Reposted by Morwenna
Does any archives people have good examples of how to deal with offensive/outdated language in archive material when cataloguing?
Anyone have any examples/guidelines/polices/articles they can send my way?
Morwenna
@morwanneg.bsky.social
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Archivist. History, books, cats, art, feminism and cricket. Views my own. She/Her
![This article presents a new theory about the creative genesis of Sir Walter Elliot’s Baronetage, the figurative device looming so large in the first and last chapters of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817). Most readers will recall the gratification that Sir Walter derives from consulting his “book of books” (7) and annotating the margins of the Elliot entry—a superb stroke of comic character-building on Austen’s part but also a motif that gestures towards her wider interest in social snobbery and the contemporary print culture that captured, enabled, and reinforced it. Scholars have noted that baronetages constituted a real eighteenth-century publishing phenomenon and have speculated that Austen had a specific text in mind when composing her entries about the Elliot family. For example, constructing a brilliant argument about Persuasion’s cross-fertilization of aristocratic and naval charactonyms, Janine Barchas suggests that Austen was “probabl[y] . . . gesturing to the latest edition” of Debrett’s Baronetage of England, published in 1815 (Barchas 207–08).
I argue that a more likely candidate to have inspired Austen is a baronetage less well-known than Debrett’s: the anonymous two-volume edition of the New Baronetage of England printed for William Miller and Edmund Lloyd in June 1804. This edition was kept in the library at Godmersham Park, which Austen used intensively for two months during late 1813 (Sabor, “Godmersham” 34–35). Moreover, selected entries are annotated in precisely the fashion that Austen attributes to Sir Walter. In this article I introduce the reader to the Godmersham Park Baronetage, build a case that it was annotated by Austen’s niece Fanny Knight (1793–1882) around 1810–12, and consider evidence that Jane Austen may have consulted it when she was planning Persuasion. In a similar spirit to Gillian Dow in her recent article addressing Marianne Knight’s books, I unite bibliographic analysis with other evidence in the service of a “specula…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3usbb4ptt4tse4scg3v2ofyx/bafkreih6cscn2eeosiddxlvokskssxpcoyxhicwzu7vdsv726iyctp2lxe)
