Issue 3, Jun 2001 (Back to Contents)

Over the last five years the Richard Morgan Library has developed from an idea in the mind of the Council to one of the leading School (or indeed FE College) libraries in the country: setting bench-mark standards, running training days, masterminding the School's new website. But it did not emerge from a vacuum. Lurking in cupboards, stashed away in the mobile shelves, lies an older library, the accumulation of 150 years of different attitudes towards our written culture.

In 1847, William Sewell was more interested in the aesthetic than in the utilitarian needs of a library. He was narrowly dissuaded from purchasing a late-15th century manuscript, and persuaded instead to buy books in bulk. 500 volumes of "the fathers and standard classics" were bought and sent to London where they were uniformly bound in leather, each stamped with a large gilded crest. Their serried ranks must have glowed as mellow light struck polished leather and gold-tooled spines.

The Radleian of the 1860s faithfully records additions to the Library: an eclectic mix of the academic - Ainsworth's Latin dictionary and the English translation of Mommsen's History of Rome, and books obviously chosen by the Sixth Form - Mr Sponge's sporting tour, Mr Jorrock's foxhounds illustrated by Leech. But not somehow supplying the needs of the whole school. A letter of April 1867 signed 'A small boy' airs the grievance of the younger boys:

It is but a trivial subject, yet many of us little boys think a good deal about it. It is this:

... there are hardly any books we care to read: - "Bishop Burnet's History of his own time", "Clarendon's History of the Revolution" ... I have not yet acquired sufficient strength of mind to open.... There are some novels, such as Dickens, but most boys have read them before they come here ... What we should like would be some more good sensible novels, not "Sponge's sporting tour," etc., but really standard works.

Whatever the outcome of his plea, the College was sufficiently proud of its library, and its collecting policy, to publish a catalogue in 1867.

About 50 of the books of Sewell's earliest purchase are still in the library, identifiable by their distinctive bindings. What were the others? Libraries tell us so much about the mind set of a particular age: what novels really were available to "A Small Boy"? What was the teaching curriculum? One missing book in particular needs to be found: the catalogue published in 1867. Does a copy still lurk in an Old Radley family's attic, discarded, dusty, worm-eaten, containing fascinating new insights into the earliest history of the school? Please look, and let me know. Thank you.

Clare Sargent
Head of Library