“We, the miners in this place” Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment Rebeca Araya Acosta This article addresses a pertinent case example of Popular Enlightenment: Westerkirk Parish Library. Dealing with the social aspect of reading, the argument is a twofold one. First, the library’s minute book reveals practices of what has been called the popularization of the Enlightenment - practices of disseminating Scottish Enlightenment texts and ideas into the larger rural community through the material sharing of books. Second, the article makes a methodological point. It argues that such a study of Westerkirk miners’ library and the founding committee’s minutes requires a media materialist perspective. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and recent reflections on the materiality of the archive, I foreground sources that at first sight do not seem to offer promising footholds for conventional literary scholarship - such as membership lists, accounts of items purchased or damaged, and lists of infractions. The emphasis is thereby placed on notational practices rather than on discourse. As such, I review two autobiographical attempts to frame Westerkirk and the adjacent sister library in Langholm in terms of what I call the ‘Enlightenment master plot’ and propose instead that we regard Westerkirk library as a dynamic archive of books held together by the meticulous actions of reader bureaucrats. Two steps for engaging with this archive are suggested as the interpretative keys for navigating ‘un-discursive’ material such as the Westerkirk minute book: specialization and inscription. Thinking of the minute book’s contents in terms of specialization and inscription forms the clue to understanding how ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment could be put in practice to start a library in an isolated community of antimony miners. 1. Introduction In February 1813, former miner John Moffat took two books home to his cottage in the valley of Glendinning, Dumfriesshire: The fifth volume of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0003 Rebeca Araya Acosta 38 Sacred Biography; or History of the Patriarchs by Church of Scotland minister Henry Hunter and Isaac Watts’ treatise The Improvement of the Mind (1741). Bearing in mind the context of the already existing rural consumption of spiritual literature and the fact that Hunter had served as secretary to the missionary literacy project of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge in the Highlands of Scotland, the choice of the first book is not surprising. However, the choice of Watts is somewhat unexpected and is therefore more interesting for the media materialist focus of this paper. A sequel to his didactic bestseller, Logick; or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725), Improvement of the Mind is equally concerned with instruction. In it, Watts dedicates two whole chapters to reading and the right choice of books. The Nonconformist educator imparts advice on how best to process reading material. There is talk of skimming first so as to obtain the “overall scheme” of the work, of synthesizing and abridging to enable revision, and even of “deal[ing] free[ly]” (Watts 1741: 61) with the authors of flawed schemes. All throughout Watts gives the impression of addressing the standard readership of students, educators, and the odd gentleman reader. The fact that he encourages his readers to furnish their minds rather than their libraries suggests that Watts suspected higher-end consumers among them. The same could be said of his notion of readerly sociability. Referring to reading in groups as an aid to comprehension, he paints a picture of leisurely conviviality: [W]hen several persons are in company, and one reads to the rest such writings [history, poetry, travel books, pamphlets], once hearing may be sufficient; provided, that every one be so attentive, and so free, as to make occasional remarks on such lines or sentences, such periods or paragraphs, as in his opinion, deserve it. Now all those paragraphs or sentiments deserve a remark, which are new and uncommon, are noble and excellent, for the matter of them, are strong and convincing for the argument contained in them, are beautiful and elegant for the language or the manner, or in any way, worthy of a second rehearsal; and at the request of any of the company, let those paragraphs be read again. (Watts 1741: 69) At the time of writing, Watts could probably not have imagined the possibility that over seventy years after publication, his treatise would be read by an antimony miner in a far corner of rural Scotland. For Moffat, conversely, the scene depicted in the passage above would have been foreign. Thirty years into the establishment of Westerkirk library and as a founding member himself, Moffat was able to look back to the formation of an altogether different reading ensemble. For these readers, the advantages of sociable reading presented by Watts could only result from the successful management of their books and concomitant reading practices. Watts could presuppose that his anonymous students had an unlimited choice of books, an abundance from which the need for systematizing and discernment Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 39 arose. When the Westerhall Mining Company presented its forty employees with a set of seventeen books for their “mutual improvement” (Westerkirk Minute Book, entry 24 th January) in January 1793, the course of reading for Moffat and fellow workers was only beginning and its material basis was accordingly slender. In this article, I will approach the establishment of the Westerkirk Parish Library as a case study for the popularization of the Enlightenment through the sharing of books. Thus, I am mainly concerned with the material side of social reading. By centering my analysis on the notational techniques and practices used to form the library, I investigate the ways in which the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment contributed towards the formation of this library, decades before Watts’ reading prescriptions could be fully put into practice. As such, this media materialist focus invites us to consider an additional dimension to the topic of social reading - namely, the attention to the basic material conditions needed for a reading collective to form into a working unit with its own public legitimation and physical space. The notion of the ‘social’ used here is borrowed from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Mostly applied to the sociology of science, this theory recasts the conventional understanding of social entities as monolithic structures wherein individuals operate. Instead, ANT represents the social as an interrelated conglomerate of human and nonhuman actors, working towards certain ends and purposes (cf. Latour 2007: 6-11). Using the minute book recording the establishment of Westerkirk library as a basis for analysis, I argue that this library and its affiliated society can be understood as one such conglomerate of actors operating in relation to each other and to their geographical, material, and ideological settings. It is here rather than in the individual records of reading coveted by the literary scholar that I expect to get a sense of exactly how these reading communities functioned. Guiding the interactions within this conglomerate were two techniques proposed by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers to account for and gauge the development of enlightened society: specialization or the division of labor and inscription. The latter is Bruno Latour’s concept for the modern practice of committing to paper physical descriptions, mathematical calculations, or any other kind of attempt at translating a given reality into paper so as to make it manageable, either epistemologically or politically (cf. Latour 1986: 13). As will ensue from the following, Moffat’s reading community was built on such like coordinated tasks and ‘scaling down’ efforts. Rebeca Araya Acosta 40 2. Westerkirk Minute Book - a productive misconception Having read about Westerkirk library in Emma Rothschild’s biography of the Johnstone family, The Inner Life of Empires (2011), and presupposing that the library’s minute book from which Rothschild quotes would testify to the popularization of the Enlightenment in rural Scotland, I booked a research appointment to examine it firsthand. However, when I arrived at Westerkirk on a cold but sunny Spring morning, this black leather-bound quarto turned out to be something else. Referring to the establishment of the library, Rothschild had written of a transformation of its surroundings “into the very microcosm of an enlightened society” (Rothschild 2011: 109). Accordingly, I had been expecting the minutes of the library’s society to confirm this claim through the record of discussions and deliberations regarding the books the society intended to purchase. Heated debates on the merits of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling and Samuel Richardson’s multi-volumed Grandison or careful deliberations on the political stakes of acquiring the Letters of Pope Clement XIV barely fifty years after Culloden and its ensuing consequences for Catholic Jacobites, filled my scholarly imagination. But on these issues the minutes were silent. The appointed clerk did not go beyond naming these titles on the society’s shopping list for August 1793. Instead, the minute book kept a rigorous record of less spectacular-sounding events: the appointment of members into administrative offices, the admission of new members, and the fines owed by individual members for blots on pages, no-returns, and absence from the society’s monthly meetings. A twenty-first century scholar’s fabulations were clearly out of place here. A latecomer to a less ‘polite’ scene of social reading, I had yet to learn about the material preconditions that would have made my imagined reading ensembles feasible in the first place. By expecting to find proof in this mining village of a conversable culture of reading worthy of the Scottish Enlightenment clubs, I had fallen prey to the same assumptions Watts was operating under regarding his reading prescriptions. The miners of Jamestown (the improvised village built by Westerhall Company) could not yet reach that level of sociable reading. The Jamestown reading community needed more than a few books and some leisure hours to become one. Although a disappointment in relation to my original expectations, the minute book is, however, not void of theoretical interest. Taking the contents of the minutes seriously as steps towards the forming of a reading community in fact helps us gain a better sense of the library’s history and, more importantly, of the very possibility of its existence. Indeed, once we do so, these reading miners can be seen as putting into practice Enlightenment thought. Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 41 3. Dodging the Enlightenment ‘master plot’ - from Telford to MacDiarmid Considering the limits of subjectivity in archival research, Alice Yaeger Kaplan points to what she calls the “conventional academic discourse” requiring scholars to “tell a story about what [they] found, but not about how [they] found it” (Kaplan 1990: 103). Clearly this expectation assumes that a “what” can be discerned easily from the archival holdings, especially if it existed in the shape of a prescribed plot put together by the researcher prior to her visit to the archive. Kaplan describes precisely the research predicament I was in when opening the minute book and not encountering anything remotely resembling a ‘finding’ in the strict sense outlined by her. I had taken Rothschild’s claim about this “microcosm of an enlightened society” (Rothschild 2011: 109) to have a wider base beyond the shopping lists of Scottish Enlightenment classics she quoted. This in turn had caused me to expect complementary written evidence that the miners were indeed following in the tracks of the Enlightenment literati. What is more, I had taken Rothschild’s phrase as a cue to emplot the Enlightenment ‘master plot’ 1 , a story about the overcoming of all odds to attain intellectual fulfilment. Here was the “what” that I had read into Rothschild’s story about the library and the object of research I had come to see for myself and not found. Ultimately, the lesson imparted by the Westerkirk archive would be that we focus on the “how”, i.e., the conditions surrounding its holdings. Indeed, while the minutes bore no trace of content-related deliberations, they kept an otherwise rigorous account of the books they referenced. The bearing these meticulous records have on my argument about the popularization of the Enlightenment will be discussed below. But before getting there, it is necessary to establish what this ‘master plot’ obfuscating my researcher’s gaze was. The Enlightenment master plot amounts to a storyline featuring the protagonists of a Bildungsroman of sorts, where the reader accompanies the protagonist through the gradual process of social, intellectual, or political maturation. Arguably, the belief in this kind of plot has been particularly promoted by eighteenth-century fiction itself. Especially after Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the story of the self-improving servant with access to her master’s library acquired a strong tangibility. Nevertheless, fiction alone cannot be blamed for a researcher’s approaching the Westerkirk miners through the lens of the Enlightenment master plot. Indeed, contributing to it are two key attempts at self-fashioning by two Dumfriesshire men who understood their own biographies as especially determined by their proximity to books: the civil engineer from Eskdale and later benefactor of the 1 I borrow this notion of a ‘master plot’ from Michie and Warhol’s biography of Sir George Scharf, Love Among the Archives. Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (2015). I return to Michie and Warhol below. Rebeca Araya Acosta 42 Westerkirk and Langholm libraries, Thomas Telford (1757-1834), and the Langholm poet, Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), otherwise known as Hugh MacDiarmid. Both of these readers helped create the image of the Dumfriesshire region as the Enlightenment microcosm that Rothschild evokes in her collective biography of the Johnstone family. Born in 1757, Thomas Telford was already twenty-six and an up-andcoming mason in charge of major building work in England by the time Westerkirk library was founded. The son of a shepherd from the remote valley of Eskdale, Telford had very humble beginnings. Indeed, Telford’s first biographer, Samuel Smiles, emphasizes such circumstances to cast the future civil engineer as a natural genius from the countryside. Referring, for instance, to Telford’s epitaph for his father’s tombstone, Smiles comments approvingly: “a simple but poetical epitaph, which Wordsworth himself might have written” (Smiles 1861: 294). Availing himself of the benefits of the local parish school and funded from his wages from herding cattle with relatives as well as through the patronage of the Johnstone family, Telford attained the necessary know-how to start an apprenticeship in the masonry business. Early in his career, the young mason had become a voracious reader to the point of “exhaust[ing] all the little book stores of his friends” (Smiles 1861: 300). Elizabeth Pasley, the aunt of army officer Sir Charles William Pasley, took a liking to Telford and granted him access to her library. It was in fact her copy of Paradise Lost that Telford took to the hills where, as he claimed, he “read and read, and glowred; then read and read again” (Smiles 1861: 300-301). Telford would remember his affinity for reading indirectly in some lines he dedicated to the poet Robert Burns with whom he identified because of their common rural background and their poetic dispositions. In this lyrical epistle that Telford addresses to Burns, the speaker suggests new topics for the consideration of the “ploughman poet”: Say how by early lessons taught (Truth’s pleasing air is willing caught,) Congenial to th’ untainted thought, The Shepherd’s boy, Who tends his flocks on lonely height, Feels holy joy. […] O tell! With what a heartfelt joy, The parent eyes the virtuous boy; And all his constant kind employ, Is how to give The best of lear [learning] he can enjoy, As means to live. Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 43 The parish school, its curious site, The master who can clear indite, And lead him on to count and write, Demand thy care; Nor pass the ploughman’s school at night Without a share Nor yet the tenty curious lad, Who o’er the ingle hings his head, And begs of nei’bours books to read; For hence arise Thy country’s sons, who far are spread, Baith bould and wise. (Telford 1804: 231-232) Interpreting these stanzas as “incidentally” (Smiles 1861: 301) autobiographical, Smiles draws attention to the last three lines and how they hint at Telford’s “own subsequent meritorious career” (ibid.). Whether Telford was indeed thinking of his own intellectual and professional trajectory when he sat to compose his address to Burns in 1792 is not entirely clear. The parallels to Telford’s childhood as an occasional herdsman and a curious youth borrowing books from neighbors are certainly there. However, it is the larger picture that is of interest here, namely, Telford’s celebration of the circumstances of his natal Eskdale as potentially conducive to great achievements by its enlightened inhabitants. From the innocence of the shepherd’s boy of “untainted thought” to the solicitous attention of the parent, coupled with the parish school and the nocturnal reading sessions of the ploughman and the thirst for knowledge of the “tenty curious lad,” Telford draws a clear picture of the countryside as a very unique hub of Enlightenment. Certainly speaking from his own experience and probably moved to writing this address by what he feared was Burns’ descent into vulgarity, 2 Telford was actively shaping the image of rural Scotland as a place that could become home to the Enlightenment that he had experienced firsthand as a burgeoning mason and admirer of the works in Edinburgh’s New Town. Naturally, his admiration went beyond the plastic manifestations of enlightened Neoclassicism. Gleaning from his correspondence with Andrew Little, a childhood friend of Telford’s, Julian Glover finds in Telford an eager reader of the period’s classics, burning to discuss them with Little: “Have you read Mr. Stewart’s book - The Philosophy of the Human Mind? Have you read Alison on the principles of taste? What do you think of those two books? ” (Glover 2017: 28) In view of his enthusiasm about this new 2 A letter addressed to Thomas Boyd, the architect of Burns’ house at Ellisland, shows a jocular but critical Telford indirectly admonishing Burns: “[T]ell him that unless he leaves off his baudy songs, that ‘he’ll get his Fairen - ‘In Hell they’ll roast him like a Herring’. - Tho’ if he goes on in his old way, not even a she Devil will be able to meet with a Milt in him.” (Telford to Boyd, qtd. in Glover 2017: 34). Rebeca Araya Acosta 44 world of ideas that was opening up for him, it is no wonder that Telford would bequeath part of his fortune towards the purchase of books for the Westerkirk and Langholm libraries once these were established. An immediate beneficiary of Telford’s scheme was another poet of the region: Hugh MacDiarmid. In his highly idiosyncratic memoirs Lucky Poet (1943), MacDiarmid reminisces on his poetic and political becoming and ascribes great importance to one circumstance: his living proximity to the neighboring Langholm library. It was that library, however, that was the great determining factor. My father was a rural postman, his beat running up the Ewes Road to Fiddleton Toll, and we lived in the post office buildings. The library, the nucleus of which had been left by Thomas Telford, the famous engineer, was upstairs. I had constant access to it, and used to fill a big washing-basket with books and bring it downstairs as often as I wanted to. My parents never interfered with or supervised my reading in any way, nor were they ever in the least inclined to deprecate my ‘wasting all my time reading’. There were upwards of twelve thousand books in the library (though it was strangely deficient in Scottish books), and a fair number of new books, chiefly novels, was constantly bought. (MacDiarmid 1994: 8) Never one for modesty, MacDiarmid precedes this quote by listing influential figures that set him on the poetic path, only to relativize their importance in relation to his autodidactic recourse to the Langholm library. In a way, MacDiarmid seems to embody the “tenty curious lad” of Telford’s poem. Backed by his own master plot of the borderland boy of workingclass background who was out to become “a great national poet of Scotland” (MacDiarmid 1994: 3), MacDiarmid regards the library exclusively within that narrative. It is unclear what MacDiarmid thought of the origins of the neighboring Westerkirk reading community; what he would have made of the collective of reading antimony miners sharing books for their mutual improvement; and whether he, like his countryman Telford before him, attached any special importance to the instruction and potential of these “sons” of Dumfriesshire. He had, however, certainly himself benefitted from this master plot of improvement and was now duly following its script through his excessive self-fashioning as “a great national poet of Scotland” (MacDiarmid 1994: 3) from the region. The two examples outlined here show the nature and influence of what I have called the Enlightenment master plot. It was the anticipation of finding this plot come true by the minutes that shaped my visit to Westerkirk library. Looking at this library through the lens of Telford and MacDiarmid’s autobiographical narratives is to expect similar accounts detailing just such ‘rags-to-riches’ stories where books played the central role. One way of illustrating the problem with the Enlightenment master plot is that it “black-boxes” (Latour 1987: 2-3) Westerkirk library. The black Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 45 box is a concept used in cybernetics to work with complex feedback systems without the need to know exactly how inputs are transformed into outputs. The black box stands for this unknown variable of transformation. The master plot seems to work in a similar way, as it represents the moment of transformation undergone by individuals receiving the input of books and thus predicts a particular type of outcome for them, namely, enlightenment. Contrary however to the cybernetician’s software, Westerkirk’s output does not coincide with the predictions of the master plot black box. Instead of finding diaries, commonplace books, or letters recording the miners’ thoughts on the material read, the researcher is confronted with, so to speak, ‘quieter’ forms of record-keeping. The search for alternative frameworks now becomes imperative. What are the right expectations in this context? What are the questions the researcher should pose to this otherwise hermetic minute book? Here is where Kaplan’s alternative question into the state - the “how” - of the material found proves rather apt. Picking up on Latour, who also uses the black box to better visualize his exploration of social constellations in the field of knowledge production (Latour 1987: 15-16), the researcher is at this point called to “un-black box” 3 (Young 2013: 497) Westerkirk. By taking this library entity apart and carefully tracing its development from a set of twenty-three books given in donation to the small center of instruction that it is to this day, the researcher will be able to adapt her expectations to the material found in the archive. While the minutes do not record the ideological reception of Enlightenment texts, they describe them in such a way that reflects an appropriation of the practices of knowledge administration especially characteristic of enlightened times. Thus, it was not that the miners were deliberating on the nature of Smith’s impartial spectator or Hume’s atomistic notion of the self that I found at the Westerkirk archive. Rather, I was granted insight into the kind of socially coordinated practices that enabled the rural organized consumption of these Enlightenment authors. This interpretative adjustment regarding the Westerkirk material resembles what we find in Michie and Warhol’s innovative biography of Sir George Scharf, Love Among the Archives. Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (2015). Suspecting a fountain of delectable information about Victorian high-end sociability behind the scanty records of the life of the artist and National Portrait Gallery director, Sir George Scharf, Michie and Warhol had soon to admit defeat. “The more we tried to fit the disparate facts of Scharf’s life into any of these familiar narrative trajectories,” meaning by the latter the master plots of Victorian fiction, “the more those facts would thwart us. […] [W]e learned that neither Scharf’s love life, nor his family life, nor his professional ascent conformed 3 I am here also drawing from Young’s masterful application of Latour in his study about lists (Young 2013: 497-516). Rebeca Araya Acosta 46 to the patterns predicted by Victorian fiction” (Michie & Warhol 2015: 55). Michie and Warhol’s key source in this, the diaries of Scharf, contain meticulous information about the dinners he attended or hosted himself, the food and drink served, and the seating arrangements, but on the topics of table talk or self-introspection, the diaries remain as quiet as the Westerkirk library minute book. The problems posed by the material in relation to their own expectations forced Michie and Warhol to introduce a new set of concepts, one of which - what they call “somatic life-writing” - is particularly useful for our purposes here. Described as “a quasi-Victorian attention to realist detail, especially to the minutiae of lived experience” (Michie & Warhol 2015: 55), “somatic life-writing” is a reorientation of the scholar’s attention from the classic narrativization of archival material to the “subnarratable” (ibid.). In Scharf’s case, this is a set of menu lists and seating charts that need to be taken seriously. In fact, Michie and Warhol go as far as to recreate one of the dinners with their students. This shift of emphasis from discourse to praxis that the concept of the subnarratable entails can be made productive in the case of Westerkirk. In this light, the only evidence left - namely the notational practices of this group of miners - should be reconsidered as going beyond their immediate signifying value. Traditionally a blind spot in the exegetic disposition of the literary scholar, lists and accounts recording the conditions and fate of items thereby require a broader, more performative sense of signification to be fully understood in their functions. Here the sociology and history of science can offer the literary scholar much conceptual and methodological help. By inquiring into the range of action that these notational techniques allow, it is possible to find out more about the context in which these documents are embedded. 4 Such an awareness of what is behind the seemingly simple (and objective) alignment of items - ultimately, a creative effort to cope with a given reality - should open the eyes of the literary scholar to the period-explanatory potential of these sources. Especially in the case of the Scottish Enlightenment, attention to techniques for streamlining information is crucial. The inquiry into the so-called “science of man” depended on such means of data management before it could be further developed by armchair anthropologists like David Hume and Adam Smith (Garrett 2019: 76). Seen from this perspective, the concept of the Enlightenment should be extended to practices as much as to the ideas they made possible. Concomitant with this conceptual extension of the Enlightenment in the Westerkirk context is a dynamic understanding of materiality as an “aspect 4 Referring to specific list types such as best-of lists, Young (2013: 502; 505), for instance, outlines how, firstly, these arrangements of information make sense of the world, and, secondly, how these ways of ordering the world prompt the ‘readers’ of these lists to a directed action. Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 47 of embodied persons’ interactions with things” (Hallam & Hockey 2001: 127). This requires that the Westerkirk books be regarded as objects undergoing constant transformation as they shifted from reader to reader - a trajectory that the minutes and related documents were meticulously tracing and thereby adding new meaning to the books concerned. Maryanne Dever’s account of the “emergent” rather than the “inherent” quality of the archived page (Dever 2019: 17) can therefore be applied to the library documents tracking the loans and returns of books. Such a dynamic understanding of the material I found at Westerkirk helped me ‘see’ these mining readers in action in a more immediate way than their reflections upon the books read could ever do. Thus, the answer to my question about the popularization of the Enlightenment in Westerkirk was not to be found on paper but in how these readers were using this paper (i.e., the minutes and their cataloguing derivations) and what this was doing to their practices and spaces of reading. As will become evident below, some of these miners were working as what Bruno Latour would call readers qua bureaucrats. Selected in their roles as librarians, treasurers, and inspectors, with pen and paper on hand, they were the small actors whose concerted efforts made the reading entity of Westerkirk Library a physical reality. The following two sections explore this process in terms of two steps: specialization and inscription. Not unimportantly, these were the steps championed by the literati themselves as means to attain and gauge civil progress, something of particularly Scottish concern. Explaining the role of notational practices in the generation of knowledge, Bruno Latour starts off by demystifying the abstract notions that usually structure historical narratives: commercial interests, the “capitalist spirit,” imperialism, or the “thirst for knowledge” (Latour 1986: 6). These concepts are devoid of meaning “as long as one does not take into account Mercator’s projection, marine clocks and their markers, copper engravings of maps, rutters, the keeping of ‘log books’ and the many printed editions of Cook’s voyages that La Pérouse,” the French naval explorer, “carries with him” (ibid). Latour here zooms in on the “small” actors and actions operating behind the concepts described above and which are too often overlooked. While the Westerkirk miners were neither explorers nor geographers plotting out the natural world for the “capitalist spirit” (ibid.) to exploit, they were certainly modelling a system for the organized consumption of their books with the ultimate goal of enlightenment in just the same way - namely, through specialization and inscription. The fact that these two steps can make sense of the Westerkirk minute book goes to show how the case for the popularization of the Enlightenment in this remote Scottish reading community can still be made, even if no trace of either the miners’ individual course of reading nor the collective reading discussions they might have had remains. Rebeca Araya Acosta 48 4. Specialization: tasks and the management of books “[A] people can make no great progress in cultivating the arts of life, until they have separated, and committed to different persons, the several tasks which require a peculiar skill and attention” (Ferguson 1767: 301). A key concept from Enlightenment historiography, specialization (or the division of labor) not only became an important parameter in Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith’s accounts of stadial history but it also carried great economic potential. Ferguson’s metaphor of the engine driven by the division of labor is an apt illustration: “Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men” (Ferguson 1767: 305). On October 1 st , 1793, the society of the burgeoning Westerkirk library had its constitutive session: The Miners this night having met & exchanged Books thought it fit to form them selves into a Society when Electing David Ell[i]ot pres[ident] [,] William Hair Clerk[,] Richard Armstrong Liberarian[,] John Pott Treasurer[,] Robert Dykes[,] D[avid? ] Thomson[,] Adam Touts[? ][,] John Pott[,] W[illiam] Greives[,] Members of the Commit[t]ie[,] D Thomson & James Johnston Inspectors & William Wair Officer for the current Quarter[.] (entry for October 1, 1793 Westerkirk Library Minute Book) By forming a society and giving themselves a committee with diverse functions, the miners were taking a page out of Ferguson’s book. The several offices, some of which are nowadays amalgamated in the position of librarian, were deemed of such importance as meriting their separation into individual tasks. The quarterly meetings of the committee were also separated from the meetings of the society, which is when members would meet monthly to exchange books. Westerkirk was certainly not the first subscription library to follow this path of self-administration through specialization and documentation. As Abigail Williams has shown, the rise of formal and not-so-formal book clubs in mid-century Scotland follows a similar pattern. An interesting case is that of apprentice to the signet, George Sandy’s “Boys club” (Williams 2017: 118). In Sandy’s case, however, the need for such protocol is rendered absurd given the fact that the club only consisted of three members, who, as Williams points out, wished to imitate the “the wider world of sociable culture” (ibid.) as much as profit from the chance of pooling their reading resources as the club format afforded them. Given that their patrons, the Johnstones, were well-connected and knew some of the literati, such as Ferguson and Hume, it could be argued that the miners in Jamestown were aspiring towards the same sophistication of manners. But something more interesting is perhaps happening in the Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 49 Jamestown case. A look at the following entries helps us make sense of their need for specialization. As early as November of 1793, the role of the committee’s inspectors becomes apparent (see Fig. 1): Held the society’s monthly meeting and exchange of books & fined Geo[rge] Jackson, Richard Armstrong[,] Matthew Elliot[,] Robert Dykes[,] An[drew] Johnston [and] D[avid] Elliot one penny each for blots in books & Ja[mes] Johnston one penny for not return of books. Figure 1: Westerkirk Minute Book, entry 1 November 1793. The thoroughness with which these men are being fined presupposes a rigorous search through the books they had taken out. This was a task for the committee’s two inspectors who were presumably leaving no page unturned in order to find a blot or even a folded leaf. Separate records show how the place and type of blots were drawn up so as to keep track of new offences (see Fig. 2). Month after month the minutes record the names of the blotting perpetrators as well as those members who failed to return books. Non-attendees of the monthly meetings were eventually also punctiliously fined, an offence that saw Moffat himself penalized. Rebeca Araya Acosta 50 Figure 2: Records of blots and penciling in books. The numbers on the left margin indicate the book titles as recorded in the Westerkirk Library Catalogue. The numbers 555-558 stand for the four volumes of the Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters owned by the library. The numbers 599- 566 record the volumes 1, 4, 7 and 8 of Sterne’s Works. Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 51 Figure 3: List of members in arrears. As commendable as such care for the preservation of books is, the extent to which it was pursued publicly is bound to raise some eyebrows today, not least because of the near inevitability of blotting when reading by candlelight. However, behind this façade of strictness lies a more simple and Rebeca Araya Acosta 52 perhaps relatable motivation: Blotting was a source of income for the burgeoning library and, as such, blots had to be treated as tangible assets on an accountant’s list. The same applied to unreturned books and absentees. In this way and within the frame created by the minute book, the negative value otherwise ascribed to damage to a book or to material and human absence was transformed into a positive one, rendering the specialized work of inspectors important cogs in generating income. An extension of these accountancy records can be found about twenty years later in the lists of members where arrears were rigorously noted (see Fig. 3). Especially when drawn in this tabular format, the accountant-like character of the inspectors’ role becomes evident. As to the actual amount of the infractions, a penny per blot or failed return of a book may not amount to much in modern-day Britain, where an eighteenth-century penny is worth about three supermarket bags. But this was a less petty amount in the 1790s, when the Jamestown miners were paid eight pence per hour. 5 Blots, no returns, and absences from the quarterly meetings could therefore add up rather quickly for someone like Moffat. Even if the value of Westerkirk’s significantly reduced copy of Smith’s Wealth of Nations from Peter Hill’s catalogue (₤1.1, approximately, 240 pence) seemed high enough, these were costs that could be slowly but surely defrayed by the carelessness of members. Through their exclusive and painstaking attention to the condition of the books and the participation of members, these inspectors contributed to the continual growth of a library still in the making. For at the time of these entries noted above, Westerkirk library was indeed still in its infancy. This pertains especially to its spatial dimensions. It is not until 1800 when the mine closed that the holdings were moved to the neighboring parish school in Bentpath and eventually transferred to their current and final destination next to the school. Completed in 1863 and resembling more a Methodist chapel than a library, this building had been designed by J Habershon, a London architect that charged the community ₤ 600 for it. Here as well the minute book had proved instrumental. 5. Inscription: stock-taking and the control over circulating books Besides the purchase of books and the admission of new members, another function of the committee officials was that of stock-taking. Already the first pages of the minutes feature a basic form of this (see Fig. 4). Remarkably, these first pages were written before the forming of the society and its administrative committee. 5 See L. G. Luescher (2016). The currency information and estimates are based on the currency converter from the National Archives’ website (2024). Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 53 Figure 4: First page of the Westerkirk Minute Book. Contrary to first impressions, this enumeration is doing more than simply recording the event of Westerhall Company’s handing over books to its miners. Rather, it is an example of what Latour calls an inscription - a literal putting into writing of a given reality, the gift of twenty-three books, with the purpose of better managing it (cf. Latour 1986: 13). The scene of the company ‘presenting’ the miners with this set of books is difficult enough to imagine, just as the later handling of the present. Who took the books for safekeeping? Where were they kept and how was access to them organized? Overlooking these questions, the conventional literary scholar Rebeca Araya Acosta 54 only cares about the fact that they were read. And it is only when the evidence for this is scarce that other records referencing these texts must be considered. This seemingly irrelevant list of books featured among the founding statements introducing the minutes is one of them, and it is an attempt, if rather oblique, to answer the more circumstantial questions initially discarded by the literary scholar. As such, this first act of stock-taking assumes the role of safekeeper of the treasure. It is not telling us where the books were to be kept nor what the reactions of the miners were to their employer’s generosity. Instead, it shows us how efficient these miners were in managing their gift. By first listing their assets on paper, they were fixating what would become the unruly items of collective property. The individual books would periodically change hands and thereby be subjected to all kinds of accidents, as the record of infractions tells us. But by giving each of these exemplars an existence on paper, these reading bureaucrats were counteracting their instability. Lists like these and their derivates, such as the cataloguing of folded leaves and blots, were an attempt at controlling from a distance. In this regard, Latour speaks of the colonial “centers of calculation,” where the same inscribing techniques enabled the plotting and control of overseas colonial possessions (Latour 1987: 219-223). This scaling down that enabled the proliferation of knowledge and empire is thus replicated in the establishment of this provincial library on the Scottish countryside. Not only were the minute book’s inscriptions necessary for the organized consumption of the books, but they also gave this incipient reading community a roadmap for the expansion of its holdings. In this way, the inscriptions are reminiscent of the surveying efforts introduced two years before the founding by the large-scale compilation project of Sir John Sinclair, The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-1799). Inspired by statistical accounts of other countries that were driven in their surveys by purposes of taxation, Sinclair sought to develop a different account of Scotland: “[T]he idea I annex to the term [‘statistical’], is an enquiry into the state of the country, for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement” (Sinclair 1798: xiii). The key word here is “improvement,” which also features in the minutes. The gift of books had been offered by Westerhall company with the express intention of furthering the improvement of its employees. Especially once these employees sought to build upon the donation, they needed to chart out the way forward by listing their assets. More books would follow in an endeavor that would outlive every single one of the founding members (Westerkirk library remains an active lending library to this day) and through the act of inscription, the minute book offered them the place to streamline their efforts. In the words of Latour, “thanks to inscriptions, we are able to oversee and control a situation in which we are submerged, we become superior to Westerkirk Parish Library as an example of popular Enlightenment 55 that which is greater than us, and we are able to gather synoptically all the actions that occurred over many days” (Latour 1999: 65) - and years, I would add, speaking for the orders of books placed by the Westerkirk committee. Accordingly, we find several entries in the minutes calling for new valuations of the stock alongside catalogues of the books acquired through the years. Stock-making went hand in hand with the inscription of the society’s rules, drawn up in vellum and circulated among the members as another means of consolidating the actions of readers towards the forming of the library. These inscriptions, however, did more than show the way forward in terms of what books to purchase and how to factor the conduct of members into the budget. Framing these units of information in this way also made them visible and mobile in ways that could only serve the overall scheme. Thus, the account of the parish of Westerkirk for the year 1794 in the eleventh volume of Sinclair’s Statistical Account features the following observation relating to the miners in the village: “[T]o encourage them to read, a present was, some months ago, made them in books, by the company, to the value of 15 l; and these, with others, which the workmen have since been able to purchase amount at present to 120 volumes” (Sinclair 1794: 527). Such visibility of their efforts towards the library would win Westerkirk not unimportant supporters in the shape of large-scale donors such as Walter Montagu-Douglas-Scott, the fifth Duke of Buccleuch (1806- 1884) and most importantly, the Westerkirk-born civil engineer Thomas Telford. Upon his death in 1834, Telford endowed the neighboring library of Langholm and Westerkirk with a thousand pounds each for the purchase of books. It was a gift that kept on giving way into the nineteenth century, as some of the remaining bound books in the library testify. 6. Conclusion By expanding the notion of social reading to include the notational practices immortalized in the Westerkirk library minutes, it has been possible to outline the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment in this Dumfriesshire town. In this context, social reading means more than the convivial setup of readers, listeners, and commentators exemplified by the leading Enlightenment figures in their debating clubs and philosophical societies, as imagined by Watts in his textbook. The records of Westerkirk library members, their tasks, and readerly infractions have reminded us of the material preconditions supporting any type of reading collective. Questions of practicality surrounding the stock, the acquisition of new material, and the rules determining the conduct of members were essential to reading with and among others in a social setting like that of the Westerkirk miners. In this way, understanding Westerkirk library as a successful story of enlightenment entails a shift of scholarly paradigms. Rather than seeking Rebeca Araya Acosta 56 in this collective endeavor the ideological setting for the exchange of ideas under the sign of Edinburgh and Glaswegian conviviality, we must look to the basic techniques fostering the formation of this reading community. This means dismounting our High-Enlightenment horses and becoming attentive to the way of the Westerkirk ANTs, to end on a Latourian note. While material circumstances might not always call for such an approach - David Allan’s study about English readers of Scottish-Enlightenment classics based on his research of individual commonplace books being the ultimate example (Allan 2008) - the Westerkirk lesson teaches the literary scholar not to take the basic steps towards enlightenment for granted. The building where Westerkirk library is currently housed is testament to a series of coordinated actions involving small actors and second-hand books in circulation. Unlike the mausoleum of the Johnstone family designed by Edinburgh architects Robert and James Adam and located in the neighboring churchyard, this humble edifice lacks the Neoclassicist touches characteristic of the New Town. Its connection to the Scottish Enlightenment is not aesthetic. Rather it is to be found in its very foundations, i.e., in the possibility of its construction. Acknowledgements I would like to thank April Davey and colleague trustees of Westerkirk Parish Library, for all their help, resourcefulness, and above all their eagerness to show me some of Westerkirk’s greatest treasures. Their input was essential for the writing of this article. References MS Minute Book of Westerkirk Library. MS Kalendar of Westerkirk Library. Allan, David (2008). Making British Culture. English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740-1830. New York/ London: Routledge. Dever, Maryanne (2019). Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page. London: Palgrave. Ferguson, Adam (1767). An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edinburgh: printed for A. Millar & T. Caddel [sic]. Garrett, Aaron (2019). Anthropology. The ‘original’ of human nature. In: Alexander Broadie & Craig Smith (Eds.). The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1017/ 9781108355063. 001. 74-89. Glover, Julian (2017). Man of Iron. 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