The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

I shall always cherish a sentiment of gratitude toward Mr Quaritch for his valuable aid during a whole decade in putting it in my power to present in instalments the fruit of my labour at the auction-rooms and elsewhere, and in agreeing to defray the entire cost of the General Index to a large portion of it. I look forward to the possibility of carrying on the task piecemeal, till it embraces the entire corpus of our earlier national literature in all its branches, each item derived from the printed original, and illustrated by such notes as may appear desirable and appropriate.

Thousands of new titles await the printer.

It was through this medium that Lord Crawford was pleased to honour me with a proof of his lordship’s catalogue of Proclamations, thinking that it might be of service; but I had to return the copy with a message by the same channel that the descriptions were drawn up on a different principle from mine, and that I never accepted information at second-hand, if I could possibly avoid it.

After what I had seen of Lord Crawford’s bibliographical discernment, I was rather distressed to hear that his lordship is regarded as one of the best-informed men on the Board of Trustees in Great Russell Street. But the qualifications of an ex-officio member cannot be always satisfactory.

I conclude that it is, except among the general public, an open secret that Mr Quaritch has been during quite a long series of years eminently indebted for his success to the varied and extraordinary erudition of his adviser, Mr Michael Kerny. Mr Quaritch was accustomed to say to me: ‘I am a shopkeeper; Mr Kerny is a gentleman;’ and there was a degree of truth in this remark. Yet the former is something more than le grand marchand; his enterprise and pluck are marvellous; and they are the outcome, for the most part, not of foolhardihood, but of genius. A man, who buys blindly, soon reaches the end of his tether. That Mr Quaritch for divers reasons has often made unwise purchases, and has missed his mark, may be perfectly the fact; but in the main he has obviously struck the right vein; and he pursues his policy season after season, witnessing the departure of old clients (or, as he would rather put it, customers) and the advent of new ones. He despises popularity, and has ere this given umbrage by his brusquerie to supporters of long standing and high position; and he leaves them to do as they please to seek other pastures or to return to their former allegiance. He is a striking example—the most striking I have ever seen—of a man, who knows how to accommodate unusual independence of character and conduct to commercial life.

The successive authorities in the Printed Book Department of the British Museum have earned my cordial gratitude by their uniform deference to my somewhat peculiar and somewhat exacting requirements. They soon formed the habit, when it was found that I was an earnest and genuine worker, of waiving in my favour, so far as it was consistent with reason and propriety, the hard and fast rule of the establishment, and even under the now rather remote and quasi-historical keepership of Mr Watts.

It was as a simple student that I in the first place sought the British Museum, and in the old reading-room initiated myself in the learning requisite to qualify me, as I imagined, for becoming the English historian of Venice. I was self-complacently happy in the unconsciousness of my own intense ignorance of the magnitude of the task and of the fact that, at a distance of forty years, I should still have merely reached a more advanced stage of my labours. It at any rate speaks for my perseverance and resolution, that my interest in the topic is unabated, and my desire and intention, to see the project of my youth completed on a suitable and satisfactory scale inflexible.

I ventured into type in 1858 and 1860, and since then I have printed farther instalments destined to fall into their places, when the time arrives. But accident directed my steps and thoughts about the same time into a different groove, and I turned my attention to book-collecting and bibliography, at first vaguely and desultorily, and by degrees on a more systematic principle; and cogent circumstances—that necessity for living, which Dr Johnson ignored—finally drove me into the market as a speculator. My conversance with old books was very special and defective; of many classes I knew next to nothing; but I gradually gained a fair insight into the value of those, for which I had contracted a personal liking—the early poetry and romances—and I tried my hand as a hunter for specialities. I naturally turned to the Museum as a channel; for I was not acquainted with many of the booksellers, and I had yet to meet with Mr Huth.

It may not be, indeed is not, generally known, how wide a diversity of persons offer their possessions or acquisitions to the national library. There are great differences of opinion respecting the questions of rarity and value, and the authorities are most unconscionably plagued by a host of individuals of imperfect bibliographical attainments, who shoot parcels of old volumes in Great Russell Street in the expectation of a more or less rich harvest, in which they are apt to be more or less disappointed. Here and there a real treasure is netted. The Bishop of Bath and Wells brought a small octavo volume from Ickworth, comprising the Prophete Jonas and other tracts of singular scarcity and importance. A gentleman from Woolwich introduced a quarto volume in old vellum of poetical compositions of the middle of the sixteenth century, including the Scholehouse of Women, the Defence of Women, the Seven Sorrows that Women have when Their Husbands be dead, etc., with the autograph on a flyleaf of ‘John Hodge, of the Six Clerks’ Office 1682.’ Such prizes atone for a vast amount of annoyance and rubbish.

But Mr Maskell, Mr Halliwell, Mr Henry Stevens, and myself have probably, apart from purchases made direct from the sales and the shops, contributed of late years most largely to supply lacunæ in the Early English Department, and supersede the three-volume catalogue.