by Dr Kelsey
Jackson Williams,
Professor Peter Davidson,
and Dr Kate Bennett
planned for late 2017
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In August last year
I made contact again with Professor Peter Davidson who wrote the text for our
very successful Winter Light, published in 2010. He proposed a book on
the English antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey (1626-1697) in collaboration
with Aubrey scholar Dr Kelsey Jackson Williams, based around a manuscript in the
Bodleian Library. I was intrigued. Here's the story ...
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John Aubrey (1626–1697) was born in a house built by his grandfather, Isaac Lyte,
at Lower Easton Pierse near the Wiltshire village of Kington St Michael, a house
he always knew he would inherit. When it came to him after his father’s death,
while he was still in his twenties, he began signing himself ‘John Aubrey of
Easton Pierse, Esq.’, a connection with his land in Wiltshire that became
essential to his identity. But inherited debts and bad luck eventually caught up
with him in his forties, and he found himself having to sell not just the lands
and house but nearly everything he owned including some of his books. It was at
this time that he prepared a collection of drawings, half of them a record of
what he was leaving behind at Easton Pierse, but the other half, more
spectacular, drawings of an Easton Pierse that had never existed. As he
completed the final drawings in 1669–70, he went into hiding from the bailiffs,
concealed his identity, and gave out rumours that he had gone abroad. His
drawings now form a manuscript in the Bodleian Library: Aubrey 17.
From being a country
gentleman with a very public sense of place he became a completely displaced
figure taking his identity from the newly-founded Royal Society. His drawings
are a record of the emotional cost of that shift, a farewell in pencil, ink, and
watercolour to a place and a way of life that had defined him until that point.
Yet the drawings are more than a simple record. For whatever reason, at the
moment of losing it entirely Aubrey decided to show what he had wanted his
estate to become: a neo-classical villa set amongst Italianate gardens and
terraces. He was in the first generation of theorists and architects who
developed the concept of a neo-classical country house, and his plans record
debts to and conversations with John Evelyn, Roger Pratt, and Christopher Wren.
On a national level
his drawings are an important record of a sea-change in English architecture
that came about in the middle of the seventeenth century as vehemently
neo-classical designs began to replace the more rambling, hybrid buildings of an
earlier era, and both architects and scholars began to distance themselves from
Gothic ‘barbarity’ in favour of a return to Rome. When read through the lens of
Aubrey's other writings about architectural style we can see both the radical
nature of what he was proposing and the extent to which he believed he was
genuinely recreating a kind of ancient Roman villa.
Aubrey’s drawings of
Easton Pierse—as it was and as it might have been—now rest in that bound volume
in the Bodleian, and The Old School Press has been given permission to reproduce
it in its entirety for the first time. To bring alive both the personal and the
architectural story alluded to above, Dr Kelsey Jackson Williams has written an
extended essay to accompany the reproductions of Aubrey’s drawings, and
Professor Peter Davidson and Dr Kate Bennett have contributed introductory
essays and commentary on the drawings. Oxford Fellow Dr Bennett is the leading
authority on Aubrey and has written the first annotated critical edition of his
best-known work, Brief Lives, published in 2015; Dr Williams is the
author of The Antiquary: John Aubrey’s Historical Scholarship. It is hard
to imagine a more knowledgeable team of experts for this book.
This new title
continues The Old School Press’s interest in matters architectural and our aim
to publish new and authoritative texts. Interest in Aubrey has been much revived
in both academic and general readership circles following two major publications
in the last two years: Dr Bennett’s own edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives,
and a fictional autobiography of Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life by
Cambridge Fellow Dr Ruth Scurr.
Aubrey’s manuscript volume is
landscape in format and we will be retaining that. Our book will be bound
between boards covered with a paper specially hand-marbled to replicate that
chosen by Aubrey for his own binding of his manuscript. The book
will be slightly larger than A3 (about 17in wide and 12in deep) and run to 72pp, so it will make a handsome volume.
There is one
important difference with this title: it will be printed entirely digitally,
rather than letterpress. Much as we would have loved to do it letterpress our
calculations suggested it would not work financially. However, our customers
need have no fear that this is the thin end of a wedge between us and
letterpress! Indeed, you can expect an announcement for a further title to be
printed in hand-set type later his year and we are about to take possession of a
range of Monotype Van Dijck!
We welcome
expressions of interest now. Further details and prices will be announced in a
future newsletter.
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