Review of Adam Matthew’s Romanticism: Life, Literature, and Landscape

While scholars almost immediately recognized the 2005 launch of Google Books as a watershed for archival research, the response was presumably more muted among educational publishers like Gale and Adam Matthew (AM), which by then had invested heavily in subscription databases featuring many of the books and periodicals now freely available online. With survival suddenly depending on staking a claim to some corner of the literary and historical archive that Silficon Valley’s scanners had missed, Gale has redoubled its focus on digitizing early newspapers, the print genre most glaringly omitted from Google Books. Meanwhile, AM has looked beyond the world of type to handwritten texts, striking deals with several leading British and American archives to digitize (and monetize) their manuscript collections. As a result, those fortunate enough to have institutional subscriptions, can now, from the comfort of their home or office, explore the Huntington Library’s collection of all plays licensed in Britain between 1737 and 1824, the Stationers’ Company’s ledgers of texts printed in England since 1554, and, as of 2020, the hoard of book-industry records in the National Library of Scotland’s John Murray archive. One of AM’s first major coups in this area came in the early 2010s, when it secured the rights to digitize the Wordsworth Trust’s (WT) entire manuscript collection and many of its artworks. The resulting database, which AM somewhat hyperbolically markets as Romanticism: Life, Literature, and Landscape, is less a smorgasbord of all things Romantic than an archive concentrating specifically on a single set of writers (the so-called “Wordsworth Circle”) and a single geographic region (the English Lakes). Building upon foundational bequests by the Wordsworths’ descendants, several generations of curators at the WT and its forerunner, the Dove Cottage Trust, have gathered 90% of William Wordsworth’s verse manuscripts, all of Dorothy Wordsworth’s extant journals and notebooks, and a wealth of correspondence by the siblings’ closest friends and relations. By digitizing these and hundreds of other major literary manuscripts owned by the WT, AM has largely obviated the need for researchers at subscribing institutions to make pilgrimages to Grasmere to pore over drafts of ThePrelude, peruse Dorothy Wordsworth’s notebook poems, or explore manuscripts by such writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, John Wilson, Thomas De Quincey, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Felicia Hemans, and Matthew Arnold. Further, the Romanticism database digitizes some 2,500 of the 9,000 works in the WT’s art collection, concentrating on portraits and landscape paintings with direct relevance to William Wordsworth’s life and works. Compared to the most robust single-archive databases—including some of AM’s own recent releases—Romanticism underwhelms in the supplementary resources it offers for appreciating and navigating this remarkable collection. While valuable in its own right, the “User Guide” is less an instruction manual for this site than a descriptive catalogue of the WT’s holdings. Other contextual materials, including a set of concise “Literary Lives” and five short introductory essays on the Wordsworths and Romantic art, only obliquely reference the collection’s strengths, rarely mentioning and never linking to specific manuscripts or paintings found therein. Worse, two of the four features grouped under the “Further Resources” tab—a set of “External Links” and an “Archive Explorer”—are so riddled with broken or outdated hyperlinks as to be essentially unusable. While “link rot” eventually infects almost any website, decay on this scale is usually associated with abandoned personal websites, not pricy educational databases. That the site’s supplementary features have fallen into such disrepair may suggest how rarely they have been used since the product’s 2012 release. Despite the myriad ways the Romanticism database might be used in classrooms, its heaviest users have presumably …