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THE READING PRACTICES OF EDWARD
SOUTHWELL AND THE FIRST KNOWN
READER RESPONSE TO APHRA BEHN’S
OROONOKO, 1690S
‘Accounts of Books Read by Edward Southwell’, University of Chicago MS271, is an invaluable source for the history of reading and textual reception in the early modern period. Edward Southwell (1671-1730) was an Anglo-Irish politician and government official, broadly representative of the upper echelons of the imperial administration of the First British Empire. The only surviving son of the career bureaucrat and President of the Royal Society, Sir Robert Southwell, Edward received an upbringing typical of a man of his station, studying at schools in Kensington and Bloomsbury before taking up a place at Merton College, Oxford, in 1687. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1692, during his father’s tenure as President. His reading journal records the first known description of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), offering new insight into the work’s earliest reception. Southwell’s account is not included in the standard scholarly text on Behn’s reception.
The reading journal covers the period between 1690/1 and 1698 in 14 pages. The notebook is broken down year by year, and the texts Edward read are not listed in alphabetical order, suggesting that they may have been listed in chronological order of reading, instead. The title page starts in January 1690, which might mean January 1690/1, so January 1691 in the new style. Southwell refers to January of an x/y year subsequently throughout the journal (1 January 1691/2, January 1692/3, January 1696/7 and March 1697/8, crossed out), indicating that he used old-style dating throughout the all rights reserved journal. Unlike a library catalogue or a selection of someone’s surviving books, the reading journal strongly implies that Edward did, in fact, read these specific books in the years he stated. The entries are numbered, but some of the numbers are skipped. The numbering jumps from 6 to 13 in the 1690/1 account, perhaps indicating that texts 7-12 were read, but not recorded.4 The level of detail in his entries decreased from short reviews in the 1690/1 and 1691/2 entries to a more straightforward list by 1698. The number of texts read per year also decreased, indicating that Edward had less spare time for reading as he aged and his career got more demanding. Alternatively, he might have chosen to record only specific books in the later entries. As the first review provided by Southwell is that of Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, the source is of no small importance for the study of reception of Behn.
The journal is in Octavo, 18 by 15 centimeters. It contains 36 foliated leaves, 24 of which are blank. It retains its original quarter-leather binding with marble covers, gold ornaments and title on spine. In his description of the manuscript, produced for internal usage at the University of Chicago Library in 1968, H. Reiter claimed that the journal is a rough copy in the author’s own hand. I would argue that the journal is a rough copy, and that the entries were added over a period of time, rather than copied into the journal later. The journal contains a mix of hands. Most of it is written in a rather rough hand, presumably that of Southwell himself. However, the entries on pp lOr-lOv are written in a more elegant, careful hand.5 That hand bears a close resemblance to the hand in which Edward Southwell’s 1696 account of his Tour of Holland is written.6 The manuscript of the travel account is clean copy potentially intended for wider private consumption and circulation, as many 17th-century manuscript travel accounts were. The entries on pp lOr-lOv of the reading journal are an outlier, as explained below. Those entries were either written by Southwell in his much neater hand were compiled by his secretary or another staff member who was also responsible for the clean copy of his travel journal.
3		University of Chicago MS271, pp Ir, Sr, 9r, 12r, 13r.
4		University of Chicago MS271, 5v.
5		University of Chicago MS271, pp lOr-lOv.
6		BL Add MSS 21495.
The manuscript was purchased by the University of Chicago library on the 12th of April 1926. The manuscript was formerly owned by the English book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) and bears his pencil shelf mark Phillipps MS 9131. Phillipps purchased it as a part of a batch from the London bookseller Thomas Thorpe (bookseller Τ.1208). Thorpe’s catalogues mention the journal in 1834, calling an ‘Account of the books perused’ by Southwell. Thorpe’s catalogue is the earliest surviving catalogue of the Southwell library and papers, and it is assumed that the journal was kept among the Southwell papers between the early 18th century and their sale in the 1830 s. Thorpe’s catalogue also includes the books of multiple other owners, so it is not exclusively representative of the Southwell collection. With this in mind, it is curious that there is only one overlapping volume between the catalogue and the reading journal: Henry Care’s The Grandeur and Glory of France (1673), indicating that either Edward’s books were dispersed or that he borrowed them (and perhaps that was the reason of their inclusion in the journal). Another possibility is that in the 1690 s Edward remained unmarried and did not have the same financial means as he would as the sole inheritor of his father’s fortune. He may therefore have owned a more modest personal library that was not subsequently merged with the Southwell family library.
The title page of the journal contains the first date (1 January 1690) and a dash, but no end date, indicating that the journal was filled on an ongoing basis. The entries are much more detailed in the first couple of years, providing Southwell’s reaction to books and/or summaries of tlie specific sections he claimed to have read. There are no entries for 1694 or 1695. All the entries for 1690 (1691) start with the phrase ‘I read’, but the entries for subsequent years primarily state the titles of the books. The earlier entries include an indication of whether he read a published book or a manuscript, the language in which the book was written (Englisli or French) and the publication date. The later entries descend into a list without any bibliographical data or full titles of books. ‘The History of Florida under Ferdinando Soto, writt in Spanish by Inca Garcilasco de la Vega, & translated into French by P. Richeler 2 vol Paris, 1670’ becomes simply ‘T. Oates—3 parts’.
Edward Southwell is interesting for a variety of reasons. Edward showed a keen interest in books, and his inquisitive nature was remarked upon by his contemporaries. Samuel Pepys claimed that he couldn’t ‘put a book or paper into [Southwell’s] hand ... but he makes me [Pepys] sweat with one confounding question or other, before 1 can get it from him again’. He translated and published a work by Henry Moore, An Account of Virtue, as a teenager in 1688 and maintained a correspondence with an amateur natural philosopher, William Cole, among others, throughout the 1690 s, indicating that in addition to expected educational achievements, he showed a genuine, deeper interest in learning. As Anthony Turner argues, studying people like Edward, his father and William Cole offers an insight into passion for natural sciences ‘by men outside of academic or professional structures’. Although it is somewhat challenging to argue that the President of the Royal Society was not embedded in academic or professional structures, the characterization holds more true for Edward, who dedicated his life to an administrative career. Despite his correspondence with Hans Sloane and acquaintance with the likes of John Ray and Martin Lister, his career path and the extent of his involvement in the intellectual life of the late 17th and early 18th centuries differed from those of established virtuosi. In Edward Southwell, we have a well-educated career administrator interested in learning for the
10 With one exception, the entry for the 30 September 1693 starts with 'T began the Life of Pope Sixte 5". a book Southwell attempted to read in Latin: University of Chicago MS271, p IIr.
" University of Chicago MS27I, pp 7r, I4r.
12		Anthony Tuner (cd.). The Correspondence of William Cole of Bristol with Sir Robert Southwell and Edward Southwell 16831701 (2024), p 8, and Guy de la Bedoyere. The Letters of Samuel Pepys 1656-1703 (2009), 175.
13		Henry Moore, An Account of Virtue (1690).
14		Turner, The Correspondence, vii. sake of learning, but not known for extensive intellectual activities, book collecting or any exceptional contributions to the Republic of Letters. As such, his reading habits are of interest because they give us a glimpse of how such a man interacted with books in the late 17th century. This furthers our understanding of the intellectual life of the ‘British’ ‘political nation’.
The texts Southwell read represent a broad and eclectic selection of genres popular in the late 17th century. Southwell records reading 58 texts over the course of 8 years. This young man mentioned reading Oroonoko, a sermon on the importance of knowledge, a polemical text about the return of Protestant gentry to Ireland, debates around Burying in Woolen Acts, potentially distributed in manuscript form, and a memoir of early 17th century France—all of that just on the first page of the journal. His reading is reflective of the broader religious and political identity of an Anglo-Irish Protestant gentleman. His reading also reflects his emerging bureaucratic career. Additionally, his reading habits demonstrate the importance of multilingualism and geographical and travel accounts for the education of imperial administrators in the late 17th century English Empire.
Some clusters give us an insight into Southwell as a political reader. Many of the items on his list, suclr as Richard Buckley’s The proposal for sending back the nobilito and gentry of Ireland (1690) or John Davies Irish Reports (1614), cover Irish affairs, especially plantation and colonization. His other political interests included affairs of political economy. Edward read what one would expect a Protestant Whig supporter of William III to read, including A declaration of the demeanor and cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, a tract popular with anti-Catholic anti-Stuart readers throughout the 17th century, and three volumes of works of Titus Oates. Southwell’s confessional sensibilities were less pronounced in his choice of a genre he was clearly fond of—military memoirs and biographies. He listed memoirs and biographies of Louis de Pontis, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne, Frederick Herman de Schomberg, 1st Duke of Schomberg and Edmund Ludlow. The exact nature of what this says about Southwell’s religious and political milieu remains to be written.
This journal rather haphazardly lists the books he read and often specifies whether he read only a particular part of the book. We know from other sources that he claimed to have read books not listed in the journal—in a letter dated 27 September 1697 Edward’s father Robert, thanked Hans Sloane for recommending to Edward some books for learning Spanish, and claimed that Edward would read them. The entries for 1697 do not mention any books related to the learning of Spanish or any books in Spanish. Similarly, Edward’s correspondence with William Cole shows that he was aware of the contents of books and papers beyond those represented in the journal. In a letter of the 7th of November 1693, he stated that ‘the French have in their Journalls, within this year, printed discourses and figures of the snow’, in response to Cole’s keen interest in studying the shape of snowflakes.18 The entries for 1693 do not record Edward reading any French journals or papers.19
A particular group of texts, recorded on pp lOr and v, stands out. Twenty texts, numbered from 1 to 21 (skipping 13), are all recorded in a visibly different way, potentially in a different hand.20 This list is entitled ‘Dr Sloane’s Various tracts vol 16 A volume of voyages containing’, and it includes 19 unspecified, presumed printed, texts and 1 entry specified as an MS. This entry, undated but presumed to be made within 1693 (as it is placed between dated entries of January 1692/3 and 30 September 1693 on p Hr), contains more than a third of the overall number of texts in the journal, all confined to a period of several months. Unlike most of the other entries throughout the journal, none of these entries contain summaries or reflections on the material. This sheds some doubt on whether these were texts read by Edward Southwell. Robert Southwell and Sloane discussed libraries and socialized together in person.21
16		BL Sloane MS 4036, ff. 354-355.
17		University of Chicago MS271, 12r-13r.
18		Turner, The Correspondence, p 112.
19		University of Chicago MS271. 9r-12r.
20		University of Chicago MS271, pp lOr-lOv.
21		March 9. 1699. Robert Southwell to Hans Sloane. BL Sloane MS 4037. ff. 226-227 on libraries; April 27. 1700, Robert Southwell Sloane, BL Sloane MS 4038, ff. 9-10 on Italy and manuscripts; December 21, 1694, Robert Southwell to Sloane, BL Sloane MS 4036, ff. 199-200 books and book-buying.

Edward Southwell himself continued an active correspondence with Sloane, talking to him about books. A deeper study of this book list might yield new information on the dissemination of books and manuscripts from Sloane’s library and collections during his lifetime.
Southwell’s Review of Oroonoko
Oroonoko is the very first book mentioned in the journal. Southwell left the earliest known and near-contemporary reaction and response to this now seminal text:
Read a book intitled Oroonoko or the Royall Slave, writt by Mrs Behn a spectator of the Action; the scenes at Surinam: He a Prince of Cormantine. His mistriss was Imoinda: it ends with his killing her and then himself. Twas acted in the year [blank] but printed 1685: the character of the black prince is very fine.
Privately recorded reactions and receptions of Oroonoko, and Behn’s wider work, before the publication and staging of Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation in the autumn of 1695 are few. Joanna Lipking collected a range of responses from the 1680 s and early 1690 s, most expressed in poetic form. They do not include any private responses like Southwell’s. Southwell’s account is not included in the standard scholarly text on Behn’s reception. As Spencer demonstrated, Behn’s public reputation was complex and multifaceted during her lifetime and in the years immediately following her death. Southwell’s account is a challenging source to use for the analysis of Behn’s reputation. He did not mention her deatli in 1689, did not refer to lier other works or any biographical details about her, complementing his approach to other authors of books he recorded reading.28 The only thing we can deduce from Southwell’s remarks is that he knew that Behn was a female writer and that he assumed that her trip to Suriname was a fact of her biography.
Although brief, this response does indicate multiple curious themes. Southwell calls ‘Mrs Belui’ a ‘spectator of the Action’, predating subsequent debates on the extent to which the text’s claims to be a ‘True History’ reflected any degree of truth of Behn's biography. On the one hand, this line might indicate that Southwell truly believed the story to at least have been based on real-life events; on the other, he might have been commenting on the narrative structure of Oroonoko. Behn herself framed the narrative as true, and presented herself as an eye-witness: ‘I was my self an Eye-Wintess to a great part, of what you will find here set down; and what 1 cou’d not be Witness of, I receiv'd from the Mouth of the chief Actor in this History.’29 William C. Spengemann argued that the framing of Oroonoko as a ‘true relation' ‘evaded [Behn’s] busy middle-class readers’ distrust of idle fictions and met their demands for useful information’.30 Spengemann’s analysis is driven by the text of Oroonoko itself, whereas in Southwell's remarks, we have a confirmation of this sentiment. Southwell's journal demonstrates that declarations of eyewitness authority and factual testimony mattered and were taken seriously enough by readers to be among the very limited aspects of the text to be directly addressed in a reader response.
Oroonoko is the only piece of fiction in Southwell’s journal.31 However, if one reframes it as a ‘travel account’ or a ‘history of a foreign country’, it becomes one of 31 texts broadly dealing with the subject, including newsletters and biographies and memoirs of notable European military figures and one Pope, at least 20 of them more traditional travel accounts. In other words, more than lialf of the texts mentioned by Southwell concerned places outside of England (the figure of 31 texts excludes texts about Ireland). Southwell
28		With a notable exception of memoirs; his entries about them often included a short biography of the subject, sourced from the memoir in question.
29		Behn, Lipkin (ed.), Oroonoko, 8.
30		Ibid., 202.
31		Katherine M. Rogers. Fact and Fiction in Aphra Belin's ‘Oroonoko’ (1988), 1-15. 
himself was an avid Continental traveller and came from a family with an educational travel tradition.
This opens the question as to whether early readers, including Southwell, clearly understood the fictitious nature of Behn’s text, and whether, even if the narrative was held to be fictitious, they nevertheless used such texts as sources of knowledge about the wider world. Here the appropriate context for Oroonoko might be Restoration prose travel narratives, the authenticity of which was questioned by later critics. MacLean presented The Adventures of (Mr T.S.) An English Merchant (1670) as ‘historically based fiction of the kind associated witli Aphra Belin’, but Southwell's comment turns this approach on its head. Instead of suggesting that some early modern fabricated travel accounts should be classified as ‘fiction’ alongside the clearly fictitious works of authors such as Behn, Southwell’s choice to read this text might hint that what appears to be clearly fiction to us might have been read for its factual and educational value.
A close reading of Southwell’s comment demonstrates his emphasis on factual information of the sort he might have sourced in geographical texts. The lines ‘the scenes at Surinam’ and ‘He a Prince of Cormantine’ especially stand out. Katherine Rogers showed that the narrative captured the his- toiy of the English colony of Suriname and the customs of local Indigenous populations fairly accurately, generously borrowing from An impartial description of Surinam by George Warren (1667). Warren’s book was also mentioned in Southwell’s reading journal as a part of a wider curriculum of travel accounts connected to Hans Sloane, albeit in a section written in a different hand, indicating that he was at least aware of it, even if he potentially liadn’t read it. The kingdom of ‘Coromantien’ did not exist—the term refers to an English slave trade Fort Cormantin, built between 1638 and 1642.
Southwell’s remarks are interesting in what they did not include, as well as in what they did. Spencer emphasised the relationship between antislavery sentiments and campaigning in the 18th century, and the reception of Oronooko. Southwell did not reference slavery in his remarks. Southwell's relationship witli slavery was ambiguous. A detailed exchange with Jonathan Harlow, an expert on Robert Southwell’s correspondence, confirms that there is no evidence to connect Robert (d. 1702), or his family during his lifetime, witli trading or ownership of slaves. Sophie Welsh highlighted the connections of the Southwell family to slavery, particularly manifest during the lifetime of Edward Southwell Jr, Edward’s son and Robert’s grandson. Further research into the specifics of the family’s involvement in enslavement and Edward Senior’s role in it is yet to be conducted. In regard to Oronooko, slavery was not something Edward Southwell chose to focus on. Despite his interest in factual travel accounts, he did not mention anything related to the practice of the Suriname colonial government under William Byam. Instead, he liighlighted the romantic plot of the narrative and the character of Oronooko.
Tire most puzzling part of Southwell’s reaction is his insistence that Oroonoko kills himself at the end of the story. In Behn’s narrative, Oroonoko does indeed kill Imoinda to protect her from retribution from the colonial governor whom Oroonoko vowed to kill, but the dramatic crux of the narrative is in what follows: he is consumed by grief, fails to execute his revenge, is captured, tries to kill himself, fails, and is then brutally and gruesomely executed in an almost Biblical scene, attended by the narrator's ‘Mother and Sister’ and ogled by ‘rude and wild [.] Rabble’ and ‘inhumane [.] Justices who stood by to see the Execution, wlio after paid dearly enough for their Insolence’. All of this narrative and symbolic complexity, not to mention direct references to an ‘execution’, are erased from Southwell’s summary, to be replaced by Oroonoko’s suicide. It is important to note that in Southerne’s play based on Behn’s narrative, to be published in 1696, the execution scene is omitted, and Oroonoko kills Imoinda, stabs the governor
55 Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife, 223-21.
36		Sophie Welsh, ‘Decolonising the Bristol Archives catalogue’, <https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/blog/decolonising- the-bristol-archives-catalogue/>
37		Spencer, Aphra Behn s Afterlife, 221.
38		Lipking (cd.), Oroonoko, 64.
and then himself, and dies. This is significant, as Southwell’s other comments seem to indicate that he conceptualized Oroonoko as a play, not a prose narrative.
It is also worth entertaining the idea that the word ’acted’ referred to the events of the narrative, not a theatre performance. ‘Twas acted’ could follow from Southwell’s assertion that Mrs Behn was a ‘spectator of the Action’, to be interpreted as a reference to the events themselves. In this case, the missing date indicates Southwell’s hesitation regarding the year of the events, not the year of a theatre performance.
The other possibility is that the journal was a later copy, or written retrospectively, accounting for Southwell’s reading over the course of the 1690 s. Southwell made a mistake in identifying the publication date of Oroonoko and confused the plot of Behn’s text and Southerne’s adaptation. His reference to the work being ‘acted in the year [blank]’, with sufficient space left to fill in the required information (which he never did), might indicate that the journal is a later copy, and that he forgot to add the date. This might also explain why he skipped entries 7 to 12 in the 1690/1 account and why he crossed out the ‘March 1697/8’ date. If this is the case, the journal is unlikely to be a fair copy intended for consumption by anyone but Southwell, as the entries are made unsystematically and, compared to the neat fair-copy hand his travel journal and the entries on pp lOr- lOv, not in the neatest hand. One could argue tliat all of the entries were made retrospectively, but that would imply that Southwell either knew the books he made detailed summaries of very well, or that he revisited them as he was writing the journal. Examples of these detailed entries include his summary of a portion of Mémoires du sieur De Pontis and chapters from a 1670 French translation of Histoire de la Floride by Garcilaso de la Vega.
Southwell was at least somewhat enthusiastic about theatre. As his diary of a visit to London shows, he ‘Saw the Morocco Ambassador at the
Play’ on the 6th of July 1682.43 Sir Robert Southwell wrote of Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew Fair in a letter of the 26th of August 1685, specifying that ‘you wou’d read, or cou’d see acted’ the play, indicating that Southwell might have consumed plays in multiple formats, by reading them or seeing them on stage.44 The very last book mentioned in Southwell’s journal is The Usefulness of the Stage by John Dennis, a polemic in defence of the theatre.45 It was read by Southwell almost immediately upon its publication in 1698, demonstrating a sustained interest in the theatre and potentially Southwell’s own agreement witli Dennis’ arguments.
However, Southwell was no Narcissus Luttrell or Samuel Pepys when it came to attending playhouses and recording his experiences. Even in his one mention of attending a play in his diary, he stressed the fact tliat the Moroccan Ambassador was in attendance, omitting the title of the play and the theatre he attended. It is possible that he simply assumed that a stage adaptation of Oroonoko must exist, as Aphra Behn was a popular and often staged playwright of the 1680 s—there is evidence of her works being performed in March, April, May and August of 1682, around the time of the only documented attendance of a play by Southwell (although, as his interest in Dennis shows, he must have attended more plays than that). In that case, his remark tells us something interesting about tlie early reception of Behn's prose—an immediate assumption that a play version must be out there. An even more intriguing proposition is that there was a stage version of Oroonoko before Southerne’s play in 1695, and that potentially such an adaptation excluded the execution scene, streamlining and simplifying the narrative, as Southerne eventually did in his text. There is no other evidence of such a performance, and Southwell’s error in identifying the publication year of Oroonoko (as 1685, rather than 1688) does not incite confidence of his deep knowledge of the subject, but the possibility remains, if even at a speculative level. Southwell did not make such a

43		BL, Egerton 1628. Diary of Edward Southwell; see The London Stage database, <https://londonstagedb.uoregon.edu/ event.php?id=1488>.
44		<chttps://londonstagedb.uoregon.edu/event.php?id=1584>
45		University of Chicago MS271, p 14r; John Dennis, The Usefulness of the Stage (1698).
mistake again in his journal: his other entries either do not specify a publication date, or give the correct one. Altemahvely, the 1685 date might not be an error, but a record of Southwell reading a published version of a play Oroonoko by Aphra Behn in which the title character killed himself, of which we have no other evidence.
Southwell’s brief remarks on Oroonoko not only present a rare almost-contemporary audience reaction to the text from someone involved in colonial, plantation and enslavement projects, but also demonstrate some intriguing inconsistencies with the chronology of Oroonoko ‘s publication and dissemination as we know it.
Conclusion
Edward Southwell’s reading journal gives us an insight into the mind of a major administrator of the early First British Empire in his formative years. It reveals a unique early audience response to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, demonstrates the extent to which travel accounts and other books about foreign lands permeated the reading matter of late 17th century elite male readers, and shows
7 how one’s political identity could be reflected in reading choices. It is the author’s sincere hope that Southwell’s reading journal will be actively included in studies of the Southwell family, the formation of early British imperialism and the political and intellectual life of late Stuart Britain. It is the author’s ambition to encourage wider usage of this source in a variety of contexts, including book history, history of reading, history of education and the broader history of political culture of English and British administration of Ireland in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Funding
This research was funded as a part of the Global Library Project, UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Project Reference MR/W009609/1.
NAILYA SHAMGUNOVA D University of East Anglia, United Kingdom https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaf154
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Bibliothecæ Southwellianæ: among them are the Ormonde Letters