The Early Roxburghe Club, 1812–1835: Book Club Pioneers and the Advancement of English Literature. By Shayne Husbands

Abstract

The Roxburghe Club celebrated its bicentenary in 2012, and to mark the occasion published a history by Nicolas Barker. This must be regarded as the Club's official account, and it covers two hundred years. Shayne Husbands's study deals with a much shorter period, and as the work of an outsider has a different viewpoint. In many ways the two books complement each other, not least because Husbands is able to devote more space to some of her themes than was possible for a book covering a much longer period: Barker was able to give roughly eighty pages to a period where she can take about two hundred. Her terminus is the year in which Viscount Clive became the club's second President, following the death of Earl Spencer. What did the Club look like to an outsider? Founded by a group of enthusiasts inspired by the extraordinary sale of the Duke of Roxburghe's books in 1812, it was pioneering not so much in its dinners, which became talked of well beyond the rooms in which they took place, as in the practice of its members to have reprinted books whose rarity had become such that they were not easily read, let alone appreciated, even by the small numbers of early-nineteenth-century scholars who interested themselves in early English literature. For some observers, the Club's social activities seemed more interesting than its books: it was easy to mock the elaborate dinners, and the costs of the wines. Bibliomania, often involving high prices for books that (it was assumed) would be little read, was not an easy phenomenon for many people to accept. The attacks were as much on what seemed to be privilege as on conspicuous consumption.