THE CARLYLES GET WIRED: SAINT JOSEPH'S SCHOLAR LANDS $150,000 NEH GRANT TO DIGITIZE 'COLLECTED LETTERS'
CONTACT: Tom Durso, 610.660.1532, [email protected]
Philadelphia, Pa. (April 17, 2000) -- The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a $150,000 grant to a Saint Joseph's University scholar to direct the publication of an online edition of "The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle."
Dr. David R. Sorensen, associate professor of English and associate director of Saint Joseph's Honors Program, will use the funds, from an NEH Collaborative Research grant, to lead a team of editors and technicians from Duke University and the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland.
In addition, as project director, Dr. Sorensen will co-edit volumes 27 to 31 of the Carlyle letters with the University of Edinburgh's K.J. Fielding, Ian Campbell, and Aileen Christianson. These volumes cover the years 1855 to 1860, a period during which the Victorian thinkers associated with a diverse group of foreign exiles, including French, Italian, Hungarian, and Russian radicals and revolutionaries.
The Internet version of the collection will be posted on the World Wide Web through the Digital Scriptorium Rare Book Library at Duke University, where the project is being coordinated. Cross-links will be established between the Carlyle letters and various e-text collections, including 19th century archives at the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the British Library. Saint Joseph's will also be provided with a mirror copy of the site, and it is anticipated that Duke, Edinburgh, and Saint Joseph's students and faculty will have free access to it.
"This is a great honor, and I am delighted that Saint Joseph's will be participating in this genuinely international project with scholars from two renowned universities," said Dr. Sorensen, who recently coordinated an international conference on the Carlyles' influence on intellectual life in the United States.
Begun in 1970, the Duke-Edinburgh edition of "The Collected Letters" is regarded by literary biographers, historians, critics, students, and general readers as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the 19th century. Twenty-six volumes have been published in book form by Duke University Press, and the collection has had a decisive impact on Victorian studies.
"There is nothing in these volumes ... to detract from the view that the Carlyles were the finest letter-writers of the 19th century," wrote Carlyle biographer Simon Heffer in the London Times. "The vividness, the immediacy of the world described jumps off the page, putting one directly into the middle of the last century. This scholarship does not come cheaply, but the fruits it has unearthed are golden."
"I have no doubt at all that this mammoth editorial task is very well worth doing, and it is being done extremely well," added Rosemary Ashton in the London Review of Books. "The Carlyles were extraordinary human beings and, as it happens, extraordinarily good letter-writers. Their letters give a uniquely valuable view not only of their life together, but also of the wider lives of all those, high and low, whom they attracted, repelled and--in the pages of their letters--impaled."
"As the recent Carlyle 2000 conference held at Saint Joseph's demonstrated, the Carlyles continue to speak to the present age--many of their concerns remain our concerns," Dr. Sorensen said.
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