To Thread - Forum Home

The Mudcat Café TM
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=165223
13 messages

Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)

09 Nov 18 - 08:42 AM (#3960887)
Subject: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Jack Campin

I have in front of me a few years of a magazine called Miscellaneous Correspondence in Prose and Verse. It starts in 1755. It is a very weird mixture of stuff. There are news reports (like a vivid set of eyewitness accounts of the Lisbon earthquake and summaries of the progress of the war with France), short pieces on geography and natural history, notices of new books (some very odd), a *lot* of mathematical problems (mainly nontrivial geometry) with solutions sent in by the readers, poems and songs, a few playscripts, and a lot of music - tunes for the songs, country dances and minuets. The songs are all forgettable pastoral stuff, the country dances look like they would work perfectly well in the present day English music scene. The minuets I'm not sure about yet.

As a source of dance tunes, I don't think it's covered by any of the standard indexes.

Before I start scanning this, has anybody already done it?


09 Nov 18 - 12:24 PM (#3960921)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stilly River Sage

Stanford University electronic resource.

Through Amazon, a publication for sale.

National Library of Australia.

Google Books.

I don't know if any of these will let you open it as an e-publication, but lots of places have it.


09 Nov 18 - 12:56 PM (#3960926)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stanron

If you do get to digitise it I would certainly like to see it.


09 Nov 18 - 12:57 PM (#3960927)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Jack Campin

Let's see if anyone can find the score and dance instructions of the jig The French Retreat on page 566 from those links.


09 Nov 18 - 02:33 PM (#3960936)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stilly River Sage

They would probably have to visit a library that owns the document or access to the electronic version. Here is the search in WorldCat that shows the libraries that own it.


09 Nov 18 - 02:47 PM (#3960940)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Jack Campin

The point of my question was whether I would be doing anything useful by scanning the tunes myself, or if I would simply be doing a worse job on something that had already been done by others. It seems that there is no generally accessible copy of this material.

What do people do with minuets these days? The magazine had something like a Minuet of the Month.


09 Nov 18 - 06:19 PM (#3960974)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: GUEST,Lighter

Jack, Google Books has a couple of these publicly available.

Here's one:

https://tinyurl.com/y6vuzlsl

The database Eighteenth Century Collections Online has no less than 18 volumes, most under the earlier title of "General Magazine of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical, Philological, Mathematical, and Mechanical," all edited by Benjamin Martin.

I have access through my university library only.


10 Nov 18 - 05:34 AM (#3961038)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Jack Campin

Thanks. The Google copy is readable on screen but there seems to be no way to download it as a PDF or DjVu to read offline. I'm not even sure how I could create a
URL for a specific page.

I had something a bit wider in mind. There are a lot of notated tunes in 18th and 19th century magazines: not usually as many as with this one, but it was common for travellers to write down tunes they heard and include them in printed descriptions. That stuff slips through the net with systematic tune indexes. It would be worth trying to organize it all with a group effort.


11 Nov 18 - 04:47 PM (#3961238)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stanron

There is a link to download it but I tried it twice and both times it failed. I'm on pay as you go so I'm not trying again. Maybe others will have better luck.


11 Nov 18 - 07:01 PM (#3961254)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Lighter

You can download a PDF from Google Books by clicking on the menu at the "settings" cogwheel icon in the upper right corner.

...Well, at least you can in the U.S.


11 Nov 18 - 08:19 PM (#3961265)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stanron

It was the cog wheel icon in the top right hand corner that I used. It is quite a large pdf. 500 plus pages. Sadly, on pay as you go, you are charged for all the data right at the start of the download. If the download fails, or if you terminate, you are still charged for the whole thing. Vodafone did me out of 7 gig in this way. They only did it once. I'm over it now, honest.


11 Nov 18 - 09:01 PM (#3961269)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: Stilly River Sage

So if someone else downloads the PDF and puts it a place where you can download it, would that be easier? It's too large to go through email but there are services for transferring large files.

If you scan what you have, it won't hurt anything and won't be challenged, as far I as I can see. Copyright isn't an issue. Go for it, if that what you were leading up to. Save the image files as a PDF and there are places where you can save it where others can reach it.


11 Nov 18 - 09:20 PM (#3961273)
Subject: RE: Miscellaneous Correspondence (1750s)
From: leeneia

I tried that with a country dance called Windsor Forest, and my computer tried to download all 967 pages. I stopped it.

I followed Lighter's link above. (Nov. 9th) I googled two of the dances there, Ramble to Oxford and Windsor Forest and didn't find either of them online.

The index of that volume on Google Books shows 17 Country Dances. I tried several of them, and they sounded ordinary. "Like exercises", as our fiddler says.

Jack, if you don't have them already, I will give you the page numbers for dances. Why not bring them up on your screen, take a small instrument in hand and play each dance to see if you like it enough to repay the effort. Here are the page nos

7,65,121,137, 152,217, 279, 372, 394, 434, 487, 505, 529, 566, 608, 646, 878.