Bibliographer: Hannah Kloetzer

The History of Miss Temple

This replica of The History of Miss Temple replaces the content of the novel with various word clouds to indicate some form of narrative style and common themes, diverging from traditional bibliography, and restructures it into a traditionalistic format.

The point of this experimental bibliography project was to combine the features of a traditional bibliography with the content, narrative style, and plot of the novel. Through voyant tools, I was able to upload a text version of each volume and calculate the most frequent words via a word cloud. To me, a word cloud is a good indicator of the narrative style a novel has, or at least it presents the more common themes and perhaps motives of the narrator. This sheds some light onto what the general plot of the novel is like. In no way is this a substitution for a summary, it is just a creative way to represent information that the traditional descriptive bibliography does not have. Along with word clouds, that had both auto-detect stop words and stopwords I chose (mostly articles and names of characters), I included other important findings, such as popular phrases, the frequency of an important word throughout the course of the volume, and the average words per sentence, in hopes to gain some more information about the content of the novel.

What I found was that there was a high prevalence of words and phrases with positive connotations throughout both volumes. In each word cloud, there were many words such as: friend, happiness, happy, heart, life, hope, and God. Furthermore, there were a lot of male names, such as spencer and charles. This could have a number of meanings. One potential interpretation, which is probable when comparing this novel to other novels in the era, is that Miss Temple is coming of age and trying to find her happiness in a suitor. Another interpretation is that this novel could follow Miss Temple throughout her whole life, not just a certain time period, and her quest to find happiness and love. While this is not a full plot summary, the knowledge about this Miss Temple and her goals as a protagonist as well knowledge about the novel in general that we can infer just from the tools on voyant is significant.

Lastly, in order to feel like one is reading the actual novel, I included the title, dedication, and page formatting of the novel in my replica of it. While doing this project I became very interested in the amount of whitespace in the title page and also in the book. I attempted to replicate the title in a way that it could be written today, since dimensions for novels seem to be different now. For the dedication, I decided to include it not only because it fit within my page formatting of duodecimo, but also because it shows the amount of empty space (a sign of wealth and elegance) each page has (I followed the margins as they are in the actual novel.)

Traditional Description

Rogers, A. The History of Miss Temple. In Two Volumes. By a Young Lady. London, 1777.

THE| HISTORY| OF| MISS TEMPLE| IN TWO VOLUMES.| BY A YOUNG LADY.| “---- generous forrow; while it sinks, exalts, | “and conscious virtue mitigates the pang.| YOUNG.| VOL I| LONDON:| PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR;| And fold by WALLIS No. 16, Ludgate Street; FLEXNEY| Holbourn; DAVENHILL, No. 30, Cornbill; and| FIELDING and WALKER, Pater-noster Row.| MDCCLXXVII.

Vol. I. 228 pp.; Vol. II. 259 pp.

Duodecimo

Vol. I. A1r Title, A2-A3 dedication, B1-L6 text
Vol. II. A1r Title, B1-M12

Sources from Harvard University Houghton Library and accessed from Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Document Number: CW3310431737. Seal for Harvard University on A1v. Vol. I. ends on page 228 with “END of the FIRST VOLUME”. Vol. II. ends on page 259 with “THE END”.

Experimental Description