‘Laboring in my Books’: A Religious Reader in Nineteenth Century New Hampshire

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the book collecting habits and annotation practices of Thomas Connary, an Irish immigrant farmer who lived in New Hampshire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Connary led a pious life that revolved around the use, annotation and sharing of religious books: his extant annotated books provide a revealing glimpse into the book collecting habits of that elusive category of ‘the common reader’, and into how non-elite readers imagined book utilities and the iconic status of religious books. The first part provides an overview of the many ways in which Thomas Connary interacts with his books. Here a profile is established of a somewhat eccentric reader-cum-annotator who gives us insight into the range of opportunities provided by the material book for recording and communicating readerly intensity and religious fervour. In the second part the focus is on the broader, shared cultural setting in which books are seen as precious testimonies of personal faith, and come to function as tools of social interaction in both domestic and public spheres. Underlying Connary's many and varied interactions with books is a belief that physical objects can materialize belief, and that working in them can be a devout exercise instrumental in human salvation.