Lexicographers and Library Treasures

"REFERENCE, s. (from refer.)

Relation; respect; view toward, allusion to. Raleigh."  Samuel Johnson, Dictionary

King George III's Library at the British Library, London  © British Library

For many of the books I pull from the shelf for reference --  like Shakespeare, Evelyn, Johnson, Dickens, Pevsner --  I have a clear image of the author,  but several I rely on equally are just names, like Roget, Kennedy, and Brewer, so this blog celebrates these indispensable nineteenth century scholars.

"The man is not wholly evil, he has a Thesaurus in his cabin."  J.M. Barrie on Captain Hook

Peter Mark Roget, physician, writer and scholar, was born in Soho in January 1779, graduating from Edinburgh in 1798.  He travelled on the continent and worked as tutor and physician in many places, finally settling in London as a professor of physiology, where he was an active member of the Royal Society and many other scientific institutions.  

Very much a child of the Enlightenment, in 1825 he contributed to the very early development of moving pictures with his observations on the retina's retained images,  and his work on natural selection in Animal and Vegetable Physiology,  published in 1833-4, was a forerunner to Darwin.

His early life was very unsettled; several close relatives died young or suffered mental problems, and he found list-making kept away depression.  As early as 1805 he was cataloguing words and phrases, and in his retirement he worked on his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, published in 1852 and never since out of print.  What writer, reader, or crossword devotee does not possess a well-thumbed copy on their bookshelf?

Strahov Monastery Library, Prague

The Theosophical Hall contains a vast collection of Bibles

Benjamin Hall Kennedy  Born in 1807, Benjamin H. Kennedy was a contemporary of Darwin at school.   An outstanding classical scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge, he took holy orders in 1824, and was a well-regarded headmaster at Shrewsbury School from 1836-1866.  His retirement also saw the first publication of his Latin Primer for Schools. Kennedy was a keen supporter of education for women and campaigned for the women students of Girton and Newnham to have full access to the University lectures and examinations.   It is not surprising then, that in 1888 he relied on his two daughters'  help for the revised edition of the Primer;  with its new rhyming mnemonics to guide even the dullest scholar, it became an indispensable success. To this day I can quote the 5 line verse for spotting the ablative absolute, without (until I looked it up) remembering what was an ablative absolute. (and see millroadcemetery.org.uk)

The Teleki-Bolyai Library, Targu-Mures, Romania

In this eighteenth century public library founded by Count Samuel Teleki, chancellor of Transylvania,  in 1802, you can see works by Galileo, Descartes, Locke and Newton, as well as books they will have studied.

Ebenezer Cobham Brewer  Born in Norwich in 1810, Brewer graduated in law from Trinity Hall, Cambridge; he then taught at his father's school and wrote textbooks on education, literature and science.  He travelled and lived in Paris for six years the 1850s, where he married, and then concentrated on his writing.
He began his "treasury of literary bric-a-brac", The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable in the 1860s, publishing it in 1870, and revising it in 1894.  It runs from A: "modified from the Hebrew aleph = an ox",  to Z: " Zulfagar, Ali's sword" .  As he explained, "I have always read with a slip of paper and a pencil at my side, to jot down whatever I think may be useful to me, and these jottings I keep sorted in different lockers."  His methodical labour and lively mind created a beguiling treasury for us, as well as a lasting work of reference.

The New York Public Library Reading Room

As well as its inspiring architecture and collections, it has a wonderful collection of authors' manuscripts, including A.A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh".

Wrapping "fork handles": a recycler turned collector to the rescue

One of the most spectacular rescuers of waste paper was collector John Ratcliffe (1707-1776), a chandler* from Southwark, who became fascinated by the old printed blackletter books (bought by weight) from which he, like other shopkeepers, tore out pages for wrapping his goods (candles, oil, soap, paint and groceries, according to the Oxford Dictionary).

St Mary Magdalen Church, Bermondsey, where he was baptised.

He kept a library at his home in East Lane, Bermondsey, where he entertained wealthy collectors with "Coffee and Chocolate every Thursday morning" and they could peruse his latest acquisitions, a gentlemen's social event.  If he (a tradesman by class) later sold them copies of the fine books they had admired, it was seen as acceptable between collectors.   Among those visitors were Dr Anthony Askew (who had 7000 Greek and Latin books and manuscripts), Topham Beauclerk, friend of Horace Walpole and Samuel Johnson,  and James West, MP and President of the Royal Society.  In his account of Bibliomania, or Book Madness  Thomas Dibdin compares their collections, judging  "West's more extensive, a magnificent repository,  and Ratcliffe's more curious, a choice cabinet of gems", with some thirty books printed by William Caxton.

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,   The Merchant's Prologue , 2nd edition printed c. 1483   

© the British Library

Wealthy enough to concentrate on collecting, rather than selling candles, for the last forty years of his life,  Ratcliffe was able to change his shopkeeper's "brown peruke and Russian apron for a gentleman's embroidered waistcoat, velvet breeches and flowing periwig".   A Dissenter, every Sunday he was seen proceeding slowly down the lower road to Deptford,  with his hat and his gold-headed cane, to hear Dr Flaxman preach.

A wig maker, powdering a wig   engraving by De Salliere c. 1780-90
(and see Georgian Gentleman)

When there was a fire close by and he needed his furniture and books removed to safety, he was in the street lamenting the loss of his precious Caxtons, until a neighbour proudly produced two of his very costly periwigs, with no idea that Ratcliffe was making such fuss over a few books. (As ten year old Fanny Burney would say in 1762 when she and her playmates ruined a ten guinea wig in a water tub, "What signifies talking so much about an Accident? The wig is wet! … and what's done can't be undone.") 

After Ratcliffe's death in 1776 his collection was sold by Mr James Christie. The British Library has an auction catalogue of the sale of  his library, Bibliotheca Ratcliffiana, annotated with prices achieved.   The Caxtons averaged around £9 a piece, with King George III buying a large number, which eventually were donated to the British Library.   Others from this "galaxy of Caxtons, Wynkyn de Wordes, Pynsons &c, &c," were purchased by collectors like Dr. William Hunter of Glasgow** (who paid £5. 15s. 6d for Higden's Polychronicon by Caxton),  and also ended up in public ownership.

Unlike the butcher Phineas Trott, who was tearing up an early Erasmus to wrap the meat in, we owe a great deal to John Ratcliffe, the little known Bermondsey shopkeeper.

Old Bermondsey,  the Abbey remains, from an engraving c. 1790

* An artisan whose trade it is to make candles:  Johnson's Dictionary
** Brother of Dr John Hunter, the anatomist,  my Collector no. 4.

A Cabinet of Collectors 4: Dr John Hunter - the 'Knife Man'.

" My Italian Collection being now ariv'd, came Moulins the great Chirurgion to see & admire the Tables of Veines and Arteries, which I purchasd, & causd to be drawne out of several humane bodys at Padua:
 I saw a private dissection at Moulin's."  so John Evelyn writes in his Diary for April 1649.

One of Evelyn's anatomical tables, from Padua, 1646 

© Hunterian Museum, London 

He purchased his four anatomical tables, the  dissected human veins and arteries preserved on panels of varnished oak, in 1646, after  watching three human dissections at the Padua anatomy school, and had them "transported into England, the first of that kind had ben ever seen in our Country, & for ought I know, in the World, though afterwards there were others".

The College of Physicians was very keen for Evelyn to donate these rarities to them, but he was only prepared to lend them for an annual Lecture, although by 1667 he felt able to present them to the Royal Society, "and are hanging up in their Repositary; with an Inscription;".    The remarkable panels were eventually given to the Royal College of Surgeons, where they are on display in the Hunterian Museum.

The museum is tucked away in Lincoln's Inn Fields,  based on the amazing collection of Dr John Hunter, the eighteenth century pioneering anatomist and surgeon.  3000 of his specimens, or preparations,  are now displayed in spectacular glass showcases* at the Royal College of Surgeons. Thousands more were lost during wartime bombing, but hundreds of  his original specimens, or  preparations, beautifully dried or preserved in formaldehyde, many in their original glass jars, are still in constant use today for the detailed study of animal and human anatomy.

Visiting the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons

The younger brother of Dr. William Hunter (founder of Glasgow's better known Hunterian Collection),  John worked as his brother's assistant dissectionist, and as an army surgeon, before setting up on his own, teaching and studying  anatomy, and researching new medical procedures.    He married well, and his surgical skills, together with his wife's fashionable salons for artists and intellectuals, brought him in touch with leading figures of society.

Dr John Hunter 1728-93,    Joshua Reynolds 1786

He introduced several new surgical procedures, from his practical experiences and his anatomical researches, including a cure for Coachman's Leg, a contemporary industrial strain injury.  His collections included a menagerie, and paintings by William Hodges and George Stubbs, and Sir Joseph Banks collected specimens for him.

This preparation, a gift from Edward Jenner to his former teacher,  shows the embryo of a cuckoo, with the shell forming.  Hunter wrote to him: "don't think, try the experiment".

Rare preparation of a pig's epididymis. 

By injecting the tightly coiled organ with mercury, Hunter was able to reveal its full length.    He was even asked to prepare anatomy specimens for teaching King George III's children.  The King appointed him Royal Physician in 1776.

Skeleton of Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant

Hunter was determined to obtain the Irish Giant's skeleton, against Byrne's wishes, reputedly paying around £500 for it.  It now is lasting evidence of Byrne's actual height of seven feet, seven inches.

The collection has continued to explore surgical history and the amazing nature of the body, carrying on from John Hunter's original work.  Today you can wonder at the left (analytical) half of Charles Babbage's brain or Winston Churchill's all-important dentures, along with the pioneering history of Lister's antiseptics and Harold Gillies' plastic surgery, with films of today's brain and keyhole surgery, all learning from John Hunter's collection and his mantra, "try the experiment!"

Images © Hunterian Museum, RCS
* John Ronan designs

At Luton Hoo Park

   Daughters of the 3rd Earl of Bute   Johann Zoffany 1763-4  © Tate UK   

Their botanist father had only just acquired his estate at Luton Park (having resigned as Prime Minister),  and Robert Adam had not yet begun work on the house.  Here the girls are playing with their pet squirrels in the park;  later they could have enjoyed the famous Walled Garden, designed by Capability Brown.  Bute had been tutor to the future George III, and would have been very familiar with the Royal Gardens at Kew.