I’ve been proofreading for most of this month. A three-volume text and annotated translation of a Latin-language newspaper is not a simple thing to check, it’s fair to say, and at the best of times the checking is not the most stimulating part of producing a book. Of all proofreading I’ve ever done, though, this for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Alaudae is by far the least painful, and for the simple reason that I’m reminded, page after page, how incredibly interesting the material is.

An illustration follows, a single paragraph taken from the middle of somewhere approaching 400 pages in total. I’m not sure I can properly explain why I like it so much, and only partly because I am seriously shattered, but it captures how Ulrichs, an impoverished exile in the middle of the Apennines, managed to leave behind him, the work of his very last years, such a remarkable, oblique document of late nineteenth-century European history.

But some background is required.

Ulrichs has sent two issues of his newspaper to Arthur Balfour, future Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland, whose honorary degree ceremony at Trinity College, Dublin in February 1891, when Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland, Ulrichs had described across two issues in March 1891 and April 1892. Ulrichs was in the habit of sending copies of his newspaper to significant people who had featured in it, an obvious way of garnering some publicity for his publication. The ceremony at Trinity had fallen at the end of Balfour’s time in Ireland, a tenure which both established him as a major force in British politics and damned him as “Bloody Balfour” among Irish nationalists. There were not a whole lot of nationalists at Trinity at this time, but Ulrichs’ source for the event was the editor of Freeman’s Journal, the leading contemporary Irish newspaper which supported the dominant nationalist aspiration at the time, Home Rule for Ireland. For the aftermath of the degree ceremony, the Journal’s pointed account repeated and embellished in Ulrichs’ Latin, see here.

Balfour is a figure whose significance is hard to overstate. Barbara Tuchman has ten pages (pp. 45-54) in The Proud Tower that make of him something like the very embodiment of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, its “Splendid Isolation” at the heyday of Empire. Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, he was for forty years one of the very leading figures in British politics, for 28 of those years in some form of ministerial role. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, when he was Foreign Secretary under Lloyd George, is of course one of the most momentous documents of the twentieth century. It is rather less well known that we have Balfour largely to thank/blame for the popularity of the game of golf.

That Balfour and Ulrichs had any contact at all is bordering on the surreal; the form it took truly so, as the Italian postal authorities refused to recognise the official government franking of Balfour’s letter, and Ulrichs as a consequence had to pay for the cost of its postage and the same again in a fine. If Balfour by this stage was Leader of the House of Commons, effectively Deputy Prime Minister, Ulrichs was so short of resources when John Addington Symonds visited him in Aquila in October 1891 that he had “no shirt and no stockings on.” But Ulrichs knew how to write a Latin newspaper that people would want to read, and the engaging writing and content was programmatic—proof of Ulrichs’ passionately held belief that Latin could be a practical modern language that would overcome the ever sharpening divisions between the ethnic and linguistic communities of late nineteenth-century Europe.

Anyhow, here is one of my favourite paragraphs in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Alaudae, in Latin and English, and then in English and English:

I believe that Balfour’s papers for this period are held by the Bodleian library. When I’m not up to my ears in proofreading or admin, which may coincide with the next blue moon, I shall head over and investigate whether there are among his papers the issues of Alaudae that Ulrichs sent to him. If so, and you never know, they will no doubt be addressed to Balfour in Ulrichs’ very finest Latin calligraphy.