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
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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 Jerry 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.
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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.