Bibliomania required, or at least implied, a librarian, except in those circumstances where collectors felt that they themselves had the time, interest, and expertise to take on the role for themselves. Some owners were confident that they did, but others were more doubtful. At Chatsworth, for example, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, though a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, was self-conscious of his lack of learning, writing to his librarian, the Shakespearean scholar and notorious forger John Payne Collier (1789–1883): “I am not worthy of my own collection, I am sorry to say; and I want you, as far as you can, to make me worthy of it by informing my ignorance.”
Nonetheless his papers include detailed notes outlining what would now be called a job description for a librarian, while Payne Collier was paid a handsome £200 a year. The well-bred bachelor duke enjoyed at best an uneasy relationship with his self-made librarian, whom he thought “simple and vulgar.” But at Stowe, the 1st Duke of Buckingham (1776–1839), had a closer and more affectionate friendship with the learned Dr. Charles O’Conor (1764–1828), a Catholic priest, but also a member of an ancient and aristocratic Irish family, whose grandfather the antiquarian Charles O’Conor (1710–91) had once owned many of the famed Irish manuscripts. Going down to Soane’s Gothic Library in 1827 to take his leave of O’Conor for the last time, Buckingham was deeply moved to find that his “old friend,” a man with a history of mental illness and by then apparently senile, was struggling to pack for his final journey back to Ireland, and was upset when the librarian displayed no signs of emotion as his employer kissed his forehead.
Similarly close relations existed between Humfrey Wanley and his employers. Wanley was assiduous in deploying his bibliographical and palaeographical skills on Lord Oxford’s behalf, recording his day-to-day activities in a diary which he kept from 1715 to 1726, a document which provides some of the most vivid descriptions we have of an acquisitive 18th-century librarian at work. He was also delighted when he received in return signs of the family’s affection and approbation, as in 1722, when Lady Oxford presented him with “a fine & large Silver Tea-Kettle, Lamp & Plate, & a neat Wooden Stand,” to add to the silver tea-pot she had already given him. “I shall never cease from praying Almighty God to Bless Her & all this Noble Family with all Blessings Temporal & Eternal,” he noted in his diary.
Sometimes librarians might be less compliant figures. At Bowood, Wiltshire, the radically minded Swiss pastor Pierre-Étienne-Louis Dumont (1759–1829) in 1786 succeeded the chemist and political radical Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) as librarian to the 1st Marquess of Lansdowne (1737–1805), Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783, when he was ousted from office after securing peace with America. There, as part of the radical “Bowood Circle,” Dumont first came into contact with Jeremy Bentham, whose work he edited and promoted in both Britain and France. By 1854, when the antiquary John Britton (1771–1857) made extensive use of the Bowood library, the librarian was a “Mr Matthews.”
At the opposite end of England, at Holkham, the Liverpool historian, banker and collector William Roscoe (1753–1831) in 1814 offered to prepare a catalogue of the great collection of medieval manuscripts. It was subsequently revised and rewritten by Frederic Madden (1801–73), the future Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, but as costs rose, the catalogue was never published, though 25 proof copies of the intended illustrations were issued. Roscoe, a pioneering enthusiast for early Italian painting, was an appropriate choice for the Holkham library, which was rich in Italian manuscripts, but foreign librarians like Dumont also appealed. Better known for his association with Dibdin, Lord Spencer had earlier retained the Italian Tommaso de Ocheda (1757–1831), a graduate of Bologna and Pavia who had previously worked in Amsterdam and was employed by Spencer for 28 years until his retirement in 1818. Interestingly, while Dibdin haggled with dealers and auctioneers or negotiated purchases with other collectors, de Ocheda’s duties included compiling a long series of catalogues (cribbed by Dibdin without due acknowledgement), preventing the ordering of duplicates—a key task in any great library—as well as sorting good from inferior copies, and making sure that reading copies of useful books were available as required in any of Spencer’s four houses.
Later in the 19th century at Chatsworth, the 7th Duke of Devonshire employed Sir James (Giacomo) Lacaita (1813–95), like Sir Antony Panizzi an anglicised Italian émigré, to catalogue his uncle’s great library, a task he performed rather badly, visiting during the summer months when the family were away—though the four large volumes describing its contents, published in 1879, remain the best guide to the Chatsworth collection. In the generation following, Lord Bute retained a series of learned librarians: in 1896 this was R. F. R. Conder, but by 1909 Dr Walter de Gray Birch (1842–1924), a Cambridge graduate, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and recently retired after 38 years in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum, had taken over.
At Wallington in the 1850s, Walter Calverley Trevelyan (1797–1879) and his learned wife Pauline, well-read but certainly not bibliophiles or bibliomaniacs, retained David Wooster (1824?–88), the former curator of the Ipswich Museum, as librarian. He had first come to Northumberland to sort the Trevelyans’ private museum. Gauche and awkward, not a servant but not quite the social equal of the Trevelyans and their sophisticated pre-Raphaelite entourage, Wooster haunted the Library, answered bibliographical queries, caused embarrassment at the breakfast table and compiled a large-scale slip catalogue of the books, similar to the one he had already produced at Ipswich. This catalogue, along with countless others, simply underlines the extent to which 19th-century private libraries were liable to be accessible to a surprisingly wide audience.
Elsewhere, others relied on the more traditional approach of engaging a local clergyman to care for their books. At Althorp in 1870, the Rector of nearby Brington, F. J. Ponsonby, was Lord Spencer’s honorary librarian, while at nearby Deene Park in the 1830s it was the the clergyman and topographer John Harwood Hill (1809–86). A trusted family retainer, Hill, it was reported, “lives among the books, and loves his labour.” At Blickling in the early 19th century, the librarian was the Reverend Mr Churchill, who received Dibdin; later the role was taken on by a local gentleman-scholar, Mr Bulwer, who corresponded with the owner, the 8th Marquess of Lothian (1832–70), on terms of easy equality. Bulwer was one of two Lothian librarians, as the great collection in the family’s Scottish house, Newbattle Abbey, was in the care of an Edinburgh bookseller, a typical arrangement. A similarly gentlemanly relationship existed at Wimpole, where Lord Hardwicke’s library was in the care of the Revd Dr Robert Plumptre (1723– 88), Rector of Wimpole and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge.
In Scotland, too, Archibald Anderson, the Duke of Gordon’s resident librarian at Gordon Castle in Morayshire, was sure enough of his status in the ducal household to send a long lesson of pompous advice to the duke, then a schoolboy at Eton, in 1760, pointedly reminding the young man that he had “had the Honour not only to know but also to have been generously used by Yr. Grace’s three last Predecessors.” Anderson was still ensconced in the castle a dozen years later, in 1772, when the duke corresponded with his factor about the need to move the old man from his accustomed room, a subject to be approached with some circumspection, the duke observing that “if the old man should have an objection to do it I don’t think I should like to force him,” but adding that the room would need to be cleaned, as he believed it had not “been washed these 40 years.”
By contrast, Richard Salter, who looked after the books at Badminton, emerges in his diary (1848–52) as more of a clerk and a book cleaner than a gentleman-librarian. Until the 20th century librarians were unlikely to be women, but Lord Derby’s librarian at Knowsley in the 1950s was a Miss Dorothy Povey, and the librarian at Longleat in the 1970s was a Miss Betty Austin. Another atypical figure, Francis Needham (1900–71), was 6 feet 7 inches tall and began his career as an assistant in the Bodleian. He then moved to Welbeck as librarian to the Duke of Portland in 1930, stayed on for 13 years before going onto a part-time retainer in 1943, was briefly Clerk of the Records to the House of Lords in 1946 and succeeded A. R. C. Grant as librarian to the Duke of Wellington in 1948. Needham’s predecessor at Welbeck, Richard Goulding, who came from a family of printers and booksellers in Louth, was librarian there for 27 years from 1902 to 1929 and was sufficiently esteemed to get a memorial plaque in the house after his death.
At Chatsworth the librarian Francis Thompson, equally respected, not only contrived emergency plans for the future of the great house as a public museum in the post-war era but also cared for the collection and organized exhibitions for the girls of Penrhos College, evacuated there during the Second World War. In some libraries the owner himself acted, at least in some measure, as his own librarian. Beckford, a voracious reader, was reportedly able to pounce on any book like a bird of prey, even though his books were essentially unordered. In a more systematic way, successive Earls of Crawford in effect acted as their own librarians, studying bibliographical reference books, formulating desiderata lists, corresponding with booksellers, musing over a classification scheme and even compiling a massive slip catalogue, pasted up between 1862 and 1865. All these pursuits were continued into the 1880s and beyond.
Nonetheless between 1891 and 1910, no fewer than 11 staff (10 men and 1 woman) worked in the Crawfords’ Library—the Bibliotheca Lindesiana–as librarians, assistant librarians and assistants. In mid-19th-century Warwickshire, the massive two-volume slip catalogue (1867) of the library at Ettington Park appears to have been compiled by the owner, the antiquarian E. P. Shirley; a third of the collection, rich in topographical books, had been assembled by Shirley himself, a third by his father and a third by his ancestors.
Another route was to bring in the trade. In the second half of the 18th century the Chester bookseller Broster and Son advertised that they organized libraries “alphabetically and according to Subjects, upon an entire new plan which has been universally approved of,” a claim which others booksellers would no doubt have repeated. The John Edward Martin who billed Lord Brownlow for £107 in 1847 “for arranging the library at Belton” and compiling the catalogue, as well as for work in the family town house in London, was presumably also a member of the trade. At Wilton in 1811, the catalogue was done by “Mr Payne,” of Payne and Foss, and at Arbury in Warwickshire in 1835 by a bookseller from nearby Nuneaton, one E.W. Short.
The 1856–57 catalogue of Chevening was done by a member of staff from Hatchard’s. At £70 1s. 6d. this was considerably cheaper than the Belton project, probably because it was created by cutting up existing catalogues and then pasting up the slips, to produce a single consolidated catalogue. This catalogue was in turn the basis of the one printed in 1865. Elsewhere, catalogues were on slips from the beginning, for example the massive late 19-century slip catalogue of the books at Duff House in Banffshire. At Goodwood the librarian William Hayley Mason, a bookseller from nearby Chichester, compiled a catalogue published in 1838.
Friendly relations with the trade could pay dividends in other ways, as in 1764 when the London bookseller Thomas Osborne (1704?–67) wrote to Sir William Lee of Hartwell in Buckinghamshire, informing him that he had come across four volumes of Don Quixote with Lee’s bookplate inside them, and wondered whether these ought to be returned. Another route was to seek guidance from a member of staff from an established library. At Trelissick in Cornwall in 1884, the owner Mrs Davies Gilbert consulted W. H. Allnutt (1849– 1903), of the Bodleian, who had been brought in by Lord Clifden at nearby Lanhydrock to work on the library there in 1878. The Welds of Lulworth retained Robert Harrison of the London Library to catalogue their books in 1867. At Patshull in Staffordshire, a catalogue by the booksellers T. and W. Boone, revised and expanded by the British Museum’s Cyril Davenport (1848–1941) in 1884, was replaced by another catalogue in about 1910 by C. Kenelley of the London Library.
In 1901 Sir Thomas Acland of Killerton consulted A. R. Atkinson of the Devon & Exeter Institute, who charged ten guineas, but passed the task of compiling a catalogue on to a local schoolmaster, one E. G. Mardon. Acland wanted his books arranged alphabetically, but Atkinson pushed for a subject arrangement, which went wrong, obliging him to write an apologetic letter to Sir Thomas in which he said, “I am sorry Mardon has made such a mess of the classification,” adding rather lamely: “When I spoke this morning about Mr Mardon’s want of knowledge I only meant of course technical knowledge, which he cannot be expected to possess, being untrained in library work.”
Similar failings occurred elsewhere, for example in the 1832 catalogue of the library at Swynnerton, a Catholic house in Staffordshire, where the compiler clearly had great problems with the reversed Cs (a typographical convention used to create the Roman numerals “m” and “d”) in the imprint dates of many Renaissance books. The tasks carried out by librarians varied considerably from place to place. At the most basic level, books ideally needed to be numbered so that they could be placed correctly on the shelves and retrieved via the catalogue when required. A memorandum in a library catalogue of 1767 from Waldershare, the North family house near Dover, explained the working method, as common now as then: “The Great Letter denotes the Book Case, the figures on the left side the Shelves, and those on the right side the Number of Volumes.”
Innumerable libraries still contain books with spine labels, either handwritten or (commonly) printed, and the chance survival of a printed broadsheet from a house in Leicestershire reveals how this was done.Innumerable libraries still contain books with spine labels, either handwritten or (commonly) printed, and the chance survival of a printed broadsheet from a house in Leicestershire reveals how this was done. Produced for the London bookseller Bernard Lintot (1675–1736), the broadsheet contains a matrix of letters and numbers, designed to be razored into its component pieces and pasted onto the spines of books. The instructions explain: “The large Capital denotes the Shelf. The Small Capital and number to be cut off and past’d on the backs of the Books on the Shelf A.B.C. &c..”
But in other libraries, shelf-marks might be written onto flyleaves rather than on labels pasted onto the spines, and in many cases books were not numbered at all. In the grandest libraries the librarian might deal with external visitors, as at Blickling in 1819, when the librarian Mr Churchill received the classical scholar Edmund Henry Barker, but made it clear that manuscripts from the library might not be borrowed, or in 1895, when A. E. Bullen (representing the Duke of Buccleuch, but a member of staff at the London booksellers Lawrence and Bullen) was robust in his response to an enquirer who wished to write an article about the ducal libraries, advising a colleague: “This man. . .is not in any sense a scholar or a bibliophile. He is a hack of very mean quality. . . .If he returns to the attack, refer him to me.”
Librarians might also be asked to advise on what subsequent generations would describe as strategic decisions. In 1851 another librarian working for the Buccleuchs, David Laing, of the Signet Library in Edinburgh, was asked to investigate whether the ducal collections in the various Buccleuch houses should be amalgamated “to form one large library.” He recommended against the idea, but the episode illustrates another area where librarians might be active: in considering or implementing proposals for fundamental changes in the way that libraries were organized or run. At Knole between 1806 and 1824, someone was checking books in the library, noting moves to London and keeping a record of missing books: the librarian as administrator and manager of cultural property.
In many libraries librarians compiled catalogues, then, as now, a task which took far longer and was far more complicated than those in charge had expected. The authorship of extant catalogues is not now always clear, but as two large and well-organized classed catalogues (catalogues arranged by subject) of the library of the Dukes of Kingston at Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire, show, even when anonymous they could be the work of people who knew what they were doing. At Chirk Castle as early as 1704, the meticulously laid-out catalogue was clearly the work of a serious scholar whose work now provides a remarkably vivid insight into the arrangement and organization of a long-vanished Library room. Many libraries, at least the larger or better organized, had two catalogues: a shelf-list, enumerating the books in the order in which they stood on the shelves (which may well have been loosely by subject), and an alphabetical catalogue or at least an author index to go with with it.
Printed catalogues were not uncommon by the 19th century, but more unusual earlier: the first English printed catalogue of a private library was that of the 1st Duke of Kingston (1665–1726), produced in 1726. Another early example of a printed country house catalogue comes from Osterley, where the Catalogus Librorum in Bibliothecae Osterleiensi (1771) was compiled by Handel’s librettist the lexicographer Thomas Morell (1703–84). Many libraries also had some sort of subject index, usually in manuscript, but later not infrequently printed, especially in the 19th century, as at Weston Park, Staffordshire, in 1887. But librarians could also end up doing their own thing. At Lanhydrock W. H. Allnutt not only compiled a catalogue and extracted binding fragments (now split between the Bodleian and Harvard), but also clearly spent a good deal of time doing his own research—much as he did at the Bodleian, which sacked him in 1896 for doing private work in work time.
Library posts could be lucrative and were certainly desirable perches, whether for established members of the book trade, gentleman amateurs, local clergy or indigent private scholars. When the 5th Duke of Buccleuch’s librarian died of a stroke in London in 1836, no fewer than 16 potential applicants immediately wrote to offer their services as a replacement. Many were, of course, booksellers. One was French, and others were Scots, one of whom stressed his poverty and his nationality in pushing his claim. Another candidate was a German, and four more, including a 28-year-old minister of the Kirk, an impecunious Cambridge MA and an unemployed Doctor of Divinity, had no very obvious qualifications for the job beyond an evidently shared belief that it sounded like an agreeable sinecure. Others had long-standing involvement with aristocratic libraries, including a bookseller who had supplied the Duke of Bedford and the Marquess of Abercorn with books, a London bookseller who had worked for Lord Salisbury, and another who had worked for Lord Bradford, the Duke of Wellington and the Marquess of Bute, and had recently been engaged as Librarian to the Duke of Bedford. But elsewhere it is clear that similarly productive relationships were brokered via estabished firms, as when a “J. G. Jennings,” of Primrose Hill, was recommended to the Ulster magnate the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava by Quaritch, for whom he had once worked.
