ABSTRACT
This large folio volume measures 320mm × 220mm, with a writing block measuring 280 mm × 170 mm. Although it begins with a regular 32 lines of text, as the text progresses Halkett manages to squeeze in as many as 38 lines on a page; consequently, it runs to approximately 44,000 words. In order to give the reader a sense of how the later pages look in the original, I have reproduced a page of the MS. (83, according to Halkett’s pagination). Unlike the ‘Meditations’, this volume is not in its original format. It was presented to the British Library by W.J. Stuart, 15 July 1884, and the binding and covers date from the nineteenth century. The folios are all on pasteboards, renumbered by the cataloguer even though it is Halkett’s own pagination that gives the volume its coherence and facilitates the reconstruction of her narrative. There is extensive damage to the first leaf; to illustrate its extent, I reproduce it below. Although some of the other leaves are damaged, the rest of the text is mostly unharmed. Unlike the other volumes, this one appears to contain very few marginal references; some references, however, are obscured by the adhesion of the leaves to the pasteboards, others by damage to the edges of the paper. Given the rarity of these references, I have noted them in footnotes rather than in the layout of the main text. In another departure from her practice in the ‘Occationall Meditations’, Lady Anne Halkett indicates her quotations by enlarging her script. This only occurs once in this section (xx), but is more evident in Halkett’s ‘Select Meditations’. There she consistently distinguishes between the biblical text and her own meditation by writing the former in a larger script.
