In the 19th Century, a vast quantity of literature from Asian languages was translated into English. Popular editions were created to make classic texts like the Ramayana, the Shahnameh, the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur’an and the Confucian Analects accessible to the general public. AVaTAR is a collection of these books, discovered and purchased by Dr Alex Bubb in second-hand bookshops. Alex formed the collection as a source of evidence for his second monograph, Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation (2023). He is now working to turn the collection into a physical and digital public resource, for use as a tool for teaching and research, and as a treasure-trove of information for anyone interested in Victorian popular orientalism.
AVaTAR’s first purpose is to collate and safeguard these largely-forgotten popular translations, many of which are now rare. But secondly, it is an archive of evidence for how non-specialist readers responded to Asian literature, because many of the books contain pencil notes left in the margin by their original owners, as well as bookplates, gift inscriptions, news clippings, and the stamps and stickers of the bookshops that originally sold them. While a few of the AVaTAR books were owned by famous individuals, such as the poet R.C. Trevelyan, the dancer Ram Gopal, and the politician John Bright, most belonged to ‘ordinary’ people, including a farmer, a printer, a teacher, a journalist, a homeopath, a lawyer, a Unitarian minister, and more than a dozen schoolboys and schoolgirls. One book was once the property of the Bangor Theological Seminary. Another came from a miners’ library in South Wales.
In 2023 the Southlands Methodist Trust funded the creation of a website for AVaTAR, featuring a searchable catalogue of the books, close-up photographs of the reader marginalia, detailed provenance information for each book, and a blog. Alex is now in the process of adding an introductory video to the website, and sample class plans. The objective is to provide a public resource that will be accessible to anyone with an interest in the cultural impact of Asian literature in Victorian Britain (and the English-speaking world more broadly), but that will also be a valuable source of historical evidence for scholars of cultural history. Finally, the website is intended as a teaching resource at university level. AVaTAR is physical proof that Victorian readers roamed far outside “English” literature, and the collection is thus a useful tool for lecturers seeking to decolonize and expand their curricula.
In In 2024, Alex curated the first public exhibition of the books in Roehampton University Library, accompanied by a hands-on workshop. His goal is to organize at least one AVaTAR exhibition somewhere in the UK each year.