Books and Borrowing 1750-1830

‘Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon at 300’: Conference Report

Last month, Katie and I had the pleasure of attending the ‘Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon at 300’ conference (18–21 July 2023), hosted by the Institute of Intellectual History and the Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and organised alongside the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, and the International Adam Smith Society.

The purpose of this conference was to mark and celebrate the 300th birthdays of Scottish Enlightenment authors Adam Smith (1723–90), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), and John Witherspoon (1723–94), and also the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s and James Boswell’s Tour of the Highlands and Western Isles in 1773.

Over the course of four days, delegates were treated to lectures from four plenary speakers (from Professors Jeng Guo Chen, Lisa Hill, Nigel Leask, and Gideon Mailer), each of whom spoke to one or more of these anniversaries. We also enjoyed a wide-ranging and multidisciplinary series of parallel panel sessions, covering topics that included, but were not limited to: moral philosophy, religion, aesthetics, economics, political theory, (art) history, and literary studies.

Attending these panels, it soon became apparent that the majority of papers (my own paper included, which I discuss briefly in a previous blog post here) centred on Smith; Ferguson and Witherspoon – and indeed, Boswell and Johnson – were, by contrast, much less often the central focus of conversation or analysis.

One obvious reason for this may, of course, be that there were simply more Smith scholars in attendance at the conference due to the organisational role played by the International Adam Smith Society. It may also be that Smith’s work happens to be pertinent to a broader selection of academic fields than his contemporaries, such as Ferguson and Witherspoon, are at present.

As a literary scholar, my own work on Smith to date has involved applying his theories of sympathy production and impartial spectatorship to interpret post-Enlightenment Scottish novel reading practices. At last month’s conference, the relevance of Smith’s work to scholars working on, for example, eighteenth-century aesthetics, mathematical formulae in the study of economics, and even psychoanalysis, became equally apparent. Smith thus quickly emerged as a central figure in current scholarship, whose influence evidently spans and transcends the boundaries of a diverse range of academic disciplines.

This is not at all to discount the conference papers that did focus on Ferguson and Witherspoon, or indeed to criticise the fact that Smith was the topic of so many papers (far from it). Smith’s overall dominance across the conference programme did, however, prompt us to think about whether or not the same dominance is evident in the borrowing records accessible via the (forthcoming) Books and Borrowing database. Does our dataset suggest that Smith’s works were also receiving (ostensibly) more attention in Scotland between the years 1750 and 1830, in terms of library borrowings, than those of Ferguson and Witherspoon, or do these records depict more equally-divided attention?

With these questions in mind, I’d like to use the remainder of this blog to discuss some brief and early findings from our database, to consider whether or not an indication of the same Smithian popularity can be gleaned from a quick perusal of our data as it currently stands.

The works of each author that we have on record within the database are as follows (I decided to focus on Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon on this particular occasion, though Boswell and Johnson both appear in the database, the former as both a borrower and an author, and the latter as an author). In most cases, our database holds records of multiple editions of each of these works:

• Witherspoon
  • The Works of J. Witherspoon (1804–05, published posthumously after Witherspoon’s death in 1794)
• Smith
  • The theory of moral sentiments (1759)
  • An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776)
  • Essays on philosophical subjects (published posthumously in 1795)
• Ferguson
  • An essay on the history of civil society (1767)
  • The history of the progress and termination of the Roman Republic (1783)
  • Principles of moral and political science; being chiefly a retrospect of lectures delivered in the College of Edinburgh (1792)

Typing each of these author’s names into an initial, simple search of our database reveals that our dataset holds 115 records of library users borrowing Witherspoon, 300 records of library users borrowing Ferguson, and 316 records of library users borrowing Smith.

Whilst then, the total number of Witherspoon borrowings amounts to just over a third of the total number of borrowings of Ferguson and Smith respectively, the margin between the total number of borrowings of Smith’s and Ferguson’s works is much narrower.

As the list of works provided above also indicates, however, our dataset includes more works by Smith and Ferguson than it does by Witherspoon. Some of Smith’s and Ferguson’s most popular works (such as, for example, The theory of moral sentiments and An essay on the history of civil society) were published at least three decades before The Works of J. Witherspoon was published, which may in turn account for there being proportionately fewer borrowing records of Witherspoon’s works.

With this in mind, it is perhaps unfair to compare Witherspoon so directly with Smith and Ferguson. It would be interesting to see, were we to analyse borrowing records that spanned beyond the project’s time period of 1750–1830, if Witherspoon’s works proved more popular in the decades that followed. If so, we might find that the margin between the number of borrowing records for each author became less pronounced over time. The most popular decade for borrowings of Smith and Ferguson is, in both cases, the 1770s (over thirty years before Witherspoon’s works were published), whilst the most popular year for Witherspoon borrowings, according to our database, is 1819 (eleven years before the end of our project’s time period). It is possible, therefore, that analysis of later borrowing records might reveal a rise in popularity for Witherspoon’s works post-1830.

Another point of consideration is that Witherspoon’s works only appear in Westerkirk Library. Meanwhile, Ferguson’s and Smith’s works are much more widely available, appearing in both larger, institutional libraries (such as the University libraries of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews and the Royal High School of Edinburgh’s library) and also smaller, rural libraries (such as Haddington Library, Westerkirk Library, and Selkirk Library). These differences in types of library may also account, in part, for Witherspoon’s works being borrowed significantly fewer times than Smith’s and Ferguson’s works. In the case of both Smith and Ferguson, for example, university students were (perhaps unsurprisingly, given these authors’ professorial tenures) the second highest category of borrower. Because Witherspoon’s works do not appear in any of the university library records, the total number of borrowings is perhaps inevitably lower.

Ferguson’s works appear in, and are borrowed from, 14 of our (18) project database libraries, whilst Smith’s works appear in 12 of these libraries. Although, therefore, Smith’s works are borrowed the most times overall, Ferguson’s works were actually accessible in the most libraries and were therefore circulated, presumably, amongst the highest number of potential borrowers and readers.

As indicated earlier, these observations are the product of a series of quick and simple searches of our database and are therefore relatively superficial. They do, however, hopefully provide some brief insight into the sorts of questions that one might ask of the data available and the different ways in which one might use the borrowing records to answer questions surrounding the popularity of specific works and authors over time (be these questions that arise spontaneously following a preliminary glance of a conference schedule, or questions that are the result of a much longer course of study and consideration).

The data that I have analysed briefly here suggests that Witherspoon was (for a variety of understandable reasons) borrowed the least number of times, whilst Ferguson and Smith are presented as being relatively equally matched, both in terms of total borrowing records and also circulation and accessibility. The prevalence of Smith’s name across last month’s conference programme may, therefore, very well be read simply as a reflection of the enduring relevance of his ideas to scholarship today across a multitude of disciplines.

In any case, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of the organisers of ‘Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon at 300’ for a very intellectually stimulating and convivial few days.