The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Book habits explored
Rarely explored borrowing records are being used to examine what people in Scotland were reading around 200 years ago.
Experts at Stirling University have been awarded £ 1 million for a project that will aim to show what people really borrowed from 15 libraries, including some in the north and north-east, from 1750 to 1830.
T he research, which represents the first attempt to systematically analyse and compare borrowers’ registers across Scotland, is being led by English studies lecturer Dr Katie Halsey, along with co-investigator Dr Matthew Sangster of Glasgow University.
Dr Halsey, based at Stirling’s faculty of arts and humanities, said the database will contain at least 150,000 records of borrowing by a range of people including miners, clergymen, advocates, farm workers, gamekeepers, vagabonds, sailors, poachers, maidservants and schoolchildren.
She added: “Understanding more about which works, authors and ideas shaped our national culture will help us to better understand – and in some cases challenge – long-standing ideas about Scottish identity.
“There are a series of narratives about which books are important in our national culture and identity. Our own hypothesis is that those books are not the ones that were circulating in the 18th Century and early 19 th Century.”
She said rather than the romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, records suggest people were reading Sir Walter Scott, Milton and Shakespeare, as well as lesser-known poets.
Dr Halsey said the Scottish Enlightenment was said to have brought in a secular society, but people were still reading religious self-help books and practical theology books.
The project’s partner libraries include Craigston Castle, in Turriff, whose register covers the years from the late 1760s to the early 1820s, and Inverness Kirk Sessions Library, which has books dating from 1525, as well as Kirk wall Subscription Library and the Aberdeen University Theological Library.