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Devonshire Collection

 Derby Local Studies Library

            The Devonshire library, donated to the new Derby Free Library in 1881, was the first of two great local history collections that form the backbone of the present Derbyshire Collection of Derby Library. That first Derbyshire-themed collection, the volumes and manuscripts presented by the dukes of Devonshire, significantly enhanced the status of the institution, which had just been established in 1878. Support for libraries by Victorian aristocrats and businessmen was common, usually motivated by religious, political and social considerations. The role of regional urban institutions such as public libraries in the formation and reinforcement of urban provincial identity was important then and remains so today. Collections devoted to local subjects, notably regional, county, or urban histories, have always had a special value and influence in provincial libraries.

            The Devonshire Collection bookplate (12.5 cm by 8.3 cm) shows the arms of the Cavendish family, who were earls and then dukes of Devonshire. The arms show sable, three bucks' heads cabossed argent with the crest of a serpent nowed proper. The motto "cavendo tutus" translates as "secure by caution." The family originated in the Sussex village of Cavendish and became established at court by the sixteenth century.1 The dukes of Devonshire were the most powerful and influential of the Derbyshire aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The dukes of Devonshire also enjoyed vast national power and influence by virtue of their extensive estates in Britain and Ireland.

            The donor of the Devonshire Collection was Sir William Cavendish, seventh duke of Devonshire (1808-91). Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he represented the university in the House of Commons from June 1829 and followed his grandfather as member for Derbyshire.2 In 1858 he succeeded his cousin as duke of Devonshire and inherited more lands and great houses than any previous holder of the title, including Lismore Castle in Ireland, Compton Place in Sussex, Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, and Holker Hall in Lancashire, in addition to the Hardwick and Chatsworth estates in Derbyshire. He once admitted that he had more great houses than he knew what to do with.3

            The earliest public libraries in Derby were the circulating libraries provided by booksellers.4 Although the earliest dated advertisement for such a library is the Saunders library of 1757, there were three booksellers in Derby by 1730, and it is probable that they offered some kind of book circulation service. The first institutional library, at least theoretically semipublic, was the library of the Derby Philosophical Society. Founded in 1783, the Philosophical Society was principally the inspiration of the physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who remained its president until his death. The Derby Philosophical Society was a gentlemen's club, as the deliberately high cost of membership fees indicated, in which the scientific library played a crucial role.5 Membership was dominated by medical men but also included Sir Brooke Boothby (1744-1824), the poet, political writer, and friend of Rousseau; the Reverend Thomas Gisborne (1758-1846), the best-selling moralist and philosopher; William Strutt, F.R.S. (1756-1830), the cotton baron, inventor, and engineer; and Charles Sylvester (1774-1828); the chemist.

            By the middle of the nineteenth century, Derby had experienced a period of unprecedented commercial and industrial expansion and population growth that placed impossible strains on local services and institutions. There was a proliferation of provincial urban public institutions providing museums and libraries, usually aimed at the middle classes. Examples at Derby included the Mechanics Institute in 1825, the Literary and Philosophical Society founded in 1808, the Literary and Scientific Society, and the Derby Town and County Museum and Natural History Society, founded in 1836. Institutions directed at the working class, such as the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society (1837), the Derby Temperance Society, and the Railway Institute, also held meetings provided libraries, and offered lectures. Voluntary societies remade the public urban environment, cultivating formal and informal social relationships and ensuring information flow that could provide scientific or commercial education and increase cultural innovation. However, the working classes were often precluded from all but friendly and benefit societies by the subscription culture and high membership fees until the provision of free institutions.

            Although the first specially designed municipal public park in Britain had been founded at Derby in 1840, the town remained considerably behind others in terms of free library provision. In 1856 an attempt had been made to adopt the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which empowered local authorities to levy a halfpenny rate to fund libraries and museums, but the measure failed to gain approval because of opposition to extra rates. A committee appointed in 1869 by the town council requested information about the free libraries of one hundred of the principal towns in Britain, including nearby Nottingham and Coventry, where it was noted that the circulation averaged 90,000 and 150,000 books per annum, respectively. They called for the establishment of a Derby library without delay.6 In  1870 the Town and County Library and Museum was offered to the borough still housed in Lockett's Mansion on the site of the present Central Library. Michael Thomas Bass (1799-1884), the MP for Derby, promised to fund most of a new library, and the stock was temporarily transferred to the Grammar School. His offer was accepted by the mayor, William Hobson (1825-97). The new Free Library, housed in a Gothic-style building by Knill Freeman of Bolton, opened with much ceremony on 28 June 1879.7 The Bass Brewing Company, based in Burton-on-Trent, was one of the most powerful in Britain, and Michael Thomas Bass was a major benefactor to Derby, providing a new recreation ground and swimming pool. It was customary to speak of him locally in terms of cloying adulation, and he was treated to many public toasts and gifts from "grateful" workers, though certainly he paid more attention to the conditions of the working classes than many industrialists did.8 One poem celebrating the library opening contained these immortal lines: 

A Library and Museum, with Tower high risen,

By M. T. Bass, M.P., was given;

To God be the praise that inclined his heart,

To do for this Town so noble a part. . . .

That [Queen Victoria's] reign may be long let us one and all pray,

And Jesus' kingdom come into full sway;

For this new Library so freely given,

May be steps to lead us nearer to heaven.9

            The seventh duke offered the Devonshire Collection to Derby in 1878, the year before the dedication of the new Free Library of Derby, with the official year of acquisition being in 1881. It was largely made up of works collected by the Victorian antiquarian Llewellyn Jewitt for a projected biobibliography of Derbyshire.10 Originally numbering some 1,171 books and 1,255 pamphlets, the collection consisted of books, prints, election addresses, and manuscripts, all of which related to Derbyshire. The donation inspired the library committee to make the topography and literature of Derbyshire an important specialty of the library service. However, Derby was subsequently ill-served by wealthy patrons, and only tiny additions were made initially, while in the first decade not one single book was issued for use. A catalog only appeared in 1891, but according to Livesey, "additions remained paltry, considering the material available and even then being collected for the still private Bemrose Library. At the time of the purchase of this latter library 33 later, the original Devonshire collection had been increased by only 380 volumes."11 This suggests that the dukes of Devonshire did not maintain an interest in new purchases, which may be attributable to the breadth of their commercial, geographical, and political interests or the financial problems that the seventh and eight dukes had to face.

            Llewellyn Jewitt, builder of the collections, was born at Kimberworth near Rotherham in 1816. After living at Duffield near Derby until 1838, he moved to London and then Plymouth in 1849.12 Jewitt became chief librarian at Plymouth Public Library, where he gave lectures, extended the building, and accepted new collections. He also drew and engraved many of the town's most important buildings and wrote a history of Plymouth. Back in Derby between 1853 and 1868, Jewitt became a secretary of the Town and County Museum and of the Mechanics Institute and a member of the Derby Philosophical Society. He founded the Derby Telegraph newspaper. His most important work, however, was the foundation of the Reliquary, an antiquarian journal, and he made contributions to the Art Journal, edited by his friend Samuel Carter Hall. Travels around Britain, articles for the Art Journal, and easy access to local libraries such as that at Chatsworth laid the foundations for Jewitt's greatest work, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain from Pre-Historic Times down to the Present Day, published in 1878.13 The same year he founded the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society with the Reverend J. C. Cox, another important local antiquary.14

The composition of the Devonshire Collection reveals much about Jewitt's wide historical and artistic interests and the ambitious scope of his projected biobibliography of Derbyshire.15 Books on the history and archaeology of Derbyshire such as Bateman's Vestiges and Ten Years Diggings jostle with works by Derbyshire authors or people born in or otherwise connected with the county such as the novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Attention was given to natural historical works by local authors. For example, the Wirksworth curate Abraham Bennet's History and Present State of Electricity was included as well as the Derby philosopher Benjamin Parker's Philosophical Dissertations, John Whitehurst's Theory of the Earth, and Lucy Hardcastle (1771-ca. 1835) of Derby's Introduction to the Linnean System of Botany. Various editions of Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791), Zoonomia (1794-96), Phytologia (1800), Temple of Nature (1803), and Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797) were other valuable acquisitions.

The history of Derby was represented by William Hutton's History and Antiquities of the Borough of Derby down to 1791 (1791) and a host of nineteenth-century works. These included editions of Stephen Glover's histories and directories, Llewellyn Jewitt's own Guide to the Borough of Derby (1826), all of which remain essential guides to any student of the Derby past. The histories were supplemented by valuable editions of maps of town and county. Local newspapers such as Drewry's Derby Mercury were also included as well as copies of parliamentary acts and reports relating to Derbyshire such as the report into electoral irregularities in the lection of 1775. County matters were covered by histories such as James Millington's View of the Present State of Derbyshire and D. P. Davies's New Historical and Descriptive View of Derbyshire (1811). Geological and topographical works included William Martin's Certificate Dieresis (1809), which used an innovative system of fossil-based stratigraphy, John Mawe's Mineralogy of Derbyshire (1802), and John Farey's detailed and comprehensive General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire (1811-17), which drew upon the knowledge and experience of the Peak lead-mining tradition. White Watson's Delineation of the Strata of Derbyshire (1811) is illustrated with wonderful stratified sections inlaid with real rock and mineral samples, and James Mandner's Miner's Glossary (1824) describes the traditions and customs of the then-declining lead-mining industry. Botanical works included Howe and Smith's Ferns of Derbyshire (1861) and the Reverend Painter's Flora of Derbyshire (1889).

Analysis of additions to the Devonshire Collection between July 1892 and August 1897 reveals, apart from the small number of works obtained, a continued adherence to Jewitt's selection criteria.16 Out of a total of fifty-four works bought, four were on religious subjects such as sermons, thirteen were biographical or histories of local families, twenty-two were historical or topographical works of the county, and six were on scientific subjects relating to Derbyshire. The "scientific" works were George Wilson's Life of Hon. Henry Cavendish (1851), J. Cotes of Wirksworth's Treatise on the Use of the Pantograph (1816), Sir George Crewes's Address to the Derby Town and County Museum (1839), the cash book of the Derby Philosophical Society (1813-45), William Smith's Strata of England and Wales (1815), and F. B. Whitlock's Birds of Derbyshire (1893). The cash book of the Philosophical Society was an extremely valuable addition given that almost no other records have survived of the society in its final decades.

The chaos of the library system in the early decades is apparent, with few books being acquired and lent, no adequate cataloging system, and no space to house the collections properly, all of which was exacerbated by First World War disruption. Important though it was, if the Devonshire Collection had been all that existed of the collection on Derbyshire subjects, it would have made a poor research base. However, Sir Henry Howe Bemrose (1827-1911), owner of a Derby printing company who became mayor of Derby and MP from 1895 to 1900, was compiling another larger Derbyshire Collection with the aim of completing a massive bibliotheca of the county.17 Devoting large resources to the project and under the guidance of his librarians, Joseph Tilley and E. E. Taylor, Bemrose intended nothing less than a complete biographical list of all Derbyshire authors and the acquisition of multiple editions of their works. The scale of his ambition is clear from his purchase of sixty editions of the works of Charles Cotton, excluding The Compleat Angler, fifty editions of the works of John Cotton, and thirty editions of the novels of Samuel Richardson.

On the death of Bemrose his executors approached the committee of the public library to facilitate a purchase, but as the price was too high the collection was eventually offered to Sotheby's for auction at £1,500. Lord Curzon of Kedleston intervened and secured a three-month option at a price of £1,000 in order to "remove from the town and county the great reproach of losing a library exclusively devoted to Derbyshire persons and subjects."18 It was proposed by Curzon with the duke of Devonshire and other benefactors that £1,500 be offered to buy the collection. Four thousand pounds were to be raised by public subscription and the Borough Council with the help of a £1,000 donation from Andrew Carnegie (1835-1918) to pay for a new extended library building, the library committee having agreed that "the necessity for further office accommodation for the Staff of the Library Museum and Art Gallery has for some time impressed itself."19 However, wartime requisitioning of the new library extension, shortage of shelving, lack of staff, and inadequate cataloging meant that it was not until 1926 that the seven thousand volumes of the Bemrose Collection were united with the Devonshire Collection and made available for loan.20 Only at this time were the Devonshire and Bemrose local history collections finally adequately housed, over forty years after the duke had made the original bequest.21

Most of the Devonshire and Bemrose Collections is now housed in the Derby Local Studies Library in Irongate. The present Derby City Council assumed responsibility of Derby libraries from Derbyshire County Council in April 1997. One corporate objective has been defined as wanting "to make Derby a place where people are proud to live," and clearly, local collections play a crucial role in fulfilling this goal. The local collection is recognized as a "unique resource that attracts users from near and far," though it is acknowledged that it could be exploited more efficiently if it was taken on to the automated library system and digitized. There is even a suggestion that the city council directly support "the publication of material on Derby and its people," which would certainly enhance the local collection.22

The next major phase of development will be the transformation of the collections into electronic storage systems to take advantage of the information technology revolution and the provision of multiple terminals for public use, a process already under way.23 In this way the riches of the Devonshire and Bemrose Collections could be fully exploited in ways never dreamed of by Jewitt or Bemrose. 

Paul Elliott

Leicester, England

Bookplate courtesy of Derby Local Studies Library

[Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 35, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 459-466.]