Portrait of an Obsession
The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the world’s greatest book collector, adapted by Nicolas Barker from the five volumes of Phillipps studies. London, Constable. 1967.. © Sheila Munby, and reproduced with her kind permission.

[We conclude these extracts with the epilogue, which provides a more balanced view of this remarkable man.]
When the portrait is finished, the painter stands back from it, ponders the course through which it has been built up by countless strokes of the brush, and attempts, for the first time, to detach himself from it enough to pass some reasoned judgement upon the finished job. No portrait can ever show the whole man, and to allow here the documents to speak for themselves about so complex a character as Sir Thomas Phillipps, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions, is not wholly just. It must be emphasized that Phillipps was obviously more pleasant in the flesh than on paper, and that the combination of a fiery temper and too facile pen have stood him in bad stead with posterity. It is clear that Sir Thomas found it a good deal easier to write than to think: he often gave wholly unintentional offence through his terse over-hasty notes. Yet there is ample evidence in his papers to give that numbers of people held him in affection, if not perhaps in any great esteem, which goes to show that the strait-laced nineteenth century was far more tolerant of eccentricity than we are today.

It is in his treatment of his family that the documents require a particular corrective. They present a partial and almost wholly unsympathetic aspect of the great collector. It is hard to believe that the ogre who appears in his dealings with both his wives and his daughters could have kept their affection. And yet it is clear that he did, even to the end, although by then their exasperation must have been almost past bearing. It is probable, too, that where he seems to the reader to have made the most blackguardly attempts to play one daughter off against the others and in particular to traduce the eldest, these were regarded by the victims as transparent and merely tiresome pieces of childish deceit. His relations with them were always overshadowed by the quarrel with Halliwell and by the sad series of events which stemmed from Phillipps's discovery that his daughter had married a thief a thief of MANUSCRIPTS who had by law to be his heir. The essential tragedy of this theme may disguise the fact that family life at Middle Hill was by no means as disagreeable as the reader might be disposed to assume. Visitors were not confined to foreign savants, and Phillipps's engagement books show that he took part in the activities which his position of a substantial landowner demanded. Family tradition extols his horsemanship, and his occasional excursions into the hunting field were obviously undertaken with enjoyment. As a landlord he was on the whole fair, though his perennial money troubles made him at times hard. He was certainly not remote from his tenants, and regularly presided at the annual dinner which he gave for them at Middle Hill. He did, of course, use his position to influence them on political and theological questions in common with many other landlords of his day.
While no one could seek to defend the Baronet's lack of scruple in money matters, it is important that his financial transactions be judged by the standards of his own day and not ours. Phillipps grew to manhood in the Regency, and was past middle age when Victoria came to the throne. The view is of comparatively recent growth that debts upper class debts at all events are positively disreputable. They were of course always imprudent, and unfair to the heir, because they encumbered the estate and so ensured that he succeeded under a handicap: but the idea that the taking of extended credit was unfair to tradesmen is surely a mid-nineteenth-century conception, and only developed when the rise of the middle classes had made tradesmen a good deal more vocal about their wrongs than they had been in the Regency. Phillipps's were calculated debts, less attractive on this account perhaps than those of a Mytton or a Brummel, but more likely to be paid. Paid in fact they were, though on occasion under the duress of the law: Phillipps never ordered books for which he did not honestly intend to pay at some future date, albeit a remote one.
These mild correctives should not be construed into an apologia for Sir Thomas's character: he was vain, selfish, dogmatic, obstinate, litigious and bigoted. To the first of these qualities, indeed, some of his unparalleled success as a collector can be ascribed. To amass so many and so valuable manuscripts that great scholars were forced to visit his library was the ambition of a vain man, though to say that is not to minimize his genuine veneration for scholarship and his solicitude for the preservation of records. Phillipps was also an arrogant man, but his arrogance had a robust, damn-your-eyes quality less unattractive to me than the glacial hauteur of Lord Ashburnham or the dark pride that secretly gnawed at Madden's vitals. He was undoubtedly hot-tempered, but except in Halliwell's case he did not bear long-standing grudges or brood on grievances. If his head was hot, his heart, as Curzon pointed out, was also warm. His mental equipment was limited, though I cannot concur with Madden's exasperated comment that he had 'the brains of a tomtit'. It was perhaps his insensitivity, his lack of imagination and above all his obstinacy that made him go doggedly ahead in the face of all difficulties with the grand design that obsessed him; and these faults must be judged inseparable from his greatest virtue, the tireless and single-minded devotion which he lavished on his life's work. For whatever view we take of Phillipps as a man, his achieve ment must be judged as heroic in conception and execution.

Did Phillipps, as he was wont to claim, 'save countless manuscripts for posterity'? The question is worth careful scrutiny, since we know that he diverted much valuable material from the British Museum, and this was particularly unfortunate at a period when the Department of Manuscripts was in the charge of an outstandingly able man, who actively sought for accessions as few Keepers had done before and none since. Even so, Phillipps's claim must be upheld. On the Continent between 1820 and 1830 he literally saved many hundreds of manuscripts from the gold-beaters, the trunkmakers and the bookbinders; and throughout his life he certainly preserved thousands of deeds, a class of manuscript destroyed in vast quantities during the last century, and even to the present day. It would, however, be a mistake to limit our estimate of Phillipps as a preserver to the manuscripts which he himself acquired. During a great part of the nineteenth century the market was fantastically overstocked, and at such a time it was to be expected that great masses of written matter at the lower end of the scale would be destroyed as unsaleable. Phillipps's wholesale intervention as a purchaser of vellum and paper at all levels raised prices to a degree which ensured that even the humblest manuscript had some value; this was undoubtedly recognized by the book trade throughout the country, and so led to the preservation of material which is prized today, but the existence of which was precarious a hundred years ago. Phillipps had no illusions that he had not driven up the market against himself, nor did he wholly regret it. 'Nothing', he wrote, 'tends to the preservation of anything so much as making it bear a high price.'
By comparison Phillipps makes all other collectors of manuscripts seem amateurs. He spent perhaps between two hundred thousand and a quarter of a million pounds altogether four or five thousand pounds a year, while accessions came in at the rate of forty or fifty a week. For thirty years he conducted single-handed the administration of a library which ranked as a national institution. Of the only two predecessors who can stand beside him, Cotton had Richard James as his librarian and Harley had Humfrey Wanley, both scholars of calibre. Phillipps stood alone. Discount, if you will, from our estimate Phillipps's two hundred or so published works, of unequal quality though by no means so useless to antiquaries as Madden's severely professional strictures would suggest. Leave out of the account the fifty thousand printed books, or rather regard perhaps fifteen thousand of them as a handapparat to be used in conjunction with the manuscripts, and the other thirty-five thousand as an aberration. Let Phillipps's stature as a collector be judged by his manuscripts alone, the greatest library of unpublished historical material ever brought together by one man, 'more than double the size', as Henry Bradshaw wrote in 1869, 'of the whole of our Cambridge University & College collec tions of MSS. put together'. Phillipps loved his manuscripts with a passionate intensity, 'a neverfailing solace', he wrote, 'in every trouble'. Yet this was no selfish accumulation hoarded for his own gratification. Literatis aperta was the motto which headed the first page of the catalogue of manuscripts in 1824, and throughout his life the collector remained true to it.
By his unswerving application and unaided efforts, Phillipps acquired perhaps sixty thousand manuscripts. He compiled, printed and distributed to public libraries at home and abroad a catalogue of 23,837 of them. He extended hospitality to hundreds of visiting scholars, who were charmed by the courtesy with which they were received and by the attentive solicitude with which he aided their studies. The answers he wrote with his own hand in reply to postal inquiries must have run into thousands. Of course at times ambition outran performance, the hard-driven human machine faltered, and there were breakdowns in the single-handed administration of an institution which would have taxed the energies of half a dozen professional librarians. In the end, moreover, when he took his final leave of his beloved manuscripts, he had shelved and not solved the problem of disposing of them which had exercised his mind for over forty years. Incapable to the last of a grand and generous gesture of benefaction, which would have made certain the enrolling of his name in the company of such immortals as Bodley and Cotton, Sir Thomas devised instead an uncertain and precarious future for his library whose formation had obsessed the whole of his life.

Let us, however, leave Sir Thomas Phillipps on a note of charity, standing at the door of Middle Hill to greet his visitor's carriage as it lurches up the long, pot-holed drive to the mansion below Broadway Tower, 'the lighthouse', as the Abbé Pitra wrote, 'which signalled a welcome to all friends of learning'. We can picture him leading his guest along airless and encumbered passages, threading their way, like Mr. Boffin among his dustheaps, though box-lined rooms, amid stacked crates and vast accumulations of charters, rolls and codices in their dedicated search for knowledge, until, when the day is far spent, Sir Thomas provides by way of relaxation one of those 'desserts of manuscripts' of which he never wearied. Readiness to share great treasures of the world is not a trait universal in bibliophiles. Has there ever been a collector more eager to make his library accessible to scholars than this self-confessed 'vello-maniac', choleric, fanatical and yet, in the last analysis, not utterly unlovable?