The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

I was once—once, only I think—so unhappy and so gauche as to incur the serious displeasure of my estimable acquaintance, and it was thus. Dr Furnivall happened to enter the place of business with a volume in his hand, which he was going to offer to the British Museum on behalf of the owner, Mr Peacock of Bottesford Manor, and without reflection I tried, standing on Tom Tiddler’s ground, to dissuade him from his project in the hearing of Ellis, and to let me have the refusal for Mr Huth. It was a beautiful little book, The School of Virtue, the second part, 1619, and unique. To the Museum it went surely enough; and I was upbraided by Ellis, perhaps not undeservedly, with having thwarted him in his own intended effort to intercept the article in transitu with the same view as myself; and I apologised. He was terribly ruffled at my indiscretion; and I was sorry that I had perpetrated it.

Dr Furnivall is my nearly forty years’ old friend. He is associated in my recollection only with two transactions, both alike unfortunate: the one just narrated, and a second, which was more ludicrous than anything else. I had seen on his table at his own house a remarkably good copy of Brathwaite’s Complete Gentlewoman, 1631, and I thought of Mr Huth. I knew Furnivall to be no collector, and I suggested to him that, if he did not urgently require the Brathwaite, for which he had given 6s., I would gladly pay him a guinea for it, and find him a working copy into the bargain. He pleasantly declined, and I was astonished the next morning to receive from him a fierce epistle enjoining me to restore to him instantly the book, which I had taken. I contented myself with writing him a line, to intimate that I had not the volume, and that I thought when he found it, he would be sorry that he had expressed his views in such a manner. I heard no more from him, till, a few days subsequently in my absence, he called on me, and asked to see my wife, and to her he declared his extreme regret at what had occurred, and announced the discovery of the lost treasure underneath a pile of papers, where he had probably put it himself. The affair was not exactly a joke; but it was just the kind of impulsive thoughtlessness, which distinguishes my eminent contemporary, and to which I dare say that he would readily plead guilty. I made no secret of the business; and it produced no substantial difference in our relations. I understood, rightly or wrongly, that he had gone so far as to advertise the supposed larceny; but I treated the matter with stoical indifference, and I believe that we have shaken hands over it years upon years.

I used to see at Ellis’s the late William Morris. He was then in the prime of life, and I recollect his long curly black hair. I do not think that he had yet imbibed those socialistic ideas, which afterward distinguished him, and which one is surprised to find in a person of considerable worldly resources—in other words, with something to lose. I bought a copy of his Earthly Paradise, when it first came out; but beyond the smooth versification, and correct phraseology I failed to discern much in it. I have often seen Morris stalking along with his rod and bag in the vicinity of Barnes.

Of his typographical and artistic styles I own that I had a very indifferent opinion, for they seemed to me to be incongruous and unsympathetic. They did not appeal to my appreciation of true work. I regarded them as bastard and empirical; they might do very well for wall-papers. I must not be too sure; but I should imagine that any one, who is familiar with the early printed books illustrated by engravings of whatever kind, would be apt to take the same view. The graphic portion of Morris’s publications is intelligible, however, and sane; one can see what is meant, if one does not agree with the treatment. It is not so utterly outrageous as Mr Beardsley’s performances.

There were two other personages, with little in common between them, whom I met in King Street—George Cruikshank and Mr A. C. Swinburne. I have come across the latter elsewhere; but Cruikshank whom my grandfather had known so well, a short, square-set figure, who once entered the shop, while I was there, it was not my fortune to behold on more than that single occasion.

I had started as a bookman nearly soon enough to meet William Pickering himself; but with his son, B. M. Pickering, when he opened a small shop in Piccadilly, my intercourse was prompt and continuous. He was a man of rather phlegmatic and unimpressionable temperament, but thoroughly honourable and trustworthy. My earliest dealings with him were on my own personal account, while I cherished the idea, that I might take my place among the collectors of the day, and I obtained from him a few very rare volumes, including a copy of England’s Helicon, quarto, 1600, which he had found in a bundle at Sotheby’s in 1857, shortly after the realisation of £31 at the same rooms for one at the Wolfreston sale. He gave £1 for this but it was not very fine, and like the Wolfreston and every other known copy, except Malone’s in the Bodleian, wanted, as I subsequently discovered, the last leaf. Pickering had it washed and bound in brown morocco by Bedford, and charged me £18, 18s. for it. Perhaps the most remarkable purchase which I ever made in this direction was a copy of Richard Crashaw’s Poems, in which an early owner had inserted a MS. text of upward of fifty otherwise unknown epigrams by Thomas Fuller. Pickering marked the volume 15s., and said nothing about the unique feature. Dr Grosart printed the collection from this source.

My relations with the younger Pickering were almost equally divided in point of time into two epochs: from 1857 to 1865, when I bought for myself, and thenceforward till the date of his death, when I added him to the number of those who assisted me in carrying out, through Mr Huth and a few others, my interminable task of cataloguing the entire corpus, with very slight reservations, of our early national literature. Pickering never objected to let me become the medium for filling up gaps in the Huth library from his periodical acquisitions; I paid him his price; and I paid it promptly, as I did all round.

Our maiden transaction was a very humble one. It was a copy of a little tract called A Caution to keep Money, 1642, and it was a sort of experiment. I had to give 5s. for it, and at the same not very extravagant figure it went to my acquaintance. He eyed it rather wistfully; the low price was somewhat against it; but he accepted it, and fortunately or otherwise he did not take its counsel practically to heart. But I discovered the futility of allowing cheapness to appear as a recommendation in the case of one, who knew comparatively little of the selling value, and to whom cheapness was not the slightest object. The pamphlet in question was the pioneer of many scores of articles of the highest rarity and interest, which found their way through the same channel to the ultimate possessor. Among them was a curious copy in the original calf binding with many uncut leaves of Taylor the Water Poet’s works, 1630, formerly belonging to Charles Cotton the angler; it had come from the Hastings library at Donnington, and I paid Pickering £30 for it. A second one, which I had of him, was the only example containing anything in the nature of a presentation from the author, whose autograph is of the rarest occurrence; but unfortunately in this case the memorandum was written by the recipient. The folio Taylor is one of those books, which has unaccountably fallen in price of late years; and certainly it is by no means uncommon.

I was almost invariably on the acquiring side. Once I sold Pickering, as I have already related, a Caxton, and at another time a first edition of Paradise Lost, 1669, in the original sheep cover. I had seen the latter at a shop in Great Russell Street, of which the rather impetuous master, when I put some query to him, seemed undecided, whether he would let me have the book after all for £2, 2s., or throw it at my head. He did the former, and an American agent begged me as a favour to let him pay me double the money, which, as I thought him to be in jest, I declined. I subsequently parted with it to Pickering for £2, 12s. 6d., which was about the prevailing tariff thirty years since. I may take the present opportunity of mentioning that it was at the same emporium in Bloomsbury, that a later occupant apologised to me, in tendering me a beautiful uncut copy in sheep of Taylor the Water Poet’s Thumb Bible, for being so unreasonable as to want 14s. for the Jeremy Taylor, as he took it to be. I forgave him, and Mr Huth was very pleased to have the volume.

Pickering had, like his father, a singular weakness for accumulating stock, and laying up imperfect copies of rare books in the distant hope of completing them. Yet he held his ground, and gradually enlarged his premises, till they were among the most spacious at the West End. Poor fellow! he lost all his belongings in an epidemic, and never recovered from the shock.