Books, books, books

Very young students from the Grasmere Primary School came to the Trust for a tour.  These dolls helped to introduce them to Dorothy and William during story time in the library.  The Trust has an active education department with lots of opportunities for learners of all ages.

Back to the Quaker Library in London.

I keep trying to capture the amazing sunsets out our window.  Nothing is quite like being here!

This week took us back to London to the Quaker Library to once again look at Thomas Wilkinson’s papers, but this time, I was looking for a letter written to him that he quoted in a letter to Wordsworth regarding the Excursion.  And I found it!  Such successful treasure hunts are wonderful.  This one yielded some interesting questions about subscription libraries of the period that I will be exploring in weeks to come.  

I also went to London to attend a seminar conducted by the Dr. Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies.  These seminars, which happen monthly, cover a range of topics for anyone interested in learning more about non-conformist activities in England.  I had marked several on my calendar, and this one looked interesting: “Private Books for Educational Use—the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library.”  I was especially interested by the time of the talk since I’d spent my day in the Quaker Library thinking about nineteenth century libraries.  While the talk wasn’t quite what I had expected, it was fascinating.  It announced a project to “make available in digital form the Catalogue of the Library of the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester (1885),” as the handout explained.  This project will add to the Dissenting AcademiesOnline: Virtual Library System by photographing (at this point) about 2500 books and entering them a searchable database.  The photographs try to capture any relevant images that indicate original provenance or marginalia. This portion of the site should go live in a month.  Ed Potten, from Cambridge University Library, spoke about questions that arise from examining these images, questions that might only be answered with the collection of more images from more books.  One of the potentially trivial but interesting questions was about the use of non-literary images drawn in the books—from early versions of the smiley face drawn into the letter “O” to brief astronomical sketches of the solar system.  Though rare, they are intriguing.  Have college students always scribbled in their books?

I have to say that I felt in the know when the discussion turned to habits of private collecting and sharing of books.  Not that I am by any means an expert, but my time at the Wordsworth Library has taught me some interesting things about how individuals used their libraries.  Wordsworth, for instance, leant out his books regularly and had a notebook to keep track of who had what book.  From the letters I’ve read in the library, too, it wasn’t just Wordsworth; people were constantly borrowing and loaning books to one another. According to David Allan (Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England), readers were forming book clubs and their own local subscription libraries.  “There may have been two thousand of the former by the 1820s and perhaps 260 of the latter,” he writes, “their participants ranging from luminaries like Wordsworth (at the Kendal Book Club), Coleridge (at the Bristol Library Society) and Austen (who joined a female-dominated book club at Chawton) to humbler figures like the apprentice cutler Hunter (who attended the Sheffield Book Society), the painter Christopher Thompson (who helped found an artisan’s library at Edwinstone in Nottinghamshire) and members of the Spitalfields silk-weaving community who established their own lending collection” (14-15).  

And marginalia, though not in every book in Wordsworth’s library, wasn’t an unusual occurrence.  A few weeks ago, a visiting scholar was looking at the marginalia in the family Bible.  Such scribbling can sometimes be quite revealing.

As always, it’s good to come home to Grasmere.  We arrived in rain, and it’s been raining all day again today, but we don’t mind.  A cozy spot on the couch with a view of the mountains through the mist will do just fine.