Friday 25th November 2016, 1-2pm, 50 George Square Project Room
Dr Katie Halsey, University of Stirling
‘Exploring Romantic-period readerships in rural Perthshire, 1780-1830’
In 1898, William Stewart of the Glasgow Herald wrote an article about Innerpeffray Library, a tiny late seventeenth-century public lending library in rural Perthshire, describing it as ‘a quaint corner of libraria’, and commenting in surprise on its founder’s early commitment to providing rural labourers with access to books.[1] Innerpeffray Library was founded in (or around) 1680 by David Drummond, third Lord Madertie, who left the sum of 5000 Scots marks in his Will for the establishment of a library which was to be for the benefit of the local community. Books from the library were made available to local borrowers from at least 1747 to 1968, when the library ceased to function as a lending library and became a ‘historic library’ visitor attraction. Borrowers came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, from local laird to shepherd and schoolchild. Through an analysis of the existing borrowers’ records (which are unusually full, recording not only books borrowed but also some socio-economic data about the borrowers) and other extant manuscript material, this paper will discuss the extent to which the founder’s wishes were interpreted and fulfilled in the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830), and thus how what we now call Romanticism was experienced in one small pocket of rural Scotland. In so doing, I hope to both illustrate and interrogate some of the ways in which scholarship of this nature can shed light on a wider history of reading.
Katie Halsey is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling, having worked previously at the Universities of St Andrews, London and Cambridge. Her research interests include Jane Austen, eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature more broadly, the history of libraries and communities, and the history of reading. Recent publications include her monograph, Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945 (2012), The History of Reading: A Reader (2010), with Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed, and, with Bob Owens, The History of Reading, vol. 2: Evidence from the British Isles (2011). She is currently working on a research project based on the library records of Innerpeffray Library.
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[1] William Stewart, ‘A Quaint Corner in Libraria’, Glasgow Herald, Saturday June 4, 1898. Issue 133.