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Ina Ferris, "Introduction
to Romantic Libraries"
Ferris's introduction outlines the ways in which the essays
by Heather Jackson, Deidre Lynch and Ina Ferris focus on the private and
personal dimensions of bookishness and library culture in the early Romantic
period.
[go to introduction]
Ina Ferris, "Bibliographical
Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object"
Early nineteenth-century phenomena such as bibliomania and
the figure of the "bookman" helped to spark a widespread awareness of
books as printed objects and an interest in the physical dimensions of
the readerly relationship to them. Taking as her focus the enormous spurt
of bibliophilic writing in the early decades, Ferris looks at how its
foregrounding of the physicality of books helped to unsettle key categories
of identity and knowledge in the period. Resisting ideals of transfer
and reproduction, bibliophilic genres produced a strangely affective book-object
which posited the singularity of literate beings and inscribed them in
particular and contingent histories rather than in the impersonal forces
of circulation and system more typically linked to the printing press.
The essay makes its argument through a reading on the one hand of the
Romantic familiar essay (e.g. William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt) and, on the
other, of the career of Thomas Frognall Dibdin, prolific bibliographer
and premier bibliomaniac, whose reception underlines the way in which
the figure of the "bookman" helped to destabilize the divisions organizing
the intellectual field.
[go to essay]
H. J. Jackson, "What Was
Mr. Bennet Doing in his Library, and What Does It Matter?"
In this article, Jackson uses the familiar example of the
Bennet household in Pride and Prejudice to outline some of the
practices associated with the establishment and maintenance of a library
about 1800. Besides gathering clues from the novel itself and providing
information about the resources likely to have been available in or near
a market town like Meryton, this essay speculates that Mr. Bennet might
have been writing in his books and surveys some of the ways of writing
that would have been available to him.
[go to essay]
Deidre Lynch, "'Wedded to
Books': Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists"
In this paper the "bibliomaniacs"—the blue-blooded,
well-heeled book collectors who scandalized and beguiled early nineteenth-century
Britain with their acquisitiveness and possessiveness—prove to be
key figures for contemporary scholars' histories of the literary canon
and of the notion of the literary heritage. The annals of Romantic-period
bibliomania can, Lynch proposes, help us understand how those histories
might be rewritten, as chapters in the history of intimacy. The bibliomaniac's
enthusiasm for rare books and, more generally, for book-objects rather
than the texts they housed, assisted importantly in the processes that
installed "literature" within the psychic territory of people's intimate
lives. To support this proposition, Lynch looks at how the bibliomaniacs'
materialistic book-love haunts the pages, as it does the lives, of the
Romantic essayists—Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Charles Lamb
specifically—who appear in her paper as the first professional "lovers"
of literature. In an age when ideas of the literary canon had come to
be articulated with new notions of a shared national culture that was
every Briton's birthright, the bibliomaniac offered the Romantic essayist
lessons in how to reprivatize the stuff of the public domain. Even as
the essayists chastise the plutocratic book glutton for the irrefragable
materialism that makes him a mere proprietor of books rather than a reader
of texts, they deliver their own commentary on canonicity's incarnation
and on the possessibility that helps render a canon loveable.
[go to essay]
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