Augustus De Morgan Redux

I have always liked Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871). Curating libraries amassed by individuals gives curators some sense of the individual: kindly, cranky, fanatical, egotistical, whatever. De Morgan, the former owner of Senate House Library’s founding collection, comes across as knowledgeable, independently minded, humorous, kindly, and quirky. Most of the sense of his character comes from his annotations in at the front of his books: anecdotes about authors, bibliographical notes, even verses from Punch pasted in. De Morgan’s books also indicate how respected he was in his time. Gifts of works by British colleagues tie him into the academic network, and letters slipped into books thank him for favours or request his advice.

To me, as the rare books librarian at Senate House Library, De Morgan is a very familiar figure. The founding collection of any library can hardly fail to be significant for that institution. This founding collection was full of rare books: of incunabula, of early sixteenth-century books in Gothic type, of works by famous early printers. It included scientific landmarks which today we could not afford to buy: the first printed edition (editio princeps) of Euclid, the world’s longest-lasting, most famous textbook; the first editions of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543), Newton’s Principia (1687) and Opticks (1704). It also contains material which has turned out to be more valuable academically than could have been imagined at the time: unique copies of mathematical sale catalogues by booksellers from whom De Morgan bought that contribute to our knowledge of the second-hand book trade of Victorian London.

Yet it has to be admitted that the mathematician and mathematical historian Augustus De Morgan is scarcely a household name. Although he was regarded in his own time as one of the United Kingdom’s greatest mathematicians, modern mathematicians need not even have heard of him. “Why was he?” and “why isn’t he?” were questions Adrian Rice, Christopher Stray and I sought to answer when co-editing the volume Augustus De Morgan, Polymath.

So restoring De Morgan to consciousness was a delight. That’s to the extent that editing a book is ever a delight (c.f. Samuel Johnson on editing a dictionary). Editing a book is a project, and it’s an instance of teamwork, with the benefits and disadvantages of both. Hardest is the chicken-and-egg element of edited volumes. You can’t interest a publisher until you have a full programme of contributors and content; some publishers won’t commit until they have seen a full volume. On the other hand, contributors are gambling when they write without assurance of publication, especially if they are targeting an essay for a volume which will be hard to adapt for other purposes. We were fortunate that everything went smoothly with the first and only publisher we approached.

Contributors you want might not be in a position to participate in your project; contributors enlisted may later withdraw, possibly too late for anybody else to fill the gap. It doesn’t mean they are irresponsible; nobody wants long-term debilitating illness, for example. Contributors, editors and publishers may perceive deadlines in different ways from each other. The editor and the contributor might not have the same vision for a chapter. You don’t see mistakes or inconsistencies until the last minute that you feel you ought to have picked up much earlier, and discovering them leaves you with the uneasy feeling that perhaps there are other things that you still haven’t noticed, on which reviewers will pounce. 

Given all this, would I have preferred a monograph? Certainly not. There is scope for a monograph about De Morgan, the only existing one being his widow’s biography of 1882. Our contributors consulted that copiously, and I hope that our volume will help the writer of a new biography. But for us it was invaluable to have experts from the various aspects of De Morgan’s life and areas of achievement: mathematics, logic, astronomy, education, his family, and so forth. No single person had full knowledge of all of these. The editorial balance showed in itself the value of collaboration. Christopher Stray’s strength is the history of education, Adrian Rice’s the history of mathematics and the life of De Morgan, and I am a book and library historian. We enjoyed email discussions about what De Morgan would have thought about a certain topic, or how he would have reacted to a particular situation. We complemented each other in our spheres of awareness. And communicating with each other forced us to realise what is and is not common knowledge. I had assumed the terms “black letter” (Gothic type) and “oblong quarto” (a quarto volume which is wider than it is high) to be ubiquitous and was flung from my ivory tower. Conversely, “quantification of the predicate” had been outside my understanding. We all learned. 

An additional benefit for me was making contact with another contributor. I looked at De Morgan’s library in the context of contemporary mathematical collections, on the basis of auction catalogues. The broader area of collecting mathematics, by no means a popular subject but nonetheless a known one, in the Victorian era is worth exploring in more detail. I doubted I would have the opportunity to undertake the research, but another contributor is interested; I was able to share the catalogues I had used and can now look forward to his findings.

We want people to find the book useful. I hope it will stir up renewed interest in Augustus De Morgan and in his superb collection at Senate House Library. Readers are always welcome.

Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on His Life and Legacy, edited by Karen Attar, Adrian Rice and Christopher Stray, was published by OpenBook Publishers on 4 September 2024. A case of books and manuscripts featured in it is on display at Senate House Library throughout September.