Historical research - the Sperling Notebooks

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

I have seen reference to the "Sperling Notebooks" in the RCO library which document a lot of ancient organs, from memory, over 1300 or so up to around the mid 1850s. Does anyone know who Sperling was, where he lived and what he did, what in particular was the raison d'etre of these researches?

Best wishes

David P

[revtonynewnham]

Hi David

I had already replied to this, but the post seems to have gone AWOL somewhere along the line - probably still floating in cyberspace.

To repeat my previous comment, there's a brief note on p.8 of the pdf on http://www.npor.org.uk/Reporter/boa.pdf

Looking a little further, I followed up the reference to the BIOS Journal no.1 (no, I've not been a member of BIOS that long - I found it in an Oxfam bookshop a few years ago!).  Anyway, to summarise Thistlethwaie:-
"The watermark 1850 appears in one of the volumes, and as the latest date to appear in the course of the text is 1854 ... " hence final version dates around that time.

He sees no reason to doubt the authorship.  John Hanson Sperling was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge in Jan 1843, matriculating BA in 1848 and ordained the following year.  Curate of S. Mary Abbotts, Kensington until 1856.

Thistlethwaite suggests, on the evidence of certain styles in the books, and another of his publications, that he was of the "ecclesiological movement", which was at its heyday during his time in Cambridge.  His explanation for the cut-off in 1854 is that Sperling got married in that year!

Contact me off list if you'd like a copy of the relevant part of the article (the whole thing runs to 25 pages) and also looks at the Leffler manuscript, a listings by G.P. England, Russell & Organographia.

Every Blessing

Tony

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Tony

Thanks for this. Hopefully others might have more to add.

One commentator mentioned that one organ could not have been observed before 1792 and another in the 1780s . . . and cataloguing over 1300 instruments, without the facilities of fast travel, would have been quite a feat in the space of only a few years, opening up the possibility that perhaps Harriet Sperling might have been involved, dying in 1854, but that the handwriting would not appear to be of one so old . . . and there was also John Sperling born in 1763.

We know that Benjamin Latrobe was an organist and that he knew Sperling in the 1790s.

I'm wondering whether there is a deeper heritage in the notebooks than is apparent at first sight and that they may be worthy of further research.

Best wishes

David P