Comprising over 800 volumes, the library advertised for sale in this catalogue (along with a small collection of ‘sundries’) was most likely auctioned by Cornelius Prout (c. 1793-1855), brother of the painter John Skinner Prout (1805-1876), who settled in Sydney in 1826 and acted for a time as the colony’s Under-Sheriff.
The vast majority of books in this collection (owner unknown) are works of poetry and fiction, primarily romances but also novels by Swift, Fielding, Goethe, and Scott, among others. Indeed, the owner must have been a prodigious reader or collector of poetry as the collection includes works by Dryden, Milton, Gifford, Pindar, Pope, Gray, Akenside, Thompson, Young, Collins, Charlotte Smith, Ossian, Burns, Byron, Moore, and Southey. The collection also contains works of drama (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays and Edgeworth’s comic dramas), along with works of literary history and aesthetics (e.g. works by Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, and Edmund Burke); geographical accounts of NSW and Van Dieman’s Land; histories (e.g. works by Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, and Ferguson); political economy (e.g. works by Adam Smith and John Ricardo); dictionaries and grammars in a number of European languages; and periodicals (primarily British but also The Australian Quarterly Journal of Theology, Science, and Literature (1828)). The collection contains a small number of works in French, including works by Rousseau and Racine.
PF
