A view of Morris’s study, shortly after his death, by Edmund H. New.
(Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library.)“Friends of Mr. Morris will always regret
that no catalogue of his complete library was ever issued, as it would
have illustrated, in a remarkable manner, the real genius in selection
which enabled him, in a very short space of time, to bring together so
many specimens of first-rate importance” (The Guardian, 14 December 1898, p. 26).
William Morris (1834–1896) was a voracious reader from an early age,
but it was only in his later years that he became a determined
book-collector, and all the evidence suggests that he then began to
acquire books and manuscripts on a large scale primarily because of his
interest in the history of book illustration and typography. Hence when
he founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891, his fascination with printing
led him on to increasingly ambitious purchases for his library,
especially of medieval books and manuscripts. Nevertheless, he also
owned a very substantial collection of nineteenth-century books—we have
identified more than a thousand so far—and this point is worth
emphasizing, because most published remarks on Morris’s library,
including those of Morris himself and Sydney Cockerell, give the
misleading impression that his bookshelves held little else but
incunables.
This website represents an attempt to reconstruct the personal
library of one of the most influential figures of the Victorian era.
Drawing upon a large number of sources, we are creating a short-title
list of all the books and manuscripts Morris is known to have had in his
collection. We are also including information about provenance,
snippets from the Sotheby sale catalogue of Morris’s library (December
1898), buyers and prices of the lots in that auction, and links to
digital copies of the titles. (We are aware, by the way, that some of
those links, especially to Google Books, are not functional outside the
United States because of copyright restrictions, but we hope that may
change in the future.) Likewise, we are making use of the three
manuscript catalogues of Morris’s books compiled during his lifetime
(see Abbreviations
under “MS catalogues”). At a later stage, we want to add more
information about individual entries, such as allusions to them in
Morris’s writings and correspondence.
The story of how Morris’s collection was dispersed after his death is
complex and can only be briefly summarized here. Though some of his
books remained within the family, his executors, Sydney Cockerell and F.
S. Ellis, arranged for a private sale of the rest of the library to
Richard Bennett, a Manchester collector, who quickly disposed of a large
number of items that were subsequently offered at auction by Sotheby’s
(London) in December 1898. Because Henry Wellcome was the most active
buyer at that sale, the Wellcome Library in London today has one of the
two largest collections of titles from Morris’s library, but of course
the remainder of the lots in the 1898 auction are now widely
scattered. The other substantial body of material once owned by Morris
is at the Morgan Library in New York, since in 1902 J. Pierpont Morgan
acquired the second part of Bennett’s collection. Unfortunately the
Wellcome Library sold hundreds of Morris’s books during the 1930s and
1940s, and even the Morgan has deaccessioned a few titles that were
treated as duplicates.
We have also decided, after some hesitation, to include books that
were owned by Morris’s wife and daughters before his death, on the
assumption that these books were all at one time under the roofs of
Kelmscott House and Kelmscott Manor, and were no doubt in some instances
mingled with Morris’s modern books. (Following the same principle, we
are recording Morris’s personal copies of Kelmscott Press books that
were published during his lifetime.) Similarly, we are listing books
given by Morris to others, except for copies of his own works and
Kelmscott Press titles. In a few instances, we know that these books
came directly from his own bookshelves as duplicate copies, and the
books he presented to others often tell us something about Morris’s
literary tastes and preferences.
We are of course recording medieval and Renaissance manuscripts owned
by Morris, though we have excluded his calligraphic exercises and
drafts of his own writings. For manuscripts later acquired by J.
Pierpont Morgan, we are making use of additional information found in
Sydney Cockerell’s marginalia in his copy of the Morgan Catalogue (see Abbreviations)
now at the Lilly Library, Indiana University; we are also providing the
first two paragraphs of each manuscript description in the Morgan Catalogue.
In order to give a better sense of how much Morris is likely to have
paid for his early books and manuscripts, we are gradually adding
details from the Ellis valuation (see Abbreviations) compiled after Morris’s death.
Obviously this site continues to be a work in progress. We welcome
suggestions, corrections, and especially new information; we are
diligently searching in all the known sources, but we urge readers to
tell us about books and manuscripts once in Morris’s possession that we
may have overlooked.
We should add that we maintain another website devoted to the Kelmscott Chaucer.
William S. Peterson (wsp@umd.edu) & Sylvia Holton Peterson (swholton2@cs.com)
