Books and the Woman: An Eighteenth-Century Owner and Her Libraries

Abstract

BOOKS AND THE WOMAN: AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY OWNER AND HER LIBRARIES ISOBEL GRUNDY University of Alberta .Libraries form a handy index to their cultural milieu. This essay will examine the series of libraries built up during her lifetime by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. These reflect, indeed, their cultural moment; they overlap in various ways with several contemporary models of the private collection (those of the scholar, the gentleman, and the gentlewoman), but, reflecting their owner’s anomalous status, they fit perfectly with no one model. The long eighteenth century was an age (unlike our own!) of library ex­ pansion and achievement. Many new buildings dating from this time (King’s College Library, Cambridge, by Christopher Wren, the Codrington and the RadcliflFe Libraries at Oxford, Archbishop Marsh’s Library in Dublin) witness to confidence in and reverence for the project of book collection. Archbishop Tenison’s library, built 1684 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, does not survive. Tenison was a friend and admirer of Lady Mary, but it is unlikely that she, as a young lady, was free to include herself with the “any stu­ dent” who might pursue research there (Oldys 401). Her friendship with Lady Harley (later Lady Oxford) enabled her to visit the fabulous Harleian library (Montagu, Letters, 2:354). The Bodleian’s legal right to a copy of every book printed in England dated from 1662; fifty years later this right was extended. Cambridge University Library began the century with 14,000 books (a good total, though far less than the great European libraries) and expanded rapidly from there (Walsh 155). The population explosion in books meant a reduction in average in­ dividual value and an increase in accessibility.1The Bodleian was already a tourist attraction: farmers in town for market could kill time watching the scholars at work, but they could not, of course, use the books. In competition or collaboration with the university libraries, those of the constituent colleges were run as shared gentlemen-and-scholars’ libraries. With exceptions (undergraduates who were noblemen, or who got their tu­ tors to borrow books for them, or obtained some special favour like leave to borrow the butler’s keys), these libraries were for the use of faculty only. Poor students were provided, as a charity, with small separate collections of commentaries on set texts. Most students depended entirely on private English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 20, l , March 1994 ownership until late nineteenth-century reforms broadened the access to col­ lege libraries.2 The issue of access had thus been raised well before the first of this period’s splendid new libraries (Trinity College, Cambridge) became a marker in literary history, with the narrator of A Room of One’s Own barred from its gates like Eve expelled from Paradise (Woolf 7-8). Outside academe the great “free” or municipal libraries, which began with the Chetham Library in Manchester, 1653, were slightly less gender-exclusive than academic libraries. Women made up six of 140 members of an early form of the Liverpool Library, and four of 137 members of the Bristol Library in 1782 (a date when it held 22 female-authored works). What is now the British Library opened as part of the British Museum in 1759, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote of the Museum as the single thing in London that she wished to see (Kaufman 9; Montagu, Letters, 3:210). But Catharine Macaulay, first woman to read there, and Hannah Adams, first to read at the Boston Athenaeum, each encountered active or visible prejudice. Those libraries that were gendered female, the lending or circulating li­ braries, inspired distrust and anxiety among the book-owning classes, whether genteel, professional, or academic. To make books, especially fiction, cheaply available was seen as corrupting the young, the uneducated, and especially the female, who would feed their fantasy life and diminish their productive labour. The image of the circulating library was of fiction predominating over every other genre; and its practice of selling paper, perfume, all kinds of bits and pieces, reinforced its commercial, female, non-serious identity. By the end of the century almost every town of any...