To the Barricades!

[dyddgu]

Fridays are when I do my work for the Wales and the French Revolution Project at what is left of the University of Wales. Aber!Boss recently discovered rather large discrepancies between the MS deposit of the letters of Edward Rigby, and the published version edited by his daughter, Lady Eastlake. In Aber!Boss's words, she "played fast and loose

Comments

[kaberett]

Oh wow, that is fascinating. And - yes, I think those letters absolutely would be candidates for - well, even for having the original on the facing page, perhaps? Though you would need other examples in order to compare... oh gosh, a parallel-translation style text would be gorgeous, but I imagine way beyond the remit of what you're actually doing.

In summary YES YES YES to photographs.

[dyddgu]

I think we're thinking of putting them up on a webpage, and writing an article about them for a journal, rather than publishing a book, so there might be more scope for fancy... things, I dunno, mouseovers or links or such. Much would also depend on how much/whether Bod would let us photograph, and what they might let us put up online, of course (and how much they might charge us for it, I've not done any of this before, so I have no idea!) Sample pages might be nice, at least, if we can't do the lot.

It's nice to know it's not me being weird! (or at least, not just me being weird ;-) )

[sea_of_flame]

Once you've done the text itself, you will of course have a digital version that you cam search for specific words - so you could potentially do at least a side-bar win images of the same set of words written at different times.

It's not quite the same as seeing the whole scribbled letter - but I would suspect it's more likely to be acceptable from a copyright viewpoint (IANAL), and it would allow a more objective comparison (because the word/s were being kept constant) to focus on the handwriting rather than squinting to decipher the content.

[dyddgu]

That's an interesting thought, thanks! I think it's quite a way away yet, but I will start pitching these things to my boss for us to think about :-)

[batswing]

How fascinating! More please!!!!

[dyddgu]

We'll have to see where he ends up next Friday. He was meant to be visiting Versailles this week, but, well...

(also, I am quite pleased that I managed to write this post and it not consist solely of "OMG squee I am touching paper that saw the Revolution!!elebenty!1!")