Reading by the Book: Ben Browne and the Reader as Improver

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the evidence of reading in a sizeable rural book collection, assembled in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Cumbria by a father and son, Old and Young Ben Browne. Their collection, perhaps the only one of its kind to survive, offers a remarkable insight into the intellectual habits of a middling farming family very far from the metropolitan elites who have dominated the history of reading. The library, containing a wide range of literary, historical, and religious works, provides a test case for the ways we think and talk about amateur readers and the marks they leave behind. The Brownes's books show some readerly habits of their time, traditions of textual improvement, and commonplacing. They also contain evidence of the indexing of works by theme, often in ways that might seem reductive or utilitarian. The article uses the material evidence of marginalia and inscription to interrogate the distinction between reading and misreading and asks what such a library might tell us about amateur domestic culture and the mixed literacies within a remote rural community.