Statement of Progress,
The William Hone
Biotext
(as of 12 December, 2000)
The William Hone Biotext
(as of 12 December, 2000)
When the Web was a very young resource--even younger than it is today--it was common for developers to put clever little yellow icons somewhere in their pages to indicate that the site was "under construction." It didn't take long before such icons themselves began to seem anachronistic, a holdover from print modes of publication where the notion of a truly "finished" work seems more valid. Web sites, and even individual web pages, can never really be finished. With a few keyboard touches, virtually any site can be edited, altered, updated or destroyed, and new links constantly appear, creating an ever richer, ever more complex virtual environment--which context inevitably changes the value of the individual site's significance. This condition of perpetual revision, expansion, and incompleteness (a Derridean différance built into the very form of the hypertext) certainly describes the current state of the William Hone Biotext.
Nonetheless, developers of such websites as the BioText must at some point decide that the site is cohesive, reliable, and clear enough to be useful and interesting to some segment of the web-reading public. In the present case, we have decided to make the site public once it provides relatively full coverage of the early years of Hone's public life--that is, up through the famous libel trials of 1817. The rest of Hone's fascinating and varied life--the popular squibs produced in conjunction with George Cruikshank, the antiquarian miscellanies of the later 1820s, and so forth--must wait for future development of the BioText. In its present incarnation, the BioText is in a kind of electronic limbo--it is available on the web so that it will be accessible to students and fellow scholars, but it is not yet in a condition to enable me to advertise its presence to the larger scholarly or web community.
These reservations and qualifications aside, a brief listing of current progress may be of help to some readers, and readers themselves are encouraged to offer suggestions for improvement or expansion. Simply send suggestions along to Kyle Grimes at kgrimes@uab.edu.
The three major divisions of the BioText are the bibliographies, the e-texts, and the biographical resources.
Bibliographies and Archives:
The bibliographies themselves are substantially complete, though the Secondary Source Bibliography will of course need to be occasionally updated. (Any additions or corrections to the Annotated Bibliography or the Short Title Bibliography are warmly welcomed.) The basic structure of the Archives pages is currently in place, with the one exception of the Adelphi library which will soon receive its own page and a much fuller description. It is to be anticipated that, as the BioText continues to grow, so too will the excerpts provided in the Archive pages--the links to the PRO Bankruptcy documents (PRO B 3/286) and to the Home Office Papers (PRO HO 42/158) offer some indication of the kind of detail possible here. As it says on the Bibliographies and Archives homepage, the Reviews are yet to come, though the link to the Quarterly Review assessment of Hone's Apocryphal New Testament may suggest something of the form. We are now in the process of collecting and transcribing into HTML all the contemporary reviews we can locate for Hone's publications, but it may be some time before these reviews finally appear. Most of Hone's publishing as an active public figure occurred after the 1817 trials; thus, there are few reviews for the earlier works highlighted in the current version of the BioText.
Etexts:
At present, the texts of Hone's 1817 parodies are available in full-text hypertext editions. In addition, The Official Account of the Noble Lord's Bite has recently appeared, as has an 1820 reprint of Hone's Buonapartephobia (originally published in 1815). Also available--courtesy of the Romantic Circles website at the University of Maryland--is a full-text facsimile edition, with notes, of Hone and Cruikshank's Political House that Jack Built (1819). In addition to these early parodies, we hope soon to add etexts and facsimiles for all of the illustrated squibs produced by Hone and Cruikshank in 1819 through 1821. These will include, The Man in the Moon, Non Mi Ricordo!, The Political Showman--At Home!, and A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang. Eventually, we hope to add title pages and synopses of the publications that stemmed from Hone's Apocryphal New Testament. Finally, and no doubt most ambitious of all, we hope to set complete electronic editions of Hone's still-useful popular culture and antiquarian miscellanies, The Every-Day Book, The Table Book, and The Year Book.
Biographical Resources:
Clearly, there is much work to be done here. The Chronology needs to be extended beyond 1818, and the correspondence collection needs to be filled out as well. The correspondence files for the early years of Hone's life will likely be of interest to the biographer--see the Correspondence index. The Who's Who section has yet to be fulfilled. What may be of most interest, however, will be the biographical fragments that are beginning to appear, complete with links into the Chronology. There are currently more than ten of these fragments, most dealing with aspects Hone's life up to the 1817 trials. One more resource that I am contemplating--a genealogy page. I frequently receive correspondence from descendents of Hone who are interested in tracing their family backgrounds. If interest warrants, I will be happy to list the names of Hone descendents along with a genealogical chart.
