GLADSTONE AND THE LONDON LIBRARY Frank Lawton on the vital role played by William Gladstone in the early years of the Library
These days you’ll find him staring into the Ladies toilets. But between 1841 and 1892 you’d have been more likely to find him striding across the lobby of The London Library, quoting Juvenal to the Librarian, skimming the shelves of theology or nosedeep in a volume of Irish history. That is, when he wasn’t running the country. For long before he was deemed worthy of a portrait next to the toilets, four-time Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone was a founding member of The London Library, and would play a key role in its development over the next half century, something to which the great monuments of Gladstone biography have paid surprisingly little attention. Libraries bookended Gladstone’s life. Born into the small but curated library of his Scottish merchant father in 1809, he would lie in state in his own library, the aptly named Temple of Peace, 90 years later. In between, Gladstone read over 20,000 titles by 4,500 authors, and his hand can be found in the annals of not just The London Library, but the library at the British Museum, where he was an active trustee for 30 years; St Catherine’s College Library, Oxford, to whom he donated the books which would begin their collection; and St Deiniol’s Library in the village of Hawarden, which he founded, managed and stocked with 22,000 of his own books. But perhaps the greatest debt is owed by The Bodleian Library, since as a Trustee (and Chairman for 30 years) of the Radcliffe Trust it was he who in 1858 first suggested (and later authorised) the use of the Radcliffe Camera to the University of Oxford, who were in desperate need of library space. Gladstone’s concerns 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
with spatial economy even went so far as pioneering compact mobile shelving (which greatly increases book-storage capacity): on a trip to Oxford for a speech, Gladstone dropped by E.W. Nicholson, the Bodley’s Librarian, to sketch out his designs on a scrap of paper still held in the Radcliffe Camera. Nicholson was so impressed that he had the models made and installed, calling Gladstone’s ‘own invention’ a ‘masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness’ . A significant technical advance in librarianship, this was a first – and presumably last – for a UK Prime Minister. A pathologically voracious reader and deeply religious man, Gladstone left Oxford with a Double First in Classics and Mathematics and a string of accolades for his debating prowess. But before affirming his move into public life he
had a serious near-turn to the clergy, going so far as to send a 4,000-word letter to his father explaining his desire for Anglican ‘ministerial office’ . As far as his father was concerned, this was the wrong type of ‘office’ to seek, and Gladstone tortuously came round to this opinion. But the conflict was real, and the question of whether his true vocation was as a religious scholar – hermetic, sedentary, private – or a politician – active, practical, public – was to dog Gladstone for much of his life. It is in the image of a library that Gladstone is best able to reconcile these competing identities, and he will come to rest implicitly on Thomas Carlyle’s rhetoric for his justification, as we will see. But why The London Library in the first place? In 1832, aged 23, Gladstone was elected to Parliament as a Tory, and his torrential eloquence and command of
