Introduction
In an old book, marginalia (which refers to hand-written notes, symbols, or other marks) might make a book appear less valuable. Booksellers often advertise “clean margins” as a selling point. These marks can, though, offer valuable insights.
The Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections owns an original edition of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s revolutionary collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads (1798). It was annotated by a friend of Wordsworth’s. John Peace met Wordsworth in Bristol and corresponded with the poet for many years; Wordsworth gave Peace, an avid walker, a walking stick carved from a tree on his property. Other signs of their friendship—and the significance that reading poetry can have—appear in the marks he made in this copy.
Classroom Exercise
For this exercise, students in English literature and composition courses read the poem in preparation for one class session. The poem is about memory, remembered memories, and the importance of place. In the poem, Wordsworth meditates on the importance of a place that he visited as a young man—Tintern Abbey, a ruined abbey on the border of Wales and England—and that he remembered fondly years later. When he returns to that place, he thinks about the ways that memories can sustain us and make us look forward to remembering them in the future. Time becomes almost circular and repetitive in the poem.
In John Peace’s annotations, time is repetitive again, but in different ways. Where Wordsworth has written “here I stand, not only with the sense / Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years,” Peace writes “and so thought I when my foot stept upon his threshold, and so have I found.” At the end of the poem, he writes “Finished as he came down Park Street, Bristol. (This he told me as we came down that street upon his next visit to Bristol in 1839).” With this note, Peace not only refers to his experience with Wordsworth himself (the “he” who came down the street with him) but also seems to be writing his own version of the poem’s return to a special place through memories as they are remembered.
Students in this class, after reading the poem, then read Peace’s annotations as page scans of the poem were projected onto a classroom screen. As a class, they discussed the value of Peace’s notes. Students were then each given a printed facsimile of the poem’s original edition, with clean margins where they are asked to make their own notes about their own memories, their favorite passages, or their personal or critical commentary.
Questions for discussion
How does reading a poet’s friend’s notes change your experience of a poem?
Does “Tintern Abbey” become more relatable, or more personal, or more private, after you read John Peace’s marginalia?
After rereading the poem and making your own marginal notes, how does your experience of the poem change?
As Heather Jackson observes, marginalia create a social experience that involves three parties—the published author, the reader, and the imagined future audience: “there always is a third party tacitly present at the writing of marginalia” (Marginalia 95). Does this idea describe your position as a reader of Peace’s notes?
How do Peace’s marginal notes compare to those you’ve made in your own books?
What does this example tell us about the potential value of historical marginalia?
Materials
Introduction, Exercises, and Discussion Questions
1 Tintern Abbey with Peace’s marginalia and transcriptions, color scans
2 Tintern Abbey without marginalia, color scan
Jeanne Britton 