(21) Mr Dykes Campbell – Top-hatted, in the far corner, back to the room, diligently scouring the shelves, is James Dykes Campbell (1838-1895), a well-travelled and well-to-do Scottish merchant of a literary bent.  Born in Port Glasgow into a shipping family, he spent a working life in Canada, India, and then in Mauritius, where in 1875 he married Mary Sophia Chesney (1856-1938), daughter of General Chesney, who commanded the island garrison. Following a European tour in 1878, Campbell retired from business in 1881 to concentrate on his literary pursuits from his flat at 29 Albert Hall Mansions.

James Dykes Campbell

Campbell was a collector of modern poetry.  In 1862, while still in Toronto, his admiration for Tennyson led to his privately publishing a well-meaning but illicit edition (“Poems, MDCCCXXX-MDCCCXXXIII”) of the early Tennyson poems omitted from the 1842 collected edition.  Tennyson subsequently went to court to prevent copies being sold by the London bookseller and publisher John Camden Hotten (“Hotten : Rotten, Forgotten”, as George R. Sims memorably summed him up).  Campbell had better fortune with Robert Browning, who became a friend. The forger Thomas J. Wise later recalled how Campbell came to complete his Browning collection in 1886: “I was invited by James Dykes Campbell to dine at his flat in Albert Hall Mansions, Kensington Gore. The only other guest that evening was Robert Browning.

Thomas J. Wise

After dinner Campbell and I sat smoking in the bow-window of his study, which overlooked the grounds in which the band of one of the then popular Exhibitions was playing; Browning, not smoking, strolled round the room looking at the contents of the bookcases which occupied two of its sides. ‘I see you have everything of mine, Campbell’, he observed. ‘No’, replied Campbell, ‘I still lack ‘Pauline’’.  ‘Oh, that gap can soon be filled’, said Browning; ‘the other morning I happened upon two copies of it; one of them shall be sent to you tomorrow’”.  To his chagrin, Wise, who had actually been present when Browning discovered the two copies in his father’s old trunk, was unable to obtain the second copy, which Browning wanted for his son. He had to wait two years and pay well over £20 for the copy which finally made its way into his library.  It may well have been this incident which led to Wise producing his type-facsimile of “Pauline” a few months later – printed for him by Richard Clay & Sons in one of his earliest, possibly his first, contact with a business with which his relationship which was to cause so much mischief.

Campbell became Honorary Secretary of the newly founded Browning Society, but his chief fame is as the biographer of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  His thoroughly researched biographical introduction to E. H. Coleridge’s edition of the “Poetical Works” (1893) was separately published the following year as “Samuel Taylor Coleridge : A Narrative of the Events of his Life”.  It has been described as “a landmark in the history of the genre in that it defines the standards of scholarship, accuracy, documentation, and impartiality by which every biographer of Coleridge has since been measured” (Alun R. Jones).  Campbell and his wife moved to 40 West Hill, St. Leonard’s, in 1889 and later to Walton Lodge, 9 Beulah Road, Tunbridge Wells, where he died on 1st June 1895. He is buried in the churchyard at Frant.

(22) Palmer’s Boy – “The youth training for bibliographical honours is known as ‘C. S. Palmer’s boy’” noted Karslake, and the fact that both he and Roberts could remember this much about the boy after a gap of some years seems to imply that he was not an unfamiliar figure in the rooms. I have no idea at all who he was, but his master must have been Clement Sadler Palmer (1854-1917), whose bookshop was at 100 Southampton Row.  A specialist in genuinely antiquarian material, Palmer had been born over his father’s bookshop at 18 Paternoster Row – his father being Ebenezer Palmer (1808-1887).  An uncle, Samuel Palmer, was a historian as well as a bookseller and printer, and compiled the Palmer Index to “The Times”, while another bookseller uncle, Joseph Palmer, has been called “the father of stamp collecting”: the boy, whoever he may have been, would not have lacked for mentors.  Clement Sadler Palmer had married Martha Elizabeth Millns (1858-1943), the daughter of a grocer from Barking, in 1884, but none of his eventual nine children would have been of an age to be the youth depicted here. Nor would a cousin, Ernest Stanley Vinall, who became Palmer’s apprentice in the 1890s.

At some point after 1901 Palmer gave up his shop and took up work as a “book expert” and cataloguer for Sotheby’s, “a charming, rather retiring man” according to Frank Herrmann’s history of the firm.  Palmer died at his home in Teddington on 10th December 1917, his personal effects stated at just £209.

William Chadwick Neligan

(23) Dr Neligan – seated on the near side of the table, but with his back to the action, engrossed in his catalogue, is the bespectacled, top-hatted and well wrapped-up figure of Dr Neligan, “an erstwhile collector”, according to Karslake.  This must be the Reverend Doctor William Chadwick Neligan (1793?-1887), the well-known Irish antiquarian, collector, and rector of St. Mary Shandon in Cork.  I gather there is an essay on him somewhere in the pages of the “The Irish Book Lover” (Vol. VII, pp. 21-23, September, 1915), in its “Great Irish Book Collectors” series.  But this raises a problem, because by the time this wood-engraving was published in “The Graphic” of 26th May 1888, Dr Neligan had been dead at least six months – he died in Cork at the age of ninety-four in the latter part of 1887.  So – whatever the origins of this picture of a book-sale at Sotheby’s, whether Paget drew it from the life in one or more sessions, built it up from composite sketches, or perhaps worked it up from a photograph, we have to accept that the players in the scene are most probably the Book-Hunters of 1887 than those of 1888.  The blocks for a relatively large and complex piece of work such as this would no doubt have taken some time for Williamson to engrave; there may have been a delay in finding a suitable opportunity to feature the picture in the magazine, or it may even have been held back for a time in deference to the passing of Dr Neligan.

Gaining his degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, Neligan was a well-known figure in the Irish community, very much a part of the Protestant Ascendancy: one of his sermons was quoted  at length in the “Cork Examiner” (Monday 24th January, 1842) – “l would rather see the angel of the Passover, walk over us at midnight, till a cry, shrill and piercing, should ascend from every mother, and a groan deep and mournful from every father, because there was one dead in every family.  I would rather witness this, than see the spirit of Popery revived amongst us, and her hand lifted up to blight all that is fair, to crush all that is beautiful, and destroy all that is lovely in our country”.

Beyond that, Neligan was a highly successful collector of antiquities and coins as well as books. He wrote the occasional monograph, e.g. “A Brief Description of a Rare French Testament by the Doctors of Louvain, Printed at Paris, 1662, including some Notice of the Bourdeaux Testament of 1686” and seems to have sold and rebuilt collections throughout his later years.  Some “highly interesting antiquities”, including a “magnificent Roman lamp”, as well as illuminated manuscripts, were sold by J. Davy & Sons in 1851. Sotheby’s sold part of his library in 1854 and another portion in a two-day sale in 1872. Again in 1878 Sotheby’s produced a “Catalogue of Roman, Saxon, Irish & Other Antiquities; Bijouterie in Gold and Silver, the property of the Rev. William C. Neligan” – and there was still much left to disperse after his death.  Davy’s sold the “Works of Art and Objects of Antiquity, Comprising the Collection of Silver Plate & Antiquities of the late Rev. William C. Neligan”, while a four-day sale at Sotheby’s in July/August 1888 was led off by “Valuable Books & Manuscripts : including the Remaining Portion of the Library of the late Rev. William C. Neligan”.   

Charles Hindley

(24) Mr C. Hindley – immediately behind Dr Neligan, poring over a large book and seemingly oblivious to all else, is the bookseller Charles Hindley (1845-1900).  All Karslake has to say of him is that he “married one of the three handsome daughters of Mr. Poole, of Booksellers Row”.  No doubt Karslake’s recollection of the three handsome daughters was accurate enough, but he was mistaken as to their father.  On 2nd May 1874, Hindley in fact married Emma Jane Holmes (1851-1940), the eldest of the three daughters of another Booksellers’ Row bookseller, Percy Holmes (1826?-1884).  Originally from Sheffield, Holmes came south with his father, William Holmes, who had a bookshop at 31 Holywell Street (Booksellers’ Row) at least as early as 1839.

Sussex Advertiser, Tuesday 27th March 1855.

Hindley himself was also born into the trade. His father, also Charles Hindley (1821?-1893), was a bookseller in Brighton with a timeless line in advertising for stock (see illustration). The younger Hindley came up to London as a young man to work for Reeves & Turner (see above). The 1871 Census finds him living in Barnard’s Inn, his occupations described as “compiler of indices, cataloguing, and other literary matters”.  He had already at this time compiled “The Book of Ready-Made Speeches … With Appropriate Quotations, Toasts, and Sentiments” (1869) and a catalogue of the Catnach Press, published by Reeves & Turner in the same year.  In 1871 he was editing “The Old Book Collector’s Miscellany : or, A Collection of Readable Reprints of Literary Rarities” (1871-1873).

Manchester Courier, Saturday 11th November, 1905.

Another compilation for Reeves & Turner in that year was “Curiosities of Street Literature, Comprising ‘Cocks’, or ‘Catch pennies’”.  By 1876 he had his own shop at 8 Holywell Street, moving to No. 41 in 1884, where he remained until his death on 17th March 1900.  His later publications of note included “The Life and Times of James Catnach” (1878) and “A History of the Cries of London” (1881).  He was, as the attached little piece from the “Manchester Courier” says, “a maker of books” as well as a seller of them – and the piece itself – “the little cavernous shops glowed with books” – is a charming recollection of the last days of Booksellers’ Row before it was taken down as part of an “improvement scheme” at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Earl of Warwick

(25) Earl of Warwick – Right at the back of the room, facing the auctioneer, is George Guy Greville (1818-1893), Fourth Earl of Warwick and Fourth Earl Brooke.  As Frank Karslake remembered him, “a courtly gentleman, quite of the old school.  Thirty-two years ago he came into my shop one day and bought a Fourth Folio Shakespeare, a beautiful copy in the original calf, for £20, and put it under his arm, just as it was, and walked away with it.  I think he told me he had the other three folios at Warwick Castle, and wanted it to complete the set”.

Educated at St John’s, Oxford, M.P. for South Warwickshire 1845-1853, Aide-de-Camp to Queen Victoria, and married to Anne Charteris, daughter of the Ninth Earl of Wemyss, the Earl of Warwick was more than just a ‘courtly gentleman’.  He is remembered for his rebuilding and ‘gothic’ improvements at Warwick Castle, as well as being a major collector of arms and armour. And his book-collecting was considerably more serious than Karslake implies.

The Earl of Warwick

Aided by the scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-1889), the Earl assembled a superb collection of Shakespeare material, including a first folio and twenty-six quartos.  Four years after his death in 1893, the collection was sold in its entirety to the Folgers for £10,000 – their first major acquisition – the sale handled by Sotheran’s in conditions of utmost secrecy, with a flurry of cables, code-names and code-words.  Henry Clay Folger summed up the collection in 1914: “The beautiful library of Shakespeareana from Warwick Castle, most comprehensive, is essentially valuable for its manuscripts, manuscripts about Shakespeare and his life, the original notebooks of early commentators, and best of all, early manuscript copies of the plays.  Indeed, the catalog claims every known copy before 1700”.

Final instalment coming shortly …