The Bow in the Cloud is an anti-slavery anthology that was published in 1834 by the London firm of Walford & Jackson, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. The anthology consists of 85 poems and prose pieces by a mixture of well-known and non-professional writers involved in anti-slavery societies throughout Great Britain. It was edited by Mary Anne Rawson, née Read (1801–1887), who sought to create what she called in her Preface to the anthology ‘a structure of moral and literary architecture’.
This digital edition aims to reconstruct the making of the anthology through its surviving manuscript collection (housed at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, UK). It is also developing network analysis techniques to study the social networks that made the anthology possible.