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Romantic Bibliomania: Authorship, Identity, and the Book Alys Romantic Bibliomania: Authorship, Identity, and the Book Alys Elizabeth Mostyn Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English June 2014 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2014 The University of Leeds and Alys Elizabeth Mostyn The right of Alys Elizabeth Mostyn to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. i Acknowledgements Thanks must first go to the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK for providing the funding for this doctoral thesis, without which it would not have been possible. I am also grateful to the British Association of Romantic Studies for the award of a Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Bursary, which allowed me to undertake archival research crucial to the completion of my second chapter. My supervisor, John Whale, has my gratitude for his continued support, both intellectual and collegial. This thesis is the direct result of his tutelage, from undergraduate level onwards. My obsession with the labyrinthine prose of Thomas De Quincey would not exist without him; whether that is a good thing or not, I do not know! Other colleagues at the University of Leeds have made undertaking a PhD here an enjoyable and enlightening experience. The company and advice of Jeremy Davis, David Fairer, Robert Jones, and Richard De Ritter has meant that Eighteenth Century and Romantic Period seminars within the School of English have always been worth attending. The wider postgraduate community at Leeds has provided an equally important support network. In particular, I am indebted to the members of ‘the quartet’: Cassie Ulph, David Ibitson, and Simon Sandison. I would like to thank them for their friendship and commend them on their intimate knowledge of David Bowie’s back catalogue. Huge thanks also go to my family: to my parents, for their unwavering support and occasional financial backing; to my sister Jane, for reminding me that there is life outside of academia; and my sister Gwen, for encouraging me to keep going, especially when I felt least able. Finally, I would like to thank David Higgins for his generosity, kindness and support over the past five years. ii Abstract This thesis explores Romantic authors’ representations of books and bookishness. It argues that bibliocentric writing from the early nineteenth century addressed anxieties associated with the profession of authorship in a rapidly changing landscape of publication, print culture, and technology. However, the contested and heterogeneous nature of Romantic cultural production meant that the book was inevitably an unstable object through which to construct authorial identity. Examining the work of Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Walter Scott and James Hogg, I chart the representation of bibliophilia across a range of genres, literary coteries, and social backgrounds. These writers, though in some respects disparate, can all be termed ‘bookish authors’: scholarly (or antiquarian), male, and, above all, concerned with the cultural significance of the book-as-object. Their writing is preoccupied with the ways in which books are owned by readers, writers, and publishers, and how their own declarations of textual ownership – signatures, inscriptions, designations, attributions – function both publically and privately. Their work reveals the extent to which books were key determinants in the expression and realisation of the Romantic period self. iii Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract ii Contents iii List of Illustrations iv Abbreviations v Introduction 1 ‘An intermediate station between authors and readers’: Bibliophilia and Authorship in the Romantic Period Chapter 1 28 Writing from the Book room: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania and Leigh Hunt’s Book Fancy Chapter 2 91 ‘The author’s and the giver’s minds at once’: Exchanging Books with Samuel Taylor Coleridge Chapter 3 153 Authorial Possession: Devils, Contracts, and Commodification in the Work of Walter Scott and James Hogg Chapter 4 213 Thomas De Quincey, Autobiography, and ‘self-combating volumes’ Afterword 264 Bibliography 272 iv List of Illustrations 1 Anon, ‘The Library, Eshton Hall’, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 1836 49 2 Anon, ‘The Drawing Room, Eshton Hall’, ibid. 49 v Abbreviations ALH The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1903) CWSTC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, in 16 parts (London: Routledge, 1969-2002) CWWH The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed.. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932) EEWN Walter Scott, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, gen. ed. David Hewitt, 30 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) LL The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed.. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1935) M Marginalia, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, part 12 NB The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed.. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols (London: Routlege,1973) SWLH The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, gen. ed.. Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle Sinatra, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) WCML The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed.. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen, 1903-05) WDQ The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003) 1 Introduction ‘An intermediate station between authors and readers’: Bibliophilia and Authorship in the Romantic Period On the 13th of July 1812, luminaries of the bibliophilic world gathered in St James’ Square. The final portion of the 30,000-strong library of John Ker, Third Duke of Roxburghe, was to be sold. The sale of the Roxburghe library had begun in May of that year. So extensive was the collection that there had already been forty-two days of consecutive auctions. Large private libraries had been sold before, but according to a commentator in The Gentleman’s Magazine in August ‘no sale of Books ever engrossed a larger share of public attention than the extensive and valuable Library of the late John Duke of Roxburghe’.1 In part, this was the result of the record prices paid for lots. The famed Valdarfer Boccaccio, which went to the Marquis of Blandford for £2260, was, until 1884, the most expensive single book ever sold. The bibliomaniac Thomas Frognall Dibdin was also responsible for establishing the auction’s reputation. Dibdin not only commemorated the sale in his Bibliographical Decameron (1817), but was the main force behind the formation of the bibliographic society which bears its name to this day. The sale was more than a treasure-trove for the period’s wealthiest book collectors or an opportunity to found an exclusive bibliophilic dining club, however. It entered the public consciousness as a cultural nexus for book enthusiasts of every stamp. The range of authors that the sale attracted was impressive. Aside from Dibdin, attendees included Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey. Busy at Abbotsford at the time, Sir Walter Scott (an 1 Anon, ‘The Roxburghe Sale’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle (1812), pp. 113-116 (p. 113). 2 acquaintance of Roxburghe and of Dibdin) asked a friend to ‘send him a memorandum respecting any remarkable articles’, while William Beckford wrote two satiric poems about the event entitled Dialogues in the Shade: Rare Doings at Roxburghe Hall (1819).2 Within the popular press, mention of the sale or the club became literary shorthand for a particular type of aristocratic, materialistic book appreciation. The Roxburghe sale was not merely the crowning event of the bibliomania boom, therefore, but an exemplar of the mass bibliophilia that captivated Romantic-period Britain. Bookishness is now considered a fundamental characteristic of Romanticism. Recent decades have seen a marked increase in the number of studies dealing with the period’s reading and publishing history. Prominent examples include Ina Ferris and Paul Keen’s edited collection Bookish Histories, H. J. Jackson’s Romantic Readers, Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books, and William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.3 This focus on the book in Romantic studies is a result of the growth of book history as a scholarly discipline, driven by the work of Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier during the 1980s and 1990s. It also reflects a contemporary interest in conceptions of book-as-object, prompted by the changing nature of reading, writing, and publishing in our digital age. Romantic readers and writers were concerned with issues similar to those that occupy us today: evolving technologies of print; mass production; the anonymity of reading audiences; and the 2 De Quincey mentions purchasing books from the Roxburghe sale in a manuscript note: ‘[Ransoming the Books]’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, gen. ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003), X, 377. Hunt is recorded as having attended by William Carew Hazlitt in The Book Collector (London: John Grant, 1904), p. 39. Scott’s letter to Daniel Terry respecting the sale can be found in John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, nd 2 edn, 7 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1839), IV, 5. 3 Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (eds), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity 1700-1900 (New York: Palgrave, 2009); H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Andew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
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