18th Century Collections

The 18^th century, both in England and in France, is a period of particular strength for Special Collections. In addition to the collections separately described below, the general collections contain large numbers of 18^th century works, particularly in politics, economics, literature, and natural history. Spencer Library's collection of 18^th century English imprints is one of the largest in North America as reported to the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC).

Bond Periodical and Newspaper Collection

A large collection 18^th century periodicals, including many involving Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

From no other source can a researcher gain so vivid and detailed a picture of this period as from the newspapers and periodicals of the day, and few sources are so elusive. Survival does not come easily to an old newspaper. Acquired by Special Collections in 1970, the collection of Richmond P. and Marjorie N. Bond was the result of years of patient and knowledgeable searching. Begun as a teaching collection - a group of representative items illustrating the development of the English periodical press - it is now a collection matched in no private hands and in but few institutions.

Of the more than 900 entries in the Bonds' original catalog, approximately one-fourth are concerned with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The great Tatler and Spectator constitute the core of the collection, occurring in original form, later editions, and varied formats. Letters, contemporary pamphlets, and other works connected with Addison and Steele add to the research value of this portion of the collection. Well over two hundred other journals published before 1800 are included, with many of the eminent journals in complete or good files and many other papers represented by a few issues. The collection ranges from the weekly news pamphlets of the Civil War period, through the Popish Plot era (the Observator and others), the post-Revolutionary Present State of Europe, and the great age of the periodical, the 18^th century. The collection includes almanacs, parliamentary debates, provincial papers, many of the great and lesser essay journals, review journals, and what can only be described as general magazines. Some items are very well known, including the Connoisseur, Dr. Johnson's Rambler, the Ladies Diary, the Flying Post, and the Daily Courant. Many others are obscure, such as Jopson's Coventry Mercury and the Lady's Curiosity. Some items in the collection - including News from the Dead and Free Holder - are extremely rare.

The collection continues to grow in variety, importance and usefulness, supported in part by the continuing generosity of Mrs. Bond. Additions to the collection since its acquisition include the following:

• L'Estrange's Intelligencer, a gift of the Friends of the Library
• scientific journals such as The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, begun in 1664 and still publishing
• periodicals in business and economics such as Lloyd's Evening Post
• many other journals that strengthen the original topics of the collection.

Altogether these materials constitute a teaching collection that has grown into a research collection of uncommon value.

Brodie of Brodie Collection

A collection of approximately 1,200 pamphlets amassed by the Brodie family of Elgin over a period of 150 years, covering subjects ranging from theology to politics to literature to technology and medicine.

The Brodie of Brodie Collection, purchased in 1961, is a group of about twelve hundred pamphlets acquired by the Brodie family of Elgin over a period of 150 years and formerly part of the library in their eastern Scottish home, Brodie Castle. The pamphlets are bound in 134 volumes with the clenched fist of the Brodie crest on each spine. The last quarter of the seventeenth century is represented by about thirty pamphlets and the first quarter of the nineteenth century by 175; the rest are from the 18^th century. The book-buying interests of four generations of Brodies are here, including the following:

• the theological fervor of the Covenanting Alexander Brodie, who began the collection
• the political pre-occupations of his son James, who added William Sherlock's The Case of the Allegiance due to Soveraign Powers (1691), Killing No Murder (1689 reprint), and A Letter to a Gentlewoman Concerning Government (1697)
• the literate and sophisticated tastes of the second Alexander Brodie, who lived in London and collected more than half of the pamphlets, including those by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Young, and many minor authors; a complete run of The Briton; and anonymous pieces on Walpole, the grand fireworks display, and "the present state of whorecraft"
• the legal, scientific, agricultural, and medical interests of the James Brodie, whose death in 1834 seems to have terminated the collection (Lunardi's An Account of the First Aerial Voyage in England, 1784; Francis Lowndes' Observations on Medical Electricity, 1787; Thomas Bucknall's The Orchardist, 1797; and numbers of works on foot plows, mine augers, the bites of mad dogs, and other practical technological and medical matters).

Edmund Curll Collection

A collection of volumes brought out by Edmund Curll (1675-1747), an 18^th century bookseller and publisher notorious for his unscrupulous publication practices.

Among the many colorful figures of the 18^th century was "the unspeakable Curll," a very successful businessman and most prolific publisher and bookseller with well over a thousand books and pamphlets to his credit or discredit. Singularly unimpressed by the concept of literary property, Curll was almost constantly at war with Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, or another of his involuntary authors. In 1955 Special Collections acquired Peter Murray Hill's private collection of Edmund Curll, numbering at that time about five hundred books. Carrying on Mr. Hill's detective endeavors, we have raised the number to nearly eight hundred. Curll's own vitality and persistence seem to be communicated to those who study him: they continue to discover previously unknown titles at such a rapid rate that it is impossible to say what proportion of the whole is present in our collection.

Of Curll's unwilling authors the best known is certainly Jonathan Swift, whose Meditation upon a Broomstick - first printed by Curll in 1710 from a manuscript obtained by theft - is one of the puzzles of the collection. Scholarship has not yet been able to discover which of the two versions in the Curll Collection is earlier: the 16-page twopenny edition or the 30-page sixpenny edition. Pope, Matthew Prior, Nicholas Rowe, John Oldmixon, Sacheverell, and Sir Thomas Browne all appear in the Curll collection. Trials, scandals, topical poems, poetical miscellanies, politics, British antiquities, travels and the classics are revealed as stock that Curll felt would move well or could be made to move by being reissued with a new and up-to-date title-page.

18^th Century Pamphlet Collections

An extensive collection of 18^th century pamphlets, organized into four groups: poetical, dramatic, political and economic, and religious.

Perhaps the most common form of publication of the 18^th century was the pamphlet. Every conceivable subject and nearly every 18^th century figure of any note was discussed in a pamphlet, or more commonly in a series of pamphlets. We have, over the years, assembled large numbers of these invaluable sources. In particular we have attempted to obtain unbound pamphlets, with the secondary aim of using them for bibliographical study.

The English 18^th century pamphlets, aside from the named collections that are discussed separately, fall into four large groups: poetical, dramatic, political and economic, and religious. The poetical pamphlets are mostly the works of minor or anonymous poets but there are a number of poems by Thomas Gray, Goldsmith, Pope, Addison, James Thomson, and other well-known authors. The dramatic pamphlets (nearly half Irish imprints) include plays by Garrick, Cibber, General Burgoyne, Nathaniel Lee, Sheridan and a host of minor authors, and operas by Dr. Arne, Charles Dibdin, and John Gay. The political and economic pamphlets--the largest category--cover the South Sea Bubble, controversies over the East India Company, Irish difficulties, reactions to the American and French revolutions, the state of the currency, and new methods of agricultural improvement, and include long series of official proclamations and acts of Parliament. The religious pamphlets are mostly sermons, a good number of them on purely devotional concerns, but many of them are political sermons dealing with the great controversies of the day.