Adam Smith’s Readers in Bristol, 1773-1795

Once published, books take on a life of their own. Few authors have had such a diverse and complex reception history as Adam Smith, as Glory Liu’s new book on Smith in America richly illustrates. Yet Smith’s reception among ordinary readers in his own time remains an understudied topic. In a previous essay on AdamSmithWorks.org, I indicated that we can learn about Smith’s readers in the eighteenth century through library records. Previous research has shown that the Wealth of Nations (WN) was one of very few standard holdings at subscription libraries in eighteenth-century America (see Knott 2017). But to understand the extent to which his books were actually read, we need to pay attention to the rather small number of libraries for which we have borrowing records.

The Bristol Library Society, set up in 1772-73, offers uniquely extensive surviving borrowing registers, running from the 1770s well into the nineteenth century. In my earlier essay I had to rely on Paul Kaufman’s pioneering research on library history (1960), which documented books borrowed at Bristol between 1773 and 1784, but crucially without providing any information about the identity of the borrowers. I am now able to draw on data I have collated on all loans at Bristol between 1773 and 1795 (approximately 30,000 in total), including biographical research on the individual borrowers. This means that I can reveal the identity of all the members who borrowed Adam Smith’s WN and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) in 1773-95 (see appendices 1 and 2, below).

My research was carried out as part of a project primarily based at the University of Liverpool in the UK, entitled Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic. This team project aims to capture and make freely available online surviving documentary evidence relating to the books acquired and circulated by more than 80 subscription libraries across the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth century. Smith’s century was a time when reading became a key part of everyday life for more people than ever before. Few philosophers have indeed been as widely read in literature as Smith, as all his works but perhaps primarily his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres demonstrate. But books remained prohibitively expensive in the eighteenth century, which meant that many readers had to borrow books rather than buy them. Subscription libraries were private membership clubs which allowed subscribers to pool their resources to acquire a wider range of books than they could afford as individuals.

The records of the Bristol Library Society show that the two volumes of WN were borrowed 57 times in total by 31 individual borrowers, the first volume 34 times and the second volume 23 times, between 1773 and 1795. It is true that we can never know with certainty if library users actually read what they borrowed. But since the great majority of those who borrowed the first volume of WN also took out the second, we can be fairly confident that most of them read at least part of the work. In all cases but one the volumes were borrowed in order and the only exception was evidently due to availability. More often than not the second volume was checked out on the same day as the first one was returned. Moreover, three of the borrowers – the merchants Peter Baillie and Samuel Henderson Jr, and the surgeon David Davies – also borrowed Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1784).

TMS was borrowed ten times by ten different borrowers between 1773 and 1795. After having been checked out five times in the 1770s, it was only borrowed once in the entire 1780s, before it enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1790s. The library did not, however, send for any of Smith’s revised editions of the text, even though it is tempting to think that the text was deemed to have become more significant after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Ten borrowings over a 22-year period may seem rather scanty, but as I pointed out in my previous essay, works in abstract philosophy were generally not popular reading at the Bristol Library Society. For comparison, A Treatise of Human Nature by Smith’s friend David Hume was only borrowed once between 1773 and 1795. The most popular books were works in travel literature and works in history, such as Hume’s History of England. Interestingly, however, three library users who took out TMS during this timeframe also borrowed WN: the merchant William Coates, the Anglican clergymen Samuel Seyer and James Brown.

Bristol is a fascinating city for studying the reception of Smith for many reasons. It prided itself as the second city in England in Smith’s lifetime, although it was overtaken by Liverpool in size in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It was primarily known for manufacturing and commerce – notoriously, the slave trade – rather than science, culture and literature. Eighteenth-century Bristol did not have a noble class. Its leaders were instead its religious ministers, both Anglican and non-conformist, and even more so its merchants. Out of the ten initial organizers who set up the Bristol library in 1772, five were merchants, and at least one other, the physician Dr Samuel Farr, belonged to a prominent commercial family in the city. Farr, a Presbyterian and as a Dissenter excluded from the English universities in Oxford and Cambridge, was partially educated on the Continent and partially at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Eventually he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society as an author of medical works, and he was suitably the first borrower of WN at the Bristol Library Society. Besides clergy and merchants, the Bristol library was dominated by the professions, medical and legal, and Smith’s readers came from all these occupational groups, as the indices below show.

Bristol was also a city where Protestant Dissenters were not only politically active but also unusually affluent and influential. The Lewin’s Mead Unitarian Chapel alone boasted eleven mayors between 1754 and 1784, representing more than a third of the period. The political parties of Whig and Tory were represented in the city by the Union Club and the Steadfast Society respectively, both originally formed in the 1730s. Religious Nonconformists dominated the former club, and they were also prominent in the founding of the Bristol library. Like Samuel Farr many of them had been educated in Presbyterian Scotland. The diploma of library member Dr James Plomer – who went to the University of Glasgow to study medicine at the age of 40 and published his thesis, De Iliaca Passione (1759) – contains Smith’s signature. The connections between the Bristol library and the Scottish Enlightenment went further. In the 1730s Hume had been an apprentice to the merchant John Peach, who was one of the founding members of the library. Although Hume was clearly unsuitable as a merchant, he admired the occupation more than Smith did (on this, see recently Schabas and Wennerlind), and he remained on good terms with Peach, who is said to have helped Hume edit his History and remove many “Scotticisms.”

Despite the Dissenting orientation of many founding members, the library built strong ties with the established clergy in the city, who were decisively Tory. Indeed, it invited the Bishop of Bristol to fill the symbolic role of President of the society, whilst the posts of Vice President and librarian were also held by Anglican clergymen. As can be seen from the data in appendices 1 and 2, Smith’s readers belonged to both camps.

Many of Bristol’s merchants were incredibly wealthy, but it was often new rather than old wealth. The Harfords, for instance, who were merchants, brass manufacturers, and bankers, were a Quaker family on the rise. Its expansion was led by Joseph Harford, a close supporter of Smith’s friend Edmund Burke, who represented Bristol between 1774 and 1780. Harford borrowed both volumes of WN in 1779.

Many in the early eighteenth century complained of the narrow spirit of Bristol’s merchants, who were often disapprovingly compared with those of London, and disparaged by authors such as Alexander Pope and Richard Savage. After the middle of the century, however, Bristol began to change, as theatres and clubs were established in the city. The library formed part of this broader cultural expansion. Many of Smith’s borrowers belonged to the new cultured class in Bristol, perhaps most notably the Romantic poet Robert Southey, who borrowed WN in 1793. Moreover, Samuel Johnson’s friend and correspondent Francesco Sastres, author of Introduction to the Italian Grammar (Bristol, 1775), borrowed TMS in 1776.

The aforementioned Seyer, who borrowed both TMS and WN, is an especially significant luminary in the intellectual history of Bristol. Seyer was educated at Bristol Grammar School, where his father was master, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he obtained a BA in 1772 and an MA in 1776. In 1780, he was ordained and became the curate of Westbury-on Trym, and master of Bristol’s Royal Fort School in 1790. The same year Seyer was elected as a committee member of the Library Society, having been a regular user of the library since the early 1780s. He attended the committee frequently, and in 1801 he was elected to the prominent and prestigious position of vice president. As an educator, Seyer was a strict disciplinarian who beat his pupils. Two of Seyer’s pupils, Andrew Crosse, who made important discoveries in the early use of electricity, and Robert Southey have retold a curious incident: during the threat of invasion by the French army in 1797, when Seyer’s pupils were equipped with rifles for protection, they conceived a plan of shooting their master because of his harsh regime. The plot was discovered, however, and Seyer’s life saved. Seyer is today best remembered as a prominent historian of Bristol, who emphasized the study of original documents unlike many of his predecessors, and published pioneering local studies of Bristol in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Since Bristol’s principal trade was with America, the imperial crisis in the 1770s and the prohibition of trade with America after 1775 became a key question for the city and the library members, many of whom went bankrupt as a result of the financial downturn, including Burke’s close friend and supporter Richard Champion. Members of the Library Society were divided on the American question, with Champion and other Whigs supporting Burke and the Rockingham Whig position of reconciliation, while the Steadfast Society, the Bristol Tories, supported Lord North’s government’s hardline policy.

Unsurprisingly, members of the Library Society were active in the debate about slavery and its abolition in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The library held plenty of abolitionist literature. In April 1788, the committee ordered Hannah More’s Slavery: A Poem and Ann Yearsley’s Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade. Both More and Yearsley were based in Bristol, though they were not members of the library. The Quaker Joseph Harford became chairperson of the abolitionist committee in Bristol and was present at the library committee meetings that ordered An Abstract of the Evidence Delivered Before a Select Committee of the House of Commons 1790 & 1791 on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in November 1791, and Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council on the Slave Trade with a Map, in March 1792. In June 1792, the library ordered Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788), in which Bristol’s major share in the trade was highlighted.

On the other side of the spectrum, the plantation owner James Tobin, who served on the committee of the library after 1791, was one of the most active campaigners against abolition of the slave trade, both locally and nationally. Tobin wrote several pamphlets against abolition, starting with Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies. By a Friend to the West India Colonies, and Their Inhabitants (1785). In April 1791, Tobin borrowed TMS, in which he would have been able to read Smith’s evocative condemnation of the slave trade:

Smith’s statement does not seem to have left much of a mark on Tobin. However, Smith’s enlightened sentiments were echoed by one of the library’s members who wrote forcefully against Tobin and the slave trade: the Anglican clergyman Francis Randolph. In his Letter to William Pitt on the Proposed Abolition of the African Slave Trade (London, 1788), Randolph wrote: “if we were forced to seek for the Virtues or the Dignity of the human Race onboard an African Trader, it would be amidst those who were groaning under their Misery; not among those whose Vice and Brutality could inflict it.” If he had read TMS, it does not seem to have been as a borrower at the Bristol library, even though he may of course have read it on site. In any case, in March 1788, the same year as he published his Letter, he borrowed both volumes of WN, in which Smith wrote about the unprofitability of slave labor.

An important topic in the history of reading in the eighteenth century is the increasing prominence of female readers. In 1700, the English reading public over the age of fifteen has been estimated at around 1,267,000 individuals (c. 815,000 males and 452,000 females). By mid-century, the total number of literate adults was approximately 1,894,000 (c. 1,136,000 males and 758,000 females), representing an expansion of nearly 50 per cent. During the next fifty years, the reading public increased by another 55 per cent, and reading proficiency and literacy continued to grow faster among women than men (for these figures, see Suarez 2009). The citizens of the eighteenth-century “nation of readers”, to use Samuel Johnson’s phrase, were clearly both male and female.

Most of the eighteenth-century subscription library members included women, though in much smaller numbers than men. Many of them were active borrowers, however. Smith only had one female borrower between 1773 and 1795: the bibliophile Mary Clayfield. Clayfield had been one of the subscribers to Mary Deverell’s Sermons (London, 1774), which was sold by Thomas Cadell at Bristol. Between 1788 and 1795, she used the Bristol library no fewer than 101 times, averaging more than one book every month; her loans included among other things Hume’s History of England and Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On 19 August 1795 she borrowed the first volume of WN and kept it until 29 September, and on 9 October the second volume, which she returned on 11 November the same year. In other words, she spent nearly three months in the company of Smith’s WN in the autumn of 1795.

Mary Clayfield is only one of many fascinating members of the diverse middling sort who read Smith in eighteenth-century Bristol. The names of all his readers, and their professions, between 1773 and 1785 can be found in the two appendices below. Several readers have “Esq.” attached to their names which indicate gentleman status, either by virtue of landownership or, more common in Bristol, due to having held a civic office in the Corporation of Bristol or being a barrister.

Appendix 1: Borrowers of TMS at the Bristol Library Society, 1773-1795

Appendix 2: Borrowers of WN at the Bristol Library Society, 1773-1795

Works cited and further reading

Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773-84: A Unique Record of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville, 1960).

Cheryl Knott, “Uncommon Knowledge: Late Eighteenth-Century American Subscription Library Collections,” in Mark Towsey and Kyle B. Roberts (eds.), Before the Public Library: Reading, Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 149-73. 

Max Skjönsberg and Mark Towsey (eds.), The Minute Books of the Bristol Library Society, 1772-1801 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2022).

Michael F. Suarez, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 5: 1695–1830, ed. Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1-35.