Richard Sher's Bookish Scottish Enlightenment

This is a well designed and nicely produced volume that will be useful to all those who deal with the history of the book and are concerned with paratexts, epitexts, and author and publisher functions. Sher's discussions of those are supported by sixty-one good illustrations. Book history is well served by this study, which has methodological as well as substantive claims to make. The volume's sections on Ireland (ca. 1764 – 1800) and Philadelphia (ca. 1770 – 1800) will interest many who have no particular concerns with either Scotland or book history, because the book offers insights into how ideas were spread and how influential Scots and Irishmen were in spreading them. Sher has followed the 619 pages of text with an appendix of nearly 100 pages containing the Scottish Enlightenment authors and publishers in his databases and book lists that try to measure the popularity of particular fields of publications. He notes the Scottish Enlightenment books printed in London, Dublin, and Philadelphia, and includes in his charts other materials about publishers and editions. The bibliography fills pages 709 to 755, with the index running to page 815. This long-awaited and massive study will be consulted somewhat selectively by many, but it is nonetheless an important book.

The author defines and defends a position on the Scottish Enlightenment that he has set out in earlier publications, which he lists in the bibliography. He is generally committed to the view that the Enlightenment in Scotland (and elsewhere) was an urban affair created mostly by professional men meeting in such venues as clubs, societies, and academies. They tended to see all knowledge as forming a single system and producing, or associated with, politeness, intellectual creativity, and improvements of various kinds. He believes this was bound up with material culture. Every place was different in its mix of people, interests, and concerns, but everywhere the Enlightenment was cosmopolitan, tolerant, secular, sentimental, yet given to rational thought. Although he tells us that publishing was but one factor among others (23) contributing to the Scottish Enlightenment, he often writes as if it were the only one that counted, because he sees it as sustaining intellectual productivity and making the Scots important in the world of letters. Indeed, he thinks the Scottish Enlightenment "inconceivable without the publishing revolution" (609), and that book publishing, beginning in Scotland ca. 1750, shaped the Enlightenment, which ended only when publishers and publication arrangements ceased to support it. He even uses publishing history to demarcate the different stages of the Scottish Enlightenment: thus, the early years, or the "formative period in the book history of the Scottish enlightenment" (98), seem to be 1725 to 1745; its maturity dates from ca. 1750; and its "golden age" or "heyday" from 1760 to 1790 (37). After that, it declines, as do the Edinburgh- and London-based firms that published its major texts, but its diffusion in Ireland and America went on through reprinted works, which sometimes added new materials of a nationalist sort. This chronology makes little allowance for social changes that had nothing to do with publishing, such as the domination of the Kirk by more moderate men after ca. 1720, or the reaction of upper-class Scots to the republicanism of French Revolutionaries.

Sher defines his enlightened Scots partly by using lists provided by men such as Tobias Smollett, William Creech, and Robert Alves, and partly by picking his own (34–35). He has given us a list of 115 men who he believes are not only a good sample of those who made the Scottish Enlightenment, but who were also its most creative thinkers. His database of authors is thus very important to the account he wishes to give. But how adequate is it?

Everyone who looks critically at this list of names will find someone who has been left off. That is the nature of lists and of our own...