Katie Halsey is a lecturer in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Stirling. She mostly works on Jane Austen and the history of reading, and has been a SHARP member since 2005.
Of late, I have found myself wandering somewhat off the beaten track, both metaphorically and literally. Taking a turning off the well-trodden paths of mainstream Jane Austen studies, I became a historian of reading. And from there, I followed an enticing little scholarly pathway that led me to my current research project and a very real byroad – the B8062 between the small rural Perthshire towns of Auchterarder and Crieff, to be precise. The B8062 leads to the tiny library of Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest public lending library, established in 1680 by David Drummond, 3rd Lord Madertie. Books from the library were made available to the local community from at least 1747 (although this may have been as early as 1680) to 1968. Starting from Lord Madertie’s private collection of 400 books, the collection grew through the generations to encompass works of divinity and theology, law, science and natural history, geography and travel, domestic economy and conduct books, periodicals and journals, and, in later years, fiction. Borrowers came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, from local laird to shepherd and schoolchild. Initially housed in the loft of the chapel, a purpose-built library was opened in 1762, and the collection of books is still housed there today. In conjunction with the school, also set up by Lord Madertie, the library functioned as part of an important Scottish Enlightenment project described in Lord Madertie’s will as being “for the improvement and education of the population particularly the young students.” The library was also, and continues to be, a site for local, national and international visitors, with Visitors’ Books dating from 1859 to the present day, signed by some notable celebrities (Bing Crosby, George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie are some of the names to be found in the Visitors’ Books).
The library’s collection is, in itself, worthy of note, including rare and early works on Astrology, demonology, chiromancy, spiritualism, war, politics, law, agriculture, horticulture, natural history, history and literature. There are bibles dating from 1530, including the pocket bible of the Marquis of Montrose (a Scottish revolutionary hero of the seventeenth century), as well as some intriguing miniature bibles, each smaller than a matchbox.
In addition, and this is where the historian of reading begins to get excited, the library holds manuscript borrowers’ ledgers, dating from 1747 to 1968 (when the library ceased to function as a lending library) which record the details of all loans made within this period. Unusually, the ledgers also in some decades record the address and occupation of the borrower, along with the conditions attached to the loan (fines for the non-return of books in the 1747-1800 ledger appear to vary from two shillings to two pounds – a very significant difference. Preliminary analysis suggests that conditions of borrowing may be related to social class, but further investigation is necessary to confirm or refute this hypothesis). These rich records thus potentially allow for analysis of the reading (or at least borrowing) habits of a cross-section of the local population, including labouring-class readers and borrowers who are so often missing from the historical record.
With a number of colleagues – in English Studies, Library and Information History, Publishing Studies, Social and Environmental History and Applied Social Sciences – and with the help and support of Innerpeffray Library’s staff and board of trustees, I have been working on preparing funding applications to support this research, a task that no doubt falls to all of us in the cash-strapped Higher Education sector with increasing frequency. Our aim is, in the first instance, to photograph and transcribe all the borrowers’ ledgers and then to organise the information contained in them into a functional database with a user-friendly web-based front end which will make the data in the ledgers available to scholars. We will then use digital maps to show the movement of the books among the borrowers, and social analysis software to chart clusters of intense activity and patterns of usage.
But the ledgers themselves are only the beginning. Working outwards from the data contained within them, we can begin to pose some extremely interesting research questions, which we hope to answer through research in other areas – by matching up Census and estate records with the ledgers, by searching out anecdotal material such as diaries, letters and autobiographies, and by analysing a variety of other material. The Environmental historians on our research team hope to be able to link the borrowing records of works on agriculture, forestry, horticulture and so on with evidence of agricultural improvement as shown in estate records and historical estate maps of the area. The library also has good records of the provenance of certain books, and in these cases we hope to be able to map the entire communications circuit, from the production of books to their reading.
At the SHARP 2011 conference in Washington DC, I had the good fortune to meet Simon Burrows and Mark Curran, the creators of the excellent The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1794 project and its attendant database which maps the trade of the Societé Typographique de Neuchatel. Theirs is a project with significant structural similarities to ours, and conversations with Simon and Mark have helped to clarify some of the technical challenges we will face. I am also grateful for help from former colleagues on the Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945. With a small grant from the Carnegie Trust, the photography of the first two ledgers has now taken place. The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has awarded us a grant which will pay for a Research Assistant to transcribe the first volume of the borrowers’ ledgers, and enter the material in that volume into our prototype database. Following analysis of the data, we will identify any changes that we need to make to our software and procedures before beginning work on the remaining ledgers.
As we embark upon this project, we would welcome comments and suggestions from the SHARP community, in particular from anyone who has experience of working with similar material.
