GARNETT, RICHARD (1835-1906), English librarian and author, son of the learned philologist Rev. Richard Garnett (1789-1850), priest-vicar of Lichfield cathedral and afterwards keeper of printed books at the British Museum, who came of a Yorkshire family, was born at Lichfield on the 27th of February 1835. His father was really the pioneer of modern philological research in England; his articles in the Quarterly Review (1835, 1836) on English lexicography and dialects, and on the Celtic question, and his essays in the Transactions of the Philological Society (reprinted 1859), were invaluable to the later study of the English language. The son, who thus owed much to his parentage, was educated at home and at a private school, and in 1851, just after his father’s death, entered the British Museum as an assistant in the library. In 1875 he rose to be superintendent of the reading-room, and from 1890 to 1899, when he retired, he was keeper of the printed books. In 1883 he was given the degree of LL.D. at Edinburgh, an honour repeated by other universities, and in 1895 he was made a C.B.
His long connexion with the British Museum library, and the value of his services there, made him a well-known figure in the literary world, and he published much original work in both prose and verse. His chief publications in book-form were: in verse, Primula (1858), Io in Egypt (1859), Idylls and Epigrams (1869, republished in 1892 as A Chaplet from the Greek Anthology), The Queen and other Poems (1902), Collected Poems (1893); in prose, biographies of Carlyle (1887), Emerson (1887), Milton (1890), Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1898); a volume of remarkably original and fanciful tales, The Twilight of the Gods (1888); a tragedy, Iphigenia in Delphi (1890); A Short History of Italian Literature (1898); Essays in Librarianship and Bibliophily (1899); Essays of an Ex-librarian (1901). He was an extensive contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography, editor of the International Library of Famous Literature, and co-editor, with E. Gosse, of the elaborate English Literature: an illustrated Record. So multifarious was his output, however, in contributions to reviews, &c., and as translator or editor, that this list represents only a small part of his published work. He was a member of numerous learned literary societies, British and foreign. His facility as an expositor, and his gift for lucid and acute generalization, together with his eminence as a bibliophile, gave his work an authority which was universally recognized, though it sometimes suffered from his relying too much on his memory and his power of generalizing—remarkable as both usually were—in cases requiring greater precision of statement in matters of detail. But as an interpreter, whether of biography or belles lettres, who brought an unusually wide range of book-learning, in its best sense, interestingly and comprehensibly before a large public, and at the same time acceptably to the canons of careful scholarship, Dr Garnett’s writing was always characterized by clearness, common sense and sympathetic appreciation. His official career at the British Museum marked an epoch in the management of the library, in the history of which his place is second only to that of Panizzi. Besides introducing the “sliding press” in 1887 he was responsible for reviving the publication of the general catalogue, the printing of which, interrupted in 1841, was resumed under him in 1880, and gradually completed. The antipodes of a Dryasdust, his human interest in books made him an ideal librarian, and his courtesy and helpfulness were outstanding features in a personality of singular charm. The whole bookish world looked on him as a friend. Among his “hobbies” was a study of astrology, to which, without associating his name with it in public, he devoted prolonged inquiry. Under the pseudonym of “A.G. Trent” he published in 1880 an article (in the University Magazine) on “The Soul and the Stars”—quoted in Wilde and Dodson’s Natal Astrology. He satisfied himself that there was more truth in the old astrology than modern criticism supposed, and he had intended to publish a further monograph on the subject, but the intention was frustrated by the ill-health which led up to his death on the 13th of April 1906. He married (1863) an Irish wife, Olivia Narney Singleton (d. 1903), and had a family of six children; his son Edward (b. 1868) being a well-known literary man, whose wife translated Turgeneff’s works into English.
(H. Ch.)
GARNIER, CLÉMENT JOSEPH (1813-1881), French economist, was born at Beuil (Alpes maritimes) on the 3rd of October 1813. Coming to Paris he studied at the École de Commerce, of which he eventually became secretary and finally a professor. In 1842 he founded with Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-1864) the Société d’Économie politique, becoming its secretary, a post which he held till his death; and in 1846 he organized the Association pour la Liberté des Échanges. He also helped to establish and edited for many years the Journal des économistes and the Annuaire de l’économie politique. Of the school of laissez faire, he was engaged during his whole life in the advancement of the science of political economy, and in the improvement of French commercial education. In 1873 he became a member of the Institute, and in 1876 a senator for the department in which he was born. He died at Paris on the 25th of September 1881. Of his writings, the following are the more important: Traité d’économie politique (1845), Richard Cobden et la Ligue (1846), Traité des finances (1862), and Principes du population (1857).
GARNIER, GERMAIN, Marquis (1754-1821), French politician and economist, was born at Auxerre on the 8th of November 1754. He was educated for the law, and obtained when young the office of procureur to the Châtelet in Paris. On the calling of the states-general he was elected as one of the députés suppléants of the city of Paris, and in 1791 administrator of the department of Paris. After the 10th of August 1792 he withdrew to the Pays de Vaud, and did not return to France till 1795. In public life, however, he seems to have been singularly fortunate. In 1797 he was on the list of candidates for the Directory; in 1800 he was prefect of Seine-et-Oise; and in 1804 he was made senator and in 1808 a count. After the Restoration he obtained a peerage, and on the return of Louis XVIII., after the Hundred Days, he became minister of state and member of privy council, and in 1817 was created a marquis. He died at Paris on the 4th of October 1821. At court he was, when young, noted for his facile power of writing society verse, but his literary reputation depends rather on his later works on political economy, especially his admirable translation, with notes and introduction, of Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1805) and his Histoire de la monnaie (2 vols., 1819), which contains much sound and well-arranged material. His Abrégé des principes de l’écon. polit. (1796) is a very clear and instructive manual. The valuable Description géographique, physique, et politique du département de Seine-et-Oise (1802) was drawn up from his instructions. Other works are De la propriété (1792) and Histoire des banques d’escompte (1806).
GARNIER, JEAN LOUIS CHARLES (1825-1898), French architect, was born in Paris on the 6th of November 1825. He was educated in a primary school, and it was intended that he should pursue his father’s craft, that of a wheelwright. His mother, however, having heard that with a little previous study he might enter an architect’s office and eventually become a measuring surveyor (vérificateur), and earn as much as six francs a day, and foreseeing that in consequence of his delicate health he would be unfit to work at the forge, sent him to learn drawing and mathematics at the Petite École de Dessin, in the rue de Médecine, the cradle of so many of the great artists of France. His progress was such as to justify his being sent first into an architect’s office and then to the well-known atelier of Lebas, where he began his studies in preparation for the examination of the École des Beaux Arts, which he passed in 1842, at the age of seventeen. Shortly after his admission it became necessary that he should support himself, and accordingly he worked during the day in various architects’ offices, among them in that of M. Viollet-le-Duc, and confined his studies for the École to the evening. In 1848 he carried off, at the early age of twenty-three, the Grand Prix de Rome, and with his comrades in sculpture, engraving and music, set off for the Villa de Medicis. His principal works were the measured drawings of the Forum of Trajan and the temple of Vesta in Rome, and the temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli. In the fifth year of his travelling studentship he went to Athens and measured the temple at Aegina, subsequently working out a complete restoration of it, with its polychromatic decoration, which was published as a monograph in 1877. The elaborate set of drawings which he was commissioned by the duc de Luynes to make of the tombs of the house of Anjou were not published, owing to the death of his patron; and since Garnier’s death they have been given to the library of the École des Beaux Arts, along with other drawings he made in Italy. On his return to Paris in 1853 he was appointed surveyor to one or two government buildings, with a very moderate salary, so that the commission given him by M. Victor Baltard to make two water-colour drawings of the Hôtel de Ville, to be placed in the album presented to Queen Victoria in 1855, on the occasion of her visit to Paris, proved very acceptable. These two drawings are now in the library at Windsor.