In my last post, I wrote about the three library catalogues that have provided me detailed information about exactly what was on offer for patients at the Crichton Royal Institution, the Murray Royal Asylum, and the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. These sources have been invaluable - but they were also incredibly unwieldy! Getting them into a shape where I’d be able to analyse their contents was a very long process.
An example page of the Crichton Royal Institution’s library catalogue. Dumfries and Galloway Archives and Local Studies, DGH1/6/17/1 (digitised by the Wellcome Library).
Today I finally finished one of the biggest tasks of my PhD. 3875 items collated from three asylum catalogues: each transcribed, sorted, cleaned up, individually researched to maximise information, & recategorised. Not too pretty, but ready for analysis! pic.twitter.com/L6CaLFq93l
— Laura Gray Blair (@lauragrayblair) September 21, 2020
First, there was the task of simply transcribing the catalogues. How long could it possibly take to turn approximately a hundred pages of book titles into a workable format? It turns out, quite a long time. For a while, I felt that I’d lost all sense of the meaning of the letters of the alphabet. I’m only glad that I was working with printed sources, and ‘only’ just under four thousand items, rather than the incredible numbers some of my fellow book historians have worked on (for example, Henning Hansen’s 18,000 items from a bookshop in Gothenburg!)
It turned out that it was after the transcription that my work would really begin. Unfortunately for me, cataloguing practices in the asylums of the nineteenth century were sadly not particularly uniform!
M. W. J., cataloguer of the Murray Royal Asylum’s library, scores a solid 9/10 for consistency. They separated their library’s contents into various useful genre categories, nearly always provide an author, and frequently include a publication date. The catalogue is helpfully arranged with books of the same genre by the same author appearing together. The 1863 copy is nicely laid out, with columns for each piece of information about the nearly 750 titles in the library. The Crichton Royal Institution’s catalogue provides a slightly more haphazard insight into the asylum’s holdings. Like the Murray Royal, it splits the library by genre: however, it provides little detail about the books. It eschews publication date, shortens titles considerably, and avoids giving author names almost entirely. With over 1500 items, this made identifying Crichton’s books with such minimal information a considerable task. The Royal Edinburgh Asylum’s catalogue, compiled by Assistant Physicians John Sibbald and T. S. Clouston, took cataloguing chaos to new heights. In an alphabetical system, should an item be catalogued by the author’s name, the book’s full title, or the key word in the title? As it turns out, Clouston and Sibbald appear not to have made this decision - or at least not discussed it with each other. Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York appears under ‘K’, ‘I’ and ‘N’, to provide one example of many.
A spread from the Murray Royal Asylum’s library catalogue, compiled by M. W. J. and published in 1863. University of Dundee Archive Services, THB29/11/2/1 (digitised by Google Books)
Clouston and Sibbald threw rather a wrench in my plan of looking at titles where multiple copies or editions of one text were kept - with it impossible to tell whether there genuinely were three copies of everything in the asylum’s library, or whether it was down to miscommunication on the part of the cataloguers, for now I’m focusing simply on the titles available. Removing ‘duplicate’ (or potentially duplicate) items from the catalogues reduced my standardisation workload a small amount, and also resulted in a revealing portrait of the asylum libraries. The Murray Royal lost only five titles to duplicate removal (good work, M. W. J.); Crichton’s library was reduced by 45 items (not bad - probably genuine examples of where the asylum held multiple copies); but the Royal Edinburgh’s library was reduced by a staggering 35%, from 1426 items to 925. This raises a question which is difficult to answer: was the catalogue accurate, or an inflation of the library’s true holdings? And was it accidental, or deliberate? I’m yet to find out.
After all of that, my next step was to get my combined catalogue in a state fit for analysing the contents of the three asylum libraries. I’ve probably provided a huge percentage of WorldCat’s site visits over the last few months, as I looked up every one of the remaining 3204 items in an attempt to identify missing authors and fill out vaguely-recorded book titles. Then came standardisation: turning every ‘W. Scott’, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, ‘Walter Scott’, and ‘Sir Scott’ into ‘Walter Scott’; wrangling wordy nineteenth-century titles and their alternatives into something manageable; making sure publishers were accurate, and assigning each text its new, standardised genre. I now have a spreadsheet (which yes, probably should be a database - but I haven’t had time yet, even in lockdown) so monstrous that my laptop audibly groans whenever I open it. After six months’ work, it’s ready for analysis!