Investigations of a Dog

The Military History Carnival has a new home at Cliopatria thanks to David Silbey. The new edition is now up, and future editions will take place every three months. You can find details of past and future editions on the  blog carnival index page, and submit posts using the new submission form.

[Edit: problem solved but I'll leave this post up in case it's useful to anyone else in the same situation]

So I submitted an article to an academic journal, and they accepted it (eventually). I’ve just received the proofs and to my horror discovered that someone has made lots of additions to the text without asking or telling me. Some of these additions are factually incorrect and contradict my arguments and evidence! (Some others are inane and irrelevant factoids which I’d prefer not to be there but I can live with them as long as they’re not actually wrong.) The additions are mostly in footnotes but some have been inserted in the main text in the middle of sentences that I wrote. What do I do now?

As usual the contract and proofing instructions state that only minor corrections can be accepted at this stage, but it’s going to take some fairly big changes to put things right. How much can I reasonably demand considering that these mistakes aren’t my fault and that I was given no chance to prevent or correct them before typesetting? If I suggest replacement text which has the same number of characters as the deleted words would that make it easier and cheaper for them to reset the pages?

I don’t have much scope to withdraw the article as I’ve already signed the contract (by which I surrendered “all rights” and gave the journal the right to modify the text. Doh!). As I’ve got an essay in an edited collection coming out later this year, and a monograph next year, it’s not like I’m desperate for another publication but it would still be nice to get this in a peer-reviewed journal because it makes some important points that I want people to take notice of.

As a last resort I could threaten to sue them for false attribution, because publishing someone else’s factual errors under my name would probably be defamatory regardless of copyright ownership or contract terms. But I’d prefer not to have to go that far. An added complication is that the journal is based in another country, although that country does have a law against false attribution which has been tested in some fairly high profile cases.

I’d be very grateful for any advice, especially if anyone else has experienced anything like this.

I’ve just started to appreciate another advantage of taking digital photos of documents in the National Archives (a.k.a. PRO): comparing original signatures. That’s not exactly a revolutionary discovery, but I actually used it this week and it was quite exciting. I’ve mentioned John Gower before in posts about my work on saddlers. I had two collections of facts which I thought probably refer to the same person, but I hadn’t conclusively proved it.

The archives of the London Saddler’s Company show that a John Gower was a freeman of the company, and was admitted to the livery in 1640. The will of John Gower, citizen and saddler of London, was written on 18 October 1644 and proved by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 9 May 1645. This will mentions that John’s wife was called Jane, and that they lived in the parish of Saint Katherine Creechurch. Jane Gower went on to sell saddles to the New Model Army in 1645.

Financial records of the Essex county committee and the committee of the Eastern Association at Cambridge show that they bought lots of saddles from a John Gower. He is sometimes described as Captain Gower, and in at least one case money was received on his behalf by his ensign. It’s quite likely that this is the same Gower who commanded a company in the Earl of Manchester’s foot regiment.

On the balance of probabilities and assumed that these records all related to the same man but I wasn’t absolutely certain. This week I was sorting out some photos from my last research trip, including warrants issued by the Essex committee (SP 28/227). I noticed that John Gower had signed receipts on some of them. I already had photos of his original will (PROB 10/648) so it was easy to compare them.

This is a receipt for money for saddles bought by the Essex committee:

And this is part of the will:

They look pretty similar to me so now I’m fairly certain that it is the same man. The signature on the will looks very shaky, presumably because he was terminally ill when he wrote it.

As well as the practical benefits of record linkage, this is also a way of connecting with the reality of the past. If the same signature appears on two different documents belonging to different organisations and created at different times, the most parsimonious explanation is that John Gower was a real person who signed the documents in the course of his life. His home must have been destroyed in the great fire, if not before or after, and as far as I know none of the saddles that he made survives today. Saddlers Hall was destroyed by fire on more than one occasion, and nearly all of the company’s 17th century plate was sold or lost. These signatures are probably the only remaining physical traces of John Gower.

1. Daniel C. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War, 1st ed. (2008).
2. Douglas Brunton and Donald H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (Hamden, Conn., 1968).
3. Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642-50 (Ashgate, 2004).
4. Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975).
5. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County, Harvard historical studies (Cambridge, Mass, 1983).
6. Mary Frear Keeler, The Long Parliament 1640-1641, a Biographical Study of its members (Philadelphia, 1954).
7. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (London, 1976).
8. Jason Peacey, Politicans and pamphleteers : propaganda during the English civil wars and interregnum (Aldershot, 2004).

I’ve already looked at a couple of these before but owning copies will be more convenient. Don’t want to gloat too much, but having a 35% discount on Ashgate books is nice. Brunton and Pennington has a really condescending quote from R. H. Tawney on the front! Also acquired some documents from the Essex Record Office thanks to their detailed online catalogue and efficient reprographics service, and for much less than a train ticket to Chelmsford (but I guess I won’t get to meet Aulus or Badvoc…).

I’m still dreaming of a time when everyone is sick to death of Labour and Tories, but that time isn’t now. There are still some crumbs of comfort:

• We already have fixed term parliaments. This is a major reform which takes an unfair advantage away from parties in government.
• The coalition agreement commits the government to making the House of Lords elected by Proportional Representation. The result of the referendum on AV for the Commons does not affect this. The Lords could potentially end up being more democratic and representative than the Commons!
• No more than 28% of the electorate actively supports the current system. While only 13% voted for AV, in absolute terms that amounts to more than 6 million people. We are not going to shut up or go away just because a different 12 million people say so. The uncommitted 59% is still potentially open to persuasion by either side. There are also many people who are not currently allowed to vote but probably should be (16 and 17-year-olds, prisoners, immigrants without full citizenship).
• Now that AV has been discredited, STV is the only alternative for the Commons. We can expect supporters of electoral reform to be more united and more enthusiastic in future.
• While the current system is still broken there are at least opportunities to bleed through the cracks. All parties will still have a chance to win seats with less than a third of the vote. Many Labour and Tory supporters have gambled on this advantaging their own party more than the others, but even if this gamble pays off the Lib Dems will not be silenced.
• Maybe liberals will now have to take the problem of ideological hegemony more seriously. The people who voted No are not necessarily stupid or evil (but those who actively campaigned for a No vote probably are), and they have not necessarily been tricked by propaganda. It’s just that to many people it’s common sense that we should keep what we’ve got because it’s ‘just normal’, and that the majority, or the biggest minority, should get everything while other groups are excluded and erased because ‘there has to be a clear winner’ and ‘someone has to lose’. These assumptions are so deeply embedded that they are seen as natural, self-evident and completely beyond question, rather than policies in a political manifesto which are up for debate. In this situation having better arguments is not enough. People need to be encouraged to question their own ideological assumptions, but they will probably find this difficult and disturbing. Tackling this problem will require liberals to challenge one of their own assumptions: that people make the best decisions when left to their own devices. Freeing people from state control is only half the battle. They also need to emancipate themselves from mental slavery.
• In future I will do more to help the Lib Dems and electoral reform (although more than I’ve done in the past might still not be very much!). The referendum has just confirmed that British politics is currently dominated by fear, ignorance, resentment and bullying. The Liberal Democrats currently offer the best chance of a positive alternative. (The Green Party offers the second best chance, so I wouldn’t mind helping them at the same time.) I might not have started voting Lib Dem so soon, or at all, if it wasn’t for my friend Andrew Hickey. One man can make a difference (say this in Richard Basehart voice for maximum effect).
• On the same day as the referendum we had a parish council election. There were nine candidates and eight vacancies, and the ballot papers said ‘vote for no more than eight candidates’. This is confusing, it breaks the principle of one person one vote, and does not give one clear winner. The people have clearly decided that they don’t want electoral systems like this. The No2AV campaign will now have to seek further reform to bring all other elections in line with First Past the Post. No2ParishCouncils!
• I promised that I’d post more if we lost the referendum. Don’t expect quality – my good writing is all going into the book – but quantity might be slightly greater than it has been in the last few months.