Introduction to the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters (CMSOL)

The goal of this edition is to publish a comprehensive, annotated, searchable, digital collection of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s outgoing correspondence, in chronological order, from her earliest known letters starting c. 1797 through the final year of her life, in 1867. We estimate Sedgwick’s letters to number in the low thousands (3000-5000). While the majority of these letters reside in The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers and other collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, hundreds of other letters, which we are continually discovering and adding to our inventory, are held in repositories across the United States and in Western Europe. We seek to make all her letters freely and widely available to scholars, students, and general readers, to support ongoing research on Sedgwick’s life, work, and influence, and to introduce her to the wider public.

Development of Sedgwick Studies and the Need for a Complete and Authoritative Edition

For Sedgwick’s personal correspondents as well as for early 19th-century Americans in general, Sedgwick’s cultural reputation appeared secure. Her contemporaries would doubtless have been surprised by the obscurity that followed her death. Her six popular novels, numerous works of didactic fiction, and 100-plus tales, sketches, and short stories made her a household name in the period before the Civil War. The Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, a very small selection of her correspondence edited by Mary E. Dewey, was published in 1871, shortly after the author’s death. This highly selective and redacted collection remains the only published edition of Sedgwick’s correspondence to date.

A resurgence of interest in Catharine Sedgwick as a writer and, more broadly, as a historical figure of interest and influence has occurred in recent years. If we date the rebirth of interest in early 19th-century American women writers in general and Sedgwick specifically from the publication of Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978), decades of scholarly interest in Sedgwick have produced hundreds of journal articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations. All six of her major novels are in print in noteworthy scholarly editions. Sedgwick’s short fiction or excerpts of her novels appear in a variety of anthologies of American literature used widely across United States’ college and university campuses. A searchable digital collection of Sedgwick’s stories, tales, and sketches is in progress and currently available. The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society was founded in 1997 and continues to promote scholarship and sponsor symposia centering Sedgwick’s life and work in the context of her era and the literature of the Early Republic.

CMSOL hopes with this edition to provide an infrastructure for future scholarly research. Existing scholarship on Sedgwick has relied either on archives, the microfilmed collection of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers at MHS, Mary Dewey’s collection of letters, or secondary sources. There is currently no comprehensive scholarly biography of Sedgwick’s life, nor is there a complete bibliography of Sedgwick’s work or secondary sources about her life and writing. However, the Sedgwick Society website has an extensive bibliography in progress: https://cmsedgwicksociety.org/sedgwick-bibliography/.

The CMSOL Team

Patricia Kalayjian, Lucinda Damon-Bach, and Deborah Gussman are the founding editors and project directors of CMSOL. Jill K. Anderson and Jordan Von Cannon serve as contributing editors. Graduate and undergraduate student collaborators have assisted with initial transcriptions, verifications, and other research as needed. A list of these contributors can be found on our About page. Members of the Sedgwick Society have also created initial transcriptions in workshops at the Sedgwick Society Symposia and have engaged their graduate students in creating initial transcriptions as well. The names of initial transcribers are encoded in the metadata of each letter.

History of Work that Led Up to this Edition

The three founding editors of this edition launched our studies of Sedgwick in the late 1980s during our doctoral programs; beginning in 1987, we each visited archives (MHS and other collections) to photograph and transcribe letters. As we became aware of each other’s work, we realized that we could make much more progress collaboratively by combining our skills, resources, and initial transcriptions, and formalizing our processes. The CMSOL editorial team applied several times to the NEH for a Scholarly Translations and Editions grant, winning a three-year award for 2020-2022, and a two-year grant beginning in 2024. The editors created an Advisory Board with expertise in Sedgwick Studies, 19th-century American literature, archival research, and digital humanities. The CMSOL project was invited to join a collaboration between MHS, Mellon, and NHPRC in 2019 to create a hub for the digital publication of primary source documents, which eventually became the Primary Source Cooperative of which CMSOL is a founding edition. As PSC partners, we embarked on a TEI/XML-based digital edition; developed our transcription and verification guidelines, subject terms, inventory control, and names database; and participated in the creation of the collaborative website. 

The Nature and Principles of this Edition

We describe our edition as a digital documentary edition.* Based on our vision of the edition as well as feedback from members of the Sedgwick Society and the Primary Source Cooperative, the letters are transcribed, encoded, and presented in a manner that closely represents the content of the original letter. Our broad editorial principles are as follows:

1. To faithfully and accurately represent the text of each of Sedgwick’s letters, thereby deepening our understanding of Sedgwick’s thoughts, life, social networks, and relation to historical events and cultural movements;
2. To make visible the invisible, recovering the ignored or unrecognized persons, labor, and activities that Sedgwick’s letters either directly or indirectly address by:
   a. Providing each person mentioned in the letters with an encoded personal reference, based on a unique identification tag that is recorded in the Cooperative’s names database. Individual records include a person’s full name, birth and death dates, date first mentioned in the letters, and a brief biography, where known.
   b. Creating annotations that provide information that cannot be easily found in a search engine, such as identifying literary and biblical allusions and references, defining foreign language terms that are uncommon, offering historical context about topics and people mentioned that may be obscure or rely on expert knowledge, and making explicit evasive or indirect language and references.
   c. Assigning topical headings to each of the letters that focus on both personal subjects that Sedgwick frequently addresses and broad cultural and social issues that may be of interest to contemporary readers. This subject analysis was based on a review of the letters, a survey of a variety of subject lists and indices for early 19th-century letter writers, and a consultation of the subject terms adopted by other members of the PSC, selecting those subjects that best reflected Sedgwick’s correspondence and concerns.
3. To encode and provide descriptive metadata about each letter that describes it as a document, allowing it to be distinguishable from other letters by including unique identifiers, physical data, and bibliographic data.
4. This is a recursive, not a linear process — we have, over time, changed our policies and practices and revised earlier letter transcriptions as we have had new insights and made new discoveries.

Treatment of the Text

Definition of a letter: The CMSOL team has reflected on and discussed what we mean by the term letter. Most of Sedgwick’s letters follow the standard form, including a salutation at the beginning, a signature at the end, a primary text that spans one or more sheets of paper, and sometimes one or more postscripts, though occasionally Sedgwick leaves off the salutation or signature.

Following the lead of the Van Gogh Letters, we endorse the definition of a letter provided by Marita Mathijsen: “A letter is a text which aims to maintain or establish contact between the writer and an identified person or number of persons with whom he or she has a connection and which is not intended in the first instance for publication or reproduction. Use of the direct form of address is typical, as is the presence of a salutation and a signature. The text is meant to be sent or given to the person to whom it is addressed.” Based on this definition, Sedgwick’s promissory note from 15 September 1822 to her niece Katherine Sedgwick Minot is included as a letter, for example.

Sedgwick often puts a letter aside, then continues or adds to it later (sometimes the same day, sometimes one or more days later), and sends it as a single document. We represent these instances as one letter, regardless of the presence or absence of formal elements or multiple dates that could lead to a different conclusion.

We have transcribed and presented Sedgwick’s letters as literally as possible given the limitations of modern typography and the ability to translate handwritten manuscripts into digital documents. Our intention is to preserve more of the original document and allow the reader to determine the significance of Sedgwick’s spelling, grammar, capitalization, and other mechanical aspects of her writing. To that end, the following is a summary of the specifics of the project’s policy.

The text of each letter is our primary focus, rather than the complete document. Thus, we include everything that Sedgwick wrote in her hand, but we exclude added material such as notes or letters within the letter written by others, as well as paratextual material such as postmarks.

We present, either typographically or in metadata, what is on the page, including crossed-out words, insertions, as well as damage (wax, blots, tears, etc.) but not the arrangement of the words on the page (for example, a paragraph continued in the margins of the page will be represented as a continuous paragraph).

Spelling is preserved as found in the letters. Irregular spellings and spelling mistakes, including obvious slips of the pen, are retained. The encoded personal names will offer corrected spellings of proper names, but no corrections are made in the text itself.

Grammar and syntax are preserved as found in the letters.

Capitalization is preserved as found in the letters, even when it violates conventional standards, such as lowercase letters used for proper nouns or at the beginnings of sentences. In indeterminate cases, where the editors cannot be certain whether Sedgwick intended for a letter to be capital or lowercase, the editors follow modern usage.

Punctuation is preserved as closely as possible as found in the letters. Sedgwick uses dashes, periods, and commas idiosyncratically and inconsistently. Thus, in general, where a mark is indeterminate, we use the context of the sentence and conventional grammar to help us decide which mark to represent. We do not represent the length of dashes, but we do represent the number. We record Sedgwick’s use of a long, low dash (which she sometimes adds to emphasize an emotional statement) as a series of five underscores.

Abbreviations and contractions, in general, are preserved as found in the letters. Ampersands and superscripts are retained in all instances. Underlining or other marks below a superscripted abbreviation are not represented.

Illegible matter is indicated by square brackets enclosing the editors’ conjectural readings (with a question mark appended if the reading is uncertain) or the word illegible within brackets if no reading can be given. The number of illegible words is not indicated. If a single letter of a word is missing, the editors supply it in brackets.

Missing matter is generally due to damage to the original letter. We indicate that condition with the word damage within brackets. When damage to the original renders a word(s) or portions of words not visible, we indicate that condition in one of three ways, following the damage tag:

1. If parts of a word, a single word, or, occasionally, several words, can be determined with some but not complete certainty, the conjectural reading is placed in brackets;
2. If parts of a word, a single word, or, occasionally, several words, are possibly determined (given the syntax and surrounding content) but with less certainty, the conjectural reading is placed in brackets with a question mark;
3. If a word or words are missing completely, that absence is indicated by the damage tag alone.

Canceled matter in the letters is included but crossed out typographically.

Interlineations are included within the body of the text at the point of insertion.

Paragraphing: like other 19th-century letter writers, Sedgwick often attempted to write as much as possible on each page. Sedgwick’s paragraphing is therefore somewhat inconsistent and includes both extremely long and very short paragraphs. Thus, in addition to paragraphs crammed into the margins of the page, postscripts in cramped handwriting, and cross-writing, Sedgwick developed what we have come to see as a short-hand for indicating a change of subject/new paragraph: an extra space followed by dashes, a long dash followed by extra spacing, or a series of short dashes followed by a long space and, often, a slight drop of line. Given that, as a digital edition, we do not need to conserve paper or space, we have decided to represent this convention as a new paragraph in our transcriptions. **

Guide to Editorial Apparatus

This guide lists the arbitrary devices used for clarifying the text in the letters. Following current best practices, we have prioritized the meaning of the text over its visual look on the page when encoding; doing so enables better search and discoverability. Because of this, in some instances the layout of the transcribed text does not precisely replicate Sedgwick’s layout on the manuscript page of the letter.  For example, while page breaks are noted, line breaks are not preserved; similarly cross-written material is presented as a separate paragraph.

Textual Devices

The following devices will be used throughout The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters to clarify the presentation of the text.

In our conversations and interventions, we have tried as much as possible to identify rather than interpret. We intend to include images alongside each transcription, and readers may then decide for themselves whether they agree with our decisions. Overall, we have aimed for a transcription that accurately represents what is on the page without too much barbed wire and that is readable.

At the same time, we acknowledge that we have made and will likely continue to make errors, and we hope that readers will engage and collaborate with us and with this edition to offer corrections, alternate readings, and discoveries.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the editorial statements from the Van Gogh Letters and the John Quincy Adams Digital Diary which helped us to conceptualize and clarify the guidelines for our project.

Notes

*See Elena Pierazzo, “Digital Documentary Editions and Others,” Scholarly Editing 35 (2014) https://scholarlyediting.org/2014/essays/essay.pierazzo.html

**To some extent then, we are shaping the material, but, as Price argues, “Even an inclusive digital archive is both an amassing of material and a shaping of it. That shaping takes place in a variety of places, including in the annotations, introductions, interface, and navigation. Editors are shirking their duties if they do not offer guidance: they are and should be, after all, something more than blind, values-neutral deliverers of goods.” Price, Kenneth, “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, pp. 434-450.