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The Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck, 1695–1825

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The Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck, 1695–1825 chapter 4 Affleck Generations: The Libraries of the Boswells of Auchinleck, 1695–1825 James J. Caudle* As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many genera- tions, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.1 edmund burke ... I consider a public sale as the most laudable method of disposing of it. From such sales my books were chiefly collected, and when I can no lon- ger use them they will be again culled by various buyers according to the measure of their wants and means … [I do not intend] to bury my trea- sure in a country mansion under the key of a jealous master! I am not flattered by the [idea which you propose of the] Gibbonian collection.2 edward gibbon ∵ These two quotations from two acquaintances of James Boswell (1740–95) sug- gest an essential tension in eighteenth-century private libraries, between the * This work emerged from over five years of collaboration with Terry Seymour, as well as J erry Morris and his team, on identifying Boswell’s books. Much of the work on this chapter was done while on a Fleeman Fellowship at the University of St Andrews in spring 2016. There, I benefitted from discussions with David Allan and Tom Jones, and the comments by the Eng- lish Research Seminar Series to whom I presented a version of this chapter. 1 The Beauties of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke … In Two Volumes (London: printed by J.W. Myers, and sold by W. West, 1798), ii. 367. 2 Edward Gibbon to Lord Sheffield, 30 May 1792, in Rowland E. Prothero, Private Letters of Ed- ward Gibbon (1753–1794), 2 vols. (London, J. Murray, 1896), ii. 300–301; James Westfall Thomp- son, ‘The Library of Gibbon the Historian’, The Library Quarterly, 7.3 (July 1937), pp. 343–353. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004348677_006 <UN> Affleck Generations 99 ambitions of a museum-like permanence and longevity across the centuries on one hand, and the rights of heirs to dispose of such a collection on the other. One side of this argument presumed that an inheritor of a carefully crafted family library had a communitarian obligation to his kin to perpetu- ate it in a stable state, at the bare minimum, and perhaps even a tacit duty to expand it with well-chosen books for his descendants’ benefit. The other side argued that the heir to a familial library was an unrestricted free-agent who might sell his ancestors’ books without compunction if they did not suit his personal tastes (or if he was himself not bookish, preferred horses or billiards to the parental tomes, or simply needed to raise some money). Imbedded with- in this debate is a broader cultural argument over whether the country house library – excusing the false dichotomy and the anachronistic adjectives – was a ‘feudal’ or a ‘capitalist’ enterprise; whether it was predicated on indissoluble and indefeasible legal and moral bonds, or on negotiable contract fungible in each new generation. Beyond the questions associated with the obligation – or lack of obligation – to maintain the library in good order for future generations of the same family, the various generations of owners of a great private library had to consider the duty they owed to the community, whether in country or in town.3 This duty, for those who acknowledged or admitted its existence, was not prescrip- tive or statutory; one could not point to any law on the statute-books of Scot- land or England which argued for it. (I am not even aware of courtesy and etiquette books of the Georgian period setting rules demanding it as a condi- tion of genteel neighbourliness.) Some country house library owners felt them- selves obliged to let neighbours consult the books in the house, duty-bound to lend to local residents, impelled to allow scholarly editors to access rare books and manuscripts for publication, or compelled to share through dona- tion from their collections with public or guild libraries.4 Yet others argued, to 3 There is a large and growing scholarly literature on private libraries in the period 1650–1850; for recent examples, see Mark Purcell, ‘The Private Library in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Surrey’, Library History, 19.2 (2003), pp. 119–127; Ed Potten, ‘Beyond Bibliophilia: Con- textualising Private Libraries in the Nineteenth Century’, Library & Information History, 31.2 (2015), pp. 73–94; and James Raven, ‘Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century’, Library & Information History, 29.3 (2013), pp. 196–209. 4 For some of these community-based notions of the private library in Scotland, see Mark Towsey, ‘“The Talent hid in a Napkin”: Castle Libraries in Scotland, 1770–1830’, in Katie Halsey and W.R. Owens (eds.), The History of Reading, Volume 2: Evidence from the British Isles, c. 1750–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 15–31; for recent consideration of community use of a prestigious town library, see Graham Jefcoate, ‘Mr Cavendish’s Librarian: Charles Heydinger and the Library of Henry Cavendish’, Library & Information History, 32.1–2 (2016), pp. 58–71. <UN>.
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