Joseph Ritson and the publication of early English literature
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Date
26/11/2018Author
McNutt, Genevieve Theodora
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Abstract
This thesis examines the work of antiquary and scholar Joseph Ritson (1752-1803) in
publishing significant and influential collections of early English and Scottish
literature, including the first collection of medieval romance, by going beyond the
biographical approaches to Ritson’s work typical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
accounts, incorporating an analysis of Ritson’s contributions to specific
fields into a study of the context which made his work possible. It makes use of the
‘Register of Manuscripts Sent to the Reading Room of the British Museum’ to shed
new light on Ritson’s use of the manuscript collections of the British Museum. The
thesis argues that Ritson’s early polemic attacks on Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy,
and the editors of Shakespeare allowed Ritson to establish his own claims to
expertise and authority, built upon the research he had already undertaken in the
British Museum and other public and private collections. Through his publications,
Ritson experimented with different strategies for organizing, systematizing,
interpreting and presenting his research, constructing very different collections for
different kinds of texts, and different kinds of readers. A comparison of Ritson’s
three major collections of songs – A Select Collection of English Songs (1783),
Ancient Songs (1790), and Scotish Songs (1794) – demonstrates some of the
consequences of his decisions, particularly the distinction made between English and
Scottish material. Although Ritson’s Robin Hood (1795) is the most frequently
reprinted of his collections, and one of the best studied, approaching this work within
the immediate context of Ritson’s research and other publications, rather than its
later reception, offers some explanation for its more idiosyncratic features. Finally,
Ritson’s Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës (1802) provides a striking example of
Ritson’s participation in collaborative networks and the difficulty of finding an
audience and a market for editions of early English literature at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.