The museum recently welcomed sixth-form students from King Edward VI School in Lichfield to an Eighteenth-Century Textual Studies workshop, run in conjunction with Dr Nicholas Seager of Keele University.
In today’s post, King Edward VI pupil Kiran tells us about their visit, introduces us to some eighteenth-century bookmaking techniques, and explains the etiquette of eighteenth-century letter-writing.
Recently, our English Literature class were given the unique opportunity to partake in a book-oriented workshop co-ordinated by Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum at Lichfield Guildhall.
The workshop itself comprised of several components each giving an in-depth insight into the processes of bookmaking, the layout of 18th century texts, and some of Samuel Johnson’s personal correspondence.
Living in an era of Amazon Prime and Kindles we are often ignorant to the laborious task of bookmaking that pre-dated such technological phenomena. Printing, chopping and binding reams of paper to form a fairly small piece of literature isn’t exactly as simple as it seems. We all soon came to the same realisation when tasked with the fairly straightforward task of folding an A3 piece of paper into a format that would make it suitable for binding.
Dr Nicholas Seager of Keele University assisted in explaining the structure of certain texts and why the books laid out in front of us had such a different format to the ones we are accustomed too. For example, some of us were confused as to why words repeated themselves on the footmarks of each page and so we dismissed it as a printing error. However, it was quite the contrary, as Dr Seager explained that printers would do this so that those who came to bind the book would know what order the pages went in. He also went onto discuss that printing differed depending on the size of book and went into further depth on the terminology used among printers to differentiate between formats. After learning all this information, we collectively had a larger appreciation for the texts we were handling and were impressed by their immaculate condition considering their age.
As the workshop progressed we were able to examine other texts from Johnson’s period including his letters to Hester Thrale. Within his correspondence you see a reflection of Johnson and who he was as a person. Considering the lack of Twitter and other means in which to show outrage and subtle grievances Johnson would have used his letters to his close friends as a way in which to communicate his annoyance or appreciation towards certain things. For example, in his correspondence with Hester, there were often mentions of other members of society with the occasional underlying snide remark. Although his published letters hid these comments by removing any mention of names, the copy belonging to Hester had them all pencilled in with other notations and comments which gave a broader context to what was being discussed. It’s fair to say that getting to read 18th century gossip was a fairly fascinating experience!
Then finally came the pièce de résistance, a first edition of Johnson’s dictionary. At first we had looked past the colossal book resting behind us not realising what it was. However, when it was pointed out to us it is fair to say that our attention was diverted from examining playbills from the 1800s to trying to find obscure and unfamiliar words in Johnson’s dictionary.
Contributor: Kiran is a sixth form student at King Edward VI School in Lichfield.