coaxing established authors to contribute and letting would-be writers down gently, hustling for grant money and blowing past unpaid bills. Given such ingredients and such results, it’s rather fitting that Buford followed up his celebrated editorial career with an equally ravenous second act as a cooking-mad writer.

Letter to Granta from Susan Sontag, 13 February 1979; copyright, The Estate of Susan Sontag.

One of the most famous of all Granta issues—the Spring 1983 number devoted to 'The Best of Young British Novelists'—shows how vision and opportunism, readerly recognition and marketing flair, could combine in the editorial act. Buford neither initiated nor chose this list of promising young writers. Rather, the 'Best of British' began as a promotional ploy by the Book Marketing Council. But Buford and Granta seized the potential of the list as an issue-shaping, generation-defining, audience-enticing format.⁶ They built on the Council’s own marketing push, selected excerpts from each author’s work, and made the list palpable to the reading public. Buford’s textual suggestions were not universally welcome. William Boyd embraced the idea of shifting a story’s pronouns, while Maggie Gee 'rejected every one of the [editor’s] 47 emendations.'⁷ Nevertheless, the magazine reaped the reward. Its cachet as a cultural arbiter immeasurably enhanced, Granta has returned to the format every ten years to anoint a new cohort (its latest 'Best of Young British Novelists' issue dropped just weeks ago).

I think of editors like Callil and Buford as readers with power—the power to select, revise, and reject. Editorial reading can be a generous force, releasing the creativity of others and realizing the potential in the text. By the same token, it may also be damaging, turning the tap off as well as on. Insofar as they can be recovered in archives such as those held by the British Library, the editor’s contributions tell us a great deal about writers, readers, and publishing institutions—about where and how power and creativity intersect.

Notes

1. Add MS 88904.
2. Add MS 889178.
3. In the 1970s and 80s, Virago was primarily known for reprint publishing: recovering and reissuing the works of neglected women writers. The Virago Modern Classics series, with its beloved green spines, introduced a generation to the books of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith, Christina Stead, Rosamond Lehmann, and many, many others. See D-M Withers, Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021).
4. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (London: Virago 1978), 1.
5. Add MS 88904/1/60.
6. See Myles Oldershaw, “Granta and the Advent of the Contemporary,” Journal of Modern Literature 43.1 (Fall 2019), pp. 150-168.
7. Deposit 11183 L. in 44.

 

Bobby C. Martin was a 2021 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

I am not a researcher in any traditional sense of the word. I am a visual artist—my practice consists of primarily painting and printmaking. So even applying for an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship was an act of stepping outside my comfort zone. When I received word that I had been accepted, it made me realize even more that I had no idea what I was getting into. My non-art faculty colleagues in the U.S. (researchers all) were so impressed that I was going to be able to spend several weeks in London at the British Library doing research. All the while, I was battling imposter syndrome—was I even going to be allowed in the building? What was I supposed to do when I got there? How does one go about doing ‘real’ research? Are there YouTube videos for that?

I can now report that all my fears and doubts were totally unfounded. The Eccles Centre staff were incredibly helpful and generous with their time and knowledge and the Library’s Maps team went out of its way both to make space for my untrained questions and to make the collection as accessible as possible. The process of requesting materials was fairly painless to learn and actually became wonderfully exciting as I stumbled upon many items that were well beyond what I had expected or even knew existed. I actually started getting into this whole ‘research’ thing! The time spent in the various Reading Rooms—touching, smelling, experiencing historic maps and materials—allowed me the opportunity to deeply explore items that have already made a tangible difference in the way I approach my art practice.

Bobby C. Martin: Granny in North America. Encaustic and collage on antique map mounted on birch panel, 2022. 17.25 x 13.75 inches. Image, artist's own.

I came to the Library (I thought) to research the Library’s map collections, specifically maps related to the Southeastern United States. Georgia and Alabama were part of my Mvskoke tribe’s ancestral homelands. Ultimately, I found much more than maps—books, hand-written journals and photographs that helped flesh out my research in ways I hadn’t anticipated. These materials have already found their way into my current work, and informed a large mural project I recently completed that drew from much of the material I discovered during my fellowship.

Section of installed mural with Alex Martin (left) and Bobby C. Martin, Council Oak Healthcare facility, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Image, artist's own.

While I might have been able find the material I needed for this large history mural project online, the research experience of being in the presence of the actual documents themselves deeply informed every design decision I made, and the resulting installation is a work that would not have been as rich and personally satisfying otherwise.

Section of installed mural with Stephanie Martin (left) and Bobby C. Martin, Council Oak Healthcare facility, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Image, artist's own.

So does my experience as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow make me an official ‘researcher’? I don’t rightly know the answer, but I do know that it was a game-changer for the way I approach my art practice going forward. I have a new appreciation both for the wealth of material that is available to anyone with a British Library Reader Pass and its accessibility for even the most unskilled of researchers. I appreciate the desire of the Library staff to share their amazing storehouse with all comers. I have a new-found interest in going down rabbit trails that lead to the most unexpected of discoveries that then find their way into my work. Poring over (and enjoying the smell of) centuries-old documents and hand-engraved maps brings me a real (if unexpected) joy. If this is what research is all about, then I am most pleased to call myself a researcher. Thank you to the Eccles Centre and the British Library for the opportunity!

To see images of new work and the mural project that was informed and influenced by my British Library  research, please visit my Instagram page @bobbycartist.

 

 

Suelin Low Chew Tung is a Grenada-based artist and was a 2020 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

During my Eccles Fellowship research at the British Library in summer 2022, I came across a familiar image: a print of a stipple engraving and etching of a memorial at the Anglican Church in the Town of St. George, the capital of Grenada (Fig. 1). 

Fig. 1: Print of the Westmacott memorial at the Anglican church, St George, Grenada. British Library shelfmark: Cartographic Items Maps K.Top.123.113

This engraving by Anthony Cardon is of a 1799 design by Richard Westmacott, part of King George III’s Topographical Collection, donated to the British nation by George IV. The accompanying description in summary reads, ‘Monument erected by the Legislature of Grenada to the memory of the Inhabitants... who were murdered at Mount Quaqua, 8th of April, 1795. By R. Westmacott, Jun. engraved by A. Cardon’ (British Library shelfmark: Cartographic Items Maps K.Top.123.113). Westmacott’s monument is described as being an  ‘inscribed rectangular tablet crowned with urn and garland between female personifications of the Island of Grenada kneeling at its feet, flanked by two oval tablets also inscribed and decorated with military regalia, palm leaves, laurel and sugar cane hanging from chains.’ 

The church housing this memorial - St George Anglican Parish Church - sits on the site of the French-built St. James Catholic Church, confiscated in 1784 by the Protestant government for use as an Anglican church.¹  Time, Hurricane Ivan, and recent renovations at the church, have collectively reduced the middle section of this memorial to rubble (Fig. 2, below):

Fig. 2: Post-Hurricane Ivan damage to Westmacott memorial in St. George Anglican Parish Church, Grenada. Image, author's own.

There has been no such remembrance for participants of Fedón's Rebellion - the 'excitable Bandiitti', as inscribed on the central tablet - named in the Trial of Attainers record book of 1796. My two-part proposal honours both the participants of the Rebellion, as well as their descendants, many of whom make up contemporary Grenadian society.

2025 will mark 230 years since the start of this Rebellion, led and controlled by Julien Fédon, a free person of colour and an enslaver. Fédon's involvement with the Rebellion that later bore his name had little to do with ending slavery. Grenada’s French population—white, free people of colour, and Blacks—had suffered religious, social and political persecution under the British from the handover of Grenada in 1763. The Rebellion, which lasted until 19 June 1796, was primarily for the reassertion of their civil rights and the reinstatement of Republican French rule.² Most of the enslaved people who dared take their freedom did so on the urging of Fédon, but some chose not to fight with him and most not to participate.³

In the end, the ‘Brigands War’ as it was called by the British, decimated Grenada’s agricultural base, made traitors of the people who rallied behind Fédon’s command, and caused the deaths of between 4,000 and 7,000 enslaved people, hundreds of British soldiers, and 47 British hostages, including Lieutenant Governor Home who was executed at Fédon’s Camp.  According to J. A. Martin, an engraved stone pillar on Morne Fédon, or Fédon’s mountain, installed sometime in the 1970s by Premier Eric Gairy, is the only visible artefact marking Fédon’s Camp, (Fig. 3, below):

Fig. 3: Stone pillar denoting site of Fédon’s Camp in 1795, Grenada. Image by J. A. Martin.

In mid-February 2023, I projected the names of the ‘rebels’ who were captured, deported/exiled or executed, onto the ruins of Westmacott's memorial.  The rebels' names are listed according to race and class in the Court of Oyer and Terminer for Trial of Attained Traitors record book [1796] (BL Shelfmark EAP295/2/6/1). The white French names start at Augustine Chevalier DeSuze (executed), and the names of the free people of colour and other rebels begin with Julien Fédon (unknown end).

For the projections, I decided to arrange the names alphabetically—single names, executed rebels, and then all of the names, alphabetically by surname. This arrangement introduces democracy into the listing and makes family names easier to locate. The names were projected across the baptismal font fronting the memorial (see Fig. 4). Serendipitously, the font was swathed with red, green and gold fabric to mark 7 February, Grenada’s Independence, with entwined stalks of sugarcane as part of the decoration. In capturing Grenada’s national colours and the sugarcane, the projections link the French population then fighting for independence from British rule and contemporary Grenada’s independence from British rule. The font symbolises the Church of England in Grenada as keeper of that knowledge and rebirth.

Fig. 4: Projected names across the baptismal font at the St. George Anglican Parish Church, Grenada. Image, author's own.

I have also proposed that the church install two permanent memorial tablets at either side of the existing ruins, plus a printed history on a nearby plaque to represent a more balanced narrative. Side tablets would be engraved with the names from the Attained Traitors book, in alphabetical surname order. The left tablet would be crowned with a jar of earth from Morne Fédon and the right tablet would be similarly crowned with a small boulder or other artefact from that location; a counterfoil to the Westmacott sculpture (Fig. 5, below). This addition will be sacred to the memory of the participants of the Rebellion, some of whose descendants live in villages named after persons in the Attained Traitors book—a more meaningful representation of their history than the Westmacott monument acknowledges.

Fig. 5: Proposed memorial at the St. George Anglican Parish Church, Grenada. Image, author's own.

The 1796 record book branded the participants in the Rebellion as traitors. While the names of a handful of the participating enslaved people are known, the majority remain nameless. At a time when former European colonies, including Grenada, are calling for reparations, I think a reparation of Grenada’s historical memory is also required.

Notes: 

1. J. A. Martin,  A~Z of Grenada Heritage. New and Revised. Gully Press, Brooklyn; 2022.  
2. T. Murphy, A reassertion of Rights: Fédon’s Rebellion, Grenada, 1795-96, La Révolution française, 2018 (14) at https://journals.openedition.org/lrf/2017#entries.
3. Martin,  2022. 

 

 

Naomi Krüger is a senior lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire and author of the novel May; she was a 2021 Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library.

My current research project is a historical novel set in 1842 in two very different cities: Nauvoo, Illinois and Preston, Lancashire. These places, though geographically distant, are linked by the arrival of Mormonism and its turbulent growth, movement, and ongoing legacy.

Growing up as a Mormon in Preston, I was acutely aware of this history. I regularly heard stories about the missionaries who crossed the Atlantic, arriving in England in 1837 and travelling straight from Liverpool to Preston due to a family connection. I was told of their astonishing success in baptising converts, finding an unexpectedly warm welcome in Lancashire, the Ribble Valley and beyond. Subsequently, there were thousands of baptisms, and these new members were very quickly encouraged to emigrate and join with the American Saints in Nauvoo – a growing city on the banks on the Mississippi. By 1844 over four thousand British converts had made this journey, making them a significant minority in a city that was about to face new challenges after the death of the founding prophet Joseph Smith.

While I was proud of living somewhere that had such historical significance, I also became aware that my access to stories of these early converts in Lancashire was circumscribed. In the official narratives found in lesson manuals and church histories, these people usually became nameless, swallowed into a wider mass of emigrants, and later assimilated into the ideal image of hardy pioneers who made the trek west to Utah. In this oversimplified narrative, Preston is Babylon - a place of smoke, corruption and exploitation - and Nauvoo is Zion - the land of promise, a place of hope, community, and righteousness. Missionaries are unfailingly heroic, intelligent, and filled with power. Converts, on the other hand, are poor, humble, and self-sacrificing.

As a writer and researcher, I am eager to move beyond this. What about the converts who stayed in Preston because they couldn’t afford to go, or wouldn’t make the sacrifice? What about those who lost their faith part-way through the journey or found that Zion was not exactly what they expected when they got there? What would it have felt like to be a missionary who began to doubt? How did the social, economic, and religious conditions of Preston at that time, intersect with the desire so many people had to start a new life elsewhere?

My novel-in-progress follows a herbal physician converted to Mormonism and trying to establish himself in Nauvoo. He finds hope and spiritual sustenance there but is also drawn into a web of secrets, rituals, and unspoken rules. When he is challenged by the charismatic prophet to sacrifice his growing medical practice, travel to England, and persuade the converts in Lancashire to emigrate back to Zion, he discovers a town divided. Preston is still reeling from the aftermath of a massacre of striking millworkers and simultaneously preparing for a lavish, once-every-twenty-year celebration of civic pride. As he grapples with cultural differences, and his unsuccessful attempts to convert a woman still bitter after being left behind by a family member who has previously emigrated, disturbing dreams of Nauvoo begin to disrupt his present calling and his still fragile faith is put under increasing amounts of pressure.

The Eccles Centre's Mormon Americana bibliographic guide has been an invaluable tool for me as I explore these questions and develop my fictional world. From primary sources like pamphlets, hymnbooks, and scriptures, to a wealth of secondary texts that detail the challenges of life in Nauvoo as a frontier city, I have been able to gather important context - details that will not only inform my world-building, but even, in some cases, change the actions and decisions that my characters make.

Seeing illustrated plans of the Nauvoo temple during my research, for example, sparked new curiosity about ritual baptisms that has led to the development of an important subplot in the novel. 

Fig. 1: Thomas Carter, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement, 2015. British Library shelfmark: YC.2015.b.1139.

Reading letters written by women in Nauvoo discussing death and doctrine alongside recipes and household tips has enabled me to create a more detailed and textured picture of life in an unfamiliar place and time.

Handling a well-loved British hymnbook covered in the owner’s urgent annotations reminded me of the importance of honouring sacred experiences of faith as much as I seek to complicate them.

Fig. 2: B. Young, P. Pratt, and F. Taylor, A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Europe, 1849. British Library shelfmark: 3437.a.16.

 

Fig. 3: B. Young, P. Pratt, and F. Taylor, A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Europe, 1849. British Library shelfmark: 3437.a.16.

The challenge of writing historical fiction is to negotiate a balance between research and imagination, the needs of a story alongside the demands of historical evidence. I am still in the middle of this complex process, but I have no doubt that the notes and images I have gathered from my time as an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow will continue to find their way into the creative work in unexpected and transformative ways.