On Tenterhooks!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

As I mentioned, I applied for a grant a couple of weeks ago. I’m waiting to hear how I got on, but it’ll be a while yet.

But today, whilst I was on a bus to Dundee, I was whiling away the time by looking for research-related ephemera. And I found something interesting – it doesn’t change anything about my proposed project, but it would certainly be nice to have.  Thematically, there’s an indirect link.  Chronologically, it’s spot on.  I did nothing about my find immediately, but on the bus home, I couldn’t resist.  I ‘favourited’ it.

Back came a reduced price.

In went my counter-offer.

So, now I’m on tenterhooks.  Will I win the ephemera? Which happens to be overseas, needing to be repatriated.  And which is really only significant with relation to the grant topic …

Watch this space.

And I won the eBay item. Step 1, you could say.  But I’ve just bid for another  …

Image by OJart from Pixabay

Victorian Copyright: the Author Miss Letitia Higgin, and Editor Lady Marian Alford

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

My new eBay purchase arrived on Sunday afternoon: Letitia Higgin’s Hand Book of Embroidery, published by her employer (the Royal School of Art Embroidery) in 1880, and edited by the Vice President of the Society: Lady Marian Alford. It’s a modern reprint: the original is an appropriately antiquarian price.

The Society had been founded in 1872. Letitia (Lily) was a middle-class young woman needing to earn her own living, who, with two of her sisters, was employed by the Society.  She was promoted to a senior position, and wrote this handbook not for absolute beginners, but for ladies who had learned the basics and needed to know more. The introduction explains that the book answers some of the most frequently asked questions. Brilliant, I thought. This could be just what I need. You know how I enjoy embroidery, even if I’m just a relative beginner.

A Daughter of Margaret Maclean-Clephane

Portrait of Lady Marian Compton, from National Trust via Art.UK
Grant, Francis – Lady Marian Margaret Compton (1817-1888), Viscountess Alford; National Trust, Belton House; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/lady-marian-margaret-compton-18171888-viscountess-alford-176409 National Trust Images via Art.UK

Enter Margaret Maclean Clephane’s elder daughter, Marian (Marianne)!  The book’s editor was none other than a daughter of song-collector Margaret Maclean-Clephane. (Just for the record, Margaret’s married name was Lady Compton, and later Lady Northampton.  That’s why her daughter was Lady Marian Margaret Compton.)  Lady Marian’s musically gifted mother was also a poet.  The family evidently had creativity in their genes. Marian’s aunt Anna was a song and folklore collector too; her other aunt was artistic; and now we find that Marian was a talented needlewoman.

A Copyright Dispute

The guide was so popular that the Society had hoped to produce a second edition, but a copyright dispute between author and editor meant that this didn’t happen.

I sat bolt upright.  We ordinary folk shall never know what the dispute was. (I learnt this much from Wikipedia. See reading list below.) Maybe the Society has archival paperwork that tells more, but I really must not let myself get distracted at the moment!

Giving Credit where Credit’s due

From my vantage point as a 21st century author, it would be easy to feel outrage on Letitia Higgin’s behalf. Had she done all the work and written the whole book, only for Lady Marian Alford to sweep in and add her name to it? Realistically, having a titled name on it would probably have added gravitas and authority in 1880. My guess is that Letitia Higgin did most of the hard work, and Lady Marian put her own titled gloss on it, but I simply don’t know. We can’t jump to conclusions.

Bust of Lady Marian Compton, from National Trust via Art.UK
Lady Marian Compton (1817–1888), Viscountess Alford
Ernesto Cali (b.1821)
National Trust, Belton House, again via Art.UK.

I do know that Miss Higgin also wrote magazine articles referring to the book, and Lady Marian also authored other works. Neither woman’s expertise is in question.

Anyway, I intended to use the book for the purpose of self-instruction, so I turned the page to find out about needles. It informed me I should use a size 5 needle for crewel work. To be honest, I don’t think I’m doing crewel work (with crewel yarn), but embroidery. With embroidery silk. I had imagined it would be similar, but I imagined wrong.

Five is Larger than Nine

Moreover, Miss Letitia Higgin and Lady Marian Alford didn’t think to tell me that size 5 needles are larger than size 9. I suspect I may have been using the right size for embroidery all along (without knowing a scooby about sizes and numbers), but now I reached for the tiniest size needle, and spent far longer than was reasonable, trying to thread one strand of thread into the eye of a needle that I couldn’t even see. Ughh! I blamed the eye (my own) that can’t even read with glasses.  Eventually I used a needle threader. The thread broke. I did get dressmaking thread through the eye. And I bent the needle before getting the single strand of embroidery floss through the eye.  The eye of the needle was ludicrously, but appropriately small for such a tiny wee needle.

The thread that would not go into the eye of the tiny needle
Tiny needle threaded with dressmaking thread
Embroidered word, HELP
Embroidered word, HELP, a needle threader, a bent needle and an embroidered heart

Temporarily giving up on Higgin and Alford, I turned to YouTube.  Thankfully, Sarah Homfray has done a series of YouTube videos about embroidery, and that’s how I learned that 5 was actually larger than 9:-

‘Are you using the right sized needle? I show you how to pick the right one!’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PtBGZn0yohU&si=LJomNgTXJTZ_hoMT

I shall eventually return to Miss Higgin and Lady Marian Alston.  I’m sure they have useful knowledge to impart, quite apart from the insights into the pastime of embroidery in the late Victorian era. You could buy a marked canvas, which someone at the Royal School of Art Embroidery had prepared and even started off for you. That sounds helpful!

However, today? I’ve signed up to a local evening class. (Although I don’t know if I’ll ever be capable of marking out a canvas to make Higgin’s and Alford’s piano cloth design!)

7. DESIGN FOR A SOFA-BACK COVER OR PIANO PANEL. By George Aitchison. Vincent Brooks Day & Son, Lith. (From Gutenberg website: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24964/24964-h/24964-h.htm#Page_75

READING LIST

  • Alford, Marian, Needlework as Art (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886.)
  • Alford, Marian – other works of local history interest.
  • Higgin, Letitia, ‘Art Needlework’, articles in The Art Amateur (1880) Vol.2 issues 5 and 6
  • Higgin, Letitia, Hand Book of Embroidery, ed. Marianne Margaret Compton Alford (London: Published by Authority of the Royal School of Art Needlework, 1880)
  • ‘Higgin, Letitia’ – Wikipedia entry
  • Homfray, Sarah, ‘Are you using the right sized needle? I show you how to pick the right one!’ YouTube
  • Hulse, Lynne, ‘Higgin, Letitia (Lily) , author and embroiderer’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  • Northampton, Margaret Compton, marchioness of (d. 1830), Manuscript book of poems, dated 1808-1821, by Lady Compton (Lady Northampton), also transcription of poems, dated 1804-1840, by her sister Anna Jane Douglas Maclean Clephane.] National Trust Libraries – Note on Jisc Library Hub Discover:- ‘Poems stated to be by Lady Compton (as Lady Northampton was known 1815-1828) on pp. 1-47, and by Lady Northampton on pp.113-120; poems by Anna Jane Clephane on pp. 52-110 and 121 to end (many with monogram AJC).
  • Royal School of Needlework. Our History

Going Off at a Tangent: an Intriguing Deviation from Research

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Straight line with a second, curved line (ending with an arrow)
Image by Bruno from Pixabay

When that book comes from Amazon, I may be distracted. Well, it’s available online already, being very old and antiquated, but how can I refer to an embroidery book online, when I want it open in front of me whilst I sit sewing? I don’t care to read it on a tablet – I want the real thing, or in this case, a reprint of it. (You can’t so easily sit with markers in different pages, flicking between different stitches and patterns, on a tablet. )

What, you might ask, does this have to do with Scottish publishers or educational music? Absolutely nothing. It does have a tangential link to something that was once a research interest – hence my inability to let it go by me.

Watch this space. We’ll soon see if I am up to any of the suggestions in this book! Maybe it’ll arrive in time for the weekend.

Thoughts about Experiencing Plagiarism

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Beautiful red apple hanging from tree, ready to be picked

‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’?

I wrote these words as a reflection, but then I wondered if other people might find them helpful. Maybe something like this – or worse (because I realise my experience was slight compared to someone whose whole article, story or book has been plagiarised) has happened to you? There might be folk who would shudder at the thought of laying bare their emotions, their gut reaction, to such a situation. As for me? My ‘words’ are my strength. If my words in the present posting make me look weak as an individual, be assured that I am fully aware of this. They also make me uniquely ‘me’, and who ever gets far by pretending to be other than themselves?

Meanwhile, my situation has been resolved, thankfully. I feel grateful. Grateful for the help. Grateful for the response and correction of the situation.

However, I feel utterly drained.  I’m taking a day’s annual leave because it’s preferable to taking a day’s sick-leave for stress.

I initially headed this posting, ‘Thoughts on detecting plagiarism’. However, ‘on detecting plagiarism’ turns out already to be in the title of someone else’s blog post – Addressing the Inherent Biases in Automated Systems: On Detecting ‘Plagiarism’ (Lancaster University, Ref 2014 Impact Case Studies). I changed my heading. Do read the Lancaster post, if you’re interested. I commend it, even though it’s actually about detecting plagiarism in student submissions, rather than realising your words have been quoted without attribution. I read their blog post briefly last night, and I am not reading it again today. I took no notes, and I have no intention of borrowing anything that was there.

They were literally just a few words, but my own words, and the crux of a 21-page article written 12 years ago. The first full article on the topic. It hurt. And then I started questioning myself:- was I considered so unimportant that my authorship is insignificant? Because, PhD or not, I was ‘merely’ a librarian, hence unimportant? Because I’m now ‘just’ a postdoc research fellow? (That was actually a promotion, by the way!) Because I’m not very famous? Was it because I’m a woman? Because I’m older, and thus considered past it? Because, once published, the words were considered free for the taking? Because, significant or not, they were just a few words, and so temptingly apposite? Low-hanging fruit.

Mulling it over as I got ready for the day, I glanced in the mirror. There I was, an older woman – not ageing particularly stunningly or gracefully, short in stature and wide in figure. My garb was workaday (I was about to sit down to a solitary morning of research, 67 or not). I wore no makeup, and I haven’t been on the latest diet long enough – you wouldn’t notice me if I walked down the street. So there I was. I’m not publicly visible as a performer or composer, unlike a large number of my colleagues. And, as I mentioned, although as a librarian I achieved some visibility in the sectors I worked in – perhaps more visibility than many – librarians aren’t generally known for this quality. We exist to help other people. I’ve not been a librarian for a year now, but I think I probably still carry the aura of invisibility. And when you say ‘librarian’, not many people immediately think, ‘Ah! A researcher. An author. A public speaker.’ Well, there it is!

Image by Bruno from Pixabay

But although librarians might exist to help, to share, to facilitate, they aren’t ghostwriters. Even when they’ve retired from librarianship and are now employed solely as a postdoctoral research fellow.

‘It Says More about Them than it does about You’

And then I reminded myself (I think this is called cognitive reframing) that I didn’t actually know what they were thinking when they used my unattributed words. I can’t read other people’s minds. My identity may not have even been a consideration. And I recalled my latest mantra: that other people’s words and actions speak more about them than about me.

Trigger warning here. I am not preaching when I say that I’m a practising Christian; I’m declaring a fact, which probably does affect my philosophy. (I’m no Evangelical, though – I’m boringly conventional!) I found an intriguing article, ‘3 Reasons Pastors and ‘Authors’ Should Never Plagiarize‘ by David Kakish (12 July 2019). He does make the salient, human point that ‘Plagiarism Fails to Give Honor Where Honor is Due’. Be assured that I’ll be reading it, out of curiosity, but it doesn’t really help the person who has been plagiarised, so I’ll leave it until later! I did do a little web-searching to see if there was a Christian take on low self-esteem. However, I found nothing that resonated, except the grounding reminder that everyone is a unique person for a purpose, so we should embrace what we are rather than wish we were someone else.

I tried not to beat myself up about my own insecurities. I know what I’ve achieved, from a mid-career standing start, against the odds. My words are old enough to be irrefutably mine, regardless. And … well, I can always write some more!

Here are some useful links which I found last night

If your experience is on the more serious end of the scale, these might be helpful. I’m not proposing to offer guidance on dealing with such situations – I’m really not qualified to – but I would urge you to seek support.

Bailey, writing about author O’Hanlon’s dreadful experience, headed his post, ‘The Emotional Toll of Plagiarism’, and my own limited experience endorses that. In my case, a migraine and shall we say, gut reactions, were clearly telling me I was stressed.  Symptoms can be treated, but how much nicer not to have had them at all!

Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay

Oral Transmission of Folk Songs

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Wavy lines of music and an artistic interpretation of a fiddle

Attribution and Authorship

When I’m talking to students about oral transmission of folk songs, my take is – perhaps a bit controversially – that I believe a lot of songs were actually written by ONE person. Passed on, passed around, changed certainly, but I don’t buy the idea that they somehow ‘grew’ anonymously or collectively out of the soil. Maybe a group of pals did sometimes sit in the pub, stand in the fields or sit at their looms working up words or a tune, but as often as not, someone ‘wrote’ or devised that song. We just don’t always know who did.

Tune Variants

The other problem, of course, is variants. If you pass things round and they get picked up by ear, or someone writes it down – but not exactly how it was performed by the last person – the tunes change slightly. Or, in times-gone-by, gaps between crotchets got filled in by two stepwise quavers, or an ornament got written out in full. And how do you determine what the ‘right’ version is? I don’t think you can, often enough, though you can certainly try to identify the most common form of a tune.  Or if you’re able to, the earliest printed version. (If Hamish McHamish wrote a song in 1825, then the earliest printed version is most likely to be closest to his intentions. But unless he took his tune to the printer, or published it himself, you can’t be sure. )

The Ravages of Time

So we have at least a couple of centuries in which some tunes had the opportunity to change a multitude of times. (And that’s before an accompanist decided that G7 would be better than E minor at a particular point …) Try and compare a song in three different published collections. It won’t necessarily be exactly the same.

The Strong but Wrong Singer

I also use the modern-day example of my own church organist experience. You teach the congregation a new tune. A strong singer gets something wrong, and thereafter, try as you may, everyone sings Jemima’s version of the tune. That, too, could be construed as oral transmission in action!

(And as for Technology)

Today, we had a new song. The choir had studiously learned it, syncopated rhythms and all. We sang it first as an anthem. Later, we sang it with the congregation. Even the syncopations went moderately well, though I can’t say I was listening out for those who, ‘like sheep had gone astray’ (to quote Handel’s Messiah). There was only one problem: the verses appeared on the PowerPoint in the wrong order, and there was not a thing could be done about it once we’d started. When the choir sang it with the congregation, the latter sang what they could, or what they saw on the screen …. ! Maybe that’s why the syncopations went well – not everyone was actually singing.

All I can do is offer a corrected version of the lyrics for the PowerPoint, and we’ll try again another day. Who knows what might have changed in the meantime?

Fruitful Days

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
George Square Edinburgh University

Friday

  • Applied for a grant.
  • Wrote a blogpost.
  • Started to update my blog bio.

I think that will do for one day!

Weekend Activity

Who said weekends were restful?! Apart from the usual domesticity, and the organ-playing, I put in some more work on this blog.

  • Finished radically updating my Bio page to better reflect my two career strands.
  • Balanced my historical copyright page (Claimed from Stationers’ Hall) with a new one: Copyright Today. My career trajectory means I take a keen interest in copyright, intellectual property, plagiarism and so on. I might as well keep useful material handy, for myself or anyone else stumbling across this blog.

Two Ladies and a Harp: the Maclean-Clephane Sisters of Torloisk on Mull (and Edinburgh)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You know how you buy a new car, and suddenly everyone seems to be driving the same white Fiat 500? It’s the same with research topics.

“Enthusiastic collectors of Gaelic songs and Irish harp tunes”

I researched Gaelic song-collectors Anna and Margaret Maclean-Clephane as part of my PhD (2009).

  • I blogged about the sisters as far back as 2012 in my librarian days, when the Whittaker Library was using Blogspot:- How Far Can a Song Travel? (Author Karen McAulay, Whittaker Live blog, Wednesday, 23 May 2012);
  • and of course they later made it into my book (Our Ancient National Airs, 2013).
  • I followed up with an extended article about them (also in 2013). See this excerpt from the article:-

Naturally, the Maclean Clephane sisters are in my Pure institutional repository at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I coined the above phrase, ‘enthusiastic collectors of Gaelic songs and Irish harp tunes’, using it both in my book (p.92) and my article (p.62), both in 2013.

‘While they were still in their teens’

The sisters had a book ‘printed but not published’ while they were still in their teens – you can read about it in my article, p.58. I have to say, the arrangements in their book were – well, okay, but not artistically stylish!

Margaret had a harp – there is actually a Raeburn portrait of Margaret with her harp – see below.   Alexander Campbell did say the sisters played, but there’s no portrait of Anna with a harp, so we can’t prove it either way. He didn’t meet them. (There was in fact a third sister, though her musical interest didn’t seem to carry through to adulthood. ) Indeed, Anna wasn’t that hot on the piano, as I recall.  They grew up on the Isle of Mull. I’ve driven past the house, Torloisk. It’s massive!

I just love researching and writing about people, particularly musicians! If they’re women musicians, then that’s all the more interesting – so it’s hardly surprising I was drawn to them, and went looking at materials in the National Library of Scotland and the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and even visiting a manuscript that’s now down in London. (Blog post Women’s History Month 2024. Musicians, this present blog.)

Details of my article

But ever since, these fascinating and talented ladies keep cropping up in my social media feeds. People who’ve read my writings also contact me from time to time. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I get notifications that people have consulted my stuff, too … and there’s also a CD whose notes cite me, too:-

Tullochgorum – Haydn – Scottish Songs, by The Poker Club Band and Masako Art (BIS-2471 | SACD

Tullochgorum – Haydn  – Scottish Songs

The harpist, Masako, asked if she could cite my work – I was very appreciative that she went to the trouble of asking me.

Correctly cited 😀
Margaret Clephane … and Masako Art

I spent so long with my early nineteenth-century heroines, but eventually my research took different directions. Not being a Gaelic scholar was just one of the problems I’d encountered! I attended classes in speaking it, at the Conservatoire. I signed up to local authority evening classes at the Gaelic School in Glasgow. But somehow, I never really had time to give it enough attention, despite having been considered good at languages at school and possessing school certificates in – well, several European languages. I understand when someone agrees with me in Gaelic, and can pronounce ‘Torloisk’, for sure, but Gaelic remains beyond me!

But look – now the music is going to be played. That’s exciting!

Interpreting Research through Textile Arts

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

If you’ve visited this blog before, you’ll know I research various aspects of Scottish music history, not textile arts.  However,  when I take a break from research, I often take up needle and thread – it’s relaxing – and what I sew is quite often a reflection of what I’ve been researching. (I can explain the house at the top of this posting – just read on!)

I applied for an international opportunity to make something really big and research-related, a few months ago. I didn’t succeed, but I went on thinking about it.  I’m not following it though, because I would have nowhere to display it if I did make it.  Instead, I have scaled it down both literally and in terms of subject matter.

In place of a large wall-hanging representing my latest research in its entirety, I’m trying a new way of making a cloth book, and focusing on a couple of Thomas Nelson books I’ve encountered. I’m still thinking about educational music books published by Nelson in the second quarter of the twentieth century. 

I’m using some iron-on embroidery transfers from my late mother’s collection (the kind where you iron-on a line drawn transfer,  leaving an outline on the background fabric, then work over it), along with a few ideas of my own.

We have only just realised that Mum hoarded things – she was so tidy and methodical that they could be sorted away in that large house, and no-one knew.  Why she kept quite so many embroidery transfers is a mystery.  For needlework teaching purposes? She retired in 1991!  Even I would never get through them, if I live another 30 years.

Anyway, with a bit of ingenuity, I’m finding musical motifs that might have been applicable in the 1930s to 1940s: Percussion bands.  Brass bands. Wind bands. I’ve copied Thomas Nelson’s singing child motif, and the Nelson publisher motif from books I’ve bought on eBay, and no doubt I’ll use the vintage thistle transfers (Scottish symbols) that I acquired from the same source.

Timpani  – second attempt!

There’s a rather fanciful house from Mum’s stash, which I embroidered against a blue background reminiscent of heavy rain, last weekend – Storm Amy was with us, and I had stayed at home last Friday rather than going to Edinburgh. (A wise choice, as it transpired.)  I need to end up with 20 cloth pages, so I might need to go through the stash again to see if I’ve missed anything, or start embroidering quotes that caught my eye. I’ve done one of those  already.

‘Three Stars and a Wish?’ Forget it!

I have to keep reminding myself that this is something I’m doing for fun, as an amateur, whilst Mum was a professional. As an old-school teacher, she hadn’t encountered the ‘three stars and a wish’ principle, and if it wasn’t up to scratch, she told you. Straight. No gentle preamble about what you had done well.  The ‘Spirit of Mum’ has more than once seen me unpick things because it was plainly ‘not my best’.  And whilst my little rainy-day house is now finished (after some unpicking and reworking), I can’t guarantee that I won’t have another go, just to try to improve it. (Maybe representing a sunny day, next time?) It’s strange how one still feels the weight of parental expectations, and hears the criticism, even when they’re no longer around.  This is probably the root of my perfectionism – but I’m working on it, honest!

The next problem, of course, is where to put my creations …?

From That, to This (the Original Idea)

It would have been a much larger art work!

Original Artistic plan for the work

I proposed to create a 2-dimensional hanging collage. Predominantly in black and greys, it would have depicted archival shelves and resources; silhouettes of editors; and in the foreground, children singing from the Nelson Scots Song Book,and a teacher at a piano.  The song-books would reflect the original colours of the Nelson books.  A furled blue and white Saltire flag would have occupied a lower corner of the collage.  Further details, space permitting, might have included popular motifs: a Highland piper, a thistle, or a Highland dancer; a snatch of a song in music notation, and a few significant editorial words from correspondence.

Explanation

The narrative behind this collage would have demonstrated that even a set of small Scots song books had an ultimate audience or user in mind, deriving from decisions by compilers and editors, and created as part of their day-to-day work amongst other projects. The books’ contents show the compilers responding to a contemporary urge to educate and immerse young Scots in their traditional culture.  Illustrations of resources would have hinted at the sheer quantity of paperwork behind the publications, and would have included stitched representations of bundles of paper, a document file and a correspondence book, whilst small, typically Scottish motifs would, if possible, have reflected (but not reproduced) the well-received line-drawn pictures commissioned for the separate pupils’ editions of the song books.

What A Day!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Untitled design from Canva. Silhouetted heads and geometric shapes
Could you hear the cogs turning?!

Right, my two proofs (an article and a contributed chapter), and the final version of another article, have all been returned to their editors. It has actually been quite interesting revisiting recent and not so recent research, after some time away from  it.  Such revisitations help consolidate things in one’s mind, and keep the topics alive and vivid.

The Big Idea

Tomorrow, by contrast, is a day for looking ahead: I need to start a book proposal and apply for some funding. Storm Amy will determine which desk, on which side of the country, I might be using. Waterproofs at the ready, but I don’t think I’ll take an umbrella! Scottish wind can invert the hardiest of specimens.

The Big Idea: another Book

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’m contemplating writing another book. It’ll be based on my recent researches as an IASH Fellow, obviously. But I’ve had a brainwave of an idea for the final chapter – which involves a bit more research – so the past few days have been dedicated to exploring possibilities. As I now know, from the historical Thomas Nelson point of view as much as my own present existence as a scholar, publishers like publishing things in series. It helps them sell, if readers can see how a book fits into a larger grouping of books. I’ve been thinking about where my book might fit in.

I’ve also had a wee jaunt to Dundee to talk to a scholar of my acquaintance; and today, I sat down to write an email. Who’d have thought it would take most of an afternoon to write an email?! But when it’s important, it’s worth taking some effort in the crafting of it.

‘Faint heart never won fair lady’

Finally, I thought it was just right. I mused that maybe I should leave it and re-read it tomorrow. But no, I must be resolute. So, I did not prevaricate. More of this thrilling story in due course …