In honour of International Women’s Day, for this #MysteryPlayMonday, our director reflects on the woman who first brought the York Mystery Plays to modern eyes.

Ever since I first started studying the York Mystery Plays, I was intrigued by the fact that the first modern edition of the plays was edited by a Victorian woman. There were plenty of male antiquarians, discovering medieval documents and bringing them to publication and public notice throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but similar work by women was relatively thin on the ground. Modern medieval drama scholarship has many brilliant, amazing women bringing out new information and insights on a regular basis, and I’m proud to call many of them friends. But I wanted to take some time to get to know the woman on whose shoulders we all stand. 

I must confess I have not hurried into this: Lucy Toulmin Smith has been a name on the spine on the bookshelf for twenty years, and it was only recently that I really got curious about who she was. What was her journey to these plays that tie us together? 

I had always somehow assumed that Smith’s interest in the York plays came from a personal connection to the area. Nope! Lucy Toulmin Smith wasn’t, technically, even British- she was born in Boston in 1838. The family was English, however; her father, Joshua, hailed from Birmingham, and it was during a five-year sojourn to America that Lucy Toulmin Smith was born. Professionally, Joshua was a lawyer, but he’s usually considered a political theorist, and the germane thing, as far as his daughter is concerned, is that he was a prolific writer whose study interests ranged beyond legal matters, to geology and history. (As the daughter of a geologist whose personal interests are history and politics, this made me smile- Lucy and I share something beyond an interest in mystery plays!) The Toulmin Smiths returned to England in 1842 and settled in London.

Other than that she was educated at home, there isn’t much information available about Toulmin Smith’s childhood- we may presume it was standard for any middle class Victorian girl- until the death of her younger brother William in 1851. The family had been educating him to be a helper in Joshua’s research and writing, but that role was then given to Lucy. The need for someone to do that work must have been great, since there were other boys in the family; but they were considerably younger, and waiting for them to grow into it was apparently impractical. I’d love to know what Lucy thought- was this a welcome development, a chance to exercise what would prove to be a brilliant  mind? Was it a disappointment to find that her parents effectively expected her to remain single and at home? We can’t know her thoughts on the situation when, at age thirteen, her path was set. We only know that she rose to the occasion, and beyond.

Joshua Tolmin Smith died in 1869, while he was in the middle of a significant research/writing project about the craft organisations of medieval England. English Gilds was completed by Lucy, and her work on the medieval documents for her father’s study was the seed for her most important project (so far as we’re concerned, at least!). It clearly set off an interest in bringing medieval and early modern documents into modern editions for scholarship, because two years later she published The Maire of Bristoweis Kalendar (The Mayor of Bristol’s Calendar), about that city in the fifteenth century, followed seven years later by an edition of Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, a mostly seventeenth-century compilation. It’s unclear if her projects were self-chosen or suggested by some of the antiquarian societies who published them, but it seems reasonable to assume that theatre history must also have interested Smith, because in 1883 she added to her early modern theatre catalogue with an edition of the 1561 play Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex.

But it was the project that followed which was her most significant, and the one for which Lucy Toulmin Smith is probably the best known: the York Mystery Plays. How long she had been working on it, since the English Gilds project first suggested it, isn’t known- it may have been percolating in her mind for many years, or it may have simply taken that long to secure permission to access the manuscript. But in 1882, the Newcastle Weekly Courant carried the news item that “Lord Ashburnham… has at last consented to the publication of his unique fifteenth century MS. of the York Mysteries, which has never been printed, though its existence has long been known. With much liberality, he has placed it in the hands of Miss Toulmin Smith, who is preparing to edit the whole….”, which hints at least at a start date for the actual work. There seems to have been a fair amount of excitement about the upcoming edition; news items from papers as far away as New Zealand note its incipient publication towards the end of 1884! (No information is readily available about what induced Lord Ashburnham to permit publication of a manuscript that that had remained in private hands, out of sight but apparently not out of mind, for a remarkably long time.)

Although she would go on to publish several more (largely medieval) editions, it was the Mystery Plays that would cement Lucy Toulmin Smith’s reputation in scholarship. One anecdote I found most delightful was that during the 1880s she spent so much time researching at the British Museum that she sometimes used it as a return address when writing letters. That dedication proved worthwhile: her back catalogue of well-received, high-quality editorial work earned Toulmin Smith a second, significant distinction. In 1894, she became the first woman in England to become head of a public library when she took the position at Manchester College in Oxford. It was a job she would keep almost until her death: she died in 1911, only a month after her retirement. 

Finding that one of the photographs that survives (and is kicking around the internet) of Toulmin Smith was taken at the 1899 International Congress of Women, a suffrage group, felt like the perfect ending to my search about Lucy’s life, for it was hard to imagine that a woman of her gifts would not have been part of the movement to give her peers a voice in political life. Her life is a testament to the intelligence and independence women could display even in the most repressive of centuries. And in pursuing her own academic interest through her work, Lucy Toulmin Smith gave to England, and the world, access to one of its great cultural treasures. Her work made mine possible. I hope she got half as much joy from revealing the Mystery Plays to the rest of the world, that those of us who have had the chance to study and stage them so much later have been granted.