Introduction to the Deering Notebook
John Peter Gandy was born in 1787. In 1827 he changed his name to Deering, to meet the terms of a bequest; he is therefore confusingly referred to either as Deering or Gandy-Deering.
John was an architect and landscape designer; among other projects, he worked on the interior of 1 Carlton House Terrace, and on the design for University College London, and designed the Shrublands Park - see the United Kingdom Database of Historic Parks and Gardens (UKPG): http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/landscapes/ukpg/designer/gandylat.htm.
In 1811 he set off on an expedition to record monuments in Greece and Turkey for the Society of Dilettanti; he remained in the Aegean until 1813, and visited Aphrodisias in November, 1812. During his travels in the area he met Lord Elgin, who later employed him as architect for his mansion at Broom Hall, in Fife. He subsequently worked with Sir William Gell in publishing material from Pompeii.
After inheriting the estate of his friend Henry Deering, in 1827, he had less need of paid work; in 1847 he became Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, and remained in Parliament until his death in 1850. For further information see Howard Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600-1840 (Second Edition Yale, 1995) and the Dictionary of National Biography.
Deering's copies of inscriptions were made incidentally to his study of the monuments. He copied 47 texts at Aphrodisias, and 6 more nearby (chiefly at Nysa); what we have is 17 loose pages from a notebook, and we do not know what else it contained. His copies were passed to the distinguished traveller and archaeologist William Leake, who published texts from them 'Inscriptions from Aphrodisias', Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature (1843), 232-45, 288-303; most of these were republished, from that publication, by Waddington, P. Le Bas and W. H. Waddington, Inscriptions grecques et latines (Paris, 1870). Leake only published those texts which had not been included in the first major publication of inscriptions from Aphrodisias, by Augustus Boeckh, in volume III of the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum which had appeared in 1835.
Leake then sent the pages, with a covering letter to Boeckh. The papers then passed to Louis Robert; and in 1984, after his death, Madame Robert very kindly passed them on to Charlotte Roueché; they are deposited with the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.
They are published here as part of the EPAPP project; we are most grateful, in particular, to the Leverhulme Trust, whose generosity has made this possible.