• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2119 0

Adopting the Brydges style of publication, he reported his findings in small-circulation works of local history, aimed at procuring noble patronage rather than commercial success. His publisher was one of Brydges's campaigners against the libraries, Lupton Relfe. It was Mantell who named one of his ancient creatures iguanodon, because its tooth resembled that of a modern iguana. But these were the very years in which the British Association for the Advancement of Science came into being, betokening the emergence of a new practice of scientific authorship quite distinct from the antiquarian conventions to which Mantell cleaved. His work at first enjoyed little attention in this scientific community, and Mantell did at length turn to more commercial publishing, not least in hopes of royalties. However, with his reputation among the scientists still precarious, he found himself confronted by the power of their own mode of publication. A long-running feud with the notoriously ambitious Richard Owen reached its peak when Owen gave a famous lecture at the British Association in 1841. Mantell believed that Owen had silently appropriated his work. He denounced the talk as "base piracy." But the Association voted to subsidize Owen's publication anyway. And his would not be a work of geological antiquarianism aimed at one or two patrons, but a professional publication directed to a transnational research community-awork befitting the newly defined role of the scientist. It was in this context that Owen, partly to cast a distinction between his work and his rival's, coined a new name for the class of creatures theywere both studying: dinosaurs. And it was his version that gained lasting influence. This was certainly not due solely to Mantell's devotion to a small-circulation, antiquarian style of authorship and Owen's to a more successful alternative. But the difference in authorial strategies was nevertheless as consequential as it was stark.73

GOTHIC GENIUS

Just as his twin strategies against the contemporary culture of print seemed to be reaching their culmination, Brydges found himself cast out of Parliament. Facing insupportable debts, he fled first to Paris, then on to Geneva. Apart from a lengthy poetic tour of Italy in 1819-21 and a second sojourn in Paris in 1825, Brydges resigned himself to a fitful but Romantic seclusion in the shadows of the Swiss Alps. There he worked late into each night writing endless sonnets, pamphlets, bibliographical and genealogical screeds, and self-righteous defenses of his cause in the Chandos case. Night after night he railed silently against Beltz's "impudent and libellous" demolition of his Chandos claim, his "pure wickedness," his "false representation," and so on.74 Meanwhile the Lee Priory press struggled on, finally closing its doors in 1821. Its most expert operator, Johnson, left somewhat earlier in high dudgeon.

In exile Brydges returned to his bibliographical endeavors. The "almost mechanical" enterprise of bibliography, he said, suited a wronged outcast incapable of deploying real imagination. Incapacitated from exercising genius himself, he preferred to reprint the works of others rather than resort to claiming as his own "thoughts borrowed from others." His reprints appeared in minute print runs from Naples, Florence, Rome, and Geneva. In one he "registered" more than a thousand ideas from previous centuries that in his own day were hailed as novel. In others he expostulated on the nature of genius and its neglect by a gluttonous public.75

The one intermission in this effort came from a brief but calamitous return to Lee Priory. Seeing his old haunts again made Brydges more melancholic than ever. And he embarked on a Byzantine scheme to pay off his debts that ended up ruining everyone who still tolerated him. The scheme involved Lee lands that were currently mortgaged. The mortgage was paid off, and they were sold to the bibliographer and mediocre poet Edward Quillinan. Quillinan then sold them back for three times as much, generating a paper profit of £15,ooo. This was divided