Sometimes academic publications make you wonder: where do researchers get their information from?
Inadequate research results in silly mistakes or peculiar errors. I quote last week's words (although not literally) and also promise to let this kind of oddities pass for the time being as they seem to be becoming commonplace.
The American Printing History Association's respectable journal Printing History published an article that puzzled me, not so much with its content and argumentation, but because of curious misspellings and attributions, which could and should have caught the editor's eye.
The young and promising scholar Jacob Romm wrote the essay 'The Marriage of Two Arts: Michael Field, Vale Press, and Queer Print in Victorian England' (Printing History, 35, Summer 2024, pages 48-63).
These two subjects, the Vale Press by Charles Ricketts, and the poems and plays by Michael Field, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, are always worth paying attention to.
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| Biography of Michael Field (detail) on Yellow Nineties 2.0 |
And here, unfortunately, we see two recurring errors. Bradley's name is consistently misspelled, not with an ‘a’ (Katharine) but as Katherine, which was not her name, even though half the Internet pretends it is, while there are accurate sources online to cite, such as The Yellow Nineties.
The second false assumption that consistently reverberates throughout this article is that Ricketts and Shannon jointly ran the Vale Press, by which, incidentally, is meant not the early period of Vale Publications but rather the later publishing firm Hacon & Ricketts. Shannon was active as a co-publisher from 1889 until about 1895, but right from the start of the real publishing company, funded by Hacon and Ricketts, he concentrated on his painting career and kept away from the publishing programme.
The oversights are related to the desired assumption that Ricketts and Shannon were a homosexual couple all their lives, whereas it is clear from diaries (especially as pages have been torn out) and later letters that Shannon maintained a series of mistresses from the late 1890s with whom he considered marriage several times - and Ricketts was alone in the relationship as a gay man.Their cohabitation was enigmatic to the outside world, centred on the art collection, and their household could well be called ‘queer’, but they each operated separately. The only constant in their collaboration was the focus on their art collection.
There are smaller misses, such as the claim that Ricketts designed three ‘uncial-inspired’ types - in fact, there was only one, the other two were inspired by Jenson's Renaissance type.
The essay mentions that the Vale Press issued works by 'Shakespeare, Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, and Gordon Bottomley'. Works by Wilde and Bottomley were designed by Ricketts, but were never issued by Hacon and Ricketts (or issued as Vale Press publications). It is even said that after the closure of the Vale Press Ricketts and Shannon occasionally designed books for friends: Ricketts did so frequently, but Shannon never designed any books after the death of Oscar Wilde in 1900.
A quote from The Times from 1931 stating that Ricketts and Shannon 'shared the same studio' goes uncorrected, while each had his own studio, even in their early days at the Vale Shannon had a private studio.
Ricketts and Shannon are called the 'printers' of the Vale Press books, which they never were, as they did not possess a printing press.
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| Thomas Campion, Fifty Songs (1896) |
It is clear from small details that the Vale Press books, even those illustrated in the article, have not been studied. Thomas Campion's Fifty Sonnets are said to be poems 'about the sea', which they are not.
The decorative paper of the cover of Fifty Sonnets is described as 'green paper patterned with gold ships', while the design is printed in blue on white paper - no gold has been used. Has the author actually handled a copy of this book?
The interpretation of the border design for the first text page of Fair Rosamund is debatable: the author assumes Ricketts showed a drawing of it to Michael Field. He did not. He only imagined that drawing of Pylades as a decadent naked dancer, as he also said in a discussion of the play. But Michael Field's opinion made that ‘vision’ dissipate and instead came the figure of Fortuna. (Incidentally, Romm calls this page a frontispiece, which is factually incorrect).
As a reader, so many inaccuracies can make you despair, especially when one encounters a characterisation of The Yellow Book as ‘Wilde's Yellow Book’, when obviously Wilde had nothing whatsoever to do with it. However, most of all, I feel sorry for the author who is so poorly supervised by an editor of a leading magazine.
Is it perhaps advisable to stop this - clearly pointless - blog, say, on reaching blog post number 700? One might wonder.
