Classified by their classifications: nineteenth-century library classifications in context

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and geographical contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century.

KEYWORDS:

• Libraries
• classification
• organization of knowledge
• epistemology
• aristocracy

Acknowledgements

Elements of this paper originated in a chapter of my PhD thesis, ‘Class Acts: The Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Earls of Crawford and their Manuscript Collections’ (University of Manchester, 2017). I am grateful to my supervisors, Professor Stephen Milner, Dr Guyda Armstrong and Professor David Matthews, for their support and guidance throughout the course of my research. An early version of the paper was presented in February 2018 at the ‘Urban Knowledges: Making Knowledge in Urban Contexts, 1700–1925’ seminar series, convened by Professor Stuart Jones under the auspices of the John Rylands Research Institute at The University of Manchester, and I am grateful to the participants for their helpful suggestions. Subsequent drafts of the article greatly benefited from the detailed comments of Professor Jones and Dr Dorothy Clayton. Especial thanks are owed to this journal’s anonymous reviewers, whose incisive criticisms greatly improved the framing and presentation of my argument. I accept full responsible for all remaining errors and deficiencies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2010 [1984]), xxix.

2 On the biases and limitations of Library of Congress Subject Headings and Dewey Decimal Classification, see Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993); Clare Beghtol, ‘Knowledge Domains: Multidisciplinarity and Bibliographic Classification Systems’, Knowledge Organization 25, no. 1‒2 (1998); Hope A. Olson, ‘Sameness and Difference: A Cultural Foundation of Classification’, Library Resources & Technical Services 45, no. 3 (2001); Megan Fox, ‘Tentative Supplement to (the History of) Classification: Librarians of Color and Operationalizing Solutions to Deconstructionist Critique’, The iJournal: Graduate Student Journal of the Faculty of Information 4, no. 3 (2019).

3 W. C. Berwick Sayers, A Manual of Classification for Librarians and Bibliographers, 2nd ed. (London: Grafton, 1944); Jesse H. Shera, Libraries and the Organization of Knowledge, ed. D. J. Foskett (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1965); J. W. Lubbock, Remarks on the Classification of the Different Branches of Human Knowledge (London: Charles Knight, 1838); Edward Edwards, Libraries and Founders of Libraries (London: Trübner, 1864).

4 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 81–115. See also Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550‒1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003).

5 David McKitterick, ‘Libraries and the Organisation of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Volume I: To 1640, ed. Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Alain Besson, ‘Classification in Private Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, 1500‒1640’ (PhD diss., University College London, 1988).

6 Rodney M. Brunt, ‘Organising Knowledge: Cataloguing, Classification and Indexing in the Modern Library’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume III: 1850‒2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); J. H. Bowman, ‘Classification in British Public Libraries: A Historical Perspective’, Library History 21, no. 3 (2005); Catherine Minter, ‘The Classification of Libraries and the Image of the Librarian in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, Library & Information History 25, no. 1 (2009).

7 Heather MacNeil, ‘Catalogues and the Collecting and Ordering of Knowledge (II): Debates about Cataloguing Practices in the British Museum and the Forebears of the Public Record Office of Great Britain, ca. 1750–1850’, Archivaria 84 (2017): 33.

8 Pauline Rafferty, ‘The Representation of Knowledge in Library Classification Schemes’, Knowledge Organization 28, no. 4 (2001). Walter C. Koehler has also situated classifications within their socio-cultural contexts, albeit at a somewhat superficial level, in Ethics and Values in Librarianship: A History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 43–78.

9 On Victorian Manchester, see Alan Kidd, Manchester: A History, 4th ed. (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2006); Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), 141–92.

10 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1. William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, 2 vols., vol. ii (London: Macmillan, 1874), 344: ‘All logical inference involves classification, which is indeed the necessary accompaniment of the action of judgment.’

11 Olson, ‘Sameness and Difference’, 115–16.

12 Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 322.

13 M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3, 47–8. See also Blair, ‘Reading Strategies’, 288–91; James Franklin, ‘Aristotle on Species Variation’, Philosophy 61, no. 236 (1986): 251–2.

14 Rodrigo de Sales and Thiago Blanch Pires, ‘The Classification of Harris: Influences of Bacon and Hegel in the Universe of Library Classification’, Proceedings from North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization 6 (2017).

15 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), 63–4, 79–80.

16 James Thompson notes the importance of practical convenience for the organization of libraries in A History of the Principles of Librarianship (London: Clive Bingley, 1977), 146–61.

17 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989); Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 8; Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400‒1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 257. Caroline Steedman has applied Bachelard's concept of topoanalysis to the study of archives in ‘The Space of Memory: In an Archive’, History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 4 (1998), and Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 79–81.

18 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed., Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152.

19 Besson, ‘Classification’, 177.

20 On Edwards, see William Arthur Munford, Edward Edwards, 1812–1886: Portrait of a Librarian (London: Library Association, 1963); Hugh Purcell McCartney, ‘Edward Edwards: Man of Letters (First Public Librarian of Manchester)’, Papers of the Manchester Literary Club 74 (1965–8); K. A. Manley, ‘Edward Edwards: A Humble Librarian at Oxford’, Library History 7, no. 3 (1985); Alistair Black, ‘Edwards, Edward (1812–1886), Librarian and Writer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8535.

21 Edward Edwards, A Letter to Benjamin Hawes, Esq. M.P.: Being Strictures on the ‘Minutes of Evidence’ Taken before the Select Committee on the British Museum (London: Effingham Wilson, 1836).

22 Ibid., 28–9. Quoted in part in Munford, Edward Edwards, 18.

23 House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on British Museum; together with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index (14 July 1836), 398.

24 Quoted in MacNeil, ‘Catalogues and the Collecting and Ordering of Knowledge’, 10–11.

25 Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy (London: Trübner, 1859), 815–31. On the limitations of the Public Libraries Act, see Alistair Black, ‘The People's University: Models of Public Library History’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume III: 1850‒2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 25–6.

26 Edward Edwards, Notes on the Classification of Human Knowledge, with Especial Reference to the Methods Which Have Been Adopted, or Proposed, for the Arrangement or Cataloguing of Libraries (Liverpool: T. Brakell, 1858).

27 Ibid., 17.

28 Ibid., 31.

29 Edwards, Memoirs, 813–31.

30 See Edward Edwards, Free Town Libraries, their Formation, Management, and History; in Britain, France, Germany, & America (London: Trübner, 1869), Table IV facing p. 193.

31 Edwards, Memoirs, 814.

32 Ibid., 1067.

33 Ibid., 814.

34 Ibid., 815; William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences: From the Earliest to the Present Times, 3 vols. (London and Cambridge: John W. Parker, J. and J.J. Deighton, 1837), and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History, 2 vols. (London and Cambridge: John W. Parker, J. and J.J. Deighton, 1840). On Whewell's taxonomy of the sciences, see Geoffrey N. Cantor, ‘Between Rationalism and Romanticism: Whewell's Historiography of the Inductive Sciences’, in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, ed. Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Raphaël Sandoz, ‘Whewell on the Classification of the Sciences’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 60 (2016); Aleta Quinn, ‘Whewell on Classification and Consilience’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 64 (2017).

35 Thomas Potter, mayor of Manchester; quoted in Munford, Edward Edwards, 100.

36 Bowman, ‘Classification’, 143. By contrast, Catherine Minter argues that systematic classification and arrangement were the norm in German libraries in the nineteenth century, although ‘catalogues […] were often at a less advanced level of development than classification schemes.’ Minter, ‘Classification of Libraries’, 9.

37 Catherine Minter, ‘Academic Library Reform and the Ideal of the Librarian in England, France, and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Library & Information History 29, no. 1 (2013): 22.

38 On professionalization in the nineteenth century, see T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982); Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, eds., Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Martin Daunton, ed. The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2005).

39 Mike Saks argues that ‘the key to the definition of a profession remains the sheltered position of professions in the marketplace, with entry to the professions usually gained through obtaining relevant higher education credentials.’ Mike Saks, ‘Defining a Profession: The Role of Knowledge and Expertise’, Professions and Professionalism 2, no. 1 (2012): 4.

40 Ruth Barton, ‘“Men of Science”: Language, Identity and Professionalization in the Mid-Victorian Scientific Community’, History of Science 41, no. 1 (2003): 76, 108.

41 Heather Ellis, ‘Knowledge, Character and Professionalisation in Nineteenth-Century British Science’, History of Education 43, no. 6 (2014).

42 See Alistair Black, A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850‒1914 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 193–224; David McKitterick, ‘Libraries, Knowledge and Public Identity’, in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2005), 298–9, 312; William Arthur Munford, A History of the Library Association, 1877‒1977 (London: Library Association, 1996). Munford (p. 43) and Black (pp. 195‒6) note that in 1885, the first year in which the Library Association held examinations, only two second-class certificates were awarded; in some subsequent years there were no entrants at all.

43 As late as 1938, it could be said of university and college libraries that ‘the value of subject and classified catalogues is commencing to be appreciated’. John L. Thornton, Cataloguing in Special Libraries: A Survey of Methods, with an introduction by Henry A. Sharp, (London: Grafton, 1938), 15.

44 On the influence of medieval curricula on libraries, see Burke, Knowledge, 81–115; Besson, ‘Classification’, 191–232.

45 Thornton, Cataloguing in Special Libraries, 15–17. In 1900 the library of Owens College, Manchester (later to become the University of Manchester), contained 70,000 books and employed just five members of staff including two boys. P. J. Hartog, ed. The Owens College, Manchester: (Founded 1851): A Brief History of the College and Description of its Various Departments (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1900), 117.

46 Munford, Edward Edwards, 113–14, 26–8; Thomas Kelly, A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain, 1845‒1975, 2nd ed. (London: Library Association, 1977), 93. Crestadoro was appointed librarian in May 1864, after completion of his catalogue. Lucy M. Evans, ‘Crestadoro, Andrea (1808–1879), Inventor and Librarian’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/6678.

47 Andrea Crestadoro, ed. Catalogue of the Books in the Manchester Free Library: Reference Department (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1864), vi. For his part, Edwards criticized his successor's catalogue: ‘no competent critic can fail to see that while the honest and unsparing labour bestowed upon it is worthy of the highest praise, its unsystematic, confused, and awkward construction largely impedes its usefulness to readers. It is not a classed catalogue in any sense.’ Edwards, Free Town Libraries, 96.

48 William E. A. Axon, Handbook of the Public Libraries of Manchester and Salford (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1877), 190–1.

49 James D. Brown, ‘Classification and Cataloguing’, The Library s1‒9, no. 1 (1897): 146.

50 For example, the catalogues of the libraries of Henry Huth (1884) and Sir William Osler (1929) have been cited as landmarks in bibliographic description. David Pearson, ‘Private Libraries and the Collecting Instinct’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume III: 1850‒2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199.

51 The best introductions to the Bibliotheca Lindesiana are: Nicolas Barker, Bibliotheca Lindesiana: The Lives and Collections of Alexander William, 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres, and James Ludovic, 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres, 2nd ed. (London: Bernard Quaritch for the Roxburghe Club, 1978); Nicolas Barker et al., eds., ‘A Poet in Paradise’: Lord Lindsay and Christian Art (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2000); and Nicolas Barker, ‘Lord Lindsay: The Making of a Collector’, in Britannia, Italia, Germania: Taste and Travel in the Nineteenth Century: Conference Papers, Edinburgh, November 2000, ed. Carol Richardson and Graham Smith (Edinburgh: VARIE, 2001).

52 Lord Lindsay's Library Report, 1861–5, Introduction, p. 16. See n. 55 below.

53 Letter from Lindsay to Colonel James Lindsay, 22 April 1849; National Library of Scotland, Acc. 9769, Crawford Papers, Crawford Personal Papers, 94/13, fols 1739‒43. There is a vast literature on bibliomania: see, for example, Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain’, Representations 71 (2000); Arnold Hunt, ‘Private Libraries in the Age of Bibliomania’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume II: 1640‒1850, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); James Raven, ‘Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century’, Library & Information History 29, no. 3 (2013).

54 On the non-Western collections, see John R. Hodgson, ‘“Spoils of Many a Distant Land”: The Earls of Crawford and the Collecting of Oriental Manuscripts in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 6 (2020).

55 Library Report, Introduction, p. 2. Lord Lindsay's Library Report, or ‘Report on the present state and future prospects of the Crawford and Balcarres or Lindesian Library’, composed between 1861 and 1865 and extending to almost 190,000 words, is unique in the annals of nineteenth-century book collecting. No other nineteenth-century collector of books and manuscripts has left such a comprehensive description or justification of his collecting activities. It remains at Balcarres House, Fife, and is quoted by kind permission of Lord Crawford.

56 On Phillipps, see A. N. L. Munby, Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the World's Greatest Book Collector, ed. Nicolas Barker (London: Constable, 1967). See also Toby Burrows, ‘“There never was such a collector since the world began”: A New Look at Sir Thomas Phillipps’, in Collecting the Past: British Collectors and their Collections from the 18th to the 20th Centuries, ed. Toby Burrows and Cynthia Johnston (London: Routledge, 2019).

57 Library Report, p. 1.

58 There is evidence that Lindsay socialized with Whewell at Cambridge on at least one occasion. On 25 May 1833, Joseph Romilly recorded in his diary that he dined with Lindsay and met Whewell amongst the company. John Patrick Tuer Bury, ed. Romilly's Cambridge Diary, 1832–42: Selected Passages from the Diary of the Rev. Joseph Romilly, Fellow of Trinity College and Registrar of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 34. Lindsay cites Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in Progression by Antagonism: A Theory, Involving Considerations Touching the Present Position, Duties, and Destiny of Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1846), 8. On Whewell, see n. 34 above.

59 Lindsay, Progression by Antagonism. On Bacon's classification, see Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Bacon's Classification of Knowledge’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter Anstey, ‘Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History’, Early Science and Medicine 17, no. 1–2 (2012).

60 Lindsay, Progression by Antagonism, 2. Hugh Brigstocke discusses Lindsay's Hegelianism in ‘Sketches’, 54, claiming there is no evidence that he had read Hegel or A. W. Schlegel by 1846. However, Hegel is cited several times in Progression by Antagonism and his influence seems strong.

61 On the use of dichotomous diagrams, see Isabelle Charmantier, ‘Carl Linnaeus and the Visual Representation of Nature’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41, no. 4 (2011); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 194. Charmantier notes (p. 386) that they ‘were regularly used to convey classifications of the natural world throughout the early modern period’. On Ramist dichotomies, see Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and its German Ramifications, 1543‒1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46.

62 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2nd ed., 2 vols., vol. i (London: printed for James and John Knapton [and others], 1728), ii. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, General Introduction [to the Encyclopædia Metropolitana]; or, Preliminary Treatise on Method (London: s.n., 1818), 44. On the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, see Richard Yeo, ‘Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730‒1850’, Isis 82, no. 1 (1991); Neal L. Evenhuis, ‘Type Designations of Diptera (Insecta) in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana’, Zootaxa 2653, no. 1 (2010).

63 ‘It is generally easier to plan what is beyond the reach of others than to execute what is within our own; and it had been well if the range of this introductory essay had been something less extensive, and its reasoning more careful.’ John Ruskin, (anon.), review of Lord Lindsay, ‘Progression by Antagonism’, and ‘Sketches of the History of Christian Art’, Quarterly Review 81, no. 161 (1847): 6. Edwards, Notes on Classification, 29.

64 Alexander William Lindsay, ‘Lord Lindsay's System of Classification’, n.d. [c.1860‒65]. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, ACC 9769 Crawford Library Papers, 296.

65 On these debates, see Heyck, Transformation; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 199–250; Josephine M. Guy, ‘Specialisation and Social Utility: Disciplining English Studies’, in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2005); H. S. Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87–8, etc.

66 On Brunet, see Jacques-Charles Brunet, The Classification System of Jacques-Charles Brunet, trans. Donald Bruce McKeon, Louisiana State University, Graduate School of Library Science, Occasional Papers, 1 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, Graduate School of Library Science, 1976), 22; Roger E. Stoddard, Jacques-Charles Brunet, le grand bibliographe: A Guide to the Books He Wrote, Compiled, and Edited and to the Book-Auction Catalogues He Expertised (London: Quaritch, 2007).

67 According to John Guillory, Belles-lettres was ‘a discourse of judgment or taste, designed to cultivate a faculty of discrimination, the ability to distinguish good writing (“fine letters”) from bad’. John Guillory, ‘Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines’, in Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 21.

68 Lady Mary Susan Félicie Meynell, Sunshine and Shadows over a Long Life (London: John Murray, 1933), 28.

69 John Lankford, ‘Amateurs versus Professionals: The Controversy over Telescope Size in Late Victorian Science’, Isis 72, no. 1 (1981); Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, ‘Obligatory Amateurs: Annie Maunder (1868‒1947) and British Women Astronomers at the Dawn of Professional Astronomy’, The British Journal for the History of Science 33, no. 1 (2000).

70 James Ludovic Lindsay, Dun Echt Observatory Publications. Advance Sheets, Subject to Revision. Classification Scheme, and Index to the Same, of the Library of the Observatory (Dunecht, Aberdeenshire: printed at the Aberdeen Journal Office, 1879). On the Dunecht Observatory Library, see also Mary F. I. Smyth and Michael J. Smyth, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Crawford Library of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Royal Observatory, 1977).

71 Lindsay, Dun Echt Classification Scheme, [3]–4.

72 On Edmond, see John Webb, John Philip Edmond: Bookbinder, Librarian and Bibliographer of Aberdeen 1850‒1906: A Short Biography (Aberdeen: Aberdeen & North-East Scotland Family History Society, 2011); Henry Guppy, ‘Obituary: Edmond (John Philip)’, Library Association Record 18 (1906). Edmond had made his reputation at Sion College in London, where he reorganized the library according to the classification schemes of Brunet and Dewey; Sion College was one of the first libraries in Britain to be classified.

73 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 61.

74 Diary entry for 9 March 1913, in John Russell Vincent, ed. The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, Twenty-Seventh Earl of Crawford and Tenth Earl of Balcarres, 1871‒1940, during the Years 1892 to 1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 311.

75 Larissa C. Brookes, ‘The Sheaf Catalogs of George John Spencer’ (master's thesis, San José State University, 2009), 90–1. Edwards, Libraries and Founders of Libraries, 444–5. The Class Catalogue is now Rylands English MS 65. William George Spencer Cavendish, sixth duke of Devonshire, Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick (London: privately printed, 1844), 73. Reference kindly supplied by Fran Baker, Archivist and Librarian at Chatsworth.

76 Library Report, p. 1.

77 Collini, Public Moralists, 21–7; Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 360.

78 On these themes, see John R. Hodgson, ‘Class Acts: The Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Earls of Crawford and their Manuscript Collections’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2017), 106–53.

79 Sophisticated discussions of the topic are provided in Daunton, Organisation.

80 On the nuanced realities (and fictions) which underlay the potent mythology of the country–city dichotomy, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).

81 Edwards, Memoirs, 556–7.

82 John Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 4th ed. (London: Harrison, 1883) records that the earl of Crawford owned 13,480 acres, with a gross rental value of £39,252 (the vast majority of which derived from the Wigan estate). On aristocrats’ involvement in industrial enterprises, see David Cannadine, ‘Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century: The Case Re-Opened’, Economic History Review 30, no. 4 (1977); David Cannadine, ‘The Landowner as Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire, c.1800‒c.1926’, Agricultural History Review 25, no. 2 (1977); David Spring, ‘Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century: A Comment’, Economic History Review 33, no. 4 (1980); David Cannadine, ‘Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century: A Restatement’, ibid.; J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660‒1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 206–37.

83 Amanda Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century: An Architectural and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Grazia Gobbi Sica, The Florentine Villa: Architecture, History, Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

84 On the use of private libraries by those outside the immediate family circle, see Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750‒1820, Library of the Written Word, 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Mark Towsey, ‘“I Can't Resist Sending You the book”: Private Libraries, Elite Women, and Shared Reading Practices in Georgian Britain’, Library & Information History 29, no. 3 (2013); Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Mark Purcell, The Country House Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 229–31.

85 Kelly, History of Public Libraries, 91–2.

86 On country house librarians, see Purcell, Country House Library, 180–5.

87 It was noted above that in 1900 the library of Owens College, Manchester, employed just five members of staff including two boys (n. 45).

88 Black, New History, 20.

89 On land management, see Lowri Ann Rees, Ciarán Reilly, and Annie Tindley, eds., The Land Agent, 1700–1920 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). On private libraries, see Purcell, Country House Library; Pearson, ‘Private Libraries’. The management practices of the Wigan Coal & Iron Co. may have influenced the professionalization of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana.

90 On the decline of aristocratic libraries, see Peter H. Reid, ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Country House Library’, Libraries & Culture 36, no. 2 (2001); Mark Purcell, ‘Clumber, Nottinghamshire: The Rise and Fall of a Ducal Library’, Library & Information History 32, no. 1‒2 (2016).

91 John Hodgson, ‘Lancashire Hodge-Podge: Reading the John Rylands Library through the Concept of Hybridity’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 91, no. 1 (2015). On transculturation see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).

92 The fifth earl Spencer, whose outstanding library was purchased by Enriqueta Rylands in 1892, was appointed Chancellor of the Victoria University of Manchester in the same year. The chancellorship was assumed by David Lindsay, twenty-seventh earl of Crawford, in 1923. H. B. Charlton, Portrait of a University, 1851–1951, to Commemorate the Centenary of Manchester University (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), 141.

93 On Guppy, see H. B. Charlton, ‘The John Rylands Librarian’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 25, no. 1 (1941).

94 Henry Guppy and Guthrie Vine, eds., A Classified Catalogue of the Works on Architecture and the Allied Arts in the Principal Libraries of Manchester and Salford, with Alphabetical Author List and Subject Index (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1909), x–xii.

95 Ian Cornelius, ‘The Interpretation of Professional Development in Librarianship since 1850’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume III: 1850‒2000, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Brunt, ‘Organising Knowledge’.