Many hands
MANUSCRIPTS PAUL GRINKE
The National Portrait Gallery is currently acting as host to an exhibition called `Manuscripts and Men' which celebrates the centenary of the Royal Commission on His- torical Manuscripts. There are all kinds of drawbacks to an exhibition of this kind, not the least being general disinterest, for few people today would echo William Upcott's sentiments of 1826: 'With the public great is the rage just now for everything auto- graphic'. Looking at old letters in a glass case is hard work, especially without a transcript, and few people are likely to spend any but the rainiest day puzzling over potholes. But it is a worthwhile exhibition, with some illuminating things in it, beauti- fully presented as one has come to expect from the NPG, and a welcome tribute to a century of valuable and totally unrecognised work.
The founding of the Royal Commission was the result of ceaseless lobbying by en- thusiastic amateurs like George Harris who saw the potential of vast untapped manu- script repositories in private hands. The Pub- lic Record Office was set up in 1838 but no provision had been made for the safe-keep- ing and scholarly examination of private muniments, many of which were consigned to outhouses and attics, unsorted, unrecog- nised and often crumbling through neglect.
Fortunately for the Royal Commission, manuscripts had acquired a certain heady romance in the public eye through the novels of Scott and Disraeli and there was a growing band of bibliomaniac collectors, whom Dibdin once addressed as 'ye pains- taking, fiddle-faddling, indefatigable collec- tors of Franks, ye threaders of autographic scraps—ye Album-ites'. They were certainly a tiresome crew, capable on occasion of outlandish acts of collecting frenzy, such as Cowden Clarke's infamous dismemberment of a Keats sonnet into thirteen pieces for separate collectors. But the enthusiasm, how- ever misapplied, was still there and the zealous collector was slowly replaced by the official inspector.
The suspicion with which the Royal Commission was viewed in official articles contrasts strangely with its rapturous recep- tion by the gentry up and down the country. George Harris's original scheme of 1859 was seen by Palmerston in the most extraordin- ary light: 'I believe it is a high church or Tractarian scheme to bring out at the Public Expense Records connected with Ecclesias- tical Bodies which would be of no public political or historical interest.' Even in this century the Commission has been bedevilled by lack of funds and government apathy.
The exhibition, supplemented by some well chosen contemporary portraits, busts and drawings, has picked a handful of themes to illustrate the vast range of the Commission's operations. It begins with selections from the archives of a number of great families notable for their participation in local or public affairs, and some mar- vellous records from King's, Cambridge, in- cluding the building accounts of the chapel which give the prosaic book-keeping side of that most poetic evocation of mediaeval piety. The Salisbury (Cecil) papers cover the entire spectrum of Elizabethan England, from Mary Queen of Scots and the 'Casket' letters to an autograph prayer by Elizabeth after the defeat of the Armada.
In the eighteenth century, the St Oswald Papers show the Adam brothers and James Paine at work on Nostell Priory, transform- ing it from a Tudor manor house to a Pal- ladian villa of the greatest elegance. The papers of the Constable family are also re- tained by the Commission and include a splendid self-portrait and the correspond- ence between young John seeking his for- tune in London and his miller father. Probably the most valuable work of the Commission lies not so much in the great collections of early family papers but in the preservation of more recent archives. The records of the Dowlais Iron Company, now submerged in the British Steel Corporation, show the rapidly changing fortunes of a small Glamorganshire village under the im- pact of the industrial revolution.
Scientific records are obviously the com- ing thing and the Commission shows selec- tions from two recent acquisitions: the papers of Professor Sir John Gaddum, in- cluding his notes on a self-administered dose of LSD made in 1953, and the papers of Professor Sir Francis Simon, the low-tem- perature physicist. The changing role of the Commission is well illustrated by a letter from the Registrar, written in 1951, in which he complains that they were so understaffed that 'the best classical scholar of his genera- tion at Cambridge [had] to drop his proper work and turn the handle of the duplicator'. Today the classical scholar is going to find his palaeographical training of little use in classifying physicist's squiggles, and a new breed of archivist will be essential.
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