I suppose any discussion of book-collecting these days is expected to start with some mention of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. A cornerstone of Bourdieu’s work is that social life can be analysed in terms of two mutually convertible forms of power, the symbolic & the economic. Economic power can only be mobilised through symbolic power, which is itself derived from the possession & accumulation of ‘cultural capital’. One kind of cultural capital takes the form of the taste, manners & style deriving from prolonged exposure to higher, or bourgeois, culture. For Bourdieu class identity is not static but dynamic & relational. As a result the consumption of culture is a function of the changing relationships between classes. He demonstrates, for instance, how cultural capital (the knowledge of high art & a taste for it) can be valued more highly than the conspicuous display of wealth.
According to Bourdieu, taste (which would include the taste for books by William Blake) is not merely a reflection of class distinctions but the instrument by which they are created & maintained. “The contradictions and ambiguities in the relationship of cultivated individuals with their culture are both promoted and sanctioned by the paradox which defines the realization of culture as naturalization” (110). Patterns of cultural taste reflect social identities & help to forge & sustain them. Aspects of this, such as connoisseurship & an aesthetic ethos, only come about through a long investment of time by mentors & educators (parents & teachers).
Central to Bourdieu’s work is the resolution of the dichotomy between the individual & ‘society’. Bourdieu argues that individuals are not pawns moved across an ecological checkerboard by transcendent forces. At least some individuals know a great deal about the working of society & are able to manipulate the rules & resources of society, but at the same time these individuals are not completely free agents capable of doing exactly as they desire; their actions are both enabled & constrained by the rules & resources that they manipulate. The advantage of Bourdieu’s analysis is that it looks at societies as composed of groups with changing interests & desires which they continually project on to culture. If consumption is the result of social behaviour then questions about its origin & meanings cannot be understood apart from their social contexts. For this reason the writings of ethnographers like Bourdieu, which look at cultural meanings & reception in relation to changing needs of social groups, might be expected to provide useful tools for exploring the history of collecting.
In the past thirty years or so, the history of art collecting has attracted considerable scholarly attention & is now a subject of increasing interest & study, bringing the methods of historical research to the study of the shifts & paradigms of collecting taste. Centuries of familiarity with art collecting meant that this phenomenon had been taken for granted. It was not seen as what it is—“a highly idiosyncratic, exceedingly complex, and in some degree, quite irrational cultural behavioural development” (Alsop, 1). A Journal of the History of Collections began publication in 1989—the scope of the journal embracing the contents of collections, the processes which initiate their formation & the circumstances of the collectors themselves.
Krzysztof Pomian (who to the best of my recollection doesn’t mention Bourdieu) has related changes in fashions for collecting to wider changes in social attitudes in the second half of the eighteenth century. He shows, for example, how the collecting of coins & medals as a demonstration of a collector’s ‘erudition’ gave way to the collecting of shells as an expression of the collector’s interest in ‘philosophy’. (Mrs. Bliss had a notable shell collection.) The importance of collecting is not only that it is a means of reinforcing status discriminations, but that it is a cultural practice by which the collector learns what his or her culture’s ethos & his or her private sensibility, even his or her sense of self, look like.
The related field of book-collecting (overlapping with the collecting of works of art) has also received recent scholarly attention. The serious study of private libraries, & of the lessons that can be learned from book ownership, can elucidate the interests & tastes of the owner & the texts that may have influenced his or her thinking. If they annotated their books, their comments may be valuable as evidence of contemporary reaction to the ideas their books contain. These observations lead on to yield information about the history of the book trade, & about the importance of books in society.
One might take from anthropology two opposing models that give an historical account of cultural patterns. Reticulate models stress the importance of continuing processes of interaction between contemporary communities. Phylogenetic models stress commonality of descent, & imply dispersal from common origins. Can one narrow this into a model for book-collecting? The study of collecting has mostly been “phylogenetic” concerned with questions of provenance & the transfer of actual objects by gift or purchase or inheritance. The study of provenance allows us to assess the size & contents of particular libraries, & to compare them with other collections of their time. It allows us to build up wider pictures of the patterns of book ownership through the centuries, & to see how those patterns change in terms of size, composition, language, subject, or origin. But if book-collectors form a network of friends & acquaintances then perhaps a “reticulate” model should apply.
William Blake & his contemporary collectors
In his introduction to William Blake: The Urizen Books, David Worrall comments that “it does a disservice to the ‘myriads of Eternity’, the lost voices of his contemporary radical culture, if we imagine that Blake’s books are the semi-private indulgences of a gifted eccentric. Lots of other people, then as now, were on Blake’s political and religious wavelength but none other had his genius for the wonderful combination of text and design”. Blake himself was print-collector & connoisseur. Blake’s poetry, even at its most obscure & enigmatic, isn’t simply seceding from the public realm of a degenerate culture into an area of pseudo privacy. The contemporary ownership of Blake’s work tells us about the contexts in which he wrote, painted, printed & published, & enables us to reconstruct the audience he found for his work. I’m concerned then with those contemporaries of Blake who acquired examples of his work as poet & artist; those persons who were sufficiently “on his wavelength” to devote part of their income to acquiring what were, even in Blake’s lifetime, quite expensive books & paintings.
What interests me is why certain men & women chose to become customers for Blake’s books, & in what terms they viewed their investment. Issues for study include: the backgrounds of collectors; their point of contact with Blake; their influence on other contemporary readers or collectors; the reasons for their purchases; the dispersal of Blake’s work after the decease of the initial collector; the place of Blake’s works in these collections; & the aesthetic culture implied by ownership. Every person who bought Blake’s work in his lifetime is of significance to Blake scholarship. Each collector provides Blake with a new critical context for his work & suggests new possibilities for Blake studies. What we need then is a sort of cognitive archaeology, reading Blake in his time, & reconstructing an intellectual community of Blake collectors.
From Bourdieu we can derive distrust of any theory which remains exclusively concerned with textuality, however broadly conceived, & which evades the question of the socio-historical conditions of writing or reading. MacDonald notes that this has some important methodological consequences for book history. “The first task of any cultural analysis is not to interpret the meaning of a text but to reconstruct its predicament” (115). Readers bring to a text their knowledge, assumptions, cultural background, experience, & insight. Different ways of reading Blake can stem from different reading contexts. Reading text means reading culture, & vice versa.
Ever since the publication of Gilchrist’s Life with its subtitle “pictor ignotus”, there has been a widely held assumption that Blake lacked any significant contemporary audience. In fact, it was larger in numbers than is generally recognised, & more diverse. Bentley’s Blake Books by my rough calculation lists some sixty-one contemporary owners of Blake’s Illuminated Books & of plates from the books: Elizabeth Aders fl. 1826-43, Robert Balmanno 1780-1860, William Beckford 1760-1844, Mr. Bird fl. 1828-31, Mrs. Bliss fl. 1826, Hannah Boddington fl. 1835, Samuel Boddington 1766-1843, Thomas Boddington 1804-1871, James Boswell 1778-1822, Marquess of Bute fl. 1804, Thomas Butts 1757-1822, Edward Calvert 1799-1883, Sir Francis Chantrey 1781-1841, Arthur Champernowne 1767-1819, R. H. Clarke, George Cumberland 1754-1848, E. Daniell 1804-1843, Maria Denman, T. F. Dibdin 1776-1847, Charles W. Dilke 1789-1864, Baron Dimsdale 1712-1800, Joseph Dinham fl. 1831, Isaac d’Israeli 1766-1848, Francis Douce 1757-1834, George Dyer 1755-1841, Thomas Edwards 1762-1834, William Odell Elwell, Edward Fitzgerald 1809-1883, John Flaxman 1756-1826, John Henry Fuseli 1741-1825, John Giles, P. A. Hanrott fl. 1826, Ozias Humphry 1782-1810, Elizabeth Iremonger fl. 1786-1813, Bishop John Jebb 1775-1833, Thomas Johnes 1748-1816, Sir Thomas Lawrence 1769-1830, John Linnell 1792-1882, Dr. William Long 1747-1818, B. H. Malkin 1769-1842, Richard Monckton Milnes 1809-1885, Harriet Jane Moore 1801-1884, William Young Ottley 1771-1836, Thomas Phillips 1770-1845, George Richmond 1809-1896, Henry Rogers, Samuel Rogers 1763-1855, Henry Crabb Robinson 1775-1867, Miss C. L. Shipley, Thomas Stothard 1755-1834, Frederick Tatham 1804-1878, C. H. Tatham 1772-1842, Rev. Joseph Thomas d. 1811, C. A. Tulk 1786-1849, William Upcott 1779-1845, John Varley 1778-1842, James Vine d. 1837, T. G. Wainewright 1794-1852, Judge Charles Warren 1769-1823, James Weale, J. J. Garth Wilkinson 1812-99.
Our current knowledge about early collectors of William Blake’s work remains patchy or uneven in quality, though more recent scholarship has brought a new awareness of the extent of the problems raised by those first owners & of the implications for modern scholarship as the primacy of enumerative bibliography is replaced by the broader concept of the history of Blake’s books. Stemmler (for Douce & Cumberland), & Viscomi (with regard to Romney & d’Israeli) have attempted to assess the backgrounds of collectors; their point of contact with Blake; their influence on other contemporary readers or collectors; the reasons for their purchases; the dispersal of Blake’s books after the deaths of the first collectors; or the aesthetic culture implied by ownership. These collectors have largely been treated as isolated figures; each has a collection unique to them & this cultural activity (collecting of work by William Blake) is not seen to interact significantly with other collectors in the same field, or even with the individual’s own other collecting interests. So far, no attempt (other than Stemmler’s tentative linking of Douce & Cumberland) has been made to view them as a network or set of networks—linked by friendship, shared religious sympathies or geographical proximity.
If the book-collector of popular imagining is a solitary figure in his lonely study, “retreating to the library” after the fashion of Robert Burton, the reality can be very different. Blake’s collectors have largely been treated as isolated figures, but from their letters & other personal papers one can reconstruct their social circle & discover links to other Blake collectors & to friends & acquaintances of William Blake himself. For example, Samuel Boddington’s diary not only makes reference to his nephew Thomas Fremaux Boddington (who owned a Songs) & to Thomas’s wife Hannah (who purchased a Job) but also records meetings with the collector Samuel Rogers & with Blake’s friend & patron John Linnell. There were connections of kinship between Mrs Bliss & William Fuller Maitland; & of teacher & pupil between Benjamin Heath Malkin & Edward Fitzgerald, both of whom owned copies of the Songs. (Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, was at Bury school 1819-26, during Dr. Malkin’s headmastership.) It is also important to see to what extent Blake’s collectors were professionally linked through the book trade (e.g. Thomas Edwards), or were fellow artists (e.g. John Flaxman), or were radical in politics (e.g. Francis Douce). The social face of book-collecting is most evident in the circle of Richard Twiss, where a group of book-collecting friends provide a context in which knowledge of Blake’s work could be disseminated—a group who dined together, lent each other books, corresponded with other collectors, & shared information on what was of interest & where to obtain it. In this network of friends, of which traces survive in letters, anecdotes & casual versifying, we can find evidence for how Blake’s work was received & how some works at least were distributed. I hope to return to Twiss the book-collector later in this blog.
Bourdieu's work can be criticised for going too far in emphasising class distinctions to the exclusion of other explanations. His emphasis on the economic & class basis of collecting can be enriched, & perhaps challenged by fuller consideration of gender, sexuality & ethnicity. I’ve been concerned over the years with a whole category of lost libraries—private libraries assembled by women book-collectors—lost because dispersed & attributed in later accounts to husbands, or male heirs. There is good empirical evidence for a hitherto unrecognised feminine audience for Blake’s work—Elizabeth Aders, Mrs. Bliss, Hannah Boddington, Maria Denman, Nancy Flaxman, Elizabeth Iremonger, Harriet Jane Moore, Miss C. L. Shipley, & the women subscribers to Blair’s The Grave.
As a bibliophile contemporary of Wollstonecraft & Austen, Mrs. Bliss’s collection of sumptuous printed books & illuminated manuscripts provides an extraordinary example of a dissenting, woman-centred, female connoisseur. She poses interesting questions as to the female role in purchasing & reading Blake’s works, about how & why such work entered the private space of women’s reading. Feminist assessment of Blake has grown increasingly sceptical over the past two decades, but attention to Mrs. Bliss & her milieu obliges us to reassess the particular appeal of his works to a contemporary female audience. Some long-held assumptions associating Blake exclusively with a male radical intelligentsia are implicitly undermined & arguably wholly refuted. In the collection of Mrs. Bliss (her Bibliotheca Splendidissima that gives its title to this blog) there are implications for Blake’s work both in the rediscovery of medieval art in the Romantic period, and the influence of Oriental imagery on his art. Other early women collectors such as Elizabeth Aders & Elizabeth Iremonger themselves merit fuller investigation.
Sources
Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions (London, 1982).
Peter Bellwood, “Phylogeny vs Reticulation in Prehistory”, Antiquity, vol. 70 (1996), 881-90.
G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
Pierre Bourdieu & Alain Darbel with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public; translated by Caroline Beattie & Nick Merriman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 110. Translation of L’Amour de l’art: les musées d’art europeëns et leur publique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969).
Peter D. MacDonald, “Implicit Structures and Explicit Interactions: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of the Book”, The Library, 6th series, vol. xix, no. 2 (June 1997), 105-121.
Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities (Cambridge, 1990).
Joan K. Stemmler, “Undisturbed Above Once in a Lustre”, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 26 (Summer 1992), 9-19.
Joseph Viscomi, “The Myth of Commissioned Illuminated Books: George Romney, Isaac D’Israeli, and ONE HUNDRED & SIXTY Designs … of Blake’s ”, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 23 (Autumn 1989), 48-74.
David Worrall, “Introduction” to William Blake: the Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books, Vol. 6 (London, 1995).
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