Meet AAS Fellow Sean Moore

Past is Present: Can you describe your current project?

Sean Moore: My project, “Slavery and the Making of the Early American Library:  British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade,” was inspired both by Brown University’s investigation of its endowment’s origins in profits from the slave trade and from my interest in how British books made their way to America in the eighteenth century.  In seeking to connect these two interests, I discovered that many pre-Revolution American subscription libraries were founded by people with investments in slavery.  I have planned six chapters for this book:  1) on private libraries financed by slavery, 2) on the Redwood Library of Newport, 3) on the Salem Social Library, 4) on the Charleston Library Society, 5) on the New York Society Library, and 6) on the Library Company of Philadelphia.  I am pairing a British literary text, and sometimes a philosophical one, from the period with each library.  For example, the first chapter, on which I have spent the majority of my time at the AAS, discusses the reading of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela by early American women slave owners like Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Esther Edwards Burr, and the purchase of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by male slave owners like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.  I do so in order to assess their appetite for imported literary commodities, their general consumer habits, and the means by which they found the money to pay to participate in British consumer culture.  My chapters on the subscription libraries basically cross-reference library proprietorship and patronage with records of who was involved in slavery and related enterprises like sugar, rum, tobacco, and shipbuilding.  The goal of my project is to map the dissemination of British books in America through what I am calling “slavery philanthropy.”

 

Past is Present: What historians or literary scholars inspired your entry into the field/inspire your work today?

Sean: My first book project sort of accidentally brought me into book history from postcolonial and economic theory when I began to realize that many of Jonathan Swift’s comments about imperial Britain and the Irish economy were making use of the jargon of workers involved in the book trade, and that he was saying that a Dublin book trade was necessary for the rest of the Irish economy to thrive.  The work of Irish book historians like Mary “Paul” Pollard, Raymond Gillespie, and many others inspired me, and I began to read more generally in the field of book history, like the work of Richard Sher, Adrian Johns, Leah Price, Robert Darnton, Lisa Maruca, and many others.  Maruca’s The Work of Print, in particular, introduced me to the seventeenth-century book trade handbook by Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, a copy of which Swift owned and perhaps made use of while writing many of his Irish political satires.

In preparing for my current project, I was inspired by Hugh Amory and David Hall’s The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World and many of the essayists they included in it, especially James Raven, who has written the most about British imports and the Charleston Library Society.  I also have taught D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, making use of their concept of the “sociology of the text,” as well as Philip Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography as a means of deepening my knowledge of the field.  For the slavery side to my project, I have been particularly inspired by the work of Simon Gikandi, Philip Gould, and Craig Wilder.

 

Past is Present: What does the AAS fellowship mean to you? What have you looked at while you’ve been on fellowship? What would you have liked to find? What would be your ideal find?

Sean: Prior to taking this fellowship, I was serving a three-year term as Director of the UNH Honors Program, which, together with teaching and raising a young family, made it difficult to write a major monograph, though I have been able to publish an essay collection and write several articles.  The NEH fellowship this fall has been crucial in helping me to jump-start my work, and I have written 80 pages this fall and read many, many books and manuscripts in the reading room and in the scholar’s residence.  The central manuscripts for me have been the Boston bookseller Jeremy Condy’s account book, a memorandum on books borrowed from the Salem Social Library, and the catalogs of many eighteenth-century American libraries.  Moreover, conversations with library staff and fellows have introduced me to much current secondary reading in early American studies, almost all of which the AAS has.  I have also spent a considerable amount of time in newspaper databases and the University of Virginia Press’s digital papers of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Pinckney to assess the availability in America of certain British books and the transatlantic business transactions of early Americans.

What I would really like to have found, and perhaps may on another visit to the AAS, is more evidence that could help me cross-reference early library membership with members’ business affairs.  I haven’t really asked anyone to help me with that on this trip, as I have been busy writing and reading other material, but if I could get lists of the proprietors of the five libraries I am researching and historical, biographical, and genealogical data on members that would really help.  An ideal find would be evidence of a barter exchange of a slave or slave-produced commodity for books, as I have seen in the digitized papers of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.

This fellowship has been crucial in immersing me in early American studies, a field in which I am somewhat of an immigrant as an Irish and British studies scholar, and the staff and fellows have been wonderfully welcoming.

 

Past is Present: I guess I’d be specifically interested in how you position yourself in the world of book history and talk a bit about the challenges you’ve faced while doing research for the project (limitations your sources presented and how you were able to overcome them successfully).  You also mentioned some of the sources (booksellers’ catalogs and manuscript material like Condy’s account book) that you looked at while at AAS–do you think AAS resources support our claim that we are at the center of studies on American book history?

Sean: I think it is safe to say that the AAS’s resources support its claim to be at the center of studies on American book history.  Of course, I may have to travel to places like the New York Society Library, Charleston Library Society, and Library Company of Philadelphia to get more detail about those libraries’ memberships, but the AAS is really a good home for my project because its physical and digital resources have enabled me to investigate libraries located no where near New England.  The one limitation I have found concerns the transatlantic aspect of my project, as one of the things that I am trying to do is assess how relevant commentators on the rise of the British novel in Britain are to its reading in early America, and the AAS doesn’t have many monographs in British Studies.  Fortunately, however, the consortium of which the AAS is a part has those resources, and I have borrowed many books on eighteenth-century British literature from Clark University.

The most exemplary case of the AAS being a great place to study book history in general concerned a paper I was preparing to deliver in Dublin in October that I called “The Social Network of Dublin Printers,” which was about how printers in Ireland often received payments from the secret service.  I remembered that I had seen a festschrift for Mary “Paul” Pollard a few years ago that had mentioned something about this, but I strongly doubted that the AAS would be the place to find it.  I scoured the catalogs of Worcester university libraries to see if anyone had it, but they didn’t.  Finally, I went ahead and tried the AAS catalog and That Woman!:  Studies in Irish Bibliography:  A Festschrift for Mary Pollard was right here at the AAS!   It was really helpful that I didn’t have to travel to find that crucial resource for this symposium paper in Irish book history, and it is very important that the AAS keeps up its policy of keeping books on the book histories of a variety of nations.

 

Past is Present: You mentioned a few female slave owners. Why did you choose them and how did you happen to come across them?

Sean: I didn’t know they were slave owners. I was more interested in the American reading of Pamela, so I looked at Kevin Hayes’s book A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf, and it mentioned Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Esther Edwards Burr as being two of the women who had read Pamela and had had certain reactions to it.  But, in doing some biographical work on them, I found that Pinckney lived on a big slave plantation and Burr also owned slaves. The people [Carol Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker] who had edited Burr’s journal had mentioned that she was so different from other colonial women because she had slaves and so the life of a wife and mother was much different for them than most other women, free or enslaved.  It’s kind of interesting if you can trace the scene of reading a novel like this on a slave household or a slave plantation, because that can get you towards an understanding of a reader’s tastes and prejudices, helping you understand why the owner of a slave plantation would be so offended by a servant character like Pamela marrying the lord of the manor.  So that’s why I became more interested in them than in some of the other readers Kevin Hayes mentions.

 

Past is Present: Are you able to do anything with free black book buyers or readers?

Sean: That’s coming towards the end of my book.  I’m specifically moving into abolition in the latter chapters of this book. I’m going to look at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a particularly strong abolitionist-type library, and I want to look at free blacks as well as enslaved blacks who were working in printing, and it would be very interesting to see if I could find any records of what such individuals might have been reading.  The person I know who is doing the most work on this right now is Christen Mucher of Smith College, with whom I have served on conference panels.

 

Past is Present: You talk about specific books paired with specific owners. How much of your chapters will be about the book owner, how much will be about the contents of the book, and how much will be about the book as a consumer item?

Sean: I’m trying to make it equal for all of those categories. As English professors, we’re very much focused on literary texts and so when we do book history we’re more focused on literary works, so I thought picking certain literary works that were appropriate to something else going on in the chapter would be interesting. The reason I focus on Pamela in the same chapter that I focus on Locke is because you can connect both through theory to the concept of possessive individualism. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is considered by C.B. Macpherson to be a crucial text in spreading ideas of possessive individualism. From that, theorists of the rise of the novel, such as Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, and many others have taken the concept of possessive individualism to be something that’s being marketed in the novel. With that also is a personality that’s requisite to participating in consumer society. That’s one pairing. Another pairing is Pope’s poem Windsor-Forest with the Redwood Library simply because he has a very complicated attitude toward slavery at the moment when Britain gets the monopoly over the slave trade with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. I argue that this complicated relationship where you’re acknowledging slavery but at the same time saying that you’re fighting for freedom for yourself as a white person is something that gets carried over later into something Edmund Morgan identified in American Slavery, American Freedom as the fact that many patriots in Virginia were arguing for their own liberties while simultaneously enslaving others. There are other literary works in other chapters, but those are the two primary ones I’m looking at now.

 

Past is Present: You mention Pope. Were you able to incorporate any of your work on or interest in Swift into this book?

Sean: There’s going to be a Swift chapter more focused on the Salem Social Library. Why I’m interested in Swift is because he was a big advocate for changing British imperial policy through boycotts. You boycott British goods. That puts pressure on the British economy, and merchants put pressure on their members of Parliament, and perhaps you get a policy change. So what I’m interested in seeing is whether the non-importation movements that began in the 1760s and continued into the 1770s in America were at all influenced by Swift’s boycotting. I have an article on this that I’m revising for resubmission to a journal, and I just need to find closer evidence that non-importation in America was inspired by Irish non-importation 50 years earlier.  By situating the reading of Swift in Salem, I hope to tie in his patriotism to the paradox Morgan identified, as many of the elite of Salem, who would have been sponsoring its library, were involved in slavery or in trading slave-produced commodities.

 

Past is Present: Where are you looking? In newspapers? Periodicals?

Sean: I’ve looked mostly in newspapers for that kind of evidence. What I really want to do, though, is find some marginalia. It’s a very challenging task.

 

Past is Present: You mention that you incorporate works of D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann into your classroom.  How have you done that in the past?

Sean: For the past four years or so I’ve taught my graduate seminars on book history with a specific focus on transatlantic book history. I’m using An Introduction to Book History by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery as a way for students to learn about book history as a field. I’ve also used collections of essays about book history to teach them about the sociology of the text with those two authors—McKenzie and McGann—but also many others. Robert Darnton’s concept of the communications circuit is something I’ve had success with among students. One of my students, Michael Haselton, was admitted to the PhD program at Duke University last year on the basis of a paper where he traced the communications circuit of a British cookbook by Hannah Glasse that was in George Washington’s library. He found out the agent through whom Washington acquired it, who that agent was in touch with in England (what bookseller he got it from), and also something about the reception of it, although he didn’t find enough evidence when recipes from it might have been served. But it was a very good example of how to do a communications circuit. I think for that reason, and because he was merging food studies with book history, he was admitted to Duke. He’s probably the best example of how my teaching has reflected the field of book history and many of the specific texts that I focus on.

 

Past is Present: Do you have primarily English students in your classes, or are they interdisciplinary?

Sean: It’s interdisciplinary. I’m one of the faculty members in the English department who gets history students to take my graduate seminars. While it would be less likely for undergraduate history majors to take my English undergraduate seminars, several times I’ve been the person who does the UNH History Department’s so-called “fourth field” for PhD candidates, which is something outside the history department. Mostly what I’m trying to do is adapt history of the book information and theory to English students and how they might think of literary texts as being part of the history of the book.

 

Past is Present: You mention you have a lot of family obligations. What advice would you give to other scholars who are starting families?

Sean: I don’t want to say that my life has been a model for what to do. We didn’t have our first child until after I was hired as an assistant professor and after I got an article accepted by PMLA, which is the top journal in English literary studies. Then I felt like, well, chances are I might be able to get tenure. Then we had our second child after I got tenure. I do know, though, that there are some faculty members who have their children in graduate school, but often that can be a struggle to both finish graduate school and to get through the tenure process. My sister, for example, had her children when she was pursuing a PhD in biology at Cornell, and it took her twelve years to finish. I took a cue from that that maybe I should be careful.  I have seven older brother and sisters, and three of them have PhDs. It took another one 25 years. But one of them was able to get it done in four. She was in psychology.  I’ve seen the challenges that people with families face in the profession. During the semester, with children, it’s very difficult to write, but the way I got my first book done was to take the family to stay with my in-laws and work in their basement most of the summer so my wife, who’s a high school teacher and would be off at that time, and her parents could mind my first child while I finished the book in the basement. You need help as a young family. The profession is very demanding, and it’s hard to write and think and do research when you have those kinds of obligations. This fellowship has been a great opportunity to complete my book. I also have a fellowship at the Newport Mansions for next semester and an NEH [fellowship] for next year as well, so I should be able to get this done.

 

Past is Present: I was just going to ask about your 2015-2016 NEH fellowship. You said you might come back to AAS?

Sean: I’d like to. One of the challenges for my family is that these fellowships have been great at replacing my normal salary but not my expenses while I’m here.  But I am going to try to figure out a way to work here next year.

 

Past is Present: So do you think you might just stay at home and write?

Sean: If I stayed at home to write, I would not get as much done or have access to the books and manuscripts that the AAS has. Our child care arrangement this year is to have an au pair, but if I were home we might not have one and I would be taking the children back and forth to school and to various appointments, which could cut into my productivity.  If we can afford an au pair next year we’ll do it again so that I can work here.

 

Past is Present: How old are your children?

Sean: Seven years old and two years old.  It is difficult now when they are so young, but my older colleagues say it gets better and better as they mature past five.  The crucial thing is to give them the attention that they need while at the same time doing the work that you need to do to advance your career and provide for them.  It’s about personal choices and what you think you can get done.

 

Past is Present: You mentioned the Condy accounts, the Salem Social Library records, and also the library catalogs. Can you say a little bit about how those have been helpful for your research?

Sean: I’ll start with the library catalogues. If I writing about Locke or Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or any of the other literary works that I’m thinking about and writing about, it’s good to be able to go to the catalogs of the five subscription libraries I’m looking at and see if they had it listed in their catalogs. One of the things I’ve noticed in looking at the borrowing records for the Salem library as well as for the Redwood Library is that the borrowing records don’t always correlate with what is listed in the catalog, so you might have an octavo edition of the works of Swift listed in the catalog, but what’s being borrowed is an 12mo edition or something like that. How to account for that, I don’t know. Does this tell us that the book catalogs are out of date or aspirational and maybe a way of showing that you have a certain kind of library but really the editions you have might be much smaller than the ones you’re reporting you have or not there at all?  Those catalogs are crucial, so wherever I’m going to be working I’m going to need to be able to access those.  If I try to work at the Library Company of Philadelphia, they have all those catalogs as well. It’s just good to have them to consult easily. Condy’s account books have been very interesting.  I copied out the whole of Henry Knox’s waste book from the microfilm that the Massachusetts Historical Society has. I did that this past summer. Both of them [Condy and Knox] were importing booksellers, booksellers that specialized in imports in the 1760s and 1770s in Boston. What’s listed in the catalogs and sometimes who’s buying from them, who’s ordering certain books, can tell you a lot about the book market. With Condy I noticed something that I’m going to turn into a paper that I’m delivering at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in March. It’s on the use of English magazines, the purchase of English magazines for thinking about what other books you might wish to buy. You can see that the London Magazine and Gentleman’s Magazine, which seem to have been the two most popular magazines for people to order (and they’ll order them for every issue for five years, and they’ll just kind of get addicted to the magazine), have book reviews. Those book reviews say certain things about books published this month at the back of every magazine. Sometimes there will be a more thorough workup of something from one of those books in the body of the magazine, a comment on a new version of a play (Oroonoko, for example). Very often you’ll see that someone who had read one of those magazines will request from the same bookseller that book, so I want to talk about that. The metaphor I’m using is that it’s like people who get the New Yorker and want to know what’s hip and cool in New York. They know what exhibits to go to, but they also look at the book reviews and sometimes excerpts from larger works that are published in the New Yorker. These magazines worked in much the same way. So that account book has been helpful as well as the Salem borrowing records, which I’m scrambling to copy out entirely before I leave here tomorrow.