Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 9780300265217

Table of contents :
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
1. Bookmen Across the Atlantic: Charles Lamb’s Books on Broadway
2. The Literary World: Publishers, Editors, Journalists
3. New York Shakespeareans: Bardomania, Testimonials, and Gift Exchange
4. Boston Antiquarians: American History, Bibliography, and Bibliomania
5. Educating America: The Dream of a Great Public Library
Epilogue
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Book Madness

Charles Lamb. Engraved from a drawing by Daniel Maclise in Fraser’s Magazine (February 1835). Author’s Collection.

Book Madness A Story of Book Collectors in America

Denise Gigante

new haven and london

Copyright © 2022 by Denise Gigante. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@ yale.edu (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Fournier type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941424 isbn 978-0-300-24848-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I like books about books. —C H ARL E S LAM B, May 16, 1820

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Contents Dramatis Personae ix Prologue 1 1. Bookmen Across the Atlantic: Charles Lamb’s Books on Broadway 12 2. The Literary World: Publishers, Editors, Journalists 66 3. New York Shakespeareans: Bardomania, Testimonials, and Gift Exchange 117 4. Boston Antiquarians: American History, Bibliography, and Bibliomania 174 5. Educating America: The Dream of a Great Public Library 226 Epilogue 280 List of Abbreviations 293 Notes 297 Acknowledgments 361 Index 363

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Dramatis Personae Protagonists; Being Buyers of Books from Charles Lamb’s Library Sold in New York in 1848 James T. Annan (d. c. 1859): Scottish bibliomaniac living in Cincinnati Robert Balmanno (1780–1861): British expatriate and bardomaniac living in Brooklyn; secretary of the American Shakespeare Society of New York; former secretary of the Society of Noviomagus Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882): American Unitarian minister; former student of the Round Hill School, Northampton, Massachusetts Charles Astor Bristed (1820–1874): American man of letters (essayist, critic, reviewer); grandson of John Jacob Astor William Evans Burton (1804–1860): British expatriate actor, theater manager, literary editor and author, bardomaniac; founder of the Chambers Street Theatre; president of the American Shakespeare Society of New York Benjamin Casseday (d. c. 1862): American historian of Louisville, Kentucky Joseph Green Cogswell (1786–1871): American bibliographer; librarian of Har­­ vard College (1821–1823); founder of the Round Hill School, Northampton, Massachusetts; first superintendent of the Astor Library, New York Thomas Jefferson Conant (1802–1891): American biblical scholar and professor at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, New York Charles Deane (1813–1889): American antiquarian with a focus on colonial New England; bibliomaniac living in Boston George Long Duyckinck (1823–1868): American man of letters; co-editor (with his brother Evert Augustus Duyckinck) of the Literary World and the Cyclopædia of American Literature George Folsom (1802–1869): American historian, book collector, and diplomat; served as librarian of the New-York Historical Society ix

x dramatis personae William Alfred Jones (1817–1900): American essayist, friend of the Duyckinck brothers George Livermore (1809–1865): American antiquarian, bibliomaniac, and Bible scholar living in Cambridge, Massachusetts; “the Antiquary” (nom de plume) George Loder (1816–1868): Expatriate British composer, colleague of William Evans Burton at the Chambers Street Theatre, New York George Henry Moore (1810–1870): Antiquarian and assistant librarian of the New-York Historical Society Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908): American man of letters from Cambridge, Massachusetts; treasurer of the Washington Library Committee George Templeton Strong (1820–1875): Diarist, bibliomaniac, and attorney living in New York Prosper Montgomery Wetmore (1798–1876): Merchant and man of letters (poet, patron, reviewer) in New York Horatio Woodman (1821–1879): Founder of the Saturday Club in Boston; attorney; editor of the Boston Evening Transcript The Reverend Alexander Young (1800–1854): Unitarian minister, book collector, and antiquarian in Boston; historian of colonial New England and editor of the Library of the Old English Prose Writers (book series)

Major Actors Daniel Appleton (1785–1849): Leading bookseller and publisher in New York John Jacob Astor (1763–1848): German-born real estate tycoon; founder of the Astor House hotel and the Astor Library, New York Mary Balmanno (1802–1875): Expatriate British artist and poet; wife of Robert Balmanno John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886): American antiquarian, bookseller, publisher, editor, bibliographer, ethnographer, and U.S. boundary commissioner Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854): Irish antiquary living in London Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847): English bibliographer; founder of the Roxburghe Club and the “father of bibliomania” Thomas Dowse (1772–1856): American book collector and bibliophile; the “Learned Leather Dresser” of Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Evert Augustus Duyckinck (1816–1878): American man of letters (essayist and editor); founder of the Literary World and of the book series Library of Choice Reading and Library of American Books; founder and co-editor of the literary journal Arcturus and the Cyclopædia of American Literature; essayist under the nom de plume “Felix Merry” James T. Fields (1817–1881): Boston publisher, editor, bookseller; sentimental book collector; autographomaniac Charles William Frederickson (1823–1897): American bibliomaniac and pioneer of sentimental book collecting; second-generation protagonist William C. Hall (1783–1863): Expatriate American bookseller living in London Richard Heber (1773–1833): The English bibliomaniac par excellence John Keese (1805–1856): American book auctioneer, editor, publisher, and wit, New York James Lenox (1800–1880): American bibliomaniac and founder of the Lenox Library, a monument of Gilded Age New York Dewitt Miller (1857–1911): American bibliomaniac and public lecturer; book sleuth on the trail of Charles Lamb’s library Ernest Dressel North (1858–1945): American bibliographer, editor, bookseller, and collector with a specialty in Charles Lamb, New York George Palmer Putnam (1814–1872): American publisher and bookseller; business partner of John Wiley Henry Hope Reed (1808–1854): American literary editor, lecturer, book collector; professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania Henry Stevens, Jr. (1819–1886): Bibliographer and antiquarian bookdealer from Vermont who relocated to London; fourth-generation protagonist Charles Welford (1815–1885): London-born bibliographer and antiquarian bookdealer; business partner of John Russell Bartlett and later of Charles Scribner; bibliographer (in the interim) for Bangs & Company John Wiley (1808–1891): Bookseller and publisher in New York

Minor Actors William Backhouse Astor (1792–1875): Real estate developer and philanthropist; son of John Jacob Astor

xii d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e George Bancroft (1800–1891): American historian; cofounder (with Joseph Green Cogswell) of the Round Hill School, Northampton, Massachusetts Lemuel Bangs (1809–1887): Leading book auctioneer in New York John Carter Brown (1797–1874): American antiquarian and book collector whose library is now part of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island James Ewing Cooley (1802–1882): American auctioneer and bookseller Thomas Francis Dillon Croker (1831–1912): British antiquary; son of Thomas Crofton Croker Edward Augustus Crowninshield (1817–1859): American antiquarian and book collector in Boston; third-generation protagonist Albert Denison, 1st Baron of Londesborough (1805–1860): English antiquary; member of the Society of Noviomagus Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere (1800–1857): English Shakespearean scholar and philanthropist; donor of the Chandos Shakespeare portrait to the National Portrait Gallery, London Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882): American essayist, lecturer, and transcendentalist philosopher Edward Everett (1794–1865): American statesman, historian, bibliophile; president of Harvard College; cofounder (with George Ticknor) of the Boston Public Library Charles Folsom (1794–1872): Librarian of Harvard College and later of the Boston Athenæum Peter Force (1790–1868): American antiquary, printer, and compiler and editor of the American Archives in Washington, D.C. Ogden Goelet (1851–1897): New York real estate tycoon, yachtsman; latergeneration protagonist Horatio Hill (1807–1891): American printer and bookseller in New Hampshire, Maine; auctioneer in New York City Charles Fenno Hoffman (1806–1884): Founder of the Knickerbocker and editor of the Literary World in New York William Thomas Hildrup Howe (1874–1939): Publisher, antiquarian book collector, head of the American Book Company of Cincinnati; latergeneration protagonist Washington Irving (1783–1859): American author; chair of the board of trustees for the Astor Library; U.S. minister to Spain

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Richard Charles Jackson (1851–1923): Eccentric English bibliomaniac who assembled “Relics of Charles Lamb” and claimed to be the grandson of Elia’s “Captain Jackson” Abbott Lawrence (1792–1855): American diplomat, businessman, philanthropist, and book collector Jonathan Leavitt (1797–1852): New York publisher, bookseller, and binder; brother-in-law of Daniel Appleton Herman Melville (1819–1891): Author of Typee, Omoo, Moby-Dick Andrews Norton (1786–1853): Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard College; Harvard librarian; father of Charles Eliot Norton Anthony Panizzi (born Antonio Genesio Maria Panizzi; 1797–1879): Principal librarian of the British Museum Obadiah Rich (1777–1850): Expatriate American antiquarian bookseller in London; specialist in American history Horatio Rodd (1798–1858): London bookseller and dealer in antiquarian relics Charles Scribner (1821–1871): New York bookseller and publisher; founder of Charles Scribner & Company and its subsidiary, Scribner & Welford George Dallas Smith (1870–1920): New York bookdealer and third-generation protagonist Harry Bache Smith (1860–1936): American stage writer, composer, sentimental book collector; fifth-generation protagonist Jared Sparks (1789–1866): American historian; editor of the collected writings of George Washington Henry Stevens, Sr. (1791–1867): American antiquarian and book collector; founder of the Vermont Historical Society George Ticknor (1791–1871): American literary scholar; cofounder (with Edward Everett) of the Boston Public Library; uncle of Charles Eliot Norton Samuel Ward III (1786–1839): American investment banker; a founder of the University of the City of New York (now New York University) George Corbin Washington (1789–1854): Grandnephew of George Washington; seller of the books of the first U.S. president to Henry Stephens Daniel Webster (1782–1852): U.S. secretary of state; U.S. congressman Robert Charles Winthrop (1809–1894): President of Massachusetts Historical Society

xiv d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e

The Lamb Circle The Reverend Henry Francis Cary (1772–1844): Translator of Dante ’s Divine Comedy into English; Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum; author of Charles Lamb’s epitaph Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): Poet, philosopher, book borrower and annotator Mary Cowden Clarke (1809–1898): Author of The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare; daughter of Vincent Novello; wife of Charles Cowden Clarke; actress in Charles Dickens’s amateur acting company William Hazlitt (1778–1830): English essayist, critic, and philosopher Jane Hood (1791–1846): Oldest sister of the poet John Hamilton Reynolds; wife of the poet Thomas Hood Thomas Hood (1799–1845): Poet, wit, literary essayist, and editor James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859): Poet and literary essayist; periodical founder, editor, and journalist; bibliophile and book collector William Jerdan (1782–1869): British journalist and literary antiquary; editor of the Literary Gazette in London Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857): English literary journalist and playwright; wit and actor in Charles Dickens’s amateur acting company Charles Lamb (1775–1834): Literary essayist best remembered for the essays of “Elia” (nom de plume); poet, playwright, and wit; patron saint of book collectors John Lamb, Jr. (1763–1821): Elder brother of Charles and Mary Lamb; employee at the South Sea House, London Mary Ann Lamb (1864–1847): Elder sister of Charles Lamb and co-author (with him) of Tales from Shakespeare Edward Moxon (1801–1858): English publisher, bookseller, and poet; husband of the Lambs’ adopted daughter, Emma Isola; sold Lamb’s library in 1847 Emma Isola Moxon (1809–1891): Adoptive daughter of Charles and Mary Lamb; wife of Edward Moxon Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867): Lawyer, diarist, and literary man about town; founder of University College, London, and the Athenæum Club Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832): Scottish novelist, poet, literary antiquarian, and bibliomaniac residing at Abbotsford, outside Edinburgh

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Robert Southey (1774–1843): Literary antiquarian, bibliomaniac, and British Poet Laureate (1813–1843), residing in Keswick, Cumbria Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854): Politician and literary journalist; executor and editor of Charles Lamb Thomas Westwood (1814–1888): Poet and neighbor of the Lambs in Enfield William Wordsworth (1770–1850): British Poet Laureate (1843–1850) residing in Rydal Mount, Ambleside, in the English Lake District

Book Actors; Being Among the Sixty Association Copies from Charles Lamb’s Library Originally Sold in New York in 1848, with Their Buyers Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., The Guardian. Vol. 1 (London, 1750) and Vol. 2 (London, 1734). George Folsom. Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., The Spectator. Vol. 9 of 9, 4th ed. (London, 1724). Benjamin Casseday. Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq. Vol. 1 of 2 (London, 1756). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead & Company, Henry Bache Smith. Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon’s Works (London, 1629). Horatio Woodman. Nathaniel Bacon, Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira (London, 1681). James T. Annan, George L. Duyckinck. Vincent Bourne, Poematia Latine Partim Reddita, Partim Scripta, 4th ed. (London, 1750). The Reverend Alexander Young (?). Samuel Butler, Hudibras (London, 1726). George Loder. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Nature’s Pictures, Drawn by Fancies Pencil (London, 1656). Benjamin Casseday. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Works (London, 1664). Prosper Montgomery Wetmore. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The World’s Olio (London, 1671). Thomas Jefferson Conant.

xvi d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet, and Lidgate’s Story of Thebes, Speght’s Edition (London, 1598). James T. Annan, William Evans Burton, Edward Augustus Crowninshield, Henry Stevens, Jr., Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons. John Cleveland, J. Cleaveland Revived: Poems, Orations, and Epistles, and Other of His Genuine Incomparable Pieces, 12mo (London, 1668). Robert Balmanno, William Thomas Hildrup Howe. John Cleveland, Poems by John Cleavland (London, 1662). Robert Balmanno, Ogden Goelet. Philippe de Commines, The History of Philip de Commines, Knight, Lord of Argenton (London, 1674). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Harry Bache Smith. Abraham Cowley, The Works (London, 1693). Horatio Woodman. John Dennis, Original Letters, Familiar, Moral, and Critical, 8vo (London, 1726). James T. Annan, William Alfred Jones (?), Thomas Pennant Barton (?). John Donne, Poems, &c. by John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s (London, 1669). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead & Company. Michael Drayton, The Works (London, 1748). James T. Annan, Edward Augustus Crowninshield, Henry Stevens, Jr., Charles W. Frederickson, Harry Bache Smith. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, and Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 8vo. George Livermore. Euripides, Euripidis tragoediarum, trans. August Matthiae (Oxford, 1821). Charles Eliot Norton. Aulus Gellius. Noctes Atticæ (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1651). Charles Astor Bristed. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, Certaine Learned and Elegant Works (London, 1633). Horatio Woodman. Ben Jonson, The Works (London, 1692). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Minor Poets, bound quarto with fifteen tracts by Sir John Vanbrugh, George Farquhar, Elkanah Settle, Andrew Marvell, Charles Cotton, Peter Anthony Motteux, &c. James T. Annan, Joseph Green Cogswell. Miscellaneous bound volume of tracts from the 1730s including Matthew Green’s The Spleen (1737); William Benson’s Letters Concerning Poetical Translations (1739); Jacob Hildebrand’s Of the Sister Arts (1734), &c. Charles Eliot Norton. Miscellanies, containing Antonio: A Tragedy by William Godwin; Remorse: A Tragedy, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Antiquity: A Farce, by Barron Field, A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham by John Lamb; and a copy of Windham’s speech delivered in the House of Commons on June 13, 1809. George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead & Company, Harry Bache Smith. Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1712). Charles Deane, Charles W. Frederickson. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (London, 1660). Charles Deane. Henry More, Philosophical Poems, Platonic Song of the Soul, &c. (Cambridge, 1647). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, George Dallas Smith. Old Plays. A Collection of twelve bound in one vol., 4to. James T. Annan, George Henry Moore. Francis Osborne, The Works (London, 1689). George Folsom. John Petvin, Letters Concerning Mind. To Which Is Added, a Sketch of Universal Arithmetic; Comprehending the Differential Calculus, and the Doctrine of Fluxions (London, 1750). George Templeton Strong. Poetical Tracts, including Poems by Charles Lloyd, 1795; Coleridge’s France, Fears in Solitude, &c.; Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches, &c. bound in one vol., 8vo. James T. Annan, Charles Eliot Norton. Political Tracts, bound vol., 4to. George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (London, 1729). George Livermore.

xviii d r a m a t i s p e r s o n a e Matthew Prior, Miscellaneous Works (London, 1740). Robert Balmanno, Charles W. Frederickson. John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against the Crying, & Execrable Sinne of (Wilfull, & Premeditated) Murther (London, 1657). George Templeton Strong, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons. William Sewell, The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers (London, 1722). Henry Whitney Bellows. William Shakespeare, Poems, Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, &c. (London, 1714). Robert Balmanno, Charles W. Frederickson, Charles Scribner’s Sons. John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea. A Collection of All the Incomparable Peeces (London, 1646). Horatio Woodman, Charles W. Frederickson, Dodd, Mead & Company, Harry Bache Smith. Jonathan Swift, Works, vol. 5 (Dublin, 1759). Robert Balmanno. Thomas Tryon, The Knowledge of a Man’s Self the Surest Guide to the True Worship of God (London, 1703). Charles Eliot Norton. Edmund Waller, The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems (London, 1690). Robert Balmanno. The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets: Namely, Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon; Charles, Earl of Dorset; Charles, Earl of Halifax; Sir Samuel Garth; George Stepney, Esq.; William Walsh, Esq.; Thomas Tickell, Esq. Vol. 1 of 2. (London, 1749). James T. Annan, Joseph Green Cogswell.

Book Madness

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Prologue Now, Lamb .  .  . never much cared for collecting or collectors, properly so-called. But collectors have long cared about Lamb—and about all the paraphernalia of editions, prices, provenances, associations, and auctions which happily yet surround his name and work. —Wallace Nethery

We are not the first, and probably will not be the last, to follow the trail of books from Charles Lamb’s library.1 Those old books have a perennial fascination—even if, in themselves, they were not worth much. Lamb’s friend Henry Crabb Robinson once remarked that Lamb had amassed “the finest collection of shabby books” that he (and perhaps anyone else) had ever seen.2 Across the Atlantic the prominent American man of letters Evert Augustus Duyckinck could not have known about the “wizened old cobbler” who helped Lamb repair his books, but he was right in suspecting, when he saw them at a bookstore on Broadway, that a shoemaker had bound them.3 Despite their dilapidated appearance, however, those same books were the relics of an author who wrote so memorably about his book collection that he has become the patron saint of book collectors ever since. “Saint Charles,” as William Makepeace Thackeray dubbed him, had a knack for making readers fall in love with all the tattered and dog-eared volumes on his shelves.4 This story of book collectors in America, by focusing on the dispersal of Charles Lamb’s library in New York in 1848, brings together and recalls to life the leading figures from the transatlantic book world at midcentury, a time when Americans were busy assembling libraries, public as well as private, from masses of old books in circulation. For American bibliophiles, Lamb provided the inspiration as well as the language necessary to combat the idea that bookishness was an Old 1

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World affectation incompatible with life in the New. It is telling that the library sale catalogue of virtually every major American book collector in the nineteenth century who owned books from Charles Lamb’s library—no matter how vast or valuable the collection, no matter how deep in historical time or how lavishly embellished with the arts of the bookbinder—appealed to its audience by boasting of its association with Saint Charles. As a bibliophile motivated by his own tastes, Lamb was as little interested in setting literary trends as in following them, immune (as he made clear in the voice of “Elia,” his best-known essayistic personality) to reigning ideologies of what a “gentleman’s library” ought or ought not to contain.5 And yet at the time our story is set, Lamb was trendy. He was a model for book collectors of all stripes in America. To some degree, his popularity was owing to the fact that he was a working man of letters: he served as a mouthpiece for all those whose weekdays were spent in the grind of economic survival but whose evenings and fugitive hours were all spent with books. The category included merchant scholars, midnight historians, scribbling civil servants, and attorneys who preferred literature to the law. Lamb himself had clerked in the accounting office of the British East India Company, then the ruling symbol of British mercantile capitalism, and he well understood what it meant to be condemned to “dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood.”6 But as a literary essayist, most memorably under the pen name “Elia,” he transformed his everyday experience in a way that profoundly touched many readers. On both sides of the Atlantic working men of letters turned to literature, books, and other bookish individuals as an escape from the disenchanted pragmatism of modernity, and Lamb spoke to them from the midst of their own world in the voice of childhood enchantment. Among likeminded bibliophiles, there naturally arose social and scripted communities in which books, like sturdy old cobblestones, formed pathways between them. This is the rationale for grouping our protagonists together into clusters of shared affinities in the chapters that follow. In the language of the book trade, the books from Charles Lamb’s library have a special name: association copies. Unlike the pristine book in its original wrappers prized by a certain kind of collector, an association copy comes trailing clouds of glory through signs of previous ownership and use. While any old book with a cracked skin and foxing (bibliographical age spots) can bespeak the singularity of individual experience, standing out against the anonymity of commodity culture, an association copy of a book

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is one whose chronicle is of general interest because the people involved in the life of the book are known to the public. Singed by smoke, soaked with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of pictures, and bescribbled, Lamb’s books bore—and still bear—all the marks of readerly engagement that define a literary life. Once, in lending his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge a pile of books that included a two-volume edition of Milton, Lamb warned, “If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that passage more especially: depend upon it, it contains good matter.”7 An association copy of a book reflects the ever-changing world in the life of that book, and the older it is, or the more signs of life it contains, the greater the potential for the stories it can tell beyond the substance of its own textual content. In his essay “On Reading Old Books” (1821), Lamb’s friend William Hazlitt described the associations that can build up in the life of a book through the experience of rereading. Each new reading—whether cursory or profound, solitary or communal—constitutes a singular event with sensory and mental associations. It recalls “the same feelings and associations” which one had in first encountering the book, and which one can never have again in any other way. Those associations connect through memory and, as the cognitive theory of association would have it, work to define who we are. Old books thereby become, according to Hazlitt, “links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity. They are land-marks and guides in our journey through life.” In rereading, “not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness; but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their life-time— the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky—return, and all my early impressions with them.” Hazlitt’s essay was published in the London Magazine where Elia’s essays were then appearing. Around the same time, a writer in the New Monthly Magazine, sitting down before some old books in the library of the British Museum, imagined that he could “clearly perceive the fluid, which, according to the Cartesian doctrine, conveys the impressions from the page to the brain. From some of the volumes, which I discovered to be the old and the black letter, it arose, rich like incense, exhilarating the features and enlivening the eye; every thought that it communicated seemed to generate associations ad infinitum.”8

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As a book moves through the world, moreover, passing from one individual to another, it can prompt more thoughts and memories—as well as commentaries, confessions, self-reflections, poetry, pictures, and other responses, which can in turn trigger further associations. In the nineteenth century, association copies also had the peculiar quality of connecting one person to another, forging chains of relation that resulted in clubs, memorials, testimonials, publications, and monuments.9 The Scottish essayist John Hill Burton found that associations formed through books at this time reshaped the very nature of human subjectivity: “He, the man—to himself the ego, and to others the mere homo—ceased to revolve around the center of gravity of his own personality, and, following the instincts of his adhesive nature, resolved himself into an associative community.”10 The key point to keep in mind is that an association copy of a book is something that connects. It connects the past to the present, the material to the immaterial, and the experiential to the imagined. Charles Lamb’s library was a living nexus of association, and its dispersal in New York in 1848 offers a unique opportunity to explore different pockets of book collecting in midcentury America. We offer this story of book collectors in America as a narrative experiment in associational literary history that views literature (in the manner of the bibliophiles who comprise it) as a lived phenomenon. To be sure, 1848 was a watershed year on both sides of the Atlantic. The California Gold Rush began in January, luring thousands of Easterners and European immigrants across the continent to fantasies of wealth in the West. The following month, the Mexican-American War ended, initiating a renegotiation of the southern border of the United States. John Russell Bartlett, a partner in the bookstore that dispersed Lamb’s library, left his life as a bookseller and publisher and headed to El Paso, Texas, in his new role as the U.S. boundary commissioner. As these events were transpiring, political upheaval was tearing through the European continent. The February Revolution of 1848 began in Paris, where the last French king, Louis-Philippe, was chased from his throne. The seizure of the royal palace by revolutionaries triggered rebellion in other European states against unconstitutional forms of government—in Vienna, Berlin, Bavaria, The Hague, Warsaw, Naples, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. More than one of our protagonists were in Paris at the time of revolution. The Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows recognized what was at stake in the event that would forever change the face of Europe: “Revolution

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in France, riots in England, ominous heaving around ancient volcanoes in Italy and Sicily—all Europe trembling and darkened at the shadow of what is to come—absolutism and freedom, after portentously eyeing each other from afar and some preliminary playing with petty passing at each other, getting now close together and terribly measuring their swords.”11 George Long Duyckinck, who would become a prominent American man of letters like his brother Evert, was also in Paris, watching many of his countrymen duck for cover, including the bibliographer Charles Welford, business partner of John Russell Bartlett. Welford, who had acquired Lamb’s book collection in London and shipped it to New York, was working out of a Parisian college basement as those books were being sold in February 1848. Charles Eliot Norton, another collector and protagonist of this story, was walking up State Street from Boston Harbor on March 18 when he heard the paperboys crying the news of revolution. “Nothing could have been more unexpected than such news,” he thought, as he ran with a copy of the Daily Evening Traveller to his uncle George Ticknor, finding him “in his delightful library,” and, he noted, “his astonishment was great, for . . . there had been no forecast of the overthrow of Louis Philippe.”12 That same day Evert Duyckinck was walking down Broadway in Manhattan, thinking of his younger brother in Paris. He wrote to George that in New York the revolution was “a thing of excitement . . . having imparted to every one that vivacity of eye, quickness of intelligence and general exhilaration which great public events extend to private ones.”13 The American librarian Joseph Green Cogswell sailed in the opposite direction as the news, hoping to take advantage of the distracted state of affairs in Europe to buy books cheaply for the Astor Library, the country’s first major public library. Against this backdrop of political and social turmoil, our story of book collectors in America takes place. It begins with the booksellers who, in shipping books across the Atlantic, risked lives and fortunes in a business where it has always been difficult to make money. We’ll see Bartlett and Welford open a bookstore on the ground floor of the Astor House on Broadway, where they dispersed the last sixty association copies that remained in Charles Lamb’s library at the time his sister, Mary Ann Lamb, died in 1847. The story shifts back in time to the years leading up to Charles’s own death in 1834, as Charles and Mary dragged their old books (and a favorite childhood bookcase) around from one house to another, accumulating more books, friends, and associations along the way. We’ll meet the Lambs’ adopted daughter, Emma

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Isola, who married the English publisher and poet Edward Moxon. Moxon’s prestigious publishing career began with Charles Lamb’s Album Verses in 1830. Fourteen years later he scandalized his countrymen by letting Elia’s books go to New York. In October 1848, after those books had been sold in the Astor House, roughly a third of the collection was resold by the auctioneers Cooley, Keese & Hill, located a few doors down from the Astor House. Thus the last relics of the quintessential book lover’s library were scattered. New York City by 1848 had become the book capital of the United States and gave rise to an emergent class of literary professionals—editors, publishers, journalists—to whom our story turns. That same year the Duyckinck brothers, Evert Augustus and George Long, sons of one of the longestestablished printers in the city, together purchased the Literary World, a biweekly paper founded by Evert, and began transforming it into a premier organ of tastemaking in the transatlantic world of letters. Evert also edited the “Library of Choice Reading,” a series of reprinted European books, for the publishers John Wiley and George Palmer Putnam, which included works by Charles Lamb and his fellow English essayists Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. The motto he chose for the series (“Books That Are Books”) alluded to Elia’s “books which are no books—biblia a-biblia” in Lamb’s well-known essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822). Professor Henry Hope Reed of the University of Pennsylvania had agreed to edit “The Coleridge Miscellany” for the Library of Choice Reading, and Reed recognized the “magic power” of Elia’s books to forge connections when Evert sent him Coleridge’s marginal notes on those books to include in the anthology.14 Coleridge, who coined the term marginalia, was himself the genre’s undisputed master, and he left enough commentary in the books he borrowed from Lamb’s library to make the literary world of New York sit up and take note. Our protagonist George Templeton Strong, who snapped up all of Elia’s volumes from the store of Bartlett & Welford with notes by Coleridge, gave Evert permission to publish those notes, which Evert eventually did in the Literary World, by which means they returned to London. New York was then not only the book capital but also the theatrical capital of the country and the city was home to a robust society of literary antiquarians whose interests centered on Shakespeare. The bardomania (as we shall call this species of bibliomania) involved not only old books and manuscripts but old rings, old goblets, old gloves, old glass panels, old oak tiles, and other Shakespeareana. The most prominent American

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bardomaniac, the English expatriate William Evans Burton—actor, theater manager, and first president of the American Shakespeare Society of New York—built a three-story Temple to Shakespeare behind his home in downtown Manhattan to house his old books and relics. His friend Robert Balmanno, another protagonist and secretary of the American Shakespeare Society, obtained the only book by Shakespeare remaining in Lamb’s library by the time it arrived in New York. These men were “amateurs” who moved in a world of testimonials, transatlantic gift exchange, and extra-illustration, the final stage of the book disease. Through Balmanno, we’ll meet the Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker, who discovered Shakespeare’s betrothal ring in 1848, and Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, who acquired the famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare in 1848 and donated it to the British government to become the first painting in the National Portrait Gallery. From the bustling streets of New York, the story shifts to the shady tranquillity of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where another pocket of literary antiquarians were busy gathering bibliographical relics at midcentury. Rather than the English bard, the Boston antiquarians were focused on the early colonial history of America, particularly New England. The Massachusetts Historical Society was the hub connecting them to one another and to other historical societies springing up throughout the United States in the 1840s. Among them was Charles Deane, a bibliomaniac who scattered memoranda of his historical research on loose slips of paper throughout the ten thousand volumes of his library; George Livermore, a biblical bibliomaniac who published under the pseudonym “the Antiquary”; and their mutual friends Alexander Young and Edward Augustus Crowninshield, also antiquaries with an interest in American history. We ’ll see Deane and Livermore engage in a debate about an obscure point in the New England Primer that almost turned bloody, and we ’ll follow Livermore to London in 1845 to meet Thomas Frognall Dibdin, the father of British bibliomania. While in England, Livermore visited the princely library of George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, at Althorp, Northamptonshire. There, with his arm resting on the most expensive book in the world, Livermore wrote a letter home to a friend, a gesture that will introduce us to one of the most unusual bibliophiles of our story: Thomas Dowse, the “Learned Leather Dresser” of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who contributed to the contemporary book world in more ways than one. For while the sheepskins he cured and tanned became the fine bindings that graced the shelves of learned society, his own

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private library became the centerpiece of the nation’s oldest historical society, the Dowse Library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a lasting monument to self-culture. While the greater part of the story explores the culture of private collecting in America, it is also true that on both sides of the Atlantic at midcentury the public library movement was gaining steam. Two of our protagonists, Henry Stevens, Jr., and Joseph Green Cogswell, were major figures in the development of public libraries in America. In the spring of 1848, Stevens addressed the Library Committee of the British House of Commons about the many different types of libraries serving the public in the United States, from mercantile libraries to subscription libraries to lyceum and athenaeum libraries to the Library of Congress. His own relentless work as a bibliographer and bookdealer did much to stock those libraries. With funds bequeathed by the real estate tycoon John Jacob Astor on April 15, 1848, Cogswell focused his efforts on acquiring books for the Astor Library, the forerunner of the New York Public Library. His work inspired his friends in Boston, George Ticknor and Edward Everett, to establish the Boston Public Library that same year as the nation’s first major public library with circulating books. Around the same time, Stevens made the most spectacular purchase of his career: the association copies from George Washington’s library in Mount Vernon. When he announced his intention of selling them to the British Museum, he roused the fighting spirits of a group of Boston bibliophiles, including George Livermore and Charles Eliot Norton, who worked to keep the library of the leader of the American Revolution in the city where that revolution began. Today it resides in the Boston Athenæum as another monument of self-culture. Our story finds its end by way of its beginning in the epilogue. Spurred by the sale of Charles W. Frederickson’s sentimental library in New York in 1897, the American bibliomaniac Dewitt Miller began tracking down all the books from Charles Lamb’s library in America. The bibliomaniacal Frederickson, while still a young man, had visited the store of Bartlett & Welford in the Astor House and seen the books from Charles Lamb’s library. Although his working wages as a printer did not allow him to buy any, he vowed that someday he would own some, and “well he kept that sacred oath, for eventually he possessed ten of them.”15 After his death, those association copies spilled back into the freewheeling bibliospace of the transatlantic book market, and Miller’s book sleuthing began. He produced an Elian book-bible

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of sorts by binding William Carew Hazlitt’s book The Lambs (1897) together with the fifty-eighth imprint of the Dibdin Club of New York’s Descriptive Catalogue of Lamb’s library (1897) and crammed his own notes into the margins. He communicated with the author of the former, William Hazlitt’s grandson, who knew more than anyone else at the time about Lamb’s books. He also contacted purchasers like Charles Eliot Norton and bibliographers like Ernest Dressel North, who had written the introduction to the Frederickson sale catalogue. He clipped out letters and articles related to the sale and pasted them into his book. The resulting patchwork volume, now in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries, was the original inspiration for this story of book collectors in America. The story takes its name from the book madness—at once a parody and a pathology—that raged in Elia’s day and swept across the Atlantic.16 The Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, a bibliographer as eccentric as his name, popularized the craze for collecting rare and antiquarian books that suffused Britain in the first decades of the century. His best-known work, The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease (1809), took the form of an epistle to Richard Heber, Esq., an English bibliomaniac who filled not just one but nine houses with books—some in England (Hodnet Hall in Shropshire, houses on York Street and in Pimlico, London) and others in continental Europe, where he frequently went on book-buying expeditions (Paris, Louvain, Leyden, The Hague, Brussels, and Antwerp).17 For bibliomaniacs like Heber, one copy of a book was never enough. “Why you see,” he explained, “no man can comfortably do without three copies of a book. One he must have for his show-copy. . . . Another he will require for his own use and reference; and unless he is inclined to part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends.”18 The dispersal of Heber’s library after his death in 1833 marked the end of what Dibdin called “the grand era of Bibliomania.”19 The second quarter of the century was “a period of retrenchment in British book collecting, a bear market after the bull market of the earlier decades of the century and the Bibliomania so famously hymned by Thomas Dibdin,” as the British librarian David Pearson explains.20 In the 1830s, the father of bibliomania himself turned from singing the praises of the book madness to lamenting what he called the “Bibliophobia.” Dibdin’s work of 1832 by that title bore the explanatory subtitle: “Remarks on the Present

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Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade.” That work, also, took the form of a letter, addressed this time not in cheerful comradery to the bibliomaniacal Heber but with rueful irony to himself, “the Author of the Bibliomania.”21 Yet this was the time that American collectors entered the transatlantic book market in full force, infusing it with new money and new interests. The American book market heated up in the 1840s, as antiquarians sought the materials to write New World history, wealthy bibliophiles amassed the book collections that would become the basis of major institutional libraries today, and librarians, bookdealers, and bibliographers worked to fill what Henry Stevens called the “hungry alcoves” of American public libraries.22 We have seen William Hazlitt describe the associative nature of books, and it was likely his friend Leigh Hunt—the man who never went anywhere without a book in his pocket as a precaution against boredom—who wrote, “If there be one word in our language, beyond all others teeming with delightful associations, Books is that word.” But what, after all, is a book? According to Roger Chartier, a pioneer of academic book studies, books are works that “take on a certain density in their peregrinations . . . about the social world.” A text may be an abstract linguistic structure, reproducible in print or digital forms, but a book obtains unique layers of meaning in its wanderings through time and space, making it a resource “for thinking about what is essential: the construction of social ties, individual subjectivity, and relationship with the sacred.”23 The books from Charles Lamb’s library are literary works as well as objects, and we will be considering them as such— moving beyond titles to content, without forgetting title pages, covers, flyleaves, marginalia, and other bibliographical features that make up a book. “Is book history a subset of textual interpretation or vice versa?” asks the literary historian Leah Price.24 There is no universal answer to this question, nor perhaps should there be. What is needed is more tension between them. For sentimental collectors too, the value of a book lay in the accidents, or unpredictable circumstances, that result from its embeddedness in the social world around it. For Walter Pater, Charles Lamb was “a true ‘collector,’ delighting in the personal finding of a thing, in the colour an old book or print gets for him by the little accidents which attest previous ownership.”25 We might remember that it was the “moving accidents” of Othello’s stories that attracted Shakespeare ’s Desdemona to him, and Elia was equally sensible of “the becoming accidents, as they may be called, of books.”26 As the books

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from Lamb’s library follow trajectories that intersect, overlap, and form tangents with one another and the collectors in this story, they reflect the accidental nature of life in a culture of letters. “Nowadays authors are to be found ‘autographing’ their books before perspiring crowds in department stores,” one bookseller complained in 1937, when the sentimental taste for association copies had gained a hold in the American culture of collecting. “These are not real association copies. They convey no sentiment of intimacy. They are advertising products and should be so rated.”27 While such books were actually intended to simulate “presentation copies,” what is true of one is true of the other: a book with genuine sentimental value cannot be manufactured like a commodity. The sixty association copies from Lamb’s library sold in New York in 1848 were all “real association copies,” and literature, for all our protagonists, was a real way of life.28 Of course, this story does not presume to address all cultures of collecting in the United States at midcentury. Nor do all the buyers of association copies from Charles Lamb’s library sold in 1848 figure in it, for not all of them are known. Who, for instance, was the “Bateman of Philadelphia” who purchased a volume of dramatic works that included Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions and Coleridge ’s translation of Wallenstein (a trilogy of plays by Friedrich Schiller) from Bartlett & Welford? What “Stranger” walked off from the store with Lamb’s copy of A Tale of a Tub? Bookstore clerks were not always accurate, and since American auction rooms were noisy and crowded, people jotting down names and prices in sale catalogues did not always hear the same thing. Occasionally, books would migrate silently from one collection to another, leaving no written record of the transaction. Given the inevitability of gaps and discrepancies in the historical record, this story of book collectors in America has been shaped according to what is known, accepting the presence of bibliographical enigmas and leaving those association copies that fall through the cracks to another day, another author—with confidence that, in the event, the shadows that play over the books from Charles Lamb’s library will continue to give them their aura of intrigue and associative potential.

1. Bookmen Across the Atlantic Charles Lamb’s Books on Broadway What would Charles Lamb think if he could know how the shabby old books which he saved from the paper-mill would be made immortal by their short sojourn upon his shelves? —Luther Samuel Livingston

New York City at midcentury was witnessing unprecedented growth as waves of dazed and seasick immigrants, driven by famine and political instability in Europe, clambered from the bowels of ships in the harbor. In 1848 alone, nearly two hundred thousand immigrants arrived at the Port of New York, many lacking the means to move farther. Within five years, that number had grown to nearly three hundred thousand new arrivals annually.1 These were the “crampless” groupings—the prolific, energetic sprawl— that Walt Whitman sings about in Leaves of Grass. In 1846, a young Mark Twain, looking down from a fifth-story window in Lower Manhattan where he worked as a printer’s apprentice, marveled at the “ ‘forest of masts,’ with all sorts of flags flying” in the harbor: “You have everything in the shape of water craft, from a fishing smack to the steamships and men-of-war; but packed so closely together for miles, that when close to them you can scarcely distinguish one from another.”2 The city was growing in the robust, headstrong fashion that the American bard celebrates, and from Downtown to Midtown there was never “such creaking of blocks, such pulling of ropes and such caulking of seams.”3 A mere two decades earlier, the intersection of the city’s two busy thoroughfares, Broadway and the Bowery, was still farmland. But a walk down Broadway, especially at lunch hour, by the mid-forties had become a challenge. Twain observed that “to cross Broadway is the rub—but once across, it is the rub for two or three squares. My plan . . . is to 12

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The juncture of Broadway and the Bowery, New York, c. 1828. Drawing from John Jacob Astor: Landlord of New York (1929) by Arthur D. Howden Smith. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

get into the crowd; and when I get in, I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs; and when I get out, it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together again.”4 Amidst all this urban hubbub, one bookstore tucked away on the ground floor of the Astor House at 229 Broadway (beneath the American Hotel, the nation’s premier luxury hotel, built by John Jacob Astor) gained a reputation as a beacon of taste. The bookstore, owned by John Russell Bartlett and Charles Welford, had a commodious reading room, and the rare book collector James Carson Brevoort (future superintendent of the Astor Library) described it as a “cozy nook.”5 Throughout the 1840s, it attracted a circle of literary lights. Bartlett recalled that it “was the resort of literary men not only from New York, but from all parts of the country.” The poet Fitz-Greene Halleck and novelist James Fenimore Cooper were daily visitors, sometimes remaining for hours in conversation. “Others would come in and look over the new books. There was scarcely a literary or scientific man in the city who did not pay frequent visits to our store, and the same class of men from other cities generally made us an early call on visiting the city to see what there was new among books.”6 Among the out-of-towners was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1848 was on a lecture tour in Britain. The following year he stopped in the store and Welford’s wife, Mary Anne, found it “too provoking” to have missed him.7 The booksellers in the Astor House were intellectuals as well as

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businessmen. While Welford fielded questions across a range of ancient and modern literature, Bartlett served as a resource for those interested in American history, ethnography, and philology. “Before the days of the Astor library,” wrote Evert and George Duyckinck, “there was no better resort for literary information in the city than the well furnished bookstore at No. 7 Astor House.”8 Particularly in Bartlett’s area of early American history, the demand for old books was on the rise, causing Bartlett to wonder at “the improvement in taste among us.”9 By the end of the decade, the store had become a legend in the literary world of New York.

Bartlett & Welford At age thirty-five, John Russell Bartlett found himself trading in books, much as his father had traded in sugar, hardware, liquor, flour, iron, steel, stationery, saddles, boots, and other dry goods at a general country store in Rhode Island. As a child, he had helped his father unpack crates that floated down the Seekonk River from Canada. As an adolescent, he worked in his uncle’s country store in Providence, awaking every morning to sweep the shop, light the fire, and unlock the front door to customers. But after hours, he indulged in his favorite studies among his books. He attended public lectures, including those sponsored by the Franklin Society, which like its namesake aimed “to embrace the whole range of the sciences and of general literature.”10 He joined the Historical Society of Rhode Island, and in 1831 he helped establish the Providence Athenæum, another institution devoted to fostering the lifelong process of self-culture. He worked to build the Athenæum’s fledgling library, and five years later, when the Athenæum merged with the Library Company of Providence (a subscription library like the Library Company of Philadelphia founded by Benjamin Franklin), its library swelled with books, pamphlets, periodicals, and manuscripts that had been accumulating for nearly a century. With bookkeeping experience in retail and banking, Bartlett moved to New York and took a job with Jessup, Swift & Company, building supply merchants with a branch in Providence. After a few short months, however, the financial Panic of 1837 put an end to the building boom in America and consequently to Bartlett’s job. “In such times as these few can weather the storm,” wrote his friend John Russell from Bluffdale, Illinois; “I learnt with deep regret that your house had also yielded to the pressure that is fast prostrating, not only the mercantile interest but the whole business of our

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country.” The bull market of the 1830s had gone bust. “The West is just beginning to feel it,” Russell reported in June, auguring more “disastrous and untried scenes . . . before us.” Andrew Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren (who became the eighth U.S. president in March) were lucky they were not in Europe, Russell believed, or their heads would have paid the price for “the wide spread ruin that is now sweeping over our country in its length and breadth.”11 Bartlett’s bookkeeping services were no longer needed by his employers, but libraries and book collectors in Providence continued to rely on him. He scanned sale catalogues, attended evening auctions, and eventually began to think he might channel his commercial and bibliographical knowledge into a new career. Surely books could be traded with as much ease or difficulty as other commodities. But his friend William C. Hall, an American bookdealer in London, warned him otherwise: “The book trade is the most dangerous of any, and not one out of 100 succeed at it in this country or any other.” Like Bartlett, Hall had begun his career at a New England country store. He was able to explain that while the logic of retailing such things as cotton, tea, rum, and molasses was straightforward—stock no goods that did not turn a profit—booksellers frequently sacrificed quantitative logic to sentiment and taste. By piling up authors, subjects, historical periods, and even bindings that appealed to them, they ran the risk of accumulating inventories that were “of little or no value, and not worth one twentieth” of the price they had paid. Flooding the market with unwanted books was not only “bad for the owners,” but bad for the business in general since “no trade is so bad as books when forced into the market.”12 The greatest reason for the sluggish sale of new books in Britain in the 1830s was the slew of “cheap literature” flooding the marketplace, a phenomenon enabled by technological innovations like steam-powered printing and machine-made paper. The Panic of 1837 compounded the slump in the British book trade by making cash scarce on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 18, 1838, Hall warned Bartlett, “Send out a man with the very best knowledge of the market & a large capital of ready cash. . . . I doubt whether he will be able to make enough to pay his board and lodging. . . . [O]ne thing is certain, all that have attempted amongst English books have become bankrupt.”13 The shelf life of a new publication was not long, and if the first print run did not sell out, the remainders would go for a fraction of their original retail price. Three years later, in November 1841, only 750 copies (of a print

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run of 1,000) of William Wordsworth’s most recent book had sold, causing the poet to fear that “the wretched state of the Book trade and the heavy stock” his publisher Edward Moxon had on hand would discourage Moxon from publishing a new volume of poems he was preparing for the press.14 In the New Year, he confessed to Moxon that Moxon’s own “account of the depressed state of the book-trade” had made him “almost indifferent about publishing the volume.”15 Yet while Moxon continued to publish new books, Hall shipped his remaining stock to Bartlett to be sold on commission in New York, happy to “quit a dangerous and an impossible business in which . . . very few get rich but many are poor.”16 American bibliomania was on the rise, and Bartlett was convinced the books would sell with enough margin for him to send Hall his 5 percent commission (half the usual bookdealer’s markup). “New York is certainly infected with the Bibliomania,” attested George Templeton Strong after one book auction on March 15, 1839; “I never saw anything like the eagerness to buy, and the prices given.”17 Three months before that, Hall had said the same thing of the book market in London: “Old books are becoming extremely scarce and generally very dear.” Prices in the previous six years had doubled, and he estimated that more antiquarian books had been offered for sale during a single month at the start of the decade than in six months combined by the end.18 In 1841, Bartlett suggested that the prices of antiquarian books had increased, and in many instances doubled again, since 1836. But the American market for such books was robust. “In this country the number of book collectors has greatly increased and in whatever department of literature a man’s taste runs, he wants a few specimens of early printing,” observed Bartlett.19 The time was ripe, and what Bartlett needed was a partner whose bibliographical expertise ran beyond American history and ethnography. As it turns out, he was prescient in his choice of Charles Welford. For while Welford was then still a young man in his mid-twenties, he would become a leading bibliographer in the transatlantic world of books, eventually partnering with Charles Scribner. As the son of a London bookseller, he had grown up around books. His father, John G. Welford, had moved the family to New York when Charles was eighteen, opening a bookstore at 424 Grand Street, where Charles worked for three years, until the age of twenty-one. At that point, he landed a job as a clerk with Daniel Appleton, then the leading bookseller in the city, at 200 Broadway. “All he knew he learned by

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experience,” said one who knew Welford; he “was entirely self educated, having had no time to go to school or college.”20 His friendly disposition masked an “extraordinary knowledge of books and a wonderful memory which enabled him to answer puzzling questions off-hand.”21 A daily customer in Daniel Appleton’s bookstore was George Templeton Strong, who stopped in on his way from school on March 8, 1836, and met Charles Welford. “I can’t conceive what this Mr. Welford is doing as clerk in a book store,” wrote the sixteen-year-old Strong in his diary: “He seems to know something about everything—talks about Sanskrit roots, Polyglots, scarce editions, boustrophedon inscriptions, and everything of the sort . . . and seems moreover perfectly well acquainted with the works of many authors not often read, and well versed in all sorts of literature. I should think he might find a better situation than that of a clerk.”22 However, as the book historian Michael Winship explains, being a bookstore clerk in nineteenth-century urban America required some bibliographical expertise: “The general stock was chiefly shelved behind counters and not accessible for browsing. Customers depended on sales clerks for advice and service.”23 Welford constantly surprised those who knew him best with the “the extent and exactness of his knowledge,” and others saw him as a “walking cyclopædia.” According to one London bookseller, Edward Marston, “if he did not know the contents of many books, he knew at least all that it was necessary to know about them for the practical purpose of buying or selling. . . . He had a peculiar faculty of seizing the leading features of a book, and his strong memory retained them.”24 When George Templeton Strong spoke with Welford at Appleton’s bookstore, their conversation drifted from old books to old coins, and Welford promised to bring coins from his own collection to the store to show the young bibliophile. “Coins of Alexander the Great, Philip, Cassander, Hiero, Abgarus, and of Etruria, Carthage, Phoenicia, the Mamertines, Libya, Syracuse and Messana, &c., &c., are not to be met with every day,” Strong marveled when he saw them. He made it known that he “would give any thing to get them,” although Welford did not seem willing to part with his relics of the ancient world. Perhaps it says something about Welford’s personality that three weeks later Strong walked off in elated spirits with thirty-seven coins, for which he had paid fifty cents each.25 Like any business, the book trade was a small world in which the leading figures knew one another, and reputation went a long way toward

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determining success. Whereas Welford “was most kindly, and greatly liked by all who knew him,” his boss Daniel Appleton had a more mixed reputation.26 In London, Appleton was known as “the old screw” and in Paris as “a very good liar.”27 He had been accused of delaying payment, of refusing to settle his accounts, of indiscreetly bragging about low prices he had been offered, of attempting to evade shipping fees, and of insisting that volumes were missing from boxes of books he had been shipped. European booksellers had become wary of dealing with him, and Appleton complained that the only books he could import from Europe were “worth only for throwing down the scuttle” (with the coal to light the fire).28 William C. Hall, who considered his bibliographical knowledge “very limited,” claimed to find, on one of his business trips to New York, books in Appleton’s cellar that had been stripped of their leather bindings and discarded but that were worth more than others for which he had paid inflated prices in London.29 The Parisian booksellers were more skeptical, suspecting that he “allowed himself to be imposed upon with his eyes open,” buying poor books at exorbitant prices to raise his commission with wealthy American clients.30 Charles Welford, on the other hand, was no more willing to overpay for books than he was to undervalue them when he sold them. “He was shrewd at a bargain, and could, on occasion be pretty stiff in maintaining his own ground,” observed Roger Burlingame, a former book editor of Scribner’s Magazine who knew Welford through Charles Scribner’s Sons. Yet for all his shrewdness, Welford “was a man with whom it was quite impossible to quarrel.” To an ingrained English politeness, he joined a “quick intuition about people, knew their frailties and prejudices and could tell a visiting American precisely how to cajole and how not to irritate some of the great and formidable men who ruled London publishing houses.”31 He had not only the knowledge, in short, but the character to succeed in the book business. In 1840, Bartlett & Welford set up shop at No. 2 Astor House, on Broadway facing City Hall Park. Determined to build the most spectacular hotel in America, John Jacob Astor, the first real estate mogul of New York, had gobbled up all the buildings in the square-block area where his own home had stood—on Broadway, between Barclay Street to the north and Vesey Street to the south, with Church Street as the eastern side of the square. There was only one holdout: John Gerard Coster, who lived immediately north of Astor on Broadway. Coster, a Dutch immigrant, had made his fortune as a shipping merchant in the United States and had no need of

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The Astor House, Broadway and Vesey Street, New York, 1842. Colored lithograph from Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, no. 5, new series (1921). Author’s Collection.

the old German immigrant’s money. His wife liked their home, and he refused to sell at any price. But Astor, having pocketed the other lots in the vicinity for under fifteen thousand dollars each, approached his neighbor one day and said, “Coster, I am going to build a hotel. I want the ground upon which your house stands. It is of no particular use to you; you can go up Broadway, above Canal Street, and build a palace with the money I will pay you.” Thus, for the sum of sixty thousand dollars, Astor had his way.32 Before long, New Yorkers were crossing the street to avoid the dust and debris flying from the demolition site. The American Hotel (sometimes referred to as the Astor Hotel or the Park Hotel) opened in 1836, with retail stores lining the streets on the ground floor. They sold a range of products, from satin scarves and Oriental robes to wigs, combs, and hair products; china, glass, and earthenware; bandages and surgical instruments; artificial flowers and perfumes; and four years later, in May 1840, Bartlett and Welford opened their “Antiquarian Bookstore and Repository for Standard Literature.”33 Visitors lounged in the store’s reading room and marveled that the firm stocked not only old and rare books but incunabula (books printed before 1500), which were rarely seen in America.34 “We will not tantalise our Bibliomaniacal friends by particularizing all the varieties to be found at this tempting repository,” a local journalist wrote four

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months later, “but recommend each and all to inspect for themselves such curiosities as rarely meet the eye in this country.” By 1843, the business had moved from No. 2 Astor House to a larger space at No. 7, which could accommodate its inventory of more than four thousand books.35 Bartlett and Welford originally advertised themselves as “Booksellers and Importers of English Books, Ancient and Modern.” They printed their early sale catalogues with Robert Craighead on Fulton Street and focused their energies on acquiring, cataloguing, and selling fine, rare, and antiquarian books. But most booksellers at the time doubled as publishers, and Bartlett had ambitions in that area. In 1844, as we shall see, he sent Welford to London to scout for antiquarian books while he began publishing new books under the imprint of Bartlett & Welford, mainly volumes that reflected his own interests. A random sampling of their early titles yields the Canadian military journal of John Graves Simcoe; a map of Oyster Bay, Long Island, during the American Revolution; an atlas of American Revolutionary battles; a collection of U.S. presidential addresses; a treatise on international copyright law; the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (cofounded by Bartlett and Albert Gallatin); Gallatin’s observations on the “semi-civilized” nations of Mexico and Central America; and a geological study of burial mounds in West Virginia and the Mississippi Valley by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. When our protagonist Robert Balmanno sent a copy of this last to his friend, the Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker, in 1848, three years after it was published, the latter replied in a burst of enthusiasm that characterized the literary antiquarianism of the time: “I can scarcely convey to you, by anything I can write, my extacies at receiving . . . the Mounds of the Mississippi Valley.”36 In the meantime, while Bartlett and Welford were still unknown figures in the contemporary book world, William Hall advised them to acquire “a few good old books” that would do credit to their store even if they did not yield direct profits, and the partners seem to have followed his advice. On June 3, 1840, just after Bartlett & Welford opened at No. 2 Astor House, Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York and a bibliomaniac to boot, stepped into the store and purchased two sets of old books that caused him much delight. The first was a six-volume illustrated edition of The Works of William Shakespear (1743–1744) by Sir Thomas Hanmer, which Hone considered “a fine old Oxford copy of Shakespeare.”37 The other was an eleven-volume edition of Homer and one of only three

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first editions that the Astor librarian, Joseph Green Cogswell, would consider necessary for a great public library. (The other two were the Gutenberg Bible, popularly, if inexactly, known as the world’s first printed book, and the first collected edition of Shakespeare ’s plays, the so-called First Folio of 1623, which Bartlett & Welford would have in their store for sale in 1847.)38 Commissioned by the London bookseller Bernard Lintot, the work Hone purchased was the original subscription copy of Pope’s translation of Homer, consisting of six folio volumes of The Iliad (1715–1720) and five folio volumes of The Odyssey (1725–1726). Pope translated the whole of the Iliad, and he later collaborated with William Broome and Elijah Fenton on the Odyssey. Like many readers before and after him, Charles Lamb preferred the Iliad, judging “the confederate jumble of Pope, Broome and Fenton which goes under Pope ’s name” to be “far inferior.”39 But from the perspective of a collector, the complete folio set in eleven volumes was a surprise on the streets of New York: “a most rare and valuable old book, in fine preservation, beautifully printed, and containing many quaint but well-executed engravings.”40 The bookstore in the Astor House was on its way to becoming a landmark in early American culture. One year into the venture, Evert Augustus Duyckinck pronounced in his column “The Loiterer” that Bartlett & Welford in “every way deserve to take the lead” among booksellers in the literary world of New York.41

The Lambs and the Moxons Charles Lamb’s literary reputation had been growing steadily in America since his death in 1834. But only after Mary Lamb’s death more than a dozen years later, in May 1846, did the public become privy to the bloody scene of matricide and madness that had shadowed Charles and Mary Lamb throughout their adult lives. Charles’s executor, Thomas Noon Talfourd, had published Lamb’s literary works, letters, and a sketch of his life with Edward Moxon in 1838, but since Mary Lamb was still living, he did not include all the letters. A decade later, when he published his Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: Consisting Chiefly of His Letters Not Before Published, with Sketches of Some of His Companions (1848), again with Moxon, the stunning letter of September 27, 1796, from Charles Lamb to Samuel Taylor Coleridge hit the press: “My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the

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death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp.”42 Whatever Mary’s mental illness might be labeled today, it was not helped by the burdens placed upon her by an impoverished family that included a father with growing signs of dementia, a mother who had become an invalid and required constant attention, and the financial responsibility of maintaining them both through such poorly paid menial labor as needlework. Her elder brother, John, employed at the South Sea Company, felt no such responsibility, and Charles, who had just completed a trial period of employment at the British East India Company, earned little. By way of introducing the letter, Talfourd printed a newspaper account from Monday, September 26, 1796, of the coroner’s report of the murder that took place four days earlier: It appeared by the evidence adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room; on the eager calls of her helpless infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late—the dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room.43

Fearing that his closest friend Coleridge would hear about the tragedy from another source, Lamb had written to him the day after the news appeared in the London papers. Responding immediately, Coleridge confessed, “Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation.”44 These events never surfaced explicitly in the essays published under the pseudonym Elia, but they helped to explain their strange tone. Readers had always recognized a taint of melancholy in Lamb’s mischievous humor. Charles was twenty-one at the time the event that permanently changed their

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lives took place, Mary nine years and nine months older. He would forever regret that he had returned home only minutes too late to snatch the knife from his sister. The madness in the Lamb family was probably hereditary. Only four months before Mary’s more violent attack of mental illness, Charles had spent six weeks at the largest private lunatic asylum in London, located at 34 Hoxton Street. “I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one,” he wrote to Coleridge on May 27, 1796: “But mad I was—and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told.”45 While his was merely a “temporary frenzy,” Mary had long been conscious “of a certain flightiness in her poor head” and never passed Bedlam (Bethlem Royal Hospital) without fearing that she would end her days in one of its cells. She had already suffered one breakdown, and in the days leading up to the matricide she had exhibited enough symptoms of mental illness that Charles had gone to consult her physician, David Pitcairn, that morning, unfortunately not finding him at home. A little over a week after the ghastly scene in the Inner Temple, Mary came to her senses in a private asylum, where Charles was relieved to find her sober and resigned, able to distinguish rationally “between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy, and the terrible guilt of a Mother’s murther.” But her fits of frenzy would recur, lasting longer and becoming more frequent as the lives of the Lambs wore on. “Tis the eleventh week of the illness, and I cannot get her well,” Charles would lament on December 15, 1827; “the world is full of troubles.”46 Over a decade later, on May 1, 1848, the British Quarterly Review published a review of Talfourd’s edition of the formerly unpublished letters, and readers on both sides of the Atlantic were shocked. Daniel Appleton rushed to reprint Talfourd’s edition under the title Literary Sketches and Letters; Being the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (1848) as the American newspapers circulated the story under the headline “A Secret in Charles Lamb’s Life.”47 Reading about it in the British Quarterly Review, Evert Duyckinck shared the news with his friend, the American literary essayist William Alfred Jones, that “Bridget Elia in a fit of insanity murdered her own mother. That was the ‘strange calamity’ of which I think Wordsworth speaks.”48 In his letter to Coleridge communicating news of the matricide, Lamb had spoken of “the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family,” and in a poem written in 1796, “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” Coleridge echoed the phrase, portraying Lamb as making his way through

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life, “With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain / and strange calamity!”49 (Duyckinck, drawing on his memory, mistook Wordsworth for Coleridge.) Yet Wordsworth was one of the few in the Lambs’ inner circle who knew the “secret,” and his elegy for Charles Lamb echoed Coleridge by referring to the “troubles strange, / Many and strange, that hung about his life.” Charles was seen as the victim of duty, chained to the “strict labours of the merchant’s desk,” in order to maintain his sister.50 In fact Charles had secured Mary’s release from custody—and the public hospital where they both feared she would wind up—by assuming legal and financial responsibility for her. Their elder brother, John, would have preferred to see Mary permanently confined on the charge of the state, though he, like their mother, Elizabeth, “never understood her right,” as Charles put it, saying that their parent “would always love my brother above Mary, who was not worthy of one tenth of that affection, which Mary had a right to claim.” After the matricide, Mary wrote to Charles from the asylum where she was confined, assuring Charles that she had no more “terrifying dreams”: “The spirit of my mother seems to descend, and smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the Almighty has given me—I shall see her again in heaven; she will then understand me better; my Grandmother too will understand me better, and will then say no more, as she used to do, ‘Polly what are those poor crazy moyther’d brains of yours thinking of always?’ ”51 The reference was to her maternal grandmother, Mary Field, and ironically the term “mothered” here means not nurtured but befouled or full of dregs. Charles Lamb’s status as a working man of letters, defined by his lifelong employment in the accounting office of the British East India Company, was made necessary by his personal tragedy. Shortly before the “day of horrors,” Coleridge had asked Lamb whether he might include some of Lamb’s poems with his own in a volume he was preparing that would also include some by their friend Charles Lloyd. In a postscript added to his letter informing Coleridge of the tragedy, Lamb responded, “Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.”52 Coleridge did publish Lamb’s poems, though not anonymously, in Poems by S.T. Coleridge, To Which Are Now Added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (1797). The internal title pages of the volume, moreover, marked a difference: “Poems,

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by S.T. Coleridge,” “Poems, by Charles Lloyd,” and “Poems, | By |Charles Lamb, | Of the India House.”53 This was not the last time Coleridge would use the phrase that identified his friend as a representative of a mercantile house of trade in one of his publications. The first printing of “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison” (1800) included the subtitle “Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the IndiaHouse, London,” and Lamb had not been happy about it. He demanded that in any future printing Coleridge cross out “Gentle-hearted Charles” and added, “Damn you, I was beginning to forgive you and believe in earnest that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional on your part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the face Charles Lamb of the India House.”54 It is unclear whether he found the emasculating gentle-heartedness or the association with the East India House as a class marker more condescending in a poem by a friend who was himself making his way in the world in the more lofty role of poet and philosopher. When Coleridge republished the poem seventeen years later in his collected poems, Sibylline Leaves (1817), he eliminated the subtitle. In his period of crisis, before he found his voice as an essayist and learned to throw the film of imagination over the tragic events of his life, Lamb leaned heavily on the Bible. When he announced to Coleridge that he was abandoning poetry, he quoted Revelation 21:4: “ ‘The former things are passed away,’ and I have something more to do than to feel.” In that same verse, Saint John relates his vision: “God shall wipe away all tears . . . and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”55 Lamb’s allusion was likewise biblical when he remarked that, like Cain after the fratricide of Abel, he and his sister were “in a manner marked.” In Genesis, God condemns Cain to a life of wandering. Cain becomes “a fugitive and a vagabond” from the land that has absorbed his brother’s blood—a type of forlorn exile adopted by Coleridge in his prose “Wanderings of Cain” (1797) and by Byron in his verse drama Cain (1821). As if to prolong his trials, “the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”56 For once having spilled his brother’s blood, there could be no hiding or turning back. Such was true of the scene in the Inner Temple. For the rest of their adult lives, Charles and Mary Lamb pursued a migratory path together in the manner of the wandering Cain, shuttling between asylums and homes. Many families and private individuals at the time rented rooms to the mentally ill,

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offering themselves as private caretakers. As Henry Crabb Robinson reports, Thomas Noon Talfourd’s own parents “kept a madhouse.”57 The Lambs’ life of “double singleness” took them from the home of the barrister Samuel Salt at No. 2 Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, where Charles and Mary had grown up and where their parents had worked as servants, to 7 Little Queen Street, Lincolns Inn Fields, when, in 1792, Salt died, and the family was thrown on its own resources. From the scene of the unwitting murder, Charles and Mary moved to the following addresses: No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville No. 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville No. 27 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple No. 34 Southampton Buildings, Holborn No. 4 Inner Temple Lane No. 20 Great Russell Street, Covent Garden Colebrooke Cottage, Islington Ponders End, Chase Side, Enfield Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton.58

Charles Lamb died in Edmonton, and six years later Mary moved back to central London, renting an upper-story room in a house in St. John’s Wood run by the sister of a former nurse as a private care facility.59 For the four decades that Charles and Mary lived together, they endured recurrent spells of madness and periods of separation that drove Charles to drink. “Whenever the approach of one of her fits of insanity was announced by some irritability or change of manner,” Charles’s friend Bryan Waller Procter recalled of their early years, “he would take her, under his arm, to Hoxton Asylum. It was very afflicting to encounter the young brother and his sister walking together (weeping together) on this painful errand.”60 Because Mary’s disease caused her to become violent, the siblings never went far without a straitjacket as a precaution, and sometimes travel itself was enough to trigger a relapse. On their one trip outside Great Britain, Charles was forced to leave his sister behind when he visited Versailles to retrieve an old folio from a friend. In the voice of Elia, however, Lamb set his troubles in a positive light. The bookkeeping he performed as an economic necessity he cast as a whim: “I

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confess that it is my humour, my fancy—in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation . . . to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise.” In “The South Sea House,” the first essay in the collected Elia, he described the old ledger books of the trading company where he had worked before the East India House with as romantic a gaze as an antiquarian might view runic writing on a standing stone—as treasured relics of a bygone age. “Thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves— with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings—their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers . . . the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library,—are very agreeable and edifying spectacles.”61 Those old South Sea tomes, like those he jokingly called his Collected Works at the East India House, were to him books in name only. Lamb signed that essay “Elia,” and readers tried to guess his identity. His next essay under that pen name, “Oxford in the Vacation,” opened by addressing the speculation he had aroused: “Doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as . . . a votary of the desk—a notched and cropt scrivener—one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill.” But such scribbling as a clerk must perform only sent Elia home with “increased appetite” to his books. There, secluded in his own study, “the enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.” The Oriental imagery was appropriate, for such essayistic flights of fancy (like Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater) were the magic-carpet rides of working men of letters. Paper was a costly artisanal product, and Elia admits to using the flyleaves and wrappings of his company’s account books for his own scribblings: “Your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays—so that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author.”62 Lamb left no essay titled “Cambridge in the Vacation,” but he and his sister did spend holidays there, where in 1820 they met the young orphan, Emma Isola, who captured their hearts and whom they “adopted” as their own. Charles paid for Emma to complete boarding school, and then at the

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age of sixteen she moved in with the Lambs. In order to provide a suitable home for her, Charles and Mary left their urban lifestyle in Covent Garden, with its theaters, taverns, and prostitutes, for a house with a garden on the New River in Islington. “I have a Cottage, in Colebrook row,” Lamb wrote, “a cottage, for it is detach’d; a white house, with 6 good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a cheerful dining room all studded over and rough with old Books, and above is a lightsome Drawing room, 3 windows, full of choice prints.”63 Four years later, the Lambs and Emma Isola moved to the more outlying village of Enfield. Looking out his window one day at Ponders End on the Chase Side (near the old hunting grounds) of Enfield, Thomas Westwood caught his first glimpse the oddly assembled household: “a slim middle-aged man, in quaint, uncontemporary habiliments; a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap; and a young girl.” The Lambs settled down in a “gambogey-looking cottage” adjacent to the Westwoods, where their final years with Emma passed quickly.64 Charles’s poem “To Emma on Her Twenty-First Birthday” expresses a half-serious wish that she could have “Remain’d a child,” gamboling about the house as in former days.65 However, if Lamb had romantic visions of settling into a life of philosophical tranquillity away from the roar and bustle of the city, the reality proved otherwise. In a letter to Mary Shelley that we’ll later see the American publisher George Palmer Putnam display in his bookstore in New York, he complained of the provincialism of the village. The local bookstore dealt merely in gothic fiction or “prose versions of Melodrama, with plates of Ghosts and Murders, and other Subterranean passages,” and the only print shop in town sold valentines.66 In certain moods, he felt well distanced from “the metropolis and its cursed annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy ink press of that stagnant pool,” but Lamb was a born-and-bred Londoner who had left his heart and his youth behind on Fleet Street, with its publishers, picture stores, street life, and mutton pies. In the same letter just quoted to his friend James Gillman (who adopted Coleridge much as the Lambs adopted Emma Isola), he distinguished the old quartos and folios on the shelves of his private library from the “books” that were daily issuing

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from the press. “All I want here, is books of the true sort, not those things in boards that moderns mistake for books—what they club for at book clubs.”67 True books, for Lamb, were books with a past. He once told Coleridge that “a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”68 The books with which he had spent his adult life were like physiognomies whose character he had learned to read in their lines—not only in lines of printed text but in lines drawn down the side of the page, doubled or tripled as the case might be, for emphasis. “Out-ofthe-way humours and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them— the oddities of authorship please me most,” says Elia in “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire.”69 Being “shy of novelties,” he stuck doggedly to the old familiar faces on his shelves, preferring his timeworn, leathery friends to new publications that seemed to fly past him as quickly as the years.70 Although he received a steady supply of new publications from friends and admirers, such books were fleeting presences in his life. “It was not that Lamb was indifferent to the literary doings of his friends,” Westwood explained, “but their books, as books, were unharmonious on his shelves. They clashed, both in outer and inner entity, with the Marlows and Miltons that were his household gods.” As his neighbor, Westwood recalled receiving a steady supply of such novelties, mostly presentation copies, through “eccentric channels”: “A Leigh Hunt, for instance, would come skimming to my feet through the branches of the apple-trees (our gardens were contiguous); or a Bernard Barton would be rolled down stairs after me, from the library door. Marcian Colonna I remember finding on my window-sill, damp with the night’s fog; and the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies I picked out of the strawberry-bed.”71 The authors of such castoffs were Lamb’s friends, but their works were not for his library. How could Thomas Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer Fairies . . . and Other Poems (1827), a book not only inscribed but dedicated to Lamb, for all its delightful Spenserian verse, stand up next to Lamb’s old folio of The Faerie Queene? How could the gothic verse narrative of Bryan Waller Procter’s Marcian Colonna: An Italian Tale with Three Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems (1820) hold its own next to the gothic typeface of his blackletter Chaucer? Better than keeping such company, Lamb preferred to sit, like the exiled Roman general Gaius Marius among the ruins of Carthage, surrounded by his old books.

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Within a few months at Enfield, Lamb had given voice to the creed of the antiquarian collector: “The best thing is never to hear of such a thing as a bookseller again, or to think there are publishers: second hand Stationers and Old Book Stalls for me. Authorship should be an idea of the Past.”72 He also believed that the form of a book should suit its content. The Victorian bibliophile Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald cited Lamb as the authority for the view that “certain authors ‘read better’ in certain editions . . . as in real life we would have the friend whom we love costumed appropriately, and in a fashion that harmonises with his character.”73 Lamb’s copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, a stubby first edition from 1621, was surely as miserable looking as the old Oxford scholar who wrote it could ever have been. And yet, Lamb insisted, it read best that way. “I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?”74 Lamb had signed his name on the title page of the old quarto, but the local shoemaker (or whoever repaired it) cropped off his surname. “A cobbler was his bookbinder,” Thomas Westwood claimed, “and the rougher the restoration, the greater the success.”75 Lamb’s books were battered, but they were also, and largely because of that, interesting. “The history of Lamb’s books is more humanly interesting than the history of the Huth or Grenville library,” William Carew Hazlitt declared, comparing Lamb’s old books to the great private libraries of Henry Huth and Thomas Grenville: “as chattels or furniture they were worthless; they were generally the poorest copies imaginable; but if they did not cost money, they often cost thought; they sometimes involved a sacrifice.”76 Unlike aristocratic collectors, whose libraries aimed not only at splendor and rarity but comprehensiveness, middle-class bibliophiles like Lamb relied on principles of selection to form libraries suited to their individual tastes. In “Old China,” Elia’s cousin Bridget reminds him of the sacrifices he made for a folio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies (1679): “You flaunted it about in that over-worn suit—your old corbeau— for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen—or sixteen shillings was it?—a great affair we thought it then—which you had lavished on the old folio.” As Lamb could not bear to read the old Jacobean plays by Beaumont and

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Fletcher but in folio, finding the smaller octavo editions “painful to look at,” he was willing to dress in a manner that others might find painful.77 In the voice of Bridget Elia, he suggests that the “poor man’s” delight in assembling a library lay in choosing one thing over another, and in thereby expressing his taste. Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late—and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from its dusty treasures—and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome—and when you presented it to me—and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it)—and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break— was there no pleasure in being a poor man?78

Choice was essential to the formation of libraries without the advantage of unlimited expenditure, and to that extent they expressed the personality of their owners. This truth was captured by a former colleague of mine, a bibliomaniac and book scholar, who said, “I work from the assumption that all libraries, all of our libraries, are autobiographies written with objects rather than words, and that these are autobiographical pieces.”79 The more interesting the individual, the more compelling the collection. Indeed, the “interesting” as an aesthetic category is one Lamb made his own: “The object we find interesting is one we tend to come back to, as if to verify that it is still interesting. To judge something interesting is thus always, potentially, to find it interesting again,” writes Sianne Ngai, an aesthetic theorist (and another former colleague).80 The books on Lamb’s shelves were ones he went back to again and again. Not everyone shared his tastes. Hazlitt placed him along with Coleridge in the “Occult School” of readers, teasing them for their literary antiquarian tastes: “Theirs are superannuated beauties that every one else has left off intriguing with, bed-ridden hags, a ‘stud of night-mares.’ ”81 Elia, the selfstyled Superannuated Man, had claimed in one of his essays that while he sporadically suffered from “an occasional night-mare,” he did “not, as in

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early youth, keep a stud of them.”82 One can only imagine what must have been his nightmares when it came time to pack the books that crowded the walls of their dining room in Colebrooke Cottage. His servant, Becky, relieved him, taking down those same books that doubtless, left to her own devices, she would have taken out with the trash. When she arrived atop a cartload of old books at Ponders End, Lamb blessed her for having “an unstuff ’d brain with such rubbish.” He confessed that, upon seeing them in daylight, he was himself embarrassed: “I am a drayhorse if I was not asham’d of the indigested dirty lumber, as I toppled ’em out of the cart.”83 By September 7, 1827, when all his old books were in his new home at Enfield, he summoned his young friend Edward Moxon from London to help him arrange his library. “I sadly want to consult you about altering the shelves, to fit them, for which I have no eye,” he wrote.84 Moxon was finding his way between poet and publisher, and Lamb, recognizing a genuine book lover when he saw one, had taken him under his wing. Moxon had come to London from rural Wakefield in Yorkshire, hoping to pursue a literary career. His father had been a cropper (a textile worker who cropped the rough surface of wool for pressing), who, seeing his son’s passion for reading, apprenticed him to a printer. For seven years between the ages of nine and sixteen, Moxon therefore found himself “occupied from morning until evening, in laborious employment” and unable to “indulge in his favourite recreation” of reading, except on holidays “or during the still more solemn hours of midnight.”85 Thus he introduces The Prospect, and Other Poems (1826), his first book of poems, inspired by his memories of Wakefield. After four years in London, at the age of twenty he landed a job with Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, at the time the most prestigious publisher of English poetry, who published his book. Edward Moxon was twenty-five and Emma Isola eighteen when he helped Lamb arrange his books at Enfield. Two years later, when he published his second book, Christmas: A Poem (1829), with his new employer, Hurst, Chance & Company, he dedicated it to Charles Lamb. He also became a willing book emissary, hunting down specific titles that Charles wanted in London and bringing Mary armfuls of novels hot off the press. Charles cared less about story than sentiment, and his books were not plot-driven. Mary by contrast enjoyed “the progress of events. . . . The fluctuations of fortune in fiction.” In “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” Elia distinguishes their reading habits: “While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some

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modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. . . . She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told—so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents.”86 So that Moxon could return the books he borrowed from his employer to be sold, Mary gained the knack of “tunneling the pages,” or reading without the aid of a penknife to cut open the leaves of a new book.87 Within a year of publishing his second book, Moxon felt he had learned enough about bookmaking to start his own business. He had dedicated his first book to the poet Samuel Rogers, and now, with a five-hundred-pound loan from Rogers, he purchased supplies and leased a retail space at 64 New Bond Street. The store was on a fashionable shopping strip, and surrounding it were other booksellers as well as bootmakers, china shops, tailors, milliners, artificial-flower makers, wine and brandy merchants, music stores, and carriage builders.88 Across the street from Moxon at 61 New Bond Street was the bookshop of Joseph Booker, a publisher of religious (mainly Catholic) literature, and a bit farther down, at No. 29, stood the publishing House of Ellis, the oldest bookstore in London.89 Owned by Thomas and William Boone, whose specialty was rare and antiquarian books, it boasted “carefully dressed windows” like those of other booksellers at the time.90 Moxon, with his exquisite taste, would not have been behindhand in appealing to customers in that respect. Moxon published the first book under his imprint, Album Verses, with a Few Others by Charles Lamb, in 1830, printing it with Bradbury & Evans on Fleet Street and intending it as a calling card of sorts, a sample of his bookmaking skill for private distribution. “You were desirous of exhibiting a specimen of the manner in which Publications, intrusted to your future care, would appear,” Lamb wrote to Moxon in a letter dedicatory to the volume: “I feel little interest in their publication. They are simply—Advertisement Verses.”91 At Moxon’s request, he had swept together his unpublished (in a few cases, obscurely published) verse, including that written in albums of friends and acquaintances. Album books were blank scrapbooks that people used to keep for others to sign and record thoughts, rhymes, doggerel verse, and wit of all kinds. Although they were used by men as well as women (Lamb’s friend the musician Vincent Novello kept one through 1848), they were chiefly the province of young ladies, as sentimental records of social relations, and therefore stereotyped as feminine. The album verses Lamb published with Moxon included lines he had written in the albums of Emma Isola, Mary Lamb, Lucy Barton, Jane Towers, a Clergyman’s Lady, a Miss

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Daubeny, a Mrs. Sergeant W——, an anonymous Miss ——, a very young Lady, and a French Teacher. Lamb’s poem “What Is an Album?” written in Emma Isola’s album defines albums as fashionable containers of artificial writing: . . . a Book kept by modern Young Ladies for show, Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know. ’Tis a Medley of scraps, fine verse, and fine prose, And some things not very like either, God knows . . . They no more resemble folks’ every-day writing, Than lines penn’d with pains do extemp’rel enditing.92

On “pain of incivility,” one could not refuse to contribute to a lady’s album, but Lamb grumbled against the mania for impromptu autograph verse and in his crankier moods wished all albums at the devil. “Would to the fifth heaven no coxcombes had invented Albums!” he exclaimed to his friend Bernard Barton.93 Elsewhere, in a poem titled “Lines for an Album,” he suggests that albums were merely (and there is some truth to this) a means of collecting autographs: “Laura, too partial to her friends’ enditing, / Requires from each a pattern of their writing. / A weightier trifle Laura might command; / For who to Laura would refuse his—hand?”94 Lamb had written these lines a few days before he summoned Moxon to Enfield to help with his bookshelves, for though he had escaped the fashionable society of London, requests for album verses in his handwriting continued to pour in. When Sarah Thomas, daughter of the Reverend Anthony Keighley Thomas, asked for a sample, he sent her a sonnet that described such poems as “cheap gifts.” Thomas seems to have agreed, for he apologized for the “unlucky sonnet,” suggesting that perhaps “a Bookbinder’s experience, & a surgical hand” might be enjoined to extract it from her album.95 As a replacement, he sent her the following acrostic on her name: Sacred be thy leaves fair Book And forbid all thoughts unholy. Reader, in this album look As in a garden planted wholly Here, or there, with Lily flowers. The pride of maids in maiden bowers— High conceits, and generous fancies, On this stage enact romances.

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Mirth, at times, come in between, And diversify the scene; Sportive jest, and wit’s gay dances.

If the gimmick of the acrostic (whose subject is revealed by stringing together the opening letters of each line) made for “poor” poetry, the genre was its own excuse for existing, and Lamb compared it to a poor person in court pleading “in forma pauperis” in one ’s own voice.96 But the plea carried little weight with Thomas, who did not like the acrostic any more than the sonnet. Lamb sent her a second acrostic, which seems to have put an end to the matter for both parties. In 1830 Lamb may have intended his poems as no more than advertising verses for Moxon, but the slim, unpretending volume roused the critics. One reviewer in the Monthly Review scoffed at the idea that Lamb’s Album Verses could make the reputation of Edward Moxon as Lord Byron’s poetry had done for the publisher John Murray: “That Mr. Moxon, or any other man, can bring honour, or any thing but ridicule on his exertions by appending his name to such a volume as this, however neatly printed, is a proposition which we must take the liberty to deny.”97 Adopting the tone of establishment snobbery that had been used by writers at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine to criticize Byron’s less privileged literary peers, the reviewer painted Lamb as a member of the defunct “Cockney School of Poetry,” which he redefined for readers as “a little coterie of half-bred men, who took up poetry and literature as a trade.” He claimed to have had a hand in silencing them and expressed dismay at seeing one of their number reemerge to threaten the public with more “namby-pamby”: As the maid whose duty it is to banish from our mansions every mischief-working insect, being about to sit down with a light heart and a merry song on her lip, imagining her work to be finished, happens sometimes to be startled from her quietude by the sudden revival of a moth or spider, whose death she hoped she had sufficiently compassed, so do we feel surprised at the reappearance before us of Charles Lamb! Poor fellow, he looks more like a ghost than any thing human or divine. His verses partake of the same character. They exhibit the fleeting, shadowy reflections of thoughts that, in their best days, were blessed with a very slender portion of substance. They are gleaned from the albums of rural damsels, who,

36 b o o k m e n a c r o s s t h e a t l a n t i c hearing that Charles Lamb was an author, chose to have a morceau from his classic pen, to shew to their sires and lovers; from newspapers, annuals, and other periodicals, which requiring now and then a page or two in the form of verse, were obliged to content themselves with the contributions of Charles Lamb.98

Lamb was a veteran of London’s literary scene who claimed to be “too old a Militant” to “care the 5 hundred thousandth part of the tythe of a half-farthing” for what the reviewers had to say. But after such criticism, who would not flinch? The Monthly Review had succeeded in making him feel more antiquated than even he was used to feeling. He signed the letter from which we have just quoted in a way that suggests a feeling of obsolescence, “C.L. Ex-Elia.”99 As his acrostic suggests, Lamb was in no mood for “wit’s gay dances” in the bowers of maidenly pride, and he deeply regretted the title Moxon had given to the book. “Album Verses! why, in the whole collection there are not twenty pages out of one hundred and fifty (and cast the acrostics in, to swell the amount) that have the smallest title to come under this denomination.”100 The collection comprised a dramatic poem, “The Wife’s Trial; or, The Intruding Widow,” based on George Crabbe’s verse tale “The Confidant,” as well as sonnets, commendatory verses, an epicedium, a “Pindaric Ode to the Tread Mill,” and nine translations of the Latin poetry of Vincent Bourne. Lamb was most proud of the latter. One year after the appearance of Album Verses, he composed an anonymous review vindicating his own book by way of its Latin translations and sent it to Moxon for publication in his Englishman’s Journal, announcing that he had “ingeniously contrived” to review himself.101 Lamb considered Bourne ’s poetry “a treat in the reading way which comes not every day,” and he regretted that Bourne had not written in his native tongue: “his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English. Bless him, Latin wasn’t good enough for him, why wasn’t he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in.” Bourne was a town mouse like Lamb, and in the same letter to Wordsworth (the great cheese of country mice) that we have just quoted, he teased the Lake Poet: “What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper counterpoise to some people’s rural extravaganzas.”102 Lamb owned a copy of Bourne’s Poematia Latine (1750), which will show up again in Boston, but now, writing under cover of an anonymous reviewer, he focused his review of Album Verses on his translations. His purpose was to shift attention from his feminized album verses to

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his more virile translations from Latin, a language associated with the allboys’ club of classical education. He claimed that “of all modern Latinity, that of Vincent Bourne is most to our taste. He is ‘so Latin,’ and yet ‘so English’ all the while.” He noted that the poet William Cowper (who had studied Latin with Bourne at Westminster School) had made several translations, one “with a felicity almost unapproachable,” but that a complete edition of Bourne in English was “a desideratum” of modern literature. As for album verses, “We early set our faces against them.”103 Still, as many an author would agree, the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity, and Moxon’s first publication attracted attention beyond what either he or its author could have expected. When William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, labeled the book a “collection of absurdities,” he prompted Robert Southey, then the British Poet Laureate, to jump to Lamb’s defense in a poem, “To Charles Lamb: On the Reviewal of his ‘Album Verses’ in the Literary Gazette.”104 Southey scourged the “empty pertness, and the vulgar wrong, / The flippant folly, the malicious will” of the reviewer. The end of the poem addresses the abused author: “I ween, old Friend! Thou art not worse bested / When with a maudlin eye and drunken aim, / Dulness hath thrown a jerdan at thy head.”105 Southey’s lines conjure an image of the goddess Dulness, javelin in hand, from Pope’s satire of the London literary world in The Dunciad. Leigh Hunt also took aim at Jerdan, satirizing his heavy-handedness in a couplet: “Last week a porter died beneath his burden. / Verdict: ‘Found carrying a Gazette by Jerdan.’ ”106 Lamb marveled at the stir he and Moxon had caused. “What a clamour against a poor collection of album verses, as if we had put forth an Epic.”107 Moxon’s imprint was launched, and though Southey had been publishing with Longman, he promised Moxon his next uncommitted manuscript.108 Four years later, Wordsworth would also leave Longman and spend the final sixteen years of his career publishing with Moxon. “I have taken an interest in Moxon’s welfare, as Mr Southey did,” Wordsworth explained in 1843, the year that Southey died and that Wordsworth succeeded him as the British Poet Laureate.109 In 1850, when Alfred Tennyson assumed the laureateship, Moxon published what would become the capstone work of each poet: Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Each distilled the essence of its literary moment—Romantic and Victorian, respectively— and each was published with loving care. Already, in 1835, Leigh Hunt had called him “the Bookseller of the Poets and (with no disparagement either in

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the antithesis) a Poet among Booksellers.”110 Lamb had expressed a wish that Moxon would become “the fosterer of poetry, not merely the sordid trader in it,” and Moxon’s future years in publishing prove that he became just that.111 For if his love of poetry did not make his own verse shine, it did make the decades in which he was publishing—from the Shelleys to the Brownings— vibrant ones for English poetry. But as Hunt reminded readers in 1831, Moxon began that career “in singularly high taste” with the early, or “primæval delicacies of Charles Lamb.”112 The three years following Moxon’s publishing debut were not easy for the Lambs. Mary’s lifelong struggles with mental illness had reached a crisis point, and the siblings finally had to admit that she needed permanent care. Her spells of lunacy or “sad long illnesses” had been lasting around two months, but in September 1827 she was “surprised with an attack” that lasted longer and augured worse to come. In Enfield that autumn, Charles had her company but not her society, for she did not recognize him, and on December 11 he told Leigh Hunt that he had seen “no symptoms of amendment.”113 Nurses had come and gone, and finally, in the spring of 1833, Mary left Ponders End for Bay Cottage. This private asylum was the home of Frederick and Ann Walden, on Church Street in the nearby parish of Edmonton. Within a week of her departure, Charles had decided that he preferred his sister’s nonsense to the common sense of others, and he too moved in with the Waldens. Emma Isola was engaged to be married to Edward Moxon, and though Mary was not aware of her imminent departure, Charles found the prospect depressing. “In my poor state of brain,” he had written to Thomas Hood in the spring of 1827, “more than one or two persons here together at this unhinging time of Emma’s going would make me ill.”114 Her departure on that occasion was temporary. The reader may imagine how he felt six years later, with Mary alienated from him and Emma never to return. On July 24, six days before the wedding, he found consolation in teasing the young couple. “For God’s sake, give Emma no more watches,” he begged Edward. “One has turn’d her head. She is arrogant, and insulting. She said something very unpleasant to our old Clock in the passage, as if he did not keep time, and yet he had made her no appointment. She takes it out every instant to look at the moment-hand. She lugs us out into the fields, because there the bird-boys ask you ‘Pray, Sir, can you tell us what’s a Clock,’ and she answers them punctually.” But in truth, Lamb had always encouraged their relationship, and in a postscript signed Elia he added, “Never mind opposite

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nonsense. She does not love you for the watch, but the watch for you.”115 In fact, Emma would remain lovingly by her husband until overwork and sickness resulted in his death a quarter of a century and eight children later. Mary was suffering one of her periods of lunacy and could not attend the wedding, but when Ann Walden raised her glass on July 30, 1833, to “Mr. and Mrs. Moxon’s health,” her patient immediately snapped to. The news of Emma and Edward’s marriage had restored her, she said in a letter written that same day, “as if by an electrical stroke: to the entire possession of my senses—I never felt so calm and quiet after a similar illness as I do now.”116 However, while the Moxons honeymooned in Paris, Mary’s spirits collapsed and she and her brother once again became like Tooth Ache and Gum Boil, providing sad relief to each other. “You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, so see us sit together, looking at each other with long and rueful faces, and saying, ‘how do you do?’ and ‘how do you do?’ and then we fall a-crying, and say we will be better on the morrow.” When Mary described this condition in 1805 to her friend Sarah Stoddart, she added, “He says we are like toothach and his friend gum bile—which though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of a rather uncomfortable sort.”117 Now, twenty-eight years later, the siblings distracted themselves with walks, cards, and reading, but not many months had passed after the wedding before Mary’s reason again fled and she became violent. It appears that reading Dante ’s Inferno was not what she needed. Mary was then sixty-nine and she encouraged her brother to attempt the Commedia in Dante ’s medieval Italian. Between them they could read French and Latin, and with the English blank-verse translation by Charles’s friend the Reverend Henry Francis Cary beside them, they plunged into Dante’s hell. “Her perseverance was gigantic, almost painful,” Charles recorded, though in the end it was too much for her. For just as they had completed their downward spiral through the nine circles of Inferno and were beginning to spiral upward in Purgatorio, Mary’s “old complaint” carried her away in a violent condition for more than six months.118 Charles had “had a scurvy nine years of it” and now considered himself “in the sorry fifth act” of his family tragedy. The house in Edmonton was a “cave” with him its resident hermit, living as if “in a desert.”119 His sense of desolation was exacerbated when Coleridge died on July 25, 1834, a shock that left him bereft. The only gleams in that dark period were the monthly visits Charles paid to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where his friend Cary

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worked as the Assistant Keeper of Printed Books.120 Lamb claimed not to like clergymen, though he made an exception for Cary, whom he described as “a model of a country Parson, lean (as a Curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of church dogmas.”121 On December 18, Lamb borrowed Cary’s copy of Theatrum poetarum Anglicanorum (Theater of the English Poets), a collection of biographical sketches of English poets from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century by John Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips. He had finished reading through the death of Sir Philip Sidney when he misplaced the book. His last letter, written on Monday, December 22, 1834, reveals him to be “quite anxious” about it. “I am very uneasy about a Book which I either have lost or left at your house,” he wrote to Honour Dyer, the wife of his old friend George Dyer. He had dined with the Dyers on Thursday, December 18, in their rooms at the top of Clifford’s Inn, Chancery Lane. Mrs. Dyer had withdrawn into the kitchen to fry some tripe, and Lamb stepped out to borrow the book from Cary, probably at the British Museum, a twenty-minute walk away. “If it is lost,” he swore as he tried to remember what he had done with it, “I shall never like tripe again.”122 He was in the same state of distraction later on Monday when, walking down Church Street, he slipped on some ice and fell. He developed a skin infection (erysipelas) that carried him away in a high fever five days later, on Saturday, December 27, 1834. Edward Moxon found the book that had caused Lamb so much anxiety and restored it to its owner. Cary was moved by seeing the page turned down at the scene of Sidney’s death where his friend had paused in his reading. He was familiar with the anecdote about Sidney dying on a battlefield in the Netherlands, having fought for the Protestant cause on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. The courteous Sidney offered his last drops of water to a wounded soldier, saying (if not believing) that the other’s need was greater than his own. In his elegiac “Lines to the Memory of Charles Lamb” inspired by seeing the book his friend had borrowed, Cary portrayed Lamb as equally gentle-hearted. The poem, which Cary sent to Moxon as a thank you, begins: So should it be, my gentle friend; Thy leaf last closed at Sydney’s end. Thou too, like Sydney, wouldst have given The water, thirsting and near heaven; Nay were it wine, fill’d to the brim, Thou hadst look’d hard, but given, like him.

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Cary’s lines wink at the penchant for drink that Lamb was known for and that the essayist himself had addressed over twenty years earlier in “Confessions of a Drunkard.” Cary ends his poem by imagining Lamb among the old English poets he loved so well. “ ’Tis done: and thou has join’d a crew, / To whom thy soul was justly due; / And yet I think, where’er thou be, / They’ll scarcely love thee more than we.”123 Perhaps Moxon might have used those closing lines as an epitaph. Originally he asked Wordsworth, the author of not just one but three “Essays upon Epitaphs,” for some lines to engrave on Lamb’s tombstone.124 But the poet found it hard to be brief, and his elegy did not seem to suit the occasion. A memorial plaque inside All Saints’ Church, Edmonton, today bears an excerpt from Wordsworth’s poem: “In Memory of | Charles Lamb . . . A Soul by Resignation Sanctified | O, He was Good, if e’er a Good Man Lived!”125 As we have seen, Wordsworth portrays Lamb as resigned to a life of duty because of his sister. But the same sister was still living and would share the same grave. In one of his sonnets, Edward Moxon imagines Mary making the daily trek up Church Street to the Edmonton churchyard, “ere the bark / Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed / A sister’s tears.”126 As in Charles’s favorite ballad, “The Babes in the Wood,” no love between these two was lost—each was to the other kind, till death did end their grief—and both possessed one grave. Eventually, Moxon turned back to Cary for the twelveline epitaph that is now on Lamb’s tombstone and begins, “farewell dear friend, that smile, that harmless mirth / no more shall gladden our domestic hearth.” Many have found these opening lines the only ones worth remembering. “The dreary and tasteless head-stone bears Cary’s feeble lines, affectionate enough, no doubt; but who cares to wade through a deluge of doggerel, to learn that Lamb’s ‘meek and harmless mirth no more shall gladden our domestic hearth’?” demanded Lamb’s American admirer Benjamin Ellis Martin.127 During the years that Mary Lamb survived her brother, she continued to alternate between states of lucidity and what was then called lunacy. From Edmonton, she moved back to London, taking lodgings at 41 Alpha Road by Regent’s Park, where she spent the last six years of her life in the care of a Mrs. Parsons, sister of her former nurse Sarah James. On Christmas Day, 1841, she described her new situation: “What a nice snug place I have got into—in the midst of a pleasant little garden. I have a room for myself and

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my old books on the ground floor, and a little bedroom up two pairs of stairs.”128 According to old “Crabby” (Mary’s affectionate nickname for Henry Crabb Robinson), she felt her brother constantly in her presence and she spoke of him “not in a tone of the least sorrow.” As time passed, friends stopping by to pay their respects would walk off with relics from Elia’s library. “One wants a book and one a picture; it’s very worrying,” she told Robinson three months after Charles died.129 Charles had bequeathed his estate to his sister under the trusteeship of two executors, Thomas Noon Talfourd and Charles Ryle, stipulating that upon Mary’s death the remainder should transfer to Emma Moxon. When Mary Lamb died on May 20, 1847, therefore, Emma inherited whatever books were left in the Lambs’ library. This meant that, legally, Edward Moxon was in charge of them. He went through the old books, tossed the volumes that seemed worthless, and set aside some sixty volumes with writing by Charles Lamb and his friends. Moxon does not seem to have offered the books for sale. “Charles Lamb had a very large circle of friends in this country who were likely to have been bidders for books that seemed so much a portion of his own personality, if they were properly in the market,” a writer in the Athenæum complained: “So far as we have been able to ascertain, it was not known amongst the friends and admirers of the deceased essayist in this country that these treasured companions of his life were for disposal; the earliest announcement of the fact to ourselves, and to any others of whom we have inquired, is a casual notice in a Transatlantic paper.”130 That paper was the Literary World, to which we will turn in the next chapter. As one of the founders of University College, London, Henry Crabb Robinson suggested to Moxon that the association copies from Lamb’s library be deposited in that institution. He thought he had Moxon’s agreement, but Moxon later claimed that “they were not worth their accepting.”131 Moxon was being defensive, though in some sense it was true. British institutions did not treat association copies as rare books, nor did they devote resources to maintaining rare books in special collections.132 Moxon had a lot of dirty books in his possession that even Robinson hesitated to touch. Moxon was a publisher, not a dealer in antiquarian books. William Hall had advised John Russell Bartlett that if a bookseller “thinks of purchasing old books, he must take off his gloves and not be afraid of soiling his fingers. It is very dirty work, and unless old books are examined, he may get some sad bargains.”133 Moxon was also a poet with a taste for the beautiful, and by the time Mary

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Lamb died, he had moved his business from New Bond Street to 44 Dover Street, off Piccadilly, and his store was full of tastefully printed books. But nothing stopped the eccentric bibliomaniac Richard Charles Jackson from claiming that he had purchased relics of Elia’s library at a sale held by Edward Moxon. Jackson printed a bookplate, which he pasted into more than a hundred books, which reads, Relics of Charles Lamb. Purchased at Edward Moxon’s Sale by Francis Jackson, Esq. Citizen, Merchant and Ship Owner, of London, (Offices, Rood Lane, E.C. Admitted Freeman of the Paviour City Company, 14th March 1805.) Red House, Mare Street, Hackney134

In strict point of fact, the City Freedom Archives of London contain no record of a “Francis Jackson, Esq.” to match this description.135 Richard Charles Jackson, who printed this bookplate, claimed to be the grandson of Elia’s “Captain Jackson” (in the essay by that title), and this is presumably the merchant shipper he names “Francis Jackson.” He also claimed that his own middle name (Charles) was derived from the essayist and that the “Charles Lamb Room” of his house in Camberwell Grove contained items formerly owned by the Lambs—among them a bookcase, a bureau, two chairs, a card table, a tea table, a tea caddy, and a collection of prints.136 Given that the bibliomaniacal Jackson stuffed his house with eight thousand books and countless curiosities, it is possible that he did own (whether knowingly or not) one or more relics from his supposed namesake. But those who knew him “were aware that he was inaccurate in matters of fact, believing just what he wanted to believe,” and we can only conclude that he and his collection of relics were as fanciful as Elia’s own Captain Jackson.137 Rather than selling the remains of Lamb’s library at a private sale, Moxon locked them away in a bookcase, and for the next few months thought no more about them.

The Battle of the Booksellers We left John Russell Bartlett minding the store in the Astor House while Charles Welford sailed to London to scout for old books. By October 1843, their literary antiquarian bookstore had moved to No. 7 Astor, an address it would occupy

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for the rest of the decade, and had in stock many “works as are found only in choice libraries or in the possession of scholars,” according to one reporter for the National Intelligencer. “One of the most curious and amusing resorts for a man of taste idle in New York is the Antiquarian Book-Shop of Bartlett & Welford,” he wrote. “Far from being interesting to antiquarians exclusively, the curiosities of this choice shop would amuse the most general reader.” The booksellers themselves, by the time Welford left for London shortly after that, had earned a reputation for being, more than merchants, “courteous bibliopoles . . . happy to gratify the curiosity of visitors.”138 When Welford arrived in London at the end of the year, his first visit in the ten years since he left, things looked different. The great British bibliopolis now seemed to him a “great Babel.” He still had a few acquaintances in town to keep him from “feeling the total isolation and abandonment contingent on the arrival of a stranger in London,” but he felt alienated from the city of his birth. He had come to believe (what he believed everyone must as they grow older) that “all true happiness is bound up with the exercise of the social affections,” and his “heart yearned for those . . . on the other side of the Atlantic.” His pillars of selfhood—parents, wife, daughter, friends— were all in New York, and America was now his home. There, back beneath the London fogs, he reminded himself (in the words of the gloomy yet indomitable Byron) that “these darkened clouds are not the only skies.”139 After four weeks of “painfully groping” his way “through the dusky and fog-obscured streets,” however, he felt he had seen little but gaslight and gloom. “Why did you not warn an inexperienced traveler of their baneful influence?” he teased Evert Duyckinck. The “skyey influences of midwinter” were so confounding and the city so congested that he concluded he had had a better sense of things from abroad. “To obtain a just idea of what is doing in London it is necessary to go to New York. No single person can raise his head sufficiently from the commingling crowd to see what is going on in the spot.”140 He looked forward to returning to New York in the spring. But if Charles Welford was lonely and disconcerted on his first business trip to London for Bartlett & Welford, he at least had enough work to keep him busy. When he returned a couple of years later, in April 1846, he found himself balked in the very work he knew best.141 Henry Stevens, an antiquarian bookdealer from Vermont, had much to do with Welford’s troubles. Stevens’s personality, large as a bear from his own Green Mountains, descended from his father, Henry Stevens, Sr., a collector and dealer in old

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books and manuscripts and the founder (and first president) of the Vermont Historical Society. “He was eccentric in person and speech,” said one who knew the elder Stevens: “He was a farmer, innkeeper, and mill owner; a great reader, with a passion for antiquarian study.”142 As an assemblyman representing the town of Barnet, he had established the state’s Committee on Useless Information and Antiquarian Lore. The younger Stevens recalled the day his father “chanced to light upon a bushel of old Continental and State money, redeemed but never properly cancelled. This he called his ‘Antiquarian Currency,’ and with it bought in his travels through the country vast numbers of old books, papers, tracts, etc.”143 Henry Stevens, Jr., had inherited his father’s business style, which was completely contrary to the muted, deferential manner of English bookmen. Worse for Welford, Stevens had also inherited his father’s nose. Whereas technique in book collecting can be acquired, a nose for a book made rare by age, association, or some other feature is difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate. “It is much easier to tell a fine copy from a poor one than a rare book from a common,” explained the English bibliographer John Carter a century later. “All that is needed for the former is a little experience and a pair of eyes. The latter requires not only much more experience but also a nose, which is a feature denied to many very conscientious and deserving book-collectors.”144 A nose is the sign of an exacting taste, in books as in wine. Stevens followed his nose in his “historical mousings in garrets, among sequestered hen-coops and old barrels,” as he dealt in antiquarian books to pay his way through college, first Middlebury then Yale. “During vacations and holidays I had for five years scouted through the New England and Middle States prospecting in out-of-the-way places for historical nuggets, mousing through public and private libraries and old homestead garrets,” he recalled. “From Maine to Virginia many a disused churn, old cradle, dilapidated hencoop, and empty flour barrel had yielded rich harvests of old papers, musty books and sallow pamphlets.” Having built a network of bookmen—librarians, booksellers, collectors—in the States, he left the Harvard law school “to try the happier hunting-fields of the Old World, its libraries, its archives, its bookstalls and its old homesteads.”145 He arrived in London on July 1, 1845, at age twenty-six, with “a few Yankee notions in head and an ample fortune of nearly forty sovereigns in pocket.” But like the proverbial golden goose, Stevens’s forty sovereigns laid golden eggs. During his first two weeks in the city, he scoured the bookstores

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of the leading antiquarian dealers: Obadiah Rich, Horatio Rodd, Thomas Thorpe, and William Pickering. The old and rare books he found, mainly relating to America, “were scrambled for in Boston and New York like hot buck-wheat cakes at a College breakfast. It was hardly possible to sweep them together fast enough.”146 As his language suggests, Stevens used his backwoods bravado to excel in a competitive marketplace. In playful mockery of aristocratic and academic titles, he signed himself “Henry Stevens, G.M.B.,” for Green Mountain Boy. “It was patriotism as well as custom,” according to biographer Wyman W. Parker, “for this was a favorite phrase of his father.” His younger brother (who bore the patriotic name of Benjamin Franklin Stevens but was called Frank) “was known to remark that these initials really stood for ‘Grubber of Musty Books.’ ”147 Stevens’s major clients at that time were neither in Boston nor New York. One was Peter Force, a printer in Washington, D.C., who had a government subsidy to compile materials (books, tracts, manuscripts) for the Library of Congress. With the support of Congress, he was in the process of printing those materials in nine volumes of his American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers, Debates, and Letters and Other Notices of Publick Affairs, the Whole Forming a Documentary History of the Origin and Progress of the North American Colonies, &c. (1837–1853). Stevens’s other major client was John Carter Brown, who was building the library that is now housed in its own building on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island. But by the time Charles Welford arrived in London, Stevens had also wooed and won the business of the greatest bibliomaniac in the United States, James Lenox of New York. At his Fifth Avenue mansion, Lenox was building the collection that became the basis of the Lenox Library, a monument of Gilded Age New York, which later merged with the Astor Library to become the New York Public Library. Originally, Lenox’s collecting interests ran to biblical literature—not only Bibles, psalm books, and catechisms, but the works of John Milton. According to Stevens, Lenox’s Milton collection surpassed “that of the British Museum and that of the Bodleian put together, rich as those libraries are in Miltons.” His greatest ambition as a collector was to obtain a perfect (or complete) copy of the Gutenberg Bible: an edition of Saint Jerome’s Latin (Vulgate) translation printed by Johannes Gutenberg and his associates in the mid-fifteenth century. It was the first European book produced using the technology of movable type, which transformed the medieval codex (a

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manuscript folded and bound in book form) into the modern form of the printed book. Our protagonist George Livermore owned a fragment of the Gutenberg Bible, but nobody in America owned a perfect copy. In 1847, Stevens located a copy at Sotheby’s and outbid the English antiquary Sir Thomas Phillips for it. He shipped it to New York, where it became “the chief ornament” of Lenox’s collection.148 When Stevens first arrived in London, Lenox was the largest importer of books through the London branch of Wiley & Putnam, the “American Literary Agency” on Paternoster Row. George Palmer Putnam, with the hospitality he was known for, invited Stevens to stay at his home, “Knickerbocker Cottage,” in Mornington Road, itself a hub of the transatlantic world of letters at midcentury. Recognizing Stevens’s skill as a bibliographer with an expertise in the growing field of Americana, he offered him a job locating old books for exportation to the United States so that he could focus on what he did best, meeting with authors and publishing. Stevens turned Lenox’s collecting interests to American history, and within six months, Lenox had asked to deal directly with him, rather than having his books pass through Wiley & Putnam’s store on Broadway. Putnam tried to retain his client (and 10 percent commission), but Lenox insisted that he was not bound to Putnam or anyone else as his exclusive London agent. Stevens began shipping so many books to Lenox that Lenox himself found it hard to keep up and begged the bookdealer to slow down. Stevens was producing lists and buying books as quickly as he could, and by the time Charles Welford arrived, he also had the British government as a client. The American historian Jared Sparks, whom we meet later in this story, had provided Stevens with a letter of introduction to Anthony Panizzi, the head librarian of the British Museum. Panizzi had obtained a grant from the British government to realize his vision for the national book collection: “a public library containing from 600,000 to 700,000 printed volumes, giving the necessary information on all branches of human learning, from all countries, in all languages, properly arranged, substantially and well bound, minutely and fully catalogued, easily accessible and yet safely preserved, capable for some years to come of keeping pace with the increase of human knowledge.”149 Impressed with Stevens’s knowledge of American bibliography, he hired Stevens as a book agent to build the American Collection (then a mere thousand titles) at the usual 10 percent commission. By the spring of 1846, Stevens had compiled a list of six thousand titles (that number

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multiplies once we count volumes) that the British Museum had agreed to buy, and he was hoping to add another four thousand titles by the end of that year. “It strikes me that this is a great undertaking for a boy without any money to come green from Yankee Land and enduce all these Libraries to purchase so largely of our literature & I flatter myself I am doing much for the Yankee by making their books known abroad,” he wrote to his sister.150 When Welford arrived in London with a mere three hundred dollars in his pocket, he found them no match for Stevens’s forty sovereigns. He watched as Stevens spent more to bind a single set of books than he had in his entire budget. In a letter to Peter Force in Washington, John Russell Bartlett apologized for having no books to send him on account of Stevens, “the great monopolist of American books in London.” He complained that Stevens not only bought whatever was to be had but kept “all the respectable dealers from selling to others.”151 Welford may have been a London-bred bookman—a professional and a bibliophile—but Stevens was “a self-appointed missionary, on an antiquarian and historical book-hunting expedition.”152 After a couple of months, Welford had become so “much out of humour, & out of spirits” that he could no longer maintain his congenial demeanor in his communications with Bartlett. “What on earth can I do in a place like London with barely money enough to buy my lodgings?” he demanded on July 3, 1846. For the lack of a few hundred pounds, he was “in a situation that would be ludicrous, if it were not mortifying and degrading.” He had no doubt that he could do much for their business with several shipments of well-selected old books, but he lacked the means. He had spent more uncomfortable hours since arriving in London than he had done in a lifetime. What if one of their clients should encounter him in such a bind? “What possible way could any one take to render our business standing contemptible better than to see me here unable to do any thing, and incapable of paying the £100 which I owe for various books I have bought?”153 It seems that Bartlett and Welford were edging dangerously close to the doom that William C. Hall had predicted. A mere two days after Welford left New York, an arsonist had set fire to the Astor House, and the water used to put out the fire had “greatly injured” their store.154 Their expenses were now beyond their income, and Bartlett had no money to send Welford. “I do not blame you because I know you have done all you can,” Welford wrote in the same rambling letter, “but

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I am angry with myself . . . thinking how miserably I must have misspent my time to be caught in such a predicament under any possible circumstances.”155 It is unlikely that he really did think he had misspent his time. His selfcondemnation reads more as a rhetorical device to recover some gentlemanly dignity in what was, after all, a desperate plea for money. Instead of cash, Bartlett sent Welford a detailed account of their finances. But his letter crossed paths with another by Welford written two weeks after the one just quoted that shows his desperation to have intensified: It appears to me you can not actually realize my situation,—& yet I have been as explicit as I possibly could. You know the amount I brought with me, the various small sums I had to pay, the expense of living in London . . . & yet it seems you fail to scan the heaping inference that I am here without a penny, & only indebted to chance . . . for the means of procuring a dinner. Surely I had a right to expect that you would not have let me be exposed to a position personally so painful—& so degrading in a business point of view even though you had been obliged to admit to some sacrifices to prevent it. You know how sensitive I am in money matters & the idea of owing now what I have promised to pay & cannot is what I never would have laid myself open to. . . . How long do you expect me to live on air? From your last letters I do not see any more prospect than the first, & . . . I try not to think of my real situation here for when I do as when now writing I am so astounded & thunderstruck that it takes away all power of expression.156

When Welford, who checked the mails every day hoping for relief, received Bartlett’s account of sales and expenditures, its effect was precisely the opposite of what Bartlett could have intended. “It would be in vain for me to attempt to tell you how indignant I feel at what I must call the cruel manner in which you suffer me to remain here without a penny in the world,” Welford raged on August 3. “It is nonsense to say you cannot get the money. Bad as the times are I suppose you find means to live yourself, & when I am here at this distance from home . . . it should be your first duty to see that I was provided with the means of doing so. If you say you could not guess my situation I am shocked at the want of consideration which has prevented you from reflecting. . . . What can you expect but that my next letter should be

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dated from the alms house or a Prison.” When Bartlett received this vexed outburst, he turned it over and relieved his injured feelings: “It was unnecessary to inflict on me a second abusive letter. You know perfectly my situation & that it was totally out of my power to remit you money when my liabilities here were actually beyond my receipts.”157 Despite challenges and mutual frustrations, the firm of Bartlett & Welford survived the summer of 1846, and Welford found his way back to New York. On September 1, 1847, he again sailed to London from New York en route through Liverpool.158 When he reached the metropolis this time, his rival Stevens was preparing to sail for New York on business. Over a dozen years had elapsed since Charles Lamb had announced the death of Elia in his preface to The Last Essays of Elia, and since then not only Elia and his cousin Bridget, but the author and his sister had both died. Hazlitt had died. Coleridge had died. Keats, Shelley, and Byron had all died. The former things had passed away, and Edward Moxon was in possession of Lamb’s library. In the four months since Mary Lamb died, he seems to have continued her own habit of giving the old books away to those who best knew how to value them. About a week before Welford sailed from New York, Moxon received a visit from the American publisher James T. Fields, known as “the Moxon of Boston.”159 He was a bibliophile after Lamb’s own heart. “Old favorites were the books he chiefly desired,” wrote his wife Annie Adams Fields, and “Charles Lamb was re-read with undiminished delight.”160 On Monday, August 23, Fields noted in his diary that he had “called on Moxon who talked of Charles Lamb and other friends who had died.”161 Over a lifetime, Fields would visit many of the best private libraries in Britain, but his early encounter with Charles Lamb’s library made a lasting impression. Perhaps the most interesting to me of all the private libraries I have ever seen in England, was the small collection of Charles and Mary Lamb, which Edward Moxon, the publisher, unlocked for me when I was first in England, before the books were dispersed as they never ought to have been. Then and there I lovingly handled his Kit Marlowe, his Drummond of Hawthornden, his Drayton, his Cowley, and his Burton! I remember how Moxon’s whole family stood around that “Life of the Duke of Newcastle by his Duchess,” and told stories of Lamb’s enthusiasm over the book, a volume about which he has written: “No casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable to honor and keep safe such a jewel.”162

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Although Fields would later regret that Lamb’s books were dispersed, his own library profited from their dispersal. Lamb’s editor Edward Verrall Lucas reports that Lamb’s copies of the Elizabethan poets Christopher Marlowe and William Drummond of Hawthornden “passed into the possession of Mr. J. T. Fields,” and Fields himself recorded in his diary that when he met Moxon in 1847, Moxon gave him Lamb’s copy of The Rape of the Lock.163 Lamb had paid only sixpence for Pope ’s satire of the belle and the badly behaved baron, and it was missing several pages. But Lamb had supplied the missing verse “in his own beautiful handwriting,” and as one of the autographomaniacs of this story, Fields would have appreciated the sight of those four pages of autograph writing.164 “Near kin to the Bibliomaniacs,” one American bookman explained in 1869, autographomaniacs “might be called the Radicals of literary antiquarianism. . . . Their ambition is to drink inspiration from original fountains, from the stream of thought in the channel through which it first flowed from the author’s pen.” For sentimental collectors of this sort, Charles Lamb was a treasure—and “nowhere more sweet and quaint than in his notelets.” Amounting to more than their content, such autographs were “little scintillations of the tenderly glowing flame that animated his life.”165 Fields left Moxon’s establishment at 44 Dover Street with the book containing Lamb’s handwriting and headed north to visit Wordsworth at Rydal Mount in the Lake District. “And so,” inquired the poet, “you read Charles Lamb in America?” “Yes,” replied the publisher, “and love him too.” Highly satisfied, the Poet Laureate turned to his wife: “Do you hear that, Mary?” “Yes, William,” she replied, “and no wonder, for he was one to be loved everywhere.”166 To be sure, in America, Lamb was beloved. “In many ways America deserved her good fortune,” Lucas acknowledged in The Life of Charles Lamb, “for American readers discovered Lamb’s genius early, and have always held his memory sacred.”167 More grudgingly, Lamb’s biographer Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald admitted that there was “almost a better appreciation of Lamb in America than in England.” As evidence, he cited the success of Lamb’s two-act farce, Mr. H——, in the United States after it had been hissed offstage in London on December 10, 1806. “Damn ’em how they hissed!” Lamb complained; “it was not a hiss neither but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hiss’d me into madness.”168 Despite his disappointment, “Lamb joined and was probably the loudest

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hisser in the house.”169 Yet, as Fitzgerald wrote, “Lamb’s ‘damned’ farce, found its way to the new country, and has been acted in several American cities, causing the greatest merriment wherever played.”170 An American publisher, Mathew Carey, was the first to see the play into print with Mr. H.; or, Beware a Bad Name: A Farce in Two Acts: As Performed at the Philadelphia Theatre (1813).171 Some scholars have concluded that Lamb was “better suited to American taste than British,” and Edward Moxon seems to have reached the same conclusion.172 After sixteen years in the book business, he had learned the rules of survival, but his fondness for Lamb had not diminished. On the ocean crossing from New York in the spring of 1850, Herman Melville found a volume by Lamb in the ship’s library and “was delighted—as everyone must be with such a rare humorist & excellent hearted man.” He met with Moxon and left a vivid portrait of how the prominent English publisher melted at the very sound of Lamb’s name: I was ushered into one of those jealous, guarded sanctums, in which these London publishers retreat from the vulgar gaze. It was a small, dim, religious looking room—a very chapel to enter. Upon the coldest day you would have taken off your hat in that room, tho’ there were no fire, no occupant, & you a Quaker.—You have heard, I dare say, of that Greenland whaler discovered near the Pole, adrift & silent in a calm, with the frozen form of a man seated at a desk in the cabin before an ink-stand of icy ink. Just so sat Mr. Moxon in that tranced cabin of his. I bowed to the spectre, & received such a glacial return, that I thought something of running out for some officer of the Humane Society, & getting a supply of hot water & blankets to resuscitate this melancholy corpse. But knowing the nature of these foggy English, & that they are not altogether impenetrable, I began a sociable talk, and happening to make mention of Charles Lamb, and alluding to the warmth of feeling with which that charming punster is regarded in America, Mr. Moxon brightened up—grew cordial—hearty;—& going into the heart of the matter—told me that he (Lamb) was the best fellow in the world to “get drunk with” (I use his own words) & that he had many a time put him to bed.

Melville, being “fresh from Lamb,” was sincere in his praise, which disposed Moxon to return his compliments. He inquired after the American novelist

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Richard Henry Dana, Jr., praising his Two Years Before the Mast and telling Melville how much Samuel Rogers, “the old Nestor,” enjoyed his seafaring accounts.173 Dana himself had warmed Moxon by mentioning Lamb’s name in a letter from Boston written in 1842, when Charles Dickens was in town: “Dickens has told us many anecdotes of Lamb, some of which are not yet published, & which interested us very much. You don’t know what a feeling there is here about Lamb.”174 One suspects that it was Moxon’s acquaintance with American authors and bookmen that influenced his decision to allow the association copies from Lamb’s library to be sold in the United States. Although we do not know the exact date when Charles Welford met with Moxon and worked out the deal that scandalized Lamb’s British readers, it was sometime in the autumn of 1847, for Welford left New York on September 2, and the books were in New York by January. In recounting the event, Fitzgerald portrayed Welford as an American swindler: “A ‘sharp’ gentleman of that country talked to him of the idolatry with which Lamb’s memory and writings were regarded in his country, and persuaded the publisher that no greater homage could be paid to that memory than to allow these relics to pass into their custody.”175 But Welford, a born Londoner, was not technically “of that country,” nor was he “sharp” in the sense that Fitzgerald intended—unscrupulous, dishonest, quick to take advantage like those “scoundrel-booksellers” of whom Dickens complained who reprinted books in America without copyright.176 Welford was a bookman among bookmen and a bibliophile who could quote Elia from memory. Moxon was a poet as well as publisher, a man of feeling as well as affairs. We can only assume that they bonded over the books from Lamb’s library. For all anyone can say, it was Moxon who suggested the ten pounds that Henry Crabb Robinson said was paid for the collection.177 Perhaps Moxon went so far as to lend Welford a ten-pound note as a token of the sale. “His behaviour will probably ever remain a mystery,” Lucas concluded. “American money cannot have tempted Moxon, as it tempts or defeats so many English collectors to-day.”178 Moxon’s own biographer Harold Guy Merriam contends that “Moxon’s knowledge of the value of the books and his long friendship with Lamb should have kept him from letting them out of his hands.”179 Moxon defended himself against critics by saying that the books “were worth nothing,” but Thomas Noon Talfourd for one was “displeased . . . and reasonably.” Robinson’s response was denial: “This cannot be true, and if true so much the worse.”180

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As averse to change as Elia, the books from Lamb’s library did not, like the Trojan Aeneas, readily seek new shores. “My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot,” wrote Lamb, “and are not rooted up without blood.”181 Seeing them not only uprooted but transported, Thomas Westwood, who “learned to love literature from Lamb’s shelves,” joined the chorus of dissent: “Oh, pity! Oh, shame! They should have been held in honour and charge by some Londoner who was a London-lover—a haunter of the old streets and of the old book-stalls. There are some libraries the dispersion of which we feel as a positive pain, almost a disgrace—and Lamb’s was of them. His books were his household gods, and he has himself told us that his household gods kept ‘a terrible fixed foot.’ Must he not have shuddered at that cruel disruption?”182 Another British author noted in the Athenæum that some of “Coleridge ’s best criticisms” were between the covers of Lamb’s old books and that the idea of losing them to America must be “painful to every student and scholar,—even if he have no twinge at the thoughts of the well-beloved inmates of Charles and Mary Lamb passing from within the precincts of ‘London with-the-many sins!’ ”183 The phrase he was quoting derives from Lamb’s letter of November 28, 1800, celebrating the pleasures of London, with its “old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on Melancholy, and Religio Medicis.”184 Lamb was a self-styled “Londoner,” and although a straggler or two from his library may have made it back to its native shores, the greater part would never see London, its Londoner, or its bookstalls again.185 Despite their unprepossessing—to some, unsightly—appearance, those books were authentic as literary relics, and news of their arrival on Broadway caused a sensation beyond New York City. “The library of the celebrated Charles Lamb has arrived at New York,” a Philadelphia gazette announced; “It is invaluable, enriched as it is with notes in his own handwriting, as well as his literary friends—many of them celebrated authors.”186 A Boston journalist suggested that “Lamb has many admirers, who, we should think, would wish to possess some memorial of him like those now offered for sale.”187 In nearby Salem, where Nathaniel Hawthorne was just sitting down to write The Scarlet Letter, another New Englander reported the “startling assertion to American—and perchance other—readers of Elia, but yet true . . . the very books of the delightful essayist are on the unhallowed counter of a book dealer in our rough and boisterous Gotham.”188 Even New Yorkers wondered what would become of the books in the back room of Bartlett &

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Welford’s bookstore. “You should have had the tumbling of those books as they lay on Bartlett’s floor,” wrote Evert Augustus Duyckinck to this brother George in Paris; “boys and men and women, for I saw all there, stomping into them.”189 In a now legendary article that appeared in the Literary World six days before the above letter to George, on February 5, 1848, Evert forecast their fates: Gentle Elia, when he dreamed that there was but one city in the world deserving to be called “The Town,” could never have conceived that Bartlett and Welford’s would be thronged by Broadway loungers curiously conning over his cherished volumes. Yet it is even so. These books, which Lamb so loved that they seemed a part of himself, have been plucked from the smoke of London, deracinated from the pavements of Cockneydom, and now they are in the Astor House, all written over in the margin by Coleridge and Southey and Lamb himself. What will their fate be now? Who, amid the ever changing fortunes of American families, will keep the herd together in a library! Their destiny is now most assuredly to travel over the continent. Some to be dog’s-eared in Oregon, some to grow crisp of cover in Labrador, some to be freshly bound in leather from a Californian bullock, some to follow annexation and be shelved in time in the “Society Library” of Mexico.190

This passage, invariably quoted whenever the topic of Charles Lamb’s library has arisen, has caused many to assume that Elia’s books really did travel to Oregon, California, Newfoundland, and Mexico from the Astor House. Yet while some headed west, to bibliophiles in Louisville and Cincinnati, most of them remained initially at least in the eastern book capitals of New York and Boston. Evert examined the books before the sale began, and to him the sight of them together was worth more than the possession of any one of them could have been.191 “There was a mournful interest hanging over them, that has never been equalled by any relics brought to the notice of our literary men,” an American journalist declared.192 In the editor’s column of the Knickerbocker, Lewis Gaylord Clark reveled in the opportunity he had been given by the booksellers in the Astor House: “a personal interview, as it were, with Lamb’s glorious intellectual companions; the ‘god-like spirits of old English literature!’ ”193 As he turned

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the pages, he exulted in reading them “as he read them,” and he copied down, for future reference, Elia’s “underscorings and references to particular passages, and notes upon the same.” Bartlett & Welford emphasized in their Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library that the association copies from Lamb’s library were “precisely in the state in which he possessed and left them,” and they pointed out that since the rest had been dispersed or destroyed, “no other such opportunity can offer to the admirers of C. Lamb.”194 In fact, they were right. For even should some institution decide to curate an exhibition of Lamb’s books, which would require no insubstantial investment to pull them together, the possibility of handling them, unselfconsciously as Lamb had done, has forever vanished with those books.

A Book Auction in Gotham News about the sale of Lamb’s library quickly spread from the eastern book capitals to places like the aforementioned Cincinnati and Louisville, as well as to Richmond, New Orleans, and Little Rock. In the Young Men’s Mercantile Library of Cincinnati, where in 1847 the first Morse telegraph had been installed in the West, our protagonist James T. Annan wired his order to Bartlett & Welford for nearly a third of the books from Charles Lamb’s library. The Mercantile Library, centrally located on Sycamore between Fourth and Fifth Streets, was one of many such independent libraries that had been cropping up across the country to serve the intellectual life of American merchants. They were gathering places for young men focused on getting ahead, not only materially through commerce but through habits of self-culture. The publisher James T. Fields had fostered his love of literature at the Mercantile Library in Boston, where the literary essayist Edwin Percy Whipple recalled meeting him when they were both around eighteen or nineteen years of age and both “inflamed by a passionate love of literature and by a cordial admiration of men of letters.” Fields became the first anniversary poet of the Mercantile Library Association when he stood before a large crowd and read “an original poem which commanded general applause.”195 On the evening of April 18, 1848, in Cincinnati, James T. Annan became the thirteenth anniversary poet of the Mercantile Library Association of Cincinnati, reciting his poem “Woman” to an equally appreciative

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crowd. By then, membership in the society had grown to 1,500 subscribers and its book collection to 8,195 volumes and hundreds of periodicals.196 Not a few of the books in the library had been donated by the bibliomaniacal Annan. A sampling of the titles he donated in 1848 consists mainly of recent publications from Britain and America: Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. Works. Ed. Basil Montagu. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1844. Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist. Philadelphia, 1839. David Hume. Private Correspondence with Several Distinguished Persons, from 1761–1776. London, 1820. Charles Lever. Arthur O’Leary; His Wanderings and Ponderings in Many Lands. London, 1845. Samuel Lover. Legends and Stories of Ireland. Philadelphia, 1846. Samuel Lover. Rory O’More: A National Romance. Philadelphia, 1846. John Stuart Mill. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. New York, 1846. William Mitford. History of Greece, to the Death of Agesilaus. Continued to the Death of Alexander the Great, by R. A. Davenport. 8 vols. London, 1835. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. Of the Origin and Progress of Language. 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1774–1792. J. P. Nichol. Thoughts on Some Important Points Relating to the System of the World. Edinburgh, 1846. Allan Ramsay. The Gentle Shepherd, a Pastoral Comedy; To Which Is Prefixed His Life. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1808. George Sand (Madame Dudevant). Consuelo. 2 vols. Boston, 1846. Friedrich von Schiller. Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and Philosophical Letters. Trans. J. Weiss. Boston, 1845. John Jay Smith. A Summer’s Jaunt Across the Water: Including Visits to England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, etc. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1846.

58 b o o k m e n a c r o s s t h e a t l a n t i c Robert Dundas Thomson. Experimental Researches on the Food of Animals, and the Fattening of Cattle; With Remarks on the Food of Man. New York, 1846. Travers Twiss. The Oregon Territory, Its History and Discovery; Including an Account of the Convention of the Escurial; Also, the Treaties and Negotiations Between the United States and Great Britain for the Settlement of a Boundary Line. New York, 1846.197

Such books as these were available for use in the reading room of the Mercantile Library, whose hours suited the working schedules of its members. The librarian paged books from nine in the morning until ten at night every day but Sunday. Members could page any number of books for use at the mahogany desks in the reading room, but borrowing privileges were limited to one volume (folio, quarto, or octavo) or a set of up to three smaller books (duodecimo) for two weeks. The Mercantile Library was not entirely free, but for an annual fee of three dollars or a lifetime membership of fifty dollars “any young man engaged in mercantile pursuits” could use it. With the approval of the board of directors, any other working-age male could become an honorary member and enjoy the same privileges.198 The evening that James T. Annan read his anniversary poem to the Mercantile Library Association, William Bebb, governor of Ohio, delivered its anniversary address. Revolution was then blazing through Europe, and Bebb claimed that “the admiring gaze of the whole civilized world” was riveted on the United States and its public institutions. He urged that “circulating libraries such as this be established in all our cities, towns and neighborhoods,” as an example of democracy in the world of letters.199 Although Bebb’s speech was subsequently printed, as anniversary lectures and poems usually were, Annan was preparing a volume of poems for publication, and in the week following the event he had revised and expanded his poem.200 The Mercantile Library Association did not print the poem he read, and his poetry collection, if it did materialize, has left no trace. His book collection, on the other hand, left many impressions. As a boy, the bookseller Robert Clarke had spent many evenings in Annan’s private library when his parlors were filled with company, and he would never forget the privilege or the pleasures he had there. “He was a very cultured Englishman,” Clarke said of Annan. “He was a great entertainer and moved in the best intellectual society of this city.” Clarke went on to open an antiquarian bookstore on the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets

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in Cincinnati that specialized in books relating to America. He later established the Robert Clarke Company of “Publishers, Booksellers, Stationers, Importers, Printers & Binders,” as his stationery advertised, with a branch in London.201 Like his friend Annan, he lived “in the midst of a busy world of affairs and of progress . . . the disciple of books.”202 But while Clarke died in his own private library among thousands of books, Annan found that “his [own] tastes were beyond his means.” According to Clarke, the bibliomaniac became “a defaulter to a large amount and shipped out.” The Cincinnati auctioneer Sherman G. Hubbard sold his books on commission for the firm where he worked, and his wife followed him afterward. Little was heard of them until news reached Cincinnati of his death some ten years later.203 Hubbard’s sale (of which Clarke claimed on May 7, 1897, that no records remained) was not the only time that Annan’s books were dispersed. On the back of Bartlett & Welford’s Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library, our protagonist Robert Balmanno noted that, eight months after buying the association copies from Lamb’s library, Annan sold “the whole of his splendid library . . . in New York to enable him to become a partner in the house where he was then a clerk.”204 The same note claimed that Annan had ordered all the books that remained in Elia’s library. This was not true to the letter, for a note from John Russell Bartlett dated February 12, 1848, attests that half a dozen books remained in the collection after Annan placed his order.205 Yet like Elia, Annan does appear to have been a clerk. One business directory from 1846 lists Annan as an accountant on the corner of John and Sixth Streets in Cincinnati, and his own testimony at a copyright-infringement trial in the Ohio Circuit Court establishes that he had been in the same line of work for eleven years before that.206 If James T. Annan’s family name is any indication, moreover, he was a Scot, not an Englishman as Clarke called him. Annan’s library that was sold in New York in 1848 contained over a hundred volumes by Sir Walter Scott and a section on Scottish history and biography. It also stocked the publications of British antiquarian societies like the Camden Society, the Aelfric Society, the Shakespeare Society, and the Percy Society. Although the auctioneers Cooley, Keese & Hill did not name him on the cover of the sale catalogue that included books from Charles Lamb’s library, these were the same books Bartlett & Welford listed him as buying, and the collection has been identified as his.207 On the evening of Saturday, October 21, 1848 (the second night of a two-day sale that began the previous evening), the association copies that

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Annan had purchased from Elia’s library were resold. Reporting on the sale in the Knickerbocker, Harry Vane set the scene: “The mingled throng which is ever hurrying through the great artery of this Babel moves with quickened pace, some in the unceasing pursuit of gain, some to their amusements, some to the embraces of idolized loved ones around cheerful fire-sides, and some to cheerless abodes of poverty and want. Now and then one steps aside from the crowd, and darts up a flight of stairs, to the great sales-room, where every night are knocked down to the highest bidder the rarest as well as crudest and most worthless works of genius and art.”208 That sales room was on the second floor of 191 Broadway, on the corner of Dey Street, where the auctioneers James Ewing Cooley, John Keese & Horatio Hill sold books on consignment. Beneath them were the publishers Leavitt, Trow & Company, who printed the sale catalogue for Annan’s library. The book business was a small world, and Jonathan Leavitt, the senior partner of the publishing firm, was indirectly linked through marriage to James Ewing Cooley, the senior partner of the auctioneers. Leavitt had married Daniel Appleton’s sister and Cooley his daughter Maria Louisa. Leavitt was also the bookdealer who had given George Palmer Putnam, now a major force in the transatlantic book world, his first job at a bookstore on Nassau Street. In 1848 Leavitt’s son George Ayres Leavitt joined the publishing firm, and when George later married James E. Cooley’s daughter, he assumed control of both businesses. Horatio Hill, on the other hand, though he had worked for Appleton, was not related to him or anyone else in the building. For over a decade, he had run the Franklin Bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire, publishing under the imprint Horatio Hill & Company both books and the Patriot and State Gazette, founded by his brother Isaac, the state governor. In New York, he entered the commission business and in 1846 formed a partnership with Cooley and Keese at 157 Broadway, the building where the Literary World was published. All three were major names in the book world, and the result was (as one paper called it) “A Strong Firm.”209 In January 1849, three months after the last remnant of Elia’s library was dispersed, Hill would leave the book business and move to Milwaukee. Although the line “Horatio Hill, auctioneer” preceded the newspaper announcements for Cooley, Keese & Hill, John Keese—wit, auctioneer, littérateur—was the entertainer the crowds came to see. “How much for Bacon,” Keese began the bidding one evening in February 1848. “ ‘A shilling,’ exclaimed a moderate bidder. ‘Oh no,’ responded the auctioneer; here’s too much pork for a shilling.” American book auctions were then a species of theater, and Keese

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was “like Yorick, ‘a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy.’ No book so rare that he cannot tell you something of its contents; no audience so dull that he cannot tickle its fancy and provoke broad grins by timely strokes of humor.” Those auctions took place in the evenings and, like the theaters, attracted mixed crowds: “Pale students with threadbare coats, antiquated book-worms from dingy, sunless chambers, amateurs of rare and curious works, and the millionaire, who comes to purchase only the elegant work of the binder.”210 London book auctions, by contrast, were held in the daytime, mainly for booksellers, “a subdued gathering of quiet men round a dingy green baize table.”211 Rather than a staff member calling out bids from a noisy crowd, the slightly raised finger or nodded head did the trick. Things had changed from the days when book auctions first began in the London coffeehouses and when the successful auctioneer was a born performer like Edward Millington, whose “name soon became a byword for auctioneering.”212 About three months after the Annan sale, our protagonist Joseph Green Cogswell remarked to Evert Duyckinck that “it would surprise a person who has been accustomed to see the crowds which attend our common New York sales, to find how few are present at a London sale.”213 But those few knew how to examine an old book without letting its cover hang perilously from the spine, and how to judge its worth without prompting from the auctioneer. Sale catalogues reflected this differing ideology. British catalogues looked like plain bibliographies (lists of titles, book sizes, number of volumes, and an occasional bibliographical “point” singled out for note), while American auction catalogues were a species of advertising, containing plugs and puffery for readers without the time or knowledge necessary to distinguish one copy of a book from another. Typography was also used for effect. As the cover of Cooley, Keese & Hill’s sale catalogue of Annan’s library indicates, the sentimental appeal of the association copies from Charles Lamb’s library equaled, if it did not surpass, that of more expensive items in the collection. For, standing out in boldface between the general categories of Annan’s collecting interests and Eighteen specific highlights of his collection was the central attraction: “Eighteen Volumes from the Library of Charles Lamb.” Lamb 214 Were it not for their association with Lamb, those same eighteen volumes might have been shown the door before they ever entered the showroom: Books beyond a certain investure of raggedness and dilapidation, backs without covers, mutilated title pages, and missing colophons, on ordinary occasions, command those stimulating fractions of advance,

62 b o o k m e n a c r o s s t h e a t l a n t i c a penny on a share, for instance, which constitute liveliness on the exchange, but beget only yawns and a distaste for his profession in the jolliest of auctioneers. They are the prerequisites of the basket and the street shelf; they shrink into corners of out of the way streets, where they suffer a partial exposure to the weather; they are cheapened from threepence to twopence, and their late destiny is probably to be boiled in soap vats, a fate of which their appearance is strikingly suggestive. They are the ill odor of auction rooms; the fly in the ointment, the flaw in the vase, the stain on the garment of the happiest of all possible professions, as illustrated by the eloquence of a [George Henry] Robins or the wit of a Keese. Over a lot of the shabbiest of all known volumes the last mentioned auctioneer was administering but they were the books of Charles Lamb: a ragged remnant of that library which once adorned (its nakedness more attractive than the gilding of [Charles] Lewis or the tooling of [James] Hayday) the walls of the rooms in the Temple where Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other choice spirits assembled, and where from these very books Elia enforced lagging conviction, on the back of a stammering argument [for indeed Lamb stammered], from divines and poets, wits and philosophers, whose authority was not to be gainsayed . . .215

Even those lacking their bindings (and many an old cover from Elia’s library was detached) kept the audience spellbound on the evening of October 21, when they were auctioned in New York. For while the workmanship of Charles Lewis and James Hayday (elite London bookbinders), greatly increased the value of books they adorned, Lamb’s books had cultural status through their literary associations, and a sagacious book lover like Annan knew how to honor their old bones by leaving them, as Bartlett & Welford had done, in their original dress. The most unusual book from Elia’s library auctioned by Keese on October 21, 1848, was a thick volume of twelve miscellaneous pamphlets. It included first printings of essays by Charles and Mary Lamb. The first was Charles’s “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1813) from The Philanthropist; or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man, a penny periodical published by the bookseller Daniel Isaac Eaton. The other was Mary Lamb’s “On Needle-work” (1814), which appeared in the New British Lady’s Magazine; or, Monthly Mirror of Literature and Fashion, and which, like her brother’s essay, was published

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Cooley, Keese & Hill, Cover of auction sale catalogue, 1848. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

pseudonymously. After the completion of the latter, Henry Crabb Robinson reported that Mary “had undergone great fatigue” and “spoke of her writing as a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt.”216 The volume also contained poetry by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Poems on Several Occasions, 1712); by Edward Young (The Force of Religion; or, Vanquish’d Love. Founded upon the Story of Lady Jane Gray, 1714); and by Anne Finch (Poems on Several Occasions, 1714). The seven dramatic works it included are all relatively obscure. Ambrose Philips’s The Briton (1722), a tragedy set in pre-Roman Britain, has characters (Vanoc, Ebranc, Idwall) that few will recognize, while the title of Henry Carey’s Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy, That Ever Was Tragedized by Any Company of Tragedians (1753) can hardly be pronounced. And to appreciate Thomas Southerne’s The Spartan Dame (1719), a Spartan spirit must be summoned to the task.217

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Yet there was one buried treasure in the volume: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions, Painted by William Blake, in Water Colours, Being the Ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored: And Drawings, for Public Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract (1809). The catalogue was a relic of Blake ’s one and only solo art exhibition, which yielded no sales beyond the catalogue included with the price of admission (two shillings and sixpence). Henry Crabb Robinson, who admired Blake, visited the show and took away four copies of the catalogue, intending to give one to Charles Lamb. His gifts stimulated others including Lamb, Robert Southey, and probably Robert Hunt to see the exhibit.218 In a review in The Examiner, Hunt dismissed the seven watercolor and nine tempera paintings included in the exhibit as “the ebullitions of a distempered brain” and the artist as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.”219 Lamb himself had enough of the madman in him to appreciate Blake’s genius. Although there is no evidence that he met Blake in person, he says explicitly in a letter to Bernard Barton that he saw Blake’s paintings: “He paints in water colours marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They have great merit. . . . I have seen his paintings.” He considered him “one of the most extraordinary persons of the age” and called his commentary on The Canterbury Tales “a most spirited criticism . . . mystical and full of Vision.” Blake’s comments on Chaucer’s poem formed part of his description of a painting, Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury, which no longer exists but which Blake engraved the next year, so its design has come down to us. For Blake it was the centerpiece of the show. He believed that the artist Thomas Stothard, who had seen his sketch for the painting, copied it in an oil painting commissioned by the publisher Robert Cromek and executed in the style of the Royal Academy. Cromek had charged a shilling to see Stothard’s The Pilgrimage to Canterbury (1806–1807), and Blake’s exhibition was intended to expose the theft. To Stothard’s more painterly version, Lamb preferred Blake ’s, calling it “hard, dry, yet with grace.”220 On the evening of October 21, the centerpiece of John Keese’s show was Lamb’s own copy of Chaucer, The Works of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet, a folio printed by Thomas Speght in 1598. Speght’s edition contained the first biography of the author in English and a glossary of the obscure and antiquarian words that would have appealed to Elia. It was the

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only book from Lamb’s library printed in the old, gothic typeface that he found so “painful to read,” for as he confessed to the English author William Harrison Ainsworth, he was “not Bibliomanist enough to like Blackletter.”221 Still, he made an exception for the father of English poetry. “That copy of Chaucer in black letter was no ordinary copy,” pronounced Evert Duyckinck in the Literary World: Lamb had eyed it afar off, shedding its luminous rays of the spirit out of the reek and dinginess of a London stall. . . . He had passed and repassed it on his daily walks, his conscience growing every day more tender over its “unhoused” condition. He felt for it as he would feel for mendacity. He could bear those pangs no longer. The three and sixpence which lurked in reluctant pockets must come forth, and the black letter victim of age and destitution be borne to the warm shelves of the Temple, its constitution hardened by the fumigation of tobacco, its dry worm-eaten leaves moistened with ale as a libation, or honored with the ascending incense of the punch bowl and the kettle.222

When the bidding for the old book began, the room fell into a hush. “How much, gentlemen, am I bid for this fine old copy of Chaucer?” Keese demanded—“How much? The ghost of Elia would forever haunt me if I should start it at less than ten—twelve I am bid: go on, gentlemen—thirteen, eighteen—twenty dollars! Thank you, Sir—twenty-two! just a g-o-n— three, twenty-three!—twenty-four!—going for—twenty-five—gone for twenty-five dollars.”223 His decisive hammer thus knocked down the book, and it did not stop until the last volume from Elia’s library had been sold. At that point, the library ceased to be a library and became instead a scattered collection of old plays and pamphlets, mutilated folios and rudely cropped quartos, miscellaneous and improvised volumes, all bearing the autograph writing that constituted their real value. As the English bibliographer Holbrook Jackson once put it, “It may be said of books more surely than of men that adversity doth acquaint them with strange bedfellows,” and indeed Elia’s old books were left to find what company they could in the New World.224 Some banded together in small groups, while others rambled off in Elian “double singleness.” Others were adopted as only children and doted on as such. Still others, like the orphaned Babes in the Wood in the ballad Lamb loved so well, went wandering up and down until they were lost.

2.  The Literary World Publishers, Editors, Journalists Lamb’s library was a literary hospital for all stages of book decrepitude—yet there was virtue in the least of those old books— since, as I actually heard a grocer remark on his first sight of them, “Elia has actually had this book in his hands!” —Evert Augustus Duyckinck

In New York in the 1840s, books and printed matter were everywhere. Up and down Broadway, boxes of used books cluttered the sidewalks. Newsstands stocked papers, literary journals, and magazines, while street vendors hawked the latest serialized novels by Dickens: “He-e-ere’s the New World— Dick’s new work. Here ’s the New World—buy Master Humphrey, sir?”1 From storefront windows, new books appealed to pedestrians with siren songs of entertainment and instruction at bargain prices, while literary annuals, gift books, and illustrated editions catered to an expanding American readership. New steam-powered rotary printing technology invented in New York in the mid-1840s revolutionized the print industry, rolling out thousands of pages per hour, while other innovations, such as stereotype printing, enabled a boom in cheap reading matter. By 1851, George Palmer Putnam had begun stocking bookstalls at railway depots with paperback “Railway Classics,” light and entertaining reading for busy persons in transit.2 Mass-produced paper, machine made from wood pulp rather than handmade from cotton, also stimulated growing networks of transcontinental and transatlantic correspondence. “This vile thin paper is my abhorrence,” complained Evert to George Duyckinck. “It is characteristic of the age. Would Milton have written on it? The aqua fortis of his Eikonoclastes would have gone through a quire of it. Charles Lamb never could have used 66

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it.”3 Stationers supplied a range of plain and “fancy” paper, as well as notebooks, pens, ink stands, pearl and ivory pencil cases, drawing pads, embossed cards, and other things, while down in the book district steam whistles summoned typesetters to work, printers inked steel and copper plates, engravers etched artwork for reproduction, and binders transformed plain cardboard covers into the leather bindings with gilt-lettered spines that graced the shelves of private libraries. From New York to California, telegraph and railway lines branched across the American continent, and steamships began crossing the Atlantic in loops of increasing frequency. On April 3, 1838, the first transatlantic steamship had pulled into the New York Harbor. George Templeton Strong, a protagonist of this chapter, was in the crowd that gathered to watch. “Hurrah for the Advance of Mind!” he thought.4 Technology was pulling the Old and New Worlds closer together, while at the same time a new generation of American literary professionals (publishers, editors, journalists) struggled to take their place in the transatlantic world of letters. In his landmark study of antebellum American literary culture, Perry Miller observed that New Yorkers “admired Hazlitt as an essayist (ignoring his radicalism), loved Leigh Hunt, worshiped De Quincey, and idolatrously adored Charles Lamb. This was the literature they wanted to reproduce in America, this cockney wit, this elegance.”5 Evert Duyckinck, in his Library of Choice Reading published by Wiley & Putnam in the 1840s, reproduced those same authors, adapting Elia’s words as a motto for the series: “Books that are Books.” Far from the tautology for which it has been mistaken, the phrase derives from Elia’s biblia a-biblia (books that are no books) in the common run of reading matter.6 The literary professionals of this chapter shared a desire to publish, edit, review, and publicize more than things in books’ clothing: books that really were—or were worthy to be called—books.

Books That Are Books The sons of Evert Duyckinck, Sr., one of the first bookseller-publishers in New York and by the time he retired the oldest, believed that criticism went hand in hand with authorship and that the advancement of literature depended on a longer literary tradition. “Time selects his favorites on different principles from modern booksellers,” Evert Duyckinck wrote the year Elia’s library was sold in New York. “The latter affect plausibility

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and easy reading. Time keeps his books as he does his oak trees for their knotty strength. The company is a great deal better at these old tables than at the new ones. The shallow evils have been intoxicated long since and carried out; only the good heads and strong brains keep the ground.”7 The attitude can be traced back to the European Enlightenment, when critics and philosophers worked to forge a standard of literary taste based on a vernacular literary canon. Just as the ancient classics had emerged from the “Dark Ages” to take on new life in the form of early printed books, the modern classics, many believed, would emerge from a body of literature that had been well sifted. By the nineteenth century, readers were feeling lost in a sea of print, and though this feeling was not entirely new, it was exacerbated by new print technologies and cheap reprints flooding the literary marketplace. “There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste of time and eyesight,” complained the bibliophile William Carew Hazlitt in his study of book collecting. Tweaking a phrase from Ecclesiastes (“of making many books there is no end”) that was frequently quoted in bibliographical writings, he spoke for many when he wrote, “Of printed matter in bookshape there is no end.”8 Literary essayists on both sides of the Atlantic— reviewers, journalists, men of letters—offered themselves as guides through this sea of print, and the Duyckinck brothers, Evert and George, in New York City were among them. Evert’s Library of Choice Reading, like many “choice” private libraries at midcentury, recognized the principle of choice or discrimination as the key element of literary taste. In an advertising flyer announcing the Library of Choice Reading on March 1, 1845, Evert explained the logic for the series, claiming that the “so-called ‘Cheap Literature,’ while it has failed to supply good and sound reading, and has been attended with many publishing defects, has in some degree prepared the way for the new demand. It has shown the extent of the reading public in the country, and the policy of supplying that public with books at low prices.”9 The Library of Choice Reading was intended to meet that demand with reprints of well-chosen books, while its companion series, the “Library of American Books,” was designed to publish choice works by American authors—Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Margaret Fuller (and, had Evert had his way, Emerson). Together these two book

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series constituted what the historian Ezra Greenspan has called “the central event in American literary publishing, the most ambitious attempt to date to circulate high-quality, contemporary works among the American reading public.”10 While Evert copyrighted unpublished works by up-and-coming American authors for his Library of American Books, he worked out “Courtesy of the Trade” agreements, which served as de facto copyright contracts, with British publishers like Edward Moxon for his Library of Choice Reading.11 Despite the practices of many American publishers, both he and his brother believed in the importance of respecting intellectual copyright. At the Duyckinck family home at 20 Clinton Place (now Eighth Street from Sixth Avenue to the Bowery), Evert and his fellow literary essayist Cornelius Mathews (with whom Evert edited the journal Arcturus) held meetings of the “American Copyright Club.”12 As George put it (quoting Mathews), “if good copyrights are not to be had it is best not to begin.”13 In this respect they differed from other participants in what the literary historian Meredith McGill calls the American “Culture of Reprinting.”14 This period, as she defines it, lasted from 1834 to 1853—or, in terms of our story, from the year Charles Lamb died to the year Evert published Coleridge’s marginalia on Lamb’s books in the Literary World. The Library of Choice Reading promoted the Elian idea that “Books that are Books” were more than commodities to be consumed and tossed aside. “How wide the field of learning,” Evert reflected on February 4, 1848, with a book from Elia’s library in hand; “so wide that we fall back in despair and content ourselves, the heart of wisdom, with cultivating the faculty of thinking—which is after all worth more than all the accumulations of knowledge.”15 Like Elia, he preferred books that stimulated thought to those that sought to divert or entertain, dismissing the countless volumes of useful information that took up space on library shelves from the literary field entirely. Elia confesses that “it moves my spleen to see these things in books’ clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants.” He was alluding to the apostle Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus of Nazareth warns, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”16 Of course, the book buyer need beware not only of sheepskin, but of goat-, pig-, and calf-.

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In the 1830s and 1840s, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was active in Britain publishing its Library of Useful Knowledge (1827– 1846), and the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, established in Boston in 1829, followed suit with its American Library of Useful Knowledge. Although Lamb’s essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822), which defined the category of biblia a-biblia, preceded those societies, Elia would have placed their volumes of “Useful Knowledge” within it. Holbrook Jackson explains that this genre of “volumes got up to look like books, but which come, properly speaking, in the category of tools,” included not only encyclopedias but “school books, technical books, primers, theological books, treatises, glossaries, concordances, and gazetteers.” Adding that “Charles Lamb called such books biblia a-biblia,” he claimed that such volumes differed little from “picks or plough-shares” as forms of instrumental knowledge.17 Elia’s own list of biblia a-biblia included stationers’ items such as “Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back,” as well as soon-to-be-outdated “Court Calendars . . . Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large.”18 Such things in books’ clothing fitted out the shelves of many a private library, but they were not what Elia would deign to call books. One might argue that Elia’s distaste for double columns and cheap reprints of his favorite authors had less to do with an elite snobbishness tied to social status than with an instinctive recoil from the industrialization of the world of letters and the ideology of practical utility associated with his moment of emergent modernity. Many working men of letters, who faced double columns all day long in account books and company ledgers, followed him in cherishing books as more than anonymous commodities. One of our protagonists, Charles Astor Bristed, who as an heir to the Astor fortune had escaped the working men’s constraints, nonetheless shared their scorn for the pretensions of those who acquired “a large amount of general information and much learning, of the ‘Society-for-the-Diffusion-ofUseful-Knowledge’ sort.”19 Leigh Hunt also expressed an aversion to the intrusions of usefulness into the book world. In his essay “Bookbinding and Heliodorus” he looked down on “cold, plain, calf, school binding,—a thing which we hate for its insipidity and formality, and for its attempting to do the business as cheaply and usefully as possible.” For Hunt, as for Lamb, the real enemy was not the old coverless quarto any more than the richly bound folio; it was the

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preponderance of fact-bound volumes targeted to the consumers of the information age. “Bind we would, if we could,” Hunt confessed, “there is no doubt of that. We should have liked to challenge the majesty of Hungary [that is, “Mathias Corvinus, king of Hungary and Bohemia, son of the great Huniades, and binder of books in vellum and gold”] to a bout at bookbinding, and seen which would have ordered the most ravishing legatura.”20 Lamb himself envied the bindings lavished on commonplace containers of Useful Knowledge, “blockheaded Encyclopædias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably reclothe my shivering folios . . . I never see these imposters, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.”21 Hunt left an account of Lamb’s library in his essay “My Books,” which shows it to be as miscellaneous a genre as the literary essay for which both were known: “a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls;— now a Chaucer at nine and two-pence; now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings; now a Jeremy Taylor; a Spinoza; an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney. . . . Even the ‘high fantastical’ Duchess of Newcastle, with her laurel on her head, is received with grave honours, and not the less for declining to trouble herself with the constitutions of her maids.”22 Hunt’s remark about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ignoring the bodily complaints of her maids while focused on higher things was a playful nod to Lamb’s relationship with his own maid Becky, whom we have seen arrive in Enfield, not with her laurel but with her cap on her head and a cart of old books behind her. Forever frustrated in her attempts to inject some common sense into the unconventional household, she must have been surprised when, instead of defending those books as they toppled out of the cart, he blessed her for having a head free of “such rubbish.”23 Two decades later, Evert Duyckinck entered the store of Bartlett & Welford and found what did look to him like rubbish. “The appearance of them was shocking,” he wrote to George of Lamb’s books, “so bad that a genius for getting together the worst possible bound bad copies was involved in the collection. They were so positively wretched that they really became fascinating in that very account—as your halfway beggars are despised by every body, while your thoroughgoing pestiferous, rag and filth accumulation sits to Murillo and the Masters.”24 Evert was comparing those beggarly

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books to the beggars he had seen painted by the Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo on the walls of the Louvre. “Beggars, indeed, they were to look at,” he called Elia’s precious volumes, “brown, stained, ragged, brokenbacked hulking folios, dragging their covers, shabby odd volumes in single misery, a Falstaff company of books—but there were princes in disguise among them.”25 Indeed, the names Shakespeare gave Sir John Falstaff ’s tattered military recruits in the second part of Henry IV—from “Mouldy” to the diseased “Bullcalf ”—would have served equally well for Lamb’s “ragged regiment” of old books.26 Yet, as in the case of the king’s son Prince Hal, who goes disguised as a servant, there was much of value beneath the blemished calfskin. The Duyckinck family library already contained copies of most of the books from Lamb’s library, and Evert felt that obtaining duplicates just because they had once belonged to the essayist was contrary to the spirit of Elia. “It is acting much more in Lamb’s spirit to get books as he did from the stalls for the good matter within than to pay an extravagant price for his copies & thereby mutilate some of the justices and charities which he practiced,” he wrote to George in Paris, explaining that he let the “ ‘books’ go by to more wealthy or careless purchasers.”27 Whether he put “books” in quotation marks because they really were books—by Lamb’s standard, biblia plain and simple— or because they were in such poor condition that they were not readily identifiable as such, we cannot say. “In old times I would have been tempted, Bartlett & Welford’s hundred percent profit to the contrary notwithstanding,” he explained, but “my book buying days are over. I shall make amends by reading over the old and annotating—filling margins and note books.”28 He would not buy books at inflated prices solely for their name-dropping power. By the time of Evert’s death, the Duyckinck family library would have grown to major bibliomaniacal proportions, with upward of fifteen thousand volumes of English and American literature, a number few elite private libraries in America could boast, but one thing the association copies from Lamb’s library had that the same books from the Duyckinck family library did not have was the autograph marginalia by Lamb and his friends.29 “The least touch of Lamb’s fingers,” Evert observed, “a mere marking of the pencil or one illustrative parallel quotation seemed to carry with it other portions of his genius. Few words from him or Coleridge are as good as other men’s books.” With the permission of the clerks at the bookstore, he brought his own copies of the titles in Charles Lamb’s library to Bartlett &

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Welford’s and copied the marginalia Elia’s books contained. For the longer passages, he used notebooks. Yet for all his sophisticated distaste for the sorry condition of Lamb’s books, he was no less carried away by the sight of them than the wide-eyed grocer whom he heard in the bookstore exclaim, “Elia has actually had this book in his hands!”30 Opening one orphaned volume, he found “much ado about nothing” in Charles Lamb’s handwriting, a note referring the reader to an illustration that the same hand had stripped out of the book.31 Most book collectors “will recoil with horror” (as the bibliographer Claude A. Prance puts it) at Mary Lamb’s account of how, one day in 1814, her brother decided to cover the back wall of a room in the Inner Temple Lane with pictures from his books.32 “He cut out every print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask my leave to strip a fresh poor author—which he might not do, you know, without my permission, as I am elder sister. There was such pasting, such consultation where their portraits, and where the series of pictures from Ovid, Milton, and Shakespear would show to most advantage, and in what obscure corner authors of humbler note might be allowed to tell their stories.” The space reserved for “a delicious set of four-and-twenty prints” from Orlando Furioso, however, had to go without the characters of Ariosto’s romance. “All the books gave up their stores but one,” Mary relates, for “when lo! we found at the moment the scissars were going to work that a part of the poem was printed at the back of every picture. What a cruel disappointment!”33 Evert Duyckinck had been preoccupied with his Library of Choice Reading, but now, “baiting gloriously among the old authors,” he found that after the lapse of a half-dozen years since he had opened many of them, they again struck him as new. “You can hardly go amiss in anything bearing the date 17th century,” he advised George.34 Reading Lamb’s books under his guiding hand, moreover, he gained an appreciation for an author he had not expected to admire: the essayist, philosopher, and poet Margaret Cavendish. He had done “the good lady the injustice to think she might have been merely a pet author” of Elia’s; now he found her writings “weighty and pregnant with good thought.” Although he passed up the chance to buy any of Lamb’s three old folios of her work, he urged his brother to keep an eye out for similar books in Europe, noting that there was “enough in her to make the purchase of her books, if you can pick them up at stall prices, something of a conquest.”35 Unlike many other female writers, who published anonymously, the Duchess of Newcastle announced her name on the title page of her works.

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The first edition of The World’s Olio (1655) referred to “the Right Honorable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle,” while the second edition (Lamb’s copy of 1671) called her “the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and most Excellent Princess, the Duchess of Newcastle.” In his essay “The Two Races of Men,” Elia borrows this language to complain of the dramatist James Kenney, who borrowed his copy of Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664) and carried it off to France. “What moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle?”36 Lamb visited Kenney in Versailles two years later, retrieving his old folio and meeting his new namesake, Charles Lamb Kenney. Wayward, this book borrower perhaps, but not spiteful. In New York that folio found its way from the store of Bartlett & Welford into the library of Prosper Montgomery Wetmore. A merchant by profession, Wetmore like other working men of letters had literary ambitions. Edgar Allan Poe ranked him among “The Literati of New York City” in an essay by that title in 1846. Wetmore ’s Lexington, with Other Fugitive Poems appeared the same year as Lamb’s Album Verses, though Wetmore’s book fared better in meeting “a very cordial reception from the press.” Poe attributed the success of the volume less to literary genius than to “the personal popularity of the man, to his facility in making acquaintances and his tact in converting them into unwavering friends.”37 The Duyckinck brothers paint a similar picture of Wetmore in their Cyclopædia of American Literature, as a man of letters “more generally known as a man of literary influence in society than as an author.”38 The folio Wetmore purchased from Elia’s library contained “The Life of the Duke of Newcastle,” a memoir by the duchess to which Elia refers to make the case that certain books deserve the magnificence of fine binding: “such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess—no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable to honor and keep safe such a jewel.”39 Lamb’s copy of Cavendish’s World’s Olio likewise remained in New York after a brief stay in the Astor House. The “Conant” listed as its purchaser was probably Thomas Jefferson Conant, a biblical scholar and professor at the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, a college with a literary society at whose meetings Wetmore and others read their work. Also, like his friend John Russell Bartlett, Conant was interested in antiquarian subjects and philology. In 1847 Daniel Appleton published

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Conant’s Defence of the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, an attempt to vindicate the Hebraist Wilhelm Gesenius from criticism by the American biblical scholar Moses B. Stuart. “How could a man who had any knowledge of the original or of the subject say,—the Aramaean commences about the time of [the Christian martyr] Cyricus; and, the Arabic branch begins its development after the Christian era!” exploded Conant.40 How, indeed? In the face of such outrage, one can only conclude that the idea is preposterous. Conant translated the Hebrew texts of Genesis, Job, Proverbs, and Psalms, although his real ambition, according to the Duyckinck brothers, was to produce a complete English translation of the Bible to supersede all others.41 From this we might conclude that Conant was as “fantastical” as Lamb considered the duchess, “the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain’d, generous Margaret Newcastle.”42 Before Lamb’s copy of The World’s Olio left the Astor House, Evert Duyckinck copied some passages that Lamb had marked. Cavendish’s text was an essayistic miscellany. Like Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon before her, she gave her essays titles in the style of commonplace-book headings: “Of Riches and Beautie,” “Of Behaviour,” “Of Feasting,” “Of Moderation,” “Of Boldness and Bashfulness,” and so forth. It was common practice to compile extracts in commonplace books by subject, and in one of Evert Duyckinck’s commonplace books we find the following extracts from Lamb’s copy of The World’s Olio on subjects like study, fame, spite, and gallantry: The reason why study seems difficult at first, and easier and clearer afterwards, is, that the Imagination hath not beaten out a pathway of understanding in the head; which when it hath, the thoughts seem new and right, without the pains of deep study, for when the way is made they need not search long to find out what they reach for: for the Brakes and Rubbish of Ignorance that obstructed the thoughts are trodden into firm and hard ground in the way of knowledge. The desire of Fame proceeds from a doubt of an after-being. Spight creeps like a snake out of the bank of base thoughts, to sting the name of good fame. For a gallant man will never strive for the breeches with his wife, but present her with the whole suit, Doublet, Breeches and Cloak and all the appurtenances and leave himself only his sword to protect her.

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Cavendish believed that what went by the name of romantic love was merely a result of physiological humors, courtly gallantries, or character similarities — all mutable factors in a relationship. The only unalterable love, she believed, was between oneself and God. But Evert, who had been married eight years, was still a romantic. Beside her claim that “All we call love is friendship,” he noted, “Love and Friendship differ, in my opinion, as essentially as combinations from correspondence, as the two characters of the heart from the two eyes.”43 The third folio by the duchess in Elia’s library had farther to go than Brooklyn. Its title was as playful as it was informative: Nature’s Pictures, Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life: In This Volume There Are Several Feigned Stories of Natural Descriptions, as Comical, Tragical, and Tragi-comical, Poetical, Romancical, Philosophical, and Historical, Both in Prose and Verse, Some All Verse, Some All Prose, Some Mixt . . . and a True Story at the End, Wherein There Is No Feigning (1656). Lamb would have appreciated this parody of critical jargon and generic crossbreeding that one finds also in Shakespeare. The working-class actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream present a tragedy in the form of a comedy, and when Polonius introduces a troupe of traveling actors to Hamlet, he boasts that they are “the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.”44 The title page of Nature’s Pictures refers to the author as the “thricenoble, illustrious, and excellent princess, the lady Marchioness of Newcastle,” and it may be hard to imagine such a dignity navigating the shallows, rapids, snags, and sawyers of the Ohio River on her way to Louisville, Kentucky. Yet that is exactly where she was destined when Benjamin Casseday, one of this story’s midnight historians, purchased the book. By day, Casseday worked at his father’s chinaware shop in Louisville, but after hours he pursued the research that resulted in the work for which he is remembered, The History of Louisville, from Its Earliest Settlement till the Year 1852. Quoting The Merchant of Venice in his preface, Casseday regretted the lack of a place for working men of letters to mingle in Louisville: “We have no mercantile clubs—no Exchange, no place ‘where merchants most do congregate.’ ”45 When he later moved to Cincinnati, which did have a Mercantile Library Association, he took his library with him. Besides Nature’s Pictures, Casseday’s library contained the ninth and last volume of a 1724 edition of The Spectator, formerly belonging to Elia.

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Lamb once confessed to Coleridge that, apart from Addison’s “exquisite humour,” he preferred Abraham Cowley’s essays (more rambling and rough around the edges) “to the courtly elegance and ease of Addison.”46 Yet in America, Lamb was seen as Addison’s successor. In the Knickerbocker, Lewis Gaylord Clark called him “the last of those sweet and gentle essayists who kept the spirit of the Addisonian age, and shed it abroad in every effort they made.”47 Casseday took Lamb’s books with him to Cincinnati, where he “struggled with poverty and died with softening of the brain.” A friend from Louisville reported that “during his long illness his wife, who had no knowledge of the value of books and no sympathy with those who love books, sold his library one or two volumes at a time as she needed a few cents. Nearly all the books went in this way.”48 Thus in the end did Lamb’s favorite, “Madge Newcastle,” disappear in the Midwest.49 While Evert Duyckinck was examining Charles Lamb’s books in the Astor House, his brother George was putting the gentlemanly cap on his education in Paris. He had graduated from the University of the City of New York (now New York University) on July 1, 1846, around the same time as our protagonist Charles Eliot Norton graduated from Harvard College. He sailed for Europe, where he remained for more than two years, a longer tour than Evert had made after graduating from Columbia College eleven years earlier—and longer, too, than Evert would have liked.50 George ’s “organization, both bodily and mental, was of that delicate and sensitive order which finds nothing congenial in the conflicts and sharp issues of the busy world.”51 He was a bookish young man in frail health, and Evert urged him while in Paris to step away from his books occasionally—to venture out and enjoy the cathedrals, the Old Master paintings, and the musicians on the boulevards. George might hire a horse and take riding lessons or else take to his feet and explore the city from high to “low life.” Astronomy, a fashionable subject, was not without interest; perhaps he might get his hands on a first-rate European telescope and examine the heavens. The Collège de France also held public lectures—the kind of “living communication with knowledge of which books are but the dead letter.”52 Given George ’s tendency to recluse himself from worldly activity and strife, it is ironic that he, of all people, should find himself in Paris in a time of revolution. The February Revolution of 1848 began only a few days after Evert’s letter encouraging him to mix more in the world arrived. The elder Duyckinck brother would have relished being “on the spot tingling all over

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with revolutionary imaginations, roused by authentic cannons which echo the rounds of ’89,” when the storming of the Bastille began the French Revolution. But while George recognized the momentous nature of the events taking place around him, and the unique chance they presented to see history in the making, he would rather have been in New York working “quietly alongside” his brother.53 Yet, as Evert informed him, New York was itself buzzing with news of revolution. Everyone seemed to think it “a fine thing,” some calling it “glorious.” Walking down Broadway, he even “heard one rather quiet man say he could give a thousand dollars to have been there.”54 Like many book lovers, Evert had a knack for seeing the world through books. A week before he described the American response to the February Revolution in his letter to George, Herman Melville had given him some chapters from Moby-Dick to read. The story in the manuscript captured his imagination, and in a letter to George of March 24, 1848, he wrote, “That great whale the French Revolution, tumbled ashore upon the American continent by the last steamer has been daily visited, wondered at and admired, [and] decidedly pronounced a fish by everybody though opinions vary upon its magnitude from a minnow up to a Triton.”55 In 1846, Wiley & Putnam had reprinted Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, and the following year Harper & Brothers published Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. But Evert predicted that Moby-Dick, “in the poetry and wildness of the thing,” would surpass both.56 Melville thought so too, and in his letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., describing his visit to Edward Moxon a year before it was published he called it “a strange sort of a book . . . ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.”57 Melville was not the only literary figure on Evert’s mind at the time. Two months later, he wrote to George, “Lamb says no young man before thirty has any feeling that he is mortal—after thirty he counts the sands. It is true. No wonder reforms are mostly effected by young men and that the old are conservative. The latter cannot afford the loss of time, the cost of a revolution.”58 Evert was thirty-one, his brother twenty-four. Yet George, the younger brother, fled Paris for London soon after the revolution commenced. Before that happened, Evert sent him a copy of Bartlett & Welford’s Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library. Although he usually sent his letters to George through the packet steamers, he sent the catalogue by way of Edmund Trowbridge Dana, Jr., a brother of the novelist, who was on his

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way to the University of Heidelberg to study law. The poet Richard Henry Dana, Sr., father of Edmund Trowbridge, Jr., and Richard Henry, Jr., had given Edmund a letter of introduction to Evert Duyckinck in New York, and Evert referred him to George in Paris, saying, “I know too you will be glad of an interchange of sympathies with the son of one whom we always held in reverence.”59 In the catalogue Edmund delivered to George, Evert had marked titles that were still available, regretting that “except a couple of stragglers,” most had been sold. The rest were also quickly disappearing “at Bartlett’s at such prices as he may choose to ask,” though Evert asked George not to mention this to Charles Welford, also in Paris in mid-February, lest the bibliographer who had acquired the books become “unhappy in the fear his more merciful partner should not charge enough.”60 Reading the list of titles, George was put in mind of Aesop’s fable, “The Old Woman and the Wine Jar.”61 When Aesop’s old woman stumbles upon an empty wine jug by the side of the road, she picks it up, shifts it back and forth to raise the bouquet, and thinks how excellent the wine must have been to leave such a sweet fragrance. Reviewers tended to describe Lamb’s writing in the same way. In 1838, a writer for the North American Review spoke of a “quality, a flavor, with which all his thoughts and images are impregnated. It is the concentrated fragrance of a thousand scattered perfumes.”62 In his biography of Charles Lamb, Alfred Ainger claimed that Lamb’s name itself had “a perfume in the mention,” one that would “retain its fragrance as long as the best spice that ever was expended upon one of the Pharaohs.”63 “How that name smacks!” Lamb once wrote, and seeing Lamb’s collection of old plays in Bartlett & Welford’s catalogue, George Duyckinck reacted just as viscerally: “There was a smack about their very titles.”64 Like Elia, George was drawn to the eccentric learnedness and antiquated prose style of “the older and more recondite branches of English literature.”65 Evert recommended that he consider one of the two prose works by the Cambridge philosopher Henry More. Lamb had signed one of them, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1712), on its front flyleaf and added his address: “Mr. Lamb, 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden, corner of Bow Street.”66 The London police began in the form of the Bow Street Runners, and Lamb may have appreciated the contrast between his address in the rough-and-tumble theater district and the sober theological contents of the book. The collection included More ’s letters to René Descartes refuting dualism, his defense of religious enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus

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Triumphatus), his essay The Immortality of the Soul, his Antidote Against Atheism, and his Cabbalistic writings (Conjectura Cabbalistica). The book itself seemed to have suffered all the indignities of time: wormholes, foxing, burn marks, frayed edges, browned paper, detached and flaking covers, circular stains where it had been used as a coaster. Evert, on second thought, judged it “perhaps . . . not worth buying.” Instead, he recommended More ’s An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660) as “the better reading” of the two.67 Yet both books had been degraded from their condition of Lamb-like innocence by the booksellers’ markup, and in the end George followed his brother in letting them go to other buyers. Evert had been able to pick up antiquarian books “very cheap” along Paternoster Row in London, and he urged George to do the same. In the used-book market, a little knowledge could go a long way, for “the best are often least appreciated and can be had here and there for a song.”68 After leaving Paris for London, George began receiving letters from Evert through George Palmer Putnam’s American Literary Agency at 12 Paternoster Row. It was common for publishers to receive and send mail for their clients, and they often performed other miscellaneous services. John Taylor helped to execute John Keats’s will—a brief scrawl on a scrap of paper dividing his books among his friends and asking that his tailor be paid—and on June 16, 1845, Wordsworth sent his publisher, Edward Moxon, a set of his false teeth that needed repairs. He had forgotten the name of his dentist but thought he might live somewhere in Bedford Row and assumed Moxon could track him down.69 A year earlier, Wordsworth had sent Moxon back to London from the Lake District with a pair of his broken eyeglasses.70 While George prowled the bookstores, Evert anxiously awaited his return to New York. By July, Charles Welford (who had left Paris for London around the same time as George) was back at the Astor House, but George was still abroad. Welford and his wife, Mary Anne, had shared cabin space with the American actor John R. Scott and his wife, also named Mary Anne, on the ship Victoria.71 Scott had spent the year in London, opening the theatrical season at the Princess Theatre. “He appears to be, and justly so, an enormous favorite,” one journalist reported, “and the large houses he draws are but a fair reward for . . . engaging so popular a tragedian.”72 Scott himself was back at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, but George was still abroad, with his brother not knowing when to expect him.

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The ship that would carry George from England to New York was a newly built American mail steamer, the Hermann, which sailed in an ongoing loop with stops at Bremen, Southampton, Halifax, and New York. On April 28, the New-York Commercial Advertiser announced that the Hermann was hung up at the dock in Southampton undergoing repairs and would not sail before May 6. The day after the expected departure, on May 7, 1848, Evert could not help writing another letter to George in London. “I think it very likely you will be on the ocean when this gets to London,” he began.73 But George was not on the ocean, and Evert wrote to him three weeks later recommending some reading for the ocean crossing. He had seen the review of Thomas Noon Talfourd’s recently released Final Memorials of Charles Lamb in the British Quarterly Review, and he suggested that if George had not already done so, he might pick up a copy from Moxon’s bookstore. Evert had not yet read it, but the “tragedy of Bridget Elia” sounded as “strange as any [John] Fletcher or [Philip] Massinger” (the Jacobean playwrights) might have imagined.74 In fact, there was plenty of time for George to do so, for the Hermann was again stalled at the dock in Southampton and would not depart until July 21. The English shipping agent sent another letter to New York begging for patience and excusing the delay. “The public ought to be confirmed in their confidence, since they must see that we will sacrifice our reputation for punctuality, rather than involve our passengers in risk.”75 The logic was sound, but Evert had been awaiting his brother’s return since the winter holidays. The Hermann was due to arrive in New York on Tuesday the first or Wednesday the second of August. On Wednesday, Evert heard “a lying newsboy” from the New-York Tribune crying, “Extra . . . arrival of the Hermann—arrival of the Hermann.” By Friday, August 4, the ship still had not arrived, though rumors of its arrival had reached the telegraph office. Evert snatched his spyglass and headed down from Clinton Place to Castle Garden to await the ship. The fortress on the lower tip of Manhattan served as the country’s first immigration portal, preceding Ellis Island, and Evert staked out a viewing station where he might see the ship pass on its way to its berth; yet though many ocean-faring vessels entered the bright round lens of Evert’s telescope that day, the Hermann was not among them. He returned home crestfallen. The next day he returned to Castle Garden, and this time his persistence was rewarded when the Hermann sailed into view. Calling to mind Milton’s lines from Paradise Lost, he felt “hope elevate” and “joy

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brighten” his crest. George was on deck, and the brothers hailed each other as the ship passed.76 Evert had been wondering whether and how George’s European travels might have changed him, but he found him “the same [as] of old, unaltered in appearance or character, without a particle of foreign affectation though bringing many new ideas from the finer sources of European experience.” He had always admired his younger brother’s intellectual and moral purity, his “jealous pursuit of things noble and worthy of living for.”77 On the Continent and in England, George had immersed himself in “the great calm world of Early Christian art.78 Evert had enough experience in the book business to wish him “a life of happiness and usefulness in a far greater degree of both” than the book trade could provide.79 But George would lose no time following his brother into the trenches of the professional literary world. The previous year Evert had founded The Literary World: A Gazette for Authors, Readers, and Publishers and edited its first few numbers. He had high ambitions for the periodical, and when the first number appeared on February 6, 1847, it evoked praise from beyond New York. But its publisher, Edward W. Osgood, who had “invested a good deal of capital in the enterprise,” thought he was sponsoring an inoffensive trade journal.80 Within three months, the clash in perspectives between editor and publisher resulted in Evert’s being peremptorily dismissed by Osgood in a public announcement in the paper on May 1, 1847: “Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck’s connexion with this Journal ceased with the last number.”81 Osgood replaced Duyckinck with Charles Fenno Hoffman, founder of the Knickerbocker, though Hoffman would not last long either. “There is very little money to be got by it,” Evert explained to George, “with a great deal of toil always.”82 Yet George was convinced his brother could raise the Literary World to the level of its best London peers, and sometime between August 5 when George returned to New York, and October 7, when he and Evert issued their first co-edited number, the Duyckinck brothers purchased the Literary World and changed its subtitle to better reflect their vision: “A Journal of American and Foreign Literature, Science, and Art.” On October 7, 1848, the editor Charles F. Hoffman graciously turned the journal over to its new owners in a valedictory address to readers: “The writer of the present paragraph, in relinquishing his charge as Editor, cannot but congratulate the readers of the Literary World, that it will hereafter be owned and conducted by those who have the mental accomplishment, the

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ability, the zeal, and the resources to carry out its objects, until it becomes all that its best friends could wish.”83 Thus, the overworked journalist bid a gracious good-bye to a job he was happy to escape, and the Duyckinck brothers proceeded to make the journal live up to their own high expectations for it. They had in mind as a model The Athenæum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, which had flourished under the editorship of Keats’s friend Charles Wentworth Dilke and which their new subtitle reflected. Although George had missed the sight of Charles Lamb’s library in New York, he had returned in time to see nearly a third of that library resold on the evening of Saturday, October 21, exactly two weeks after he and Evert issued their first number of the Literary World. A friend described him as an “almost shadowy figure flitting through the street,” and were it not for the poverty it implied, Harry Vane’s portrait of a shy bookworm at the back of the room on the evening Elia’s books were sold might have served well enough for George: “Do you observe that young man in plain dress, thread-bare almost, on the outer circle of bidders, whose restless eyes flash from beneath the heavy brows which overhang his intellectual countenance? I have often seen him poring over antiquated musty volumes at book-stalls, and the shelves of bibliomaniacs. A poor student and lover of books evidently; and almost any evening you may see him at the little window of his loft in a back street, busy with his pen till midnight or long after.”84 Four days before climbing the stairs to the auction sale room, George had turned twenty-five. Fifteen years later, after George’s death, the Episcopal minister William Ferdinand Morgan would write that “the shadow of death had so long rested upon Mr. Duyckinck, he had so often revived, and been received back to life again . . . that his end . . . appeared sudden and abrupt.”85 In the meantime, George could no longer resist the lure of association copies from Charles Lamb’s library, leaving the auction hall of Cooley, Keese & Hill with an Elian relic: The Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira, in the Year 1548. As Gerald D. McDonald, former head of archives at the New York Public Library, once noted, Lamb “knew Spira from Burton’s Anatomy. He was the desperate old Italian who ‘by no counsel of learned men could be comforted; he felt (as he said) the pains of hell in his soul.’ ”86 This account of the Protestant apostate Francesco Spira, who renounced his faith on the central square of Venice to avoid persecution by the Inquisition, was by Nathaniel Bacon, although Lamb’s copy was missing its title page and

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Lamb had attributed it to “one Springer, a Lawyer” The caption to the frontispiece sums up the moral of the story: “Spira by Slavish Fear doth Truth Deny / And sets his Trembling Hand to Popery / This Iudgment let Apostates still Admire / And know our God a Consuming Fire.”87 One wonders whether George Duyckinck recognized a secular version of apostasy when he turned his back on the truth of his brother’s belletrism and purchased the book. “You must have executed much self-denial in letting the volumes pass,” George had written to Evert from Europe, “but your reasons are the true ones.”88 Still, with the auctioneer officiating as high priest and a spotlight surrounding the book like an aureole, how could a poor book lover resist? Perhaps like nothing else, the auction of Charles Lamb’s bibliographical relics reveals the transference from religious to secular literary authority in the transatlantic world at midcentury. “These then are the very volumes that have rested on his shelves; have been pored over by the purest and most gentle, the most enduring yet most benevolent genius of English literature,” murmur voices in the crowd.89 Wise men come from afar to do homage to the books in their cradles (an anachronistic image, perhaps, but apt). After renouncing his faith, Spira heard a voice condemning him to eternal damnation. He fell into despair, disputed with priests who tried to comfort him, waged nightly battles with a devil, refused exorcism, attempted suicide, and finally died by refusing to eat. The tale was brief but, like much of the material in Lamb’s book collection, queer and compelling. Evert pocketed his notes on the auction for an article in the Literary World, while George did the same with the book he had purchased from Lamb’s library. Together, they returned to the Duyckinck family home, where the punch bowl was as convivial and the guests as distinguished in the America of their day as Elia’s had been in his own time. And there George set the book down to adorn (“if such a term can be applied to calf-skin so far gone”) the shelves of the Duyckinck family library.90

The Diary of a Bibliomaniac By the time George Templeton Strong diagnosed his own bibliomania in 1842, the book madness had gripped New York. “Bibliomania is a kind of constitutional disease with me,” he confessed to his diary. “I’ve been subject to it almost as long as I can remember.”91 His goal as a young man had been

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to compile a library of twelve thousand volumes and a thousand manuscripts, and though he had the avidity of the bibliomaniac, he also had the love of general literature that defined belletrism. He was a book connoisseur, but not the Dibdinian, or technical, bibliomaniac with (as Evert Duyckinck put it) the “antiquarian taste . . . for old folios, original portraits and prefaces, titlepages, colophons, and other little bookish matters, which afford a great deal of gratification to many very innocent old gentlemen.”92 Rarity had defined the Dibdinian age of European book collecting, and although George Templeton Strong did collect some bibliographical rarities, he tended to do so only when something more intangible in them appealed to him. “Rarity adds to the value of what’s good,” he believed, “but alone it’s nothing.” The writings of Thomas Frognall Dibdin amused him, but the more “technical bibliomania, the pure, abstract Delirium Dibdinianum that rages after those things simply as book varieties, independently of any interest attaching to the edition, I never was smitten with to any great extent.”93 The auctioneers who later dispersed his library described his collecting habits as those of a discerning belletrist, “never confining himself to any particular branch of English literature, but purchasing with care and discrimination only books possessing genuine intrinsic value, remarkable historical importance, or some unique and interesting peculiarity.”94 He did not see himself as “such an enthusiastic bibliomaniac” as Dibdin, who delighted in recounting the extremities of his own book disease.95 “Rarity in books is such a difficult thing to define that a taste for it easily degenerates into absurdity,” observed a New York correspondent for the National Intelligencer in 1843. “The mania is very common, but there is a mania for books according to their rare value to read, and mania for books valuable by accidental circumstances—such as coming from a particular press, being made of singular materials, having once belonged to a celebrated library, or being the only one of their kind.”96 Among these various manias, the bibliomaniac George Templeton Strong was finding his way to producing a library that was itself “exceedingly rare” and that in the category of association copies included nine volumes from Charles Lamb’s library.97 As an attorney who spent most of his money on books, he visited his binders more frequently than his own tailor, but like other protagonists in this story he was savvy enough to preserve Elia’s relics in their own beggarly wrappings. It is telling that of all the rare and valuable books in his collection at the time of his death, the chief highlights singled out by the auctioneers

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Bangs & Company—in boldface—were his association copies from Lamb’s library: It would require too much space to enumerate all the books to be found in this Catalogue that are valuable, curious, and very rarely met with; it will be sufficient merely to call the book buyer’s atten510,, a copy of tion to a few of the most attractive, such as: Lot 510 Donne’s Poems, from the library of Charles Lamb, with numerous manuscript notes by S. T. Coleridge; Lot 904 904,, Ben. Jonson, which belonged to Charles Lamb, with his notes; Lot 242 242,, John Buncle, and a copy of God’s Revenge against Murder, Lot 1357 1357,, both from 98 Charles Lamb’s library. library

Of course only to a sentimental collector could these books be ranked among the “most attractive” volumes of George Templeton Strong’s library. The 1692 folio of Ben Jonson’s Works named above was a degenerate assemblage with broken joints, frayed leaves, threadbare covers, a missing frontispiece, and three leather straps holding it together.99 But Lamb had loved it as it was. Instead of sending it to the binders to be reoutfitted, Strong ordered a case of full red morocco leather to keep it intact on his bookshelf. Strong also purchased all five books in Bartlett & Welford’s Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library with autograph writing by Coleridge, a man legendary as a conversationalist for whom Lamb’s books were silent interlocutors, receiving his generous commentary and preserving it for future generations. Elia describes such commentary as “in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals.”100 Coleridge’s most extensive marginalia in the association copies sold by Bartlett & Welford were contained between the covers of Lamb’s copy of Poems, &c. by John Donne Late Dean of St. Pauls. With Elegies on the Authors Death. To Which Is Added Divers Copies Under His Own Hand, Never Before Printed (1669), the first book to which the auctioneers refer above. “How much is there of Coleridge ’s mind for us to travel [in] and when we think we have accomplished the feat we shall be in a condition to begin the journey,” marveled Evert Duyckinck when he read those notes in the Astor House.101 In “The Two Races of Men,” Lamb divides the human species into two categories, borrowers and lenders. “To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers,” he explains, the worst class of borrowers were “borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections,

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George Templeton Strong’s autograph initials in Charles Lamb’s copy of Poems, &c. by John Donne (1669). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.” He calls Coleridge (S.T.C. in the essay) “matchless in his depredations,” placing him as chief among the borrowers and himself among the lenders, a straitened race of “little men.” As one can see, he cleverly inverts the two categories. For whereas lenders are usually seen as generous and borrowers as self-serving, the soul of S.T.C. overflows in Lamb’s books while Lamb begrudges the borrower. “Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it,” he advises, “or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C.—he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience.”102 George Templeton Strong signed the title page of Donne’s Poems “G.T.S.”: a near palindrome of S.T.C., minus the inward bent of the “G,” thereby implicating himself, knowingly, in the complex web of association within and surrounding Lamb’s books.

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On the flyleaves and in the margins of Lamb’s copy of Donne, Coleridge left nothing less than a detailed theory of poetics, attempting to explain the idiosyncratic verse style of the metaphysical poet in terms other than conventional neoclassical verse meter. He claimed that “not one in a 1000 of his Readers have any notion of how his Lines are to be read—to the many 5 out of 6 appear anti-metrical.” Understanding Donne’s accentual syllabic verse was not merely a matter of scanning lines and grouping syllables into poetic feet, as schoolboys learned to do with quantitative verse in Latin and Greek. A subjective element was involved. “To read Dryden, Pope &c., you need only count syllables,” Coleridge wrote, “but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of Each word by the Sense & Passion.”103 Such a poetics involved the sensibility of the reader. At once radical and conservative, Coleridge’s approach to Donne authorized the reader not only to supply the missing quantitative element of English verse by intuiting whether vowels (and hence syllables) should be long or short, but also to add, skip, or rearrange words in order to convey semantic or emotional content. “I am convinced that where no mode of rational Declamation, by pause, hurrying of voice, or apt, some times double, Emphasis can at once make the verse metrical & bring out the sense & passion more prominently, that there we are entitled to alter the Text, when it can be done by simple omission or addition of That, Which, And, & such ‘small Deer’—or by mere new-placing of the same Words.—I would venture nothing beyond.”104 The reader was justified in modifying minor but necessary features of language, such as pronouns, articles, and conjunctions, when it seemed right to do so. Coleridge compares such linguistic elements to “small Deer,” or the rodents that Edgar, disguised as “poor Tom” in Shakespeare’s King Lear, hunts for food: “Mice and Rats, and such small deer, / Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.”105 Gobbling up or spitting out such critters according to individual taste was the prerogative of the actively engaged reader. Although Coleridge, insofar as the organ of possessiveness seemed absent from his brain was no bibliomaniac, he was acutely aware of his role as a relic maker in the age of bibliomania. In Lamb’s copy of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies (1679), whose purchase we have seen Bridget Elia describe in the previous chapter, he boasted of his power to transform a book into a relic: “I shall not be long here, Charles! I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. S.T.C.”106 This was not the first hypochondriacal apology Coleridge left in Lamb’s

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books. On the back flyleaf of Donne’s Poems, he had written, “I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb! and then you—will not be vexed that I had bescribbled your Books.”107 Although Coleridge was nowhere near death at the time, he could not have known that. But he certainly did know that he was not spoiling Lamb’s book. “Spite of Appearances,” he wrote elsewhere in the volume, “this Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes. The Annotator himself says so.”108 Coleridge’s notes in Donne’s Poems were performative and, as at least one critic has noted, “reflect the imaginary presence of Lamb.”109 Coleridge was in conversation not only with authors and owners of books but also with other readers. We see this in a copy of Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets, and Commonly Presumed Truths (1658), which Lamb presented to Coleridge at dinner on March 10, 1804. The book, whose Latin title means something like “widespread false teachings,” was an inspiration for Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies.” Coleridge exulted in the gift and read it the same day. At midnight, he sat down with it at his desk at Barnard’s Inn (an Inn of Chancery) and addressed a letter to Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchison, with whom he was hopelessly in love, on its front flyleaf. “My Dear Sara!” he began; “Sir Thomas Browne is among my first favorites.” To guide her reading, he provided a key to his annotations: •

a profound or at least solid and judicious observation

= majesty of conception or style // sublimity X brilliance or ingenuity Q characteristic quaintness F an error in fact or philosophy110

Coleridge sent the book to Hutchison, who passed it on to Wordsworth, who signed its title page, “W. Wordsworth, Rydal Mount,” thus declaring proprietary status. The American rare book curator Gerald D. McDonald observed that “Wordsworth assaulted Lamb’s books as he did everyone’s.” He noted that Thomas De Quincey once saw the poet tear into a book with a butter knife, literally, to open its pages, leaving “its greasy honours behind it on every page.”111 Like an oracular wave leaving its deposits behind, Coleridge was not above commenting on his comments, or adding postscripts to his postscripts. One “nota bene” on the front flyleaf of Lamb’s copy of Donne’s Poems has

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge autograph marginalia in Charles Lamb’s copy of Poems, &c. by John Donne (1669). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

nothing to do with the note preceding it but everything to do with the selfconscious nature of Coleridge’s written performance as an annotator: “N.B. Tho’ I have scribbled in it, this is & was Mr Charles Lamb’s Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all the Volumes of the ‘Old Plays’ excepting one.”112 The postscript contained a wink to the owner, for it referred to the fourth volume of Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays, a set which before it met Coleridge was complete in ten volumes. “Pray, if you can,” Lamb had begged his friend when the book disappeared, “remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set.113 But Coleridge could not remember, and Lamb was left with a painful breach in his collection of old plays. The missing volume contained three comedies (Robert Tailor’s The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, John Cooke ’s Greene’s Tu Quoque, and Thomas

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Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore) as well as a historical drama, Jasper Fisher’s Fuimos Troes (We were Trojans), about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain. But John Webster’s The White Divel; or, The Tragedy of Paolo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano. With the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the Famous Venetian Curtisan was the play that made it “perhaps the most valuable volume of them all.” Lamb admired the title character, Vittoria Corombona, “a spunky Italian Lady, a Leonardo one, nick-named the White Devil,” as he called her in a letter to William Hazlitt. In the same letter, he quoted some lines from the scene in which Vittoria is on trial for murdering the Duke of Brachiano that are worthy of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra: “Condemn you me for that the Duke did love me? / So may you blame some fair and chrystal river, / For that some melancholic distracted man / Hath drown’d himself in it.”114 Lamb reprinted this scene in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare, published in 1808, one year before Coleridge lost his copy of the play. Indeed the title Lamb used for the play in his anthology was not from the first edition, Webster’s 1612 quarto, but from the version acted at the Phoenix Theatre in 1665, which Dodsley had anthologized: The White Devil; or, Vittoria Corombona, A Lady of Venice. A Tragedy. Instead of a Venetian courtesan, this Vittoria is a lady. And rather than being “The Tragedy of Paolo Giordano Ursini, Duke of Brachiano,” this version of the tragedy belongs to her. When Coleridge lost the volume containing it, the gap it left on Lamb’s shelves plagued him like a sore tooth. “Dodsley’s dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is!” Elia wails, comparing the missing volume to the Trojan hero killed by Achilles: “The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam’s refuse sons, when the Fates borrowed Hector.”115 The dark cavity where The White Devil sat became a constant, selfrenewing irritant. “You never come but you take away some folio that is part of my existence,” Lamb complained to Coleridge after the book borrower had walked off with his copy of Martin Luther’s Table-Talk. “My maid Becky brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It was ‘Luster’s Tables,’ which, for some time, I could not make out. ‘What! has he carried away any of the tables, Becky?’ ‘No, it wasn’t any tables, but it was a book that he called Luster’s Tables.’ I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I

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had sustained.” At the end of this letter, the abused lender circled back to his old complaint, his missing volume of Old Plays: “My third shelf (northern compartment) from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two eye-teeth.”116 The other missing eyetooth was an old folio and the largest in Lamb’s library. Elia explains that his Opera Bonaventuræ, containing the theological writings of Saint Bonaventure, had been “abstracted” by S.T.C., “upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that ‘the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant’s powers of understanding and appreciating the same.’ ” The theory derived from Joseph Addison, who held that a person with a cultivated mind has “a kind of Property in every thing he sees.” Given Coleridge ’s extraordinary powers of discernment, Lamb might well wonder, “Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?” Elia echoes his prototype in comparing the “foul gap” where his folio of Bonaventure used to sit to “a great eye-tooth knocked out.”117 The gaps came in all sizes. When Coleridge borrowed the two volumes of Thomas Amory’s The Life of John Buncle, Esq.; Containing Various Observations and Reflections, Made in Several Parts of the World; and Many Extraordinary Relations, he left an octavo-size gap, returning only the first volume to its owner. In purchasing that volume half a century later, George Templeton Strong transferred the gap implicit beside it from Elia’s shelves to his own. Lamb had recommended the book to Coleridge as “a curious romance-like work” and “an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects, from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth.” The title character was “formed in Nature ’s most eccentric hour,” and while the narrative contained “much abstruse science” that went over Lamb’s head, it also had “an infinite fund of pleasantry” that did not.118 Coleridge was better equipped to follow Buncle into the fields of “abstruse science,” and he concluded in the margins of the first volume that Amory’s autobiographical persona was an incompetent philosopher but an entertaining soul, “a fine ignorant worthy fellow.”119 What he made of the second volume we may never know. Amory admits in his preface to the novel that his character had been formed by a course of antiquarian reading much like Elia’s, steeped in romance and moral philosophy: “I was not only a lover of books from the

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time I could spell them to this hour; but read with an extraordinary pleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the [church] fathers, and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain piety and extravagance.”120 Buncle, who was married seven times, discovers an extravagant way of grieving when his second wife dies of the smallpox: “I became again a mourner. I sat with my eyes shut for three days.”121 Elia refers to this scene from the missing volume of the novel when he points to the first: “In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with ‘eyes closed,’ mourns his ravished mate.”122 Another autobiographical narrative that Strong purchased from Charles Lamb’s library was The History of Philip de Commines, Knight, Lord of Argenton (1674), a first-person account of the struggle between the French king Louis XI and his rebellious noblemen in the fifteenth century. Walter Scott based his historical novel Quentin Durward (1823) upon it, filtering his story through the lens of the title character, one of the king’s archers. Lamb’s copy of The History of Philip de Commines was a revised edition of the English translation by Thomas Dannett which, like many Elizabethan translations—from George Chapman’s Homer to Edward Fairfax’s Jerusalem Delivered to Sir John Herington’s Orlando Furioso—had become its own classic. Lamb approached the text as he did all histories, through his interest in character and the quirks of individual personality that gave life to a story. “I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country,” Elia confides: “Not that I affect ignorance—but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching.” One such curiosity was Commines’s account of the death of Louis XI and his “ingenious contrivances . . . not to be thought dead.” Another was the king’s cavalier dismissal of a servant on the grounds “that Nature delighteth in variety.”123 We might imagine Lamb vicariously dismissing the “illtemperd” Becky in the same way, for in reality he could never have done so.124 Whereas Lamb reveled in the particularity of the actual that characterized history, Coleridge ’s métier was philosophy. Coleridge was more actively engaged in Lamb’s copy of John Petvin’s Letters Concerning Mind (1750), which Strong also purchased, than in Commines’s account of the feuding nobles during the French civil wars. Coleridge explains on the title page of Petvin’s work that the author was writing at a time when ancient philosophy (and its legacy in scholastic metaphysics), which tied the human mind to an

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ineffable psyche or soul, was being superseded by John Locke’s empiricist definition of mind as an aggregate of sensory perceptions. In attempting to reconcile the two contending theories of human consciousness, Petvin fell into some inconsistencies that Coleridge was quick to point out. His comments in the margins of Lamb’s book range from rapturous approval (“This is sound—excellent!”) to moderate agreement (“most true”) to animated dissent (“The Deuce!”).125 Whereas most philosophers following Locke abandoned the supersensible element of mind, Coleridge writes that there were some “of a better mould, who retaining their love and veneration of the ancients were anxious to combine it with the new Orthodoxy by explaining Aristotle and even Plato down into John Locke.” Others, who better understood the Ancients but lacked the courage to go against the tide, “attempted to reconcile the old with the new Authority by a double operation—now, like the former class, lowering down Pl and Arist to John Locke, & now pully-ing John Locke up to Plato and Aristotle. The result was, now a confusion in their own thoughts & an inconsistency in their several positions; now & more frequently, an expression of the Truth in lax, inaccurate, & inappropriate Terms.”126 In this category, he ranked Petvin, who impressed as well as exasperated him. Throughout the volume, Coleridge censures the philosopher for using vague language to cover confusion. When Petvin interprets Plato’s “great sea of beauty” (πολὺ πεγαλος τοῦ καλοῦ), for instance, to mean “that we are here and there, and everywhere, in the Universal Mind, as Fishes in the Sea,” Coleridge fumes, “What in the name of Plato can Mr Petvin have meant by this Fishery! A Fish is not here, there, & everywhere, but one here & one there.” Elsewhere, he catches Petvin inferring causal necessity from empirical circumstance. “It is painful to see the influence of Locke on so clear a mind as that of this Writer,” he remarks, deploring such “gross confusion of probability with absolute certainty, of contingency with necessity.”127 Just as metrical scansion sometimes required more than merely counting syllables, philosophy, according to Coleridge, required more than logic: it involved feeling as well as cognition, heart as well as mind. Thus, when Petvin claims that the man who pursues truth is a “complete” philosopher,” Coleridge protests, “God forbid! for then the first shrewd Knave, I met with, might be a Philosopher.” Similarly, when Petvin observes that “Philosophy is nothing but the Love of Truth,” Coleridge responds,

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O no! no! This were Philology—Philosophy is the Love of Truth in the speculative, + Goodness in the practical, = Wisdom.

The neo-Aristotelian categories of Kant’s Critique of Judgment are relevant in the formulation above: Pure Reason (“Truth in the speculative”) combines with Practical Reason (“Goodness in the practical”) to form a kind of theological Wisdom (Sophos), which Coleridge following Kant understands as a transcendental category. He writes: Truth + Good = Wisdom. Love of Truth + Love of the Good = Philosophy. Philosophy is the Wisdom of Love, as well as the Love of Wisdom.

In copying Coleridge ’s notes on Lamb’s copy of Letters Concerning Mind into his commonplace book in 1848, Evert Duyckinck concluded that Coleridge ’s criticism had “the moral beauty of the choicest poetry.”128 Henry Crabb Robinson, discovering Coleridge’s marginalia in the same book seven years earlier, also decided to copy it. He saw the book on a parlor bookshelf during a visit to Mary Lamb on August 18, 1841, and requested to borrow it. The next day he spent copying the notes in the Athenæum Club, an institution which, like the University of London, he was instrumental in founding. The following day he returned the book to Mary Lamb along with some fruit and cake.129 Dost thou think, O philosopher of moral beauty (“Crabby” might have wondered) that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale? As we have seen, Coleridge was aware of the sentimental value of relics in the age of bibliomania, and on the flyleaf of another book Strong purchased from Elia’s library, he spins the term bibliomaniac to refer to the “Murthero-maniacal John Reynolds.” Just as the bibliomaniac’s heart and soul are his books, Coleridge observed “how absolutely & integrally J. Reynolds’s heart & soul are swallowed up in the notion [of] ‘Murder,’ & in all other crimes only as far as they lead to Murder.” The book in question, a folio of illustrated crime stories, was titled The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against the Crying, & Execrable Sinne of (Wilfull, & Premeditated) Murther. With His Miraculous Discoveries, and Severe Punishment Thereof. In Thirty Several Tragical Histories, &c. (1657). The contrast between the salacious tales that Reynolds recounts with such gusto and the pat morality with which he pads them amused Coleridge: “There is something half-celestial in that

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infantine Combination of intense feeling with the vulgarest Truisms, the merest mouldy Scraps, of generalizing Morality.”130 Reynolds’s murderers were always guilty and the murdered always innocent. “The most execrable Wretch about to be murdered, becomes ‘poor innocent man’—‘worthy harmless Gentleman,’ &c.,—and the most heroic Character . . . execrable bloody Lady, as soon as she forms the thought of punishing the horrible crimes to herself and her poisoned Lord & Husband, & his Mother, on the old Monster who had perpetrated them.” Where Reynolds describes one victim as a “poor honest Gentleman, sick with the Gout, and a Cough of the Lungs,” Coleridge (underlining the phrase set here in italics) writes, “damn’d old Scoundrel.” Similarly, where Reynolds speaks of a “poor harmlesse Gentleman” who “loved his young wife so tenderly and dearly” he could not bear to be away from her, Coleridge corrects to “filthy old Dotard!” Such “Beauties” in the work were endless— “So flatly delicious, so deliciously flat!”131 George Templeton Strong had been pursuing his own course of reading in the English literary tradition, recording his opinions in his diary. He thought that Coleridge himself had left little poetry that would survive, though “the gems that he has left for posterity—to wit, The Ancient Mariner and Wallenstein—are unsurpassable.”132 The unexpected pairing of Coleridge’s best-known poem, from which we get the sense of an “albatross” as a burden, with his translation of Friedrich Schiller’s largely forgotten dramatic trilogy shows that the canon of English literature was still evolving. Strong ranked Robert Southey on a par with John Milton, though when Southey died in 1843 he perhaps came closer to the mark: “His writings never will be popular; he never will take the rank, I think, in English literature to which his intellect and his attainments entitled him.”133 He considered Wordsworth “a deeper philosopher” than Southey, but Lord Byron a “greater poet” than Wordsworth. Percy Bysshe Shelley “had a more glorious mind than any of them, only he wasted its energies and threw himself away.” Shelley’s poetry was “humbuggical,” while his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, had produced a novel that was “all humbug.” Frankenstein was “one of the most unearthly and ghastly pieces of diablesse” Strong had ever encountered and “woefully deficient in probability.”134 The only British Romantic writer for whom he expressed unqualified admiration was Charles Lamb. Strong was a junior at Columbia College when he returned home from school one day with his first book by Lamb.

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The campus was located downtown on a leafy green square between Murray and Barclay Streets, where classes were still held in the same threestory building that had housed the King’s College before the Revolution. It had an astronomical observatory but no dormitories, and so Strong and the other eighteen students in his graduating class walked to and from school.135 It was the year of the great financial panic; times were bad and merchants “going to the devil en masse.” But on April 12, 1837, when Strong carried home the book by Lamb, he found the “grass green and birds singing.” He spent the afternoon reading it and judged it “a genuine and real acquisition” to his library. Since Lamb’s genius was in prose— associational, miscellaneous, conversational—it was probably Strong’s copy of Thomas Noon Talfourd’s The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life (1837).136 The previous year, Park Benjamin (founder of the New World) had pronounced the impossibility of successfully copying Lamb’s writing style: “The genuine English of Elia is indeed worthy of all imitation, but his vein is so delicate, that one can hardly attempt to copy it in its purity without sinking into insipidity, or emulate its humour without running into quaintness.”137 Writing in his commonplace book probably around the same time, Evert Duyckinck agreed. “We may have many imitations of Elia, but as an author he will stand apart. His reflections in life are his own.”138 Yet, Duyckinck’s own imitation of Charles Lamb in the essayistic persona of “Felix Merry, Gent.,” may be the closest thing we have to an American Elia. Lamb claimed to have derived his now famous nom de plume from a fellow clerk at the South Sea House who like him had “added the function of an author to that of a scrivener.” Elia the scrivener, whom Lamb’s biographer Alfred Ainger later identified as Felix Elia, was born the same year as Lamb and died the same month that Lamb adopted his name in “The South Sea House,” the first of his Elia essays. “Poor Elia, the real, (for I am but a counterfeit,) is dead,” wrote Lamb to his publisher John Taylor on June 30, 1821. “I went the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think; and ’tis all he has left me.”139 Doubling the name “Felix” (“merry” in Latin), Evert Duyckinck began his series “Essays from the Fireside” in the American Monthly Magazine in 1838, one year after Benjamin had declared the Elian voice inimitable and Strong had written that

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he had never “got hold of a style . . . quite equal to it . . . it is truly, as they call it, ‘inimitable.’ ”140 At the time, George Templeton Strong’s book collection was in the library of his family home at 108 Greenwich Street, though by the time he added association copies from Lamb’s library to it, he had moved to a new house he had built in the lot behind it. “The palazzo-vulgo, the rear building, progresses,” he recorded on April 25, 1843, “and I hope in the course of a couple of weeks to see it under roof.”141 Three weeks later, he described the construction of the “villa, bungalow, schloss, château or whatever may be its appropriate name” in imitation of the opening stanza of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream”: G.T.S. S.T.C. In Greenwich Street did G.T.S. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately backbuilding decree, A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where clear the Croton Water ran Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through pipes impervious Through caverns measureless   to man—   to man Up to the third storie. Down to a sunless sea. So x square feet of useless ground So twice five miles of fertile ground With fair brick walls were girdled With walls and towers were  round.  girdled round:

In Coleridge’s poem, the River Alph flows through sublime landscape to a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice. In Strong’s imitation, water from the Croton River flows through a network of pipes in underground Manhattan to Strong’s newfangled water closet: “The bath room! ‘C’est un notion magnifique—supairbe!’ ”142 A tributary of the Hudson, the Croton River flowed from a dam located north of Manhattan to the crossroads of the city, the Croton Reservoir on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets—the site of the future central branch of the New York Public Library that would rise up to dispense a different kind of nutriment. Until that time the water ran from the reservoir past Greenwich Street to the center of City Hall Park, where it bubbled up in a celebratory gesture across from the Astor House. Yet while the “Croton Water” reached the Croton Fountain, it did not reach the third story—or “storie” as Strong spells it in the fifth line above after Coleridge’s antiquated ballad orthography—for there was no such floor “in rerum natura, at least

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The Croton Fountain before the Astor House, c. 1845. Endicott & Company, New York, Museum of the City of New York (29.100.1875).

not in the backbuilding.”143 Strong was taking poetic license with the plan of his new house, substituting “third” for “second” in order to maintain Coleridge ’s trimeter: “Down to a sunless sea.” Likewise for the sake of the meter he let “x” stand in for the number of square feet to retain Coleridge’s tetrameter: “So twice five miles of fertile ground.” Truth be told, Strong did not know the number of square feet of the house rising up behind him, but he was going for rhythm rather than accuracy, keeping Coleridge ’s iambic dimeter (“So twice five miles”) with his “So x square feet.” Had he inserted any believable number in place of the “x,” he claimed, he would have converted Coleridge’s “harmonious iambic dimeter into a choliambic pentameter hyper-paralytic with a ‘tail out of joint’ like Pope Alexander’s wounded Alexandrine Snake.”144 The description is a mouthful, but that was the point. As a bibliomaniac with the heart of a belletrist, he was attentive to textual as well as bibliographical detail. He was alluding to Pope ’s “Essay on Criticism,” which formally mimics the poetic blunders it critiques. An extra iambic foot was often used to round off a stanza with a hexameter line, called an Alexandrine. The virtuosity of poetic technique is on display in Pope ’s poem, which demonstrates how such an added metrical foot can, when ineptly used, make the line creep along: “A needless Alexandrine ends the song, / That, like a wounded snake, drags its

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slow length along.”145 By inverting Alexander Pope’s name (Pope Alexander) in his diary, moreover, Strong highlighted the “Alexander” in Alexandrine. Such wordplay, granting the poet authority on a level with the head of the Catholic church (and Pope was a Catholic), was enough to confuse the indexers of The Diary of George Templeton Strong, who listed Pope under the A’s as if he really were a pope.146 Moving at any distance can be a melancholy business. “To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths,” Charles Lamb wrote, claiming that he might have left some of his “flesh sticking to the door posts” at Colebrooke Cottage.”147 When George Templeton Strong took down his books from his shelves to box them up for moving, he found that his library was left looking as desecrated as “the Monasteries after Henry VIII cleared out their books.”148 Quoting Milton, he compared his books to pagan gods who are “with sighing sent” from their native homes with the birth of the Christ child.149 His books, like Elia’s, were his household gods. But he soon faced the more pleasant task of arranging them in his new home. They had not been there long before rain flooded the basement, causing a dampness that treated his books “very unhandsomely.” He woke one day to find their covers “decorated with a mossy growth of mould, mildew, fungus, or some other vegetable production neither useful nor ornamental that would have made Dr. Dibdin perspire with agony.” Flying “into a violent state of activity,” he ordered a fire to be lit and spent the day rubbing down his books. In the end, there was no harm done. Seeing them lined up once more on his shelves, he admired what “an imposing figure they cut there, though their emigration was mournful.” Within a month, he had settled into the new library: “So here I am, fairly established in great comfort in this, my new abiding place, with a long row of books—shelf upon shelf of the great and mighty of past days looking down on me. Health to the New Library.”150 His association copies from Elia’s library would join the rest five years later. In addition to the books with Coleridge’s marginalia, Ben Jonson’s Works, and Henry More ’s Philosophical Poems, Strong also purchased two miscellaneous volumes assembled by Lamb. Charles Welford had labeled one “Poetical Tracts” and the other “Miscellanies.” In a note to Leigh Hunt on the cover of the latter asking Hunt to return the volume when he was done reading it, Lamb referred to its contents as “The remainder of Christs

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hospital.”151 Although this volume of writings associated with Lamb’s schooldays did not include Hunt, who had also attended Christ’s Hospital, it did include dramatic works by two of Lamb’s schoolmates, Coleridge and Barron Field (the son of Henry Field, the school apothecary, who provided the students with medical care): Coleridge ’s Remorse, a tragedy acted at Drury Lane Theatre in 1813, and Field’s two-act farce Antiquity, published in 1808. It also contained three of Lamb’s essays: “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital” from the Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1813); its sequel, “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” from the London Magazine (November 1820); and “Confessions of a Drunkard,” from the Philanthropist; or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man (January 1813). Lamb had torn his own essays out of the volume and obliterated their titles from his table of contents, but the bibliophiles at Dodd, Mead & Company deciphered the scratched-out writing half a century later.152 Although William Godwin’s closest tie to the school was his Juvenile Library, a book series including Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Poetry for Children, Godwin’s five-act tragedy Antonio was also bound into the volume. The play opened and closed at Drury Lane Theatre

Charles Lamb’s autograph table of contents for a volume of miscellaneous tracts (CCLL, no. 54). Reproduced from Dodd, Mead & Company, Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library [1899]. Author’s Collection.

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on the evening of December 13, 1800. The actor John Kemble, who played the lead role, did not think highly of the play, and Lamb blamed its failure on him: John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dullness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. . . . I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.’s “Antonio.” G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to be realized in our time), or willing to let the sceptical worldlings see, that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been— wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish—the plot simple, without being naked—the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour, immolates his sister— But I must not anticipate the catastrophe . . .153

This excerpt from Elia’s essay “The Old Actors” alludes to Godwin’s most influential work, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), and his best-known novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Both were philosophical examinations of the theme of political justice. But Godwin’s attempt at philosophical drama fell flat. Lamb was in the audience the evening the play failed. “The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio . . . suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was, as if a murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation demanding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces.”154 The plays bound into the volume were all extremely scarce, but the rarest item in it was by Charles’s brother, John Lamb. John had also attended Christ’s Hospital, and Charles’s poem “The Lame Brother” describes him limping along on the way to school: “He leans on me, when we to school / Do every morning walk; / I cheer him on his weary way, / He loves to hear

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my talk.”155 Elia describes him in “Dream Children” as the “lame-footed” elder brother and regrets that he did not “make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in pain.”156 John Lamb’s own mutilated body, the result of a serious leg injury in 1796, may have been behind his defense of helpless, tortured animals in the pamphlet included with the remainders of Christ’s Hospital, A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham, on His Opposition to Lord Erskine’s Bill, for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1810). At the time Strong purchased the volume, it contained the only known copy of the John Lamb’s letter along with Windham’s speech.157 Windham had opposed Lord Erskine ’s bill “for the more effectual Prevention of Cruelty towards ‘Animals’ ” in the House of Commons on June 13, 1809, urging the members of Parliament not to be carried away by sentimental impulses. The proposed bill would have been the first legislation on behalf of animal rights, and Windham asked them to consider “soberly and coolly . . . whether those who engage in the attempt at present, may not do far more harm than good.”158 Windham argued his case abstractly, and John Lamb confronted “the unfeeling metaphysician” with a more empirical account of the kind of abuse animals endured for the sake of human pleasure. If an eel had the wisdom of Solomon, he could not help himself in the ill-usage that befalls him; but if he had, and were told, that it was necessary for our subsistence that he should be eaten, that he must be skinned first, and then broiled; if ignorant of man’s usual practice, he would conclude that the cook would so far use her reason as to cut off his head first, which is not fit for food, as then he might be skinned and broiled without harm; for however the other parts of his body might be convulsed during the culinary operations, there could be no feeling of consciousness therein, the communication with the brain being cut off; but if the woman were immediately to stick a fork into his eye, skin him alive, coil him up in a skewer, head and all, so that in the extremest agony he could not move, and forthwith broil him to death: then were the same Almighty Power that formed man from the dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, to call the eel into a new existence, with a knowledge of the treatment he had undergone, and . . . that eels were not the only sufferers; that lobsters and other shell fish were put into cold water and boiled to death by slow degrees . . .159

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The above sentence extends to a greater length than we have space to quote, but it is clear that the rhetoric of sensibility informing John Lamb’s defense of animal rights contrasted with the cool sophistry of the politician who did not believe in legislating sympathy. Yet the elder Lamb’s dietary politics were at odds with the epicureanism of the younger. Many of Charles Lamb’s essays and letters sat naturally within a gastronomical discourse imported from France in which such culinary cruelties were acceptable, if not perversely appealing. Charles once proposed to Robert Southey a book of poems on the topic, “accompanied with plates descriptive of animal torments, cooks roasting lobsters, fishmongers crimping skates, &c., &c.”160 No less mischievously, Elia adopts the tone of the gastronome, or “judicious epicure,” to consider the custom of whipping pigs to death in order to tenderize their flesh. He concludes that “we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto—.”161 When Charles sent John Lamb’s printed letter to Henry Crabb Robinson at his brother’s request, he warned him not to show it to Mrs. John Dyer Collier, who made “excellent Eel soup,” for “the leading points of the Book are directed against that very process.”162 Louis-Eustache Ude, then the preeminent French chef in London, was known for his tasty Tourte aux Anguilles (eel pie), although his recipe had been criticized by animal rights activists since it involved skinning and frying an eel alive, the same process John Lamb described. “Take one or two live eels; throw them into the fire; as they are twisting about on all sides, lay hold of them with a towel in your hand, and skin them from head to tail. . . . Cut the eel in pieces without ripping the belly, then run your knife into the hollow part, and turn it round to take out the inside.” The English epicure Abraham Hayward cited this recipe as proof that the “true gastronome is as insensible to suffering as a conqueror.” Ude defended himself by arguing that the blue skin and oil that otherwise remained rendered the eel indigestible, but Hayward wished the chef had been bolder: “The argumentum ad gulam is here very logically applied; but M. Ude might have taken higher ground, and urged not merely that the eel was used to skinning, but gloried in it.”163 As one can see, the books from Lamb’s library bore associations that sometimes entailed a cacophony of perspectives and sensibilities. Strong spent just over a year with Elia’s books before he again faced the heavy-hearted task of taking them down and boxing them up for removal.

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“It’s mournful work pulling them down from the places where I’ve been so happy in putting them and from which they’ve looked down on me through so many long desolate winter evenings,” he observed—“the shelves where I’ve watched them accumulating and multiplying so long.”164 Unlike many bibliomaniacs, who remained bachelors, he had fallen in love and would be getting married—entering a new phase of life that would require concerns and expenditures other than books. “A terrible business will be the tottle of the bills growing out of that charming specimen of domestic architecture,” he wrote of a new house he was having built at 74 East 21st Street, Gramercy Park. “The primal curse that condemned man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow was heavy, but far heavier is the curse that man has laid upon himself by the artificial habits and conventional necessities and social fictions of the system of luxury and extravagance and ostentation to which he has bound himself in these latter days.”165 His home would have a third story this time, but it augured a future in which he would no longer be spending his evenings alone with his books. After the first ten minutes of taking them down, he realized that the “great gap” he had made on his shelves would “never be filled up again. I believe my sense of local attachment must be very strong,” he wrote, “for it made me feel quite disconsolate to look at the breach I had made.”166 He was drawing on the language of sentimental attachment that Wordsworth had associated with nature and Lamb with the city. “My attachments are all local, purely local,” Lamb wrote to Wordsworth (in the same spirit of urban defiance that characterized his communications with the Lake Poet). “I have no passion . . . to groves and vallies. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved. . . . Have I not enough, without your mountains?”167 In adapting Elia to the streets of New York, Evert Duyckinck quoted this letter as an epigraph to the second number of his Felix Merry essays. Again, he was quoting from memory, for the quotation was a paraphrase: “I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed so many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead nature.”168 To most people, a breach on a bookshelf might not have the same sublime effect as a natural chasm—whether in the rocky ravines of the Lake District or in the imaginative landscape of “Kubla Khan”—but in the eyes of a bibliophile like George Templeton Strong it was equally profound.

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“The Coleridge Miscellany” Henry Hope Reed edited the first complete American edition of Wordsworth’s poetry in 1837, and he also believed that he could produce an edition of Coleridge’s collected poetry that would be better than any in print. He had “often thought it a great pity that so much that is thoughtful and what is still better—thought-giving” in Coleridge should be “generally inaccessible” to an American readership. He admired the taste and quality of Evert Duyckinck’s Library of Choice Reading, and in the spring of 1846 he wrote to the publisher John Wiley proposing to edit a volume of Coleridge’s verse for the series. Wiley forwarded the letter to Duyckinck, who suggested that Reed instead edit a selection of Coleridge ’s prose. Reed liked the idea. The poet’s nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge had edited four volumes of The Literary Remains (1836–1839) for the English publisher William Pickering, but Reed thought that “a skilful compilation might be prepared which for general use would be preferable to any of the forms in which his wisdom is now given to us.”169 Coleridge ’s Shakespeare criticism was virtually unknown in America, and Reed also had a sense of how he might introduce Coleridge’s distinctive genius. He only hoped (ominous words and prophetic) “that the execution of it would not fail.”170 Reed proposed “Coleridgeana” for a title, but Duyckinck rejected the idea and Reed thought better of it himself. It was “long and clumsy” and, as such, would not reflect well on the work. He quickly discovered that he had “a repugnance to fantastical titles—or even fancy names unless particularly happy” and assured Duyckinck that he “would not give a book of mine such style of name any more than to any of my children.” On May 1, 1846, he sketched out on a scrap of paper the following title: “The Coleridge Miscellany | or | Thoughts and Trains of Thought | Gathered from | The Writings and the Remains of |Samuel Taylor Coleridge | By Henry Reed.”171 He enclosed it in a letter and sent it to Duyckinck, who liked the new title. Thus encouraged, Reed went to work, circling passages of prose he thought worth including and drawing up a list of books by Coleridge he hoped the publishers could procure for him. But like many academics, Reed was involved in more than one project. He had agreed to give a course of public lectures on the history of England, which he described to Duyckinck as “historical lectures requiring a large grasp, and with audiences such as to keep a man at the top of his strength all the while.”172 The prospect of standing

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Henry Hope Reed’s autograph title page for “The Coleridge Miscellany.” Duyckinck Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

before such a crowd proved a greater spur than his contract for “The Coleridge Miscellany.” Putting the anthology on hold, he began researching his lectures. In the process of doing so, it occurred to him that an American edition of Philip Henry Stanhope ’s History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713–1783 (a second edition had appeared in London in 1846) might find a ready audience. He proposed the idea to Daniel Appleton, who commissioned Reed to prepare the edition. Little more passed between Reed and Duyckinck until the sale of Charles Lamb’s books in the Astor House two years later. Duyckinck sent Reed the marginalia by Coleridge that he had copied at the store of Bartlett & Welford for inclusion in “The Coleridge Miscellany.” “How in the world did it happen that Nelson Coleridge in preparing the

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Remains did not access Lamb’s books?” Reed wondered. This new cache of unpublished marginalia rekindled his interest in the anthology as well as his sense of guilt. “It is a grief to me to think how long that Coleridge book which I undertook has been delayed,” he wrote on February 15, 1848. He had seen the sale announced in the Literary World, along with the list of titles. He had been “practising self-denial in the matter of book buying,” but he felt himself melting at the thought of Elia’s old books. “I greatly crave a single specimen, but fear the prices are very high,” he wrote to Evert. “Perhaps you can inform me as to what opportunities there are for me to soften myself to be tempted.”173 By that point, however, most of Lamb’s books had been sold, and Reed did not buy any. Although Evert Duyckinck had graduated from Columbia College only three years before George Templeton Strong, the two bibliophiles did not know each other. When Duyckinck wrote to Strong to request permission to publish the notes by Coleridge he had copied from Lamb’s books in “The Coleridge Miscellany,” he offered to relinquish the notebook in which he had copied them should Strong wish to retain exclusive rights to them. But Strong replied graciously: “I beg that you will consider yourself entirely at liberty to make copies of any of these notes which you may find to be worth preserving. No one who esteems Coleridge’s published writings as highly as I do would ever dream of making anything he has written be subject to exclusive possession and enjoyment.”174 Duyckinck sent them to Reed, who now had better materials to work with than Henry Nelson Coleridge had had when he printed his uncle ’s marginalia on John Donne in Alexander Chalmers’s The Works of the English Poets.175 But another ten months went by without progress on “The Coleridge Miscellany.” “Is the Coleridge book suspended for a long time?” Duyckinck politely asked when Reed sent him a copy of a lecture he had given on Coleridge hoping to see it mentioned in the Literary World. But this gentle nudge only provoked more excuses. Reed explained that while the book was currently “at a stance,” he intended to return to it as soon as possible and “get it into printing condition.” As if to revive his own interest in it, he recalled all the work he had done, observing that “the more I did in the way of getting the materials into shape and construction, the more I became interested in it, and the better satisfied that something of much value could be made by a different arrangement of Coleridge ’s literary and critical stores than has yet appeared.”176 But even this recollection of former enthusiasm reveals

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insecurity about whether he could produce an edition of Coleridge’s prose to meet his own standards. In the end, Henry Hope Reed would be as baffled in pulling Coleridge ’s selected prose writings together as Coleridge had been in synthesizing them all into a single magnum opus. Three months later, rumors reached Reed that his publisher had failed. John Wiley and George Palmer Putnam found their business styles incompatible, and early in 1848 they dissolved their partnership. Putnam opened a new store a few doors down from Wiley’s at 155 Broadway while Wiley stayed put at 161 Broadway, where he had been for fourteen years. “Putnam is filling his fine store with books out of the old stock,” Evert Duyckinck reported to George on February 25, adding, “Wiley to meet his neighbor meditates uniting the whole extent of his rooms with one brilliant store with new pillars in the rear.” Although nothing seems to have come of Wiley’s intention, on March 11 Evert announced, “Putnam has opened his store and it is the simplest and best in arrangement of any in Broadway—well lighted, airy & clear as the deck of the Washington” (the first American transatlantic mail steamer, which Evert had watched leave New York on June 1, 1847, on its maiden voyage to Southampton).177 George Palmer Putnam had returned to New York City that same June after a decade abroad in London. His “growing relations with literary circles” through the American Literary Agency had given him “an increasing interest in publishing plans and possibilities,” as his son George Haven Putnam explained. “These plans he found it too difficult to develop in London, the more particularly as the senior partner in New York, Mr. Wiley, was disposed to be skeptical in regard to the prospects of profit from publishing undertak­­ ings or at least from international publishing arrangements.” Putnam therefore settled into a beachfront home on Staten Island, looked around for a bibliographer to take over his American Literary Agency in London, and began to realize his dreams as a publisher at a newer, brighter bookstore on Broadway. By May 9, as Evert Duyckinck reported to George, he had concluded a deal with Washington Irving to publish a “standard” collected edition of his works to be illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley, making Irving (as Ezra Greenspan puts it) “the first canonized American author.” When Evert bumped into Putnam in the street on May 15, “he produced a specimen page of the Sketch Book which he was bearing from the printers.”178 In temperament and outlook, Wiley and Putnam were almost exact opposites. A couple of weeks after Evert Duyckinck compared Putnam’s

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store to the deck of the Washington, he again made it sound, in a letter to George, like a luxury liner: “You walk along black walnut looking cases of the books on a footing of thick matting and drop into waiting armchairs. All over the doors is written ‘Putnam.’ ” By contrast, he reported, “Wiley’s looks dingy and opaque.”179 Wiley’s father, Charles Wiley, had been a pioneering bookseller-publisher in New York along with Evert Duyckinck, Sr., and George Long. After the elder Wiley died, his twenty-one-year-old son John took over the business in partnership with Long’s son, George W. Long. Wiley was a cautious businessman who lacked his father’s literary passion and adopted “a course directed, if by anything, more by expediency than by any particular taste or conviction,” writes Greenspan. “If Wiley did exhibit any tendency at all, it was toward a mild attraction to works of religion and conduct, one that reflected his personal conservatism and orthodoxy.”180 Putnam’s son painted a similar picture: “Mr. Wiley was a clearheaded and shrewd business man; but his experience had up to that time been almost exclusively that of a bookseller,” and he tended “to discourage as visionary and doubtful” his partner’s publishing schemes.181 Putnam had come to New York as a teenager from Brunswick, Maine, and much like the young Edward Moxon in London worked his way up by dint of determination and talent. John Wiley’s descendants describe Putnam as “a literary socializer, and impressive intellect, an author who could talk to authors, a traveler, an effective advocate for publishers and authors, and, at times, a spendthrift.”182 He had joined Wiley & Long in 1834, when the partners opened their business at 161 Broadway. There Putnam began the country’s first trade journal, Booksellers’ Advertiser, and Monthly Register of New Publications, American and Foreign.183 After two years, Wiley sent him to London to establish a European branch of the company, which he named the American Literary Agency. While Putnam was in London, Evert Duyckinck had been dealing with Wiley. When Duyckinck broached the idea of publishing the Literary World to Wiley in 1845, “Wiley turned him down without so much as mentioning the idea to Putnam.”184 George Duyckinck warned his brother to be careful in his future dealings with both men. “If either of them want your aid make them give you a salary,” he advised. “You have had a specimen of Wiley’s gratitude. I do not think Putnam would act so meanly, but I would not rely much on him.”185 In what Evert called the “mysterious division of the stock” that took place between Wiley and Putnam in February 1848, the Library of

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Choice Reading went to Wiley.186 None of this boded well for “The Coleridge Miscellany,” whose fate was now linked to Wiley’s. Two years later, on March 9, 1850, James Fenimore Cooper informed his wife that “Wiley has failed.”187 While this was not exactly true, since Wiley & Sons is still in business today, Wiley deserted the field of belles lettres, having freed himself of his more literary partner, and turned to publishing scientific, medical, and technical books, which he saw as safer investments. Like other American booksellers at the time, he also added other retail items, including instruments such as stereoscopes and violins, to his stock.188 The news that Wiley had failed reached Philadelphia, where Reed wrote to Evert Duyckinck to express regret that “Mr. Wiley’s failure broke up the plan of publishing the Coleridge book.”189 Although Duyckinck had rejected the title “Coleridgeana” for his Library of Choice Reading, he seemed to think it would do well enough in a periodical like the Literary World. For on April 2, 1853, he began a four-part series under that title which contained the transcriptions he had made five years earlier of Coleridge ’s marginalia in the Astor House. By then, Harper & Brothers had released four of seven volumes of a collected edition of Coleridge ’s writings edited by the American theologian William Greenough Thayer Shedd: The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions. The first installment of “Coleridgeana” in the Literary World constituted a review essay of the first four volumes. A month and two issues later, under the heading “Coleridgeana II,” he presented Coleridge’s notes on John Donne’s Poems to the public. Its sequel, “Coleridgeana III,” comprised more of the Donne notes, and “Coleridgeana IV” contained the last of those notes along with Coleridge ’s commentary on John Reynolds and John Petvin.190 Being less substantial, his marginalia on Amory’s Life of John Buncle and on Philippe de Commines’s memoir would have to wait another century before being typeset and taking their place with the rest of Coleridge’s marginalia in six hefty volumes of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge published by Princeton University Press.191 In introducing the marginalia, Evert Duyckinck recalled the arrival of Lamb’s library in 1848 at a “bookstore of select resort” in New York. His remarks had a nostalgic tone, for Bartlett & Welford, like Wiley & Putnam, were no more. He described the loss of the bookstore as “a serious misfortune to the better class of literary loungers,—clergymen on a Monday,

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lawyers on their way to the Hall, intellectual travelers at the Astor upstairs, editors with a doubt to solve, book makers and book consumers of the finer instincts at all times.”192 But the store in the Astor House could no longer sustain two families, and John Russell Bartlett had other projects (lexicographic, ethnographic, and political) in the works. Bartlett and Albert Gallatin, a scholar of Native American languages and tribal culture, had founded the American Ethnological Society in New York, a society that included among its founding fathers several actors in this story: Charles Welford, George Folsom (see Chapters 4 and 5), and Frederick Catherwood (Chapter 3).193 Bartlett had published Gallatin’s book Peace with Mexico under the imprint of Bartlett & Welford in 1847, and the following year he published his own Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States. By early December, he and William W. Turner, another member of the American Ethnological Society, had written a prospectus for “a Complete Dictionary of the English Language: Embracing both Archaic Words and the Terms Used in Literature, Science, and the Arts.”194 Besides these editorial pursuits in the fields of philology and ethnology, Bartlett, perhaps inspired by men like Gallatin and Folsom, began pursuing a diplomatic career. Gallatin had played an important role in the federal government—in his case, as state representative, senator, secretary of the treasury, U.S. minister to France and to the United Kingdom, and a diplomat who helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. The United States at the time had no embassy in Denmark or in the Netherlands, countries in the process of transitioning to a constitutional government following the February Revolution. But in the spring of 1849 Bartlett applied for the position of chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen with the support of George Folsom, who went to The Hague the next year in the same capacity on behalf of the U.S. government. Bartlett himself was in a period of transition, from bookman to man of affairs. “I perceive that my friends speak in too flattering terms of my literary attainments,” he wrote to Secretary of State John M. Clayton when applying for the job. “I am not a scholar by profession. I was bred a merchant and have followed the mercantile business to the present time, except three years while acting as cashier of the Globe Bank in this city. If I have acquired any literary fame, it is but the result of leisure hours profitably spent.”195

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Bartlett wrote that letter from Providence, Rhode Island. The cholera pandemic that ravaged Europe in 1848 had crossed the Atlantic to New York by January 1849, and Bartlett left with his family that spring. “I was surprised to learn from your note to me of the change in your plans,” Charles Eliot Norton wrote to Bartlett on May 1; “your absence will make a great difference in New York—in fact I hardly know how they will get on there without you.”196 The bookstore in the Astor House did not get on without him, and Charles Welford’s letters to his partner over the next fifteen months chronicle its slow demise. The cholera outbreak had reached epidemic proportions by June, and on July 24, Welford described the city as “a deserted village.”197 He sent his wife and daughter to the beach at Coney Island while he remained behind in the Astor House trying to collect money from clients who had disappeared.198 The daily receipts of the store, ranging between $2.84 and $14.87, were not enough to cover its rent, and a random selection of Welford’s letters to Bartlett from the summer of 1849 through the summer of 1850 paints a grim picture: June 28, 1849 Everyone says that business is quite at a standstill & our experience quite confirms this. July 10, 1849 I am beginning hard to collect money as we have over $1000 to pay this month. July 16, 1849

Business at a standstill.

July 24, 1849

You know we can make no sales at this time.

August 11, 1849

Business remains almost null & void.

August 17, 1849 The prospect of business is not flattering, and I sometimes feel quite discouraged. August 18, 1849

Nothing new.

August 30, 1849 Business still very dull, more than ever in fact. October 25, 1849

Nothing new.

November 8, 1849 Nothing new here. December 23, 1849 Business is very dull. January 2, 1850

We did not do much Christmas trade.

March 11, 1850 We have been taking so little lately and I have been anxious. March 27, 1850

Trade is not good.

114 t h e l i t e r a r y w o r l d June 6, 1850 For the last ten days there has been literally nothing doing. June 19, 1850 I feel so cramped by such a position by which our credit in England has been entirely destroyed. I have not hesitated to sacrifice property as you know to satisfy all parties. August 15, 1850 Unusually hot & consequently very little doing. August 27, 1850 If you can do anything about the $1400 please do.199

Welford found himself at the end of the decade in the same position he had been in four years earlier in London, begging Bartlett for money that never arrived. But by the time he wrote the last letter above, Bartlett was no longer in Providence. On August 13, 1850, Bartlett left Washington, D.C., accompanied by a troop of federal soldiers on his way to the American Southwest. President Zachary Taylor had appointed him as the U.S. boundary commissioner to replace John C. Frémont. The purpose of the Boundary Commission, a delegation formed after the termination of the Mexican-American War, was to survey and negotiate the border between the two countries. On the road to El Paso, where Bartlett planned to meet with the Mexican ambassador, he stopped in New Orleans, to find Welford’s letter referring to their overdue debts waiting for him. Welford would hold out until the following spring, when the auctioneer Lemuel Bangs offered him a job. Bangs, Brother & Company was then the leading book auction and commission business in the city, and the firm needed a bibliographer like Welford to help with imports. Beginning on October 27, 1852, in their auction room at 13 Park Row, Lemuel and Elijah Keeler Bangs helped Welford disperse the remaining inventory of Bartlett & Welford. The sale took place over the course of thirteen evenings, and in their announcements for the sale, the auctioneers described the collection that had been accumulating for a decade in the Astor House: One of the most splendid and valuable collections of books ever submitted to the public, comprising the entire stock of the firm of Bartlett & Welford (so well known as importers and dealers in rare,

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curious and valuable books). . . . The collection, which has been many years in forming, contains a choice and unrivalled assortment of the best and most valuable books, both ancient and modern editions, in every department of literature, all (with scarcely an exception) well bound and in fine condition. Bartlett & Welford were famous for paying particular attention to the department of American Antiquities, History, Early Voyages, &c. and their stock is particularly rich in works of this character, offering an unrivalled opportunity for collectors. Another department to which their attention was given was that of Early English Literature, Belles Lettres, the Drama, &c. and in this branch an exceedingly choice collection will be found. The stock of Richly Bound Books, Illustrated Works, and the best Library editions of standard authors in fine London bindings is especially recommended to the attention of purchasers, as it comprises much that has never before been offered at auction.200

Leaving the auctioneering to Lemuel and the bookkeeping to Elijah Bangs, Charles Welford sailed to London to scout for books. By February 1853, he was back in New York, producing the catalogue for a sale that would occupy ten evenings beginning on April 27. The Bangs brothers were thrilled with their new hire and continued to boast of his bibliographical expertise and taste. They trumpeted him as “one of the most thorough bibliographers in the country” and capitalized on the cultural cachet that had accrued through his partnership with Bartlett in “the well-known late firm of Bartlett & Welford, Booksellers, Astor House, New York.”201 Once the spring sale of 1853 concluded, Welford again sailed to Europe. By November, he was back cataloguing his imports in New York. In papers like the Evening Post, the Bangs brothers announced another “Important Sale of Books,” saying, “Persons desirous of securing the best editions of their favorite authors, handsomely bound, not one in a hundred of which can be found at any bookstore in the United States, will do well to attend this sale.”202 For the next four years, Welford would continue to travel back and forth across the Atlantic on business for the Bangs brothers. At that point, Charles Scribner stepped in with an offer that shaped and secured the rest of Welford’s career. Having founded the Charles Scribner Company after the death of his former partner, he offered Welford a partnership in “Scribner & Welford,” a franchise for the importation and sale of European books. “In those days, when you wanted to do something different, you started a new,

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additional company for the purpose,” explained Roger Burlingame, a former book editor for Scribner’s Magazine who knew Welford.203 Welford would continue his regular transatlantic crossings on behalf of Scribner & Welford until 1865, when he opened a London branch. He moved back to the city of his birth and, for the next twenty years, continued to supply the New York office of the company with a steady supply of choicely selected books. He also built his own “valuable and extensive” private library at his home in Hampstead. His antiquarian distaste for omnibuses, cabs, taxis, and railways kept him walking, and he bragged that he never got sick.204 But on a trip to New York he caught pneumonia and never recovered. The bookseller Edward Marston visited Welford on his deathbed and noted that the bibliographer “seemed quite surprised that there should be anything the matter with him.”205 When Welford died in 1885 at the age of seventy, he had earned “the reputation—and he deserved it—of knowing more about books, particularly those connected with English literature, than any other man in the business.”206

3.  New York Shakespeareans Bardomania, Testimonials, and Gift Exchange I do not care for a First Folio of Shakespeare. You cannot make a pet book of an author whom every body reads. —Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb may not have coveted a First Folio of Shakespeare, but he had plenty of fans across the Atlantic (many of whom had crossed the Atlantic) who would have given their all for one. As the first printed collection of Shakespeare ’s plays, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to the True Original Copies (1623), the First Folio was the bible of transatlantic bardolatry.1 Shakespeare was the reigning divinity of English literary tradition and the protagonists of this chapter venerated any book or object associated with him. When combined with the collecting impulse, this form of idolatry resulted in what we shall call bardomania, a subset of bibliomania focused on Shakespeare. Bardomaniacs collected not only books, tracts, and manuscripts related to the bard but other relics that bore the aura of his life and times. A coin that once passed through his hands, a pair of old leather gloves worn through at the fingers, a piece of a black mulberry tree he planted, a tile from his home (New Place) in Stratford-upon-Avon, an old Delft mug dug up in his garden: all were products of the transatlantic Shakespeare industry at midcentury.2 No closed loop, however, the sentimental economy of bardomania was an open, associational network of gift giving, testimonials, memento mori, jubilees, and other commemorative objects and events that challenged the “mechanisms and geographies of mercantile capitalism” with its “standardized soul-destroying routines,” providing opportunities for collaborative escape from the anonymity of everyday life and the commodification of all things and persons through capitalism.3 117

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The bardomaniacs we are about to meet were connected through the library of an author who, though not a Shakespearean collector himself, was a literary antiquarian of the Shakespearean stamp. On both sides of the Atlantic, Charles and Mary Lamb were known for their popular Tales from Shakespeare, written and illustrated for children. Elia was known for his Shakespearean criticism (in essays like “Stage Illusion”) and a fondness for the theater that drew him from the comfort of his armchair to see Shakespeare ’s characters come to life onstage. We might add Charles’s own portrait of Puck in “The Defeat of Time; or, A Tale of the Fairies,” his preface to the parodic Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, and the constant Shakespearean allusions that run throughout his letters and speech. Among his admirers stateside was William E. Burton, an English-born actor with a comic genius who opened and managed theaters in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York. Burton’s bibliomaniacal library, a three-story Temple to Shakespeare in downtown Manhattan, was a storehouse of relics and research materials for his “Great Shakespearean Revival” at midcentury.4 Burton became the first president of the American Shakespeare Society of New York, and his friend Robert Balmanno became its secretary. Balmanno, another literary antiquarian of British origin, purchased the only Shakespeare volume remaining in Lamb’s library when it was sold at the Astor House. Robert and his wife, Mary Balmanno, a talented artist and poet, had known the Lambs and others of their circle in London. With the participation of 250 Americans, from Daniel Webster to P. T. Barnum, the Balmannos arranged a testimonial, a Shakespearean reading chair containing a hidden relic of the bard for the Lambs’ friend Mary Cowden Clarke, author of a concordance to Shakespeare. At midcentury, the bardomania was itself a spectacle in which the protagonists of this chapter played leading parts.

The American Enthusiast When Robert Balmanno made his way up Broadway on Monday, February 7, 1848, to the Astor House to see the books from Charles Lamb’s library, the streets were a mixture of brownish slush and frail crystalline patches of white from the previous evening’s snowfall. He was sixty-eight and had lived in New York City for eighteen years, but time had not dulled his fond memories of the Lambs. He well recalled the first time they dined together at the

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home of Thomas and Jane Hood and the subsequent evening when they all gathered again at his own home in Mornington Place. Charles had entered the parlor with his sister and approached Mary Balmanno as if they had never met. “ ‘Allow me, madam,’ said he, ‘to introduce you, my sister Mary; she’s a very good woman, but she drinks!’ ” The hostess, unused to such pranks, simply stared at her guests. “ ‘Charles, Charles,’ said Miss Lamb, imploringly (her face at the same time covered with blushes), ‘how can you say such a thing?’ ‘Why,’ rejoined he, ‘you know it’s a fact; look at the redness of your face. Did I not see you in your cups at nine o’clock this morning?’ ‘For shame, Charles,’ returned his sister; ‘what will our friends think?’ ” Mary Balmanno felt the urge to “shake” her mischievous guest, but Jane Hood came to the rescue: “Don’t mind him, my dear Miss Lamb . . . I will answer that the cups were only breakfast-cups full of coffee.”5 Such eccentric behavior had also captured Mary Balmanno’s attention the previous evening. She had watched as Charles circled the table like a shark, sizing up the dishes laid out for the first course, before finally sitting down before an inviting lobster salad. During the meal, serving up a roast fowl, Jane Hood turned to Lamb and asked which part he preferred. “Back,” he replied, “I always prefer back.” At this, Robert Balmanno laid down his knife and fork and exclaimed, “ ‘By heavens! I could not have believed it, if anybody else had sworn it!’ ‘Believed what?’ said kind Mrs. Hood, anxiously, colouring to the temples, and fancying there was something amiss in the piece he had been helped to. ‘Believed what? why, madam, that Charles Lamb was a back-biter!’ ” The witticism sent Charles Lamb, himself a master-punner (or “Lamb-punnist,” as he once joked to Edward Moxon) “off into a loud fit of mirth.” “Now that’s devilish good!” he exclaimed; “I’ll sup with you to-morrow night.”6 Now, fourteen years after the death of Charles Lamb, Robert Balmanno directed his steps toward the bookstore of Bartlett & Welford. Like Evert Duyckinck before him, he picked up—literally, but also in his case figuratively, by purchasing—the fifth volume of The Works of Jonathan Swift (1759). Published by the Irish printer George Faulkner in Dublin, it contained Swift’s political writings, including his contributions to the Tory Examiner (1710) and his treatise The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying on the Present War (1711). The latter harshly critiqued (lambasted, Elia might have said) the leader of the British and allied forces in the War of the Spanish Succession, namely, John Churchill, 1st Duke of

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Marlborough. Lamb was no fan of political prose, but he had squeezed six pages of poetry on related topics into the book. The inside front cover contained, in his handwriting, twelve stanzas of Swift’s “To the Earl of Peterborow,” a poem addressed to Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough, who commanded the British forces in Spain. Whether or not Lamb identified with the slim yet vigorous Mordaunt in Swift’s poem, he certainly appreciated Swift’s biting—or mordant—sense of humor. Despite his gentleness, Lamb on occasion when provoked was as capable of castigating his fellows as Swift. When his publisher John Taylor threatened to sue Edward Moxon over copyright for the second volume of Elia (published by Moxon as The Last Essays of Elia), Lamb channeled some verse by Swift: “The more I think of him, the less I think of him. His meanness is invisible with aid of solar microscope, my moral eye smarts at him. The less flea that bites little fleas!”7 The analogy of the flea derives from Swift’s castigation of backbiters in the world of letters: “Each Poet of inferior Size / On you shall rail and criticize; / And strive to tear you Limb from Limb, / While others do as much for him. // . . . So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea / Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey, / And these have smaller yet to bite ’em, / And so proceed ad infinitum.”8 Lamb’s letter was written in the dark period of 1833, when he and his sister were reading the Inferno, and he finished it off by damning Taylor in a manner worthy of Dante: “If curses are not dis-hallowed by descending so low . . . Maledicatur in extremis” (Curses attend his death-bed!).9 Opposite “To the Earl of Peterborow,” Lamb copied sixteen rhymed quatrains of Swift’s “The Run upon the Bankers,” a didactic poem about the crash of the British stock market in 1720. Runaway speculation in the South Sea Company had caused a panicked run on the banks that became the nation’s first major lesson in the dangers of a credit economy since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. “This was once a house of trade,” says Elia on a visit to the South Sea House. “The throng of merchants was here—the quick pulse of gain.” But a century later, the pulse had slowed down and the gains had been “long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble.” Like an antiquarian exploring a ruin, he finds the old offices “deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks” and “long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany.” The building where Elia began his life as a scrivener, once a triumphant symbol of British mercantile capitalism, with massy silver

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inkstands and leather-topped conference tables, was now “a magnificent relic!”10 Swift’s poem on the South Sea Bubble opens by comparing the unpredictable whims of the marketplace to waves that wash in from the sea to wipe away entire coastal trading cities: The bold Encroachers on the Deep, Gain by Degrees huge Tracts of Land, ’Till Neptune with a Gen’ral Sweep Turns all again to barren Strand. The Multitude’s capricious Pranks Are said to represent the Seas, Breaking the Bankers and the Banks, Resume their own when e’er they please.11

The brute force of nature, like that of the unthinking multitude, cannot be predicted. Having lived through the Panic of 1837, which wreaked similar havoc on the American economy, Robert Balmanno would have recognized a fundamental insight of Swift’s poem: the instability of a fluid credit economy in the world of international commerce. Besides this volume by Swift containing Lamb’s handwritten verses, Balmanno gravitated to the poetry from Elia’s library. The Cavalier poet Edmund Waller, author of “Go, Lovely Rose,” a widely anthologized and highly celebrated carpe diem poem, was the author of another volume Balmanno purchased that morning, The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems (1690). A posthumous sequel to the 1645 collected edition, it contained formerly unpublished writings, among them Waller’s revision of The Maid’s Tragedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Lamb’s notes in the margins of the book suggest that this was the source text for his excerpts of The Maid’s Tragedy in his anthology of dramatic verse, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare. Beaumont and Fletcher played second fiddle to Shakespeare, but in terms of plot twist and character, “All poets after Shakespeare yield to ’em in variety of genius.” Lamb once paid Southey’s poetry the compliment of having no equal “in simplicity and tenderness,” except The Maid’s Tragedy.12 Turning over the title page of The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems, Balmanno would have discovered another poem by Waller in Lamb’s handwriting, “To a Fair Lady Playing with a Snake.” Its title suggests the overt

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sexuality characterizing the genre of Cavalier poetry, or poetry associated with the court of Charles I (which the Puritans rose up like a wave from the sea to destroy). Waller’s snake creeps up the lady’s sleeve to lie between her breasts, and the poet, who has been denied such bliss, complains that his mistress should “start at Love, and play with Snakes.”13 At the end of the book, Lamb scribbled a note to indicate that, despite some missing end pages, the text was complete. While the book was thus (in the language of the book trade) “perfect,” it was in typical Elian condition: missing leaves, worn and frayed edges, loose covers, mutilated pages, and so on.14 None of this deterred a sentimental buyer like Balmanno. Another Cavalier poet who made it to Balmanno’s bookshelves in Brooklyn was John Cleveland (also Cleavland or Cleaveland). Although Cleveland was a Royalist, his poetry displayed much of the metaphysical style of poetry associated with the Puritan dissenters. The metaphysical poets had a reputation for mechanical rather than natural conceits, recondite wit, and discordant harmony (concordia discours). Lamb’s copy of Poems by John Cleavland (1662) constituted its own pleasing cacophony: elegies, obsequies, epitaphs, songs, carpe diem lyrics, satires, petitions, letters, political sallies, and Latin verse. In his biography of the metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley, Samuel Johnson defined the genre of metaphysical poetry as one in which the “most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”15 On the back of the title page of Cleveland’s Poems, Lamb transcribed a remark from the English biographer Thomas Fuller connecting the metaphysical Cleveland to the sexually discordant figure of the hermaphrodite. According to Fuller, those “who have Clevelandized, endeavouring to imitate his masculine style, could never go beyond the Hermaphrodite . . . betraying the weaker sex in their deficient conceits.”16 Cleveland had used the hermaphrodite as a conceit in two poems included in the volume from Lamb’s library, “Upon an Hermaphrodite” and “The Authors Hermaphrodite.” The first poem is the subject of the second, whose subtitle explains its own raison d’être: Cleveland’s “Hermaphrodite” had been “Made after Mr. Randolph’s death, yet inserted into his Poems.” Cleveland’s friend and contemporary Thomas Randolph also had a reputation for wit, and after his death his editors mistakenly included Cleveland’s poem in a posthumous collection of his poetry. Subsequently, Cleveland wrote his second hermaphrodite poem to correct the mistake. In “The Authors Hermaphrodite,” he imagines Randolph in the manner of classical

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elegy as transformed into a star—in Randolph’s case, the sun. He suggests that the sun, which brings life, also animates poetry: “The Sun [Randolph] and man [Cleveland] get man [Hermaphrodite], thus Tom and I / Are the joynt fathers of the Poetry [“Upon an Hermaphrodite”].” And thus, Cleveland (or “Cleaveland” since here the contemporary orthography is fitting) offers to split authorship of the first hermaphrodite poem with his friend. For since (blest shade) this verse is male, but O’ th’ weaker Sex, a fancy feminine; We’ll part the child & yet commit no slaughter So shall it be thy Son, and yet my daughter.17

Cleveland modestly attributes the masculine style to Randolph and claims the reigning conceit or “fancy feminine” (phantasia) as his own. Yet, given that “feminine” here implies weak, Fuller, in his biographical sketch of Cleveland, ascribes to Cleveland the “Masculine Stile” and to his imitators the feminized “deficient conceits.” In the same volume of Cleveland’s poems, Lamb also transcribed a “Song” by Matthew Prior from the Miscellaneous Works of His Late Excellency Matthew Prior (1740), another book in his library that Balmanno purchased at the store of Bartlett & Welford. The lyric is brief enough to quote entire: For God’s sake—nay, dear Sir, Lord, what do You mean? I protest, and I vow Sir, Your ways are obscene. Pray give over, O! fie, Pish, leave of[f] your fooling, Forbear, or I’ll cry,— I hate this rude doing. Let me die if I stay, Does the Devil possess You; Your hand take away, Then perhaps I may bless You.18

The three stanzas of this playful Cavalier poem read like a passage from the diary of Samuel Pepys—a peep show (if you will) into the amorous antics of the Restoration period. As the speaker fends off the lusty advances of a

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gentleman, it becomes clear that, for all her protestations, this coy mistress is enjoying the public grope session. Of course, as the “deviant” sexuality of Cleveland’s verse should remind us, there is no reason, beyond convention, to assume that the speaker is female. Opposite Prior’s “Song” in his volume of Cleveland’s poems, Lamb copied Cleveland’s “Petition to His Highnesse the Lord Protector,” and perhaps lest there should be any question, he also copied, on the last page of the volume, Cleveland’s “Definition of a Protector.” The text of the latter derived from another book in his library, J. Cleaveland Revived: Poems, Orations, Epistles, and Other of His Genuine Incomparable Pieces (1668), which likewise found its way to Robert Balmanno’s bookshelves in Brooklyn. “What’s a Protector?” Cleveland asks at the start of his “Definition,” and his royalist sympathies dictate the ironic reply: “He’s a stately thing / That Apes it in the non-age of a King.” At the time Oliver Cromwell became the Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the twenty-three-year-old Charles II was in exile in France. Cleveland thus sets Cromwell’s political playacting during the youth or “nonage” of the legitimate king. He hyphenates the term, however, suggesting that the whole period of the interregnum between Charles I and Charles II was a “nonage.” He also portrays the Protector as “a tragick actor, Cæsar in a clown,” by which latter we are to understand a worker or an uncourtly rustic like the “clowns” Shakespeare invented for comedy. (Lamb added an asterisk to note that “Cromwell was reported to have been a brewer.”)19 But Cleveland intends Cromwell as a “tragic actor” in more ways than one: an inept player in the role of Britain’s chief potentate and an actor in the tragedy, or regicide, of Charles I. Among the other books in Balmanno’s library was a 1602 copy of Chaucer with a “note in old writing” on the title page signed “J. Cromwell,” suggesting that it had once belonged “to the family of that terrible fellow Oliver.”20 Both association copies of Cleveland’s poetry that Robert Balmanno purchased from Lamb’s book collection are now in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. J. Cleaveland Revived first passed through the private library of William Thomas Hildrup Howe, an antiquarian book collector from Cincinnati who pasted his elegant gilt bookplate inside the front cover. But Howe stopped short of rebinding the book, which can still be seen today in its original Elian glory—torn pages, cracked back, flaking leather, missing

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Bookplate of William Thomas Hildrup Howe, pasted into Charles Lamb’s copy of J. Cleaveland Revived (1668). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

leaves, loose covers. Lamb’s copy of Poems by John Cleavland, however, stands in stark contrast to its companion. Probably to suit the Gilded Era tastes of a later owner, the New York millionaire Ogden Goelet, the book was richly reoutfitted in blue morocco with ornamental panels, raised bands, and gilt letters that proclaim not only the title and date of publication, but the fact that it was “CHARLES / LAMB’S / COPY.” The sentimental value of the book thus proudly announces itself in golden splendor. But had Robert and Mary Balmanno lived to see these two volumes in their current condition, one suspects that the former, in all its tattered authenticity, would have appealed to them more than the latter. With his relics from Charles Lamb’s library secured, Robert Balmanno headed downtown to the Custom House. The Port of New York had become the main point of entry for goods as well as passengers into the United States. The historians Robert Greenhalgh Albion and Jennie Barnes Pope explain

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Spine of Charles Lamb’s copy of Poems by John Cleavland (1662). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.

that by midcentury “New York [had] made itself into an entrepôt where goods of every sort from every place were exchanged” and where “New Yorkers grew rich from the profits, commissions, freights, and other excuses for levying toll.”21 The government had recently moved its most lucrative customhouse from a converted bookshop on Wall Street to the columned dignity of what is now Federal Hall. Yet as the hours wore on, Balmanno’s mind drifted from revenues and freightage back to Charles Lamb’s books, and he began to think he had missed something. Pushing his other papers aside, he dashed off a note to John Russell Bartlett. “Will you do me the favor to select one, or two, more Lambs for me, to the extent of Ten dollars, in addition to my own selection this morning. I had not time to look at his books carefully.”22

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The bookseller, familiar with Balmanno’s Shakespearean tastes, set aside for him the ninth and last volume of a set of Shakespeare’s works. The first eight volumes contained the plays edited by Nicholas Rowe and published by the London bookseller Jacob Tonson, who had obtained the copyright to them. When a ninth volume, containing Shakespeare’s nondramatic poetry, was added to the revised edition of the plays in 1714, it became the first collected edition of Shakespeare ’s complete works. Along with the longer narrative poems “Venus and Adonis,” “The Rape of Lucrece,” and “Tarquin and Lucrece,” the ninth volume included all the shorter lyrics that had been collected and published by John Benson in 1640, among them “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and 154 sonnets.23 Tonson and Rowe’s affordably priced, duodecimo “everyman” editions of Shakespeare were the equivalent of today’s Shakespeare paperbacks, and Lamb for one preferred them to more expensively illustrated or scholarly editions. The Elian sensibility found something artificial in the elite packaging of the bard as a collector’s item, as in The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare in nine folio volumes, edited by George Steevens and elaborately printed by John and Josiah Boydell in cooperation with their brother-in-law George W. Nichol, Bookseller to King George III. “I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays,” Elia explained, “and I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.” He also believed that “the better a book is, the less it demands from binding” and other ornamentation. He preferred Tonson’s rough, unfinished woodcuts to the highly polished engravings of Boydell’s edition, which left less to the imagination. He explained that the woodcuts, “being so execrably bad,” served merely as “maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text . . . without pretending to any supposable emulation with it.”24 Nor did Elia stock his shelves with scholarly editions of the bard. Prolonged editorial commentaries about diction, source materials, and textual variants were impertinent interferences in the reading experience. “Shakespear is one of the last books one should like to give up,” he once told Wordsworth, and this volume of Shakespeare was one of the last books—and, as mentioned, the only by Shakespeare—in his collection by 1848.25 This volume also had four pages of handwritten extracts, corrections, and cross-references by Lamb, and Balmanno was thrilled with the bookseller’s choice. But as time wore on, he again became anxious. What if something happened to the book before he could retrieve it from the store? What

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if some heedless customer, unversed in the ways of old books, got hold of it? Three days later, therefore, on Thursday, February 10, he scribbled another note to Bartlett, asking him to tuck the book away in his desk and show it only to those who might ask to see it. Believing, as he did, that a love of Shakespeare “makes the whole world kin,” Balmanno could hardly think of keeping the volume entirely to himself.26 Exactly two more years had passed when, in the dark hours of the night between February 10 and 11, 1850, Robert Balmanno experienced a dream that seemed to come straight out of “Venus and Adonis.” As he slept, the walls of his home at 292 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, fell away, and he found himself transported to a large, oak-paneled room in Tudor England. Shakespeare was standing in Elizabethan doublet and hose with his back to the fireplace. “There was a good-humoured smile on his face, almost inclining to a laugh.” His wife, Anne, like an admiring Venus, sat in a nearby armchair. She was a fleshly, good-looking woman, with gray voluptuous eyes and “the most superb bust” Balmanno had ever seen, “white as a lily, but exquisitely round and full, as that of the Venus herself.” As she spoke, her words flowed “so freely, so distinctly” that Balmanno was overcome “in a perfect delirium of delight.” Shakespeare kept smiling, as his wife continued rhyming in perfectly measured tetrameter couplets. “Yes, excellent poetry,” Balmanno pronounced them, “every couplet told exactly.” But Shakespeare was headed out for the evening, and his wife’s speech betrayed jealousy. The last couplet Balmanno heard was a command: “Only let me charge thee this, / That thou dost not even kiss!”27 With that, Balmanno awoke. He started from his pillow and rushed to the mantelpiece, groping desperately in the dark for a match to light his spirit-lamp (an alcohol-burning device with an open flame). As he could not find one, he made his way to the front bedroom, where he did find a match. But when he struck it on the grate of the fireplace, it broke in half. He recalled that his weather journal lay on a bureau in the same room. Stationers sold such notebooks for keeping track of weather patterns in the days before televised weather forecasts. Perhaps, he thought, if he wrote his letters large enough and spaced them out, he might read what he had written in the morning. With the poetry of his dream still echoing in his head, he began scratching out what he could recall of Anne Shakespeare’s speech. But when he awoke the next morning, “horror of horrors!” The verse he had recorded was swallowed up in the ink of some well-used blotting

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paper. His vision had fled, and the only words he could decipher (besides the injunction not to kiss) was a fragment: “Waste not time in.” We are tempted to complete the line for him: Waste not time in deciphering the lost verse of your Shakespearean Venus, for if the couplet that remains is any indication, it is best left as a pleasant memory.28 Yet Balmanno found a sympathetic listener in his own wife, who composed some verses to commemorate the occasion. From Degraw Street, Balmanno then turned his attention to another Shakespearean Venus across the Atlantic. She was born Mary Victoria Novello, and Charles Lamb had called her Victoria. She was the eldest daughter of Vincent Novello—composer, organist, conductor, music publisher, and a bardolater who once played Falstaff. Her sisters sang with him at private recitals in their parlor on Oxford Street, and her brother Alfred published music and poetry with her husband, Charles Cowden Clarke. When they were married, in 1828, Lamb had composed a wedding song titled “Serenata, for Two Voices, on the Marriage of Charles Cowden Clarke, Esqre., to Victoria, eldest daughter of Vincent Novello, Esqre.” He intended to have it performed as a surprise for the newlyweds at the Greyhound, a pub in Enfield where they spent their honeymoon. When he sent it to Vincent Novello to be set to music, he specified that “the peculiar tone of the composition demands sprightliness, occasionally checked by tenderness.”29 But Mary Lamb rained on her brother’s epithalamium. “Mary forbid it me, as too light for the occasion—as if the subject required anything heavy—so in a tiff with her I sent no congratulation at all.”30 As for her being a Shakespearean Venus, Mary Cowden Clarke agreed with Mrs. Shakespeare. In December 1847, Douglas Jerrold, an author and editor of Punch magazine, published a fictional “Shakespeare Night,” which depicts Mary Cowden Clarke rousing the jealousy of Shakespeare’s wife. In Jerrold’s sketch, the Shakespeares visit Covent Garden Theatre, and various scholars pay tribute to the bard by presenting him with copies of their work. Shakespeare spies out Mary Cowden Clarke shrinking in a corner and recognizes her immediately. Taking “her two hands, and looking a Shakespearean look in her now pale face,” he says, “in tones of unimaginable depth and sweetness—‘But where is your book, Mistress Mary Clarke? Where is your Concordance?’ ” As her knees start knocking, he presses her hands, and “with a smile of sun-lighted Apollo” says, “I pray you, let me take it home with me.” She mutters her consent, and the bard turns to his wife. “A very fair and cordial gentlewoman, Anne,” he says. But as in Robert Balmanno’s Shakespearean

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dream, the gallantry of the bard threatens his wife, who refuses to grant her rival the compliment of being a fair woman. “It was just like him,” she scoffs, “he was always seeing something fair where nobody else saw anything. The woman—od’s her life!—was well enough.”31 When the epistolary relationship between Robert Balmanno and Mary Cowden Clarke began in 1848, she referred him to Jerrold’s sketch for a picture of her character. Mary Cowden Clarke had spent twelve years compiling The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1845), and Balmanno considered her “one of the most estimable and extraordinary women that ever existed . . . exhibiting the most wonderful instincts of female perseverance ever heard of.”32 She was also the author of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850) and an amateur actress in Charles Dickens’s theatrical company who played Shakespeare ’s female characters, including the comic Mistress Quickly. Every morning she awoke to a sight of the bard, whose portrait hung as a “guardian angel” at her bedside. Beneath his portrait, she had written: “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity.” This was Shakespeare’s description of Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, but Cowden Clarke (like others before her), in applying it to Shakespeare, left out the rest of the sentence: “but you gods will give us / Some faults to make us men.”33 While the editorial scholar in her was concerned with textual accuracy, the bardolater regularly took Shakespeare ’s words out of context, adapting them to everyday life. Robert Balmanno had heard that during the years Mary Cowden Clarke spent compiling her Shakespeare concordance she had kept a box or basket for every letter of the alphabet into which she would drop her indexing slips. He estimated that she had indexed some “three hundred and nine thousand six hundred lines! (309,600)”—a number he found “perfectly astounding.”34 When the concordance appeared as a book after first being issued in eighteen monthly installments, it superseded the work of previous scholars. It was more complete than the index the publisher John Stockdale commissioned for Shakespeare ’s Dramatic Works (1790) edited by Samuel Ayscough, and it was more authoritative than Francis Twiss’s Complete Verbal Index to the Plays of Shakespeare (1805). Balmanno called it “unrivalled.” The American literary historian George Ticknor declared that it would “never be superseded” and that former reference works were now “entirely useless.”35 Balmanno had seen a facsimile of Mary Cowden Clarke’s signature in the preface to her concordance and wished to have his own copy of her autograph. He also coveted one of the indexing slips that she had used in

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compiling the work as a relic of the production process. He hoped to place it in his copy of the concordance to show others how “the wonderful work was worked out.” He asked his friend, the antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker, to visit her at Craven Hill Cottage, Bayswater, and “introduce” him as her “American Enthusiast.” But Croker, who was preoccupied with his discovery of “Shakespeare ’s betrothal ring,” dragged his feet. He did not know Mary Cowden Clarke, and Balmanno instead turned to someone who did for assistance: Douglas Jerrold, who acted with the author of the Shakespeare concordance in Dickens’s amateur theater company. On October 10, 1849, Jerrold addressed her as follows: “I know a man who knows a man (in America) who says, ‘I would give two ounces of Californian gold for two lines written by Mrs. Cowden Clarke!’ Will you write me two lines for the wise enthusiast? and, if I get the gold . . . I will struggle with the angel Conscience that you may have it.” The California Gold Rush had begun the previous year, and Balmanno’s offer was in the spirit of the times. On May 1, Croker had compared Mary Balmanno’s “gentle and fascinating manner” to a clear glass that, like the surface of still water, revealed underlying wealth: “sound sense and sterling worth . . . worth all the gold of California.”36 Jerrold hoped that the reward would come in some shape other than “dirt in yellow gold,” and Balmanno himself hesitated to send Mary Cowden Clarke a lump of filthy lucre in exchange for her autograph, thereby stripping the exchange of its sentiment and reducing it to commerce.37 Instead he sent her “an elegantly ornamented card box, containing a smaller one of crimson velvet, in which were six gold pens; a holder of ivory and silver; another of tortoise-shell and sliver; the whole enveloped in a mat of dovecoloured cloth and rose-coloured satin.” Fortunately, there were still plenty of indexing slips left to send her American admirer with her autograph, for she and her husband were “but sorry relic-preservers.” Ever since the publication of the concordance, those slips had been going, a basket at a time, to light the fire.38 Balmanno also kept his identity secret in communication with Mary Cowden Clarke, receiving her first letters addressed to “The American Enthusiast, New York” through his friend William Taylor at the post office. When he offered to send her any American autograph she might desire, she replied that the only one that interested her was “the genuine one—the real signature—of ‘The American Enthusiast.’ ”39 Balmanno gloated over the autograph when it reached New York. The day after Jerrold’s original request, she had sat down to thank her “American

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enthusiast” for the compliment, copying out some lines from Troilus and Cressida for him. She folded the sheet of paper containing her autograph and sealed it in wax with a seal ring containing a portrait head of Shakespeare. Balmanno had begged that she send him the autograph in the old-fashioned style, without an envelope, since he wished “not an enveloped letter, but one carrying prima facie evidence of its authenticity, the post office stamps and date.” Explaining this desire, he protested “the detestable fashion, now prevailing, of putting all letters and notes into envelopes, thus destroying that which courts of law have recognized as evidence, the government stamp. May he or she who first made envelopes fashionable for letters passing through the post office, be enveloped in everlasting oblivion!”40 When Balmanno encountered Evert Duyckinck, he dangled his letter from Mary Cowden Clarke before him, saying that a true autograph collector would give him a hundred dollars for it. Like others of Balmanno’s acquaintance, including George Palmer Putnam, Duyckinck was an autographomaniac. In the spring of 1848, when Putnam put his autograph collection on display in his new store to attract customers, Duyckinck had enjoyed looking it over. In particular, he had been delighted by a letter from Charles Lamb to Mary Shelley complaining of the “ineffable dullness” of Enfield. In that letter, dated January 1830, Lamb had grumbled, “It is ice, but nobody slides, nobody tumbles down, nobody dies as I can see, or nobody cares if they do, the Doctors seem to have no Patients, there is no Accidents nor Offences, a good thief would be something in this well-governed Hamlet. We have for indoors amusement a Library without books, and the middle of the week hopes of a Sunday newspaper to link us by filmy associations to a world we are dead to.”41 Duyckinck, writing to his brother on May 1, 1848, thought he might try to bribe Putnam for a copy of it.42 Robert Balmanno possessed his own letter by Lamb, the pièce de résistance of his autograph collection, which he had been building for years based on principles of sentimental selection. As he wrote in February 1852, “We have been, for many years a collector of autograph letters; not those of the million—kings, princes and peers have had not value in our eyes. . . . Our collection has been confined to literary men and artists, such as will live and be valued hundreds of years hence.” His autograph letter from Lamb to Thomas Hood had been written two and a half years before Lamb’s letter to Shelley. It contained Lamb’s account, which we have already seen, of the “dirty lumber” of his library arriving on a cart with his servant Becky during

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the Lambs’ move to Enfield. It also reveals him looking forward to the pleasures of rustication and being sequestered, far from the glossy superficiality and decadence of the city, with his old books: O the curds & cream you shall eat with us here! O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there! O the old books we shall peruse here! O the new nonsense we shall trifle over there! O Sir T. Browne!—here. O Mr. Hood & Mr. Jerdan there.

Yet turtle soup and lobster salads were really nothing to scoff at for a Londoner like Lamb, who signed the letter, “C(urbanus) L(sylvanus) (Elia ambo).”43 When Balmanno showed Park Benjamin the letter, the New York journalist replied, “A copy of that letter would be worth a thousand dollars to my paper!”44 Walter Pater once observed that just as Lamb’s spoken witticisms pale in “losing the actual tones of the stammerer,” so too, “in the printed letters the reader will lose the curious varieties with which the originals abound.”45 Charles Lamb was at the top of the list of autographs that James T. Fields, the Boston publisher we have already encountered as an autographomaniac, wished to have, and he swore to “have it if I steal it.”46 In some sense, this is what he ended up doing. He and Lamb’s friend Bryan Waller Procter were looking over a collection of Lamb’s autograph letters when Procter heard his wife coming down the stairs. Anne Benson Procter was “a lady of strong character, a witty and delightful talker said to have had few equals and no superior.” She had known the Lambs before her marriage, and she “piqued herself on being as good a hater as she was a friend, and Lamb loved a good hater.”47 Before she entered the room, Procter slipped Fields one of Lamb’s letters and whispered, “Cram it into your pocket . . . perhaps she won’t let you carry it off.”48 Much of the personality and character conveyed in Lamb’s autograph letters could not be reproduced. Before Edward Fitzgerald made Lamb’s letter of December 1, 1824, famous by recounting the anecdote of Thackeray stopping when reading it, pressing it to his forehead, and uttering “Saint Charles,” for instance, collected editions of Lamb’s letters did not reprint the full letter to Bernard Barton containing its postscript for Barton’s daughter Lucy. Lamb wrote the postscript, signed “Elia,” in a miniature

134 n e w y o r k s h a k e s p e a r e a n s From Charles Lamb’s letter to Bernard Barton, December 1, 1824. The Letters of Charles Lamb to Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb (1935), vol. 2, edited by E. V. Lucas. Author’s Collection.

hand. “Your pretty little letterets make me ashamed of my great straggling coarse handwriting,” he explained. “I wonder where you get pens to write so small. Sure they must be the pinions of a small wren, or a robin. If you write so in your Album, you must give us glasses to read by.” Edward Verrall Lucas included the text of the postscript in his three-volume edition of The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, but it was not typeset “in extremely small characters,” nor were the two lines of verse it contained reproduced in alternate red and black inks. Lamb, claiming to have seen the dual-tone color scheme used in early printed books in the album of a young lady, recommended it to Lucy Barton as a method of conveying “an agreeable variety to the eye.”49 Among the agreeable varieties (or for Pater, “curious varieties”) that have made it into the collected letters are Lamb’s drawings—squiggles really—included in the same letter that impressed Thackeray. The Reverend John R. Mitford, a literary antiquarian and book collector, was in the market for some Chinese vases, and Lamb claimed that his friend Samuel Ball, a tea inspector in Canton, could be trusted to “take the proper care for their execution.” In a gentle parody of ornamental connoisseurship, he included some designs, suggesting that the two to the left might “indifferently hold daisies, marjoram, sweet Williams, and that sort,” while the last might hold buttercups (ranunculuses). But the season was too far gone for roses, which Mitford must be content to see “wither in a Wedgwood pot.50 To look at these designs is to smile. They are at once cute, zany, and interesting—all aesthetic categories that have been associated with consumerism. In their shivering energy, they seem ready to spring off the page and dance. Lamb certainly was speaking with his tongue in his cheek when he declared, “The last pattern is obviously fitted for ranunculuses only.” The material connoisseurship of scholar-dandies like Lamb (book collectors, gastronomes, lovers of old china) resisted the standardizing aesthetic ideals of a century earlier, as well as the commodification of life in the present. As Lamb wrote after his whimsical suggestions, each must “consult his own taste after all.”51 While this was not the letter that James T. Fields crammed into his pocket, it was associated with the anecdote that canonized “Saint

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Charles” as the patron saint of the transatlantic book world. And like Fields’s letter, the anecdote made its way from the great British bibliopolis to Boston—this time in a letter from Edward Fitzgerald to Charles Eliot Norton, whom we ’ll meet again in the final chapter of this story.52

The Testimonial Armchair One may wonder whether Robert Balmanno was familiar with Mary Cowden Clarke ’s essay “My Arm-Chair,” which appeared in a weekly antiquarian paper, the Table Book, shortly before the Balmannos came to New York. The Balmannos moved in the same literary-antiquarian circle as its publishers, Charles Cowden Clarke and Leigh Hunt. Its editor was the antiquary William Hone, and it included work not only by Mary Cowden Clarke but also by Charles Lamb—including Lamb’s Shakespearean “Defeat of Time; or, A Tale of the Fairies,” a prose retelling of Thomas Hood’s Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, which we have seen Thomas Westwood pluck out of the strawberry patch in Enfield.53 Shakespeare was the reigning monarch of English literary tradition, and an armchair in the typical English household was like a throne fit for a king. Elia reigns over his domestic realm in his “bachelor arm-chair,” and Mary Cowden Clarke recognized its appeal in her essay for the Table Book: “On entering a room where there is an easy-chair you are struck by the look of conscious self-importance which seems to distinguish it as the monarch of all the surrounding chairs; there is an appearance of regal superiority about it, blended, however, with such a charming condescension, that you immediately avail yourself of its gracious inclination to receive the burden of your homage.”54 Such an armchair, supposing it were surmounted by an ivory portrait head of Shakespeare and a testimonial plaque from her American admirers, would be the perfect receptacle for the burden as well as the homage of the author of the Shakespeare concordance. With this idea in mind, Robert Balmanno set to work to raise a subscription for a testimonial armchair. He stayed up late scribbling letters when he might have been sleeping, met with silversmiths and wood carvers when he might have been working, and in general submitted himself to such “botheration” on behalf of Mary Cowden Clarke ’s testimonial that his wife began to call him “Mrs. Clarke’s testymenial.”55 But his efforts paid off, as the number of subscribers swelled to 250, with money pouring in from around the country—Alabama, California,

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Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C. Balmanno had often thought it a shame that only after the death of some “great public benefactor” did people begin to reflect and think that the person’s memory “should not be allowed to sink into oblivion, without some commemoration of the benefits which all are then ready to admit have been derived from his genius.” Better to honor such genius in the present, he believed, and in this belief began his appeal to subscribers: A few devoted admirers of Shakespeare have considered it would be a well deserved compliment, to present to Mrs. Cowden Clarke some testimonial of their appreciation. This most amiable lady spent Twelve long years in writing out her Concordance, and Four more, in correcting the press—an instance of perseverance and devotion, unequalled in the world, even among men. As some acknowledgment for such a noble performance . . . it is hoped the lovers of Shakespeare, in America, who are constantly deriving benefit from Mrs. Clarke’s labor, will have gallantry sufficient to present a testimonial while it can be enjoyed, rather than wait, as is too often the case, till the lapse of time shall render it unavailing.

To underscore the futility of commemorating departed merit, Balmanno borrowed a phrase from Macbeth: “ ‘After life’s fitful fever,’ ‘Storied urn or animated bust,’ are of small consequence.” While the first quotation is from Shakespeare, the latter derives from Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a poem still popular a century after its publication. From cremation urns adorned with pictorial narrative to statues so realistic they seem to live, Balmanno suggests, memorials by the living can mean little to the deceased.56 Balmanno drafted the flyer himself but asked others to sign it. “The greatest pleasure I know,” Charles Lamb once said, “is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.”57 This quotation circulated in the American papers in 1848, and in arranging the testimonial armchair for Mary Cowden Clarke, Robert Balmanno acted in the same Elian spirit. Signing their names to the appeal were George Palmer Putnam, who agreed to keep the subscription book in his store and had influence in the American world of letters; William Cullen Bryant, then editor of the Evening Post; and the celebrated actor William Evans Burton. Bryant’s friends, Henry J.

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Raymond, a speaker in the New York state legislature, and the merchant Alfred Pell also signed the letter. Balmanno set the subscription limit at five dollars, and Mary Balmanno—forgiving her husband’s testiness and entering into his enthusiasms—added her name, residence, and five-dollar pledge to the list. Robert Balmanno, pledging the same amount, signed himself merely, “The American Enthusiast, South Brooklyn.”58 As one can see from the following sampling, Americans from a variety of professions, as well as states and territories, joined in the testimonial for Mary Cowden Clarke: Actors and Entertainers P. T. Barnum, William Evans Burton, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Pearce Christy Authors Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Gilmore Simms, Sarah Rogers Haight, Anita George Bibliomaniacs James Carson Brevoort, Alexander Augustus Smets, Zelotes Hosmer Booksellers and Publishers

George Palmer Putnam

Business magnates

William Backhouse Astor

Educators

Horace Webster

Historians

J. K. Tefft

Journalists Lewis Gaylord Clark, Nathaniel P. Willis, William E. Cramer, Henry J. Raymond Attorneys and Judges Horace Mower, John Howland, Edward Curtis, Luther B. Wyman Scholars George Ticknor, J. Austin Allibone, Calvin Ellis Stowe Merchants Prosper Montgomery Wetmore, Richard K. Haight, Elisha Ely Morgan Military men Joseph Howland, John B. Grayson, W. E. Blake Minters

Joseph Reuben Curtis

Physicians

Theodric Romeyn Beck

Statesmen Daniel Webster, John Van Buren, Duncan C. Pell

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Daniel Webster, then secretary of state—and for Balmanno, not only “America’s greatest statesman” but “the Magnus Apollo of America”—jumped at the chance “to sign the subscription, first, or last, or any where.” He considered the concordance “a perfect wonder, surprisingly full and accurate, and exhibiting proof of unexampled labor and patience. She has treasured up every word of Shakespeare, as if he were her lover, and she were his.”59 With four hundred dollars of subscription money secured, the Balmannos went about designing the testimonial armchair. At the top center of the carved rosewood frame of the chair, a silver-plated plaque read, To Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke, This Chair Is Presented, By a Few Ladies and Gentlemen of America, As a Tribute of Gratitude for the Unequalled Industry Which Gave the Readers of English Throughout the World, Her Concordance to Shakespeare.60

The plaque was dated July 15, 1850, to mark the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Shakespeare concordance. An ivory portrait head of the bard, based on Shakespeare ’s funeral monument at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, presided in alto relief above the plaque. Robert Balmanno had intended to have the head mounted on a frosted silver-plated star, but the silversmith made the star too small for the purpose. Instead, a carved wreath of oak leaves and laurel, representing Old England and its bard, surrounded the head in a circular frame. The wings of swans, symbolizing the “Sweet Swan of Avon” (Ben Jonson’s phrase from the First Folio), formed “a protecting canopy” above the bard’s head.61 At the bottom center of the filigreed frame of the chair, the masks of comedy and tragedy looked out in three-quarter profile, and from one of its arms a wooden reading desk swung on a silver-plated crane. The upholstery caused some controversy. Robert Balmanno had in mind a rich crimson Genoa velvet with a satin ground for the chair cushions, but his wife, in consultation with the wives of Daniel Webster and of Edward Curtis, decided that “although regal,” the fabric had “become somewhat old fashioned.” Another gentleman involved in the project proposed a green morocco leather, but he too was vetoed by the ladies since “to leather a lady’s chair would have been rather preposterous!” Instead, they chose an elegant

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Mary Balmanno, Testimonial Shakespeare chair. Engraved by Alexander Anderson for Mary Balmanno, Pen and Pencil (1858). Author’s Collection.

French satin brocade.62 The testimonial reading chair was well on its way to matching, as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hoped it would, the “royal rich array” of “Great Juno’s golden Chair . . . which, they say, / The gods stand gazing on.” Matthew King, a furniture maker with a store near Putnam’s at 466 Broadway who specialized in seating, executed the designs for the chair and put it on display in his window—where pedestrians stood “gazing on” until Friday, October 31, 1850, when it was taken down and packed for shipping.63 The Honorable Abbott Lawrence, U.S. minister to Great Britain, had agreed to present the testimonial armchair to Mary Cowden Clarke. If we may credit Melville ’s portrait of Lawrence as a “Gentleman with Gold Sleeve-Buttons” in The Confidence-Man (1857), Lawrence was “a man of more than winsome aspect.”64 If one may tell a man from his books, moreover, he was just the kind of person Elia would have dreaded to meet in a stagecoach. “There is nothing which I dread so much, as being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man, that does not know me,” confessed Elia, who always felt “a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world.”65 Lawrence did not set out to collect a distinguished book collection, “but as a practical man, and as one who has been considerably in

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the public service . . . simply purchased books when he wanted them, and aimed to buy books of everyday use, and not those merely interesting to the antiquarian, or the bibliographer.” His private library, overlooking the Boston Common, housed more than ten thousand volumes, including a good number of Elia’s biblia a-biblia: encyclopedias, histories of the different counties and territories of the United States, geographies, dictionaries, biographies, and books of political economy. It also included “standard” literature in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. A proponent of Useful Knowledge and a member of the Mercantile Library of Boston, Lawrence formed a collection that was “of quite a miscellaneous character, such as an active business and practical man, who did not pretend to be a scholar, would be likely to gather around him.”66 On New Year’s Day, 1852, he sent his emissary Charles F. Dennet, “a most gentlemanly, handsome young man” (as the author of the Shakespeare concordance found him), to announce that her testimonial armchair had arrived in London.67 Inclement weather held up its delivery for almost three weeks, but on Monday, January 19, Lawrence’s son and attaché, Colonel Timothy Bigelow Lawrence, presented the testimonial armchair to Mary Cowden Clarke with the following high-sounding words from his father: It is with a feeling of high satisfaction . . . that I should present for your acceptance the accompanying chair as a slight testimonial from a number of my distinguished countrymen of their great appreciation of the eminent talent and research which characterized your admirable “Concordance to Shakespeare.” In executing this request, it gives me great pleasure to add my own testimony to that of others and to assure you of the gratitude and obligation which all admirers of Shakespeare, not only in England and America, but throughout the world feel towards one who has done so much to diffuse a true appreciation and a correct knowledge of the immortal productions of his pen. . . . Accept it Madam, with the sincere good wishes of the donors, that your useful life may long be continued in happiness and prosperity.68

The chair did seem to move in its own magical world of good feeling. The shipper Edward Knight Collins sent the case to Liverpool without charging for the freightage, and the delivery firm of Edwards, Sanford & Company, “with the like generosity took charge of the case, paid the duty, and conveyed it to London, charging nothing for their trouble.”69

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Mary Cowden Clarke rushed to thank her admirers, both individually and as a group. Her letter “To the Donors of the Testimonial Chair” opened in an equally high rhetorical register, following her original autograph letter to Robert Balmanno in declining to personalize the recognition she had received: “The distinguished honor you have done me, has fairly overwhelmed and ‘bereft me of all words.’ . . . It is in the reflection that this is not only an individual honor, but a general and National one,—not only a testimony of applause conferred upon one humble woman, but upon the diligence with which she labored in a cause dear to the universal mind and heart,—that I chiefly find courage to attempt conveying any idea of my feelings upon this occasion.” She was quoting Bassanio from The Merchant of Venice, who while claiming to be speechless, makes a gracious speech upon receiving a ring from the lady Portia.70 Again, she was adapting Shakespeare ’s words to a lived context outside the framework of the play, for although Bassanio swears never to part from the ring, he ends up giving it away. The same letter to her American donors also adapted The Winter’s Tale. The testimonial, she suggested, stood as evidence that the two nations, the United Kingdom and the United States, had “rooted betwixt them such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now: royally attornied, with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies.” In the opening scene of Shakespeare ’s play, the Sicilian courtier Camillo describes the long-standing affection that had subsisted between the King of Sicilia (Leontes) and the King of Bohemia (Polixenes). Divided by the sea, they “seemed to be together” through gifts, letters, and messengers, thereby shaking hands “as over a vast” and embracing “as it were, from the ends of opposed winds.”71 But Shakespeare ’s play immediately puts that friendship to the test when, shortly after Camillo delivers his speech, Leontes desires the death of his friend. Mary Cowden Clarke of course intended no such irony, and Robert Balmanno had her letter printed and bound in marbled half-leather covers as a keepsake for donors.72 Around the same time as Robert Balmanno was distributing his gift book, his wife was producing another testimonial in the form of an illustrated poem, “To Mrs. Cowden Clarke; Who Spent Twelve Years in Compiling her ‘Concordance to Shakespeare.’ ”73 When published in 1858, the poem had for a background the same Shakespearean stationery her husband used in his transatlantic correspondence with Mary Cowden Clarke.

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Mary Balmanno, “To Mrs. Cowden Clarke.” Engraved by Richardson & Cox for Mary Balmanno, Pen and Pencil (1858). Author’s Collection.

Probably designed by Mary Balmanno herself, it featured the standard Shakespearean iconography, which we have seen on the testimonial armchair: portrait heads of the bard, swans, and the masks of comedy and tragedy (sock and buskin), to which were added clusters of mulberries and Shakespeare ’s heraldic coat of arms.

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The poem opens by addressing Cowden Clarke as a bardolater (“Fair Vot’ress at great Shakespeare’s shrine”), and the illustration depicts her on her knees before a statue of Shakespeare. The statue is turned away from her, as if the bard is wrapped up in higher things. Mary Balmanno based her design on John Bell’s eighteen-inch statuette of Shakespeare, which she felt captured “the idea of a mighty mind concentrated in its own imaginings. . . . To a devout worshipper of the immortal Bard, the effect produced by this mind-breathing form and face, is like that experienced by a lover when gazing on the highly finished miniature of his mistress.”74 Mary Cowden Clarke also admired Bell’s rendering of Shakespeare. Favorably comparing it to Louis-François Roubiliac’s life-size statue of the bard, commissioned by David Garrick and now in the British Museum, she wrote that the statuette “suggests intellectual supremacy better than all the upturned looks and eyes cast to heaven, that were ever invented by the Frenchy imagination of a Roubiliac to represent ideality.”75 Among the donors to Mary Cowden Clarke ’s armchair who received a copy of the testimonial keepsake from Robert Balmanno was the Frenchman Alexander Augustus Smets, a wealthy collector in Savannah, Georgia, and founder of the Georgia Historical Society. The keepsake was dated February 16, 1852, only three days after one of the Georgia papers reported a littleknown fact about the armchair: “In a part of it is inserted a small piece of the celebrated mulberry tree planted at Stratford by Shakespeare.”76 Most Shakespeareans were familiar with the story of the black mulberry tree that Shakespeare was said to have planted in his garden—in 1609, if concentric rings in the wood tell true, or seven years before he died.77 The evil villain of the story of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree is the Reverend Francis Gastrell, who purchased Shakespeare’s home, New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1753 and five years later chopped down the tree to rid himself of tourists. Robert Balmanno calls him the “Goth” who “most barbarously cut down” the living relic of the bard and then demolished New Place. The hero of the story is Thomas Sharpe, a local silversmith who, seeing the chopped-up tree piled as firewood, purchased its remains from Gastrell. The English bardomaniac James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips recounts that “shortly after the purchase, one of the logs being on the fire, a visitor suggesting the profit that could have been made by converting it into saleable relics, the owner immediately took the hint and snatched away the piece that was burning.”78 Thus began a relic industry that has had as at least as many spurious as original productions.

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The chip of mulberry wood in Mary Cowden Clarke’s rosewood reading chair endowed the testimonial with the associational quality prized by sentimental collectors. But Robert Balmanno was not a man to be content with a single concealed relic. He also sent the author of the Shakespeare concordance an Elizabethan coin reputed to have belonged to the bard. For all her professed indifference to relics, she was profoundly moved by the sight of it. She considered hanging it from a necklace so as to have it always about her, but the thought of drilling a hole through it quickly squelched that idea. By heaven, she might have said, I had rather coin my heart. What she did say, in heartfelt thanks to Robert Balmanno, came not from the mouth of Shakespeare’s Brutus but again from The Winter’s Tale: “Time as long again would be filled up, my brother, with our thanks; and yet we should, for perpetuity, go hence in debt.”79 In this case, the rest of Polixenes’ speech would have applied, for she too multiplied, with one “we thank you,” many that had gone before. In the sentimental economy of transatlantic bardolatry, such bottomless, unquantifiable debt was superior to any amount of credit.

Bibliotheca Dramatica By the time William Evans Burton moved to New York in 1848, Manhattan had become not only the book capital but the theatrical center of America. The son of an English bookseller, he had left London for Philadelphia fourteen years earlier. The American historian Lawrence L. Levine has argued that American theater in the first half of the nineteenth century “was a kaleidoscopic, democratic institution presenting a widely varying bill of fare to all classes and socioeconomic groups,” and American playbills and advertisements reflected that same variety at midcentury.80 On the evening of July 12, 1848, for example, fifty cents admitted one to any seat in the house at Burton’s newly opened Chambers Street Theatre, New York, where a troupe of Viennese dancers, alternating with Burton’s acting company, performed A Grand Pastoral Divertissement; being a Pas des Bergers, a shepherd dance or pastoral with 36 dancers The Weathercock, by John Till Allingham, a farce, with songs from the libretto by Matthew Peter King

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A Pas Hongrois! or Hungarian dance with 24 dancers The Irish Dragoon, a comedy based on the story by the popular Irish novelist Charles James Lever with the Irish actor John Brougham in the lead role of Charles O’Mally Tching, Tchang, Tchung, a Chinese “ballabile” or ballet with 48 dancers81

Burton’s own genius was comedic, and American audiences loved him. One American critic in 1836 proclaimed that “as a comedian he has no rival, free and easy in his manners, he is at home in all parts, his natural and contagious merry laugh, all combine to render him an agreeable actor.”82 He began his American career as the chief comic actor at the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, often playing two lead roles in one evening. He then assumed management of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre, returning eventually to manage the Arch Street Theatre. While enlivening the stage in Philadelphia, Burton also took on management of Baltimore ’s Front Street Theatre and brought new life to the city. In 1839, the Baltimore Sun ran a front-page news story reporting the death of an audience member. Witnesses said the theatergoer “was killed by one William E. Burton, a low comedian, who threw the deceased into such paroxysms of laughter that he died right off, and that said William E. Burton had acted in such a way as very nearly to cause them a similar affliction.”83 Yet if Burton was “a low comedian,” it was mainly because comedy was considered a low art form. He was also “a gentleman, equally well known on the dramatic and literary stage.” He contributed “clever and agreeable papers” to the Knickerbocker, and in July 1837 started a journal, the Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review, which he intended to make the largest and cheapest literary periodical in the country. He hired Edgar Allan Poe to edit the journal, and to many it seemed that “a literary bark, thus officered” could not “fail to reach the haven of success.” Together with the poet Charles Thomson, he also produced the annual Literary Souvenir, a gift book intended for the holidays.84 From Philadelphia and Baltimore, he expanded his reach to the nation’s capital, leasing, renovating, and opening the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., on January 13, 1845.

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“The theatrical company in which Mr. Burton presents himself to the citizens and visitors at the capital, is the best that has appeared here for years,” wrote a local theater critic.85 Burton’s greatest success was at the Chambers Street Theatre in Manhattan. The eight-hundred-seat venue, built in 1844 between Broadway and Centre Street, was situated well in the vicinity of the Astor House and City Hall Park. The restaurateur Ferdinand Palmo had intended it as an intimate opera house, but it bankrupted him within two years. Over the next two years, it passed through several hands and gained a sordid reputation. William Knight Northall, who contributed comedies to Burton’s Chambers Street Theatre, explained the challenges the actor-manager faced in 1848: “When Mr. Burton arrived in New York, to assume the management of the Theatre in Chambers Street, it was thought by many that the enterprise would certainly fail. No efforts which had been made by previous managers had won the public in favor of the place, and, besides, for a long time before Mr. Burton took it, it had been used for the filthy, brutal, and disgusting model artist exhibitions.”86 Model-artist exhibitions were tableaux vivants, or living still lifes composed of actors or models grouped into silent scenes, typically from mythology or artwork. They were popular on stages on both sides of the Atlantic, but at Palmo’s (the British journalist George C. Foster complained), “Things were carried to the most filthy and incredible extent— dances being sometimes performed by men and women in a state of complete nudity, (without even the tights,) and every device resorted to in order to increase the ‘richness’ of these abominable orgies.”87 As a result, the theater had become “associated in the minds of the respectable portion of the community with everything which was low and vulgar, and no decent person would have been seen to enter its doors.”88 Yet Burton was “determined to succeed,” and “so far from quailing before the difficulties which beset his career, braced himself more firmly up to make a vigorous effort.”89 He had overcome such obstacles before, for as the American theater historian David L. Rinear points out, the character of the Arch Street Theatre when he assumed its management was similar.90 The theatrical season began in autumn, and Burton’s friends feared for the result when he opened his Chambers Street Theatre on Monday, July 10, 1848, with the slate of entertainment catalogued above. Two days later, the New York Herald announced that Burton’s theater, “being within pistol-shot of the Astor House and the Park, nightly attracts overflowing houses.”91

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Burton communicated daily with his other theaters by telegraph, occasionally appearing on their stages, while he paid bills, directed rehearsals, wrote scripts, hired actors, collaborated with composers, supervised set designers, and created the roles that made him famous. Dickens’s Dombey and Son had appeared as a novel in April 1848, and Burton and his stage manager John Brougham adapted it to the stage. Burton’s performances as Captain Cuttle launched the play on “a long and successful run at his popular theatre,” where it gained “fresh laurels on each night of its performance.”92 After fifty nights, Burton and his company were invited to perform the play that had caused such “a great sensation in New York” at the Howard Athenæum, Boston’s premier theater, where Dombey and Son opened on November 27, 1848.93 Stimulated by its success, Burton and Brougham began to adapt other Dickens novels in rapid succession: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and David Copperfield. Within two years, the Irish American Weekly would compare Burton’s Chambers Street Theatre to the Haymarket Theatre in London, famed for its comedy. “Chamber Street is crowded nightly, where a splendid stock company perform some of the best dramatic pieces in the language,” wrote the critic. “The ‘Haymarket’ of New York is fully equal to the London celebrity; Burton being the bright particular star in comedy, having no more brilliant luminary to contend with.”94 With his audience primed for literary spectacles, Burton then began his “Great Shakespearean Revival,” bringing the various clowns, fools, grave diggers, drunkards, and cutpurses from Shakespeare ’s world to New York. He played the pompous Dogberry, the swaggering Falstaff, and the half-starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. He played monsters like Caliban, a witch from Macbeth, and the enchanted Nick Bottom with the head of an ass. He played characters who are outwitted, like Polonius, and those who outwit others, like Sir Toby Belch. “The drama flourishes and one thing’s certain,” quipped one contemporary, “Wealth, taste and beauty throng to laugh at Burton. / There they behold great Shakespeare ’s finest scholar, / A poet and a wit, for half a dollar.”95 Burton made humor and wit his study and learned to tell the difference between them. In the introduction to his Cyclopædia of Wit and Humor, he quoted Charles Lamb as saying, “Humor is Wit, steeped in mannerism.”96 As the statement does not appear in Lamb’s published writings, he may have heard it directly from Lamb or one of his friends. Burton was an actor to whom physical humor came naturally, who knew how to bring down the

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house with a wink, and we may assume that he understood “mannerism” not as the painterly style but the manner in which wit was performed. In the library behind his house at 174 Hudson Street, Burton found the historical materials that guided him in rendering accurate period productions of Shakespeare. The handbill for his “Great Shakespearean Revival” of The Merry Wives of Windsor boasted its “Correct and Beautiful Scenery and Costumes.” From a landscape drawing of the age of Henry IV, for instance, he and his artistic director, George Heige, re-created the High Street of Windsor. They reproduced the interior of the Garter Inn, overlooking Windsor Castle, and the Long Walk in Windsor Park with a distant view of the castle as it would have appeared. They also constructed an arras, or tapestry chamber, and a stained-glass window with a leaded insignia of the Order of the Garter for the home of the play’s Doctor Caius, a husband of one of the Merry Wives.97 The servant of the doctor in the play is Mistress Quickly, a role Mary Cowden Clarke had performed in Dickens’s theatricals. When Robert Balmanno saw the play before it closed on April 1, 1853, he sent her a copy of the handbill. The sight of it “effected another revival,” namely, that of all her “old ‘Mistress Quickly’ feelings.” She said that, could she but conquer her fear of crossing the Atlantic, she would enjoy playing Mistress Quickly to Burton’s Falstaff.98 On the evening of Friday, October 20, 1848, meanwhile, the doors of Burton’s theater opened at 7 p.m. for an evening of comedy. The main attractions were William Knight Northall’s Lucy Did Sham Amour, a burlesque of the tragic opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti with a score by Burton’s music director George Loder, and a one-act farce, The Irish Tiger by John Maddison Morton.99 At precisely the same time, a few blocks down from Chambers Street on Broadway, Burton’s friend John Keese, another charismatic performer, began the auction of James T. Annan’s book collection. Audiences flocked to Keese ’s salesroom as they did to Burton’s theater. William Keese, the auctioneer’s son, claimed that Burton himself “regarded the auction-room of Cooley & Keese as no contemptible rival.” The younger Keese had heard people in the audience at his father’s auctions say “that to go there was as good as a play.”100 On Saturday evening, when eighteen volumes from Charles Lamb’s library were resold, both Burton and Loder, taking a break from their own theatricals, were in Keese’s audience. “Verily, old Dan Chaucer must have tingled somewhere in his ancient veins as the warm hearted youth and fusty old connoisseurs thronged around

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him in the auction room in Broadway, and bid for the honor of his company as rival families outvie each other in Anniversary season for the company of a favorite saint or clergyman,” wrote Evert Duyckinck in the Literary World. Rather than mistaking Chaucer’s first name, he was alluding to Spenser’s description of the poet in The Faerie Queene: “Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled” (where “Dan” represents the Elizabethan pronunciation of “Don,” or “Sir”). In England perhaps the old book should have rested, but “rest was not for its aged weariness, which had long since exhibited itself in yawns that would not contract, misanthropic turnings up of leaves which would not be laid, and a protruding back bone from which the calf skin had long since vanished.”101 At the time of his death, Burton’s library contained two old folios of Chaucer, both in blackletter: William Thynne ’s edition of 1542 and John Stowe ’s edition of 1561.102 Lamb’s 1598 edition by William Speght outdid them with the first biography of Chaucer and a frontispiece portrait with Chaucer’s genealogical family tree, designed in the manner of the biblical Jesse Tree that shows the ancestry of Christ from the line of David. It is hard to say whether the auctioneer or the actor who purchased the book would have claimed more attention during the bidding. As we have seen, Robert Balmanno also had a blackletter copy of Chaucer, an association copy signed by “J. Cromwell,” but in Mary Balmanno’s words it was “nothing like the prize his friend Burton got.”103 Following Chaucer to the block was an edition of Original Letters by the English drama critic John Dennis. Although the Publishers’ Weekly would later report that Burton bought the book, an annotated copy of the sale catalogue at the American Antiquarian Society lists “Barton.”104 The buyer was probably Thomas Pennant Barton, another bardomaniac, who, like Burton, amassed a library of sixteen thousand volumes and who, like Burton, owned not only the First Folio but the first four folios, or collected editions, of Shakespeare ’s plays. To be sure this book has its enigmas. While the bibliographer Joseph Sabin did not list the volume in his catalogue of William Evans Burton’s library, the printed catalogue of the Barton Collection at the Boston Public Library from 1888 does list a copy, though it does not appear in the online catalogue. It was printed in 1721, but Charles Welford gives its date as 1726.105 And it was the only volume from Elia’s library sold by John Keese on October 21, 1848, that was not purchased by James T. Annan from the store of Bartlett & Welford.

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One autograph document, “Prices and Purchasers of Sixty Volumes of Books Which Belonged to Charles Lamb of London Sold in New York at Private Sale by Bartlett & Welford, February 1848,” now in a copy of the sale catalogue in the New York Public Library, lists “Jones” as the buyer.106 While such a name might seem as enigmatic as the book, our suspicions alight on William Alfred Jones. “Jones,” as the Duyckinck brothers called him, attended college with Evert, later contributing to Evert and Cornelius Mathews’s journal Arcturus and becoming the Columbia College librarian. He was at the top of George ’s list of friends to receive book gifts from Europe, and when the Duyckinck brothers purchased the Literary World, he began contributing articles to it. A loose and unidentified typewritten page in the collection of the Duyckinck Family Papers at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library records Evert’s influence on Jones: “Alfred had for years been inhaling, on a more or less empty stomach, not champagne but the incense he burned at the feet of Evert Duyckinck. . . . He read everything, and he did everything Duyckinck told him to do.”107 Jones’s Literary Studies: A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays (1847) unflinchingly ranks Charles Lamb among the best English poets. “The two best male writers of letters, between Pope and Lamb, were both poets like them,” Jones wrote of William Cowper and Thomas Gray, their status as poets being “almost the sole point of resemblance the four possessed in common.”108 But if Jones purchased Lamb’s copy of Dennis’s Original Letters from Bartlett & Welford, why he should consign it to be sold by Cooley, Keese & Hill eight months later remains a mystery. Like the manager of the Chambers Street Theatre, its music director George Loder enjoyed more popularity in the 1840s in America than he had done in England. He “made a striking figure . . . because of his long, wellkept beard” and he wielded “his baton as if it were a wand of power.”109 In addition to writing scores for burlesques, he also wrote the score for Burton’s production of Milton’s masque Comus, and on the evening of October 21, he was drawn to Lamb’s copy of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1726). It was “an excellent copy,” Evert Duyckinck joked, with the slight exception that its covers were detached and the illustrations by William Hogarth plucked out of it.110 The poem, set between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, portrays the squabblings, plottings, and counterplottings of the interregnum, when “civil Dudgeon first grew high, / And men fell out, they knew not why.”111 Puritan dissenters from the Church of England attacked the churches and

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destroyed its artwork—paintings, stained glass, statues of saints and martyrs—much as Henry VIII had sacked the Catholic monasteries in establishing that same Anglican Church. Although Lamb himself was a dissenting Protestant, he was hardly Puritanical enough to destroy the illustrations of Butler’s poem as false idols. To the contrary, as we have seen, he hung them on his wall to be the more readily revered. Burton’s home was a short walk from the theater. It was downtown on Hudson Street before commerce had converted the area “into a busy and noisy nightmare.”112 Behind the four-story house, with a balcony above a colonnaded entrance, Burton had built his own Temple to Shakespeare—an octagonal domed structure, resembling David Garrick’s neoclassical temple to the bard in Hampton—which contained Burton’s library. A conservatory gallery filled with plants (for among other things, Burton was a devoted gardener) connected the house to the ground floor of the library, which housed a billiards table—and should this seem out of keeping with the actor’s Shakespearean tastes, we might recall that it was Henry VIII who imported the game from France to the Tudor court (although the billiards lawn had not yet shrunk down into the green tabletop). Like the rest of the library, the room was furnished with antiques and relics and lit by bronze chandeliers. In the reading room on the floor above it Burton kept all the oversized books, pictures, and portfolios that were too large to fit on the shelves of the main library on the third floor: the sanctum sanctorum of Burton’s Temple to Shakespeare. There, beneath a stained-glass dome, the walls of the octagonal room were lined with dark mahogany bookshelves looming up to a height of nine feet. Groined rafters rising from each angle of the room supported the dome, and above the bookshelves, oil paintings covered the walls. In a carved oaken alcove at the head of the room stood a full-length statue of Shakespeare by the Scottish sculptor James Thom. In a nook between two of the bookshelves, a plaster cast of Shakespeare ’s funeral monument at Holy Trinity Church hung from an Elizabethan bracket. As William Keese remembered, “Wherever the eye turned it was held by some object of artistic design, historic interest, or haunting beauty. Mailed effigies in niche and compartment embalmed the stern glory of the Middle Ages, and the spirit of Shakespeare held sceptered sway, breathing from sculptured image, bust and cenotaph, and many a priceless relic.”113 Burton’s Bibliotheca Dramatica—multilingual and transhistorical— dated from the earliest records of stage performance and included works

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across a wide range of theatrical topics: costumes, gestures, masks, action, elocution, oratory, pageants, stage fights, set design, architecture, special effects, and so on. Burton collected all the printed works mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays and the source materials (ballads, romances, dramas, histories) he had used in constructing his plots. Among the latter were two thick, folio volumes of Ralph Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1586–1587). Shakespeare drew on Holinshed not only in his history plays but also in tragedies like Cymbeline and King Lear. Burton’s blackletter copy of the Chronicles was a working copy, in which the actor had marked in red ink all the text relevant to Shakespeare. In addition to the First Folio and subsequent collected editions of the plays, Burton owned the pirated quarto editions of individual plays published during Shakespeare ’s lifetime, including the two plays of disputed authorship (The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Life and Death of King John), which the actors who produced the First Folio left out of the collection. One of Burton’s copies of the disputed plays had Shakespeare’s name on the title page, and another had not only his printed name but his signature and more of the same handwriting inside the book. “Burton inclined to the opinion that the work once belonged to Shakespeare and that the signature is genuine,” the younger Keese remarked. “If so, it is probably the only scrap of his handwriting on this continent.”114 Among the primary materials in Burton’s collection were four calf-bound folios of manuscripts dating from 1445 through 1796, “the most extensive collection of memoranda ever got together towards furnishing material for a life of the Immortal Bard.”115 Overall, Burton had amassed more than seventy editions of the plays, not excluding the illustrated Boydell edition that Elia found remote from his tastes. It was published by John Boydell, an English engraver, with his nephew, the painter Josiah Boydell, and George Nichol, bookseller to King George III and husband of Mary Boydell (Josiah’s sister). The engravings were based on paintings from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery by Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West, Richard Westall, Angelica Kaufmann, Thomas Stothard, and others. Burton’s copy was the presentation copy from John Boydell to his niece Mary. Regally bound in dark-blue gold-tooled morocco, it was a “picked” edition containing Boydell’s choice of the best impressions of the engravings. The first volume contained certificates of authenticity by Nichol and the librarian at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, where the best-known portrait of Shakespeare

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had hung until 1848, when it was sold to Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere. Burton had also managed to obtain John Boydell’s portfolio from the production process containing the engraved copper plates and the artist’s proofs for each of the ninety-nine illustrations. But the crown jewel of Burton’s collection was a masterwork of his own invention. By the 1840s, the practice of extra-illustrating, or interleaving extra images into a book from external sources, had become a popular branch of book collecting. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, calling it “a very general and violent symptom of the Bibliomania,” defined it as a “passion for books illustrated, or adorned with numerous Prints representing characters, or circumstances, mentioned in the work.”116 Burton went about the business of extra-illustrating Shakespeare “with a prodigality of labor and expense . . . far above any similar work ever attempted.”117 His forty-four extra-illustrated folio volumes, some of them containing over two hundred added illustrations, were devoted to the plays, poems, portraits, life, times, and legacy of the bard. Any drawing, etching, watercolor, map, costume design, or portrait that might illustrate or otherwise shed light on Shakespeare found its way into those volumes. Thirty-seven contained the plays in the First Folio; two, the disputed plays; two, materials on Shakespeare’s life and times; one, the nondramatic poetry; another, portraits of Shakespeare; and the last, lives of distinguished Shakespeareans—all told, “the most remarkable and costly monument in this shape ever attempted by a devout worshipper of the Bard of Avon.”118 Forgeries, another a subset of the bibliomania, also appealed to bardomaniacs. The most notorious Shakespeare forger of the eighteenth century was William Henry Ireland, who fooled even his father, Samuel Ireland, a noted Shakespeare scholar. His “discovery” of Vortigern, an Historical Play caused much excitement as a lost Shakespeare play, though by the time it was staged, at Drury Lane Theatre on April 2, 1796, the formidable Shakespearean Edward Malone had exposed the fraud. Burton owned multiple copies of the printed play and a large folio volume containing other forged manuscripts by Ireland: a promissory note to the Elizabethan actor John Heminges, a profession of faith, a letter to the comedian Richard Cowley, and love letters to Anne Hathaway, one with a lock of hair attached.119 He also owned a parody of the forgery phenomenon, Original Letters, &c. of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends; Now First Made Public by a Gentleman, a Descendant of Dame Quickly, from Genuine Manuscripts Which Have Been in the Possession of the Quickly Family Near Four Hundred Years, produced the

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same year as Vortigern and dedicated to “Master Samuel Irelaunde.”120 Charles Lamb identified his friend James White (a devout Falstaffian) as the author, but Edward Moxon, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Robert Southey, and Alfred Ainger all believed that Lamb had written it. Whether or not he collaborated on the letters, he certainly wrote the preface.121 Shakespearean First Folios were the “Stradivarii of books” (as Holbrook Jackson put it), and Burton knew how to play his.122 In the Shakespearean library behind his home, where he often brought guests, he “would exhibit his precious Shakespeareana, and discourse with the ardor of a devotee upon the circumstances of their acquisition, their history, rarity, and value. On such occasions the actor seemed to be forgotten, and his listeners became aware that they were in the presence of a profound and reverent student of the mighty dramatist. Warmed by the subject, and conscious of an interested and appreciative audience, the comedian would draw upon his fund of memory and knowledge, and dwell upon his favorite theme with captivating and suggestive eloquence.”123 On Sunday afternoons, he would take his Shakespearean children to his library and “show to them the wonderful collection of pictures he was accumulating for his great copy of Shakespeare.”124 His daughters, Cecilia and Rosine, were the namesakes of Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It, and his second son was named Harry—like Falstaff ’s boon companion. For his eldest son, no name would do but William Shakespeare Burton.125 We might imagine the actor showing them how to handle an old book without damaging its spine or how to read a watermark. We might see him pulling down copies of the early French, Spanish, and Italian humorists—Rabelais, Cervantes, and Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso was a source for As You Like It—and making them laugh out loud. We might see him flipping through his copy of Chaucer from 1598, its old, blackletter pages scrawled over with poetical extracts, and recounting stories about its former owner—the inimitable essayist and insatiate theatergoer, the consummate wit, who had taught him, the great comedian William Evans Burton, how to tell wit from humor.

The American Shakespeare Society David Garrick, as the high priest of British bardolatry, was the model for William Evans Burton in America. In the famous balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has Juliet call Romeo “the god of my

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idolatry.”126 In what we might call the founding gesture of Shakespearean bardolatry, Garrick quoted that line in the town where Shakespeare was born, schooled, and buried. The year was 1769, the place Stratfordupon-Avon, when Garrick stood outside in the rain under a covered pavilion to celebrate the bicentennial of Shakespeare ’s birth with a poem he had written for the occasion and the English composer Thomas Arne had set to music, Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon. Pointing to a statue of the bard based on the one in Westminster Abbey, he exclaimed, “ ’Tis he! ’tis he! / The god of our idolatry!”127 Garrick was as theatrical as his successor Burton in his bardolatry. “Garrick was a worshipper himself,” wrote William Cowper. “He drew the Liturgy, and fram’d the rites / . . . And call’d the World to worship on the banks / Of Avon fam’d in song.” But Cowper strayed from fact into fiction when he portrayed those who attended the 1769 jubilee in Stratford dancing around Shakespeare ’s mulberry tree: The mulb’ry tree was hung with blooming wreaths, The mulb’ry tree stood centre of the dance, The mulb’ry tree was hymn’d with dulcet airs, And from his touchwood trunk the mulb’ry tree Supplied such relics as devotion holds Still sacred, and preserves with pious care.128

Although the mulberry tree was no longer standing, its relics were legion. At the jubilee banquet Garrick raised a goblet made from mulberry wood: “Behold this fair goblet; / ’T was carved from the tree / Which, O my dear Shakespeare, / Was planted by thee!” That same goblet descended to Burton, who drew the liturgy and framed the rites of American bardolatry.129 At the Stratford jubilee, David Garrick recited his ode with a copy of the medal he had designed for the occasion dangling from a ribbon around his neck, and who is to say that William Evans Burton did not hang his copy of the medal from a ribbon around his neck at the Shakespeare jubilee held in New York City on April 23, 1852?130 For Burton was in the habit of holding an annual jubilee to celebrate the birthday of the bard in the United States. It was on the way home from one of Burton’s Shakespeare jubilees the previous year (on April 23, 1851) that Balmanno had conceived the idea of the testimonial armchair for Mary Cowden Clarke, and it is likely Balmanno who came

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up with the idea of founding an American Shakespeare Society in New York (one already existed in Philadelphia) at the jubilee banquet of 1852. Balmanno wrote to Washington Irving to invite him to stand for election as president of the society, but two days before the jubilee Irving declined the honor: “I have neither the tact nor the taste for tasks of the kind.” Nor did he attend the jubilee the following year when he was voted an honorary member. “I am growing more and more recluse in my habits and slow to respond to the claims of society,” he apologized. “All kinds of public and society dinners I avoid. I am no longer clubable.” He had not seen Burton’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, presented early the next year in New York, but he had been following the progress of Burton’s Chambers Street Theatre and formed “a high opinion of his judgment and good taste from the manner in which he conducts his theatre and selects his plays and performances.” He had seen him play Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, which had made him think Burton could play Falstaff. “It is a part easily buffooned, but difficult to be hit off with truth, as all Shakespeare’s Masterpieces are,” he explained in another letter to Balmanno. “The actor who plays Falstaff ought to be a gentleman, though a jovial one, and in this respect I should suppose Mr. Burton to be well qualified for it.”131 Irving suggested that Burton stand for president of the Shakespeare Society, and at the jubilee dinner on April 23, 1852, Burton was unanimously elected. That day, at John M. Sanderson’s College Hotel on Murray Street, around the corner from Burton’s theater, a life-size bust of Shakespeare overlooked the festivities, crowned with fresh laurel, just as the statue that Garrick dedicated to Stratford had been. At the center of the banqueting table a miniature of Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, festooned with bay laurel and rose leaves, served as a centerpiece. From under its cupola, a mini­ ature bust of the bard peered out at the guests. John Keese, who had agreed to chair the meeting, sat at the head of the table, “his electric brain whirling off its bright scintillations in a thousand unimaginable and mirth-provoking forms.”132 With champagne flowing, he called the assembly to order: “Gentlemen, we are met this evening in a social and informal manner, to do honor to the nativity of the highest literary genius the world has ever known. It is a great day that we celebrate—the greatest in the intellectual calendar of time.”133 Stimulated by such grandiloquence, and with the blood of his forefathers coursing through his veins, Robert Balmanno stood to pledge “the lady to whom all lovers and readers of Shakespeare are so much indebted . . .

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Mrs. Cowden Clarke, authoress of the ‘Concordance,’ ” with Highland honors. This “hearty Scottish custom” required all gathered at the table to stand on their chairs, place their right foot on the table, hold their glasses above their heads at full arm’s length, pronounce the name of the person they wished to honor, and swallow the bumper without spilling a drop.134 But the actor in Burton was not to be outdone. To the astonishment of the company, he pulled out an enormous silver chalice delicately chased with figures from Shakespeare ’s plays. The design was based on Thomas Stothard’s panoramic painting Shakespeare’s Principal Characters, produced for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and now in the Tate Britain. From left to right, it features Olivia, Malvolio, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Sir Toby Belch; Sir John Falstaff; Celia and Rosalind; Prospero and Miranda; King Lear and Cordelia; Hamlet and Ophelia; and Lady Macbeth and the Witches. “The extreme beauty of this magnificent chef-d’oeuvre” was duly appreciated, but it was just the opening act.135 Reaching into the chalice, Burton pulled out Garrick’s goblet from the Stratford jubilee. “As a relic I kiss it, and bow at thy shrine,” he might have said, following Garrick, “What comes from thy hand must be ever divine.”136 Such demonstrations were frequent enough among literary antiquarians. Leigh Hunt once remarked “how natural it was in C. L. to give a kiss to an old folio.”137 Mulberry was the wood of choice in the transatlantic bardomania, and of all the relics made from it—as Balmanno put it, “for the gratification of sensuality in drinking”—this goblet from the Stratford jubilee was the most famous. But according to Horatio Rodd, a dealer in old books and relics in London, “the finest specimen” of the mulberry tree “as a work of art” was an ornamental tea caddy with a silver handle.138 Although Rodd had no documentation to prove the authenticity of the caddy, he had “not the slightest doubt” (a phrase he underlined three times in a letter to Burton) that it was genuine: “It carries conviction with it inside and out, and it was never doubted . . . nor will it be.” The caddy, which is today at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., features a carved portrait head of Shakespeare surrounded by mulberry leaves, branches, and berries. On the lid is Shakespeare ’s coat of arms. Inside are three tin compartments with sliding wooden lids, each of the two side panels with a mulberry tree in altorelief. On the central panel, a white enamel cartouche contains a carving of Shakespeare ’s statue in Westminster Abbey and an inscription from his tomb in the Abbey derived from The Tempest: “The cloud clapt towers / Shall

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Mulberry tea caddy. Folger Digital Image Collection, no. 1372. The Folger Shakespeare Library.

dissolve, / And like the ceaseless, / Fabrick of a vision / Leave not a wreck behind.”139 Of course, the caddy itself was only one of countless wrecks (ruins, remains, relics) that the bard and his prolific mulberry tree left behind. In Hamlet, the king’s counselor Polonius vouches for the truth of what he has just said by pointing to his head and shoulders and saying to King Claudius, “Take this from this, if this be otherwise.” Horatio Rodd, with less than his own head at stake, quotes Polonius to vouch for the authenticity of the mulberry tea caddy: “ ‘If it prove otherwise take this from that,’ as Polonius did not say—or rather in plain English if the wood is not the wood— then is the bargain Null and Void and it is ‘no go’—send it back.”140 The true test of authenticity, he argued, was in the trained eye. For with relics “as with pictures and all other works of art—if there is not evidence in the thing itself no document however strong will be relied on—We repeatedly have guarantees from the great connoisseurs & Men in office in the galleries abroad— beautifully done in stamped paper which are as genuine, as the letters of the quack Doctor that decorated their shops . . . all may be told by the practiced eye without any guarantee.”141 William Evans Burton was as qualified as anyone to judge, and he did not send the tea caddy back. There was “still a rich harvest” of genuine Shakespearean relics, Burton suggested in a speech he delivered at the jubilee dinner in 1852. The bard’s marriage license had only recently been discovered, and “amongst the thousands of old forgotten libraries and repositories of England, some bundle of Shakespearian documents, poems, or letters may yet turn up.” Shakespeare “must have written hundreds of letters to his friends . . . and it would seem odd indeed if all had perished—the ‘great fire,’ as it is called, did

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not extend over all England, or all London.” The Shakespeare Society of London had been founded thirteen years earlier with the purpose of reprinting rare old books, prints, and manuscripts “connected with, and illustrative of, the Plays of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries,” as the prospectus for the society explained.142 Burton now urged the American Shakespeare Society to form a publication committee to issue “choice bits, and articles relative to our beloved Saint.” For decades, he had diligently preserved newspaper and magazine clippings related to the bard, and believing that many of them deserved better than to “rest comparatively unknown,” he offered his scrapbooks to the society as a stimulus for their publishing program. He hoped the society might issue its publications, in the manner of other British antiquarian societies, as “gems of typography,” suited to the collector as well as the scholar.143 Burton then turned to his friend Balmanno (unanimously elected secretary of the Shakespeare Society) and cited his oft-repeated claim that “a love of Shakespeare acts as a sort of Freemasonry among men.” It was the same belief Mary Cowden Clarke had expressed in copying lines from Troilus and Cressida to send as a specimen of her autograph writing to Balmanno. In the scene she transcribed, the character of Ulysses says, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” which she took to symbolize the power of Shakespeare to bring people together. “When I find a man fond of Shakespeare, I feel towards him as a brother,” Balmanno followed her in saying; “The name of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin.”144 Throughout the eighteenth century, Shakespeare was known as the “Poet of Nature” and so the substitution “Shakespeare” for “Nature” came naturally. Mary Cowden Clarke went a step farther in her letter to the donors of the testimonial armchair, as we have seen, saying, “One love of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin.”145 Given the degraded nature of romantic attachments in a play where Cressida represents an unfaithful Juliet, her erasure of “touch” and substitution of “love” was itself a nice touch. With this sense of kinship established, the members of the American Shakespeare Society of New York went their separate ways. At their jubilee dinner the next year, they agreed to convene annually for a country outing during mulberry season.146 The president of the society seems to have had the perfect place in mind, for on Saturday, July 23, 1853, the society members and their families stepped off the steamboat from the city onto the dock at Glen Cove, Long Island, where Burton’s country seat (the Rosary) sat high

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atop a wooded bluff. From behind a Tudor-style lodge covered with roses and honeysuckle, they followed the driveway up the cliffside. Beds of flowers lined the road, separated by rows of locust trees with flowering vines spiraling around them. They passed under a long grape arbor before arriving at a magnificent view of the Sound. Trails led throughout Burton’s fifty-acre estate, with benches positioned to enjoy the sweeping prospects. From the main house, a stone stairwell led down the bluff to the beach. Bathing houses were in vogue in the nineteenth century. Burton’s bathing houses provided a convenient place to change for those who wished to wade, dive, or descend into the water from a ladder at the end of the dock. In England, they were used not only as changing stations, but as a kind of spa therapy. A rapid change of temperature was thought to do the body good, and at seaside resorts from Devon to Kent “bathing machines” equipped with a trapdoor to dunk the bather were dragged to the edge of the water and set afloat. One wonders whether Burton, unremitting newspaper clipper that he was, ever saw the anecdote about Charles Lamb in the bathing house at Hastings reprinted from Thomas De Quincey’s 1848 review of Thomas Noon Talfourd’s Final Memorials of Charles Lamb in the American papers. As De Quincey relates the story, which he had from Coleridge, Lamb appears at the door of his bathing machine: Whilst he stood shivering with cold, two stout fellows laid hold of him, one at each shoulder, like heraldic supporters; they waited for the word of command from their principal, who began the following oration to them: “Hear me, men! Take notice of this—I am to be dipped.” What more he would have said is unknown to land or sea bathing machines, for having reached the word dipped, he commenced such a rolling fire of Di—di—di—di, that when at length he descended aplomb upon the full word dipped, the two men, rather tired of the long suspense, became satisfied that they had reached what lawyers call the “operative” clause of the sentence; and both exclaiming at once, “oh, yes, sir, we ’re quite aware of that”—down they plunged him into the sea. On emerging, Lamb sobbed so much from the cold, that he found no voice suitable to his indignation; from necessity he seemed tranquil; and again addressing the men, who stood respectfully listening, he began thus:—“Men! is it possible to obtain your attention?” “Oh, surely, sir, by all means.” “Then listen: once more I tell you, I am to be di—di—di”—and

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then, with a burst of indignation, “dipped I tell you‚”—“Oh, decidedly sir”—and down the stammerer went for the second time. Petrified with cold and wrath, once more Lamb made a feeble attempt at explanation—“Grant me pa—pa—patience; is it mum—um— murder you me—me—mean? And a—ga—ga—gain, I tell you I’m to be di—di—di—dipped,” now speaking furiously, with the voice of an injured man. “Oh, yes, sir,” the men replied, “we know that—we fully understood it”—and for the third time, down went Lamb into the sea. “Oh limbs of Satan!” he said, on coming up for the third time, “It’s now too late; I tell you that I am—no, that I was—to be di—di—di—dipped only once.”147

Long Island Sound in the third week of July was hardly as cold as the English Channel when Lamb suffered his tribulations in the bathing machine at Hastings. Before ascending to the Rosary for “a sumptuous dinner,” the members of the American Shakespeare Society and their families would have enjoyed more than one voluntary dip.148 Merrily did they drop, as Coleridge might have said, below the kirk, below the hill, below the lighthouse top. After dinner, the society members retreated, past Burton’s billiards room, to the library. There they watched as Robert Balmanno unwrapped, from many sheets of folded tissue paper, another wooden relic—one made not of mulberry, this time, but of oak. Burton’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which had closed three months earlier, featured a re-creation of the haunted oak tree from Windsor Forest that Shakespeare had called Herne’s Oak. Herne was the Elizabethan pronunciation of “horn,” and this was the name given by the residents of Windsor to a ghostly hunter “with great ragg’d horns,” who haunted the oak tree. At midnight he would circle the oak, shake his chain in “a most hideous and dreadful manner,” and terrorize the inhabitants by blasting the tree, stealing cattle, and making cows yield blood rather than milk.149 Balmanno had made a pilgrimage to Herne’s Oak and scraped off a piece of bark. “ ‘You took this from the trunk of the old oak itself, did you, Mr. Balmanno,’ asked John Keese when he saw the relic. ‘I did,’ was the response. ‘Ah!’ was the reply of his questioner, eying the relic with affectionate admiration, but thoughtfully, after a slight pause ‘isn’t it barely possible, Mr. Balmanno, that you may have been barking up the wrong tree?’ ”150 Most Shakespearean relics came in mulberry and oak, though Burton (like his friend Balmanno) also had one made of crabapple. Legend has it that Shakespeare one day, having heard that the men of Bidford-on-Avon

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were “deep drinkers and merry fellows,” set off to see them. Just outside the village, he asked a local shepherd where the Bidford drinkers were to be found. Sizing up the bard from his appearance, the man replied that the drinkers were away, but that “the Bidford Sippers were at home” and that they should be enough for him. He directed Shakespeare to the Falcon Inn, and the prophecy proved true. Shakespeare was forced to sleep off the escapade under shelter of a crabapple tree by the side of the road, thereafter known as “Shakespeare ’s Canopy.”151 Burton’s relic was a silver-rimmed goblet from the collection of the English actor Thomas Betterton, while Balmanno’s was a plain slice of crabapple wood.152 With these rituals and other business completed, the members of the American Shakespeare Society joined their families in a dance around a black mulberry tree, planted not by the bard in this case, nor on the tranquil banks of the Avon, but by his chief American bardolater on a rocky cliff, overlooking the breakers in Glen Cove, Long Island. Less than a week had passed when the secretary of the American Shakespeare Society found himself standing in the lobby of the Clarendon Hotel, Union Square, with the society’s record book locked in a bag. At their recent meeting at the Rosary, the society had voted to elect two honorary members, Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, and Balmanno’s own darling, Mary Cowden Clarke. She was gratified to be recognized at the same time as “a nobleman no less distinguished by his poetical and literary endowments, than by his rank as an English peer.”153 As mentioned, Lord Ellesmere had acquired the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare from Stowe House, where it had hung since Shakespeare sat for it (if he sat for it) until Richard TempleGrenville, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold the painting to Ellesmere in 1848. It is generally considered the most authentic portrait of the bard, and three years after his meeting with Balmanno Ellesmere would donate it to the British government to become the first work in the National Portrait Gallery, the most famous, and a symbol of British culture. Balmanno was now waiting for Lord Ellesmere to finish having dinner with his family. His Lordship had come to New York for the inauguration of the American Crystal Palace, a sequel to the first World’s Fair, or “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” held two years earlier at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. Although Lord Ellesmere had caught a cold on a visit to Niagara Falls with his family and was too ill to attend the opening ceremony on July 14, 1853, his wife and daughters (Lady Blanche and Lady

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Alice) were in the audience in the north nave of the Crystal Palace (an enormous turreted building covered by a hundred-foot dome in what is now Bryant Park) when the newly elected U.S. president, Franklin Pierce, delivered the inaugural address. “Everything around us reminds us that we live in a utilitarian age,” he proclaimed, “where science, instead of being locked up for the admiration of the world, has become tributary to the arts, manufacturers, agriculture, and all that goes to promote our universal prosperity.”154 Among the arts to which technology catered was bookmaking. George Palmer Putnam had a booth at the fair and published a selected guide that drew attention to his own publications as “illustrations, of the progress of literature, science and art in this country.” Reporting on the fair for the New York Tribune, either Horace Greeley or one of his writers suggested that “books, at this day, may not be individually superior to the books of the days of Elzevir, but millions of men now possess books, where hundreds only possessed them formerly. . . . Our progress, in these modern times, then, consists in this, that we have democratized the means and appliances of a higher life.”155 Hearing that Ellesmere was in New York, Balmanno had written to him, proposing to honor his “Lordship’s generous patronage of everything connected with the Immortal Shakespeare.” His purpose now was to obtain the peer’s signature for the record book of the American Shakespeare Society. When Lord Ellesmere entered the lobby, he grasped the secretary by the hand “with the greatest Kindness and cordiality.” Balmanno ceremoniously unlocked his bag and withdrew a large, illustrated, leather-bound folio. It contained engravings as well as drawings by Mary Balmanno. Ellesmere admired the “very supreme style” in which the society had begun their recordkeeping, and said he hoped that they would go on “in the same handsome manner since Shakespeare was entitled to all the honor which man could pay to his memory.”156 The page Ellesmere was to sign had a horizontal line drawn across the middle. Above it, Mary Balmanno intended to draw his coronet and crest. The space beneath it, she had reserved for his motto, Sic donec (thus until), a phrase derived from the Latin poem “To Bartolomeo Cavalcanti” by the Italian humanist Marco Antonio Flaminio. In context, it means, It is best to live thus benignly with God until the end of life.157 When Lady Ellesmere and her daughters entered the lobby, they too admired the record book. Flipping through its pages, they paused over an engraving of the oil painting in their possession, the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, by the Shakespeare Society of London. Balmanno offered

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Ellesmere a pen, and the earl signed his name followed by his place of birth, “Egerton Ellesmere, London.” As he was about to add his birth date, as Balmanno had requested, he looked up and said pleasantly that it was a peculiar one: January 1, 1800. These formalities completed, Robert Balmanno was attempting to take his leave with a bow when Lord Ellesmere again grasped him by the hand, a gesture he interpreted as yet further proof “that a Love of Shakespeare acts as a sort of Freemasonry among men.” He signed his report of the encounter for the society in the manner of a true bardolater, “All which is true, so help me Will.”158 Although the records of the American Shakespeare Society of New York cease shortly after this, the bardolatrous activity of its secretary carries us forward one more year.

Shakespeare’s Gimmel Ring Thomas Crofton Croker was in poor health when he wrote to Robert Balmanno on July 21, 1854, that “this may be the last letter I may have it in my power to write.”159 The letter was prophetic, for the Irish antiquary died eighteen days later. With his passing, Balmanno lost his longest-lasting bond in the field of literary antiquarianism. Croker was a “collector of rare and curious things,” as Mary Balmanno recalled him, one who “delighted in adorning his dwelling with the fragments and relics he had accumulated.”160 His cottage on Gloucester Road, Brompton, was draped in tapestries and crammed with relics—old books, old coins, old tools, old seals, old weapons, old drinking vessels, old parchments, old maps, old urns, old prints of old ruined castles . . . as Leigh Hunt once put it, “ ‘Old,’ like ‘book,’ is a fine word to repeat.”161 The room Croker called his museum contained swords, shields, torques, combs, and other objects scavenged from the graves of the Vikings in the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, and the north of Ireland. But his library was a phenomenon to rival fiction. In The Antiquary (1816), Walter Scott describes the library of the title character in a manner that gives us insight into Croker’s: It was a lofty room of middling size, obscurely lighted by high narrow latticed windows. One end was entirely occupied by bookshelves, greatly too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them, which were, therefore, drawn up in ranks of two

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and three files deep, while numberless others littered the floor, and the tables, amid a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and Highland targets. Behind Mr. Oldbuck’s seat, (which was an ancient leathern-covered easy-chair, worn smooth by constant use,) was a huge oaken cabinet . . . covered with busts, and Roman lamps and paternae, intermingled with one or two bronze figures. . . . A large old-fashioned oak table was covered with a profusion of papers, parchments, books, and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it indicates. . . . The floor, as well as the table and chairs, was overflowed by the same mare magnum of miscellaneous trumpery, where it would have been as impossible to find any individual article wanted, as to put it to any use when discovered.162

The objects in the Scottish antiquary’s collection ranked low on the scale of usefulness, but Scott was antiquarian—and bibliomaniacal—enough to know that such a metric had no meaning to an antiquary. Of what use, after all, were the Irish antiquary’s old broken mirrors, or his bone weapons from the Cape of Good Hope? what use might he find for the flint arrowheads Balmanno sent him from the plains of North America, or for the cap Charles I wore when his head rolled from the scaffold? what could he do with a charter horn from the head of a Highland buffalo, a creature extinct for hundreds of years? or what, in the name of the Irish antiquary himself, could he do with his old jeweled breastplates in the age of the omnibus? Such objects gained value in antiquarian circles through the narratological (and sometimes performative) skill of the collector. Each item in Croker’s collection seemed to bear some relation to an anecdote or tradition he had uncovered in his research. “Among other things, know friend Balmanno,” he declared in October 1848, “that Mermaids were the Northern or Danish Sailors who frequented the courts of Scotland and Ireland between the seventh and eleventh centuries.” He claimed to have “tangible evidence” that the mythic creature we call a mermaid was nothing other than “an Old Norse sailor in a skin boat.”163 Croker, who collected legends as well as objects and was adept at a tale, intended his published writings to be, like Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s, “ ‘semi-antiquarian and semi-anecdotal—in short an attempt to enliven the usual dryness’ of historiographical writing” (as Dibdin had done for bibliography).164

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The work for which Croker is best remembered, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), was an anthology that formed part of a wave of interest in the songs, stories, and legends of Britain’s indigenous past. Collections of old ballads by Bishop Thomas Percy, Robert Burns, Joseph Ritson, and Sir Walter Scott fueled the literary antiquarianism of the age of bibliomania, and ballads like Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and Coleridge ’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” resulted from it. The literary scholar Judith Pascoe ascribes the rise of antiquarianism at this time to “culture ’s new understanding of the past as an idealized lost world, partly salvageable through the recovery and preservation of old objects and documents.”165 Yet it was a story rather than a historical artefact that first brought the Scottish antiquary Robert Balmanno and the Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker together. Waiting for dinner one afternoon at the house of the publisher Joseph Johnson in St. Paul’s Churchyard, London, Balmanno listened in amazement as the artist Henry Fuseli related a story about an English fairy recently seen in Turnham Green. Captain John Gabriel Stedman, the author of a book published by Johnson and (partly) engraved by William Blake, had seen the “little Fairy-man” from a stagecoach window. A strange noise attracted his attention, and when he looked out the window what should he see but “a little withered old man about two feet high, in scarlet coat, and cocked hat, with a gold-headed cane in his hand, which he swished about, making a great cloud of dust.” He seemed to bid Stedman and the other passengers defiance “by twirling his mustachios” and looking “as if he could devour” them. Despite his miniature size, he carried “himself in a military manner, and with that swinging stride peculiar to soldiers; his face . . . all puckered up, and his eyes standing out like those of a lobster.” Suddenly he picked up his pace, outpaced the stagecoach, and left his admiring spectators in the dust.166 It would be remiss not to mention that Fuseli was as skilled a raconteur as the collector of Irish fairy legends to whom Balmanno sent the story, thereby initiating a friendship that would survive decades and volumes of transatlantic correspondence. Mary Balmanno never forgot Croker’s “black and brilliant eyes,” and one can only imagine how they sparkled when in the autumn of 1848 he discovered a betrothal ring that seemed to be Shakespeare’s. He had been on his way home from a meeting of the British Archaeological Association in Worcester when he arrived in Gloucester with half an hour to spare for the

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connecting train to London. Poking about the local shops, he laid out a few shillings for a couple of old rings. One was of Roman workmanship, and he judged it to be the more valuable. The other was a silver-plated “gimmel” ring, with the initials “W” and “A” bound together in a true-love knot. The term “gimmel” (or gimmal) derives from the Latin gemellus (twin), or, in a romantic context, soulmate. Medieval and Elizabethan gimmel rings were composed of twin hoops, each with a flat top, which when locked together brought the initials of the lovers’ Christian names into union. The English antiquary Robert Smith explained that “the double hoop, each apparently free yet inseparable, both formed for uniting, and complete only in their union, affords a not unapt representation of the married state.”167 In Shakespeare ’s day, the betrothal ceremony was performed in church. The engaged couple would exchange rings and agree to marry on a certain date. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare describes the result as a contract sealed by the exchange of rings and attested by a kiss.168 In the heraldry of true-love knots depicted on such rings, a single tie represented the entanglement of affections and served as a declaration of love. A second tie, formed from the tassels of the first, indicated faithfulness and would be added at the betrothal ceremony. After that, it was acceptable for the couple to live together before the wedding, at which point a third tie would be added, joining friendship to faith and love. The initials of the lovers’ first names would then be linked together under the initial of the patrilinear family name. In researching the ring, Croker discovered other Shakespearean relics that contained the same iconography. A gold signet ring found in a field by Holy Trinity Church thought to be Shakespeare’s bore the initials “W.S.” in a true-love knot, and a pane of painted glass dated 1615, reputedly salvaged from New Place, contained the initials “W” and “A” in a triple lover’s knot beneath an “S.” Its lead was decayed, its glass loose, and it seemed “as genuine a relic as any” that had been offered. Croker had been one of the few to see the original glass pane, for its owner (a descendant of one of the workers who tore down New Place) “had an honest dislike to the many pretenders to relics” and showed it only to those who asked to see it.169 He considered it one of “the best authenticated relics of our immortal bard.” Reporting his discovery to Robert Balmanno on December 1, 1848, Croker sealed his letter with “Shakespeare ’s” gimmel ring.170 Mary Balmanno was quick to pay tribute to it in an illustrated poem, which begins with sylphs, elves, and fairies dancing around the ring as “the

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Mary Balmanno, William Shakespeare ’s gimmel ring. Engraved by Lossing & Barrett for Mary Balmanno, Pen and Pencil (1858). Author’s Collection.

James Orchard Halliwell, William Shakespeare ’s seal ring. Woodcut in The Life of William Shakespeare (1848). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Frederick William Fairholt, Painted glass panel from New Place. Woodcut in Frederick William Fairholt, The Home of Shakspere Illustrated and Described (1847). The Huntington Library Collection.

betrothal vows are crowned / With Shakespeare’s Gimmel-ring.” Possibly because the triple lover’s knot was often used to mark tableware and linen, the circular frame surrounding the illustration of the ring resembles a dinner plate. The border of the plate is composed of fairies, and they are obviously Irish fairies because the foliage tying them together is shamrock. Balmanno depicts the soon-to-be-married Anne Hathaway as an emblem of pastoral innocence—a blond village maid with hair bound in roses, lightly dancing on a green. Her appearance dissipates the “blissful reverie” of the bard, who stands rapt in thought beneath a nearby tree. “See him start, / The boughs are drawn aside; / He clasps the maiden of his heart, / His long-loved promised bride.”171 Clearly, the unmarried Anne Hathaway has more sway over the abstracted bard than the jealous wife of Robert Balmanno’s “never-tobe-forgotten Shakespeare dream.”172

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S. Wallin, Gimmel ring surrounded by fairies. Engraved by Lossing & Barrett for Mary Balmanno, Pen and Pencil (1858). Author’s Collection.

After Thomas Crofton Croker’s death, the auctioneers Thomas D. Puttick and William S. Simpson catalogued and sold his collection. Robert Balmanno dreamed of purchasing the ring, but he assumed that Croker’s friend, the antiquary Albert Denison, 1st Baron of Londesborough, would obtain it “against all the world” and “at any price.”173 On November 20, 1850, the baron had joined the Society of Noviomagus founded in 1828 by Croker and Balmanno, its first president and secretary, respectively, and named after a lost Roman city in Kent. Every member of what Croker called the “learned and jollie Order and Broderhood of Noviomagus” had a high-sounding title.174 Croker was its Lord High President, and Balmanno, as Confraternitatis Noviomagensis Secretarius (Secretary of the Noviomagian Brotherhood), marshaled the various Lord High Constables, Lord Keepers, Father

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Confessors, Poet-Laureates, and Keepers of Records to a local pub for monthly meetings. William Jerdan, a society member whom we have met as a critic of Charles Lamb’s Album Verses, remembered the club’s early archaeological expeditions to the site of the lost Noviomagus: “Thither, in commencing our career, we went to dig and dine, and certainly turned up a few bits of broken pottery on the spot, but whether actually taken from the bosom of the earth, or carried there by some humourist of the party, I am as unable to determine as any original inhabitant of the city, if now called on, would be.” Their Lord High Treasurer was the antiquarian archivist Robert Lemon, whom Jerdan describes as “gorged with remarkable pieces of information” from his job as Deputy Keeper of the State Paper Office.175 Lemon once presented Robert Balmanno with some blank leaves of a notebook formerly belonging to Henry VIII, which Balmanno carried with him to America and preserved unfolded in his library in Brooklyn as samples of Tudor paper. One year after Crofton Croker died, he presented one of the leaves, along with “the history of the paper, and all about it,” to a protagonist of the next chapter, an antiquary from Boston. For to drive home a point: the stories surrounding literary relics were often the real measure of their worth for bardomaniacs and other sentimental collectors. Over a quarter of a century earlier, Lemon had addressed Balmanno not only as the Noviomagensis Secretarius but also as Succi Glenlivatici insatiabilis Potator (Insatiable Drinker of Glenlivet Whisky), which perhaps says as much as anything about the nature of the club’s antiquarian gatherings.176 When Balmanno received a copy of Puttick & Simpson’s catalogue of Thomas Crofton Croker’s library from Croker’s son, Thomas Francis Dillon Croker, he was shocked to see the gimmel ring estimated at £3.10. “Why my Dear Sir, you must surely be under a delusion—even if it was not real,” Balmanno exclaimed to Dillon Croker. “Willingly would I have given Ten figures for it.”177 While ten figures spelled out sequentially were of course beyond Balmanno’s means, he playfully clarified his meaning (£10.10) or two “Ten figures.” But at the auction held by Puttick & Simpson on December 18, 1854, Lord Londesborough did not buy the ring. That honor was reserved for James Orchard Halliwell, a bardomaniac who had boasted to Balmanno, “My Shakespeare Museum is quite an unique collection. . . . It would be impossible to equal it in the world.”178 Balmanno grieved for the loss of the ring, though the younger Croker assured him that although his father had

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been “very sanguine” about its authenticity, many (including himself ) were not: “I really don’t know any one who swallowed it.”179 In the last letter he had it in his power to write, dated July 21, 1854, Thomas Crofton Croker claimed that he had made out his will earlier in the day, bequeathing some “very slight tokens of acknowledgement” to the Balmannos—more a memento mori than a bequest, or “what poor facetious ‘Dick Millikin’ of Cork [the poet Richard Alfred Milliken] was wont to term ‘May-men-too-more-eye.’ ”180 The tokens were in fact so slight that his own son and executor knew nothing about them. When Balmanno mentioned his father’s promise to Dillon Croker, the latter could find no mention of anything similar in his father’s will and feared his father had “promised more than he was allowed to perform.” In compensation, he offered to send his father’s old friend anything from his collection that he might like “as a remembrance.”181 But when he heard that a friend’s father would be sailing to New York from Liverpool about a week later, he made up his own package to send to Robert Balmanno. Dillon Croker worked for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a merchant shipping firm in London. His colleague Frederick Abbott Catherwood, the son of the British explorer Frederick Catherwood, may have told him that his father had just made out his own will and was on his way to the United States. The elder Catherwood had been one of the original members of the American Ethnological Society, along with the booksellers John Russell Bartlett and Charles Welford, and he was also a friend of Robert Balmanno’s. Twenty years earlier, he had given Balmanno some Egyptian papyrus and mummy cloth that were still carefully preserved in Balmanno’s library in Brooklyn. Catherwood sailed from Liverpool on September 20, 1854, on an American paddle steamer named the Arctic. It was part of a line of luxury mail steamers owned by the same merchant shipper, Edward Knight Collins, who had transported Mary Cowden Clarke’s testimonial armchair from New York to Liverpool two years earlier. After seven days at sea, the Arctic collided with a French steamer in the thick fog off Cape Race, Newfoundland. The ship was heavily freighted and carrying 250 passengers as well as a large crew. When the deck began to fill with water, the passengers crowded into the hurricane deck at the top of the ship, leaving the crew (and some of the more stalwart passengers) to work the pumps. The captain ordered the chief mate and boatswain to take some engineers and repair the damaged propeller. But the

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lowering of the lifeboats caused many passengers to panic and jump from the deck. Judging the situation hopeless, the lifeboats deserted the main craft. The captain then ordered the third mate to lower the sixth (and last) lifeboat to relieve the propellor, causing another wave of panicked passengers to jump ship. “For God’s sake, Captain,” the mate cried out, “clear the raft, so that we can work. I won’t desert the ship while there’s a timber above water.” But within three minutes of his cry, the stern sank, dashing those left on deck against the pipe containing the propellor shaft. One survivor would never forget the final moments of the Arctic, as “foam went boiling over the tumbling heap of human beings” and a single “wild yell” pierced the air.182 Nervous speculation began stateside after the Arctic’s expected date of arrival came and went and more days passed without word. Eventually another westbound ship brought word of the wreck, and by October 11 the news was in the papers. A couple of months later Balmanno was sorting through some of the antiquities in his library, figuring out which ones to place in a new cedar showcase, when he stumbled upon the papyrus and mummy cloth Catherwood had given him. The memory was bittersweet, and he realized he had not heard from Dillon Croker since before Catherwood’s ship sailed in September. “I believe I have received all your letters,” he wrote on December 13, not realizing the irony of his statement when he added, “unless my poor dear friend Frederick Catherwood was the bearer of one.”183 In fact, the letter, together with the memento mori from Dillon Croker’s father and Dillon’s own friend’s father, Frederick Catherwood, Sr., were all at the bottom of the sea off Cape Race. Balmanno raged at the owner of the shipping line. Collins, one of the wealthiest men in New York, was also “one of the greatest liars in existence.” Although his lies were “swallowed by the millions,” he had “excited the utter disgust of all impartial people.”184 His company, named the United States Mail Steamship Company, received subsidies from the U.S. government to carry the mails, and in the 1840s his line of speedy and luxurious paddle steamers dominated the transatlantic corridor. But there had been problems before the Arctic, and his contract to carry the mails had been revoked. At the time the ship went down, he was in Washington contesting Congress’s decision to cancel his contract. But if Collins really were the “knave” that Balmanno portrayed him as being, he paid a heavy price for it. For Collins’s wife, son, and daughter were all aboard the Arctic when it sank, and it would not be long before his business failed.185

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Dillon Croker chose another memento mori for his father’s friend in New York and sent it this time through the publishers Trübner & Company, care of the bookseller John Wiley. “My Dear Darling Dillon,” Balmanno exulted when it arrived, “I could hug you to my heart for your generous Kindness. After the Ring!! I prefer this piece of wood to all and everything in the catalogue.”186 The wood to which he was referring was a block of the old mulberry tree—a massive piece of the main stem with the crotch of a branch attached—and the only one of six authenticated blocks of the tree whose whereabouts Balmanno had not known. A certificate of authenticity, dated July 9, 1762, and stamped with David Garrick’s seal (a portrait head of Shakespeare), accompanied the block.187 Thomas Crofton Croker had added a note stating that the town of Stratford presented the block to Garrick in 1763. After Garrick’s death, it had passed to his widow, Eva Marie Veigel, who added her own endorsement to the block, although, if Balmanno was reading correctly, the date she recorded (1768) was “palpably an error—the tremulous hand shows she was in her dotage.” It then passed to her executor, George Frederick Belts, and from him to his brother Samuel, who presented it to Croker in 1844. “Thus, then, the long missing relic, owing to the generosity of Mr. Croker’s son, makes its appearance in New York,” announced Balmanno eleven years later in the Evening Post, “the dying gift of one old friend to another!” As he contemplated the block of mulberry, he wondered whether he should have it carved into a seated statue of the bard. Of one thing he was certain, it would not be made into more “vile, sensual drinking-cups.”188 Upon Balmanno’s death, the mulberry block would pass unaltered to Mary Balmanno, who would sell it to a friend of the artist John Sartain, James Earle, who owned a glass and frame shop in Philadelphia.189 In the meantime, Robert Balmanno placed the mulberry relic in its case and set it in a place of honor in his library. There it would remain, a household god guarding over his books, until his own death seven years later.

4. Boston Antiquarians American History, Bibliography, and Bibliomania It is a very refreshing experience to the healthy mind to turn from the crowded highway, where merit is disfigured with dust and tinsel, and clamorous applause marks alike the good and evil, and find, in calmer scenes, the contented spirit, a reward to itself, achieving its progress, not by the guidance of popular impulse, but by the inward promptings of the truth. —Howard Crosby

In the 1840s in America, the mania for collecting old books and manuscripts relating to the New World was a feature of the emergent historical consciousness sweeping the country. Henry Stevens of Vermont observed on April 5, 1845, that “the rage for collecting books related to America has by no means subsided in Boston, but on the contrary the ‘Club’ seems more crazy than ever.”1 The Club was the Massachusetts Historical Society, a hub of antiquarian activity at midcentury, and the rage for collecting old books from and about America was the fastest-growing sector of the bibliomania. The society’s rooms looked out over the graves of the early settlers in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground of Boston. Among the old Puritans who rested there was Hezekiah Usher, the first printer in the British colonies. The most famous book Usher printed was the Bay Psalm Book, the Psalter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had iconic status among collectors as the first book printed in British America. One bibliographer called it “the crowning triumph to which every American collector aspires.”2 Of the seventeen hundred copies printed in 1640, only ten remained, most of them in poor condition and missing pages. Our protagonist George Livermore owned one, as did two of his antiquarian friends, Alexander Young and Edward Augustus 174

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Crowninshield, both minor protagonists of this story. When their mutual friend Charles Deane (the other main protagonist of this chapter) offered to buy Young’s copy, Young refused to sell it but promised that should he obtain another, Deane would have “the first and strongest claim to it.”3 Old books like the Bay Psalm Book were more than mere textual chronicles of the past. They were actual participants in it and thus, like other historical witnesses, needed to be examined and cross-examined. Such books served as speaking relics and were “more than high-priced curiosities,” as the book historian David McKitterick writes: “If they were to be understood, and therefore if their contents were to be understood, then it was necessary to understand their making.”4 Bibliography consequently became an essential skill in the thriving new field of American antiquarianism. The archive of American history was still being formed, and the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society were “stuffed to bursting with books, newspapers, pamphlets, documents, portraits, and historical bric-a-brac. The librarian and cabinet-keeper found it necessary to use even the hallways for storage as they shuffled materials from room to room in an effort to organize the expanding collection.”5 One society member complained that their quarters were not only “dingy” but gave off “a musty odor” due to the “many natural curiosities,—plants, insects, birds, &c., supposed to be in a state of ‘preservation,’ but which ‘either from neglect or from their succumbing to the law of things earthy’ ” were disintegrating among the old books and papers.6 This state of things changed when a local bibliophile left his magnificent private library, the product of a lifetime’s labor by a self-made man, to the institution. Thomas Dowse, the “Learned Leather Dresser” of Cambridge, was no antiquarian bibliomaniac like his friends, but he united the members of the nation’s oldest historical society in a lasting memorial to the nineteenth-century ideal of self-culture.

The Old Hive Unlike their peers across the Atlantic, who had the resources of the British Museum and other major archives at their disposal, American historians were largely reliant on private libraries for research materials at midcentury. Old books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and other historical relics provided the particularity necessary for antiquarian writing. Whereas historiographical writing synthesized and extrapolated book-length arguments and narratives from historical materials, antiquarian writing tended to appear in the form of

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articles, lectures, and chronicles (documentary-style compilations that, to the degree possible, let historical actors and records speak for themselves). Before the writing of history could begin, the materials first needed to be uncovered, organized, and catalogued, and then dissected, compared to other sources, annotated, edited, and often printed or reprinted before they could be properly studied. “Persons not familiar with investigations of this nature are not aware of the amount of labor involved,” Charles Deane explained; “the mass of documents to be collected, read, and digested . . . letters, depositions, newspapers, old half-effaced records,—from these to sift out the evidence, arrange it, and bring order out of chaos: all this is no ordinary labor.”7 Yet unlike academic historians, whose research formed part of their profession, antiquaries were “amateurs” who, like other working men of letters in America, typically held day jobs. They collected old books and pursued history as a passion rather than a means to a living. To the antiquarian as to the bibliographer, first editions lost their authority along with their aura when leaves were missing. Charles Deane himself was “never quite content with a book that was in any way cardinal in such investigations, unless he could find a copy in the original binding.”8 The stiff back of a rebound book, like endpapers that fit to the millimeter but did not lie naturally, were warnings to beware. As the twentieth-century bibliographer John Carter observed, “There is a special feel, indefinable but to the seasoned or sensitive hand (if on its guard) unmistakable, about a book which has once been divorced from its covers. . . . Leaves may have been substituted or washed, bookplates may have been switched, title-pages tampered with, endpapers renewed—anything is possible.”9 For this reason, American antiquarians, unlike the literary antiquaries of the American Shakespeare Society, looked askance at the practice of extra-illustrating, which mangled and scrambled the materials of history. “Books are robbed of their integrity,” said Deane, when illustrations or maps were removed, “and those volumes for which the robbery is made, owing to ignorance or indifference, are often supplied with illustrations—maps and plates—which do not belong to them. This is an evil greatly to be deplored, for historical investigation is often thwarted by the existence of such books.”10 An enormous amount of bibliographical labor was involved, parsing reliable from unreliable narratives and materials and performing background historical research, and Deane for one felt that “the layman had no conception of this, when he read the finished paper of the historian.”11

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In an address to the Maine Historical Society in September 1847, George Folsom, another of this story’s protagonists, suggested that American antiquaries performed the work of curators—librarians and bibliographers— collecting, arranging, and making available the archives of American history: “The most striking evidence now bestowed on the subject of historical investigation in this country, is found in the organization of Historical Societies throughout the Union, having in view the specific object of collecting and preserving the materials of history. The Massachusetts society was the first in the field: it has already published twenty-nine volumes of Collections, containing a prodigious mass of information, relating chiefly to the history of New England.”12 Such activity reached a fever pitch in the 1840s and was essential to the field of American history. And yet, as the historian Rosemary Sweet cautions (having studied the origins of the phenomenon in eighteenth-century Britain), “It is important not to fall into the trap of assuming that all that the antiquaries achieved was to provide the dross of raw materials from which historians proper could refine the narrative of history.”13 The antiquarian labor of charting and navigating the historical archives made it possible for historians to set their course toward truth, but it also helped shape the methodology of historical investigation as a rigorous study of source materials. Introducing his Bibliotheca Americana, Henry Stevens—ubiquitous in this story as in the transatlantic book world of his day—complained that the field of bibliography lacked the respect it deserved as a science: Bibliography is both the hands of History; and as these two poor hands are the slaves of the eye and the ear, so Bibliography without distinction or reward, ministers to the wants of History. He who catalogues beetles or star-fish, in a language that never lived, is by common consent a savant, and may walk, with his brows above his temples, unrebuked in the paths of science, while he who diligently ransacks the remotest nooks, clears away literary rubbish, sorts, calendars, and elaborately describes the dry and isolated materials of history; arranges, indexes, describes, and catalogues books and manuscripts, must content himself with the unappreciated airs of the bibliographer.14

The virtuoso, who amassed and catalogued curiosities of nature resembled the book collector who assembled cabinets of bibliographical curiosities.

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Seal of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

“The intelligent shelf-hunter might easily imagine himself to be in the private library of a virtuoso,” Evert Duyckinck observed of the antiquarian bookstore of Bartlett & Welford in 1841.15 While the virtuoso was acclaimed as a scientific investigator and gathered into the fold of the British Royal Society, however, the bibliographer was neglected as a mere instrument of investigative science. But for the antiquaries at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the disinterested labor of collecting, parsing, annotating, and expanding the materials of history was its own reward. The society’s seal reflects this commitment. Its design features a beehive in the foreground with a river (probably the Charles) running behind it. The motto, Sic Vos non Vobis (thus you but not for yourselves), is a deliberate fragment. In his biography of Virgil, Aelius Donatus relates that Virgil one evening posted a couplet on the imperial palace gate in praise of Augustus Caesar. The Latin verse, as first translated into English, reads, “All night it rains, the lights at morning tide return again, / And Caesar with almighty Jove hath match and equal reign.”16 Virgil did not sign his name, and Caesar sought in vain for the author. When another poet, Bathyllus of Alexandria, took credit for the lines, Virgil posted some more verses on Augustus’s palace gate to expose the deception: “Hoc ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honorem / Sic vos non vobis” (I made the verses for which another took the praise / So you, not for yourselves). The fragmentary second line was repeated four times. Augustus, himself an accomplished poet, then held a competition to complete the unfinished verse, and when Bathyllus failed to do so, Virgil stepped forth to recite: Sic vos non vobis fertis ara¯tra boves, Sic vos non vobis mellifica¯tis apes, Sic vos non vobis vellêra fertis oves, Sic vos non vobis nidifica¯tis aves.

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Thus you make the soil fertile, oxen, but not for yourselves, Thus you make honey, bees, but not for yourselves, Thus you make fleece, sheep, but not for yourselves, Thus you make nests, birds, but not for yourselves.17

Work takes different forms for different creatures, but it is the operative category of the verb in each of the lines above. The repeated phrase “Sic vos non vobis” emphasizes the disinterested nature of work in the animal kingdom. The bee makes honey other animals enjoy, birds make nests for their young, “the patient ox . . . uncomplaining, bears the yoke, and the innocent sheep . . . yields for our comfort its rich fleece,” Deane explained, all equally representing “the sentiment embodied in our chosen motto.” He noted that the Latin phrase had “always been regarded as a favorite motto for quotation, to indicate devoted and disinterested labor, that is to say, for the good of others; and the bee as the fitting emblem to represent that sentiment.”18 His friend George Livermore proposed (as perhaps only an antiquary could have done without irony) that the topic was worthy of “thorough investigation” and that Deane undertake a study of the motto from the age of Augustus down to the present.19 The antiquaries of the Old Hive, as the members of the Massachusetts Historical Society fondly called it, considered the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake a worthy ideal and an alternative to the utilitarian thinking of the day. The Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been active from the 1830s, publishing successive volumes of its American Library of Useful Knowledge, and in 1851 Henry David Thoreau would express the view that many literary antiquarians shared: “Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense; for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?”20 We have seen Henry Stevens, Sr., express a similar attitude—namely, that pragmatic usefulness was not the only index of value for human endeavor—in establishing his Committee on Useless Information and Antiquarian Lore through the Vermont state legislature. Jeremy Belknap, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Historical Society, had originally proposed a design for the seal that would have stressed the laboriousness, rather than the selfless disinterestedness, of antiquarian

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research. The image would have featured two beavers supporting a beehive, a mixed visual metaphor made up of laboring animals, and the motto would have read, Nil Magnum sine Labore (Nothing great is done without labor). An alternate image would have featured a flying eagle, a ranging wolf, and a shark, all seeking their prey. Yet as analogues for the historian in the quest of truth, such predators might have seemed too ferocious to the antiquaries at the Old Hive. James Winthrop suggested a different motto, E Vestutate Lux (from such ornaments comes light), to be accompanied by a more genteel, neoclassical design—an antiquary sitting on a ruin, copying an inscription from the pedestal of an obelisk. Other architectural relics of the past (a ruined city wall, a pyramid, broken Grecian columns) would appear in the background. But this focus on the ancient world did not suit the American antiquaries, whose illumination came from less colossal relics. “While the mutilated fragments of classical antiquity are gathered up and cherished with a religious zeal,” Alexander Young remarked, “it seems neither creditable nor grateful, that the venerable and beautiful remains of our own ancestral literature” should be neglected.21 The primary materials of American antiquarianism were bibliographical, and working men of letters in the 1840s formed private libraries essential to their own research. One would have to go through Charles Deane’s “abundant and extraordinary library of nearly thirteen thousand volumes to find the minutes of his researches which he scattered so plentifully on the flyleaves and margins, and to discover the letters, memoranda, and scraps which he had laid between the leaves of his books.”22 Deane’s interest in American history focused on colonial New England. “Deane was one of a number of nineteenth-century Americans who combined a skill in business with a great interest in history,” observes one American historian. “Although some twentieth-century historians have tended to dismiss Deane as an antiquarian rather than a critical historian, his work was crucial in the development of an American historical tradition. Lacking the many centuries of history of European nations, the young United States greatly needed to embrace, enhance, and even mythologize its beginnings . . . in order to develop a national consciousness.”23 At a time when such materials were still available, Deane acquired old books, tracts, and manuscripts relating to the first British colonies, including dozens of sermons by the Puritan minister John Cotton. Among them was Cotton’s God’s Promise to His Plantation (1630), his farewell sermon preached

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to John Winthrop and other settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they sailed from the dock at Southampton.24 Like John Russell Bartlett (from whom he would obtain two books from Charles Lamb’s library), Deane had begun his working life at his uncle’s country store in New England, in Deane’s case, Kennebunkport, Maine. He accumulated a “slender stock of books,” mainly in the area of moral philosophy, and at age nineteen moved to Boston, where he joined the firm of Waterson, Pray & Company. His acquaintance there with local antiquaries like Edward Augustus Crowninshield and the Reverend Alexander Young gave him “a new zest for the buying of books,” and shifted his collecting interests to the history of New England.25 The three men would meet every day at lunch hour at the bookstore of Little, Brown & Company, established in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown. The booksellers published Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth (1841) and its sequel, Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (1846). Both works were exemplary productions of American antiquarianism, collations of annotated documents that let the early colonials tell their own story. In the interim between the two, specifically the summer of 1843, Deane realized that he did not know the difference between the two original British colonies, that is, the Plymouth Colony, established by the Pilgrims who crossed the sea on the Mayflower in 1621, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, established by settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Company, under charter of the British crown, in 1630. By the time Young published his chronicles of the latter, however, Deane had learned enough about both to review the book. On July 8, 1846, Young thanked Deane for his review, adding, “I value it the more, because I consider you as among the few who are qualified by the accurate study of our history to express an opinion about such matters.”26 The branch of moral philosophy that had early preoccupied Deane was the same one that had occupied those whom Young called “the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth,” namely, the contradictory doctrines of free will and necessity (predestination). “I bought and read a good many books on the subject,” recounted Deane, who also debated the matter with his father, Ezra Deane, a physician descended from a Plymouth Colony settler named Walter Deane.27 The elder Deane weighed in on the side of necessity, as did one of the authors represented by two large folios in the younger Deane ’s library originally owned by Charles Lamb. The Cambridge philosopher Henry More had difficulty reconciling the idea of free will with

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the concept of divine omniscience and the biblical prophecies. Like Deane himself, More in the end concluded that the arguments on behalf of free will did not “carry much weight or force.”28 For with his paternal legacy hanging over him, Deane had come to believe “deeply that the necessitarians had the best of the arguments.”29 Earlier in this story, we saw Evert Duyckinck advise his brother George against purchasing one of the two folios that Deane obtained from Lamb’s library, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1712). Evert suggested that the other, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness; or, A True and Faithfull Representation of the Everlasting Gospel of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Onely Begotten Son of God and Sovereign over Men and Angels (1660), offered better reading. Although the second folio disappeared from Deane ’s library before he died in 1898, he held on to the first, into which he laid a copy of Bartlett & Welford’s Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library and a letter from the booksellers. “No man loved his books more tenderly than Mr. Deane,” remarked Deane ’s friend Justin Winsor.30 In that same copy of More ’s Philosophical Writings, which even the auctioneer Charles F. Libbie, in a rare moment of disclosure, admitted was “broken and stained,” Lamb had transcribed a two-part poem by More.31 More had originally written the poem in Greek, and he included it with his Philosophical Poems (1647), a book that we have seen George Templeton Strong purchase from Elia’s library.32 In The Life of the Learned and Pious Henry More, published two years before More’s Philosophical Writings, the biographer Richard Ward claimed that the two stanzas of the poem “contain as Noble a Sense of Mind, and as fine a Strain of Poetry, as ever fell from the Pen of Man.”33 Lamb may have agreed, for he copied Ward’s opinion onto a blank page (perhaps a flyleaf from Ward’s Life) and pasted it onto the front flyleaf of his folio of Philosophical Writings. Above Ward’s comment, he transcribed More ’s own English translation of his Greek original:   His Aporia Nor whence, nor who I am, poor wretch, know I: Nor yet, O madness! whither I must go: But yet in grief ’s crook’d claws fast held I lie; And live, I think, by force tugg’d to and fro; Asleep or wake all one. O father Jove, ’Tis brave, we mortals live in clouds like thee.

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Lies, night-dreams, empty toys, fear, fatal love, This is my life: I nothing else do see.   His Euphoria I come from heaven; am an immortal ray Of God; O joy! And back to God shall go: And here sweet Love on’s wings me up doth stay. I live, I’m sure; & joy this life to know. Night and vain dreams be gone: Father of lights, We live as thou, clad with eternal day. Faith, Wisdom, Love, fix’d Joy, free-winged Might This is true life: all else death and decay.34

More explains that he wrote the eight lines of the first stanza (Ἀπορία) before taking his degree from Christ’s College, Cambridge, and that it represents a state of soul in which “all is dark and unpassable.” Such a condition, in a Christian context, indicates spiritual despair, and in a modern context the physiological-psychological malady of depression. However labeled, it is a mood characterized by “Emptiness” (aporia) and “Inviousness,” or having no roads or pathways. Within a few years, More overcame his despair, passing from “Inviousness and Emptiness” to “Purity and Simplicity of Mind,” and into “a most Joyous and Lucid State of Mind.” In his improved state of consciousness, he composed the second stanza (Ἐυπορία), intending to capture a state of soul characterized by “Perviousness,” a word meaning open or unblocked.35 Combined, the two poems portray the experience of spiritual crisis and recovery that was often taken as a subject in the metaphysical poetry of seventeenth-century Puritan clerics—and one that was also familiar to American Puritan settlers caught in the nowhere land between free will and necessity. Yet although a necessitarian in his philosophical writings, More claimed in introducing his philosophical poems to have recovered from his spiritual crisis through an act of free will. Like his friend Deane, George Livermore also purchased an association copy from Elia’s library on the topic of free will and necessity. This book, a hybrid volume representing both viewpoints, contained Joseph Priestley’s The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity and Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of free will: A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion of That Freedom of the Will, Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. Lamb first encountered

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the work of Priestley, the founder of Unitarianism, two years after Priestley fled to the United States from England to escape religious persecution. Writing to Coleridge in 1796, when Coleridge was serving as a Unitarian minister, Lamb claimed that Priestley’s Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity had caused him to “love and honor” the author “almost profanely.” He considered it a “wise book,” one that made him rejoice in feeling “a kind of communion, a kind of friendship even, with the great and good.”36 Although an explanation of the phenomenon is beyond the bounds of this story, it should be noted that by the time Livermore acquired Lamb’s volume on Free Will and Necessity, the two contrary doctrines—associated, respectively, with the Congregationalist Church of Edwards and the Unitarian Church of Priestley—were no longer incompatible in American dissenting theology. Livermore was a member of both the Unitarian Association of Boston and the South Congregational Church. Whether he valued the book from Lamb’s library because it contained the differing doctrines of the churches where he worshipped or because of its association with its former owner, we cannot say. But Deane assures us that Livermore loved “the gentle Charles Lamb . . . as an elder brother.”37 Nor was he the only Boston antiquary in their circle who did. The Reverend Alexander Young had “many literary affinities” with his friend Livermore, including a love of Charles Lamb.38 He edited a ninevolume book series, the “Library of the Old English Prose Writers,” which included many of Lamb’s favorite authors—Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Sir Thomas Browne. The Duyckinck brothers identify this series as “the first attempt in the United States to emulate the example of the best scholars of the day in England in the revival of the treasures of the Elizabethan literature.”39 Given Young’s interest in the same antiquated prose writing that influenced the Elian style and his friendship with literary antiquarians (George Livermore, Charles Deane, Edward Augustus Crownin­ shield) who all purchased Charles Lamb’s books from Bartlett & Welford, it is not farfetched to presume that he may have been the “Rev. Mr. Alexander” whom the booksellers list as having purchased Lamb’s copy of Vincent Bourne ’s Poematia Latine (1750). Vincent Bourne was the poet whom Lamb, in reviewing his own Album Verses, wished had written in English, and his nine translations from Bourne’s Latin poetry derive from Poematia Latine.40 On the flyleaves of the book, Lamb had added not only his usual extracts, the ongoing record of an

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associative reading practice, but some Latin verse of his own. Although he had not written poetry in Latin since his schooldays, he could not refuse the request of a schoolboy, James Augustus Hessey, son of the English publisher James Hessey, and the result was a six-line epigram he called “not a very happy-gram.”41 The young Hessey was having trouble completing a school assignment for the Merchant Taylors’ School, a Latin epigram on the topic of suum cuique (to each his own). He wondered whether he might prevail upon the “good-natured and humorous old gentleman” whom he had met through his father, a partner in Taylor & Hessey, which published the first Elia volume. He buttered up the essayist by saying that he had “devoured” his “Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” and Lamb complimented him for “possessing a thorough schoolboy’s appetite.”42 Lamb’s epigram opens with an ironic meditation on the subject of stealing: “Riches from you and me the robber takes / Disdainful of such words as ‘his’ and ‘mine.’ ” Hessey would later claim that the poem was inspired by “the grim satisfaction which had recently been expressed by the public at the capture and execution of some notorious highwayman,” but the topic was too suited to the occasion not to make one wonder whether Lamb had the young Hessey in mind as the robber. The closing couplet delivers the suum cuique: “His garments to the hangman’s hand are thrown. / The devil has his soul. To each his own.”43 With his school uniform in the hands of the hangman and his soul with the devil, the schoolboy at least had the author’s good wishes for the meter. “I pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity,” Lamb wrote to Robert Southey, “but ’tis with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years.”44 The younger Hessey remembered the essayist as “very kind . . . and very quaint,” and to be sure he was both.45 More than the Boston antiquaries who admired him, he cultivated a deliberately antiquarian persona. “Charles Lamb was a living anachronism,” Thomas Westwood avowed, “a seventeenth century man, mislaid and brought to light two hundred years too late. Never did author less belong to what was, nominally, his own time; he could neither sympathise with it, nor comprehend it. His quaintness of style and antiquarianism of taste were no affectation.”46 Lamb himself defended his antiquarian prose style in a preface to The Last Essays of Elia, saying that “a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him.”47 His American reviewers also believed that his quaintness came naturally and was “wholly free from affectation.” The same critic in the North American Review that we have just

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quoted remarked that Lamb’s “love of quaint conceits . . . was a part of his nature.” At the same time, it was fed by his reading the same kind of writing that Young reprinted in his Library of the Old English Prose Writers: “His enthusiastic study of the early English authors . . . furnished his mind with its most genial sustenance; and his easy flow of expression and pithy language received a certain antique coloring from the same source. His mind sympathized so completely with his favorite writers, that he became almost their contemporary, and poured out his rich drollery in their quaint expressions, with the same natural gush of imagination and whim, as they would have done themselves.”48 In introducing the Old English Prose Writers, Young contrasted their antiquarian style with the more polluted currents of modern English. “In this age of books, when everybody is sipping of the shallow and ofttimes poisoned fountains of an ephemeral literature, how few there are that draw from the deep and healthful ‘wells of English undefiled’!”49 Like Evert Duyckinck in the Literary World, Young was alluding to The Faerie Queene and Spenser’s description of old Dan Chaucer as a pure source of the English language. It was in fact the introduction of printing in England that codified the spoken tongue and resulted in modern English. The motto Young chose for his book series also derived from Chaucer: “Out of the olde fieldes, as men saithe, / Cometh all this newe corn fro yere to yere; / And out of olde books, in goode faithe, / Cometh all this newe science that men lere.”50 The English antiquary Henry Southern had used the same quotation, from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, as the motto for his Retrospective Review, and Histor­­­­ ical and Antiquarian Magazine (1820–1826). Southern likewise regretted that the “old and venerable literature . . . which has, as much as any thing, tended to make us what we are, is treated with distant reverence,” while “the productions which daily issue from the press; newspapers, reviews, pamphlets, magazines, the popular poetry, the fashionable romances, together with new voyages and travels, occupy the reading time, and fix the attention of the people.”51 In the task of restoring old and forgotten writers to legibility, literary antiquarians resembled the title character of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, who spends his time scraping moss from tombstones to reveal the names which were hid. Young sought to do the same for the old prose writers, explaining that “moss has been suffered to creep over them, and hide their clear and sparkling waters from the general view.”52 Addressing the Maine

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Historical Society in 1847, George Folsom declared, “If Historical Associations should do no more than point out the resting places of departed merit, disencumbering the humble tomb-stone of its moss, and freshening the sod that lies upon the grave of genius, they will perform a truly grateful though it may be humble office, and be the means of holding up to public view examples worthy of imitation.”53 But in the United States this bookish faith in the ongoing relevance of the past met its share of skeptics. One American reviewer took exception to the perspective guiding Young’s series. “Books are not the fields of knowledge; they are but the storehouses,” he wrote, refuting the Chaucerian motto. “When men shall leave their fields uncultivated, and, for their future support, rely solely upon what they have already harvested then may they believe that the stores of knowledge, already provided, will be adequate to all future emergencies.”54 But this writer was reviewing a book titled On the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge, and his sympathies lay with the diffusers of useful knowledge. The Reverend Alexander Young shared Elia’s love of old prose, and also his love of old books. “He had a true Dibdin eye for a good book, and the rare art of handling a volume properly, which few persons possess,” said Charles Deane. “He knew how to open a book without breaking its back, and to turn over its leaves so that its owner would not tremble while it was in his hand. There is a knack in all this, known only to the true lover of books,— to him who reverences not merely the author, or the author’s thoughts, but the concrete object before him.” What one American antiquary said of the books from Charles Lamb’s library in the Historical Magazine was equally true of those from Young’s, being “no unimportant chapter of his mental history,” with many an old volume serving as “a most curious and valuable memento of his favorite studies.”55 Young invited Deane to his private library in 1846, and those old books sent Deane irreclaimably down the path of American antiquarianism. From the founding of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, his historical interests grew to include separatist movements within the colonies, wars between the colonists and Native Americans, and witchcraft trials and persecutions. By 1848 he had become known around Boston for being “very curious in all matters relating to the beginnings of New England.”56 His research in these matters took him to Plymouth, where he visited the graves of the Pilgrims on Burial Hill and examined old documents in the courthouse. On one occasion, he took some Harvard students with him. As

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they were waiting for dinner, he pulled half a dozen old tracts from his pocket and explained “how it was by arduous critical analysis and by comparison of statements that the truth was worked out.”57 Justin Winsor, who was there at the time, learned his bibliographical lessons well. For Deane’s protégé would go on to become a historian and bibliographer of early American history, not to mention the Harvard librarian for twenty years, the superintendent of the Boston Public Library, and the first president of the American Library Association. One year after the sale of Charles Lamb’s library, this same concern for close bibliographical scrutiny led Charles Deane and George Livermore— two gentle, unassuming bookworms—to engage in a public battle over a point of historical fact that to anyone but an antiquary might seem pointless to dispute: How many children did England’s first Protestant martyr have at the time he was burned at the stake? The question had no practical value, but to the antiquaries at the Old Hive, its relevance to historical methodology and the disinterested pursuit of objective truth meant everything. While today such a debate, if it took place at all, would play out in a specialized publication like the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Livermore and Deane marshaled their evidence and targeted their arguments to a general audience through the local newspapers. For more than two hundred years, scholars had debated the number of John Rogers’s children, some claiming nine and others ten. In his capacity as a Sunday School teacher, Livermore had seen his pupils struggling to make out the number of children in the frontispiece to the New England Primer, which depicts Rogers burning at the stake in Smithfield while his wife and an indistinct number of children look upon “the awful sight” from a crowd of spectators. Sometimes his pupils “tried to solve the difficulty by counting the heads of the children in the picture; but the artist, modestly declining to meddle with matters beyond his business, used, in the old Primer, to leave the matter as much in the dark as he found it. A glorious indistinctness in the picture renders it utterly impossible to distinguish the children of the Martyr from the common crowd.”58 If one believed, as Livermore did, that the Primer “had done more than any other book, except the Bible, to fix the faith and shape the character of the people of New England,” then even the smallest detail regarding it should be of general interest.59 In the Cambridge Chronicle, he plucked up the nerve to propose that the martyr had eleven children, while his opponent Deane held fast in Boston’s Evening Transcript at ten.

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What prompted Livermore to reapproach the old knotty point was the publication of a new edition of the New England Primer by the American clergyman Heman Humphrey. Humphrey’s edition eliminated confusion by having the frontispiece redrawn so that the spectators in the crowd disappear, leaving only Rogers’s wife, Adriana de Weyden, with nine small children and a newborn nursing at her breast. Livermore felt that the new frontispiece was based on an arbitrary choice about a detail whose symbolic value as an unsettled point of history outweighed any other value it might have. The Massachusetts Sabbath School Society had distributed a hundred thousand copies of the new edition of the Primer when Livermore, adopting the pen name of “The Antiquary,” reopened the debate by asserting that the martyr had eleven children. Only by going beyond the New England Primer to the sources upon which it was based could truth be obtained, and Livermore sought “above all things to create an interest in the early editions and to teach readers to distrust all second hand authorities.”60 The primary source of information about the martyr was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days, commonly known as Foxe ’s Book of Martyrs, published eight years after Rogers’s death in 1563. Foxe based his account on manuscripts left in Rogers’s prison cell, but he introduced confusion by saying that the martyr met his wife on the way to his execution with “nine small children, and one at the breast.”61 The statement could mean that there were nine small children including one at the breast, or nine small children plus another at the breast. What seemed clear, until the Antiquary further muddied the waters, was that the number could not have been less than nine or more than ten. The caption to the frontispiece in Humphrey’s Primer stated that Rogers “was burnt at Smithfield, February 14, 1554.” But Livermore pointed out that the martyrdom took place on February 4, 1555. He explained that such an error could not have been caused by an effort to adapt the Julian calendar (used before 1750) to the New Style calendar (whose year begins on January 1 rather than March 25), for while “such a change would correctly carry the day forward from the 4th to the 14th, it would not carry the year backward to 1554.” With this “glaring error” uncovered, he established the unreliability of the text.62 Although Charles Deane disagreed with Livermore about the number of John Rogers’s children, he too recognized what was really at stake in the debate: the idea that bibliographical fact-checking and textual analysis were linked.

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In his correspondence with his adversary, Livermore put a playful distance between his private self and his public persona. “I have seen ‘The Antiquary’ and he has had an opportunity of seeing, reading & pondering your note,” he wrote to Deane. “I placed before him every shadow of evidence that has come to light leading to the supposition that there was but ten young Rogers on the day of the martyrdom. I threatened to publish old John’s own account of his family. But all to no purpose. The obstinate old fellow will not budge an inch! He says ‘Deane does not know any thing about Mrs Rogers excepting from Foxe; and [Foxe] says “x able to go and one sucking on her breast” “being xi in number.” ’ ”63 Deane owned an abridged copy of the Book of Martyrs from 1589, in which Foxe quotes Rogers, on three different occasions about a week before his death, saying that he had “X” children.64 Livermore owned an earlier edition from 1583, which refers to “XI” children: “His wife and children, being XI in number, X able to go and one sucking on her breast, met him on the way as he went toward Smithfield.”65 Given the inaccuracy of early printed texts, Deane suggested in a private letter to Livermore that the “XI” could have been a printer’s error.66 Responding in kind two days later, Livermore assured Deane that it was “quite as likely that the printer left out a figure in printing Rogers’s statement, as that he added one.”67 The only way to resolve the discrepancy was to refer to the original documents upon which the martyrologist had relied. Yet here as elsewhere, the American historian was stymied in his research unless he had the means to cross the Atlantic, for Rogers’s manuscripts were deposited in the British Museum. Livermore had been to England in 1845, but he was not yet involved in the debate and did not examine Rogers’s papers. That same year the English Bible scholar Christopher Anderson published his Annals of the English Bible, which maintains that the martyr had eleven children. The Antiquary referred to Anderson’s two-volume book as “a work of the highest authority on historical and other matters pertaining to the period of which it treats,” adding that when Anderson speaks of an “eleventh child, an unconscious babe now hanging at the mother’s breast,” his testimony must be “positive and conclusive.”68 But here Deane caught the Antiquary in self-contradiction. “After the strong appeals urged by him to distrust all second-hand authorities, it seems quite difficult to understand why he should . . . resort to his numerous modern authorities,” countered Deane.69 Behind the scenes, Livermore defended

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himself to Deane, promising to procure Anderson’s “authority for the statement,” with “the fullest confidence” that the historian could produce his source. “I should be more ready to believe that Mrs. Rogers went to the stake with an infant less than a week old,” he insisted, “than that Dr Anderson, who has had the subject under consideration for many years . . . should have erred.”70 But belief was belief and fact was fact. The matter of an eleventh, suckling child may have been a historically neutral question, but it was inflammatory on religious grounds. Since, as Deane explained, “Rogers had been lying a whole year in Newgate, having no intercourse with his family except by occasional messages,” the possibility of a newborn child raised the specter of adultery.71 Anderson quotes Rogers complaining to the Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, “Ye have dealt with me most cruelly; for ye have put me in prison without law, and kept me there now almost a year and a half. For I was almost half a year in my house, where I was obedient to you, God knoweth, and spake with no man. And now have I been a full year in Newgate, at great cost and charges, having a wife and ten children to fund; and I had never a penny of my livings, which was against the law.” Yet as Rogers walked toward Smithfield, reciting the fifty-first psalm (“Have mercy upon me, O God”) on his way to the stake, a surprise confronted him in the crowd: “His wife, the foreigner, with all her children—one of these, a youth named Daniel, if the eldest, now nearly seventeen years of age; the youngest, or the eleventh child, an unconscious babe, now hanging at the mother’s breast! In the midst of this overwhelming scene, the husband and father stood firm, and having got through it, the bitterness of death was past!”72 Among those disturbed by the “dangerous heresy” of the eleventh child was Lewis Glover Pray, author of the Boston Sunday School Hymn Book. “Until the ‘Antiquary’ can set aside the testimony of John Rogers,” he consoled Deane, “the court will not admit any hearsay or inferior evidence.”73 Alexander Young, on the other hand, avoided taking sides. Having read an article by Deane in the Evening Transcript, he found the ten-children argument convincing.74 Deane did not sign the article, however, and Young assumed that it had been written by another local antiquary, Lucius Manlius Sargent. Sargent published in the same paper under various pen names, including “A Sexton of the Old School.” On July 15, 1848, he explained that it was “quite common to look upon a sexton, as a mere grave digger, and upon his calling as a cold, underground employment, divested of everything

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like sentiment or solemnity.” But in “olden time” the sexton had charge of the sacristy and its sacred vessels.75 An Old School Sexton was a custodian of relics, by another name an antiquary. But this antiquary did not write the article that Young found convincing, as he learned the next day when he ran into Livermore. The Antiquary defended his own eleven-child hypothesis in the flesh, and Young found himself in the middle. “You have convinced me— but Livermore says he is right,” Young told Deane. “As Charles Lamb would say, I wish I could believe you both.”76 Throughout their debate about the martyr, both the Antiquary and his rival attempted to maintain a tone of objective, scholarly inquiry. “No matter what his preconceived notions, his local pride, his friendly interest, his national predilections, they all stood for nothing in his quest for the truth,” Winsor said of Deane, and the same was true of Livermore.77 “I do not propose in any of my communications to criticise the contents of the Primer, as a partizan,” Livermore declared at the outset of the debate, “but simply as a truth-seeking antiquary.”78 Yet when the Antiquary announced the discovery of original genealogical documents proving “beyond the shadow of a doubt” that the martyr had eleven children, the debate between Livermore and Deane threatened to turn bloody.79 A certain Rogers of Salem, Massachusetts, who claimed descent from the English martyr, was working on a family tree and declared that he had uncovered the names of all the martyr’s children. By his count, there were eleven. “The Antiquary is triumphant!” Livermore gloated.80 But Deane was no more willing to accept the Salem Rogers as a legitimate source of information than he had been Christopher Anderson. When Anderson identified one of the martyr’s sons in a certain Richard Rogers of Wethersfield, Essex, an “old and eminent minister,” Deane scoffed that “the Rogerses in England are as plenty as blackberries.” He had his own authority, James Savage, “the most eminent genealogist in England,” who had assured Deane that there was “not the slightest ground for a conjecture that the martyr’s descendants are in this country.” With such testimony behind him, he suggested that any old documents in the possession of the Salem Rogers presuming to “settle all mysteries,” or “bring together once more the scattered remnants of the martyr’s children, as by the sound of the last trump,” quite likely came “from the eleventh child.” Yet beyond merely casting doubt on his source, Deane went farther and gave the Antiquary the lie, insinuating that those documents were “no doubt . . . furnished to order.”81

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Livermore responded quickly to this assault on his honor. Switching from the Cambridge Chronicle, where he had been publishing as the Antiquary, to Boston’s Evening Transcript, where Deane published as “D,” he deplored his antagonist’s “uncalled-for and unwarranted insinuation,” vowing that he “had no theory to support, and no object to gain, but the simple truth.”82 Two days before this public reply appeared in the paper, he wrote to Deane directly. Had he replied in kind, he reminded his friend, the two would have been “in danger of coming, very soon, to ‘coffee & Pistols’ in earnest.”83 Deane realized he had crossed a line, and in a subsequent letter to the editor he explained that the “whole matter concerning the Ten or Eleven Children of John Rogers, has been viewed by me, as any one would see, in the light of a pleasant recreation; and I hope ‘The Antiquary,’ understanding this, will not feel that I have, towards him, violated any rules of courtesy.”84 With this apology, the two antiquaries from the Old Hive avoided a scene that would have been as absurd as it was tragic. One irony of this story is that the other volume George Livermore obtained from Charles Lamb’s library in 1848 was Elia’s variorum edition of The Dunciad, a satire of the learned world, with its carping over textual and factual minutiae. A variorum edition typically includes extensive annotation, and Pope ’s Dunciad Variorum, published in 1729, was a spoof of the genre. The first edition of the Dunciad had appeared anonymously one year earlier, with footnotes that formed part of the poem. The second edition heaped up more authorities, explanations (scholia), and counterarguments (adversaria). A bookseller’s “Advertisement” announced, “The Reader has here a much more correct and compleat Copy of the Dunciad, than has hitherto appear’d: I cannot answer but some Mistakes may have slipt into it, but a vast Number of others will be prevented, by the Names being now not only put at length, but justified by the Authorities and Reasons given.”85 The editorial paratext also included “Prolegomena” attributed to the fictional dunce “Martinus Scriblerus,” a “Dissertation on the poem,” a Dunciados Periocha (synopsis), and a letter to the publisher offering more notes, commentary, and corrections toward a future edition. Had Pope lived to witness the debate over the number of John Rogers’s children, he might have included both the Antiquary and his rival in his satire. A week or so after their narrowly averted feud, Deane sent Livermore a lengthy summary of the case as he saw it, concluding that the controversy “may now be considered as settled in favour of ‘Ten.’ ”86 Feeling that his

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friend was merely repeating himself, Livermore declined to restate his case. He replied that he would sooner help Deane to another argument in favor of the ten-child hypothesis (as good as any he yet heard), though in the end “it would not destroy that eleventh child, or harm a hair of her head.” The eleventh child, it seems, was female, though to name her would only have been to incite a grin on Deane ’s “incredulous countenance.”87 Two more years had passed when Deane suddenly ceded the field. “My favorite theory is overthrown. I am down,” he admitted, citing new testimony from a witness.88 Still, Deane seems to have been a dubious “elevener,” if not the fervent “ten-er” of yore, for eight years after that he again ceded the field to George Livermore.89 Both antiquaries believed that a careful study of unbiased evidence would lead inevitably to incontrovertible truth, and the Antiquary graciously replied that only truth could have conquered his rival: I am glad you have the grace to own that you are “used up,” vanquished, annihilated. I wonder there was enough left to write the note. It is with [a] feeling, of proud satisfaction that I contemplate the fact that Goliath is fallen. The giant . . . is laid low. The deed too was done without any effort of mine. Saul remained in royal state and a stripling with a stone and sling slew the boasting Philistine. “Truth is [always] mighty and will eventually prevail.” Though you carried your head haughtily for a while, you are at length laid low. It is strange that the thought never came into your mind before, that the poor martyr in the perplexity of his trying situation had other matters to attend to, than seeing if his arithmetic was correct in its first and simplest rule. Probably English arithmetics were not common in those days—at least I have never seen one printed so early. The martyr studied numeration on his fingers. He counted as far as they with the aid of his two thumbs would go and stopped . . . he had his hands full. But as you “own beat” there is no need of any explanations on my part. I hope you will not take the matter too much to heart. I shall not be proud though I am triumphant. I would not insult a fallen foe. Although, as you acknowledge, your “mouth is entirely stopped” yet I shall always feel that you did all that could be done to sustain your side, and nothing but the truth (which is always too mighty for error) could have conquered you.90

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Livermore refers here to the proverbial wisdom of Magna est veritas, et praevalebit (Truth is mighty and will prevail). Yet such wisdom, even in the nineteenth century, had its skeptics. “Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that ‘Truth is mighty and will prevail,’ ” jibed Mark Twain, calling it “the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved.”91 Only a couple of months after Livermore and Deane had determined the true number of John Rogers’s children to be eleven, an article in the American papers reduced that number once more to ten, claiming that the matter had “at last been definitely and historically settled.”92 If the debate between Livermore and Deane proved nothing definitive about the number of John Rogers’s children, it did demonstrate the importance of old books and manuscripts in historical research. Before publishing his first article in the persona of the Antiquary, Livermore had hesitated, wondering whether he should mollify “the strong—if not ‘saucy’ ” tone he had used.93 As he was turning over the matter in his mind, John Landon Sibley, the bibliographer who first made Livermore’s “eyes open very wide” at the sight of old books, paid him a visit.94 Sibley suggested that since the Antiquary had cited his sources, it would be best to state his case “positively rather than doubtingly,” as he had done: “No one need to be misled, if they are wrong, as the means of correction are given.” This was, and had always been, the real point. Seeking to encourage others in the quest for truth, Livermore decided to take his blows and, if need be, give them. “It makes no difference whatever with the common reader what the number be,” he admitted, “but it is of the highest importance that all should go beyond the Primer to solve their differences when they arise.”95 In an age when truth of all sorts was being parceled out to experts, the antiquaries at the Old Hive showed that even an amateur could take matters into his own hands, question the given, and discover new truths in old books.

A Biblical Bibliomaniac Like others in our story, George Livermore spent all his savings on books and all his spare time reading. Bibliomania was the occupational hazard of the bibliographer, and he was a willing victim of the disease. At age fourteen, having graduated from the Cambridgeport Academy, he entered his family’s

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dry goods business. One day at work an elderly client warned him that it was “a bad sign for a merchant to read in his counting-room,” shaming but not deterring him from his bookish habits. By his late twenties, Livermore had a library of two hundred “good books,” which, had the book disease not gripped him, he might have considered a respectable collection. But with the exacting eye of a bibliomaniac, he could see only its gaps and deficiencies. “On one thing I am determined,” he vowed, “to buy no more trash; what works I do have shall be of good editions. I love literature too well and prize books too highly to have a good author in a mean dress.”96 Honoring that vow, he built a library that by midcentury contained “the best editions of the best authors.”97 One of the books he read in his counting house while a merchant’s apprentice was The Merchant of Venice. He decided “that an author who could write like that was worth owning entire,” and in his visits to the Boston auction houses after hours began shopping for Shakespeare. One day an illustrated edition caught his eye. It cost twenty times what he was used to paying for books, but he saved his pennies until he had three dollars and then took the bus across the river to Boston. “I was not disappointed,” he recounts: After waiting an hour, the auctioneer put up a copy of Shakespeare. The bidding began at $2.50, and advanced 5¢ till it reached $2.90, when it was knocked down, and the name of the purchaser was called for. I had bid $2.90, but another bidder gave his name. I claimed the book, as I had fairly made the bid; and I called out to the auctioneer that I had bid $2.90 too. “Ah,” said he, “if you bid $2.92, the book is yours, as you are the highest bidder.” I had not disposition to quibble about his pun, but gladly paid $2.92, and hurried home with my big book under my arm, a prouder and happier boy than I had ever been before.

Like Elia, he marked the passages that impressed him and noted their page numbers on a front flyleaf. Eventually, feeling that he should own an annotated edition, he traded in his copy. “Many a time have I regretted this,” he confessed. “I would, if I could, have bought it back, and given for it its weight in gold.”98 He is hardly the only bibliophile to regret trading in an irreplaceable copy of a book, one with handwritten notes, for one whose notes were as exchangeable as any commodity. Livermore then entered the wool trading business with his older brother Isaac and found that the new arrangement suited the cultivation of

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his literary tastes since Isaac looked “with an indulgent eye” on the pursuits of the junior partner.99 “Every day I go to Burnham’s and Drake’s and other bookstores, to see something new,” he recorded in his diary. He was referring to the bookstores founded by Thomas Burnham in 1825 and by Samuel Gardener Drake in 1828 as, respectively, the first secondhand and the first antiquarian bookstore in the United States. Burnham’s bookstore had descended to his sons, Theodore, Frederick, and Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry, though his namesake was best fitted to the job. “Oh!” said Thomas (“Perry”) Burnham, “you will find the book you are after on the third floor, such a shelf, on the left hand, near the end.” The Burnham brothers also had “a deaf sister who tended the curiosity department.” Although by night Livermore encouraged himself to “form a resolution to keep away” from the old bookstores in Cornhill, by day he did nothing of the kind.100 His library grew, ranging across literary genres from poetry to spiritual autobiography, prose fiction, travel writing, biography, memoirs, letters, reminiscences, diaries, essays, sermons, lectures, drama, art criticism, satires, vindications, political theory, and moral philosophy. But as an antiquary, Livermore was determined not to waste time in “a desultory, unprofitable course of reading,” accumulating what he called “a superficial knowledge of almost every conceivable subject.” He instead chose to focus on the publication history of the Bible, and he seems to have followed the same advice that he gave to others, namely, “going to the bottom of whatever subject interests them, and, having exhausted the wisdom of past generations . . . adding to the stock of general knowledge” through one ’s own thoughts and experience.101 According to Deane, “his ambition was to know every thing,—to exhaust the subject.”102 His Bible collection began early. He owned copies of Scripture on papyrus and eleven of the forty original blocks of the Biblia Pauperum (poor person’s Bible), produced as “the first essay towards the art of printing, by letters and figures, cut out in blocks of wood, before the invention of moveable types.”103 He owned a copy of the Hebrew Bible on a scroll of thirty-six parchment skins sewn together and mounted on wood handles and an eighthcentury copy of the New Testament on parchment, then the oldest “book” in the country. Among his illuminated manuscripts were two copies of Saint Jerome ’s Vulgate Bible, the Latin translation that became the text for the Gutenberg Bible, both copies produced on vellum by monks who made each the work of a lifetime. One of the two was an association copy, with the arms

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of Pope Pius VI stamped on the cover. He also owned a fragment of the Gutenberg Bible, an association copy of the Vulgate with autograph commentary by Luther’s disciple Philipp Melanchthon, and a presentation copy of the Book of Mormon signed “Joseph Smith, Prophet.” Add to these illuminated, autographed, and xylographic Bibles; polyglot Bibles; pocket Bibles, miniature Bibles, and illustrated thumb Bibles, and it is no surprise that Livermore ’s friends should diagnose him with the book madness. “Do you know my Dear Sir, it does look, like a maniac, to me, for you . . . to collect so many editions of the same book,” Robert Balmanno wrote to him; “nay will you pardon me for saying it seems the very last stage of the disease, worse even than that which Dibdin considered the last, Illustrating!”104 Charles Deane claimed that Livermore “became like ‘the man of one book,’ of whom we are told in the proverb to ‘beware.’ ”105 He was referring to the Latin phrase attributed to Thomas Aquinas, “Hominem unius libri timeo” (I fear the man of one book). As a distinguished doctor of the church (Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, Doctor Universalis), “St. Thomas Aquinas was asked in what manner a man might best become learned,” explained Robert Southey in The Doctor (1848), a book owned by both Livermore and Deane. “He answered, ‘by reading one book.’ ”106 The French bibliomaniac Louis Bollioud de Mermet, in the book that gave a name to the bibliomania (De la Bibliomanie, 1761), interpreted the proverbial “Cave ab homine unius libri” (beware the man of one book) as a warning to avoid disputation with such a one, for when it comes to his chosen book, he “is so full fed with it, so impregnated with it, that he becomes formidable to all who would argue with him on the subject of which it treats.”107 Livermore ’s Bible collection ranged not only temporally but spatially, and besides Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, he had translations in Eastern languages (Chinese, Arabic, Syriac, Bohemian, Burmese, Laponese, Malay) and Western (Abenaki, Mi’kmaq, Hawaiian). He owned multiple copies of John Eliot’s Indian Bible, printed “for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Indians of New England” by the Massachusetts Bay Company.108 He had Bibles in modern European languages (Italian, Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Russian) and ancient (Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Old French). He even had a Bible in hieroglyphics. But Livermore, who could read Latin but not Greek or Hebrew, specialized in the English Bible. That collection began with the Coverdale Bible (1535), the first complete Bible in modern English, translated by the

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Reverend Myles Coverdale. He owned multiple copies of the Geneva Bible (1560), the first English translation to include verse numbers, and the Bishops’ Bible (1568), produced by Anglican prelates during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He owned a variant of the Geneva Bible, known as the Breeches Bible (1579), in which Adam and Eve “sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches” (Gen. 3:6). He owned a first edition of the King James Bible (1611), a blackletter folio bound in calfskin with gilt-edged leaves. But he did not own the variant known as the “Wicked Bible” (1631) in which a typographical error in the book of Exodus results in a sinful commandment: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Charles I, hearing of this sacrilege in the King James Bible, ordered his printers to destroy all copies of the book, though a couple survived and found their way into the hands of Henry Stevens.109 Until Stevens turned up another copy, moreover, Livermore owned the only known copy of The Souldier’s Pocket Bible (1643), an abridged King James Bible used by Oliver Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War. As its title page explained, it contained excerpts or “places contained in Holy Scripture, which do show the qualifications of his inner man, that is, a fit Soldier to fight the Lord’s Battle, both before the fight, in the fight, and after the fight.” During the American Civil War, the American Tract Society would reprint Livermore ’s copy (with an introduction by Livermore) and distribute it to the Union Army. In compensation for his efforts, he would receive another historical relic for his collection: the pen Abraham Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.110 George Livermore ’s library—in its penchant for multiple, uncut, picked, pointed, presentation, association, tall, and large-paper copies— showed telling signs of the Dibdinian brand of bibliomania, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin himself, the father of modern bibliography, was familiar with Livermore ’s biblical bibliomania. Dibdin singled out the Boston antiquary as one of the few individuals in the transatlantic book world to merit a signed presentation copy—one of only fifty printed—of his revised Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of . . . Polyglot Bibles, Hebrew Psalters, Greek Bibles and Testaments, the Greek and Latin Fathers (1827). This tall calfskin octavo sat on Livermore’s shelves with three dozen other volumes, including rare and unpublished works, by the English bibliographer. “Bibliographical books are to the librarian and the literary man what the compass is to the mariner, or the tools of his trade to the artisan,”

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Livermore believed, estimating that a “complete bibliographical library would not of itself contain less than 20,000 volumes.”111 Among the rarer curiosities of Livermore’s Bibliotheca Dibdiniana was a slim tract titled Bibliography: A Poem in Six Books (1812). Dibdin printed only fifty copies of this unfinished poem—and then destroyed most of them. Livermore ’s copy was lacking a title page, and its Russia leather binding was cracked, but it is saying much that the relic found its way at all into his library. Running a close second in rarity was a first edition, one of only thirty-six copies, of Dibdin’s Book Rarities; or, A Descriptive Catalogue of Some of the Most Curious, Rare, and Valuable Books of Early Date, Chiefly in the Collection of George John Earl Spencer (1811). This catalogue was a sketch for ten lavishly illustrated volumes devoted to the same topic, which Dibdin began publishing three years later and which Livermore also owned: Bibliotheca Spenceriana; or A Descriptive Account of the Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century, and of Many Valuable First Editions in the Library of George John, Earl Spencer (1814–1822) in five volumes imperial octavo, bound in full straight-grained green morocco, with gilt edges. The Bibliographical Decameron; or, Ten Days’ Pleasant Discourse upon Illuminated Manuscripts and Subjects Connected with Early Engraving, Typography, and Bibliography (1817) in three royal octavo volumes, bound in full crimson morocco, with gilt edges over marbled paper. Ædes Althorpianæ [Temple of Althorp]; or an Account of the Mansion, Books and Pictures at Althorp, the Residence of Earl Spencer, to which is added a Supplement of the Bibliotheca Spenceriana (1822) in two volumes imperial octavo, bound in full crimson morocco, with gilt edges.112

Dibdin’s bibliographical writings were intended to entertain as well as inform, to satisfy the aesthetic sensibility of the book collector as well as the intellectual curiosity of the scholar, for he believed that only by appealing to a wider audience would the uses of bibliography “be more generally acknowledged.”113 Sir Walter Scott praised him for infusing the field with a sense of humor. “You have contrived to strew flowers over a path which, in other hands, would have proved a very dull one,” he wrote to Dibdin, “and all Bibliomanes must remember you long, as he who first united their antiquarian details with good-humoured raillery and cheerfulness.” The subtitle of one of Dibdin’s printed but unpublished works, Specimen

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Bibliothecæ Britannicæ, suggests an unexpected kinship between antiquarian values (rare, curious) and the useful: “Specimen of a Digested Catalogue of Rare, Curious, and Useful Books in the English Language” (1808).114 By replacing the word “Valuable,” which typically followed “Rare” and “Curious” in catalogue titles, with “Useful,” Dibdin redefined—or asked his reader to redefine—the value of usefulness. And by substituting “Spec­ imen” for the plural “Specimens” usually found in the titles of antiquarian works, he positioned his own work as a curiosity. Dibdin’s Bibliothecæ Britannicæ was a working sketch for his Typographical Antiquities; or, The History of Printing in England, Scotland and Ireland; with Memoirs of Ancient Printers and a Register of the Books Printed by Them (1810–1819). This foundational work of British bibliography was begun by the English antiquary Joseph Ames, edited and augmented by the bibliographer William Herbert, and further enlarged and annotated by Dibdin himself. Livermore owned all four illustrated volumes in uncut, mint condition, but, more impressive from a collecting perspective, he also owned one of only forty printed copies of the unpublished sketch for that work, Specimen Bibliothecæ Britannicæ, printed in plain boards by Dibdin for private distribution. Collectors’ items came in these two opposed forms—lavish and plain if not spoiled—and Livermore’s two editions of Dibdin’s Library Companion; or, The Young Man’s Guide and the Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of a Library underscore the compatibility between them in the library of a bibliomaniac. His copy of the first edition of the Library Companion (1824) was a tall copy in fine morocco binding, while the second edition (1825) was an uncut copy in plain cardboard covers. Each retained the aura of originality, for while the well-bound copy was a first edition, the second was still in its original drab boards. A collector like George Templeton Strong—a belletrist who, as we have seen, was no adherent of the technical bibliomania that raged after bibliographical curiosities—opted for a well-bound copy of the second edition. “Dibdin is very interesting, full of anecdote and information,” he observed when he first borrowed the book from the library of Columbia College, “but the author is perfectly crazy, mad, on the subject of ‘large paper’ and ‘tall copies,’ and insane about ‘fine old Morocco bindings.’ ”115 But Dibdin’s most famous work was The Bibliomania, a book no bibliomaniac could be without. While Livermore, like his friend Charles Deane and George Templeton Strong, owned a first edition, Livermore’s copy had

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an autograph letter from the author and a portrait of Dibdin tenderly laid into it.116 A month before Dibdin began The Bibliomania, the Scottish physician John Ferriar, whose specialty was manias, published a slim volume with the same title, The Bibliomania, an Epistle, to Richard Heber, Esq. (1809). When Dibdin’s book appeared a few months later, its title page followed Ferriar in positioning it as a mock-medical treatise addressed to Heber: The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease. In an Epistle Addressed to Richard Heber, Esq. Both authors, while pathologizing the obsessive fervor of the bibliomaniac, made clear that they well understood “what wild desires, what restless torments seize / The hapless man, who feels the book-disease” (to quote Ferriar).117 The first edition of Dibdin’s Bibliomania also reads as a sympathetic, tongue-in-cheek tribute from one bibliomaniac to another. The bibliomaniac who emerged from these epistles addressed to Richard Heber was no dull bookworm, but a romantic book lover energized and torn by his passions. Heber was, as previously mentioned, the English bibliomaniac par excellence. When a particular volume caught his eye, he did not hesitate to travel four or five hundred miles, heedless of the wear and tear of stagecoach travel, in hot pursuit. “A book is a book,” he maintained, “and he bought all that came in his way, by cart-loads and ship-loads, and in whole libraries, on which in some cases he never cast his eyes. The most zealous lovers of books have smiled at his duplicates, quadruplicates, and multiplied specimens of a single edition.”118 On one trip to Paris, he snapped up a library of thirty thousand volumes, a larger collection than any American university library in the mid-nineteenth century could boast with the exception of Harvard’s.119 In the end, his library grew to be larger than the major university libraries in Bologna, Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, Copenhagen, Turin, Dublin, and Edinburgh.120 The Scottish poet Thomas Campbell regarded Heber as “the fiercest and strongest of the bibliomaniacs,” and even the bibliomaniacal Scott considered Heber’s book collection “superior to all others in the world.”121 The original title page of Dibdin’s Bibliomania featured a detail from Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the “Book Fool.”122 The Book Fool, a type dating back to classical antiquity, was more interested in the material composition of his books than their contents. In the early years of print, he was a connoisseur of fonts and bindings, but his progenitor, in the days when book volumes consisted of rolled animal skins rather than gatherings of

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Albrecht Dürer. The Book Fool. Woodcut from Das Narrenschyff (1495). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1930.

folded paper, was “always unrolling them and rolling them up, gluing them, trimming them, smearing them with saffron and oil of cedar, putting slipcovers on them and fitting them with knobs.”123 Sebastian Brandt’s Book Fool follows suit in his Ship of Fools (1494), a satire of society originally published in German (Das Narrenschyff) and translated into Latin as Stultifera Navis four years later. Among the woodcuts commissioned by the Swiss publisher Johann Bergmann von Olpe for the Latin edition was a portrait of the Book Fool at his desk, brushing rather than reading his books, keeping them free of hazards like dust, rat droppings, and worms. With the freedom of a bardomaniac quoting Shakespeare’s plays, Dibdin took liberties with illustrations from earlier works, cropping them as he saw fit and reprinting them out of context. The Book Fool who appears on

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the title page of the first edition of Dibdin’s Bibliomania is in fact a detail of Dürer’s woodcut. He appears with his fool’s cap, duster, and a large folio spread open before him, and it is worth noting that the term “foolscap,” a folio-sized sheet of paper, derives from an early watermark (or logo of a papermaker) depicting the head of a fool, hence fool’s cap or Narrenkappe.124 Yet while an antiquary might have deplored Dibdin’s decision to abstract the Book Fool from his books, eliminating from Dürer’s design the volumes crowding the Book Fool’s desk and the bookshelves behind him, it would have been in step with Dibdin’s own form of bibliomaniacal self-parody to identify himself with a material, bibliographical feature of a book such as foolscap, rather than with its contents. Beneath the detail of the Book Fool on his title page he quotes an English translation of the Book Fool’s speech: Styll am I besy bokes assemblynge, For to have plenty it is a plesaunt thynge In my conceyt, and to have them ay in honde: But what they mene do I nat understonde.   Pynson’s Ship of Fools. Edit. 1509.125

Dibdin attributes these lines of verse neither to the author (Sebastian Brandt), nor to their first English translator (Alexander Barclay), but to the printer Richard Pynson, who published Barclay’s translation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools in 1509. Dibdin was signaling to the knowing reader, through his unconventional manner of citation, his own book foolery. The English antiquarian William Andrew Chatto complained of the freedom Dibdin took with his illustrations, but he was the first to admit that Dibdin’s originality lay in the creative freedom he brought to the field of bibliography. “I am perfectly aware of Dr. Dibdin’s numerous blunders,” he wrote to Robert Balmanno in 1856, “but his books are generally so beautifully got up, and he seems to be such a good natured, unconscious, heedless blunderer” that Chatto, in his Treatise on Wood Engraving, “had not the heart to lay hands verbally on him.”126 This figure of the Book Fool recurs two centuries after The Ship of Fools in Joseph Addison’s caricature of the bibliographer “Tom Folio.” While Folio (or foolscap) has enough knowledge to discourse eloquently about paper and typography, he has nothing to say about the intangible qualities of books:

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The Book Fool as printed on the title page of Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness (1809). Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Tom Folio is a Broker in Learning, employed to get together good Editions, and stock the Libraries of great Men. There is not a Sale of Books begins till Tom Folio is seen at the Door. There is not an Auction where his name is not heard, and that too in the very Nick of Time, in the Critical Moment, before the last decisive Stroke of the Hammer. There is not a Subscription goes forward, in which Tom is not privy to the first rough Draught of the Proposals; nor a Catalogue printed, that doth not come to him wet from the Press. He is an universal Scholar, so far as the Title Page of all Authors, knows the Manuscripts in which they were discovered, the Editions through which they have passed, with the Praises or Censures which they have received from the several Members of the Learned World. He has a greater esteem for Aldus and Elzevir, than for Virgil and Horace. If you talk of Herodotus, he breaks out into a Panegyrick upon Harry Stephans. He thinks he gives you an account of the author, when he tells the Subject he treats of, the Name of the Editor, and the Year in which it was printed. Or if you draw him into further Particulars, he cries up the Goodness of the Paper, extols the Diligence of the Corrector, and is transported with the Beauty of the Letter.127

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Rather than Virgil and Horace, Addison’s Tom Folio praises the editions of those classical authors by Aldus Manutius, founder of the Venetian Aldine Press, and the renowned House of Elzevir in the Netherlands. He cares less about Herodotus than about the French printer, Henri Estienne (Harry Stephans), who produced a sixteenth-century edition of the Greek historian. Addison’s Tom Folio was a descendant of medieval Tom Fools, yet he was also based on a historical figure, the contemporary bibliomaniac Thomas Rawlinson, known around London as Tom Folio. The four rooms of Rawlinson’s lodgings in Gray’s Inn were “so completely filled with books, that his bed was removed into the passage.” He moved to a larger house on Aldersgate Street, and that house too quickly filled with books. “If his purse had been much wider he had a passion beyond it,” remarked his friend, the literary antiquarian William Oldys, “such a pitch of curiosity or dotage he was arrived at upon a different edition, a fairer copy, a larger paper, than twenty of the same sort he might be already possessed of . . . and as he lived so he died, in his bundles, piles, and bulwarks of paper, in dust and cobwebs, at London House in Aldersgate Street.”128 Rawlinson’s library of fifty thousand books and more than a thousand manuscripts was the largest collection ever offered for sale in Britain when it was dispersed over a series of sixteen sales, some of them lasting weeks. The bidding began in St. Paul’s Coffee House in the book district on December 4, 1721, and was still going a dozen years and sixteen thick sale catalogues later.129 Richard Heber outdid his predecessor. “Probably no private person ever organised so extensive an intercourse with booksellers and auctioneers, both at home and abroad,” remarked the British library historian Edward Edwards, “and his interest in the pursuit was as keen as ever during the latest days of his life.”130 Dibdin was astonished when after a fifteen-years’ acquaintance with Heber, he entered the bibliomaniac’s home in Pimlico for the first time. “I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors, so choked, so suffocated with books. Treble rows were here, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching up from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended; while the floor was strewed with them, in loose and numerous heaps.”131 Heber by then had died, and the search for his will had begun. His attorneys sent agents to Hodnet Hall in Shropshire and to some half-dozen other houses he had filled with books, but stunningly could find no mention

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of what was to become of them. Not until Dibdin, reorganizing some duodecimos on an upper shelf in the room where Heber died, discovered the folded scrap of paper that constituted Heber’s will did it become clear that the bibliomaniac had left no word about his books, or what William Carew Hazlitt has called “the most extensive, most valuable, and most ill-fated” private library ever assembled.132 They were consigned to the block and hammer, and like Rawlinson’s would take sixteen auctions to disperse, in Paris and Ghent as well as London.133 Thomas Frognall Dibdin recast the second edition of Bibliomania as a romance, transforming book collecting from a pathology into a genteel if not knightly quest. Gone was the Book Fool on the title page, which bore a new subtitle: Bibliomania; or Book-Madness; a Bibliographical Romance. “The knight-errantry of bookmen concerns itself with the rescue of fair volumes from incompatible surroundings and hapless companionships,” Holbrook Jackson remarks; “every bookman of spirit can recount in proper company and on suitable occasion the hairbreadth escapes of editiones principes, the perilous adventures of Elzevirs, or the astounding circumstances attending on the restoration of kingly Black Letters or noble Aldines; the happy endings of all such adventures and stories being possession by the Sir Galahad of the bookman’s round table. Each man seeks the Holy Grail in his own way.”134 This hybrid genre of “bibliographical romance” was particularly suited to a literary period when poets sought to revive the romance of the past and when literature assumed the aura of the sacred. As the book historian Seth Lerer has observed, “The bibliomaniac was akin to a Romantic visionary: possessed by a madness, in search of a sublime experience (in this case, the successful discovery of an old book), preoccupied with the arcana of the past.”135 The protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s Bibliomania (1836) was a tragic heir of this same tradition. “He had but one idea, but one love, but one passion: books. And this love, this passion burned within him, used up his days, devoured his existence.” Like a bibliographical Young Werther, the tragic hero of Flaubert’s story (a self-portrait of the author as an adolescent) falls victim to his own obsessions. Barely eating and unable to sleep, he spends “feverish and burning nights” among his books. Flaubert portrays the bibliomaniac running through his library, “his hair in disorder, his eyes fixed and sparkling,” and then reaching for a book with hands warm, damp, and trembling. Taking it down from the shelves, he turns over its leaves,

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caresses its paper, and admires “the gilding, the cover, the letters, the ink, the folds, and the arrangement of drawings for the word Finis.” He then puts it back in a different location, on a higher shelf, and remains for hours gazing upon it among its new companions.136 Many collectors will recognize the familiar itching Flaubert describes, when sleep is elusive, to visit one ’s bookshelves and, spying new associations in new juxtapositions, reorganize the collection into new shapes and forms. Art collectors, in nocturnal sweats about the placement of paintings, have been known to stare long and hard at their walls before doing the same. While for aesthetic purists, smell should have nothing to do with artistic appreciation, Flaubert’s bibliomaniac indulges his love of tactility by lifting one of his manuscripts to his nose, “the oldest, the most used, the dirtiest; he looked at its parchment with love and happiness; he smelt its holy and venerable dust; then his nostrils filled with joy and pride, and a smile came upon his lips.” Lest these details seem unbelievable, the present author will attest that she has seen a bibliomaniac pick up a first edition of a dramatic poem by a Romantic poet, instinctively sniff its pages, discern with bright eyes a lingering aroma of smoke, and imagine the conditions in which it must have been read by the hearth fire in an English cottage with poor ventilation.137 As a literary experimenter, Thomas Frognall Dibdin did more than invent the category of bibliographical romance. He also adapted the antiquarian genre of the picturesque tour to the purposes of bibliography. Livermore owned his Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821) and A Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and in Scotland (1838). The category of bibliographical autobiography was another hybrid genre, one we have seen before used by the essayists (Hazlitt’s “On Reading Old Books,” for example). Coleridge began his Biographia Literaria (1817) in that vein, and Dibdin followed in 1836 with his Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836). This was the book that caused Livermore, who owned one of its few large-paper copies, to turn to Charles Deane one day and mutter, “I love him.”138 It is a pity that the bibliomaniacal Antiquary did not fulfill his intention of writing his own Reminiscences of a Too Short, but Very Pleasant Acquaintance with Thomas Frognall Dibdin, for on his visit to England in 1845, he showed up and surprised the bibliographer with the fact that he had an American audience.139 As George Stillman Hillard recorded in a speech to the Massachusetts Histori­ ­cal Society, “The veteran bibliographer was surprised and gratified to learn

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that here in this remote America we were familiar with his name and writings.”140 Dibdin kept his promise to show Livermore some bibliographical treasures, accompanying him to Thomas Grenville’s library at Hamilton Place, Piccadilly, and dispatching him with a letter of introduction to Earl Spencer’s princely library at Althorp, in Northamptonshire. “Seizing Mr. Livermore’s hands,” he said: “ ‘My dear sir, I see you are a genuine bibliomaniac. I thank you for coming to see me. I will point out to you such treasures in books as will delight your heart. You must go with me to Mr. Grenville’s library; and I will give you an introduction to Oxford, Althorp, and other places, where you will see such books as you have never beheld before.’ ”141 Livermore ’s timing was propitious, for the ninety-year-old Grenville would die the next year, and a year after that Dibdin would follow him to what one American bibliomaniac called “the Elysian Fields of bibliophiles.” In the meantime, Grenville still sat in “the quietude of his rare and splendid library,” surrounded by upward of twenty thousand volumes.142 He was fond of recalling the time “he bid at a sale against a whole bench of bishops” for a scarce edition of the Bible.143 Whether or not he recounted the story to Livermore, the sight of the old man’s Bible collection (which included a vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible) “gave new inspiration to his interest in the history of the early publications of the Scriptures, and in general bibliography.”144 The book our Antiquary was most keen to see at Althorp was a first edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed by Christoph Valdarfer in Venice in 1471: a princely editio princeps and a rare one, to which Dibdin had devoted three illustrated volumes. Spencer owned the only known complete copy in existence, and the story of its sale at the auction of the library of John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe, was the stuff of bibliographical legend. Dibdin founded the Roxburghe Club, the first notable society of book connoisseurs, to commemorate the sale of the book, becoming its first secretary, with Earl Spencer as its first president. The Valdarfer Decameron was the gem of the Spencerian collection and when Livermore saw it, it was the most expensive book in the world—a distinction it would retain for more than three decades after that. In The Bibliographical Decameron, Dibdin recounts the drama that took place in the dining room of Roxburghe ’s house in St. James’s Square, when the bookseller Robert Harding Evans auctioned the only known perfect copy of the Valdarfer Decameron:

210 b o s t o n a n t i q u a r i a n s The rain fell in torrents as we alighted from the carriage and rushed with a sort of impetuosity to gain seats to view the contest. The room was crowded to excess; and a sudden darkness which came across gave rather an additional interest to the scene. At length the moment of sale arrived. Mr. Evans prefaced the putting up of the article by an appropriate oration, in which he expatiated upon its excessive rarity, and concluded by informing the company of the regret and even “anguish of heart” expressed by Mr. [Joseph Basile Bernard] Van Praet that such a treasure was not at that time to be found in the imperial collection at Paris.145

Spencer’s main contender for the book was his cousin, George Spencer Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, and subsequently the 5th Duke of Marlborough. Blandford’s library at Whiteknights, Berkshire, already housed a copy of the book, but it was missing five pages. The marquess was resolved to have it in perfect condition, and at any price. On June 17, 1812, Earl Spencer stood leaning against a wall on the right hand of the auctioneer, and his cousin the marquess was behind him. Yet neither of the two noble cousins who had their sights set on the book placed the first bid. That honor was reserved for “a gentleman from Shropshire.” He bid a hundred pounds, seemingly as oblivious of the sublime scene he was interrupting as Coleridge ’s Man from Porlock in the preface to “Kubla Khan.” A moment of silence followed, and then the Man from Shropshire, being “unused to this species of warfare, seemed to recoil from the reverberation of the report himself had made!” Within moments, the price of the book had risen to five hundred pounds. “Hitherto, however, it was evident that the firing was but masked and desultory,” relates Dibdin. “At length all random shots ceased; and the champions before named stood gallantly up to each other resolving not to flinch from a trial of their respective strengths.” Lord Spencer entered the lists and in a single blow doubled the price of the book, to one thousand pounds. “Every sword was put home within its scabbard—and not a piece of steel was seen to move or to glitter save that which each of these champions brandished in his valorous hand.”146 But the Marquess of Blandford nonchalantly added ten pounds to top the price. His cousin countered, and the battle continued until the price of the Valdarfer Decameron had doubled again, to two thousand pounds, a price theretofore unthinkable for any book.

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At that point, Earl Spencer paused to reflect. “His countenance was marked by a fixed determination to gain the prize,” and he resumed the bidding by adding another £250 to the price of the book. The spectators were “absolutely electrified,” and in the suspense while all eyes turned on his cousin, one “might have heard a pin drop.” But Blandford, as blandly as ever (it must be said), added his usual £10. “All eyes were turned—all breathing well nigh stopped.” The room awaited Spencer’s reply, and Evans’s hammer hung suspended. When it dropped, “Boccaccio himself startled from his slumber of some five hundred years.” The £2,260 that the marquess paid for the book “astonished the whole Book-World. Not a living creature could have anticipated it,” even in “the grand era of Bibliomania.”147 By the time George Livermore arrived at Althorp, the Valdarfer Decameron had passed from the Marquess of Blandford to Earl Spencer. The champion at the sale of the Roxburghe library, the highest roller in the international book world, was a spendthrift whose magnificent library at White­ knights had been seized by his creditors to pay his debts. Seven years after selling the Valdarfer Decameron to Blandford, Robert Evans returned to his podium with the book, but this time without the reckless marquess in the audience to inflate the price. Earl Spencer snapped up the book for £918, less than half the price his cousin had paid for it. Now, on entering Earl Spencer’s library at Althorp, Livermore sought out the famous volume. He placed it on a table, admired its fine gold-tooled binding by Charles Lewis, the aristocrat’s bookbinder, and pulled out a pen. With his arm resting upon the most expensive book in the world, he composed a letter to a friend back in Cambridge. “What can better illustrate his love of rare books, and his sympathy with a friend in the enjoyment of them?” Charles Deane asks.148 It was a crowning moment in the life of our Antiquary. While others might be content to experience such a rare book through Dibdin’s illustrated writings, for a bibliomaniac like George Livermore, there was no substitute for an original.

The Learned Leather Dresser Although Charles Deane does not name the friend to whom our Antiquary addressed his letter with his arm resting on the Valdarfer Decameron, we suspect that it was Thomas Dowse, the “Learned Leather Dresser” of

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose letters have all disappeared. Like his best friend Livermore—his executor and the man to whom he would later offer his entire book collection, the product of a lifetime’s devotion—Dowse owned all three volumes of Dibdin’s Bibliographical Decameron. They were an exact replica of Livermore ’s set, in large-paper, royal octavo bound in crimson morocco with gilt leaves. Dowse also owned the five volumes of Dibdin’s Bibliotheca Spenceriana (again, like Livermore’s, in full straightgrained green morocco with gilt edges) and the two of Ædes Althorpianæ (likewise in full crimson morocco).149 Such were treasures to delight not only an antiquary like Livermore but a homebound bibliophile like Dowse. Unlike his friend the Antiquary, Dowse had never been to Europe, much less beyond the borders of Massachusetts, the state in which he was born. He could only have experienced the illustrious Valdarfer Decameron in the way he did most things—vicariously—through his books. The narrative of the life of the Learned Leather Dresser is brief and summed up in the story of his library. Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on December 28, 1772, to a leather dresser named Eleaser Dowse and his wife, Mehitable, he escaped Boston with his family when their house was burned in the Battle of Bunker Hill. They settled in Sherborn, Massachusetts, where at the age of six Dowse experienced the two most formative events of his life in quick succession: a fall from an apple tree that left him lame, and a rheumatic fever that kept him bedridden long enough to develop his deep love of reading. “Lameness drove us both to books,” Dowse once said of his literary idol Walter Scott, “him to making them, and me to reading them.”150 Like a young Lincoln, he read all the books that could be found in his hometown and dreamed of the world beyond. When he came of age, a friend of his father, the captain of a ship about to sail for Europe, offered him passage to the Old World. But Dowse, who could not afford coach fare to Norfolk, Virginia, where the ship was docked, missed his chance while waiting for a ride in a coasting vessel that had been delayed by an east wind. This missed opportunity marked a turning point in the life of the Learned Leather Dresser, who afterward hunkered down with his books and spent the rest of his life as a mental traveler. Rather than returning home in defeat, he apprenticed himself to a leather dresser in Roxbury, Massachusetts. “I never had any means but the wages of a journeyman leather-dresser, at twenty-five dollars per month,” he later recalled; “I had never paid five dollars for conveyance from one place

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to another; I had never worn a pair of boots,” but by age twenty-eight he had a collection of “several hundred good books, well bound.”151 At thirty, he moved from Roxbury to Old Cambridge, then a tree-shaded village surrounded by farms, and opened a leather-dressing business in partnership with a man named Aaron Gay. The business prospered, and Dowse eventually built a three-story home on the corner of Main and Prospect Streets in Center Square. George Barrell Emerson, a schoolmaster and cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, recalled seeing him there, at work in his shop, behind a tastefully carved wooden sign of a sheep atop a Grecian column: “For many years, and many times in a year, I have passed by the shop of a diligent, industrious mechanic, whom I have often seen busy at his trade, with his arms bare, hard at work.”152 Above his workshop in the largest room of his house was his library. “Under the same roof that covers his workshop, he has the most excellent library of English books, for its size, with which I am acquainted,” wrote the Reverend Luther Farnham in the first study of American private libraries, produced at midcentury.153 Dowse ’s friend Edward Everett, who served as the sixteenth president of Harvard College from 1846 to 1848, described Dowse as “a taciturn, lonely, self-reliant man, drawing solitary enjoyment from the deep cold wells of reading and thought,” and those wells were the same old wells of English we have seen before, for English was the only language he knew.154 Outside his home was a garden, in which he kept “a range of bee-hives,” a model of disinterested labor familiar to his friends at the Old Hive, for Dowse never took “their hard earned honey from them . . . finding an ample reward in watching the labors of—‘The singing masons building roofs of gold.’ ”155 Had he lived to see this description of him, he might have recognized the quotation from Henry V in which the Archbishop of Canterbury describes the necessary division of labor in the state, for his library was well stocked with Shakespeare. Those “irreverent Harvard collegians” who gave Thomas Dowse the facetious title L.L.D. from which his nickname of Learned Leather Dresser derived were playing on the Latin abbreviation for the Doctor of Laws degree, Legum Doctor, with a double “L” to indicate the plural—for law books were bound in sheepskin.156 “Mr. Dowse carried on, for a whole generation, the dressing of sheep-skins, so well doing his work that Little & Brown recently attributed a large part of their success as standard publishers of lawbooks to the fact that they used Dowse ’s skins for binding, there being

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nothing equal to them,” one local paper reported in 1856.157 The store of Little & Brown was then the country’s leading seller of law books. And the “Law Robe,” as Charles Lamb dubbed it, being “as comely and gentlemanly a garb as a Book would wish to wear,” would have given a dignified air to the bookstore.158 Charles Deane may have had Dowse’s sheepskins in mind when he described our antiquaries from the Old Hive (Livermore, Young, and Crowninshield) gathering at noontime to hold “sweet converse among the noble volumes which surrounded them.”159 Thomas Dowse ’s own book collection reached the size of 4,665 volumes, which was on a par with the best private libraries in the country, though unlike other bibliomaniacs in this story he was not concerned with size. “ ‘How many volumes have you in your collection?’ was a question often put to him by impertinent curiosity. ‘Never counted them,’ was the quick and decisive reply.”160 Nor was he concerned with rarity for its own sake. He did not seek out bibliographical curiosities, and if he did obtain one, he was hardly effusive about it. Everett recalls him pointing to a volume and saying merely, in a low voice, “A rare book.”161 He was less obsessive in his reading habits than his antiquarian friends, less a fearful man of one book than a bookish man who loved books for their internal and external beauty. His library was made up of well-selected, well-bound editions of “standard” European literature in English. Yet that library acquired such local fame that Josiah Quincy, before stepping down as the fifteenth president of Harvard in 1845, offered to build a separate, fireproof building for his books, should Dowse, a bachelor, resolve to leave them to the college. But Dowse could not decide whether to accept the offer. When Quincy left office, he was succeeded by Dowse’s good friend Everett, another Old Hiver who presumably would have honored Quincy’s offer. More years passed, and on February 1, 1849, Everett relinquished the office. He was succeeded as president by the historian Jared Sparks, yet another Old Hiver, who probably also would have honored the offer. On February 10, 1853, Sparks stepped down, and James Walker, the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, succeeded him. When Dowse fell ill during Walker’s tenure, he panicked about the unsettled future of his books and sent George Livermore to speak with Walker and see whether the offer Josiah Quincy had made was still standing. But Walker balked at the unprecedented expense to the corporation.

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Rather than constructing a separate, fireproof building to house Dowse ’s books, he proposed placing the collection in Gore Hall, an aptly named neo-Gothic structure, with the other books in the Harvard library. Little had been left of the library after a fire swept through Harvard Hall in 1764, destroying all but a few volumes that had been checked out, but a new library had been assembled, and Gore Hall had been built to contain it. Dowse found the proposal unacceptable, however, unable to imagine his books mixed in among the rest for borrowing. He instead offered his library to Livermore. But Livermore, declining to accept a gift of such magnitude, urged his friend to leave his books to an institution that could maintain them and make them accessible to a wider public. This idea caused Dowse to lapse back into a state of nervous indecision. For a while, according to Deane, there seemed “to be danger that this collection of books would come to the hammer.”162 A turning point came in the spring of 1856. Livermore hosted the annual strawberry festival of the Massachusetts Historical Society at his home in Cambridge and invited the Learned Leather Dresser to attend. As Robert Balmanno remarked to Livermore two years later, the gatherings of antiquaries “give a true relish to life.”163 But Dowse was too ill to join the antiquaries for strawberries, and it is questionable whether he would have gone anyway. “To every form of communication with the public by the written or the spoken word he was absolutely a stranger,” Edward Everett claimed. “He never addressed a public meeting; for he never attended a public meeting, except to exercise the right of suffrage.”164 Yet, in a gesture that some attributed to the genial appeal of the strawberries, Dowse announced shortly after the event that he had decided to leave his books to the society. “Cambridge strawberries have ever since had a peculiar flavor for us,” joked the society’s president Robert C. Winthrop, proposing to call the endowment “the Livermore Seedling or the Dowse Graft.”165 Although Dowse was too weak to hold a pen when Winthrop visited him on July 30, he had already managed to inscribe one of his books “as an earnest and evidence of my having given the whole of my library to [the] Massachusetts Historical Society.”166 The book was an old folio in the genre of travel and exploration: Purchas His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discouered, from the Creation unto this Present. Containing a Theologicall and Geographicall Historie of Asia,

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Africa, and America, with the Islands Adjacent (1626). It was the last volume of a five-volume set adorned with illustrations and maps—an encyclopedic effort that left the author, the English cleric Samuel Purchas, in debt, and generations of historians following him in debt to Purchas. From some thirteen hundred source materials by or relating to early British explorers, Purchas had compiled his antiquarian chronicle, Purchas’s Pilgrimage, in modern English. The first four volumes of the set, whose spines read Purchas’s Pilgrims, consisted of materials that had been compiled by Richard Hakluyt, another cleric with an interest in geography, and edited by Purchas. They had been published a year before his own volume under the title Haklvytvs Posthumus; or, Pvrchas His Pilgrimes Contaying a History of the World, in Sea Voyages, & Lande-Trauells, by Englishmen and Others. Hakluyt had left the materials unpublished at the time of his death, and Purchas stepped in to abbreviate, expand, annotate, and supplement them with more illustrations and maps. All five volumes in Dowse ’s collection were bound in expensive Russia leather with gilt-lettered spines. Hakluyt was more directly interested in the exploration and colonization of North America than Purchas, and the Ur-text in the genre of American travel and discovery was Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America and the Ilands Adjacent unto the Same, Made First of All by Our Englishmen, and Afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons (1582). Deane owned a first edition of the book, and the bibliomaniac James Lenox, whom we met in Chapter 1, made his “first great mistake in book collecting, which he mourned for many a day,” by passing up one.167 Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Discoveries, and Traffiques of the English Nation (1589) was another classic, and Deane ’s copy of this book was not only a first edition but an association copy signed by Thomas Cavendish, the first English explorer to circumnavigate the globe. Dowse had the funds and wherewithal to purchase a first edition, for he knew the bookdealer (Henry Stevens) who could find one, but he did not have the bibliomaniacal craving for first editions. Dowse ’s copy of The Principal Navigations was a largepaper, limited edition of 270 copies, produced between 1809 and 1812 in five quarto volumes by Robert H. Evans, the bookseller we have seen auction off the Valdarfer Decameron. As a belletristic bibliophile, Dowse did not look down his nose at limited editions beautifully produced as collectors’ items. Nor did he scruple to exchange the original covers prized by collecting

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enthusiasts for the attractive leather bindings that looked out with tasteful, bourgeois decency from his bookshelves. Dowse had made his selection carefully for the occasion, for the book he inscribed as a symbol of his bequest was a valuable specimen of early printing relating to America. But that same inscription included a proviso stipulating that his books were to “be preserved for ever in a room by themselves, only to be used in said room.”168 The society appointed a committee, chaired by their librarian Chandler Robbins and with the indefatigable Livermore at the helm, to steer Dowse ’s books toward a safe and attractive harbor. At the time, none of the colorless rooms occupied by the Massachusetts Historical Society at 30 Tremont Street could suit the latter standard, stuffed as they were with books, papers, and arcana that only an antiquary could love. The committee aspired to prepare a space (as Robbins put it after Dowse ’s death) into which they should not be ashamed to introduce the bibliophile himself, “were he to return to earth, or had we the power to show him the disposition we had made of the treasures, so precious to himself, which he had intrusted to our care.”169 In the end, it would take three thousand dollars of Dowse ’s own money to convert one of the society’s rooms into the elegant apartment lined with books that it is today. His executors, Livermore and Ebenezer Dale, would set aside another ten thousand dollars to endow a fund to maintain the library in perpetuum. Having provided for his books, meanwhile, the Learned Leather Dresser turned to preparing his own resting place. “He seemed to feel that the great object of his life had at length been happily provided for,” Winthrop observed, “and that he was now ready to be released from the burdens of the flesh.”170 He had made up his mind to lie on the Cambridge side of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, in the shadow of one who had been a lifelong inspiration: Benjamin Franklin, “a self-made man of kindred spirit.”171 According to Everett, the example of Franklin, “the hard-working journeyman-printer, who rose to the heights of usefulness and fame, had often cheered the humble leather-dresser . . . in the solitary and friendless outset of his own career.”172 Introducing the first Franklin Lectures in 1831, Everett explained that the public lecture series, intended to range across different fields of knowledge in the arts and sciences, had been named “in honor of our distinguished townsman, the immortal Franklin, the son of a tallow-chandler, and the apprentice to a printer in this town;—a man, who passed all his early years, and a very considerable portion of his life, in manual industry; and who was

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chiefly distinguished by his zealous and successful efforts for the promotion of useful knowledge.”173 The ideal of self-culture that Benjamin Franklin represented was especially popular in the decades around the mid-nineteenth century when athenaeums, lyceums, literary societies, historical societies, and other clubs and institutions were sponsoring lectures, collecting books, and otherwise helping to promote continuing education for adults. One American man of letters, Bela Bates Edwards, argued that Americans needed “to be inured to habits of self-education and to be intrusted with the power of elevating themselves indefinitely in the scale of improvement.”174 Seven years after Everett, the Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing introduced the Franklin Lectures in a speech published the next year as Self-Culture: An Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Delivered at Boston, September, 1838. That book did as much as anything to popularize the ethos of selfimprovement that guided the lives of the bibliophiles in this story. As an executor of Dowse ’s will, Livermore would arrange for an annual series of lectures in Dowse ’s name modeled on the Franklin Lectures. On December 14, 1858, Edward Everett delivered the introductory address for the series sponsored by the Dowse Institute of Cambridge, thereby inaugurating the Dowse Lectures, as he had done the Franklin Lectures a quarter of a century before.175 Books were essential to the project of self-cultivation, but they were not the only means to that end. “Improve every minute,” George Livermore counseled in 1834, “but do not consider time lost, if spent in profitable conversation,—or even sometimes in silence. There are other ways of improving the mind than reading books; read men, read the volume of Nature; read everything you see; but when you take a printed volume, bestow on it your whole attention, and read it through before you commence anything else.”176 George Stillman Hillard described Livermore as “at once a man of business and a man of letters; a combination not indeed peculiar to our country, but found here, I think, in higher perfection than anywhere else.”177 On the same occasion, a tribute to Livermore at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Oliver Wendell Holmes put Thomas Dowse in the same category: “When a plain suburban settlement like Cambridgeport can set before the world two such examples as those of Thomas Dowse and George Livermore,—men who in their different spheres illustrated their every-day working lives with the light of literary culture,—what may we not hope

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from the growth of institutions which can give us such citizens . . . over all our land?”178 Franklin was a model for Dowse and other working men of letters like Livermore and Deane who began their working lives in early adolescence. Although it never made it onto his tombstone, an epitaph Franklin wrote for himself at age twenty-two reveals how closely his identity was bound up not only with books, but with the material art of bookmaking: The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author.179

Franklin was buried in Philadelphia, but he had been born in Boston, like Thomas Dowse, when Massachusetts was still a colony. The only commemorative monument to Franklin in the country at the time was Francesco Lazzarini’s white marble statue in the niche above the entrance to the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin had founded. Dowse decided that it was time to erect a monument to him in the city of his birth. In planning his monument, the Learned Leather Dresser “raised no committee; levied no contributions on the weary circle of impatient subscribers, who murmur while they give; summoned no crowd to witness the laying of the corner-stone; but, in the solitude of his library, projected, carried on, completed, and paid for the work.”180 We may assume that there too, among his books, he penned the inscription that is now engraved on the gray granite obelisk that Dowse had erected as a cenotaph for Franklin in the Mount Auburn Cemetery: To the Memory of Benjamin Franklin

220 b o s t o n a n t i q u a r i a n s The Printer The Philosopher The Patriot Who by his Wisdom Blessed His Country & his Age and Bequeathed to the World An Illustrious Example of Industry Integrity and Self-Culture.181

A few weeks after the inauguration of the Franklin obelisk, Thomas Dowse passed away in his eighty-fifth year. Hearing that he had breathed his last, Robert Balmanno sighed to his friend Livermore, “Poor dear Mr. Dowse he is gone where I must soon follow.”182 Early in life, Dowse had cast his vote for George Washington as the country’s first president, and he died just hours before seeing the fifteenth U.S. president, the Democrat James Buchanan, elected to office. At nine o’clock in the morning on November 4, 1856, “the very day of election, he received a call from the grim messenger, who forgets none but had so long delayed his coming, granting many years of grace, which had been well improved.”183 We do not know what he thought of Buchanan or of his defeated opponent, the Republican John C. Frémont. But Dowse did not care for party politics, and he avoided political discussion. Nor did he care for church politics. “He had constantly on his table, during the latter months of his life, a copy of the Liturgy compiled . . . from the liturgies of the leading branches of the Christian church; a truly significant expression of that yearning for union, which is cherished,” as Everett put it, “by sincere and earnest men throughout Christendom.”184 The book was The Christian Liturgy and Book of Common Prayer (1847) by David Sears, a bibliophile whose own library of over four thousand books included more than seventy volumes by Voltaire, the voice of religious toleration who believed that the worst crimes were caused by religion.

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Rather than attending church services, Dowse preferred to spend his Sundays in sober reflection among his books. His shelves supported a range of theologians, from the orthodox divines of the Anglican Church (Richard Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, William Chillingworth, John Tillotson, Samuel Horsley), to dissenters in the British tradition (Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, Theophilus Lindsey, Joseph Priestley), to American theologians (Charles Chauncy, James Freeman, Joseph Stevens Buckminster). The churchmen sat alongside more heterodox thinkers such as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, John Toland, Bernard Mandeville, JeanJacques Rousseau, and Voltaire. For the most part, Dowse’s own thoughts transpired in silence, often in invisible colloquy with voices that traversed long spatial and temporal distances to put into perspective the events taking place around him. When the members of the Massachusetts Historical Society gathered for their annual meeting in the spring following Thomas Dowse’s death, they watched George Livermore present to President Robert C. Winthrop the catalogue and key to the new Dowse Library. He then moved that the antiquaries, without further ado, take possession of the room. Accordingly, Josiah Quincy and James Savage, the senior members of the society, rose to lead their companions from the drab quarters to which they had become accustomed into the elegantly appointed chamber that would become their new meeting place. They entered to see mahogany bookcases lining the walls and, on a pedestal in the far-left corner, the bust of Sir Walter Scott looking out on his fellow antiquaries with a barely suppressed smile. This plaster cast of Sir Francis Chantrey’s marble bust of the author wrapped in his plaid was one of only two pieces of artwork to have kept Thomas Dowse company in his library. The other was a drawing of Edward Everett by the American painter Gilbert Charles Stuart. At the society’s request, in the spring of 1856 Dowse had sat for the local artist Moses Wight, and his portrait now hung above the mantlepiece opposite the entrance—a frontispiece of sorts to a bibliophile ’s “collected works.” Above the bookshelves, the library committee had added busts of authors and historical figures “whose writings or whose lives were especially dear to Mr. Dowse.”185 Chief among them was Franklin, but George Washington, Shakespeare, and Milton were also represented. The literary historian William Roscoe made a less expected addition to such company, but Roscoe was a man of self-culture. As Livermore put it, he was not one to

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The Dowse Library. Engraving by H. Wright Smith after H. Billings, c. 1857. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

become “sunk in worldliness, consumed by the love of gain” or to conform to the ways of that world “instead of being transformed by the renewing of his mind!”186 Dowse ’s book collection included Roscoe’s biographies of Alexander Pope, Pope Leo X, and Lorenzo de’ Medici; his ten-volume edition of The Works of Alexander Pope; and his translation from Italian of Luigi Tansillo’s La Balia (The Caregiver). Livermore himself owned fifteen volumes by Roscoe. The bust of Roscoe above the shelves in the Dowse Library was one of three that Livermore had acquired in England. Another rested in the vestibule of his home, the third in Gore Hall. Before boarding the ship that carried him home, he had visited Roscoe ’s gravesite and clipped a sprig of sweetbriar along with some ivy as keepsakes.187 We might imagine him placing his ivy leaves and sweetbriar in his copies of Roscoe’s books—or at least in any of the dozen whose pages had been cut open. The practice of pressing plants and flowers in between the pages of books is one we tend to associate with the sentimentalism of the nineteenth century, but it is worth noting that it had been around since before the printed book. About a generation after Chaucer, Richard de Bury complained of the sentimental bibliophile who

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Moses Wight, Thomas Dowse (1856). Oil portrait. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

would “stuff his volume with violets, and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil,” distending it beyond what could be comfortably clasped.188 At the large oval table at the center of the Dowse Library, Robert C. Winthrop sat down in the presidential armchair and called the attention of the room to the “noble volume” that Dowse had inscribed the previous year to solemnize his bequest. “The volume is here, and will now resume its place in the series to which it belongs,” Winthrop said, “but the hand which gave it is cold and motionless, and the ear to which I would again have addressed your acknowledgments is beyond all reach of human utterance.”189 At a subsequent society meeting, the same president would sit down again in the same presidential armchair and draw the attention of the assembly to the books of the Dowse Library. He would recall how Edward Everett had rattled off, in a eulogy for the donor at the Boston Music Hall, all the names in the catalogue: “fifty-three of the ancient authors of Greek and Roman literature, of nineteen of the modern German, of fourteen of the Italian, of forty-seven of the French, of sixteen or seventeen of the Portuguese and

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Spanish, making up in all an aggregate of more than one hundred and eighty names of artists and authors, many of them as hard to pronounce as they were difficult to be remembered.” But despite the challenge of foreign tongues to many Americans, Everett had recited the names “with as much ease and fluency as he doubtless had rolled off the famous catalogue of the ships, in the second book of Homer’s Iliad, with the text-book in his hand, as a college student or as Greek professor, half a century before!”190 For Thomas Dowse, books had always been escape hatches to other times and places, but they were also tactile bonds of sociability in the present. George B. Emerson was being at once literal and figurative when he described the Learned Leather Dresser among his books: At night he sits down in his little parlor, by his quiet fire side, and enjoys the company of his friends. And he has the most extraordinary collection of friends that any man in New England can boast of. William H. Prescott goes out from Boston, and talks with him about Ferdinand and Isabella. Washington Irving comes from New York, and tells him the story of the wars of Grenada, and the adventurous voyage of Columbus, or the legend of the Sleepy Hollow, or the tale of the Broken Heart. George Bancroft sits down with him, and points out on a map the colonies and settlements of America, their circumstances and fates, and gives the early history of liberty. . . . Nor is his acquaintance confined to his own country. In his grave hours, he sends for Sir John Herschel from across the ocean, and he comes and sits down and discourses eloquently upon the wonders of the vast creation, of all the worlds that are poured upon our sight by the glories of a starry night. Nor is it across the stormy ocean of the blue wave alone that his friends come to visit him; but across the darker and wider ocean of time, come the wise and the good, the eloquent and the witty, and sit down by his table, and discourse with him as long as he wishes to listen.191

Among those who crossed the sea of time and space to join the Learned Leather Dresser in his library were the Lambs. He would have spent more than one evening with them, flipping through their Tales from Shakespeare, and pausing over the woodcuts. In a mood for poetry, he might have reached for their Poetical Works or for Charles Lamb’s anthology of English dramatic poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare. In a mood for prose,

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he had two volumes of Elia to draw on and a volume of miscellaneous writings. “Books are to me instead of friends,” Elia once confessed: “I wish they did not resemble the latter in their scarceness.”192 For a bibliophile like Thomas Dowse, books were also like friends—instructors, interlocutors, companions—though in Boston in the age of bibliomania, neither was scarce.

5.  Educating America The Dream of a Great Public Library This country is sadly in want of books. We can boast of a land stretching from sea to sea, with the greatest varieties of climate, soil and productions. . . . But what visitor crosses the sea to view our libraries? Who has ever heard of them abroad, except their diminutive size and meager character has given them a “bad eminence?” We have not a single library with one hundred thousand volumes, while there are several in Europe with five times this number of books, and one or two with a million or more. —Luther Farnham

Our story of book collectors in America has thus far been focused on private libraries. But on both sides of the Atlantic at midcentury, governments, philanthropists, librarians, and bibliographers were working to build a rapidly growing network of public libraries. Addressing the Select Committee on Public Libraries for the British House of Commons on May 8, 1849, Henry Stevens surveyed the broad spectrum of American libraries serving the public: “The Congress Library, the State libraries, the college and university libraries, libraries of mechanics’ associations, mercantile and apprentice libraries, libraries of learned societies, joint-stock and subscription libraries, town, city, village, and municipal libraries, church or congregational libraries, academy libraries, common school libraries, and Sunday school libraries.”1 The public library movement was closely tied to the mission of public education, and the central protagonist of this chapter, Joseph Green Cogswell, was a visionary in both areas. His dream was to establish a great public library in the United States on a scale to match those of Europe. With four hundred thousand dollars bequeathed for the purpose 226

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by the real estate tycoon John Jacob Astor, he compiled, organized, and administered the Astor Library, a precursor of New York Public Library. In March 1848 (the same month Astor died), Cogswell’s friends Edward Everett and George Ticknor, inspired by his work, followed suit in Boston and the result was the Boston Public Library. These free public-access libraries, whether designed as libraries of research and deposit like the Astor Library and the Library of Congress or as lending libraries like the Boston Public Library, would become the new standard in the new country, superseding independent libraries that had served the public in a more limited way. Many felt that the nation lacked monuments to link it to a longer history and spur it toward a more glorious future. “We have no Westminster Abbey to perpetuate the remembrance of valor, genius, or beneficence,” George Folsom observed. “Even Washington sleeps in a common tomb with his kindred, and of his distinguished associates in the field, how few of us can tell where their remains now repose!”2 American libraries serving the public at midcentury sought to do more than perpetuate the memory of the past, however; they also sought to inspire. Among such libraries was the Boston Athenæum, whose book collection had grown to become the third largest in the country. With a sculpture gallery on the first floor, the library on the second, and a picture gallery on the third floor of its new Renaissance Revival building near the Boston Common, the Athenæum was a symbol of art and culture. When Henry Stevens in the spring of 1848 acquired the association copies from George Washington’s library and announced his intention of selling them to the British Museum, he stirred the patriotism of a group of Bostonians who worked to keep the bibliographical relics of the country’s first president in the United States, ultimately installing them in the Boston Athenæum as part of the national heritage. Charles Eliot Norton, a prime mover in that effort, believed that such monuments mattered to sustaining the principles upon which the country had been founded: “Such is the frailty of our nature that our principles require to be supported by sentiment, and our sentiments draw nourishment from material things, from visible memorials, from familiar objects to which affection may cling.”3 The protagonists of this chapter were united in the view that the greatest memorial the country could erect was a world-class library. “Brass and marble may flatter family or national pride,” wrote Edward Everett to Joseph Green Cogswell, “but a great and growing library is a perennial life spring of instruction.”4

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The Astor Librarian Joseph Green Cogswell, a restless spirt of formidable energy, took a circuitous path through the transatlantic book world before finally settling down— in his robe and slippers—among the hundred thousand volumes he had almost singlehandedly acquired, catalogued, and shelved in the Astor Library of New York. George Ticknor remarked that “Cogswell, above all men, wants active practical employment to absorb, as far as possible, his attention and interest. . . . He is formed for the world and he must live in it. He must mingle with his fellow beings and enter into their projects, and feel their hopes and their fears, he must be continually active and interested, or he cannot long be happy, or even contented. . . . He is one of the few spirits to whom society is necessary and who are necessary to society.”5 Throughout his career, Cogswell would vacillate between the contemplative and the active life, the life of a scholar and the life of a man mixing in and stirring things up in the world. For as one of his former students put it, he combined “the qualities of the man of study and of action.”6 His mission to establish a great public library in America modeled on European research and university libraries would draw upon both aspects of his character, bringing his various skills, knowledge, and experience into focus. We find the bibliographer as a young man in relative intellectual isolation in Belfast, Maine. After attending Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, Cogswell had studied law, married his childhood sweetheart Mary F. Gilman, daughter of Governor John Taylor Gilman of Massachusetts, and moved to Belfast to practice. We see him quietly seated with a book open before him in the little back room of his office by the side of a fire, listening to the wind whistle and the snow beat violently against his windows: “My books, I believe, are my best friends, and I am sure they are the pleasantest companions I can find, in this savage land.”7 But the weather in the old colonial outpost proved too much for the frail health of his tubercular bride. “The house in which I live is so miserably built, that it is hardly possible to make it comfortably warm,” he complained. “In going from the fire to the backside of my room you must pass through every temperature, from that of the equator to that of the poles, and, if your progress be not very rapid, you would become as immovable before you reached there, as the mountains of ice which eternally surround those regions.”8 The loss of his wife after less than a year of marriage became for Joseph Green Cogswell—like the fall of

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Thomas Dowse from an apple tree—a transformative moment in the life of the bibliophile. Ticknor explained that “the hand of death . . . not only removed the object of his affections and cares, and darkened the path and prospects of his life,” but it also took from him “the radical principle of his character.”9 It left a gaping hole at the center of his being that he would spend a lifetime trying to fill. Like Charles and Mary Lamb before him, he uprooted himself and became a wanderer. “A man who is bound to a particular spot, by a family and a circle of friends, cannot be expected to prosecute researches into wildernesses and deserts, where dangers threaten him every hour,” he reasoned, “but a man like myself, who is left in the prime of his life, almost alone in the world, who breaks no ties and gives pain to no heart if he wanders as wild as the lion in the forest, such a man, I say, is bound to sacrifice ease and comfort, to bear fatigue and privation, to deaden his affections and roam in solitudes, to sacrifice health and life, for the good of his fellow-beings.”10 We find him here sounding much like Victor Frankenstein—and his alter ego, the polar explorer Robert Walton—in the novel Mary Shelley was in the midst of writing. The president of Harvard College, John Thornton Kirkland, drew Cogswell back into the quiet fold of Cambridge, offering him a position as a Latin tutor. But such a life, as Cogswell discovered, was not for him. “Shut him up under the exhausted receiver of a tutorship, and he will either break the glass in his struggle, or perish,” his friend Ticknor correctly predicted, for it was impossible that “a spirit so impatient and restless as his would always remain satisfied with the even tenor and gradual progress of a college life.” More than a job, Cogswell was seeking a vocation, a worthy motive for self-sacrifice, or in Ticknor’s words, “an employment to which he can promise his life.”11 Before long he left Cambridge to pursue a doctorate at the University of Göttingen, then the capital of European learning in the sciences. His chosen field of study was mineralogy and geology, which gave interest to his hikes through the Harz Mountains and prepared him for the rugged terrain of his dreams. “I have been led to believe that nothing remains for me in life,” he wrote, “but to prepare for a traveller in some parts hitherto little explored where Science will be more use to me than Philology, History or Politics.”12 Cogswell’s mineralogical enthusiasms endeared him to the man he called the “great giant of German literature, the creator and sole governor of

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their taste,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s cabinets of mineralogical specimens in Weimar filled several large rooms of his palace, and when Cogswell visited him there, Goethe led him on a tour of his collection, pointing out “all its remarkables, with a facility that could not have been exceeded by a Professor of Mineralogy.”13 Goethe would later regret that his young American friend could not join him on a trip to Carlsbad to see “some remarkable points in that important mountain region.”14 The two also engaged in literary conversation, and Cogswell agreed with Goethe that Lord Byron was the greatest poet living. After Göttingen, he toured France and Italy, passing from Venice on his way to Padua through the Italian town of Mira, where Byron was living in the Villa Foscarini dei Carmini. But as he arrived at nine in the morning and knew that the poet never rose before noon, he kept going, thinking it “best not to disturb his slumbers.”15 Like the heroes of Byron’s most characteristic verse, Cogswell was feeling something of an outcast himself, with leanings toward the misanthropic. Venice seemed a “gloomy prison,” and Marseille a “place of Bœotian dullness.”16 The latter, conveniently situated at the foot of the Alps, at the crossroads of Mediterranean trade routes, seemed an ideal place to spend a few months in independent study. But in that, Cogswell was disappointed. “I have not gained a new idea by a three months’ residence in it,” he grumbled; “no books can be procured here, except such as are connected with, or current in trade. A Greek classic of any value is not to be found, nor any works of science. . . . Whenever a stray volume of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or any other outlandish tongue, falls into the hands of the hawkers of literature, it is brought to me, as invariably as if I were the only person in the city that thought it of any value.”17 From the Continent, he crossed the Channel to England and headed north to the rocky ridges and fells of Cumbria. At the foot of Skiddaw Mountain, he found the Poet Laureate Robert Southey nestled in his library among thousands of old books. Southey was a literary antiquarian who impressed his American visitor “more in the extent and minuteness of his knowledge than in the display of his own genius and power.”18 At the time, he was at work on Oliver Newman: A New England Tale, a story that had been inspired by reading Abiel Holmes’s American Annals; or, A Chronological History of America, from Its Discovery in 1492 to 1806. The author of the latter was a minister of the Congregationalist First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Southey’s tale focused on the

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trials and adventures of William Goffe, a former captain in Oliver Cromwell’s army who helped to bring Charles I to trial and ultimately signed his death warrant. The story is set in 1675, when Goffe escapes England, sailing from Bristol to Plymouth. When his ship is blown off course along the coast of Massachusetts and drops anchor before reaching Plymouth, Goffe makes his way over treacherous terrain inland. Holmes portrays him as a hero who arrives at Deerfield, Massachusetts, and finds the English settlers being massacred during their hour of worship by the Pennacook: “The enemy were repulsed by the valour and good conduct of an aged, venerable man, who, suddenly appearing in the midst of the affrighted inhabitants, put himself at their head; led them to the onset; and, after the dispersion of the enemy, instantly disappeared.”19 Southey was struggling to adapt the story, and he took advantage of the occasion, a surprise visit from a New Englander familiar with Cambridge (where Goffe settled), to read parts of the poem aloud. But Cogswell found it “vastly inferior” to Madoc (1805), an earlier poem by Southey set in twelfth-century America. Cogswell predicted that the poet would not finish his New England tale and that if he did, it would not do him or its subject much credit. Like other Europeans, Southey was “totally ignorant of the character and spirit of the people” in America “but profoundly and minutely learned in its history.”20 Southey never did finish his “New England Tale,” and one wonders whether the response of this candid New Englander had something to do with that. From Keswick, Cogswell traveled north to Edinburgh. At 39 Castle Street, a stone ’s throw from Edinburgh Castle, he would have seen “the place in all Edinburgh where the feet of pilgrims to literary shrines love best to linger,” as Annie Adams Fields (the wife of the American publisher James T. Fields) described it, the quaint and labyrinthine town house of Sir Walter Scott.21 John Gibson Lockhart, a writer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, left the following description of his father-in-law’s “den”: The walls were entirely clothed with books; most of them folios and quartos, and all in that complete state of repair which at a glance reveals a tinge of bibliomania. A dozen volumes or so, needful for immediate purposes of reference, were placed close by him on a small movable frame—something like a dumb-waiter. All the rest were in their proper niches, and wherever a volume had been lent,

232 e d u c a t i n g a m e r i c a its room was occupied by a wooden block of the same size, having a card with the name of the borrower and date of the loan, tacked on its front. The old bindings had obviously been retouched and regilt in the most approved manner; the new, when the books were of any mark, were rich but never gaudy—a large proportion of blue morocco—all stamped with his device of the portcullis, and its motto clausus tutus ero [closed in I am secure]—being an anagram of his name in Latin. Every case and shelf was accurately lettered, and the works arranged systematically; history and biography on one side— poetry and the drama on another—law books and dictionaries behind his own chair.22

Yet Cogswell did not find Sir Walter Scott safely cloistered in Edinburgh amid his books. He had to go forty miles outside Edinburgh to Abbotsford, Scott’s neo-Gothic castle and grounds, to pay his respects. In 1847, when James T. Fields visited Abbotsford, Scott had been dead for fifteen years, though his castle was still a shrine for literary pilgrims. “I sat in Scott’s Library chair, walked about among his books, examined his pictures, looked upon his hat and cane and the last coat he ever wore,” Fields wrote in his diary.23 Scott’s desk was (and still is) at the center of his study at Abbotsford, walled around with leather-bound volumes two stories high and a railed balcony circling the room. Behind his study is the large, bright room containing the bulk of Scott’s library, consisting of books the bibliomaniac had been collecting since childhood. When Cogswell arrived in 1819, Scott invited his American guest to spend a few days. At the time, he was busy correcting proofs of the third series of Tales of My Landlord, a subset of the Waverley Novels including The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose—appropriately gothic novels for an author whose study was accessed through his armory. “There never was anybody like him for simplicity of manners, good humor, spirit in conversation, variety of learning, anecdotes, and all that constitutes a pleasant companion,” found Cogswell, who lapsed into a spell of melancholy in tearing himself away.24 For all of his brushes with literary genius and conversations in the elite shrines of bibliomania, the part of Cogswell’s European experience that had the most lasting impact on him was the time he spent with librarian Georg Friedrich Benecke in the university library at Göttingen. At midcentury, that library contained some 360,000 volumes, more than any other European

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university library, and more too than the libraries of many European cities.25 Benecke spent many hours with Cogswell, explaining the logic behind the divisions and classifications of books and opening his eyes to the field of library science. Cogswell’s visits to other libraries in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Britain only confirmed his view that the Göttingen library was the most systematically organized library in Europe—and the best for its size. When he returned to the United States, he sought to apply the bibliographical knowledge he had gained in Göttingen. Charles Eliot Norton’s father, Andrews Norton, a professor of biblical literature at Harvard College, vacated the post of librarian in 1821, and Cogswell replaced him.26 Although the library, with its 72,000 volumes, was the largest in the country at midcentury, Cogswell found it disappointing. Its holdings could not compare to the collections he had seen in Europe. Whereas European librarians had been accumulating books and other materials since ancient times—think of the great library in Alexandria— institutional book collecting in America was in its infancy. The British Museum at midcentury housed more than 435,000 volumes, a collection only half the size of the national library in Paris, which, having absorbed the books of the First and Second Estates, housed some 824,000 volumes. By contrast, the U.S. national collection, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., had a mere 50,000 volumes to show for itself.27 During his tenure as librarian, from 1821 to 1823, Cogswell made vigorous attempts to reorganize and modernize the Harvard library. He had to scale back the subdivisions of his catalogue to suit reality, but he did have a lasting influence on how American library catalogues were arranged and accessed. At the time, like those in Great Britain, they were printed. Anthony Panizzi was looking to change cataloguing methods in the British Museum, but the task was immense. Cogswell imported to the United States from Germany the more flexible system of the card catalogue, in which books were listed on separate cards and organized alphabetically.28 “Cogswell is doing much good in the library,” George Ticknor observed, gratified to see his friend redirecting the intensity of his nature to a worthy purpose. He was reforming the library “utterly,” and Ticknor predicted that when he had finished his new “systematic catalogue, and shown its gross deficiencies,” he would “persuade people to do something serious towards filling it up.” But university trustees did not take kindly to change. Cogswell soon found himself “in a state of mortal discontent . . . bitterly vexed with the want of

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liberal views in the Corporation, as to the principles on which the Library shall be managed and increased.”29 In addition to his paid post as librarian, Cogswell held a nominal (unpaid) position as professor of geology and mineralogy, and his experi­ ence in the classroom left him equally “weary of the imperfect system of education at College.”30 Disappointed by the methods, bureaucracy, and conservatism of the school, Cogswell left Harvard after two years. He and his friend George Bancroft, a historian who had also studied at Göttingen and who also held a Harvard professorship, pooled their resources and headed to the rolling hills of Northampton, Massachusetts, with a library of four thousand volumes. There they established an academy, the Round Hill School for Boys, modeled on the curriculum and pedagogical methods of the German gymnasium. Cogswell believed that schools in America, in comparison with their European counterparts (particularly in Germany and in Prague) were leagues behind in pedagogy. No wonder his Harvard students disappointed him, “for when a man loses the first twenty years of his life it is no small praise that he advances beyond the A B C of any science . . . it is the defects in our education which is the cause of all our literary inferiority.”31 As Charles Eliot Norton argued, a “vast majority of scholars leave school with practically empty minds, possessed of more or less information, but with little material of thought, with little training of the faculties of observation and judgment, and with little sense of their social responsibilities as members of the community.”32 Cogswell and Bancroft sought to address the problem of American education at its core, college preparatory training. Yet Cogswell would find that educational reform was no easier than library reform. In administering the entrance exams for the school, which opened on October 1, 1823, he discovered at least one obstacle to the work before him in each candidate he interviewed. “It was either obtuseness to be sharpened, obstinacy to be subdued, roughness to be smoothed, rudeness to be snubbed, habits of idleness to be corrected, new notions of study to be infused, or, worse than all, mind to be created. I soon found that the only course to be followed was, to begin de novo with every one, and to consider them as opening a book for the first time.”33 In less than a month after the school’s opening, Bancroft could report, “Our little family is fast forming habits of obedience and order; and as confinement and retirement are no evils to a scholar, there is nothing which is unpleasant in our situation.” Whereas Cogswell lived in the same building

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as the boys, Bancroft lived on his own and only saw the boys during school hours. A former student, George E. Ellis, recalled that Bancroft “was absentminded, dreamy, and often in abstracted moods.” He would enter the classroom early to hear the pupils recite their lessons “with a slipper or shoe on one foot and a boot on the other,” often having forgotten the eyeglasses which he needed to see, for he was extremely near-sighted. After classes, while Bancroft pursued historical research in the library, Cogswell, fortified by his hikes through the Saxon Harz and Swiss Alps, led the boys in physical exercises.34 “He was a consistent purveyor in the fields of knowledge,” Henry Theodore Tuckerman recalled. “Devoid of both literary and personal ambition, which are so apt to absorb in selfish isolation the gifts and graces of the mind, he gave to sympathy what so many cultivated men give to self.”35 The school grew to become a landmark in American education. According to the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, one of our protagonists, who studied there, no other American academy “had at the time so large, varied, well-paid, and gifted a faculty as the Round Hill School. It outnumbered Harvard and Yale in the corps of its teachers, and put a complete circle about them in the comprehensiveness of its scheme of education.”36 Cogswell’s influence well surpassed any information he might have imparted, and indeed in describing Bellows, Bellows’s friends likewise describe Joseph Green Cogswell: While he was eminently a man of head, he was also a man of heart and impulse. —Rush Christopher Hawkins37 Because he was constituted so much by and in [his] correspondence with others, and . . . as his understanding was suited to or undertook no virile tasks of systematic speculative toil, but met with matchless equipment of wit and eloquence every occasion as it came, therefore he has left no one literary monument which can disclose to us the full measure of his strength. —Cyrus Augustus Bartol38 He did not believe that an unemployed life was most favorable for study or reflection. He thought, rather, that extensive reading and practical activity interacted beneficially upon each other, and that a large culture might diffuse a radiance over every calling. —Anna L. Bellows39

236 e d u c a t i n g a m e r i c a [He] was an industrious, indefatigable, enthusiastic reader, but a scholar he was not. To be a scholar one must make choice of some particular line of study, and give to this all his best hours. —John White Chadwick40 He was no specialist—deeming it necessary to know only one thing in order to know it well; but rather deeming it essential to know many things, nay, so nearly as possible, to know everything in order to know even one thing of importance, as it ought to be known. —Martin Kellogg Schermerhorn41

Among the things that the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows absorbed from Cogswell during his days at the Round Hill School was a yearning to accomplish something great. “At times I will confess, I have felt myself called to a more than common place in the world, to possess a more than ordinary discernment & to be capable of a wider & more permanent influence,” he wrote on November 1, 1848. “A certain passion for relations with manhood in general, for a sphere as wide as the world & for an influence as broad as the sea, has possessed me.”42 He had learned from Cogswell the discipline and self-sacrifice that ambition demands, and he came to resemble his schoolteacher in “that many-sided culture, that wide-reaching wisdom, that everything-appropriating, all-comprehending intellectuality which fitted him well to be what he finally was—a teacher of teachers in almost every department of thought.”43 After collapsing from overwork one day in January 1848, Bellows petitioned the authorities at the Unitarian Church of the Divine Unity on Broadway, where he served as pastor, for a six-month leave of absence. On February 18, he was unanimously granted that leave in order to recover his health and would sail for Europe in the third week of April.44 He did not depart before picking up some reading matter at the store of Bartlett & Welford. “Reader, if you are not acquainted with it,” advised Elia, “I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel’s History of the Quakers.”45 He was referring to The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers, Intermixed with Several Remarkable Occurrences (1722), a chronicle in the antiquarian manner based on the journals of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and other records of the early Quakers. Bellows purchased Lamb’s copy of the

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book, a rare first edition of the English translation by the author, William Sewel, a Dutch historian who first published the book in Low Dutch. Lamb had admired Sewel’s simple account, which, lacking the narrative drama of the historian, contained “nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit.” He also admired one of Sewel’s subjects, “that muchinjured, ridiculed man . . . James Naylor!” This early Quaker preacher endured the pillory, “the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons,” and the branding of a “B” (for blasphemer) on his forehead, as Elia writes; “What dreadful sufferings . . . without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!”46 Naylor served as a model of a believer with the strength of mind to challenge his own beliefs. Sewel writes that he “came to a perfect Recovery from his having been in a Maze” and quotes him as saying, “How good is it that Man be proved in the Night, that he may know his Folly.”47 This capacity for honest self-questioning also characterized Bellows, who was at once “radical and conservative, a believer and a skeptic.”48 Joseph Green Cogswell and the Round Hill School produced such students. When George Bancroft left the school to pursue other projects, however, Cogswell found it hard to keep going. After seven years in Northampton, his old wanderlust returned. “I find it is a dangerous thing to get the spirit of roving,” he confessed to Anna Eliot Ticknor (the wife of George Ticknor); “one cannot feel easy without indulging it.”49 At age forty-six, he set off again, this time for the South, in order to see what more he could do to remedy the “starving condition of the minds of our youth.”50 Three different schools were beckoning him with offers—in Baltimore, Raleigh, and Savannah—and he decided to explore his options. “I shall go forth,” he proclaimed, “to the rude regions of the South, anticipating a life of toil, with the same spirit of enterprise and exertion that I had twenty years ago.”51 He was looking for adventure, and he found it. On his way from Philadelphia to Baltimore, his railway car overturned and he “narrowly escaped being killed.” Although spared this disaster, he found the rest of his journey fraught with “more perils than ordinarily await the circumnavigator of the globe,” as when his coach got stuck in a swamp on the way from Richmond to Raleigh.52 On the road from Raleigh to Savannah things calmed down,

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and he found himself bored. Looking out his window, he saw a land “tame and desolate . . . no variety in the surface, no cultivation, and no appearance of civilization and comfort.”53 But the fire within him was bright. “The salvation of our land depends much upon the efforts made upon our Southern youths,” he believed; “their notions are extravagant beyond all that we can conceive of, and our government is gone if their opinions go on unchecked.”54 In the end, Cogswell chose Raleigh over Savannah and accepted a job as the first headmaster of the Episcopal School of North Carolina founded by Bishop Levi Silliman Ives.55 The school opened in June 1834 in a plantation house that the school trustees had leased from William J. Gaston, a congressional state representative, to serve as a dormitory. The stone schoolhouse was still under construction in a neighboring oak grove, and Cogswell held his first lessons in a room on the ground floor of the main house. Within the first two weeks, he had expelled a student for breaking his precepts—a rigorous set of rules designed to tame a brood of “high-spirited Southerners, which they said no Yankee could do.”56 He had informed the boys that “the school had not been established for their pleasure, but for their improvement, and that they would be sure to find it a life of labor and self-denial” as long as he was in charge.57 There would be no sneaking into town, no smoking, no pocket money, no crying to one ’s parents, and no thinking of Saturday as a holiday. They would rise at five and begin lessons at five-thirty. As he had at the Round Hill School, Cogswell resided in the same building as the boys, for he saw “in the twinkling of an eye, how things would go” if he were not around to maintain order.58 When the schoolhouse was ready, he marched his pupils to a comfortable distance from the house where they ate and slept: “Our grove is a real academy, devoted only to pure literature, the sound of knives and forks never reaches it.” He felt some satisfaction as he looked around him. “I am here in a sort of desolate island, lord of all I survey, in the midst of an oak forest, a mile from Raleigh, sole sovereign and supreme over nearly sixty boys. They are round me by day and by night, at this moment the whole herd is buzzing around me, as I sit on my throne in the school-room.”59 Yet life in the South was not to his taste. The people were “exceedingly kind,” even annoyingly so, visiting him with all the “restoratives and cordials” at their disposal when he was sick, but still failing to revive his spirit. “It is a strange land, their manners are strange, the countenances are all strange, and even the names are strange.”60 What

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disturbed him most were the “atrocious sentiments” he heard uttered in favor of slavery, an institution “sustained upon a principle revolting to every generous feeling of the heart,—that of placing a portion of the human race precisely on a footing with a herd of cattle, providing for them as such, nurturing them as such, and disposing of them as such, and that, not for a crime, but for the mere accident of color and subjugation.”61 He had been to the Senate House in Columbia, South Carolina, where the floor was littered with peanut shells. He had seen a drunken assemblyman who could hardly stand on his feet attempt to make a speech as tobacco juice ran in streams down the aisles. The southern states seemed to him on the verge of rebellion, and Cogswell, who had never been known for his patience, grew eager to leave his job as headmaster of the Episcopal School. His acquaintance Thomas Devereux, a school board member, offered him a twenty-thousand-dollar advance to become the overseer of a cotton plantation, but Cogswell preferred to “wield the birchen sceptre” over his schoolboys than take up the lash among hundreds of slaves.62 Governor George McDuffie of South Carolina invited him to become a professor of Greek and Roman literature at the state college, a precursor of the University of South Carolina, but he rejected the offer. The governor of Louisiana, Edward Douglass White, invited him to become president of the College of Jefferson in Convent, a school that had opened the same year as the Episcopal School, but nothing could tempt him to remain in the South. Instead, with an unpredictability all his own, he moved to the “great Commercial Emporium” of New York.63

The Astor Library Samuel Ward III, a wealthy Wall Street banker, lured Joseph Green Cogswell to New York City with a job tutoring his sons, Henry and Samuel Cutler, the latter of whom would later marry Emily Astor, granddaughter of the man who had become the landlord of New York. Sometime during the holiday season of 1837–1838, Ward introduced Cogswell to John Jacob Astor, and this encounter between the schoolteacher and the real estate tycoon was well timed. At age fifty-one, Cogswell felt that he had done nothing. He was seeking some great enterprise to which he could commit his remaining years, while Astor, now the richest man in the country, was looking for a way to

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memorialize his name. He had earmarked four hundred thousand dollars for philanthropy, and Cogswell suggested that the old man could do nothing better with his money than establish the country’s first great public library. The time had come for an American library of research and deposit to consist of a hundred thousand well-selected, systematically organized volumes. Most public libraries at midcentury averaged around seven thousand volumes, many of them donations from individual private libraries. “To look at many of the volumes that are to be found in our public libraries,” Luther Farnham complained, “one would think, that those who by a figure of speech are called the donors, ought to pay for their storage, particularly, where they mar the appearance of very nice library halls.”64 A great public library must do more than house a random collection of castoffs, and when it came to bibliography and library science, Cogswell, as George Hillard noted, “had few equals and no superior” in America.65 The ideal of universal, encyclopedic knowledge that had guided Enlightenment science depended on systematically organized inquiry, and Cogswell, schooled in the very cradle of Aufklärung, believed that systematicity was the best, and perhaps only, way to make sense of miscellaneous knowledge. A great library must be greater than the sum of its parts. “Neither its mass nor its power is to be measured by counting its volumes,” explained one of Cogswell’s heirs, a superintendent of the Boston Public Library. “It is an organism in which every part augments the vigor of every other part and of the whole.”66 German libraries at midcentury reflected that belief. Testifying before the Select Committee on Public Libraries, Charles Meyer, the German secretary to Prince Albert, claimed that systematicity had “saved a great number of . . . German learned men from the danger of becoming autodidactoi, self-taught.” In Britain, by contrast, he said, there were “a great number of self-taught people, who think according to their own views, without any reference to previous scientific works. They make, sometimes, very great discoveries, but sometimes they find that they have wasted their labor upon subjects already known.”67 What was true of a public with all the resources of the British Museum behind it was at least equally so across the Atlantic. In the American world of letters, the advancement of learning depended on self-culture, and scholars and working men, as we have seen, not only mixed together but were often embodied in the same person. Cogswell had been surprised to discover “the entire separation” of the learned from the lay people in Germany. Alexander von Humboldt was one

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of the only professors he had seen in society, and by that point he was “more of a courtier than a man of science.”68 Cogswell sought to convince Astor, a German-born immigrant, that a public research library on the German model in America would ensure him a respectable legacy. To most New Yorkers, however, Astor was just an Old Screw. As the son of a butcher from Walldorf, he had arrived in the United States in 1789 with a few pounds sterling in his pocket, a handful of flutes, and a determination to become rich. Having worked for his brother, a musical instrument maker in London, he knew enough about the music business to open his own shop in New York. But he soon found trading fur to be more lucrative than selling flutes, and with the money he saved he invested in real estate, shrewdly buying up much of Manhattan. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville has his narrator boast of his occupation among bonds, deeds, and mortgages on behalf of “John Jacob Astor; a name which . . . hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.”69 In the Panic of 1837, when many New Yorkers lost their homes and businesses, Astor and his son William Backhouse Astor thrived, sweeping up properties for a fraction of their worth and piling new riches onto their riches. George Templeton Strong observed three years later that he would “hardly trust John Jacob Astor with twenty dollars unless secured with real estate worth a hundred.”70 When Cogswell met Astor, the tycoon had gone into semi-retirement at Hell Gate, a white-columned mansion on a thirteen-acre estate in upper Manhattan, overlooking the East River. Melville was among the elite coterie—authors, financiers, collectors, politicians—that Astor spent his time entertaining with music, books, and hospitality. Astor was interested in and articulate on a wide range of topics, and Cogswell was not the only one to find him more than “the mere accumulator of dollars” he had expected.71 When George Templeton Strong met Astor in person, he too was “agreeably surprised to find him a sound, sensible man.”72 Washington Irving, Henry Brevoort, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Daniel Webster, Samuel Ward, and the wealthy politician and attorney Samuel B. Ruggles were frequent guests at Astor’s home, and Cogswell fit in among them. Astor was fascinated by the New Englander—his familiarity with European culture, his acquaintance with the leading minds of the day, his knowledge of books and libraries, his facility in German. But while Astor encouraged Cogswell in the idea of founding a great public library, Cogswell would soon find that John Jacob Astor found it easier to accumulate than to spend money.

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Hell Gate: John Jacob Astor Estate on the East River at 86th Street, 1864. George Hayward, Museum of the City of New York (29.100.1551B).

By July 20, 1838, six months after moving to New York, Cogswell was itching to leave. “Had I not foreseen that this object would never have been effected unless some one had been at the old gentleman’s elbow, to push him on, I should have left New York long since,” he confided to George Ticknor.73 The autumn advanced, with no movement on the library, and he began to dread the idea of “frittering away another winter in New York.” He thought he could do more to improve his mind almost anywhere else. But the selfwilled and self-made multi-millionaire was not about to let his interesting new friend escape the city. He offered Cogswell a handsome salary to remain in Manhattan and keep him company at Hell Gate. “If I accede to his proposal it will be in the hope of advancing the great project,” Cogswell wrote, and we may believe he was sincere when he balked at the “thought of eating any man’s bread without rendering him an equivalent.”74 He ultimately rejected Astor’s offer, but decided to stay in New York. He purchased the New York Review and began editing the journal, while continuing to tempt John Jacob Astor with catalogues of old and rare books. He also peppered him with questions. What kind of character did he envision for the Astor Library? which subjects did he consider important? which were essential? Fired by such discourse, Astor created a board of

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trustees for the library. Chaired by Washington Irving, it included his friends Brevoort, Halleck, Ruggles, Ward, and Ward’s business partner James Gore King; his son William B. Astor; his grandson Charles Astor Bristed; his attorney, Daniel Lord; and Cogswell.75 It seemed that they were at last making progress. When William B. Astor asked Cogswell to accompany his son to Europe, Cogswell agreed under the condition that he be given a budget to buy books for the Astor Library. The elder Astor allocated sixty thousand dollars for the purpose, and so Cogswell again crossed the Atlantic. “I do not want to go to Europe a bit,” he mumbled; “nothing would have induced me to undertake the expedition but the hope of making it operate to bring the old gentleman to a decision about the Library.”76 When he returned to New York in the spring of 1840, he spread before his patron a written plan for the Astor Library. He showed Astor lists of titles and prices, and as cogently as he could explained “the utility and necessity” of compiling a catalogue of desired acquisitions. Astor “expressed himself perfectly satisfied” and said he would leave the whole matter to Cogswell, under one condition: Cogswell must move into Hell Gate.77 Cogswell let the summer pass without accepting the offer, and in September Astor had “a fresh fit of stirring in the library.”78 He hired an architect, Alexander Sältzer, to design a library building. A German immigrant himself, Sältzer was known for his neo-Romanesque churches, and the plans he produced for the Astor Library were based on the design of a Byzantine cathedral. An enormous glass dome would surmount a central library hall, while ranges of columns supporting the roof would divide the sides of the main hall into alcoves. Large windows at either end of the hall would supplement natural lighting from the dome. The facade would feature a neoclassical entablature above a Gothic, triple-arched entrance. This integration of different architectural styles reflected the fact that the main objective was not historically accurate period reconstruction but grandeur in the European manner. When Samuel B. Ruggles later brought George Templeton Strong to see the designs, Strong thought them more Romanesque than Byzantine but admitted that “all those terms seem to be very loosely employed.”79 With William B. Astor encouraging his father, Sältzer’s design was approved, and Cogswell left Hell Gate with the other trustees confident that construction of the library building would soon be under way. But before he saw John Jacob Astor again, another architect, Richard Upjohn, a British immigrant specializing in the Gothic Revival style, had

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The Astor Library, 1853. Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.

brought Astor another set of designs, causing Astor to lapse into the indecision that Cogswell considered “the weakness of his age.”80 So close, yet so far from the end in sight, Cogswell finally capitulated and took up residence at Hell Gate, where he could keep an eye on his fickle patron. Determined to reduce the matter to business, he granted Astor five hours of his time each day for an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars and an office to work on the Astor Library catalogue. “I do not like this altogether,” he told Ticknor, but he would “submit to anything to get the main business . . . nailed,” and

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he thought he knew Astor “well enough to say with confidence that, once started, he will be as eager as one can wish, to press on.”81 For the next two years, Cogswell continued to work on his catalogue, but no library dome was decreed. In February 1842, President John Tyler, urged by his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, appointed Washington Irving U.S. minister to Spain. Irving needed a secretary, and he invited Cogswell to fill the post. Cogswell, who had become convinced that nothing short of a miracle would make John Jacob Astor begin the Astor Library during his lifetime, accepted the offer and prepared to leave Hell Gate. “Say what consideration will induce you to stay with me,” Astor begged him, only “leave the question of the library to my future decision.” Of course, that decision was all Cogswell wanted, as Astor himself knew. When Cogswell began to pack, he then panicked and yielded to all Cogswell’s demands: he would begin construction of the library building, raise Cogswell’s annual salary for work on the catalogue to $2,000, and guarantee Cogswell the position of superintendent with a salary of $2,500 per annum once the library opened. “If he flinches now I shall not have a reproach to cast upon myself, let what will happen,” swore Cogswell to Ticknor on March 28, 1842.82 Irving left for Madrid, and Astor summoned architects, masons, and contractors to Hell Gate. Yet predictably, “just as all seemed to be going on rightly,” Astor “got into one of his nervous fits” and canceled the work. Cogswell could do nothing to revive his interest. Writing to Anna Ticknor on May 3, he repeated what he had earlier expressed to her husband: “I have made a sacrifice of my own pleasure, comfort, and standing in life, to secure this object for the cause of good learning in our land, and in no case will its blood be upon my head.83 Given the commitment of Astor’s family and friends to the Astor Library, Cogswell did not despair that it would materialize. But his relationship with his capricious patron called on all his reserves of patience, and as we have seen, those reserves were limited. One day, as Astor and Cogswell were inching along the dock on their way toward an afternoon sailboat ride, Cogswell mused out loud for sheer “devilment” that every minute they kept the boat waiting would cost Astor twenty-five cents. Hearing this, the man who had amassed more money than anyone else in the country “broke into a worried trot.”84 (In 1844, around the time these events took place, Philip Hone—whom we encountered purchasing Lamb’s Shakespeare and Homer editions—estimated

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Astor’s riches at fifteen million dollars.)85 As time wore on, Astor became homebound. His physician gave orders to “toss his decrepit frame in a blanket so many minutes a day,” and on one occasion as Astor was lying rolled in his blanket, one of his real estate agents entered the room. “Has Mrs. Blank paid that rent yet?” “No,” replied the agent. “Well, but she must pay it,” said the poor old man. “Mr. Astor,” rejoined the agent, “she can’t pay it now; she has had misfortunes, and we must give her time.” “No, no,” said Astor; “I tell you she can pay it, and she will pay it. You don’t go the right way to work with her.” The agent took leave, and mentioned the anxiety of the old man with regard to this unpaid rent to his son, who counted out the requisite sum, and told the agent to give it to the old man, as if he had received it from the tenant. “There,” exclaimed Mr. Astor, when he received the money. “I told you that she would pay it if you went the right way to work with her.”86

If the Astor Library was the price Astor “was paying for the wisdom and companionship of Joseph Green Cogswell,” as one librarian historian has remarked, it is equally true that such companionship as Astor had to offer was the price Cogswell was paying for the library.87 Astor’s hands shook with palsy and he could no longer sleep. Cogswell would sit up with him at night and find himself unable to work the next day. At mealtimes, he would watch as Astor’s head hung “down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dropping from this mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched.” They were weary days for the bibliographer. Others may have seen him as Astor’s “train-bearer and prime minister,” as Hone called him after one visit to Hell Gate, but the reality was far less glorified.88 “The mind that had conceived the first trust, that could see New York stretching north to the Harlem, retained a grip upon reality, despite a childish preoccupation with the acquisitiveness which had controlled his character; but his stomach failed entirely, and the last few weeks of his existence—it scarcely deserves to be thought of as life—he was unable to retain any food except breast-milk.”89

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In 1847 Astor’s grandson, Charles Astor Bristed, returned to New York. Astor had raised Bristed from the age of twelve, when Astor’s eldest daughter (Magdalena) died. His father, the Reverend John Bristed, was the rector of St. Michael’s Church in Bristol, Rhode Island, until 1843, when in ill health he resigned. The young Bristed had been trained in the classics—at Eton, Yale, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he had recently returned. In June he published a review in the Knickerbocker of Cornelius Conway Felton’s translation from the Greek, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Felton held a chaired professorship of Greek literature at Harvard, and he was on the governing board of the Library of Congress. Bristed caused a stir in the American world of letters when he wrote, “Mr. Felton, who, we have no doubt, from all that has been told us of him, is a very excellent citizen and agreeable man; a nice, pleasant gentleman, who knows a little of every thing, including a little Greek; took the Greek Professorship at Harvard because it happened to be vacant, and could have filled any other chair with at least equal success.”90 Based on this description, Melville might have called him a Gentleman with Gold Sleeve Buttons, Charles Lamb a New Schoolmaster. In an article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published in January 1848, Bristed ascribed the “one great radical cause of inferiority in American periodical literature, affecting it in all its departments” to the failures of American education that resulted in the kind of superficiality in letters he described thus: “The popular object of education in the new world is to make men speak fluently and write readily about any thing and every thing— speaking and writing which, from their very fluency and readiness, tend to platitude and commonplace.” Quoting the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, he suggested that such failures were not only institutional but associated with self-culture. “Men read much but they do not ‘mark, learn, and inwardly digest.’ Their reading is chiefly of new books, a most uncritical style of reading, to which the words reference, comparison, illustration, are altogether foreign.”91 Cogswell shared similar disappointments with the American system of education and had not forgotten his own evenings in Edinburgh with the Blackwood’s crew—those “brilliant stars” he had met just before the commencement of “the Symposia of the Noctes.”92 He was referring to the essay series published in Blackwood’s under the title “Noctes Ambrosianæ” (1822–1835), based on evening conversations by the periodical writers at the Ambrose Tavern in Edinburgh.

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The miscellaneous Blackwood’s series, in name if not in content, derived inspiration from the Noctes Atticæ (Attic Nights) of the Roman essayist Aulus Gellius. Only a month after publishing his critique of the periodical literature of America, Charles Astor Bristed directed his steps to the store beneath his grandfather’s hotel and purchased Lamb’s copy of the book.93 Published in 1651 by Louis Elzevir, it was an association copy even before it reached Lamb’s shelves. It had belonged to the politician and philologist John Horne Tooke, whom William Hazlitt described as “a man of the world, a scholar bred, and a most acute and powerful logician,” but one who “had no imagination (or he would not have scorned it!)—no delicacy of taste, no rooted prejudices or strong attachments: his intellect was like a bow of polished steel, from which he shot sharp-pointed poisoned arrows at his friends in private, at his enemies in public.”94 This was a “matchless portrait” according to Lamb, whose copy of Noctes Atticæ was pierced throughout by Tooke ’s arrows.95 One likes at least to think that Bristed would have showed the book to the bibliographer who had spent a decade by the side of his grandfather, cajoling, coaxing, and ultimately convincing him to use his great wealth to make genuine learning available to those who, like the young John Jacob Astor himself, might not otherwise have access to it. On March 29, 1848, just a few weeks after his grandson’s brush with Charles Lamb’s library in the Astor House, John Jacob Astor breathed his last. “The old gentleman always led me to expect my whole reward for my devotedness to him, from my post in the library,” Cogswell assured his friends; “I want nothing else.”96 In this case, it was wise policy, for nothing else would he receive. After Astor’s death, his son William took possession of the house in which Cogswell had been living and converted it into a headquarters for the Astor Library. Released from Hell Gate, Cogswell began spending his days in the bookstores and his evenings in the auction houses. Construction of the library was scheduled to begin the following year on a centrally located plot of land between Broadway and the Bowery. No longer the farmland it had been two decades earlier, the area was still “a good Degree exempt from the Throng and Noise and Bustle of business Streets,” as Reuben A. Guild, the newly appointed librarian at Brown University, put it. That section of Broadway, from Third through Eighth Streets, had “a refined, classic Air,” and “a more appropriate Site could not be found in New York.”97 In his capacity as the Astor librarian, Joseph Green Cogswell was not a sentimental collector. He would have had little interest in the books from

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Lamb’s library as association copies. Still, we find him seven months later, on the evening of October 21, among the crowd gathered to see eighteen books from Charles Lamb’s library resold. Someone recording names and prices in a copy of the sale catalogue that is now in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society noted that Cogswell paid $10.25 for two Elian volumes of “minor poets.”98 Evert Duyckinck reported in the Literary World that he paid $8.00 for one of them: the first volume of a two-volume set titled The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets: Namely, Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon; Charles, Earl of Dorset; Charles, Earl of Halifax; Sir Samuel Garth; George Stepney, Esq.; William Walsh, Esq.; Thomas Tickell, Esq. (1749). He also spent $2.25 for a bound quarto of fifteen tracts, which Lamb had itemized, by the Restoration playwrights George Farquhar and Sir John Vanbrugh and the poets Andrew Marvell, George Cotton, and Peter Anthony Motteux. Duyckinck for one hoped that the two old books would end their wanderings and come to “rest at last in the Astor Library!”99 Where they actually came to rest is anyone’s guess. Gerald D. McDonald, former head of Special Collections at the New York Public Library, reported that an exhaustive search for the volumes had come to nothing. The Dibdin Club of New York had printed a descriptive catalogue of Lamb’s library claiming that they were in the Astor Library, but in 1834 McDonald responded, “Reluctantly we deny this. Eighty-five years can bring strange changes to public library books: they may be lost or stolen; worn out or rebound beyond recognition . . . libraries are not always successful as friendly guardians. So, these Lamb books have been the subject of a search first hopeful and excited, then doubtful, and finally ending in disenchanted certainty. No Library records, early or late, Astor or Lenox or other, give any reason to believe that the books ever were here.”100 The two missing volumes do not appear in A Catalogue of Books from the Library of J.G. Cogswell, nor in the handwritten “Catalogue of Books belonging to C. A. Bristed, 49 Lafayette Place.”101 We cannot speculate about where they went, but what we can say is this: at the time Joseph Green Cogswell was supposed to have purchased the two volumes from Elia’s library, he was still at a point in his life when he found time to read as well as to buy and catalogue books. But that time was quickly coming to an end. He had now taken the full-body plunge into the most ambitious bibliographical project the country had yet known, and there would be no return from such depths.

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George Washington’s Library Henry Stevens, Jr., was another key figure in the development of public libraries in the transatlantic world. At the same time as he scoured Europe for books to stock American libraries, he swept the States for books to place in the British Museum. In the twenty years between 1845, when Anthony Panizzi commissioned him to build the American book collection (then a mere thousand titles) and 1865, when Panizzi retired and Stevens’s role as a book agent diminished, Stevens placed over a hundred thousand volumes in the British Museum.102 He may have done more than and certainly did as much as anyone to increase the circulation of books across the Atlantic at midcentury. Like the Astor librarian, Stevens manifested a “happy union of bibliographical attainments with social qualities,” though perhaps without the sting in the tail of Cogswellian wit.103 His early years had been spent in Vermont in the daily round of selling cows, thrashing, sleigh riding, harrowing, hiking, plowing, scraping and moving roads, building chimneys, sawing, making fences, keeping the Lord’s day, shearing sheep, hoeing corn and potatoes, picking cherries, and other activities his father, Henry Stevens, Sr., described in his diary.104 As an American bookdealer in London, he brought a mind stocked with varied experience and his own brand of Yankee eloquence to the cause of the public library. “Do you know, I rather like the Yankees,” wrote Thomas Crofton Croker to Robert Balmanno on May 4, 1849, after meeting Stevens. “There is a blunt shrewdness about them which pleases me, and it has been my good fortune to fall in with some admirable specimens.”105 Croker would add this fine specimen of Americana to his living curiosity cabinet, the Noviomagian Society, and Stevens would playfully sign himself, “The American Minister at Noviomagus.”106 When Stevens addressed the British parliamentary Committee on Public Libraries on May 8, 1849, he was able to speak with firsthand knowledge about “the numerous College, Athenæum, Lyceum, Mercantile, State, Town, Village, and other libraries, more or less public, that are now so rapidly springing up in every part of the United States,” as he put it in his Catalogue of My English Library.107 Smaller public libraries scattered throughout the United States, like those in the British provinces, played an important educational role, but they were better suited to self-improvement than to serious research. Lamb’s friend Bryan Waller Procter recalled his

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early days at a local circulating library: “Its contents were of a very humble description. It contained the novels and romances of fifty years ago, a score of old histories, and a few volumes of biography now forgotten. The books had been bought at sales for the value of waste paper. Nevertheless it was out of this dusty collection of learning that I was enabled to select a few books which spurred me on the great road of thought.”108 Such collections may have had their value to bibliophiles, but institutional librarians aimed to do better. We have seen James T. Fields and James T. Annan join the Mercantile Library Associations of Boston and Cincinnati, respectively, for mercantile libraries formed an important part of the public library system at midcentury. The Mercantile Library in Boston was only a fifth the size of the one in New York. Philip Hone, whose statue presided proudly in the reading room of the Mercantile Library of New York, estimated that in 1848 it housed 27,000 volumes—a larger collection than either the New York State Library, with its 24,000 volumes, or the Yale College library, with 21,000 volumes. George Templeton Strong, who visited the latter in 1846, was not impressed: “Books badly chosen—ninety per cent mere lumber . . . the collection on the whole is rubbish—old Puritan divinity and the like.” By contrast, Henry Stevens testified three years later that the books at the Mercantile Library of New York were too popular for their own good, saying that readers “actually wear out from 10 to 20 copies of many books in the first five years after they are published.”109 Like lyceums, athenaeums, and other institutions devoted to selfeducation, mercantile libraries also sponsored public lectures. Edward Everett’s lecture on medieval society at the Mercantile Library of New York prompted the young George Palmer Putnam to embark on a course of independent reading that had lasting impact on the contemporary world of letters. He worked his way through Western history, facilitating his retention of so much knowledge through “a system of note-taking that evolved from hundreds of pages of notations to organized tables of dates and events.” In 1833 he published those notes as a guide for others under the title Chronology; or, An Introduction and Index to Universal History, Biography, and Useful Knowledge. “Putnam never forgot the debt he owed such public institutions,” writes Ezra Greenspan, “a debt he would repay in later years by using his book and periodical agency in England and his overseas connections to supply libraries and historical societies throughout the United States with books, manuscripts, and documents.”110

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On January 3, 1848, the Mercantile Library Association of Boston opened its new library, which, with contributions from men like Abbott Lawrence, was also becoming an important part of the American project of self-education. An inaugural poem by Stephen Augustus Dix celebrated, rather than deplored, the age of commerce in which merchants were thriving: “Progressive Times, in which our lots are cast / That court the future rather than the past, / Age of the steamboat, railroad, telegraph.” Rather than seeking purely material gain, working men of letters like himself and others belonging to the library association caught “inspiration from unhallowed work / At ledger, day-book, balance-sheets, accounts, / Discounts and dividends, premiums, gross amounts.” In an inaugural speech following him, Daniel N. Haskell praised the association’s book collection, drawing inspi­ ration from (and quoting) William Ellery Channing’s Self-Culture: “God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers.”111 Following the mercantile libraries were the apprentices’ libraries. The Apprentices’ Library on the corner of Henry and Cranberry Streets in Brooklyn provided free access to books, maps, pictures, and useful information, and in 1841 began a program of continuing education whereby for three dollars, members of the Apprentices’ Library Association could attend evening classes on various subjects: “Reading, Writing, Grammar, Geography, Architectural and Mechanical Drawing, Arithmetic, Book-keeping, Algebra, Geometry, Landscape and Figure Drawing.”112 The Apprentices’ Library Association of Baltimore published works such as The Youth’s Athenæum, intended “to stimulate the young to intellectual custom—to create within their breasts a thirst for that knowledge, without which man’s condition here is most miserable indeed.”113 And in Charleston, South Carolina, the Apprentices’ Library Society sponsored lectures, demonstrations of ventriloquism and magic, and art exhibitions “for the encouragement of the fine arts” at its hall on Meeting Street.114 Our protagonist Charles W. Frederickson made use of an apprentices’ library in New York, as did Mark Twain. “The printers have two libraries in town, entirely free to the craft,” wrote Twain in 1853, “and in these I can spend my evenings most pleasantly. If books are not good company, where will I find it?”115 But in his address to the British House of Commons, Henry Stevens claimed that “the want of large public consulting libraries, like those of Europe, is much felt by students in the United States. Many persons engaged

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in works requiring great research, are obliged to visit London, or Paris, or Berlin.”116 All too often, American scholars exhausted themselves before they began writing, spending time, money, and energy in compiling sources. Not every book in a public research library needed to be in regular use, nor even of interest to most readers; it was enough that those who needed access to it should not have to cross the Atlantic to find it. American librarians had yet to grasp these truths. What the country needed, Stevens argued, were librarians with vision, those who understood that “a public library should lead and not follow the wants of scholars.”117 In making his case for the kind of great public library that Cogswell hoped to create, Stevens lamented the provincialism of librarians who believed that they need not stock books in languages other than English. One might as well attempt to write the history of New England without a knowledge of the English language, as a history of New York without the Dutch, or of Brazil without the Portuguese, of Mexico without the Spanish, or Canada without the French. A very considerable proportion of our earliest and best geographical books are in Latin and no other language. Many of our earliest maps are by German geographers; and in order to comprehend their lines and see as they saw, the modern historian must divest himself of his native shackles, stand in their shoes, take the same inland views, and study under the same circumstances. He must read the same reports of the navigators, in the same languages, and he will most likely by this process see the blunders that very early confused the geographers, and have since puzzled the historians. Bring all these books, maps, and languages together, and the sun will rise. We shall then ascertain our historical bearings, and know wither and how far we have drifted these four hundred years. Our moorings to the apronstrings of the Old World will be cut, and the two hemispheres will revolve as loving companions and equals in the waltz of the spheres. It is difficult at this late day to attempt anything like a complete collection of the history and literature of the Old World, but it is unpardonable to neglect that of the New.118

To emerge as anything other than a scion of the Old World, the New World must know its own history, and to do this, American libraries needed to stock not only new publications and reprints of standard literature but old, foreign,

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and out-of-the-way books: the development of American literature and the advancement of knowledge depended on them. In working toward a common goal, however, Cogswell and Stevens at times found themselves in competition. Stevens recalled the time that he offered for sale to John Carter Brown a collection of old books, tracts, and manuscripts in Native American languages, which his client turned down. “Dr Cogswell showed up, with his grand new Catalogue, not of the Astor Library, but of the chief books he intended to buy for the Astor Library. He saw this linguistic collection, and though not one of the books was named among the 100,000 volumes of his future library, he pounced upon the whole like an eagle ever wide-awake and ready for his prey.”119 Brown regretted the lost opportunity, and the Astor Library profited from the sagacity of its chief librarian. Since Cogswell had enough bibliographical knowledge to dispense with a middleman like Stevens, and since Stevens had enough libraries to fill without the business of the Astor Library, the two bibliographers operated independently within the same orbits. In the autumn of 1847, Stevens left London for New York and set himself up in the Astor House, which would become his headquarters through the following summer. Anthony Panizzi, hearing that Stevens was “sweeping London of rare books for America,” had invited him to “undertake to sweep America for us.”120 John Russell Bartlett and Charles Welford, the booksellers whom Stevens had so recently baffled in the antiquarian book trade in London, now had the Green Mountain Boy for an upstairs neighbor— and a regular presence in their bookstore. On his first day in the city, Stevens paid a visit to the man who had become his top American client, the bibliomaniac James Lenox. Although Lenox rarely opened his doors to visitors, and only then by appointment, Stevens was admitted without delay. The wealthy bibliomaniac had shut himself up in his mansion on Fifth Avenue with his books. He gave no interviews and “uniformly declined applications to ‘see his library.’ ”121 “Mr Lenox, you know, is peculiar,” Charles Deane remarked in 1854, “and very shy.”122 When researchers asked to consult volumes in his collection, he would arrange for those books to be used under supervision, in a place where he was not. Once the Astor Library opened, Joseph Green Cogswell would supervise their use in the reading room. Despite his reticence with strangers, however, Lenox maintained an active correspondence with book collectors and antiquarians who shared his interests, which occasionally warmed his heart into friendship. “I do not

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know why he should speak so strongly about seeing me, unless he fears that I know his reputation for not seeing callers,” wrote Deane, who had visited Lenox only once, “and then after several invitations from him. He received me very cordially and urged me to come whenever I was in New York. Perhaps because I have not called again he thinks I fear a similar reception to that which many visitors have had.”123 Stevens had been shipping so many books and so quickly to Lenox that the bibliomaniac had no time to organize or catalogue his acquisitions. “The great bulk of his book collection was piled away in the numerous spare rooms of his large house, till they were filled to the ceiling from the further end back to the door, which was then locked and the room for the present done with.” For bibliomaniacs, as we have seen, one copy of a book was never enough. Like his British prototype Heber, Lenox would buy “duplicates for immediate use or to lend, rather than grope for the copies he knew to be in the stacks in some of his store-rooms or chambers.” His bibliographical labors consumed his days and “kept him up nights collating, examining, passing and entering, or ticking off in his various lists.” He would keep track of his purchases in small notebooks (legible to him if unintelligible to others), which were then “corded up like wood.” Despite his idiosyncratic style of administering his collection, Lenox had earned Stevens’s respect as “an ingrain bibliographer” with “an eye like a hawk for rare books.”124 When Stevens returned to the Astor House, all eyes were upon him. “My gossiping friends the next day and often afterwards sat on me in Bartlett and Welford’s store, where they used most to congregate, but they were welcome to all the interior news they extracted. I had already learned to put up my Lenox chain.”125 He divulged no information about the bibliomaniac or his library, going about his business with all the prudence of a bookdealer who knew how to keep himself employed. In fact, he had more work than he could handle. “I am dogged to death, every body is teasing me for books relating to America,” he complained to his friend Obadiah Rich, an American antiquarian bookdealer in London. “The demand is certainly increasing and I think there will be more Browns & more Lenoxes next year—but where will they find more Riches and more Stevenses to find the books for them?”126 Rich and Stevens shared interests and customers, but as the book historian Nicholas A. Basbanes observes, Rich “was no match for Henry Stevens when it came to sizing up the players, securing inventory, and controlling the flow.”127 And yet when Stevens made the most sensational purchase of his

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career, the association copies from George Washington’s library, Rich proved he had learned something that Stevens had not. British institutional librarians cared little for relics. Books considered rare due to antiquity, scarcity, or associational value were still shelved with the regular collections.128 The practice of not isolating rare books in special collections was “consistent with the view that an institutional library’s business is to conserve and to make available to properly accredited persons the raw materials of scholarship: that it is of no concern whether a book is precious or beautiful or rare or charged with associative emotion, provided that it is simply there.”129 Not until later in the century, with the founding of the British Library Association in 1877, would British institutional libraries begin to collect, catalogue, and display rare books as such.130 “Your purchase of the Washington Library was a lucky hit certainly,” Rich wrote to Stevens on April 25, 1848, “but I think that it would sell to greater advantage in the U.S. than here. The Museum will certainly not buy them, merely because they belonged to Washington.”131 The sentimental value of George Washington’s library would not register with the British Museum, and Stevens had yet to realize that fact. Having urged Stevens to offer the association copies from Washington’s library for sale in the United States, Rich on June 1 wrote more directly: “You will find eventually that you have committed a great mistake in purchasing the so-called Washington Library: as unless there are books of really intrinsic value, among them, you will get nothing for them here. If you have not already ship’d them, I recommend you most sincerely to dispose of them in the only place where they would be properly valued, viz. in Boston or New York.”132 With the exception of the Library of Congress, a library of research and deposit on the European model, American institutional libraries followed a more sentimental approach to book collecting, taking “a very lively interest in rare books as rare books.”133 The British government might not have taken an interest in George Washington’s books, but the American government did. The day before Rich warned his friend not to ship the books from Washington’s library to England, Senator John H. Clarke of Rhode Island submitted a resolution calling on the Congressional Library Association to consider the collection—whether it could be purchased and at what price.134 The Library of Congress had been established two years earlier as part of the Smithsonian Institution, an organization designed to increase and diffuse knowledge. The

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Board of Regents responsible for its oversight consisted of the chief justice of the United States, the vice president, three senators, three members of the House of Representatives, and nine private citizens. Although the congressional resolution to consider the purchase of Washington’s library passed in the Senate, no further action was taken. A local reporter demanded to know what had “become of the regency of the Smithsonian Institution, and of the Smithsonian library fund, and of the act of Congress providing for a large expenditure from the interest of the fund for a library . . . that such a library should go a begging, and then be sold for a song to a speculator for the English market?”135 For while George Washington’s grandnephew Colonel George Corbin Washington still kept careful guard over “the sword and pistols, the surveyor’s field books, and other relics of his illustrious ancestor,” he sold his books to Henry Stevens.136 George Washington had bequeathed his library to his nephew Bushrod Washington, who had nearly doubled the number of books it contained by the time of his death. Bushrod split the collection between his nephews, John Augustine Washington II and George Corbin Washington. John Augustine inherited the 468 volumes in the dining-room bookcase at Mount Vernon, while George Corbin inherited the 658 volumes and 1,125 pamphlets from George Washington’s study. John Augustine died in 1832, leaving the books along with the mansion and much of the estate of Mount Vernon to his son John Augustine Washington III. George Corbin, five years after inheriting the books from the study, sold the military books and presidential papers in the collection to the Library of Congress, retaining 460 volumes and 750 unbound pamphlets, which he sold to Stevens. Of the 359 association copies of books that Stevens obtained, roughly two-thirds contained George Washington’s signature and a few the signature of Martha Washington.137 Stevens pocketed some of them as curiosities to carry with him, including “an old work school book, bearing the name of the boy who used it more than a century ago.” The book was George Washington’s grammar, which George Livermore would borrow from Stevens to show at the dedication of the Dana Hill School House in Cambridge.138 That was in late June 1848; before then, Stevens was in a hurry to sell George Washington’s library. He needed cash to make up some debts, and when he heard that the library might be detained by Congress, he wrote to his friend Peter Force to complain. In compiling old books and manuscripts for his documentary history of the United States, a project subsidized by

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Congress, Force had helped to build the archive of the Library of Congress. Stevens had supplied him with many of those materials, and his letter to Force of May 4 had its effect. Stevens complained that the “Committee on the Library have no right to detain or even to look at it,” and indeed in the end, “nothing appears to have been done about getting the books for the national library.” Stevens shipped the books to New York, stowed them in the Merchants’ Exchange Building, and hired a scrivener to produce a list of the titles, while the American world of letters looked on, anxiously anticipating his next move. Many believed that the library should remain in the country at all costs, or “if dollars and cents can purchase it.”139 Among the first to protest the sale of George Washington’s library to the British was Stevens’s own father, the old antiquarian from Vermont. “The purchase of Washington’s Library for the British Museum is really wicked, it ought not to go out of the government,” he wrote to scold his son.140 Andrews Norton (whom we met ceding the role of Harvard College librarian to Joseph Green Cogswell) also wrote directly to Stevens: “The Library of Washington . . . should be secured complete for some public Institution here.”141 He might have liked to see those books in the Harvard library, but “after all the main point is to prevent the Library from being carried out of the country; and if Congress will purchase it, perhaps Washington is the most proper place of deposit for it,” he wrote to his son, Charles Eliot Norton, who was then in New York.142 The price Stevens was asking for George Washington’s library ($7,500) was inflated, based purely on the associational value of the books, but the elder Norton strongly believed that the books should be kept together as part of the national heritage. He convinced Jared Sparks, who had edited The Writings of George Washington (1833–1839), to sign a subscription letter intended to raise the money. That letter would describe Washington as a man “preëminent for his services to his countrymen, for his freedom from all sordid and selfish motives, for his elevation above ordinary human weaknesses, and for his thorough integrity and completeness of character.” He was, in short, a secular saint of whom “all the relics should be venerated,” though of all the remains “there can be few of more interest than the books which have been in his hands, and which are marked by his handwriting.”143 With a hundred fifty-dollar donations, Norton calculated, they would have five thousand dollars to purchase the library, and the only difficulty would be convincing Stevens to accept an offer that was a full third less than

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he wanted. Norton asked his son to inspect the book collection, determine its worth, and then (assuming the Library of Congress did offer to buy the books), negotiate the first right of refusal with Stevens. He suggested that the younger Norton show the enclosed letter by Sparks, outlining the proposal to Stevens, to one of Stevens’s more important clients in New York, George Templeton Strong—himself the son of one of Washington’s namesakes, George Washington Strong, a prominent New York attorney. Charles Eliot Norton did as instructed, and at a loss for options, Stevens accepted the offer. He gave the Bostonians two weeks to raise five thousand dollars. They sent their appeal to hundreds of potential donors, and its message resounded in the local papers. “These sacred relics of the Father of his Country should be preserved here,” proclaimed the Barre Patriot.144 Two weeks later, the Boston Evening Transcript reported with mistaken optimism that George Washington’s relics not only should remain in the United States but that they had never left Mount Vernon. “Mrs Jane Washington of Mount Vernon denies that the library of Washington has been sold, or that there is any intention of selling it, and adds, with a spirit worthy of the name she bears, that five times the sum named could not purchase it.” This writer was confusing the part of George Washington’s library that had descended from his nephew Bushrod Washington to George Corbin Washington with the part of the library that had descended to John Augustine III, through his father John Augustine II, the late husband of Jane Charlotte Blackburn Washington quoted above, the mother of John Augustine III.145 Andrews Norton and Jared Sparks placed a subscription book in the office of the Boston Insurance Company, which had insured the manuscripts from Washington’s library that Sparks had used in his edition of Washington’s collected writings.146 But after two weeks of fanfare, only twenty-seven donors had signed it. “I sold the collection to a parcel of Bostonians for $5,000,” Stevens lamented, “but after passing that old Boston hat round for two or three months . . . only $3,250 could be raised, and therefore, as I had used a few hundred dollars of the money advanced to me by the promoters and was in a tight place, I was compelled to subscribe the rest myself to make up the amount of the purchase.” The organizers Andrews Norton, Charles Eliot Norton, Jared Sparks, and George Livermore were among the first to pledge their support, though the list of subscribers also included other names we have seen before, among them Edward Everett, George Ticknor, Josiah Quincy, Daniel Webster, and Abbott Lawrence. Stevens was “vexed and

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mortified” at the result of his enterprise, but we may be assured that, by using his own money to keep George Washington’s library in the country, he mollified the vexation and mortification of his father, the American antiquarian book collector from Vermont.147 Before Charles Eliot Norton received his marching orders from his father on behalf of George Washington’s library, he had been living a tranquil life in Cambridge. A random glance at his personal expense book from 1848 reveals a typical day in the life of a Boston Brahmin (as the city’s elite class was known): Lunch 9¢ Hair brushed 6¢ Sheridan’s Dramatic Works at Little & Brown’s $1.25 Scotch plaid 50¢ White gloves 63¢ Dinner 50¢148

Like the antiquaries at the Old Hive, Norton was drawn to the bookstore of Little & Brown, in his case mainly in quest of belletristic reading. Here he records his purchase of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s dramatic works, probably the edition published by Edward Moxon in 1846 with a biographical and critical introduction by Leigh Hunt. Like others in this story, Norton admitted to having the sentimental bibliophile ’s fondness for association copies, or as he put it, a “taste for books that have once belonged to men who have written good books themselves.”149 Turning to the second week of February 1848 (shortly before the warfare over Washington’s library began), we find him purchasing books from Charles Lamb’s library: Hair cut 25¢ Thick gloves $1.25 Lunch 12¢ Flowers $12 More’s Life of More $2.25 Shirt studs 25¢ Tea 25¢

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Sleigh Ride 50¢ Low’s Bill $13 Rec’d from Store $10 Books from Lamb’s Library $7 Postage 5¢

The bibliographical expenses here are Norton’s purchase of The Life of Thomas More by the philosopher’s great-grandson Thomas More, his settling of accounts with the London bookseller Sampson Low, and his purchase of Elia’s old books. On February 11, he asked John Russell Bartlett to select a couple of volumes from Lamb’s library on his behalf, and Bartlett sent him “two of the best books” that remained. “We regret that you could not have procured some of the choice ones,” Bartlett apologized, “Those sent you are a fair specimen of the condition of the whole, as to binding.”150 One was a 1703 edition of Thomas Tryon’s The Knowledge of a Man’s Self the Surest Guide to the True Worship of God, and Good Government of the Mind and Body and the other a bound volume of miscellaneous pamphlets from the 1730s. The Tryon book was missing its title page, and in his catalogue of Charles Lamb’s library, Welford listed it under the title of the first chapter, “Of the Knowledge of a Man’s Self.” He also noted that the volume contained a “Curious MS. Account of the Author” in Lamb’s handwriting, and as Carl L. Woodring points out in his study of Lamb materials in the Harvard library, the account was “curious largely because Tryon was curious.” Lamb had copied a bibliographical sketch by the antiquarian James Caulfield chronicling Tryon’s eccentricities: his abhorrence of woolen clothing, his researches in astrology and occult science, his apprenticeship to a hatter, his “strange journal” and “strange books,” his peculiar manner of burying birds, his efforts to teach a sheep to write, and his vegetable diet.151 He was clearly just the sort of character who would have appealed to Elia. Charles Eliot Norton, replicating Lamb’s own practice of associative reading, copied Lamb’s autograph note about Tryon onto the flyleaf of another book in his library, Tryon’s Letters, Domestick and Foreign, to Several Persons of Quality (1700). Next to that he copied Benjamin Franklin’s account of converting to a vegetable diet after reading Tryon’s A Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (1691). The book Franklin read was Tryon’s bestknown work, one to which The Knowledge of a Man’s Self can be considered

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a sequel. In his Autobiography, Franklin claimed that the trouble of having to cook his own meals while working as a printer’s apprentice in order to keep to his vegetarian diet was compensated by the money he saved on food, which for him became “an additional Fund for buying Books.”152 The second volume Bartlett sent Norton contained another work on the topic of health and well-being: Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro’s The Uncertainty of Physick; Being a Translation of the Spanish (1739). Perhaps the work of the Spanish monk should have been bound instead with Tryon’s, for the life of the English vegetarian, ending at age sixty-nine “when he perhaps had thought of remaining a series of ages in this world thro’ his tenderness to beasts, birds, fishes, insects, & reptiles,” seemed to prove the uncertainty of physic.153 Bartlett also sent Norton a list of the half-dozen titles from Elia’s library that remained at the store. Perhaps Norton ran into George Livermore and Charles Deane one day while shopping at Little & Brown, for two of those titles went to them. Norton also chose a third title for himself: Euripidis tragoediarum (1821), a Latin translation of Euripides’ tragedies by August Heinrich Matthiae.154 Lamb’s friend Henry Francis Cary had inscribed the book to the Lambs. “Sitting by me is my good sister, turning over Euripides, your gift, dear Cary,” Lamb wrote in thanking him. Lamb’s letter was in Latin, and it opened with a pun on Cary’s name: “Carissime Cary” (dearest Cary, or dearest dear). It was written in 1831, when Charles and Mary were in the last act of their own tragedy. “Most acceptable to both of us is this book of ‘Pity’s Priest,’ a sacred work of your bestowing,” Charles wrote, “yourself a priest of the most humane Religion. We shall take our pleasure weeping.”155 In calling Euripides “Pity’s Priest,” he was quoting Joseph Warton’s Ode Occasioned by Reading Mr. West’s Translation of Pindar, which describes the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar as a priest of pity, and the weeping occasioned by reading his odes a type of catharsis that “melts in useful Woes the bleeding Breast.”156 Lamb confessed that “there are times when pain turns pleasure, and I would not always be laughing.”157 The last volume that remained on Bartlett’s list, after Norton, Deane, and Livermore purchased the others, was Zachary Pearce’s Review of the Text of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1733), marked as being sold to one “Richards.” This could have been anyone, but it may have been Alfred Bate Richards. Bartlett told Norton that one of the telegraph orders that he had received for Lamb’s books was from London, and Richards was an English

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poet, playwright, and literary journalist who formed part of the literary circle that included Thomas Hood. When he published The Dream of the Soul and Other Poems (1848) with William Pickering, Richards sent a presentation copy to Evert Duyckinck, “Editor of the Literary World.” Richards’s own book is safely tucked away in the Duyckinck Family Collection at the New York Public Library, but as for “Richards’s” copy of Elia’s book, we know no more than Elia what became of it. The association copies from George Washington’s library, however, remained together, and we know exactly what became of them. Commenting on them under his antiquarian pen name “A Sexton of the Old School,” Lucius Manlius Sargent remarked that “there are some things, seemingly so vast—so very—very national—that one can scarcely believe it possible for any private cabinet to contain them gracefully.” All agreed that the relics of Washington’s library should be preserved in a public institution as national treasures. The Boston Public Library had been officially founded in March 1848, but it was still a dream in the making. The closest thing to a public library in Boston at the time was the one in the Boston Athenæum, which through the efforts of men like George Livermore and Edward Everett, had grown to equal in size, and by some counts surpass, the Library of Congress.158 Technically, the library of the Boston Athenæum was an independent subscription library, like the Library Company of Philadelphia. Henry Stevens described the latter as the only subscription library in the country that lent its books “quite freely,” since for three cents and a security deposit of three times the book’s value, anyone could borrow a book.159 The founders of the Athenæum likewise intended it to “answer the highest purposes of a Public Library.” Government officials, clergymen, and alumni of Harvard and of other specified colleges had the same borrowing privileges as subscribers, their families, and any two other people a subscriber might choose to add to his account. Subscribers could also distribute one-month access passes to “any number of strangers,” and anyone falling outside these categories who wished to consult the collections could do so by obtaining a letter of introduction from a member.160 On May 8, 1849, the chair of the Select Committee on Public Libraries for the British House of Commons asked Henry Stevens which libraries were “freely accessible” in the United States, and Stevens did not name subscription libraries: “many of the college libraries, the State libraries, the Historical Society libraries, academy and common school libraries, and the

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town or city libraries.” When asked about the nature of American subscription libraries, he conceded that access to them was not granted freely but only as a discretionary courtesy: Chair: Are subscription and joint stock libraries open to everybody, without any introduction? Stevens: They are free to subscribers or shareholders by right, and others by courtesy. Chair: Do not the subscribers demur to persons who do not subscribe having access to the library? Stevens: No, I think not; their object is to show the library and gain subscribers. Chair: May a person read for any length of time in one of those subscription libraries? Stevens: He may be tolerated by courtesy for a short time. Chair: For a short time only? Stevens: For a few months. Chair: On the Continent a person may go and read for a whole year without being objected to by anybody; that is not the case in the libraries you are speaking of? Stevens: In many of the large libraries he may do so.

Still, the Boston Athenæum had been founded on the idea, as Charles Eliot Norton expressed it, that the intellectual life of America required “revival and reinvigoration, not in the interest of the few, a select and eminent class, but in the interest of the many, of the whole community.”161 The cornerstone of the Athenæum had been laid in 1847, and it would open to the public in all its neoclassical splendor in 1849. With Charles Eliot Norton as treasurer and George Livermore as chair, the Washington Library Committee determined that the relics of George Washington’s library would rest at the Boston Athenæum. Charles Eliot Norton had been bookish since boyhood. “My associations had been essentially literary,” he later reflected, “and the love of books had been so established in me that there was little risk of my losing it. It was well for me that in my nineteenth year I was introduced to the active world of men.”162 His father had counseled him that an active life was compatible with an intellectual life, that a man was “likely to be most useful, and to enjoy most, who is engaged with others in the business of the world; who has some

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active employment or necessary occupation. To him study will not become wearisome; he is most likely to enjoy the pleasures of literature and knowledge with the keenest relish.”163 The younger Norton began his working life, much like Elia, as a clerk. After graduating from Harvard in 1846, he joined the counting house of Bullard & Lee, a company of East India traders, at the Boston Harbor. When ships arrived, he would spend long days out on the wharf, taking stock of merchandise—bags of coffee, bales of goatskins and gunny, chests of indigo—as it was unloaded. At times shivering in the cold, at other times sweltering in the sun, he would struggle to keep his faculties alert. If a single item went missing, he would have to go through the inventory again in the storeroom, tearing through carefully constructed piles to see whether the error had been made on the shipping or receiving side. When there were no new arrivals, he would spend his time, like Elia, drawing up invoices, copying letters, balancing accounts, settling bills, writing out bills of lading, and learning the ropes of the counting house under the “martinets” William S. Bullard and Henry Lee. Far from resenting their strict style of management, he claimed that “nothing could have been more fortunate” for him than to have learned from two such businessmen.164 On May 21, 1849, as George Washington’s library was still being catalogued, Charles Eliot Norton sailed for India. The journey to Madras, the ship’s first port of call on the way to Calcutta, would last 110 days. Appropriately, given that his ship was named the Milton, the little library of books he carried with him on the ocean crossing included Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.165 What he said of his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had also been true of his own youth at Shady Hill, Cambridge: “It was through books that the household mainly felt its connection with the wide life of mankind, with the poetic and historic past.”166 In an envelope marked “To be opened at sea,” his father addressed him: “I am satisfied, that should you live, your experiences for the next two years may not only be a source of great pleasure to you, but a source of great improvement; that they may serve not merely to enlarge and inform your mind, but to strengthen your powers of active usefulness. If this be so, as we both believe, the course you have adopted is the course of duty; and under any circumstances, it can never be a subject of reasonable regret to yourself or to us at home, that you have pursued it.”167 This paternal farewell captures not only the values of duty, civic responsibility, pragmatism, and self-improvement with which Charles

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Eliot Norton was raised but the puritanical attitude of a father who could preface his message to his son with those chilling words, should you live. From Bombay (Mumbai) to Anatolia, Egypt, Paris, and London, the younger Norton would roam extensively overseas. Often he traveled on business, other times with “no commercial object, but simply as a man of letters travelling for information and pleasure.”168 He was laying the foundation for that wide-reaching view of civilization that “a young roaring and money-getting democracy, inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with ‘business success,’ most needed to have brought home to it,” as Henry James put it. Visiting the influential man of letters years later at Shady Hill, James would find him “among pictures and books, drawings and medals, memories and relics and anecdotes, things of a remote but charming reference,” all of which made the young novelist feel “the effect of a sudden rise into a finer and clearer air.”169 In London, Norton would visit Henry Crabb Robinson, then in his mid-seventies. He found him “genial and amiable, living in his past long friendships with Wordsworth and Lamb (I meant to put Lamb’s name first) and supporting a vivid self-appreciation by the heat reflected from their blaze.” To the young bibliophile from Shady Hill, old Crabby confessed, “Of all the men whom I have ever known, and I have known most of the distinguished literary men of Germany and England during my life, Charles Lamb was to me most to be loved.”170 A few months before Norton’s visit to Henry Crabb Robinson, the librarian of the Boston Athenæum, Charles Folsom, who had followed Cogswell as the Harvard librarian, paid George Livermore a visit. He had a package he would be sending to Norton the next day and invited Livermore to add anything he might like to it. It was a Monday and Livermore had a busy day ahead of him, but he sat down to update the treasurer of the Washington Library Committee about the progress of the catalogue. He had discovered a paper “more like vellum in complexion and texture” than anything he had seen in the United States and was planning to print fifty of the seven hundred copies of the catalogue on it. He was confident that Norton would admire its “creamy hue.”171 He had also tracked down the original copper plate used to make Washington’s bookplate and gained the permission of its owner to use it to produce prints for the catalogue. One American bookplate collector in 1894 criticized “the poor heraldry” of the design of Washington’s family arms: “It will be noticed that

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George Washington’s bookplate. Anonymous etching and engraving, 1772. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of William E. Baillie, 1920.

the engraver has placed a wreath under the crown (an absolute heresy), and this, with the faulty drawing of the raven, makes the whole plate a very slovenly piece of work.” Yet for all its rustic heraldry, George Livermore was lucky to have located it before it disappeared. The owner, a book collector from Philadelphia, once “having printed what he deemed a sufficient number of re-strikes from it” and worrying that their value would be reduced by others making more prints from the plate, cut the copper into pieces and, from a bridge over the Schuylkill River, threw them in.172 Fifteen association copies from George Washington’s library at the Boston Athenæum contained the bookplate, whose motto was strangely suited to the leader of a revolution: “Exitus acta probat” (the end justifies the means). Livermore enclosed a copy of the catalogue ’s title page, which featured an illustration of the inside of the Athenæum Library. He planned to have it printed in red and black inks in the manner of early English catalogues, and

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he assured Norton that the printer was still at work on alternatives. His own private library included a section devoted to George Washington which contained numerous portrait engravings, and he had asked George William Curtis to compose an essay on Washingtonian portraiture for the catalogue. “Everything relating to the history and character of Washington had an interest for Mr. Livermore,” Charles Deane explained.173 By 1897, when William Coolidge Lane, a subsequent Athenæum librarian, prepared an appendix containing information about the whereabouts of association copies from Washington’s library not in the Athenæum, the catalogue had become a bibliographical tour de force of 540 pages.174 But what of Charles Folsom? A handwritten list of buyers at Bartlett & Welford’s sale of Charles Lamb’s library identifies “Folsom” as the purchaser of two books: a mismatched two-volume set of The Guardian and The Works of Francis Osborne, Esq.: Divine, Moral, Historical, Political (1689). The first was a short-lived newspaper edited by Richard Steele that ran from March 12 through October 1, 1813, and featured such authors as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Thomas Tickell, and Ambrose Philips. Lamb and his father had both signed the first volume, published in 1750, and the second, published sixteen years earlier, showed every sign of having been “picked up at some stall.”175 The other book contained Osborne’s “Advice to a Son,” an early precursor to George Washington’s “Rules of Behaviour in Company and Conversation.” In his “Life of Washington,” Jared Sparks characterized those rules as “a system of maxims, and regulations of conduct, drawn from miscellaneous sources” that the leader of the American Revolution had used to subdue his own fiery temperament.176 Although Charles Folsom was part of a close-knit circle of antiquarians, librarians, and bibliophiles who are protagonists in this story, Joseph Rosenblum, in an article on the dispersal of Elia’s library by Bartlett & Welford, identifies “George Folsom of New York” as the Folsom who purchased Lamb’s books.177 George Folsom was a friend of John Russell Bartlett’s who in 1849, when Bartlett was looking around for a diplomatic position, recommended him to Secretary of State John M. Clayton for the position of chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen.178 He was a member of the New-York Historical Society, and he would himself assume the position of U.S. chargé d’affaires in The Hague in 1850. The catalogue of George Folsom’s library does include a copy of the same edition of Osborne’s Works that Lamb owned, but it makes no mention of The Guardian.179 In

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courtesy to Rosenblum, we name George over Charles in the list of protagonists, though the difference is immaterial to this story. Early in the decade in which Lamb’s books were sold, George Folsom served as librarian for the New-York Historical Society, and Rosenblum identifies his assistant, George Henry Moore, as the buyer of a book from Elia’s library at the auction held in 1848.180 When Moore joined the nation’s second-oldest historical society, it was little more than “a quiet potentiality, a respectable egg.” Its books and papers were stowed away in the New York University building on the northeast corner of Washington Square, leading “a very dingy life.” Moore was only a sophomore in college, but when he went to work in the library “new life entered the old bones.” By the end of the decade, the society hardly knew itself, for it had become “a power in the community.” Like other antiquarians we have met, Moore led a life that was, like Elia’s, “a protest against the noise, and bluster, and sensation of the day.” He shared the antiquarian interest in the past and desire to systematize and preserve its remains, and it may have been he, rather than James T. Annan, who placed a copy of Bartlett & Welford’s Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library in the quarto of old plays from Elia’s library that is now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.181 Having determined to make the catalogue of George Washington’s library “the best specimen of a work of the kind” ever produced in the country, George Livermore, as he informed Charles Eliot Norton, made a literary pilgrimage to Mount Vernon where John Augustine III and his mother were still living. There in the dining room he took down every volume from its place in the bookcase and copied its marginalia. “I value our collection far more highly than before, since I have seen these books,” he told Norton. “We have much the larger and better part of Washington’s Library.”182 At Arlington House, he interviewed Martha Washington’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, and then crossed the Potomac River to Georgetown to speak with Colonel George Corbin Washington, who had sold his granduncle ’s books to Henry Stevens. Livermore hoped that one day the association copies from George Washington’s library in the Boston Athenæum would be reunited with their kindred, and he saw what he was producing as a first step in that direction. Over a decade later, Charles Eliot Norton would still be carrying the torch, corresponding with bookmen and collectors, and hunting down the remaining relics of a man who, as his father had put it, “stands alone among the great men of the world.”183

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The Astor Ghost While the Boston patriots were fighting to keep George Washington’s library in the country he had helped to found, Europe was embroiled in revolution. “The volcano which has so long been rumbling under the throne of Louis Philippe, the King of the French, has at length burst forth with awful violence, overturning that throne, and hurling the unwise occupant of it from the country” announced one Boston paper on March 18, 1848.184 Nearly five hundred lives had been lost since the king incited rebellion by cancelling the Reform Banquet that had been scheduled the previous month, and the royal family had since fled to England. In a replay of the French Revolution, the Royal Palace had been sacked, its furniture thrown from the windows, and the throne paraded through the streets on its way to be burned in a public square. The slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité once more appeared on the walls of public buildings, and cries of “Vive la République” rang through the streets. To keep troops from coming to the aid of the government, the revolutionaries had torn up the railway tracks leading to the city and blocked the bridges across the Seine. Rome itself was in a feverish and unsettled state as rumors circulated that the pope, in opposing reform, had been deposed. From Bavaria to Naples, Austrian troops were on the alert, and the emperor himself, Ferdinand I, had abandoned his throne. Our protagonist Henry Whitney Bellows, whose vacation in Paris was rather ill-timed, found “a sort of nonplussed, what-is-to-come-next expression . . . on most faces.”185 But this was precisely the moment when his former teacher, Joseph Green Cogswell, chose to sail for Europe, hoping to take advantage of “the distracted political condition of Europe and the reduction of prices consequent upon it” to buy books for the Astor Library.186 He rented a house next to Obadiah Rich’s which he rapidly began filling with books.187 Librarians, hearing of his ambition “to start the Astor on the most prudent and judicious plan,” offered him tours of their buildings and collections. Booksellers, hearing that he had resolved to buy “the best and greatest number of books suitable for the nucleus of a great library,” set aside great heaps of books for his review.188 Bibliographers he hardly knew, hearing of his catalogue of a hundred thousand volumes, spent hours in consultation with him. Everywhere he turned in the great British bibliopolis he seemed to find encouragement.

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At age sixty-two, he was making up for lost time. “I go out as early as anybody is stirring in this place of clouds, fogs, and darkness, and reconnoitre the book-shops, collect catalogues, compare prices, and, when I come upon anything nice and at the same time cheap, I buy it and order it. . . . In work of this kind I spend all the hours of demi-daylight, for as you know, at this season there is no entire sunlight in London.”189 In the evenings, his head swirling with titles and prices, he would cross-check his lists and plan his next day’s assault on the book market. Bookdealers began to treat him “as one of their craft,” and he blended in among the cognoscenti in the auction halls. Yet the more he became surrounded by books, the more he found himself losing touch with them “in the spiritual sense.”190 Given his official role as the Astor librarian, he resisted such collecting fetishes as limited editions, tall or large-paper copies, and imprints by William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde, England’s first bookmakers. Nor did he fall for “richly bound books in old French red morocco, which sold high for their coats alone.” Authors and titles concerned him, not typeface and binding. The sentimental appeal of first editions and association copies held no sway over him. “I am governed more by intrinsic value than by the accident of rarity,” he explained to Evert Duyckinck, who was watching his progress from New York. “The Astor Library should be a learned and a useful one, rather than a mere museum of curiosities.” There were only three first editions that he hoped to see on the shelves of the Astor Library: a Gutenberg Bible, which he despaired of obtaining; a First Folio of Shakespeare, which he determined to have; and Pope ’s translations of Homer, which he had already purchased.191 In the spring of 1849, as Charles Eliot Norton was sailing to India on the Milton, Joseph Green Cogswell sailed back to New York. There, in a rented house on Bond Street, he and his assistant, Patrick Gafney, unpacked the boxes of books he had shipped and arranged the books on shelves. He was pleased to discover that under his tutelage his assistant had become “an exceedingly bookish man.”192 For the next several months, Cogswell checked his books against his catalogue, his catalogue against his books, and his catalogue against other catalogues—victim, it would seem, of the “insidious infirmity” of Catalogitis. As one sentimental collector from New York described the symptoms of this species of book disease, “The stricken man is observed to keep aloof. He is abstracted and taciturn, and is rarely without a pamphlet in his hand and a pencil in active employment. He does not deliberately refuse

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food if it be thrust upon him; but at table, when tempted with his favorite dishes, he is likely to be checking with his pencil in some London price-list the books which he would buy if he could see his way to paying for them.”193 Cogswell paid so little attention to his meals that, within a few months, his clothes hung about him “like meal-bags.”194 Another year of his “oyster life” wore on in this manner, and on August 16, 1850, he wrote to Anna Ticknor, “I have not lost an hour, since I came from Europe, to the library and its interests. . . . Books, books, books, everlastingly books, I am sure you will exclaim.”195 The library trustees, seeing the flesh fade from him, decided unanimously that he must go back to Europe for a few months to recover his health, much as the Church of the Divine Unity had done for his student Bellows two years earlier. Back in Europe, Cogswell was surprised to find how scarce old books had become. Perhaps the London booksellers were right in saying that all the good books had gone to America. Or perhaps since he had already acquired thirty thousand volumes, the challenge of finding books on his list of desired acquisitions was naturally becoming more difficult.196 Whatever the reason, the Astor librarian could no longer find what he was looking for in London or Paris and had to venture farther afield—from Rome to Hamburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The northerners treated him royally, but “it was so cold, and the aspect of everything . . . so cheerless, it quite deprived me of the power of enjoying anything.”197 A few months extended to nearly a year before he returned to New York, having doubled the size of the Astor collection. His next three months of fact-checking involved taking down every volume from its shelf, comparing it with the information in his catalogue, making any corrections or checking it off, and returning it to the shelf. At ten o’clock on the evening of November 29, 1852, he completed a task that, had he known how much work it would be, he would have shrunk from starting. “Thank God it is done,” he wrote, “done faithfully, no shamming, and I am still alive.”198 Alive but, at age sixty-six, all but sepulchered in books. He had grown “sick of the very sight of books.” The same objects that had once sustained him now tantalized him with their outsides without being able to refresh his spirit with their insides. Still his steely will drove him forward to scour the bookstores on his daily rounds. Often he would plow through hundreds of books set aside for him without finding a single volume he wanted to acquire. “It is a very hard, dirty, disagreeable work,” he complained to Anna Ticknor

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on December 28, “but I must go through with it, or confess that with age I have lost all energy.”199 Clouds of mortality were gathering as the old year came to an end, and the New Year promised nothing new. “Of all sounds of all bells,” Elia had confessed, “most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected—in that regretted time.”200 Whatever Cogswell might have done or regretted not doing in 1852, we can be sure it had to do with books. He had all but left the land of the living in his single-minded drive to build the best and largest library in America—and books had closed their hearts to him. Yet when Cogswell crossed “the great pond” between America and Europe for the last time in the spring of 1853, he had the satisfaction of knowing that when he returned he would be able to see all the books he had acquired on the shelves of the Astor Library.201 Half of them were already there. On Monday, January 9, 1854, Cogswell watched as crowds poured up the great marble stairway to the central reading room of the Astor Library and marveled at “the magnificent facilities there afforded for the pursuit of knowledge.”202 A reporter from the New York Times, learning that the stacks above the reading room contained two miles of shelving, calculated that stacked in a single line they would reach from Central Park to Union Square.203 The paging of books in the reading room was scheduled to commence on February 1, when any member of the public at least fourteen years old could fill out a paging slip, and have the requested book brought down for use in the reading room. The books in the Astor Library, a library of research and deposit on the European model, could not be checked out. More than one member of the media expressed doubts about the suitability of the library for the American public. Over a fifth of the collection consisted of books in foreign languages, “including Scandinavian, Sclavonic [sic], and other useless tongues to general readers,” as a reporter for the New York Mirror remarked. The reporter found it hard to imagine most New Yorkers sitting down in the “elegant building, reading abstruse works on the natural sciences, metaphysics, ethics, &c.”204 A reporter from the Evening Post agreed: “Our people are too fond of excitement, and too wearied after their daily toils, to spend much of their time in solid reading,

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even at home; and the idea of walking to the Astor Library for such purpose requires a keener zest for study than experience has shown them to possess.”205 Yet as Joseph Green Cogswell saw it, entertaining the masses was not the mission of a great public library. “There is no use in having lots of boys here, reading translations of their Latin and Greek books, and novels,” he insisted. “I never want to see a reader who does not come for a valuable purpose.”206 The popular literature of the day, which included not only periodicals like Punch and the Illustrated London News but novels by Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Dickens, was to him nothing but “trashy.”207 The attitude dates back to eighteenth-century London, when circulating libraries sprang up around booksellers as a means of promoting new publications. As James Raven explains, concerns then too had arisen about “arbitrary or irresponsible reading attributable to the uneducated and ruder classes, but also to the young, impressionable and ill-informed.”208 The diffusion of cheap literature in the United States was even tied to criminality. The publisher James T. Fields was dismayed to find “young people everywhere absorbed in reading “immoral and exciting cheap books.” In railway cars, he would see “school-boys secluding themselves from observation busily occupied in reading ‘Dime Novels.’ ” In the engine and baggage rooms, “one or two workmen off duty, earnestly devouring the ‘Police Gazette,’ or other illustrated journals devoted to crime.” On steamboats, readers seated on boxes on the freight deck, “all intent on the garbage thrown out to them by infamous scribblers who pander to all the worst passions of human or inhuman nature.” In the halls and lobbies of hotels, “ ‘call boys’ poisoning themselves with stories of murder, rape, burglary, and horrors unnameable.” Convinced that bad reading had bad effects, he visited the Charleston State Prison of Massachusetts, where Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the youngest person to be convicted of first-degree murder in the state, was serving a lifetime sentence of solitary confinement, and “came away from the young murderer’s cell with the conviction more deeply impressed on my mind than ever that the curse of youth in our day is that widespread, degrading, unwatched literature, called cheap, which if unchecked by law is destined to sap the morals of our land.”209 Although dime novels had not yet made their appearance in Cogswell’s day, the Astor librarian was more expansive in his definition of bad literature. In an unpublished notebook sketch of a librarian, Evert Duyckinck captured the kind of Superannuated Man that Cogswell had become:

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There was a sedateness and melancholy gravity in his air. He felt the dignity of his situation among the antique volumes. He lived among these ancients and expressed the moderns. Every new author intruding into the library he feels to be a Goth or Vandal making predatory incursions. Nothing moved his anger more than those dapper two volume duodecimos—fine gentlemen of the sidewalk—which arm-in-arm elbow aside the old worthies. He adopted some standing rules towards the close of his life when old age had made him testy, one of which was that the hundred and first imitation of a popular author should not be received in his charge.210

Duodecimos, the cheapest of standard book sizes, challenged the order of bibliographical rank and precedence just as novels challenged the traditional hierarchy of the arts. Joseph Addison had joked in The Spectator about the prestige adhering to different book sizes: “I have observed that the Author of a Folio, in all Companies and Conversations, sets himself above the Author of a Quarto; the Author of a Quarto above the Author of an Octavo; and so on, by a gradual Descent and Subordination, to an Author in Twenty-Fours. This Distinction is so well observed, that in an Assembly of the Learned, I have seen a Folio Writer place himself in an Elbow-chair, when the Author of a Duodecimo has, out of a just Deference to his superior Quality, seated himself upon a Squabb” (ottoman).211 Americans, however, resisted hierarchies, and in this, bibliographically at least, Cogswell was out of sync with his age. The worst readers Cogswell set eyes on were “the young fry,” but he consoled himself with the thought that reading was at least better than “spinning street yarns.” As long as the young, impressionable, and ill-informed remained decorous in his reading room, he would “not object to their amusing themselves with poor books.”212 Every morning at nine, he would take up his post behind the railing in the reading room and remain there “as a fixture until half-past four.” The library closed its doors at that hour in the days before gas lighting, but as long as those doors remained open, Cogswell’s waking reality became “one unbroken string of questions . . . requiring constant and wearying repetition of the same answers.” Patrons would look wistfully behind the railing and beg to browse among the books in the stacks. When he explained that the rules forbade it, they would often (as he experienced it) “break out into a railing accusation.” “But it’s no use,”

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he would reply. “You can’t do it.” He was glad he had designed the rules as he had. It would have “crazed” him to see “a crowd ranging lawlessly among the books, and throwing everything into confusion.” 213 He had wanted to set the minimum age for entry at seventeen, and though the trustees resisted, he convinced them before many weeks had passed to raise it from fourteen to sixteen.214 In Boston, George Ticknor and Edward Everett were following Cogswell’s lead. Unlike the Astor librarian, however, Ticknor favored the idea of allowing books to circulate, and the Boston Public Library would become the country’s first major public library with freely circulating books.215 But the Boston legislature lacked the funds of the Astors. William B. Astor would commit to making the library his father had founded “the great library of the Western Continent” and over time would contribute as much money to it as his father had done, doubling the size of the library building and its endowment.216 “As a Bostonian I envy New York nothing but the Astor fund,” Everett assured Cogswell; “as an American I honor and admire this magnificent endowment of letters.”217 He fully agreed with the central motivating belief of the Astor librarian that “a Public Library, well supplied with books in the various departments of art and science, and open at all times for consultation and study to the citizens at large, is absolutely needed to make our admirable system of Public Education complete.”218 One might be forgiven for thinking that Joseph Green Cogswell, having realized his dream, might have relished his accomplishment. But at age sixty-eight, he felt only cranky and harassed, or in his own word, “waspish.”219 Some days it seemed he hardly had fifteen minutes to himself. He had grown so weary of the “ceaseless round of work” constituting library administration that he could hardly lift his head from his pillow. Yet he knew better than anyone that his ongoing devotion to the cause of “sound learning” was self-imposed.220 “It is out of the question for me to be here and not give my whole time to the Library,” he admitted before the end of his first year as superintendent. “Not that it is absolutely necessary, but it has so become my ruling passion that as long as I am in sight of the building I cannot rest without being in it and at work.”221 The books he had collected had become part of himself, and before another year had elapsed, he had taken up residence among them. He moved into an apartment on the second floor of the Astor Library, where he soon became “very snugly domiciliated.” Concerned about his

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living alone among so many books, William B. Astor provided him with a bell to ring for the porter, who slept in the basement. The man came every morning to light Cogswell’s fire and to bring him his toast and tea. “I repose very quietly, with no one to disturb me or make me afraid,” he assured his friends; “Mr. Astor won’t let me live altogether in solitude.” In winter, he hardly stepped out of the library for days at a time, and when he did, it was usually just to cross the street for a meal. Lounging en pantouffles and in his robe de chambre, he enjoyed his “solitary grandeur,” feeling that he had at last “gone into dignified retirement.”222 Of course, if the reader imagines that retirement for Joseph Green Cogswell meant giving up his labors, his portrait has not been faithfully painted. Some mornings, he rose at four and kept going until midnight. “I will die in the trench rather than give up,” he vowed, as he continued to carry books up and down the stairs and to work on his catalogues.223 Such unremitting toil had at least one advantage: it so completely filled his days that he had no time to dwell on his loneliness. When Sundays rolled around, however, he felt as desolate as “an old tree on the moor which winter has stript of its leaves, and left neither shoot nor shelter around it.”224 Had he not lost the habit of reading, he might have found some enjoyment in the books around him. “I would not be so stupid . . . if I lived in the world of animated beings, instead of being immured with these dumb, and I am almost tempted to add another d—— books,” he wrote on November 9, 1856. The myth of Tantalus was “a feeble picture of suffering compared with what I have daily to endure, his was only physical, mine is all mental. My thirst for knowledge is as great as anybody’s, and here I am, all the time up to my chin in a grand reservoir of all that human thought and genius has produced, without being able to drink in one drop of it.”225 Still, in and out of health, the Astor librarian persevered. The Astor Library trustees declared the library to be “the fruit” of Cogswell’s “untiring labors,” the end to which he devoted all his resources— “a singular union of learning and ability, of efficiency and discretion, of modesty and taste, of energy, industry, and disinterestedness.”226 Out of this labor would come another great institution: the New York Public Library, created when the Astor Library merged with the Lenox Library nearly half a century later. Harry Miller Lydenberg, its third director, describes the evolution of what has become one of the world’s leading libraries: “First, many isolated, independent efforts towards a common end,

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the public weal; then the union of a few of these independent, and wasteful, efforts; the resultant body gradually attracting and consolidating those remaining outside the fold; the outcome justifying itself by a strong, resourceful, elastic whole.”227 But while the names of Astor, Lenox, and Samuel J. Tilden, who endowed the fund to merge the two libraries in 1895, are permanently associated with the New York Public Library (through publications, websites, and the stone facade of its central branch on Fifth Avenue), the name of the man who from the time the Astor Library was no more than a glimmer in a bibliographer’s eye had been its Geist, or animating spirit, has been effaced.228 One evening, a few years after taking up his residence in the Astor Library, Joseph Green Cogswell beheld a ghost. Whether the spectral figure with a coat draped over its arm reaching toward the shelves for a book was a veritable phantasm or the effect of the moonlight, we will not presume to say. More than one of our protagonists has tempted us from the more solid historical ground of our story into the shady region of bibliographical metaphysics, a field that has not yet come into its own. In 1846, John Russell Bartlett believed that the ghost of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic, had been seen in New England, causing George Templeton Strong after visiting Bartlett in the Astor House to joke: “Mr. Bartlett looks awful when he talks about it and ponders the Ghost’s sayings and reads ’em forward and backwards and upside down and all sorts of ways to find out what they mean and what the Ghost’s sentiments really are, but he hasn’t succeeded yet.”229 A decade later there were those who “cherished a firm belief in the appari­ tion which the distinguished librarian of the Astor Library beheld” and, desiring no commonsensical explanations about it, visited “the spot where the reading phantom appeared.”230 The American writer Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy Waterson was one of them. “Who shall say that authors and students do not come back to the books which contain their invisible souls, or spirits like themselves?” she demanded in the Atlantic Monthly. “At midnight what a circle might come forth and visit the library! Scott and Burns and Byron, Burke and Fox and Sheridan, all in one evening . . . Rogers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Charles Lamb;—what a social club that would be!”231 Earlier in the century, “Elia’s Ghost” had materialized to sign his name to an essay in the London Magazine, whose editors, John Scott and John Taylor, claimed to have seen him: “His ghostship has promised us very material assistance in our future

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Numbers.”232 But if Elia’s ghost was a fiction, and Swedenborg’s ghost a tall tale, what went on at midnight in the Astor Library must remain a mystery. Let us conclude our story with the mere proposition that if librarians as well as authors haunt libraries, the ghost of the Astor librarian may still be seen— perhaps with his coat draped over his arm—reaching for one of the millions of books in the New York Public Library today.

Epilogue On an uncertain day in 1848—weather and season unknown—a solitary pedestrian might have been seen strolling along Broadway in the pleasant little American city of New York. Pausing before the Astor House, an imposing structure towering to the height of five stories, he gazed into the window of a book shop over the door of which was emblazoned the firm name of Bartlett and Welford. Why should we withhold from the impatient reader that the perambulating stranger was a young printer, Charles Frederickson by name? On this day, portentous for book collectors . . . Frederickson probably entered the book shop with the feelings common to most of us on such occasions, a hope to be sorely tempted struggling with a mental inventory of spare cash. This is one of the thrills that wealth cannot give. —Harry Bache Smith

When he first saw Charles Lamb’s books on display in the Astor House, Charles W. Frederickson resembled Keats as “a schoolboy . . . With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.”1 He had yet to become the wealthy bibliomaniac, known as “Fred” in the auction halls, who could purchase any book that caught his fancy. When he attended the auction held by Cooley, Keese & Hill at which a third of Lamb’s library was resold, his mental calculations once again yielded no spare cash. “Mr. Frederickson is not named among the purchasers at this sacrificial auction, to which no doubt his poverty and not his will consented,” observes Harry B. Smith, a fourth-generation protagonist of this story.2 The American bookseller Ernest Dressel North records in his introduction to the catalogue of Charles Frederickson’s library that when a boy Frederickson visited the store of Bartlett & Welford and “looked longingly over the books for sale from Lamb’s library, registering a

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vow that some day he would own some of them.”3 Frederickson kept that vow, becoming a legend in a white linen jacket and pockets stuffed with books whose sentimental library of association copies, first editions, presentation copies, and autographs included eleven volumes from the library of Charles Lamb. Although Frederickson began his book collecting with Shakespeare, ongoing disputes about the authenticity of the plays and other texts and objects related to the bard caused him to sell off his Shakespeare collection. He began collecting the bibliographical remains of British Romantic writers, “at a date when such conduct must have been labelled as eccentric by even the charitably minded among his peers.” The bibliographical remains of poets like Keats and Shelley were not yet widely venerated as relics, but, as John Carter has argued, “the very fact that his enthusiasms seem ordinary enough today marks him as a pioneer.”4 As a second-generation protagonist of this story, Frederickson entered the transatlantic book world at a turning point, when tastes were shifting from the kind of bibliographical rarities and specimens of early printing that had been coveted in the grand era of British bibliomania to a sentimental preference for relics of English literary tradition. “I believe there is no previous record—certainly none in America—of a collector who prized rarity less than the sentimental interest that converts a book into relic,” wrote Smith, who nominated Frederickson as “the connecting link between the new and the old schools of book collecting in America.”5 The pivot may not be as clearly positioned as that, for as we have seen, sentimental collecting in America began before Lamb’s books were sold in the Astor House. Yet by the time Frederickson’s library was sold, the prices of association copies had soared to new levels, for sentimental collecting had come into its own. The bibliographer North, who introduced the sale catalogue for Frederickson’s library, was himself “said to have the largest collection of Charles Lamb materials in the country, including many books from Lamb’s personal library.”6 At the sale of Frederickson’s library held by Bangs & Company on Fifth Avenue, the city’s two leading booksellers— Charles Scribner’s Sons and Dodd, Mead & Company—bought up most of the books from Lamb’s library. Seeing one of them in the possession of his friend Frank Howard Dodd, Luther S. Livingston, the first curator of the Henry Elkins Widener Collection at Harvard, paused over the

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old octavo in half-sheep binding with its broken joints and badly worn corners to sigh, “What a copy, Charles Lamb’s own!”7 That book was a bound volume of miscellaneous tracts that we have seen Lamb label “the remainder of Christs hospital” in a note to Leigh Hunt. Dodd, Mead & Company purchased it along with Lamb’s copies of Amory’s John Buncle and John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea. Yet before they could print their sale catalogue targeted to sentimental collectors, Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library and of Some Presentation Copies and First Editions of His Rarer Books (1899), all three association copies from Lamb’s library had already been sold. A note pasted onto the inside front cover of the catalogue contains this apology: “Since this catalogue was put in type the three books from Lamb’s library . . . have been sold.”8 It was Harry B. Smith himself who beat other sentimental collectors to those books.9 The Scribner brothers purchased the book that had stolen the show half a century earlier at the auction run by John Keese, Lamb’s blackletter copy of Chaucer, though it was not identified by the auctioneers this time as having belonged to Charles Lamb. The fact that the pages of the old folio were covered with Lamb’s autograph writing was something only a few who inspected the book before the bidding began realized. This important detail the more enlightened examiners of the books discovered for themselves. It was amusing to see a dealer or a collector take up this book and suddenly realize that it was Lamb’s copy. After giving a very fair imitation of Robinson Crusoe finding the foot-print, he would lay the book down and walk away with elaborate nonchalance, convinced that he knew something that nobody else knew. So many did this and the secret was buried in so many bosoms that the book, started recklessly at five dollars, rose steadily in the bidding while the hearts of the foxy ones sank within them. It sold for $340, causing chuckles of innocent glee among the uninitiated.10

Had Charles W. Frederickson been among the crowd on the afternoon of Monday, May 24, 1897, when the book was sold on the first day of the auction of his library, he might have joined the chucklers. For by the gay nineties, the sentimental bibliomaniac with the long white beard “needed only a red coat and a pack on his back to be an ideal Santa Claus.”11

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William Evans Burton had paid twenty-five dollars for the same book half a century earlier, though it was not the most expensive volume from Elia’s library sold that evening. Instead, Lamb’s copy of The Works of Michael Drayton, Esq. A Celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I. and Charles I. (1748) emerged as “the Coryphaeus,” or leader of the chorus of Lamb’s old poets and prose writers, as Evert Duyckinck called it in the Literary World.12 It was the largest of the sixty books from Elia’s library sold by Bartlett & Welford earlier that year, and Harry B. Smith suggested that the book Duyckinck called the leader of the pack “was doubtless the colonel of Elia’s ‘ragged regiment,’ having been chosen for its great height and the comparatively good condition of its uniform.”13 When John Keese sold it on October 21, 1848, it fetched three dollars more than Lamb’s copy of Chaucer. “Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear—to mine, at least—than that of Milton or of Shakespeare?”14 Drayton was one of those sweeter names to which Elia was referring, and in his copy of Drayton, containing more than four hundred pages of double-columned verse in small font, he had gone through and numbered the stanzas, as well as adding in nineteen folio pages of poetry in his own handwriting. From James T. Annan, the book had passed to the antiquary Edward Augustus Crowninshield, and from him to Henry Stevens, who preempted the auction of Crowninshield’s library by swooping up the entire collection for ten thousand dollars, “mainly to obtain his perfect copy of the Bay Psalm Book.”15 From Stevens, it had passed to Frederickson. Charles Welford noted that the book was “literally crowded with illustrative extracts from Elizabethan authors, additional poems, &c., including the whole of Skelton’s Philip Sparrow, in C. Lamb’s ‘most clerkly’ hand writing.” Elia had described Coleridge ’s writing in the books from his library as done in “no very clerkly hand,” and Welford was alluding to Lamb’s portrait of Coleridge as a book borrower in order to make the contrast with Lamb’s own neat transcription of poems and extracts in the book.16 All told, they added up to about seventeen hundred lines of verse in Lamb’s autograph writing, in addition to his annotations on the text. His marginalia included a sonnet as well as other poems by Drayton that had been left out of the book:

284 e p i l o g u e The Ballad of Dowsabel The Ballad of Agincourt To His Rival To His Coy Love An Ode Written on the Peak A Hymn to His Lady’s Birth-place To Himself and the Harp To the Virginian Voyage To the Worthy Knight and My Noble Friend, Sir Henry Goodere The Sacrifice to Apollo

To his transcription of the sixty-four lines of the last poem on the list above, Lamb added a note to say that he remembered the room in the Devil Tavern, Fleet Street, where Drayton had seen the bust of Apollo, and that “so late as the year 17—, my father spoke some verses of his own composition to a Society for the Benefit of Widows. Apollo then stood over the mantelpiece.”17 But the most impressive marginal undertaking in the book by this afterhours scrivener was his transcription of seven hundred lines, on four folio pages, of John Skelton’s “A Little Book of Philip Sparrow.”18 Skelton’s poem takes the form of a mock funeral mass for a sparrow named Phyllyp—or Phyp, a name derived from the chirping sound of the bird. The speaker is Jane Scrope (or Scroop), a schoolgirl at the Benedictine convent of Carrow Abbey in Norwich, who had adopted the sparrow as a pet. The sparrow having been killed by a cat, she finds herself at mass, unable to concentrate on the liturgy as her mind drifts to the amorous antics of her dead bird. It had a velvet cap, And wold syt upon my lap, And seke after small wormes, And somtyme white bred crommes; And many tymes and ofte Betwene my brestes softe It wolde lye and rest— It was propre and prest. Somtyme he wolde gaspe Whan he sawe a waspe;

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A fly, or a gnat, He wolde flye at that; And prytely he wolde pant Whan he saw an ant; Lord, how he wolde pry After the butterfly! Lorde, how he wolde hop After the gressop! And whan I sayd, “Phyp, Phyp,” Than he wold lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp. Alas, it wyll me so, That Phyllyp is gone me fro!19

Skelton preceded the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets (including those like Edmund Waller and John Cleveland whom we have seen Robert Balmanno buy from Lamb’s library), although Skelton’s spirited and sexualized sparrow, lying between his mistress’s breasts and kissing her on the lips, captures the same irreverent spirit we have seen in their work. It is tempting to think that Lamb transcribed the whole of Skelton’s “Sparrow” as a counter to Michael Drayton’s “Owl,” included in his folio of Drayton’s works. Unlike the sparrow, the owl is a gloomy, nocturnal creature associated with death. Wordsworth alluded to Drayton’s “Owl” in his poem An Evening Walk. An Epistle; in Verse. Addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of England, which Wordsworth had inscribed to Lamb when it was first published by Joseph Johnson in 1793. Beside the line “Heard by the night-calm of the watry plains,” Wordsworth had added a footnote to indicate that he had borrowed the phrase “night-calm”: “ ‘Charming the night-calm with her powerful song.’ A line of one of our older poets.”20 Wordsworth did not name, and may not have remembered, the poet to whom he was alluding, but Lamb in his copy of the poem scribbled next to the note: “The Nightingale among, / That charms the night calm with her powerful song. / Drayton’s Owl.”21 In poetic tradition, the nightingale competes with the owl for the palm of most melancholy bird, but unlike the owl it redeems itself by its musicality, its sad yet beautiful song. Drayton’s owl presides over a chorus of heartbroken, melancholy birds—turtledoves, hens, swallows, herns, kites, cocks, cranes, nightingales, robin redbreasts—who “in the dark groves

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where they made abode, / Sung many a sad and mournful Palinod.”22 Lamb may have thought the merry sparrow deserved a part in the chorus. To be sure, in copying Skelton’s poem into his copy of Drayton’s works, he turned the latter into “the Coryphaeus” of Elian association copies at both auctions—that of James T. Annan’s library and that of Charles W. Frederickson’s—where the chorus of his old English books appealed to admiring audiences across the sea. The Publishers’ Weekly, in announcing the sale of Frederickson’s library in 1897, reminded readers of the “more than a ‘seven-days’ wonder’ ” that those books had caused half a century earlier.23 The media publicity prompted Dewitt Miller, an American bibliomaniac mentioned in our prologue, to set off on the trail of Charles Lamb’s books in America. That same year the Dibdin Club of New York printed, in a limited edition of a hundred copies, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb containing the names of buyers of Lamb’s books at the Frederickson sale. Miller obtained the fifty-eighth imprint and bound it with another recent publication containing updated information about Lamb’s library, William Carew Hazlitt’s The Lambs: Their Lives, Their Friends, and Their Correspondence (1897), which included a chapter on their books. Miller added notes from his own research, including conversations with the bookseller Ernest Dressel North, to the margins and pasted in handwritten letters from Hazlitt and from Robert Clarke (a friend of James T. Annan’s) along with clippings from the Frederickson catalogue and the Publishers’ Weekly.24 He then sent the bound volume to Charles Eliot Norton, asking him to squeeze whatever information he could about Elia’s books into the margins. Norton, declining to take part in such a motley production, replied, “I cannot write all that you ask of me in the margin of your book; but I will send you in the form of a letter the information you desire.”25 It was from Norton that Miller learned the whereabouts of Lamb’s copy of An Evening Walk, for it was in Norton’s library at Shady Hill, bound in a volume that Welford had labeled “Poetical Tracts.” That volume also contained other rare first editions, all presentation copies from friends, which Lamb had itemized inside the front cover in the following order: Charles Lloyd, Poems on Various Subjects (Carlisle: J. Richardson, 1795). Charles Lloyd, Lines Suggested by the Fast, Appointed on Wednesday, February 27, 1799 (Birmingham: E. Piercy, 1799).

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fears in Solitude. Written, April 1798, During the Alarm of an Invasion. To Which Are Added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight (London: Joseph Johnson, 1798). William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, in Verse. Taken During a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps (London: Joseph Johnson, 1793). William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk. An Epistle; in Verse. Addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of England (London: Joseph Johnson, 1793).26

Since the individual pamphlets bound into this volume were of diverse sizes, most of them too large for the octavo-size covers in which they were bound, their pages had been lopped and mangled to fit. Had the old Benedictine monk Richard Aungervyle, the bibliophile of Bury St. Edmunds, risen from his own five-hundred-year slumber to see Charles Lamb compiling this volume, he might have cursed him for his efforts: “There is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving only the text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the protection of the book, for various uses and abuses—a king of sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of anathema.”27 The edges of this book are angled rather than squared, and in some cases so ragged that one can identify exactly where the scissors opened and shut. Despite her dexterity as a seamstress, Mary Lamb has usually been blamed for mutilating her brother’s books, though, as we have seen, it was he who cut out their illustrations. Charles Eliot Norton continued this tradition when he informed Dewitt Miller that the inscription on the title page of Charles Lloyd’s Lines Suggested by the Fast had been snipped in two: “ ‘Charles Lloyd to Charles’ the ‘Lamb’ having been cut off by Mary Lamb’s scissors.” Also noting that An Evening Walk was missing its title page, he assumed it to have fallen prey to “the same scissors.”28 Yet, if (as we presume) it was Charles who cut off the margins with as little mercy as he cut out the illustrations of his books, he seems to have gone about it with all the skill of a schoolboy. At least half a dozen pages of An Evening Walk have left-hand margins trimmed so narrowly that the opening letters of the individual lines of the verse disappear into the binding, and one will look for the line numbers

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printed to the right of those lines in vain. The marauding instrument that went at title pages and margins, shearing off letters and numbers indiscriminately, also cut off page headings, page numbers, and signature letters (used by early bookmakers to compile gatherings of folded paper into a book). At the end of the day, the tracts in this volume resemble victims of the legendary Procrustean bed—guests of the evil Procrustes, who would cut down their limbs, or stretch them on the rack, to fit them into his bed. Lamb’s presence, however, breathes throughout this handmade anthology as a reader actively engaged with the text. He corrected typos, crossed out lines and stanzas, and suggested changes to his friends’ poems. He added dates next to titles in the table of contents of Lloyd’s Poems and wrote the date of publication above the dedication to Robert Jones in Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches. He also cut off catchwords in Coleridge’s two odes. (A catchword is a word that floats in the lower right-hand corner of a page and is repeated as the first word of the text on the next page.) Although this bibliographical feature was again intended to guide bookmakers, it was also helpful for those reading aloud to keep the verse flowing. The flaking leather covers of the book—ironically, given that its pages were clipped to fit them—have since become detached from its spine, and its paper is foxed and stained. Yet to a sentimental collector, such defects only add to the value of a book as a relic. When Charles Eliot Norton informed Dewitt Miller that his volume of “Poetical Tracts” was “cropped close,” one wonders whether he realized that he was addressing a bibliomaniac who was himself a confirmed clipper.29 Clipping was a common reading practice in a world flooded with cheap print, as we have seen, for example, by way of William Evans Burton and his scrapbooks of Shakespeareana. Miller, who “generally read scissors in hand” and who “would clip and clip like an exchange editor,” carried around extra scissors with him as some carried extra pens or pencils. “He had a taste for foldingscissors of a particular make,” one of his fellows on the American lecture circuit recalled, “and always kept a supply of them on hand for the benefit of acquaintances who could appreciate the attention. Every now and then one meets a member of the tribe of vagrant lecturers whom Miller has distinguished by bestowing on him a pair of folding-scissors.” In Miller’s private library, there was “no end of clipping and pasting of the clippings in the back of books.”30 It should therefore come as no surprise that when he received Norton’s letter about the books from Charles Lamb’s library, he immediately

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clipped it up into five pieces and pasted them into the volume he was assembling on Lamb’s books. He also learned from Norton the identity of the “Woodman of Boston” who had purchased four books from Elia’s library from Bartlett & Welford: “a certain Horatio Woodman . . . who was a great lover of good literature and for a time was a figure in the set of Boston literary men; not that he himself contributed to literature but that he was a friend of those who did.”31 Edward Waldo Emerson, the son of the transcendentalist, described him as “a rather slight, alert man with reddish hair and English whiskers.” Woodman was an attorney, and he edited Boston’s Evening Transcript, but that which he considered “the great achievement of his life . . . the thing on which he most prided himself,” was the founding of the Saturday Club in Boston. Woodman “loved the society of men of letters,” but he also had the skill and the means to bring such men together.32 The elder Emerson described him as having the magical touch of an alchemist to reconcile discordant elements: Man of affairs, Harmonizing oddest pairs With a passion to unite Oil and water, if he might. .................... Skilled was he to reconcile Scientific feud, To pacify the injured heart And mollify the rude; And, while genius he respected, Hastes to succor the neglected; And was founder of the Club Most modest in the famous Hub.33

Woodman seems to have provided just the kind of alloy needed in any gathering of egos. By the time Charles Eliot Norton was invited into the club in 1860, membership in it had become a sign of status in the American world of letters.34 The Saturday Club originated in a chance encounter between Woodman and Emerson at the bookstore of an American publisher who has made more than one appearance in this story, James T. Fields. “There are very few persons, who have dwelt any considerable time in Boston, who are not familiar

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with the appearance of the old Corner Store on Washington and School Streets,” observed the Boston antiquarian Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff of the place where “the principal literary spirits of Boston and of the neighboring towns and cities” used to gather.35 The bookseller William Davis Ticknor had hired Fields at the start of his career, and the firm, which occupied the whole building in which the Corner Bookstore was located, had grown into one of the most important publishing houses in the transatlantic world by midcentury. Developing a relationship with the Riverside Press, it would later become the Houghton Mifflin Company. At the back of the store, behind green curtains, Fields spoke with authors, while in a gated office in the opposite corner his partner Ticknor presided over the accounts. “What a crowded, busy shop it was, with the shelves full of books, and piles of books upon the counters and tables, and loiterers tasting them with their eyes, and turning the glossy new pages,” recalled the American essayist George William Curtis, “loiterers at whom you looked curiously, suspecting them to be makers of books as well as readers.”36 Nathaniel Hawthorne would sit in a chair next to Ticknor, “gazing passively on the world surrounding him, from his shadowy hiding place . . . a secluded niche where he could see and yet be out of sight.”37 On the day that Woodman and Emerson met at the store, they walked down School Street for lunch at the Albion Hotel, where the Saturday Club was born, the brainchild of Emerson but the result of Woodman’s enthusiasm. Before long, the club was meeting on the last Saturday of the month at Harvey D. Parker’s hotel on Tremont Street, near the Old Hive. Among the four association copies that Woodman purchased from Lamb’s library at Bartlett & Welford was a volume of poems by Sir John Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea. A Collection of All the Incomparable Peeces (1646).38 Suckling’s “Golden Fragments” were gathered by the publisher Humphrey Moseley after his death and printed as the remains of a poet who stood out as an “Ornament” in an “Age of Paper-prostitutions.”39 Lamb had transcribed an excerpt from a biographical sketch by Suckling’s contemporary John Aubrey describing the poet as “the greatest gallant of his time.” The engraved portrait by William Marshall of the author in a scalloped mantle and lace cuffs was missing from Lamb’s copy of the book, but Lamb noted Aubrey’s claim that whenever Suckling lost money gambling he would buy himself a new outfit and make himself “most glorious apparel.” The poet believed “he had . . . best luck when he was most gallant, & his spirits

epilogue

291

were highest.”40 Given such coxcombry, Suckling might have rejected his own golden fragments could he have seen them two centuries later in the old broken-backed sheepskin octavo that made its way from Elia’s shelves to Woodman’s. Charles W. Frederickson, who obtained his Elian association copies from Charles Lamb’s library through first-generation protagonists like George Templeton Strong and Robert Balmanno, came into possession of Fragmenta Aurea through Horatio Woodman. When Frederickson’s library was sold in 1897, the cousins Frank Howard Dodd and Edward S. Mead purchased the book, as mentioned above. If it is true, as the Dibdin Club of New York reported, that they also acquired Lamb’s copy of Donne’s Poems, we are unable to say how it got from them to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. Their competitors, the Scribner brothers (John Blair Scribner, Charles Scribner II, and Arthur Hawley Scribner), who obtained Lamb’s copy of Chaucer, also acquired his copies of Ben Jonson’s works, of Shakespeare ’s poems, of John Reynolds, and of Philip de Commines (which Harry Bache Smith would buy from them). George Dallas Smith, another well-known bookdealer in New York, purchased Lamb’s copy of Henry More ’s Philosophical Poems. The only purchaser of the high-priced association copies from Charles Lamb’s library at the Frederickson sale who was not a professional bookdealer was our sentimental bibliophile Harry Bache Smith. He proudly placed the winning bid on Elia’s copy of Drayton. Although it did not come cheap, he later estimated that the $250 he paid for “the Coryphaeus” of Lamb’s book collection was only a quarter the price of a single one of its autograph pages in Lamb’s handwriting (and, as we may recall, there were nineteen of them) three decades later.41 In truth, however, such justifications were foreign to the field of sentimental collecting. In 1897, when that book was sold, Ernest Dressel North explained in his column on rare books for the Book Buyer (a periodical published by Charles Scribner’s Sons) that value in the case of such books was often unpredictable: “So many other things enter the question of values, in rare books and autographs, that he would be a foolish man who undertakes to establish a law concerning them.”42 Sentimental collectors typically felt no need to explain their tastes any more than their expenditures. “If a man’s mind can be so uncouthly practical that he can think of asking, ‘Why first editions?’ he is beyond the reach of sentimental argument,” Harry B. Smith

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declared in introducing his Sentimental Library in 1914. “He is one of Dr. Johnson’s ‘prosaic rascals,’ and the wells of poetry and romance are dry within him. Do not tell such a man that a first edition brings you nearer to the author. He will ask, ‘Why nearer to the author?’ and you will be lured into a maze of subtleties.”43 On the morning of Thursday, May 27, 1897, two days after placing his winning bid on Charles Lamb’s copy of Drayton, Harry B. Smith purchased a unique copy of a book that was too radical at the time it was composed in 1813 to be published. Only 250 copies of the book, Queen Mab; a Philosophical Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, had been printed, and those by the author himself. Of them, Shelley had bound seventy copies in book form and distributed them among his friends. Smith purchased the copy that Shelley had inscribed to his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. “You see, Mary, I have not forgotten you,” scribbled the poet in pencil to the sixteenyear-old whose father, William Godwin, had inspired the book but who had subsequently forbidden its author to see his daughter.44 As Smith was leaving the auction house of Bangs & Company with the association copy, an elderly gentleman—a stranger—approached him and asked if he could hold it. Smith pulled the volume Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had considered sacred (and in which she had written her own love poems to Shelley) out of its custom leather case and handed it, in its original cardboard covers, to the old man. “He caressed the volume, looking longingly at it with tears in his eyes.” Such a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion could not help but endear him to the sentimental owner. “Scoff not, O reader of ‘the six best sellers’!” Smith warned in recounting the story. “That old man was a poet, though he had never written a line.”45 That same old man, stopping our protagonist with his skinny hand, holding him transfixed with his glittering eye, and begging to handle his copy of Queen Mab—a book made lyrical by the touch of the quintessential lyric poet—in the end comes to stand for all the protagonists in this story of book collectors in America: all who turned their backs on everything that that glittered in 1848, preferring the fairy dust on old books to gold dust; all who in an age of hardnosed utility challenged the purveyors of useful knowledge with clubs, committees, and societies devoted to the useless; all who dared (and who still dare) to believe that there may be more between the covers of an old book than any “prosaic rascal” might dream of.

Abbreviations AN Berg

CCLL

CD CDC CEN CEN Papers

CL CW DFP

Diary

Andrews Norton The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library for Sale by Bartlett & Welford, Booksellers and Importers, 7 Astor House, New York (New York, 1848). The New York Public Library contains one unmarked, and three “priced” and “named” copies (containing names of buyers and prices paid for the books). Copy 1 (Berg) has an extra autograph page labeled “Prices & Purchasers’ Names of Sixty Volumes of Books which belonged to Charles Lamb of London sold in New York at Private Sale by Bartlett & Welford,” attributed to Charles Welford Charles Deane Charles Deane Correspondence, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Charles Eliot Norton Charles Eliot Norton, Miscellaneous Papers, 1825–1923, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Charles Lamb Charles Welford Duyckinck Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols., vol. 1: 1835–1843 (New York: Macmillan, 1952) 293

294 a b b r e v i a t i o n s DM

EAD EM FSL GFP GL GLD GT GTS HCR HHR HS IB

JGC JRB JRB Papers KJV LCML

LE

LJGC

Dewitt Miller, bound volume containing William Carew Hazlitt, The Lambs: Their Lives, Their Friends, and Their Correspondence (London: Elkin Mathews, 1897); A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, No. 58 of 100 (New York: Dibdin Club, 1897); letters from William C. Hazlitt and CEN; catalogue and newspaper clippings; and autograph marginalia, Felton Collection, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California Evert Augustus Duyckinck Edward Moxon Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. George Folsom Papers, New-York Historical Society George Livermore George Long Duyckinck George Ticknor George Templeton Strong Henry Crabb Robinson Henry Hope Reed Henry Stevens The Industrial Book: 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, vol. 3 of A History of the Book in America, 5 vols., ed. David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the American Antiquarian Society, 2007) Joseph Green Cogswell John Russell Bartlett John Russell Bartlett Papers, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island The Holy Bible, King James Version The Letters of Charles Lamb to Which Are Added Those of His Sister Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas., 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935) Mary Cowden Clarke. Letters to an Enthusiast: Being a Series of Letters Addressed to Robert Balmanno, Esq., of New York, 1850–1861, ed. Anne Upton Nettleton (Chicago: McClurg, 1902) Joseph Green Cogswell, Life of Joseph Green Cogswell, as Sketched in His Letters, ed. Anna Eliot Ticknor (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1874)

abbreviations

MB ML MCC RB RS STC TCC TCCC

TFDC WAJ WCH WCML WEB WW

295

Mary Balmanno Mary Lamb Mary Cowden Clarke Robert Balmanno The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 6th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) Samuel Taylor Coleridge Thomas Crofton Croker Thomas Crofton Croker Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Thomas Francis Dillon Croker William Alfred Jones William C. Hall The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 6 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903) William Evans Burton William Wordsworth

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Notes Prologue Epigraph: Wallace Nethery, “Midnight Darlings on Broadway,” The American Book Collector 10:9 (May 1960): 3–6 (3). 1. Studies of CL’s library include William C. Hazlitt, “Lamb’s Library,” in The Lambs: Their Lives, Their Friends, and Their Correspondence (New York: Scribner’s, 1897), 61–67; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb (New York: Dibdin Club, 1897); Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library (New York: Dodd, Mead, [1897]); “Charles Lamb’s Library in New York,” The Publishers’ Weekly (May 15, 1897), 817–820; E. V. Lucas, “Charles Lamb’s Books,” in The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1905), 2:304–326; Gerald D. McDonald, “Charles Lamb as a Collector,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 38:9 (September 1934): 707–712; Jeremiah S. Finch, “The Scribner Lamb Collection,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 7:4 (June 1946): 133–148; Charles R. Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library,” Harvard Library Bulletin 10:2 (Spring 1956): 208–239, and 10:3 (Autumn 1956): 367–401; Nethery, “Midnight Darlings on Broadway”; Peter A. Brier, “Charles Lamb in the Huntington Library (1796–1833),” The Wordsworth Circle 3:2 (Spring 1972): 123–146; Barbara Rosenbaum, “Lamb’s Library,” The Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 4, pt. 2 (London: Mansell, 1990): 665–730; and Joseph Rosenblum, “Lost Lambs; or, The Dispersal of Charles Lamb’s Library: An Essay in Reconstruction,” The Charles Lamb Bulletin 86 (1994): 47–55. 2. HCR, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1938), 1:301. 3. Thomas Westwood, “Recollections of Lamb and His Friends,” Notes and Queries 171 (July 11, 1936): 22–24 (22); EAD to GLD, February 9, 1848, DFP. 297

298 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 – 9 4. See William Makepeace Thackeray, Interviews and Recollections, ed. Philip Collins, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1983), 1:32. 5. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:172. 6. CL to Bernard Barton, September 11, 1822, LCML, 2:332. Cf. WCML, 5:55. 7. CL to STC, November 4, 1802, LCML, 1:328. 8. William Hazlitt, “On Reading Old Books,” The London Magazine 3:14 (February 1821): 128–134 (129–130). Hazlitt’s “On Reading New Books” (emphasis mine), which later appeared in the Monthly Magazine; or British Register of Literature, Sciences & the Belles Lettres 3:19 (July 1827): 17–25, may be considered a sequel. The seminal account of the cognitive theory of association is John Locke ’s “The Association of Ideas,” book 2, chap. 33, of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). “Y.,” “Old Books,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 2 (1821): 117–120 (117). 9. “Borrowing, bartering, gifting, or selling a book,” as Leon Jackson claims of American culture at the time our story is set, “created webs of connection that were no less important a part of a transaction than any money that might have changed hands.” For Jackson, these webs are “embedded economies” that became “progressively, although unevenly, disembedded” in nineteenthcentury America as the business model came to dominate; see The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2, 235. 10. John Hill Burton, The Book-Hunter, Etc., rev. ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1882), 248. For more on this, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Henry Whitney Bellows quoted in Walter Donald Kring, Henry Whitney Bellows (Boston: Skinner House, 1979), 78. 12. CEN, autograph note dated “Shady Hill, 30 Dec. 1902” with clipping of Saturday Evening Traveller dated March 18, 1848, CEN Papers (HO bMS Am 1088.5). 13. EAD to GLD, March 18, 1848, DFP. 14. HHR to EAD, February 15, 1848, DFP. 15. Harry Bache Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” The Colophon: A Quarterly for Book Lovers 1:3 (1930): [1–8 (2)]. 16. On the bibliomania, see Ina Ferris, “Book Fancy: Bibliomania and the Literary World,” The Keats-Shelley Journal 58 (2009): 33–52; Bernhard Metz, “Bibliomania and the Folly of Reading,” Comparative Critical Studies 5:2–3 (2008): 249–269; Arnold Hunt, “Private Libraries in the Age of Bibliomania,” in The

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Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2: 1640–1850, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 438–458; Deidre Lynch, “ ‘Wedded to Books’: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists,” in Romantic Libraries, ed. Ina Ferris, Romantic Circles Praxis 25 (October 2004), https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/libraries/ index.html, and Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,” Representations 71 (2000): 24–47. Related studies of book culture include Ina Ferris, Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature, Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 2 vols. (London: John Major, 1836), 1:444. Dibdin does not mention the York-Street house featured in the second volume of Sotheby’s library sale catalogue: Bibliotheca Heberiana: Catalogue of the Library of the Late Richard Heber, Esq.; Part the Second, Removed from His Houses in York-Street and at Pimlico; Which Will Be Sold by Auction . . . June 5, and Twenty-Four Following Days . . . 1834 (London: Sotheby & Son, 1834). 18. Richard Heber quoted in Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1859), 2:136. 19. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron; or, Ten Days Pleasant Discourse upon Illuminated Manuscripts, and Subjects Connected with Early Engraving, Typography, and Bibliography, 3 vols. (London: W. Bulmer, 1817), 3:64. 20. David Pearson, “Private Libraries and the Collecting Instinct,” The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 3: 1850–2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 180–202 (184). 21. Mercurius Rusticus [Thomas Frognall Dibdin], Bibliophobia: Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade. In a Letter Addressed to the Author of the Bibliomania (London: H. Bohn, 1832).

300 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 – 1 2 22. HS, Bibliotheca Historica; or, A Catalogue of Five Thousand Volumes of Books and Manuscripts Relating Chiefly to the History and Literature of North and South America (Cambridge: Riverside, 1870), xi. 23. “J.H.,” “Books,” in The Table Book, 2 vols. (London: printed for William Hone by Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1827–1828), 1:217–219 (217). Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), x. 24. Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 20. 25. Walter Pater, Appreciations; with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 121. 26. Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.134 (RS); Percy [Hetherington] Fitzgerald, The Book Fancier; or, The Romance of Book Collecting (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1886), 89. 27. Charles E. Goodspeed, Yankee Bookseller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1937), 93. 28. Harold Bloom elaborates on this concept in The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). The title of his book, it should be noted, cleverly reappropriates that of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), long a favorite with bibliomaniacs. Holbrook Jackson describes Burton’s Anatomy as the Grand Marshall of the “Pageant of Books for Bookmen” (of which his own book takes part) in The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 2 vols. (London: Soncino, 1930–1931), 1:2.

Chapter 1.  Bookmen Across the Atlantic Epigraph: Luther S. Livingston, “An Appreciation,” in Harry B. Smith, A Sentimental Library: Comprising Books Formerly Owned by Famous Writers, Presentation Copies, Manuscripts, and Drawings (New York, 1914), xvii–xxvi (xvii). 1. In 1848, 182,176 immigrants arrived at the Port of New York; in 1853, the number had risen to 284,945; see Samuel Osgood, New York in the Nineteenth Century: A Discourse Delivered Before the New York Historical Society, on Its Sixty-Second Anniversary, November 20, 1866 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1867), 102. 2. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to his mother (Jane Clemens), August 31, 1853, in M. M. Brashear, “An Early Mark Twain Letter,” Modern Language Notes 44:4 (April 1929): 256–259 (257–258).

n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 – 1 8

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3. Philip Hone, April 27, 1846, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936), 761. 4. Twain quoted in Brashear, “An Early Mark Twain Letter,” 258. 5. James Carson Brevoort, quoted in John Duncan Haskell, Jr., “John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886): Bookman” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1977), 61. 6. JRB, Autobiography of John Russell Bartlett, 1805–1886, ed. Jerry E. Mueller (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 2006), 24. 7. Mary Anne L. Welford to Ralph Waldo Emerson, June 19, 1849, Houghton Library (HO B Ms AM 1289), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 8. [EAD and GLD], Cyclopædia of American Literature; Embracing Personal and Critical Notices of Authors, and Selections from Their Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1855), 2:418. 9. JRB, Autobiography, 41. 10. Prospectus for Providence Franklin Society, Manuscripts Division, Rhode Island Historical Society (MSS 162), Providence. 11. John Russell to JRB, June 10, 1837, JRB Papers. 12. WCH to JRB, June 14, 1839, JRB Papers. 13. WCH to JRB, December 18, 1838, JRB Papers. 14. WW to Dora Quillinan, [November 1841], The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 3:1095. 15. WW to EM, January 18, 1842, Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 3:1111. 16. WCH to JRB, June 14, 1839, JRB Papers. 17. GTS, March 15, 1839, Diary, 100. 18. WCH to JRB, December 18, 1848, JRB Papers. 19. JRB, Autobiography, 41. 20. “Literary and Art Notes,” Kansas City Times (June 1, 1885), 3. 21. “Literary Gossip,” The Athenæum: Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Music, and the Drama 3004 (May 23, 1885): 663–664 (664). 22. GTS, March 8, 1836, Diary, 12. 23. Michael Winship, “Distribution and the Trade,” in IB, 117–129 (128). 24. Edward Marston, After Work: Fragments from the Workshop of an Old Publisher (London: Heinemann, 1904), 82–83. 25. GTS, March 30, 1836, Diary, 12, 14. 26. “Literary Gossip,” 664. 27. WCH to JRB, November 5, 1838, and January 28, 1839, JRB Papers.

302 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 – 2 2 2 8. Daniel Appleton quoted in WCH to JRB, June 14, 1839, JRB Papers. 29. WCH to JRB, November 5, 1838, JRB Papers. 30. WCH to JRB, December 26, 1838, JRB Papers. 31. Roger Burlingame, Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing and Publishing (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 164, 162. 32. Arthur D. Howden Smith, John Jacob Astor: Landlord of New York (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1927), 275–277. 33. Various advertisements: New-York Commercial Advertiser (April 2 and 5, 1842), [1, 3]; Daily National Intelligencer (January 1, 4, and 12, 1842), [1, 4, 1]; Evening Post (January 19, 1842), 3. 34. Bartlett & Welford mention their “commodious Reading Room” in their first sale catalogue: Catalogue of a Select Collection of Rare and Curious Old Books . . . from the Libraries of Distinguished Collectors Lately Disposed of in London, Now for Sale . . . for Cash by Bartlett & Welford, Booksellers and Importers, at Their Antiquarian Bookstore and Repository for Standard Literature, Ancient and Modern, No. 2, Astor House, Broadway (New York: printed by Robert Craighead, 1840), JRB Papers. 35. “An Older Book,” New-York Commercial Advertiser (September 26, 1840), 2; “From our New York Correspondent,” National Intelligencer (October 20, 1843), 3. 36. TCC to RB, October 13, 1848, TCCC. The book was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Observations Respecting the Grave Creek Mound in Western Virginia: The Antique Inscription Discovered in Its Excavation and the Connected Evidences of the Occupancy of the Mississippi Valley During the Mound Period and Prior to the Discovery of America by Columbus (New York: Bartlett & Welford, 1845). 37. WCH to JRB, June 14, 1839, JRB Papers; Hone, June 3, 1840, Diary, 483. 38. JGC to EAD, January 26, 1849, LJGC, 247; on the First Folio, “Letters from New York,” New Hampshire Gazette and Republican Union (November 16, 1847), 1. 39. CL to Charles Lloyd, March 10, 1810, LCML, 2:95. 4 0. Hone, June 3, 1840, Diary, 483. 41. [EAD], “The Loiterer,” Arcturus: A Journal of Books and Opinion 2:11 (October 1841): 319–328 (324). 42. CL to STC, [September 27, 1796], quoted in Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: Consisting Chiefly of His Letters Not Before Published, with Sketches of Some of His Companions, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd, 2 vols. (London: Moxon, 1848), 1:51–52; also in LCML, 1:39.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 2 – 2 6

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43. Coroner’s report in Morning Chronicle quoted in Talfourd, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, 50. Talfourd mistakenly attributes the report published September 26, 1796, to The Times, but it did not appear there; Lucas reprints it in LCML, 1:40. 44. STC to CL, [September 28, 1796], quoted in LCML, 1:41. 45. CL to STC, May 27, 1796, LCML, 1:2. 46. CL to STC, October 3, 1796, and CL to William Hone, December 15, 1827, LCML, 1:42, 3:145. On the visit to Dr. Pitcairn, see the Morning Chronicle report, LCML, 1:40. 47. “A Secret in Charles Lamb’s Life,” Daily Evening Transcript (June 16, 1848), Alexandria Gazette (June 23, 1848), Connecticut Courant (July 1, 1848), Pensacola Gazette (July 15, 1848), and Salem Observer (August 5, 1848), among others. The British Quarterly Review named Talfourd’s edition of CL’s literary remains (Final Memorials) in a manner more descriptive than accurate: “Art. II: Review of The Works of Charles Lamb, Including His Life and Letters, Collected into One Volume,” British Quarterly Review 7 (May 1, 1848): 292–311. 48. EAD to WAJ, May 30, 1848, DFP. 49. CL to STC, September 27, 1796, LCML, 1:39; [STC], “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison: A Poem, Addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India-House, London,” The Annual Anthology 2 (1800): 140–144 (142). The anthology, edited by Robert Southey, did not continue past this number. 50. WW, “Written After the Death of Charles Lamb,” ll. 28–29, 5–6, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, rev. ed., 6 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1850), 5:141–142. 51. CL to STC, October 17, 1796, LCML 1:47 (ML quoted herein). 52. CL to STC, October 3, 1796 (on the “day of horrors”), and September 27, 1796, LCML, 1:43, 1:39–40. 53. For the latter, see Poems by S.T. Coleridge, Second Edition. To Which Are Added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (Bristol: J. Cottle, 1797), 215. 54. CL to STC, August 14, 1800, LCML, 1:203. 55. CL to STC, September 27, 1796, LCML, 1:39–40 (“that” corrected to “than”); Revelation 21:4 (KJV). 56. CL to STC, May 12, 1800, LCML, 1:188; Genesis 4:12, 15 (KJV). 57. HCR, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1938), 2:455. 58. The phrase “double singleness” is from CL, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” WCML, 2:75. List compiled by Claude A. Prance, Companion to

304 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 6 – 3 2 Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760–1847 (London: Mansell, 1983), 155. 59. Lucas, LCML, 3:423n. 60. Barry Cornwall [Bryan Waller Procter], Charles Lamb: A Memoir (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1866), 52. 61. CL, “The South Sea House,” WCML, 2:2. 62. CL, “Oxford in the Vacation,” WCML, 2:7–8. 63. CL to Bernard Barton, September 2, 1823, LCML, 2:394. 64. T[homas] W[estwood], “Recollections of Charles Lamb,” Notes and Queries 3:10 (September 22, 1866): 221–222 (221). 65. CL, “To Emma on Her Twenty-First Birthday,” l. 8, in Emma Isola Moxon, Autograph Album, Houghton Library (MS Eng. 601.66), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 66. CL to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, [undated, probably January 18, 1830], LCML, 3:239. 67. CL to James Gillman, November 30, 1829, LCML, 3:237. 68. CL to STC, October 11, 1802, LCML, 1:322–323. 69. CL, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” WCML, 2:75. 70. CL, “New Year’s Eve,” WCML, 2:27. 71. Westwood, “Recollections of Charles Lamb,” 221. 72. CL to Bernard Barton, December 4, 1827, LCML, 3:144. 73. Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, The Book Fancier; or, The Romance of Book Collecting (London: Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886), 89. 74. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:174. 75. Westwood, “Recollections of Charles Lamb,” 221. 76. William Carew Hazlitt, The Book Collector (London: John Grant, 1904), 15. 77. CL, “Old China” and “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:249, 2:174. 78. CL, “Old China,” WCML, 2:249. 79. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, “Multiple Associations: An Interview with Jay Fliegelman,” Imprint 24:2 (Spring 2006): 17–31 (28). 80. Sianne Ngai, “Merely Interesting,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 777–817 (786). 81. William Hazlitt, “On Criticism,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1930), 8:225. 82. CL, “Witches, and other Night-Fears,” WCML, 2:68. See CL, “The Superannuated Man,” WCML, 2:193–199. 83. CL to Thomas Hood, [September 18, 1827], LCML, 3:131.

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  84. CL to EM, September 7, 1827, quoted in Charles R. Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library [Part II],” Harvard Library Bulletin 10:3 (Autumn 1956): 367–401 (388).   85. EM, The Prospect, and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826), vi.   86. CL, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” WCML, 2:75.   87. Thomas Westwood quoted in Edward Verrall Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1906), 2:190.   88. Entries for “New Bond Street,” Michael Winton, Pigot & Co.’s National Commercial Directory, 1839 (King’s Lynn: Michael Winton, 1993), xxv–153.   89. For more on the House of Ellis, see George Smith and Frank Benger, The Oldest London Bookshop: A History of Two Hundred Years (London: Ellis, 1928).   90. 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, Naomi Tadmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175–201 (178).   91. CL, Album Verses, with a Few Others (London: Edward Moxon, 1830), iii–iv.   92. CL, “What Is an Album?” WCML, 5:92 (ellipsis mine).   93. CL to Bernard Barton, December 4, 1827, LCML, 3:144 (“coxcombess” corrected to “coxcombs” and the exclamation mark added).   94. CL, “Lines for an Album” included in CL to William Hone, September 2, [1827], LCML, 3:125.   95. CL to Rev. [Daniel] Cresswell, [undated, probably spring or summer 1831], LCML, 3:312. The wife of Cresswell, Vicar of Enfield, was a friend of Sarah Thomas. CL, “Cheap Gifts: A Sonnet,” was later printed in Athenæum 329 (February 15, 1834): 124.   96. CL to Cresswell, [undated], LCML, 3:312 (acrostic included).   97. “Review of Album Verses, with a Few Others by Charles Lamb,” Monthly Review (August 1830): 529–535 (530).   98. “Review of Album Verses,” 529–530. Attacks by John Gibson Lockhart and his associates in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine on the “Cockney School” of poets and prose writers appeared from October 1817 through August 1818.   99. CL to Bernard Barton, August 30, 1830, LCML, 3:288. 100. [CL], “The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne,” Englishman’s Magazine (September 1831): 60–63 (62). 101. CL to EM, August 1831, LCML, 3:319.

306 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 6 – 3 9 1 02. CL to WW, April 7, 1815; LCML, 2:154. 103. [CL], “The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne,” 60, 63. On Cowper and Bourne, see John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, editorial note in The Poems of William Cowper, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 3:373; also 219–238 (for Cowper’s English translations) and 373–384 (for Bourne ’s formerly unpublished Latin originals). CL claims that Cowper made four translations, and though the number was closer to twenty, it is immaterial here. 104. [William Jerdan], Review of Album Verses, with a Few Others, The Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 703 (July 10, 1830): 441–442 (442). 105. [Robert Southey], “To Charles Lamb: On the Reviewal of His ‘Album Verses’ in the Literary Gazette,” LCML, 3:289. 106. Leigh Hunt, “Inquests Extraordinary,” The Tatler: A Daily Paper of Literature, Fine Arts, Music, and the Stage (September 4, 1830), 3–4 (4). 107. CL to Bernard Barton, August 30, 1830, LCML, 3:288. 108. Robert Southey to EM, May 31, 1830, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 4:184. 109. WW to Henry Taylor, March 31, 1843, Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 3:1155. 110. Leigh Hunt, “Charles Lamb,” Leigh Hunt’s London Journal 2:47 (1835): 50–51 (50) (opening parenthesis moved from before “and”). Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley edited the first complete edition of her husband’s poems: The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1839). 111. [CL], Review of Sonnets by Edward Moxon, Athenæum 285 (April 13, 1833): 229. 112. Leigh Hunt, “Mr. Moxon’s Publications,” Tatler (June 4, 1831), 937–938 (937). 113. CL to Bernard Barton, [mid-September 1827], and CL to Leigh Hunt [December 11, 1827], LCML, 3:127, 3:144–145. 114. CL to Thomas Hood, Spring 1827, LCML, 3:81. 115. CL to EM, July 24, 1833, LCML, 3:378. 116. ML to EM and Emma Moxon, July 30, 1833, WCML, 3:380. 117. ML to Sarah Stoddart, [early November 1805], LCML, 1:407 (“confort” corrected). ML is doubtless using CL’s pronunciation of “boil” as “bile,” for on September 28, 1805, CL wrote to WW of “Gum Boil and Tooth Ache”: LCML 1:401.

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1 18. CL to EM, [October 1, 1827], LCML, 3:135. 119. CL to Thomas Manning, May 10, 1834, LCML, 3:409. 120. CL to Bernard Barton, September 2, 1832, LCML, 2:395. 121. CL to Barton, September 2, 1832, LCML, 2:395; on not liking clergymen: CL to Mary Shelley, [October 14, 1827], LCML, 3:143. 122. CL to Mrs. George Dyer, December 22, 1834, LCML, 3:422. 123. Henry Francis Cary, “Lines to the Memory of Charles Lamb,” LCML, 3:422n. 124. For WW’s “Essays upon Epitaphs,” see The Prose Works of William Words­ worth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2:45–100. 125. I am grateful to the Rev. Stuart Owen, Vicar, All Saints’ Church, Edmonton, for a photograph of the CL memorial plaque inside the church. 126. EM, “Sonnet XII,” Sonnets, 2nd ed. (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1837), 52. 127. Benjamin Ellis Martin, In the Footprints of Charles Lamb (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), 139. The epitaph is quoted from CL’s tombstone in the churchyard of All Saints’ Church, Edmonton, and also in Henry Cary, Memoir of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, M.A., Translator of Dante; With His Literary Journals and Letters, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1847), 2:279–280. 128. ML to Jane Norris, December 25, [1841], LCML, 3:423. 129. HCR, January 12, 1835, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 2:455 (ML quoted herein). 130. “Our Weekly Gossip,” Athenæum 1068 (April 15, 1848): 391. 131. HCR, April 2, 1848, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 2:675. 132. We return to this idea by way of Henry Stevens, Jr., in Chapter 5. 133. WCH to JRB, July 1839, JRB Papers. 134. The number of Richard Charles Jackson’s “Relics” is unclear, but that there were at least 133 is suggested by the bookplate in his copy of Launcelot Sturgeon, Essays, Moral, Philosophical, and Stomachical, on the Important Science of Good-Living (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823), identifying the book as no. 133 of the “Relics of Charles Lamb,” Rare Books and Manuscripts (TX635.S93 1823), Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park. 135. Freedom Admissions Papers, 1681–1930, London Metropolitan Archives, Ref. COL/CHD/FR/02/0027–0033. 136. G. E. Bentley, Jr., “Richard C. Jackson, Collector of Treasures and Wishes: Walter Pater, Charles Lamb, William Blake,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly

308 n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 3 – 4 8 36:3 (Winter 2002–2003): 92–105 (94). The original sale catalogue for Jackson’s library, Important Sale of Antique Furniture [. . .] 185 Camberwell Grove, Denmark Hill (London: Goddard & Smith, 1923), is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 137. “An Eccentric Recluse—Mr Jackson and Walter Pater,” Times (July 30, 1923), 8. 138. “From our New York Correspondent,” 3 (spelling of “visiters” updated). 139. CW to Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, February 3, 1844 (quoting Lord Byron’s “Heaven and Earth”), Frances Sargent Locke Osgood Papers, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 140. CW to EAD, January 3, 1844, DFP. 141. CW’s departure from New York is recorded in “Shipping News,” Evening Post (April 6, 1846), 3. 142. Headnote to “The Diary of Henry Stevens,” Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society 2:3 (1931): 115–128 (128). 143. HS, Bibliotheca Historica; or, A Catalogue of 5000 Volumes of Books and Manuscripts Relating Chiefly to the History and Literature of North and South America Among Which Is Included the Larger Proportion of the Extraordinary Library of the Late Henry Stevens Senior of Burnet Vt, &c. (Boston: H.O. Houghton, 1870), viii. 144. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting: A Study of Recent Developments in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 121. 145. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox of New York (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 16–17. 146. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 15, 17. 147. Wyman W. Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont: American Rare Book Dealer in London, 1845–1886 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1963), 91 (HS quoted), 94. 148. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 45, 33. 149. Anthony Panizzi quoted in Richard Garnett, “The Late Henry Stevens, F.S.A.,” in Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London: George Allen, 1899), 325–333 (329). On Panizzi’s expansion efforts, see P. R. Harris, “The First Century of the British Museum Library,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, 3 vols., vol. 2: 1640–1850, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 405–421. 150. HS quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 91. 151. CW to JRB, May 8, 1846, JRB Papers; JRB quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 53.

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1 52. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 15. 153. CW to JRB, July 3, 1846, JRB Papers. 154. “Infernal Attempts to Burn Down Three of the Largest Hotels in This City,” reprinted from the New York Daily Globe in the Pittsfield Sun (April 9, 1846), 1. 155. CW to JRB, July 3, 1846, JRB Papers. 156. CW to JRB, July 18, 1846, JRB Papers. 157. JRB note written on CW to JRB, August 3, 1846, JRB Papers. 158. “Mr. Welford” sailed on the Cambria: “Shipping News,” New-York Commercial Advertiser (September 2, 1847), 1. 159. MCC to RB, July 12, 1852, LE, 149. 160. Annie Adams Fields, James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches with Unpublished Fragments and Tributes from Men and Women of Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881), 272. 161. James T. Fields, August 23, 1847, Diary, Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852– 1912 (P281, Microfiche Roll 3), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 162. James T. Fields quoted in Mrs. James T. [Annie Adams] Fields, A Shelf of Old Books (New York: Scribner’s, 1894), 184–186n. 163. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2:317, 319. 164. Fields, A Shelf of Old Books, 184. Cf. James T. Fields, August 23, 1847, Diary, Annie Adams Fields Papers. 165. Theodore F[relinghuysen]. Dwight, “Autographomania,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 3:4 (October 1869): 342–349 (342–343). 166. James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, 11th ed. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875), 255. 167. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2:305. 168. Percy [Hetherington] Fitzgerald, Charles Lamb: His Friends, His Haunts, and His Books (London: Richard Bentley, 1866), 84; CL to Thomas Manning, February 26, 1808, LCML, 2:49. 169. HCR, April 27, 1848, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 1:9. 170. Fitzgerald, Charles Lamb, 84. 171. Mathew Carey’s sons, Henry Charles and Edward, together with their brother-in-law Isaac Lea, published the first American edition of Elia, a reprint of Elia: Essays Which Have Appeared Under That Signature in the London Magazine (London: Taylor & Hessey, 1823) in 1828. It sold quickly, and a few months later the publishers issued a second volume of essays by Elia, which preceded Edward Moxon’s edition of The Last Essays of Elia by five years and mistakenly contained some Elian imitations.

310 n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 2 – 5 5 172. Joseph E. Riehl, The Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998), 24. 173. Herman Melville to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., May 1, 1850, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell Davis and William Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 107–108. I have hazarded the substitution of “glacial” for “galvanic,” which does not make sense in this context. 174. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., to EM, January 31, 1842, autograph letter, James Pepper Rare Books, Santa Barbara, California, Biblio.com (Bookseller Inventory #12588J), https://www.biblio.com/book/autograph-lettersigned-richard-henry-dana/d/49193472. 175. Fitzgerald, Charles Lamb, 85. 176. Charles Dickens to Henry Austen, May 1, 1842, The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1820–1870, vol. 3: The Letters, 1842–1843, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 230. 177. HCR, April 27, 1848, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 2:675. 178. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2:305. 179. Harold Guy Merriam, Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 74. 180. EM and Thomas Noon Talfourd quoted in HCR, April 27, 1848, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 2:675. 181. CL, “New Year’s Eve,” WCML, 2:29. 182. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 2:305 (Westwood quoted herein). 183. “Literary Gossip,” Athenæum 1064 (March 18, 1848): 204–295 (295). 184. CL to Thomas Manning, November 28, 1800, LCML, 1:224. 185. Bartlett & Welford received at least one telegraph order from London: JRB to CEN, February 12, 1848, on the inside front cover of Poetical Tracts (CCLL, no. 37), Houghton Library (EC8.C6795.798f ), Cambridge, Massachusetts. On “The Londoner,” see CL to Thomas Manning, February 15, 1802, LCML, 1:305. The first (and last) number of an intended essay series by “the Londoner” appeared in the Morning Post on February 1, 1802. 186. “Gleanings from the Mails,” North American and United States Gazette (February 11, 1848): 1. 187. “Lamb’s Library,” Daily Evening Transcript (February 1, 1848), 2. 188. “Charles Lamb’s Library in New York,” Salem Observer (February 12, 1848), 2. 189. EAD to GLD, February 11, 1848, DFP. 190. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Library in New York,” The Literary World: A Journal of Foreign and American Literature, Science, and Art 3 (February 5, 1848): 10–11 (10).

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1 91. EAD to GLD, February 4, 1848, DFP. 192. “Elia,” reprinted from the New York Journal of Commerce in the Richmond Whig (September 8, 1848), 1. 193. [Lewis Gaylord Clark], “Old Books: Lamb’s Library,” The Knickerbocker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine 31:3 (March 1848): 263–268 (268, 264), quoting Charles Fenno Hoffman, “Ollapodiana,” Knickerbocker 5:3 (March 1835), 235–241 (236). 194. [Clark], “Old Books,” 236; [CW], headnote, CCLL, 1. 195. Edwin Percy Whipple quoted in Fields, James T. Fields, 15. 196. Catalogue of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: printed by Ephraim Morgan, [1855]), xvii. 197. Supplementary Catalogue of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library in Cincinnati (Cincinnati: The Association, 1848), alphabetical listings. 198. Catalogue of the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association, cover, xxviii. 199. William Bebb, Cincinnati: Her Position, Duty, and Destiny: An Address Before the Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association, of Cincinnati, in Celebration of Its Thirteenth Anniversary, April 18, 1848 (Cincinnati: Young Men’s Mercantile Library Association, 1848), 28. 200. James T. Annan to Joseph C. Butler, D. M. Corwine, and James Lupton, letter dated April 25, 1848, in Bebb, Cincinnati, [4]. 201. Robert Clarke to Dewitt Miller, May 7, 1897 (on letterhead), DM. 202. “Gift to Cincinnati University: Robert Clarke’s Library Presented to It by William A. Procter,” New York Times (November 26, 1898): 2. For more on Clarke, see Charles H. McMullen, “The Publishing Activities of Robert Clarke & Co, of Cincinnati, 1858–1909,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 34:4 (1940): 315–326; and E. O. Randall, “Robert Clarke, 1829–1899,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 8:4 (1900): 488. 203. Clarke to Miller, May 7, 1897, DM. 204. [RB], autograph “Note by Mr. Balmanno,” CCLL (copy 1), 4; Berg. Gerald D. McDonald deciphers the note in “Lamb as a Collector,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 38:9 (September 1934): 707–712 (708). 205. JRB to CEN, February 12, 1848, lists the books; Poetical Tracts (EC8. C6795.798f ), Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 206. Robinson & Jones Cincinnati Directory for 1846 (Cincinnati: Robinson & Jones, 1846), 79; James T. Annan quoted in Case no. 1,076, “[R. M.] Bartlett v. [A. F.] Crittenden et al.,” November Term, 1849, Circuit Court, D. Ohio. 207. George L. McKay, American Book Auction Catalogues, 1713–1934; A Union List (New York: New York Public Library, 1937), 81.

312 n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 0 – 6 5 208. Harry Vane, “A Book-Auction in Gotham,” Knickerbocker 32 (November 1848): 529–534 (529). It is unclear whether this was a pseudonym. 209. [Cooley, Keese & Hill partnership announcement], New-York Commercial Advertiser (May 14, 18467), 3; “A Strong Firm,” True Sun (May 15, 1846), 2. 210. “Wit in the Auction Room,” Daily Evening Transcript (February 11, 1848), 2; Vane, “A Book-Auction in Gotham,” 530. 211. Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting, 131. 212. Giles Mandelbrote, “The Organization of Book Auctions in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in Under the Hammer: Book Auctions Since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001), 15–36 (31). 213. JGC to EAD, January 26, 1849, LJGC, 246. 214. Leavitt, Trow & Company, Catalogue of a Private Library, Embracing a Large Collection of Rare and Valuable Works . . . To Be Sold by Cooley, Keese & Hill, at Their Auction Sales Room, 191 Broadway, Corner of Dey-Street, on Friday and Saturday Evenings Oct. 20th and 21st (New York: Leavitt, Trow & Co., 1848), cover. 215. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction,” Literary World 3:40 (November 4, 1848): 1. Sometimes attributed to GLD, probably following A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb (New York: Dibdin Club, 1997), 12, though the latter work, privately compiled and printed in a limited edition of 100 copies, contains errors. Internal evidence suggests the hand of EAD. 216. HCR, December 11, 1814, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books, 1:156. 217. The other “Old Plays” were John Galt’s three-act tragedy The Witness (1814); Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler (written 1794, published 1817); and Thomas Arne ’s opera Artaxerxes (1813). The volume is in the Robert H. Taylor Collection (RHT 19th-305), Princeton University Library. 218. Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies: Notes on His Life and Works in Seventeen Chapters (New York: Haskell, 1971), 87. 219. [Robert Hunt], “Fine Arts,” The Examiner (September 17, 1809), 605. 220. CL to Bernard Barton, May 15, 1824, LCML, 2:425. 221. CL to William Harrison Ainsworth, December 9, 1823, LCML, 2:411. 222. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction.” 223. Vane, “A Book-Auction in Gotham,” 534. CL’s copy of Chaucer was not the most expensive book from his library sold on October 21, 1848; his copy of Michael Drayton’s Works topped it at $28. The other books ranged between $1.75 and $10.50, according to handwritten notes in the copy of Leavitt, Trow & Company, Catalogue of a Private Library in the American

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Antiquarian Society’s Book Auction Catalogue Collection. Joseph Rosenblum, “Lost Lambs; or, The Dispersal of Charles Lamb’s Library: An Essay in Reconstruction,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 86 (1994): 47–55, also discusses pricing. Later, at the auction of Charles W. Frederickson’s library in 1897, Bangs & Company sold the Chaucer for $340 and the Drayton for $250; Harry B. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” Colophon 1:3 (1930): [3–4]. 224. Holbrook Jackson, “Bookmen,” in Occasions: A Volume of Essays on Such Divers Themes as Laughter and Cathedrals, Town and Profanity, Gardens and Bibliomania, etc. (London: G. Richards, 1922), 165–171 (167).

Chapter 2.  The Literary World Epigraph: EAD to GLD, February 11, 1848, DFP. 1. GTS, April 29, 1840, Diary, 136. Master Humphrey’s Clock, a periodical written and edited by Charles Dickens, appeared from April 1840 to December 1841. 2. Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 247. Also on Putnam’s railway series, see Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 74. On developing book technology at midcentury, see Michael Winship, “Manufacturing and Book Production,” in IB, 40–69. 3. EAD to GLD, March 11, 1848, DFP. 4. GTS, April 23, 1838, Diary, 84. 5. Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harvest, 1956), 29. 6. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:172. 7. EAD, Unpublished Notebook, 1848, DFP. 8. William Carew Hazlitt, The Book Collector: A General Survey of the Pursuit and of Those Who Have Engaged in It at Home and Abroad from the Earliest Period to the Present Times (London: John Grant, 1904), 101; Ecclesiastes 12:12 (KJV). 9. [EAD], “Wiley and Putnam’s Library of Choice Reading” (publisher’s circular), March 1, 1845, [1], DFP. 10. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 166. On EAD’s efforts to recruit Ralph Waldo Emerson for the Library of American Books, see EAD’s letters to him of February 7, August 18, September 20, and October 1, 1845, DFP.

314 n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 9 – 7 2 11. On “gentlemen’s agreements,” see Jeffrey D. Groves, “Courtesy of the Trade,” and Meredith L. McGill, “Copyright,” IB, 139–148, 158–178. 12. See printed invitation to the American Copyright Club, 20 Clinton Place, in EAD to WAJ, February 15, 1844 (among others), DFP. On the history of copyright, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); James J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815–1854 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974); Albert J. Clark, The Movement for International Copyright in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1960); Michael J. Everton, The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 4: “The Moral Vernacular of American Copyright Reform.” 13. GLD to EAD, January 23, 1849, DFP. 14. Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834– 1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Since her book was published, Americanists have contested the beginning and end dates of McGill’s “Culture of Reprinting,” pushing them both forward and back, but such debates are foreign to our purposes. 15. EAD to GLD, February 4, 1848, DFP. 16. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2: 172–173; Matthew 7:15 (KJV). 17. Holbrook Jackson, “The Uses of Books,” in Occasions: A Volume of Essays on such Divers Themes as Laughter and Cathedrals, Town and Profanity, Gardens and Bibliomania, etc. (London: G. Richards, 1922), 172–183 (178–179). 18. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:172. 19. C[harles] A[stor] B[risted], “Review of The Agamemnon of Æschylus, with Notes,” Knickerbocker 29:6 (June 1847): 543–559 (543). 20. Leigh Hunt, “Bookbinding and Heliodorus,” in Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Essays, and Critical Memoirs, from His Uncollected Prose Writings, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1847), 2:67–74 (67, 69). 21. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:173. 22. Leigh Hunt, “My Books,” in The Indicator: A Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside, 2 vols. (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845), 1:136–151 (139). 23. CL to Thomas Hood, [September 18, 1827], LCML, 3:131. 24. EAD to GLD, February 9, 1848, DFP. 25. [EAD], “Coleridgeana II,” Literary World 12:326 (April 30, 1853): 349–350 (349).

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26. CL, “Preface, by a Friend of the late Elia,” WCML, 2:152. Cf. William Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 3.2. 27. EAD to GLD, February 15, 1848, DFP. 28. EAD to GLD, February 9, 1848, DFP. 29. DFP finding aid, Archives and Manuscripts Division (Mss. 873), New York Public Library. 30. EAD to GLD, February 9, 1848, DFP. 31. EAD to GLD, February 9, 1848, DFP. 32. Claude A. Prance, Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760–1847 (London: Mansell, 1983), 200. 33. ML to Barbara Betham, November 2, 1814, LCML, 2:142. 34. EAD to GLD, February 25, 1848, DFP. 35. EAD to GLD, February 15, 1848, DFP. 36. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:26. 37. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Literati of New York City, No. IV,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 33 (August 1846): 72–78 (76). 38. EAD and GLD, Cyclopædia of American Literature; Embracing Personal and Critical Notices of Authors, and Selections from Their Writings: From the Earliest Period to the Present Day, 2 vols. (New York, Scribner’s, 1855), 2:279. 39. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:174. 4 0. Thomas Jefferson Conant, Defence of the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius Against Prof. Stuart’s Translation (New York: Appleton, 1847), 7. 41. EAD and GLD, Cyclopædia of American Literature, 2:88. 42. CL, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire,” WCML, 2:76. 43. EAD, Unpublished Commonplace Book [1848–1871], DFP. 44. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.395–399 (RS). 45. Ben Casseday, The History of Louisville, from Its Earliest Settlement till the Year 1852 (Louisville: Hull and Brother, 1852), 6, [4]. Cf. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.49 (RS). 46. CL to STC, January 10, 1797, LCML, 1:85. 47. [Lewis Gaylord Clark], “Editor’s Table: The Author of Elia,” Knickerbocker 5:3 (March 1835), 259. 48. Hester W. B. Jennings to Ernest Dressel North, June 16, 1897, quoted in DM, 66 (commas added for clarity). 49. CL to Robert Southey, August 19, 1825, LCML, 3:22. 50. “Commencement of the New York University,” Evening Post (July 2, 1846), 1. EAD graduated from Columbia College in 1835 in a class of twenty-five

316 n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 7 – 8 0 students. For that itemized list, see EAD to George Henry Moore, March 10, 1848, in Columbiana Manuscripts, Columbia University Archives. 51. William Ferdinand Morgan, Obituary Notice of the Late George L. Duyckinck, Esq. (New York: Episcopal Sunday School Union and Church Book Society, 1863), 8. 52. EAD to GLD, February 4, 1848, DFP. 53. GLD to EAD, March 5, 1848, DFP (misspelling of “cannons” corrected). 54. EAD to GLD, March 18, 1848, DFP. 55. EAD to GLD, March 24, 1848, DFP. 56. EAD to GLD, March 11, 1848, DFP. 57. Herman Melville to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., May 1, 1850, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell Davis and William Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 108. 58. EAD to GLD, May 9, 1848, DFP. Cf. CL, “New Year’s Eve” (“the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal”), WCML, 2:29. 59. Richard Henry Dana, Sr., to EAD, January 20, 1848, and EAD to GLD, February 15, 1848, DFP. 60. EAD to GLD, February 4, 1848, DFP. 61. GLD to EAD, March 27, 1848, DFP. 62. Review of The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life, by Thomas Noon Talfourd (London: Edward Moxon, 1837), North American Review 46:98 (January 1838): 55–71 (58). 63. Alfred Ainger, Charles Lamb (London: Macmillan, 1888), 226. 64. CL to John Bates Dibdin, [September 18, 1827], LCML, 3:129; GLD to EAD, March 27, 1848, DFP. 65. “Death of George L. Duyckinck,” New York Daily Tribune (March 31, 1863), 8. 66. EAD to GLD, February 15, 1848, DFP; CL, autograph note on Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings . . . As Namely, His Antidote Against Atheism. Appendix to the Said Antidote. Enthusiasmus Triumphatus. Letters to Des Cartes, etc. (London: J. Downing, 1712[–1713]), Houghton Library (EC8.L1654.Zz712m), Cambridge, Massachusetts. The buyer of both volumes of Henry More’s prose works (Charles Deane) is introduced in Chapter 4. A volume of More’s poetry sold to George Templeton Strong. 67. EAD to GLD, February 18, 1848, DFP. 68. EAD to GLD, February 25, 1848, DFP. 69. John Keats, autograph will, included in letter to John Taylor, August 14, 1820, the Morgan Library (104648), New York; WW to EM, June 16, 1845,

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The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 3:1055. 70. WW to Isabella Fenwick, July 22, 1844, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 3:2017. 71. Ship manifest of the Victoria, May 24, 1848, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, 1820–1897, National Archives and Records Administration (M237, Roll 72: May 9–31, 1848). 72. “Sayings and Doings in London,” The Anglo American: A Journal of Literature, News, Politics, the Drama, Fine Arts, etc. 10:4 (November 13, 1847): 88. 73. EAD to GLD, May 7, 1848, DFP. 74. EAD to GLD, May 30, 1848, DFP. 75. “Postscript,” New-York Commercial Advertiser (May 16, 1848), 3. 76. EAD to WAJ, August 4, 1848, DFP. Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost 9.633–634; all Milton quotations are from Merritt Y. Hughes’s edition of Milton’s Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957). GLD is listed on the ship manifest for the Hermann, arriving in New York on August 5, 1848, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, 1820–1897, National Archives and Records Administration (M237, Roll 74: July 11–August 24, 1848). 77. EAD to GLD, February 15, 1848, DFP. 78. EAD to WAJ, August 11, 1848, DFP. 79. EAD to GLD, February 18, 1848, DFP. 80. “The Literary World,” Evening Post (January 22, 1847), 2. 81. [Announcement], Literary World 1:13 (May 1, 1847): 293. 82. GLD to EAD, February 18, 1848, DFP. 83. Charles F. Hoffman, “To the Reader,” Literary World 3:88 (October 7, 1848): 701. 84. Unidentified newspaper obituary in GLD, “Personal Miscellaneous papers,” DFP; Harry Vane, “A Book-Auction in Gotham,” Knickerbocker 32 (November 1848): 529–534 (533–534). 85. Morgan, Obituary Notice of the Late George L. Duyckinck, 19. 86. Gerald D. McDonald, “Charles Lamb as a Collector,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 38:2 (September 1934): 707–712 (709). 87. CCLL, 3; Nathaniel Bacon, Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira, in the Year 1548 (London: Edward Thomas, 1681). 88. GLD to EAD, March 27, 1848, DFP. 89. Vane, “A Book-Auction in Gotham,” 533. 90. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction,” Literary World 3:40 (November 4, 1848): 1.

318 n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 4 – 8 9   91. GTS, September 30, 1842, Diary, 187.   92. [EAD], “Old English Books,” Arcturus 1 (December 1840): 42–44 (42).   93. GTS, April 24, 1844, Diary, 228–229.   94. Bangs & Company, Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, Etc., of the Late George T. Strong, Esq. (New York: printed by C. C. Shelley, 1878), iii.   95. GTS, December 24, 1836, Diary, 45.   96. “From our New York Correspondent,” Daily National Intelligencer (October 20, 1843), 3.   97. Bangs & Company, Catalogue of the Books, . . . of the Late George T. Strong, iii.   98. Bangs & Company, Catalogue . . . of the Late George T. Strong, iii.   99. See description of CL’s copy of Jonson (CCLL, no. 20) in The Collection of Robert S. Pirie, vol. 2, lot no. 987 (New York: Sotheby’s, [2015]), 317. 100. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:26–27. 101. EAD to GLD, February 4, 1848, DFP (bracketed word difficult to decipher). 102. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:25–26. 103. STC, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 12 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1969), 2:216. STC’s marginalia in volume 12 are divided into 6 parts; the citations that follow indicate part and page number. For STC’s original autograph notes on CL’s copy of John Donne, see Poems, &c. by John Donne Late Dean of St. Pauls. With Elegies on the Authors Death. To Which Is Added Divers Copies Under His Own Hand, Never Before Printed (London: Henry Herringman, 1669), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (lh D718 C633h), New Haven, Connecticut. 104. STC, Collected Works, 2:217. 105. William Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.4.138–139 (RS). 106. STC (in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies) quoted in E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1905), 2:313. 107. STC, Collected Works, 2:243. 108. STC, Collected Works, 2:221. 109. Raoul Granquist, The Reputation of John Donne, 1779–1873 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1975), 78. 110. STC, autograph note dated March 10, 1804, on front flyleaf of CL’s copy of Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets, and Commonly Presumed Truths, 3rd ed. (London: Nathaniel Ekins, 1658), Berg.

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1 11. McDonald, “Charles Lamb as a Collector,” 707. 112. STC, Collected Works, 2:217. 113. CL to STC, June 7, 1809, LCML, 2:75. 114. CL to STC, June 7, 1809, and CL to William Hazlitt, November 10, 1805, LCML, 2:75, 1:411. 115. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:25. 116. CL to STC, undated, LCML, 2:284–285. The book was probably the first English translation, Dris Martini Lutheri colloquia mensalia; or, Dr Martin Luther’s Divine Discourses at His Table, &c. (1652). Not until 1848 would William Hazlitt’s son William produce another English translation. 117. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:25; Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 411 (June 21, 1712), in The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 3:538. 118. CL to STC, June 24, 1797, LCML, 1:110. 119. STC, Collected Works, 6:250. 120. Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq.; Containing Various Observations and Reflections, Made in Several Parts of the World; and Many Extraordinary Relations (London: J. Noon, 1756), vii. 121. Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, &c. (London: Joseph Johnson and B. Davenport, 1766), 52 (“become” corrected to “became”). The two volumes (1756, 1766) are considered two parts of the same book. 122. CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:26. 123. CL, “The Old and the New Schoolmaster,” WCML, 2:49; CL, autograph inside front cover of Philippe de la Clyte, Sire de Commines, The History of Philip de Commines, Knight, Lord of Argenton (London: Printed for Samuel Mearne, John Martyn, and Henry Herringman, 1674), Rare Books and Special Collections (Oversize 1509.146.26.1 lq), Princeton University Library. 124. CL to Bernard Barton, July 25, 1829, LCML, 3:224. 125. STC, Collected Works, 4:113–115. 126. STC, Collected Works, 4:105–106. 127. STC, Collected Works, 4:109 (John Petvin and Plato quoted herein). 128. STC, Collected Works, 4:111–112; EAD, Unpublished Commonplace book [1848–1871?], DFP. 129. HCR, August 19–20, 1841, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley, 3 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons), 2:598. 130. STC, Collected Works, 4:237–238. The original of CL’s copy of John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenge Against the Crying, & Execrable Sinne of

320 n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 6 – 1 0 0 (Wilfull, & Premeditated) Murther (London: William Lee, 1657) is in the Houghton Library (EC8 C6795 Zz657r), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 131. STC, Collected Works, 4:238, 4:240 (John Reynolds quoted herein). 132. GTS, January 11, 1840, Diary, 122 (my italics). 133. GTS, April 20, 1843, Diary, 201. 134. GTS, January 11, 1840; March 23, 1837; and March 29, 1837, Diary, 122, 52, 54. 135. For the list of students in GTS’s graduating class of 1838 at Columbia College, see GTS to George Henry Moore, March 10, 1848, Columbiana Manuscripts, Columbia University Archives. 136. GTS, April 12, 1837, Diary, 57. At the time it was sold, GTS’s library included the following works by CL: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Moxon, 1835), The Poetical Works (Moxon, 1836), and The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd (Moxon, 1837): Bangs & Company, Catalogue . . . of the Late George T. Strong, 91–92. 137. [Park Benjamin], “Critical Notices: The Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb, in 1 volume by [Charles] Dearborn,” American Monthly Magazine (January 1837), 87. 138. EAD, Undated, unpublished Commonplace Book, DFP. 139. CL to John Taylor, June 30, 1821, LCML, 2:302; Alfred Ainger, Charles Lamb (London: Macmillan, 1888), 124; for more on Felix Elia (or Ellia), see David Chandler, “ ‘Elia, the Real’: The Original of Lamb’s Nom de Plume,” Review of English Studies 58:237 (November 2007): 669–683. 140. GTS, April 13, 1837, Diary, 58. 141. GTS, April 25, 1843, Diary, 201. 142. GTS, May 17, 1843, Diary, 202–204; STC, “Kubla Khan” (ll. 1–7), Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep (London: John Murray, 1816), 55. 143. GTS, May 17, 1843, Diary, 203. 144. GTS, May 17, 1843, Diary, 203–204. 145. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols. (London: Pickering, 1835), 2:17 (GTS’s edition). 146. See GTS, Diary, 367 (index). 147. CL to Thomas Hood, [September 18, 1827], LCML, 3:131. 148. GTS, September 7, 1843, Diary, 212. 149. Milton, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” l. 186. 150. GTS, September 7, 1843, and October 8, 1843, Diary, 212, 214.

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151. Poetical Tracts (CCLL, no. 36) included William Mason’s The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books (1772) and an engraving, Thomas Bowles’s A View of Covent Garden Looking Across the Piazza with the Market in Progress, St. Paul’s Church on the Left, a Column in the Center (1751). The other was Tracts (CCLL, no. 26), described in Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library and Some Presentation Copies and First Editions of His Rarer Books with Collations and Notes (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 6–9. 152. See Luther S. Livingston, “A Literary Curiosity from Charles Lamb’s Library: Discovery of a Book That Has Hitherto Baffled Lamb Students,” Bookman: An Illustrated Quarterly 8:5 (January 1899): 453–457. 153. CL, “The Old Actors,” WCML, 2:291 (emphasis mine). 154. CL, “The Old Actors,” WCML, 2: 293. 155. CL, “The Lame Brother,” WCML, 3:364. 156. “Dream Children,” WCML, 2:102–103. 157. “One copy only is known,” writes E. V. Lucas, “and that is in America, and the owner declines to permit it to be reprinted”: LCML, 2:94n. That owner would have been Charles W. Frederickson. 158. William Windham, Speeches in Parliament (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 303, 305. 159. [John Lamb], A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham, on His Opposition to Lord Erskine’s Bill, for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (London: Maxwell & Wilson, 1810), quoted in LCML, 2:94n. 160. CL to Robert Southey, March 20, 1799, LCML, 1:165. 161. CL, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” WCML, 2:125–126. 162. CL to HCR, February 7, 1810; LCML, 2:93. 163. Abraham Hayward, The Art of Dining; or, Gastronomy and Gastronomers, rev. ed. (London: John Murray, 1853), 112–113. 164. GTS, February 19, 1849, Diary, 345. 165. GTS, July 31, 1849, Diary, 360. 166. GTS, February 19, 1849, Diary, 345. 167. CL to WW, January 30, 1801, LCML, 1:241. 168. CL quoted in EAD, “The City and the Country,” American Monthly Magazine (May 1838), 413–416 (413). 169. HHR to EAD, April 18, 1848, DFP. 170. HHR to EAD, April 18, 1848, DFP. 171. HHR to EAD, May 1, 1846, DFP. 172. HHR to EAD, February 23, 1847, DFP. 173. HHR to EAD, February 15, 1848, DFP.

322 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 8 – 1 1 2 1 74. GTS to EAD, February 18, 1848, DFP. 175. See Henry Nelson Coleridge, ed., The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1836), 1:148n. 176. EAD quoted and HHR commenting in HRR to EAD, December 8, 1848, DFP. 177. EAD to GLD, February 25, 1848, and March 11, 1848, DFP. On the Washington see EAD, June 1, 1847, unpublished diary: May–November 1847, DFP. 178. George Haven Putnam, George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir: Together with a Record of the Earlier Years of the Publishing House Founded by Him (New York: Putnam’s, 1912), 99–100; EAD to GLD, May 9 and May 15, 1848, DFP; Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 217. 179. EAD to GLD, March 11, 1848, DFP. 180. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 74. 181. Putnam, George Palmer Putnam, 100. 182. Peter Booth Wiley and Frances Chaves, John Wiley & Sons: 200 Years of Publishing (New York: Wiley, 2010), 23. 183. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 44. For more on this journal, see Jeffrey D. Groves, “Trade Communication,” in IB, 130–139 (130). 184. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 207. 185. GLD to EAD, February 8, 1848, DFP. 186. EAD to GLD, March 11, 1848, DFP. 187. James Fenimore Cooper to Susan Cooper, March 9, 1850, Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 6:155. 188. Wiley and Chaves, John Wiley & Sons, 23–24. 189. HHR to EAD, May 23, 1850, DFP. 190. [GLD?], “Coleridgeana,” Literary World 12:322 (April 2, 1853): 263–265; [EAD], “Coleridgeana II,” Literary World 12:326 (April 30, 1853): 349– 350; [EAD], “Coleridgeana III,” Literary World, 12:328 (May 14, 1853): 393; [EAD], “Coleridgeana IV,” Literary World, 12:330 (May 28, 1853): 433–434. 191. STC, Collected Works, 6:249–250 (Amory) and 2:99–101 (Commines). 192. [EAD], “Coleridgeana II,” 349. 193. Article 1 of the Constitution of the American Ethnological Society quoted in J.G.W., “Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society,” American Anthropologist 2:4 (October–December 1900): 785–796 (787). 194. JRB and William W. Turner, Plan for the Compilation and Publication of a Complete Dictionary of the English Language . . . by An Association of Philologists, circular dated December 12, 1848, DFP.

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195. George Folsom to Secretary of State [John M. Clayton], May 18, 1849, and JRB to Secretary of State [John M. Clayton], May 11, 1849, JRB Papers. 196. CEN to JRB, May 1, 1849, JRB Papers. 197. CW to JRB, June 28, and July 24, 1849, JRB Papers. 198. Mary Anne L. Welford to JRB, July 1, 1849; JRB Papers. 199. CW to JRB, dated as indicated, JRB Papers. 200. “Great Sale of English Books,” Evening Post (September 27, 1852), [1]. 201. “Great Sale of Splendid English Books,” Pennsylvania Inquirer (April 15, 1853), 2 (capitalization and hyphen added for legibility). 202. “Important Sale of Books,” Evening Post (November 29, 1853), 2. 203. Roger Burlingame, Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing and Publishing (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 78. 204. See A Catalogue of the Valuable & Extensive Library of the Late Charles Welford, Esq. (London: Hodgson & Company, 1885). 205. Edward Marston, After Work: Fragments from the Workshop of an Old Publisher (London: Heinemann, 1904), 83. 206. “Literary and Art Notes,” Kansas City Times (June 1, 1885), 3. CW was survived by his wife, Mary Anne (d. March 3, 1860, in New York), and one daughter, Mrs. Gellgud; “Obituary: Charles Welford,” New York Tribune (May 20, 1885), 5.

Chapter 3.  New York Shakespeareans Epigraph: CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” London Magazine 6:31 (July 1822): 33–36 (34). The revised essay as printed in WCML omits the second sentence of the epigraph. 1. Jonathan Bate notes that George Bernard Shaw coined the term “Bardolatry,” which is often capitalized, in the preface to his Three Plays for Puritans (1901): Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 22n1. 2. We vouch for the authenticity of none of them. Although the gloves do not feature in this chapter, see “Shakespeare ’s Gloves: One Pair of Them Preserved to the Present with Their History,” undated clipping from the Philadelphia Record in Horatio Rodd to WEB, FSL (Y.C.1415). 3. See David D. Hall, “Introduction,” A History of the Book in America, vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press / American Antiquarian Society, 2007): 1–25 (6); Rita Felski, “Introduction” to special issue,

324 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 8 – 1 2 3 “Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33:4 (Autumn 2002): 607–622 (613). Elisa Tamarkin discusses the collaborative, politically collective-making nature of the kind of testimonials discussed in this chapter in Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 4. Handbill for The Merry Wives of Windsor, April 1, 1853, interleaved in The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, 8 vols., ed. Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight & Company, 1839), 5:202, Copy 4, FSL. 5. MB, Pen and Pencil (New York: Appleton, 1858), 135. 6. MB, Pen and Pencil, 134–135. 7. CL to EM, [Spring 1833], LCML, 3:359. 8. Jonathan Swift, “On Poetry: A Rhapsody” (ll. 331–340), Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 578. 9. CL to EM, [Spring 1833] LCML, 3:359, 360n. 10. CL, “The South-Sea House,” WCML, 2:1–2. 11. Swift, “The Run upon the Bankers,” Poetical Works, 192. 12. CL to STC, June 14, 1796, LCML, 1:29. 13. Edmund Waller, Poems, &c. Written upon Several Occasions, and to Several Persons, 10th ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1722), 119. 14. CL’s autograph note quoted and condition of book described in lot no. 358, A Noteworthy Collection of Rare Sporting Books and First Editions from the Library of the Late Gifford A. Cochran (New York: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, 1931), 88. 15. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. Roger Lonsdale and John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16. 16. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, Who for Parts and Learning Have Been Eminent in the Several Counties. Together with An Historical Narrative of the Native Commodities and Rarities in Each County (London: Thomas Williams, 1662), 135; CL, autograph note in CL’s copy of Poems by John Cleavland; with Additions Never Before Printed (London: printed for W. Shears, 1662), Berg. 17. John Cleveland, “The Authors Hermaphrodite. Made After Mr. Randolph’s Death, Yet Inserted into His Poems” (ll. 57–62), Poems by John Cleavland (London: W. Shears, 1662), 22. 18. Matthew Prior as transcribed by CL in his copy of Poems by John Cleavland, Berg. Cf. Matthew Prior, Miscellaneous Works of His Late Excellency Matthew Prior, Esq.: Consisting of Poems on Several Occasions, viz.: Epistles, Tales, Satires, Epigrams, &c. (London: Adrian Drift, 1740), 189.

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19. CL, autograph note in his copy of J. Cleaveland Revived: Poems, Orations, Epistles, and Other of His Genuine Incomparable Pieces (London: Nathaniel Brook, 1668), 70, Berg. 20. MB to John Sartain, February 15, 1862, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 21. Robert Greenhalgh Albion with the collaboration of Jennie Barnes Pope, The Rise of New York Port: 1815–1860 (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 10. 22. RB to JRB, February 7, 1848, JRB Papers. 23. William Shakespeare, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 9 vols., vol. 9: Poems (London: J. Tonson, E. Curll, J. Pemberton, K. Sanger, 1714). 24. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:173–174. 25. CL to WW, February 1, 1806, LCML, 1:419. 26. RB to JRB, February 10, 1848, JRB Papers. Cf. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.175 (RS). 27. RB to MCC, April 2, 1850, LE, 24. 28. RB to MCC, April 2, 1850, LE, 25. For an account of a similar experience, see STC’s prose preface to “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” 29. CL to Vincent Novello, November 6, 1828, LCML, 3:189. 30. CL to Charles Cowden Clarke, [October 1828], LCML, 3:186. 31. Douglas Jerrold, “The Shakespeare Night,” Punch; or the London Charivari (December 11, 1847), 221. Since MCC chafed when people shortened her married name to Clarke (as here), I refer to her in the text as Cowden Clarke. 32. RB to MCC, April 2, 1850, LE, 20. 33. MCC to RB, July 12, 1852, LE, 147. Cf. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 5.1.32–33 (RS). 34. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials: Mary Cowden Clarke ’s Concordance to Shakespeare,” American Whig Review 9:15 (February 1852): 156–164 (158); RB to MCC, April 2, 1850, LE, 20. 35. RB to GL, October 24, 1856, New-York Historical Society; GT quoted in [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 160. 36. Douglas Jerrold quoted in Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, [1878]), 289; TCC to RB, May 4, 1849, TCCC. 37. Jerrold quoted in Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers, 290. 38. MCC to RB, April 4, 1851, and August 4, 1850, LE, 28, 59.

326 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 3 1 – 1 3 4 39. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 158; MCC to RB, February 18, 1850, LE, 15–16, 18. 4 0. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 157. 41. RB to EAD, undated [c. 1849?], DFP; CL to Mary Shelley, [January 18, 1830], LCML, 3:240. 42. EAD to GLD, May 1, 1848, DFP. 43. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 157; CL to Thomas Hood [September 18, 1827], LCML, 3:131–132 (spelling of “theer” corrected and “Elia” restored to title case, as per autograph letter reproduced in MB, Pen and Pencil, unnumbered insert between pages 38 and 39). 44. Park Benjamin quoted in [RB], “Burns,” Knickerbocker 32 (1848): 206–214 (210). RB did consider letting Benjamin publish the letter, but second thoughts prevailed as MB was planning to include it in her illustrated gift book Pen and Pencil. See RB to GL, October 24, 1856, New-York Historical Society. 45. Walter Pater, “Charles Lamb,” in Appreciations; with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 121. 46. James T. Fields quoted in Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 242. 47. Claude A. Prance, Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760–1847 (London: Mansell, 1983), 307. 48. Bryan Waller Procter quoted in Mrs. James T. [Annie Adams] Fields, A Shelf of Old Books (New York: Scribner’s, 1894), 187. 49. CL to Lucy Barton, December 1, 1824, LCML, 2:448. 50. CL to Bernard and Lucy Barton, December 1, 1824, LCML, 2:446. 51. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); CL to Bernard Barton, December 1, 1824, LCML, 2:446. On the relations among book collecting, chinaware, and gastronomy with reference to Joseph Addison, Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, and CL, see my “Transgressions in Taste: Libraries Ornamental, Gastronomical, and Bibliomaniacal,” in The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life Since Bourdieu, ed. Dave Beech, Michael Lehnert, Malcolm Quinn, Carol Tulloch, and Stephen Wilson (London: Routledge, 2018), 35–48, and “Transgressing the Sacred Frontier of Culture,” in Transgressing Boundaries: Limits and Taboos in Romantic Literature, ed. Norbert Lennartz (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021), 147–163.

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52. Edward Fitzgerald to CEN, April 4, 1878, CEN Papers. Cf. William Makepeace Thackeray, Interviews and Recollections, ed. Philip Collins, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1983), 1:32. 53. Elia [CL], “The Defeat of Time; or, A Tale of the Fairies,” in The Table Book, ed. William Hone, 2 vols. (London: printed by Leigh Hunt and Charles Cowden Clarke, 1827–1828), 2:335–340. Prior to this collected edition, the Table Book was issued weekly to subscribers. Cf. Thomas Hood’s “The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,” the lead poem in The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur, and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 1–64. 54. M.H. [MCC], “My Arm-Chair,” in The Table Book, 1:786–778 (787). 55. George Haven Putnam, George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir: Together with a Record of the Earlier Years of the Publishing House Founded by Him (New York: Putnam’s, 1912), 114. 56. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 156, and circular quoted, 159; [RB], undated circular (signed Henry J. Raymond, Alfred Pell, William C. Bryant, and William E. Burton), MCC, Autograph Letters (scrapbook), FSL (Y.c.970). 57. CL quoted in Vermont Gazette (March 28, 1848), 2. 58. See list of subscribers dated October 25, 1851, in MCC, Autograph Letters, FSL (Y.c.970); reproduced in [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 162–163. 59. Daniel Webster to RB, July 11, 1851, quoted in [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 159–160. 60. “Inscription on the Plate,” MCC, Autograph Letters, FSL (Y.c.970). 61. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 160; Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. Master William Shakespeare” (l. 71), Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, Published According to the True Originall Copies (London: printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), dedicatory verse. 62. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 161–162. 63. Longfellow quoted in [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 160 (quoting Spenser’s Faerie Queene, I.iv.17); unidentified newspaper clipping dated October 25, 1851, MCC, Autograph Letters, FSL (Y.c.970). 64. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857), 53. 65. CL, “The Old and the New Schoolmaster,” WCML, 2:49–50.

328 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 4 0 – 1 4 6 66. Luther Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries, ed. Roger E. Stoddard (Weston, Mass.: M&S, 1991), 21–22. 67. MCC to RB, January 1, 1852, LE, 121. 68. Abbott Lawrence to MCC, January 19, 1852, MCC, Autograph Letters, FSL (Y.c.970). 69. [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 163. 70. MCC to the Donors of the Testimonial Chair, January 15, 1852, Autograph Letters (Y.c.970). Cf. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.175 (RS). 71. MCC to the Donors of the Testimonial Chair; Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 1.1.23–31 (RS). 72. A Testimonial to Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke, Author of the Concordance to Shakespeare (New York: privately printed, 1852). 73. MB, Pen and Pencil, 149–150. 74. MB, Pen and Pencil, 154–155. 75. MCC to RB, August 15, 1856, LE, 252–253. 76. “To Mrs. Mary Cowden Clarke,” Daily Chronicle & Sentinel (February 13, 1852), 2. 77. [RB], “Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree,” Evening Post (February 23, 1855), [2]. 78. [RB], “Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree”; J[ames] O[rchard] Halliwell-Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 8th ed., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), 1:413. 79. MCC to RB, January 1, 1852, LE, 124. Cf. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.3–6, and Julius Caesar, 4.3.72 (RS). 80. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21. 81. “Burton’s Theatre, Chambers Street,” Evening Post (July 12, 1848), 3. 82. Untitled, Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser (May 26, 1836), 2. 83. “Inquest Extraordinary,” The Sun (August 30, 1839), 1. 84. “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” Commercial Advertiser (July 21, 1837), 2; “Burton’s Magazine,” Charleston Courier (April 23, 1840), 2. 85. “National Theatre, Washington,” Daily National Intelligencer (January 10, 1845), 3; “National Theatre,” The Daily Madisonian (January 11, 1845), 2. 86. William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain; or, Fifteen Years’ Observations Among the Theatres of New York (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), 104. 87. George G. Foster, New York by Gas Light: With Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 16. 88. Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 104.

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  89. Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, 105.   90. David L. Rinear, Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 119.   91. Untitled news item, Daily Evening Transcript (July 11, 1848), 2; “Burton’s Theatre, Chambers Street,” New York Herald (July 13, 1848), 4.   92. “From our New York Correspondent,” Daily National Tribune (November 20, 1848), 3; “Burton’s Theatre,” The Weekly Herald (November 18, 1848), 5.   93. “Amusements: Howard Athenæum,” Boston Daily Times (November 25, 1848), 4.   94. “Dramatic,” Irish American Weekly (September 14, 1850), 2 (“Street” capitalized).   95. Anonymous poet quoted in William L. Keese, John Keese, Wit and Littérateur: A Biographical Memoir (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1883), 83.   96. WEB, The Cyclopædia of Wit and Humor Containing Choice and Characteristic Selections from the Writings of the Most Eminent Humorists of America, Ireland, Scotland, and England (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1875), xii.   97. Handbill for The Merry Wives of Windsor.   98. MCC to RB, May 19, 1853, LE, 193.   99. “Burton’s Theatre,” Evening Post (October 20, 1848), 3. 100. Keese, John Keese, 73. 101. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction,” Literary World 3:40 (November 4, 1848): 1; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (4.2.32), ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1980), 439. 102. Joseph Sabin, lot nos. 4168–4170, Bibliotheca Dramatica; Catalogue of the Theatrical and Miscellaneous Library of the Late William E. Burton (New York: J. Sabin & Company, 1860), 298. 103. MB to John Sartain, February 15, 1862, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 104. John Dennis, Original Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical, 2 vols. in 1 (London: W. Mears, 1721); “Charles Lamb’s Library in New York,” Publishers’ Weekly (May 15, 1897), 817–20 (820); Catalogue of a Private Library, Embracing a Large Collection of Rare and Valuable Works . . . To Be Sold by Cooley, Keese & Hill, at Their Auction Sales Room, 191 Broadway, Corner of Dey-Street, on Friday and Saturday Evenings Oct. 20th and 21st (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1848), Book Auction Catalogues Collection, American Antiquarian Society.

330 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 4 9 – 1 5 3 105. Catalogue of the Barton Collection, Boston Public Library (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1888), 146; CCLL, 2. 106. [CW], “Prices and Purchasers of Sixty Volumes of Books Which Belonged to Charles Lamb of London Sold in New York at Private Sale by Bartlett & Welford, February 1848,” autograph page in copy 1 of Catalogue of Charles Lambs Library, for Sale by Bartlett & Welford, Berg. 107. Miscellaneous typewritten page in Literary Correspondence of EAD and WAJ, DFP (spelling of “insense” corrected). 108. WAJ, Literary Studies: A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays, 2 vols. (New York: Edward Walker, 1847), 1:58. 109. Vera Brodsky Lawrence (quoting others), Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, vol. 1: Resonances, 1836– 1849 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 185–186. 110. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction.” 111. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, in Three Parts, with Annotations (London: D. Browne, J. Tonson, T. Longman, et al., 1726), 15. 112. William L. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career Other Than That of Actor, with Glimpses of His Home Life, and Extracts from His Theatrical Journal (New York: Burt Franklin, 1891), 11. Keese provides details for the description that follows. 113. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 15. 114. William L. Keese, William Evans Burton: Actor, Author, and Manager; A Sketch of His Career with Recollections of His Performances (New York: Putnam’s, 1885), 202; James Wynne, Private Libraries of New York (New York: E. French, 1860), 151. Wynne was probably the source of this comment, reprinted without attribution. 115. Joseph Sabin, lot no. 4826, Bibliotheca Dramatica, 364. 116. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; A Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts (London: printed for the author by J. McCreery, 1811), 664–665. For more on the phenomenon of extra-illustrating, see Daniel M. Tredwell, A Monograph on Privately Illustrated Books: A Plea for Bibliomania (Flatbush, New York, privately printed, 1892). 117. Keese, William Evans Burton: Actor, Author, Manager, 199–200. 118. Sabin, lot no. 4976, Bibliotheca Dramatica, 381. 119. See Edward Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, 1795, and Attributed to Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton . . . in a Letter

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Addressed to the Right Hon. James, Earl of Charlemont (London: T. Cadell, Jr., and W. Davies, 1796). 120. Original Letters, &c. of Sir John Falstaff and His Friends; Now First Made Public by a Gentleman, a Descendant of Dame Quickly, from Genuine Manuscripts Which Have Been in the Possession of the Quickly Family Near Four Hundred Years (London, 1796), [v]. 121. CL to STC, May 27, 1796, LCML, 1:2; Fields, A Shelf of Old Books, 198. 122. Holbrook Jackson, “Bookmen,” in Occasions: A Volume of Essays on Such Divers Themes as Laughter and Cathedrals, Town and Profanity, Gardens and Bibliomania, etc. (London: G. Richards, 1922), 165–171 (166). 123. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 15–16. 124. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 17. 125. Memorial pages for WEB (September 24, 1804–February 10, 1860), ID# 118371397; Caroline Glessing Burton (1818–January 24, 1886), ID# 155598667; William Shakespeare Burton (1826–1916), ID# 137420125; Harry Burton (September 30, 1836–July 13, 1844), ID# 155598679; Cecilia (née Burton) de Medina (1838–April 17, 1910), ID# 155598726; and Rosine (née Burton) Massett (1844–August 19, 1920), ID# 125704787, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, Find A Grave, https:// www.findagrave.com (accessed August 21, 2020). 126. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.144 (RS). 127. David Garrick, An Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1769), [1]. 128. William Cowper, “The Task, Book VI” (ll. 685–690), The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Longman, 1994), 217. 129. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 30; Sabin, lot no. 6085, Bibliotheca Dramatica, 457. 130. One can see the Shakespeare jubilee medallion, with its portrait head and motto, in the Folger Digital Image Collection (no. 6379): FSL Collection, uncatalogued. WEB’s copy: lot no. 6087, Bibliotheca Dramatica, 457. 131. Washington Irving to RB, April 21, 1852, Records of the Shakespeare Society of New York, FSL (Y.d.961, no. 1); Washington Irving to RB, May 29, 1853, printed in miscellaneous catalogue page in “Balmanno, Robert, 1780–1861,” Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 132. John Keese quoted in Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 30. 133. John Keese quoted in Keese, John Keese, 81.

332 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 5 7 – 1 6 2 134. RB quoted in Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 32; [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 159. 135. Keese, William E. Burton: A Sketch of His Career, 30. 136. David Garrick quoted in [RB], “Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree.” 137. [James Henry] Leigh Hunt, “My Books,” Essays (London: Edward Moxon, 1841), 49–54 (49). 138. [RB], “Shakespeare ’s Mulberry Tree”; Horatio Rodd to WEB, June 18, 1851, FSL (Y.c.1415). 139. Rodd to WEB, June 18, 1851, FSL (Y.c.1415); tea caddy, FSL Collection (Wood, no. 11), described in the Folger Digital Image Collection (no. 1372). Cf. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1.152–156. 140. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.156 (RS); Horatio Rodd to WEB, May 23, 1851, FSL (Y.c.1415). 141. Horatio Rodd to WEB, June 18, 1851, FSL (Y.c.1415). 142. WEB, Paper read at Shakespeare Society Dinner, April 23, 1852, Records of the Shakespeare Society of New York, FSL (Y.d.961, no. 1); The Shakespeare Society [Prospectus] (London [1839]), [1], British Library (741.k.1). 143. WEB, Paper read at Shakespeare Society Dinner. On the clipping practice, see Jillian Hess, “The Scholar’s Scrapbook: Reading Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century,” Book History 21 (2018): 214–244. 144. WEB, Paper read at Shakespeare Society Dinner; MCC to RB, October 11, 1849, quoted in [RB], “Complimentary Testimonials,” 157–158 (not in LE); Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3.3.175 (RS). 145. MCC to the Donors of the Testimonial Chair, January 15, 1852 (emphasis mine). 146. Records of the Shakespeare Society of New York, FSL (Y.d.961, no. 1). 147. Anecdote reprinted from Thomas De Quincey’s review of Final Memorials of Charles Lamb by Thomas Noon Talfourd in the North British Review 10:19 (November 1848): 179–214 (202–203) in various American papers without attribution: e.g., “Anecdote of Charles Lamb,” Washington Reporter (April 25, 1849), 1. 148. “W. E. Burton, Esq.,” Sun (July 28, 1853), 1. 149. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.4.31–34 (RS). 150. Keese, John Keese, 83. 151. “Letter from the Place of Shakespeare’s Nativity, Concerning Some Particulars Relating to That Great Poet and His Family,” The British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Gentlemen & Ladies (June 7, 1762), 302. 152. Wynne, Private Libraries of New York, 154; MB to John Sartain, February 20, 1862, “Robert Balmanno: Personal Miscellaneous Papers,” Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

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153. MCC to RB, August 9, 1853, Records of the Shakespeare Society of New York, FSL (Y.d.961, no. 9); MCC to RB, August 9, 1853 (LE, 205–206), is a more personal letter written the same day but not intended to be shown to the members of the Shakespeare Society. 154. Franklin Pierce quoted in Weekly Argus (July 23, 1853), 5. 155. William Carey Richards, A Day in the New York Crystal Palace and How to Make the Most of It: Being a Popular Companion to the “Official Catalogue” and a Guide to All the Objects of Special Interest in the New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (New York: Putnam, 1853), 97; Horace Greeley, ed., Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace New York, 1853–4: Showing the Progress and the State of the Various Useful and Esthetic Pursuits. From the New York Tribune (New York: Redfield, 1853), 52. 156. RB, [report on meeting Lord Ellesmere], Records of the Shakespeare Society of New York, FSL (Y.d.961, no. 6). 157. See Marco Antonio Flaminio, “Ad Bartholomaeum Cavalcantem,” ll. 1–3, Marci Antonii, Joannis Antonii et Gabrielis Flaminiorum, Forocorneliensium Carmina (Padua: J. Cominus, 1743), 188. 158. RB, [report on meeting Lord Ellesmere], FSL. 159. TCC to RB, July 21, 1854, TCCC. 160. MB, Century of Queens, 187. 161. Leigh Hunt, “Old Books and Bookshops,” in Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washborn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 471. 162. Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 32–33. 163. TCC to RB, October 13, 1848, and January 20, 1854, TCCC. For more on mermaids and Nordic sailors, see TCC to RB, April 10, 1851, and TCC to RB, January 11, 1854, TCCC. 164. TCC is quoting a review (quite possibly his own) of Henry Thomas Colebrooke ’s On Sanskrit and Prakrit Poetry in The British Review and London Critical Journal 4 (1812): 160–174 (169). 165. Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 4. 166. MB, Pen and Pencil, 158. 167. Robert Smith, “Remarks on a Gimmal Ring in a Letter to the Rev. John Brand, Secretary,” Archaeologia; or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 14 (January 1803): 7–13 (9). 168. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 5.1.156–159 (RS).

334 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 6 7 – 1 7 4 169. Frederick William Fairholt, The Home of Shakspere Illustrated and Described (London: Chapman and Hall, 1847), 27. 170. [TCC], “Proceedings of the Association,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 4 (1839): 389–391 (390); TCC to RB, December 1, 1848, TCCC. 171. MB, “Shakespeare’s Gimmel-Ring,” Pen and Pencil, 168. 172. RB to MCC, April 2, 1850, LE, 24. 173. RB to TFDC, December 13, 1854, FSL (Y.c.1726, no. 6). 174. TCC to RB, April 11, 1828, TCCC. 175. William Jerdan, The Autobiography of William Jerdan, with His Literary, Political, and Social Remains During the Last Fifty Years, 4 vols. (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1852–1853), 4:32–33. 176. RB to GL, August 20, 1855, New-York Historical Society Library; Robert Lemon to RB, September 12, 1829, TCCC. 177. RB to TFDC, January 9, 1855, FSL (Y.c.1726). 178. James Orchard Halliwell to RB, October 11, 1852, Robert Balmanno Correspondence, 1852–1868, Manuscripts and Archives Division (MssCol 190), New York Public Library. 179. TFDC to RB, December 18, 1854, TCCC. 180. TCC to RB, July 21, 1854, TCCC. 181. TFDC to RB, September 14, 1854, TCCC. 182. “The Arctic Lost: Collision with Propeller,” Albany Journal (October 11, 1854), 2. 183. RB to TFDC, December 13, 1854, FSL (Y.c.1726). 184. RB to TFDC, December 13, 1854, FSL (Y.c.1726). 185. “New-York Correspondence,” Charleston Courier (October 11, 1854), 2. 186. RB to TFDC, February 21, 1855; FSL (Y.c.1726). 187. [RB], “Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree.” 188. [RB], “Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree.” 189. MB to John Sartain, February 20, 1862, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library. I assume this is the Earle she speaks of.

Chapter 4.  Boston Antiquarians Epigraph: Howard Crosby, George Henry Moore, L.L.D.: A Memoir (Morrisania, N.Y.: printed by The Historical Magazine for private distribution, 1870), 1–2, Library of Congress (116, 7.7M8). 1. HS quoted in Wyman W. Parker, “Henry Stevens: The Making of a Bookseller,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 48:2 (1954): 149–169 (160).

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2. James Hammond Trumbull quoted in John T. Winterich, Early American Books and Printing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 29–30. 3. Alexander Young to CD, January 2, 1851, CDC. 4. David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books Since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 184. 5. Louis Leonard Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791–1991 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1996), 72. 6. George E. Ellis quoted in Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society, 74. 7. CD quoted in Justin Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane, LL.D.,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 7 (1891): 45–89 (81). 8. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 81. 9. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting: A Study of Recent Developments in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 185. 10. CD quoted in Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 81–82. 11. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Dean,” 81. 12. George Folsom, A Discourse Delivered Before the Maine Historical Society, at Its Annual Meeting September 6th 1847 (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1847), 10. 13. Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon & London, 2004), xv. In an American context, Lindsay Di Cuirci writes similarly that “Historical societies in the United States were not repositories only; they were also meaningful participants in early American print culture and scholarship”: Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 10. 14. HS, Historical Nuggets: Bibliotheca Americana; or, A Descriptive Account of My Collection of Rare Books Relating to America, 2 vols. (London: Whittingham & Wilkins, 1862), 1:v. 15. [EAD], “The Loiterer,” Arcturus 2:11 (October 1841): 324. 16. Virgil quoted in Aelius Donatus, Virgils Life, trans. Thomas Twyne (London: Wyllyam How, 1573), iv (spelling modernized in text). 17. Virgil quoted in CD, “Remarks on the Seal of the Society,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 15 (1876–1877): 256–258 (257) (translation mine). 18. CD, “Remarks on the Seal of the Society,” 257. 19. GL to CD, September 1, 1858, CDC.

336 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 7 9 – 1 8 4 20. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Atlantic Monthly (June 1, 1862), 657–674 (671). 21. Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society, 59–60; Alexander Young quoted in Ezra S. Gannett, A Discourse Delivered in the Meetinghouse on Church Green, Boston, on Monday, March 20, 1854, at the Funeral of the Late Rev. Alexander Young, D.D., Pastor of the New South Church (Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Company, 1854), 16. 22. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 45. 23. Samuel Willard Crompton, “Deane, Charles,” American National Biography, ed. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6:295. 24. Lot no. 890, Catalogue of the Valuable Private Library of the Late Charles Deane, LL.D., Historian, Vice-President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Member of Many Other Historical Societies, Part I (Boston: C. F. Libbie, 1898), 78. 25. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 47–48. 26. Alexander Young to CD, July 8, 1846, CDC. 27. CD quoted in Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 48. 28. Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings . . . As Namely, His Antidote Against Atheism. Appendix to the Said Antidote. Enthusiasmus triumphatus. Letters to Des Cartes, etc. Immortality of the Soul. Conjectura cabbalistica (London: J. Downing, 1712), 55. 29. CD quoted in Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 48. 30. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 68. 31. C.F. Libbie, Catalogue of the Valuable Private Library of the Late Charles Deane, 231. 32. Henry More, Philosophical Poems (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647), 334. 33. Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Henry More (London: Joseph Downing, 1710), 16. 34. CL, autograph note mounted on front flyleaf of CL’s copy of Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, Houghton Library (EC8.L1654. Zz712m), Cambridge, Massachusetts; cf. Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Henry More, 11 (Ἀπορία), 16 (Ἐυπορία). 35. Henry More quoted in Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Henry More, 15–16. 36. CL to STC, May 31, 1796, and January 10, 1797, LCML, 1:11, 87. 37. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (1869): 415–468 (424).

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3 8. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 431. 39. EAD and GLD, Cyclopædia of American Literature; Embracing Personal and Critical Notices of Authors, and Selections from Their Writings: From the Earliest Period to the Present Day, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 2:316. 4 0. See the list of purchasers in CCLL, copy 1, Berg. 41. CL to Robert Southey, May 10, 1830, LCML, 3:270. 42. James Augustus Hessey quoted in LCML, 3:274n. 43. CL, Suum Cuique (trans. E. V. Knox), LCML, 3:274n (emphasis mine), Hessey quoted herein. 44. CL to Robert Southey, May 10, 1830, LCML, 3:270. 45. Hessey quoted in LCML, 3:274n. 46. [T[homas] W[estwood], “Recollections of Charles Lamb,” Notes and Queries 3:10 (September 22, 1866): 221–222 (222). 47. CL, “Preface by a Friend of the Late Elia,” WCML, 2:151. 48. “Review of The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life, by Thomas Noon Talfourd (London: Edward Moxon, 1837),” North American Review 46:98 (January 1838): 55–71 (57–58). 49. Alexander Young quoted in Ezra S. Gannett, Discourse, 16. Cf. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (4.2.32), ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1980), 439. 50. Young’s “Library of the Old English Prose Writers” was printed by Hilliard & Brown, “Booksellers to the University,” in Cambridge (1831–1834). The Chaucer quotation appeared on the page between the general title page (for the series) and the full-title page (for the individual volume). 51. Henry Southern, “Introduction,” Retrospective Review, and Historical and Antiquarian Magazine 1:1 (1820): i–xvii (iv). 52. Alexander Young quoted in Gannett, Discourse, 16. 53. Folsom, A Discourse Delivered Before the Maine Historical Society, 12. 54. “Review of On the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge,” The Christian Examiner and General Review 15 (1834): 350–364 (359). 55. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 431; “Books of Charles Lamb’s Library in America,” The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America 9:2 (February 1, 1865): 45–49 (45). 56. “Incidents on Board the Mayflower,” Boston Recorder (April 28, 1848), 2. 57. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 81. 58. [GL], The Origin, History and Character of the New England Primer: Being a Series of Articles Contributed to the Cambridge Chronicle (Cambridge, Mass.:

338 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 8 8 – 1 9 1 privately printed for the author, 1849), 32, CEN Papers (No. 2237). I refer to GL’s collected articles when quoting the Antiquary. 59. GL quoted from speech to the Congressional Library Association in Daily Evening Traveller (August 30, 1855), clipping enclosed in GL to CD, August 29, 1855, CDC. (GL either began his letter a day earlier than the paper was published or mistook the day.) GL boasts, “You will perceive by the notice from the Traveller (what you would not have discovered if you had heard the essay) that it was an ‘admirable paper’!” 60. GL to CD, April 27, 1849, CDC. 61. GL owned a blackletter edition of Foxe ’s Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable, Happenying in the Church with an Vniuersall History of the Same, &c., 2 vols. in 1 (London: John Daye, 1583), and a later edition, Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable Happening in the Church, 9th ed., 3 vols. (London: printed for the company of Stationers, 1684), lot nos. 1286–1287, Catalogue of the Valuable Private Library of the Late George Livermore, Esq., of Cambridge, Mass. (Boston: Charles F. Libbie, 1894), 104. 62. [GL], The Origin, History and Character of the New England Primer, 31–32. 63. GL to CD, May 14, 1849, CDC. 64. John Fox[e], An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monuments of the Church, ed. Timothe Bright (London, 1859), lot no. 1358, Catalogue of the Valuable Private Library of the Late Charles Deane, 124. 65. John Foxe quoted in [GL], The Origin, History and Character of the New England Primer, 33. 66. CD to GL, May 12, 1849, CDC. 67. GL to CD, May 14, 1849, CDC. 68. [GL], “How Many Children Had John Rogers, the Martyr?” Daily Evening Transcript (July 18, 1849), 1. 69. [CD], “The Children of John Rogers,” Daily Evening Transcript (July 24, 1849), 4. 70. GL to CD, April 26, 1849, CDC. 71. [CD], “The Children of John Rogers.” 72. John Rogers quoted in Christopher Anderson, Annals of the English Bible, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1845), 2:283 (“find” corrected to “fund”), and 2:286; Psalm 51:1 (KJV). 73. Lewis G. Pray to CD, July 30, 1849, CDC. 74. [CD], “How Many Children Had John Rogers the Martyr?” Daily Evening Transcript (July 16, 1849), [4].

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75. “A Sexton of the Old School” [Lucius Manlius Sargent], “Dealings with the Dead, no. XV,” Daily Evening Transcript (July 15, 1848), [4]. 76. Alexander Young to CD, July 18, 1849, CDC. See [CD], “How Many Children Had John Rogers the Martyr?” [4]. 77. Winsor, “Memoir of Charles Deane,” 82. 78. [GL], The Origin, History and Character of the New England Primer, 31. 79. [GL], “How Many Children Had John Rogers, the Martyr?” 80. GL to CD, July 16, 1849, CDC. 81. [CD], “The Children of John Rogers.” Savage ’s skepticism would not stop other Americans in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Indiana from claiming descent from the martyr; see “The Descendants of John Rogers, the Martyr,” National Anti-Slavery Standard (October 2, 1858), 3. 82. [GL], “The John Rogers Controversy,” Daily Evening Transcript (July 27, 1849), 1. 83. GL to CD, July 25, 1849, CDC. 84. [CD], Letter to the Editor, Daily Evening Transcript (July 27, 1849), 1. 85. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum; with the Prolegomena of Scriblerus (London: A. Dob, 1729), 1. CL’s copy is lot no. 1570 in the Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 125. 86. CD quoted in GL to CD, August 4, 1849, CDC. 87. GL to CD, August 4, 1849, CDC. 88. CD to GL, May 4, 1851, CDC. 89. These phrases appear in GL to CD, January 21, 1852, CDC. 90. GL to CD, August 13, 1859, CDC. 91. Mark Twain, “Advice to Youth,” (1882), in Mark Twain: Protagonist for the Popular Culture, ed. Marlene Boyd Vallin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), 135–137 (136). 92. “The Number of John Roger’s Children,” Evening Post (October 12, 1859), 1. The evidence upon which this article relies, and credits to Chancellor Reuben H. Walworth as new information, had already been published a decade earlier by CD. 93. GL to CD, April 27, 1849, CDC. 94. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 427. 95. GL to CD, April 27, 1849, CDC, John Landon Sibley quoted herein. 96. GL quoted in CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 425. 97. Luther Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries, ed. Roger E. Stoddard (Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1991), 67.

340 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 9 6 – 2 0 1   98. GL quoted in CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 416–417.   99. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 423. 100. GL quoted in CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 426; “The Three Burnham Brothers and Their Antecedents,” New York Times (July 21, 1894), 6. 101. [GL], “Public Libraries,” North American Review 72 (1850): 185–220 (191). 102. CD quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society to the Memory of George Livermore (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1866), 9–10. 103. Henry C. Bohn quoted in lot no. 106, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 10; for the other Bibles mentioned, see the Bible section (9–60). 104. RB to GL, August 20, 1855, Mss. Collection (Robert Balmanno Letters to George Livermore, 1855–1858), New-York Historical Society. 105. CD quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 10. 106. Robert Southey, The Doctor, ed. John Wood Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1848), 164, lot no. 2204, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 172. 107. Louis Bollioud de Mermet, Crazy Book-Collecting; or, Bibliomania: Showing the Great Folly of Collecting Rare and Curious Books, First Editions, Unique and Large Paper Copies, in Costly Bindings, etc. . . . First Published Anonymously in 1761, and Now Done into English and Republished for the Perusal and Delectation of the Members of the Grolier Club of New York et Amicorum (New York: Duprat, 1894), 23. 108. Facsimile title page, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, following 22. 109. See HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 33–36. 110. Henry C. Badger, The Consecrated Life: A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of George Livermore (Cambridge, Mass.: printed for the family, 1865), 14. See description of The Souldier’s Pocket Bible, lot no. 187, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 21 (spelling in text modernized). 111. [GL], “Public Libraries,” 199. Cf. JGC, A Concise Classified List of the Most Important Works on Bibliography, Being Those Selected in This Department for the Astor Library (New York: R. Craighead, 1949). 112. See lot nos. 785–789, 793, Catalogue of . . . the Late George Livermore, 67–68. 113. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 2 vols. (London: John Major, 1836), 1:554. 114. Walter Scott quoted in Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 2:675. Specimen Bibliothecæ Britannicæ is lot no. 782, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 67.

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115. GTS, January 7, 1837, Diary, 49. GL’s copies of Dibdin’s Library Companion are lot nos. 791 and 792, Catalogue of . . . the Late George Livermore, 68; for GTS’s, see lot no. 463, Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, Etc., of the late George T. Strong, Esq., &c. (New York: Bangs & Company, 1878), 45. 116. See description of GL’s copy of Dibdin’s Bibliomania (1809), lot no. 783, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 67. Cf. lot no. 458, Catalogue of the Books, Manuscripts, Etc., of the late George T. Strong, 44, and lot no. 1089, Catalogue of the Valuable Private Library of the Late Charles Deane, 98. 117. John Ferriar, The Bibliomania, an Epistle, to Richard Heber, Esq. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), 3. 118. Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton, The Great Book-Collectors (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893), 213–214. 119. Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1859), 2:137. 120. [GL], “Public Libraries,” 197. 121. Thomas Campbell quoted in H. Phipps Hemming, “The Fiercest of Bibliomaniacs,” Library Review 6:7 (1938): 317–332 (317); Walter Scott quoted in John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 10 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black 1862), 2:280. 122. For the attribution of Albrecht Dürer as the artist of the woodcut of the Book Fool, see the object description of Sebastian Brandt, Das Narrenschyff (Basel, Switzerland: printed by Johann Bergmann de Olpe, 1495), sig.aiii verso, Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 30.71). 123. Lucian of Samosata quoted in Bernhard Metz, “Bibliomania and the Folly of Reading,” Comparative Critical Studies 5:2–3 (2008): 249–269 (265n16). 124. Two types of the fool’s-head or “foolscap” design (A7/1/3/1 and A7/1/3/2) may be seen in the International Standard for the Registration of Papers With or Without Watermarks, version 2.1.1 (Basel, Switzerland: International Association of Paper Historians, 2013), 37. 125. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliomania; or, Book-Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease. In an Epistle Addressed to Richard Heber, Esq. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1809), title page. 126. William Andrew Chatto quoted in RB to GL, December 1, 1856, Mss. Collection (Robert Balmanno Letters to George Livermore, 1855–1858), New-York Historical Society. For an instance where Chatto does object, see A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (London: Charles Knight, 1839), 234.

342 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 0 5 – 2 0 8 127. Joseph Addison, Tatler, no. 158 (April 13, 1710), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 2:384. 128. William Oldys, A Literary Antiquary: Memoir of William Oldys, Esq. Norroy King-at-Arms; Together with His Diary, Choice Notes from His Adversaria, and an Account of the London Libraries (London: Spottiswoode, 1862), 101. 129. Giles Mandelbrote, “The Organization of Book Auctions in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in Under the Hammer: Book Auctions Since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2001), 15–36 (28). See too Brian J. Enright, “The Later Auction Sales of Thomas Rawlinson’s Library: 1727– 34,” in Richard Rawlinson: A Tercentenary Memorial, ed. Georgian Rawlinson Tashjian, David R. Tashjian, Brian J. Enright (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1990), 133–167. 130. Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, 2:137. 131. Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 1:436–437 (spelling of “ceiling” corrected). 132. William Carew Hazlitt, The Book Collector: A General Survey of the Pursuit and of Those Who Have Engaged in It at Home and Abroad from the Earliest Period to the Present Times (London: John Grant, 1904), 40. 133. See Arnold Hunt, “The Sale of Richard Heber’s Library,” in Under the Hammer, 143–172. 134. Holbrook Jackson, “Bookmen,” in Occasions: A Volume of Essays upon Divers Subjects (London: Grant Richards, 1922), 165–171 (167). 135. Seth Lerer, “Caxton in the Nineteenth Century,” in Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. William Ruskin (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006): 326–370 (329). 136. Gustave Flaubert, Bibliomania: A Tale, trans. Theodore Wesley Koch (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Library, 1929), 10. 137. Flaubert, Bibliomania, 11. The curious may be gratified to know that the scene took place in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries: the year, 2000; the book, Shelley’s Cenci; the bibliomaniac, Jay Fliegelman. For more on his library and methods, see Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, “Multiple Associations: An Interview with Jay Fliegelman,” Imprint 24:2 (Spring 2006): 17–31. 138. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 427. Dibdin’s works in the genre of the bibliographical tour were lot nos. 790, 794, Catalogue of . . . the Late George Livermore, 68. 139. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 447.

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140. George S[tillman] Hillard quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 14. 141. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 436. 142. Harry Bache Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” Colophon 1:3 (1930): [1–8] ([3]); “Obituary: Right Hon. Thomas Grenville,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 17 (February 1847), 197–201 (200). 143. Robert Joseph Phillimore, Memoir of the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville (London: George Woodfall & Son, 1847), 18. 144. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 439. 145. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron; or, Ten Days Pleasant Discourse upon Illuminated Manuscripts, and Subjects Connected with Early Engraving, Typography, and Bibliography, 3 vols. (London: W. Bulmer, 1817), 3:64. 146. Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron, 3:64. 147. Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron, 3:65. 148. CD quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 9. 149. Lot nos. 787–789, Catalogue of the Private Library of Thomas Dowse, of Cambridge, Mass., Presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society, July 30, 1856 (Boston: John Wilson, 1956), 67–68. 150. Edward Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3 (1855–1858), 361–398 (365, 368–369). 151. Thomas Dowse quoted in Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 388. 152. George B. Emerson, “Miscellany: The Cambridge Leather Dresser,” Vermont Chronicle (August 3, 1842), 124. 153. Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries, 61. 154. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 368. 155. “A Memorable Citizen,” Lowell Daily Citizen and News (December 6, 1856), 2. Cf. Shakespeare, Henry V, 1.2.221 (RS). 156. “Obituary: Thomas Dowse,” New York Herald (November 7, 1856), 4. 157. “A Memorable Citizen.” 158. CL to WW, February 1, 1806, LCML, 1:419. 159. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 433. 160. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 433–434. 161. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 386. 162. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 458n. 163. RB to GL, July 21, 1858, Mss. Collection (Robert Balmanno Letters to George Livermore, 1855–1858), New-York Historical Society. 164. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 390.

344 n o t e s t o pa g e s 21 5 – 2 2 3 165. Robert C. Winthrop quoted in Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society, 85. 166. Thomas Dowse quoted in [GL], The Dowse Library: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Relating to the Donations from Thomas Dowse (Boston: printed for private distribution, 1859), 9. 167. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox of New York, 19. 168. Thomas Dowse quoted in [GL], The Dowse Library, 9. 169. [GL], The Dowse Library, 31, 23. 170. Robert C. Winthrop quoted in “Thomas Dowse, Esq., and Hon. Samuel Hoar,” Boston Daily Advertiser (November 14, 1856), 2. 171. “Inauguration of the Franklin Statue,” Boston Daily Atlas (September 19, 1856), 1. 172. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 393. 173. Edward Everett, An Address Delivered as the Introduction to the Franklin Lectures, in Boston, November 14, 1831 (Boston: Gray & Bowen, 1832), 4. 174. Bela Bates Edwards, Biography of Self-Taught Men (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1832), x. 175. “Everett’s Last Oration,” Norwich Aurora (December 18, 1858), 2. 176. GL quoted in CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 420. 177. Hillard quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 14. 178. Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted in Tribute of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 19. 179. Benjamin Franklin, “Epitaph,” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 111. 180. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 394–395. 181. The Benjamin Franklin Memorial may be seen in the Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts; inscription reproduced in Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 394. 182. RB to GL, December 1, 1856 (Robert Balmanno Letters to George Livermore, 1855–1858), New-York Historical Society. 183. “A Memorable Citizen.” 184. Everett, “Eulogy on Thomas Dowse,” 391–392. 185. [GL], The Dowse Library, 28. 186. GL, A Merchant of the Old School: A Tribute to the Memory of James Johnson (Boston: printed for private distribution, 1855), 12. 187. CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” 440. 188. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. E. C. Thomas, ed. Michael Maclagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 157–159 (158 in Latin). GL’s copy of this book

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 2 3 – 2 3 0

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(lot no. 780, Catalogue of . . . George Livermore, 67) was published in 1832 by Thomas Rodd. 189. Robert C. Winthrop quoted in [GL], The Dowse Library, 28–29. 190. Robert C. Winthrop, “Tribute to Edward Everett,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 8 (1864–1868): 101–170 (103). 191. Emerson, “Miscellany,” 124. 192. CL to STC, January 10, 1797, LCML, 1:87.

Chapter 5.  Educating America Epigraph: Luther Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1855), 5–6 (quoting Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.6). 1. HS quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: printed by the House of Commons, July 23, 1849), 97. EAD reprinted HS’s statement to the Select Committee on Public Libraries in “The Public Libraries of America,” Literary World 6:161 (March 2, 1850): 195. 2. George Folsom, A Discourse Delivered Before the Maine Historical Society, at Its Annual Meeting September 6th 1847 (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1847), 12. 3. CEN, “The Lack of Old Homes in America,” Scribner’s Magazine (May 1889), 636–640 (638). 4. Edward Everett to JGC, April 10, 1852, Joseph Green Cogswell Collection, Archives and Manuscripts, New York Public Library. 5. GT to C[harles] S. Daveis, August 30, 1813, LJGC, 26–27. 6. Thomas Gold Appleton, “Some Souvenirs of Round-Hill School,” Old and New 6:1 (July 1872): 27–41 (28). 7. JGC to Daveis, January 15, 1813, LJGC, 17. 8. JGC to Daveis, January 30, 1813, LJGC, 18. 9. GT to Daveis, August 30, 1813, LJGC, 26. 10. JGC to Prof. [John] Farrar, March 9, 1817, LJCG, 54. 11. GT to Daveis, August 30, 1813, LJGC, 25–26. 12. JGC to Farrar, March 9, 1817, LGCG, 53–54. 13. JGC to Mrs. C. S. Daveis, April 17, 1817, LJGC, 57–58. 14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to JGC, August 11, 1819, LJGC, 106. 15. JGC to W[illiam] H[ickling] Prescott, December 24, 1817, LJGC, 72. 16. JGC to Prescott, December 24, 1817, and JGC to Daveis, December 30, 1815, LJGC, 72, 41.

346 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 3 0 – 2 3 4 1 7. JGC to Daveis, December 30, 1815, LJGC, 41. 18. JGC to Mrs. [Susan] Prescott, November 21, 1818, LJGC, 89–90. 19. Abiel Holmes, American Annals; or, A Chronological History of America, from Its Discovery in 1492 to 1806, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: W. Hilliard, 1805), 1:424. 20. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, November 21, 1818, LJGC, 90. 21. Mrs. James T. [Annie Adams] Fields, A Shelf of Old Books (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 72. 22. John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols. (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1837–1838), 4:148. 23. James T. Fields, August 31, 1847, Diary (1847), Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852–1912, Massachusetts Historical Society (P281). 24. JGC to Daveis, February 19, 1819, LJGC, 95. 25. [GL], “Public Libraries,” North American Review 72 (1850): 185–220 (195). 26. Five of the actors in this story served as Harvard librarians: Andrews Norton (1813–1821), Joseph Green Cogswell (1821–1823), Charles Folsom (1823– 1826), John Langdon Sibley (1856–1877), and Justin Winsor (1877–1897). 27. [GL], “Public Libraries,” 197, 195. It is worth noting here that this article is a review of four texts: (1) Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: printed for the House of Commons on July 23, 1849); (2) Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Government of the British Museum with Minutes of Evidence. Presented to Both Houses of Parliament, by Command of Her Majesty (London: William Cowers & Sons, 1850); (3) Annual Report of the Trustees of the Astor Library of the City of New York. Made to the Legislature, January 29, 1850 (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1850); (4) Reports, etc., of the Smithsonian Institution, Exhibiting Its Plans, Operations, and Financial Condition up to January 1, 1849. From the Third Annual Report of the Board of Regents. Presented to Congress, February 19th, 1849 (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Ritchie, 1849). 28. Arthur T. Hamlin, The University Library in the United States: Its Origins and Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 34. 29. GT to S[amuel] A[tkins] Eliot, April 1, 1822, LJGC, 133; GT to Eliot, October 29, 1822, LJGC, 134. 30. GT to Eliot, October 29, 1822, LJGC, 134. 31. JGC to GT, October 1, 1819, LJGC, 108. 32. CEN, “The Intellectual Life of America,” The New Princeton Review 6 (November 1888): 312–324 (317).

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3 3. JGC to GT, October 12, 1823, LJGC, 140–141. 34. George Bancroft and George E. Ellis quoted in Orrie William Long, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), 145. 35. Henry Theodore Tuckerman quoted in LJGC, 345. 36. Henry Whitney Bellows quoted in John W. Chadwick, Henry W. Bellows: His Life and Character (New York: S. W. Green’s Son, 1882), 8. 37. Rush Christopher Hawkins quoted in Anna L. Bellows, Recollections of Henry Whitney Bellows (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1897), 55–56. 38. C[yrus] A[ugustus] Bartol, “Henry Whitney Bellows,” 4, reprinted from the Unitarian Review and bound with Chadwick, Henry W. Bellows, Massachusetts Historical Society (B Bellows). 39. Bellows, Recollections of Henry Whitney Bellows, 36. 4 0. Chadwick, Henry W. Bellows, 22. 41. Martin K. Schermerhorn, Memorial Services of Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D. Held at the Channing Memorial Church, Newport, R.I. (February 5, 1882), 17, Massachusetts Historical Society (B Bellows). 42. Henry Whitney Bellows quoted in Walter Donald Kring, Henry Whitney Bellows (Boston: Skinner House, 1979), 90. 43. Schermerhorn, Memorial Services, 16. 44. Kring, Henry Whitney Bellows, 77; [Untitled news item], National AntiSlavery Standard (April 20, 1848), 3. 45. CL, “A Quaker’s Meeting,” WCML, 2:47. 46. CL, “A Quaker’s Meeting,” WCML, 2:47. 47. William Sewel, The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers: Intermixed with Several Remarkable Occurrences (London: J. Sowle, 1722), 147–148. 48. Schermerhorn, Memorial Services, 19. 49. JGC to Mrs. [Anna Eliot] Ticknor (henceforth Mrs. GT), March 13, 1830, LJGC, 166. 50. JGC to GT, November 21, 1819, LJGC, 118. 51. JGC to Mrs. GT, July 7, 1832, LJGC, 175. 52. JGC to Mrs. GT, April 24, 1833, LJGC, 181. 53. JGC to Mrs. GT, April 24, 1833, LJGC, 182. 54. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, December 3, 1834, LJGC, 194. 55. On the school and JGC’s time there, see Michael T. Malone, “The Episcopal School of North Carolina, 1832–1842,” North Carolina Historical Review 49:2 (April 1972): 178–194.

348 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 3 8 – 2 4 6 5 6. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, August 10, 1834, LJGC, 189. 57. JGC to Mrs. GT, June 28, [1834], LJGC, 188. 58. JGC to Mrs. GT, June 28, [1834], LJGC, 188. 59. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, August 10, 1834, LJGC, 189. 60. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, August 10, 1834, LJGC, 189. 61. JGC to Mrs. Prescott, December 13, 1835, LJGC, 203. 62. JGC to S[amuel] Ward, February 23, 1836, LJGC, 204. 63. JGC to Daveis, December 25, 1834, LJGC, 194n. 64. Farnham, A Glance at Private Libraries, 6. 65. George S. Hillard quoted in LJGC, 344. 66. Mellen Chamberlain, John Adams, the Statesman of the American Revolution with Other Essays and Addresses Historical and Literary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 425. 67. Charles Meyer quoted in [GL], “Public Libraries,” 207. 68. JGC to C. S. Daveis, May 27, 1840, LJGC, 224. 69. Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Piazza Tales, ed. Egbert S. Oliver (New York: Hendricks, 1948), 17. 70. GTS, February 21, 1840, Diary, 131. 71. JGC to C. S. Daveis, January 2, 1838, LJGC, 213. 72. GTS, July 14, 1844, Diary, 242. 73. JGC to GT, July 20, 1838, LJGC, 216. 74. JGC to GT, October 8, 1838, LJGC, 217. 75. Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1859), 2:220. Also see Act of Incorporation and By-Laws of the Trustees of the Astor Library (New York: Sibell & Mott, 1849). 76. JGC to C. S. Daveis, October 8, 1839, LJGC, 221. 77. JGC to GT, May 27, 1840, LJGC, 225. 78. JGC to GT, September 15, 1840, LJGC, 226. 79. GTS, June 29, 1840, Diary, 357. 80. JGC to GT, September 15, 1840, LJGC, 226. 81. JGC to GT, May 27, 1840, LJGC, 225. 82. JGC to GT, March 10, 1842, LJGC, 231. 83. JGC to Mrs. GT, May 3, 1842, LJGC, 233. 84. Arthur D[ouglas] Howden Smith, John Jacob Astor: Landlord of New York (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1929), 286. 85. Philip Hone, October 9, 1844, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936), 716.

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  86. Smith, John Jacob Astor, 288–289.   87. Sidney Herbert Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture: A Social History of the American Public Library Movement in New England and the Middle States from 1850 to 1900 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947), 142.   88. Hone, October 9, 1844, Diary, 716–717.   89. Smith, John Jacob Astor, 289.   90. C[harles] A[stor] B[risted], “Review of The Agamemnon of Æschylus, with Notes,” Knickerbocker 29:6 (June 1847): 543–559 (543).   91. [Charles Astor Bristed], “The Periodical Literature of America,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 63:387 (January 1848): 106–112 (110–111).   92. JCG to Mrs. William Burns, August 27, 1863, LJCG, 295.   93. Autograph “Catalogue of Books belonging to C. A. Bristed, 49 Lafayette Place,” 26, Charles Astor Bristed Notebooks and Other Material, 1838– 1888, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (MSS 462), New Haven, Connecticut.   94. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), 99–100.   95. CL to Bernard Barton, February 10, 1825, LCML, 2:460.   96. JGC to C. S. Daveis, April 4, 1848, LJCG, 238.   97. Reuben A. Guild, A Treatise on Bibliography, Comprising a Select and Descriptive List of Bibliographical Works (New York: Charles B. Norton, 1858), 188.   98. The volumes in question were CCLL, nos. 25, 34. See the autograph notes for lot nos. 366 and 368 in Catalogue of a Private Library, Embracing a Large Collection of Rare and Valuable Works . . . To Be Sold by Cooley, Keese & Hill, at Their Auction Sales Room, 191 Broadway, Corner of Dey-Street, on Friday and Saturday Evenings Oct. 20th and 21st (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1848), Book Auction Catalogues Collection, American Antiquarian Society.   99. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction,” Literary World 3:40 (November 4, 1848): 1. 100. Gerald D. McDonald, “Charles Lamb as a Collector,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 38:9 (September 1934): 707–712 (710). 101. J. L. Cunningham, A Catalogue of Books from the Library of J.G. Cogswell, Being a Rare Collection of Works on Natural History, and in Foreign, English and Miscellaneous Literature to Be Sold . . . on Wednesday the 26th of February, &c. ([Boston]: J. L. Cunningham, 1884); Autograph “Catalogue of Books Belonging to C. A. Bristed.” 102. HS quoted in Wyman Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont: American Rare Book Dealer in London, 1845–1886 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1963), 75–76.

350 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 5 0 – 2 5 3 103. Richard Garnett, “The Late Henry Stevens, F.S.A.,” in Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography (London: George Allen, 1899), 325–333 (325). 104. Henry Stevens, Sr., Diary (excerpted), Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society 2:3 (1931): 115–128. 105. TCC to RB, May 4, 1849, TCCC. 106. HS quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 263. 107. HS, Catalogue of My English Library (London: C. Whittingham, 1853), vi. 108. Bryan Waller Procter quoted in Annie Adams Fields, James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches with Unpublished Fragments and Tributes from Men and Women of Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881), 10. 109. Philip Hone, January 8, 1848, Diary, 835; on the size of the other libraries, see [GL], “Public Libraries,” 197; GTS, June 13, 1846, Diary, 279; HS quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries, 101. 110. Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 45, 40–41. 111. S. A. Dix and Daniel N. Haskell, Address and Poem Delivered Before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, at the Dedication of Their New Rooms, January 3, 1848 (Boston: Mercantile Library Association, 1848), 5–7, 32–33. On the event, see “Mercantile Library Association,” Daily Evening Transcript (January 4, 1848), 2. Cf. William E[llery] Channing, Self-Culture: An Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Delivered at Boston, United States, September, 1838 (London: John Mardon, 1839), 22. 112. “Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association: Evening School,” Brooklyn Eagle and King’s County Democrat (October 27, 1841), 1. 113. “The Youth’s Athenæum,” Sun (November 18, 1841), 2. 114. “Grand Entertainment,” Charleston Courier (February 29, 1844), 3; [Announcement], Charleston Courier (August 11, 1843). 115. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to his mother (Jane Clemens), August 31, 1853, quoted in M. M. Brashear, “An Early Mark Twain Letter,” Modern Language Notes 44:4 (April 1929): 256–259 (258). 116. HS quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries, 97. 117. HS, Bibliotheca Historica; or, A Catalogue of Five Thousand Volumes of Books and Manuscripts Relating Chiefly to the History and Literature of North and South America Among Which Is Included the Larger Proportion of the Extraordinary Library of the Late Henry Stevens, &c. (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1870), xi. 118. HS, Bibliotheca Historica, xi–xii.

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119. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 182. 120. Anthony Panizzi quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 72. 121. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 9. 122. CD to GL, March 26, 1854, CDC. 123. CD to GL, April 4, 1854, CDC. 124. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 10–11, 26–27. 125. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox, 133. 126. HS quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 107. 127. Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Holt, 1995), 159. 128. M. S. Batts, “The 18th-Century Concept of the Rare Book,” Book Collector 45 (Autumn 1975): 381–400 (382). See too B. C. Bloomfield, “Rare-book Libraries and the Growth of Humanities Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 3: 1850–2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 503–519 (503). 129. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting: A Study of Recent Developments in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 95. 130. David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 315. 131. Obadiah Rich to HS, April 25, 1848, quoted in Wyman W. Parker, “Henry Stevens Sweeps the States,” Bibliographical Society of America Papers 52 (1958): 249–261 (257). This article was revised for Parker’s Henry Stevens of Vermont, but because it contains some details that did not make it into the book, I draw upon both sources. 132. Obadiah Rich to HS, June 1, 1848, quoted in Parker, “Henry Stevens Sweeps the States,” 257. 133. Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting, 96. 134. “Thirteenth Congress. First Session. Senate,” New-York Commercial Advertiser (April 25, 1848), 1. 135. “Washington’s Library,” reprinted from Journal of Commerce in the Daily Sanduskian (May 3, 1848), 3. 136. “Purchase of Washington’s Library,” Daily Evening Transcript (April 25, 1848), 2. 137. Appleton P. C. Griffin, ed., A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenæum ([Cambridge]: Boston Athenæum, 1897), vii. Parker

352 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 5 7 – 2 6 1 mentions 300 books with Washington’s signature (Henry Stevens of Vermont, 113), while Griffin cites 240 and an unspecified “few” with Martha Washington’s signature (vii). The difference is immaterial to this story. 138. “A Valued Relic,” Daily Evening Transcript (July 7, 1848), 2. 139. HS quoted in Parker, “Henry Stevens Sweeps the States,” 258; “Washington’s Library,” Daily Evening Transcript (May 17, 1848), 2. 140. Henry Stevens, Sr., quoted in Parker, Henry Stevens of Vermont, 113. 141. AN to HS, April 10, 1848, quoted in Kenneth E. Carpenter, “Why George Washington’s Library Is Not at Harvard,” Harvard Library Bulletin (2020), available at https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS: 37366376. 142. AN to CEN, April 29, 1848, CEN Papers. 143. AN and Jared Sparks, subscription circular dated May 25, 1848, laid in Griffin, A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenæum, Massachusetts Historical Society (Z8950.B75). 144. “Washington’s Library,” Barre Patriot (April 7, 1848), 2 (emphasis mine). 145. “Washington’s Library,” Daily Evening Transcript (April 24, 1848), 2. 146. Dorothy S. Eaton, “Introduction to the Index to the George Washington Papers, Microfilm Collection,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/ collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/provenance/. 147. HS quoted in Parker, “Henry Stevens Sweeps the States,” 259; “Subscribers to the Fund for the Purchase of the Books from Washington’s Library, Now in the Boston Athenæum,” in Griffin, A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenæum, [i]. 148. CEN, autograph memorandum in The Lady’s Pocket Companion for 1848, CEN Papers. 149. CEN to Arthur Hugh Clough, October 16, 1854, The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. De Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 1:115. 150. CEN, autograph memorandum in The Lady’s Pocket Companion for 1848, CEN Papers; JRB and CW to CEN, February 12, 1848, autograph letter pasted on inside front cover of Poetical Tracts (CCLL, no. 37), Houghton Library (EC8.C6795.798f ), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 151. CL quoted in Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library [Part II],” Harvard Library Bulletin 10:3 (Autumn 1956): 367–402 (376–377). Cf. James Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, from the Revolution in 1688 to the End of the Reign of George II, 4 vols. (London T. H. Whitely, 1819–1820), 1:56.

n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 6 2 – 2 6 6

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152. Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library [Part II],” 377; Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Joyce E. Chaplin (New York: Norton, 2012), 21. 153. This volume (CCLL, no. 52) also contains Matthew Green’s The Spleen (1737), William Benson’s Letters Concerning Poetical Translations: And Virgil’s and Milton’s Arts of Verse, &c. (1739), Jacob Hildebrand’s Of the Sister Arts: An Essay (1734), Francis Webb’s A Philosophical Dissertation upon the Inlets to Human Knowledge (1739), published under the pseudonym “Philalethes”; CL’s transcription of James Caulfield quoted in Woodring, “Charles Lamb in the Harvard Library [Part II],” 377. 154. See CL’s copy of Euripides, Euripidis Tragoediarum, trans. August H. Matthiae (Oxford: G. Baxter, 1821), Houghton Library (Nor2111), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 155. CL to H[enry] F[rancis] Cary, May 6, 1831, LCML, 3:311n (English translation from Latin by Stephen Gwynn). 156. Joseph Warton, An Ode Occasioned by Reading Mr. West’s Translation of Pindar (London: W. Owen, 1749), 7. 157. CL to Cary, May 6, 1831, LCML, 3:311n. 158. [Lucius Manlius Sargent], “Dealings with the Dead. No. XXV,” Daily Evening Transcript (November 18, 1848), 4; GL lists 50,000 volumes for the Boston Athenæum at midcentury in “Public Libraries,” 197; Edwards lists 60,000 in Memoirs of Libraries, 2:194. 159. HS quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries, 101. 160. Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, 2:196. 161. HS and William Ewart quoted in Report from the Select Committee on Public Libraries, 98; CEN, “The Intellectual Life of America,” 323. 162. CEN, Miscellaneous Papers: Extract from Journal of College Days, CEN Papers. 163. AN to CEN, May 5, 1843, CEN Papers. 164. CEN, Extract from Journal of College Days, CEN Papers. 165. CEN, entry for June 16, 1849, undated Commonplace Book, CEN Papers. 166. CEN, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: A Sketch of His Life Together with Longfellow’s Chief Autobiographical Poems (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 6. 167. AN to CEN, May 20, 1849, CEN Papers. 168. CEN to Manning H. Force, April 10, 1850, The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:36. 169. Henry James, Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes (New York: Scribner’s, 1914), 415.

354 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 6 6 – 2 6 9 170. CEN to Samuel E. Guild, May 23, 1850, The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:69–70. 171. GL to CEN, January 21, 1850, laid into George E. Ellis, Memoir of Jared Sparks, LL.D. (Cambridge: John Wilson & Son, 1869), Boston Athenæum (RB l E 175.S73 E44 1869). 172. Charles Dexter Allen, American Book-Plates: A Guide to Their Study with Examples (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 92–93. For more about George Washington’s bookplate, see Alan Capps, “Coat of Arms,” Washington Library, Center for Digital History, https://www.mountvernon.org/ library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/coat-of-arms/. 173. GL to CEN, January 21, 1850; CD, “Memoir of George Livermore,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (1869): 415–468 (445). 174. Lane’s index is titled “The Inventory of Washington’s Books Drawn Up by the Appraisers of His Estate with Notes in Regard to the Full Titles of the Several Books, and the Later History and Present Ownership of Those Not in the Athenæum Collection,” in Griffin, A Catalogue of the Washington Collection in the Boston Athenæum. 175. [CW], “Prices and Purchasers of Sixty Volumes of Books Which Belonged to Charles Lamb of London Sold in New York at Private Sale by Bartlett & Welford, February 1848,” autograph page in copy 1 of Catalogue of Charles Lambs Library, for Sale by Bartlett & Welford, Berg; CW quoted in CCLL, 2. 176. Jared Sparks, “Life of Washington,” in The Writings of George Washington; Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published form the Original Manuscripts; with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, ed. Jared Sparks, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), 1:7. 177. Joseph Rosenblum, “Lost Lambs; or, The Dispersal of Charles Lamb’s Library: An Essay in Reconstruction,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 86 (1994): 47–55 (51). 178. George Folsom to Secretary of State [John M. Clayton], May 18, 1849, JRB Papers. 179. The Catalogue of the Late George Folsom (New York: F.B. Patterson, 1877), 114. 180. Rosenblum, “Lost Lambs,” 52. 181. Howard Crosby, George Henry Moore, L.L.D.: A Memoir (Morrisania, N.Y.: printed by The Historical Magazine for private distribution, 1870), Library of Congress (116, 7.7M8), 2–4. The volume (CCLL, no. 32) contains Aphra Behn’s The Feign’d Curtizans; or, A Night’s Intrigue: A Comedy (1679);

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John Crowne ’s The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (1677) and his City Politiques: A Comedy (1688); Thomas D’Urfey’s A Fool’s Preferment; or, The Three Dukes of Dunstable: A Comedy (1688) and his The Injured Princess; or, The Fatal Wager (1682); Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius; or, The Force of Love (1680) and his Massacre of Paris: A Tragedy (1690); Edward Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds; A Comedy (1688); Elkanah Settle’s The Female Prelate; Being the History of the Life and Death of Pope Joan: A Tragedy (1680); and Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine: A Tragedy (1676), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (L165 Zz690), New Haven, Connecticut. 182. GL to CEN, January 21, 1850, CEN Papers. 183. Sparks and AN, subscription circular. On CEN’s later activities on behalf of the Washington Library see, e.g., CEN to Charles Sumner, February 28, 1863, CEN Papers. 184. Clipping from Boston Evening Traveller, March 18, 1848, Miscellaneous Papers, 1825–1923 (HO bMS Am 1088.5), CEN Papers. The account that follows draws on this. 185. Henry Whitney Bellows quoted in Kring, Henry Whitney Bellows, 81. 186. Annual Report of the Trustees of the Astor Library quoted in GL, “Public Libraries,” 218. Annual reports from the Astor Library trustees were transmitted to the New York State Legislature, 1849–1892, and issued as numbered Assembly documents, e.g., no. 43, January 29, 1850, submitted by Washington Irving, President, and Samuel B. Ruggles, Secretary. 187. JGC to GT, December 29, 1848, LJGC, 244. 188. JGC to GT, October 23, 1848, LJGC, 242. 189. JGC to GT, December 29, 1848, LJGC, 243–244. 190. JGC to GT, January 26, 1849, LJGC, 244. 191. JGC to EAD, January 26, 1849, LJGC, 247–248. 192. JGC to GT, June 28, 1849, LJGC, 252. 193. Harry B. Smith, A Sentimental Library, Comprising Books Formerly Owned by Famous Writers, Presentation Copies, Manuscripts, and Drawings (New York: De Vinne, 1914), xi. 194. JGC, late summer 1849, LJGC, 252n. 195. JGC to Mrs. GT, August 16, 1850, LJGC, 254. 196. JGC to GT, April 22, 1855, LJGC, 255. 197. JGC to GT, August 5, 1851, LJGC, 258. 198. JGC to Mrs. GT, November 30, [1852], LJGC, 261. 199. JGC to Mrs. GT, December 28, 1852, LJGC, 261–262.

356 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 7 3 – 2 7 7 2 00. CL, “New Year’s Eve,” WCML, 2:27. 201. JGC to GT, March 26, 1853, LJGC, 262. 202. “City Intelligence: The Astor Library,” Evening Post (January 10, 1854), 3. 203. New York Times quoted in “The Astor Library, New York,” Boston Evening Transcript (January 10, 1854), 1. 204. New York Mirror quoted in “The Astor Library, New York.” 205. “City Intelligence: The Astor Library.” 206. JGC to GT, March 2, 1854, LJGC, 265. 207. JGC to GT, February 24, 1854, LJGC, 265. 208. 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 Tadmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175–201 (179). 209. James T. Fields, entry for 1875, Diary [begun] 1847, Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852–1812 P281, Roll 3, Massachusetts Historical Society. Cf. Fields, James T. Fields, 223–224. 210. EAD, “Sketch of a Librarian,” Notebook dated 1848, DFP; “The Superannuated Man” is an essay by Elia: WCML, 2:193–199. 211. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 529 (November 6, 1712), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 4:386. 212. JGC to GT, February 24, 1854, LJGC, 264–265. 213. JGC to GT, January 18, 1854, LJGC, 264. 214. JGC to GT, March 2, 1854, LJGC, 265. On the library hours and minimum age, see Phyllis Dain, The New York Public Library: A Universe of Knowledge (New York: New York Public Library, 2000), 12. 215. Albert Predeek, A History of Libraries in Great Britain and North America, trans. Lawrence S. Thomson (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947), 93. 216. George Bancroft quoted in EAD and GLD, “The Astor Library,” 2:765. 217. Edward Everett to JGC, April 10, 1852, JGC Collection, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books, New York Public Library. 218. Edward Everett quoted in Kenneth E. Carpenter, “Libraries,” in IB, 303–318 (309). 219. JGC to Mrs. GT, August 16, 1850, LJGC, 253. 220. JGC to Mrs. [William] Burns, February 27, 1859, LJGC, 278. 221. JGC to Mrs. GT, November 28, 1854, LJGC, 265. 222. JGC to Mrs. GT, November 30, 1855, and JGC to GT, December 31, 1855, LJGC, 268, 269.

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223. JGC to Mrs. Burns, October 19, 1856, LJGC, 271. The catalogues included JGC, Supplement to the Astor Library Catalogue: with an Alphabetical Index of Subjects in All the Volumes (New York: R. Craighead, 1866); [JGC], Catalogue or Alphabetical Index of the Astor Library in Two Parts, 4 vols. (New York: R. Craighead, 1857–1861); [JCG], List of Periodicals and Transactions of Societies Taken In by the Astor Library, 1855 (New York: printed at the Astor Library Autographic Press, 1855); JCG and Frederic Louis Otto Roehrig, Catalogue of Books in the Astor Library Relating to the Languages and Literature of Asia, Africa, and the Oceanic Islands (New York: printed at the Astor Library Autographic Press, 1854). For his earlier catalogue, see [JGC], Alphabetical Index to the Astor Library, or Catalogue with Short Titles, of the Books Now Collected and of the Proposed Accessions, as Submitted to the Trustees of the Library for Their Approval, January 1851 (New York: R. Craighead, 1851). 224. JGC to Mrs. Burns, October 19, 1856, LJGC, 271. 225. JGC to Mrs. Burns, November 9, 1856, LJGC, 272. 226. Astor Library trustees report quoted in EAD and GLD, “The Astor Library,” Cyclopædia of American Literature: Embracing Personal and Critical Notices of Authors, and Selections from Their Writings, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, ed. Michael Laird Simmons, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: W. Rutter [1875], 2:765. 227. Harry Miller Lydenberg, History of the New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (New York: New York Public Library, 1923), 1. Cf. Act of Incorporation and By-Laws of the Trustees of the Astor Library. 228. “The person most responsible for shaping the character of the Astor Library was not John Jacob Astor, but rather a New England scholarlibrarian named Joseph Green Cogswell”: Tom Glynn, Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 160–161. On JGC’s life as a scholar, see Long, Literary Pioneers, 77–107. 229. GTS, August 11, 1846, Diary, 280. 230. Mrs. [Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy] Waterson, “The Visible and Invisible in Libraries,” Atlantic Monthly (1865), 525–535 (532). 231. Waterson, “The Visible and Invisible in Libraries,” 532. 232. Elia’s Ghost [CL], “Rejoicings upon the New Year’s Coming of Age,” and [John Taylor and John Scott], “The Lion’s Head,” London Magazine 7:37 (January 1823): 5–7, and [3]–4 (4). In the same issue, CL officially killed off Elia: “A Character of the Late Elia, by a Friend,” signed “Phil-Elia,” 19–21,

358 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 8 0 – 2 8 3 later published in The Last Essays of Elia as a “Preface, by a Friend of the Late Elia,” WCML, 2:151–153.

Epilogue Epigraph: Harry Bache Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” Colophon 1:3 (1930): [1–8] ([1]). 1. William Butler Yeats describes Keats in this way in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” ll. 55–56, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1997), 163. 2. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” [3]. 3. Ernest Dressel North, “Introduction,” in Bangs & Company, Catalogue of the Library of the Late Charles W. Frederickson . . . To Be Sold at Auction . . . May 24th–29th, 1897, by Bangs & Co. . . . New York (New York: D. Taylor, 1897), iv. 4. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting: A Study of Recent Developments in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 19. 5. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” [4]. 6. Donald C. Dickinson, Dictionary of American Antiquarian Bookdealers (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998), 156. 7. Luther S. Livingston, “A Literary Curiosity from Charles Lamb’s Library: Discovery of a Book That Has Hitherto Baffled Lamb Students,” Bookman (January 1899): 453–457 (454). 8. “Notice,” Dodd, Mead & Company, Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library and of Some Presentation Copies and First Editions of His Rarer Books with Collations and Notes (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, [1899]); author’s copy. 9. Harry Bache Smith, A Sentimental Library: Comprising Books Formerly Owned by Famous Writers, Presentation Copies, Manuscripts, and Drawings (New York: [De Vinne], 1914), 146–149. 10. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” [3]. 11. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” [1]. 12. [EAD], “Charles Lamb’s Books at Auction,” Literary World 3:40 (November 4, 1848): 1. 13. Smith, A Sentimental Library, 145. 14. CL, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” WCML, 2:174. 15. HS, Recollections of Mr James Lenox of New York (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 62.

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1 6. CW quoted in CCLL, 2; CL, “The Two Races of Men,” WCML, 2:27. 17. Smith, A Sentimental Library, 145–156 (CL quoted 146; “Birth-place” corrected from “birthday”). 18. Smith, A Sentimental Library, 146. 19. John Skelton, “Phyllyp Sparowe,” ll. 120–42, Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 74–75. 20. WW, An Evening Walk. An Epistle; in Verse. Addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of England (London: Joseph Johnson, 1793), 24. 21. CL, autograph note on his copy of WW’s An Evening Walk. An Epistle (1793), bound into Poetical Tracts (EC8.C6795.798f ), Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 22. Michael Drayton, “The Owle. Noctuas Athenas,” as printed in CL’s edition of The Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A Celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I. and Charles I. (London: J. Hughs, 1748), 403–412 (404). 23. “Charles Lamb’s Library in New York,” Publishers’ Weekly (May 15, 1897), 817–820 (817). 24. DM. 25. CEN to Dewitt Miller, May 17, 1897, DM. 26. See CL’s autograph note in CEN’s copy of Poetical Tracts compiled by CL, Houghton Library (EC8.C6795.798f ), Cambridge, Massachusetts. 27. Richard [Aungerville] de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. E. C. Thomas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 159. 28. CEN to Dewitt Miller, May 17, 1897, DM. 29. CEN to Dewitt Miller, May 17, 1897, DM. 30. Leon H. Vincent, Dewitt Miller: A Biographical Sketch (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1927), 126, 133–134, 64. 31. Miller, autograph note quoting CEN to North, May 27, 1897, DM, 64. 32. Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 124. 33. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 125. 34. James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 164. 35. Nathaniel B[radstreet] Shurtleff, A History of the Old Building on the Corner of School and Washington Streets, Boston (Boston: Damrell & Upham, 1887), 1.

360 n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 9 0 – 2 9 2 36. George William Curtis quoted in Annie Adams Fields, James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches with Unpublished Fragments and Tributes from Men and Women of Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1881), 53. 37. Dorothea Lawrance Mann, A Century of Book Selling: The Story of the Old Corner Book Store on the Occasion of Its One Hundredth Birthday (Boston: Lincoln & Smith, [1928]), 16–17. 38. The other books Horatio Woodman purchased were: Lord Bacon’s Works (1629); a small folio of Certaine Learned and Elegant Works of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke, Written in His Youth, and Familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney (1633); and a folio of The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (1693), with three pages of Lamb’s additions and extracts. 39. Humphrey Moseley, “To the Reader,” in Fragmenta Aurea. A Collection of All the Incomparable Peeces, Written by Sir John Suckling. And published by a Friend to Perpetuate His Memory (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646), [A4]. 4 0. CL autograph note (from John Aubrey) quoted in Dodd, Mead & Company’s description of Fragmenta Aurea in Descriptions of a Few Books from Charles Lamb’s Library, 9. 41. Smith, “Gentlemen of the Old School,” [4]. 42. Ernest Dressel North, “Notes of Rare Books,” Book Buyer ser. 3, 15:3 (1897): 237–238 (238). 43. Smith, A Sentimental Library, xiii. 44. Percy Bysshe Shelley quoted in lot no. 1561, Bangs & Company, Catalogue of the Library of the Late Charles W. Frederickson, 146. 45. Smith, A Sentimental Library, xiii.

Acknowledgments For archival and bibliographical assistance with this story of book collectors in America, I wish to thank the staff and librarians at the American Antiquarian Society; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Boston Athenæum; the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the Grolier Club in New York; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Huntington Library; the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the New-York Historical Society; the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library; the Noel Memorial Library at Louisiana State University Shreveport; the Prince­ton University Library; and the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries. I have also relied on the digital resources of the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Readex database of America’s Historical Newspapers, Project Gutenberg, and Google Books, Images, and Maps. The book could not have been completed without generous funding. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a William Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas from the Bibliographical Society of America; a Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Research Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society; and unstinting support from the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University enabled the scholarship upon which it relies. I am grateful for invitations to present material from this book at the Harold Jantz Memorial Lecture at Oberlin College, the Vincent A. De Luca Lecture at the University of Toronto, the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Grasmere, the “Symposium on Romanticism and the Atlantic World” at Boston University, and the “Interacting with Print Colloquium” at McGill

361

362 a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

University in Montreal. Some material from Chapter 2 first appeared in “On Book Borrowing: Forming a Part of a Literary History Seen Through the Perspective of a Book from Charles Lamb’s Library,” Studies in Romanticism, Volume 55, Issue 3, Fall 2016, pages 369–391. Copyright © 2016 Trustees of Boston University and used here with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. I have had too many excellent research assistants over the years to enumerate, but I am indebted to all the undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs who took time from their studies at Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale to help with research—and special thanks to Joe Shapiro, Alex Torres, Julian Rovee, and Sarah Weston. I am pleasantly indebted to my editors, past and present, at Yale University Press, from John Kulka to Susan Laity, and to Kathryn James and Joseph Rezek for reading an earlier draft of the manuscript. For inspiration and support along the way, my sincere thanks to Harold Bloom, Sarah Churchwell, Jay Fliegelman, Seth Lerer, Fred Porta, Leah Price, Esther Schor, and Jennifer Summit—book lovers all!

Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Appleton, Daniel, x, 16–17, 18, 60, 74–75, 107 apprentices’ libraries, 252 Aquinas, Thomas, 198 Arch Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 146 Arctic (steamship), 171–172 Arcturus, 69, 150 Arne, Thomas, 155, 312n217 association copies, 2–5, 10; and Cogswell, 271, 294; Deane’s, 216; Frederickson’s, 281, 291–292; from Lamb’s library, 2–3, 5, 8, 10–11, 42, 53, 56, 59, 61–62, 72, 83–87, 87, 90, 98, 100, 104, 124, 125, 126, 183–184, 248, 260, 282, 286, 290; Livermore’s, 198; Norton’s, 260; Strong’s, 87, 92, 98, 100–101, 182; from Washington’s library, 8, 227, 256–258, 263, 267, 269. See also book actors Astor, Emily, 239 Astor, John Jacob, x; and the Astor Library, 227, 241–246, 278; with Cogswell, 239–246; death of, 248; Hell Gate estate, 241, 242, 242–246, 248; real estate dealings of, 18–19, 241 Astor, William Backhouse, xi, 241, 243, 248, 276–277 Astor House, 13, 18, 19, 43, 48, 55, 80, 107, 113, 118, 146, 254. See also Bartlett & Welford bookstore Astor Library, 8, 13–14, 46, 227, 228, 239–249, 244; board of trustees, 243; opening of, 273; purchase of books for, 5, 8, 21, 270–272 Athenæum, 42, 54, 83 Athenæum Club (London), 95 athenaeum libraries, 8, 250–251; at the Boston Athenæum, 227, 263–264, 267; Providence Athenæum, 14

Abbotsford, 232 acrostics, 34–35 Addison, Joseph, 76–77, 92, 204–206, 268, 275 Aelfric Society, 59 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 247 Ainger, Alfred, 79, 97, 154 Ainsworth, William Harrison, 65 Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, 125–126 album books, 33–34 Album Verses (Lamb), 6, 33–37, 74, 170, 184; criticized, 35–36 Aldine Press, 205–206 Althorp, 7, 209, 211 American Archives (Force), 46 American Ethnological Society, 112, 171 American Hotel (Astor Hotel), 13 American Literary Agency, 109 American Shakespeare Society (New York), 118, 154–164 Ames, Joseph, 201 Amory, Thomas, Life of John Buncle, 86, 92–93, 111, 282 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 30, 83, 300n28 Anderson, Christopher, 190–191, 192 Annan, James T., ix, 56–60, 251, 269 antiquarian societies: Aelfric, 59; American, 149; British, 49; Camden, 59; Percy, 59. See also historical societies; Shakespeare Society (London); Shakespeare Society (New York) antiquarianism: American, 175, 180, 181; Lamb’s, 185; literary, 20, 51, 164, 166

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364 i n d e x Aubrey, John, 282 auctioneers: Elijah Keeler Bangs, 114; Lemuel Bangs, 86, 114; Bangs, Brother & Company, 86, 114–115, 281, 292, 313n223; Cooley and Keese, 148; Cooley, Keese & Hill, 6, 59, 60, 280; James E. Cooley, 60; Robert H. Evans, 209–210, 216; Horatio Hill & Co., 60; Sherman G. Hubbard, 59; John Keese, 60–61, 62, 64, 148, 149, 156, 161, 282, 283; Charles F. Libbie, 182; Edward Millington, 61; Thomas D. Puttick, 169; William S. Simpson, 169 auctions: of Annan’s library, 6, 59–65, 83–84, 148, 286; of the Bartlett & Welford inventory, 114–115; in Boston, 196; British vs. American, 11, 60–61; of Croker’s library, 170; of Crowninshield’s library, 283; of Frederickson’s library, 286; of Heber’s library, 207; of Lamb’s library, 6, 61–65, 83–85, 148–149, 269, 280, 282, 292; origins of, 61; of the Roxburghe library, 209; of Strong’s library, 85–86; of the Valdarfer Decameron, 209–211, 216 Aungervyle, Richard (Richard De Bury), 222, 287 autograph writing: in album books, 34; in Bibles, 198, 216; Cowden Clarke’s, 130–132, 141, 159; Cromwell’s, 124; Dibdin’s, 202; Lord Ellesmere’s, 163; Charles Lamb’s, 51, 72, 101, 133, 150, 261, 281–283, 291; Shakespeare’s, 152; Strong’s, 87, 87. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, marginalia autographomania, 51, 132–133 Ayscough, Samuel, 130 Bacon, Francis, Lord Bacon’s Works, 60 Bacon, Nathaniel, Relation of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira, 83–84 Ball, Samuel, 134 Balmanno, Mary, x; drawings by, 163; friendship with Lambs, 118–119; on Lamb’s books, 125; and the mulberry block, 123; and the testimonial armchair, 137; testimonial poem, 141–143, 142; and Thomas Croker, 166–168, 171 Balmanno, Robert, ix; and the American Shakespeare Society, 7, 118, 155–156, 159, 161–164; on Annan’s library, 59; Chatto’s

letter to, 204; correspondence (with Cowden Clarke), 130–132, 148 (with Livermore), 198, 215, 220; and Croker, 7, 20, 166, 171, 173; and Lord Ellesmere, 7, 162–164; and the Lambs, 118–119; and Lamb’s books, 7, 121–128, 285, 291; and the Noviomagian Society, 169–170; Shakespearean dream, 128–129, 168; and the testimonial armchair, 135–144, 155, 171 Bancroft, George, xii, 234–235, 237 Bangs, Elijah, 114–115 Bangs, Lemuel, xii, 114–115 Bangs & Company, 292 bardolatry, 117, 144, 154, 155, 164, 323n1 bardomania, 6–7, 117–118 bardomaniacs: Robert Balmanno, 125, 131, 143–144, 155, 157, 161–162, 170, 173; Thomas Pennant Barton, 149; William Evans Burton, 7, 118, 151–154, 155, 161–162, 288; David Garrick, 154–155, 157, 173 Barnum, P. T., 118 Bartlett, John Russell, x; as bookseller, 13–16, 18–20, 126–127, 261–263; as boundary commissioner, 4, 114; correspondence (with Hall), 42 (with Welford), 48–49, 133–134; diplomatic career, 112–114; as founder of the American Ethnological Society, 171; as merchant, 14–15; as publisher, 20, 112; on Swedenborg’s ghost, 278. See also Bartlett & Welford bookstore Bartlett & Welford bookstore: 13–14, 18–21, 43–44, 59, 71–73, 78–79, 86, 115, 178, 182, 236, 255, 269; demise of, 111–115; financial difficulties, 48–50; and Lamb’s books, 6, 8, 11, 53–56, 62, 119, 123, 150, 184, 268, 280, 283, 289, 290. See also Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library Bartlett & Welford publishers, 20, 112 Barton, Bernard, 34, 64, 133 Barton, Lucy, 33, 133–134 Barton, Thomas Pennant, 149 Basbanes, Nicholas A., 255 Bateman of Philadelphia, 11 bathing houses, 160–161 Bay Psalm Book, 174–175, 283 Beaumont, Francis, 30–31, 88; The Maid’s Tragedy, 121 Bebb, William, 58

index Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 269, 291 Belknap, Jeremy, 179–180 Bell, John, 143 belletrism, 85, 99, 201, 216, 260 Bellows, Henry Whitney, ix, 4–5, 235, 236, 270 Belts, George Frederick, 173 Belts, Samuel, 173 Benecke, Georg Friedrich, 232–233 Benjamin, Park, 97, 133 Benson, John, 127 Betterton, Thomas, 162 Bible, 21, 46, 75; association copies, 197–198; Biblia pauperum (xylographic) 197; Breeches, 199; Coverdale, 198–199; Eliot’s Indian, 198; Grenville’s, 209; Gutenberg, 21, 46–47, 197–198, 209; King James, 199; Lenox’s, 46–47; Livermore’s, 197–199; Souldier’s Pocket, 199; Wicked, 199 biblia a-biblia (Lamb), 6, 67, 70, 140 bibliographers: Tom Folio (Addison), 205–206. See also Cogswell, Joseph Green; Dibdin, Thomas Frognall; North, Ernest Dressel; Rich, Obadiah; Stevens, Henry, Jr.; Welford, Charles bibliography: and American history, 175; Deane on, 176; and Dibdin, 165, 200–201, 204, 208; Livermore on, 199–200; Stevens on, 177 bibliomania, 7–10, 51, 84–85, 88, 95, 117, 153, 198, 202, 204, 207–208, 211, 255; in America, 174–175; biblical, 195–196, 198, 199; as romance, 207. See also bardomania Bibliomania (Flaubert), 207–208 Bibliomania, an Epistle, to Richard Heber, Esq. (Ferriar), 202 Bibliomania; or, Book Madness (Dibdin), 9, 201–204, 205 bibliomaniacs: Blandford, 209–211; John Carter Brown, xii, 46, 254; Thomas Crofton Croker, 164–165; Deane, 7, 180, 182; Ferriar, 202; Flaubert, 207–208; Frederickson, 280–281; Grenville, 30, 209; Heber, xi, 9–10, 202, 206–207; Holbrook Jackson, 65, 70, 154, 207; Lenox, xi, 46–47, 216, 254, 278; Livermore 7, 47, 174, 183, 184, 195–200, 209–211; Dewitt Miller, 286; Rawlinson, 206; Duke of Roxburghe, 209;

365 Scott, 231–232; Smets, 137, 143; Earl Spencer, 7, 200, 209–212; Strong, 16–17, 84–85, 201, 259, 291; Alexander Young, 174–175, 181. See also bardomaniacs Bibliomanie, De la (Bollioud de Mermet), 198 blackletter, 3; in Burton’s library, 152, 154; Chaucer, 29, 149, 282; Lamb on, 65; in Livermore’s library, 199, 338n61 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 35, 231, 247–248, 305n98 Blake, William, 64, 166 Blandford, Marquess of. See Churchill, George Spencer Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 209, 212, 216 Bollioud de Mermet, Louis, 198 book actors, xv–xviii book borrower/borrowing, 298n9; at the Boston Athenæum, 263; Coleridge as, 6, 74, 86–87, 91–92, 283; Heber on, 9; Lamb as, 40; Lenox and, 254–255; Livermore as, 257; at the Mercantile Library of Cincinnati, 58; Moxon as, 33; Henry Crabb Robinson as, 95; and Scott, 232; Strong as, 201 Book Fool, 202–204, 203, 205, 207, 341n122 book technology, 15, 46–47, 66–68, 163, 313n2 book trade: in America, 10, 16–17, 66–67; in Britain, 15–16, 80; decline of, 9–10; thriving, 9; uncertainties of, 15–16 bookbinders: James Hayday, 62; Charles Lewis, 62, 211 bookbinding/bindings, 18, 67, 201, 232; Deane on, 176; Dowse’s, 216–217; Hunt on, 70–71; Lamb on, 71, 74, 127; and Lamb’s books, 62, 216, 281–282, 287–288; sheepskin, 7, 69, 213–214, 291; tooling, 62, 152, 211. See also morocco leather; tooling Booker, Joseph, 33 bookplates, 43, 124, 125, 176, 307n134; Washington’s, 266–267, 267, 354n72 books: album books, 33–34; antiquarian, 7, 9, 16, 20, 30, 33, 44–46, 80, 85, 92–93, 174; codices, 46–47; commonplace, 75, 95, 97; dime novels, 274; extra-illustrating, 7, 153, 176, 330n116; foolscap, 204; forgeries, 153–154; as household gods, 29, 54, 100, 173; incunabula, 19; large-paper copies, 199, 208, 212, 216, 271; limited editions,

366 i n d e x books (continued) 216–217, 286; presentation copies, 11, 281, 286; Railway Classics, 66; rare, 45, 85, 256; rebound, 176; sizes of, 275; tall copies, 201; “that are books,” 6, 67, 69, 72; “that are no books” (biblia a-biblia), 6, 67, 70, 140; uncut copies, 201. See also association copies; blackletter; book borrower/borrowing; book trade; bookbinding/bindings; cheap literature; first editions booksellers: Appleton, 16–17, 18, 60, 74–75, 107; Cooley, 60; Dodd, Mead & Company, 281–282; Duyckinck Sr., 67, 110; Evans, 109–110, 216; Hall, 15–16, 18, 42, 48; Leavitt, 60; Lintot, 21; Little & Brown, 181, 213–214, 260, 262; Low, 261; Marston, 17, 116; Moxon, 33, 43; North, 8, 280, 281, 286; Putnam, 66, 109–110, 132, 136; Rich, 56, 255, 270; Robert Clarke Company, 58–59, 286; Rodd, 46, 157–158; scoundrel booksellers, 53; Scribner’s, 16, 18, 115–116, 281; Ticknor & Fields, 290; Tonson, 127; Charles Wiley, 110, 111; John Wiley, 6, 106, 109–110, 111, 173. See also Bartlett & Welford bookstore Boone, Thomas, 33 Boone, William, 33 Boston Athenæum, 8, 227, 263–264, 266–267, 268–269 Boston Public Library, 227, 263, 276; Barton Collection, 149 Bourne, Vincent, 36–37, 184–185; Poematia Latine, 36, 184–185 Boydell, John, 127, 152–153 Boydell, Josiah, 127, 152 Boydell, Mary, 152 Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 152, 157 Bradbury & Evans, 33 Brandt, Sebastian, 203, 204 Brevoort, Henry, 241, 243 Brevoort, James Carson, 13 Bristed, Charles Astor, ix, 70, 243, 247–248 Bristed, John, 247 Bristed, Magdalena Astor, 247 British Archaeological Association, 166 British East India Company, 2, 22, 24–25, 27 British Library Association, 256

British Museum, 190, 227, 233, 256, 258; American book collection, 47–48, 250; Reading Room, 39–40 Broome, William, 21 Brougham, John, 147 Brown, James, 181 Brown, John Carter, xii, 46, 254 Brown University library, 46 Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 89 Bryant, William Cullen, 136 Bullard, William S., 265 Bullard & Lee, 265 Buncle, John. See Amory, Thomas Burlingame, Roger, 18, 116 Burnham’s bookstore, 197 Burns, Robert, 166 Burton, John Hill, 4 Burton, Robert, 30 Burton, William Evans, ix, 136; acting career, 144–149; and the American Shakespeare Society, 7, 118, 156, 157–161; and the Chambers Street Theatre, 118, 144, 146–148, 156; extra-illustrating, 153; library (Temple to Shakespeare), 7, 118, 149, 151–155, 161–162; purchase of Chaucer, 283 Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, 150 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 35, 50, 96, 230 Cain, 25 Camden Society, 59 Campbell, Thomas, 202 Carey, Henry, 63 Carter, John, 45, 176, 201, 281 Cary, Henry Francis, xiv, 39–41, 262 Casseday, Benjamin, ix, 76–77 catalogitis, 271–272 Catalogue of Charles Lamb’s Library, 56, 59, 86, 261, 293; Deane’s copy, 182; Duyckinck’s copy, 78–79; Moore’s copy, 269 catchwords, 288 Catherwood, Frederick Abbott, Jr., 171 Catherwood, Frederick Abbott, Sr., 112, 171–172 Caulfield, James, 261 Cavalier poetry, 121–124, 285 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 71, 73–76 Cavendish, Thomas, 216

index Caxton, William, 271 Chambers Street Theatre (New York), 144, 146–147, 156 Channing, William Ellery, Self-Culture, 218, 252 Charles Scribner’s Sons, 18, 281 Chartier, Roger, 10 Chatto, William Andrew, 204 Chaucer, Geoffrey: known as Dan Chaucer, 148–149, 186; Lamb’s copy of, xvi, 29, 64–65, 148–149, 154, 282–283, 312–313n223 cheap literature, 15, 66, 68, 70, 274–275; Cogswell on, 274; and crime, 274 cholera, 113 Churchill, George Spencer, Marquess of Blandford, 6th Duke of Marlborough, 209–211 Churchill, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 119–120 Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 55–56, 77 Clarke, John H., 256 Clarke, Robert, 58–59, 286 Clayton, John M., 112, 268 Cleveland (Cleavland/Cleaveland), John, 122–125, 125, 126, 285 Clipping practice: Burton, 159; Dewitt Miller, 288–289, 332n143 codices, 46–47 Cogswell, Joseph Green, ix, 8; and the Astor Library, 5, 8, 21, 240–249, 254, 270–278; as bibliophile, 228; and Byron, 230; at the Episcopal School, 238–239; Everett’s letter to, 227; and Goethe, 229–230; at Göttingen, 229, 232–233; at Harvard Library, 233–234; ghostly vision, 278–279; as Latin tutor, 229; as librarian, 233–234, 254, 275; in London, 61, 270–271; and mineralogy, 229–230, 234; New York Review, 242; on public education, 226; on public libraries, 8, 226; and the Round Hill School, 234–238; on slavery, 239; and Scott, 231–232; and Southey, 230–231; travels in America, 237–238; travels in Europe, 230–233, 243, 272 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 106, 107–108 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xiv; as book borrower, 3, 86–87, 90–92; correspondence with Lamb, 21–25, 29, 77, 184; death of, 39, 50; key to marginalia, 89; marginalia, 6, 54, 55, 69, 72, 86–90, 90, 94–96, 100, 107–108,

367 111–112; in Occult School, 31; on philosophy, 93–95; on poetic meter, 99–100; powers of discernment, 92 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, works: Biographia Literaria, 208; Complete Works (Harper & Brothers), 111; Complete Works (Princeton), 31; Fears in Solitude, 100, 286, 287, 288; France: An Ode, 287; “Kubla Khan,” 98–100; The Literary Remains (H. N. Coleridge), 106, 107–108; Poems by S.T. Coleridge, 24–25; Remorse, 101–102; Sibylline Leaves, 25; Wallenstein translation, 11, 96 “Coleridge Miscellany,” 106–109, 107 Collier, Mrs. John Dyer, 104 Collins, Edward Knight, 140, 171, 172 Columbia College, 97; and E. A. Duyckinck, 77, 108; and Strong, 96, 201 Commines, Philippe de, The History of Philip de Commines, 93, 111, 291 Committee on Useless Information and Antiquarian Lore, 45, 179 commonplace books, 75, 95, 97 Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (Cowden Clarke), 118, 129, 130–131, 135, 138, 140, 141, 157 Conant, Thomas Jefferson, ix, 74–75 Cooley, James Ewing, xii, 60 Cooley, Keese & Hill, 6, 59–61, 63, 83, 148, 150, 280 Cooley, Maria Louisa, 60 Cooper, James Fenimore, 13, 111, 274 copyright, 53, 59, 69, 120, 314nn11–12; American Copyright Club, 69; Courtesy of the Trade, 69 Corner Bookstore (Boston), 289–290 Coryphaeus, 283, 286, 291 Coster, John Gerard, 18–19 Cotton, John, 180–181 Coverdale, Myles, 198–199 Cowden Clarke, Charles, 129, 135 Cowden Clarke, Mary, xiv, 118, 129–130, 157; Concordance to Shakespeare, 118, 129, 130–131, 135, 138, 140, 141, 157; correspondence with Robert Balmanno, 130–132; as honorary member of the American Shakespeare Society, 162; “My Arm-Chair,” 135; testimonials for, 135–144, 139, 141–143, 142, 155, 171

368 i n d e x Cowley, Abraham, 122; The Works, 50, 77 Cowley, Richard, 153 Cowper, William, 37, 155 crabapple tree (Shakespeare’s Canopy), 161–162 Croker, Thomas Crofton, x; as antiquarian, 20, 164–165; and Fairy Legends, 166; his memento mori, 171–173; and the Noviomagian Society, 169–170, 250; and Shakespeare’s gimmel ring, 7, 167, 170 Croker, Thomas Francis Dillon, xii; 170–171, 173 Cromek, Robert, 64 Croton Fountain, 98, 99 Crowninshield, Edward Augustus, xii, 7, 174–175, 184, 214, 283 Crystal Palace (New York), 162–163 Culture of Reprinting, 69 Curtis, Edward, 138 Curtis, George William, 268, 290 Custis, George Washington Parke, 269 Cyclopædia of American Literature, 74–75 Cyclopædia of Wit and Humor, 147 Dale, Ebenezer, 217 Dana, Edmund Trowbridge, Jr., 78–79 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 53, 78 Dana, Richard Henry, Sr., 79 Dante, 39, 120 Darley, Felix Octavius Carr, 109 De Bury, Richard (Richard Aungervyle), 222, 287 De Quincey, Thomas, 27, 67; on Lamb, 160; on Wordsworth, 8 Deane, Charles, ix; as antiquarian, 176, 179, 181–182, 184; on Lenox, 254–255; library of, 7, 180, 182; and Livermore, 188–195, 197–198, 208, 211, 268; on Young, 187 Deane, Ezra, 181 Deane, Walter, 181 Decameron (Boccaccio), 209–211, 212, 216 Denison, Albert, 1st Baron of Londesborough, xii, 169 Dennet, Charles F., 140 Dennis, John, Original Letters, 149, 150 Descartes, René, 79 Devereux, Thomas, 239

Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, x, 7, 9, 85, 153, 165, 199–210; American audience of, 208–209; on Heber’s library, 206–207 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, works: Ædes Althorpiana, 200, 212; The Bibliographical Decameron, 200, 209–211, 212; Bibliography: A Poem, 200; Bibliomania, 207; The Bibliomania, 9, 201–204, 205; Bibliophobia, 9–10; Bibliotheca Spenceriana, 200, 212; Book Rarities, 200; Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions, 199; Library Companion, 201; Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 208; Specimen Bibliothecæ Britannicæ, 201; Typographical Antiquities, 201 Dibdin Club of New York, 9, 249, 286, 291 Dickens, Charles, 66, 274; acting company, 130–131, 148; anecdotes of Lamb, 53; work staged at Chambers Street Theatre, 147 dime novels, 274 Dix, Stephen Augustus, 252 Dodd, Frank Howard, 281, 291 Dodd, Mead & Company, 281–282; Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, 286 Dodsley, Robert, Old Plays, 90–91 Donne, John, Poems, 86–90, 87, 90, 108, 111, 291 Dowse, Thomas (The Learned Leather Dresser), x; as bibliophile, 7, 175, 211–225; and Franklin, 218–220; religion, 220–221, 222; portrait, 223 Dowse Institute, 218 Dowse Lectures, 218 Dowse Library, 8, 214–218, 221, 222, 223 Drake, Samuel Gardener, 197 Drayton, Michael, 50, 283–286, 291–292 Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 51 Dunciad (Pope), 37, 193 Dürer, Albrecht, 203; Book Fool, 202–204, 205, 207 Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, xi, 44, 75–76, 78–79, 85–86, 95, 150, 178, 271; Arcturus, 69, 150; as autograph collector, 132; on Bartlett & Welford, 14, 21, 77; and “The Coleridge Miscellany,” 106–108; correspondence with George Duyckinck, 5, 66, 72, 73, 78, 79–82, 109–110, 182; Cyclopædia

index of American Literature, 74–75, 184; as Felix Merry, 97–98, 105; on Lamb’s books, 1, 55, 65, 71–72, 111–112, 149–150; on Lamb’s writing style, 97–98; Library of American Books, 68–69; Library of Choice Reading, 67–69, 73, 106, 110–111; on literary tradition, 67–69; and The Literary World, 6, 82–83, 110, 111, 150, 186, 249, 263, 283; portrait of a librarian, 274–275 Duyckinck, Evert Augustus, Sr., 67, 110 Duyckinck, George Long: antiquarian taste, 79; correspondence with Evert Duyckinck, 55, 66, 71, 72, 73, 78, 80–81, 109–110, 182; Cyclopædia of American Literature, 74–75, 184; frail health, 77, 83; The Literary World, 6, 82–83, 150; in London, 80; in Paris, 5, 77–78, 79; purchase of Bacon’s Spira, 83–84; return to America, 81–82 Duyckinck Family Library, 72, 84, 150 Dyer, George, 40 Dyer, Honour, 40 Earle, James, 173 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 62 Ecclesiastes, 68 Edwards, Bela Bates, 218 Edwards, Edward, 206 Edwards, Jonathan, Freedom of the Will, 183–184 Egerton, Francis, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, xii, 7, 153, 162–164 Elia (pseud. of Charles Lamb), 2–3, 22, 26–27, 31, 50, 53–55, 59, 62, 64–67, 69–70, 72–73, 86, 91–93, 152, 265; Elia’s ghost, 65, 278–279; Ex-Elia, 36; inimitable, 97–98; postscripts, 38, 133. See also Elia, essays of Elia, Bridget, 23, 30–31, 50, 81, 88–89 Elia, essays of: “Captain Jackson,” 43;“Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” 6, 67, 69–70, 74, 127, 283; “Dream Children,” 103; Elia: Essays Which have Appeared Under That Signature in the London Magazine, 50, 120, 185, 225, 309n171; The Last Essays of Elia (2nd vol.), 50, 120, 185, 225; “Mackery End,” 29, 32, 303n58; “New Year’s Eve,” 54, 273; “The Old Actors,” 102; “The Old and the New Schoolmaster,” 93, 139; “Old China,” 30;

369 “A Quaker’s Meeting,” 236–237; “The Two Races of Men,” 74, 86, 91–93, 283; “The South Sea House,” 27, 120–121; “Stage Illusion,” 118; “The Superannuated Man,” 31 Elia, Felix, 97, 320n139 Ellesmere, Lady, 162–164 Ellesmere, Francis Egerton, Lord, xii, 7, 153, 162–164 Ellis, George E., 235 Ellis, House of, 33 Elzevir (publishing house), 163, 205–207, 248 Elzevir, Louis, 248 Emerson, Edward Waldo, 289 Emerson, George Barrell, 213, 224 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xii, 13, 68, 289, 290 engraving/engravings, 21, 127, 152, 163, 165, 268. See also wood engraving envelopes, 132, 265 epitaphs, 41, 291 Erskine, Thomas, 1st Baron Erskine, 103 Estienne, Henri (Harry Stephans), 206 Euripides, 262 Evans, Robert Harding, 209–210, 216 Everett, Edward, xii, 213, 215, 220, 221, 223–224, 227, 259, 263, 276 extra-illustrating, 7, 153, 176, 330n116 eye-teeth, 92–92 Fairfax, Edward, 93 Farnham, Luther, 213, 226, 240 Faulkner, George, 119 February Revolution, 4–5, 58, 77–78, 112, 270 Feijóo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo, The Uncertainty of Physick, 262 Felton, Cornelius Conway, 247 Felix Merry (pseud. of E. A. Duyckinck), 97, 105 Fenton, Elijah, 21 Ferriar, John, The Bibliomania, 202 Field, Barron, 101–102 Field, Mary, 24 Fields, Annie Adams, 50, 231 Fields, James T., xi; as autograph collector, 133, 134; as bibliophile, 50–51, 232, 274, 289–290; and the Mercantile Library of Boston, 56, 251; and Wordsworth, 51 Finch, Anne, 63

370 i n d e x first editions, 30, 74, 199–202, 204, 208, 216, 237, 271, 281, 286, 292; of Decameron, 209. See also First Folio First Folio (Shakespeare), 21, 117, 138, 152–154 Fitzgerald, Edward, 133, 135 Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington, 30, 51, 53 Flaubert, Gustave, 207–208 Fletcher, John, 30–31, 88; The Maid’s Tragedy, 121 Folger Shakespeare Library, 157 Folsom, Charles, xii, 266 Folsom, George, ix, 112, 177, 187, 227, 268–269 foolscap, 204 Force, Peter, xii, 46, 48, 257–258 forgeries, 153–154 Foster, George C., 146 Fox, George, 236 Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs, 189, 190 Franklin, Benjamin: cenotaph for, 219–220; epigraph, 219; self-culture, 14, 217–218; vegetarianism, 261–262 Franklin Bookstore, 60 Franklin Lectures, 217–218 Frederickson, Charles William, xi, 8, 252, 280–281, 283, 286 291 free will, 181–184 Front Street Theatre (Baltimore), 145 frontispieces, 86, 149, 189 Fuller, Margaret, 68 Fuller, Thomas, 122 Fuseli, Henry, 166 Gafney, Patrick, 271 Gallatin, Albert, 20, 112 Gardiner, Stephen, 191 Garrick, David, 154–155, 157, 173 Gastrell, Francis, 143 Gay, Aaron, 213 Gellius, Aulus, Noctes Atticæ, 248 Gesenius, Wilhelm, 75 Gillman, James, 28 Gilman, Mary F. (Cogswell), 228 gimmel (gimmal) rings, 164–173, 168, 169 Godwin, William, 292; Antonio, 101–102 Goelet, Ogden, xii, 125 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 230 Goffe, William, 231

Gold Rush, 4, 131 Göttingen library, 232–233 Gray, Thomas, 136 Great Shakespearean Revival, 118, 147–148 Greeley, Horace, 163 Green Mountain Boy, 46. See also Stevens, Henry, Jr. Greenspan, Ezra, 69, 251 Grenville, Thomas, 30, 209 Guardian (Addison and Steele), 268 Guild, Reuben A., 248 Gutenberg, Johannes, 46 Gutenberg Bible, 21, 46–47, 197–198, 209 Hakluyt, Richard, 216 Hall, William C., xi, 15–16, 18, 42, 48 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 13, 241, 243 Halliwell (-Phillips), James Orchard, 143, 170 Hanmer, Thomas, 20 Harper & Brothers, 111 Harvard Library, 215, 233, 258; Widener Collection, 281 Haskell, Daniel N., 252 Hathaway, Anne (Shakespeare), 128–130, 153, 168 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 54, 68, 290 Hayday, James, 62 Hayward, Abraham, 104 Hazlitt, William, xiv, 6, 67, 91; “On Reading Old Books,” 3, 208; on John Horne Tooke, 248; on the Occult School, 31 Hazlitt, William Carew, 30, 68, 207; The Lambs, 9, 286 Heber, Richard, xi, 9, 202, 206–207, 255 Heige, George, 148 Hell Gate, 241, 242, 242–246, 248 Heminges, John, 153 Herbert, William, 201 Herington, Sir John, 93 Hermann (steamship), 81 Hessey, James, 185 Hessey, James Augustus, 185 Hill, Horatio, xii, 60 Hillard, George Stillman, 208–209, 218, 240 historical societies, 7–8, 335n13; Georgia, 143; Maine, 177, 186–187; New York, 268–262; Rhode Island, 14; Vermont, 45. See also Massachusetts Historical Society

index Hodnet Hall, 9, 206 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, xii, 82 Holinshed, Ralph, 152 Holmes, Abiel, 230 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 218 230–231 Homer, 224; Chapman’s translation, 93; Pope’s translation, 20–21, 271 Hone, Philip, 20, 245–246, 251 Hone, William, 135 Hood, Jane, xiv, 119 Hood, Thomas, xiv, 29, 38, 119, 135, 263; Lamb’s letter to, 132–133 Houghton Mifflin Company, 290 household gods, 29, 54, 100, 173 Howard Athenæum (Boston), 147 Howe, William Thomas Hildrup, xii, 124 Hubbard, Sherman G., 59 Hudibras (Butler), 150 Humboldt, Alexander von, 240–241 Humphrey, Herman, 189 Hunt, James Henry Leigh, xiv, 29, 135, 260; on books, 10, 70–71, 164; and Christ’s Hospital Volume, 100, 282; as essayist, 6, 67; on Lamb kissing book, 157; on Moxon, 38; satirizing Jerdan, 37 Hunt, Robert, 64 Hutchinson, Sara, 89 Huth, Henry, 30 incunabula, 19 Ireland, Samuel, 153 Ireland, William Henry, 153 Irving, Washington, xii, 137, 156, 241, 243; as minister to Spain, 245; Putnam’s edition of, 109 Isola, Emma. See Moxon, Emma Isola Ives, Levi Silliman, 238 Jackson, Holbrook, 65, 70, 154, 207 Jackson, Leon, 298n9 Jackson, Richard Charles, xiii, 43 James, Henry, 266 James, Sarah, 41 Jerdan, William, xiv, 170; Literary Gazette, 37 Jerrold, Douglas William, xiv; 129–131 Johnson, Joseph, 166, 285 Johnson, Samuel, 122, 292 Jones, Robert, 288

371 Jones, William Alfred, x, 23, 150 Jonson, Ben, 86, 100, 138, 291 Kant, Immanuel, 95 Keats, John, 80, 278, 280–281 Keese, John, xi, 60–61, 62, 64, 148, 149, 156, 161, 282, 283 Keese, William, 148, 151–152 Kemble, John, 102 Kenney, Charles Lamb, 74 Kenney, James, 74 Ker, John, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe, 209 King, James Gore, 243 King, Matthew, 139 Kirkland, John Thornton, 229 Knickerbocker, 55, 60, 77, 82, 145, 287 Knickerbocker Cottage, 47 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 98–100, 105, 210, 325n28 Lamb, Charles, xiv; American audience, 51–52, 67, 184–186; as antiquarian, 30, 157, 185; in bathing house, 160–161; as bibliophile, 1–2, 10, 29–31, 127; on book borrowers, 86–87, 90–92; death of, 40–42, 50; drawings, 134; and Emma Isola, 27–28, 38–39; epicureanism, 104, 119, 133; and family madness, 21–26; letters (to Coleridge), 21–22, 23 (to Hood), 132–133 (to Moxon), 32 (to Mary Shelley) 28, 132; as Londoner, 28, 53–54, 133, 310n185; and moving, 26, 100, 132–133; marginalia, 121–122, 127, 283–284, 288. See also Elia Lamb, Charles, library: Bartlett & Welford sale, 53–56, 107–108, 111–112, 118–119, 280; book actors, xv–xviii; Cooley, Keese & Hill sale, 6, 60–62, 83–84, 148–150; cutting up of, 73, 287–288; dispersal in America; 5, 8, 53, 54, 111–112; E. A. Duyckinck on, 1, 53, 55, 71–72; as interesting, 30–31; Fields’s encounter with, 50–51; in Frederickson’s library, 2–3, 5, 8, 10–11, 42, 53, 56, 59, 61–62, 72, 83–87, 87, 90, 98, 100, 104, 124, 126, 183–184, 248, 260, 282, 286, 290; as household gods, 29, 54; Hunt on, 71; Miller’s search for, 8–9, 286–288; Moxon’s care of, 42–43, 50; Norton’s purchase of, 260–262; “Relics of Charles Lamb,” 43,

372 i n d e x Lamb, Charles, library: (continued) 307n134; Robinson on, 1, 42, 53, 95; in Strong’s library, 87, 92, 98, 100–101, 182; tables of contents, 101, 249, 286; Westwood on, 29–30, 54. See also association copies; relics Lamb, Charles, works: Album Verses, 6, 33–37, 170, 184; “Cheap Gifts,” 34–35; “Confessions of a Drunkard,” 41, 101; “The Defeat of Time,” 135; letters (collected), 133–134, 134; Mr. H., 51–52; Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff, 118; in Poems by S.T. Coleridge, 24–25; Poetical Works, 224; Poetry for Children (with Mary), 101; “Sarah Thomas” (acrostic), 34–35; “Serenata,” 129; Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 91, 121; Tales from Shakespeare (with Mary), 101, 118, 224; “What Is an Album?” 34. See also Elia, essays of Lamb, Elizabeth, 21–22, 24 Lamb, John, Jr., xiv, 22, 24, 102–104; defense of animal rights, 102–104 Lamb, John, Sr., 22, 268, 284 Lamb, Mary Ann, xiv, 33, 119, 129; as Bridget Elia, 23, 30–31, 50, 81, 88–89; and her brother’s library, 42, 73, 95, 287; death of, 5, 42–43, 50; essays by, 62–63; and Henry Crabb Robinson, 42, 63, 95; madness of, 21–26, 38–39, 41; Poetical Works, 224; Poetry for Children (with Charles), 101; Tales from Shakespeare (with Charles), 101, 118, 224 Lane, William Coolidge, 268 large-paper copies, 199, 208, 212, 216, 271. Lawrence, Abbott, xiii, 139–140, 252, 259 Lawrence, Timothy Bigelow, 140 Learned Leather Dresser. See Dowse, Thomas Leavitt, George, 60 Leavitt, Jonathan, xiii, 60 Leavitt, Trow & Company, 60 Lee, Henry, 265 Lemon, Robert, 170 Lenox, James, xi, 46–47, 216, 254, 278 Lenox Library, 277 Lerer, Seth, 207 Levine, Lawrence L., 144 Lewis, Charles, 62

Libbie, Charles F., 182 librarians, 10, 177, 226, 251, 253, 256, 270, 279; Benecke, 232–233; British vs. American, 233; Mellen Chamberlain (quoted), 240; Cogswell, 233–234, 254, 275; Duyckinck’s notebook sketch of one, 274–275; Charles Folsom, 266; George Folsom, 269; Harvard, 346n26; William Coolidge Lane, 268; Luther S. Livingston, 281–282; Harry M. Lydenberg, 277–278; George Henry Moore, 269; Andrews Norton, 233; Anthony Panizzi, 47, 233, 250, 254; Chandler Robbins, 217; John Langdon Sibley, 195; Justin Winsor, 188 libraries, historical society, 263; Maine, 177; Massachusetts, 174–175, 217; New-York, 269. See also Dowse Library libraries, independent, 56; in American athenaeums 8, 250–251; Astor Library, 5, 8, 13–14, 21, 46, 227, 228, 239–249, 244, 270–273; circulating (London), 274; Folger Shakespeare Library, 157; Lenox Library, 277; Library Company of Philadelphia, 14, 263; printers’ libraries, 252. See also libraries, historical society libraries, private, 30–31, 50, 68, 175, 180, 213; Althorp (Lord Spencer), 209, 211; Burton’s, 118, 149, 151–154, 161; Dowse’s, 213–214; Duyckinck family, 72, 84, 263; Frederickson’s, 8, 281–282; Grenville’s, 30, 209; Heber’s, 9, 202; Huth, 30; Lamb’s, 50, 54; Lawrence’s, 139–140; Lenox’s, 46; Rawlinson’s, 206; Scott’s, 231–232; Strong’s, 85–86, 98; Washington’s, 8, 227, 256–259; Welford’s 116 libraries, public, 8, 10, 226–227, 240, 250–251, 253, 256, 263–264; British Museum, 3, 8, 39–40, 46–48, 175, 190, 227, 223, 250, 256, 258; Boston Public, 149, 227, 263, 276; Library of Congress, 8, 227, 233, 256–258, 263; New York Public, 8, 46, 98, 150, 227, 249, 263, 277–279 libraries, subscription, 8, 263–264, apprentices’, 252; Boston Athenæum, 227, 263–264, 267; Library Company of Philadelphia, 14, 263; Library Company of Providence, 14; mercantile, 56–58, 76, 251–252; printers’, 252

index libraries, university: at Brown, 46; at Columbia, 201; at Harvard, 215, 233, 258; in Europe, 233; in Göttingen, 232–233; at Stanford, 9; at Yale, 251 Library of American Books, 68, 69 Library of Choice Reading, 67, 68, 69, 73, 106, 110–111 Library of the Old English Prose Writers, 184, 186 Library of Useful Knowledge, 70, 179 limited editions, 216–217, 286 Lintot, Bernard, 21 Literary Gazette, 37 Literary World, 6, 82–83, 110, 111, 150, 186, 249, 263, 283 Little, Charles Coffin, 181 Little & Brown, 181, 213–214, 260, 262 Livermore, George, x, 218; as antiquary, 179, 188–195, 218; as bibliomaniac, 7, 47, 174, 183, 184, 195–202, 208–211; in England, 208–209, 211; as friend of Dowse, 214, 217, 221–222; and Washington’s library, 8, 259, 263, 264–269 Livermore, Isaac, 196–197 Livingston, Luther S., 12, 281–282 Lloyd, Charles, 24, 100, 286, 288 Locke, John, 94, 298n8 Lockhart, John Gibson, 231, 305n98 Loder, George, x, 148, 150–151 Londesborough, Baron. See Denison, Albert, 1st Baron of Londesborough Long, George, 110 Long, George W., 110 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 137, 139, 265 Lord, Daniel, 243 Low, Sampson, 261 Lucas, Edward Verrall, 51, 134 Luther, Martin, 91 Lydenberg, Harry Miller, 277–278 Maine Historical Society, 177, 186–187 Malone, Edward, 153 man from Shropshire, 210 man of one book, 198 Manutius, Aldus, 206 marginalia: by Coleridge, 6, 54, 55, 69, 72, 86–90, 90, 94–96, 100, 107–108, 111–112; by Lamb, 69, 72–73, 121, 127, 283–284, 288;

373 by Livermore, 196; Norton’s, 261–262; in Washington’s library, 269 Marlborough, Duke of. See Churchill, George Spencer; Churchill, John Marlowe, Christopher, 51 Marshall, William, 282 Marston, Edward, 17, 116 Martin, Benjamin Ellis, 41 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 174, 178–181, 187 Massachusetts Historical Society, 174–175, 177, 208, 213, 214; and Dowse’s books, 8, 215–217, 221; members of, 178, 179–180, 214; seal, 178–180, 178. See also Dowse Library Mathews, Cornelius, 69, 150 Matthiae, August Heinrich, Euripidis tragoediarum, 262 McDonald, Gerald D., 83, 89, 249 McGill, Meredith, 69 McKitterick, David, 175 Mead, Edward S., 291 Melanchthon, Philipp, 198 Melville, Herman, xiii, 52–53, 78, 139, 241 mercantile libraries, 56–58, 76, 251–252 Merriam, Harold Guy, 53 metaphysical poetry, 122; Cleveland’s, 122–123; Cowley’s, 122; Donne’s, 88; Henry More’s, 182–183 Mexican American War, 4, 114 Meyer, Charles, 240 Miller, Dewitt, xi, 8–9, 286, 287–289 Miller, Perry, 67 Milliken, Richard Alfred, 171 Millington, Edward, 61 Milton (ship), 265 Milton, John, 40, 46, 81, 96, 100, 150, 262, 265 Minor Poets (bound quarto), 249 Miscellanies (bound volume), 101–102 Mitford, John R., 134 Monthly Review (London), 35–36 Moore, George Henry, x, 269 Mordaunt, Charles, 3rd Earl of Peterborough, 120 More, Henry, 79–80, 100, 181–183, 291, 316n65 More, Thomas, 261 Morgan, William Ferdinand, 83

374 i n d e x morocco leather, 71, 86, 125, 138, 152, 200–201, 212, 232, 271. See also bookbinding/ bindings Morton, John Maddison, The Irish Tiger, 148 Moseley, Humphrey, 282 mottoes, 6, 67, 163, 178–180, 186–187, 232, 267, 331n130 Moxon, Edward, xiv, 36, 52–53, 120; and the Lambs, 21, 32–43, 50, 154; as publisher, 6, 16, 69, 78, 260 Moxon, Emma Isola, xiv, 5–6, 27, 33–34, 38–39, 42 mulberry festival, 159–162 mulberry tree: Shakespeare’s 117, 143, 155, 157–158, 162, 173; tea caddy, 157–158, 158 Murray, John, 35 National Theatre (Washington, D.C.), 145–146 Necessity, doctrine of, 183–184 New England Primer, 7, 188–189, 192, 195 New York, growth of, 12–13, 13, 125, 300n1 New-York Historical Society, 268–269 New York Public Library, 8, 46, 98, 150, 227, 263, 277–278; Berg Collection, 124, 293 Newcastle, Margaret. See Cavendish, Margaret Ngai, Sianne, 31 Nichol, George W., 127, 152 “Noctes Ambrosianæ” (series), 247–248 Noctes Atticæ (Gellius), 248 North, Ernest Dressel, xi, 9, 280, 281, 286, 291 Northall, William Knight, 146, 148 Norton, Andrews, xiii, 233, 258–259, 260 Norton, Charles Eliot, x, 113, 135, 234, 258; as bibliophile, 5, 7, 260–262, 286, 288–289; traveling abroad, 77, 265–266; and Washington’s library, 8, 227, 258–260, 264–265, 269 nose, 45 Novello, Mary Victoria. See Cowden Clarke, Mary Novello, Vincent, 33, 129 Noviomagian Society, 169–170, 250 Occult School, 31–32 Old Hive. See Massachusetts Historical Society

Old Plays (bound volume), 79, 92, 269 Oldys, William, 206 Olpe, Johann Bergmann von, Stultifera navis, 203 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto), 73, 93, 154 Osborne, Francis, The Works, 268 Osgood, Edward W., 82 Palmo, Ferdinand, 146 pamphlets (tracts): Deane’s, 180–181, 188; Washington’s, 257 Panic of 1837, 14–15, 97, 241 Panizzi, Anthony, xiii, 47, 233, 250, 254 paper, 15, 27, 67; blotting, 128–129; flyleaves as, 27, 287; foolscap, 204; Tudor, 170; like vellum, 266 Parker, Harvey D., 290 Parker, Wyman W., 46 Pascoe, Judith, 166 Pater, Walter, 10, 133–134 Pearce, Zachary, 262 Pearson, David, 9 Pell, Alfred, 137 Percy, Thomas, 166 Percy Society, 59 Petvin, John, Letters Concerning Mind, 93–94, 111 “Philip (Phyllyp, Phyp) Sparrow” (Skelton), 283, 284 Philips, Ambrose, 63, 268 Philips, Thomas, 47 Phillips, Edward, 40 Pickering, William, 46, 106, 263 Pierce, Franklin, 163 Plato, 94 Plymouth Colony, 181, 187 Poe, Edgar Allan, 68, 74, 145 Poetical Tracts (bound volume), 100, 286, 288 Pomeroy, Jesse Harding, 274 Pope, Alexander, 99–100, 222, 268; The Dunciad, 37, 193 Pope, Jennie Barnes, 125–126 Prance, Claude A., 73 presentation copies, 11, 281, 286 Pray, Lewis Glover, 191 Price, Leah, 10 Priestley, Joseph, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, 183–184

index printers, 67, 190, 199, 268; Clarke, 59; Duyckinck Sr., 6, 110; Estienne, 206; Faulkner, 119; Force, 46; Franklin, 217, 219–220; Hill, 60; Pynson, 204; Usher, 174 printers’ apprentices: Franklin, 262; Frederickson, 8, 280; Moxon, 32; Twain, 12, 280 Prior, Matthew, Miscellaneous Works, 71, 123–124 Procrustes, 288 Procter, Anne Benson, 133 Procter, Bryan Waller, 26, 29, 133, 250–251 prospectuses, 112, 159 Providence Athenæum, 14 Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), 89 publishers: 16–17, 18, 60, 74–75, 107; Daniel Appleton, 16–17, 18, 60, 74–75, 107; Joseph Booker, 33; Bradbury & Evans, 33; Dodd, Meade & Co., 281–282; Ellis (House of ), 31; Elzevir, 206, 248; Harper & Brothers, 78, 111; Houghton Mifflin, 290; Joseph Johnson, 166, 285; Leavitt, Trow & Company, 60; Moxon, 6, 16, 69, 78, 260; Murray, 35; Osgood, 82; Pickering, 46, 106, 263; Putnam, 6, 28, 47, 66, 80, 109–110; Riverside, 290; Robert Clarke Company, 59; Scribner’s 18, 115, 123, 281–282, 291; Taylor & Hessey, 185; Ticknor & Fields, 290; Tonson & Rowe, 127; Wiley & Long, 110; Wiley & Putnam, 47, 67, 106, 109–110; Wiley & Sons, 111. See also booksellers; printers Purchas, Samuel, 216 Putnam, George Haven, 109 Putnam, George Palmer, xi, 136, 251; as autograph collector, 132; as publisher, 6, 28, 47, 66, 80, 109–110 Puttick, Thomas D., 169 Pynson, Richard, 224

375

Queen Mab (Shelley), 292 Quincy, Josiah, 214, 221, 259

relics: American antiquarian, 175, 180, 192; Balmanno’s, 125, 131, 161, 170, 173; British vs. American attitudes, 256; Burton’s, 7, 118, 151, 162; Coleridge as relic maker, 88–89, 95; Croker’s 164; Frederickson’s, 281; of Charles Lamb, 1, 6, 31, 42, 53–55, 64, 83–85, 125, 288; Livermore’s, 199–200; Norton’s, 266; Shakespearean, 117, 143–144, 155, 157–158, 167; South Sea House as, 27, 121; of George Washington, 227, 257–259, 263–264, 269; Welford’s, 17 “Relics of Charles Lamb” (Richard Charles Jackson bookplate and collection), 43, 307n34 Reynolds, John, 291; The Triumphs of Gods Revenge, 95–96 Rich, Obadiah, xiii, 46, 255–256, 270 Richards, Alfred Bate, 262–263 Rinear, David L., 146 Ritson, Joseph, 166 Riverside Press, 290 Robbins, Chandler, 217 Robert Clarke Company, 59 Robinson, Henry Crabb, xiv, 26, 64, 95, 104, 266; on Mary Lamb, 42, 63; on Lamb’s books, 1, 42, 53 Rodd, Horatio, xiii, 46, 157–158 Rogers of Salem, 192 Rogers, John, 188–195 Rogers, Richard, 192 Rogers, Samuel, 33, 53 Roscoe, William, 221–222 Rosenblum, Joseph, 268, 269 Round Hill School, 234–237 Rowe, Nicholas, 127 Roxburghe, Duke of. See Ker, John Roxburghe Club, 209 Royal Society, 178 Ruggles, Samuel B., 241, 243 Russell, John, 14–15 Ryle, Charles, 42

Railway Classics, 66 Randolph, Thomas, 122–123 Raven, James, 274 Rawlinson, Thomas, 206 Raymond, Henry J., 136–137 Reed, Henry Hope, xi, 6, 106–109, 107, 111

Sabin, Joseph, 149 Sältzer, Alexander, 243 Sanderson, John M., 156 Sargent, Lucius Manlius, 191, 263 Saturday Club, 289–290 Savage, James, 192, 221

376 i n d e x Schiller, Friedrich, 11, 57, 96 Scott, John R., 80 Scott, Mary Anne, 80 Scott, Sir Walter, xiv, 159, 212, 221, 166; The Antiquary, 164–165; and Cogswell, 231–232, 274; and Dibdin, 200, 202; Old Mortality, 186; Quentin Durward, 93 Scribner, Charles, xiii, 16, 115 Scribner & Welford, 115–116 Scribner brothers, 282; Arthur Hawley, 291; John Blair, 291; Charles II, 291 seal rings, 132, 168 Sears, David, 220 Select Committee on Public Libraries (House of Commons), 226, 240, 263–264 self-culture, 8, 14, 56, 175, 218, 221, 240, 247, 252 sentimental collectors, 10–11, 51, 61, 86, 117, 282, 288; Robert Balmanno, 122, 132, 144, 170; Frederickson, 280–281; Livermore, 222; North, 281; Norton, 260; Harry B. Smith, 291–292 Sewel, William, History of the Quakers, 236–237 “Sexton of the Old School,” (Sargent), 191–193, 263 Shady Hill, 265–266, 286 Shakespeare, William, 6–7, 106, 129–130, 143; Robert Balmanno’s dream, 128–129; Burton’s collection of, 151–154; and the crabapple tree, 161–162; First Folio, 21, 117, 138, 152–154; forgeries, 153–154; gimmel ring, 164–173, 168, 169; jubilees, 155–159; and Lamb, 10, 121, 127, 191; mulberry relics, 143–144, 155, 157, 161–162, 173; New Place, 117, 143, 167–168. See also bardolatry; bardomania Shakespeare, William, works: Antony and Cleopatra, 130; Ayscough’s edition, 130; Boydells’ edition, 127; Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio), 21, 117, 138, 152, 153, 154; Cymbeline, 152; Hamlet, 158; Hanmer’s edition, 20–21; Henry IV, 72; Henry V, 213; King John, 152; King Lear, 88, 152; Macbeth, 136, 147; The Merchant of Venice, 76, 141, 196; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 148, 156, 161; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 76; Othello, 10; Poems, &c.,

7, 118, 245, 291; Romeo and Juliet, 147, 154–155; The Tempest, 157–158; Troilus and Cressida, 132, 159; Twelfth Night, 156, 167; The Two Noble Kinsmen, 152; The Winter’s Tale, 141, 144 Shakespeare Society (London), 59, 159, 163 Shakespeare Society (New York), 118, 154–164 Shakespeare’s Canopy, 161–162 Sharpe, Thomas, 143 Shedd, William Greenough Thayer, 111 sheepskins, 213–214 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 132, 292; as author of Frankenstein, 28, 229 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 50, 96, 292 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 260 Ship of Fools (Brandt), 203–204 Shurtleff, Nathaniel Bradstreet, 290 Sidney, Sir Philip, 40 signature letters, 288 Simpson, William S., 169 Skelton, John, 284, 284–285, 286 Smets, Alexander Augustus, 143 Smith, George Dallas, xiii, 291 Smith, Harry Bache, xiii, 280, 282, 283, 291–292 Smith, Joseph, 198 Smith, Robert, 167 Smithsonian Institution, 256–257 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: American, 179, British, 70 South Sea Bubble, 120–121 Southern, Henry, Retrospective Review, 186 Southerne, Thomas, 63 Southey, Robert, xiv, 37, 64, 96, 121, 198; and Cogswell, 230–231; and Lamb, 37, 104, 154, 185 Sparks, Jared, xiii, 47, 214, 258, 259, 268 Specht, Thomas, 64–65 Spectator, 76–77, 275 Speght, William, 149 Spencer, George John, 2nd Earl Spencer, 7, 209–211 Spira, Francis (Francesco), 83–84 Stanford Special Collections, 9 Stanhope, Philip Henry, History of England, 107

index Stedman, John Gabriel, 166 Steele, Richard, 76–77, 268, 275 Steevens, George, 127 Stephans, Harry (Henri Estienne), 206 Stevens, Benjamin Franklin, 46 Stevens, Henry, Jr., xi, 8, 44–48, 50, 174, 177, 199, 216, 226–227, 250–260, 263, 283 Stevens, Henry, Sr., xiii, 44–45, 179, 250, 258 Stockdale, John, 130 Stoddart, Sarah, 39 Stothard, Thomas, 157 strawberry festival, 215 Strong, George Templeton, x, 16–17, 67, 84–85, 96, 108, 201, 243, 251, 259, 278, 291; on Astor, 241; imitation of “Kubla Khan,” 98–100; library of, 85–86, 87, 92, 98, 100–101, 104–105, 182 Strong, George Washington, 259 Stuart, Gilbert Charles, 221 Stuart, Moses B., 75 subscriptions: Pope’s Homer, 21; the testimonial armchair, 135–137; Washington’s library, 259–260 Suckling, John, Fragmenta Aurea, 282, 290–292 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 278 Swift, Jonathan, Works, 119–121 Table Book (Hone), 135 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, xiv, 21, 33, 42, 154; Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, 21, 81, 160; Letters of Charles Lamb, 97; Literary Sketches and Letters, 23 tall copies, 201 Taylor, John, 80, 97, 120 Taylor, William, 131 Taylor & Hessey, 185 Temple-Grenville, Richard, Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 162 Tennyson, Alfred, 37 testimonial armchair, 135–144, 139, 155, 171 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1, 133, 134 Thomas, Anthony Keighley, 34 Thomas, Sarah, 34–35 Thomson, Charles, 145 Thoreau, Henry David, 179 Thorpe, Thomas, 46 Tickell, Thomas, 249, 268

377 Ticknor, Anna Eliot, 237, 245, 272 Ticknor, George, xiii, 5, 130, 259, 276; and Cogswell, 227, 228, 229, 233, 242, 244 Ticknor, William Davis, 290 Tilden, Samuel J., 278 “Tom Folio” (Addison), 204–206 Tonson, Jacob, 127 Tooke, John Horne, 248 tooling, 62, 152, 211 Towers, Jane, 33 Tryon, Thomas, The Knowledge of a Man’s Self, 261–262 Tuckerman, Henry Theodore, 235 tunneling the pages, 33 Turner, William W., 112 Twain, Mark, 12–13, 195, 252 Twiss, Francis, Complete Verbal Index to the Plays of Shakespeare, 130 Tyler, John, 245 Ude, Louis-Eustache, 104 uncut copies, 201 Upjohn, Richard, 243–244 Useful Knowledge, 69–71, 140, 179, 187, 218, 251, 292 Usher, Hezekiah, 174 Valdarfer, Christoph, 209, 212, 216 Valdarfer Decameron, 209–211, 216 Vane, Harry, 60, 83 Veigel, Eva Marie, 173 Vermont Historical Society, 45 Victoria (ship), 80 Virgil, 178–179 Voltaire, 220–221 Walden, Ann, 38, 39 Walden, Frederick, 38 Walker, James, 214–215 Waller, Edmund, 285; The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems, 121–122 Walsh, William, 249 Ward, Henry, 239 Ward, Richard, 182 Ward, Samuel, III, xiii, 239 Ward, Samuel Cutler, 239, 241, 243 Warton, Joseph, 262 Washington, Bushrod, 257, 259

378 i n d e x Washington, George, 227; bookplate, 266–267, 267; library, 8, 256–259; “Rules of Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” 268 Washington, George Corbin, xiii, 257, 259, 269 Washington, Jane Charlotte Blackburn, 259, 269 Washington, John Augustine, II, 257, 259 Washington, John Augustine, III, 257, 259, 269 Washington Library Committee, 264 Waterson, Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy, 278–279 Webster, Daniel, xiii, 118, 138, 241, 245, 259 Welford, Charles, xi, 5, 13–14, 16–18, 261; aboard the Victoria, 80; and the American Ethnological Society, 112, 171; on the demise of Bartlett & Welford, 113–115; on Lamb’s books, 100, 149, 283; in London, 43–44, 46, 47–50, 115–116; in New York, 53; in Paris, 79; and Charles Scribner, 115–116. See also Bartlett & Welford bookstore Welford, John G., 16 Welford, Mary Anne, 13, 80 Westwood, Thomas, xiv, 28, 29, 30, 54, 135, 185 Wetmore, Prosper Montgomery, x, 74 Weyden, Adriana de, 189 Whipple, Edwin Percy, 56 White, James, Original Letters, 154 Whitman, Walt, 12 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 68 Wight, Moses, 221, 223 Wiley, Charles, 110 Wiley, John, xi, 6, 106, 109–110, 111, 173 Wiley & Putnam, 47, 67 Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester, 63 Windham, William, 101–102, 103 Winship, Michael, 17

Winsor, Justin, 182, 188 Winthrop, James, 180 Winthrop, John, 181 Winthrop, Robert Charles, xiii, 215, 217, 221 wood engraving (woodcuts), 127, 203–204, 224 Woodman, Horatio, x, 289–290, 291 Woodring, Carl L., 261 Worde, Wynkyn de, 271 Wordsworth, Mary, 51 Wordsworth, William, xiv; American edition of, 106; broken eyeglasses, 80; Descriptive Sketches (Lamb’s copy), 100, 286, 288; epitaph for Lamb, 41; An Evening Walk, 285–287; false teeth, 80; and Fields, 51; as friend of the Lambs, 24, 105, 127, 285; Lamb’s letter to, 105; and Moxon, 16, 30, 37; as Poet Laureate, 37, 51 working men of letters, 2, 27, 70, 74, 76, 176, 180, 219, 252 Works (Chaucer), 29, 64–65, 149, 154, 282–283, 291 Works (Cowley), 50, 77 Works (Drayton), 50, 283, 285–286, 291–292 Works (Jonson), 86, 100, 291 Works (Osborne), 268 Works (Swift), 119–121 Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets, 249 World’s Fair (New York), 162–163 World’s Olio (Cavendish), 74–76 Yale library, 251. See also Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Young, Alexander, x, 7, 174–175, 181, 184, 191; Library of the Old English Prose Writers, 184, 186 Young, Edward, 63 Young Men’s Mercantile Library (Cincinnati), 56–58