8 - Subscribing: Patronising Surveys and ProvincialLibraries

Summary

The foregoing chapters have, with the exception of afew individual examples, emphasised the productionrather than the reception of the various parish,county and regional surveys. That is partly becausethe Statistical Account ofScotland was circulated and read viavarious forms of ‘subscription’, which are the focusof a fuller and more dedicated investigation here.This chapter analyses the structure of thissubscription to better understand the prosopographyof Statistical Accountreaders and to analyse the cultural collective thatcohered around the project of surveying Edinburgh'sexpanding environs. It draws on the booksellers’lists of subscribers as well as lending libraryrecords to populate this geographically dispersedbut socio-economically cohesive audience for thestatistical surveys that were published inEdinburgh. The chapter also analyses the particularrelationship between author/contributor andaudience/reader that developed from the subscriptionmodel of StatisticalAccount distribution. It demonstratesthat a distinctive model of agricultural improvementand a particular set of interests were built intothe statistical surveying that was based in anddistributed from late eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century Edinburgh. Furthermore,‘subscription’ is understood as entailing multiplemeanings in this context: (1) a system for receivinga publication, usually on a regular basis andusually by paying in advance; (2) an arrangement bywhich one gains access to organisations orinstitutions; and (3) an expression of endorsementor agreement with something. All three meanings areexplored in what follows.

The contributors to the Statistical Account project were mostlycountry ministers, landowning elites and urbanprofessionals, as the chapters in this part haveshown. The audience was similar, as the booksellers’accounts reveal, and these social groups formed alarge and powerful segment of the bookshop'scustomer base more generally. These interconnectedranks of readers of agricultural ‘improvement’ textsincluded Edinburgh's lawyers, excise men and othercity elites among them. These were often people whocame from country families and/or stood to inheritrural estates. Their particular interests andinfluence as customers were reflected in thepopularity of books like Nathaniel Kent's Hints to Gentlemen of LandedProperty (1775), bought by legalgentlemen such as ‘Robert Graeme Esq., Adv[ocate]’in 1807. Lawyers like Graeme were closely involvedin rural land management even if they did not ownland themselves. Another buyer of Kent's Hints was the ‘stabler’Francis Sharp in September 1775.