PART IV.—BOOK-CLUB LITERATURE.
Generalities.
early a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the printing of books and documents connected with the early civil, ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now thickly followed. Any attempt to classify them as a whole, is apt to resemble Whately's illustration of illogical division—"e.g., if you were to divide 'book' into 'poetical, historical, folio, quarto, French, Latin,'" &c. One of the systems of arrangement is topographical, as the Chetham, "for the purpose of publishing biographical and historical books connected with the counties palatine of Lancaster and Chester."[76] The Surtees, again, named after our friend the ballad-monger, affects "those parts of England and Scotland included in the east between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and in the west between the Mersey and the Clyde—a region which constituted the ancient kingdom of Northumberland." The Maitland, with its headquarters in Glasgow, gives a preference to the west of Scotland, but has not been exclusive. The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen, the granite capital of the far north, is the luminary of its own district, and has produced fully as much valuable historical matter as any other club in Britain. Then there is the Irish Archæological—perhaps the most learned of all—with its casual assistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the Iona. The Ælfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden professes, as we have seen, to be general to the British Empire. The name of the club called "The Oriental Translation Fund," tells its own story.
There are others, too, with no topographical connection, which express pretty well their purpose in their names—as the Shakespeare, for the old drama—the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt has a delightful field—old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given to them readily indicate.
In divinity and ecclesiastical history we have the Parker Society, named after the archbishop. Its tendencies are "Low," or, at all events, "Broad;" and as it counted some seven thousand members, it could not be allowed the run of the public mind without an antidote being accessible. Hence "The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology," the tendency of which was not only shown in its name, but in its possessing among its earliest adherents the Rev. E.B. Pusey and the Rev. John Keble. The same party strengthened themselves by a series of volumes called the "Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the East and West, translated by Members of the English Church." In Scotland, the two branches which deny the supremacy of Rome (it would give offence to call them both Protestant) are well represented by the Spottiswoode, already referred to as the organ of Episcopacy; and the more prolific Wodrow, which, named after the zealous historian of the Troubles, was devoted to the history of Presbyterianism, and the works of the Presbyterian fathers.
Thus are the book clubs eminently the republic of letters, in which no party or class has an absolute predominance, but each enjoys a fair hearing. And whereas if we saw people for other purposes than literature combining together according to ecclesiastical divisions, as High Church or Low, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, we should probably find that each excluded from its circle all that do not spiritually belong to it, we are assured it is quite otherwise in the book clubs—that High Churchmen or Romanists have not been excluded from the Parker, or Evangelical divines prohibited from investing in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Nay, the most zealous would incline to encourage the communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there also are of slightly latitudinarian propensities, to whom the aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever be the denominational banner under which they have been exhibited. Some of these clubs now rest from their labours, the literary strata in which they were employed having been in fact worked out. Whether dead or living, however, their books are now a considerable and varied intellectual garden, in which the literary busy bee may gather honey all the day and many a day.