This post is part 5 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Erik Wasson

One of the reasons that The Lucubrator seems so strange is the range of topics the manuscript covers, as is promised in its subtitle, Containing Essays on Various Subjects. However, influential writers of the eighteenth century commonly published literature on “various subjects.” In my research, I have focused on the famous essayist Vicesimus Knox: specifically, his two published essay collections, Winter Evenings; or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters (London 1788; New York 1805) and Essays Moral and Literary (London, 1778; Philadelphia 1792).

Winter Evenings covers a variety of subjects just as does The Lucubrator. Besides having the word “lucubrator” in their titles, both works have a table of contents that lay out similar topics of interest. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “lucubrator” as “a nocturnal student,” and the word “lucubrations” as “the product of nocturnal study and meditation; hence, a literary work showing signs of careful elaboration. Now somewhat derisive or playful, suggesting the notion of something pedantic or overelaborate.” This definition of the word “lucubrator” gives a clue as to the purpose of The Lucubrator and the reason for why the contents of the manuscript are so wide-ranging, from discussions of female education to living in the countryside. The author’s mission was to create a manuscript, which, told through an apprehensive narrative voice, had intellectual thought and moralistic and societal concern as its structure.

In his prefaces to Essays Moral and Literary and Winter Evenings, Knox discusses lucubrations as if they were a genre all on their own. He claims that their literary footprint is significant to his culture and to the education of readers. What is most interesting about Essays Moral and Literary is found in the preface. Here Knox writes:

An unknown Writer who sends his lucubrations into the world, and solicits public favour, is exactly in the condition of a new man aspiring to hounours among the ancient Romans. They who have established their fame, are jealous of an intruder; they who are competitors, are angry with a rival; and the unconcerned spectators will seldom withdraw their eyes from the contemplation of allowed merit, to examine the pretentions of doubtful excellence.

Perhaps to avoid being criticized by other writers and readers of his day, Knox attempted to publish his essays anonymously. In the preface to the second edition of Essays, Knox wrote: “The Author of the following Papers can truly say, he never meant to claim them” (ix). This statement made by Knox gives strong evidence towards why The Lucubrator was never published. Knox calls his essays “the unguarded production of his leisure hours.” Perhaps the author of the manuscript thought, too, that lucubrations were too private or personal for publication.

This post is part 4 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Amy Cantrall

The pages of The Lucubrator are filled with advice, opinions, and contemplations about life. The very last essay casts a different tone: one of fiction, as it contains all the elements of storytelling. The story, dated as being written on August 25, 1797, is of the narrator coming across a hurt man on the road; it is entitled “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments.” This last essay follows this stranger’s path through his life of misery, action, and adventure. It is a tale fit for modern novels—the man, sent to work at a young age, becomes involved in war as he grows older. Mistaken identities, seafaring adventures, piracy, and a strong-willed attempt to return home encapsulate this amazing story; enough to certainly keep readers on the edge of their seats to find out what will happen to the poor stranger who happened to come upon the narrator’s path.

However, we don’t find out what happens to the narrator. Sadly, one of the many mysteries of The Lucubrator includes what has happened to the rest of the manuscript. The missing pages could suggest that there is a second volume of The Lucubrator, especially due to the fact that the story has no satisfying conclusion. The fictional tale ends with the sentence “Soon after we were transported to Great Britain, where we remained as prisoners till exchanged towards the conclusion of the war.” Although the story seems to be in the middle, the back page remains blank, with no further writings. The mysteriousness of the unfinished story captures our wonder for this stranger within the final ten pages of a mysterious manuscript. This story strikes a reader as intriguing also because it is not like the other essays, which are educational and moralistic; this one seems to be a complete work of fiction, pulled from the writer’s imagination. Its placement at the end of The Lucubrator could perhaps also be a way of filling up pages, as the American publisher Robert Bell did with Samuel Jackson Pratt’s novel Emma Corbett (1780); rather than waste valuable sheets of paper, he filled them (Pratt 233). If we are to believe this is what Noyes had intended, then it is possible that “On the Probability” was never a finished story.

In an attempt to discover who James Noyes might have been, I came across one James Noyes’s almanac entitled An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, 1797. Similar to The Lucubrator, the Astronomical Diary contains a fictional tale entitled simply, “Humorous: A Humorous Tale.” This tale is an amusing story of two Englishmen who stay the night in a house with a corpse. After one of the men returns to what he believes to be his room, he climbs into bed unknowingly with the corpse—causing much fright for the servants when they believe the corpse has come back to life. This is a short, humorous tale; its presence near the end of an almanac seems to function as a way of entertaining readers, as almanacs mostly provide factual information and details about daily weather for planting and growing crops. In this way, the placement of the humorous tale is unexpected and not so straightforward; but it is understandable why it would be there. Similarly, the final essay of The Lucubrator is also a sensational and unexpected fiction, with its unfinished story leaving much for readers to question. I think this could very well be the same James Noyes, as both seem to like including fictional stories at the end of their writings.

Fictional stories and novels in early America provided a new scope of reading. With fiction, news stories could be presented in new ways and grow into new genres. As we have found with such popular novels as Emma Corbett, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), narratives that followed fictional lives often benefited readers by demonstrating strong moral conduct and warning against seduction. In this way, early novels were often didactic. But the two fictional stories I have chosen to examine, “A Humorous Tale” and “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments” are not instructive. Because the latter short tale does not have a proper ending, it is unknown whether or not the author intended for a moral lesson or some sort of warning as the title implies. This is why I believe these fictions are of a different kind than we find in contemporary novels. They are used solely for the purpose of surprising and entertaining readers who expect advice and meditations in The Lucubrator and weather reports in the almanac. 

Perhaps, in these short fictions, we can see one moment in the evolution of American fiction. If the author of “On the Probability of Future Rewards and Punishments” had turned the tale into a novel, I believe he or she would have written it in a single narrative voice, as was becoming popular during the period of the manuscript’s creation. From here on out, fictional storytelling (including short stories and novels alike) would only expand and develop further.

---

Works Cited

Noyes, James. An Astromonical Diary or Almanack, for the Year of Christian Aera, 1797. Dover: 1796. America's Historical Imprints. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Noyes, James. Lucubrator. N.d. MS. University of Missouri, n.p.

Noyes, James. The Federal Arithmetic; Or, A Compendium of the Most Useful Rules of That Science, Adapted to the Currency of the United States. For the Use of Schools and Private Persons. Published Agreeably to Act of Congress. Exeter: 1797. America's Historical Imprints. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.

Pratt, Samuel Jackson. Emma Corbett, Or, The Miseries of Civil War. Ed. Eve Tavor Bannet. Peterborough: Broadview, 2011.

This post is part 3 of our continuing series on Dr. Juliette Paul's English 4300 class and their research on an early American manuscript in Special Collections.

by Sarah Fine

When we think of blogging, we probably think of someone sitting in front of a computer. However, the concept of blogging isn’t new; in fact, people have been practicing forms of life writing for hundreds of years. Most people are probably familiar with diaries, but 18^th-century Americans also composed scrapbooks and commonplace books, and used these outlets much in the same way that modern life writers might use social media. So, what was The Lucubrator to its author?

We have a little evidence to go by. First, as far as we can tell, the manuscript was never published, either in whole or in part. A diary, to an 18^th-century writer, would have been an outlet for private, personal expression, much like a personal blog today; and the author of The Lucubrator certainly expresses him or herself in a series of opinionated essays. However, we can tell from the somewhat disorganized nature of the book that it probably was not meant to be a diary, if only because this book is not like other early modern diaries that exist today. First, in their subject matter, as Harriette Merrifield Forbes notes:

Many of the diaries listed [in catalogues] seem to have but little value,

but however insignificant they may contain facts saved by no one else and of great interest to a few. Others, like those of Judge Samuel Sewall, and the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, give nearly complete histories of the social life of the towns where the diarists lived. (vii)

The Lucubrator deals only with very general topics; there is no mention of, for example, specific people in the author’s life, in a specific place, or even during specific events (with the exception of Independence Day); in other words, we would expect a diary to include more specific references to his or her own life than The Lucubrator does because, well, it is a diary. Secondly, The Lucubrator doesn’t look at all like you’d expect a diary to look; it has page numbers, but the dates given in the individual entries are inconsistent and not always in chronological order. The entries are also titled, and the book has a title page and a table of contents. It’s highly unlikely that a normal diarist would ever go to such lengths to decorate his or her own diary only to inscribe the entries irregularly and out of order.

So, if The Lucubrator is not a diary, does that mean it was meant to be shared? If so, that would make the manuscript more akin to a scrapbook, which, like the scrapbooks of the 21^st-century, would be used to log the creator’s experiences for the sake of revisiting them later. Actually, 18^th-century scrapbooks were a lot like Facebook; according to Katie Good, a scrapbook was meant to document relationships, collect media (which, as print grew, was becoming more abundant), and express personal tastes while building “cultural capital” (557). The Lucubrator obviously does one of these things: it expresses the writer’s personal tastes or beliefs. It may also do a second, in that it may be a means of collecting media. However, that could mean that the essays are more or less plagiarized. It was not uncommon in the 17^th-and 18^th– centuries for a reader to, upon feeling connected with a certain piece, copy it down, perhaps as a means of committing it to memory, or as a means of putting it in a convenient place (i.e. a scrapbook) where it could be easily found again for rereading. However, this assertion is almost as unlikely as the diary hypothesis, namely because there is no record of the essays in print anywhere else; none, at least that can be easily found. It could be that the writer paraphrased or shortened essays that he or she read elsewhere. But a scrapbook, according to Good, should also document personal relationships or memories (The Lucubrator is so vague that we can’t say with certainty where it even came from, let alone who it is about), and should contain some sort of printed memorabilia¾ticket stubs, playbills, letters, or cards. The Lucubrator doesn’t contain anything like this, except for a single broadside, found folded and tucked into the back cover. However, due to the book’s unclear history, we can’t know whether this broadside was original to the book or was placed there for safekeeping by one of its many owners through the centuries.

So, if The Lucubrator is neither a diary nor a scrapbook, what is this thing? We can best classify it as a commonplace book, which is not dissimilar to a Tumblr page; commonplace books were meant to contain a writer’s original thoughts or reactions to others’ work, as well as copied-down essays or works written by others, much in the same way a Tumblr page can contain both original posts and the reblogged posts of others. They were meant as places for reflection; the Enlightenment had made self-improvement through education a very popular idea, and commonplace books popped up as a means of fostering one’s own critical thinking about events or readings. This fits The Lucubrator to a T. Fred Schurink writes that, of the commonplace books that have survived, the majority are academic in tone, and carefully organized; some, even the more casual ones, include handwritten indices to allow the collector to find passages more easily (463, 466). The Lucubrator looks similar to one contemporary commonplace book, that of Hector Orr. Orr’s essays are similarly numbered and titled. His subject matter is quite similar as well, as the manuscript comprises mostly moralistic or observational essays. However, unlike The Lucubrator, Orr’s commonplace book does not have a table of contents, page numbers, or dated entries. The primary detractor from the commonplace book hypothesis is that The Lucubrator is decidedly un-academic. While it is possible that the essays are responses to the author’s readings, those readings aren’t named, nor are their sources or authors given. The writer also doesn’t include (or, at least, doesn’t denote) direct quotations from these source works. This would suggest that the author wasn’t taking notes while reading another work, and at most might be writing in response to those works.

With all of these criteria in mind, it becomes clear that The Lucubrator does not fall neatly into a single category. Of course, The Lucubrator could also be a sort of mashup of all three genres. According to Zboray and Zboray, separate books would sometimes combine or even transform over time: “While the folks who created these literary items recognized each one’s distinct form and purpose … in practice they often merged formats, so that a diary, for example, could easily morph into a scrapbook or a scrapbook into a commonplace book” (Zboray, et. al, 12). So, the author of The Lucubrator could very well have used the manuscript as a venue to write response essays to other, published essays, or to events in his or her life. This would, in a way, place the manuscript in both the scrapbook category, as it is a means to commemorate the works of others, and as a commonplace book, as it is a place to reflect upon those works. This would imply that the creation of the book was a personal project, and that the manuscript was not meant for publication, or possibly even for sharing among family and neighbors.

---

Works Cited

Forbes, Harriette Merrifield. New England Diaries: 1602-1800; a Descriptive Catalogue  of Diaries, Orderly Books and Sea Journals. New York: Russell & Russell, 1967.

Good, Katie. “From Scrapbook to Facebook: a history of personal media assemblage and archives.” New Media and Society. 15.4 (2013): 557-73.

Orr, Hector. Commonplace book of Hector Orr, 1789-1804. Colonial North American Project. Harvard University. Web. Accessed April 15, 2016.

Schurink, Fred. “Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England.” The Huntington Library Quarterly. 73.3 (2010): 453-69.

Zboray, Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray. “Is It a Diary, Commonplace Book, Scrapbook, or Whatchamacallit? Six Years of Explorations in New England’s Manuscript Archives.” Libraries and the Cultural Record. 44.1 (2009): 101-23.