Collecting the Past

British Collectors and their Collections from the 18th to the 20th Centuries

Toby Burrows, Cynthia Johnston, Toby Burrows, Cynthia Johnston

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351208536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Today's libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects. Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J. P. Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty and R. E. Hart. Contributors to the volume examine the phenomenon of collecting in a variety of settings and across a range of different materials. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the history of these collections after the collector's death. Particular attention is given to the often complicated relationship between collectors and the public institutions that subsequently came to house their collections. Situated within the framework of cultural collecting more generally, this book offers an authoritative series of essays on key collectors. Collecting the Past should be most interesting to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museum studies, book history, manuscript studies, museum history, library history and the history of collecting. Professionals in libraries, museums and galleries will also find the volume of great interest.

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Collecting the past

Manuscript and book collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Toby Burrows and Cynthia Johnston

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a great age of manuscript and book collecting in Britain and North America. Many of the best-known collectors were active in this period, and several of them founded significant libraries or museums which perpetuate and memorialize their collections to the present day. The turnover of manuscripts alone was at a very high level; the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts records almost 100,000 transactions through auctions and sales catalogues during this time.¹ This volume, which has its origins in a conference held in 2016 at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, brings together essays on a selection of key people involved in collecting books and manuscripts during this period. While these essays are not intended to form a fully comprehensive history, they aim to illustrate the breadth and variety of collectors and their activities, and demonstrate the various different themes which were at play during this time.

In various ways the history of book and manuscript collecting has parallels in the astonishing growth of the market for artworks in the same period.² Many of the key features of that market can also be seen in the world of manuscripts and books. Historic collections in Britain and Western Europe were being sold in the face of changing economic, social and political conditions for aristocratic and landed families. Items from religious houses and churches were acquired, stolen and dispersed, especially in the wake of the suppressions by Napoleon and other rulers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The rapid industrialization of the nineteenth century produced a growing number of extremely wealthy industrialists and bankers, especially in the United States, who felt (or were persuaded to feel) a need to demonstrate their taste, culture and philanthropic commitment through the purchase of rare and expensive books and manuscripts. An increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of dealers, experts and scholars emerged to serve the market; these roles were often blurred and combined, resulting in frequent conflicts of interest. As with the art market, prices for the most desirable items rose to astronomical levels, even as the number of items available for sale contracted. This trend reached its culmination in 2014 when a record price was set for a manuscript volume, with the Rothschild Prayerbook selling at auction for $13.6 million.³

The collectors discussed in these essays came from various different backgrounds and collected for different purposes. They range from Sir Hans Sloane, who served as an eighteenth-century precursor of many later developments, and Sarah Sophia Banks, who played an important role alongside her brother Joseph Banks, through to such well-known collectors as Thomas Phillipps, Alfred Chester Beatty and the Morgans, and those who worked with them and for them, like Sydney Cockerell and Belle da Costa Greene. Also covered are R. E. Hart, who exemplifies the regional collecting of northern, industrial Britain, and the hundreds of individual collectors whose collections now form part of the academic and public libraries of Great Britain.

Identifying and reconstructing these collections is not necessarily a straightforward process. In some cases, notably J. Pierpont Morgan and his son Jack (J. P. Morgan Jr.), the collecting fed directly into a public institution established by the collectors themselves (the Morgan Library), and the items they collected – together with the records of their acquisitions – are still together as a collection.⁴ Other collections were bequeathed or donated to public institutions, where they have been kept intact. The visiting cards and other printed ephemera collected by Sarah Sophia Banks were donated after her death to the British Museum. R. E. Hart’s collections were donated en bloc to the Blackburn Public Library, where they remain intact and well documented. The vast collections of Hans Sloane were, for the most part, acquired by the British Museum together with his catalogues and documentation – but not all of the material was retained amid the changing perspectives of the nineteenth century.

In the case of Alfred Chester Beatty, on the other hand, the present-day Chester Beatty Library in Dublin does not reflect the totality of his collecting in the twentieth century. Many of his Western manuscripts were sold off in 1932–1933 and again in 1968–1969. Reconstructing his collections involves painstaking research in the archives of libraries and dealers, as well as through auction and sale catalogues.⁵ Thomas Phillipps is an even more extreme case; his huge collection was gradually dispersed in the century after his death in 1872, and is now scattered around the world. The documentation relating to this dispersal is voluminous and complex, and exists in formats ranging from archival documents to printed catalogues to databases of various kinds.⁶ The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts is a particularly valuable starting point for identifying and reconstructing collections like those of Beatty and Phillipps.

One of the features of book and manuscript collecting in the period covered by this volume was the rise of the ‘professional’ curator and expert, exemplified by such twentieth-century figures as Sydney Cockerell of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Belle da Costa Greene of the Morgan Library, and earlier by Sir Frederic Madden at the British Museum and Henry Bradshaw at the Cambridge University Library. They were not primarily collectors themselves, though Cockerell and Madden certainly dabbled in acquiring their own books and leaves. Instead, they worked to build an institution’s collections – as Madden did at the British Museum, and Cockerell at the Fitzwilliam Museum – or they worked closely with one of the wealthy collectors, as Greene did with the Morgans. While they had an impressive degree of knowledge of the history and value of manuscripts, they also had other skills more suited to institutional collection-building. Stella Panayotova shows how Sydney Cockerell was a relentless – and usually successful – practitioner of the art of persuading and influencing wealthy donors, either to give money or to leave their collections to the Fitzwilliam. Laura Cleaver and Danielle Magnusson reveal Belle da Costa Greene’s ability to manipulate and negotiate with firms like Quaritch, as well as the value of her talent for persuasion allied with the deep pockets of the Morgans.

There is a tension here between private collecting and public collecting, beginning with Sir Hans Sloane – who, as Alice Marples demonstrates, was deeply concerned that his collections be used and that they be made available for public access. His insistence that they be acquired by the nation and made accessible through the British Museum was one of the driving forces in his frenetic and omnivorous collecting activities.⁷ Sir Thomas Phillipps, more than a century later, assembled an equally gigantic collection but failed in his attempts to make it available to more than a few scholarly visitors. As Toby Burrows shows, Phillipps had several similarities with Sloane: absorbing the collections of others, being driven primarily by a desire to preserve the documentary record of the past, and enduring some criticism and ridicule from his contemporaries for his supposed lack of connoisseurship. But he lacked Sloane’s talents for influencing and persuading those in power. Phillipps’s vast collection was scattered across the globe after his death, and his legacy – unlike Sloane’s – is indirect and largely invisible. Some later collectors, such as Alfred Chester Beatty and the Morgans, worked to turn their collections into public institutions as well as personal memorials. Cynthia Johnston demonstrates that others – like R. E. Hart in Blackburn, Lancashire – used their collections to enhance the civic value and importance of their native town.

Karen Attar uses the term ‘ossified collections’ to identify those handed over to institutional care and maintenance, as opposed to the dynamic nature of collections being formed and added to by private collectors. This tension can also be seen in the Phillipps manuscript collection; what had been a living and continually growing collection over a period of more than 50 years was split into innumerable pieces after his death and subsumed into many institutional settings.⁸ Interestingly, however, a significant number of the items from his collection are still in private hands. The career of Sydney Cockerell is also revealing from this point of view.⁹ He worked tirelessly to shape personal, dynamic collections like those of Dyson Perrins and Alfred Chester Beatty, with the long-term goal of turning them into institutional assets, preferably at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Yet even his remarkable talents could not prevent some of these collections from slipping through his fingers.

A striking feature of the activities of many of these collectors was the breadth of their interests. Manuscripts and printed materials were only one aspect of their collecting, in most cases. Sarah Sophia Banks collected coins and medals in addition to the printed ephemera which Arlene Leis discusses here. R. E. Hart also had an extensive coin collection to go with his book collection. Phillipps collected Old Master drawings and paintings, and acted as a patron for two contemporary artists. Cockerell collected paintings and antiquities for the Fitzwilliam. Sloane’s books and manuscripts were an adjunct to his huge collection of natural history specimens. In most of the cases covered by this volume, book and manuscript collecting needs to be seen within this broader context of acquisitions across a wide range of different types of material. Even the scope of their manuscript collecting was generally quite broad; Sloane, Phillipps, Beatty and Cockerell were all interested in acquiring manuscripts with origins beyond Western Europe, especially Persia, India and Hispanic America.

None of these collectors worked on their own; they were all part of broader networks of like-minded people, and they all worked their connections vigorously to identify and acquire material. Hans Sloane was part of a global network of suppliers, agents and collectors, and made a crucial contribution to the Royal Society as one of its early Presidents.¹⁰ Sarah Sophia Banks benefited from the extensive social and scientific connections of her brother, Sir Joseph, who was also a long-serving President of the Royal Society.¹¹ Even Thomas Phillipps made use of a wide circle of dealers and booksellers, and was well-connected with other scholars and antiquarians; he too was a Fellow of the Royal Society.¹² Sydney Cockerell assembled an unrivalled set of patrons, mentors and suppliers, beginning with John Ruskin and William Morris.¹³ In a different register, perhaps, R. E. Hart moved in the tight social circles of northern industrialists, as well as having his own connections in the book trade.¹⁴

The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that book and manuscript collecting in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century was dominated by men, with little obvious involvement from women. After all, most of the best-known collectors were men. And yet, as many of these essays show, women played a significant part in this world. In some cases, like Sarah Sophia Banks, they were collectors in their own right, whose collections were housed alongside those of their better-known male relatives. In other cases, like Edith Beatty, they worked with their husbands, making their own acquisitions and (in her case) spending more freely than he did. As for Bella da Costa Greene, she played a crucial role in building the manuscript collection of what became the Morgan Library; the money may have come from the Morgan family, but she was the one who carried out many of the negotiations for the more expensive purchases, and she was the one who built the network of connections with connoisseurs, dealers and owners.¹⁵ Karen Attar shows how many of the special collections now in British libraries were put together by women, sometimes working by themselves and sometimes in collaboration with men. She also reveals that a significant number of collections assembled by men were actually donated to libraries by their female relatives, as some kind of memorial to the collectors.

One of the notable features of the period from the later nineteenth century was the increasing dominance of North American collectors. Laura Cleaver and Danielle Magnusson demonstrate how this worked in the case of the Morgan family, and the alarmed and shocked reaction it provoked in Great Britain. They also discuss the interesting case of Alfred Chester Beatty, who started off as an American mining engineer and ended up as a central figure in the British and Irish collecting world.¹⁶ Nevertheless, British collecting continued to thrive despite the American onslaught, as exemplified by the work of Sydney Cockerell and of collectors like R. E. Hart. As Karen Attar shows, many hundreds of special collections continued to be formed by individual collectors and were subsequently acquired by British libraries during the twentieth century.

Perhaps the most common question asked about these notable collectors was why they collected, and why they collected so obsessively. On the basis of the evidence in this volume, it is clear that there are many answers to this question, and that any one collector may have had multiple reasons for collecting. Undoubtedly, a common element was that collecting manuscripts and other valuable historical objects was a way of demonstrating taste, wealth and social standing. In Great Britain, there was a strong tradition of connoisseurship among the landed gentry, and even new arrivals to this class felt the need to fill their country houses with suitable artistic and literary objects.¹⁷ In the case of the American industrialists and financiers like the Morgans and Beatty, conspicuous expenditure on luxury items was a good way of demonstrating success, taste and wealth. People like Sydney Cockerell and Belle da Costa Greene were able to make good careers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Collecting the past: manuscript and book collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 2 Creating and keeping a national treasure: the changing uses of Hans Sloane’s collection in the eighteenth century
• 3 Sarah Sophia Banks: a ‘truly interesting collection of visiting cards and Co.’
• 4 ‘There never was such a collector since the world began’: a new look at Sir Thomas Phillipps
• 5 American collectors and the trade in medieval illuminated manuscripts in London, 1919–1939: J. P. Morgan Junior, A. Chester Beatty and Bernard Quaritch Ltd.
• 6 Sydney Cockerell: a bibliophile director-collector
• 7 Spending a fortune: Robert Edward Hart, bibliophile and numismatist, an industrialist collector in Blackburn, Lancashire
• 8 Ossified collections: the past encapsulated in British institutions today
• Index