vivdunstan

Back to more work on the Scottish black servants academic journal paper. Now typing up the story of John Ogilvie Glasgow, a servant just outside Dundee. Whose baptism was - like so many others - missing from the ScotlandsPeople indexes. Though in this case it was not so much a case of systemic racism among those compiling the original indexes, but rather the GRO for Scotland and ScotlandsPeople had missed out an entire register of Strathmartine parish baptisms from their computer indexes! Luckily they had the original paper records, and I had traced this one through a separate baptisms index on FindMyPast. ScotlandsPeople were able to email me a digital image.

I finished this the other night, the first in a trilogy I think of stories set in the Scarlet Pimpernel world of the French Revolution, with added vampires. I'd previously read one Invisible Library series book by the same author.

There was a lot to like in Scarlet. You don't need to be familiar with the original Scarlet Pimpernel stories by Baroness Orczy, though it's nice to recognise familiar characters. It is set after the first Pimpernel book, and tells you what you need to know. The Scarlet Pimpernel is an English aristocrat, with a French wife, who with his gang of fellow conspirators goes undercover in France to rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine.

The book is told through the experiences of an English maid, who gets embroiled in the Pimpernel's efforts in France. I did wonder how well this was going to work. Was she always going to be listening at doors, one step removed? But no, she is enmeshed effectively, in what to me was a surprising and good way.

I did expect the plot to go slightly differently in one section of the book, but overall it was full of surprises. And not necessarily following the history as we know it.

I wasn't so keen on another fantasy element (not the vampires) that was introduced later on in the story. But maybe this will be developed more in the subsequent books.

The big downside of the book for me was that there was far too much info dumping about the history. Not least in the introduction to the book, which had a phenomenally in-depth - far, far too much depth to be honest - essay giving a historical overview of the French Revolution at this point. Which I found phenomenally off-putting, and did not endear me to the author. Show us what we need to know through the story, through what the character encounters, and their experiences. Do not have a long-winded and frankly boring history lesson. I would skip this sort of thing when I was my doing my taught postgraduate Masters degree in history including this exact historical period. I don't want to read it in a fiction book, even historical fiction.

Also I don’t recommend following a Dramatis Personae listing with an opening chapter about a whole bunch of folk not in the list. It was a good chapter, but having the list immediately before it was jarring.

There were also extended sections - often multiple pages - of psychological reflections by the characters. I think the editor(s) could have tightened this aspect considerably.

For these reasons I'm rating it 3/5 stars. But I did enjoy it. And would read the sequels. But it should have been better.

Some belated reading with Murray Pittock's groundbreaking "The Myth of the Jacobite Clans". I'm especially interested in evidence from the localities, and the Lowland components of Jacobitism. Also nice to see my history PhD supervisor's work cited and praised. I need to read his relevant book too!

I'm finishing off a book review I'm writing for an academic journal. The book is a new collection of Scottish poems in the long 18th century. Each poet's section includes a short biography before one or more poems from them. And I can't help myself constantly researching the poets and their lives more. My big success last night was confirming one poet being baptised in my home town Hawick in 1764. Far more precise than "born in one of the border counties washed by the Tweed" in DNB etc. He had many siblings baptised in Hawick or Wilton, then younger ones in Gala and Edinburgh before the parents moved to Kilmarnock and more baptised there. I should probably write this up as an academic journal paper too, not least to show the possibilities of easily accessed digitised Scottish parish registers to expand on these life stories.

Got through my final two Edinburgh Book Festival 2023 recordings, nicely ahead of the 3AM on 30th September deadline to view them online!

Here are the latest two talks I watched:

• Kübra Gümüşy, R F Kuang & Irene Vallejo: A Short History of Language - a fascinating panel discussing language, translation, culture, colonialism and power
• David Greig & Alan Warner: Scottish Legends Retold - two authors of recent novellas set in Scotland in the 9th and 18th centuries, with an insightful discussion about the writing process, historical research, dealing with imposter syndrome and aiming for historical fidelity

I was especially wowed by the latter panel, which had a great discussion between the two authors and chair Sally Magnusson. And I very much want to read their two books, reimagining the stories of the theft of St Columba's bones and Bonnie Prince Charlie's flight across the Highlands and Islands.

Digital tickets are still available for a huge number of 2023 Edinburgh Book Festival events, but you have to watch the recordings by 3AM on this coming Saturday, so time is tight!

I'm continuing to watch panels of interest to me from this summer's SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) book history conference. Which this year was totally online. I was too ill at the time to watch anything live, but have until the end of August to watch the Zoom recordings I want to see. So far I have watched 8 panels, each usually with 2 or 3 speakers. And a list of more to watch in the coming weeks.

Every single academic conference talk I am able to watch - now usually from home, in my pyjamas, typically in bed! - inspires my own research. For example today I was watching a panel about black voices and enslaved workers in the North American book trade. So many similar names to the black servants I have been uncovering in eighteenth-century Scotland. I need to get that research written up and submitted to an academic journal for peer review. Watching this panel today gave me a kick up the butt to do that! Another talk I enjoyed was an academic who researched popular readership and translations of Asian literature in the Victorian era for his PhD. Along the way he started building up his own collection of books from that field and era. He talked in the panel about how he researched those books' owners and readers. And again that reminded me that I have some slightly related research that I should write up and publish on sometime.