Randolph Henry Ash’s copy of Vico’s *Principi di una Scienza Nuova*

Randolph Henry Ash’s copy of Vico’s Principi di una Scienza Nuova is both a book Ash read and a concealed repository of his writings. In the London Library, Roland Michell’s examination of its annotations leads from an inquiry into Ash’s poem about Proserpina to the discovery of letters in Ash’s hand. The volume thus joins intellectual interpretation to material evidence: its pages preserve a historical argument, but also make the order, survival, and ownership of private papers part of the story.

The Book and Its Discovery

The volume had been kept in Locked Safe no. 5 at the London Library, among books on classical and sexual subjects. In September 1986, Roland, a part-time research assistant to James Blackadder, consulted it because he hoped Ash’s own copy might contain marginalia overlooked by other scholars and might help him find sources for The Garden of Proserpina. The book’s distribution among libraries and private collections made that possibility especially valuable: the largest group of Ash’s books was held by the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University, where Mortimer Cropper was preparing an edition of Ash’s correspondence.

The copy had a battered binding and was bound with dirty white tape. When the librarian removed its wrapping and Roland opened it, loose, faded sheets fell from between the pages. They were notes on Vico, written on the backs of book-bills and letters in Ash’s recognizable hand. Their soot-black edges matched the stains on the pages, and their positions appeared undisturbed. The librarian allowed Roland to study them on the condition that he preserve their sequence until they could be listed and described. The book was therefore not simply a source to consult: its physical arrangement was part of the evidence.

Vico, Myth, and Proserpina

Roland’s notes connect Vico’s method to the critical debate over Ash’s Proserpina. Vico searched for historical fact in the metaphors of myth and legend; in his interpretation, Proserpina represented grain, an origin of commerce and community. Ash’s poem had instead been read as a reflection on religious doubt and resurrection, while Blackadder argued that its figure of Proserpina personified history in its early mythical form. The copy gave Roland a way to test these readings against the ideas Ash himself had been reading.

A passage in the book traces the golden apples of myth to grain, imagined as the world’s first gold. It connects Hercules, the golden links issuing from his mouth, the capture of Proserpina by Dis, and the golden bough carried by Aeneas into the underworld. Roland saw possible correspondences with Ash’s Proserpina, described in his notes as both “gold-skinned in the gloom” and “grain-golden,” and as “bound with golden links.” He indexed the passage under grain, apples, chain, and treasure, making his method visible: interpretation proceeds through links among images rather than through a single settled identification.

The Interleaved Papers and Their Uncertainty

Among the papers folded into the volume was a note written on the back of a candle bill. It describes the individual as briefly joining a community of thought, altering it, and dying, while the species survives to reap the benefit of that temporary life. Roland copied the passage and questioned whether Ash had quoted another source or written it himself. He also asked whether Proserpina represented the species or the individual, and whether Ash’s notes preceded or followed the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The paper preserves Ash’s thought, but does not resolve its authorship, date, or precise relation to his poem.

The same uncertainty surrounds the letters Roland found beneath page 300. They were written in Ash’s hand on paper bearing his Great Russell Street address, dated June 21 without a year, and addressed “Dear Madam.” Neither was signed, and one was considerably shorter than the other. Their discovery shifted the volume’s significance from a scholarly aid to a container of private correspondence. The missing year and signatures leave the letters’ circumstances open, while their placement among Ash’s reading papers ties literary interpretation to the history of personal documents.

Preservation, Privacy, and Afterlife

The novel places the volume within a wider history of papers saved, dispersed, destroyed, or buried. The surviving archive associated with Christabel LaMotte includes manuscripts, lyrics, revisions of Melusina, and a short run of Blanche Glover’s diary, but its custodians acknowledge that other material may have been lost. Ellen Ash, in her account of the period after her husband’s death, recalls his wish that private things not be made into curiosities for later biographers. She burned some papers but could not bring herself to destroy others, including the letters, which she chose to lay to rest with him.

That later account gives the papers in Ash’s Vico an ethical as well as scholarly charge. Roland’s pleasure in possessing knowledge for himself conflicts with the obligation to preserve the order of the fragments and report discoveries to Blackadder. Elsewhere, a surviving sheet addressed to Ellen accuses her of keeping evidence and asks her to reconsider what she has done, without specifying in the note itself what evidence is meant. When Cropper later opens the container recovered from Ash’s grave, it holds a bundle of letters among other carefully wrapped objects. The book’s interleaved documents thus belong to a larger pattern in which material survival enables discovery but never makes private history transparent. Its central significance lies in that tension: the archive offers real traces, while their fragmentary form and contested custody limit what can be known from them.