Circulating Libraries and Private Networks: Locating Sources for Mary Hays’s Female Biography, 1795–1803

Abstract

IN APRIL 1803, A REVIEWER OF Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women of all Ages and Countries (6 vols, 1803) by the radical feminist novelist of the 1790s, Mary Hays (1759– 1843), contended that ‘much novelty could not be expected in a compilation which boasts no other resources than are in every common library’. By ‘common library’ the reviewer did not mean private libraries, though some individuals might have owned certain volumes used by Hays, such as works by Pierre Bayle, George Ballard, Thomas Gibbons, David Hume, and John Adams.¹ Most probably the reviewer meant the many circulating and newly formed subscription libraries operating in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and, in that regard, the writer’s assumption was largely correct. Questions about Hays’s access to such sources for Female Biography were first raised by Gina Luria Walker in the General Introduction to her edition of Female Biography in 2013 and reiterated in her Introduction to The Invention of Female Biography in 2018, a volume of carefully researched essays devoted to uncovering and examining Hays’s sources.² Nevertheless, questions remain concerning Hays’s acquisition of this substantial body of printed materials. ‘How and where [Hays] gained access to the more arcane sources she used remains a mystery’, Walker ponders, ‘because there is no evidence that she accessed the King’s Library, given to the nation by George III, where she might have found a wealth of material’. Complicating the situation is the fact that ‘we have few primary documents that reveal Hays’s activities while she was producing Female Biography or provide information about where and how she obtained the 100 sources that we can document she consulted’.³

Hays’s correspondence suggests she relied at times upon several of her friends, such as William Tooke, Sr (1744–1820) and his son, William Tooke, Jr (1777–1863), Thomas Richard Underwood (1772–1835), John Aikin (1747–1821), Rochemont Barbauld (1749–1808), and her collaborator at the Analytical Review, George Gregory (1754–1808), for books from their private libraries or from the various public libraries to which they had access either through their own subscriptions or those of their friends. It is also possible that Hays or other members of her large family, such as her mother, Elizabeth Judge Hays (c. 1730–1812), her younger sister Elizabeth (1765/6–1825), or her wealthy brother-in-law John Dunkin, Jr (1753–1827), already owned some of the books she used, books that may have resided with her family from her childhood. As the daughter of a Baptist merchant in Southwark, Hays probably enjoyed a family library well stocked in divinity, nonconformist sermons, history, and poetry, as her early letters (1779–80) to her fiancé, John Eccles (1755–1780), reveal. Nor was she prohibited from purchasing new or used books herself, for her annuity from her father’s estate (about £40 a year) and proceeds from her work as a professional writer enabled her to live on her own in central and south London between 1795 and 1809, first as a tenant and then as a head of household.⁴ Nevertheless, Hays could never have accessed the titles necessary to compose approximately three hundred biographies of women by relying solely on books borrowed from friends and family members or purchased from local bookshops. Completing her task required access to the circulating and subscription libraries that proliferated in London in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, some of which she may have been frequenting since the late 1770s. An examination of the locations, holdings, and subscription lists of a select group of these libraries provides compelling evidence of the availability of the sources Hays needed for Female Biography, as well as insights into the strategic importance of her move to central London and the social connections she developed as a professional writer between 1795 and 1803.

Acquiring reading materials in Gainsford Street, 1775–94

It is probable that Mary Hays frequented bookshops and circulating libraries in her youth while living with her family, initially above her father’s warehouse along Shad Thames and later in the family home at 5 Gainsford Street. The frequent allusions to fiction, drama, and poetry in her correspondence with Eccles suggests Hays had either a well stocked library at home or ready access to local bookshops or circulating libraries. Hays did not need to cross the Thames, however, to find reading material of interest to a young Baptist girl with literary aspirations, for more than a dozen dissenting printers and booksellers operated in Southwark during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, including several Baptists. Just to the south of her Gainsford Street home, in Fair Street, Horsleydown, Hays could have visited the ‘Printing Office’ or ‘Portable Printing Press’ of the Revd Joseph Brown (1730–1803), who appeared from that address on some thirty imprints between 1775 and 1800. Brown arrived in Southwark in 1767 as minister of the General Baptist congregation there, one of the oldest Baptist congregations in London.⁵ The membership was already in decline, and in 1771 Brown moved the congregation to new premises across the Thames in Bury Street, though he retained his business in Fair Street. In 1781, the congregation moved again, this time to Worship Street, near Finsbury Square, where the remnant of the original Horsleydown congregation joined with four other General Baptist congregations in constructing a common meeting place. John Evans (1767–1827), a former Particular Baptist turned Unitarian, became the primary minister at Worship Street in 1792, and by the following year had become a friend and correspondent of Mary Hays. Joseph Brown published a sermon by Evans in 1794 and one in 1799 by Sampson Kingsford (1740–1821), a prominent General Baptist/Unitarian elder in Canterbury who was also a friend of Mary Hays.⁶

Given his connection with Worship Street, it is likely Brown had become a Unitarian by the 1780s; yet he appears to have associated easily at that time with the Calvinists in the nearby ‘Blackfield’s’ Particular Baptist chapel in Gainsford Street. That was the chapel which Hays and her family attended during the ministries of John Dolman (c. 1754–c. 1764), John Langford (1765–1777), and Michael Brown (1778–1820), the latter becoming, like Joseph Brown, Evans, and Hays, a Unitarian by the late 1780s. In 1776 Joseph Brown published Langford’s A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which was sold in Brown’s shop as well as by Langford in the vestry of ‘the meeting, in Black’s Fields, Horsly-Down, Southwark’. In 1783 Brown also printed and sold two editions of John Dunkin, Jr’s, The Divinity of the Son of God, and the Complete Atonement for Sin, by the Sufferings and Death of Jesus Christ, proved from the Word of God (1783),⁷ a critique of a pamphlet by the Unitarian theologian and scientist, Joseph Priestley. As the title page notes, Dunkin’s tract was composed ‘for the benefit of a widow’, the widow being Dunkin’s next-door neighbour and mother-in-law, Elizabeth Judge Hays.

Four other Baptist booksellers in Southwark are worth noting: John Robinson (fl. 1743–1772), Joseph Dermer (fl. 1773–1790), William Button (1754–1821), and William Lepard (fl. 1765–1798). Robinson operated from the Globe and Bible, Horsleydown New-Stairs, in Dockhead, a five-minute walk due north from Hays’s homes along Shad Thames and Gainsford Street. Robinson was a member of the Particular Baptist congregation in Carter Lane, attending services with George Keith, a printer/bookseller who had apprenticed Joseph Johnson (Hays’s future publisher) in the 1750s. Prior to 1745, however, Robinson had been a member of the Particular Baptist congregation in Unicorn Yard, Southwark, the same congregation of which Joseph Dermer was a member and where William Button also attended for a time in the early 1770s.⁸ Dermer’s dates and location (Horsleydown New-Stairs) suggest that he succeeded John Robinson, though none of his imprints provide that information. William Button grew up in the Carter Lane congregation and received his education at John Collett Ryland’s Academy in Northampton in the late 1760s. Button’s classmates included John Dunkin, Jr, and his brother Christopher Dunkin, as well as William Hills, another member of the Gainsford Street chapel whose brother, Thomas Hills (1753–1803), married Sarah Hays (1756–1836), the sister of Mary Hays. In 1774 a group seceded from Carter Lane and formed a new Baptist meeting in Dean Street, Southwark, choosing Button as their initial pastor, a position he retained until 1815.

In the late 1770s Button opened his first bookshop in Charles Street, Southwark, just to the south of Fair Street. In 1787 he moved to Newington Causeway, about a thirty-minute walk from Gainsford Street, and in 1793 to 24 Paternoster Row, where in 1815 he printed and sold Hays’s The Brothers, a moral drama aimed at working-class readers.⁹ Hays might also in her youth have visited the bookshop of William Lepard (d. 1805), who operated in Tooley Street, Southwark, from 1765 to 1782, prior to his move to Newgate Street, where he remained for another twenty years. Like John Robinson, Lepard was also a member of the Baptist congregation in Carter Lane; he appeared as a seller on nine imprints with Robinson in 1765 and 1766 and on eleven imprints (eight titles) between 1782 and 1788, the latter all composed by Robert Robinson (1735–1790), the controversial Baptist minister at St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, and a family friend and correspondent of Mary Hays throughout the 1780s. William Lepard’s daughter, Ann, was Mary Hays’s closest friend during her teenage years and appears on several occasions in Hays’s correspondence with Eccles.¹⁰

‘The idea of being free’: the move to Kirby Street, 1795

By the early 1790s, Hays had rejected the Calvinism of the Particular Baptists and become a ‘rational Christian’, worshiping among the Unitarians at Salters’ Hall and Essex Street, as well as with John Evans at Worship Street and enjoying stimulating intellectual conversations generated by tracts and sermons composed by her newly acquired Unitarian friends, even composing one tract herself, a response to Gilbert Wakefield’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792). In late 1794, Hays added William Godwin to her circle of radical acquaintances. Though his conversations generally resisted theological discussions, Godwin moved easily within Unitarian circles at that time. Hays borrowed Political Justice from Godwin in the autumn of 1794, about a year before she left her family in Southwark and took rooms in Ann Cole’s house at 30 Kirby Street. Hays remained there until 1800, when she moved with Cole, a single woman who had assumed her father’s business as a printer and engraver after his death in 1794, to a new residence at 22 Hatton Garden. Hays confessed to Godwin that her move to Kirby Street was largely precipitated by her mother’s fear that Hays was having a negative influence over her youngest sister Marianna (1773–1797), and that the move had left Hays ‘more exposed & less assured’.¹¹ Overall, however, Hays was satisfied that her decision to leave home was firmly grounded in

the idea of being free, a wish to break by the necessity of greater of exertion … certain fatal, connected, trains of thinking, a desire of strengthening my mind by standing alone, & of relieving the relations I love of the burthen of my wayward fancies, also, I will own, a latent hope of enjoying, occasionally, more of the intercourse & conversation that pleases me.¹²

Godwin, Wollstonecraft, the novelist and children’s author Eliza Fenwick (1764–1840), and Elizabeth Hays (also a novelist) would provide much of that ‘intercourse & conversation’ during a time of great ‘exertion’ and ‘strengthening’ of Hays’s mind.¹³

Private assistance from friends like Godwin in acquiring reading materials for personal pleasure was not difficult for Hays to attain, but for a project as bold as Female Biography, she faced a more difficult task. If she wanted any degree of regularity in acquiring printed sources for her grand project, she would have to procure them through more accessible venues—subscription and circulating libraries and, if necessary, second-hand bookshops. Many of these establishments, some with elegant reading rooms by the 1790s, were convenient to Hays from her quarters in Hatton Garden, providing her access to a public room that augmented her private room in Ann Cole’s house, a room from which the now ‘free’ Mary Hays could satisfy her demands for stimulating social intercourse and intellectual pursuits.¹⁴ The use of a circulating or subscription library may explain a reference by Elizabeth Hays to her sister in early January 1796 in which she thanks Mary for her loan of Rousseau’s Emilius and Sophia: or, A New System of Education, which appeared in a four-volume set in London in 1783 and was carried by nearly all the circulating libraries at that time:

I read Rousseau yesterday from morn, till night & have return’d you the two first volumes—the others I have not quite done with—that it has interested me I need not say, the rapidity with which I have pursued it, is a sufficient proof—the farther I proceed, the more I am charm’d—yet I find in it a thousand things to disapprove … It has enervated me beyond measure—but this will soon be over, my mind will shortly regain its elasticity—I return to Helvetius with new vigour.¹⁵

Elizabeth’s comments make clear the books were on loan to her from her sister, but her promise to return them quickly implies the volumes may have been borrowed from a circulating library, which generally had specific time limits for borrowed books.¹⁶ Reading day and night to satisfy the demands of a quick return, as Elizabeth Hays confesses in her letter, was a common activity for subscribers to circulating libraries.¹⁷

Thus, Hays’s move to Kirby Street appears to have been only partially motivated by a desire to be free from tensions with her mother in Gainsford Street and to embrace new friendships with Godwin and others in his circle. Her ‘idea of being free’ also included a search for a suitable ‘room’, both private and public, in which she could satisfy her enquiries in religion, philosophy, gender equality, and women’s history. These four areas of study merged in 1796 into what would become an even greater pursuit in Hays’s life and career—a feminist interpretation of women’s lives and life-writing, a motive that lies at the heart of both Hays’s novels Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799), as well as her biographical accounts of Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith. Personal experience and informal sources (private letters) were essential to these works, but the vast scope of Female Biography would require the use of formal sources found primarily in public, subscription, and circulating libraries.

Dr Williams’s Library and London’s subscription libraries

Three likely venues for Hays’s acquisition of source material for Female Biography were Dr Williams’s Library, located at that time in Red Cross Street, in the City of London, and London’s two subscription libraries, the original London Library and Westminster Library, both of which opened in the 1780s within walking distance of Hatton Garden. Dr Williams’s Library was organized in 1729 to serve as a depository of books and materials for the benefit of ministers and ministerial students within the three primary dissenting denominations at that time in England—Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists. By the 1790s, the library’s trustees and members included numerous Unitarians, a trend Hays would have found welcoming. Though theology was its primary purpose, the library possessed extensive holdings in philosophy, history, and literature, useful areas of research for Hays’s Female Biography. The library’s 1801 Catalogue noted that the desire of the Librarian (at that time, Thomas Morgan) and Trustees was to enlarge the library’s holdings through gifts from the public, for ‘it would certainly be honourable to the Dissenters, and conducive to the interests of Literature among them, that a Public Library, chiefly, though not exclusively, appropriated to their use, should consist of a numerous Collection of valuable and well chosen books’.¹⁸ The titles in the Catalogue were not numbered, but with some thirty titles on average per page (377 total pages), the library’s holdings in 1801 would have exceeded 10,000 titles.

It is unlikely that Hays could have been a formal member of Dr Williams’s Library, but the possibility of dissenting women having access to the reading room may have occurred in the 1790s, especially given the prominent connections with the library by members of two prominent Unitarian families in London at that time and friends of Hays, the Aikins and Barbaulds. Hays would have been familiar with the library from her youth as a Southwark Baptist, and, given the broadly worded gender-free statement in the Catalogue about access to the library—’All persons shall be admitted during the appointed hours [10–3, Tuesday–Friday], upon producing to the Librarian a written order from one of the trustees, specifying their names, places of abode, and proper additions’¹⁹—it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Hays could have acquired the necessary recommendations for admittance as a reader. Whatever the case, we know with certainty that she made at least one visit to the library, on 11 December 1807, to sign as a witness for the birth entry of Orlando Fenwick (1798–1816), Eliza Fenwick’s son, in the Birth Register kept by the library at that time, a determined statement on the part of both Fenwick and Hays as late as 1807 to maintain a decided connection with religious dissent.²⁰

Besides Dr Williams’s Library, similar collections of materials resided in London’s two subscription libraries, the London Library and the Westminster Library. The original London Library was founded in 1785 and operated primarily from Ludgate Street before moving in 1801 to 108 Hatton Garden, just down the street from Hays’s rooms at 22 Hatton Garden. The Westminster Library was established in 1789 in Greek Street; after moves to St Martin’s Street and Panton Square, the library finally settled in 1804 at 44 Jermyn Street.²¹ The first catalogue of the London Library was published in March 1786 and contained 585 titles comprising 1,527 volumes, of which only a small proportion related to popular or contemporary literature. By 1791, the subscribers’ list had grown to 127, with the number of titles rising to 747 (1,870 volumes).²² The 1798 Catalogue of the London Library contained nearly 1,100 titles (some 2,800 volumes), including 22 works by Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian minister, scientist, and friend and mentor of Mary Hays.²³ The first catalogue of the Westminster Library appeared in 1803, listing 1,695 titles (4,088 volumes); by 1808, the year of the next printed catalogue, the Library’s holdings had grown to nearly 2,900 titles comprising some 6,800 volumes, more than twice that of the London Library.²⁴ By 1817 the London Library appears to have been subsumed into the Westminster Library, which was itself on the brink of closing, their fates eventually sealed by the sale of the remaining stock of the combined libraries in 1821.²⁵

Even though the holdings of London’s large circulating libraries dwarfed those of the two subscription libraries, the social, political, and religious prominence of subscribers to the subscription libraries, as well as a ‘plethora of extremely valuable material’ residing among their collections, placed them, as Keith Manley argues, ‘above the common run of commercial circulating libraries’.²⁶ Subscribers were primarily middle- to upper-class men and women whose annual subscription of one guinea covered the expenses of the library and the acquisition of books and other materials. Lawyers, doctors, ministers, and other professional men (many of whom were Unitarians) dominate the list of subscribers to the London and Westminster Libraries in the 1790s.²⁷ The 1791 Catalogue of the London Library also includes four women among its subscribers, providing some basis for the possibility that Hays may have added her name to that list at some point.²⁸

Whether Hays was a subscriber in the late 1790s is not known, but she may have joined the Westminster Library at some point during the period of her research for Female Biography. If so, Hays would have found herself surrounded by numerous friends and acquaintances, most of whom she came to know during that decade and who would have maintained ties as well to Dr Williams’s Library. These included Joseph Johnson (1738–1809), the former Particular Baptist who published four titles by Hays between 1798 and 1807; Andrew Kippis (1725–1795) and Abraham Rees (1743–1825), Presbyterian ministers in London who also served as tutors in the 1780s and early 1790s at the Hoxton Academy and then at the New College, Hackney; and George Gregory (1754–1808), an Anglican minister associated with the Foundling Hospital who was best known for his work as an editor for Kippis’s Biographia Britannica as well as Johnson’s Analytical Review; the latter periodical published seven reviews by Hays between 1796 and 1798. Gregory’s sister, Eliza, was also a friend and correspondent of Hays and may have acquired books for her through the assistance of her brother.²⁹ Along with the Gregorys, Hays was acquainted with Alexander Geddes (1737–1802), a Roman Catholic biblical commentator, translator, and supporter of the French Revolution who also contributed to the Analytical Review in the 1790s. The prominent physician John Coakley Lettsom (1744–1815) was known to Hays as early as 1780 when he served as the primary physician for her fiancé during his fatal illness that year. In the 1790s Hays met another subscriber, John Towill Rutt (1760–1841), a friend of Godwin, biographer of Priestley, and distant relation by marriage to Crabb Robinson, all of whom moved in the same Unitarian circles as Hays.³⁰ One other subscriber who may have borrowed books for Hays was Thomas Richard Underwood (1772–1835), a watercolourist, geologist, and proprietor of the Royal Institution, who resided with his father at 43 Lamb’s Conduit Street, only a short distance from Hatton Garden.³¹

In 1801 the probability of a connection between Hays and the London Library increased significantly when the library’s collections moved to 108 Hatton Garden, the home of the dissenting engraver and writer Charles Taylor (1765–1823), someone easily known to Hays through her wide connections within London’s dissenting community. Taylor came from a prominent family of engravers and was for many years a member of the Independent congregation in Fetter Lane. He published several books on literature and religion, most notably an edition of Calmet’s Dictionary of the Holy Bible. Hays’s residence was at the upper end of Hatton Garden near the corner with Charles Street, only a short walk from Taylor’s residence at the lower end of the street near Holborn and not far from the Architectural Library at 56 High Holborn operated by Taylor’s brother, Josiah (1761–1834). Ann Cole’s father had been an engraver like the Taylors, and, given her role as landlady to Mary Hays, it is likely the Coles were dissenters as well and thus could easily have had religious and professional connections with the Taylors, connections that would have proved beneficial to Hays at this time. Charles Taylor began revising Calmet’s Dictionary in 1797, a year after his younger brother Isaac (1759–1829), also a prominent engraver, settled as the Independent minister at Colchester. His son, Isaac Taylor, Jr (1787–1865), a popular religious writer, reminisced about a visit to his uncle’s home not long after the arrival of the London Library. He noted that the rooms were ‘crammed with books—up-stairs, down-stairs, and in the hall and passages … books of all sizes and sorts: … books in piles, that had slid down from chairs or stools, and had rested unmoved until a deep deposit of dust had got a lodgment upon them!’³² The library’s long hours of operation, its accessible though somewhat chaotic reading room, and its provision for taking books home would have suited Hays well as she composed her six volumes of biographies in the early years of the new century.³³

London’s circulating libraries: some likely choices for Hays

Far more pervasive in their presence and influence than Dr Williams’s Library and London’s two subscription libraries were the more than sixty circulating libraries operating at one time or another in London in the last half of the eighteenth century.³⁴ When Hays moved to Kirby Street in 1795, there were no less than thirty in operation, with another dozen opening during the years she worked on Female Biography, more than enough to enable Hays to access the printed materials she needed for her work. The explosion of circulating libraries in the metropolis after 1770 primarily occurred outside the boundary of the old City of London, with libraries operating in Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury, Oxford Street, Soho, Mayfair, Chelsea, Marylebone, Westminster, along the Strand and Holborn and across the Thames into Lambeth, Southwark, Clapham, and Deptford, areas of London that Hays frequented often between 1777 and 1813, the years of her greatest activity as a reader, writer, commentator, researcher, and teacher.

To acquire historical and biographical works about important female figures in the history of France, a central part of her work in Female Biography, Hays might have turned to Dulau and Company, a French circulating library in the Soho (c. 1799–1800), or William Earle’s long-established foreign-language library that moved from the Soho to 47 Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, in 1799, which later became Earle and Hemet Circulating Library. If she was still inclined toward dissenting booksellers, she could easily have visited the shop of Thomas Gardiner, a prominent member of the Baptist congregation meeting at that time in Keppel Street (what is now the location of the Senate House, University of London). Gardiner operated a circulating library in the early years of the nineteenth century from his premises in 19 (and later 20) Princes Street, Cavendish Square.

A few of the circulating libraries within walking distance of Hays’s residences between 1795 and 1813 were operated by women. Mary Lowe, at 1 Pall Mall, in Westminster (1794–99), became a Bookseller to the Queen in 1797. Even closer was the circulating library of a Mrs Lynott and John Lynott at 1 Grenville Street, Brunswick Square (1800–1809). Another option was Joseph Wenman’s circulating library at 144 Fleet Street, which after his death continued under Mary and Elizabeth Wenman (possibly his daughters), and then with Edward Hodgson, before closing in 1797. After 1803, when Hays lived for a time in Camberwell and turned her attention to works for adolescent readers, she could have walked to Mrs Johnson’s Circulating Library at 12 Black Prince Row, Walworth, or to Omer’s Circulating Library in Deptford, where Elizabeth Omer (1784–1867), a dissenting printer and bookseller, worked with her father until 1808, her husband until 1812, and then on her own until 1822.³⁵ After her removal to Islington in 1806, where Hays composed the last two volumes of her Historical Dialogues for Young Persons while tutoring three of her nieces in 1807–8, Hays might have found helpful reading materials at the Juvenile Library at 259 Oxford Street operated by Lucy Peacock between 1793 and 1810.³⁶ Peacock’s library competed with a similar venture operated by Mary Jane Godwin, William Godwin’s second wife, at 41 Skinner Street, where Eliza Fenwick worked c. 1807–8 (the time period in which she and Hays visited Dr Williams’s Library), though neither of these juvenile libraries circulated books. Between 1809 and 1813, while living with the family of her brother, Thomas Hays, at Wandsworth Common, Mary Hays may have maintained her voracious reading habits by visits to Batten’s Circulating Library on nearby Clapham Common.³⁷

Annual subscriptions to the circulating libraries were usually set at one guinea, with quarterly subscriptions at four shillings and some offering daily loans of books (with a sufficient amount left on deposit). Since no one library owned all the books Hays needed, quarterly subscriptions would have enabled her to work in and borrow from multiple libraries over a span of several years, moving from library to library until she had accomplished her desired end. Typical operating hours ranged from 9 am to 8 pm, Monday through Saturday, allowing Hays plenty of time to work in the library’s reading room (if one were available) or pick up a new set of books. Despite her connections with numerous members of the two subscription libraries discussed previously, Hays would have found the impressive holdings of London’s circulating libraries, along with their easily accessible locations, flexible subscription options, and ample opening times, good venues for her reading and research.

Among the large circulating libraries that flourished near Hays’s rooms in Kirby Street and Hatton Garden was the ‘British Library’ at 132 Strand, operated by John Bell (1745–1831), a bookseller, printer, publisher, newspaper proprietor, and type-founder.³⁸ Bell gained a reputation for republishing classical authors in cheap, multi-volume editions, boasting on the title page of his c. 1778 Catalogue that his subscribers could access some 50,000 volumes in twenty-three categories and three languages—English, Italian, and French.³⁹ In his ‘Enlarged Plan’, inserted near the front of his Catalogue, Bell informed his readers (and potential subscribers such as Mary Hays) that he had expanded his Library upon ‘more useful principles’ designed to make the reading and acquisition of books (and thus general knowledge) more accessible to people in all walks of life, especially those whose financial situation, like that of Hays, required strict attention to price, quantity, and accessibility of the library’s reading materials. ‘The British Museum and other Libraries or public institutions’, he wrote, ‘may contain every publication, but then the mode of accommodation to individuals, is on so confined a Plan, as to render it almost useless; and the application to private collections, if too often repeated, may put friendship too much to the test’. To ‘obviate these inconveniences’ and ‘facilitate the advantages of Literature’, Bell wished to create a circulating library that would ‘enable every reader to form a proper judgment of Books before he becomes a purchaser of them, and to accommodate those who do not chuse to be at the expence of purchasing many new works, altho’ they may wish to read all of them’.⁴⁰ Given the improbability of Hays acquiring permission to read in the British Museum at that time (her reputation as a Jacobin novelist and friend of Godwin and Wollstoncraft would have been sufficiently damaging for a suitable reference letter), Hays would have found Bell’s approach more welcoming.

Circulating libraries, especially the smaller ones and those in the provinces, were frequently criticized in the eighteenth century for their role in promoting novel reading, a pastime many thought frivolous and even dangerous to one’s morals, especially for young female readers.⁴¹ Modern scholarship has focused much attention upon the role fiction played in the success of circulating libraries, especially in promoting women authors and attracting women readers.⁴² However, as Paul Kaufman rightly noted half a century ago, the surviving catalogues of many circulating libraries, especially the larger ones in London, focused on other categories of reading, such as history, divinity, travels, and miscellanies, far more than novels, romances, plays, and poetry.⁴³ Kaufman argues that, as the century progressed, circulating libraries with their spacious reading rooms began to replace the coffee houses as ‘not only centers for exchange of news and gossip but for discussion of the issues of the hour. They were thus civilizing progressive influences for thousands of Englishmen of all but the lowest classes’ and promoters of ‘general cultural progress’.⁴⁴ George Cawthorn’s c. 1800 advertisement reinforces Kaufman’s claims, boasting that his reading room in the Strand afforded ‘Gentlemen of leisure’ who were ‘fond of literary and political information’ ‘a suitable opportunity of enjoying a free communication and converse and of consulting works of a greater magnitude and value than are generally to be met with in one collection. Here the Scholar, intent on any particular enquiry, will be enabled to consult such books as are necessary to his purpose, and to avail himself of the opinions of men of erudition.’⁴⁵

Though obviously not a ‘Gentleman of leisure’, Mary Hays had for some time viewed herself as a ‘Scholar’, invoking an inclusive reading of a term and an activity that was largely reserved for men at that time. As James Raven makes clear, however, women had been frequent visitors and subscribers to London’s circulating libraries since the 1740s, and for Hays by the late 1790s to appropriate Bell’s British Library into a space for scholarly research seems entirely fitting to her character and ambition.⁴⁶ Given the nature and quality of her work in central London between 1795 and 1803, Mary Hays benefited from the ‘progressive influences’ of these circulating libraries, indulging herself in their impressive collections in history, antiquities, biographies, and memoirs, the four areas required for her bio graphical and historical research.

By the late 1780s, Bell faced increasing competition from several other London booksellers who operated circulating libraries or maintained massive inventories of second-hand books at cheap prices. Among these book - sellers were Thomas Hookham (1764, with various successors among his descendants through 1871), Thomas Vernor (fl. 1766–1793), John Boosey (fl. 1773–1791), William Lane (fl. 1774–1814), David Ogilvy (fl. 1789–1807), and James Lackington (fl. 1776–1798). Boosey, a Calvinist dissenter who became a follower of Robert Sandeman around 1770, operated his library at 39 King Street, Cheapside, possessing ‘upwards of Fifteen Thousand Volumes, English, French, Italian, &c’, according to his c. 1787 Catalogue.⁴⁷ Boosey’s library closed in 1791, but his successor, Richard Cheesewright, operated ‘The City Library’ from the same address through 1811. William Lane advertised that he held ‘upwards of Five Hundred Thousand Volumes in All Classes of Literature’ for loan or sale at the Minerva Press and Library in Leadenhall Street, of which some 17,000 appeared in his c. 1798 Catalogue (he was one of the sellers on the title page of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy in 1795).⁴⁸ Another likely place for Hays to have read and borrowed books was David Ogilvy’s London and Westminster Circulating Library at 315 Holborn, which opened as a subsidiary of his bookselling business in January 1797. Ogilvy’s borrowing policies may have been particularly useful to Hays, for he also allowed for daily book loans even for a non-subscriber, simply requiring the borrower to leave the value of the book(s) on deposit, a practice common to many of the libraries. In his notice ‘To the Public’, Ogilvy declared that ‘no Work of Repute, whether new or old, shall be withheld’, even works by controversial women writers, for among the 5,573 titles listed in his Catalogue that year was a copy of Hays’s Emma Courtney and two works by Wollstonecraft.⁴⁹ Hays could also have turned to the circulating library of Robert Dutton (a former librarian for Lane) in Birchin Lane and then Gracechurch Street, who assumed control of the library of Vernor and Hood in 1796. Thomas Vernor (d. 1793), a former Particular Baptist who worshiped with Boosey in the Sandemanian congregation (first at St Martin’s le Grand and then at Paul’s Alley, London), opened his library in 1767, at that time in partnership with John Chater, another member of the same Sandemanian congregation.⁵⁰

If Hays was looking to purchase books on her own, which her income during these years would have allowed, she had several options. Most of the circulating libraries were bookshops as well, offering titles for loan or sell. One shop not far from her Gainsford Street home was that of James Annereau, most likely a dissenting bookseller operating on Borough Street in Southwark, an establishment Hays may have known prior to 1795. Annereau appeared as a seller on the title page of the 1796 London edition of Lady Russell’s Letters, one of the works used by Hays for Female Biography.⁵¹ Hays’s best resource for book purchases, however, was the ‘Temple of the Muses’ in Finsbury Square, where the on-again off-again Methodist James Lackington built his massive bookstore for his extensive holdings in second-hand books (in French as well as English), easily challenging the supremacy of Bell, Lane, and Hookham as an establishment holding a large percentage of the sources, many for sale at inexpensive prices, that Hays would need to complete her work on Female Biography.⁵²

Though no records exist to demonstrate that Hays was a subscriber to any particular library, surviving catalogues provide substantial evidence that London’s circulating and subscription libraries and bookshops held all the sources required by Hays for Female Biography. Of the approximately 110 works upon which she drew for information, 103 can be located in one or more of the nine libraries and two bookstores mentioned above, with 78 appearing in at least two of these establishments. In fact, all but two of the titles can be found in the five largest establishments operating at that time: Hookham (61 titles, with 31 in the c. 1785 Catalogue, 13 in the c. 1791 and c. 1800 French Catalogue, and another 17 in the 1829 Catalogue), Lackington (48 titles in 1793 [vol. 2 of the Catalogue], 1797 [vol. 2], and 1799 [vol. 1]), Lane (43 titles in his c. 1798 Catalogue), Bell (36 titles in his c. 1778 Catalogue), and Boosey (36 titles in his c. 1787 Catalogue).⁵³ Of the remaining establishments, nineteen titles appear in the 1801 Catalogue for Dr Williams’s Library; eighteen in Annereau’s 1800 Catalogue; seventeen each in the catalogues for Ogilvy (1797), the London Library (1791), and the combined sale catalogue of the London-Westminster Libraries (1821); and four titles in Vernor’s Catalogue (1788).⁵⁴ Five titles, including Biographia Brittanica, Robertson’s History of Ancient Greece and his History of Scotland, Rollin’s Ancient History, and Plutarch’s Lives, appeared in eight of the eleven establishments. Seven held the following five titles: Biographical Dictionary, Hume’s History of England, Letters from the Marchioness de Sevigne, Rowe’s The Life of Mrs. [Elizabeth Singer] Rowe, and Voltaire’s Complete Works. After these groups, the divisions were fairly predictable: five titles appeared in six establishments, eleven in five, four in four, eighteen in three, thirty-one in two, and twenty-four in only one of the establishments, with Hookham’s circulating library serving as the lone owner of thirteen of those titles. Hays could have accomplished her research mission by utilizing only a portion of these establishments. Hookham, Lackington, Lane, Bell, and Boosey provided her with 100 of the 103 titles; when Lackington is removed and replaced by Dr Williams’s Library, the number of titles only declines to ninety-seven. Even the smallest grouping of five catalogues produces ninety-two titles; four catalogues eighty-nine; three catalogues seventy-six; and two catalogues sixty-eight of the titles used by Hays for Female Biography, a clear demonstration of Cawthorn’s declaration that in his library (and others discussed in this essay) ‘the Scholar, intent on any particular enquiry, will be enabled to consult such books as are necessary to his purpose’.⁵⁵

Given her options, Hays’s best choice was Hookham’s Circulating Library, where by 1800 she would have found sixty per cent of the titles she needed for Female Biography. Thomas Hookham, Sr (c. 1739–1819) opened his bookshop and library in Hanover Square in 1764. He moved his library to 147 New Bond Street (near the corner of Bruton Street) in the 1780s and in 1792 settled at 15 Old Bond Street, where the library remained until 1871.⁵⁶ By 1790, Hookham’s collections easily rivalled those of Bell, Lane, and Boosey, and by 1800 stood second only to Lackington, Allen, and Co. A New Catalogue of Hookham’s Circulating Library, published around 1784, boasted that 40,000 books could be accessed in his establishment in eighteen categories and several languages, a sum that stood at 100,000 volumes by the mid-1790s.⁵⁷ In 1794, Hookham expanded his library’s services through the addition of an elegant reading room at his Old Bond Street location, creating a lavish space where his subscribers, predominantly aristocrats and members of the professional classes, could browse current periodicals and access a wide assortment of titles in English, French, and Italian. Mary Hays later became a friend and correspondent of Thomas Hookham, Jr’s wife, Mary Ann Starling Hookham (1801–1876), which may explain why Hookham’s 1829 Catalogue lists copies for loan or sale of Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), The Victim of Prejudice (1799), Female Biography (1803), and Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (1821).⁵⁸

Conclusion

By the summer of 1800, Mary Hays experienced a degree of social isolation and emotional turmoil that left lasting scars on her psyche and public face. Her close friend, Mary Wollstonecraft, was now deceased, her relationship with Godwin strained, her reputation badly tarnished at the hands of Richard Polwhele, Charles Lloyd, and Elizabeth Hamilton, and her new best male friend, a young Crabb Robinson (1775–1867), was on his way to Germany for five years. Her loss of the vibrant social life and intellectual discourse she had enjoyed at the height of her involvement with Godwin and his circle of friends in the mid-1790s, however, was not replaced solely by isolation, nor did she seek isolation as an end in itself. Instead, as a means of overcoming her personal hardships, Hays focused on her family, her research, and her writing, resulting in the most productive period of her professional life. Once secluded in her rooms in Kirby Street and then in Hatton Garden and Camberwell, her time and space were exclusively her own. Socially and intellectually free and surrounded by an assortment of libraries and friends willing to assist her, Hays commenced the new century by completing one of the most arduous and comprehensive research programmes ever attempted by a British woman.

This essay has demonstrated the accessibility and feasibility of the sources Hays required for Female Biography, nearly all of which resided in libraries and bookshops within close proximity to her various residences and whose subscriptions and prices were within the bounds of Hays’s limited finances. Other questions concerning the process by which Hays derived her initial knowledge of these sources remain unanswered: How did she determine that the more than one hundred sources she needed for Female Biography were the correct ones? Did she employ a process of elimination, in which multiple sources would have been examined in an effort to ascertain the right one? If that is true, then it is likely she examined twice the number of sources she actually used in Female Biography. Given the abundance of titles in the catalogues pertinent to her topic, such a number would not have been out of reach, further evidence for the necessity of her use of subscription and circulating libraries to procure her sources and a suitable ‘room’ in which to pursue her studies, both requiring public and private spaces. Even the number of women whose biographies comprise Female Biography was dependent upon Hays’s process of research, for how could she have known from the commencement of her research that there were three hundred women worthy of biographical accounts? That would presuppose she already knew of these women and, as a corollary, may have already been familiar with many of the sources she needed for her project prior to her move to Kirby Street in 1795, an assertion that adds further weight to Hays’s autodidactism during her early years in Southwark. Thus, it seems likely Hays began her project with a substantial list of women and sources previously gleaned from her wide reading in history and biography in books she may have owned but most likely borrowed from friends and family or from the subscription and circulating libraries discussed in this essay, reading that began in the late 1770s and reached its fruition with the publication of Female Biography in 1803.

These possibilities illumine the scope and method of Hays’s research in ways not previously examined. Hays’s remarkable productivity was facilitated by an independent income, freedom from daily mundane domestic duties, and a set of public and private rooms where she could read, research, and compose her biographies, with one of those public rooms (the London Library) less than a thousand feet away from her residence between 1801 and 1803, the years of her most intense work. Though we cannot know with certainty what libraries Hays visited or those to which she may have subscribed, we can be certain that Hays could not have completed Female Biography without acquiring books from these libraries. The use of her own personal library and those of her family and well-connected friends, the possible purchase of selected texts through her own funds, and the use of subscription and circulating libraries in central London not only provide feasible solutions to the questions about Hays and her sources but also offer a blueprint that may be applied to other women whose life writings in the following decades would build upon the foundation established by Mary Hays.

Footnotes