Q&A: Book Launch: The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson

Select answers from Diane Ehrenpreis and Endrina Tay, authors of The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson

Q: Was it common for a collector to create such an order for their books as Jefferson did?  Or was he doing something unique?

A: No, Jefferson was not unique in adopting a subject-based classification system for his books. For example, William Byrd of Westover shelved his books by subject. However, it was typical and quite common at the time for collectors and lending libraries to shelve their library books not by subject, but by size and/or alphabetically by title or author.

Q: Does the Spirit of Inquiry ever mention Abbe Correia de Serra, Jefferson’s close friend and guest during his retirement? 

A: [Not in our essay. We did not encounter him as part of Thomas Jefferson’s plans for this library or correspondence.]

Q: Did Jefferson’s papers live only at Monticello? Or did he carry it around with him to Washington and other places he stated?

A: Thomas Jefferson kept his working papers with him wherever he was working. His public papers and correspondence during his tenure as Secretary of State were kept in a filing press in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1793. He would take certain documents with him if he needed to work on them while on a hiatus to Monticello, but the bulk would stay secured in his paper press in Philadelphia. This press was later transferred to Monticello once Jefferson left Philadelphia. This appears to be his pattern and practice during his public career. His private correspondence was kept at Monticello, and transferred there even if he received them elsewhere.

Q: Was the Book Room ever used as Martha Jefferson Randolph’s sitting room? If not, where did she conduct her business as de facto mistress of the plantation household?

A: Jefferson ceded the Book Room to Martha Jefferson Randolph only after he sold the bulk of his collection of books to Congress in 1815. This is confirmed in the family correspondence starting in 1816, where we see the first mentions of mother’s “setting” or sitting room. Prior to this date, Martha did not have a designated space on the first floor for her own use. She did have her bedchamber on the second floor, and this room probably doubled as sitting room and workspace for running the household. She could have also undertaken tasks in shared spaces and common areas such as the Parlor and the Tea Room.

Q: As you say, Jefferson used the Baconian system to organize his library – why was that his choice and were there any alternative systems he could have chosen instead?

A: As an individual shaped by the Enlightenment, Jefferson came into early contact with the ideas and treatises of Francis Bacon, who in his work, The Advancement of Learning, put forth a universal classification system of human knowledge as a means of making such knowledge accessible to the public and to the masses. With his polymathic interests and inclinations, Jefferson gravitated to Bacon’s ideas and named him amongst “the three greatest men that ever lived.” Jefferson adapted Bacon’s “faculties of the mind,” namely Memory, Reason and Imagination, along with D’Alembert’s classification published in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1781) to create a subject-based classification system that fit his own needs and interests. There were earlier classification systems developed and utilized by Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes that Jefferson was familiar with, but these were not as expansive as Bacon’s and D’Alembert’s.

Q: What are some areas of Jefferson’s life and work that you think need more study?

A: One area for Diane is that of Jefferson’s connection to the architect Benjamin Latrobe. New evidence suggests that he influenced Jefferson’s furniture commissions for Monticello, and by extension the President’s House, ca. 1803-1809. More scrutiny of the family letters, and those of visitors to Monticello, will enrich our understanding of how life played out for these privileged individuals and for the enslaved who worked there. Remarkably, not much is known about the young gentlemen who lived at Monticello while studying under Jefferson and who enjoyed access to his extensive library and book collection. Endrina hopes to track down the many books (and novels) that Jefferson’s family at Monticello read and circulated among themselves that Jefferson did not consider part of his personal book collection and so were not recorded by him as having been at Monticello, especially ones read by his daughters and his grandchildren. Finally, we never give up hope of finding more surviving books from Jefferson’s library, like the cache we discovered at Washington University in St. Louis in 2011.

Q: Could you describe a bit more the nature of the “technical” books in Jefferson’s library? Would books at the time be anything like technical manuals we know today (with step-by-step breakdowns of items or processes) or were they different?

A: The books that Jefferson collected and classified under the category he termed, “Technical Arts,” encompassed books he would later call subjects related to the “Occupations of Man” or human activity. So these would include a whole range of topics from education, reading, writing, and printing to bookkeeping, beekeeping, dyeing, brewing and distilling, etc. So yes, some of these would be manuals with instructions and methods, or descriptions of various processes.

Q: Is there any indication in Jefferson’s correspondence with Dupont de Nemours that Jefferson was influenced by Dupont’s perspectives on education?

A: Jefferson and Dupont certainly exchanged ideas on education and corresponded frequently on this topic. We know Jefferson drew upon Dupont’s ideas, as well as those of Joseph Priestley, and models at the time such as the University of Edinburgh and the College of Geneva when he corresponded with Littleton Tazewell in 1805 on the subject of an endowment for a state college. 

Q: Where at Monticello did TJ conduct plantation business?

A: It’s unclear at this point. If Jefferson devised a specialized system for documenting and storing plantation records, it has not come to light. Many of his financial records were kept in press “A,” a large library bookcase that stood in the Book Room, and this would include plantation materials. It seems likely that he sat at his secretary bookcase in the Library to work on plantation accounts, write slave inventories, calculate tobacco yields, and draw up plans for his garden and for his farm operations.