The EN344 Book, Edition, Archive class’s research on the WLCB is kicking into high gear, which means new discoveries are in the offing.

For one: a couple weeks ago while rooting around in the Maryland Historical Society catalog looking for other things, I happened across a listing which ended up being a notebook containing meeting minutes from spring 1895-spring 1899– a notebook that had been deemed lost.

I’m guessing that this notebook got misplaced because it was quite a bit larger than the other minutes books. It probably got stuck on a shelf above or below the other materials, which is why it got catalogued under a different call number than all the other notebooks.

This means that we have historical/documentary evidence for 3 more years than we originally thought– a significant addition to the 17-18 years of meeting minutes that we have already transcribed. Cynthia (thank god for Cynthia!) is in the process of transcribing them now.

Even more significant, perhaps, is another discovery I made on the same day: an 1895 bibliography of works published by members of the Club.

I had gone to MDHS to look for the different versions of the WLCB Constitution, just to see if and how it had changed over the years. As noted in the Club history on the WLCB archive site, the Club was nearly torn apart in the early years of its existence over proposed amendments to the Constitution that would have made the Club more than literary in nature–which is to say, engaged in philanthropy and social reform. The outcome of that debate was not to change the Constitution in any significant way, and I just needed to compare the different versions to make sure that was indeed the case.

So I wasn’t really expecting to find anything. Mostly, I was going with the expectation of not finding anything interesting.

But as is so often the case when doing research in the archive, I found exactly what I wasn’t looking for. One of the versions of the Constitution I was examining was an entire pamphlet, beautifully printed on thick, creamy paper, which appeared to have been printed in honor of the Club’s 5th Anniversary. It included the Constitution, the names of all current members, the entire list of programs from 1894-1895 and 1895-1896 seasons, and … a bunch of pages that were still uncut.

Of course I had to get them cut. And when I opened them I was shocked– and thrilled– to discover that the last 12 or so pages of the pamphlet were a detailed listing of all of the Club members’ writings to that date. A gold mine!

 

If only we had known about this bibliography two years ago, when the five students who worked with me in the summer of 2017 were in the archive transcribing documents. If only we had known about it last spring, when my Aperio seminar students were searching through catalogs and databases and online archives looking for Club member publications. If only I had had the bibliography when planning for my current semester’s class, where students are editing the works located by last year’s class. If only.

That was my initial thought. But then, I thought, maybe it was best this way. Because we may have stopped with this list, rather than finding so many of the other publications that emerged from the Club after 1895.

Of course, my first question was, did we find all the pre-1895 publications and writers? I went through the list with some trepidation, afraid that I would discover lots of writers and publications that we hadn’t located, and thus tanking the entire book project we’d been working so hard on for the past 2 years.

Luckily– or perhaps, a testament to the thoroughness of last year’s students– we only missed a few. One is Sallie Webster Dorsey, sister of Club founder Hester Dorsey Richardson and fellow member Mary Dorsey (who published under the name Marion V. Dorsey). Another is Lily G. Early, daughter of founding member Maud Graham Early (one of the “Miss Early”s referred to in Club minutes).  I am in the process of tracking down the publications listed for these writers.

And I was able to confirm that Elizabeth M. Reese (Mrs. Percy M. Reese) did, indeed, publish; we were unable to confirm this last spring and had cut her from the anthology, but now we can add her back in. And the list reveals additional publications by other Club members. One of the most tantalizing is a Civil War memoir by Lucy Randolph Cautley, for whom we thus far had only been able to locate one published poem. Her memoir “A Child’s Recollection of the War” was apparently published in the Philadelphia Times–an interesting fact because Cautley was a Southern sympathizer. Unfortunately, there is no date listed for the publication of the memoir, and the Philadelphia Times is only available on microfilm … which is being sent from the Pennsylvania State Library, 5 reels at a time. Finding this work will be a summer 2019 project for yours truly.

We also now know of additional novels by Elizabeth T. Graham, poems by Elizabeth Latimer, and more works by Katharine Pearson Woods (yes, there were members of the WLCB not named Elizabeth). And today I was able to locate two stories by Louise Clarkson Whitelock  that we previously didn’t know about, published in Godey’s Magazine and Harper’s, both well-known and well-respected national magazines of the day. (These stories were published under her maiden name, incidentally: “L. Clarkson”; by 1895 she appears to have married her husband, politician George Whitelock, because her 1895 story collection A Mad Madonna is published under her married name.)

These discoveries, to be sure, will continue! I hope to share things that this year’s class of students are discovering in upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, I’ll be giving my first public talk about the WLCB at the Maryland Historical Society on April 16!