Making Sense of the Mehew Collection: Uses of Scholars’ Archives
Lena Wånggren, Edinburgh & Edinburgh Napier, & Duncan Milne Edinburgh Napier
As universities move toward an open-access approach to research, mainly through digitising collections and scholarship, the role of the physical archive (for so long available only to specialists) changes. This paper examines the importance of one specific physical archive: the Mehew Collection, housed at Edinburgh Napier University and open to the public since March 2016. The Mehew Collection (www.mehewcollection.omeka/net) is an archive comprised of books, miscellaneous papers, and ephemera collected over a period of approximately fifty years by the late Ernest Mehew, editor of nine volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson letters. This archive is the largest research collection on Robert Louis Stevenson in Europe, and additionally holds items of great interest for scholars of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture, containing works by and on writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Many of the items in the Mehew Collection are rare examples of books and Stevensoniana that would previously have been ignored or even discarded as items of little value or significance.
Importantly, the Mehew Collection is not a collector’s archive but a scholar’s archive: while it does not always – as would a research library – contain complete sets of items, it is an archive complete with the traces of scholarly work; traces not only of nineteenth-century writing but of the methods of collecting and interpreting material. Unique to the Mehew Collection is the fact that many of the items in the archive – books and periodicals – contain further important and valuable items inserted within them: letters, research papers, and cut-out news items and articles. Through exploring the relations between these items and Stevenson scholarship as a whole, one can now decipher the decisions Mehew made regarding his scholarship, in this way mapping the power structures of an archive through the traces of Mehew’s own scholarship upon the archival material. This method of researching the past not only through published material, but also through of the lines of communication between and the interventions of members of scholarly and literary networks, makes possible an unpacking of the curatorial role of the editor of any work of collected correspondence.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
