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MY RESEARCH HISTORY AND INTERESTS,

PAST AND PRESENT

 

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       My true research experience (and mission) began in December 1997 when I traveled to the UK to work in the Angus Library and the Bristol Baptist College Library on a search for connections between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and some Bristol Baptists. I had been intrigued by that topic of research after I delivered a paper that August at the Wordsworth Conference at Grasmere (my first trip out of the United States), a paper on Coleridge and a hyper-Calvinist reading of the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I found some connections in his letters and I wanted to see if there was more to be found. I did not find much on that first trip other than the fact that Joseph Cottle of Bristol was a Baptist (that had apparently escaped virtually every contemporary Romantic scholar!), and from that one piece of evidence I became addicted to archival research. The result has been nearly 60 articles and 12 books since 2000, a remarkable achievement for someone who had never conducted archival research prior to that 1997 visit, nor ever held a manuscript of any kind, let alone transcribed one.

       Needless to say, I continued to return year after year, sometimes twice in the same year, working a second (and sometimes a third) teaching job for many years to support my research. My efforts have proved a most rewarding experience for me, for they have allowed me to explore an amazing range of scholarly subjects in scores of archives in the UK and the USA that I would never have anticipated doing prior to that fortuitous trip in 1997. My Ph.D. was in the early American Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), and my teaching since coming to Georgia Southern University in 1989 has been restricted to Early American courses (up too 1865), and a World Literature course for General Education requirements, so I was not prepared by my previous work for anything related to Baptist history and Romantic studies. Since 1997, in spite of my research and publication record, I have only taught one course (2016) in British Nonconformist Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century. Despite my isolation as a teacher from my research, I have continued to commit myself to my work in dissenting history and women’s studies, resulting in several ground-breaking areas of research in the late 17th through the first half of the 19th century in

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• British Baptist history, mainly within the Particular Baptists and the rise of Evangelical Calvinism.

 

• Nonconformist writers, especially women writers and primarily those emerging from among the Baptists or connected to the Baptists in some fashion.

 

• Unitarian writers connected with political reform in the 1790s, primarily Benjamin Flower (1755-1829), the radical newspaper editor at Cambridge and Harlow, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), the voluminous diarist and letter writer, and his long-standing friend and correspondent Mary Hays (1759-1843), the radical novelist, writer of periodical essays and historical works and moral fiction for young and working-class readers, and prolific biographer of women who was raised a Particular Baptist and then became an outspoken Unitarian after 1790.

 

• and more recently, dissenting literary and print culture, recovering the lives, imprint histories, and, in some cases, the writings of several dissenting figures, both men (some were also ministers) and women, who operated as printers and booksellers in the last half of the 18th century and into the early decades of the 19th century, including the Baptists Martha Gurney (1733-1816) and her brother Joseph (1744-1815), Mary Lewis (1703-91) the Moravian, William Fox (. 1770-95) the radical pamphlet writer and abolitionist, and Joseph Johnson (1738-1809), the leading dissenting bookseller of the 18th century.

 

      I am most grateful to those who have supported my work over the years, especially librarians and archivists who have graciously taken of their time and labors and allowed me access to the collections that, in some instances, has been nothing short of unprecedented. Among these individuals are Roger Hayden, John Briggs, Faith Bowers, David Wykes, Sue Mills, Susan Halloran, Emma Walsh, Emily Burgoyne, Michael Brealey, Isabel Rivers, Michael Haykin, Duncan Wu, Nicholas Roe, Fred Berwick, Marilyn Gaull, Graham Davidson, Gina Luria Walker, Julia B. Griffin, Douglas Thomson, James Vigus, Felicity James, Tessa Whitehouse, Jonathan Yeager, to name just a few.

        Since 1997, as I have engaged in my explorations of these various topics I have been fortunate to work in some 75 libraries and archives, including

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• The Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, the premier library in the world for the study of Baptist history, where I have waded through scores of boxes of manuscripts and rare books, as well as priceless church books, the records and letters of the Baptist Missionary Society, numerous 18th century Baptist church books, and, more importantly for my research, the massive collections of manuscripts and rare printed materials related to Baptist women writers held by the Angus Library. The most important of these is the impressive Steele Collection of manuscripts and rare books and pamphlets relating to Anne Cator Steele (1689-1760), Anne Steele (1717-78), Mary Steele (1753-1813), Mary Scott (1751-93), and Jane Attwater (1753-1843). Several other collections relating to other women writers affiliated with the Steele Circle reside as well in the Angus Library, most particularly the collections of manuscript poetry and letters by Maria Grace Saffery (1772-1858) and her sister, Anne Whitaker (1774-1865). My work in the Angus Library on the manuscript and printed works of these women (with some materials held as well by the Bodleian, at Record Offices and History Centres in Bristol, Leicester, and Chippenham, and at the Bristol Baptist College Library) led to a major publication in 2011, my 8-volume series, (London: Pickering & Chatto), of which volumes 1 and 2 (on the poetry, prose, and letters of Anne Steele) were edited by my colleague at GSU, Julia B. Griffin. Further work on four of these women – Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman – led to my monograph in 2015, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

 

• The Bodleian Library, where, besides combing through many collections in search of Baptist letters, I spent some four years (2101-13) calendaring the Reeves Collection; it was uncatalogued at that time and rescued from oblivion by my timely appearance in the office of the Librarian of Western Manuscripts, an account of which can be found in the Introduction to Volume 5 of . The Reeves Collection contained a substantial amount of manuscript poems, letters, and rare printed works relating to many of the women connected with the Steele Circle and Maria Grace Saffery. Over many visits I calendared and collated these materials with their counterparts in the Reeves, Steele, Attwater, Saffery, and Whitaker Collections within the archives of the Angus Library, an effort that resulted in a printed calendar of all the materials in both libraries that now sits on a shelf the Western Manuscripts reading room in the New Bodleian, one of the few calendars of a collection belonging to the Bodleian Library created by someone not on the library’s staff.

 

• The Bristol Baptist College Library, where I have worked on my first research trip in December 1997 and held eighteenth-century manuscript letters for the first time, resulting in an addiction that I have never satisfied to this day. My reason for working there was to explore some connections between the Romantic figure Samuel Taylor Coleridge and some Bristol Baptists, an area of research that, from that first trip, led me to the Angus and the British Library and from which all my publications since have been indebted. My work on Baptist history at the Angus Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Bristol Baptist College Library, and many other libraries, has resulted in 9 articles in the Baptist Quarterly, and in relation to Coleridge and his Baptist connections, another 19 articles, including two articles involving a previously unknown manuscript letter and annotation in a book by Coleridge, one appearing in the and the other in .

 

• The British Library, where I have worked since every year since 1997 (I was privileged to work in the British Museum for two days that year prior to its move to the King’s Cross location in 1998, where I worked shortly after it opened). The experience of working with manuscripts and rare books in the British Library, meeting friends there for coffee and robust conversations about our research projects, and attending events hosted by the Library has been one of my most cherished experiences during my research trips to the UK over the years. As an outgrowth of my work on Mary Hays, I discovered at the British Library in 2016 the previously unidentified novel by Mary Hays’s younger sister Elizabeth Hays Lanfear (1765/6-1825), a novel that has resided in the Library’s collections since the nineteenth century but was never located by a scholar of Mary Hays due to the authorship of the book appearing under her married name of “Lanfear” and not Hays (Elizabeth wrote the novel . 1796-7, prior to her marriage, but it was not published until 1819, long after her marriage). That led to the publication in 2019 of Lanfear’s novel, (London: Routledge), co-edited by Felicity James of the University of Leicester.

 

• The four articles on Mary and Elizabeth Hays (besides the edition of ) and my website, an online storehouse of material (one of the first of its kind) solely devoted to the life and career of an important woman novelist and writer of the Romantic Era.

 

• Dr. Williams’s Library, London, where I have worked through mountains of manuscripts within the Henry Crabb Robinson Archive, as well as materials, rare books, and rare church histories relating to religious dissent in England during the 18th and early 19th centuries, including a rare and virtually unknown collection of manuscript material belonging to the Congregational Library that were once part of the papers of the Baptist minister, John Rippon (1751-1836). This work has resulted in numerous articles, an online edition of (2013) and (2014) and will eventually result in the publication of Robinson’s (OUP) with James Vigus.

 

• The John Rylands University Library of Manchester, where I uncovered over a span of some five years (1999-2004) more than 300 Baptist letters in the Thomas Raffles Collections and the Methodist Archives not previously identified as Baptist letters. This work led to my second book,

 

• The National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, where I found the 121 letters that passed between Benjamin Flower, the first major British Romantic figure that I explored in depth, and his wife, Eliza Gould Flower (1770-1810), from 1794 (they were not married until 1800) to 1808. This work resulted in my first book,

 

• Duke University, Special Collections, David M. Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where I came across the diary of Dorothy Smith of Newburyport (solely by accident) during a search for Baptist letters in 2002.

 

• The Pennsylvania Historical Society Library, Philadelphia, where in the past few years I have discovered hundreds of letters (one by Mary Hays) by women writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and by British dissenting ministers, especially Baptists, all of which will soon be written about in forthcoming articles.

 

Below is a list of all the libraries, special collections, and archives in which I have the privilege, honor, and joy to work since 1997.

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Libraries in the UK

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1. Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford

2. Bristol Baptist College Library, Bristol

3. Bristol Central Library, Bristol

4. Bristol Record Office, Bristol

5. Bodleian Library, Oxford

6. Rhodes House, Library and Archives, Oxford

7. Tate Library, Man­chester Harris College, Oxford

8. Oxford Central Library, Oxford

9. British Library, London

10. National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), Kew, London

11. Dr. Williams’s Library, London

12. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London

13. Lambeth Palace, London

14. The Newspaper Library, London

15. Guildhall Library, London

16. Senate House Library, University of London

17. Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, University of London

18. Family History Library, London

19. London Metropolitan Archives, London

20. Society of Genealogists Library, London

21. Royal Holloway, University of London, Archives and Special Collections

22. Mile End Library, Queen Mary University of London

23. Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle, London

24. Evangelical Library, London

25. Moravian Archives, Moravian Church House, Muswell Hill, London

26. Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich

27. Westminster Library Archives, London

28. Camden Library and Archives, London

29. Islington History Centre, London

30. Hackney Archives, London

31. Tower Hamlets Library, London

32. Southwark Local History Library and Archive, London

33. Lambeth Archives, London

34. Clapham Library, London

35. Cambridge University Library, Special Collections and Rare Books, Cambridge, Cambridge

36. Cambridgeshire Record Office, Cambridge

37. Cambridge Central Library, Cambridge

38. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Special Collections

39. Fitzwilliam Museum, Archives, Cambridge

40. Pembroke College, Cambridge, Special Collections

41. John Rylands Library, Manchester

42. University of Manchester Library, Manchester

43. Central Library, Manchester, UK

44. Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere

45. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales

46. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

47. Somerset Record Office, Taunton, UK

48. Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham, UK

49. Devon Record Office, Exeter, UK

50. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, UK

51. South Molton and District Museum, South Molton, UK

52. Northampton­shire Record Office, Northampton, UK

 

Libraries in North America

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1. McGill University, Special Collections, Montreal, Canada

2. Pratt Library, Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada

3. University of British Columbia, Rare Books and Special Collections, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Vancouver, Canada

4. Duke University, Special Collections, Durham, NC

5. University of Kansas, Spencer Research Library, Lawrence, KS

6. New York Public Library, Berg Collection, NYC

7. New York Public Library, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, NYC

8. New York Historical Society, Library and Archives, NYC

9. Yale University, Special Collections, Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT

10. Historical Society of Old Newbury, Cushing House Museum, Newburyport, MA

11. University of South Carolina, Cooper Library, Columbia, SC

12. South Carolina Historical Library, Columbia, SC

13. Charleston Library Society, Charleston, SC

14. South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC

15. Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA

16. Emory University, Pitts Theology Library and Special Collections, Candler School of Theology, Atlanta, GA

17. American Baptist Historical Society Archives, Atlanta, GA

18. University of Florida, George A. Smathers Library, Gainesville, FL

19. Mercer University, Jack Tarver Library, Macon, GA

20. Mercer University, Monroe F. Swilley, Jr., Library, Atlanta, GA

21. William Jewell College, William E. Partee Center for Baptist Historical Studies, Curry Library, Liberty, MO

22. University of North Florida, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, Jacksonville, FL

23. Georgia Southern University, Zach S. Henderson Library, Statesboro, GA