The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Clark is rich in British literature and history from the Civil War through the reign of George II (about 1641-1760). It holds virtually all the first editions of Restoration drama. The Dryden collection is rivaled only by that of the British Library, and has formed the basis of the ongoing University of California Press Dryden Project. Some of the other outstanding literary collections center on Milton, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Fielding, and Behn. The library owns several hundred volumes of music books and songs, scores, and musicology printed before 1750; ballad and comic operas; the edited works of Purcell, Handel, and their contemporaries in England; and a choice collection of manuscript anthems, hymns, and incidental music assembled by Theodore Finney. Works by Newton, Boyle, Halley, Evelyn, and Digby form the core of the largest history of science collection in the western United States. The theological library of Thomas Cartwright (1671-1748) and the Harmsworth collection of Protestant theology are supplemented by more than 8,500 pamphlets by the minor and sometimes forgotten writers who were involved in controversial issues of the times, political as well as religious. Political philosophy and theory are represented by fine collections of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and others.

Other printed materials support the study of poetry (especially early eighteenth century), dance, grammar and rhetoric, social history, criminology, anthropology, mercantile practice, husbandry, psychology, statistics, and gender. Pamphlets, newsbooks, broadsides, ballad sheets, and other ephemeral materials are well represented. The manuscript collection contains legal documents, commonplace books, and unpublished poetry and music. More recently, with the aid of funds from the Ahmanson Foundation, the Clark has been collecting later in the eighteenth century and on into the early 1800s, deepening its traditional strengths with contemporary foreign-language editions of English authors and with other materials documenting cultural exchanges between the British Isles and Europe.

The Clark subscribes to the UMI microfilm series Early English Books, 1641-1700, which virtually expands our holdings in this period by more than 40,000 editions. Microfilm from the even vaster Primary Source Media series The Eighteenth Century can be paged from campus within a couple of days.

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