And we’re off! This was the first full week of working sans trainings or review. In honor of that, I’d like to talk about the process I go through on The Spectator quotes – in part because I was just discussing this with my supervisor, but also because I think it’s interesting to learn how things work. In another post, I’ll go through the similar, but slightly more convoluted, process of working on no-match quotations!
To provide a little background, The Spectator was a British publication that includes letters sent in from readers with responses written by (what I call) columnists. Honestly, it feels very gossip/advice column-y, which is so fun to think about something like that having been in existence as far back as 1711.
The process really begins once a few tabs are open. As I’m currently focusing on sourcing quotes from the first four – of eight – volumes of The Spectator, those volumes will be open in addition to the magical spreadsheet of quotes. Since there will only be four volumes referenced right now, this means I’ll need to do a second round of search once I’ve exhausted the first four.
It seems straightforward: copy the word and search for it in the text, right? Unfortunately, we must contend with the difference in printers back then – mostly the use of long s’s (which look like a fancy f), which sometimes the transcription will understand, but others not so much. For example, searching for dissertation came up with nothing, but looking for secretaries produced results. Very hit or miss, scientific process here. Because of this my strategy tends towards avoiding words with s in it, as well as words that are very common, such as “the” or “and”. Additionally, while it would be great to use the word that is being defined, apparently Johnson changed the words used in the original quotes at times, so I tend to avoid it, just in case. For example, from the quote “They both of them punctually observed the time thus agreed upon” I would pick “punctually” because of its (hopeful) relatively low usage and the lack of s.
After I’ve determined the word I’ll be searching, I can finally turn to the volumes. Though some quotes already have an issue number it can be incorrect, so regardless I will paste that word into each volume’s search feature until I find it. HathiTrust (where the collection is hosted) provides search results that can be sorted, so I just sort and scroll until I find the right one! Thrilling, I know.
The word found and volume confirmed, we then get into the particulars. What we’re looking for is the author, such as they are recorded, issue number, a direct link to the quote, and the date of the issue. Sometimes the quote is from the main Spectator authors (often L. or C.), but other times it’s from the letter sent in. For me, it’s always more exciting when the author is from a letter; it’s like a little treat and much more fun to type than a single letter (no offense, L. or C.). These details found and filled in, it’s time to do it all again and move onto the next quote!
And that, in what was probably an excruciating amount of detail, is my process for researching Spectator quotes. Thanks for sticking around and let’s go find some quote origins!