Wal Kirsop, Academic Responsibilities, and the Liberality of Communication

In July 2010, Wal Kirsop gave a talk at the annual seminar of the Johnson Society of Australia on "Boulard the Bibliomaniac and Johnson's Rambler." I didn't hear the talk, but Wal gave me a copy of the printed version of his paper. When I was re-reading it today, I was struck by this peroration:

If a summary conclusion is needed, it is that, far from being a sad victim of an overwhelming mania, Boulard was a misunderstood prophet of intellectual entrepreneurship and even liberation. His is not perhaps a voice for our own dreary and boring managerial time, but I like to think that some day it will [be] heard again. In the meantime his affinity with Johnson—whose definition of academic duties and responsibilities is still posted on my office door—should reassure us that we are somewhere on the right path.

Note that Wal doesn't quote Johnson's definition of academic duties and responsibilities. Perhaps, if he used slides during his lecture, he may have shown it at this point, but I doubt he did that. Instead, in a footnote to his paper, the reader is directed to David Fairer's "J. D. Fleeman: A Memoir" (Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 48 (1995): 23–24). Fairer, in turn, provides the reference for the original publication of Johnson's definition, which was as an appendix to John Moir, Hospitality. A Discourse Occasioned by Reading His Majesty’s Letter in Behalf of the Emigrant French Clergy, in St. Dionis Back Church, May 26, 1793 (London: Rivington and Owen, 1793): 42–43 (ESTC T219725).

Presumably, Wal thought everyone should read the Fairer's memoir as well as Johnson's definition. Those who wish to read Fairer's memoir and Johnson's entire "Fragment" will find it reprinted here. Johnson's definition is quoted in a few places online (as here), but Moir's Hospitality is not available, so I have illustrated this post with images of the title-page and the final page of text from the Bodleian Library copy on ECCO.)

Having chased Wal's allusion back to Fairer's Memoir, I could offer the complete text of Johnson's definition to my readers, but I will, instead, just quote the parts of it that I think Wal had in mind (the rest is available via the link above):

An academick is a man supported at the public cost, and dignified with public honours, that he may attain and impart wisdom. He is maintained by the public, that he may study at leisure; he is dignified with honours, that he may teach with weight. The great duty therefore of an academick is diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication. Of him that is appointed to teach, the first business is to learn, an unintermitted attendance to reading must qualify him to be heard with profit. … For such service he can be fitted only by laborious study, and study therefore is the business of his life; the business which he cannot neglect without breaking a virtual contract with the community. Ignorance in other men may be censured as idleness, in an academick it must be abhorred as treachery.

"Diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication" captures nicely Wal's own "unintermitted" activities. In addition to what might be considered his formal scholarly publications—book-length studies, essays published in scholarly journals etc.—Wal's "liberality of communication" extended to scores of pamphlet publications, under the imprints of the Ancora and Chaskett Press, for Louis Green and Foxcroft lectures, among others. One indicator of the present managerial malaise that Wal identifies is that—regardless of the eminence of many of the authors of these Ancora and Chaskett Press publications, and the quality of their writing—none of them would be considered "Quality publications" by Monash, based on their flawed model of bibliometrics.

Although I hadn't read Johnson's definition of academic duties and responsibilities when I started this blog in June of 2009, it has long been a part of my own attempt to fulfil Johnson's ideal. Being a generation younger that Wal, my "liberality of communication" has taken the form of a blog, rather than printed pamphlets. It is likely that Wal's Ancora and Chaskett Press publications will long outlive any of my blog posts, but they are treated with equal contempt indifference by Monash. Nevertheless, like Wal, I will continue to be liberal in my communications.

(Given the long gap in my blog posts between mid-2023 and the start of 2026, close readers of this blog may wonder at this declaration. Close personal acquaintances, will not. All I will say here is that I was obliged to take a lot of leave to care for someone close to me who barely survived a series of traumatic brain injuries. I have struggled to regain both my scholarly and blog-posting momentum since then, and have not wanted to say even this much about my hiatus until I managed to make some progress. My immediate goal was to submit for publication at least two fresh articles (which I have now done) and to publish more than 27 posts in a year, which I succeeded in doing with my last post (28 being now my highest number of posts in a year, since 2011). Hopefully, I have not jinxed myself by offering this explanation, and that scholarly publishing and my blog-posting will continue to be regular in future!)

The Spedding Collection of Baconiana, 1916

Sadly, and as I explain below, "The Spedding Collection of Baconiana" is not the Patrick Spedding collection of books by and about Francis Bacon, but, rather, the rather more famous James Spedding collection of books by and about Francis Bacon, catalogued and offered for sale by Quaritch (inauspiciously) in the middle of WW1.

I feel a quite a bit of affinity with my childless kinsman, James. This is partly a matter of convoluted family connections, but I have a modest collection of books by Francis Bacon, including a handful of seventeenth-century editions, which in no way compares to the collection James assembled, but which did lead me to wonder to what extent our collections may have overlapped (answer: not much).

I started buying books by Bacon four decades ago. Bacon’s Essays are still among my favourite works. Indeed, Bacon’s Essays are partly responsible for my love of both the essay (as a genre) and, by association, seventeenth and eighteenth-century character writing too—the focus of another sub-collection of mine—but I think that the first book I read by Bacon was actually his unfinished utopia New Atlantis.

For what it is worth, I don’t think that New Atlantis is a particularly good utopia (sorry), but I really enjoyed the experience of reading it, in January of 1989, in (what was then) a lovely, newly-acquired 1639 folio edition, in its original binding. I spent a lot of money buying this folio from a Kenneth Hince; at a time when I was a poor student, living off Austudy, so I suppose must have sold a lot of my books in order to make the purchase. (Sometimes, I remember very nice books that I once had, and which I must have sold, and I wonder what possessed me to do sell them. This is an instance of the “what possessed me”!)

Anyway, since it is my ambition to have a collection of my books catalogued and offered for sale as a collection by Quaritch—or a dealer of a similar stature—I thought I’d buy this copy of James’s catalogue. If my ambition is ever realised it won’t, however, be for an armload of editions of Bacon’s essays, or his other works, it is will be my own working library of books by and about Eliza Haywood.

When I bought my copy of James’s catalogue, I wanted to see how our collections compared—not in terms of titles, rarity or value, but in terms of a working library, or scholar-collector-utility. This desire became even stronger once it occurred to me that, while James was focussed on the works of Bacon (mostly published two and a half centuries earlier), I was similarly focussed on the works of Haywood (mostly published two and a half centuries earlier).

Looking at James’s collection, I am struck by how many volumes are NQR—like my own! (Not my Bacon volumes, which are all unusually beautiful, but my Haywood volumes.) Just focussing on two titles in James's collection: the margins are "defective" on his 1625 Essayes and the title-page "mounted" on his 1632 edition; the portrait is “missing” from his 1627 and 1628 editions of Sylva Sylvarum (which contains his New Atlantis), ten pages are missing from a second copy of the 1628 edition, and the Dedication is missing from a copy of the 1670 edition. Indeed, a search of the catalogue for "missing" locates 25 instances in 24 pages!

I am not sure what benefit James’s kin got from the sale of his collection (see below), but it is a shame that none of his books came my way—even the many nineteeth-century editions—and that I have been only able to find the catalogue of his collection since I started looking for his books.

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James Spedding (born 26 June 1808), M.A. (Camb. 1834), younger brother of Thomas Story Spedding (see my post here), died on 9 March 1881, after he was hit by a cab crossing a street in London. Thirty-five years later, Bernard Quaritch offered "The Spedding Collection of Baconiana"—lightly "salted"— for GBP400 (the Cornell University copy is here; The Columbia University copy is here).

(The catalogue is undated but was issued by November 1916; library catalogue assertions asside, it appears in a list of "Recent Bibliographies" in The Library Journal, Vol. 41, no. 11 (November 1916): 860; here.)

As well as being undated, the catalogue is unnumbered. The opening description of the collection (transcribed below) states that it contains “363 vols, in 318”—which seems to mean 318 items in 363 volumes rather than 363 items in 318 volumes. (I am too lazy to go through the catalogue, number the items for myself, and count or estimate the total volumes; and ChatGPT seems to be not up to the task yet.)

The publisher of "The Spedding Collection of Baconiana" notes that "A few volumes have been added by me to strengthen the collection, but the great bulk is as Spedding owned it." The language here doesn’t quite gel: "a few volumes … added" implies rather less "salt" (books added by a bookseller to fill out a catalogue) than "the great bulk" leaves room for.

Here is the opening spiel:

BACON COLLECTION. The Collection of Books used by JAMES SPEDDING (1808–1881), the accomplished Editor of the Works of Sir Francis Bacon, as his working library in bringing out that "unsurpassable model of thorough and scholarlike editing." 363 vols. in 318, folio, 4to., and 8vo. v. d.

Price of the Collection, £400 net.

This collection should be an invaluable acquisition to a public library or to a collector of Baconiana, as it includes a number of the first and early editions of Bacon's Works and those of his contemporaries, some of them of great rarity, and also a valuable collection of books in Baconian literature. Additional value is given to many of the books from the fact that they are enriched with Spedding's MS. notes (all the cases in which they occur are not mentioned below). A few volumes have been added by me to strengthen the collection, but the great bulk is as Spedding owned it.

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If an institution had taken Quaritch's bait (as they should have done)—and bought the collection as a whole—it might now be an easy matter to identify how many works and volumes were in Spedding's working library. Unfortunately, it seems that, after a period, Quaritch broke up the collection and sold the items separately. Searching ESTC and Copac, it is possible to identify a few Spedding items, each at a different library:

The essaies of Sr Francis Bacon Knight (1612) [Baconiana, p.4, item 2] is at King's College, Cambridge [Keynes.A.08.20].

Francisci de Verulamio, Summi Angliæ Cancellarii, Instauratio magna (1620) [Baconiana, p.6, item 7] is at the Huntington Library [601344].

The remaines of the Right Honorable Francis Lord Verulam Viscount of St. Albanes (1648) [Baconiana, p.8, item 1] is at the University of Toronto, Library [bac B33 R45 1648] (online here).

A declaration of the demeanor and cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh (1618) [not in Baconiana] is at the Folger Shakespeare Library [STC 20653 Copy 1].

If, I future, I find any more Spedding items, I will add them here.