ABSTRACT
English men and women, as we have repeatedly seen, were inveterate consumers of the much-talked-about literature of an enlightened age. More than this, and crucially for our own inquiries, they were also widely acquainted—sometimes obsessively so—with the published output of their Scottish contemporaries. Accordingly, it is clear that even if they would not have recognised the label, and even though they would certainly have had divergent opinions about which texts and authors it might connote as well as in relation to what was singularly enlightened or definitively Scottish about it, English readers would often have acknowledged, as recent historians have largely been content to do, the reality of a Scottish Enlightenment. 1 The myriad individual encounters between English consumers and Scottish books upon which this increasing intimacy at the developing heart of a new British culture was founded, however, were demonstrably diverse. Indeed, from the disparate evidence at which we have now looked, the experience of reading clearly took a great many forms, differing widely from person to person and from occasion to occasion.
