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Libraries in the British Isles and their German Holdings

The Development of Libraries in Great Britain since the Middle Ages

Institutional diversity is perhaps a hallmark of British and Irish libraries in a way that is not of libraries in other countries. Where centralisation has indeed ``rationalised'' holdings by bringing them together within particular institutions, then parallel developments and new library foundations have tended to balance this process with new diversity. Britain has three national libraries, and five in all with the right of legal deposit, but there are no ``state and university or ``city and university libraries on the German model. Neither do the major municipal libraries play quite the same role as their counterparts in France. Not even the national libraries play any formal coordinating role among libraries. Historic collections are found in institutions of all kinds, public and private, and many of them are of national or international significance. A brief survey of the development of libraries in Britain might provide some insight into this phenomenon. [1]

Dispersal of Pre-Reformation Collections

The dissolution of the monasteries and other pre-Reformation institutions in England beginning in the 1530s led to the dispersal or outright destruction of numerous collections of books and manuscripts. By the 1550s, for example, the University Library at Oxford, founded in the fifteenth century, had been entirely emptied of books. The books of the library at Guildhall, the municipal library of the City of London, founded in 1425, were all confiscated by the Lord Protector, Edward, Duke of Somerset, in 1549. In Scotland, only 92 manuscripts from pre-Reformation foundations have survived.

During the second half of the sixteenth century, individuals such as Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) and Matthew Parker (1504-1575), Archbishop of Canterbury, built private collections largely from material recovered from these dispersals. In a culture based on common law, ancient documents were valued for the precedents they contained. Cotton's collection was soon regarded as a national resource, passing during the seventeenth century into the custody of the state and becoming, during the eighteenth, one of the foundation collections of the British Museum. Scholars' libraries, such as that of the magus John Dee, became de facto research collections accessible to a wide circle of contemporary scholars.

The Seventeenth Century

Sir Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), who re-equipped Oxford University's library between 1598 and 1602, regarded the accumulation of documentary evidence in a great library as a powerful weapon in the ideological struggle between Anglican Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. A collection of books and manuscripts with ``critical mass'' would allow its owners to expose the falsifications and refute the casuistry of Parisian scholasticism.

Although England possessed no court library to rival those on the continent, by the middle of the century the Bodleian had established itself as one of Europe's greatest research collections. The first Bodleian catalogue was issued as early as 1605. Books at the Bodleian Library and elsewhere were arranged in this period in ``stalls'' and chained for security, a practice that continued in many institutions into the eighteenth century. The printed text of the catalogue served not only in book form; reset on single sheets, it was affixed on frames at the end of each press as a shelf guide. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683-1734), who visited Oxford in 1710, described conditions for readers in Merkwürdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen, Holland und Engelland (pt. 3, Ulm 1754). Access to libraries in this period was normally very restricted, in terms of opening hours, facilities and, above all, the right to use the collection. Nevertheless, the Bodleian Library set standards for European libraries during the seventeenth century, marked-up copies of its successive catalogues often being used instead of locally compiled listings.

If libraries were able to recover somewhat from the dispersals and confiscations of the Reformation period during the first half of the seventeenth century, then the chaotic circumstances of the Civil War, and the depletions of the Commonwealth period, had emptied many of them again by 1660. The latter part of the century, however, saw a sustained recovery. Many Oxford and Cambridge college libraries were restored and cathedral libraries newly endowed. Investment in new representational buildings (such as the Wren libraries at Lincoln Cathedral or Trinity College, Cambridge) demonstrated an institutional commitment to libraries as engines for piety and learning.

Other library foundations in this period were associated with parish churches; Thomas Bray, the Anglican divine, promoted parish libraries through donations of small collections of approved titles (many of which had strong connections with Halle Pietism). Most of the major Scottish and some English towns possessed municipal libraries by 1700, although London itself remained an exception. Notable among them is Chetham's Library, founded in Manchester by Humphry Chetham, a local merchant, in 1653. Most of the holdings of libraries of all kinds were theological or devotional and the number of users was small.

The Licensing Act of 1662 accorded the Royal Library and the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge the right to obtain copies under a system of legal deposit. The Copyright Act of 1709 extended this right to a wider circle of libraries, including Sion College in London, the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh (founded in 1689) and the four Scottish university libraries (St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh), although few made systematic use of their legal deposit privileges before the nineteenth century. [2]

In Ireland, the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (founded in 1601) grew rapidly into the country's most important research collection. It remained inaccessible, however, not only to Ireland's Catholic majority but also to its Protestant undergraduates. It was largely for this reason that Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713), Dublin's Anglican archbishop, founded a public library in 1701.

The seventeenth century also saw what might be described as the beginnings of a theory of librarianship. John Durie (1596-1680) published The reformed librarie keeper, the first work in English on the subject, in 1650. Durie was much influenced by the educational ideas of Samuel Hartlib and his circle and lived much of his life in Germany. The polymath John Evelyn (1620-1706), whose English translation of Gabriel Naudé's Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris 1627) appeared in 1661, introduced a further continental influence. Both Durie and Evelyn's Naudé argue strongly for recognition of the importance of libraries not only for the world of learning but also for the state.

Thomas Hyde's Bodleian catalogue of 1674 was the first to attempt a consistent transcription of the information contained on titlepages. Its usefulness as a bibliographical tool was enhanced by numerous cross-references. In recognition of the comprehensiveness and quality of Hyde's catalogue, many libraries (including some on the continent) dispensed with a local catalogue, preferring to mark up Hyde's with their own shelf-marks. Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the Cambridge scholar and the long-serving Keeper of the Royal Library, deployed cogent arguments in his struggle to obtain improved accommodation for the collection. In his Proposal for building a royal library, an anonymous broadside issued in 1691, he argued for the maintenance of the collection to be placed on a firmer legislative footing with a ``perpetual yearly revenue''.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

During the eighteenth century, new forms of library emerged to meet the demands of a growing middle class and new circles of readers in provincial towns. Many circulating and subscription libraries founded in the period were associated with non-conformist divines. Samuel Fancourt started circulating libraries in Salisbury (1735) and in London (1742). Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), a non-conformist minister and natural scientist, clearly saw the foundation of libraries as an important aspect of the Enlightenment enterprise. He was associated with the establishment of subscription libraries in Warrington, Leeds and Birmingham. Non-conformists were also responsible for the establishment of a subscription library in London 1785. By the end of the century, such institutions developed against a background of a rapidly growing network of reading clubs and commercial circulating libraries. In the 1790s, foreign-language subscription libraries began to emerge in London and some provincial towns, including (in 1794) a short-lived Deutsche Lese-Bibliothek at Charing Cross.

The Library of the British Museum was founded in 1753 and opened its doors to readers in 1759. [3] The Museum had been conceived as a depository for collections that had passed into the hands of the nation, most notably the books and manuscripts collected by Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), Robert and Edward Harley, Earls of Oxford (1661-1724 and 1689-1741 respectively), and Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Although the collections grew rapidly through donations and bequests during the latter part of the eighteenth century, it was only in the nineteenth century that the concept of the Museum as a national library and international research collection was realised.

The British Museum began to exercise its right to legal deposit more effectively after 1814. The acquisition of George III's library in 1828 almost doubled its holdings of printed books, but it was the rise of Antonio (later Sir Anthony) Panizzi (1797-1879) that traced the transformation of the Museum into the world's greatest research library. Panizzi served as Keeper of Printed Books from 1837 and Principal Librarian (in effect, the Museum's director) from 1856 until his retirement in 1866. During this period he won increased funding from government enabling him to improve conditions for staff and, above all, to build a collection with pretensions to ``universality'' across languages, periods and cultures. He set library procedures, for example cataloguing, on a more systematic footing; improved facilities for readers took dramatic expression in the round Reading Room (1857). In his arguments for increased public funding for the library, Panizzi deployed evidence drawn from the experience of continental libraries, including the Königliche Bibliothek at Berlin and the University Library at Göttingen.

In parallel with the development of a national library, educational and social reformers pressed for the creation of a network of public libraries supported by local government. A Public Libraries Act of 1850 enabled rates to be levied for this purpose, although systematic provision across the country was only achieved after the First World War. Twenty-five years after the act, only four municipal libraries (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool) held more than 100,000 volumes. [4]

During this period, the foundation of new universities in London and provincial centres ensured many cities supported a network of libraries addressing different segments of the population. By the turn of the century, Manchester, for example, was home to Chetham's Library (founded in the seventeenth century but still used by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth to research early economic literature), the Portico Library, a subscription library founded in 1816, a new university library, a new municipal library, and (from the 1890s) John Rylands Library, a privately endowed international research collection. Foreign-language books were present in considerable numbers in all of these libraries; indeed, new public libraries often instituted foreign-language departments. In London, Edinburgh and some provincial centres, the libraries of learned societies and professional organisations (many of which were founded in the years 1750 to 1850) further augmented this rich provision.

In 1877, the Library Association, a professional association for libraries and librarians, was founded. One of its early aims was the introduction of accredited library qualifications. The first formal library school was founded at University College London in 1919. During the same period, British librarians made a substantial contribution to the development of historical bibliography as a subject. The Bibliographical Society of London (founded in 1892) brought together specialists in the method and practice of describing early printed books. Based on pioneering cataloguing work at the British Museum, the Society published in 1919 a Short-Title Catalogue of English books printed before 1641, in effect the basis for a national bibliography and union list. British Museum catalogues of incunabula and foreign books set international standards. [5]

The Twentieth Century

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, a series of acts further strengthened the position of public libraries across the country. The charitable foundation of Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), the Scots-American tycoon, invested enormous sums in new library buildings (some 380 across the United Kingdom as a whole). National Libraries were founded in Ireland (Dublin, 1877), Wales (Aberystwyth, 1907) and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1925), the latter based on the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. A National Central Library was founded in London in 1931 to support the expanding network of public and other libraries through inter-library loan, cataloguing and other shared services.

During the Second World War, British libraries suffered serious losses owing to aerial bombing. Although not in any way comparable with the dispersal and destruction of German libraries, the Library of the British Museum alone lost some 200,000 volumes and losses among public libraries were in the region of three quarters of a million volumes. The National Central Library itself was completely destroyed in 1941.

In retrospect, the years following 1945 might be regarded as a period of relative neglect. For example, no new library buildings were opened for many years. Budgets for retrospective acquisitions in research collections were small. Only from ca. 1960 did library provision appear to expand again with the foundation of new universities and the acceptance of a role for libraries as engines of technological innovation. When the new Birmingham Central Library opened in 1974, it was the largest public library in Europe. It was in this spirit that a new national library was created in the same year by merging the reference collections of the British Museum with the National Library of Science and Invention and the National Central Library. The functions of the new British Library were probably wider in range and scope than those of any other national library.

As a ``flagship'' project, the new British Library took on the creation of a machine-readable Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) to be made available over networks. The ESTC has since expanded, as the English STC, to encompass all English printing from Caxton to 1800. The Library has also continued to make a contribution to international bibliography in the compilation of foreign-language STCs based on its holdings, for example the magisterial listing of seventeenth-century German books by David Paisey (1995). Many other research collections have created retrospective catalogues of their own holdings or have contributed to union catalogues, so that the record of holdings of early printed books in British libraries is probably more complete than that in any other European country of comparable size. [6]

By the end of the twentieth century, librarianship had been established as an all-graduate profession, although research libraries, in particular, continue to employ new entrants with alternative postgraduate qualifications. [7] Nevertheless, it cannot be said that librarians have attained the professional status enjoyed by their peers in many other countries. Ironically, as the formal status of library professionals has improved, the numbers with a knowledge or understanding of early printed books have declined.

The distribution of the nation's bibliographic resources, and especially of historic collections, through the diverse institutions mapped in the following section, has increasingly become a matter for concern. As institutions of all kinds (public and private) have perceived themselves as under financial threat, the sale and dispersal of historic assets has frequently been chosen as a convenient solution to the problem of underfunding. In the last year alone, well-publicised cases of the sale abroad of collections of early printed books in such diverse fields as the history of mathematics or classical dance have exemplified an accelerating trend.

The librarian's new role as mediator between user and information technology, a new professionalism, and the infusions of considerable public funds give some grounds for hope of change in the next century. [8] As awareness of a shared European experience and an appreciation of the value of ``cultural heritage'' of all kinds increase, we may be reasonably optimistic about the future of early German printed books in British and Irish collections.

The Diversity of Libraries in the British Isles and their German Holdings

The range of institutions in Britain with significant holdings of historic materials is probably wider than in most other countries. Important collections are not only to be found in national and academic libraries: public and private libraries of all kinds also contribute to a rich but highly distributed resource. This very diversity, however, is a significant disadvantage for a project such as the Handbuch. Many institutions with relevant holdings found it difficult to participate in the project owing to a lack of resources or local expertise. In Ireland, only three libraries were able to participate. The absence of a full-time central editorial team has meant that the holdings of many important collections have remained unsurveyed. [9] Nevertheless, we have assembled over 50 entries reflecting the rich diversity of holdings in the countries that make up the British Isles.

The pattern that has emerged is reasonably clear. Considerable numbers of German imprints are found in almost all types of library and in the very earliest collections, for example Oxford and Cambridge libraries and some cathedral libraries. [10] Incunabula and post-incunabula were often donated by alumni or local clergy. Subject areas covered include divinity, classics, history and biography. Strasbourg and Basel predominate among the earlier imprints from German-speaking Europe. Frankfurt am Main, Jena and Leipzig tend to replace them among later imprints. All were publishing centres renowned for the excellence of their scholarly editions and, unsurprisingly, imprints from them form a considerable proportion of the total holdings of many collections. In Aberdeen University Library, for example, about 20-30 per cent of sixteenth-century holdings carry imprints from German-speaking Europe.

If these holdings of German imprints contain few titles in the German language, then this reflects the relatively low status of German among foreign languages studied and spoken in the early modern period. In the eighteenth century, dynastic ties between Britain and Hanover and the presence of large numbers of Germans in Britain itself did not lead to any substantial increase in the importation of German-language titles (see also below). It was not until the nineteenth century that German literature and philosophy did at last appear to have real influence over British writers and intellectuals such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot or Thomas Carlyle. [11] German gradually became accepted as one of the ``modern languages'' appropriate for university-level study and research. [12]

German immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has doubtless played its role. Certainly, British libraries have benefited greatly from the presence of political exiles. The Rosenbusch collection at Leeds University Library and the library of the Warburg Institute in London may serve as examples here. [13] Nevertheless, interest in modern German literature, reflected for example in the numbers of translations, remains limited and knowledge of German among the wider population relatively low.

National and Copyright Libraries

National libraries are represented in this volume of the Handbuch by the British Library itself, one of the greatest collections of early German material to be found anywhere, and by the National Library of Scotland, perhaps unexpectedly rich in relevant collections. [14] Britain's three national libraries constitute, with the university libraries of Cambridge and Oxford, the group of national ``copyright'' libraries with the right to claim Pflichtexemplare through legal deposit. Because of the historic ties between the United Kingdom and Ireland, a foreign library, the library of Trinity College, Dublin, is also permitted to exercise this right in respect of British publications. All three university libraries with the right of legal deposit are acknowledged as having early German holdings of international significance. Indeed, at the time of writing, the British Library is in discussion with Cambridge University Library on the coordination of collection development policy as it affects the acquisition of current German material.

Although German books are present in both the Old Royal Library (donated to the British Museum by George II in 1757) and the King's Library of George III, even here they are certainly outnumbered by books in French and Italian. The great transformation took place only in the nineteenth century, with the systematic acquisitions policy of Antonio Panizzi at the British Museum and the introduction of German as a subject of study in British universities. Adolf Asher & Co. of Berlin supplied the British Museum with antiquarian and current material from the 1840s until communications were disrupted by war in the twentieth century. The Museum acquired whole German collections (such as those of Ludwig Tieck or Wendelin von Maltzahn) and benefited greatly from the duplicate sales of the Hofbibliothek in Munich.

The British Library and other research libraries continue to add to their holdings of early printed books in foreign languages (if not on the scale of even the recent past) acquiring material by donation or purchase. The British Library itself understands its incomparable foreign-language holdings as the necessary context for developing our own ``national printed archive''.

Asher and the Munich duplicate sales also played a role in the development of German collections at the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford, the systematic acquisition of German books can be traced back at least as far as the purchase of Lüder Kulenkamp's library (sold at Göttingen in 1796). At the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, the acquisition of 100,000 volumes from the library of Georg Septimus Dieterichs of Regensburg in 1820 transformed German-language holdings.

The inclusion of an entry for the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings reminds us of the origins of the United Kingdom's national library in the British Museum. The Natural History Museum is another ``successor'' institution of the British Museum. It is joined here by the Science Museum, though not (regrettably) by its neighbour in South Kensington, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. [15]

The presence of an entry for the Public Record Office, the United Kingdom's national documentary archive, might seem equally surprising in this context. Their bibliographic holdings prove rich, however, in early printed material in German, often acquired as part of a diplomatic archive. [16]

Higher Education Libraries

The holdings of the university libraries are supplemented by the collections of faculty and institute libraries and (at Oxford and Cambridge) of college libraries, many of them particularly rich in Reformation and post-Reformation material. Knowledge of their early continental holdings remains uneven and it is a matter of regret that it was not possible to survey more college libraries for the present volume. [17] Even so, entries have been obtained for some of the most significant collections in both of the ancient English universities.

All the oldest Scottish universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh) have been included. The richness of their early German holdings might prove for some one of the most surprising features of the present volume. [18] Most, if not all, of the older English foundations outside Oxford and Cambridge are also covered (some obvious gaps will be apparent). Many hold very important special collections of relevant material. They include the university libraries of Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and Durham, as well as King's College and University College in London, both of which instituted chairs of German around 1830.

Among the many special collections in these older provincial universities, the libraries of the Moravian Church at Bristol and the library of Dr Hans Rosenbusch (1883-1966) at Leeds, rich in early literary editions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, should be singled out. A survey of the holdings of the University of London, with the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature, was a sine qua non of the project. Equally indispensable were the libraries of two of the major foreign-language research institutes in the United Kingdom, the Taylor Institution at Oxford and the Institute of Germanic Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

No independent or other secondary school libraries have been included in the present survey, though the holdings of many of the older foundations are significant. Eton College, for example, possesses one of the six or seven complete copies of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible recorded in the British Isles.

Learned Societies and Research Institutes

In both London and Edinburgh, a considerable number of learned societies holds significant collections of early printed material. The natural sciences are particularly well covered by the present volume. Many of the major holdings of older scientific literature have been surveyed, including the Royal Society (founded in 1662), the Royal Astronomical Society and the Linnean Society. The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine was also an early contributor. The Royal Academy of Arts (founded in 1768) stands as a rare example in this volume of a collection specialising in the fine arts. In each of these, German-language material takes its appropriate place as a primary medium for scholarly discourse in the modern period. The Library of the Royal Irish Academy (founded in Dublin in 1785) has a long tradition of exchange of scholarly publications with academies on the continent.

Ecclesiastical Libraries

We are especially pleased to have entries for the two largest cathedral libraries in England (York and Canterbury) as well as Durham and, indispensably, Lambeth Palace, the library of the Archbishops of Canterbury (one of the first draft entries to be received). The holdings of Dr Williams's Library reflect the importance of German theology on English non-conformity. The absence here of an entry for the library of St Patrick's College, Maynooth (founded in 1795) is a matter of regret. It is one of the most significant examples of a post-Reformation Catholic collection in the British Isles.

The recently published second volume of the Bibliographical Society's Cathedral Libraries Catalogue will demonstrate the wealth of resources that remain to be surveyed elsewhere. [19] Other ecclesiastical or church-related libraries are represented, but, again, very wide gaps in coverage will be found. The forthcoming survey of parish libraries may well reveal further sources of evidence for the impact of Reformation and post-Reformation ideas at a local level. [20]

Public and Endowed Libraries

Much evidence for this process is found in Chetham's Library in Manchester, said to be the oldest surviving public library in the country. In the 1830s, a Foreign Library was instituted for the use of the substantial foreign communities (including Germans) in Manchester. The extraordinary Plume Library at Maldon, a ``time-capsule'' of late seventeenth-century culture, offers important clues for the impact and significance of German ideas outside the universities. If coverage of public libraries with significant special collections holdings in the present volume is disappointing, then the inclusion of Birmingham Central Library, with its remarkable Shakespearean and other rich collections, ensures that one of the most important is represented.

Subscription Libraries

We are equally pleased to have been able to include entries for two of the older proprietary or subscription libraries, namely the oldest (the Leeds Library, founded in 1768) and the largest (the renowned London Library, founded in 1840, another early supporter of the project). Their holdings reflect the tastes of a wider reading public perhaps more closely than others do. The Leeds Library incorporates a foreign section (founded in 1778), the holdings of which reflected a reasonably representative cross-section of German fiction and non-fiction. Not surprisingly, German is probably the best-represented foreign language among the holdings of the London Library, as one would have expected of the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle.

Private Libraries

The presence of a single entry for a National Trust property (Lanhydrock) reminds us, at least, of the rich and occasionally unexpected holdings of England's grand country houses. The Leighton Library at Dunblane also proves unexpectedly rich in early German material. Many other collections, in private libraries and archives of all kinds, remain to be surveyed systematically.

Reasons for the Presence of German Books in the British Isles

In a Nachwort to his popular biography, Richard Friedenthal, an exile in England since 1938, writes movingly of the edition of Goethe's works he read in his youth: ``Sie haben mich seither begleitet und sich in der Tat als unzerreißbar erwiesen, selbst als sie mir 1944 bei einem Bombenangriff aus meiner Londoner Wohnung in den Garten geschleudert wurden, wo ich sie wieder aufsammelte.'' [21] The very richness of German material in British collections is, in many ways, as surprising as the presence of an edition of Goethe's works in an English garden. Why were German imprints or books in German imported and collected in the British Isles at all? Many of the factors that account for German-language holdings in other European countries clearly do not apply to the British Isles. The influence of German-language culture on the English-speaking world during the early-modern and modern periods was relatively small, and very largely confined to the religious sphere. Neither does the presence of a large community of German-speakers in London from the eighteenth century appear to have had very great impact. Like all immigrant groups, they were subject to the pressures of assimilation; second-generation Germans were often unable to communicate in their mother tongue. The significance of the dynastic union between Britain and Hanover from 1714 should also not be exaggerated.

A comparison with early-modern Sweden may be instructive here. In the introduction to the Denmark/Sweden volume of the Handbuch, we learn that: ``Deutschland behielt eine starke Stellung als Vermittler europäischer Kultur und Literatur nach Schweden.

[...] Der Handel mit schwedischen und ausländischen Büchern lag seit der Reformation hauptsächlich in den Händen deutscher Kaufleute und deutschstämmiger Buchbinder. [...] Auch in Schweden selbst wurde in deutscher Sprache publiziert [...]''. Quite clearly, none of these statements holds true for Britain or Ireland. Knowledge of the German language and literature remained very low throughout the period. Only with the spread of modern languages in higher education in the nineteenth century do we find much systematic collecting of literature in German. [22] In this volume of the Handbuch, one entry after another attests to the significance of German presses in early modern scholarly printing, but few refer to more than a handful of sixteenth or seventeenth-century books in the German language itself. [23]

Knowledge of the German Language and the Importation of German Books

The role of the Frankfurt Book Fairs in the dissemination of German scholarship is also clear from the survey. (The visits of John Bill to Frankfurt from 1618 are perhaps the best known example of these early connections.) It goes almost without saying this dissemination was almost exclusively in Latin. With some exceptions (a few Reformation pamphlets, for example), German-language material is almost entirely absent from collections made in this early period.

Giles Barber's evaluation of the customs records in the Public Record Office shows that a ``substantial trade existed'' with Germany throughout the period, imports being second only to those from the Netherlands. [24] Imports were certainly less disrupted by the century's frequent wars than those from France or Flanders. This is certainly supported by the evidence of contemporary English book catalogues, where the overwhelming majority of German imprints offered for sale are in Latin. There are exceptions, however, including the 130 items in ``German and Low-Dutch'' offered by Thomas Osborne in a catalogue issued early in 1750 (with amusing misprints!). [25] Perhaps significantly, this catalogue appeared at a time when a German book trade was seeking to establish itself in London.

The great majority of imports into the British Isles from German-speaking Europe in this period were therefore scholarly texts in Latin. Given the range and quality of German academic publishing, the foundation of learned academies in the early modern period and the vitality of many contemporary north German universities, the strong representation of Latin works from Frankfurt and Leipzig on British and Irish library shelves up to the mid-eighteenth century is scarcely surprising. As vernaculars replaced Latin as the preferred academic discourse, however (a process that lasted longer in central Europe than elsewhere), the absolute number of books imported for scholarly or library use must inevitably have declined. As a medium, the German language proved (and perhaps continues to be) a barrier to the reception of German ideas in the English-speaking world. Neither is there evidence that German vernacular works were being assiduously translated before the nineteenth century.

A search of the current file of the English Short Title Catalogue, the online national bibliography for the English-speaking world to 1800, using the search terms ``translated and ``High Dutch or ``German'', retrieves some 800 titles (not all of which are relevant to the topic). This total might be compared with the findings of the project at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, which aims to identify and record translations of English works into German before 1810. It would show that the latter exceed the former by a factor of more than ten.

If the numbers of translations speak for themselves, then it should also be noted that the titles actually translated from German into English hardly reflect the breadth of German-language culture. For most of the eighteenth century, German imaginative literature remained terra incognita for the great majority of readers of English. Although certain literary texts were quite popular among the English in the eighteenth century, the great majority of translated texts were theological or devotional. Even relative ``best-sellers'' such as Klopstock's Messias or Salomon Gessner's Der Tod Abels [26] have a clearly religious theme.

The single most significant German influence on English-language culture during the eighteenth century was undoubtedly Pietism, the Lutheran reform movement. Disciples of August Hermann Francke (1673-1727), the founder of the eponymous foundation at Halle an der Saale in 1698, are recorded in London from an early date. Anton Wilhelm Böhm (1673-1722) used his position in the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and connections in the book trade to see a programme of Pietist publications through the London presses. [27] Disregarding a number of German sermons printed for local congregations, these were translations into English (for the general reader) or even Latin (for the university market).

On his arrival in London in 1703, Böhm had found an established community of German-speaking Lutherans. [28] German settlement in London is recorded since the Middle Ages (the Stahlhof or Steel Yard, the Hanseatic depot on the Thames at Blackfriars, is well known). Since the Restoration, numbers had increased steadily. Conservative estimates of the German-speaking population of London around 1800 are in the region of 16,000-20,000. By this date, there were five Lutheran parishes, other Calvinist chapels, a Catholic chapel and a synagogue. The Marienkirche and the Georgenkirche also supported parish schools, with instruction in both English and German. At a time when Berlin had scarcely more than 80,000 inhabitants, and Cologne probably half this figure, German-speaking London was a rather considerable community.

Apart from a number of practical guides (for example, a language coach published especially for Palatine refugees) [29] and some sermons (mostly by Böhm), there is little evidence for printing in German in London before 1749. Johann Christian Jacobi (1670-1750) set up a Pietist bookshop on the Strand in 1709, which continued until at least 1718. In early 1749, Johann Christoph Haberkorn (d. 1776) and Johann Nicodemus Gussen set up a German printing press on the north side of Gerrard Street in Soho, a German New Testament intended for the transatlantic market being among their very first productions. Andreas Linde opened a bookshop in Catherine Street off the Strand in 1751. About 1766, Carl Heydinger established a printing house and bookshop in the same area, eventually taking over Haberkorn's business.

The description of Haberkorn, Linde or and Heydinger as ``German'' printers or booksellers needs some qualification. None could afford to specialise in producing, publishing or retailing German books exclusively. All of them printed or published works in modern foreign languages, including Italian, French and, unsurprisingly, English. None played a major role in the affairs of the London book trade beyond his niche market. After Heydinger's departure from the scene in the early 1780s, no further printer or bookseller with a German background was active in London for nearly a decade.

A distinctly ``German'' book trade revived only in the 1790s, at a time when the British were becoming increasingly interested in German imaginative literature, partly as a reaction against French influence which had been tainted by Revolutionary excess. Examples of this rather unexpected new interest were rival translations of Georg August Bürger's Lenore (usually printed with the original text for comparison) and the intense (if short-lived) success of productions of Kotzebue's bourgeois dramas. London literary periodicals began to comment favourably on German literature and ideas as a contrast to those of Revolutionary France. This was the period in which Scott translated Schiller, and Coleridge, having attempted a translation of Wieland's Oberon (without the benefit of actually knowing any German), set off for Germany itself to learn the language at its roots.

Although relatively little printing in German is recorded from this period (the small domestic market apparently being satisfied by imports), James Remnant, Henry Escher and Constantine Geisweiler had all set up retail outlets by the end of the century.

Study of German Language and Literature from 1800

Although a guide to the German language had been printed in London as early as 1680, [30] and various editions of grammars and dictionaries had appeared since, contemporaries were still complaining about the lack of a good grammar for English learners in 1800. Almost as serious an impediment, perhaps, was the contemporary view of what good German literature actually comprised; most lists of important writers before 1800 rated Wieland as the leading author of the day. By far the most popular German author in London around 1800 was August von Kotzebue, whose dramas dominated the London stage for a few seasons in the latter part of the 1790s. [31] Once the vogue had passed, Kotzebue and his contemporary dramatists (such as Iffland and Schiller) were roundly condemned as examples of ``Jacobin'' tendencies. After 1800, those that retained a residual interest in ``German'' imaginative literature, probably got by with anthologies of translations or with the pseudo-German settings of ``Gothick'' novels and romances. [32]

If books in German were largely absent from British collections in the early modern period, then here is the explanation: a German-speaking community, largely indifferent to books and subject in any case to the pressures of assimilation, resided among a host English-speaking community with little or no knowledge of the German language or of German literature. When at the turn of the nineteenth century, some German imaginative literature became available in translation, this only served to highlight an apparent, and fundamental, ``difference of taste''.

August 1999

Graham Jefcoate

German Studies and Collections since 1830

The presence of significant collections of German books of historic interest is explained in part by the growth of interest in the study of German in the second half of the nineteenth century in schools and universities, engendered not least by a growing respect for the excellence of German scholarship in fields such as philology and historical studies, while the Civil Service and military academies also exhibited an interest in German because of an increased awareness of the growing economic and military power of Prussia and, after 1871, of the German Empire. Another factor conducive to the presence of collections of German books was the existence of large communities of Germans in London and other cities such as Manchester and Sheffield. German merchants had been active in Britain for centuries, and more recently the influx of German-speaking intellectuals into England, particularly in the wake of the 1848 revolution [33] and in the 1930s, [34] led to the formation of private collections of German books, many of which later found their way into British libraries, especially university libraries, through donation, bequest or purchase (one thinks of the Levison collection at Durham, the Kantorowicz and the Frida Mond collections at King's College London, the Gundolf and the Berthold Auerbach collections at the Institute of Germanic Studies).

It may help to explain the presence and distribution of collections of German books in the United Kingdom if we outline the growth of German studies in the educational system. It has to be appreciated that - leaving aside the role of the classical languages, especially Latin, in earlier times - the principal foreign language taught in Britain has, for geographical and historical reasons, always been, and still is, French - already in the fourteenth century the chronicler Ranulph Higden remarked that ever since the Norman Conquest in 1066 English schoolchildren had been compelled ``to leave their mother tongue and to construe their lessons in French''. The study of German came in comparatively late. The earliest German grammar, The High Dutch Minerva - the only item of specifically German interest in the library of Sir Isaac Newton - was not published until 1680, [35] to be followed shortly by Henry Offelen's Double Grammar for Germans to Learn English and for English-Men to Learn the German Tongue (London 1687).

In the eighteenth century and beyond there was a widespread mistrust of modern languages as a suitable discipline for study, they were considered markedly inferior to the classics. But in the mid-nineteenth century, in the days of Queen Victoria and her German consort Prince Albert, attitudes were changing, at least in some quarters. Members of Parliament are reported as having pointed with scorn ``to the counting houses of this country, filled with German clerks, who come here, and obtain employment because they have a better knowledge of foreign languages than our own people''. Among the great English public schools German was introduced into the curriculum at Harrow in 1839, at Winchester in 1845, at the King's School Canterbury and Marlborough in 1846, at Uppingham in 1848, with Shrewsbury, Westminster, St Paul's, Merchant Taylors', Charterhouse and Rugby following suit over the next few years, while Eton did not do so until rather later.

The first among the 782 endowed grammar schools to introduce German in the nineteenth century seems to have been Lady Manners' School at Derby in 1850. Real progress, however, was not made until the 1890s when schools like Clifton, in Bristol, and Manchester Grammar School instituted what was called ``the modern side'' in which modern language studies were seriously fostered, in the case of Manchester under its distinguished High Master John Lewis Paton who, although a Classicist, had received part of his own education at Halle. As early as 1910 he organised exchanges of pupils with a school at Frankfurt am Main.

As for the universities, whereas English was being offered at five German universities even before the end of the seventeenth century, it was not until the eighteenth century that we find encouragement being given to the study of modern European languages in Britain. On 16 May 1724, Lord Townshend, writing on behalf of King George I, drew the attention of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (the only two universities in England) to the desirability of providing tuition in modern languages. [36] But this admonition fell largely on deaf ears because here too the study of the classics was, and would long remain, predominant. The prevailing view, as Charles Colbeck described it as late as 1887, was that ``the living languages ...are too trivial to be scholarly, too easy to be learned, too useful to be dignified''. [37]

Yet against the background of such conservative attitudes it stands out as a remarkable fact that the first University Chair of German anywhere in the world had been established in the British Isles, at Trinity College Dublin in 1775 (almost a decade before the first on the Continent, at Budapest, in 1784). However, the study of German as an academic discipline began very slowly and uncertainly. Even at Dublin the aim had been to enable ``young Gentlemen of Fortune to finish their Education at home'', i.e. without embarking on a tiresome grand tour of Europe. [38] In 1788 the highly successful London architect Sir Robert Taylor (1714-1788) instructed that part of his substantial bequest to the University of Oxford be used ``for establishing a foundation for the teaching and improving the European languages'', yet little progress was made until well into the nineteenth century: indeed it was not until 1847 that Oxford finally agreed to make provision for those languages ``essential to Diplomatic or commercial pursuits'' and which possessed what was deemed a ``sufficient'' literature. Yet from Thomas Carlyle's letter of 22 December 1829 to Goethe we learn that at that time ``even in Oxford and Cambridge, our two English Universities, which have all along been regarded as the strongholds of insular pride and prejudice'' there was ``a strange stir'' in respect of the appreciation of German literature [39] and scholarship so that in Cambridge able translators had been found in Connop Thirlwall and Julius Charles Hare [40] for B. G. Niebuhr's Römische Geschichte (1811), and in Oxford two or three Germans were finding employment as teachers of the language. ``Of the benefits that must in the end result from all this,'' Carlyle continued, ``no man can be doubtful: let nations, like individuals, but know one another and mutual hatred will give place to mutual helpfulness; and instead of natural enemies, as neighbouring countries are sometimes called, we shall all be natural friends''.

The Oxford Chair of European Languages was first held by a Swiss, Francis Henry Trithen, but after he had been succeeded by the famous Indo-European philologist Max Müller, who held it from 1854 to 1868, it was transformed into a Chair of Comparative Philology. It would not be until 1886 at Cambridge, and as late as 1903 at Oxford, that students could take a full degree course in German, the first Oxford professorship in German being established in 1907 when Hermann Georg Fiedler (1862-1945), former tutor to the Prince of Wales, was appointed as first Taylor Professor of German. At Cambridge the Schröder Chair of German was established in 1910, its first holder Karl Breul (1860-1932) occupying it until his death. Both at Oxford and Cambridge the emphasis in the course of study was on philological training in the German mode: at Cambridge, for example, students of German early in the twentieth century concentrated on the study of Gothic and the other old Germanic languages, even Old Irish and Sanskrit, and medieval German literature, to the extent that even as late as 1925 the only work they studied from later than the sixteenth century was Goethe's Faust. Perhaps it is no surprise that the numbers of students studying German were small. [41]

As at Oxford and Cambridge, the old Scottish universities - Aberdeen (King's College, founded in 1495, and Marischal College, established in 1593), Edinburgh (1583), Glasgow (1451), and St Andrews (1411) - too did not make serious attempts to introduce modern languages until the turn of the nineteenth century, though occasional lectures were given on German literature at Glasgow from 1887 and at Edinburgh from 1888. [42]

Things were different in London. At the time when Carlyle was writing, around 1830, German language and literature were already being taught in the nascent University of London: at University College (founded in 1828) by Ludwig von Mühlenfels, the son-in-law of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and at King's College (founded in 1829) by Adolphus Bernays (1794-1864), a cousin of the famous classical scholar Jakob Bernays. [43] Whereas Mühlenfels was in London for only a very short period, Bernays held the chair of German at King's College for more than thirty years, from 1831 to 1863, and though he does not appear to have promoted the study of German outside the metropolis, it may be assumed that successive editions of his many books on German grammar, poetry and drama will have had an impact on teaching in other places too.

Outside London, the nineteenth century saw the foundations laid for numerous university institutions in England, many of these ``university colleges'' preparing students for the examinations of the University of London until they were granted their own royal charters as independent universities. The University of Durham was founded in 1832. Some of the constituent colleges of the University of Wales (formally established in 1893) were nineteenth-century foundations: Aberystwyth (1872), Bangor (1884), and St David's, Lampeter, even going back as far as 1822. The ``civic (or ``red-brick) universities - such as University of Manchester (granted a charter in 1903 but going back to Owens College, founded in 1851), [44] Birmingham (1900), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904), Sheffield (1905), [45] Bristol (1909), and later Reading (1926), Exeter (1955), Nottingham (1948), [46] Hull (1954), Leicester (1957) and Southampton (1952) - were followed in the 1960s by the ``new'' universities (East Anglia at Norwich, Essex, Kent at Canterbury, Stirling, Surrey, Sussex, Warwick, York) and the technological universities at Aston, Bath, Bradford, Loughborough, and Salford. Many of these teach German and some have significant holdings of German books. In the 1990s, a new wave of universities was created mostly by ``upgrading'' former polytechnics. Though most of the latter institutions will not have significant holdings of German books, even though German may well be taught there in some measure, some may attract worthwhile collections from time to time. Unexpected riches may sometimes be found in out-of-the-way

places.

The earliest generation of teachers of German at British universities came from the Continent - they included not only Bernays, Fiedler and Breul, but men such as Robert Priebsch (University College London), Otto Schlapp (1859-1939, at Edinburgh), A. W. Schüddekopf (Leeds), and K. Wichmann (Birmingham). [47] In some cases they may even have brought working collections of German books with them or have built them up over the years. After the First World War chairs of German at British universities came increasingly to be occupied by British scholars, and while many of these too may have built up significant libraries they were probably not as extensive as those assembled by their German colleagues. Nevertheless, it is certain that the private collections of German scholars and British Germanists have enriched many university libraries. The Taylor Institution at Oxford, for instance, holds the collection of H. G. Fiedler, while the Institute of Germanic Studies, London, has a substantial part of the libraries of Robert Priebsch (1866-1935) and August Closs (1898-1990), including manuscripts and incunabula.

The University of Bristol, whose library had already benefited from Closs's acumen, was recently enriched with some rare seventeenth-century books from the library of Leonard Forster (1913-1997). Liverpool has books from the collection of W. E. Collinson (1889-1969), a pupil and collaborator of Priebsch's, while University College London has books collected by the noted Goethe scholar L. A. Willoughby (1885-1977). The Beit Library at Cambridge has books from the personal collection of Otto Beit, others bought by Karl Breul and his successors in the Schröder Chair, and notable items bequeathed by Dr F. J. Stopp (1911-1979). The Brotherton Library at Leeds has the correspondence and papers of Jethro Bithell, while Rudolf Majut's collection enriches the library of the University of Leicester. Eudo Mason (1901-1969), sometime Professor of German at Edinburgh, built up an extensive collection of children's books, including very many nineteenth-century German ones, which is now in the National Library of Scotland.

Beyond the field of German studies in the narrow sense we find many other collections rich in German books, for example that of the historian Lord Acton, the Helmstedt imprints in the collection of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, and the Ritschl collection of dissertations, all at Cambridge University Library, the Hare collection at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Eyles collection of geological books at Bristol University, the collection of the eminent medieval historian Wilhelm Levison at Durham University, the Anglo-German collection at the University of Leeds, various collections of Reformation pamphlets (at Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, and elsewhere), the Allen collection of Erasmiana and the Deneke Mendelssohn collection at the Bodleian Library, and the Yiddish collection at the Taylor Institution, Oxford.

Some collections have, alas, been dispersed or destroyed. Doubtless some opportunities were lost as a result of the virulent anti-German feeling at the time of the First World War, [48] though perhaps no loss has been so great as the calamity of the dispersal of the magnificent library of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, which was so rich in German books, sold at Christie's in 1819. More recently, a large part of the German library at University College London was destroyed in an air raid in September 1940, and the British Museum too lost part of its German holdings in similar circumstances. The College was, however, able to augment its collections by the acquisition in 1945 of the library of the Anglo-German Academic Bureau which was remarkably rich in editions and translations of eighteenth-century authors.

October 1999

John L. Flood

[1] A history of libraries in Britain and Ireland, the first comprehensive account of British and Irish library history, is currently in preparation at the Cambridge University Press. My very brief surveys of British and (with Ann Lennon) Irish library history in the Lexikon des Gesamten Buchwesens (vol. 3, Stuttgart 1989, pp. 277-279, and vol. 4, Stuttgart 1992, pp. 35-36) and Paul Sturges's entry for the ``Modern United Kingdom'' in the Encyclopedia of library history, New York and London 1994, pp. 631-639, append bibliographies of major sources.

[2] Trinity College, Dublin, was added to the list following the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.

[3] P. R. Harris's chronological History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973, London 1998, provides the fullest introduction to the Library's development.

[4] The best account of public libraries in this period remains Thomas Kelly's A history of public libraries in Great Britain, 1845-1975, London 1977.

[5] The so-called ``Foreign Short-Title Catalogues'' remain essential bibliographical tools for areas without their own retrospective national bibliographies. The importance of the British Library's German STCs (1455-1600 and 1601-1700) is widely recognised in Germany itself.

[6] British libraries were also at the forefront of the retrospective conversion of their catalogues, many of which are now accessible over the Internet. A notable example is COPAC, the online union catalogue of the Consortium of University and Research Libraries (CURL).

[7] There is no equivalent in Britain of the German ``Diplombibliothekar''.

[8] Examples of new investment in historic collections include those supported through the new Heritage Lottery Fund and much-expanded programmes in higher education institutions.

[9] Almost all of these are covered to some extent by the Library Association's Directory of rare book and special collections in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, 2nd ed., ed. by B. C. Bloomfield, London 1997, which therefore remains an indispensable tool.

[10] The German holdings of Durham Cathedral Library may serve as an example here.

[11] See for example Rosemary Ashton's The German idea, London 1980.

[12] This aspect is treated in more detail by John Flood below.

[13] Regrettably, the Library of the Warburg Institute of London University was among those few libraries that declined to participate in the present project. Its inclusion would have demonstrated the importance of German exile collections as few others can.

[14] The National Library of Wales believed its holdings in this field to be too small to justify participation in the project.

[15] The National Art Library felt unable to participate in the present project.

[16] These include unique copies of early news-sheets.

[17] See surveys of holdings such as H. M. Adams's Catalogue of books printed on the continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge libraries, Cambridge 1967.

[18] The Biesenthal Collection of Hebrew printing at Aberdeen might serve here as an example.

[19] D. J. Shaw (ed.), Cathedral libraries catalogue. Vol. 2: Books printed on the continent of Europe before 1701. London 1998.

[20] The forthcoming survey will be a revision of The parochial libraries of the Church of England, ed. by N. R. Ker, London 1959.

[21] Goethe: sein Leben und seine Zeit. Munich and Zürich 1982, p. 632. The edition, from Insel-Verlag, was printed on English bible paper.

[22] Although the first chair of German was established at Trinity College, Dublin, as early as 1775, London colleges were the first university institutions in Britain to introduce formal modern-language teaching in the middle of the nineteenth century. See John Flood's account below.

[23] If there is an exception to this rule, then it is Reformation literature, although collections of this kind tend to have been acquired in the nineteenth century. See Michael A. Pegg, A catalogue of German Reformation pamphlets, 1516-1546, in libraries of Great Britain and Ireland, Baden-Baden 1973.

[24] Giles Barber, Book imports and exports in the eighteenth century. In: The sale and distribution of books from 1700, ed. by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, Oxford 1984, pp. 77-105.

[25] A catalogue of books of the libraries of the several gentlemen undermentioned, deceased; ... [London 1750].

[26] ESTC currently records 92 separate editions or adaptations from the British Isles and the United States of this title alone.

[27] 47 editions of works by Francke and 45 by Böhm are currently listed in the ESTC, but these represent only a proportion of all Pietist publications in the period.

[28] For a fallible account of German communities in Britain see Germans in Britain since 1500, ed. P. Panayi. London and Rio Grande 1996. Panayi has also published German immigrants in Britain during the nineteenth century, 1815-1914, London and Washington, D.C., 1995.

[29] A short and easy way for the Palatines to learn English. Oder eine kurze Anleitung zur englischen Sprach, zum Nutz der armen Pfälzer. London 1710.

[30]

[#] []Daniel Higgs] a! z! des edelen hohteutshe Sprachkonst vor di Englishen. The High Dutch Minerva a-la-mode or a. perfect. grammar never extant before, whereby the English may both easily and exactly learne the neatest dialect of the German mother-language used throughout Europe .... London: printed in L. Britain, and to be sold at the Rabbets and Harrow in Jacksons court Blackfrayer, 1680.

[31] Sheridan's Pizarro, a version of Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru, is probably the best known legacy of this popularity.

[32] Nevertheless, the record of early translation is not unimpressive, including, for example, Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1795, 1796), Don Carlos (three editions in 1798 and 1801), Die Räuber (1799, 1800), Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (1799), Wallenstein (by Coleridge, 1800), and Geschichte des Abfalls der Niederlande (1807). Walter Scott's second publication (after his thesis) was a translation of Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen (1799). See also R. Pick, Schiller in England, 1785-1960: a bibliography, London 1961.

[33] On these see, for example, Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany. Exile and asylum in Victorian England, Oxford 1986; and Peter Alter and Rudolf Muhs (eds.), Exilanten und andere Deutsche in Fontanes London, Stuttgart 1996 (Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 331). They included Friedrich Althaus (1829-1897, Professor at University College London from 1874), Gottfried Kinkel (1815-1882), Karl Buchheim (1822-1900, the second Professor of German at King's College London), Eugen Oswald (1826-1912, founder-member and secretary of the English Goethe Society, founded in 1886) and many others, not to mention the famous Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

[34] See, for example, Charmian Brinson et al. (eds.), `Keine Klage über England?' Deutsche und österreichische Exilerfahrungen in Großbritannien 1939-1945, Munich 1998, and the literature cited there.

[35] See n. 30 above.

[36] John Willis Clark, Endowments of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge 1904, p. 185; also Sir Charles Firth, Modern languages at Oxford, 1724-1929, London 1929, p. 6.

[37] Charles Colbeck, On the teaching of modern languages in theory and practice, Cambridge 1887, p. 4.

[38] See M. M. Raraty, The Chair of German at Trinity College, Dublin 1775-1866. In: Hermathena. A Dublin University Review 102 (1966) pp. 53-72. For the early history of German studies in Britain see C. W. Proescholdt, The introduction of German language teaching into England. In: German Life and Letters, n.s. 44 (1991) pp. 93-102; and the essays by Michael S. Batts, Die englische Germanistik um 1896 - eine importierte oder eine bodenständige Disziplin?, and Eda Sagarra, Die britische Germanistik 1896 bis 1946. In: Frank Fürbeth et al. (eds.), Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa. 150 Jahre Erste Germanistenversammlung in Frankfurt am Main (1846-1896), Tübingen 1999, pp. 379-387 and 683-696 respectively. See also David R. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities, London 1988.

[39] See John Boening (ed.), The reception of classical German literature in England, 1760-1860. A documentary history from contemporary periodicals, 2 vols, New York and London 1977.

[40] In 1825 Henry Crabb Robinson noted that Hare (1795-1855) had ``the best collection of modern German books I have ever seen in England''. See Hertha Marquardt and Kurt Schreinert, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde, Göttingen 1967, vol. 2, p. 102 (Palaestra 249). For a knowledgeable description of the collection see Roger Paulin, Julius Hare's German books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge. In: Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (1987) pp. 174-193.

[41] In 1911, for example, out of 440 awards made for study at Oxford and Cambridge, only eight went to Modern Languages compared with 205 for Classics.

[42] See Richard Wakely, Modern language studies at Scottish universities: the early days. In: Richard Wakely and Philip E. Bennett (eds.), France and Germany in Scotland: studies in language and culture. Papers from the centenary celebrations of the Departments of French and German at the University of Edinburgh 1894-1995, Edinburgh 1996, pp. 1-21.

[43] Until the 1820s London was the only European capital city without a university. On the origins of the University of London see Kurt Semmelroth, Die Gründung der Universität London und ihre historischen Voraussetzungen, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Einflusses. Diss. Münster 1937; Negley Harte, The University of London 1836-1986. An illustrated history, London and Atlantic Highlands NJ 1986; and F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The University of London and the world of learning, 1836-1986,

London and Ronceverte WV 1990. For the early history of German teaching at London see John L. Flood, Ginger beer and sugared cauliflower. Adolphus Bernays and language teaching in nineteenth-century London. In: Rüdiger Görner and Helen Kelly-Holmes (eds.), Vermittlungen. German studies at the turn of the century. Festschrift for Nigel B. R. Reeves, Munich 1999, pp. 101-115.

[44] On German at Manchester see Eda Sagarra, The centenary of the Henry Simon Chair of German at the University of Manchester (1996): commemorative address. In: German Life and Letters, n.s. 51 (1998), pp. 501-524.

[45] On German at Sheffield see Gerald Newton, German studies at the University of Sheffield. An historical perspective, 1880-1988, Sheffield 1988.

[46] See Hinrich Siefken, German at Nottingham. A personal view, Nottingham 1998.

[47] In 1914 there were chairs of German at twelve of the fifteen universities in Britain. Of the twelve professors eight had been born in German-speaking countries.

[48] See Stuart Wallace, War and the image of Germany. British academics 1914-1918, Edinburgh 1988.


Quelle: Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände in Deutschland. Digitalisiert von Günter Kükenshöner.
Hrsg. von Bernhard Fabian. Hildesheim: Olms Neue Medien 2003.