An Actor’s Library: David Garrick, Book Collecting and Literary Friendships by Nicholas D. Smith (review)

David Garrick had only one functioning kidney, as his 1779 autopsy revealed. He was not short of physical or intellectual energy, but all his life he had to pace himself, because whenever he overdid he got sick. From 1743 on, he made more money acting than he knew what to do with. His earliest traceable bulk purchase of books—which was not necessarily his first—came in 1744: seventeen titles from the Lewis Theobald sale, including his annotated copy of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, can be traced among the Garrick books in the British Library today (George M. Kahrl, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays, p. 17). When Garrick became co-owner and co-manager of Drury Lane Theatre in 1747, he needed to be able to propose roles for himself and productions for his company. In order to enforce discipline graciously but effectively, he also needed ways to disassociate himself from other actors outside the precincts of the theater. Book collecting on a grand scale helped accomplish that. Anyone exploring Garrick’s libraries needs to keep in mind these circumstances that differentiate him from other collectors. The hobby allowed him to accomplish much with little effort, and he had no reason to keep records of the process. Collecting may have started as a convenience or as an indulgence, but over time grew into an obsession: he owned well over four thousand books when he died, the majority uncatalogued.

He developed two libraries: a wide-ranging “general” collection and a smaller division he called “old English plays,” dating from the very early printed texts to roughly 1700. His plan to bequeath them to the British Museum was known to friends at least as early as 1766, but he was aware much earlier of how special those thousand books were. The museum proved to be somewhat careless with the collection, and after Garrick lost his status as an icon in the nineteenth century, it was broken up and parts were sold off, though much of it is still identifiable. Kahrl, who catalogued it, notes that we lack “any account” of “how it was conceived,” or “from whence and when the items came” (p. 4). Apart from noting occasional mentions of books in correspondence and memoirs, the best we can do is associate titles with sale catalogues.

Did either library benefit Garrick’s professional work? His approach to acting was already set before his hobby blossomed. The pattern did not grow out of his reading or for the most part demonstrably change with it. One might argue that his last production of Hamlet suffered from French influence, but he did not impose that form on other plays in the repertoire. If he annotated what we might call working copies of plays, he did not keep them. Nor did he mark other books, so we have little evidence as to which of the thousands he owned he actually read, quite apart from the question of his knowledge of languages. If they inspired costume, prop, or scene designs, nobody mentioned the fact. Garrick was not likely to inflict Gorboduc or even Arden of Faversham on his audience. He was ostentatiously generous in lending books, especially the plays, but we cannot show that he lent to others in the theater: that was not what the books were for. Book collecting as Garrick practiced it did take him into social realms he could never have entered otherwise. As he branched out into subject matter beyond theater, he widened the distance between himself and other actors. The bulk of what he developed was precisely not an actor’s library.

Smith is deeply knowledgeable about the eighteenth century but is handicapped by the limits of evidence about Garrick’s library. He has had no better luck than Kahrl at deducing principles of acquisition or practical utilization for the general library. Whim seems to have jostled with competitive book...