The Four Books By Alice Thornton
Digital Edition
Over the course of the next year, this project will produce an interactive and fully searchable digital edition of Alice Thornton’s autobiographical ‘Books’ which will be freely accessible here.
The text of all four manuscript volumes will be available to read in both fully modernised and semi-diplomatic versions, either separately or side-by-side. As we are using the widely recognised Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup schema, the edition will be fully searchable (for example, users will be able to trace people and events across all four volumes).
Book of Remembrances
GB-0033-CCOM 38
Book One
Add. MS 88897/1
Book Two
GB-0033-CCOM 7
Book Three
Add. MS 88897/2
Although we are not digitising the manuscripts, we will provide some sample images from each of the volumes to offer a sense of how the original materials looked.
You can now access our partial release of 103 pages from one book, in both semi-diplomatic and modernised versions. See also our first release of the search function.
We would appreciate all feedback so please click on the button at the bottom right or email us - alicethorntonsbooks at gmail dot com - to let us know your thoughts.
Background
When Alice Thornton died in 1707, she bequeathed ‘three Books of my own Meditations and Transactions of my life, and all the residue of my Papers and Books written with my own hand’ to her daughter, Alice Thornton Comber. In addition to those three Books, there exists another, smaller volume known as a Book of Remembrances.
In the introduction to his nineteenth-century edition, Charles C. Jackson refers to all four volumes; after this, however, the location of the manuscripts was unclear for many years.
In 1982 and 1994, two volumes re-emerged and were sold to a private buyer, Paula Peyraud. These volumes were resold in 2009 and are now held at the British Library (BL).
In 2018 and 2019, Cordelia Beattie located the other two manuscripts: one was still in the hands of the Comber family and the other had been in the possession of Durham Cathedral Library (DCL) since 1969 but had been misidentified in the catalogue. Today, both volumes form part of the Comber Collection at DCL.
These are the four books that we are in the process of preparing for our digital edition.
It has become common to refer to Thornton’s volumes as the Book of Remembrances (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 38), Book 1 (BL, Add. MS 88897/1), Book 2 (DCL, GB-0033-CCOM 7), and Book 3 (BL, Add. MS 88897/2). However, material evidence suggests that the relationship between Thornton’s Books is not straightforwardly sequential. A key issue this project seeks to address is why and how these volumes are interconnected.
Our editorial and markup practice aims to make this possible. We prefer the following fuller titles, which use descriptions derived from her writings:
- Book of Remembrances
- Book 1: The First Book of My Life
- Book 2: The First Book of My Widowed Condition
- Book 3: The Second Book of My Widowed Condition
However, for ease of reference, we will also use abbreviated titles:
- Book Rem
- Book 1
- Book 2
- Book 3
Citing this web page:
Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill, Joanne Edge, Sharon Howard. 'The Four Books By Alice Thornton'. Alice Thornton's Books. Accessed .https://thornton.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/books/