The British Museum and its staff are some of the most consistently referenced elements in Madden’s 1826 journal. The entry for the 2nd January (the first working day of the year) begins with “At Musm”, referring to the British Museum, as do all but one of the entries for the first week of the year. Madden spent a considerable amount of time at the Museum and yet he was not employed there at the beginning of 1826. Instead he was undertaking freelance work on manuscripts in the collections. Throughout the year Madden attempted to gain official employment at the Museum, and in doing so left valuable evidence for the internal structure of the British Museum and the politics of its governance.
In 1826, the British Museum Library was the closest organisation Britain had to a national library (in the modern sense). The Museum had been founded by the British Museum Act in 1753. It was initially funded by a lottery, which quickly became renowned for corruption, but left the Board of Trustees with enough money to begin building the British Museum. The first six members of the Board were two representatives from the families of each of the founding collections (Sloane, Cotton, and Harley). A further seventeen trustees were great officers of state such as the Archbishop of Canterbury. The three principal trustees were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons.
When Madden attempted to gain employment at the library in 1826, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Manners-Sutton (1755-1828), was repeatedly referred to as the deciding voice on hiring. For example, on the 7th July 1826, Taylor Combe (1774-1826) died, leaving the position of Keeper of the Department of Antiquities vacant. Madden wrote “Who will succeed? — N’importe. I shall not” in his journal entry for the day. In the entry for 11th July 1826, Madden described a letter sent to him by Dr Philip Bliss (1787-1857), a Junior Sub-Librarian at the Bodleian Library, who had previously been employed at the British Museum. Bliss encouraged Madden to apply directly to the archbishop for Combe’s job. Madden drew on his own contacts for testimonials that were sent to the Archbishop. Although Madden was ultimately unsuccessful, this demonstrates the control the Trustees had over the day-to-day management of the Museum.
The 1753 Act created the position of ‘Principal Librarian’ with a salary £200 per annum, which was first held by the physician Gowin Knight (1713-1772). The salary was reduced to £80 to pay for a secretary and an accountant which the original act had not provided for. Beneath the Principal Librarian, there were three Under-Librarians who each oversaw the running of a department. There were also three Assistant Librarians, a Keeper of the Reading Room, as well as a Messenger, Porter, two watchmen and three maids. The first department was to hold the printed books and manuscripts from the collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), and the second would hold his ‘natural and artificial curiosities.’ The third would then hold the collections of Robert Harley (1661-1724) and his son, Edward Harley (1689-1741), and that of Sir Robert Cotton (1570/1-1631). However, as more collections were acquired by the Museum, it became clear that these departments were not flexible enough, and they were therefore reconfigured into a Department of Manuscripts, a Department of Printed Books and a Department of Natural and Artificial Productions.
In 1826 the Principal Librarian was Joseph Planta (1744-1827), whose tenure (1799-1827) has become known as one of the most significant in the Museum’s history. Before Planta, the Museum was not a public institution in the way that it is now understood. Access was difficult, with visitors having to acquire a limited number of tickets and be shown around by senior staff members, despite their ever-growing workload. Planta opened galleries to the public and began to increase the staff at the Museum. This included hiring Henry Ellis (1777-1869) in the Department of Printed Books and appointing additional reading room and visitor attendants. He also increased staff pay. Madden’s 1826 journal includes a few references to Planta consulting with the Archbishop of Canterbury about appointments, as well as a pessimistic observation that Planta might live for many more years, preventing a vacancy.
Under Planta’s leadership, the British Museum became, firstly, a public institution “underpinned by the conjoined principles of freedom of access and public benefit.” He was responsible for specific provisions for students to visit the galleries and reading rooms, the records of which show the early phases of a shifting staff culture in the British Museum towards middle-class professionals. Planta was also very keen on cataloguing the Museum’s continuously expanding collections, creating the Department of Antiquities in 1808, to facilitate this.
Henry Ellis appears regularly in Madden’s account of 1826, supporting Madden in his attempts to secure a position at the Museum. Ellis is also presented as a great story-teller. For example, in the entry for 17th July, Madden wrote, “Ellis came to tell us some of his odd stories, as usual, & from the anecdotes he related of ^the Revd Thomas Maurice, quondam Sub-libn. ^at the Museum, the latter must have been the most drunken ^and immoral beast that ever lived!”
In 1826 the British Museum Library was going through a period of change, becoming increasingly public facing. The expanding collections needed additional cataloguing, and in June Madden was one of four men employed to work on this task. The Board of Trustees and in particular the Archbishop of Canterbury continued to hold huge power over appointments. Madden’s attempts to secure a permanent post involved networks of patronage and shed light on the tensions between the conservative power structures of the Museum and some of its staff, tensions that would dominate Madden’s journals for the rest of his career.
Isabel Tookey
Further reading:
P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum library, 1753-1973 (London, 1998).
Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet; A History of the British Museum (Athens, 1974).
Leave a Reply