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The Thomason Collection: Rebuttal to Michael Mendle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
I read with great interest Michael Mendle's critique of my work in dating pamphlets from the English Civil War. Obviously, this is an area where honest men may disagree, particularly since so many of our conclusions rest upon different interpretations of an ambiguous manuscript. Nevertheless, I find that I must begin by saying that Professor Mendle has entirely missed the main purpose of my research, and has therefore misconstrued my methodology.
As I wrote in my original article, my chief concern was availability:
For example, how soon after an event could a pamphlet be available? How many pamphlets were actually being printed (and when) as opposed to what was being entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company of London? In other words, what could a concerned citizen find for sale at the bookstalls on a given morning?
The demands of these questions imposed their own limitations, and pointed to their own solutions. Only two day-by-day lists of publications exist: the Thomason manuscript and the registers of the Stationers' Company. The latter is clearly insufficiently complete for the task at hand. Moreover, it is well-known that entry in the Stationers' Registers is not a guarantee of actual publication. We are left with the Thomason manuscript as a difficult but unique source for the answers that I sought.
Exactly when the two existing manuscripts were compiled is an unanswerable question. They may have been compiled, as Professor Mendle suggests, when the collection was nearly complete. They may represent a fair copy of notes that Thomason had been keeping all along. It is inescapable, however, that the manuscripts preserve the order in which Thomason obtained the tracts, and do so with far greater accuracy than either the printed British Museum catalogue or the present bound volumes.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1990
References
1 Greenberg, Stephen J., “Dating Civil War Pamphlets, 1641–1644,” Albion 20, 3 (Fall 1988): 387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Mendle seems to use the term “acquisitions list” to define a list made day-to-day and never recopied. I see no purpose for this limitation, as long as the original order is maintained. This is clearly the case here.
3 I find this terminology to be more precise and useful than Mendle's “place-dates.” However, merely knowing that Pamphlet A is relatively older than Pamphlet B is of little or no use here.
4 See Mendle's note 17 supra.
5 Most of the absolute dates for the early items are actually the date when a sermon or speech was delivered, rather than printed, which further limits their usefulness. This sort of dating occurs sporadically throughout the manuscript and the printed catalogue.
6 The British Library annotations are useful, but they are neither comprehensive nor consistent.
7 Nelson, Carolyn and Seccombe, Matthew, eds., British Newspapers and Periodicals 1641–1700: A Short-title Catalogue of Serials…. (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. Publication of this work came too late for its valuable insights to be included in my original article.
8 Certainly they were not used to obscure the data, as Mendle seems to imply.
9 I cannot help being struck by Mendle's blanket dismissal of my figures, since, in his own words, he was “unable to consult the Thomason manuscript” during the preparation of his remarks.
10 Nelson, and Seccombe, , British Newspapers and Periodicals, p. 622.Google Scholar
11 As Mendle notes, even the number of missing tracts is a matter of controversy.