- Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820
Book history can, with some authority, provide us with facts about production and distribution. It can excise the underground of piracy and adjudicate instances of the theft and vandalism of books. But witnessing readership is a far greater challenge, and one that has too often been baffled by the obfuscations of theory. Mark Towsey is among recent scholars including, notably, David Allan in Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (2007) and Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (2010) and, more controversially, William St Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), who have attempted an empirical account of reading during the long eighteenth century. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1695-1830 (2009) and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, 1707-1800 (2011) also make readerships a significant part of their mandates. Towsey, whose work appears in the Edinburgh History, undertakes specifically to map the geography of provincial reading in enlightenment Scotland.
David Allan supervised the St Andrews dissertation that became Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, and in its design and disposition, Towsey's book reflects the two Allan volumes mentioned above: Part One (Chapters One to Four) examines eighteenth-century provincial Scottish libraries, and Part Two (Chapters Five to Eight) analyzes a number of representative readers principally through their common place accounts. Some 400 surviving catalogues of private libraries (for the most part falling between 1780 and 1830, with only 69 dated before 1780) provide mostly predictable insights into the sort of individuals who purchased books on a scale sufficient to need cataloguing: the vast majority were moneyed with either [End Page 347] professional or bloodline pedigrees, although 11 tradesmen, 2 farmers, and 5 members of the book trade figure among the rest. In turn, Towsey's data from subscription, circulating, and religious or endowed libraries at sites including Aberdeen, Dunbar, Selkirk, Dumfries, Inverness, and Innerpeffray identifies socially and educationally diverse borrowers, with women significantly represented.
Titles available could be eclectic, but the lending registries indicate that provincial readers, whatever their status, tended to choose the enlightenment's 'bestsellers' by Hume, Smith, Robertson, and company. Histories were popular in every sort of library, with scientific and philosophical works also prominent. Elsewhere, in Gray's Library, for example, Henry Fielding is much lent out, while Thomson's Seasons and Beattie's Minstrel are the most circulated nonfiction among the holdings of the School Wynd Congregation. In most of Scotland's provincial libraries, novels comprised about twenty per cent of the stock. Meanwhile the Paisley Circulating Library may be at the extreme end but is still not atypical in setting aside a mere ten per cent of its shelf space for religion and church history. None of this is startling, but it is good to know that provincial readers could reach beyond their Bibles and a few religious tracts when they visited their local library, and that those shelves in turn reflected the current intellectual rages in Edinburgh and London.
The second half of Towsey's book is less predictable in its discoveries. Here we get to peer over the shoulders of men and women from various backgrounds as they actually read the books they acquired as purchasers or borrowers. We do so in part through Towsey's recounting of their correspondence and marginalia, but principally and more satisfactorily through the study of their commonplace books. The story Towsey tells here is intellectually compelling, even moving, and the most enthral ling of his many protagonists are the clergyman George Ridpath, the Nairnshire lady Elizabeth Rose, and the army paymaster Andrew Douglas. They make print the very pulse of their daily lives, demonstrating unambiguously and in a way that defies theorizing the necessity of literacy to emergent modern culture. Towsey's various readers became intimate participants in their historic moment, the Scottish Enlightenment, through...