Book Ownership in Stuart England. The Lyell Lectures, 2018 by David Pearson (review)

This book comes hard on the heels of the revised edition of David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History. It is composed of a series of expository chapters, followed by an annotated list of 1,374 individuals known to have owned at least one book. For anyone wishing to learn more about a private book owner in the period, it will surely be the first port of call, if they have not already consulted Pearson’s database Book Owners Online, which contains a vast amount of further information.

So disparate a body of people presents considerable challenges of organization. In his census, Pearson has divided themes according to the occupations of different groups: academics, businessmen and tradesmen, clergy (Anglican and nonconformist), lawyers, gentry, etc. Among these are one gardener (George London, chief gardener to Queen Anne) and four astrologers. There are only two yeomen/farmers, the well-known Browne family of Townend and the less recognized John Bromhall of Cheshire (d. 1630), whose books were valued, with no details of authors or titles, in a post-mortem inventory. Perhaps for the last group especially, we can confidently expect that others will be added to this assembly.

At the core of his enquiry lie not only what books people owned, but also why they owned them. For some, including academics, clergy or other professional people, the answers may be generally obvious. Pearson tries to take us beyond this, in chapters addressing the size and nature of libraries among different groups of people. Questions abound even for established topics, such as women readers, the storage of books, books for show, and the development of different cultures of collecting. Further than this, a generously illustrated chapter on books for the ‘common man’ explores areas less considered so far in the existing literature. As he points out, relevant examples for this very diverse category could be extended indefinitely, though here as on most occasions the fragmentary nature of surviving evidence means that conclusions will always be hedged with degrees of uncertainty.

Pearson rightly eschews the term ‘collector’, where simply a person who owned books is meant. We have moved a long way from the high ground of Seymour de Ricci’s English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts of 1930. Pearson’s preference of ‘user’ for reader is nonetheless open to challenge. As he realizes, reading need not mean what it has come to mean in innumerable studies of the history of the subject. Simply to glance at a title page is to read. It is not necessarily an extended operation. But ‘use’ carries its own inadequacies. As contemporaries observed, very many books finished up being torn apart and used in lavatories, or used as paper for pastry cooks.

The term ‘Stuart England’ is easy for a title, but less easy for a subject. The closing date, defined by death, means the omission of Sir Isaac Newton (d. 1727), whereas the much lesser mathematician Humphrey Ditton (d. 1714), born thirty-odd years after Newton, gets in. There is at least one Welshman, Robert Vaughan of Merioneth (d. 1667). The much more famous Isaac Vossius, a Dutchman and canon of Windsor, who died there in 1689, does not appear, despite documentation by Bernard in 1697 and his surviving collections now at Leiden. For reasons of space, Pearson has to be selective in his bibliographical references. It is also important to remember that this is a study of book ownership, not of reading. Accordingly, the studies of even so well documented people as Ralph Josselin (d. 1683) or Sir John Newdigate (d. 1610) and an increasing number of others do not appear, though evidence for their possessions is strong. Such evidence is generally uneven, and for ownership it may be imperfectly defined. Lists, apparently more reliable, may be incomplete for all kinds of reasons; owners do not always add their names to their books; and in...