{"id":175,"date":"2014-09-12T12:52:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T11:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=175"},"modified":"2014-09-12T15:24:29","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T14:24:29","slug":"follow-the-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=175","title":{"rendered":"Follow the thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

The auction catalogues of library sales are (as I have previously noted<\/a>) often a useful source in reconstructing the ownership (and inferring the readership) of a particular text. One of the many nineteenth-century auction catalogues in which Macintosh’s\u00a0Travels<\/em>\u00a0was listed for sale was that drawn up in 1823 to dispose of the enormous (20,000-volume) library which William Beckford (1760\u20131844) had assembled in his equally enormous Fonthill Abbey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>

William Beckford (1760\u20131844).<\/p><\/div>\n

Beckford’s collection,\u00a0listed in\u00a0The valuable library of books in Fonthill Abbey<\/em><\/a> (1823) and sold by the London auctioneer\u00a0Harry Phillips,<\/a>\u00a0included\u00a0a 1782 first edition of Macintosh’s\u00a0Travels<\/em> and a copy of\u00a0Joseph Price’s critical response<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whilst it is possible that Beckford purchased these texts at the time of their publication, it seems more probable that these were originally part of the private library of Edward Gibbon (1737\u20131794)\u2014parliamentarian and author of\u00a0The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire<\/em> (1776\u201388)\u2014which was sold to Beckford following Gibbon’s death.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>

Edward Gibbon (1737\u20131794).<\/p><\/div>\n

There are a number of interesting connections between Gibbon and Warren Hastings. Both were alumni of Westminster School and Gibbon was present at Hastings’ parliamentary trial\u2014an event he described as a ‘persecution’, motivated by party politics. Whether or not Gibbon’s sympathy for Hastings was motivated by their shared educational background is unclear. It would clearly be interesting to know, however, what Gibbon thought of Macintosh’s criticism of Hastings (assuming Gibbon was the original owner of the copy of\u00a0Travels<\/em> auctioned off in London in 1823).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The auction catalogues of library sales are (as I have previously noted) often a useful source in reconstructing the ownership (and inferring the readership) of a particular text. One of the many nineteenth-century auction catalogues in which Macintosh’s\u00a0Travels\u00a0was listed for sale was that drawn up in 1823 to dispose of the enormous (20,000-volume) library which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}