Expanding the book collection, 1743–1776

PRESIDENT BLAIR’S death in 1743 placed the college in the hands of a faculty that was closely allied to Queens College, Oxford. Blair’s successor, William Dawson, who had assumed the chair of moral philosophy at William and Mary in 1729, was a veteran of nine years of undergraduate and graduate work at Queens. Dawson, throughout his career in Virginia from 1729 until his death in 1752, maintained close contacts with his former associates at Queens.^[1] Dawson’s successor as president of the college, William Stith the historian, was also a Queens graduate. Indeed, a majority of the William and Mary professors and masters from 1729 to 1757 were Queens alumni.^[2] Symbolic of the relationship was the dramatic appearance of President William Dawson and three of his full professors in complete Queens academic regalia on the occasion of the formal celebration of Transfer Day at William and Mary in 1747.^[3] Dawson, in a letter to his friend, George Fothergill, chaplain of Queens, reported that after this ceremony, the quartet repaired to the common room and “cheerfully drank Prosperity to Col. Reg. Oxon.”^[4] The Queens relationship, moreover, was further strengthened through the person of another alumnus, Edmund Gibson, bishop of London. Gibson, as chancellor of William and Mary, was influential in matters of academic policy.

The link with Queens doubtless accentuated a need for improving the resources of the library in the area of classical literature. Student compositions, preserved among the Dawson papers in the Library of Congress, suggest a new emphasis on classical studies at the college after 1743. Dawson, it will be remembered, regretted in 1732 that the library lacked “a compleat set of the Classicks.” And in 1738 that hard and fast theologian, President Blair, was still stubbornly resolved “to let the Classicks alone.” It is therefore likely that after 1743 funds were earmarked to bridge those gaps in the library collection.

Insofar as finances were concerned, Blair left the library in good shape. Income from the tax on wines and liquors enabled the college authorities to make regular invesnnents in books until the levy expired in 1776. The library was better off in this respect than most of its counterparts in England, where a regular income for academic libraries was the exception rather than the rule.^[5] Eyewitness accounts of the conflagration of 1859, in which the book collection was consumed, stressed the loss of large numbers of volumes bearing the General Assembly bookplate, evidence that the volumes ha-d been acquired with funds ap6 propriated by the colonial legislature.^[6]

The only colonial accounts of the college bursar that have been preserved commence in 1764. These list numerous expenditures on the pan of the librarian, ranging in sums from one to sixty-two pounds.^[7] Payments were made to several Williamsburg booksellers—such as Purdie and Dixon and Thomas Dixon—but the entries are skimpy and do not spell out the titles that were acquired. Several loose invoices have also survived in the college archives showing that books were consigned to the college in 1765 and in 1771 by its London agents, C. and O. Hanbury and Osgood Hanbury and Company.^[8] But, as usual, none of the volumes were listed by title. In general, it would be reasonable to assume that most of the library books were ordered from London. Yet bookstores were operating in Williamsburg. When William Parks, Virginia’s first printer, decided to open a shop in 1742, the fact was carefully noted in the journal of the president and masters of the college.^[9]

In 1761 the president and masters finally got around to appointing a librarian. Before this, as was noted earlier, the post was held by one of the grammar school ushers. But on June 26, 1761, Emanuel Jones, son of the earlier benefactor of the library, was formally appointed to the post.^[10] Jones, who had been master of the Indian school since 1755, remained at the college until 1777.^[11] In addition to serving as librarian, Jones acted as “Clerk to the Society,” that is, secretary of the faculty.^[12] The combination of these responsibilities continued in force at William and Mary well into the nineteenth century. As librarian, Jones received an annual salary of ten pounds sterling; as “Clerk to the Society,” the sum of six pounds; and as master of the Indian school, approximately sixty pounds per annum drawn from the Brafferton revenues in England.^[13]

Several entries in the Bursar’s accounts between 1764 and 1770 suggest that Jones also handled the distribution of college textbooks.^[14] This activity would have commenced in 1756 when the president and masters resolved that

mr. Em: Jones be appointed to sell those Books wch the Colledge shall imp[or] t—that he is not to stand to any Loss—but sell them for seventy-five per cent: & be allowed ten per cent: for his Trouble in selling & collecting.^[15]

From 1743 until the outbreak of the American Revolution the library must have continued to enjoy the patronage of English friends of the college. It had become customary for the various bishops of London and archbishops of Canterbury, who alternated in the office of chancellor, to contribute books to the collection. Tangible proof of their benefactions would have disappeared in the fire of 1859. Nothing remains, for example, to show that Bishops Sherlock and Hayter or Archbishops Herring, Hutton, and Secker ever contributed to the collections. Nor is there any surviving evidence that the only nonecclesiastical chancellors of the college during this period, the earls of Hardwicke and of Egremont, made donations to the library. But a failure to conform to precedent in this re­spect would have brought forth pointed reminders from the academic officials.

The learned classicist, John Potter, archbishop of Canterbury from 1737 to 1747, presented to the library a welcome addition to its church fathers, the great Benedictine edition of the works of St. John Chrysostom.^[16] Along with this gift came Potter’s own important two-volume folio edition of Clementis Alexandrini opera quae extant. And George III, soon after ascending the throne, donated what was later described to his royal granddaughter as a “superb copy of the authorized English version of the Bible” in two volumes folio.^[17] To all of this piety and learning, the naturalist Mark Catesby, who was well-known in Williamsburg, added his Natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.^[18] Catesby’s work, in two elephant folios with magnificent plates colored by the author, was highly prized by its custodians. Indeed, it was proudly displayed at every opportunity to visitors passing through Williamsburg. The text referred both to the college and to its Indian school. Thomas Jefferson, at some time or other during the course of his long association with William and Mary, carefully noted on a flyleaf that “it should never go out of the College.”^[19] It was among the most loudly bewailed treasures lost in the fire of 1859.

Colonial governors also continued the contributions to the library which their seventeenth-century predecessor, Colonel Nicholson, had taken such pains to encourage. Before departing for England in 1758, Governor Robert Dinwiddie—who “always looked on Seminaries of Learning with an awful respect and true Regard” and who held to the opinion that “the College of William and Mary is undoubtedly a very great Blessing to Virginia”^[20] —turned over to the library the bulk of his personal collection of books.^[21] Two of these miraculously escaped destruction both in 1859 and in 1862. One of the survivors is Dinwiddie’s copy of Henry Grove’s System of moral philosophy and the other is his copy of Felix Anthony de Alvarado’s Spanish and English dialogues: Containing an easy method of learning either of those languages. The latter was far from the building when the fires of 1859 and 1862 took place. Luis Hue Girardin, an early nineteenth-century professor of modern languages at the college, removed Alvarado at some time or other from the library shelves and added it to his own personal collection of books. Over Dinwiddie’s elaborate armorial plate, the wayward professor casually pasted his own austere label. The book .remained in the possession of Girardin’s descendants until recovered by the college shortly after World War II. The subject matter of the volume is significant: it indicates that the library possessed some resources, at least, touching a field in which the college pioneered in 1779 with the establishment of the first American professorship of modem languages.

Gifts to the library occasionally arrived from unlikely sources. In 1747 John Sherwin, a seagoing friend of President Dawson, donated to the collection a copy of Benjamin Hederick’s useful and popular Graecum lexicon manuale and a set of the two-volume folio edition of Anthony a Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensis. Sherwin explained that he felt these “wou’d not ill suit a Colledge Library.” The donation, recalling that of Captain Nicholas Humfrys in 1703/4, apparently stemmed from “the Genteel entertainment” which the donor received “from Mr. Dawson when at Williamsburg.” In announcing the gift to Dawson, Sherwin expressed a hope that “you’l observe I am but a Voyager & accept this Mite, when I have a better Oportunity I shan’t be mindful of something greater.”^[22]

The library also profited from the evangelical activities of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. From 1742 to 1765 first William Dawson, then his brother Thomas, who succeeded Stith as president of the college in 1755, maintained active relations with the two organizations. Virtually all of the letters directed by the Dawson brothers to the officials of the two societies mention the distribution of pious literature.^[23] Many of the books dispatched to evangelical arenas by the SPG and the SPCK probably ended up on the college shelves. The hapless students paid in sweat and tears for this flood of inspiration and devotion. On July 12, 1744, for instance, William Dawson advised Philip Bearcroft, secretary of the SPG, that he had received 150 copies of the Bishop of Sodor and Man’s (that is, Thomas Wilson’s) Essay towards an instruction for the Indians. That tract, begun at Oglethorpe’s insistence and dedicated to Georgia’s trustees, carried a commendatory preface written by Dawson himself. Dawson notified Bearcroft that a copy was given to each “of our Scholars,” who were employed “every Night last Lent, in reading audibly, distinctly and solemnly, so much of this excellent Work, as the Understandings of the Hearers, in general, were able to receive.”^[24]

One of the most unusual accessions made by the library in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution was drawn from the estate of Rev. James Horrocks. Horrocks, holder of a master of arts degree from Trinity, Cambridge, and one-time usher at Wakefield School in England, had come to Virginia in 1762 to serve as master of the grammar school at William and Mary.^[25] In 1764, amid some bitterness within the faculty, he succeeded Rev. William Yates as president of the college. Death came to Horrocks while he was en route to England in 1771. The following year, the college selected and purchased from the deceased president’s effects a small but choice collection of volumes that were wanted on its library shelves.

Samuel Henley, who had joined the faculty in 1770 as professor of moral philosophy and who later acquired dubious distinction in translating William Beckford’s Vathek, apparently assumed the task of selecting the books for the college.^[26] An inventory of Henley’s selections, in his own hand and dated December 8, 1772, is still preserved in the college archives.^[27] The list of titles exhibits a shift in emphasis at the college from theology and the classics to the physical sciences. Indeed, the books purchased from the Horrocks estate, costing £17/12/ —, reflected the impact of entirely new intellectual ideals. This shift must be attributed in part to the lectures of Professor William Small, a man described by Jefferson, one of his students, as “profound in most of the useful branches of science.”^[28] Small’s lectures at William and Mary from 1758 to 1764 stressed disciplines that in a decade or so were to become dominant features of the curriculum.

Foremost among the works selected by Henley from the Horrocks collection was that indispensable adjunct to eighteenth-century enlightened thought, a set of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique. As Professor Fraser Neiman notes in his introduction to The Henley-Horrocks inventory, Horrocks’ set of Bayle may have been in French or in English, for the entry in Henley’s inventory fails to specify the edition. Of equal significance is the fact that the Horrocks accession brought to the college shelves two of Sir Isaac Newton’s greatest works, his Principia mathematica and his Opticks, as well as a copy of his Universal arithmetick. Another major work in its field, Guillaume François de L’Hôpital’s Method of fluxions, was among the volumes acquired from the deceased president’s effects.

Other works in mathematics came from the same source. These included the three-volume quarto edition of Thomas Simpson’s Miscellaneous tracts and Simpson’s textbook on Elements of plane geometry, copies of William Emerson’s Arithmetick of infinities, Nicholas Saunderson’s Elements of algebra, Luke Trevigar’s Sectionum conicarum elementa, John Ward’s Compendium of algebra, Henry Gore’s Elements of solid geometry, and James Hodgson’s textbook on The doctrine of fluxions.

Astronomy was represented in Henley’s selections by the works of James Ferguson, a dominant figure in eighteenth-century astronomical research; these included Ferguson’s most influential production, Astronomy explained, which went through thirteen editions before 1811, his popular Lectures on select subjects in mechanics, and his Tables and tracts. Two works on navigation—Archibald Patoun’s Complete treatise of navigation and William Emerson’s Mathematical principles of geography—together with copies of Charles Leadbetter’s Mechanick dialling and Richard Jack’s Mathematical principles of theology also appeared on the Henley list. Another entry covered several unspecified pamphlets and three untitled “calendeiers.” The latter may have been almanacs or, as Professor Neiman has suggested, tables of considerable substance inasmuch as they cost the college nine shillings.

But the most notable components of the accession, aside from Bayle’s great dictionary and Newton’s major works, were in the fields of physics and electrical research. Interest in these areas had been promoted at William and Mary by Small’s lectures and by the laboratory equipment that Small had purchased for the college in England in 1767. Horrocks had obviously been intrigued by the same subjects, for his private library contained copies—acquired by Henley for the college—of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and observations on electricity, Joseph Priestley’s History and present state of electricity, and Benjamin Wilson’s Short view of electricity. In short, a useful collection of treatises reflecting contemporary scientific thought was added to the shelves of a library that had previously stressed theology and the classics.

The other volumes in Horrocks’ extensive private library were sold in Williamsburg, according to the August 13, 1772, Virginia gazette, “at Mr. William Pearce’s Store . . . where Catalogues, with the Prices annexed, may be seen.” No copy of the catalogue is known to have survived. But at least one volume thus dispersed—Volume II of Croker, Williams, and Clark’s Complete dictionary of arts and sciences—has come to light within recent years and has been given to the college. The fact that this work was dismissed by Henley in making his selections for the library may indicate that a set of the multivolume compilation was already on the college shelves in 1772.

The mid-eighteenth-century development of book collections within the frameworks of undergraduate societies and clubs is indicative of the limited role allotted the library in the life of the academic community. Its stately folios and ponderous sets of patristical, theological, and philosophical lore, as well as any lighter resources in the fields of art, history, belles-lettres, the classics, and biography, were assembled solely for the use of the masters and graduate students. The undergraduate was expected to form his own personal shelf of books for general and recreational reading. If a youth fancied the lively works of the restoration dramatists or the witticisms of Alexander Pope, he had to acquire the volumes either from a dealer in Williamsburg or through his family’s London agent.

But valuing good fellowship, a group of William and Mary students in 1750 banded together and organized the first undergraduate fraternity thus far discovered in the annals of an American university or college.^[29] The members, in their private correspondence, secretively referred to the organization as “the F.H.C. Society.” It is now generally believed that the initials, despite the redundancy of the resulting phrase, stood for Flat Hat Club. Miss Jane Carson, writing in the Thomas Perkins Abernethy festschrift entitled The Old Dominion (1964), which was edited by Darrett B. Rutman, has suggested, on the other hand, that the initials could just as well have stood for Fraternitas Hilaritas Cognitioque. In any event, the F.H.C. Society sought to develop a library for the edification of its brethren.

Undergraduate societies founded later in the century at other academic establishments were motivated by similar aims. At Harvard, for example, both the Hasty Pudding and Porcellian clubs undertook the development of book collections. The Harvard fraternities kept their respective collections in an undergraduate librarian’s room, affording the members “an opportunity of general reading for which the College Library was then ill-equipped.”^[30]

The F.H.C. Society from about 1770 to 1776 enjoyed the patronage of Thomas Gwatkin, a Christ Church, Oxford, master of arts who had come to William and Mary in 1770 as professor of natural philosophy and mathematics.^[31] Gwatkin was requested by the brethren to prepare a catalogue of “the most useful and valuable books with which it would be proper to begin the establishment of a Library.”^[32] In complying, Gwatkin provided posterity with a glimpse of what was considered good undergraduate reading matter at the college on the eve of the American Revolution. He listed his recommendations under six headings: (1) moral philosophy and civil law, (2) mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural history, (3) history, (4) government, (5) trade, and, of course, (6) miscellaneous works.^[33] As proof of his familiarity with the works thus cited, he arranged the titles under each heading according to the size of the volumes, folio, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo.

Many of the works proposed by Gwatkin for the F.H.C. Society must have duplicated works already on the college library shelves. For example, Newton’s Principia, listed in the section on mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural history, had been purchased from the Horrocks estate. Newton’s Opticks, Priestley’s Electricity, and Simpson’s Geometry, also proposed by Gwatkin, had come from the same source. And Burnet’s celebrated History of the reformation, a F.H.C. Society desideratum, had probably been given to the college by the author himself.

The emphasis on mathematics and the physical sciences noted in connection with the books that Samuel Henley had selected from Horrocks’ effects was even more pronounced in the fraternity checklist. Nearly 50 per cent of the titles touched those subjects. This means that the impressive sets of theological and classical literature that were gathered on the college shelves had virtually assumed the status of antiquarian memorabilia. The college itself, as a matter of fact, was in the throes of an intellectual ferment that was to culminate, during the American Revolution, in a drastic revision of its academic organization and aims.