Bibliomania: Book collecting, cultural politics, and the rise of literary heritage in Romantic Britain

Representations

Volumn 71, Issue , 2001, Pages 24-47

  Connell, Philip ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33646911187     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2000.71.1.01p00764     Document Type: Review

References (103)

1. Gustave Flaubert, Bibliomanie (1837), trans. T.W. Koch (London, 1954), 11-14
2. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), 68
3. James Raven, "From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries," in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, 1996), 176
4. See also Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, 1978), chap. 6
5. The marquis of Blandford's bid was the successful one, but he was forced to sell the book in 1818, when Spencer acquired it at auction for only 875 guineas, a further testament to the volatility of the antiquarian market at this time; Edward Edwards, Libraries and the Founders of Libraries (London, 1864), 406-7
6. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts, 2d ed., enlarged (London, 1811), 540
7. Antiquarian book prices declined in the mid-1820s, as the publishing trade as a whole suffered from the effects of banking crisis and economic depression; see [Thomas Frognall Dibdin], Bibliophobia. Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade ... (London, 1832)
8. and for a more judicious analysis, John Sutherland, "The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1826," Library, 6th ser., 9 (1987): 148-61
9. Robert Pearse Gillies, Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (London, 1851), 2:2
10. quoted in Jane Campbell, The Retrospective Review (1820-1828) and the Revival of Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Waterloo, Ont., 1972), 5
11. Compare Walter Scott, The Antiquary (1816), ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh, 1995), 23-24
12. Barbara M. Benedict, "The 'Curious Attitude' in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Observing and Owning," Eighteenth-Century Life, n.s., 14 (1990): 60
13. James H. Bunn, "The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism," New Literary History 11 (1980): 314
14. See also Anthony Alan Shelton, "Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the New World," in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Eisner and Roger Cardinal (London, 1994), 203
15. [James Beresford], Bibliosophia; or, Book-Wisdom ... (London, 1810)
16. and, for an earlier example, [Louis Bollioud Mermet], De la bibliomanie (La Haie, 1761)
17. Samuel Egerton Brydges, Collins's Peerage of England (London, 1812), 1:x
18. quoted in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven,/1992), 177
19. See also [William Clarke], Reportorium Bibliographicum; or, Some Account of the Most Celebrated British Libraries (London, 1829)
20. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, 1994), 26-28
21. Trevor Ross, "Copyright and the Invention of Tradition," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992): 1-27
22. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), 480-88
23. Campbell, The Retrospective Review, 1
24. The Retrospective Review 1 (1820): iv
25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London, 1991), chap. 5
26. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), 96-97
27. Marilyn Buffer, "Antiquarianism (Popular)," in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford, 1999), 328-38
28. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830, 2d ed. (London, 1997), 240-44
29. Peter Mandler, "'In the Olden Time': Romantic History and English National Identity, 1820-50," in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750-c. 1850, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester, 1997), 86-87
30. [Richard Chevenix], "State of Science in England and France," Edinburgh Review 67 (1820): 417
31. Sidney L. Jackson, Libraries and Librarianship in the West: A Brief History (New York, 1974), 274-77
32. K. W. Humphreys, A National Library in Theory and Practice (London, 1988)
33. On the revolutionary legacy of the French national library, see Anthony Vidier, "Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliothèque de France," Representations 42 (Spring 1993): 115-34
34. Edwards, Libraries and the Founders of Libraries, 446
35. Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, 1997), 21
36. Anthony Lister, "George John, 2nd Earl Spencer and His 'Librarian,' Thomas Frognall Dibdin," in Bibliophily, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Cambridge, 1986), 90-120
37. See William Beckford, A Dialogue in the Shades ... (London, 1817)
38. This Lucianic dialogue took as its particular target Dibdin's Lincolne Nosegay (London, [1811]), a text that has been described as perhaps "the most exclusive bookseller's catalogue ever issued."
39. Renato Rabariotti, "Beckford's A Dialogue in the Shades and Dibdin's Lincolne Nosegay," Book Collector 38 (1989): 212
40. [De Quincey], "The Street Companion; or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort, in the Choice of Shoes," London Magazine, n.s., 1 (1825): 73-77
41. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Library Companion; or, the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort, in the Choice of a Library (1824), 2d ed., corr. (London, 1825)
42. G. F. Barwick, "De Quincey and T. F. Dibdin," The Library, n.s., 8 (1907): 267-79
43. Dibdin, Bibliomania, 279-83, 625-29
44. For a related study of the nervous pathology of consumer society undertaken by Thomas Trotter, an early-nineteenth-century medical man, see Roy Porter, "Addicted to Modernity: Nervousness in the Early Consumer Society," in Culture in History: Production, Consumption, and Values in a Historical Perspective, ed. Joseph Melling and Jonathan Barry (Exeter, 1992), 180-94
45. Dibdin, Bibliomania, 542-43
46. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, 1987), 88
47. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Sermons, Doctrinal and Practical ... (London, 1820), 153
48. Dibdin, Library Companion, xvii-xviii, xxi
49. Dibdin, Library Companion, xiv-xv
50. Burke, Reflections, 96
51. [Isaac D'Israeli], Vaurien ... (London, 1797), l:vi
52. George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism (Edinburgh, 1911), 392
53. The only substantial scholarly discussion of D'Israeli's career is James Ogden's biography, Isaac D'Israeli (Oxford, 1969)
54. but Susan Stewart makes some suggestive comments, germane to the present argument, in her On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore, 1984)
55. and David Simpson includes a brief but useful discussion of D'Israeli's Dissertation on Anecdotes in his The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago, 1993), 55-58
56. Isaac D'Israeli, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, Drawn From Their Own Feelings and Confessions, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1822), 1:9, 33
57. D'Israeli was somewhat more sympathetic to the empiricist tradition than was Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Robert Southey, although he gradually moved from an environmentalist to an anti-Lockean and cautiously innatist theory of the origins of genius in a way that paralleled his changing political beliefs; see James S. Malek, "Isaac D'Israeli, William Godwin, and the Eighteenth-Century Controversy over Innate and Acquired Genius," Rocky Mountain Review 34 (1980): 48-64
58. For D'Israeli's changing opinion on this issue, compare Isaac D'Israeli, Miscellanies; or, Literary Recreations (London, 1796), 248-309
59. and D'Israeli, The Literary Character (1822), 1:32-34. D'Israeli revised and expanded successive editions of his works, often in significant and revealing ways. Citations will therefore record the earliest edition in which a particular quotation is to be found
60. [Isaac D'Israeli], Curiosities of Literature, Consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Critical, and Historical (London, 1791-1817), 1:19
61. [Isaac D'Israeli], Curiosities of Literature, new ed., enlarged (Newry, 1817), 3
62. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge, 1994), 88
63. Devendra P. Varma, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge (Washington, D.C., 1972), 75-78
64. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White (London, 1972), 36-38
65. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiev, Diacritics 16 (1986): 26
66. Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy (London, 1859), 2:570-71
67. Thomas De Quincey, "Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected" (1823), in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London, 1896-97), 10:38
68. Catharine McDonagh, De Quincey's Disciplines (Oxford, 1994), 66-69
69. Compare Retrospective Review 1 (1820): vii-viii, where the great libraries of the day are described as striking "the heart of the student that enters them with despair, should he aim at attaining universal knowledge through the medium of books."
70. Retrospective Review 1 (1820): iii
71. D'Israeli, Literary Character (1822), 1:10
72. [D'Israeli], Curiosities (1817), 10
73. Compare [Beresford], Bibliosophia, 10
74. See also an earlier version of this work, Isaac D'Israeli, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (London, 1795), vii, xiv
75. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution," in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 193-212
76. D'Israeli, Literary Character (1795), xiv
77. In this respect, D'Israeli's work is indebted to the approach of eighteenth-century polite essayists such as Vicesimus Knox who, by combining moral instruction with pleasing diversion, had attempted to forge a style appropriate to "a commercial country like our own, where only the short intervals, which the pursuit of gain and the practice of mechanic arts afford, will be devoted to letters by the more numerous classes of the community"; Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary, 2d ed. (London, 1782), 2:3
78. [John Wilson], "D'Israeli on the Literary Character," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 19 (1818): 14
79. See, for example, Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London, 1984), 45-67
80. [Isaac D'Israeli], The Literary Character Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions (London, 1818), 296
81. Compare [James Crossley], "The Retrospective Review," Blackwood's 59, part 2 (1821): 707-8
82. [D'Israeli], Literary Character (1818), 297
83. D'Israeli, Miscellanies, xxii
84. D'Israeli, Literary Character (1822), 2:131
85. [Isaac D'Israeli], A Dissertation on Anecdotes (London, 1793)
86. Compare Karl Kroeber's treatment of Romantic historicism, which sees the unitary, epic vision of Neoclassical history challenged by a fragmentary and dehierarchized "sublimity of the unspectacular"; Karl Kroeber, "Romantic Historicism: The Temporal Sublime," in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven, 1978), 151
87. James Chandler has recently drawn attention to certain parallels between the New Historicist mode and the Romantic vogue for the literary-historical anecdote; see his England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), 166 n. 25
88. See also Simpson's discussion in The Academic Postmodern (cited in note 32)
89. and Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 49-76
90. I have not chosen to dwell on the apparent similarities between the New Historicism's penchant for the anecdote and D'Israeli's anecdotal histories, for what I believe to be good (historicist) reasons. Such comparisons tend to distort the immediate context and significance of the rise of the anecdote in the late eighteenth century, discussion of which has typically been subordinated to the genealogical explanation - if not legitimation - of certain rather specialized critical practices commonly identified with New Historicism. D'Israeli's literary histories represent an important formative contribution to a generalist, and self-consciously populist tradition of literary-historical discourse. From this point of view it is clear that he has far less in common with, say, Stephen Greenblatt than with that type of popular literary history which, while largely ignored by professional scholarship, continues to attract a substantial audience outside the academic market-place. For an example of the latter see Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1993)
91. [D'Israeli], Dissertation, 26, 16
92. Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Miscellanies ..., new ed., enlarged (London, 1801), 67-68
93. For Coleridge's usage, see Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 56 (1821): 254
94. Coleridge later mounted a covert attack on D'Israeli's anecdotal methodology in The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (London, 1969), 2:107
95. reproduced in Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 14-15
96. D'Israeli, Literary Character (1822), 1:3; 2:279
97. [D'Israeli], Calamities of Authors; Including Some Inquiries Respecting Their Moral and Literary Character (London, 1812), 1:319-21
98. This attitude was shared by Brydges, who maintained that anecdotal and miscellaneous forms of antiquarian composition were greatly preferable to the dogmatic, "narrow and erroneous" methods of "system-mongers. " Brydge's allusions to these slaves of system, identifiable with "a certain class of literati, calling themselves philosophic" evoke a widespread counter-revolutionary distrust of abstract principle and contrast with his praise of Burke elsewhere as a "literary genius" whose speeches are enlivened by their expansive, generalizing tendency; Samuel Egerton Brydges, The Anti-Critic ... (Geneva, 1822), vii
99. Samuel Egerton Brydges, Gnomica ... (Geneva, 1824), 19
100. [D'Israeli], Dissertation, 30
101. See also D'Israeli, Miscellanies (1796), 191
102. D'Israeli, Miscellanies of Literature, new ed., rev. and corr. (London, 1840), 3
103. Bunn, "Aesthetics of British Mercantilism," 308