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PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND METHODOLOGY
Project Beginnings
In July 1999, Doug McElrath, Curator of Marylandia and Rare Books at the University of Maryland Libraries, conceived of the idea to recreate the library of George and Rosalie Calvert as an intellectual exercise. The Calverts owned the Riversdale mansion from 1803 to 1838 and were the parents of the founder of the University of Maryland, Charles Benedict Calvert.
None of the volumes of their personal library have survived in Calvert family hands, nor are they among the holdings of the Riversdale House Museum.
In summer 2002, the University of Maryland Libraries incorporated plans for the Riversdale Bookshelf project into a cooperative agreement between the National Agricultural Library and the university. The agreement provides support for work on agriculture-related projects in Special Collections. The Libraries hired a project archivist, Jennifer Evans, and a graduate assistant, Jill Reilly, under the auspices of the agreement. Evans and Reilly became the primary project staff working on the Riversdale Bookshelf.
Challenges
As there is no inventory of the Calverts' library of the first half of the nineteenth century, the project staff undertook research in both primary and secondary resources to attempt to construct one, in the historical context of wealthy planters of early republic and antebellum America. The staff also sought to identify specific titles that the Calverts would have owned, between 1803 and 1838, given their interests, social position, and activities.
The inventory of the Riversdale mansion at the time of George's death,
in 1838, does not specify the number or subjects of books in the library.
An auction of the contents of Riversdale was held in 1877, upon the death
of George's daughter-in-law (and Charles Benedict Calvert's widow), Charlotte
A. Calvert. The 1877 auction catalog
lists books by title. Since many of the books auctioned at this time were
published after George's death, this library inventory more accurately
reflects the collection of Charles Benedict Calvert, son of George and
Rosalie. Some of the titles with publication dates earlier than 1838 may
be books that Charles inherited from his parents. The diverse subjects
in the books listed in the 1877 auction catalog suggests that the variety
of subjects of George's library might have been equally broad, because
the father and son shared similar interests in agriculture, business,
and politics.
Methodology
An important source of information on the library contents was Rosalie's correspondence with her family in Belgium in Margaret Law Callcott's English language edition, Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821. [i] Without this resource, the Riversdale Bookshelf project would have been immensely more difficult to complete, because the correspondence documents Rosalie's candid observations on her activities and those of her family as well as her reading habits.
It is likely that planter George Calvert surely read books and subscribed to periodicals about agriculture. Mistress of Riversdale only reports that George read an agricultural publication on Plaster of Paris and a history, Jerusalem Delivered. [ii] To compile a bibliography of agricultural titles that George might have read or owned, project staff consulted a variety of relevant sources. We investigated the reading habits of other prominent planters and popular titles on agriculture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The June 16, 1820, issue of the American Farmer reprinted letters from John Taylor, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, recommending titles for an agricultural library. These letters included both classic and modern titles on agriculture. The selected bibliography of George Washington's library on agriculture by Alan M. and Donna Jean Fusonie also guided our study. The work of A.C. True and Rodney True were particularly helpful in identifying important and popular titles. Stephen C. Stuntz's bibliography was invaluable in identifying agricultural periodicals of the era. [iii]
Context
Because of their social position, geographic location, and personal connections, the Calverts had access to books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Rosalie's relatives sent her and her children books from Europe. George traveled regularly to Baltimore, Georgetown, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and Washington, D.C., where he also could easily purchase the latest editions.
Within their social network, the Calverts had access to the personal libraries of friends, including George Washington. [iv] It is clear from Rosalie's correspondence and recent scholarship that books were frequently circulated among friends. She wrote to her brother, Charles, in 1808, "You know how books travel in the country (much to the detriment of their covers), but it is an excellent idea. The expense of a complete library would be too great, so everyone purchases several new volumes each year, and they are loaned around and their merits discussed, which clears up the estimates on both sides." [v]
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the gentry in the American colonies bordering the Chesapeake began to diversify their reading selections. Personal libraries that had been primarily composed of religious and legal texts began to incorporate books with more diverse subjects, including science, literature, history, and philosophy. [vi]
The subjects of books owned by the Calverts actually may have been much diverse than even this project suggests, because of the trend towards subject variety in personal libraries throughout the antebellum period. For example, the library of John Randolph, a plantation owner, congressman, orator, and contemporary of George Calvert, contained works by Aristotle, Jane Austen, Euclid, Goethe, Irish poet Thomas Moore, Rousseau, Scott, Shakespeare, and Voltaire; histories of ancient Rome and the United States; volumes on trigonometry and geography; the speeches of Patrick Henry; Arabian Nights Entertainments; and newspapers and periodicals. [vii] Without more information about the lives of those inhabiting Riversdale, especially George, it is difficult to say with any certainty what books may have been read there.
The Bibliographies
Project staff identified nine subject areas in which the Calverts most likely read: agriculture; gardening and landscape design; history, geography, and travel; law and finance; literature; periodicals and newspapers; reference; religious; and schools books and juvenile literature. We organized our research and compiled lists of titles according to these subject divisions.
We combined lists of titles gathered from Rosalie Calvert's letters, the auction catalog, citations from library inventories of their contemporaries, and historical and literary studies into a large bibliography. Individual titles were subjected to scrutiny - weighing the likelihood of certain titles' inclusion over others (based on their publication date, popularity, and availability) and identifying extant copies. To locate citations that met modern scholarly standards, we conducted bibliographic searches in the online bibliographic utility WorldCat, selecting certain editions over others based on four criteria: (1) the appropriateness of the publication date to the project's scope; (2) the number of extant copies, from which we inferred the size of the original publication run; (3) the place of publication, giving preference to editions published in Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, and Paris; and (4) the holdings of the University of Maryland Libraries, the National Agricultural Library, and other neighboring institutions.
The listing of titles in the Calvert Library compiled from these sources
is available in a bibliography arranged under subject headings, reflecting
the interests of Rosalie and George Calvert.
Several additional bibliographies provide users of this site and the Calvert
Library bibliography with a fuller picture of resources consulted. Of
special note is our Research Documentation
Bibliography. There are also two bibliographic essays by Jill Reilly,
reviewing historical scholarship on gardening
in the United States and surveying the historical and literary scholarship
on women and reading in the United States, Great
Britain, and France.
Final Considerations
While this project was primarily an intellectual exercise, material realities were not neglected. For example, while books published as early as the seventeenth century are included in the list, no title published after the death of George Calvert in 1838 is included. [viii] The Riversdale Bookshelf project focused on George and Rosalie's time at Riversdale, in part, because the historic Riversdale House Museum is being interpreted and restored to the period when George and Rosalie lived there.
In addition, the actual size of the house and library limited the number of books. While Rosalie's writing desk had shelves for books and the children would have been taught in other rooms in the house, most of the books probably would have been housed in the library, which has built-in bookcases. The 1877 auction catalog listed six books in the parlor; 462 volumes with titles and 150 miscellaneous works formed the tontents of the library -- a total of 618 volumes. Originally we sought to compile approximately 300 titles, regardless of how many volumes each title comprised. The Calvert Library bibliography includes 348 titles.
This project attempts to fill a void in the literature about the reading habits of the gentry in the Mid-Atlantic, border states of the early republic and antebellum periods. Many areas for further research remain. Promising paths for historical bibliographic investigation include an examination of bookseller advertisements in newspapers and a systematic study of the inventories of personal libraries in Maryland. Scholars and researchers in the history of the book and the history of reading should devote more attention to the antebellum period, which stands as a relatively unstudied area between the historical literatures on book culture in colonial and post-Civil War America.
The Riversdale Bookshelf project aimed at
applying inventive research methods to recreate intellectually the Calvert
Library from 1803 to 1838, illuminating the reading habits and intellectual
lives of George and Rosalie Calvert, and inspiring visitors to the website
to explore the cultural and social history of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Maryland families.
Notes
i. Margaret Law Callcott, ed. Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991).
ii. Mistress, 66, 304-305.
iii. John Taylor, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, "Catalogue of An Agricultural Library," American Farmer 2 no. 12 (June 16, 1820): 93-94; Alan and Donna Jean Fusonie, eds., A Selected Bibliography on George Washington's Interest in Agriculture (Agricultural History Center, UC Davis, 1976); Alfred Charles True, "Agricultural Education in the United States," Yearbook of Agriculture, U. S. Department of Agriculture (1899): 157-190; Rodney H. True, Beginnings of Agricultural Literature in America. American Library Association. Bulletin 14 (July 1920): 186-194; Stephen C. Stuntz and Emma B. Hawks, ed., List of Agricultural periodicals of the United States and Canada Published During the Century July 1810-July 1910 (Washington: U. S. Department of Agriculture Miscellaneous Publication 398, 1941).
iv. George Calvert's sister, Eleanor Calvert, married George Washington's stepson, John Parke Custis. George and Rosalie Calvert were guests at Mount Vernon on their honeymoon.
v. Mistress, 196.
vi. Carl E. Garrigus, Jr., "The Reading Habits of Maryland's Planter Gentry, 1718-1747" Maryland Historical Magazine, 92 (Spring 1997): 36-53.
vii. Clyde Cantrell, "Reading Habits of Antebellum Southerners" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois,1960). For Cantrell's composite inventory of Southern, antebellum, personal libraries, including John Randolph's collection, refer to Appendix I.
viii. Samuel Hartlib, Samuel
Hartlib His Legacy of Husbandry, Wherein are bequeathed to the Common-wealth
of England, not onely Braband, and Flanders, but also many more Outlandish
and Domestick Experiments and Secrets of (Gabriel Plats and others) never
heretofore divulged in reference to Universal Husbandry (London: Printed
by J. M. for Richard Wodnothe, 1655) is the earliest published volume.
