The Smedley books held at the Folger Shakespere Library

The Smedley books acquired by the Folger Shakespeare Library

William Smedley occupies an important, if now largely forgotten, place in the early twentieth-century afterlife of Francis Bacon. As editor of Baconiana for roughly a decade, Smedley functioned less as a polemicist than as a custodian of materials. He assembled an extensive private library of early modern books, philosophical, literary, theological, many bearing marginalia and corrections in Bacon’s handwriting. After Smedley’s death, a significant portion of this collection entered the Folger Shakespeare Library, where it remains underutilized. Among the most intriguing items is a copy of The Anatomie of the Minde (1576), alleged to contain corrections and annotations attributable to Bacon. Whether or not such attributions ultimately withstand paleographical scrutiny, the intellectual profile of the annotations—legal, moral, psychological—aligns closely enough with Bacon’s known interests to warrant renewed, non-partisan examination using modern imaging and handwriting-comparison techniques. In The Mystery of Francis Bacon Smedley wrote:

The following suggestion is put forward with all diffidence, but after long and careful investigation. Francis Bacon was the author of two books which were published, one before he left England, and the other shortly after. The first is a philosophical discourse entitled The Anatomie of the Minde. . . There is in existence a copy of the book with the printer’s and other errors corrected in Bacon’s own handwriting.

Smedley did not identify the book he thought Bacon published soon after he left England, but I believe it’s the book known as Anti-Machiavel. That book and The Anatomie of the Minde have extensive parallels with each other, documented in an appendix here, and appear to have been composed during Bacon’s time at Cambridge.

A parallel case with Smedley’s Bacon library is the collection assembled by Edwin Durning-Lawrence, whose books are now housed at the Senate House Library in the University of London. Durning-Lawrence, a wealthy and indefatigable Bacon enthusiast, amassed one of the most substantial private Baconian libraries of the period. Among its highlights is a 1612 English Don Quixote containing marginal corrections and annotations that he likewise attributed to Bacon. As with the Smedley materials, the scholarly problem is not whether one must accept these attributions wholesale, but that the books themselves, objects bearing layers of early modern readerly intervention, have never been systematically digitized, collated, or subjected to high-resolution multispectral analysis. A focused project to digitize and cross-compare the Smedley and Durning-Lawrence holdings would allow scholars to move beyond anecdote and advocacy toward a genuinely empirical assessment: comparing hands across multiple volumes, mapping patterns of annotation, and situating them within the broader ecology of Elizabethan and Jacobean marginal practice. Even if Bacon’s direct authorship were ultimately disproved in specific cases, the exercise would still recover a lost archive of elite early modern reading, one that speaks directly to the intellectual environment out of which Bacon’s works emerged.