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 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.

William Gladstone in 1843.

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

detail fast marked him out as one of the rising stars of the party under Sir Robert Peel. Sure enough, he was given his first junior post in government aged just 25, but when the Peel government resigned in April 1835, Gladstone returned to the back benches. He used his sudden spare time to pen his first book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), which argued that the state should promote and defend the interests of the Church of England. An unfashionable position even then, it was received poorly by Peel, going as it did against the grain of Tory policy. His spell out of office, coupled with the critical reaction to his book, intensified Gladstone’s self-prosecuting doubts about his true calling. ‘How often, how daily, & this for how many years’ , he asked his diary in March 1839, ‘do I inwardly ask of Him in whose lap is cast the lot of my destiny … shall I ever be a man of study and of prayer, a man of the cell and of the lamp?’

An engraving by F.C. Lewis from a drawing by George Richmond, image © Athenaeum, Liverpool; Thomas Carlyle, c.1840s, by Samuel Lawrence.

It was in this context – one of doubt, of tension between the apparently disparate mindsets of a religious scholar and a public politician – that Gladstone first encountered Carlyle, a gruff, charismatic, hulking Scotsman, by turns fierce and cranky, a man with indefatigable energy, a touch of mysticism and a whip of a tongue. It would prove a fruitful, if increasingly fractious, relationship and one which would help shape The London Library in those early years.

Carlyle and Gladstone first met at a boozy dinner party on 12 April 1838. The event seems to have left little impression on Carlyle but, the introduction having been made, Carlyle’s estimation of Gladstone grew rapidly, such that by February 1839 he was telling Ralph Waldo Emerson about ‘a certain W. Gladstone, an Oxford crack scholar, Tory MP and devout Churchman of great talent and hope … I know him for a serious silentminded man’ .

In between dinner parties, Carlyle was becoming ever more frustrated at the

dearth of libraries in the capital and the subsequent difficulty in finding both the books and space conducive to serious ‘brainwork’ . In a much-quoted diary entry of May 1832, Carlyle lamented: ‘what a sad way I am in for want of libraries, of books to gather facts from! Why is there not a Majesty’s library in every town? There is a Majesty’s gaol and gallows in every one!’ He would have to wait until the Public Libraries Act 1850 for the first such library, but in the meantime he was dependent on the British Museum, a place he increasingly despised: never able to find a seat, he was reduced to perching on ladders and scavenging among the less-than-scholarly scraps selected by his nemesis, the ‘Keeper of Printed Books’ , Antonio Panizzi, a man who enforced his regime of silence with a series of barking shouts that echoed through the building.

By 1840 Carlyle had suffered one ‘museum headache’ too many and, on 24 June, at a well-trailed and widely reported gathering of journalists, politicos and reforming intellectuals at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn, he set out his vision for a new London Library in a quasi-missionary language that would resonate with the young Gladstone. The library would be ‘a Church also – which

every devout soul may enter – a Church but with no quarrelling’ , a civilising force since ‘everyone able to read a good book becomes a wise man … a similar centre of light and order and just insight into the things around him’ .

Such arguments were of a piece with those made in a remarkable series of lectures Carlyle gave only a month earlier, which were published in 1841 as On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, a volume Gladstone read and feverishly annotated in September that year. Carlyle’s argument that ‘in Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream’ , received Gladstone’s ‘NB’ mark of special notice in the margin. So, too, did his claim that the modern man of letters was the equivalent of the medieval priest – ‘He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop … of all England? … The writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country’ .

Inside The London Library, c.1890, before its St James’s Square premises were substantially redesigned in 1898.

Carlyle’s mixing of the missionary and the literary, the social and spiritual, provided a compelling vocabulary that Gladstone would echo in later years when essaying on books – ‘the voices of the dead … the main instrument of communion with the vast procession of the other world’ (‘On Books and the Housing of Them’ , 1890) – and in the rhetoric surrounding the establishment of St Deiniol’s Library. Perhaps most importantly it goes some way to explaining why Gladstone became involved in The London Library at such an early stage: at a time when he was undergoing a vocational crisis, the Library offered a way for Gladstone to marry the pull of the religious scholar with the pull of public duty. A Christian intellectual in politics, here he could be a politician in an intellectual church.

Gladstone joined the Library’s first committee (alongside one Charles Dickens) and threw himself into the founding process. In February 1841 he was one of three who went to inspect the premises of a prospective first home for the Library, at 49 Pall Mall. As he surveyed its musty eighteenth-century rooms it is hard to imagine that the man whom Disraeli accused of not having one redeeming vice was fully aware of the building’s history. For 49 Pall Mall was the original 1759 site of Almack’s, one of the most fashionable (and notorious) gambling dens in London, whose members included Charles James Fox, William Pitt the Younger and Edward Gibbon.

Either way, Gladstone evidently approved, because he recommended taking on a seven-year lease, with a view to moving to bigger premises in the future. The committee agreed, the lease was signed and the Library was made manifest. But, before it opened on 3 May 1841, there was still one thing missing: books. Again Gladstone was at hand, scouring booksellers’ catalogues in order to select the Library’s founding stock of theology and ecclesiastical history (while his soon-to-be Liberal Party colleague in the Commons, John Stuart Mill, did the same for philosophy and political economy).

Gladstone in his own library, the ‘Temple of Peace’, Hawarden Castle, 6 June 1884. Photograph © Flintshire Record Office.

While the Library was a platform for Gladstone’s administrative virtues, it also proved to be the stage for some nakedly political chicanery. Over the Library’s first decade, Carlyle’s opinion of Gladstone deteriorated. From a man of ‘great talent’ and the only ‘hope’ for the Conservative party, Carlyle now saw Gladstone as an opportunist with ‘no convictions’ , while Gladstone found Carlyle’s manner overbearing, his religion mere undercooked mysticism and his prose style interminable (which didn’t stop Gladstone still reading him extensively).

The death of the first Librarian, John George Cochrane, brought things to a head in 1852. By this time the Library had moved to its current location at 14 St James’s Square and, with its increasing growth in membership and attendant professionalisation, the choice of the next Librarian was critical. Carlyle backed William Bodham Donne, a scholar and a friend of William Makepeace Thackeray and Edward Fitzgerald. Gladstone proposed an unknown, charming Italian he had met on holiday, who had been in the UK but four months and who had virtually no experience as a librarian.

He was, in other words, an odd choice. Gladstone had met Giacomo ‘James’ Lacaita in Naples in 1850 and immediately they hit it off, taking long walks quoting Dante to each other and picnicking together with their families. However, unbeknownst to Gladstone, the iron-fisted Bourbon King of Naples (‘King Bomba’) had been keeping Lacaita under surveillance, and found in the letters between the families a reference to their little band as a ‘glorious republic’ . This sounded dangerously like sedition and landed Lacaita in a Neapolitan jail. He was soon released but still had charges pending against him, and Gladstone, bubbling with characteristic righteous anger at the whole affair, sensed a chance of domestic political gain for taking a stand against the illiberal Bomba.

Keen to build a strong case, he wrote to Lacaita promising that ‘on every ground, as well as on account of the effect that any hostile proceeding might have on you, I have sought in the first instance to go to work quietly’ . Gladstone’s ‘quietly’ amounted to publishing two pamphlets addressed directly to the Foreign Secretary which condemned the bombastic King’s regime as ‘an outrage upon religion, upon civilization, upon humanity and upon decency’ . While this proved popular at home, the result abroad was less happy, if equally predictable. Lacaita wrote to Gladstone telling him that he, Lacaita, was suspected of authoring the pamphlets, or at least of being Gladstone’s main source, and was in a whole lot more trouble.

It’s not clear how Lacaita escaped Naples before being arrested again, but when he arrived in London in January 1852 he was understandably peeved, replying to a letter from Gladstone with: ‘I was delighted to see again and without any alarm your handwriting. Don’t write any more about Naples. ’ For his part, Gladstone saw Lacaita as a political refugee for whom he was at least partially responsible and, in light of Lacaita’s dwindling funds, proposed the librarianship.

By this time Carlyle was no longer officially on the committee, but remained an influential presence. What he thought mattered, and Gladstone seems to have sneaked Lacaita on to the shortlist with some sweet-talking: ‘from Gladstone’s own account to me, ’ recalled Carlyle, ‘I figured him as some ingenious bookish young advocate, who probably had helped Gladstone in his pamphlets underhand’ . However, as Carlyle learned more about ‘the Neopolitan’ , his position toughened, calling the proposal ‘quite inadmissible’; ‘the post ought to be given to an Englishman’ .

Nevertheless, as the days rolled on, things looked to be going Gladstone’s way. One committee member wrote to Carlyle telling him how Gladstone was ‘stirring Heaven and Earth’ to get Lacaita elected, and that the committee members were ‘a clear majority of malleable material, some of it as soft as butter under the hammer’ of Gladstone’s political might. Carlyle was despondent, and resented the Library being used for what he saw as personal political expediency. Gladstone will ‘probably succeed, ’ he wrote to his brother, ‘but he shall not do it without one man at least insisting on having Reason and common Honesty, as well as Gladstone and Charity at the other men’s expense, satisfied in the matter; and protesting to a plainly audible extent against the latter amiable couple walking over the belly of the former’ .

Carlyle was no political naïf, and this ‘audible extent’ involved plotting behind Gladstone’s back to have himself re-elected to the committee to bolster the vote. In the weeks before the formal selection, furious lobbying went on behind the scenes, and the tide began to turn on Lacaita. When the day of the election came, Gladstone and Carlyle stood up and made their respective cases, with Carlyle responding to Gladstone’s impassioned speech by snidely thanking him for descending like Apollo to address them all. With positions by now entrenched, a vote was called as ‘they were not convincing one another’ . Amid a heavy stillness, the result was called: Carlyle had prevailed, Gladstone defeated. Donne was made Librarian. Gladstone would shrug off the result, going on to steer the Library to the crucial purchase of the St James’s property outright in 1877, and would stand for President of the Library in 1892. Then nearing 85 and in his fourth spell as Prime Minister, Gladstone lost out to the younger Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf.

It would be the last election Gladstone took part in, an appropriate final act for a man who, as he put it in an 1888 speech, had grown to see the library as ‘a rich treasure-house of all that can fertilize the human mind and enable men to devote themselves either wholly or partially to the high pursuit of politics’ . In recasting the library as a transformative marriage of scholarly seclusion and public action, Gladstone replicated his own negotiation between competing visions of himself. That such visions could be played out at The London Library speaks of an older political culture where our leaders were known as readers too. Older, but, as long as the Library remains, not quite lost.