As I’m working on digitising Marina, a Peter Whittle guide to Southport published in 1831, I can’t help but to think on the guide that came immediately before Whittle’s, A Guide to Southport, North Meols, in the County of Lancaster: With an Account of the Places in Its Immediate Neighbourhood, written in 1809 by Thomas K. Glazebrook.
Glazebrook’s A Guide to Southport is considered to be the first book about Southport. Short after its second –amended and expanded– edition Whittle published his Marina. What is fascinating about it is that Whittle borrowed heavily from Glazebrook. As Whittle’s was published 5 years after the second edition of Glazebrook, there are some blanks that Whittle does fill– mainly by citing journals of his time. Even the biblical quotations he uses are from different bibles, as each comes from a distinct translation; so Whittle either had a lot of bibles about him –some catholic, some protestant– or he borrowed all of those quotes from diverse sources, too.
This is no more than anecdotal today, as the prevalence of this text over other guides that are harder to find nowadays makes it useful for learning about Southport, but, as stated first, it does make me wonder about the concept of authorship during the early XIX century.
Centuries before, the concept of authorship was not as defined as it is today, because back then all inspiration came from god; kids turning in papers that had exactly the same spelling mistakes as the kid’s in the bench next to theirs could just claim that they didn’t cheat, but were conveniently stricken by the same inspiration as their cleverer neighbour– and this was actually done by painters of the age.
But Whittle does live in the same landmass where one Ben Jonson coined the term ‘plagiary’, and it’s difficult to think that a good two centuries of enlightenment didn’t unblur the lines of inspiration and imitation. Where one could sometimes justify the hubris of shamelessness that is required to publish under your name the work of your peer through the idea that maybe the readers won’t notice because you are at least being careful enough to publish the book you’re passing as yours in a different continent, or translated from a different language, Whittle published Glazebrook’s without even considering a pseudonym. That’s bravado.
While it could, of course, be argued that there’s only so many ways to retell the forty years of history a small town such as Southport has, it must be brought to our attention that Glazebrook published his volume with what I, as a teacher, would consider to be (excuse the jargon) ‘a-whole-lot-of-filler’, and Whittle parroted and doubled down on the left-field content– for nothing says ‘Southport’ like a chapter entitled “Fairy Castles, or, fata-morgana, or dama-fata-morgana” or an almost word-for-word ‘extensive quotation’ of Glazenbrook’s treatise on the “Phosphorescence of the Sea”, complete with a Falconer poem.
Though it’s good for Whittle that Glazenbrook’s estate was not litigious, and good for us that Whittle was so keen on including everything remotely related to Southport in his work, because all of this content is now context to the era and the work, and this is why I have preferred Whittle over Glazebrook to start with the books on Southport I mean to modernise.
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