In 2015, UCC celebrated the bicentenary of George Boole, 1815-64. Boole was born in Lincoln and was a largely self-taught mathematical genius. He was appointed to UCC, then known as Queen's College Cork in 1849. This provided him with the opportunity to develop his most important work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. For more about Boole and the events celebrating George Boole 200 see here.
Caption: George Boole's signature on An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
Special Collections was approached by the British Library in late 2013 regarding the possibility of a loan for their then-upcoming exhibition: Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. The item the British Library sought was The Orphan of the Rhine by Eleanor Sleath.
The Terror and Wonder exhibition coincided with the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Castle of Otranto which was the first Gothic novel. The exhibition took a comprehensive look at the history of (primarily) British Gothic literature and its wide-ranging influence up to the present day. One of the key Gothic texts that the British Library featured was Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). In particular, they were interested in bringing together the seven “horrid novels” mentioned in the text which were long thought to have been made up by Austen. The British Library holds five of the novels but were missing Horrid Histories (London, 1796) and The Orphan of the Rhine (Dublin, 1802). As far as they knew this would have been the first time that the seven “horrid novels” would be exhibited together in Britain and Ireland.
Caption: The Orphan of the Rhine title page (volume 1) and cataloguing stamp (volume 2).
