The Director's Column (no.
38, Fall 2001)
Peter H. Reill, Director
 On
10 June 1926, William Andrews Clark Jr. offered to the Regents of the
University of California his library, dedicated to his father, as a
gift to UCLA. The Regents accepted, the library building was completed
in October 1926, and UCLA took possession upon Clark’s death in 1934.
This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the “Senator William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library,” certainly the oldest and one of the
most elegant of UCLA’s buildings. To commemorate this occasion we have
planned a number of special events to mark our past achievements and
to present our plans for the future. We will inaugurate our yearlong
celebration on 10 October with a staged reading of Oscar Wilde’s “Lady
Windermere’s Fan,” produced by John Lithgow, who will perform it with
several of his friends and colleagues. On 5 May, we will offer a special
chamber music concert to honor William Andrews Clark Jr., the founder,
not only of our library, but also of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra;
the Ying Quartet, old friends of the Clark, will perform. We will conclude
our formal celebrations with a gala event, probably tied to our annual
“Afternoon of Acquisitions.” In addition to these occasions, we have
organized the most ambitious academic and cultural program in the Center/Clark’s
history: thirty-four separate events in a thirty-week academic year.
All of these programs will celebrate William Andrews Clark Jr. and the
magnificent gift he gave to UCLA, its first major bequest, and still
one of the most generous in the university’s history.
But we also plan to use this opportunity to initiate an ambitious plan
for refurbishing the Clark and its grounds, and for improving its services
to readers. Though the Clark still strikes the visitor with its elegant
beauty, years of wear and tear and the effects of deferred maintenance
have left their mark. The building’s infrastructure—plumbing, electricity,
waterproofing, fire protection, air-conditioning—little changed since
1926, is showing its age. The gardens and grounds have lost much of
their original allure, and the library’s wood paneling, flooring, and
murals, along with its outside structures, require restoration. Because
of our success in significantly increasing the acquisitions budget,
we are quickly running out of room for books in our underground stacks
and must enlarge the library’s storage capability. Finally, it is imperative
that the entire building undergo seismic retrofitting.
To meet these needs, we are devising a major construction program for
the Clark that includes retrofitting, refurbishment, construction of
a new underground storage facility, and redesign of the reading area.
This, of course, is an expensive proposition, and we cannot expect the
state, the university, or the Regents to foot the entire bill. We estimate
the total cost of this project to be about ten million dollars and expect
to get half of that amount from public funds, primarily for the retrofitting.
The rest will have to be raised from other sources. We will mark the
Clark’s seventy-fifth anniversary by inaugurating a campaign to fund
this ambitious project. The generosity of William Andrews Clark Jr.
has greatly enriched cultural and academic life at UCLA and in Los Angeles,
and I hope we will be able to mobilize the library’s friends and supporters
to emulate his generosity and help us implement this exciting plan for
restoring the Clark to its original luster.
History, Theory, and the Subject of Rights, ca.
1640–1848
Kirstie M. McClure, Center & Clark
Professor, 2001–02
(no.
38, Fall 2001)
No longer riveted to the ideological framework of liberalism, “the
subject of rights” now seems a more capacious if less settled vehicle
of political and ethical claims than the abstract individual once taken
as its exemplary instance. As a formal category it has proven hospitable
to a wide array of articulations. Individuals, yes, but also corporations,
peoples, nations, races, sexes, classes—indeed, humanity itself—all
these are on offer as subjects of rights. At the same time, a resurgent
scepticism has renewed doubts about the metaphysical grounds of rights-talk
in a world for which, in Hannah Arendt’s telling phrase, political judgment—like
political and moral reflection more generally—proceeds “without banisters.”
In effect, as many have noted, the paradox of rights-talk these days
is its buzzing proliferation amidst the ruins of its foundations. As
a consequence, philosophers and theorists from a range of contemporary
perspectives have urged a rethinking of the language of rights—a reconsideration
of its bearers or subjects, of the contingencies of its claims, and
of the social practices, institutions, and networks of power that inflect
its multiform articulations.
It is no dishonor to philosophy, however, to suggest that such post-metaphysical
hopes might benefit from the sense of perspective generated by historical
and comparative inquiry, and more particularly from researches attentive
to the thick, if often fractious, plurality of rights-talk in early
modern Europe. There, too, rights could be diversely ascribed to and
claimed by a range of “subjects,” including but not limited to individuals:
corporations again, such as cities or universities or guilds, as well
as social groups and strata, families, sexes, peoples, and nations.
Humanity, too, could appear in early modern invocations of rights—though
the juris humani of those times were not necessarily the “human
rights” of ours. No less various than their imagined bearers could be
the sorts of rights at issue: negative liberty protections against harm
or interference, positive liberty rights of political participation,
and entitlement claims to various forms of public provision or support.
Diverse, too, were the modes of assertion and frames of justification
imagined proper to such claims, as well as the purposes they could be
taken to serve. Some made their mark through petition, agitation, and
legislation; others by revolution and constitutions. Some drew sustenance
from notions of custom or tradition; others flew the banners of divinity
or nature, reason or providence; still others hailed the instrumental
rationality of convenience or utility. Some justified revolution, others
imperial conquest; some sought to end social conflict, others to channel,
modulate, or manage it; some identified themselves with the “civilizing”
mission of European expansion even as others subjected all such projects
to scathing criticism. And finally—whether intoned in speech or written
into the burgeoning print culture of the period—all these variants could
be variously aligned in relation to the affective, passional, and emotive
registers of human experience.
This assemblage suggests that it is not only the turmoils of the twentieth
century and the critique of metaphysics that make the smooth association
of the subject of rights with a formally liberal, rational, and juridical
individualism less than satisfactory. And yet, it is precisely that
association that has made the language of rights the target of much
contemporary criticism, including but not limited to republican, communitarian,
marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial
perspectives. To rethink the language of rights, however, is not to
abandon the political, ethical, and affective charges of its historical
enunciations but to consider them anew in their manifold variety. Titled
History, Theory, and the Subject of Rights, ca. 1640–1848, the
Center/Clark core program for 2001–02 will offer a venue in which history
and theory might be linked, if briefly, to that end. By encouraging
connections between historically inflected theoretical work and theoretically
invested historical research, the program will engage the protean dimensions
of rights-talk on the long cusp of political modernity.
Four interdisciplinary conferences are planned:
2–3 November. “Diverse Subjects: Entities/Affects/Rights.”
This opening conference will take up matters either oblique
or proximate to “the subject of rights,” conventionally understood as
an abstract, autonomous, rational individual. On the one hand, we will
consider historical evocations of such entities as humanity, families,
crowds, sexes, races, or perhaps nations or peoples as subjects of rights.
On the other hand, we’ll engage such things as uneasiness or anxiety,
emotions or passions, fear or envy, as aspects of affectivity pertinent
to rights-talk in various early modern discussions.
22–23 February. “Inside/Outside Constitutionalisms:
Rights/Revolutions/Empires.” The American and French Revolutions
of the eighteenth century put universal rights and modern constitutionalism
on the mattering map of political modernity. And yet, neither customary
practices nor more recent patterns of social engagement or encounter,
nor even aspects of ancient constitutionalist alternatives disappeared
from that topography. In colonial arenas in particular, but also in
the domestic politics of various European states, regional or non-national
particularities, hierarchies, and hybridities both challenged and inflected
the elaboration of the rights of citizens in practice. Attuned to such
diverse contexts, this conference will explore the social partitions
and remainders roiling in the wake of modern constitutionalism.
15–16 March. “Opposition, Dissent, and Revolutionary
Sympathies: Origins of the British Left, 1770–1800.” [Organized by Visiting
Center/Clark Professor J. G. A. Pocock, Johns Hopkins University.] During
the wars against the American and French Revolutions, there emerged
in Britain the phenomenon of an opposition so far convinced that these
wars were wrong as, at times, to welcome revolutionary victories against
British forces or those of their allies. This attitude was new in being
based less on religious conviction than on “enlightened” and “liberal”
principle, and within Britain it displayed less revolutionary intention
than sympathy with the revolutions of others. Americans who remember
the 1960s will know that this mindset is an enduring force in modern
history, and this conference will investigate its origins in the Britain
of George III. Some lay in the politics of Whiggism, others in the politics
of Dissent; and the European war against the universal claims of the
French Revolution is situated within a period of civil war within the
British empire, from America in the 1770s to Ireland in 1798. It will
be suggested that the characters of patriotism, loyalism, and their
opposites, including treason and subversion, changed significantly during
these years.
5–6 April. “Writing Rights: Literatures and Public
Spheres.” Philosophical writing was only one site for the elaboration
of sensibilities associated with the language of rights. Others worth
considering are essays, periodical literatures, and historical writing,
as well as epistolary, autobiographical, novelistic, and poetic forms.
Here we will invite attention to the circulation of political claims
through the diverse literary forms and genres of the public spheres,
“bourgeois” or otherwise, across the many geographies touched by early
modern European political contestation.
"The World from Here":
Library Treasures
Bruce Whiteman, Head Librarian, Clark
Library
(no.
38, Fall 2001)
The largest exhibition of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, maps,
and other special collections material ever assembled for public view
in Los Angeles will open this fall at UCLA’s
Armand Hammer Museum. The World from Here: Treasures of the Great
Libraries of Los Angeles will bring together almost 400 objects
from thirty-two public collections in an effort to demonstrate the richness
of the holdings of the city’s special collections libraries. A committee,
which I chair, of ten librarians and curators has been working for four
years on the project and has selected 391 items that will make up the
exhibition. The choice was based on several criteria, including rarity,
visual interest, and representativeness in terms of the institutional
collections from which objects were drawn.
The World from Here will be divided into eight sections. The
first, “Starting Here,” is devoted to the here of the show’s
premise, California in general and Los Angeles in particular. Three
themes are emphasized: California history (including several books printed
by Augustín Zamorano, California’s first printer), the relocation of
Japanese Americans during World War II (drawing on the rich holdings
of UCLA’s Department of Special Collections), and the cultural coming
of age that occurred in Los Angeles after World War I (with a special
sub-theme focused on the film industry). The second section, “The Printed
Word,” looks at printing history, from the fifteenth century to the
present. The main groupings here are early printed books, among them
the first edition of The Canterbury Tales, and examples from
the late nineteenth-century printing revival, including several books
from the Clark. Among the latter, especially striking is the Kelmscott
Press Syr Perecyvelle of Gales, once part of the private library
of William Morris’s daughter, May, a magnificent copy printed on vellum
and illuminated by hand by a Swiss artist named Edmund Reuter.
 The
third section, “Word and Image,” features illustrated books, and, again,
it runs from incunabula to livres d’artiste from the recent past. Some
of the most visually stunning items fall into this section of the exhibition,
for example, the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and William Blake’s
Book of Thel, as well as the Clark’s copy of John Stalker’s A Treatise
of Japaning and Varnishing, a very rare late seventeenth-century
book on enameling. Following this is a section called “Earth and Universe,”
devoted to scientific and medical books (many drawn from the History
and Special Collections Division of the Bio-Medical Library at UCLA),
where, not only are some of the classics (Newton, Copernicus, Vesalius)
exhibited, but also intriguing if less well-known items, such as a Japanese
woodblock print from ca. 1880 depicting the nine stages of pregnancy,
and several beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical books.
“Lands of Hope and Fear” is the title of the fifth section, which explores
books relating to travel and discovery. The Clark’s copy of Travels
in the Interior of North America (1843), with its famous illustrations
by Karl Bodmer, will be found here, among other items ranging from the
Columbus letter (Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, 1493) to
photographer Michael Light’s remarkable composite photograph of images
from the Apollo 15 mission on the moon. “Ingenious Structures,” which
follows, is comprised of works relating to engineering and architecture.
The first printed work of architecture, Alberti’s De re aedificatoria
(1485, from UCLA’s Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana) stands at the beginning
of this section, and contemporary drawings and models by Los Angeles-based
architects Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry (from UCLA’s Department of
Special Collections and the Getty Research Institute Library respectively)
stand at the end.
The penultimate section is called “The Practice of Everyday Life” and
consists of material relating to cookery, children’s books, education,
and sport and entertainment. Several books and manuscripts from the
Los Angeles Public Library’s extensive cookbook collection will be shown,
including How to Keep a Husband; or, Culinary Tactics (San Francisco,
1872), as well as early books on tennis and swimming, the Clark’s copy
of Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1695, a book on sex and childbirth),
and the first printed books on golf (1743) and television (1926). “Fully
Alive,” the final section, deals with literature, religion, and philosophy,
and closes with a small group of objects devoted to music. It is here
that many of the so-called “great books” will be found: first editions
by Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Rimbaud, Pound, Aristotle, Adam Smith,
and Hume, as well as the King James Bible, a Hebrew incunable Bible,
a beautiful Buddhist text called the Lotus Sutra, and The
Book of Morman, among others. Music is represented with printed
scores by Thomas Morley and Beethoven, as well as manuscripts by Mendelssohn,
George Antheil, Stravinsky, and John Cage.
The World from Here will show some of the great and most visually
arresting materials held in Los Angeles collections, and it will do
so in ways that will help set a new standard for library exhibitions.
The museum setting in and of itself will contribute to this. The designers
of the exhibition have found new ways to display books, and they have
achieved an overall “look” that will be stylish, contemporary, and seductive.
The show, which opens on 17 October, will be accompanied by a 450-page
catalogue and a series of public lectures, to be held at the Hammer
Museum. It will close on 13 January 2002.
"Roxana": The 1740 Version
Robert J. Griffin, Tel Aviv University
(no.
38, Fall 2001)
[Professor Griffin was a Short-Term fellow at the Clark during the
Fall of 2000.]
As part of my research on anonymous publication in eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century England, I came to the Clark Library to learn
more about Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756), the prolific writer of novels,
plays, poems, polemics, and periodical essays. Haywood’s name appeared
on the title pages of her early novels, but she increasingly found uses
for anonymity in her later writings. I was not expecting to learn more
about Daniel Defoe as well, but that is how things happen in a research
library.
 Enormously
popular in her own time, by the twentieth century, with the exception
of her appearance in Pope’s satire The Dunciad, Eliza Haywood had become
nearly invisible. With the revival of interest in Haywood by feminist
literary historians and critics, however, we learn more about her life
and work with each new crop of scholarship. Still, for an overview of
Haywood, the early twentieth-century study by George F. Whicher, The
Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915), is valuable, and
that is one of the places I began.
I became fascinated by Whicher’s discussion of Haywood’s presence in
the 1740 edition of Defoe’s Roxana, first published in 1724.
Whicher was responding to G. A. Aitken, who had observed in 1895 that
a 1740 edition of the book adds “a continuation of nearly one hundred
and fifty pages, many of which are filled with rubbish about women named
Cleomira and Belinda.” Whicher identified these pages as a passage,
lifted verbatim, from Haywood’s 1722 novel, The British Recluse.
Naturally, I wanted to see a copy of the 1740 Roxana, and
I went to the nearest computer terminal to check the Short-Title Catalogue
for its whereabouts. There are only four known extant copies: at the
British Library, the Bienecke at Yale, the Newberry in Chicago, and,
yes, the Clark Library! Within ten minutes I had the book on my desk,
together with an edition of Haywood’s The British Recluse. The
relation between Haywood and Defoe became even further entwined when
I realized that The Fortunate Mistress, the original title of
Roxana, was likely a play upon the title of Haywood’s novel of
the previous year, The Unfortunate Mistress. But the title of
Defoe’s novel of 1724 is ironic.
To understand something of the significance of the 1740 continuation,
it is necessary to give a brief summary of the original plot. Roxana
is the story, told in the first person, of a woman married at age
fifteen to a worthless brewery heir who squanders all his money, leaving
Roxana and her five children with no source of income. She places the
children with relatives and eventually, completely destitute, succumbs
to an offer from her landlord, a jeweler by trade, going off with him
to France. The jeweler is murdered on the road one evening, leaving
Roxana in possession of a substantial fortune. Now wealthy, she increases
her material security by forming a connection with a nobleman who has
come to mourn the jeweler. Subsequently, a Dutch merchant proposes marriage,
but, jealous of her independence, she rejects his offer and returns
to England, taking up lodgings in a fashionable part of town. It is
here that she acquires the name Roxana after dancing in a Turkish costume
reminiscent of a character in a recent play—in the drama of the period,
oriental queens were often named Roxana. But her fortunes change. In
the last third of the book, the suspense reaches unbearable proportions
as Roxana, married at last to the Dutch merchant, is pursued by Susan,
one of her daughters now grown to adulthood, who does not believe that
her mother is dead. The book breaks off rather abruptly, with Roxana
telling the reader only that she has lived to see misery and hinting
that her maid and longtime companion, Amy, has murdered Susan to prevent
her from discovering the truth about her mother.
It turns out that various publishers, taking advantage of this abrupt
ending, commissioned writers to fill in the details. The 1740 edition
is only one of nine continued versions. In some, the daughter is not
murdered, catches up with her mother in Holland, and exposes her to
her husband; Roxana dies penniless in prison. In others, Roxana is eventually
reconciled with all her children and dies wealthy, at peace with the
world. The 1740 edition gives a happy ending, but only after interpolating
the story of Haywood’s Cleomira and Belinda, both of whom have been
seduced and abandoned by the same gentleman. Roxana, it appears, knows
one of them through a friend, and she relates their story as a cautionary
tale. The publisher apparently thought that stories of scandal with
a good moral added on could reinforce one another and add variety, no
matter who their author. Haywood was very much alive in 1740, and one
wonders if she even knew about the piracy of her work. In any case,
when this section breaks off, Susan, Roxana’s eldest daughter, is in
fine health, and nothing more is said on that subject. The remainder
of the 1740 edition adds a long section on the wisdom of Quaker marriage
customs, Roxana’s brief reunion with the nobleman while her husband
is away, a reprise of her famous dance as Roxana, her children’s successful
marriages and careers, her husband’s death, her discovery of the virtuous
pleasures of reading, letters of advice to her son, and a coda in the
third-person explaining how she died “in charity with all the world.”
 
The 1740 edition was originally published serially, in
thirty-seven numbers, most likely weekly, which means that the first
owner of the Clark copy gathered all the numbers together as they appeared
and bound them in book form. The story of Roxana belonged to
popular literature, and it seems unlikely that its readers had any notion
of who had written it. In the case of the 1740 Roxana, we can
identify three separate authors: Defoe, Haywood, and the anonymous continuer
who spliced the episodes together and kept writing. All editions of
Roxana until 1775, forty-four years after Defoe’s death in 1731,
by the way, were published anonymously, that is, as though they had
been written by Roxana herself. It is odd, then, to reflect that the
1775 edition, the first to have Defoe’s name on the title page, removes
completely the episode of Susan pursuing her mother. Specialists such
as Maximillian Novak do not doubt that Defoe wrote the original Roxana,
and I am not questioning the attribution. But such were the vagaries
of the eighteenth-century book trade that the title page of this mangled
edition of 1775 is the only piece of external evidence that we possess.
The 1740 edition, among other things, reminds us that nine years after
Defoe’s death, the originally anonymous Roxana could be republished
anonymously, with no indication of Defoe’s authorship, and with over
one hundred pages of text filling out the story as the writer or publisher
saw fit.
Images reproduced in this on-line
issue:
When not otherwise identified, the images reproduced
here are from the Clark
Library Collection.
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