A Match Made in the Archive: Reading and Poaching Through Ngrams and Rare Books

On a hunch, I went home after the DH events last September and typed “Jesuit” into the English corpus of Google Books’ Ngram Viewer. The tool is more powerful than what I used it for, but my search revealed how popular the word was in the English-language books that Google has digitized and made searchable. One result from 1524 (before the Society was founded) is the result of a wrong date (actually 1920). But things get really interesting in 1609, four years after the Gunpowder Plot to restore a Catholic monarchy failed and English Jesuit missionaries took a good chunk of the blame. Things more or less taper off as the corpus of extant books expands in later years, but with curious spikes in popularity, one of which occurs between 1840 and 1860.

This spike follows the 1844 Philadelphia Nativist Riots, which is in the news lately as journalists draw apt comparisons between the anti-Muslim paranoia of Donald Trump & Co. and the ultra-nationalist anti-Catholicism of nineteenth-century America. Sometimes called the Bible Riots, Philadelphia nativists violently destroyed Catholic property after outrage over Catholic parents’ wanting their children to be allowed to personally use a Catholic translation of the Bible in their public-school Bible studies: Protestants feared a foreign takeover from these people who often heralded from Ireland or Italy and followed a religious leader in Rome. The Google Books corpus shows that anti-Catholic sentiment persisted on both sides of the Atlantic, however, and includes such salacious titles as Jesuit Interference with Domestic Affairs: A True Statement of Facts Concerning the Conduct of the Jesuit Priests of Texas (unknown, 1848); The Friendship of a Jesuit (with an epigram from Hamlet: “meet it is, I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain”; Edinburgh and London, 1848); The Perverter in High Life: a True Narrative of Jesuit Duplicity (London, 1851); The Female Jesuit; or, The Spy in the Family (New York, 1851 — and its 1853 sequel); and Madelon Hawley, or, The Jesuit and His Victim: A Revelation of Romanism (New York, 1857; 1859).

This last title, written by William Earle Binder, has a hard copy housed in the Special Collections Resource Center (SCRC) at Syracuse University’s Bird Library. The book is fairly small for a hardbound book by today’s standards, a little smaller than a trade paperback — a book for casual reading. Though the interior is in good shape, it has a worn-out cover and spotted edges. Framed as a story that the author heard from a dying man, Joseph Secor, who left a corrupt Society of Jesus, the text traffics in the hallmarks of anti-Catholic prejudice handed down from the English Reformation. During his time in the Society, the Fr. Joseph clashes with a tyrannical and cunning senior member, Fr. Eustace, who tormented to death the married Mrs. Hawley, a woman who refused his sexual advances; later, he pursues her virginal daughter Madelon even after excommunicating her (spoiler alert: he and Madelon both die). The pages are filled with priests in disguise, gross caricatures of the Irish, kidnapped women held prisoner in cloisters, allusions to the Inquisition, and vivid (historically and doctrinally inaccurate) ritual. Flipping through the book, I wondered what kind of person would have held it before I put my hands on it — what they would have thought of a dorky Catholic studying Jesuit literature for a living. Indeed, I found written large inside the back cover:

Mrs Clara T Crane

91 3/4 Clark Street

Auburn NY

Auburn hits rather closer to home than Philadelphia. A little Googling revealed Mrs. Crane to be the wife of a W.W. Crane, an English immigrant and manufacturer; in 1900, he died and was buried with Episcopalian and Masonic services.[1] Perhaps she was an anti-Catholic crusader: her husband came to America in 1852, when many of the anti-Jesuit texts were published in England and the US. Maybe she just liked sensational conspiracy novels. Or maybe the book belonged to someone else who merely took note of her address on the back flap of a text they didn’t care about.

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (himself a Jesuit) suggests that there is no text without a reader: the reader “invents in texts something different from what [the author] ‘intended’” (169), “like nomads poaching their way across field they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174).[2] Consequently, there are as many readings of a text as there are readers; each reader interacts with the text differently, and that interaction subtly shapes their interpretation of the book. My experience, as a dorky Catholic studying Jesuit literature, with a specific copy of a text that may have belonged to someone who enjoyed anti-Catholic sensation novels will necessarily shape my interpretation of that particular book. Similarly, your experience, as someone with your background, with this digitized version of a different copy of the text will necessarily shape your interpretation differently, especially since you’ve read this post and are probably thinking your own thoughts in the process. Especially, you can’t touch the handwriting at the back of the SCRC’s book; if this book were reproduced by a nineteenth-century equivalent of EEBO instead, you wouldn’t even know there’s a name and address copied there, since EEBO doesn’t usually include covers in their scans.

Books have real, material, human consequences. Sometimes, digital humanities can efface the small consequences: somewhere in Auburn, probably, someone bought an anti-Jesuit sensation novel in the wake of the Nativist Riots, buying into anti-Catholic sentiment at least economically. But other times, DH brings to light the bigger consequences: Madelon Hawley fits into a long literary tradition of demonizing the Catholic other. The humanities are at their best when they combine the two to reveal something about how humans read the books we can still access today, no matter the format.

Next week: The human in the humanities.

[1] See Auburn Weekly Bulletin, February 27, 1900 and Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, Vol. 6.

[2] Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 165-76.

Many thanks to the Special Collections Resource Center at Bird Library, and especially to Nicolette Dombrowski and Nicole Dittrich, for their assistance with researching this post and for permission to post photographs of the book.

Ashley O’Mara (@ashleymomara | ORCID 0000-0003-0540-5376) is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the Syracuse University English program. She studies how Ignatian imagination and Catholic iconology shape representations of sacred femininity in Early Modern devotional writings. In her down time, she writes creative nonfiction and snuggles her bunny Toffee.