Mrs. Jefferson’s things would not reach Monticello until the snow melted somewhat. When her personal belongings arrived, they included many books. In the family, she had a reputation as an avid reader. Only one volume among Jefferson’s surviving collection contains evidence of her ownership, a copy of an English translation of Fénelon’s Adventures of Telemachus, but other evidence suggests that she owned the kinds of books typically found on the colonial woman’s bookshelf. Isaac Jefferson remembered her coming into the kitchen “with a cookery book in her hand” and reading aloud recipes for making cakes and tarts to his mother, Ursula.16 Apparently, Mrs. Jefferson wanted to teach Ursula how to make proper English pastries. The episode shows one way print culture could interact with folk tradition.
Several books from the library of Bathurst Skelton came into Jefferson’s possession through his wife. Unlike his older brother, Bathurst was no bookman. Save for a few multivolume collections of the standard eighteenth-century poets and essayists—Alexander Pope’s Works in ten volumes, the eight-volume edition of The Spectator—Bathurst’s collection largely consisted of textbooks from grammar school and college.
Since Bathurst Skelton had entered William and Mary in 1763, he, too, had studied with William Small. Consequently, his schoolbooks duplicated some Jefferson already owned. In other instances, they served as replacement copies for schoolbooks lost in the Shadwell fire. Jefferson unloaded the duplicates and kept the others. None of his surviving books contains evidence of Bathurst Skelton’s ownership, but titles common to Skelton’s estate inventory and Jefferson’s great library include mathematics textbooks by several different authors and two works by James Ferguson: Astronomy and Lectures of Select Subjects in Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics and Optics, both of which Jefferson long remembered. Three decades later he recommended Ferguson’s Astronomy to one young man who had asked him for some bookish advice and Ferguson’s Mechanics to another. In the late 1760s, rumors went ’round Virginia that Ferguson was planning to come to William and Mary as Professor of Natural Philosophy.17 Perpetuating the rumor, Jefferson exclaimed, “That most famous Ferguson, who wrote on astronomy, will come, it is said, to the College of William and Mary, an excellent successor to the most excellent Small!” But Ferguson never did come, so his works served in his stead.
Jefferson’s marriage also connected him to the Skipwith family. Martha’s half-sister Tabitha, or Tibby, had recently married a young Virginia gentleman named Robert Skipwith. On one occasion when both men were visiting The Forest together, they talked at great length about literature and learning. Jefferson promised to help Skipwith assemble a library of his own. Afterward, Skipwith wrote to remind him of the promise. In his letter, Skipwith provided a general idea of what he wanted in a personal library, specifically, books “suited to the capacity of the common reader who understands but little of the classicks and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study.” His letter implies that during their conversation Jefferson had been carried off by his passion for erudite scholarly books. The guidelines Skipwith provided seem intended to bring Jefferson back down to earth. Most important, Skip-with stressed that he wanted books that were “improving as well as amusing.” Finally, he placed a monetary limit on the total cost of the library: five and twenty pounds sterling or, at most, thirty.18
But Jefferson got carried away as he assembled the list of titles for Skipwith. In terms of cost, he greatly exceeded the upper limit Skipwith stipulated. Jefferson explained, “I sat down with a design of executing your request to form a catalogue of books amounting to about 30. lib. sterl. but could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make. Thinking therefore it might be as agreeable to you, I have framed such a general collection as I think you would wish, and might in time find convenient, to procure.” Jefferson had not read all the books on the list, which contains many titles he did not own. The list is as much a reflection of what Jefferson wanted to read at the moment as a recommendation to his friend. Considering Skipwith’s request for a primarily belletristic library, Jefferson imagined an ideal collection of belles lettres, a collection he would not mind having himself.19
He enclosed the list with a letter to Skipwith setting forth the rationale underlying his choice of titles. Given Skipwith’s request for pleasurable reading, Jefferson made the list rich in novels, including many of the most memorable ones of the century: Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison; the twelve-volume edition of Henry Fielding’s Works, which included all of his novels; and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a work Jefferson used as a touchstone for judging literary quality.
In the letter, Jefferson justified reading fiction at some length. His defense of fiction reflects the influence of another work he put on the list of recommended books, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism. He synthesized Kames’s critical theories to create a pithy essay on the moral utility of fiction.20 Jefferson observed:
A little attention … to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written, every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility, asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored? I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue. When any signal act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions; and disposition of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit; and in the instance of which we speak, the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer.21
Jefferson obscured the boundaries between fact and fiction, suggesting that a work of literature should be judged by the effect it has on the reader. Essentially, he described the ideal reading process: a good book should draw its readers into the world it creates and keep them here in an almost dreamlike state of suspension.
The examples Jefferson used to support his argument show that he had in mind not only novels but also other genres of fiction, including drama and narrative verse. He continued, “I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite him as great horror of villainy, as the real one of Henry IV by Ravillac as related by Davilla?” Jefferson was not suggesting that Skipwith read Shakespeare in lieu of Davila: the well-read gentleman need not choose between the two—as the list clarifies, he should own and read both. Elsewhere, Jefferson called Davila’s History “one of the most entertaining books he ever read.”22 Though he had read Davila in Italian, Jefferson did not expect Skipwith to do so—he recommended Davila’s History of the Civil Wars in France in Ellis Farneworth’s English translation.
Fiction, Jefferson observed, could fulfill the purpose of teaching moral virtue better than fact. History was too uneven—few episodes in history could excite the “sympathetic emotion of virtue” at its highest level. Fiction, alternatively, could evoke a reader’s sympathy because imaginary characters can be fashioned in a way real personages cannot. Fictional characters can illustrate and exemplify “every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty,” he continued, “is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.”23
Jefferson recommended to Skipwith the same edition of Shakespeare he owned himself: the ten-volume duodecimo edition prepared by Edward Capell and published in 1767 and 1768. The marginalia Jefferson inscribed in his copy of Capell’s Shakespeare, which survives at the University of Virginia, help explain the presence of another work on his list of recommended books—Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry—and suggest that Jefferson had been reading his Shakespeare with the eyes of a scholar during the late 1760s and early 1770s.
In his first series of ancient songs and ballads, Percy devoted the second book to ballads illustrating Shakespeare’s works. Introducing this section, Percy observed, “Our great dramatic poet having occasionally quoted many ancient ballads, and even taken the plot of one, if not more, of his plays from among them, it was judged proper to preserve as many of these as could be recovered, and that they might be the more easily found, to exhibit them in one collective view.” Jefferson appreciated the recovery and preservation of traditional literature. His copy of Shakespeare shows that he was reading the plays with a copy of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry nearby. Though Percy had collected together songs and ballads pertinent to Shakespeare in one section, Jefferson did not restrict himself to that section as he annotated his personal copy of Shakespeare. He found verbal parallels between Percy’s Reliques and the songs and speeches in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Much Ado about Nothing. Though he specifically recommended Shakespeare’s tragedies to Skipwith, Jefferson clearly enjoyed the comedies, too.
Favorably comparing King Lear to works of divinity, Jefferson let his animosity toward religious literature take him off track. With his reference to Lear, he dropped his comparison between fiction and history to compare fiction to divinity. The paucity of religious titles in the list of recommended books reinforces the skepticism toward devotional writing his comparison suggests.
Jefferson did include a category for religious books, but the fifteen titles listed under “Religion” constitute one of the most idiosyncratic lists of religious books ever compiled. Few would include the title that comes at the middle of the list—Bolingbroke’s Philosophical Works—among a list of recommended religious books, but this particular inclusion offers the key to understanding the list as a whole. Earlier Jefferson had commonplaced a passage from Bolingbroke evaluating the New Testament as a system of ethics. Observing that collections of aphorisms culled from ancient authors had long been useful, Bolingbroke imagined a similar collection of sayings compiled from the gospel but concluded that such a compilation would be inadequate—it would form an incomplete and unconnected system of ethics. Alternatively, a compilation “from the writings of antient heathen moralists of Tully, of Seneca, of Epictetus, and others, would be more full, more entire, more coherent, and more clearly deduced from unquestionable principles of knowledge.”24
The works Jefferson listed under religion include ones by each of the authors Bolingbroke named in this passage. From Cicero, he included the Tusculan Disputations and the Offices. He also listed Seneca’s Morals and Epictetus. Only three of the titles listed under religion can really be classified as works of Christian divinity: the seven-volume edition of Laurence Sterne’s Sermons, William Sherlock’s Practical Discourse Concerning Death, and Sherlock’s Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment. Perhaps Epictetus can make some claim. Jefferson recommended that Skipwith read Epictetus in Elizabeth Carter’s translation, the fullest version of his writings in English. In her critical introduction and footnotes, she compared Epictetus’s thought to Christian philosophy and emphasized the superiority of Christianity. Jefferson later changed his mind about Elizabeth Carter’s translation and even considered translating Epictetus himself.25
All of the titles in the list are organized under general subject categories in the following order:
Fine Arts
Criticism on the Fine Arts
Politics, Trade
Religion
Law
History, Ancient
History, Modern
Natural Philosophy, Natural History &c.
Miscellaneous
This, Jefferson’s earliest known bibliographical scheme, lacks the underlying philosophical basis of his subsequent, more sophisticated schemes. “Fine Arts,” the category containing the largest number of titles, includes novels, poetry, plays, letters, and essays. Some of the listed items suggest that he was continuing to consult the Foulis catalogues he had received from Wythe: he recommended the poems of John Dryden, John Gay, and Matthew Prior, all in duodecimo Foulis editions.
The third category, “Politicks, Trade,” lists only eight titles. As Jefferson explained to Skipwith, “Of Politicks and Trade I have given you a few only of the best books, as you would probably chuse to be not unacquainted with those commercial principles which bring wealth into our country, and the constitutional security we have for the enjoiment of that wealth.” Similarly, the list of law books contains only three titles because knowledge “of the minutiae of that science is not necessary for a private gentleman.”26
Ancient history, which includes both ancient and modern authors and works, provocatively begins with the Bible. The placement of the Bible here reinforces the challenge to established religious beliefs that the books listed under religion imply. To Peter Carr, Jefferson recommended reading the Bible “as you would read Livy or Tacitus.”27 By making the Bible a work of history, Jefferson denied its status as the word of God.
The titles under natural history and philosophy cover a wide variety of scientific topics, including such up-to-date ideas as electricity, which is represented by Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity. Though Jefferson had yet to meet Franklin, he clearly respected his accomplishments as a scientist. Jefferson installed one of Franklin’s lightning rods at Monticello. Living on a mountaintop, he was grateful for it on numerous occasions. Isaac Jefferson recorded a typical remark Thomas Jefferson made during electrical storms: “If it hadn’t been for that Franklin the whole house would have gone.”28
In closing, Jefferson downplayed the need for Skipwith to assemble such a fine personal library when he could visit Monticello as often as he wished:
But whence the necessity of this collection? Come to the new Rowanty, from which you may reach your hand to a library formed on a more extensive plan. Separated from each other but a few paces, the possessions of each would be open to the other. A spring, centrically situated, might be the scene of every evening’s joy. There we should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in Musick, Chess, or the merriments of our family companions. The heart thus lightened, our pillows would be soft, and health and long life would attend the happy scene.29
These remarks reveal the exuberant pride Jefferson took in his new home regardless how many years away from completion it was. Furthermore, his words show that his plan for a new library was integral to his plans for the new home. He clearly foresaw his home not only as a place for domestic felicity but also as a center of social interaction and intellectual discourse. During his student days, he had participated as a member of Professor Small’s Williamsburg circle; he now foresaw his own home as the center of a new intellectual circle, physically represented by a spring that would serve as a place for enlightened postprandial conversation.
Jefferson was devoting considerable thought to what that spring would be like. Onto spare blank pages of his interleaved copy of that year’s Virginia Almanack, he outlined his plans. Located on the north side of Monticello, the spring would cascade over a terrace. The water would be conducted across the bottom of the terrace to its west side, where it would fall into a cistern beneath a handsomely constructed temple. The temple would be elevated two feet above ground level. Its walls would be made of stone. The first story would be constructed with arches on three sides and a solid wall against the hillside on the fourth, the second with a door on one side and spacious windows on the other three. The fl
oor of each room would measure eight-by-eight with eight-foot ceilings, making the interior space of each a perfect cube. The second floor would contain a small table and a few chairs. Jefferson imagined several possible designs for the roof of the temple: “Chinese, Grecian, or in the taste of the Lanthern of Demosthenes at Athens.”30
The grounds surrounding the temple would be meticulously landscaped. The area above the spring would be leveled and covered with grass. Nearby a statue of a sleeping figure would recline on a marble slab. A stone or metal plate fastened to a tree near the spring would be inscribed with verses from Horace celebrating the happiness of the man who could have such a peaceful retreat. Beech and aspen trees would be planted partway around the spring, leaving open a vista of the mill pond, the river, the road, or, in time, a neighboring village. The spring would not only gratify the visual sensibilities of Jefferson and his guests, but also gratify their senses of smell and hearing. Interspersed around the area would be planted an abundance of jasmine, honeysuckle, and sweet briar. Beneath the temple would be placed an Aeolian harp.
Though Monticello’s intellectual circle had yet to cross from Jefferson’s imagination to reality, a new intellectual circle was coming together in Williamsburg with the arrival in 1770 of the Reverend Samuel Henley, who had come to fill the position of Professor of Moral Philosophy at William and Mary. Henley became friends with the Reverend James Madison, president of the college; James McClurg, the Edinburgh-trained physician; and John Clayton, the venerable botanist, as well as George Wythe, John Page, and Thomas Jefferson. The intellectual gatherings of these men took place both informally and formally. In 1772, they founded Virginia’s Philosophical Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, and Henley became secretary of this new scientific organization.31
The Road to Monticello Page 17