The first year of my project was devoted to archival research and training. I explored the archives further in the second year, until the coronavirus pandemic erupted. After processing and analysing the data, I wrote proposals for the article and the book. I organised public engagement activities and a short online symposium on “Women Translators and Authorship”. With IES, I had a chance to convert my learning and research into a lecture, which I delivered to students of the M.A. in Book History. With its sheer amount of materials, the archive of Richard Bentley & Son (British Library), one of the most enduring and significant publishing businesses in nineteenth-century Britain, quickly proved to present both a mine of information on the production of Victorian translations and a source of methodological questions. Although I also visited the archives at Trinity College, Dublin and University of Reading, I decided to focus on the Bentley archive to conduct an in-depth analysis. The results are manifold. First, using translator-publisher correspondence, costs of translations and copyright agreements, the project contributes a theoretical and empirical perspective on both what I term the ‘professional turn’ in translation studies and on the Archive as a concept. It offers a book-translation perspective on the usefulness of archives to the work of uncovering neglected agents and processes in the production of texts. These aspects are discussed in the Meta article ‘Towards a Professional Identity: Translators in the Victorian Publisher’s Archive’. The findings provide a range of copyright and contractual patterns, showing that the English copyright of translations was purchased, shared or given in a variety of ways. They also unveil various agents in the process – foreign publishers and authors, British or Irish editors, and many (often anonymous) translators. Materials include half-profit share agreements, authors’ formal authorizations, outright purchase of copyrights, commissioned work, and other, less common arrangements. Situated at the interdisciplinary junction where translation history and book history meet, the CUP book, titled Translation and Book History: Theoretical, Historical and Archival Perspectives, provides fresh insights into this under-conceptualized area.
Most of the available archival data and findings relate to Work Package 1 (translators’ earnings and copyright). I conducted WP 2 (censorship) in the form of a book exhibition in collaboration with Senate House Library, thus gaining skills in curation and public engagement. By interconnecting three distinct yet related stories of Victorian censorship – Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of ‘The Toilette of Salomé’ (1894); the censorship of English translations published by Henry Vizetelly (1880s); and novelist George Moore’s pamphlet Literature at nurse: or, Circulating morals (1885), a critique of the brand of censorship exerted by circulating libraries – the display, Censorship, Translation and Obscenity in Late Victorian Times, took a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of Victorian censorship and its treatment of obscenity.
