Webster’s Timeline History: Webster’s Timeline Histories Reviewed, 2025–2026

Webster’s Timeline History: Bristol, 1000–1893

For those who have never been to Bristol and who know very little about that obscure seaport nestled in a British backwater, Webster’s Timeline History: Bristol, 1000–1893, published in San Diego, California, serves as a self-declaredly authoritative, albeit dry-as-chalk-dust, guide, moving from the Norman Conquest and all that to the High Victorian era and all that. It is actually a crazy quiltwork of chronologically arranged references sourced online and erratically stitched together in 2009 by Professor Philip M. Parker, who had explored the internet with a globe-girdling search engine using the place name “Bristol” as his headword. The resultant compendium, gathered in the middling noughties, resembles search engine as siege engine. Having broken through, as it were, into multiple museological recesses carrying the dank odor of dungeons, the siege engine has returned to spit out portions, gobbets, and tidbits of a munched-over feast of toponymous trivia, deposited in print as if rendered through the chattering teeth of a devotedly dogged, and possibly demented, robot.

With Professor Parker acting at once as an editor sifting dross from dross, as an amanuensis wearing his metaphorical quill down to the stump while taking dictation from browsing web crawlers, and as a psychopomp of sorts, burning late-night oil in order to catalogue Bristolian quotations from a roll call of bygone town worthies, the reader must trust his assaying and amassment of Bristol home truths to tell it like it is. It’s the gospel of Bristol according to Parker, where all is cramped, crimped, clipped—and seen through a cupping glass darkly.

His starchy and stodgy digest piles up like harvested bushels of moldering chaff, containing the occasional silver needle, ornamental brooch, or curious gem. It’s a kind of sinkhole paste of printed matter. The first entry—which dates, unexpectedly, from the sixth century—is for “Wodin’s Dyke,” “a mediaeval defensive linear earthwork” that starts south of Bristol. The very last entry, from 1893, names George Edward Weare as “author of a collectanea relating to … Gray Friars …, together with a concise history of the dissolution of the houses of the Four Orders of Mendicant Friars in Bristol.” There you have it: an omnium gatherum from Alpha to Omega, not of all things Bristol, but of Bristol as an expression of bibliomania for those who still care about such things.

—David Eggleton