"Wedded to Books":
Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists

1. Lists enumerating the symptoms of the book madness are common to Dibdin's Bibliomania, Ferriar's "Bibliomania," and Beresford's Bibliosophia.
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2. I am guided here by Siegel's helpful remarks on recent cultural theory, 283-85 n. 1. See also Favret.
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3. In this context it is worth noting that John Ferriar, the first poet of the bibliomania, was an Edinburgh-trained physician. In this capacity he authored an Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, which proposed that ghostly apparitions should be understood as psychological rather than supernatural phenomena and should be investigated therefore by scholars of the brain. Tellingly, the Essay elucidates the doctrines of psychological associationism by instancing the case of a "bibliomane" who in his dreams supposes himself to be purchasing "early editions on vellum" for "trifling" sums (18).
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4. See Raven for an account of the ample guidance that owners of domestic libraries received in decorating their rooms and arranging and displaying their books: "The library of the peer could be recreated on an appropriate scale and to an appropriate budget in any gentleman's house" (191). As Raven establishes, the dissemination of the pattern books published by cabinet-makers, of booksellers' auction catalogues, and of descriptions of the country houses of the well-to-do ensured that domestic libraries increasingly made their statements about literacy in a single voice.
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5. On Hunt's prison cell, see his Autobiography, 216-20. Those sources also provide tantalizingly partial glimpses of how Mary contributed to the script that the Lambs' Bloomsbury household devised to guide its cohabitation with literature. The brother and sister enacted their book-love as if performing a duet. "[B]oth great readers," but in "different directions," according to Elia, they appear to have arranged matters so that Charles would be the book-collector, and Mary, the book-borrower, a client of the circulating libraries that kept their "common reading-table" supplied with daily doses of "some modern tale or adventure" ("Mackery End," qtd. in Lucas, 259).
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6. Those sources also provide tantalizingly partial glimpses of how Mary contributed to the script that the Lambs' Bloomsbury household devised to guide its cohabitation with literature. The brother and sister enacted their book-love as if performing a duet. "[B]oth great readers," but in "different directions," according to Elia, they appear to have arranged matters so that Charles would be the book-collector, and Mary, the book-borrower, a client of the circulating libraries that kept their "common reading-table" supplied with daily doses of "some modern tale or adventure" ("Mackery End," qtd. in Lucas, 259).
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