A
Brief Introduction to
Hone and the BioText
Hone and the BioText
William Hone (1780-1842) arguably did more than any other writer, printer, or publisher to shape British popular print culture in the early decades of the nineteenth century. When Hone entered into public life at about the turn of the century, print culture was still primarily the province of the wealthier upper and emerging middle classes; by the time of Hone's death in 1842, print culture had expanded dramatically to include a "mass reading public" in something resembling the contemporary sense of the term. One of the BioText's founding premises is that Hone himself had a lot to do with this demographic and political shift.
In his own time, Hone was famous in three widely differing contexts:
First, on three consecutive days in December of 1817, Hone successfully defended himself in the King's Court at Guildhall against
three libel charges brought upon him by the Attorney General. The well-publicized trials and the rather surprising acquittals made Hone a celebrity within the radical and reformist community. He was heralded (or bemoaned, depending upon one's point of view) as a worthy "Champion of the Free Press," and the transcripts of the trials--Hone printed them himself beginning in 1818--were frequently reprinted during the nineteenth century, becoming something of a classic in the history of the English press.
Second, during the post-Peterloo agitation of late 1819 and again during the so-called "Queen Caroline Affair" of 1820, Hone collaborated with the brilliant young engraver George Cruikshank to produce a series of extremely popular political satires. With sales reaching well into the tens of thousands of copies, these works (The Political House that Jack Built, The Man in the Moon, Non Mi Ricordo! and others) quite literally defined one branch of public opinion on these momentous political affairs.
And finally, between 1825 and 1832 Hone produced a series of popular miscellanies--The Every-Day Book, The Table Book and The Year Book--that present accounts of all sorts of local history, popular customs and other matters of antiquarian interest. Popular with many Victorian readers (including Hone's friend Charles Dickens) and most recently republished in 1997, these works are still useful as sourcebooks on English popular culture and local traditions.
Clearly Hone is a significant figure in early nineteenth-century print culture, and the BioText offers several kinds of resources for the study of the man, his publications, and his effects on literary culture more generally. In effect, the BioText is an academic experiment that combines what have traditionally been separate genres of scholarly endeavor--biography, bibliography, and textual editing. In the section called "biographical resources" readers will discover chronologies of the period, fragments of a biography of Hone, an index (with selections) of Hone's correspondence, and other such primary and secondary documents. The "bibliography and archives" section includes bibliogaphies of works written, published, or otherwise associated with Hone as well as a listing of recent scholarly studies of the man. Perhaps more useful to the student of the period, however, are the descriptions of the chief Hone archives of primary documents both in Britain and the United States. It is my hope and intention in the coming months to continue to add more transcripts of the primary documents themselves. (For a sense of the potential here, follow the link to the Public Record Office and then to the individual archives.) And finally, the "etexts" section offers, as its name implies, a small but growing library of the full texts of Hone's works. When complete, all three of these areas will be fully interlinked so that readers will be able, with the click of a button, to go from a biographical account of some moment in Hone's life to the relevant transcriptions of Hone's letters and publications and then to any additional archival sources that might help to document the period. A more detailed account of the theory underlying this hypertextual experiment is available in the introductory essay on "Discursive Hosts."
A note on "Open Source Scholarship":
One of the more exciting trends in recent computer publishing is known as "open source software." In a nutshell, the producers of open source software do not merely provide users with a working version of some program; they also supply free access to the source computer code that drives the program. The idea is both to offer knowledgeable users the opportunity to alter the program to fit their own needs and to enable users to improve the program by identifying and fixing any flaws in the original software code. With its implicit respect for the users and with its decentralization of the role of Author/Creator, the idea of open source software is long overdue in scholarly publishing as well.
I envision the BioText as a kind of scholarly analogy to open source publishing. In the biographical fragments, for instance, I offer brief narrative accounts of certain key moments in Hone's life and career. Inevitably, the fragments present an implicit "thesis" about the meaning and significance of certain specific elements of the historical record, and such thesis claims rest in turn on a knowledge of the history of the period, on the evidence of the surviving archival and print record, and on my own interpretation and conjecture. There is nothing particularly surprising or unusual in this--it is the same historiographic process that has governed literary biography for decades. But what is perhaps unusual with the BioText is the opportunity it offers for readers easily to examine for themselves at least some portion of the archival, manuscript, or rare print sources. Some readers may well find that the source documents tell a story rather different from the one I provide; some may wish to correct some detail or add to the materials here assembled; some may wish to suggest whole new areas or contexts to link to the Hone materials; and so forth. Unlike a printed book, the BioText encourages such contributions. It is a flexible, growing, organic resource that--or such is my hope--can only benefit from the collective contributions of its readers and users. Suggestions, contributions, and comments will be warmly welcomed by the author-cum-editor, Kyle Grimes, at kgrimes@uab.edu.
In the meantime, I hope you find the site interesting and useful, and I encourage you to visit frequently to see how the project develops.
