Thomas Pope Blount, Essays on Several Subjects (1697); Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Naturall Historie, comp. William Rawley (1685)

This post offers another instalment in the continuing and collaboratively written story of the growing library of Katherine (Butler) Blount: for earlier posts, see Sarah Lindenbaum, Sophie Floate, William Poole, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Victoria Burke, and Martine van Elk. The number of known books with Katherine Blount’s provenance stands currently at 42, and her library seems likely to have been considerably larger still. The date and circumstances of its dispersal have yet to be traced.

The first of the two books discussed here is Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s presentation copy to his daughter-in-law Katherine of the third edition of his Essays on Several Subjects (1697). Researchers interested in Katherine Blount knew this book existed because of its appearance in a 1905 auction catalogue, but not where it was currently located. It appears as lot 733 in Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, Catalogue of books and manuscripts including a selection from the libraries of J.H. Reddan … and other properties… which will be sold by auction … February 16th, 1905.  Blount’s copy of her father-in-law’s Essays appears in the catalogue among “other properties,” in a group aptly headed “The Property of a Lady.”

This early twentieth-century female owner is unfortunately unidentifiable, and none of the other 50+ books from her library (lots 732-85) appears to be associated with Blount. The book was acquired soon after the auction by Harvard University (Houghton Library, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC), as it bears a Harvard accession stamp dated Dec. 1906.

Katherine Blount has inscribed the book on the recto of the front flyleaf in her distinctively clear hand, “Katherine Blount / Given me by the / Author / May the 13^th. 1697.”

As the 1905 auction catalogue promises, the book retains its original personalized binding, stamped with Katherine Blount’s “K B” monogram in gilt on both the front and back boards. This is the only book known so far to feature Blount’s monogrammed binding, though it is possible that similar bindings survive on some of the other books identified as hers but which have not yet been examined. This binding is rebacked, so any spine decoration is lost. An illegible inscription or signature (****ising?) appears on the title-page, in an early hand but evidently post-dating Blount.

Sir Thomas Pope Blount, first baronet (1649–97), politician and writer, was the father of Katherine Blount’s husband, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, second baronet (1670–1731). Blount’s father-in-law was best known for his encyclopedic compilations, Censura celebriorum authorum (1690), A Natural History (1693), and De re poetica (1694); his Essays, first published in 1691 and his only original work, were also well regarded in their time. As described in the article on Pope Blount in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “In seven short pieces, he treats of self-interest; the mischiefs of learning; education and custom; a tempered respect for antiquity; the virtues of modern men; passion; and the uncertainty of human knowledge. An eighth essay, added to a third, expanded edition (1697), concerns religion. In domestic metaphors and plain prose, Blount reveals himself to be sceptical, cynical, cheerfully optimistic, possessed of a dry wit, and warmly anti-Catholic.”[1] From what is known so far of her library, Katherine Blount shared her father-in-law’s wide-ranging interests, though this book offers no evidence of her engagement with his Essays: other than a couple of pencilled marginal markings that post-date Blount’s ownership, the text itself is clean. But Pope Blount’s compilations and essays do offer a window onto Katherine Blount’s intellectual milieu.

The second book featured today speaks to Katherine Blount’s interest in natural science, the subject of her father-in-law’s compilation A Natural History. The book is a copy of the 1685 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, a folio gathering of heterogenous observations, experiments, and theories compiled by Bacon’s former chaplain William Rawley from manuscripts soon after Bacon’s death. Enormously popular in the seventeenth century (the 1685 edition is the eleventh), the collection is now best known for its inclusion of Bacon’s New Atlantis and, in editions starting from the 1670s, an epitome in English translation of his Novum Organum. For other copies of Sylva Sylvarum owned by women in the seventeenth century, see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum.

Sylva Sylvarum was not the only work Blount owned by Francis Bacon: her copy of the 1673 edition of Bacon’s Essays is mentioned in a 1902 work on book collecting but remains untraced (see this post by Sarah Lindenbaum). Perhaps like her copy of Pope Blount’s Essays it sits in a major research library, waiting for a researcher to run a search for “Katherine Blount.” Blount purchased this copy of Sylva Sylvarum herself: it was not an inheritance, gift, or presentation copy, like her copy of her father-in-law’s Essays. Her inscription on the recto of the front flyleaf reads: “Katherine Blount / Price 8^s. / 1699.”

That Blount bought the book fourteen years after it was published does not necessarily mean that she bought a used copy: 1685 remained the most recent edition (and the work would not in fact be published again until the nineteenth century), and the price Blount paid suggests she purchased the book new. The 1673 Term Catalogue e.g. lists Sylva Sylvarum at “Price bound 8 s. sold by several Booksellers.”[2] The binding is a simply decorated calf with a gilt decorated spine and probably represents the original “trade binding” in which the book was sold. The text is clean other than a few marginal markings in pencil: the use of pencil again indicates that these markings post-date Blount.

This copy features the bookplate of Brentford Public Library (stamped “Withdrawn from stock”), in the West London borough of Hounslow; additional stamps indicate that the book entered the library as part of the “Layton collection.” The antiquarian Thomas Layton (1819-1911) collected books, coins, and antiquities for seventy years, accumulating what has been described as “probably the largest collection of London antiquities ever amassed by a single individual”: for information about Layton and his collections, see here. He bequeathed his collection of over 20,000 objects—evidently including this book—to the people of Brentford, though since his death the collection has been divided among several locations. A collection of over 8,000 of Layton’s books is currently stored at Feltham Library, also in the West London borough of Hounslow. This particular book may have become separated from that main collection, remaining at the Brentwood Public Library until it was withdrawn. The 8000 Layton books at Feltham are catalogued but insufficient copy-specific information appears in these records to determine if Layton acquired other books with a Blount provenance over the many decades in which he built his collections.

Source: Thomas Pope Blount, Essays on Several Subjects (1697): Houghton Library, Harvard University, shelfmark *EC65 B6239 691EC. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1685): book in private ownership. All images of both books reproduced with permission.

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[1] Jonathan Pritchard, “Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, first baronet (1649–1697),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

[2] Robert Clavell, comp., A catalogue of all the books printed in England since the dreadful fire of London in 1666, to the end of Michaelmas term, 1672 (1673), H1v.

Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks (1727)

This is another installment in our series of blog posts Katherine Blount, who, as we have discovered, owned a formidable library. The more we look, the more we find. The search for Blount books started with a post by Sarah Lindenbaum, which was followed by posts by Sophie Floate, William Poole, and Mary Ann O’Donnell, who all added to the list compiled by Sarah. Then, most recently, Victoria Burke wrote for us on a manuscript miscellany that she could, with the help of evidence featured on the blog, identify definitively as written by Blount. The miscellany provides broad evidence of Blount’s reading, including many books not featured in our blog before, which were possibly part of the family library rather than Blount’s personal collection. Much work remains to be done in terms of identifying and locating the books from which she copied material in the miscellany manuscript.

Fortunately for us, Blount meticulously signed many of the books she owned, almost always including a date and often a price or a note about the person who gave her the book. I will not repeat the biographical facts of her life here since those can be found in any of the posts linked above. Her gift inscriptions show that she was frequently given books by her husband and other friends and relations, allowing us to begin to think about the networks of which she was a part. The particular book I concentrate on here is Vegetable Staticks by Stephen Hales. Vegetable Staticks was presented to Blount, her inscription shows, by Hales himself in 1727.

Who was Hales and why might Blount have been interested in this book? Stephen Hales (1677–1761), as the title page of the book tells us, was both a clergyman and a scientist. His main position, as Curate of Teddington, would have brought him in close proximity to Twickenham, the estate that was the primary residence of Blount and her husband, which is, according to Google Maps, a mere half an hour walk away.

Stephen Hales, studio of Thomas Hudson; oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1759. NPG 1861© National Portrait Gallery, London

Hales had become interested in science while at Cambridge and wrote a number of scientific works, making important discoveries and inventing various devices to benefit human health. Statick Vegetables is perhaps his most important work. The book collects Hales’s papers presented at the Royal Society on plant nutrition, considering the circulation of water and how plants acquire energy through air and possibly light. A section of the book is devoted to air chemistry, an important topic to Hales, who argued for the importance of air circulation to health and invented a kind of ventilator.

The entry on Hales in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography quotes contemporary Gilbert White’s impressions of Hales:

“Gilbert White noted that ‘His whole mind seemed replete with experiment which of course gave a tincture and turn to his conversation often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting’. He listed a series of anecdotes to support this view, among which were Hales’s concern with the incrustation of ladies’ tea-kettles, his advising the use of showers of water to test the salubrity of wells, his directing air-holes to be let in the outer walls of rooms, his imploring young people not to drink their tea scalding hot, his ad hoc advice to ferrymen on how to maintain the bottoms of their boats, and his teaching housewives to place inverted teacups in their pies to prevent the syrup from boiling over.”

The conversations Blount may have had with Hales may have ranged from science and botany to cooking and tea kettles. We can only speculate, but the fact that he presented her with his book means that he must have felt she would be interested in biology. Perhaps he was looking for patronage. The books in Blount’s collection we have uncovered so far are generally not directly scientific though one book in the list of works mentioned in her miscellany, Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society, tells us that she may have had an investment in the history of scientific discovery.

Blount’s Vegetable Staticks’s later provenance history is visible in a book plate belonging to Henry Carrington Bolton (1843–1903), an American professor of chemistry and science historian, whose interest in the subject is obvious and whose ownership may explain how the book has ended up in the Library of Congress today.

Our other posts on Blount do not show the bindings for her books, but the images below can prove helpful in the future in establishing her ownership of other works.

Source: Library of Congress, shelfmark QK711 .H2 1727. Images by the Library of Congress, used with permission.

Further Reading

Allan, D. G. C. “Hales, Stephen (1677–1761), natural philosopher.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  Oxford University Press, 2023.

Bacon and Rawley, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Naturall Historie (1631)

One of the most popular works of the seventeenth century is Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or, a Natural Historie, first published the year after he died in 1627 and compiled by the philosopher-scientist’s chaplain William Rawley. English-language imprints from the 1630s, 1650s, 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s are still commonly found for sale today. Its loose organizational structure and relative incoherence set it apart from other Baconian publications, and it has vexed scholars for centuries. Rusu and Lüthy have argued that the text was compiled from manuscripts written by Bacon and never meant for publication, but that it nonetheless provides a window into his methods and demonstrates that he used these rough-hewn manuscripts in issuing other, more organized natural histories.

Despite being so dissimilar to his previously published works, Sylva Sylvarum was his most popular work in the seventeenth century. This third edition was owned some forty years after its publication by a Margaret and William Pratt, then later Sir George Strickland, 5th Baronet (1729– 1808) and his son Henry Eustatius Strickland (1777-1865). The Stricklands were of Yorkshire, though Henry eventually set up residence at Apperly Court in Gloucestershire.

The book is signed on the title page “Will: Pratt. A.M. 1670” and on the front flyleaf recto “The Booke of Mrs Margaret Pra[tt].” The A.M. after William’s name may signifies ‘Assembly Member,’ though of which governing body is unknown. An additional annotation in William’s hand above his ownership inscription is illegible due to trimming of the textblock, but may indicate when the book was procured and / or what price was paid for it.

Given the commonness of their names, it is difficult to say with certainty what the relationship William and Margaret had. The “Mrs” indicates a married name, though she could have been either his mother or wife.

It is also unknown how the book left the Pratts’ possession and entered the Stricklands’, though the Pratts may have been a Yorkshire family like the Stricklands. The book is bound in contemporary speckled calf.

Given the book’s popularity, it is not surprising that many surviving copies contain women’s inscriptions, even though generally it is less common to see women signing works of natural history and science than it is religious or devotional works. Another 1631 edition was offered for auction in July 2023 and is signed on A3r “Jane Eyton Jane Eyton / 1655 do[?] when / Jane Eyton.” This inscription gives the impression of someone sketching idly, maybe even considering the relationship between her signature and identity (the repeated lowercase Ys suggest an attempt to hone the inscription’s appearance).

There are no other clues in the book to suggest Jane’s identity. Hers seems to be the only legible ownership inscription, although the final text page has faded annotations at the foot, in what appears to be an earlier hand.

The divisional title page of another leaf has expunged annotations that say in part “A Table of The Experiments” and appear to be dated 1771, though whether there is an ownership inscription there is hard to determine.

Jane, like Margaret, is unidentified, but together the signatures indicate women’s interest in wide-ranging subjects.

Sources: Books offered for sale by Stanley Louis Remarkable Books and eBay seller booker17 in July 2023. Images used with permission.

[1] Doina-Cristina Rusu & Christoph Lüthy. “Extracts from a Paper Laboratory: The Nature of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum,” Intellectual History Review, 27:2 (2017), 171-202, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2017.1292020.

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1651)

Title page from the 1651 edition at the Huntington Library

Frontispiece from the 1651 edition at the Huntington Library

Appearing in eight editions (plus additional issues) between 1621 and 1676, seven of them in folio, Robert Burton’s expansive and erudite Anatomy of Melancholy was a seventeenth-century publishing phenomenon. A copy of the 1651 edition of Burton’s Anatomy, held by the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island (shelfmark PR 2223.A1 1651), is the first to appear on the EMFBO site.[1] Furthermore, the evidence here of early modern female book ownership is but one of this book’s several interesting features—including the only known manuscript copy of Katherine Philips’ song “Pompey’s Ghost” in a seventeenth-century printed book or made by a seventeenth-century woman.

The Redwood copy is in a modern binding and lacks the frontispiece and title-page, but it retains two original flyleaves and the half-title that precedes the now missing frontispiece.[2] The earliest provenance appears on the recto of the second of the two flyleaves, where Pleasant Rawlins has enthusiastically inscribed her full name four times: “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book”; “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book Aprill the 1 day 16**” [second line of inscription obliterated and date trimmed]; “Pleasant Rawlins her book / Aprill y^e 1 day 1672” [entire inscription obliterated]; and, at the bottom of the page, “Pleasant Rawlins her book.”

Second flyleaf recto (top)

Second flyleaf recto (middle)

She subsequently re-inscribed her name in an accomplished calligraphic hand on the recto of the first flyleaf, the inscription oriented vertically on the page: “M^rs Pleasant Biker / her booke / Aprill Idus Mensis pridie [the day before the Ides of April, i.e. April 12] Anno Domine 1676.”

First flyleaf recto

The obliterations of the two dated “Rawlins” entries look likely to be by Rawlins herself, possibly prompted by her addition of the re-dated inscription under her married name. The same hand has obliterated two instances of the name “John” on the “Rawlins” inscription page, in the same ink and probably at the same time as the other obliterations. On the top left of the “Biker” page, also oriented vertically, is another inscription, probably not by Rawlins/Biker but still early and possibly missing some text due to paper repairs. Difficult to decipher, it reads like a quotation but remains untraced: “[?Jan*** pa**] / I shall Endeavour for the future / To have \no/ constant indareance between us / by Letter.”

Pleasant Rawlins and Mrs Pleasant Biker are the same person: Pleasant Rawlins, daughter of William and Katherine Rawlins, was baptised in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldgate in London on February 1, 1652. She married Samuel Biker (d.1685) at some point between April 1672 (the date of her “Rawlins” inscription) and 1674, the year her daughter Pleasant Biker (d.1696) was baptised, also in St Botolph Without Aldgate, on August 30. Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker died in early 1685, the same year as her husband, and was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on January 12 of that year, at the age of thirty-two.[3]

Pleasant Rawlins was a young woman of twenty when she first inscribed her copy of Burton’s Anatomy. The Latin in her 1676 inscription as well as her practised use of Italic and calligraphic hands, not to mention her ownership of a work like Burton’s Anatomy, suggests a certain level of education. In addition, the thirty-line poem she has copied in the book, beginning on the “Rawlins” inscription page (in the same hand and ink as her signature at the bottom of the page) and continuing onto the facing verso of the preceding flyleaf, suggests a fashionably current literary sensibility. Beginning “From lasting and unclouded Day,” the poem is an extract, often known as “Pompey’s Ghost,” from Katherine Philips’s play Pompey, her translation of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy La mort de Pompeé. “Pompey’s Ghost” is one of the newly written songs Philips innovatively added to the translated play.

The version copied by Rawlins reads:[4]

[second flyleaf recto]

From lasting and unclouded Day,
From joys refin’d above allay
And from a Spring without decay.
I come by Cynthia’s borrow’d bems
To visit my Cornelia’s Drems,
And give them yet sublimer Thems.

Second flyleaf recto

[first flyleaf verso, oriented vertically]

Behold the Man thou love’dst before
Pure streams have wash’d away his Gore
And Pompey now shall bleed no more.
By Death my Glory I resume,
For ’twould have been a harsher doom
T’ outlive the Liberty of Rome.
By me her doubtfull fortune try’d
Falling, bequeaths my Fame this Pride
I for it lived and with it Dy’d.
Nor shall my Vengeance bee withstood
Nor unattempted, with a Flood
off Roman and Egitptian blood.
Cesar himselfe it shall pursue
his days shall troubled bee & few
And hee shall dye by treason too.
hee by severity Divine
shallbee an offring att my shrine
As I was his hee must bee mine
Thy stormy life Ile regrett noe more
For Fate shall waft the soone ashore
[And to thy Pompey the restore]
There none a Guilty Crowne shall weare
nor Cesar bee Dictator there
nor shall Cornelia shed one teare

First flyleaf verso

Rawlins has omitted from Philips’ original the penultimate three-line stanza, probably for reasons of space: working around some pen trials already on the page, she changed hands halfway through the first line of the sixth stanza from her elegant italic to a more cramped secretary, squeezing stanzas six and seven onto the lower half of the left side, then squeezing stanzas eight and nine onto the lower half of the right side (in stanza nine, the final line has been trimmed in rebinding and the final words of the first two lines are covered by a paper repair), then adding the final stanza in an empty space above, breaking up lines to make it fit. The omitted stanza reads, in Philips’ original, “Where past the fears of sad removes / We’l entertain our spotless Loves, / In beauteous, and Immortal Groves.” Rawlins has bracketed stanzas eight and nine, adding an unfortunately illegible (and possibly trimmed) word in the margin (?*eib*).

Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker and her husband Samuel both died in 1685, in London: Samuel was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on February 21, about six weeks after his wife. At some point that same year, the next owner of this copy of Burton’s Anatomy bought it in a location a world away: an inscription across the top of the book’s half-title reads, “Benjamin Newberry Ejus Liber Bought att / Port Royall In Jamaica 1685.” This is probably Benjamin Newberry (c.1653-1711), of Newport, Rhode Island.

Half-title

The Newberrys were a prominent merchant family in Newport and would likely have had trade dealings in Jamaica; the Newport connection could also explain the current presence of the book in the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. The same page features one additional later signature, the (untraced) “Robert Morton / 1828.” If this copy of Burton remained in the possession of the Rawlins/Biker family until the deaths of Pleasant and then Samuel in early 1685, it soon made its way into the hands of somebody with an entrepreneurial sense of the potential transatlantic market for used books. While other copies of Burton’s Anatomy are documented in America in the seventeenth century, including at least one owned by a woman,[8] this book may represent the earliest text by Katherine Philips to make its way across the Atlantic.

Source: Redwood Library & Athenaeum, call number PR 2223.A1 1651. Photos reproduced with permission.

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[1] I would like to thank Michelle Farias, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, for drawing this book to my attention during a visit there in January 2022, and Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Hageman for their comments on early versions of this note.

[2] Because the title-page is missing, the holding library has catalogued the copy on the basis of its colophon, dated 1651 (sig. 4A4r). The same colophon appears in the 1652 re-issue, which differs only in its re-dated title-page: the copy may therefore represent the 1652 re-issue (Wing B6182) rather than the 1651 edition (Wing B6181).

[3] The genealogical data presented here all derives from records found in ancestrylibrary.com. This Pleasant Rawlins is not to be confused with her niece, also Pleasant Rawlins (b.1684), who was the teenaged victim of a notorious 1702 case of heiress abduction and forced marriage regarded as a source for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: see Beth Swan, “Clarissa Harlowe, Pleasant Rawlins, and Eighteenth-Century Discourses of Law,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001), 71-93.

[4] Long ‘s’ and initial ‘ff’ regularized, abbreviations silently expanded, and a false start on one stanza omitted.

[5] Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 182.

[6] Salzman, 187-90; Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM), PsK 575-77; John Cunningham, “Songs Lost and Found: Katherine Philips’s ‘Pompey’s Ghost’,” Music and Letters, advance article 20 May 2022.

[7] The Folger Union First Line Index of English Verse lists five manuscript copies; CELM adds two, one now lost (PsK 578-80); Cunningham, incorporating ongoing research by Nathan Tinker, adds seven more, all copied in the USA in the eighteenth century (20-23). For a study of manuscript copying of other work by Philips by early modern women, see Victoria E. Burke, “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips,” Women’s Writing 24.3 (2017), 280-97.

[8] Charles Heventhal Jr., “Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ in Early America,” PBSA 63.3 (1969), 157-75.  Heventhal notes that a copy of the 1632 edition is described in the 1870 catalogue of the Thomas Prince library as signed “Sarah Standish” (159-60). Prince bequeathed his library to Boston’s Old South Church in 1758, and this could be any one of several Sarah Standishes who lived in the New England settlements between the mid-seventeenth century and the date of Prince’s death. The Prince library is currently held by the Boston Public Library, but this copy of Burton’s Anatomy seems no longer to be present in the collection.