Private Libraries in Post-Revolutionary Virginia

This paper reports on the results of a study of two Virginia counties, Lunenburg and Fairfax, and the city of Fredericksburg during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Every estate inventory in these locations, a total of 908, was examined during a thirty-six year period for the counties(1780-1816) and a fifty-eight year period for Fredericksburg (1782-1840), in order to gain insight into book owners, non-owners and the types of libraries which people had. This analysis poses a number of important questions, such as who owned books, what professions did they have, and how much of a factor was wealth for book ownership. It also indicates the kinds of books people owned, the size of private libraries, and the characteristics of individual libraries in a city as compared to two rural areas.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.