Anatomy of an Annotation

Connolly did not make it easy to footnote his work. This wasn’t part of some devilish plan to keep the professors busy: he simply didn’t feel it was important – either because the references were understood at the time, or that they were secondary to the purpose of the piece, which was to build a political argument not provide a research thesis.

This makes my work as his editor all the more difficult, especially as many of his other editors didn’t feel the need to footnote either. One or two provided a small number of references, but in general they’re patchy and of limited use. I’ve set myself the task here to address that and finally provide a working annotation of his articles, public letters, and speeches.

It is a very slow process. Each reference can take an hour or two to track down and write up. Some take longer; in the case of the one above it took me three days.

In September and October 1898, Connolly published the opening chapters of Labour in Irish History as a series of articles in Workers’ Republic. The fifth one, 22 October, contained the following line:

In the year 1794 a pamphlet published at 7 Capel Street, Dublin, stated that the average wage of a day labourer in the County Meath reached only 6d. per day in Summer, and 4d. per day in Winter…

Ok. So I’ve got to find the pamphlet he’s talking about, as well as check the figures for wages. The problem is that Connolly did not provide the title, the author, or the publisher of the pamphlet in question. All that I have to go on is that it was published in 1794, at 7 Capel Street, and that it dealt with day labourers in Meath.

My first port of call is always HaithiTrust and Google Books. I type into their search engines, “day labourers meath” and see what comes back. HathiTrust was a blank, while the only positive hit on Google Books was Labour in Irish History itself.

I also tried the British Library newspaper database, and again nothing useful came back.

Shit.

I need to engage in a bit of lateral thinking. I know Connolly read it somewhere – he wasn’t one for inventing stuff and then passing it off as authentic with an unfindable source – and in 1898 there was really only one place he could have used: the National Library in Dublin.

I try that and I get a couple of hits, which I am able to narrow down by date, and sure enough I get a potential candidate for 1794.

This looks promising. Only thing, it’s now late on Thursday evening and I won’t get into Dublin until Saturday morning. I order it up online and two days later I’m trundling through its gates in search of a pamphlet on day labourers in Meath.

I pick it up at the librarian’s desk and straight away it looks good. The year is right, the title is right, and the place of publication – 7 Capel Street – is a direct match.

I start reading through it, and on page fifteen I come across a description that seems to match Connolly’s reference. It reads:

According to the best information the writer could obtain, the situation of the cottager in the County of Meath, is as follows… 6d. per day for one half year, 5d. the other…

Connolly substituted “Summer” and “Winter” for each use of “one half year;” he also wrote “4d.” instead of “5d.” – but I’ve checked his work enough times now to know that he wasn’t the most meticulous of note-takers.

He never changed meaning, but he often wrote down a letter or a word or a number wrong, so the above would fall well into his “normal” mistakes, and the differences between the original text and Connolly’s text are so minor that, coupled with the other information – the title, year, address, and wage information for day labourers in Meath – I think I can reasonably cite this pamphlet as the one Connolly used.

Which meant I could finally complete the annotation. And no correction of Connolly’s mis-transcription. It’s not my job to mark his homework. He wrote what he wrote. The correct line in the footnote is enough.

So yeah, three days chasing a single annotation. Not all of them require this kind of legwork, but even so it is a slow process with a lot of concentration and attention to detail. I sometimes feel like Nick Park making a Wallace and Gromit movie: tiny meticulous movements, day upon day, working towards a final flowing scene.

If I was to do what most of his other editors did, and just take selections from his articles with no context or annotation, I could publish the entire “Complete Works” relatively quickly. This is because I have them already transcribed in rough form – around 840,000 words. But if I did that, we’d still be in the same position as before. Connolly’s writings deserve more respect than that. Hence, one volume every twelve/eighteen months, properly annotated and checked against the original. We’ll get there, and when it’s done it’ll be worth it.