The Glover Notebooks
I recently received this email (reduced extract) - Many of your visitors will have heard of Stephen Glover who was active as a writer of travel guides and directories in the first part of the nineteenth century. His magnum opus was to be The History and Gazetteer of the County of Derby (1829 & 1831). This was an ambitious work, overly so in retrospect as only two of the three or four promised volumes appeared. Miraculously, now nearly 200 years old, Glover’s notes for the whole work have survived and are lodged in the Derby Local History Library.
I’m Stephen Glover’s three-times great grandson (my mother was a Glover). I’ve known about the existence of the Notebooks since a child and resolved to someday exhume and publish them. My wife and I went to the North-East in 1973 and they rested in the Library until the beginning of this century when, fortuitously, I was appointed as an external examiner at the University of Derby. That re-kindled the idea and I made contact with the Library. It was very supportive and I was able, over several visits, to photograph every page of the six manuscript books, the first five of which go from A to Z of all the Derbyshire towns and villages some of which, through boundary changes, are no longer in the County. Though some of those pages were still legible, others have faded or are heavily overwritten with his later additions and crossings out so that reading them was quite difficult. The text is illustrated with pictures cut from magazines of the time; Glover doubtless intending to replace them with specially commissioned etchings in the final publication. His moneyed subscribers also paid for etchings of their houses to be included in the books. Three of these, previously unpublished, have survived in the Glover family and are reproduced where appropriate in the transcription. Even more interesting are his many sketches, especially of church monuments and of armorial bearings, made in the early years of the nineteenth century. Comparing these with what we now find reveals details now lost through the ravages of time.
It rapidly became clear that trying to reconstruct the missing parts of the History and Gazetteer was impossible but I resolved to attempt a transcription of the Notebooks. That I did and it seemed, for a time, that it was going to be published in book-form but, like so many other things, the sharp down-turn in the economy overtook the idea and nothing happened. Just as well because, a decade on, we have been able to do a much better transcription. It was possible to enhance the faint sketches while preserving the Glover, ‘style’. It has also been possible to include many footnotes, expanding on Glover’s often terse remarks and references, bringing major items up-to-date and providing modern measurements.
So, at last it is published, all 600 pages of it, in book-form. It’s available from the publishers, Moorleys Print and Publishing, 23 Park Road, Ilkeston, DE7 5DA, for £21. 0115 932 0643
‘The Glover Notebooks’ ISBN 9780860717362
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