@article{7681,
  author = {John W. Clark Jr.},
  title = {Opening the Bishop's Books: John Strachan's Library and Enlightenment Thought},
  abstract = {This paper examines a selection of books from the personal library of John Strachan (1778-1867), first Anglican bishop of Toronto, showing how they reflect a man raised during, educated in, and greatly influenced by the eighteenth-century Western European Enlightenment, perusing the personal libraries of a few of the best-known Anglican public intellectuals in England and the United States who were Strachan’s contemporaries makes it apparent that the works of a number of important classical and contemporary authors in Strachan’s library could also be found in the libraries of luminaries such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Thomas Jefferson. However, a notable difference appears between the libraries of Upper Canadian Anglicans like Strachan and the libraries of his English counterparts. Strachan was not only interested in the most important classical and contemporary authors of Western civilization, but also as important, owned a significant number of works on natural science and books critical of the Roman Catholic Church. This difference stems from both background and circumstances. Unlike public intellectuals in England and the United States, Strachan was forced to contend with significant challenges on the Upper Canadian frontier. Strachan’s contemporaries in more intellectually and culturally developed cities like London and Boston did not have to contend with the political, geographical, and financial difficulties facing Upper Canadian intellectuals. Strachan came of age during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and began his career during
the first decade of the nineteenth century, when the Counter-Enlightenment was at its apogee. Nevertheless, the diversity of ancient and contemporary works in his library suggests that Strachan’s intellectual and emotional temperament was not only that of an unwavering eighteenth-century monarchist and Tory, but also equally that of an eighteenth-century “enlightened ecclesiastic.”
},
  year = {2014},
  journal = {Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society},
  volume = {52},
  pages = {3-32},
  language = {English},
}