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Book-hunters and Book-huntresses:

Gender and Cultures of Antiquarian
Book Collecting in Britain, c.
1880–1900
a
Heidi Egginton
a
Newnham College, University of Cambridge
Published online: 19 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Heidi Egginton (2014) Book-hunters and Book-huntresses: Gender and Cultures
of Antiquarian Book Collecting in Britain, c. 1880–1900, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19:3, 346-364,
DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2014.947178

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.947178

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 Journal of Victorian Culture, 2014
Vol. 19, No. 3, 346–364, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.947178

Book-hunters and Book-huntresses: Gender and Cultures of

Antiquarian Book Collecting in Britain, c. 1880 – 1900
Heidi Egginton

In December 1899, artistic decoration magazine The House was on hand to provide
expert wisdom for those struggling with their Christmas shopping. First, they counselled,
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one should concentrate on finding presents for collectors; in this case books of ‘special
historical interest’ made delightful gifts. There was only one problem for the female
shopper, however: ‘Women are excluded from the joy of ransacking old bookshops’;
though ‘any treasures secured in this way’ were ‘sure to be acceptable’.1 For a variety of
late-Victorian writers, the association between masculinity and antiquarian bookshops,
along with the rare books they contained, was deep-rooted. The Scottish essayist and
folklorist Andrew Lang, writing in his popular guide for middle-class book collectors,
made the often-repeated claim that along with damp, dirt, dust and thieves, ladies were
natural ‘foes’ of old editions. The reasons for their ‘inveterate’ aversion to beautiful books
were simple: ‘First, they don’t understand them; second, they are jealous of their
mysterious charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see
money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed
characters’.2 Fifteen years later, another collector agreed with this assessment: ‘it seems a
curiously contradictory fact that, although Englishwomen are on the whole greater
readers than men, they are, as book-collectors . . . an almost unknown quantity’.3 This
notion proved remarkably pervasive. Bibliophile Holbrook Jackson declared in 1930 that
‘book love’ was ‘as masculine (although not as common) as growing a beard’.4 Author,
collector and antiquarian bookseller John Carter argued in 1947 that ‘bibliophily, like
dandyism, is less common among women’.5 As late as 1980 one scholar and collector
could state: ‘it is generally assumed that “book-collector” is a masculine noun’.6

1. [‘Penelope’], ‘On the Giving of Christmas Presents’, The House: A Magazine of Domestic
Ornament, 6 (December 1899), 156.
2. Andrew Lang, The Library (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), p. 61. Lang did clarify this
statement: women were the ‘foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular
volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name’.
3. William Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London: Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and
Collecting (London: Eliot Stock, 1895), p. 259.
4. Quoted in Willa Silverman, New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 167.
5. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1949), p. 9.
6. George Leslie Brook, Books and Book Collecting (London: Grafton Books, 1980), p. 77.

q 2014 Leeds Trinity University

 Journal of Victorian Culture 347

In order to explore what lay at the foundations of such assertions, this article
examines representations of collectors in the books and periodicals belonging to a new
genre of writing that emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the
book-collecting passion that encompassed aesthetes and antiquarians like Lang as well
as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how this particular type of
collecting was used rhetorically to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to a
more effeminate, ephemeral and even destructive engagement with the physical book.
‘Broadly speaking’, Lang sighed, ‘women detest the books which the collector desires
and admires.’7 Masculinist images of book collectors were refracted through a variety
of printed literature. As Victoria Mills has shown, during the late-nineteenth century
collecting, ‘in both fact and fiction’, became an important site at which gender
identities were shaped and contested.8 This had ramifications in practice, not least as it
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resulted in a social code that saw some women, like those of the conservative House
magazine’s readership, feel ‘excluded’ from old bookshops. Willa Silverman’s history of
the culture of book collecting in France during this period has highlighted the
difficulties women faced in gaining acceptance among ‘bohemian gentleman’
bibliophiles and in the homosocial spaces they frequented.9 The British writers under
consideration here also saw themselves as belonging to an exclusive fellowship of like-
minded bibliophiles; as collectors, they shared a keen interest in reading the books they
bought, and as readers, shared a delight in the aesthetic properties of the books they
read. A wide variety of collectable editions existed to tempt the late-Victorian
bibliophile; the field of old books was only one sphere of interest among many, and by
no means the most important.10 Yet it is striking that, whenever the issue of women’s
suitability as book collectors surfaced in print during this period, antiquarian editions
were key to the discussion. A similarly gendered criticism was at work in debates on
traditional forms of printing and typography, where all that ‘serious’ bibliophiles
decried as cheapness and vulgarity in modern mechanized book production was also
strongly associated with femininity.11 On the whole, it was argued that women’s tastes
were too modish and consumerist to permit them to engage fully in the reverence for
historic editions that writers like Lang associated with genuine ‘book love’.

7. Lang, The Library, p. 61.

8. Victoria Mills, ‘“A Long, Sunny Harvest of Taste and Curiosity”: Collecting, Aesthetics, and
the Female Body in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton’, Women’s History Review, 18
(2009), 669–86 (pp. 669–72).
9. Silverman, New Bibliopolis, pp. 165–99.
10. Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the
Eighteen-Nineties’, Victorian Studies, 35 (1991), 71–86; David Pearson, ‘Private Libraries and
the Collecting Instinct’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland 1850–
2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), III, 180–202; Stephen Calloway, ‘The
Book Beautiful’, in The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement, 1860–1900, ed. by Stephen
Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), pp. 252–55.
11. Megan Benton, ‘Typography and Gender: Remasculating the Modern Book’, in Illuminating
Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, ed. by Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 80 –82.
 348 Heidi Egginton

While previous scholars have looked at late-Victorian bibliophiles’ attempts to

police the subversive sexualities linked with the discourse of collecting, my discussion
focuses instead on collectors’ gender and related class anxieties.12 The debate over
women’s qualifications as book-buyers is striking in a era in which collecting crazes of
all kinds blossomed; historians have begun to explore the renewed interests in second-
hand goods during the late-nineteenth century, from bric-à-brac and blue-and-white
china to old furniture and curiosities.13 Typically, the practice of collecting has been
viewed as a point of entry for upper- and middle-class women into stereotypically
masculine spaces in the public sphere, along with the world of scholarship and literary
production. The pursuit of collecting, however, was never recognized as a fully
legitimate use of time or capital, and the more obsessive collectors were perennially
vilified as fetishists, hoarders and decadents.14 It thus became common for late-
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Victorian collectors who discussed their pursuit in print to construct hierarchies of

expertise within their respective fields, highlighting the division between objective
experts and irrational or amateur pretenders; most typically this was mapped onto a
scale of respectability between ‘collectors’ and mere ‘consumers’. As it will be shown in
the case of old-book collecting, this scale became sharply gendered during the last two
decades of the nineteenth century. Collecting in modern Western societies can serve ‘as
a metaphor . . . for capital accumulation’ as well as production; hence effeminate
shoppers’ attempts to be taken seriously as connoisseurs are often read as challenges to
prevailing patriarchal ideologies.15 Furthermore, as Mary Hammond points out,
though many debates at the time focused on women’s consumption of texts, ‘Books
classify, even before they have been read’; this was felt especially acutely in relation to
copies of old, rare or otherwise unique editions.16 Maintaining a ‘library’ or book-
lined study within the home during the late-Victorian period was, like the
demarcation of other spaces devoted to specific leisure activities such as the music

12. Marvin Taylor, ‘The Anatomy of Bibliography: Book Collecting, Bibliography, and Male
Homosocial Discourse’, Textual Practice, 14 (2010), 457 –77; Victoria Mills, ‘Bibliomania,
the Male Body and Sensory Erotics in Victorian Literature’, in Bodies and Things in
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. by Katharina Boehm (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), pp. 130 –52.
13. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006), pp. 145 –68; Anne Anderson, ‘“Chinamania”: Collecting Old Blue
for the House Beautiful’, in Material Cultures: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting,
1749 –1920, ed. by John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 109–28;
Kate Hill, ‘Collecting Authenticity: Domestic, Familial, and Everyday “Old Things” in
English Museums, 1850–1939’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 203 –21.
14. Anne Anderson, ‘Men, Women, and “Cultchah” in the English Aesthetic Movement
c. 1870–1900’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), 219–54 (pp. 223–24).
15. Russell W. Belk and Melanie Wallendorf, ‘Of Mice and Men: Gendered Identity in
Collecting’, in The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture, ed. by
Katharine Martinez and Kenneth Ames (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1997),
pp. 9 –10.
16. Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England,
1880 –1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 42–43.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 349

room, a physical and a symbolic marker separating the upper- and upper middle-class
household from that of the lower- and ‘middle middle-class’.17
For ‘book-hunters’ the act of collecting also became a means of self-fashioning: of
demonstrating and quantifying one’s suitability as a ‘gentleman’, a notoriously slippery
term during this period.18 It could certainly be argued that the collector in the guise of
the ‘book-hunter’ remained obsessive, but during the late-nineteenth century his was a
pursuit involving elements of risk, competition and financial speculation,
encapsulated in the language of the imperial or aristocratic ‘hunt’: values that had
captured the imagination of fin-de-siécle society. Gaining recognition as a gentlemanly
collector of books could thus be said to be a ‘project’ accomplished over time, in
negotiation with prevailing moral conventions and social mores.19 In this literature,
women were placed in a double bind, viewed alternately as frivolous consumers and as
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ignorant of collectables’ true value. However, I argue that this critique would not have
been articulated so forcefully during this period had women not been taking a
determined interest in old books. The cultural ‘throw’ of the book-hunters’
masculinist representations of collectors had definite limits.20 While some, like the
House’s columnist, may have internalized the disapproval that prevented them in
practice from ‘ransacking’ old bookshops, there is also evidence to suggest that, during
the 1890s, those ladies who could afford to indulge in the pursuit were making
antiquarian collections of their own.

The hunt for books

Book collecting was by no means a new hobby, but as a pastime for the educated
middle and upper middle classes, as opposed to professional librarians or
antiquarians, it gained a greater visibility during the nineteenth century.21 As James
Raven has shown, books and book collections had accompanied the spread of the new
luxury goods throughout the homes of modest provincial gentry and urban
tradesmen; by the end of the eighteenth century the setting up of a private library in

17. Francesca Carnevali and Lucy Newton, ‘Pianos for the People: From Producer to Consumer
in Britain, 1851– 1914’, Enterprise & Society, 14 (2013), 37 –70 (pp. 42 –43).
18. Geoffrey Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in
Victorian Britain’, in Language, History and Class, ed. by Penelope Corfield (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), pp. 164– 65; David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1998), pp. 92– 93. As Christopher Breward demonstrates, late-Victorian
masculine identities could be shaped in the process of shopping; see: Christopher Breward,
The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 100 –01.
19. Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept’, Gender & Society, 19 (2005), 829–59 (p. 843).
20. Peter Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004),
94 –117 (pp. 96 –97).
21. Trends in second-hand book sales during the nineteenth century have been dealt with
elsewhere; see: David McKitterick, ‘Secondhand and Old Books’, in The Cambridge History
of the Book in Britain, 1830 –1914, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
VI, 635 –73.
 350 Heidi Egginton

discreet emulation of noble and courtly examples ‘could be recreated on an

appropriate scale and to an appropriate budget in any gentleman’s house’.22 The
ownership of a book collection was often justified as a semi-public resource and
research indicates that genteel library-owners – both men and women – granted
access to their domestic collections and facilitated the lending of reference books to
interested members of their communities.23 After the mid-century, private libraries
tended to become less comprehensive and more specialized, or else more closely tied to
their owners’ tastes, following the style of ‘cabinet collecting’ pioneered by Frederick
Locker-Lampson.24 At the same time, however, book-buying was an activity that
prominent bibliophiles could – and did – take to extremes and associations of mania,
degeneracy and effeminacy would cling to the pursuit throughout the Victorian
period, resurfacing in 1895 with the trials of Oscar Wilde.25
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It was not until the last two decades of the nineteenth century that a distinct genre
of literature emerged to support ‘book-hunting’ as a hobby. The publication of Lang’s
The Library in 1881, as part of Macmillan’s ‘Art at Home’ series for middle-class
decorators, inspired a variety of affordable books and periodicals for amateurs. These
ranged from histories of collections and collectors’ personal memoirs and catalogues,
to practical advice manuals for novices.26 A number of guides pointed the
metropolitan book-hunter in the direction of promising bookstalls and shops where
the best ‘prizes’ might be uncovered.27 In addition, specialist periodicals like
Bookworm (est. 1881) and Bookman (est. 1891) catered for a bookish audience,

22. James Raven, ‘Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth
Century’, Library & Information History, 29 (2013), 196 –209.
23. Philip Connell, ‘Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary
Heritage in Romantic Britain’, Representations, 71 (2000), 27; Mark Towsey, ‘“I can’t resist
sending you the book”: Private Libraries, Elite Women, and Shared Reading Practices in
Georgian Scotland’, Library & Information History, 29 (2013), 210 –22 (p. 212).
24. Pearson, ‘Private Libraries’, pp. 186–87.
25. For romantic book collectors and bibliomaniacs, see: Deidre Lynch, ‘“Wedded to Books”:
Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists’, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (February 2004)
, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch.html. [accessed 13 May 2014];
Arnold Hunt, ‘Private Libraries in the Age of Bibliomania’, in The Cambridge History of
Libraries in Britain and Ireland, 1640– 1850, ed. by Giles Mandelbrote and K.A. Manley,
3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), II, 438 –58; Michael Robinson,
‘Ornamental Gentlemen: Thomas F. Dibdin, Romantic Bibliomania, and Romantic
Sexualities’, European Romantic Review, 22 (2011), 685–706. For Oscar Wilde’s private
library, see: Thomas Wright, Oscar’s Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008).
26. Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton, The Great Book Collectors (London: Kegan
Paul, 1883); Henry Benjamin Wheatley, How to Form a Library (London: Elliot Stock,
1887); Charles Blackburn, Rambles in Books (London: Sampson Low Marston & Company,
1893); William Carew Hazlitt, The Confessions of a Collector (London: Ward & Downey,
1897), among others. One of the most prolific and widely read authors was J.H. Slater; see,
for example: The Library Manual: A Guide to the Formation of a Library, and the Valuation of
Rare and Standard Books (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1883).
27. John Herbert Slater, Round and About the Bookstalls: A Guide for the Book-Hunter (London:
L. Upcott Gill, 1891); Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 351

containing articles by both men and women on bibliography, bookseller’s

advertisements and reports on contemporary auctions. Associated collecting cultures,
such as those focused on the design and exchange of bookplates, also attracted
numerous devotees, male and female.28 Meanwhile, articles on book collecting and
guidance on furnishing ‘book rooms’ could be found in newspaper supplements and
mass-market women’s and household magazines. The public face of book collecting
may have since been represented almost exclusively by ultra-wealthy collectors, or else
by literary ‘Bohemians’ like Wilde; writers such as Richard Le Gallienne; connoisseurs
in the mode of Locker-Lampson; ‘vello-maniacs’ like Sir Thomas Phillipps; or
antiquarians and bibliographers. Yet during the late-nineteenth century there clearly
also remained a rich sub-culture of book collecting and private library ownership
outside this male canon that deserves further investigation.
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One influential, yet understudied, collector and writer who communicated the
pleasures of second-hand book-buying to a non-specialist audience during the second
half of the nineteenth century was the Scottish historian John Hill Burton, author of a
series of articles on the subject for Blackwood’s Magazine, later published in book form
as The Book-Hunter &c. in 1862 and reissued posthumously in 1882.29 It was ‘book-
hunting’ that had given late-Victorian book collecting a more respectable dimension:
that of the ‘bargain-hunter’; this generally meant searching for cheap or forgotten old
literature. Burton dismissed the libraries of ‘men with measureless purses’ as
characteristic of an appetite for luxury, rather than of an authentic love of books.
He believed that the genuine collector ought to be able to exercise powers of restraint,
judgment and modesty, informed by good sense and cultivated literary taste, when it
came to the selection of volumes for his bookshelves.30 In comparison with
‘bibliomania’, book-hunting fostered manliness. Even as they accumulated a greater
number of books than they could ever hope to read in a lifetime, Burton urged his
readers to eschew effete and meaningless extravagance by becoming ‘Bohemians of
Literature’. They could thus avoid succumbing to the habits of ‘the female sex, [who]
read screeds of good books, which they have not the presumption to understand’.31 At
its heart, respectable book-hunting was akin to professional research: the collector
selected volumes for his study just as the historian picked up facts and ‘curiosities . . .
for his own private intellectual museum’; in fact, he argued, the two activities were

28. Brian North Lee, ‘Gentlemen and their Book-Plates’, in Property of a Gentleman: The
Formation, Organisation, and Dispersal of the Private Library (Winchester: Oak Knoll Press,
1991), p. 46.
29. John Hill Burton, The Book-Hunter &c., 1st ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons,
1862). Earlier, the term ‘book-hunter’ had mostly described overly-pedantic scholars or
was almost interchangeable with ‘bibliomaniac’. See: ‘To the Man of Pleasure’, The Weekly
Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, 17 (1772), 330; ‘Bibliomania, or Book-Madness’, The
Satirist, 5 (1809), 7; and Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 2nd series, 3 vols (1823),
III, 131 –32.
30. John Hill Burton, The Book-Hunter &c., 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons,
1882), pp. 165 –66. All subsequent citations are taken from the second edition.
31. Burton, Book-Hunter, p. 113.
 352 Heidi Egginton

inseparable and equally productive.32 Following Burton, the late-nineteenth-century

‘book-hunters’ under consideration here mostly addressed themselves to collectors
with ‘limited’ means, but who were nonetheless interested in both the contents and the
aesthetic properties of books.33 Although prices for presentation copies, manuscripts
and first editions were rising, before the turn of the century the field of second-hand
books still promised a world of possibilities for the aspirant bibliophile. It was also
an area in which women’s deficiencies as collectors appeared to be felt particularly
acutely.

Men and the ‘enemies of books’

What is striking about the literature for book-hunters is how often a deliberately
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archaic tone is adopted to describe women’s involvement – or lack thereof – in old

book collecting. ‘A book is not the kind of bibelot for which ladies care’, a writer for
the Saturday Review suggested; instead, women were typically ‘more at home with
the collecting of fans, or of porcelain, or, sad to say, of book-plates – a modern vice,
a new sin’. The circulating library had historically served their reading needs, the
journalist argued: ‘Book-collecting was only taken up by Englishwomen when they
took up salmon-fishing, golf and other masculine vanities’.34 On the subject of
women, book-hunters seemed, on the whole, to agree with the Romantic essayist
William Hazlitt’s assertion that ‘Women judge of books as they do of fashions or
complexions, which are admired only “in their newest gloss”’.35 Those who did
acknowledge ladies’ increasing interest in collectable books towards the end of the
century noted that their tastes were often at odds with those of traditional
connoisseurs. A manual for owners of country house libraries written by a manager
at the fashionable Piccadilly bookshop Hatchards, Arthur Humphreys, explained that
‘Women have their own way of loving books’. A lady would generally prefer to keep a
set of books ‘separate from her husband’s or her brother’s, or the general family
collection’, in order to indulge her taste for colourful modern bindings and ‘tiny
bookcases’.36
Feminine literary appetites were said to make women unsuitable collectors of old
or rare volumes in particular. The reading average women preferred, it was assumed,
could be found in the form of disposable novels: volumes to be read casually and
treated indifferently. Thus when women did lay their hands on collectables, they
naturally handled them in the same way. It must be noted that female friends of
bibliophiles were not often assigned a great deal of agency; defilement of the
gentleman’s collection was seen to occur whenever ladies gained access to it, regardless

32. Burton, Book-Hunter, pp. 118 –21.

33. Slater, Round and About the Bookstalls, p. 9.
34. ‘Women Book-Collectors’, Saturday Review, 24 June 1893, p. 675.
35. William Hazlitt, ‘On Reading Old Books’, reprinted in Saunterings in Bookland, ed. by
Joseph Shaylor (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co., 1899), pp. 64 –65.
36. Arthur Lee Humphreys, The Private Library: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, What
We Ought to Know About Our Books (London: Strangeways and Sons, 1897), pp. 46 –52.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 353

of their intentions or suitability as professional collaborators.37 The printer,

bibliographer and eminent Caxton scholar William Blades, for example, described
wives and daughters, along with servants, as innocent but deadly in the company of
old volumes. The damage done by repeated dusting, he maintained, was ‘incalculable’;
women simply had to be trained before handling their master’s books. ‘Explain where
caution must be used, and in what cases tenderness is a virtue’, he proposed in his
popular work The Enemies of Books, which went through several editions in the two
decades after it was published in 1880. If just ‘one Eve in the family can be
indoctrinated with book-reverence you are a happy man; her price is above that of
rubies; she will prolong your life [sic ]’.38
Book-hunters often directed their ire at a very specific kind of woman: their
‘enemy’ was young, fashionable and progressive. Some late-Victorian periodicals, like
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the Bookman, admitted literary ‘New Women’ to their coterie, on commercial if not
feminist grounds; others were not so generous.39 M.G. Watkins, writing for The
Gentleman’s Magazine in 1882, found Blades’s ‘amusing’ advice on the subject to be
perhaps a little too ‘strong’. More sensible and ‘justified’, in his opinion, were Lang’s
various statements on women and libraries, ‘ungallant though they may be’. The ladies
in Watkins’s social circle, he confessed, were unworthy owners of old books; one,
indeed, was wont to replace priceless original seventeenth-century leather bindings
with ‘gaudy’ modern covers, ‘begilt with sprawling roses’. Worse still:

We have known such precious little tomes dismissed to back settlements, burnt, sold for
an old song, ruthlessly mangled, torn up and flung aside as useless frippery with all
manner of . . . insult by the womankind of some unsuspecting book-lover who had not
placed his library under lock and key when that miserable craze for cleaning infatuates
most women at the spring full moons.40

The message was clear. As awkward as it may have been to admit, otherwise polite
women became almost uncivilized in the presence of old books. Bibliophiles who
denigrated women as book collectors were, in effect, rewriting history; Bookworm even
reprinted a fable written in the 1820s about women’s innate disrespect for books, with
no explanation of its earlier provenance as a satire.41 It was simple adherence to the
‘commands’ of ‘Fashion’ that could, for these writers, sufficiently explain the creation
of the majority of gentlewomen’s private libraries over the centuries.42

37. Many upper-middle class women assisted their husbands in tasks related to his occupation
at home; see: M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian
Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 175 –86. Libraries surely
proved ideal for collaborations where they were found. See, for instance: ‘Chats with
Celebrities: Lady Borthwick’, Hearth and Home, 16 June 1892, p. 154.
38. William Blades, The Enemies of Books, 2nd ed. (London: Elliot Stock, 1888), pp. 133– 34.
39. Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘The New Woman and the British Periodical Press of the 1890s’,
Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 272–85 (p. 276).
40. Morgan George Watkins, ‘The Library’, Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1882, 102 –03.
41. ‘Book-Borrowers: II’, Bookworm, June 1890, 209–10. Cf. ‘Book-Borrowers’, Literary
Magnet, July 1826, 137–45.
42. Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London, p. 273.
 354 Heidi Egginton

This rhetoric worked on a pre-existing concern for the printed page in an age
where forms of communication were rapidly changing. Marked increases in the mass
production of books and other forms of print, accompanied by a perceived decline in
slow reading, as occurred in Britain after the mid-nineteenth century, had caused ‘a
crisis in value’ that was keenly felt by book-lovers.43 It had become problematic for
private collectors, on account of their association with a more dubious aestheticism or
obsessiveness towards the end of the century, to defend their acquisitions on
paternalistic or charitable grounds.44 As Mills has shown, it was precisely this cocktail
of the respectable and civic-minded with the frivolous, which probably made the
pursuit so alluring.45 In a simultaneous development, however, the spread of literacy
meant that by the end of the Victorian period, as Leah Price has pointed out, studious
reading on its own could no longer serve as a symbol of ‘rank or gender’: ‘To use books
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no longer proved anything; to refrain from misusing them did’.46 This is why asserting
one’s position as a ‘collector’, as opposed to a mere consumer, of old books by the late-
nineteenth century also meant affirming the importance of the inspired ‘rescue’ of
historic or important specimens of literature, though in reality collectors may well
have indulged in regular purchases of large quantities of uninspiring cheap print.
Burton opined that the ‘true collector – not the man who follows the occupation as a
mere expensive taste . . . – considers himself a finder or a discoverer rather than a
purchaser’.47 Caring for books in the correct manner had become another means by
which to assert one’s superior social standing, via that ‘ineffable’ standard of
cultivation that ultimately could not be bought.48 By contrast, Watkins’s fashionable
female acquaintances, however well read, were shown to have behaved like unruly
visitors in a museum of priceless antiquities.
Such concerns were also rooted in domestic life: in accounts of collectors’
encounters with their family and acquaintances, real or imagined, the lack of regard for
the value of rare books and old manuscripts was a cause of much unease. Percy
Fitzgerald chose to begin his volume on the ‘romance’ of books – his contribution to
that ‘revival of the old and elegant taste of the book-fancier’ begun by Burton and
Lang – with an image of a private library consigned to oblivion by selfish and
insensitive relatives:49

Foreboding . . . has often wrung the collector’s heart as he surveys his treasures ranged
within their glass-bound tenements; for he knows that, whatever securities he may

43. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), pp. 33 –34.
44. Anne Anderson, ‘Men, Women, and “Cultchah”’, 219 –54.
45. Mills, ‘Bibliomania’, 135 –47.
46. Leah Price, How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2012), p. 2.
47. Burton, Book-Hunter &c., pp. 50– 51.
48. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, ‘Bookcases, Slipcases, Uncut Leaves: The Anxiety of the Gentleman’s
Library’, Novel, 39 (2005), 5 –24 (pp. 5 –7).
49. Percy Fitzgerald, The Book Fancier, or the Romance of Book Collecting (London: Sampson
Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886), pp. v–vi.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 355

contrive, their dispersion is almost inevitable . . . there is even a grim legend of one
library carried to the saleroom, ‘by order of the relatives’, on the very day after the
interment of the owner . . . far too often, indeed, the ‘hobby’ has been ridden at the
sacrifice of family comforts, and even family embarrassment – hence the pressing
temptation to recover what is thought to have been unrighteously abstracted.50

A recurring stereotype was that of an oblivious widow who bundled her deceased
husband’s collection into boxes and was grateful to receive a tiny sum from a book
dealer for the volumes, oblivious to the priceless treasures inside. Lang stated that he
had written The Library in the hope of avoiding such casual blunders in the future:
‘this little work will not have been written in vain’, he writes, inviting the reader to take
him seriously, if: ‘it persuades ladies who inherit books not to sell them hastily,
without taking good and disinterested opinion as to their value. They often dispose of
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treasures worth thousands, for a ten pound note, and take pride in the bargain.’51
There were undoubtedly many other gentlemen for whom family disapproval only
increased the appeal of their hobby. The first instalment of a column in the Leeds
Mercury supplement entitled ‘Musings Before a Bookcase’ dealt at length with exactly
this question of relative value. Considering his own, modest library, which contained
some three hundred volumes, ‘the fruits of many years anxious hunting’, the author
concluded that a professional dealer might scorn the scope and quality of his collection
and ‘Perhaps he would be right’, but he would never deign to accept the comments of his
female relations, who ‘declare that one shelf of the modern gaily-bound books in the
dining-room are worth all the rubbish I store away so carefully in the study . . . they can
never convince me that my old books are valueless, or that I prize them foolishly’.52
Even so, the collector’s ritual of installing books in the home could be a delicate
task in the company of suspicious women. For Walter Hamilton, writing in a
humorous piece in Bookworm in 1894, ‘“Extreme cunning” had thus become one of
the most typical “symptoms” of their “disease”. Valuable books, prints, or pictures will
be smuggled surreptitiously into the house in all manner of odd ways, and at the most
awkward and unexpected times. Should the patient be detected in the act by his wife,
or say his mother-in-law, he will affect an easy and unconstrained air, and jocularly
remark, “A mere trifle, my dear. I picked it up for a few pence at a bookstall”’.53
In 1882 one columnist regretted that he had not yet been able to find ‘the ways
and means of conveying the handsome quarto edition’ of the Book-Hunter ‘into the
domestic castle over which I am supposed to rule, without encountering the watchful
eyes of the domestic coastguard – ahem – woman, to whom a bookseller’s catalogue
is an abomination’; this was a predicament particularly galling as he watched prices
of this edition rise after Burton’s death.54 In the previous year, Lang had been
positively indignant on this topic: he reported with some dismay that ‘many men are

50. Fitzgerald, Book Fancier, pp. 1 –2.

51. Lang, The Library, p. 62.
52. ‘Musings Before a Bookcase I: What Value?’, Leeds Mercury Weekly Supplement, 13 January
1883, p. 1.
53. Walter Hamilton, ‘The Collecting Mania’, Bookworm (January 1894), 44.
54. ‘Library Table Talk’, The Owl: A Journal of Wit and Wisdom, (29 September 1882), 7.
 356 Heidi Egginton

reduced to collecting Elzevirs, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot
smuggle a folio volume easily’. Here, the bibliophile’s wife is said to have forced her
well-to-do collector husband to affect the ‘guile’ of a petty criminal in order to bring
rare books across ‘his own frontier’.55 Tensions between married collectors with
different tastes even played out in children’s fiction during this period.56 In homes
large enough to accommodate them, the private gentleman’s study was often thought
the ideal location for a collection of valuable books (one popular turn-of-the-century
guide for decorators suggested that one could combine ‘library and smoking room;
for books and tobacco seem, somehow, to go together’).57 In some ways, then, these
concerns were symptomatic of the increasing importance attached to exclusive male
space among members of the upper-middle and middle classes during the last two
decades of the nineteenth century.58
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The threat of envious women may not have been taken entirely seriously by
aspiring book-hunters; it is surely telling that bibliophiles such as Lang most often
discussed selfish female ‘enemies’ of libraries in exaggerated terms. As Watkins
admitted, the idea that a woman would not know how to pick up a valuable book
properly was, by the 1880s, quite ‘amusing’, but the ‘anxious’ nature of the male book
collector’s pursuit should not be underestimated. It is not difficult to imagine why
devoting a significant amount of time, energy and capital to a leisure activity for which
one’s family had little sympathy could provoke this kind of paranoia. Moreover, in
inventing a tradition of women’s lack of appreciation for old books, the book-hunters
found themselves at odds with prevailing cultural shifts that did acknowledge the
increasing feminization of both reading and consumption, along with women’s claims
to participation in higher education and literary life. That bibliophiles like the
widower Fitzgerald or Lang, who gladly acknowledged that his wife had collaborated
with him in the gathering and translating of his anthologies of folk tales, could so
fervently express the precariousness of an antiquarian collection left in the hands of a
woman is testament to a deeper anxiety over rights of ownership of heirlooms and
private property during this period. Though they may have abstained from
‘bibliomania’ and though the wider public motives for the gentleman’s judicious
collecting of old books were fast disappearing in an era of cheap print, on the issue of
gender some late-Victorian book-hunters positioned themselves and their assumed
reader in much the same way as their early-nineteenth century predecessors, defending
their avowedly old-fashioned tastes from the onslaught of the ‘new’.

55. Lang, The Library, p. 61.

56. See, for instance, ‘Brickerbrack’s Bookcase’, in which the Liberty-obsessed wife of an
antiquarian book collector secretly arranges for the disposal of the hated twelve-foot
antique bookcase in her husband’s study in the middle of the night, leaving him ‘haunted’
by an apparent robbery and locked room mystery in his own home. Walter Parke,
‘Brickerbrack’s Bookcase’, Atalanta: The Victorian Magazine, (1 March 1896), 385 –88.
57. H.J. Jennings, Our Homes and How to Beautify Them, 3rd ed. (London: Harrison & Sons,
1902), p. 207.
58. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 182.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 357

‘Book-huntresses’
While some book-hunters affected scorn for female ownership of books, others
directed their criticism at contemporary women book-buyers. It is argued here that
such critique was linked to educated women’s increasing visibility in the urban public
sphere during the late-Victorian period.59 A similar trend has been identified during
this period in the ‘literary neighbourhoods’ – cultural districts containing antiques
markets and bookshops – of cities in the late-Qing empire; here elite women’s
infiltration of ‘spaces generally reserved for male collectors’ had prepared the way for a
broadening of their social and cultural roles.60 Book-hunters’ hostile attitudes to
bookish women were challenged from a number of angles during this period: in
contrast to fin-de-siècle Paris, evidence from London booksellers suggests that in
Britain book-collecting circles at the high-end of the market could be receptive to
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female bibliophiles.61 However, an antiquarian or scholarly interest in old books alone

was not sufficient to guarantee a woman acceptance; whereas male book-hunters of
varying means could demonstrate their capabilities as ‘collectors’ through the
uncovering of bargains, social connection along with a significant outlay on rare or
expensive volumes seemed to be expected of aspiring female connoisseurs.
Judging by the testimony from a variety of booksellers recorded in the book-
hunting literature, before the turn of the century the custom of metropolitan women
was not universally welcomed. Much of the critique focused on their disrespectful
browsing habits. Women were held in ‘deep contempt’ by those who sold second-hand
books from stalls both in Holborn and in the City. ‘They can read a chapter in a
minute’, one stallholder told William Roberts; ‘Not once in a blue moon, sir, does
womenfolk buy a book’.62 Women were at best indecisive; at worst, they used
illustrated books to entertain their children or read several periodicals cover-to-cover
before reluctantly purchasing one. These comments were echoed by their Parisian
equivalents, the bouquinistes, in a work by Octave Uzanne, a translation of which was
sold in Britain as a companion volume to Roberts’s guide.63 Significantly, however,
both writers were ambivalent about the impact of these women on the field of book-
collecting itself. The ‘New Woman’ may yet ‘develop into a genuine book-lover’,

59. Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of
London, 1850 –1900’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. by Clarissa Campbell-Orr
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 79; Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping
for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001), pp. 117–41.
60. Shana J. Brown, ‘The Women of Liulichang: Female Collectors and Bibliophiles in the Late
Qing’, in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. by
Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 280 –81.
61. Silverman, New Bibliopolis, pp. 12 –16.
62. Roberts, The Book-Hunter in London, p. 273. Roberts, who collected the testimony of a
number of central London booksellers, admitted: ‘it would not be possible to repeat all the
hard things [the stallholders] say about the sex’.
63. Octave Uzanne, The Book-Hunter in Paris, trans. by Augustine Birrell (London: Elliot Stock,
1893), pp. 115 –16.
 358 Heidi Egginton

Roberts mused (it was ‘certain that the old one will not’).64 Uzanne noted that this
‘army of book-huntresses’ – the use of the neologism is surely sarcastic – had lately
been enlarged by students and ‘lady lecturers’, who even stopped to make notes before
tossing the books aside. In his view, the New Woman used the stalls ‘until she abuse[d]
them. From that point to slipping a useful book into her pocket or under her cloak is,
to feminine logic, but a distance relatively small, and some of these ladies boldly take
the step’.65 Back in London, the Graphic responded directly to Uzanne’s critique,
pointing out that in contrast to Parisian ladies of fashion many ‘distinguished’ English
women of the present day were passionate, discriminating collectors. Those they
singled out for praise – the Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Lady Wolseley – were not in
the habit of ‘making bookstalling expeditions on their own account’, however, and the
journalist could not find fault with Uzanne’s larger point: in Britain ‘Most booksellers’
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did ‘admit to having ladies among their clients’, and their dealings with women ‘almost
invariably [left them] in a state of perspiration and profanity’.66
Such disdain could be explained as a reaction to female patrons treating their
businesses like any other bric-à-brac shop, in which one was not always expected to
simply spend money. Yet rarely was this critique extended to impecunious men.
Antiquarian bookshops, indeed, invited prolonged browsing and offered attentive,
personalized service to customers. For example, R.M. Williamson, a Scottish
bookseller, asserted in 1904: ‘one may go to a [second-hand bookshop], and examine
every book in the place, read a bit out of one volume, look at the pictures in another,
admire the binding of a third, and finish by having a friendly gossip with the
bookseller, and never be asked to spend a penny’; it was precisely this congenial
relationship between shopkeeper and consumer that attracted a literary clientele and
distinguished the typical antiquarian bookseller’s from the ‘linen draper’s’ and the
‘greengrocer’s’.67 The New Oxford Street bookseller Walter Spencer, who catered for an
aristocratic and artistic milieu, recalled that, in the 1880s and 1890s, his shop was often
haunted in the evenings by ‘shabby’ young men; among them was a young George
Gissing, who ‘never appeared to be able to buy books for himself ’.68 A passionate
collector of Dickensiana and a ‘good Dickensian’ himself, Spencer wrote happily that
‘Those whom chance and circumstance have deprived of the perilous privilege of a
cheque-book [were], nonetheless, as warmly welcomed as are individuals whose
purses are heavier than their hearts.’69
Some late-Victorian women clearly had reasons for avoiding these shops. It has
been noted that women perusing old bookstalls in disreputable streets were seen by

64. Roberts, Book-Hunter in London, p. 273.

65. Uzanne, Book-Hunter in Paris, pp. 118–19. That she would ‘buy if she had the money’
seemed obvious, Uzanne thought, ‘for she likes books; but money she had none’.
66. ‘Book-Huntresses’, Graphic, (24 March 1894), p. 343.
67. R.M. Williamson, Bits from an Old Book Shop (London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent
& Co., 1904), p. 10.
68. Walter Spencer, Forty Years in My Bookshop (London: Constable & Company, 1923),
pp. 217 –18.
69. Spencer, My Bookshop, pp. 121 –22.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 359

some to have flouted moral as well as social conventions; for instance, some may well
have refrained from visiting booksellers in Holywell Street, which had traditionally
been associated with the trade in pornographic literature.70 Some antiquarian
bookshops were clearly more reputable than others; hence one anonymous
correspondent who wrote to the Girl’s Own Paper in 1882 for advice regarding the
value of their ‘old “black-letter” Bible (dated 1578)’ was encouraged to take it to a
‘respectable second-hand bookshop’.71 In the writings of book-hunters like Lang, and
in Roberts’s and Uzanne’s commentary in particular, it was the presumption of women
to use, let alone possess old or rare books, including scholarly texts, which was
evidently most disconcerting.
That women’s very presence in antiquarian bookshops in London during this
period seemed cause for comment reveals a reflexive mistrust of female engagement
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with costly collectables. Spencer mentioned only two female book collectors, as
opposed to customers, who had bought directly from his shop in the 1880s and
1890s in his memoirs: Lady Tree, a Trollope collector to whom he had been
specifically introduced by Sir Philip Burne-Jones; and the novelist and poet ‘Violet
Fane’. The latter he paused, rather pointedly given criticisms of effeminate modern
bookbinding practices, to describe as a ‘lady of great personal gifts who used to buy
rare first editions of Swinburne and Rossetti, and had them bound in morocco to
match the original cloth covers’.72 In another, earlier account, in the 1880s the well-
known antiquarian book dealer Bernard Quaritch reacted incredulously to an upper-
class woman who entered his premises at 15 Piccadilly and picked up a work on
Southern Indian antiquities and natural history. Stopped on his way through the
shop by one of his assistants, who asked on the lady’s behalf for the price of the
volume, the bookseller turned to look in a ‘queer way’ at her. ‘Do you want this
book?’ She replied in the affirmative. ‘I don’t understand what a girl like you can
want with such a book?’, Quaritch exclaimed. ‘But you are a German girl, are you
not? . . . I like to see a German girl take an interest in such subjects; the price is three
guineas, but you shall have it for two.’ Upon offering to have the book delivered to
the ‘suburbs’ for her, he was ‘taken somewhat aback’ when his customer’s lady-in-
waiting gave the address as Buckingham Palace. Quaritch begged ‘Her Royal
Highness’ – the Duchess of Connaught – to excuse him; she paid the two guineas as
he had offered and carried the book out of the shop.73 This episode is significant in
light of the fact that second-hand bookshops were central to many bookish,

70. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 184– 85.
71. ‘Answers to Correspondents’, Girl’s Own Paper, 25 November 1882, p. 127 (emphasis
added).
72. Spencer, My Bookshop, pp. 19, 25.
73. The account was recorded in the memoirs of another collector: John Henry Rivett-Carnac,
Many Memories of Life in India, at Home, and Abroad (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1910),
pp. 341 –42. The Duchess was given free rein of Rivett-Carnac’s own private library, in
which she read ‘all the very best books on Indian history, religions, and antiquities’.
 360 Heidi Egginton

suburban women’s access to print during this period.74 It was precisely this ‘girl’s’
selection of an antiquarian volume that startled the bookseller.
By the early 1890s, however, there were signs that any lingering standards of
propriety that may have prevented women from ‘ransacking’ bookshops for collectable
editions were beginning to seem outmoded. In an interview with the Daily Chronicle
in 1893, shortly after joining Hatchards, Arthur Humphreys took issue with an article
in which Lang had repeated his pessimistic opinion of contemporary female collectors:

I should say that the bulk of our buyers are ladies, or rather, that ladies buy more than
men. . . . Mr Andrew Lang said he did not know any lady of distinction who could tell the
difference between wide margins and narrow, who, in a word, knew about a book as a
book. Speaking from my own experience, I entirely disagree with him. I believe there is an
increasing number of ladies who take a deep interest in beautiful paper, fine bindings,
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and so on. In other words, I see signs, which lead me to think that in the not very far
distant future the collection of valuable books will not remain a hobby for men only.75

Turn-of-the-century customer lists show that Quaritch regularly sent antiquarian books
from his shop at 15 Piccadilly to female customers not only in London, but also across
Britain. In fact, the lists contain the names of a significant number of individual women
along with their addresses and field of interest, suggesting that the firm might have
helped them make specific collections; these undoubtedly included old books. A ‘Mrs
Hughes’ of Cambridge was in the market for ‘Herballs [sic ]’, for example, while ‘Miss
Owen’ of Beckenham bought ‘Oriental’ books, and ‘Mrs Cheetham’ of Stalybridge was
apparently after ‘Huguenot’ literature.76 Moreover, the bookseller’s correspondence
reveals that he did extend his more aristocratic services to a select group of favoured
female customers, involving them in a culture of private viewing in the same way as his
most important gentleman clients. For instance, Quaritch personally brought a set of
books on lace as well as some antiquarian volumes to the home of Helen Lindsay,
daughter of the writer and literary patron Lady Lindsay, in Hans Place one spring. The
‘beautiful’ books were ‘much appreciated, especially by my friend Miss Oswald, who
works a great deal with her needle’, Helen reported afterwards. She enclosed £10 for one
book she had retained – ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book’ – but asked if he would ‘allow
[her] to wait’ before sending the £18 she owed him for her ‘Eikon Basilike’.77 Wealth and

74. Sian Pooley and Colin Pooley, ‘“Such a Splendid Tale”: The Late Nineteenth-Century
World of a Young Female Reader’, Cultural and Social History, 2 (2005), 329–51 (p. 343).
75. ‘Hatchards’, reprinted in Bookworm (July 1893), 251–52. The feminist paper Woman’s Herald
triumphantly copied the section of Humphreys’s interview concerning women; ‘What We
Read: According to a West-End Bookseller’, Woman’s Herald, 16 March 1893, p. 58.
76. Bernard Quaritch, ‘Customer List: Britain’, (c. 1895 –1902), London, British Library, Add.
MS 64219.
77. Helen Lindsay [Anne Helen Lindsay] to Bernard Quaritch, n.d. [19 May], Bodleian Library,
MS Eng.lett.c.436, fols. 139 –40. In 1884 Quaritch offered a ‘very scarce’ first edition ‘Booke
of Christian Prayer (usually termed Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book)’ by the printer John
Daye with original woodcuts, lined in silk with gilt edging, for £12; see: A Catalogue of
English Literature, Poetic, Dramatic, Historic, Miscellaneous (London: Bernard Quaritch,
1884), p. 2225.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 361

social status, therefore, could eclipse gender; it was after all in the antiquarian book
dealer’s financial interest to extend credit to upper-class clients who brought with them
important connections and a gateway into literary and artistic circles.
In the market for rare editions ‘book-huntresses’, it should be noted, did not
pretend to be motivated by the same impulses as those guiding the genteel patrons of
Hatchards or Quaritch. The London-based critic and cookery-book collector
Elizabeth Robins Pennell confessed that her purchases would not have met with the
approval of any of the archetypal collectors sketched out in Burton’s Book-Hunter;
her library had been made with her own, personal ‘amusement’ in mind and could
not be easily subsumed into any of the categories he had supplied.78 Old books could
be valued additions to women’s domestic decorative collections for their own sake,
and there is evidence to suggest this taste could perfectly suit women of more
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moderate means. The columnist Mrs Talbot Coke expounded on the aesthetic charms
of ‘shabby’ books and yellowing manuscripts in her decorating advice pages for
middle-class housewives, demonstrating that there could be less high-minded
motives for acquiring antiquarian editions or, alternatively, searching for cheap old
printed material for the home.79 Male dealers were occasionally mystified by female
collecting priorities in the salerooms: Williamson depicted a bidding war between two
women he had witnessed as a baffling spectacle. The lot in question could have been
worth no more than ‘10s.’ to the bookseller himself, yet between them the ladies
pushed the price up to £200. ‘There must have been a history connected’ with it:
‘Who could understand the feelings of these women, or know what was the secret . . .
which prompted such foolishness?’80
This is not to say that some late-Victorian women did not aspire to become old
book collectors on the same terms as men. Here, wealth and status certainly did create
a barrier to greater female involvement in this particular collecting culture.
Interestingly, while women had been pilloried for underestimating the value of old
books, during the 1890s the male book-hunters came under scrutiny in the press for
their apparent overestimation of them. Writing in response to an Oxford academic
who had suggested that no self-respecting gentleman should possess less than a
thousand books, the Irish author Elsa D’Esterre Keeling declared in Bookworm in 1893
that she (the owner of a respectable hundred books) took pleasure in finishing one

78. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, My Cookery Books (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903),
p. vii –viii. For Pennell’s literary attempts to pass as a ‘connoisseur’, see: Talia Schaffer, ‘The
Importance of Being Greedy: Connoisseurship and Domesticity in the Writings of
Elizabeth Robins Pennell’, in The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, ed. by
Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 105 –26.
79. Mrs Talbot Coke, ‘A Peep into the Past’, Hearth and Home, (8 December 1892), 74. Coke
did, however, note elsewhere that she had heard of a West Country rector whose ‘pious
selfishness’ in purchasing ‘rare’ specimens for his book room quickly resulted in the
deterioration of the rest of his house ‘from shabbiness to squalor’; Mrs Talbot Coke, ‘From
Castle to Cottage’, Hearth and Home, 29 December 1898, p. 288. Cf. Cohen, Household
Gods, fn. 36, p. 249.
80. Williamson, Old Book Shop, p. 61.
 362 Heidi Egginton

volume before she would allow herself to buy the next.81 She thus ensured – in
contrast, it is made clear, to many contemporary male connoisseurs – that she had
acquired an intimate knowledge of the contents of her purchases.82 In the following
year the feminist Women’s Signal drew attention to the vast majority of ladies’
disadvantages in the field as prices for the best editions crept upwards towards the end
of the century. The writer admitted that they agreed with the assertion of a ‘prominent
secondhand bookseller’ acquaintance that he had ‘never met with a genuine woman
book-hunter’:

The woman book lover exists; but she unfortunately belongs to the species of the flowers
that are born to blush unseen. I once knew a woman book-lover. She could have done
excellent work of the sort for which it is fondly supposed the capacity exists only among
men; but she was sometimes in severe straits for a bare maintenance.
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While others ‘[took] to drink’, the journalist’s ‘lady friend’s orgie [sic ] took the form of
book-buying with reckless extravagance, and she rectified the balance when, so to
speak, sobriety returned by going for a time with an insufficient allowance of the
necessaries of life’.83 The practical issue governing the division of bibliophiles into
lovers and ‘enemies’ of books, experts and amateurs, collectors and shoppers, was not
simply one of suitability: it must also have been one of cost.
Male collectors did not hold a monopoly on moderation. Repeating Ruskin’s
comments from ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, including his claim that one did ‘not hear of men
ruining themselves by their books’, an anonymous writer for the Ladies’ Treasury in 1893
noted wryly: ‘this is rather good, as coming from a man whose books have always been
published at something like prohibitory prices’. Whether male or female, the writer
clearly sympathized with those alienated from the world of the private library-owner.
In this piece, the suggestion that the arbitrary diffusion of certain tastes was inciting
shoppers to irritation, most typically associated with female consumers, is turned back
upon gentleman collectors. As the author pointed out, when one considered market for
first editions:

We are brought into touch with these vagaries of fashion in book hunting, which the
bibliomaniacs endeavour so vainly to justify. The presence or absence of half-an-inch
of paper in the ‘uncut’ margin of a book, will make a difference of value ranging
from five shillings to a hundred pounds. Some books, as Mr. Lang remarks – and he
should know something about the matter – are run after because they are beautifully
bound; some are competed for with equal eagerness because they have been bound
at all.84

81. On debates regarding the ‘hundred best books’ in the late 1880s and 90s, see: Claire Hutton,
‘The Best Hundred Irish Books Controversy of 1886’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39
(2011), 581 –92 (p. 581).
82. Elsa D’Esterre Keeling, ‘A Woman on Books’, Bookworm, October 1893, pp. 329–35.
83. ‘Lady Book-Hunters’, Woman’s Signal, 15 February 1894, p. 108.
84. [‘J.C.H .’], ‘Crazes in Book Buying’, The Ladies’ Treasury: A Household Magazine, 1 November
1893, 677 –78.
 Journal of Victorian Culture 363

After all, to make books ‘arduous to come by’, as Richard Le Gallienne was to put it a
few months later – in other words, to make them worth hunting for – was also to
make ‘prices increasingly “prohibitive”’.85
The majority of female bibliophiles – unlike collectors of relatively inexpensive bric-
à-brac or natural specimens, for instance – almost certainly did lack the funds and the
credit to participate in the competition for collectables on the same terms as men. This
did not mean that educated women necessarily lacked the high-minded approach to
rescuing old books and creating private libraries of their male counterparts. Bemused
commentary on ladies who took an active interest in old volumes reveals less about the
deficiencies of female bibliophiles – as antiquarian dealers like Humphreys and
Quaritch realized, ‘ladies’ could be good for business – and more about the desire of
male collectors to contrive to fashion the buying of rare books as a chiefly masculine
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leisure pursuit. For both men and women, establishing oneself as a respectable book
collector, as opposed to a mere consumer, during this period was thus a process that had
to be carefully negotiated in relation to contemporary social norms and moral
conventions, as well as personal and family finances. Male bibliophiles who denigrated
female book-buyers in print were thus attempting to distance their own pursuit from
the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just
to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of
second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and
literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments.

Conclusion
The majority of women, whether for reasons of personal finance or old-fashioned
propriety, may have been ‘excluded from the joy of ransacking old book shops’ during
the late-Victorian period, but their daughters did so freely alongside men. In her 1924
guide to London, Elizabeth Montizambert recommended visitors on the hunt for
second-hand books, a favourite pastime of hers, head straight for the Charing Cross
Road, where ‘in this street of a thousand dreams . . . rustily-clad individuals stand at the
outside stalls, turning over the leaves of the book they cannot buy, and bob-haired girls
buy surprisingly learned books, and spectacled men no less surprisingly frivolous
ones’.86 The peculiar, romantic charms of the old bookshop meant that it had remained
a site where class and gender identities could be fashioned and re-fashioned in
‘surprising’ ways, but its joys were now available to the modern woman, too. Reading
between the lines of the book-hunters’ impassioned critique of the ‘book-huntresses’, it
can be surmised that this shift in cultural perceptions had begun during the late-
Victorian period. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, women are
shown to have frequented second-hand bookstalls and made use of old volumes for

85. Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Philosophy of Limited Editions’, Prose Fancies (London: John Lane,
1894) , http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15025/15025-h/15025-h.htm. [accessed 15
December 2013].
86. Elizabeth Montizambert, London Discoveries in Shops and Restaurants (London: Women
Publishers Limited, 1924), p. 34.
 364 Heidi Egginton

scholarly purposes, while ladies entered antiquarian bookshops and gained access to
gentlemen’s private libraries – and often in spite of the obvious discomfort of these male
onlookers. Pennell recalled the moment at which she became a ‘collector’ in this way
with obvious satisfaction. Though her desk, bookshelves and ‘linen closet’ were already
overflowing with old books, ‘it was not until the summer when [she] went without a
new gown, and carried off at Sotheby’s, from the clutches of the dealer and the maw of
the librarian, one of the few first editions’ of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery on the
market that she felt able to use the term with confidence.87 The increasing presence of
women in the urban public sphere during the last two decades of the nineteenth century
had thus had the effect of sharpening the terms by which collectors were defined.
For bibliophiles such as Burton, Lang and Roberts, any claim to true individual
mastery over the formation and preservation of a book collection and thus to cultural
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and literary production, rested on the effort to declare their endeavours as ‘collectors’
free from the cheap novels and vulgar shopping habits that had become part of the
trappings of modern commercial society. Faced with evidence of centuries of serious
female collecting activity, as well as female book-lovers in the flesh in the antiquarian
shops and second-hand bookstalls that they frequented, however, it could not be
denied that they shared similar tastes and objectives with women. Therein lay the
utility of the ‘book-hunter’: a rhetorical persona that allowed scholarly and aesthetic
upper middle-class men to imaginatively engage with dominant codes of masculinity,
while preserving the legitimacy of their own, sentimental spending on forgotten
literature. Thereafter, these writers could only describe any pretension to true
collecting and other ‘masculine vanities’ on the part of women as a pathetic form of
emulation. ‘Where ladies have caught “the Bibliomania”’, Lang airily asserted, ‘I fancy
they have taken this pretty fever from the other sex’.88 Ultimately, this was imitation at
its most transparent – and its least flattering. As educated women became increasingly
prominent in cultural and literary life towards the end of the century, and continued
to take a keen interest in reading and acquiring antiquarian collectables, it became less
and less tenable to argue that a masculine version of the collecting passion was the
standard to which all other bibliophiles should aspire.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Professor Peter Mandler especially for his incisive and insightful comments. I am
also extremely grateful to Emily Sloan and the anonymous reviewers at Victorian Studies and the
Journal of Victorian Culture for their detailed and constructive feedback on several earlier drafts of
this paper. The British Library and the Bodleian have kindly granted permission to quote from
manuscript sources in their collections.

Heidi Egginton
Newnham College, University of Cambridge
he233@cam.ac.uk

87. Pennell, My Cookery Books, p. 3.

88. Lang, ‘Lady Book Lovers’, p. 634.