BEHIND THE BOOK Adrian Leak reveals some of the Library titles that aided his research for his latest collection of essays, which were inspired by his wide and colourful experience of life as a country parson
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Adrian Leak’s Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (Book Guild Ltd, 2018).
My recent book, Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (2018), includes among other pieces 15 thumbnail portraits of churchmen and women over the centuries. For these I made extensive use of the Library’s collections. u Sidonius
Apollinaris and his Age by C.E. Stevens (Oxford 1933). This book describes Sidonius Apollinaris, a fifth-century country gentleman born into the Romano-Gallic aristocracy. He held public office under his father-inlaw, the Emperor Avitus, and later under the Visigothic king, Theodoric II, before becoming Bishop of Clermont. He had a large library of classical authors and enjoyed a good read with his meal. u Bede’s Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford 2013). This edition of the Venerable Bede’s account of the foundation by Benedict Biscop of the twin monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, in 674 and 682 respectively, has a translation and introduction setting the historical context. Biscop’s abbey at Wearmouth (Sunderland) possessed one of the beststocked libraries north of the Alps; it was destroyed by Vikings. u Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times, and Works, ed. Anne Lyon Haight (New York 1965). Commissioned by the Hroswitha Club of New York, this title includes an informative account of Hroswitha, the tenth-century playwright, poet and nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony. Influenced by the humanism of the
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classics, she admitted an occasional preference for the polished elegance of Terence to the rugged Latin of the Vulgate. u Memoir of Richard Busby, D.D. (1606–1695): With Some Account of Westminster School in the Seventeenth Century by G.F. Russell Barker (London 1895). In this slim volume the author gives an account of Richard Busby, the schoolmaster who taught Christopher Wren, John Locke and John Dryden. For much of the seventeenth century Busby was Headmaster of Westminster School. Asked how he and the school survived the turbulence of the Commonwealth, he said, indicating Parliament next door: ‘The fathers rule the country, the mothers rule the fathers, the boys rule the mothers and I rule the boys. ’ After the Restoration the school’s link with the Church was restored and remained as strong as ever; Busby claimed to have birched 16 future bishops. u Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of Sabine Baring-Gould, Parson, Squire, Novelist, Antiquary, 1834–1924 by William Purcell, with an introduction by John Betjeman (London 1957). A dedicated country parson, folklorist, historian and all-round polymath, Sabine Baring-Gould had a huge literary output, much of which is in the Library. William Purcell’s biography provides a
fascinating account of this ‘squarson’ , who had little time for bishops and once described William Thomson, the officious Archbishop of York, as possessing ‘an autocratic temper such as was naturally bred in a man rapidly advanced from a breeches-maker’s shop in a small provincial town’ . u Things Past by Michael Sadleir (London 1944). This most readable collection of essays by the publisher, art collector and author Michael Sadleir contains a piece about the bibliophile and country parson Francis Wrangham (1769–1842), whose library contained over 15,000 volumes. u Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life by Georgina Battiscombe (London 1981). In Max Beerbohm’s caricature an exasperated Dante Gabriel Rossetti asks his sister: ‘What is the use, Christina, of having a heart like a singing bird and a water shoot and all the rest of it, if you insist on getting yourself up like a pew-opener?’ Christina Rossetti, now best known for her poem In the Bleak Midwinter, was afflicted throughout her life by self-doubt, which would probably be recognised now as clinical depression. Georgina Battiscombe’s sensitive biography shines a light on the life and work of this troubled poet and – obliquely – on the world of the Pre-Raphaelites.
