An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of Nineteenth-Century Reading

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia’s library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans’s poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of widescale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.