Ellen, a pre-Civil War African/Native American

Newly acquired:

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge by Francis Harriet Green (Providence, 1847).


According to the late great Sidney Rider (1833-1917), bookseller and antiquarian of Providence, Francis Harriet Whipple Green (1805-1878) always chose "the unpopular side of every question in Rhode Island." From 1830 on she supported one cause after another--temperance, labor, suffrage, abolition, spiritualism, etc.

Her most popular work was the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (1838) followed by Elleanor's Second Book (1839), the actual story of the sufferings of a mixed-race woman:

"She was born at Warwick, R.I., March 26, 1785. Her paternal grandfather was a native African. He was indeed, with his family, to come on board and American slaver, under pretence of trade."

Tricked into slavery, the man, his wife, and four children suffer the "middle passage" and are sold on the auction block. Elleanor's father, Robin, becomes Robin Eldridge, who later enlists to fight in the American Revolution (and therefore gain his freedom). Before enlisting he marries Hannah Prophet, daughter of Mary Fuller, a Native American of the Narragansett tribe, who dies at 102 in the year 1780.

Elleanor eventually became a resourceful and pioneering Rhode Island entrepreneur who used the proceeds of her successful cleaning business to buy real estate. However, during a serious illness much of her property was essentially stolen from her. Representing herself in court she reached an out-of-court settlement and was able to reclaim her properties at an expense subsidized in part by this memoir, originally printed in two parts in 1838 & 1839. Eldridge's memoir is one of the few narratives of the life of pre-Civil War free black women.

Derick De Deer* Fails the Hunt

Just acquired!
These statutes (printed in Amsterdam in 1843) form the articles of association of the Dutch Whaling Company, which operated under a government-granted monopoly. This apparently did no good, as almost every Dutch whaling voyage in search of the sperm whale in the south failed to repay its initial investment. According to Men and Whales by Richard Ellis (1991):

"One of the least known--and least successful--entries into the southern whale fishery was the Dutch. Representing a long tradition of northern whaling which stretched back to the early seventeenth century, the burghers of the Netherlands made a feeble attempt to join the sperm whale sweepstakes in the Southern Ocean . . . It [later] appeared that whatever whale oil was going to be used in Holland would be delivered there by Yankee whalers."

*A free copy of Logbooks & Leviathans (a pamphlet about out Nicholson Collection) will be sent to anyone who knows the significance of the title of this post.

Coming soon: Issue #2 of the Occasional Nuggets

By the time Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form, Harriett Beecher Stowe had been a professional writer for two decades. Her husband and seven children depended on the income she generated through essays, sketches and stories submitted initially to publications like Western Monthly, the Cincinnati Chronicle, and The Evangelist. Later she would appear in Godey’s Lady’s Book along with contemporaries Edgar Allen Poe and William Gilmore Simms. “If you see my name coming out everywhere,” she wrote to her friend, Mary Dutton, in 1838, “you may be sure of one thing, that I do it for the pay.”

“Reader,” urged the Morning Star of Dover, in 1852, “buy Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Go after it, send for it by mail, send some way, any way, only get it. By all means do not go out of this world without having read ‘the Story of the Age.’”

This issue will feature a discussion of the publication of the first edition of UTC, as well as a list of the dozens of translations we have in the library, evidence of the book as a global phenomenon.

The sky is falling!

Or rather, the roof. Never let it be said that library work is dull. Today a two-foot-square section of my ceiling collapsed on part of the Wetmore collection (children's books), with some (fortunately) minor damage--it looks worse than it is.

The sky is blue, the day is hot, no rain anywhere, but water soaked through my ceiling and the plaster fell. Apparently a hose coming off a condenser came loose, and the water which was supposed to drain away simply pooled and did what water does, seeking a downward path.

"Know your building," we were told by the rare books curator in library school, who took us all around the library, into machine rooms and steam tunnels and even up to the roof.

Indeed. Protecting these materials is the goal, so the building is their outer perimeter.

A True Believer

Just acquired an edition of the New England Primer (see my previous post for a further discussion of this work's place in early America, here: http://pplspeccoll.blogspot.com/search?q=new+england+primer). This bears no date, but was published between 1815 and 1830. I especially like the woodcut of the Protestant martyr John Rogers--the man is burning, and he looks like the happiest person in the picture!

He coulda been a contender!

In March 2009 the Library of America published a selection of Lafcadio Hearn’s works, edited by Christopher Benfey, entitled Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings. In an interview Benfey stated, “I’m completely convinced that Hearn’s time has come. He famously wrote that he worshiped ‘the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.’ Such pronouncements have made it easy to dismiss him as some oddball combination of Poe and Gauguin, living in an escapist world of dreams. But what Hearn was really interested in was the astonishing variety of human life.”

Lafcadio Hearn was a mongrel child of the world,—a global villager,—a man unattached to country, kin, or creed. He was a sensitive underdog marginalized for his proclivities from beginning to end. Born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn on June 27, 1850, on the Ionian island of Leucadia just north of Ithaca (of Homeric fame), Lafcadio’s own odyssey would bring him to far shores and settings, both exotic and mundane.

Hearn’s mother, Rosa Antonia Cassimati, was from Cerigo (known to the Greeks as Cythera); his father, Charles Bush Hearn, was an Irish surgeon and officer in the British Army. Their romance was not favored by either of their families. After Charles was re-assigned to the West Indies, he managed to send Rosa and young Patrick to Dublin, where his relations greeted these “gypsy” additions to their household with predictable warmth. An estranged aunt who doted on Patrick took them in, but after Charles finally returned to Ireland and established a little household in 1853 it became clear he had lost interest in Rosa. He took a new military assignment in the West Indies, and by the time he returned in 1856, Rosa had gone back to Greece and left five-year-old Patrick alone with his great-aunt. Charles Hearn annulled their marriage, and the Hearn family hid the boy from his mother when she returned to Ireland to see him.

At age nine or ten young Patrick discovered the library in his great-aunt’s house, and found several books of art containing images from Greek mythology. “How my heart leaped and fluttered on that happy day!” he would later write. “Breathless I gazed; and the longer that I gazed the more unspeakably lovely those faces and forms appeared. Figure after figure dazzled, astounded, bewitched me.” This fascination with the elder gods did not sit well with his aunt, a devout Catholic, who sent him to a boarding school—three quarters monastery and one quarter military academy—run by “a hateful venomous-hearted old maid.” Guy de Maupassant, who attended the school months after Lafcadio left, wrote “I can never think of the place even now without a shudder. It smelled of prayers the way a fish market smells of fish . . . We lived there in a narrow, contemplative, unnatural piety—and also in a truly meritorious state of filth . . . As for baths, they were as unknown as the name of Victor Hugo. Our masters apparently held them in the greatest contempt.”

When he was sixteen Hearn suffered an accident which blinded his left eye, and from then on he would instinctively cover it with his left hand in conversation, or look down or to the left when photographed. Financial troubles forced him to seek schooling in London while living with a dock worker and his wife (distant relatives)—and there he made his first forays into the underside of urban existence, fascinated and repelled by “the wolf’s side of life, the ravening side, the apish side; the ugly facets of the monkey puzzle.” Fed up with his dilatory and dreamy ways, his family gave him a one-way ticket to New York City and told him to make his way to Cincinnati, to another set of relatives who didn’t want the strange young man. Penniless and homeless, he wandered the streets of the river town until he found work doing odd jobs at one of the local newspapers. In October of 1872 he submitted a review of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which became his first signed publication. Thus was born a literary journalist—an intelligent, provocative observer with a ripe facility for language and a penchant for exposing the horror and the humor of everyday urban life.

Christopher Benfey notes, “One of our best current travel writers, Pico Iyer, uses the phrase ‘global soul’ for people who have adapted themselves to our new world of mass migration and globalization. Hearn, it seems ot me, was an early version of a global soul. Born into the British Empire, he experienced firsthand the bitter divisions of the American Gilded Age, and lived to witness the rise of a new power in Asia: Imperial Japan.”

Books by Lafcadio Hearn in the PPL Special Collections

Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1884).

Two Years in the French West Indies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890).

[Japanese Fairy Tales]. The Boy Who Drew Cats (1898), The Goblin Spider (1899), The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling (1902), and Chin Chin Kobakama (1903).

Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Elizabeth Bisland. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. and The Riverside Press, 1906). [pic of original leaf laid in]

Letters from the Raven: Being the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry Watkin. (New York: Brentano’s, 1907).

The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Elizabeth Bisland. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. and The Riverside Press, 1910).

An American Miscellany. Collected by Albert Mordell. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1924).

Creole Sketches by Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Charles Woodward Hutson. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. and The Riverside Press, 1924).

Editorials by Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Charles Woodward Hutson. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. and The Riverside Press, 1926).

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Intro. by Oscar Lewis. (Tokyo: Limited Editions Club, 1934).

Further Reading about Lafcadio Hearn:

Cott, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. (New York: Knopf, 1990).

Murray, Paul. A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn. (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 1997).

Perkins, P.D. and Ione. Lafcadio Hearn: A Bibliography of His Writings. (Tokyo, 1934; reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1968).

What Does It All Mean?

On July 1, The Providence Public Library became a different institution. As has been reported in the news, we have turned over the 10 neighborhood branches to a group calling themselves the Providence Community Library (GIVING them all the books, computers, and furniture in the buildings and leasing those buildings for minuscule sums). While everyone hopes they can make a go of it (because NO ONE likes it when a library closes), there are simply no guarantees. But the branches are now their problem.

The Central Library, where I work, and which contains over 1 million items, has experienced an almost 70% staff reduction, and so a crew of 32 people are attempting, rather valiantly, to do what more than 80 people did a few weeks ago.

So, my posting has slowed down because I have more work to do in general. Readers can add our story to the nationwide plight of libraries--all libraries--no matter what funding streams or sources (private or public) they have, what leadership they are under, or what socio-economic slice of the public they serve.

In this emerging time of trimmed budgets, streamlined functions, and general re-tooling, I am often under a bit more pressure to explain why special collections is still vital--and I suppose I'll be using this blog as more of a think-through-it venue than a "look what I found" dump, which is how it started.

Top of the Heap

The unofficial motto of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is “give, get, or get out.” A seat on it will run you at least $10 million. The boards of non-profits in Providence should take note of it, as a sort of stellar goal to which they might aspire. This is the mentality of a serious institution--one which, after 138 years, has an endowment worth several billion dollars, a staff of almost 2,000, generates almost $300 million in revenue per year, is visited by over five million people a year, and can actually claim to be “the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world” (bar none).

Of course, “The Met,” as everyone knows it, has been at the pinnacle of New York’s socio-cultural scene for generations, counting among its benefactors old families like Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor, and Houghton. Its challenge now, says Michael Gross, who has charted a fine topography of the major players of the Met’s history in Rogues’ Gallery, is to find the right path to its own identity going forward. It is a challenge shared by many institutions with similar missions—how can an organization based on traditional cultural values and aesthetics make itself relevant as those values and aesthetics morph and change beyond recognition?

Gross had to approach writing Rogues’ Gallery as an investigative reporter does with powerful people unwilling to cooperate. Phillipe de Montebello, who was director of the Met when Gross began his inquiries in 2006, said “the museum has no secrets.” And yet, some months before, the curatorial staff had been told not to speak to Gross. “With the stakes so high and money and egos involved so big,” writes Gross, “the Met has always had to operate in the shade, whether it was acquiring art under questionable circumstances, dealing with donors hoping to launder very sketchy reputations, or merely trying to appear above reproach in a world where behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime.”

Excavating the Met’s history in six chapters from 1870 to 2009, Gross reveals the personalities and relationships between donors and directors, curators and dealers, and the city of New York and its cultural crown jewel. It is astonishing what people will do for money, power, and social prominence, and we see a great deal of what they will do in Rogues’ Gallery. In the end, Gross wants the Met to succeed—he is not lobbing stones at the cathedral, but rather revealing what the men and women at the pulpit have been up to behind closed doors.

I Walk the Line

Conventional wisdom (or, What We Are Taught In Library School) about special collections includes a cardinal rule: the stacks (i.e. shelves) are NOT browseable.

This idea is reinforced with every report of rare book theft and at every conference which touches on security.

What bothers me is that, of all the places in a library, special collections is the place where browsing can generate the MOST inspiration. Especially when you are dealing with the sort of patrons who are using my collections the most: ARTISTS.

An artist, unlike a scholar, does not generally welcome the idea of searching, be it through an online or card catalog. Artists need to SEE what they are looking at, and often need to touch it as well.

What I want is a way to let the patrons browse the books without worrying about security. The few times I have let this happen, controlling it as much as possible, there have been fabulous results--very excited people who revere the materials and respect them for what they are, and use them to further or even engender their creative or intellectual projects.

THAT is the great function of special collections.