The AHRC Grant
(Jim McLaverty)
It was decided to apply to the AHRC for a grant to cover research assistance with the print volumes, including help for volume editors in acquiring materials but particularly in seeing their volumes through the press, and to prepare an electronic archive of variant prose texts that would enrich the print edition. The application was made by Jim McLaverty and David Womersley. In May 2004, a grant of £533,661 was made for a five-year research project. It provided for the appointment of two research assistants (who, because of their high scholarly standing, have been called research fellows throughout), for annual meetings between the research team and the general editors, for photocopying or the acquisition of images of the original materials, and for digitization of the texts by rekeying. There was also a sum for consultancy for planning the electronic development of the project and for preparing the archive for deposit with the AHDS.
Research Fellows
The plan was for the research fellows to assist with the print edition and to be recognized as the editors of the Archive. The grant-holders were able to appoint as research fellows two candidates who already had strong scholarly reputations. Dr Paddy Bullard was chosen to work with Professor Womersley at Oxford. He had been acting as tutor in English at St Anne’s College Oxford, and had recognized expertise in eighteenth-century intellectual history. Dr Adam Rounce took the post at Keele to work with Professor McLaverty. He had been a Leverhulme Fellow at Bristol University and was known for his work on Charles Churchill and the reception of Pope.
In the initial stages of the project, the research fellows worked on the materials that would be necessary for all the volumes, preparing the chronology that would be prefixed to each one (and is now available in the archive), the abbreviations that were to be used in the edition, and the instructions for mark-up for the volumes. Paddy Bullard worked on the complex history of Gulliver’s Travels, helping to prepare the textual materials for that volume, while Adam Rounce helped correct the text of Tale of a Tub and began the ordering of copies of materials for the archive and, when the copies arrived, sending them off for keying. Subsequently, Dr Rounce helped see English Political Writings 171-1714 through the press, while Dr Bullard took charge of the archive and helped with the final stages of Tale of a Tub.
In October 2008 Adam Rounce took a post as Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and the project was fortunate in being able to appoint for its final year Dr Daniel Cook from Queens’ College Cambridge, who was just finishing his edition of essays on Swift for the series bearing Harold Bloom’s imprimatur. Dr Cook helped with the print edition by checking some of the textual materials of Gulliver’s Travels as it began its progress through the press, and assisted in the editing of the archive.
In the final two years of the project the task was undertaken, under the leadership of Dr Bullard, of ordering and organizing the archive and of checking the XML encoding and accuracy of the texts themselves.