In the stained glass of the chapel at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, the phrase ‘Élargissez Dieu’ – Make God bigger – appears several times. I confess that, despite being Principal of the college for the past four years, I had not paid any attention to it until recently when Professor Nicholas Cronk, Director of the Voltaire Foundation, was visiting and pointed it out.
Close-up of the stained glass window at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, showing the quotation ‘Élargissez Dieu’ from Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques.
The phrase is from the eighteenth-century French philosopher Diderot, from his Pensées philosophiques, fragment 26. This was Diderot’s first original work (he had worked on translations up until then) and it appeared anonymously in 1746. But, despite the attempt at anonymity, his name as author leaked out and its arguments in favour of deism and materialism, along with its critique of Christianity, caused trouble for him and he soon landed up imprisoned.
What is a quotation from one of the Enlightenment’s most sceptical philosophers (and a French one, at that) doing in stained glass designed by Edward Burne-Jones, in a very English, late nineteenth-century arts and crafts chapel?
This chapel – although built in the late nineteenth century when Manchester College (as it was then named) came to Oxford – has its roots in the Enlightenment because the college was founded at the height of the Enlightenment in the 1780s. It was begun by and for those who could not accept the dogma of any denomination; those who had absorbed the words of Diderot and other Enlightenment philosophers and found themselves questioning many aspects of Christian theology. In practice, many of those people were Unitarians.
The Unitarians shared Diderot’s quest for an expansive God. It is no surprise, then, that this quotation from Diderot was a favourite of James Losh (1763–1833) a Unitarian lawyer, reformer, and ardent campaigner for the abolition of slavery, who was much influenced by the Enlightenment and visited revolutionary France in the 1790s. Losh was the grandfather of James Arlosh (1834–1904), a prominent Unitarian and trustee of Manchester College in the 1890s when the chapel was built. James and his wife Isabella funded the six days of creation windows in memory of their son, Godfrey, who had died in a riding accident on Port Meadow in Oxford. At the top of each of these six windows, Diderot’s words ‘Élargissez Dieu’ are inscribed. The portraits of James, Isabella, and Godfrey are in the college’s dining hall, named the Arlosh Hall in acknowledgement of their generosity to the college.
Harris Manchester College Chapel, Oxford.
In Harris Manchester College chapel, Diderot’s words in the stained glass stand as a reminder of the deep influence of the Enlightenment on the liberal and reformed thinking of the college’s founders and benefactors. And that influence came not just from the English Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley, who was one of the college’s tutors, but also the French philosophes. In the spirit of both the Unitarians and Diderot, we might translate ‘Élargissez Dieu’ as ‘You – make your God bigger!’
– Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College, Oxford
In the late 1780s, Londoners had a rare opportunity to see the great writer and philosopher Voltaire with their own eyes for the cost of just one shilling. The fact that he had died eight years earlier was of no concern, for this Voltaire was sculpted entirely from wax.
Voltaire had been rendered in wax by one Mr Sylvester – an ‘eminent Artist’ who had recently trained at the Royal Academy in Paris – and housed in his Wax Work Cabinet. The Cabinet had first been on display in Paris, before moving to ‘Mr. Ansell’s Large Room, Spring Gardens, London’ – a street at the southeast extreme of St James’s, crossing the eastern end of The Mall, a fashionable quarter of the city inhabited by civil servants and politicians. The Cabinet was described as being ‘an assembly of the most distinguished potentates and characters in Europe’ including royalty from across Europe, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Madame du Barre, the goddess Venus, and the Countess de la Motte accompanied by a fortune teller.
Bodleian Library, BodleianLibraryWaxworks3(12c), ‘For the inspection of the curious grand exhibition of royal wax-work’ (1794).
In January 1786, notices were placed in local newspapers declaring that Mr Sylvester’s Wax Work Cabinet was being moved ‘to that more centrical situation, the Lyceum, in the Strand’, a grander venue just a ten-minute walk from Spring Gardens. The Lyceum had been built in 1772 as an exhibition room for the use of the Royal Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain, having been designed by the architect James Paine to rival the ‘grand salons’ of Paris. It quickly became clear, however, that the Lyceum was a financial disaster as it could not compete with the Royal Academy. The building was subsequently sold in 1777, becoming an exchange, exhibition space, debating room, and gallery. It was while the Lyceum was in this state that Mr Sylvester moved his collection of wax works into the Grand Saloon in 1786, but it was not to last long; the Lyceum was put up for auction in March 1790 and though it did not sell, the space was instead repurposed, coming to house a Phantasmagoriathat featured a menagerie of exotic animals, Mr Diller’s Philosophical Fireworks, and an Irish giant.
Advertisements for Mr Sylvester’s exhibition of the Wax Work Cabinet at the Lyceum proclaimed that the spectacle was designed ‘for the Inspection of the CURIOUS’ and it was here that Voltaire’s waxwork was prominently displayed alongside a host of other wax curios including ‘an exact Representation of The Seraglio’, the rulers of Germany, Russia, France, Spain, Prussia, Naples, and the Netherlands, and a rendition of the goddess Venus sleeping, though one newspaper reported that the most popular figures were those of the Princess Royal, the Prince of Wales, the Countess de la Motte, le Montrofin, and the Countess du Barre. Indeed, Mr. Sylvester was noted for his specialism in the life-sized reproduction of royal figures, making his inclusion of Voltaire in the midst of such royalty notable, and these noble figures were much admired by spectators. The actor and theatrical manager Henry Irving, for instance, visited the exhibition in November 1790 just before its closure and remarked upon the visit in the following way:
‘The enterprising Mr. Sylvester, always anxious to gratify the Curiosity of a generous Public, has added to his grand Exhibition a Model of the Head of the late Governor of the Bastille. He received the exact likeness from the same Gentleman who sent him the likeness of Baron Trenck, who happened to be on the spot when the Governor was executed, and got permission of the mob to take it off in plaster, which Mask he sent to Mr. Sylvester. N.B. Mr. Sylvester returns his most grateful Thanks to the Nobility and Gentry, and Public in general, for the very great encouragement he has received; and as he means to close his Exhibition very soon, admits Servants and Children at Half Price, viz., Sixpence only. That much admired Figure of the Sleeping Venus at Full Length.’ (Brereton, 1803, p.18)
From this account, it is clear that the exhibition was ever-evolving, adding new figures to an illustrious cast of which Voltaire was a steady constant.
The closure of the exhibition at the Lyceum did not signal the end of the Wax Work Cabinet, however. A newspaper advertisement from 1794 noted that the exhibition had moved to ‘No. 341, near Catherine-street, in the Strand’ and was now being run by Mrs Sylvester, the former proprietor’s wife. The Cabinet appears to have been well-travelled between its departure from the Lyceum and its arrival on the Strand, with the advertisement noting that the exhibition – including Voltaire – had been ‘displayed with so much éclat at Dublin, Edinburgh, and most of the principal Towns in England, and approved of by the most curious Connoisseurs, and chiefly by the most eminent Artists in most parts of Europe’. And, as was ever the case, the Cabinet continued to evolve and grow in size, now totalling fifty-two figures and including renderings of recent events such as the British naval victory over the French on 1st June 1794. The advertisement reported that the additions and alterations made by Mrs Sylvester had been well received, being ‘deservedly esteemed by an impartial Public, to be the first productions of the kind’.
This was not the first time that Voltaire had been rendered in wax and it certainly would not be the last. He had been the subject of the very first waxwork crafted by the now famous Marie Tussaud in 1777 when she was just 16 years old, for instance. Tussaud had made the cast of Voltaire’s face just two months before his death, and the resulting waxwork was initially displayed in the Salon de Cire sat at a desk surrounded by books. Voltaire himself had insisted on sending his own clothes to dress the waxwork and onlookers often remarked that his model was significantly scruffier than others on display (Pillbeam, 2006, p.29). Tussaud later brought both the Voltaire mould and waxwork to England, where they remain today, and one catalogue for her London exhibition remarked that ‘the most admirable specimen of her talent in the present collection is the portrait model of the most famous wit Voltaire’ (Pillbeam, 2006, p.173). Clearly her wax rendering of Voltaire was a big hit.
Tussaud’s uncle, Philippe Curtius, also created a wax figure of Voltaire but for a much more sombre purpose, this time to be used in his funeral procession. Here, the model of Voltaire lay on a sarcophagus placed in a funeral chariot that was drawn by twelve white horses, offering mourners one last chance to glimpse the writer before his burial. Unfortunately, heavy rain caused the vermillion robes in which the waxwork had been clothed to run, turning the effigy a somewhat grotesque shade of purple. So well-received was this figure, however, despite its ghoulish hue, that Curtius instigated a boom for wax effigies in funeral processions, with tourists attending funeral processions specifically to view the waxworks on display, as if they were carnivalesque floats. The advertisements for the Cabinet certainly were not wrong when they described the audience for waxworks as curious.
Waxworks of Voltaire were also made in miniature. In c.1790, for example, Francesco Orso created a set of miniature waxworks that included Voltaire, the only example of his waxwork to survive today. Orso was not so concerned with accuracy here as he was allegory and genre, situating his miniature Voltaire in a pastoral scene besides the other spiritual fathers of the French Revolution – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin – and two children. This peaceful scene exudes an air of new beginnings and the blossoming of Spring after a long, hard winter. Other miniature waxworks of Voltaire were more gruesome, such as the 55 x 48.5 cm wax relief of Voltaire on his death bed produced by Samuel Percy in England in the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century, modelled on an earlier example by Philippe Curtius. Here, Voltaire is not delightfully posed in an allegorical pastoral scene but instead lies awkwardly across a green canopied bed as a maid enters to the left, raising her hands in horror at the sight. This was not a waxwork designed to glorify a great man as much as it was a scene intended to invoke an emotive response, with the artist depicting Voltaire as a frail, pained, and pitiful figure lacking any dignity in his final moments. Even more disturbing is a waxwork produced by Kaspar Berhard Hardy in c.1780, again of Voltaire on his deathbed. This time, the wider scene of the bedroom has been stripped away and the waxwork centres on Voltaire’s face and upper body, reclining ungracefully, his expression pained, as he takes his last breaths. Again, we see no glory in this 24 x 7 x 23.5 cm cased waxwork figure, no triumphal or defiant display in the face of his own mortality, but rather a pained and frightened Voltaire fearfully awaiting his death. There is an intimacy here, and a humbling of a great literary figure, stripping back the layers of celebrity to reveal a mere mortal, not so dissimilar to the viewer.
But why should waxworks of Voltaire have created such a draw for visitors? What was it about lifelike waxworks that proved to be such an attraction? And did visitors attach any emotion to their viewing of such figures? In the advertisement for Sylvester’s exhibition, Voltaire is described as ‘that justly admired French Genius, who died in Paris in the Year 1778, aged 85, and has been in his Life-time an intimate Friend to Pope, Congreve and Young’. He was not only an admired individual but also an influential one. Certainly, this celebrity could have been enough of a draw in and of itself, offering the public the chance to see great figures for themselves, with their own eyes.
There is, however, as Michelle E. Bloom has noted, something captivating about waxworks simply for their ability to blur boundaries (Bloom, 2003, pp.xi-xiii). No longer is the spectator sure of the dividing line between human being and inanimate form, life and death, celebrity and normality. The viewer knows that the Voltaire they are seeing is a mere artistic representation, that the real Voltaire has been dead for many years, and yet there is something so lifelike about the waxwork that it is as if the veil between life and death has been lifted, just for a moment. Indeed, waxworks had their origins in funeral effigies rather than art, being carried atop royal coffins across medieval and early modern Europe in order to provide onlookers with one last chance to catch a glimpse of someone of status. These effigies would often be displayed by the tomb of the deceased royal or elsewhere in the church after the funeral, becoming a popular attraction that visitors would sometimes have to pay to view. For many who had never seen a royal figure before, such displays of effigies in churches provided the rare opportunity to see the majesty of royalty for themselves, to get up close to a member of the royal family in a way that they never could have done in life, momentarily dismantling social divides.
Waxworks thus seem to be intimately intertwined with possibility. For many, it is unlikely that they will ever meet a celebrity. Yet a waxwork provides the opportunity to at least stand shoulder to shoulder with their likeness. At the same time, waxworks break down the barrier between celebrities and normal people. These were not attempts, necessarily, to glorify; waxworks did not smooth wrinkles, remove scars, or reverse time as lofty marble busts may have done. Instead, they portrayed the subject in intimate and realistic detail. When viewing a Voltaire waxwork, therefore, the spectator was not viewing a great marble effigy designed to instil a sense of grandeur – such as Jean-Antoine Houdon’sSeated Voltaire – or a trinket sized piece of memorabilia – like the statuettes featured in a recent study by Antoine Lilti – but rather a humbling glimpse of the real man behind the vast writings, warts and all. Such realistic representations were not always well received. Antonio Canova and commentator on the visual arts James Ralph both thought that waxworks were undignified, ‘expressing neither figure like statuary nor colour like painting’ (Craske, 1997, p.192-94).
But perhaps the purpose of the waxwork was never meant to be art. Perhaps instead the place of the waxwork was firmly entrenched in the juxtaposing notions of celebrity and humility. The ability to look a great celebrity in the eyes, to stand in their presence, and yet see them exactly as they were (a human being just like the viewer) was perhaps equally as emotive, albeit in a different way, as viewing a painting produced by a great master of a beautiful and idealised figure.
Waxworks create a world of make-believe that somehow feels very real. The viewer knows that the slightly iridescent flesh and glassy eyes they are staring at have been shaped by human hands and yet there is the unnerving sense that when one turns ones back on a waxwork it may just come alive. To view figures like Voltaire in this way, to gaze upon them more intently than one ever could in polite society, and to note the most intimate details of their faces, blurs the boundary between normality and celebrity, life and death, mortality and immortality. It offers a unique and humbling chance to see notable figures as the human beings that they are or were and, as the advertisement for the Wax Work Cabinet proclaimed, was undeniably an experience for the curious.
– Zoe Screti, Astra Foundation Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies at the Voltaire Foundation
Voltaire’s comments on Frederick II’s L’Art de la guerre, Clement Draper’s depictions of chemical processes, Herman Melville’s pencil scores, or Samuel Beckett’s reading traces… these are all what we define as marginalia: the reader’s markings in the margins of a book. These markings are difficult to pin down in terms more specific than scribbles, references, and thoughts captured on a page. There is no apparent common rule that groups them together and specifies how they should be understood as a whole, even though they are often studied as an ensemble or a genre. Furthermore, the line – if there is a line – that defines the margins themselves is not always evident, and that is why scholars are constantly questioning what marginalia are, while trying to differentiate between the primary text and its annotations. As Laura Estill acknowledges in her article ‘Encoding the edge: manuscript marginalia and the TEI’, ‘perhaps there are easier distinctions to be made when marginalia is handwritten in printed books – although even then, in the case of authorial revisions, stop-press corrections, or (say) Whitman’s notes in another book, there is no easy answer as to what is “marginal”’.
A discussion of what exactly this marginal space is and how it interacts with the text is crucial when considering the central query of the Editing and Digitising Marginalia workshop: how can the marginalia of source material be encoded as fully, accurately, and helpfully as possible? By trying to define the purpose and character of Voltaire’s, Draper’s, Melville’s and Beckett’s marginalia, Nicholas Cronk, Gillian Pink, and Dan Barker; and Zoe Screti, Christopher Ohge, and Dirk Van Hulle respectively delved into the challenges of digitally editing marginalia, which requires a completely different framework of analysis compared to pre-digital editions or even digital facsimile editions. Following on from the OCTET colloquium on Writers’ Libraries, this workshop explored the importance of studying authors through their reading practices. It focused on the editorial choices behind digitally encoding marginalia, with the added layer of complexity that derives both from the difficulties and the possibilities of the digital medium.
When designing a data model that could represent marginalia as a key component of Voltaire’s complete works, for example, the verbal elements were comparatively easier to encode than the non-verbal marks. Voltaire used different materials to underline, draw, and mark the pages he was reading, or he folded, licked, and stuck them together. How can these practices possibly be translated into the digital sphere? For this digital project, the source material came from the transcribed print volumes of the Corpus des notes marginales de Voltaire, which were themselves one step removed from the original source material, since they had already undergone an editorial process that transformed the original squiggles into typeset signs.
Dan Barker, ‘The aim of digitising OCV’, picture taken by author.
Dan Barker, the Digital Consultant at the Voltaire Foundation, explained in his presentation ‘The aim of digitising OCV’ how he had created a system of mark types to record these marks in order to reproduce source material fully, accurately, and helpfully. He classified a mark according to nodes (the points where the lines meet or cross) or edges (uninterrupted lines) to convey their nature, presence, and relationship to the text. Even if the method does not account for the colour, medium, intensity, or even authorship of marginal marks, readers will be able to search for specific classifications of marks and see if Voltaire used them more than once and where. It is a process that operates within the principles proposed by Gillian Pink of what a new-born digital edition of a manuscript should be: legible, containing both visual and non-verbal elements, and searchable, taking into account the modernisation of the transcription to avoid the potential pitfalls of searching for idiosyncratic spellings.
The issue of searchability was further discussed by Zoe Screti, a postdoctoral researcher at the Voltaire Foundation, in her paper ‘Alchemical marginalia written in prison and cataloguing marginalia’. The quantity and diversity of Clement Draper’s marginalia, in the shape of memory aids, summaries, symbols, diagrams, or eyewitness accounts, are not reflected in the catalogue entries of his archival materials. That discrepancy points towards an incompatibility in the way catalogues were built and the questions that scholars are asking now, hence why Screti is updating the system with usability and consistency in mind, both of which aim to make sources of marginalia accessible and discoverable.
She has access to a subset of Voltaire’s manuscripts and is cataloguing them from scratch, which provides her with a decision-making margin that others might not be able to work with. They are also small in size, allowing for a detailed granularity that would be difficult to obtain if working with Draper’s notebooks, for example. But the challenges of ensuring that catalogues keep up with the pace of research on marginalia remain, in big and small collections alike. If we want to be able to locate specific categories of marginalia, as is the case with Voltaire’s non-verbal markings, and include nuances in our current search and text analysis tools, they need to appear in the catalogue entries, and that means going beyond filters and single codes.
Voltaire’s non-verbal annotations to the Marquis de Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain and their appearance in the Voltaire Foundation’s edition of the marginalia.
Finally, both Melville’s and Beckett’s marginalia are representative of common methodological issues in terms of how to create a uniform TEI data model. As Christopher Ohge explained in his talkentitled ‘Melville’s Marginalia Online, with some general provocations’, there is no solution that covers all cases of marginalia encoding, and that is why current projects have very different data models. He provided an overview of those differences, showing how in Keats’s Paradise Lost, a Digital Edition or Whitman’s marginalia to Thoreau’s A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, marginalia are wedged into the hierarchy of the existing text to make it work within different structures, while Archaeology of Readinghas a bespoke XML tagging structure with a marginalia attribute.
But changing content IDs and crossing over the hierarchy of line elements or having a general term that does not include subtleties is not the methodological solution chosen for Melville’s Marginalia Online. This research tool uses software developed by the Whitman Project to generate the page coordinates of the already uploaded facsimile images, to find a page directly with a word search. Melville’s marginalia are encoded in a <div> tag with several attribute values, so as to include all detail and information. The question posed by Ohge then was as follows: how much context is needed to understand marginalia, and how much granularity?
In an intervention entitled ‘Editing Beckett’s Marginalia’, Dirk Van Hulle answered by stating that it depends on the author, the type of marginalia they wrote, and the resources available for the digital project that provides such context. One of the key elements that digital marginalia allows, as is the case with Beckett, is an insight not only into the reader himself, but the underlying structure of all his drafts and notebooks: a network of markings that, in turn, puts into context how his reading engendered his writing.
In order to make that network visible and searchable, one of the solutions going forward is to use IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) as a means of engaging with marginalia. Making resources IIIF compliant ensures they are interoperable with other software, as well as easy to maintain as an online resource with which scholars can interact. It is also culturally inclusive, as it operates on a ‘blank canvas’ principle meaning that non-codex objects can be presented in full.
A piece of marginalia in Voltaire’s copy of the Marquis de Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain demonstrating a stark difference in line weight.
IIIF image viewers could potentially work with improving transcription software, such as Transkribus, to allow for comprehensive resources that can display an image of the page with all its marginalia, paratext, and physical attributes as well as an interactive description and viewable transcription. The ability to describe elements of a text accurately and efficiently via pinpointing areas that have their own locus of metadata, as IIIF is capable of, means that more effort can be devoted to accurate scholarship, which is precisely what Gillian Pink stated in her paper ‘Editing Voltaire’s commentary on Frederick II’s L’Art de la guerre – third time lucky?’ She proposed, for example, to use different colours for the different hands that worked on the manuscript (Frederick II, his secretary, and Voltaire) as a way to take advantage of annotation possibilities with IIIF. However, the question remains: how can we decide which textual blocks should be transcribed as a unit in order to properly represent Voltaire’s marginalia?
The various contributions to the Editing and Digitising Marginalia workshop helped us sketch some answers to this question. Nonetheless, many threads were left to pull, ensuring that, hopefully, there will be another workshop to show how all the projects have built on existing methods while defying their own limits and scope, so that we keep rediscovering authors through the marginal notes that they left.
Voltaire Foundation 