1995: Provisional Notes Toward a Mallard Archive
Professor Alice Mallard, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (Adjunct: Anthropology), University of Sydney
Every family has its chronicler, and every chronicler their accidents. Ours was Arthur Blandy. He had the luck—or presumption—to name himself editor of what he called The Mallard‑Malbury Correspondence, 1790–1910, though only about a third of the material corresponded with anything except itself. He meant well.
That phrase, “he meant well,” is perhaps the only line in this essay free of qualification.
Blandy was never a careful man, but he possessed that English gift for seriousness which can so easily pass for accuracy. He compiled, edited, prefaced, and occasionally invented the volumes that still bear his name in outdated catalogues: the Prefatory Notes on Regency Satire (1954), Hearth and Halo: The Early Mallards (1957), and later the haphazard Collected Scandals, vol. 1 (unfinished, 1962). To him, research was a devotional activity—footnotes as prayer beads—and plagiarism a form of homage.
The university never reciprocated his devotion. He longed for tenure, a longing he made public by capitalising it in letters. “It is, in my view, an Issue of Integrity,” he once wrote, underlining both nouns. Ultimately his employers decided the issue differently. His dismissal, recorded under the neutral heading Administrative Re‑structuring, 1963, strikes me as cruelly honest.
My aunt, Viola Vorpel, was more severe. “He edits as if polishing a fog,” she said in one of her diary entries, later republished (with some censorship) in A Baronial Eye for Error (1988). Viola never mistook confusion for charm. She accused Blandy of laziness, which was true, and of vulgarity, which was also true, and of contaminating our family scholarship, which was true enough to hurt. But she missed something.
The archive—if such a word can still be used for this porous entity—outlives both its caretakers and its vandals. There are hundreds of boxes, many unsorted, some suspiciously duplicated. In one carton, a draft of Blandy’s own application for tenure appears twice: once intact, once in his handwriting overlaid with my aunt’s annotations in scarlet ink reading “preposterous/mournful/confessional rubbish.” In another, I found a letter signed by my grandmother, offering “moral encouragement but no funds.” Blandy filed that under Critical Reception.
(In his personal index, “Mallard, Alice” leads not to myself but to a recipe for fish stew.)
He may have smudged our record, but he kept it alive. That sentence has taken me years to write without flinching. Because laziness, when combined with obsession, produces continuity. Arthur’s indolence was somehow generative; he mistitled, misdated, misattributed, yet ensured nothing was discarded. He left the cartons open, and the gaps between them wide enough for later scholars to slip through.
It is unfashionable now to defend the minor male bunglers of history, but Arthur’s bungling was oddly democratic. He mishandled the Mallards with exactly the same inept reverence he applied to Switt, the Marchioness of Malbury, and the anonymous pamphleteers of 1850s Bath (two of whom were almost certainly the same person). He copied, recopied, lost, and rediscovered their sentences as if history were a transcription error perpetually awaiting correction. And perhaps, archivally speaking, it is.
The archive stands now in a temperature‑controlled corner of the Fisher Library Annex, its boxes stamped Under Review. No one quite remembers when or by whose authority it arrived there. I have contributed to its digital reincarnation, an act that may qualify simultaneously as preservation and blasphemy. Optical scanners are less forgiving than diarists; they record creases as data.
When I first began cataloguing the collection under the auspices of my second doctorate, I imagined I would restore order where Arthur had left collage. I soon learned that tidy metadata is a form of historical fiction. Ancestry refuses algorithm. My aunt talked of “trampled centuries.” I have come to think the trampling part of the landscape.
Arthur imagined that by protecting the truth he was saving it. In fact, he was manufacturing it through care. This is perhaps universal: the more precision one applies, the less stable the object becomes. The digital versions of his footnotes float from context to context, bleeding chronologies until the system mistakes a duchess of 1823 for a faculty donor of 1923. Both, as it happens, gave money under protest.
The computerised archive presently lists “Vorpel, Lady V.” under Possible Machine Derivatives, following a clerical error in metadata entry. I have not corrected it.
My aunt would loathe what we are doing. She disliked any suggestion that interpretation might replace control. “Archives are not diaries,” she once told me, “and shouldn’t be arranged as if they feel things.” Yet she filled her own diaries with marginalia, rebuttals, and drafts of letters never sent. One might accuse her of being her own editor’s ghost.
I remain uncertain whether to name this current project The Mallard Papers or An Archive of Misremembrance. The former assures professional respectability; the latter describes it. Still, universities prefer confidence, even misplaced. My proposal to the faculty last spring—part digital humanities, part family exorcism—was received as promising, provided the “personal component” remain “implicit.” Administrative translation: embarrassment is admissible if disguised as research.
My students, most of them born after the first IBM PC, find Blandy amusingly inefficient. They forget that his typewriter was as intelligent as the average committee. In one lecture I read aloud his list of “confirmed genealogical constants”: thirteen names, nine question marks, and the word approx. beside his own date of birth. The class applauded, thinking it parody.
Yet he meant well. He wanted, genuinely, to rescue wit from decay. He borrowed liberally from my ancestors because he loved their cleverness; he copied Viola’s sentences because they sounded like truth even when they contradicted him. In one of his last letters—to no one in particular, carbon‑copied to half the humanities faculty—he wrote: “I edit not for accuracy but for affection.” It is difficult, in a profession obsessed with citation, to admit that affection may be the only lasting method.
So here we are: an archive vast enough to confuse and generous enough to persist. I picture Viola at her desk, stabbing her pen like a rapier; Arthur fumbling through index cards about to be obsolete; and myself, somewhere between them, trying to digitise the dust. When people ask whether I consider myself part of the Mallard tradition, I hesitate. Tradition implies coherence. What we have is compost—layered, damp, occasionally luminous. And yet, something grows from it.
Whether the record clarifies anything is beside the point. It continues. The Mallard archive, first in Blandy’s jam‑stained notebooks, now in my servers’ humming cores, is the truest kind of inheritance: untidy, compulsive, and, for all its errors, optimistic about being read.
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