P. R. Harris This is a celebration of the Reading Room which was built in 1854-57. It was however preceded

The Reading Room of the British Museum

 (London, 1929), pp. 23-4.

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The Reading Room in Literature

eBLJ 2019,  Article 5

Soon after the Reading Room opened Templeman was reprimanded for supplying more than 

one book or MS at a time to a reader. He asked for clear guidance on the subject, and pointed 

out that one reader had already asked for 48 MSS in one day. So although the readers were few, 

some were very demanding.

In July 1759 the poet Thomas Gray was granted a reader’s ticket, and he wrote to friends in 

Cambridge as follows:

I this day passed thro’ the jaws of a great Leviathan, that lay in my way, into the belly of 

Dr. Templeman, Super-Intendent of the reading-room, who congratulated himself on the 

sight of so much good company. […]

    [The Museum] (as you will imagine) is my favourite Domain, where I often pass four 

hours in the day in the stillness and solitude of the reading room, which is uninterrupted by 

any thing but Dr Stukeley the Antiquary, who comes there to talk nonsense, and Coffee-house 

news.  The rest of the Learned are (I suppose) in the country; at least none of them come there, 

except two Prussians, and a Man, who writes for Lord Royston.  When I call it peaceful, you 

are to understand it only of us Visiters, for the Society itself, Trustees, and all, are up in arms, 

like the Fellows of a College. The Keepers have broke off all intercourse with one another, 

and only lower a silent defiance, as they pass by.  Dr Knight has wall’d up the passage to the 

little-House, because some of the rest were obliged to pass by one of his windows in the way 

to it. Moreover the trustees lay out 500£ a year more than their income; so you may expect, 

all the books and the crocodiles will soon be put up to auction.

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As  a  resident  first  of  Peterhouse  and  then  of  Pembroke  College,  Gray  could  speak  from 

personal knowledge of disputes in academic communities. In the case of the British Museum, 

friction between senior members of the staff (all of whom lived on the premises) must have been 

exacerbated by their constant proximity to each other, and by resentment when one colleague 

had a better set of apartments than another.

In 1763 one of the first women readers was admitted. This was Catharine Maccaulay who 

published an eight-volume history of England.  After her death in 1791, her husband complained 

that Isaac D’Israeli (from whom we shall hear in a moment) had circulated a story that she 

had been excluded from the Reading Room because she had torn four leaves from one of the 

Harleian MSS.  The records do not disclose the outcome of this matter. But the Trustees were 

curiously indulgent in 1779 to John Brooke who admitted cutting pieces from two Harleian 

MSS. He pleaded that he had done this years before when he was a boy, and unaware of the 

seriousness of the matter. The Trustees decided to take no action against Brooke, who was 

by this date Somerset Herald. (The DNB reports intriguingly that he was crushed to death in 

February 1794 when attempting to get out of the pit of the Haymarket Theatre.)

The second Keeper of the Reading Room, Richard Penneck, complained frequently that the 

basement was damp and cold. So in 1774 two rooms at the west end of the ground floor were 

converted into the Reading Rooms. These were the rooms which Isaac D’Israeli (who was a 

reader from 1786 until his death in 1848) used in the 1790s.

I passed two years in agreeable researches at the British Museum, which then (1790) was 

so rare a circumstance, that it had been difficult to have made up a jury of all the spirits 

of study which haunted the reading-room.  I often sate [

sic

] between the Abbé de la Rue 

and  Pinkerton,  between  Norman  antiquity  and  Scottish  history. There  we  were,  little 

attended to, musing in silence and oblivion; for sometimes we had to wait a day or two 

till the volumes, so eagerly demanded, slowly appeared.

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