ST ANDREWS UNIVERSITY LIBRARY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : SCOTTISH EDUCATION AND PRINT-CULTURE Matthew Simpson A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St. Andrews 1999 Full metadata for this item is available in Research@StAndrews:FullText at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1848 This item is protected by original copyright St Andrews University Library in the Eighteenth Century: Scottish education and print-culture Matthew Simpson Ph.D thesis: University of St Andrews, June, 1999 11 The context of this thesis is the growth in size and significance of the St Andrews University Library, made possible by the University's entitlement, under the Copyright Acts between 1709 and 1836, to free copies of new publications. Chapter I shows how the University used its improving Library to present to clients and visitors an image of the University's social and intellectual ideology. Both medium and message in this case told of a migration into the printed book of the University's functions, intellectual, spiritual, and moral, a migration which was going forward likewise in the other Scottish universities and in Scottish culture at large. Chapters II and III chart that migration respectively in religious discourse and in moral education. This growing importance of the book prompted some Scottish professors to devise agencies other than consumer demand to control what was read in their universities and beyond, and indeed what was printed. Chapter IV reviews those devices, one of which was the subject Rhetoric, now being reformed to bring modern literature into its discipline. Chapter V argues that the new Rhetoric tended in fact to confirm the hegemony of print by turning literary study from a general literary apprenticeship into the specialist reading of canonical printed texts. That tendency was not without opposition. Chapter VI analyses the challenge from traditional oral culture as it was expressed in the marginalia added to the Library books at St Andrews University by its students, and argues that this dissident culture helped to form the voice of the poet Robert Fergusson while he was one of those students. Chapter VII goes on to show how Fergusson used that voice to warn his countrymen of the threat which print represented to their culture, and to show how it might be resisted in the interests of both literature and conviviality. iii I, Matthew Simpson, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 100,000 words in length (not counting Appendix II), has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. date signature of candidate I was admitted as a research student in September, 1995, and as a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in September, 1996; the higher study for which this is a record was carried out in the University of St Andrews between 1995 and 1999. date signature of candidate I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of St Andrews, and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree. date iv In submitting this thesis to the University of St Andrews I understand that I am giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the University Library for the time being in force, subject to any copyrght vested in the work not being affected thereby. I also understand that the title and abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker. date signature of candidate v Preface and acknowledgements From 1709 until 1836, the Library of St Andrews University was entitled by the Copyright Acts to claim a copy of any or every book printed and registered in Britain. Although the University was not otherwise well-funded, it thus acquired during the period a fine collection of literature. The collection as it survives (increased of course by later purchases) is complemented by a remarkable series of contemporary records of the use and management of the Library. In 1994, the English School in the University decided that this unusual archive of eighteenth-century literary culture ought to be more fully exploited in research, and this thesis is at least a start in that direction. I do not mean to suggest that the books and manuscripts concerned, or their readers, have been in any sense neglected hitherto. Anyone who uses the research collection in the Library will know what great knowledge and kindness the staff there bring to the treatment of books and people, and I would especially like to thank Norman Reid, Christine Gascoigne, and Cilla Jackson for the generous help which they have given to me. Often, too, I have appealed to the comprehensive St Andrews learning of Robert Smart: if not often enough, that has not been his fault. Some of the Library'S records of student borrowing in the eighteenth century I have transcribed onto computer disk. I use this selected material, and information derived from it, in the main text, and present it as a whole in an appendix, partly as evidence, partly to indicate the possibilities of these records. I am very grateful to Julian Crowe for liberally providing his computing expertise and ingenuity for this part of the project. Like every researcher in post-Union Scottish culture, I am in debt to Robert Crawford for his illuminating work in that subject; I would like to thank Professor Crawford also for his personal interest and much-valued help in my project. Finally I wish to thank Christopher MacLachlan for the learned advice and sympathetic encouragement which, in his supervision of my research, he has steadily made available to me over the years. vi St Andrews University Library in the Eighteenth Century: Scottish education and print-culture Contents: List of abbreviations Vll Introduction 1 Chapter I The University Library: the building and its ideology 9 Chapter II Church and print 44 Chapter III Moral education: from the tutor to the book 81 Chapter IV Institutions for the supervision of literature 122 Chapter V Classics, Rhetoric, and the printed text 164 Chapter VI Print and marginalia: contrasting cultures at St Andrews 208 Chapter VII Johnson, Fergusson, and print-culture 237 Conclusion 272 Appendix I List of curiosities in the possession of the St Andrews 285 Library, up to 1838 Appendix II Borrowing records at St Andrews University, 1748-1782 289 Bibliography 399 vii Abbreviations used in the footnotes Curators' Reports Reports of the Library Curators from 1738 to 1788 (one volume, which includes lists of purchased books and of books received from Stationers' Hall) Library Bulletin Library Bulletin of the University of St Andrews, 10 vols, St Andrews, 1901-1925 (including printings of past minutes of the Senatus Academicus, and of other historical documents of the University) Evidence, vol.III, Evidence, oral and documentary, taken and received by the Commissioners appointed by his Majesty George IV, July 23rd 1826; and re-appointed by his Majesty William IV, October 12th, 1830; for visiting the Universities of Scotland: Vol.III. University of St Andrews, London, 1837 L.R.B. Library Receipt Book (borrowing records of professors and students) Introduction By the Copyright Act of 1709, the University of St Andrews became one of nine British institutions enabled to claim a free copy of any printed publication registered for copyright with the Company of Stationers in London.1 Understandably, these institutions found it best simply to claim one each of everything printed, but, owing to the reluctance of printers and publishers to give away so many books, the Act and its successors did not in practice furnish those institutions with more than a part of their entitlement. In the case of St Andrews, between one tenth and one fifth of what they were owed at any particular time was actually arriving in the Library. Even so, the Act made possible an increase in the Library's stock far beyond what the University's modest funds could have bought. Together with the books purchased with those funds, the supplies from Stationers' Hall had turned the Library into a substantial collection by the time the copyright entitlement was withdrawn from it in 1836.2 In 1709, there had probably been about 3000 volumes in the Library; by 1836 there were at least 27,000. 3 The University itself seems to have been giving out the figure of 40,000.4 Already in 1805 one guide-book says that the Library is 1 The story of the University's dealings under this and subsequent Copyright Acts has been told by Philip Ardagh in 'St Andrews University Library and the Copyright Acts', Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, n.s., vol.III (1948-55), 1957, pp.179-211. Unless otherwise referenced, my information in this paragraph is derived from that article. 2 By this date there were eleven institutions entitled to claim under the Act: St Andrews University was one of six which were now disempowered. See R. C. Barrington Partridge, The History of the Legal Deposit of Books throughout the British Empire, London, 1938, pp.74-77. 3 Ardagh (,St Andrews University Library', p.185) estimates the number in 1710 to be between 3000 and 3500. An estimate for the year 1695, of 2000, is made by James Maitland Anderson in his chapter on the University Library in Votiva Tabella, St Andrews, 1911, pp.93-116 (p.l03).