Libraries: the pleasure of reading old books
Miranda Seymour
hate to read new books,' Hazlitt wrote in the essay from which the title of this piece comes. 'There are 20 or 30 vol- umes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire to read at all.' In the same essay, he goes on to describe books as 'the links in the chain of our conscious being', and as the friendly 'landmarks and guides in our journeys through life'. To a biographer, the discovery of their subject's library is the best of gifts. Almost as thrilling to me was the realisation, when I started researching a life of Mary Shelley, that the library at my own home, lovingly assembled at the beginning of the 19th cen- tury, contained an immense number of the books which Mary herself must have read, and in contemporary editions. Did she, I wondered, read the little Conversations on Chemistry, written for girls and addressed to them by a female chemist when her father was setting up his own Juvenile Library in London? Did she, like me, pore over the accounts of Arctic voyages in the Edinburgh and the Quarterly? How I blessed John Emerton, who built our library up, even though it's clear that an awful lot of the sermons were only pur- chased and handsomely bound to fill up spaces; how I cursed the stingy spirit of the 8th Lady Byron who, in 1841 (ten years before Mary Shelley died), decided to economise by stopping her subscription to all those glorious reviews. Blackwoods, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly; all of them came to an end in the same month, Octo- ber, 1841. Just about the time, I realise, that Lady Byron started making expensive improvements to the village church. Mary's father, William Godwin, left us the rare gift, not of his books, but of a meticulous record of what they were and even where they were placed, in a neat 28- page list in his own hand, dated 15 May, 1817. Phenomenally well read, even for those times, Godwin's (unpublished) jour- nal shows that he never bought a book which he didn't read at least twice. Each is given with its publication date in the list; each is placed with care, as if Godwin was enjoying a sedate little joke with himself. His first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, had a tormented relationship with Fuseli, painter of the famous 'The Nightmare'; Fuseli's essay on Rousseau was placed next on Godwin's shelves to Mary Wollstoneeraft's works. And what should we make of his famously tetchy relationship with Shelley, his son-in-law, when we find Shelley's Queen Mab sitting right beside two of God- win's own best-known novels, Caleb Williams and St Leon? It's a shame we can't see the originals with their annotations; one survivor, a volume of Carew's poems at the Bodleian, shows that Godwin was any- thing but a prude. Carew's enthusiastic lines on the joy of being a ship which might sail between the twin glories of a lady's thighs are marked with an approving pen- cil.
Libraries should be kept in one place, not dispersed. Jon Stallworthy, writing his life of Wilfred Owen, found it immeasur- ably helpful to have at his side the few dozen books of Owen's which his family had carefully preserved; there was, rightly, great lamentation a few years ago when an English university decided to sell off a pre- cious fragment of Isaac Newton's library.
George Ramsden has taken the opposite course. He has, over the past 15 years, devoted himself to cataloguing and adding to the portion of Edith Wharton's magnifi- cent 4,000-volume library which she left in trust to Colin Clark (son of Sir Kenneth), her godson. The. rest of the library, bequeathed to her friends, the Tylers, was destroyed in London by a bomb in 1940. To round off this heroic task, Ramsden has produced a superb catalogue with a preface by Hermione Lee, Wharton's current biog- rapher.
Catalogues sound dry. Don't be misled. What this remarkable — the word 'unique' would not be an overstatement, for once — book offers is a riveting glimpse into the mind of the author Henry James called 'the most brilliant of women', evidence of her enviable fluency in four languages and of the ease and readiness with which she drew on her own beloved library for her writings. Here, we can see the contents of her father's very gentlemanly library (Cowper, Lamb, Wordsworth, Washington Irving), the books chosen for young Edith to read (suitable poetry anthologies) and the books for which, with the encouragement of her friend Emelyn Washburn, she rapidly dis- covered a preference (Dante, Goethe, Lessing, Manzoni).
The dedications and inscriptions all have tales to tell. Morton Fullerton, Edith Wharton's lover, gave her a copy of Tristan et Iseult, with appropriate phrases; Henry James playfully inscribed a book of poems titled Misrepresentative Women: 'To a much misrepresented woman from the largest of her admirers'. Battered blue guides remind us of her passion for travel; heavily anno- tated volumes of poetry show how she lin- gered over the most emotional passages, finding mirrors for her own moods. Hermione Lee, in her excellent introduc- tion, singles out some of the passages by which Mrs Wharton marked a line, as if pleased to have found a parallel with her own circumstances. One, in which she sure- ly wished to see herself, was in an essay by George Eliot on Madame de Sable:
She was not a genius, not a heroine, but a woman whom men could more than love — whom they could make their friend, confi- dante and counsellor; the sharer not of their joys and sorrows only, but of their ideas and aims.
And, of course, there is Hazlitt, with a mark by a passage in the essay from which this piece began, 'On Reading Old Books'. The one annotated by Mrs Wharton, per- haps the most famous, begins, 'I shake hands with, and look an old, tried and val- ued friend in the face, compare notes, and chat the hours away.'
To anybody who, like myself, has some- times found Edith Wharton a little chilling, this catalogue is a revelation. It is a work of scholarly dedication, an act of faith. Rams- den's own mentors were W. S. Lewis, who reassembled Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill library at Yale, and Kenneth Monkman, the resuscitator of Lawrence Sterne's Shandy Hall. His catalogue, pub- lished in a limited edition of 350 copies at £60, can be bought by writing to him at: The Old Rectory, Settrington, Malton, York, Y017 8NP. The library is now for sale en bloc. The obvious purchasers, if they have any sense, would be the trustees of The Mount, the home of Edith Wharton in Massachusetts, which is now being restored as a museum.
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