Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

A Year of Books and Borrowing

It’s been a shamefully long time since I updated readers of this blog on things that have been happening on the Books and Borrowing front. This is mainly because it’s been an exceptionally busy year on many fronts, and, now that our funding from the AHRC is at an end, blogging has taken a back seat, but this isn’t because there isn’t plenty to say!

So I’ll use this blog post as a general round-up to let you all know what has been going on since our official launch back in April 2024, and to highlight some of the things members of our team have been doing.

Shortly after our launch, I was delighted to be invited down to Westerkirk, which was being featured on ITV’s Borders Life programme, to talk about book borrowing from Westerkirk in the early nineteenth century.

The programme aired at the end of May, and just before it came out, I travelled down to Cardiff to speak to members of their Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, at the kind invitation of Bill Bell and Anthony Mandal. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to speak to the audience there, who asked me some searching and helpful questions, which have been extremely useful to me as Matt and I have been working on our co-authored book Books and Borrowing in Scotland, 1750-1830.

At the end of May, we had an intensive burst of work on the book at the University of Stirling’s Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual Writing Retreat, held in the beautiful surroundings of Alexander House ( 5* Exclusive Use Wedding Venue and Holiday Home in Scotland (alexanderhousescotland.com). Other members of the Books and Borrowing team who attended the retreat were Cleo, Josh, Gema, Jacqueline and Isla, and all made excellent progress on their respective writing projects. Thanks are due to Jo Lewis for allowing us to use her beautiful home, and to Oana and the housekeeping team for making us so comfortable.

In early June, I spoke at the annual conference of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), which was held this year at the University of Stirling, on the theme of ‘Libraries Making A Difference’. It was a great opportunity to talk to those who work in libraries today about the ways in which, historically, libraries had been used, and I am grateful to Colin Sinclair for introducing me to the organisers, and to Gillian Daly for fitting me into the programme at relatively short notice.  Mid-June found me in Southampton, at a symposium to honour the work of Mary Hammond, whose research on the history of reading in the nineteenth century is so important and valuable, where I talked about the Books and Borrowing project as part of the wider endeavour to recreate the history of reading in the early nineteenth century. My thanks to Aude Campmas for organising the event. At the end of the month I was in Dundee, at the Scottish Book History Conference organised by Kelsey Jackson Williams and Daryl Green, on a round table on Early Modern Scottish collections in libraries. It was a lovely, convivial occasion, and it was great to see so many friends of the Books and Borrowing project collected in one room!

From one conference to another – at the very beginning of July, I hot-footed it down to Reading to attend the Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) where I spoke on a panel with Juliette Wells and Katie Maclean, about Jane Austen’s circulation from the Books and Borrowing libraries of Selkirk, Orkney, Chambers, and the Advocates Library. Josh was also at the conference, where he gave an excellent paper about reform and reading in the Bristol Library Society, 1828-1832.

In this very busy period, an opportunity to apply for funding unexpectedly arose, so almost the whole team was, from the middle of June to the middle of July, busy putting together a funding bid for a new AHRC pilot programme called the Mission Awards. We were sadly unsuccessful, but we enjoyed working together to get it in place, and we hope we might be able to repurpose some of this application for future funding bids.

At the end of July, many of us were reunited in Glasgow at the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) conference. This year’s theme was ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’, and the conference was organised by Matt, with colleagues at Glasgow, and was a tremendous success. Papers were given by Matt, Rachael, Gema, Alex, Gerry, Cleo, Katie, and Jacqueline, the latter three as part of a dedicated Books and Borrowing panel, in which we discussed, respectively, ‘Reading Practices Within and Outwith the Early-Nineteenth-Century Scottish Novel’ (Cleo), ‘The Making or Unmaking of Social Barriers in Romantic-Period Orkney’ (Jacqueline) and ‘Books, Borrowing and New Versions of Scottish Literary History’ (Katie). At the conference, I was happy to meet Anna Fancett, postdoctoral research fellow at Aberdeen, who has been working with Professor Ali Lumsden on the edition of Walter Scott’s writings, and we will soon be showcasing her marvellous materials for schools, along with those created by Maxine, on the Books and Borrowing website. Watch this space!

In September, Matt gave his inaugural lecture to celebrate becoming a Professor, entitled ‘Canons, Classics and Quotidian Joy: Living with Romantic and Fantastical Traditions,’ while Josh submitted his PhD thesis on ‘The Politics of Reading at the Subscription Library in Britain in the Age of Reform, 1789-1832’. Also in September, Jacqueline and I gave a talk at Cromlix (About Us | Cromlix, 5 Star Luxury Hotel in Dunblane), a fund-raiser in aid of the Leighton Library’s Restoration Fund, about the links between Cromlix and the Leighton Library. This drew heavily on Jacqueline’s excellent research on the Leighton Water Drinkers, which is now published in the Journal of the Friends of Dunblane Cathedral.

Meanwhile, Kit worked extremely hard to complete some additional data entry for Selkirk Subscription Library, finding out a number of fascinating extra things about the Prisoners of War who used that library during the Napoleonic Wars, and Jacqueline transcribed four further registers from Orkney Library as part of her MSc project, funded by the ESRC via the Scottish Graduate School for the Social Sciences. Jacqueline passed the MSc with Distinction, and is now in the first year of her PhD. And at Innerpeffray Library, running from 1 March until 31 October 2024, Isla’s exhibition, ‘Travellers Tales’, based on the Innerpeffray Library Visitors’ Books, was a great success, showcasing her research and engaging visitors from all around the world.

Over the course of the summer, Matt and I also finished a chapter for an edited collection on Library Catalogues as Data: Research, Practice and Usage, edited by Sarah Ames, Paul and Melissa Terras. Our chapter is called ‘Realising the Potential of Historical Library Data’. The book is now in press, and will be out shortly, in later 2025.

During the summer, I also wrote an article introducing the Books and Borrowing project for a special issue on ‘Loaning and Borrowing Books in Early Modern European Libraries’ in Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes (thankfully I did not have to write it in French; the editor kindly agreed to finding a translator!), and Brian, Matt and I completed a reasonably technical article for the Digital Deliverables section of the Victorians Institute Journal, which discusses the development of the Books and Borrowing digital resource, and which we hope might be useful to future developers of Digital Humanities projects. Careful readers of this blog will also remember that it featured a memorial on the death of William St Clair back in 2021; one of the lovely things I also did over summer 2024 was to write the entry for William St Clair for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

In November, Josh passed his viva triumphantly with no corrections. He is now Dr Smith! You can request a copy of his brilliant thesis, ‘The Politics of Reading at the Subscription Library in Britain in the Age of Reform, 1789-1832’, here. Cleo is on the verge of submitting her thesis, ‘Novel Reading and Self-Improvement in Scotland, c.1800-37’ this summer.

In March 2025, Matt and I gave a workshop and lecture at the University of Edinburgh, where we introduced workshop participants to the Edinburgh University Library borrowers’ registers, ably assisted by Kit, and to some of the most borrowed books, including some fun rude marginalia, and then discussed two structuring concepts from the period, instruction and entertainment, and how the data from the Books and Borrowing database maps onto those two concepts. We enjoyed seeing some friends of the project there, as well as getting back into the archive to look at the physical registers once again.

At around the same period, we heard that Kit was awarded a Jean Guild Grant from the Old Edinburgh Club to work on a new register from the University of Edinburgh, which covers the borrowings of ‘others’ – i.e. townspeople rather than university professors and students. We are very much looking forward to seeing the results of her work on this register in the database very soon. Congratulations, Kit!

March was, in fact, our month! More good news came our way later in the month, when we heard that the Books and Borrowing Digital Resource had been awarded the 2025 edition of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Digital Prize. We are absolutely delighted by this recognition for Brian’s amazing work in constructing the resource, and celebrated with a team get-together and dinner in Edinburgh in May.

Early April saw me at Westerkirk, spending some intensive time with the manuscript materials from their archive. I very much enjoyed matching up evidence of book use from the Kalendar (borrowers’ register), Blot Book (list of damage to the books) and the books themselves, and am also enjoying writing this up into a chapter, which will be published in 2026 in a collection entitled The Uses of Books, edited by Leah Orr and Nicholas Seager. Matt also has a chapter underway for the same collection, on the marginalia at St Andrews and elsewhere. I am very grateful to April and Jacqueline at Westerkirk for all their help.

Work continues on the Books and Borrowing monograph, Books and Borrowing in Scotland, 1750-1830, which Matt and I hope to complete by the end of the year. It’s shaping up to be another busy summer. Most of the team will be at the Stirling Eighteenth-Century Writing Group retreat again next week (May 2025), and after that, Matt, Cleo and I are presenting research findings from the project at the Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) conference at Stirling in June, and Matt will be giving a paper on borrowings of Jane Austen from our database at the 250^th anniversary Jane Austen conference in Southampton in July.

One of my favourite things over the course of the year has been talking to people who have been using the Books and Borrowing database in exciting, new and creative ways, from teaching their undergraduates to informing their own research. I’ve very much enjoyed reading publications by Tom Jones and Sophie Coulombeau, for example, which make use of our data in exciting and innovative ways. It’s wonderful to know that the resource is helping people to think differently about the period. I would be grateful to hear (by email) from anyone who has used the resource in their research, teaching or for personal interest.  Please do be in touch!