| Sir Thomas Phillipps | |
|---|---|
Sir Thomas Phillipps, ca. 1860 |
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| Born | July 2, 1792 Manchester |
| Died | February 6, 1872 (aged 79) Thirlestaine House |
| Occupation | antiquarian, book collector |
| Spouse | Henrietta Elizabeth Molyneux (1819-1832); Elizabeth Harriet Anne Mansel (1848-1872) |
| Children | Henrietta (b.1819), Sophia (b.1821), and Katharine (b.1829) |
| Parents | Thomas Phillipps and Hannah Walton (illegitimate)[1] |
Sir Thomas Phillipps, 1st Baronet (July 2, 1792 — February 6, 1872) was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was an illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate, which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.[2]
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Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford.[3] Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term “vello-maniac”[4] to describe his obsession. A.N.L. Munby notes that ‘’[h]e 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.”[5] His success as a collector owed something to the dispersal of the monastic libraries following the French Revolution and the relative cheapness of a large amount of vellum material, in particular English legal documents, many of which owe their survival to Phillipps. He was an assiduous cataloguer who established the Middle Hill Press (named after his country seat at Broadway, Worcestershire) in 1822 not only to record his book holdings but also to publish his findings in English topography and genealogy.[6]
During his lifetime, Phillipps attempted to turn over his collection to the British nation and corresponded with the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Disraeli in order that it should be acquired for the British Library. Negotiations proved unsuccessful, and, ultimately, the dispersal of his collection took over 100 years. Phillipps's will stipulated that his books should remain intact at Thirlestaine House, that no bookseller or stranger should rearrange them and that no Roman Catholic, especially his son-in-law James Halliwell, should be permitted to view them.[7] In 1885, the Court of Chancery declared this too restrictive and thus made possible the sale of the library which Phillipps’s grandson Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick supervised for the next fifty years. Significant portions of the European material were sold to the national collections on the continent including the Royal Library, Berlin, the Royal Library of Belgium, and the Provincial Archives in Utrecht as well as the sale of outstanding individual items to the J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry E. Huntington libraries. By 1946, what was known as the "residue" was sold to London booksellers Phillip and Lionel Robinson for £100,000, though this part of the collection was uncatalogued and unexamined. The Robinsons endeavored to sell these books through their own published catalogues and a number of Sothebys sales. The final portion of the collection was sold by Christie's on 7 June 2006, lots 18-38.[8] A five-volume history of the collection and its dispersal, Phillipps Studies, by A.N.L. Munby was published between 1951 and 1960.