Леди Шарлотта Гест: Аристократка, меценат и возрождение валлийской литературы.

English aristocrat

Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Guest (née Bertie; 19 May 1812 – 15 January 1895), later Lady Charlotte Schreiber, was an English aristocrat who is best known as the first publisher in modern print format of the Mabinogion, the earliest prose literature of Britain. Guest established the Mabinogion as a source literary text of Europe, claiming this recognition among literati in the context of contemporary passions for the chivalric romance of King Arthur and the Gothic movement. The name Guest used for the book was derived from a mediaeval copyist's error, already established in the 18th century by William Owen Pughe and the London Welsh societies. As an accomplished linguist and the wife of a foremost Welsh ironmaster John Josiah Guest, she became a leading figure in the study of literature and the wider Welsh Renaissance of the 19th century. With her second husband, Charles Schreiber, she became a well known Victorian collector of porcelain; their collection is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum. She also created major collections of fans, games, and playing cards, which she gave to the British Museum. She was noted as an international industrialist, pioneering liberal educator, philanthropist and elite society hostess.

Lady Charlotte was born on 19 May 1812 at Uffington House in Uffington, Lincolnshire, the daughter of Albemarle Bertie, 9th Earl of Lindsey (1744–1818), and his second wife Charlotte Susanna Elizabeth Layard. She was christened Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie. When she was six years old she suffered the loss of her father and during this year she was also caught in a house fire, from which she escaped. Her mother later remarried the Reverend Peter William Pegus (her first cousin), whom Charlotte reportedly disliked. She had two younger brothers and half sisters. With time her mother slowly began to change from being an active woman to someone who retreated with illness. It is during this time that Charlotte began to take over for her mother in the running of the house. It appears that she particularly enjoyed the refuge of the garden and with time she developed a dislike for being kept inside. Furthermore, at the age of nineteen she had continually to apologise for her family's actions. Ever since she was young she had a keen interest in politics and keenly expressed her views on topics that she had formed an opinion on. Charlotte showed a great aptitude for languages and literature. She taught herself Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian as well as studying Latin, Greek, French and Italian with her brothers' tutor. Her dedication to trying to improve education can also be seen in the library that was constructed in the mid 1840s. Originally there was a subscription fee of 1s 6d, however this was later changed in 1853 and it became a public library. Charlotte Guest took assisted management of Dowlais Ironworks after the death of her husband in 1852. She along with G. T. Clark and Edward Divett would become executors and trustees of the Ironworks. As a result of this Guest would be sole trustee while a widow but she remarried in 1855 to Charles Schreiber and de facto control fell to Clark although there are reports that she gave up running the iron works, and instead travelled and assembled an impressive ceramics collection.

Guest arrived in Wales already expert in seven languages. She learnt Welsh, and associated with leading literary scholars of the Abergavenny Welsh Society Cymdeithas Cymreigyddion y Fenni, notably including Thomas Price, and John Jones (Tegid) who supported and encouraged her in her work. Villemarqué had an initially cordial relationship with her about Breton sources, but then plagiarised her work. She translated several mediaeval songs and poems, then in 1837 she began on the Mabinogion. John Jones (Tegid) borrowed a copy of the Llyfr Coch Hergest manuscript for her from Judge Bosanquet, who had originally commissioned him to transcribe a copy when Tegid was a young scholar at Oxford. The first tale Charlotte translated from Tegid's transcription was "The Lady of the Fountain" or "Owain," which was well received when published in 1838. Some characters from the tales had been profiled in William Owen Pughe's Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales. Pughe published a translation of the first episode of Pwyll, from the First Branch, in 1795, and again in 1821. He made a complete translation of all the tales, but the work was unpublished at his death in 1835. Guest did not rely on Pughe's translations, though she did use a Welsh dictionary Pughe had completed in 1803. The Charlotte Guest Mabinogion became the first translation of the material to be published in modern print format. It was published in seven volumes between 1838 and 1845, with the first volumes dedicated to Guest's favourite Arthurian material. In 1849 the work was republished in three volumes: Volume I contained the Welsh Romances Owain, Peredur, and Geraint and Enid; Volume II contained Culhwch ac Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabwy. Volume III contained the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and Taliesin. Geraint and Enid in Volume I was the basis for Alfred, Lord Tennyson's two poems about Geraint in the Idylls of the King. The seven volume series 1838–45, and the three volume set 1849, were all bilingual, presenting Tegid's transcribed Welsh text, and Guest's English translation. They included copious scholarly footnotes, mainly in English, totalling 145 pages in all. They were lavishly produced, with full illustrations, and gold tooled, leather covers. All volumes were published simultaneously in Llandovery, Wales by the Tonn Press, and by Longmans of London. The next edition in 1877 was the English translation only, and this became the standard edition which was to become so very well known.

The name Mabinogion for these stories is often incorrectly thought to begin with Guest but it was already in use in the late 18th century cf. Pughe 1795 and his circle in the London Welsh Societies. The name was derived from a mediaeval copyist mistake where a single instance of the word mabynnogyon looks like a plural for the term 'mabinogi;' but 'mabinogi' is already a Welsh plural. The meaning Mabinogi is obscure, but it clearly roots in the word 'mab' for son, child, young person: this is to be seen in the naming convention 'son of' in genealogies. Beyond that scholars have no consensus. As a title the 'Mabinogi' properly applies to only the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. These are not just four stories, as each contains at least three tales, but they are formally referred to as four tales out of the eleven which comprise the standardised Mabinogion collection, post Guest. Guest's own collection included twelve stories, adding in the Hanes Taliesin which is subsequently omitted by other scholars, as it is not found in the Llyfr Coch Hergest, or the Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, like the rest. In 2007 the leading modern scholar of the field, John Bollard, challenged the validity of the Mabinogion collection, saying that apart from the Four Branches of the Mabinogi which are coherent, the stories have little in common with each other except that they are prose fictions surviving in the same mediaeval manuscripts.

During her life she had many suitors. At one point Herbert Marsh was considered as a possible suitor. She made friends with the learned men of the time and almost married the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), who was attracted to her intelligence. Her first love is believed to have been Augustus O’Brien whom she had met at the age of fourteen, something which was later described as the best day of her life. However, this relationship was doomed as her mother was entirely against her daughter being bound to the son of a local squire, even going as far as to claim that she would sooner see her daughter in a grave than married to Augustus.

Schreiber, Charlotte, Lady. Playing Cards of Various Ages and Countries Volume III Swiss, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese (London, England; John Murray, 1895)
Schreiber, Charlotte. Lady Charlotte Schreiber's Journals: Confidences of a Collector of Ceramics and Antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria and Germany from the year 1869–1885. (London and New York: John Lane, 1911), edited by Montague John Guest. Guest, R. and John, A. (1989), Lady Charlotte: A Biography of the 19th Century, United Kingdom: Weidenfeld and Nicolson