CHAPTER VIII
The Royal Commission, 1847-49.
To return to the British Museum and[and] the Royal Commission of 1847-49—which differed widely from the Committee of 1835-36. Before both Parliamentary Committee and Royal Commission, the Institution was on its trial, but the points of attack were different. In 1835, the Natural History Departments engrossed the principal attention, while the Library escaped with comparatively slight notice, for although its deficiencies were not less conspicuous than those of the Natural History Department, the public standard of completeness in the Library was low. Panizzi had been Keeper eleven out of the twelve years. There could hardly have been a better proof of his administration than the elevated ideal of a public Library which it had produced. He was tried by a standard of his own, which but for him would have had no existence. Many silent in 1836 were now clamorous for the realization of an ideal which they owed to him, and the severity of their attacks was in truth the best testimony to his desert.
It soon appeared that Panizzi would be the lion of the day, and that the proceedings of the Commission would be chiefly important as they might result in confirming or weakening his position with the public. It was believed, indeed, that the dissatisfaction of scientific men with the preponderance of literature in the governing body had much to do with the appointment of the Commission; and the ostensible cause was undoubtedly a memorial addressed by many persons of high eminence in science to the Prime Minister on March 10th, 1847. The centre of gravity, nevertheless, shifted very quickly. The proceedings of the Commission, as regarded the Library, were interesting from beginning to end; elsewhere, though much that was curious and amusing came to light, it would hardly be thought that a nodus tali dignus vindice had been shown to exist.[exist.] If such there were, it was in the Secretary’s Office, where irregularities were admitted requiring correction, and involving the examination of the whole anomalous system by which, in a measure since 1828, and more particularly since the Committee of 1835, the Secretary had been allowed to usurp the functions of the Principal Librarian. Everywhere else the subjects calling for inquiry were comparatively slight, such as misunderstandings between Sir C.[C.] Fellows and Sir R. Westmacott respecting the arrangement of the Xanthian marbles, or disagreements between Dr. Gray and Mr. König respecting the rightful custody of the Gilbertson fossils and the boundaries of Zoology and Palæontology in general. The Library was the real field of contention, and matters relating to it occupy more than one half of the bulky tome in which the evidence and recommendations of the Committee were finally embodied (1850).
The Commission was originally appointed on June 17th, 1847, but was only enabled to hold three sittings during the expiring session of that year.
It reassembled in 1848, amid the storms of Continental revolution which inevitably occupied much of the time and thoughts of its members; and it was soon discovered, both that its numbers were too limited, and that the quorum required by the Royal Letters of appointment was too large to insure the indispensable regularity of attendance. It having on one occasion proved impossible to obtain a sufficient attendance, the original Commission was revoked, and a new one issued, increasing the number of Commissioners from eleven to fourteen, and reducing the number necessary for despatch of business from five to three (May 5, 1848).
The Commission, as thus finally constituted, was a very strong one, presided over by so accomplished a man of letters as Lord Ellesmere, and including, among its more active members Lord Seymour (the present Duke of Somerset), Lord Canning, Sir R. Murchison, and the Lord Advocate, Mr. Andrew Rutherfurd. Mr. John Payne Collier, at that time Librarian to the Duke of Devonshire, officiated as Secretary.
The first attention of the Commissioners was naturally directed to the Principal Librarian’s and Secretary’s Offices, and their inquiry soon brought out the extent to which the functions of the former had come to be discharged by the latter. “He has risen,” said the report, “to be the most important officer in the establishment, though without that responsibility which attached to the Principal Librarian and the heads of departments.” The importance which the Commissioners rightly ascribed to this officer entirely depended upon his preparation of the agenda to be submitted to the Trustees, and his habitual attendance at their meetings. The duties of his office were in other respects so light, although they had been represented to require the assistance of a subordinate, who had actually been appointed (Mr. Fitzgerald, subsequently Prime Minister in New Zealand), that when Mr. Forshall was attacked with serious illness, during the sittings of the Commissioners, Sir Henry Ellis found himself able to discharge all the duties of the Secretary in addition to his own. Of an endeavour which had been made to find the Secretary occupation in keeping a register of acquisitions, the Commissioners were obliged to report that this document, as prepared in his office, was “not only of no practical use, but in some cases destructive of responsibility.[responsibility.]”
Under these circumstances, the Commissioners very quickly came to the conclusion that the false step made in 1837 must be retraced, and the offices of Principal Librarian and Secretary amalgamated—a decision so obviously sound that it must probably have been carried into effect, even if, shortly after the close of their deliberations, Mr. Forshall’s infirmities had not rendered his retirement absolutely inevitable.
The administration of the Secretary’s Office had a strong bearing upon the questions relating to the Department of Printed Books of which the Commissioners had to take cognizance. Nothing had more strongly excited public animadversion than the delay in the preparation of the new printed Catalogue. The Trustees, as was supposed, had directed that it should be complete in print by the end of 1844. The year 1848 had now come, and it had not progressed, even in manuscript, beyond letter D. One volume, containing letter A (or part of it), had been printed in 1841, and there were no symptoms of a successor. Panizzi was able to show convincingly how contradictory were the instructions which the inexplicable carelessness of the executive department had allowed to be attributed to the Trustees. In the manuscript copy of their minute of July 13, 1839, the application of the rules of cataloguing was left to his discretion. In the copy subsequently printed by direction of the Trustees, this discretion was limited to titles already prepared. In the former he was ordered to have the Catalogue ready in press by December, 1844. In the latter he was told that it must be ready for press. The latter, it would appear, was what the Trustees really intended; but no intimation of their wishes having been conveyed to Panizzi, time, labour, and money had been wasted in printing an imperfect volume, which, it now appeared, need not have been printed at all; whilst the supposed necessity for an alphabetical method of cataloguing had prevented recourse to the much more expeditious plan of taking the books shelf by shelf. It further appeared that this unfortunate minute need not necessarily have been final. An opportunity for remonstrance had been expressly reserved, but the portion of the document referring to this point having been kept from Panizzi’s knowledge, no action could be taken, so that the Trustees and their Officer were committed to an impracticable undertaking. The Commissioners determined that “any delay which could have been avoided was mainly ascribable to the desire of the Trustees to hurry on printing.”
A still more important question was whether the Catalogue ought to be printed at all. The opinion of the literary witnesses unconnected with the Museum was naturally strongly in favour of a printed Catalogue. The opinion of Panizzi may be gathered from the verbal replies he had already given to questions put to him by the Library Committee of the Trustees on March 6th, 1847.
“The Catalogue might be completed by the end of 1854 of all the books which the Museum will contain up to that period. It would take to 1860 to prepare such Catalogue in such a state of revision as might be fit for the press. It would occupy seventy volumes. It would require one year to correct the press of two volumes. It would, therefore, require thirty-five years to pass the catalogue through the press, and, when completed in 1895, it would represent the state of the Library in 1854.”
This estimate could not be impeached if its basis were admitted—namely, that the system already adopted in framing the Catalogue was to be adhered to. Many men of letters, however, thought that the plan of the Catalogue might be contracted with advantage, but found it difficult to answer the argument that the work already done must, in that case, be thrown away. Mr. J. Payne Collier, the Secretary to the Commission, apparently thought this sacrifice immaterial. He had convinced himself that by short entries, and a disregard of minor niceties, the rate of cataloguing could be accelerated fourfold, and was, perhaps, justified in considering that if so, the abandonment of all that had been effected would be a measure of economy. Unluckily for Mr. Collier, he did not, like Panizzi’s other antagonists, confine himself to abstract propositions, but rashly exhibited himself in the light of an amateur cataloguer. He catalogued twenty-five books in his own library, and placed the titles in the hands of Panizzi, who transferred them for examination to his principal Assistant, Mr. Winter Jones. “They contain,” said Mr. Jones, “almost every possible error which can be committed in cataloguing books, and are open to almost every possible objection which can be brought against concise titles.”
As Mr. Collier had entered a play of Aristophanes under Mitchell, and the works of Shakespeare under Schlegel, as he had put an anonymous English book under a writer to whom it was only attributed conjecturally, and had catalogued a collection of plays in such a manner as to suggest that it was a history of the drama, the justice of Mr. Jones’ characterization could not be disputed. The Commissioners were, doubtless, justified in the unexpressed conclusion at which they evidently arrived, that such blunders, committed by a man of Mr. Collier’s attainments, must be attributable to the fundamental errors of his system. Mr. J. Bruce, Mr. G. L. Craik, and other advocates of hasty work and concise catalogues, would have fared no better at the hands of Mr. Winter Jones. One of them, indeed, Mr. J. G. Cochrane, of the London Library, had actually produced a Catalogue, the unscientific character of which was pungently exposed by Professor De Morgan, by far the most bibliographically competent of all the witnesses, and whose profound acquaintance with early mathematical literature enabled him to demonstrate what research, accuracy, and scholarship, the correct description of such literature demands. Another valuable witness was Mr. John Wilson Croker, whose evidence was in general full of good sense, and who brought forward the scheme (already independently suggested by Mr. E. Roy of the Library) for keeping up the Catalogue on movable slips pasted on the leaf, and thus admitting of displacement when it became necessary to insert new matter. This plan was subsequently adopted, and proved adequate for all practical purposes until recently, when, from the enormous bulk of the Manuscript Catalogue, printing has been adopted.
Several other matters of great, though minor, importance were the subject of detailed explanation on the part of Panizzi. He had to rebut the frequent complaints made on account of deficiencies in the Library. These proved to be utterly unfounded in almost every specific instance alleged, with the sole exception of the English books which had not been duly delivered under the Copyright-Act, the enforcement of which was at that time, as we shall hereafter fully discuss, no part of the keeper’s duty, and had been performed with little zeal by the Secretary. As regarded the unquestionable deficiencies of the Library in foreign literature, no one, it was admitted, had exposed them so energetically as Panizzi himself in the celebrated report of 1845, to which reference has already been made. He had done more than point them out; by personal influence he had obtained the grant of £10,000 per annum towards making them good. Not the least interesting portion of his evidence related to the measures adopted to this end in concert with intelligent booksellers, such as Asher and Stevens. The Grenville Library, however, had been by far the most brilliant acquisition of his Keepership; and this, as we shall soon show, was wholly due to his private influence with Mr. Grenville. His prescience of the ultimate destination of this magnificent collection accounted for his apparent neglect of several opportunities of acquiring books, for which he had silently submitted to censure. There was nothing in which Panizzi’s practical good sense was more apparent than in the improvements introduced by him into binding, whether as regards economy or durability. The books bound before his time are in very many instances tumbling to pieces, and not from use, while not a single book bound under his direction has required rebinding, except from excessive wear and tear.
On the whole, it may be confidently affirmed that no public officer whose conduct had been subjected to scrutiny ever established a more triumphant justification than Panizzi, and that investigation has seldom brought to light more creditable facts, previously unknown, or not properly appreciated. His detractors were covered with confusion, and he appeared to the world as the one man in the Museum endowed with signal administrative talent, and as qualified, above all other men, to be at the head of the Institution. The Commissioners did not say this in so many words, but their opinion was no mystery, and their report, in so far as the Library was concerned, was in general but the echo or endorsement of Panizzi’s views.
One most important recommendation they made, which unfortunately was not acted upon—viz., the provision of means for the compilation of an index of subjects to the catalogue, to proceed pari passu with the alphabetical titles of the latter. This would have doubled the value of the Catalogue; but thirty years have passed, and the Catalogue is still destitute of this inestimable auxiliary. The suggestion may still be carried into effect at any moment, as regards accessions for the future; but the lost ground will be regained with difficulty.
Of many other questions raised, the only really important one, outside the Printed Book Department, related to the Secretary’s Office, and here the Commissioners’ purpose was firm, and the reform they proposed radical. The post of Secretary, as distinct from that of Principal Librarian, was to be abolished altogether. This return to the ancient practice of the Museum had the advocacy of one of the most accomplished and influential of the Trustees, Mr. W. R. Hamilton; and the indisposition of Mr. Forshall soon rendered it necessary, as well as expedient, to carry it into effect. From that hour Panizzi was the real ruler of the British Museum.
It may be remarked that the Trustees and their officers alike appeared in a much more advantageous light than before the Parliamentary Committee of 1835. The inquiries of that Committee had borne fruit. The duties of the officers were understood and discharged in a far more liberal spirit, and the Board of Trustees had profited largely from the disposition to elect its members out of regard to literary and scientific eminence or proved administrative ability rather than mere rank.
This tendency, happily for the Museum, has gone on increasing to the present day.
We may now proceed to treat of that acquisition of the Grenville Library which so greatly affected the fortunes of the British Museum, and for which Panizzi has mainly to be thanked. For this a new chapter seems to be required.
