Content area
Full Text
The Commonplace Book of William Byrd 11 of Westover. Edited by Kevin Berland,Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth A. Lockridge. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
William Byrd II (1674-1744) is an important figure in the history of colonial America. Born in Virginia, schooled in England, he lived half his life on the Westover plantation and half in London. He is most famous for his charming account of the 1726 surveying expedition of the line between Virginia and North Carolina. His amusing anecdotes about the local culture and informative descriptions of southern natural history have delighted naturalists and historians ever since. Thomas Jefferson admired Byrd's History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, and quite recently Stephen Husband's Byrd's Line: a Natural History (2002) appraises Byrd's descriptions of the flora and fauna. Byrd was a gentleman, an amateur scientist, an active member of the House of Burgesses, and possessed the largest library in the colonies for his time. Because Byrd lived most of his youth in London but matured in Virginia, his life is an example of the emergence in the early eighteenth century of a southern colonial identity distinct from the English one. His recently edited commonplace book gives us insight into the mind of a Virginia gentleman caught between these two worlds.
A commonplace book is essentially a private notebook in which students and gentlemen copied quotations, maxims, figures,jokes and other bon mots that could assist them in public discourse, both written and spoken. Normally, according to the...