HOME

 

BITS & PIECES

A periodically updated miscellany

 

& & &

 

April 5, 2008

 

I am hoping to arrange a celebration of the completion of the Bibliography on midsummer day – June 21 - in 2010: hopefully a personal celebration with invited guests that will take place in the Wren Library at Trinity College, which is where, in a very real sense, it all began in earnest. Three supporters – and subsequently great friends – gathered in the Wren on midsummer day 1961 to consider how best to provide this enterprise with what is commonly called a “kick start”. This homely jargon does little justice to the wonderful support I got from John Oates, Tim Munby, and Herbert Adams: internationally known scholars  who opened doors on three continents as if by magic. I am hoping that the private celebration might be part of a larger event to review the past, and suggest directions for the future of English language studies.

 

 

Bibliography of the English Language

 

 

Contents of Volumes I – XIX

 

 I am frequently asked by correspondents to provide a key to the contents of the published volumes.

 

VOLUME CONTENTS

 

Volume I               English grammars written in English or Latin                 Nos. 1-536

 

Volume II              Polyglot dictionaries & polyglot grammars           Nos. 1-138, 139-155

                             Treatises on English – French  - German - Dutch

Danish – Swedish – Portuguese – Spanish - Italian

Hungarian – Persian – Bengali – Russian                       Nos. 156-637

 

Volume III             Old English, Middle English                                           Nos. 1-48

                             The “Rowley” Controversy                                            Nos. 49-65

                             Early Modern English                                                     Nos. 66-120

                             Miscellaneous                                                                 Nos. 121-432

                             Vocabularies, Glossaries, Miscellaneous                         Nos. 433-526

                             Encyclopedias                                                                Nos. 527-568

                             Punctuation, Concordances,

Language in General,

                             Origin of Language, Theory of Grammar                       Nos. 569-863

Volume IV            Spelling Books                                                                Nos. 1-962

 

Volume V             The English Dictionary                                                   Nos. 1-352

                             Miscellaneous Works on Lexicography                          Nos. 353-370

 

Volume VI            Rhetoric                                                                         Nos. 1-264

                             Pulpit Rhetoric                                                               Nos. 265-315

                             Elocution                                                                       Nos. 316-437

                             Prosody                                                                          Nos. 438-461

                             Pronunciation                                                                Nos. 462-516

                             Phonetic Spelling, Spelling Reform                                Nos. 517-573

                             Miscellaneous                                                                 Nos. 575-581.

 

Volume VII           Logic, Philosophy, Epistemology                                   Nos. 1-300

 

Volume VIII Short-Hand                                                                    Nos. 1-315

 

Volume IX            English Dialects                                                              Nos. 1-70

                             Scottish Dialects                                                             Nos. 71-216

                             Cant & Vulgar English                                                    Nos. 217-337

 

Volume X             Education & Language Teaching                                    Nos. 1-348

 

Volume XI            Place Names & Personal Names

                             Place Names, Dictionaries, Gazetteers                           Nos. 1-167

                             Personal Names                                                             Nos. 168-186

 

Volume XII-1        Grammars of French                                                      Nos. 1-619a

                             Dictionaries of French                                                    Nos. 620-734

 

Volume XII-2        Grammars & Dictionaries of Italian                                Nos. 1-131

                             Grammars & Dictionaries  of Spanish                    Nos. 132-185

                             Grammars & Dictionaries of Portugue                           Nos. 186-194

                             Romansh                                                                        No. 195

 

Volume XIII Grammars of German &

Miscellaneous Treatises                                                  Nos. 1-63a

                             Grammars of Dutch &

Miscellaneous Treatises                                                  Nos. 64-108

                             Grammars of Danish &

Miscellaneous Treatises                                                  Nos. 109-114

                             Grammars of Swedish &

Miscellaneous Treatises                                                  Nos. 115-121

                             Addenda to Volume II                                                    Nos. 344-576

 

Volume XIV          Languages of the British Isles                                          Nos. 1-84

                             Hebrew                                                                          Nos. 85-222

Languages of the Middle East,

Eastern Europe, South Asia,

China, Japan, Australasia, Pacific Ocean               Nos. 222a-512

Languages of the Americas                                             Nos. 513-599

 

Volume XV Greek Language                                                             Nos. 1-92

                             Latin Language to 1650                                                 Nos. 93-1031

 

Volume XVI          Latin Language 1651-1800                                            Nos. 1-1029a

 

Volume XVII         Botany, Horticulture, Agriculture                                  Nos. 1-1147

 

Volume XVIII-1    Zoology                                                                         Nos. 1-276

                             Geology                                                                         Nos. 277-299

                             Chemistry                                                                      Nos. 300-371

                             Medicine                                                                        Nos. 372-496

                             Veterinary Medicine                                                       Nos. 496a-845

                             Mathematics & Geometry                                               Nos. 844-862

                             Astronomy                                                                     Nos. 863-885

 

Volume XVIII-2    Law                                                                                Nos. 1-276

                             Art & Architecture                                                          Nos. 277-409

                             Heraldry                                                                         Nos. 410-494

 

Volume XVIII-3    Military & Naval Arts & Sciences

                             Military Ats & Sciences                                                   Nos. 1-623a

                             Naval & Maritime Arts & Sciences                                  Nos. 624-1003

 

Volume XVIII-4   Rural Sports & Pastimes                                         Nos. 1-225

                             Horsemanship                                                                Nos. 226-317

                             Indoor Sports & Pastimes, Card Games                          Nos. 318-414

                             Cookery                                                                         Nos. 415-493

                             Business, Commerce, Trade, Coinage, Measures Nos. 494-1283

Mythology, Religion, Classical Antiquities                     Nos. 1284-1613

Religion – Bible                                                             Nos. 1616-1626

Music                                                                             Nos. 1627-1759

Printing, Dyalling, Clock Making, Mechanics                 Nos. 1760-1784

Satire, Sign Language, Freemasonry                               Nos. 1785-1826

Voume XIX-1       Periodical Literature                                                      Nos. 1-385

 

Volume XXI         Addenda to all published volumes                                  Nos. I-1-XVIII-4 1820a

 

 

Volume XX – Disaster strikes!

 

When I moved from Suffolk in 2000, I sold a large part of my extensive reference library. Though I had no idea what my future living arrangements might be I was certain of one thing: it was time to shed the last vestiges of my once-large library. I decided that I had had enough of having to live in a house which could accommodate thousands of books! My former wife (Joanna) and I had agreed to patch up the other disaster that was our divorce in 1995, and try to make a second go at living together. She still had the house in Medburn Street (which we had moved to in 1989), so arrangements were made to dispose of unwanted furniture, and to transport what was left to London. The day of moving was in October 2000. Having hastily built bookshelves for the books and files that remained, I moved back into 15 Medburn Street. Many boxes were left unpacked for some months. Then, early in 2001 I decided to unpack the remaining boxes and it was only then that I realised that somehow two large boxes of files containing all my slips and notes for the volume dealing with manuscripts accumulated between 1960 and 1980 were missing. In spite of every attempt to determine how these boxes went astray proved fruitless. So I am faced with the truly appalling problem of trying to retrace my steps all those years ago when I was collecting materials in manuscript. There is, of course, no way this can be achieved, since the process of collection went on for many years in my travels around the world. In most cases the manuscripts I found have never been catalogued except on cards. I have, however, started the slow and tedious procedure of reading once again all the printed catalogues of manuscripts which exist for the major research libraries and as this going to take time it is unlikely that Volume XX will appear before I have completed XIX and XXI.



                                                                                                                                                      Another degree!

 

On December 9 2005 the School of Advanced Study held the annual postgraduate degree ceremony in Senate House. It was a gala occasion; and even provided with music from the Royal College of Music. After the traditional encomium pronounced by the Dean, Nicholas Mann, I was honoured with the degree HonDLitt. The dinner following the ceremony was attended by (Lord) Randolph Quirk and his wife Gabby; Sarah Tyacke, recently retired CEO of the National Archives at Kew; Warwick Gould; and my old friend Ian Willison – just visible in this phjotograph (front row right).

 

News from Senate House

 

Not good! The repairs and rebuilding is going to take considerably longer than forecast. However, the Institute of English Studies is doing its best to provide me with accommodation in June and July this year while I complete the checking of periodicals for Volume XIX and more checking for Volume XX. There is still no reliable date for a return to the previous accommodation.

 

April, 2008

 

Canada – Then and Now

 

My life has been spent – for the most part – in Trinidad (where I was born); Barbados (where I went to school, met my wife Joanna, and now live most of the year); England; and Canada.  I left the Caribbean in 1946 to fulfill my father’s wish that I should be the third member of the family to attend Rugby School. Rugby taught me many things apart from Latin and Greek composition: suffering harsh discipline (beaten for trivial offences, including errors in resolving quadratic equations); surviving rugby football; forfeiting (it seemed for ever) human warmth and affection; and finding it difficult to comprehend the pervasive homosexuality of the English Public School. On the other hand, Rugby introduced me to music, and at the age of sixteen I was determined to become a concert pianist. My great problem was that I quickly became addicted to the magnificent power of the Chapel’s splendid Harrison four-manual organ, with three 32 foot diapason stops. Then, in order to participate in the school orchestra, I learned the French horn: the most unforgiving of wind instruments. In a very real sense music saved my sanity at Rugby, but a dear and admired aunt, a brilliant concert pianist, told me when I was sixteen not to make music my career. With that special gentleness and kindness for which aunts are celebrated in so many autobiographies she explained that I was not – in her opinion – in the top 1%. So: music, it seemed, was destined to give way to the other love of my life at Rugby: literature. My tutor, Tim Tosswill, was an inspired teacher, and I recall with pleasure the evenings spent at his house discussing Chaucer and Shakespeare.  My piano teacher – at the beginning – was Kenneth Stubbs. He was a wholly wonderful musician, and was offered in 1948 the post of BBC accompanist. He turned it down. He taught me, in a kindly way (unlike my teacher of mathematics), and his star pupils became good friends: it was impossible not to love and admire the man: more than I can say for many of my Rugby teachers.

 

1951 saw me back briefly in Barbados where my father had built a wonderful home high in the parish of St. Thomas overlooking the West Coast: now the haunt of those who can afford to stay at Sandy Lane. In those days Sandy Lane beach was a quiet place where one seldom saw a tourist. Then it was to Canada. The reason for Canada was that, as a born colonial, I could avoid army service on the Rhine if I left England. Knowing that I had many years of academic study ahead of me it did not seem like cowardice that I elected for UBC in Vancouver rather than Heidelberg.

 

I arrived in Vancouver (my passport duly stamped landed immigrant) on July 1, 1951. My first employment was at the UBC farm, mucking out stables and feeding cattle. Work started at 5 am., and I got back to the humble accommodation on West 14th Avenue at 5 pm. The pay was derisory; so I found more lucrative employment at the steel foundry of Letson & Burpee in the East (very rough) end of Vancouver. The hours there were midnight to 8 am, but the pay was far better than the farm. However, the work was quite the most arduous I have ever had to endure. I was given a huge blade three metres long of stainless steel to polish for the Powell River Paper Mill; and eight weeks in which to make it gleam like a mirror. The polishing was effected by a 40 lb. steel block and emory paper - softened with water - pushed back and forth for eight hours, with one break for Chinese food on Commercial Road at midnight. On the second morning I could barely breathe, let alone walk. The manager gave me one day’s respite: without pay. I did finish the blade, and left the company with mixed feelings. My protector – Charlie – who managed a monstrous steel-pressing machine was a vast and kindly soul, and on many occasions came to my rescue in a society for which kindness is not a known virtue. Many years later, with my wife and eighteen month old son, we took the train from Vancouver to Calgary, and as we passed the Letson and Burpee factory my heart missed a beat. I was just a little saddened later to discover that the firm, established in Vancouver in 1895, no longer exists - the last traces of it being in the early 1980s.

 

My three years at UBC were filled with delights and challenges. The English Department was administered by Roy Daniells (scholar and poet): his lectures on Milton were filled with subtle humour and passion: not at all like the teaching I had to endure a few years later at Oxford. He sowed seeds in that course that were to bloom much later: at Toronto where I studied Milton under A.S.P Woodhouse; and still later when I was asked to take over the Milton lectures at Leeds University, as no one in the department wanted to give them! Three of my mentors at UBC have left their mark indelibly: Roy Daniells; Bill Robbins, who fired my enthusiasm for Victorian literature; and Albert Willem de Groot, a distinguished classicist and linguist from Holland who gave the first lectures in Canada on theoretical and structural linguistics. His lectures were attended by students from several disciplines, and included Peter Smith - later to become one of Canada’s most distinguished classical scholars. It was at UBC that I met Reg Waters, the Canadian bibliographer. I worked with him on his Canadian bibliography for two years and learned in the dim hours in a research room in the stacks how to read library catalogues at speed. One exercise required me to read the entire British Museum catalogue in the summer of 1953: a task I was later to undertake for my Bibliography of the English Language in the 1960s, and yet again in the 1970s for ESTC.

 

From UBC I went to Oxford to study English literature under Freddy Bateson at Corpus Christi College. Freddy was uncompromising, and expected - if the poetry of Donne was the subject of the weekly read essay - that I would quote from the originals in the Bodleian Library: not from modern reprints! My preparation for the weekly essay was always carried out in Duke Humphrey, as close to the central heating pipe as I could get! It was difficult to write as my fingers were almost frozen with the cold. All that changed in the 1960s when Duke Humphrey and Arts End were refurbished and provided with proper heating and light. In those days the only warm room was the Upper Reading Room: but my needs could only be met in the oldest (and coldest) part of the library. It was entirely due to Freddy that I succeeded in being awarded a Teaching Fellowship at Toronto in 1956. As a don in one of the student’s residences on St.George Street my accommodation costs were met; and with the TF funding my fees were met, with a little left over for fun and games.

 

My two years at Toronto involved a shift in studies after the curriculum at Oxford. I undertook a MPhil in Old English at St Michael’s College with Fathers Madden, Shook and Boyle (later to become Vatican Librarian). My thesis was on the signed poems of Cynewulf. That completed (in one year not two) the genial monks of St. Michael’s got me involved in a doctoral thesis on the compotus and the medieval history of calculating the date of Easter.  It was not long before I realized that a dignified retreat was called for: and I applied – successfully - for a teaching post at the new University of New Brunswick. There at least I could develop my teaching skills and, as the regime was not very demanding, begin my scholarly publishing career. The first fruits of this were two books: a conventional grammar of Old English, and a much less conventional book on Old English composition, teaching students how to translate modern English into Old English. This project engaged me in a lively correspondence with Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie at Columbia; Frank Magoun at Harvard; and John Pope at Yale. The correspondence gradually developed from being in English to being Old English. The idea never caught on: in spite of the fact that composition has always been an essential part of the training of classicists. But one day I was asked by the Library of Congress to undertake a revision of Arthur Kennedy’s Bibliography of the English Language, published by Harvard in 1926. I spent the summer of 1959 in the British Museum, and after much checking concluded that what was needed was not a revision, but a completely new approach. On my return to Fredericton in September I started the research for what has become a life work. I also decided that my days at Fredericton were numbered and began making plans for a return to England, and the challenge of acquiring a PhD. London became my destination; and in September 1960 I enrolled at King’s College for a doctorate under John Sheard.

 

John never really comprehended what I was up to, as so much of my time seemed to be spent traveling abroad and visiting the great libraries of France, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain! Knowing that my thesis on the history of spelling reform in England from 1550 to 1700 would require only part of my energies, I determined to lay the groundwork for the Bibliography which has been my abiding interest for almost fifty years now. Few bibliographers (English or American) had strayed much beyond the known boundaries, and even the great Bill Jackson, then nearing completion of his revision of STC, was astonished at the books I told him about that I had discovered in the libraries of Europe. I started in earnest on my thesis in September 1963, and with the help of a dual-carriage typewriter built for me and able to type Old English, Old Norse, IPA, and Greek, completed the task in the Spring of 1964.

 

Before I had completed the thesis Kathleen Coburn (for whom I worked part time on the Coleridge notebooks to earn a crust) introduced me to Derry Jeffares in the British Museum canteen. The result was an interview in Leeds where I was offered a post in Medieval Language and Literature under the great Harold Orton. The degree duly awarded I arrived in Leeds in the summer of 1964. All thoughts of returning to Canada – and most probably Toronto – were now abandoned, and it was not long before a new career in publishing began: the creation of Scolar Press.

 

Canada once again became part of my life when, after I had retired from London University, my wife and I took up where we had left off in 1995. She had, during our separation between 1995 and 1999, found this house in a small village called Portland on the Rideau Lake and Canal system. In November 1999 we visited Portland. Neither of us was certain what the outcome of this visit might be. I might have hated the place: especially she had chosen it with Douglas Killam who had been my best friend at UBC (1951-1954), and again in London (1960-1964) when we were both studying for our doctorate! However, I was determined to make the “second time around” a success; and very soon became very attached to both the house and the area. Life In Canada during the summers between 1999 and 2006 were filled with boating, visiting some of Ontario’s wilderness, and the Laurentians North of Montreal, which I had visited with my parents in 1943. Summers in Canada were also spent in completing several volumes of my Bibliography, as Queens University generously gave me faculty privileges in its various libraries. Having spent part of my life training librarians I can say, without reservations, that the Queens library system is one of the best I have ever encountered: and I have worked in hundreds of libraries large and small.

 

 

G  G  G

 

Updated: 05-04-08 

 

HOME