At the Margins of the Gentry: The Library of William Clarke, 1688

Abstract Few seventeenth-century library lists survive for lesser gentlemen or the ‘middling sort’. The inventory published here comprises 200 books owned by the Somerset attorney William Clarke at his death in 1688. It reveals the working and leisure library of an attorney and steward of estates, who became a JP, hoped to be an MP, and aspired to be a gentleman. The library is, in one respect, utterly (and valuably) representative, for the books are mostly steady sellers published in multiple editions; but, in another regard, exhibits a precocious taste in literature, English and Continental. The library exhibits the workaday, self-improving, risqué, romantic, and political. This article sets the context of Clarke’s avocations, as a Whig canvasser for the first earl of Shaftesbury, and as steward and trustee for the poet and libertine the earl of Rochester and his wife Elizabeth Malet, thereby illuminating Rochester’s cultural landscape.