Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History

Circulating library catalogs offer one of the most revealing views available of book publishing and reading in eighteenth-century Britain, since those catalogs and the libraries they document were put together by book traders whose livelihood depended upon giving an unprecedentedly wide range of British readers the books they wanted. ¹ Of course, the perspective on eighteenth-century British book culture provided by their catalogs is nowhere near as comprehensive as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (ESTC) or the recently published first volume of The English Novel 1770 - 1829 : A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (TEN), which "seeks to list all novels of the period whether or not surviving in extant copies, their publication and pricing details, and contemporary review information." ² As James Raven's "Historical Introduction" to TEN (15-121) testifies, such comprehensive bibliographies allow for unprecedentedly authoritative insights into a vast array of issues, ranging from broad facts (such as which titles were most often reprinted) to details (such as relations between individual publishers and printers). Yet we need to remember that retrospective bibliographies, however comprehensive, cannot sufficiently represent book culture as a living culture, with complex local variations and behavioral peculiarities. By contrast, precisely because circulating library catalogs and the libraries they bespeak were put together at specific times by specific traders for readers in specific places, they capture the lived particularity of book culture better than probably any other source. ³

This essay seeks to illustrate the value of balancing comprehensive, retrospective bibliographies and statistics with more localized sources like circulating library catalogs by setting TEN alongside an analysis of the works of fiction listed in the catalogs of Thomas Lowndes (London, c. 1766) and Michael Heavisides (Darlington, 1790). The libraries of both Lowndes and Heavisides endured for more than thirty years, so presumably they were vital enough parts of their local cultures to represent their relations to books with relative accuracy. Yet these libraries also represent two distinct aspects of the circulating library institution, differing in the scale, composition, location, date, and relative stability of their enterprises.

Based in London, Lowndes ran one of the earliest, largest, and most successful circulating libraries in Britain, operating continuously from 1751 until the early 1780s, when his son succeeded to the business. ⁴ Published circa 1766, fifteen years after Lowndes's library opened, his catalog captures the fiction trade at the end of the "rise" of the formally realistic, didactic novel centered around Samuel Richardson. It lists 6,290 titles (including 1,132 plays), of which only around 10 percent are fiction. However, both in size and percentage of fiction, Lowndes's catalog is typical of the surviving catalogs of Samuel Fancourt (1748), William Bathoe (1757), and John and Francis Noble (1767), who along with Lowndes constituted the "first generation" of large libraries that began to flourish from the 1740s in London. ⁵ Lowndes was also a major publisher of plays and fiction, being responsible,for instance, for Frances Burney's first novel, Evelina (1778). Like Lowndes(and the Noble brothers), most eighteenth-century circulating librarians who also published books in significant numbers operated in London. ⁶

Heavisides opened his small, 466-title circulating library in 1784 in provincial Darlington, just north of the border between Yorkshire and County Durham. By this time he was also working as a printer, copperplate press engraver, binder, stationer, and bookseller. In 1790 he issued the catalog of his library, but twelve years later he went bankrupt: the Newcastle Chronicle of 23 January 1802 advertised the sale of "all his Printing and Bookbinding materials" but not (significantly) his stock of books. By 1805 he was back in business both as a librarian and printer in Darlington and worked there until he again went bankrupt "about 1811." ⁷ In 1818 he resurfaced in nearby Newcastle as a bookseller and circulating librarian—having evidently given up on printing, binding, and engraving—and worked as such until at least...