Serendipity (or summat)

Ulrichs expresses the wish in the very last issue of Alaudae that an educational award ceremony in Rome on October 2, 1894 had not been given the political dimension it was by the politically charged speeches that accompanied it, and furthermore regrets that the event had taken place “on that day.”

The only thing I could associate with “that day”, October 2, was the plebiscite in 1870 that brought Rome and the other Papal States into the new state of Italy and out of Papal control, but that date has no significance today (I checked with my Italian friends), so I’d left it as an outside possibility that this was what Ulrichs had meant.

But while proofing and indexing last week I happened on a scan in Google Books of the Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia for October to December 1894, and from it it was clear, something that Ulrichs had omitted to say, that the mayor of Rome, in introducing the educational event, had made an explicit connection in nationalistic terms between the recognition of the academic merit of the young and the plebiscite 24 years earlier.

So I’d been on the right track after all, and Ulrichs deserves credit for baulking at the overt intrusion of nationalism into education. But then Ulrichs, a Hanoverian exile from the German Empire, was sensitive to such things.

All well and good, but worth a blog? Probably not, and my real reason for writing won’t make it so either. But when looking back at the pdf I’d downloaded for the reference I needed to write a footnote, I noticed the provenance of the scan on Google Books, a copy of the Gazzetta Ufficiale for October-December 1894 given to the library of Princeton University by “M. T. Pyne”, Moses Taylor Pyne, a dubious character in many ways, but a major financial benefactor of Princeton and influence on its development.

I registered the name Pyne because he’s in the index to Ulrichs’ newspaper I’m composing alongside the proof reading. He’s there because Ulrichs had received a letter from Pyne complimenting Ulrichs on an account in Alaudae of folkloric traditions at Princeton.

It’s a small world, I suppose, or maybe it was in 1894.