By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
I belong to a book group in the town where I live. We circulate ideas for books to read via WhatsApp and meet once a month in a member’s home to discuss them. We really do read (some of!) the books, but it will come as no surprise that our monthly meetings are predominantly social occasions. After all, book groups are about human connection – an excuse for bringing people together to exchange ideas and to build relationships. In a small town, they create a sense of belonging.
I’d love to know whether the same was true of the Woodleigh Deanery Book Club. I discovered this note in Exeter Cathedral Library’s copy of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition, written by Charles Gore and published in 1898. It isn’t the sort of book that would go down well in my book group, but it would seem that members of Woodleigh Deanery Book Club had a good stab at it.
The names on the list give us some idea of the date of the note – it must date before 1904 because the Reverend Algernon Barrington Simeon was Rector of Bigbury in the Deanery of Woodleigh when the book was published, but ceased membership of the club in 1904 when he moved to Berkshire.
It would appear that Woodleigh Deanery Book Club had at least nine members. The Diocese of Exeter is organised into parishes within deaneries within archdeaconries – Woodleigh Deanery (in the Archdeaconry of Totnes) includes such parishes as East Portlemouth, Kingsbridge, Loddiswell, Salcombe, Slapton, Stoke Fleming, Thurlestone and, of course, Woodleigh. We don’t know whether these nine clergymen were the only members of the Book Club or whether it comprised members from all twenty-four parishes in Woodleigh Deanery. If the latter, it’s clear from this short Order of Circulation that members opted to read certain books and not others.
Evidently, members of the Woodleigh Deanery Book Club had a month to read books before they passed them to the next person on the list. The Reverend T. F. Boultbee of Loddiswell is the outright winner here – he seems to have devoured the book within five days. (Or, perhaps, he gave up halfway through.) I don’t know whether the Woodleigh Deanery Book Club ever met in person but I’d like to think they did, and that they enjoyed their time together. Perhaps they even discussed St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.