In search of lost books
Alison M. Scott's "Romance in the Stacks; or, Popular Romance Fiction Imperiled" [1], which notes the near-total absence of romance fiction from university research libraries, also raises some more wide-ranging practical issues for those of us who work on non-canonical texts. There's been an upsurge of interest in literature & religion lately, which is nice, but this doesn't necessarily correlate with the actual presence of books on shelves. Let's take my friend Emily Sarah Holt, for example, who has finally found her way to a publisher after four years a-borning. Holt's most popular novel was Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards. A COPAC search reveals that only three research libraries in the UK, including the British Library, hold the 1868 first edition; WorldCat, meanwhile, shows that no American library does. Five American libraries, plus two UK libraries, hold at least one of the two US editions from 1869; the French and Norwegian translations are held by one US library apiece. Similarly, only one library in the US--Cornell, as it happens--owns Holt's Out in the Forty-Five; or, Duncan Keith's Vow (on which I spend 1/3 of my article).
While some popular religious novelists have made it into the stacks on a regular basis--e.g., Mrs. J. H. Ewing, Mrs. Sherwood, Hesba Stretton, Charlotte Yonge--many others, both male and female, have suffered Holt's fate [2]. For example, aside from The Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Edwy the Fair, the Rev. A. D. Crake's novels regularly top out at 2-3 libraries per edition. (And several of Crake's books are missing entirely from US holdings.) Similarly, Emma Leslie's Peter the Apprentice appears in no more than two libraries per edition. No US library holds Blanche Moggridge's Hid in the Cevennes (although there's a copy in Alberta). Many of the RTS' doughty contributors have vanished into thin air. And so forth. Even novels originating in the US escape notice; "Frances Eastwood's" Geoffrey the Lollard, for example, appears in only eleven US libraries. Bear in mind that these are authors whose novels sold rather well and were often reprinted quite frequently.
Now, it is not necessarily the case that the novels themselves have disappeared; in fact, they're reasonably plentiful, and not necessarily priced sky-high. (eBay sellers who try to mark up the price on these novels are often disappointed; there just isn't that much of a market for them.) But anyone who wants to study the authors and texts in question faces some real problems. How do you write about a book that isn't there? ILL frequently doesn't work; I've occasionally managed to see a copy of a book that exists in, say, six or ten libraries, but I've had no luck with anything more rare. What about travel? If the scholar-gipsy is in luck, the necessary books will be part of a larger collection dedicated to nineteenth-century fiction or, perhaps, children's literature (e.g., the Sadleir Collection at UCLA, or the children's literature collections at the University of Florida or Stanford). If not in luck, well...there's something frustrating about spending several hundred dollars to visit one book, but there you have it. It's ironic that the cheapest thing to do is--you guessed it--collect the books on your own. I hadn't anticipated winding up with what I suspect is one of the world's largest collections of Emily Sarah Holt (thirty-nine novels, at last count), but scholarship sometimes works in mysterious ways.
Like Alison Scott, I'm not railing at the unfairness of it all, but instead pointing out that what's available skews our understanding of what exists. As Scott puts it, "[t]o the degree that series romance fiction, as women's reading and as popular reading, is excluded from research collections, the inevitable result will be the difficulty, if not impossibility, of research into the full measure of the bibliographic culture of the late twentieth century" (221). By the same token, it's hard to delineate the messy history of novelistic genres if the novels themselves are not available where we automatically look for them.
[1] Alison M. Scott, "Romance in the Stacks; or, Popular Romance Fiction Imperiled," Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America, ed. Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 213-24.
[2] In other words, there's a canon of the non-canonical, if that makes any sense. It would be interesting to know why libraries acquired some didactic/religious novelists and not others; Yonge, at least, had a serious mainstream reputation for the Heir of Redclyffe. Donations must have played a part, as well as any religious affiliations a school might have or have had.