A ‘Quaint Corner’ of the Reading Nation: Romantic readerships in rural Perthshire, 1780-1830

In 1898, William Stewart of the Glasgow Herald wrote an article about Innerpeffray Library, a tiny late seventeenth-century public lending library in rural Perthshire, describing it as ‘a quaint corner of libraria’, and commenting in surprise on its founder’s early commitment to providing rural labourers with access to books. 1 Innerpeffray Library was founded in (or around) 1680 by David Drummond, third Lord Madertie, who left the sum of 5000 Scots marks in his Will for the establishment of a library which was to be ‘preserved entire and to be augmented by my successors yearly in time coming in measure underwritten for the benefit and encouragement of young students’. 2 Madertie’s Will stipulated that a keeper of books or librarian should be employed, that new books should be purchased yearly, and that a schoolhouse should be built. Madertie’s successors seem to have interpreted the phrase ‘young students’ liberally, and a further Deed of Mortification which solved some of the various legal problems posed by Madertie’s original Will interpreted the will as being for the benefit of the local community more broadly (‘for the benefit of the country’) 3 , allowing almost any member of the community to read the library’s books, and only ‘restricting the use of the library to six or more parishes around’. 4

almost any member of the community to read the library's books, and only 'restricting the use of the library to six or more parishes around '. 4 Under the terms of the Mortification, Trusteesdrawn from the important local landowning familieswere appointed to manage the library, with the assumption that this Trusteeship would be passed down through the later generations of these families, This would become a source of tension in due course, as later generations of Trustees neglected their duties to the library and to its users, who, denied a formal say in the administration of the library and its acquisitions policy, nonetheless felt a strong sense of ownership over it. Books from the library were made available to the local community from at least 1747 (although this may have been earlier; borrowers' records are only extant from 1747, but Madertie's collection was presumably available from the time the Deed of Mortification was proved in 1696) to 1968, when the library ceased to function as a lending library and became a 'historic library' visitor attraction. The library began as Lord Madertie's private collection of some four hundred books, mainly works of divinity, theology, law, science, agriculture and natural history. The collection grew through the generations to encompass philosophy, geography and travel, domestic economy and conduct books, periodicals and journals, and, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, fiction, drama and poetry. Borrowers came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, from local laird to shepherd and schoolchild. Through an analysis of the existing borrowers' records and other extant manuscript material, this chapter will discuss both the extent to which the founder's wishes were interpreted and fulfilled in the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830) Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971)that is, an emphasis on innovation in the form and style of poetry, the concept of writing as organic, rather than artificial, a focus on the relationship between the external world, as represented usually by natural landscape, and the author's mind, a turn towards the lyric mode, a tendency towards political radicalism and revolution, and a belief in the importance of the faculty of the imagination.) However, although minor wrangles have occurred over the exact periodization of Romanticism, a broad consensus exists over its basic historical period. Accepting, therefore, that any use of the terms 'Romantic' and 'Romanticism' should proceed with due caution, for the purposes of this chapter I intend to take a strictly period-based definition, and to consider 'Romantic' writing to be texts written or first published within the historical period 1780 to 1830. My first aim will be to establish whether Innerpeffray's borrowers were able to access such texts, and whether they did in fact do so. My second will be to consider what these findings tell us about the role of this library in the local community.
In unrepresentative and often anecdotal evidence, as well as of remembering that the evidence of intended reading is assuredly not evidence for actual reading. 20 Innerpeffray Library's borrowers' registers are certainly therefore problematic in one sense, as we have no evidence that those who borrowed from the library ever did read the books they took away with them, but various factors would suggest that the effort expended in borrowing the books would have been entirely disproportionate if the borrowers did not intend to read them. On average, Innerpeffray's borrowers in the Romantic period travelled for about ten miles (round trip), usually on foot, and often in the winter through the Scottish climate of cold, rain, mud, and frequent snow, to borrow books. Although borrowing itself was free, they bound themselves to pay fines for non-return or damage of the books that could represent a substantial proportion of many borrowers' weekly income, and they carried away books that were physically heavy (the collection at this date was mostly folio and quarto volumes) to homes that were deficient in space, quiet, and the amenities for reading that we take for granted in the twenty-first century. Under such circumstances, the balance of probability is that the borrowers did in fact read the books, or at least some portion of them.
The registers are also, of course, unrepresentative, in the sense that they represent only a tiny  21 An exact count is impossible because of the vagaries of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century spelling of names, and hence difficulties of disambiguating borrowers with the same or similar names (e.g. James Anderson, Jas. Anderson, J. Anderson, Jas. Anders.). This difficulty is compounded by the practice of naming sons after fathers and grandfathers.
England and Wales, a population of 7.5 million in 1780 rose to 18.5 million by 1850. As discussed above, the reading choices of the borrowers are also unrepresentative, dictated by the quirks of the collection, which reflected the tastes of the founder and his successors, rather than necessarily those books that the borrowers would have most liked to read.

Access to Romantic Texts
Here  (1780) Why, then, should the library's collections so dramatically fail to reflect world events at this point?
To find an answer we must turn, not to questions of the economics of production, as St Clair's systems approach might, but instead to the library's archives. The evidence is patchy, but certain facts nevertheless come to light, which once again remind us of the problems faced by labouring-class readers who were dependent on others for their access to reading incident to a great body of the most meritorious students'. 23 We might note here the language of this petition, in which we see a strong sense that the library belonged to its users, not to its proprietor. Young speaks of his 'right' to use the library, and the library as the 'property of students and others'. These claims of 'right' and 'property' are important, and will be further explored below.
In strict legal terms, of course, the library did not belong to the students or its users, but in 1825, the Proprietor of the library, Thomas, 11 th Earl of Kinnoull, was anxious enough about local opinion to take legal advice to ascertain the extent of his legal and financial responsibilities, and to try to find out who had the right to hold him to account for moneys owing to the library. the community; users clearly recognised its importance as a resource for the students who borrowed from it, felt a sense of ownership over it, and a proportional sense of grievance when it was ill-managed. This sense of ownership, and of 'right' to the library should be read in its socio-political context. As a student in 1823, William Young grew up in the era immediately following the French Revolution, when discourse about the 'rights of man' 10s. is recorded.
These various documents reveal a depressing story of financial woe and neglect of the library by those charged with its care. The Founder's ambition for a collection regularly augmented with new material for the benefit of its borrowers was sadly undermined in the Romantic period, because of dereliction of duty by the Trustees. Perhaps because they themselves did not need to borrow materials from the library, they were unaware of its potential importance to the actual users. Or perhaps they were simply uninterested and disengaged, inheriting familial ties to the Trusteeships which they found to be distasteful or irrelevant. Whatever the reasons for their failings, the result was that Innerpeffray's readers in the period 1780 to 1830 therefore had no first-hand access at all to what would now be considered mainstream Romantic material from this library (although it is at this stage of research impossible to say whether or not they found it by other means). 30 Nonetheless, the borrowers' registers for the period show an extremely healthy amount of borrowing activity. They may not have been borrowing Paine, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron or Jane Austen, but readers in this corner of rural Perthshire were nonetheless making the most of the books that were available to them. Innerpeffray Library did not give them the latest books or news, it seems, but it still gave them something of value. We must turn now to the registers to see what they took away with them.

Borrowing Romantic Texts
There are (1607) was still borrowed once in the period. 33 Towsey, exclusion that cannot, in fact, have lasted long, given the dates above) therefore seems disproportionate. It seems most probable that Young was the spokesman for a group of disgruntled students who felt that the Schoolmaster/Librarian was not fulfilling his duties correctly, some or many of whom used the library much more frequently than Young.
Their idea of the library as belonging to its users, not its owners, and their strong sense of grievance at having been deprived of a 'right' to access printed matter is striking. Ironically, although there is no evidence that Young or his local peers ever read Romantic works of revolutionary philosophy, such rhetoric partakes strongly of Romanticism's revolutionary impulses and beginnings, and equally strongly of that famously transatlantic document, the Innerpeffray's borrowers may have absorbed radical ideas not directly from their reading, but from discussions about reading held with friends, peers and authority figures. Indeed, the very fact of access to education, once granted and now denied, was enough to turn the minds of Innerpeffray's users to thoughts of rights and duties, rank and privilege. Mismanagement of the library deprived the borrowers of Romantic books to read, but ironically it seems also to have brought them together as a community who understood and valued their rights to read.
Trust, whose financial support made the transcription and digitisation of the Borrowers' Registers possible.