Classes of readers: Owners of books in 18th-century The Hague

Abstract

Within the history of books, the second half of the 18th century is viewed as a period in which important developments took place: the production of titles grew substantially and there was increasing differentiation of titles. Common opinion has been that these alterations in the supply of titles cannot but indicate an increasing demand for reading matter. Several explanatory theories have been formulated based on this assumption, for instance Engelsing's Leserevolution and Plumb's connection with an English ‘consumer revolution’. These theories focus on a new, mainly middle class audience. Using data gathered from household inventories, this paper shows that book ownership in the city of The Hague, the political capital of Holland, increased in the first half of the 18th century. After this period, however, growth stagnated, and the number of book owners no longer increased. Thus, we may surmise that the assumed increase in demand for books in the second half of the 18th century was a rather hasty conclusion, and that the growth and differentiation in the supply of books was a result of stagnation in demand. Moreover, the increase in book possession in the first half of the 18th century was not due to a middle class which came to possess ever more books, but due to the lower classes who became owners of (ritual) books for the first time, and especially to the growing collections of the elite. Book possession did become more varied, but this is true only of the period up to about 1750. Additionally, I found no evidence for another general assumption, the secularisation of book possession. The relative proportion of Bibles, hymn and church books indeed decreased, but the possession of collections of sermons and other religious ‘miscellany’ grew. Cluster analysis shows that the possession of theological books seems more strongly related to religious persuasion than to the socio-economic background of the possessors. Application of this method also suggests that the majority of books in 18th-century bookcases in The Hague often served other purposes than reading per se. The texts which literary historians usually associate with the middle classes, like travel stories, novels and spectatorial magazines, only appeared in the libraries of the elite.