Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access published online on December 7, 2006
Journal of the History of Collections, doi:10.1093/jhc/fhl037
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
A friendly gathering
The social politics of presentation books and their extra-illustration in Horace Walpole's circle
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Abstract |
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All authors are at the mercy of their readers. In the eighteenth century, this realization created a tension that was keenly felt, and articulated, by genteel authors whose response to the unchartable nature of reading was inextricably linked to the material qualities of their books as commodities. These anxieties can be traced in the social politics of presentation books within Horace Walpole's circle of friends and readers. This essay examines the production and reception of such genteel books, particularly those collected, inscribed and extra-illustrated by Richard Bull. Bull's deferential annotations and innovative practice of extra-illustration turned his books into personalized artefacts, rich in emotional investment and individualized experience. His books, thus rendered a spectacle for an audience to enjoy, serve as an instructive diagnostic of the socio-economic culture of gift exchange and ritual response that underpinned the rhetoric of eighteenth-century amateurism and thus helped to assert both the author's gentility and that of his extra-illustrator.
1 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans., S. Randall (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London, 1988), p. 174.
2 R. Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans., L. G. Cochrane (Oxford, 1994), p. 1.
3 Currently, the best-known treatment of the phenomenon of extra-illustration is found in M. Pointon, Hanging the Head. Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 53–78; it is also briefly mentioned in T. Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven and London, 1998), p. 244. I am currently preparing a monograph on the subject and have also elaborated on the practice and its social meanings in a number of articles that are cited in the appropriate notes below.
4 J. Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, George Birkbeck Hill (ed.), rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols (rpt., 1887: Oxford, 1934–50), vol. III, p. 19. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli goes further in her analysis of Johnson's famous expletive; she argues that Johnson was acutely antagonized by the public's literary servility towards the work of ‘aristocratic poetasters’ naming Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors as Johnson's animus. See A. Wheeler Cafarelli, Prose in the Age of Poets. Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia, 1990).
5 R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), vol. I, pp. xl–xliv, cited in A. Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998), p. 176.
6 Johns, op. cit. (note 5), p. 175.
7 Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in tracing the historical development and cultural significance of amateurism in the early modern period. This is particularly evinced by K. Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’. Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600– 1800 (London, 2000) and A. Bermingham, Learning to Draw. Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London, 2000), esp. ch. 4.
8 Although the word amateur was first used to denote an art lover, the term came to be applied to those practising art around the 1770s –1780s. The concept of the amateur or virtuoso dates back to the early seventeenth century, and is predicated on an individual operating ‘without regard for pecuniary advantage’; see Sloan, op. cit. (note 7). The trend for published repudiations of profit is charted in J. S. Peters, ‘The bank, the press, and the "return of nature": on currency, credit and literary property in the 1690s’, in J. Brewer and S. Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York, 1995), pp. 365–88.
9 Some further examples, and the point that this tradition was particularly marked among antiquarian publications, is discussed in R. Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004), p. 68. It should also be noted that Sweet's book is now essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural importance of antiquarianism as a platform for masculine sociability, national identity and popular culture during the eighteenth century.
10 T. Pennant, The British Zoology (London, 1766), n.p.
11 T. Pennant, Of London (London, 1790), p. iii.
12 T. Pennant, The Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell (London, 1796), n.p.
13 Cited in Boswell, op. cit. (note 4), p. 19n.
14 See Peters, op. cit. (note 8), p. 373.
15 A similar point is also made in I. Parsons, ‘Copyright and society’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing in Celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the House of Longman 1724 –1974 (London, 1974), pp. 31–60, esp. p. 35.
16 S. Paterson, Joineriana: or the Book of Scraps, 2 vols (London, 1772), vol. I, p. 53. W. S. Lewis discusses Walpole's reasons for founding the Strawberry Hill Press in Collector's Progress (London, 1952), pp. 81–7.
17 Cited in Lewis, op. cit. (note 16), p. 82.
18 M. A. Havens, Horace Walpole and the Strawberry Hill Press, 1757 –1789 (Canton, PA, 1901), p. 11.
19 P. Toynbee, Journal of the Printing-Office at Strawberry Hill (London, 1923), p. 1.
20 Letter from H. Walpole to W. Mason, 15 May 1773, in Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, W.S. Lewis (ed.), 48 vols (N ew Haven and London, 1937–83), vol. XXVIII, p. 88.
21 Letter from H. Walpole to W. Cole, 18 February 1773, in Lewis, op. cit. (note 20), vol. I, p. 300.
22 For a discussion of the seventeenth-century concern of idleness leading to melancholy, see Sloan, op. cit. (note 7), p. 15.
23 Letter from H. Walpole to W. Mason, 7 May 1775, in Lewis, op. cit. (note 20), vol. XXVIII, p. 195.
24 H. Walpole, A Collection of Prints Engraved by Various Persons of Quality, 2 vols, n.d. (c. 1775 –96), 49 3588 1–2, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (hereinafter LWL). For a brief description of this collection, see D. Alexander, Amateurs and Printmaking in England 1750–1830, exh. cat., Wolfson College (Oxford, 1983), pp. 4–5.
25 See Bermingham, op. cit. (note 7), p. 180.
26 Walpole extra-illustrated several of the works he wrote. His extra-illustrated Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill, Anecdotes of Painting in England and Mémoires du Comte de Grammont are all now LWL. The phenomenon of the author as extra-illustrator will be addressed in my forthcoming monograph on the subject of extra-illustration.
27 Letter from T. Kirgate to C. Bedford, n.d. (c. 1800 –11), MS LWL. Kirgate was employed by Walpole as the printer at the Strawberry Hill Press between 1765 and 1797.
28 R. Bull, Etchings and Engravings, by the Nobility and Gentry of England by Persons Not exercising the Art as a Trade, 2 vols, n.d. (c. 1770s –1805), *189 b 22, 23, Department of Prints & Drawings, British Museum. The title page to this two-volume set is reproduced in L. Peltz, ‘Engraved Portrait Heads and the Rise of Extra-illustration. The Eton Correspondence of the Rev. James Granger and Richard Bull, 1769–1774’, Walpole Society, 66 (2004), pp. 1–161, at Fig. 5. See also J. Chelsum, Collection of Etchings by Notable Dilletanti (c.1780), Center for British Art, Yale University, B1977.14.200049-20188.
29 T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (London, 1925), p.28.
30 For a useful introduction to Veblen's ideas, and their relevance to eighteenth-century economic theory see R. Mason, The Economics of Conspicuous Consumption: Theory and Thought since 1700 (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, 1998).
31 P. Burke ‘Res et verba: conspicuous consumption in the early modern world’, in R. Porter and J. Brewer (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York, 1993), pp. 148–61, 149.
32 L. Stone and J.C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite England 1540– 1880 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 7, 16–25.
33 Letter from W Stukeley, 1751, mss. Eng. Misc. c 538.f.7, Bodleian Library, cited by C. Wainwright, ‘The library as living room’, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds.), The Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library (Winchester, 1991), pp. 15–24, 15.
34 G. Naudeus [Naudé], Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library: Presented to My Lord the Président de Mesme (1627), trans., J. Evelyn, J. Cotton Dana (ed.) (rpt., 1661: Cambridge, 1903), p. 10.
35 Cited in Chartier, op. cit. (note 2), p. 64.
36 R. Blome, The Gentleman's Recreation (London, 1686), n.p.
37 S. Bishop ‘The library’, in The Poetical Works of the Rev. Samuel Bishop, 2 vols (London, 1796), vol. I, p. 106. R. Chartier made this point in ‘The practical impact of writing’, in P. Ariès and G. Duby (eds.), The History of Private Life. trans., A. Goldhammer, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1989), vol. III, pp. 111–59, 134–6.
38 M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven and London, 1978), pp. 169–70. T. F. Dibdin, The Library Companion; or, the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the Choice of a Library (London, 1824), p. xxi.
39 J. Ferriar, The Bibliomania, An Epistle to Richard Heber, Esq. (London, 1809). A similar poem is J. Caulfield, Calcographiana: The Printseller's Chronicle and Collector's Guide to the Knowledge and Value of Engraved British Portraits (London, 1814).
40 Ferriar, op. cit. (note 39), p. 10.
41 T. F. Dibdin, Aedes Althorpianae; or An Account of the Mansion, Books and Pictures, at Althorp (London, 1802), p. 206.
42 H. Snowden Ward, ‘Grangerising or extra-illustrating’, The Useful Arts, vol.52 (1902), p. 9.
43 T. Downes, A Copious Index to Pennant's Account of London (London, 1814), p. iii.
44 For a discussion of the popularization of extra-illustration in the 1790s and the rise of a commercial industry that sustained the fashion, see L. Peltz, ‘Facing the text. The amateur and commercial histories of extra-illustration, c. 1770–1820’, in M. Harris, G. Mandelbrote and R. Myers (eds.), Book Trade Consumers: Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (London and New Castle, DE, 2005), pp. 91–135.
45 It is worth noting the distinction between the active and concerted extra-illustration of dictionaries, encyclopaedias or narratives and the idiosyncratic inclusion of the occasional print into a book; a practice that has surely been enjoyed for as long as words and images themselves.
46 For a study of Bull's Granger, now at the Huntington Library, see Peltz, op. cit. (note 28).
47 ‘Richard Bull [obit. ]’, Gentleman's Magazine, 76, no.1 (March 1806), p. 289.
48 Inscription at the front of Richard Bull's extra-illustrated presentation manuscript copy of T. Pennant, From London to Dover, 2 vols (c. 1789), vol. I, n.p., Museum in Docklands, Port of London Authority Collection.
49 For a discussion of Bull's daughters’ extra-illustration see L. Peltz, ‘The extra-illustration of London: the gendered spaces and practices of antiquarianism in the late eighteenth century’, in M. Myrone and L. Peltz (eds. ), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700 –1850 (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 115–34.
50 M. Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans., I. Cunnison (rpt., 1954: London, 1988).
51 For an introduction to Mauss and subsequent theories of the gift see, A. D. Schrift, The Logic of the Gift.Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York and London, 1997).
52 The temporal framework of gift exchange is the concern of J. Derrida, Given Time, trans., P. Kamuf (Chicago, 1992) and P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans., R. Nice (Cambridge, 1990).
53 C. Macherel ‘Don et réciprocité en europe’, Archives européennes de sociologie, 24 (1983), pp. 151–66, cited in N. Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000), p. 9.
54 Mauss, op. cit. (note 50), p. 18.
55 This view is shared by R. Waldo Emerson, ‘Gifts’, in Essays, 2nd ser. (1844), reproduced in Schrift, op. cit. (note 51), pp. 25–7 and G. Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. I, ‘Consumption’, trans., R. Hurley (New York, 1988).
56 Letter from R. Bull to T Pennant, 18 July 1790. CR 2017 TP 189/22, Warwickshire County Records Office (hereinafter WCRO).
57 N. Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the market: books as gifts in sixteenth-century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 33 (1983), pp. 69–88, at p. 83.
58 Walpole's library indicates that he had a penchant for books of interesting provenance, such as Pope's Homer. For an overview of Walpole's library see A. T.Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library, 3 vols (London, 1969). For a bibliographic definition of ‘association copies’ see J. Carter, ABC for Book Collectors, rev. N. Barker, 6th edn (New Castle, DE, 1992).
59 Letter from H. Walpole to H. Mann, 4 March 1759, in Lewis (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), vol. XXI, p. 278.
60 For a summary of the contemporary collectors of Strawberry Hill publications see ‘Owners of Copies’, in A. T. Hazen and J. P. Kirby, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (New Haven, 1942), pp. 279–92.
61 From Hazen and Kirby's Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press, op. cit. (note 60), I estimate that thirty-four of the Strawberry Hill editions constitute books rather than pamphlets or detached pieces. Aside from the Sotheby's sale of 1880, Bull's books can also be traced in; Bibliotheca Splendidissima. A Catalogue of the Duplicates of the Two Libraries of R. H. A. Bennet, Esq. and of the late Richard Bull, of Ongar, Essex, Esq ... Which will be sold by Auction by Leigh and Sotheby ... March 8th and seven following days, 1810 (London, 1810); A Catalogue of a Very Good Collection of Miscellaneous Prints, Portraits, and Drawings ... the Property of an Eminent Collector, Deceased. Which will be sold by Auction, By Leigh and Sotheby ... on Friday, April 3, 1812, and following Day (London, 1812); Catalogue of the Valuable Library ... Formed at the End of the Eighteenth Century by Richard Bull, Esq. and now removed from Northcourt, Isle of Wight ... Which Will be Sold by Auction by Messrs. Sotheby and Co ... Monday, the 28th of June 1926 (London, 1926); and A Catalogue of Valuable Printed Books, Fine Prints and a Few Manuscripts ... Which Will be Auctioned at Sotheby & Co. on 8 & 9 February, 1973 (London, 1973).
62 For detailed descriptions of these, see respectively: Sotheby's 1880, lot 731 (now 24 10 copy 2, LWL); Sotheby's 1926 (untraced), and Sotheby's 1880, lot 886 (now 33 30 copy 11, LWL); this last item is currently being mounted, spread by spread, on the Lewis Walpole Library website.
63 These are now, respectively, 33 2 copy 4 and 33 19 copy 1, LWL.
64 Now 33 1 copy 9, LWL; according to the on-line catalogue, there now seems to be some confusion about the provenance of this item, however, bearing Bull's armorial bookplate and traces of his usual practice its link to that collector is, in my mind, certain.
66 Letter from H. Walpole to R. Bull, 20 December 1781, in Lewis, op. cit. (note 20), vol. XLI, pp. 467. This letter was originally tipped in to Bull's volume; it has been removed and is now stored in a separate sequence at LWL.
67 H. Walpole ‘Of collectors of English portrait prints’, Book of Materials (c. 1771 –97), p. 2, MS LWL.
68 Letter from R. Bull to W. Cole, March 1787, Add. ms 5811 ff. 97 101 b, Department of Manuscripts, British Library.
69 For more on the sociability of Bull's extra-illustration, see Peltz, op. cit. (note 28), pp. 325.
70 Letter from H. Walpole to W. Cole, 16 June 1781 in Lewis (ed.), op. cit. (note 20), vol. II, p. 273.
73 Letter from H. Walpole to R Bull, 10 January 1787, tipped in on the flyleaf of Bull's extra-illustrated Postscript to the Royal and Noble Authors (1758), 33 3 copy 21, LWL.
74 Davis, op. cit. (note 57), p. 87.
75 Chartier, op. cit. (note 2), p. 38.
76 F. Yrubslips [F. Spilsbury], The Art of Etching and Aquatinting (London, 1774), p. 6.
77 Chartier, op. cit. (note 2), p. 39.
78 Stephen Colclough describes the social culture of the manuscript sharing of texts, in the early nineteenth century, in his work on commonplace books composed of transcriptions of literary fragments. This essay is found in Harris, Mandelbrote and Myers, op. cit. (note 44), pp. 153–73.
79 Letter from R. Bull to T. Pennant, 4 February 1792. CR 2017 TP 189/41, WCRO.
80 Pennant's A Journey from London to the Isle of Wight was eventually published, posthumously, in 1801.
81 Letter from R. Bull to T. Pennant, 11 February 1791, CR 2017 TP 189/27, WCRO.
82 Letter from R. Bull to T. Pennant, 13 June 1787, CR 2017 TP 189/11, WCRO. The Pennants’ journey actually extended beyond Dover to the Isle of Wight although the text does not reflect this.
83 Letter from T. Pennant to R. Bull, 23 March 1791, 5500 C (92), ms National Library of Wales.
84 Letter from H. Walpole to R. Bull, c 1789, pasted into Bull's extra-illustrated Description of Strawberry Hill, p. 40.
85 Bermingham draws a similar conclusion on contrasting the taste for print-based female accomplishments, in the early nineteenth century, with the growth of more efficient, industrial processes for commercial production. See Bermingham, op. cit. (note 7), esp. p. 160.
86 Chartier, op. cit. (note 2), p. 39.
87 Lady M. Coke, Manuscript Journals, 22 December 1782, cited in Lewis, op. cit. (note 20), vol. XXXI, pp. 297–8.
Correspondence: Dr Lucy Peltz, Curator of Eighteenth Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London WC2H OHE. lpeltz{at}npg.org.uk