The ideas contained in the verses flow, too, interrupted here and there by words scratched through and improved by substitution. It’s a hurried hand, with letters half-printed, half-linked in a cursive flow.

“I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,” the writing begins, “As once Electra her sepulchral urn . . .”

It’s Sonnet 5 from 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets of the Portuguese.”

The handwriting is Barrett Browning’s own, linking a present-day viewer to a past when the ink was wet and the poetry fresh.

It’s a handwriting familiar to Rita Patteson, director of the Armstrong Browning Library, who read through the 15 poems contained in Barrett Browning’s handwritten notebook after Baylor University acquired it in a 2008 auction. She not only discovered a rough draft of Sonnet 5, but three unpublished poems written between 1836 and 1848.

Geoff Hunt, archives assistant of Baylor University’s Texas Collection, demonstrates the large size of a 17th-century legal document, one with tufts of cotton embedded in wax seals to demonstrate authenticity. Such documents were folded into smaller sizes for storage in days before filing cabinets and drawers.
Jerry Larson/Waco Tribune-Herald

And in the slanting stanzas, scratched-out words and hurried script captured in the poet’s handwriting, Patteson discovered a sense of Barrett Browning as a writer.

“I think she was very thoughtful. She considered what she was writing as she was writing,” she said.

In a digital age where it seems only signatures are handwritten, historians and scholars find telling details about a person, a time and a culture in the handwritten pages and books saved for history.

To make that point, Patteson and curator for books and printed material Cynthia Burgess point to a table in Patteson’s office loaded with books and pamphlets from the Brownings and their contemporaries. A narrow leather box contains Robert’s traveling library of Greek classics, the small volumes precursors to today’s paperbacks. A book bearing Charles Dickens’ library nameplate demonstrates he was in their circle of friends. A pamphlet contains the early printed version of some of Robert’s poems, before re-edited to book format. And a printer’s proof contains Robert’s handwritten corrections and additions before an edition was printed.

“It’s the thought processes that’s so interesting to the scholars who come in and see these works,” explained Patteson, who oversees one of the world’s foremost collections of Browning materials, one that’s largely open to the public.

That’s why handwritten documents play key roles in Baylor University’s libraries and special collections — and why today’s researchers wonder what future scholars will miss in the digital documents we’ll leave behind.

choover@wacotrib.com

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