Special Collections
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Book of the Month, October 2005
The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon, commonly known as The Advancement of Learning , first appeared four hundred years ago, in October, 1605. It is the product of two enforced periods of leisure, from March 1603 until March 1604 and from December 1604 until December 1605. The Advancement of Learning is Bacon's first published philosophical work and the only one to have been published in English rather than Latin, with haste having thwarted Bacon's original intention to publish it in both languages simultaneously. The first of the two books defends the importance of learning for every field of life. The second, much longer and weightier, is a general survey of the contemporary state of human knowledge, under the three headings of history, poetry and philosophy, corresponding to the three faculties of memory, imagination and reason. It identifies the deficiencies or the contemporary state of knowledge and supplying Bacon's broad suggestions for improvement - i.e., how to advance all fields of learning, theological and secular. Bacon's result shows a wide grasp of many subjects, including original analyses of rhetoric, psychology, ethics and politics.
Two English editions followed the first one in the STC period, in 1629 and 1633, and there was also a French translation in 1624 (Senate House Library holds all three in the Durning-Lawrence Library). Bacon expanded the ideas presented in The Advancement of Learning in the Latin De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623).
Senate House Library possesses four copies of this book. It was one of ten works by Bacon which Sir Louis Sterling (1879-1958) gave as part of the Sterling Library. The Sterling copy, shown, contains the inscriptions "Clemens Barksdale" and "Clement Barkesdale, Oxon. 1630" on the title-page; Clement Barksdale (1609-1687) was a clergyman and author who translated and popularised the works of Hugo Grotius. In 1630, when he acquired the book, he had been awarded his B.A. (1629) from Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College , in Oxford and was proceeding towards his M.A. (1632). The Sterling copy is the Library's only perfect one. The Baconian protagonist Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837-1914), the main strength of whose library consisted of the works of Francis Bacon, owned two imperfect copies of the first edition, in addition to several later editions. The fourth copy is housed in the Durning-Lawrence library and is interesting for being in a different state from the others, with line 5 of leaf C4r reading, correctly, "amiable" rather than "maniable".
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